dovegreyreader scribbles

Mr Rosenblum's List ~ Natasha Solomons

Mr Rosenblum's List or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman to give the novel its full title and this one's a peach of a summer read if you're looking for one.
Talking of summer reads the NTTVBG team have been putting together a selection which we will be posting about soon, not collective reads, just some suggestions for good holiday reads for your delectation and I'd add this one to the pile too.
Young married couple Jack and Sadie Rosenblum and their baby daughter Elizabeth arrive in Harwich as refugees having fled from Germany in1937, and Jack has aspired to be an Englishman ever since. Having been given the leaflet While you are in England : Helpful Information and Friendly Guidance for every Refugee Jack decides that assimilation is the way forward and proceeds to live his life by the letter of the rules. Sadie meanwhile is grieving and continues to do so, not only for her family left behind but for the loss of her way of her Jewish way of life and its traditions. Jack is 5ft 3" of tenacious, sanguine and determined man, desperate to belong and be accepted by his new nation, whilst Sadie is nervous, insecure.. an outsider and determined to remain so.
Slowly Jack prospers and makes his fortune in carpets and on a whim, as Coronation year approaches, he buys a cottage and some land in Dorset. Every golf club in the country has rejected Jack's application and convinced that he can't be properly English until he belongs to one... and even though he can't play but doesn't think it can be that difficult... Jack decides to build his own course and have a grand opening on Coronation Day.
Much as I don't wish any ill on Her Majesty I'd love to witness a coronation. Amazing to think that for anyone my age or under (I was born three months later) we have never witnessed one and Bookhound at just five months old doesn't remember much about the last one either.
This book may sound eccentric, improbable and far-fetched, in fact very Englishly so, but that's the source of its unbridled joy because somehow Natasha Solomons has captured a really unique writing style and narrative voice that beguiles and enchants in the most unusual way. It's a new take on a serious subject, light and humorous as Jack takes his book of rules at face value... if you're invited for drinks at the Big House at 7pm Jack assumes you must arrive at 7pm, not 7.30pm, and wearing...well what do you wear for drinks?
We used to get invited to a Big House for Christmas drinks, and we weren't even refugees but it was always a source of unmitigated stress and an elephant on the Christmas horizon for us as we anguished about what the dress rule 'Jerseys' , noted on the invitation, might mean.
Is that some posh jersey?
Is a jersey a jumper?
Can it be hand-knitted or should it be bought?
Will M&S do?
Bookhound, who never wears a jumper or a jersey hauled himself into his only one, some great chunky outdoor thing the size of a Big Top, it was indeed a very big top, and all because the invitation said so, and proceeded to boil alive, and needless to say when we arrived looking like peasants to find everyone else in suits (because they were going out to dinner afterwards) we felt like a pair of complete numpties and declined future invites.
That was it for us and Big House socialising.
Natasha Solomons' humour conceals some starkly unpleasant home truths about the impossibilities of the British class system, cultural exclusion, anti-semitism and underlying themes of exile and identity frequently surface. The depth of Sadie's grief is slowly revealed and when her Memory Box containing precious links with her family is destroyed she must seek other ways to keep her memories alive and maintain those continuing bonds with her past.
As I read Mr Rosenblum's List I quite thought I'd found a book wherein no one dies and was cheering that fact, except I was wrong, but no worries, it's actually a 'lovely' and 'right' death, and I do believe there can be such things,and this is a lovely and right book too that I have enjoyed reading immensely.
So the Gamekeeper walked in and found me sitting out on the verandah at 8pm reading the final pages of this one,


'Ah just the person I need,' I said...and he's used to questions like this.

'Can you really catch moles with ferrets?'

Guffawing...

'They do in this book' I replied 'and make things out of the skins, I told you we should have done that with all yours, nice pair of patchwork moleskin trousers, we'd only have needed about 200...you've easily caught that many'

More guffawing.

'It's fiction, it's allowed, you just need a bit of imagination.'

and the winners are..

This is one book I wish everyone could win but congratulations to the lucky four, Weeds and Wildflowers will be sprouting in your post boxes as soon as you can e mail addresses to me at dovegreyreader at gmail.com

11 - Janis Goodman

21 - Kathleen Jones

35 - Kate

47 - Lynne Neal

Weeds and Wild Flowers ~ Poems by Alice Oswald Etchings by Jessica Greenwood

I'm very partial to an abundant hedgerow.
It all began with those 1950's holidays with my grandparents in their very basic cottage down here in Devon, at Coleford a tiny village near Crediton. I was equipped with the Observer's Book of Wild Flowers and along with my I-Spy book my dream was to spot a Cuckoo Pint, which I actually couldn't tick off until we moved here, but I have been an occasional wild flower geek ever since. Brownie badges and flower presses you look at after a day (hopeless) or forget about for five years (not much better)
Charlotte Moore cites the method for hedgerow dating in Hancox, a rough approximation of a hundred years for each species and she counts seven.
So I go out and count at least seven too...

Ash, Oak, Hawthorn, Blackthorn (Sloe), Sycamore, Beech, Hazel, Holly... do they all count?
Does that make us very ancient?
Bookhound is cynical and reckons 300 years, I'm a complete romantic and have 16th century leanings at least and feel sure Shakespeare must have walked right along here to gather the inspiration for Ophelia's flowers.
I'm always spotting something new out in the lane and running back in to check it out, so the arrival of Weeds and Wild Flowers by Alice Oswald and published by Faber (& Faber) leapt right onto my radar, and not only because it is a beautiful book to have and to hold but because Alice Oswald is a Devon-based poet who, to my complete chagrin, I had never really explored in depth.

With the most generous praise from one poet to another, Carol Ann Duffy recently suggested that Alice Oswald should by rights be winning every prize going this year as she presented her with the inaugural Ted Hughes award (Carol Ann Duffy has diverted her annual £5000 Laureate's stipend to this award)  for this collection Weeds and Wildflowers, so it seemed like another good reason to start the Alice Oswald trail.
I have spent the last month doing exactly that....and I have been in raptures with it all.
Isn't it brilliant to find new words, in a new order that confirm you are on the cusp of an exciting reading experience. I've given up lamenting that I didn't come to this sooner, no use crying over ignored poetry, I'm there now and perhaps it's much more about the time being right for me and Alice to become acquainted. I have to be in the right mood for poetry and often I'm not, but now I can't get enough of it and with the suggestion that Alice Oswald is,

'an inheritor of some of Britain's greatest poetic voices, an heir to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill...'

well I was sold. I've been dipping back into Seamus and Ted, and now that Geoffrey Hill has finally filled the contentious Oxford Professor of Poetry slot I'd better start on him too.
I have much to say about Alice Oswald's other collections and will do soon. Listening to her reading Dart as I drove back from Exeter the other day was sufficiently compelling to force me into a long detour to Postbridge, just to go and dip my toes in the river's water.
Weeds and Wildflowers has touched a divining chord too, and at a time when I am surrounded by floribundence. I think by 'divining' I'm trying to suggest that search for what lies beneath the surface, much like the dowser who searched our garden for the water supply that we now use.
I wonder if it can be applied to poetry too?
With words instead of hazel twigs, Alice Oswald, who works as a gardener, somehow divines something mystically deep and permanent and plentiful about the earth.
Of the collection Alice Oswald herself says she hopes..

"that the experience of reading and looking at the book will be a slightly unsettling pleasure, like walking through a garden at night, when the plants come right up to the edges of their names and beyond them".

The poems appear to be accompanied by the most exquisite etchings by Jessica Greenman, but as Alice Oswald suggests in her introduction this is not quite the case. This is not an illustrated book but two separate books, etchings and poems 'shuffled together'. And whilst the acid bites into the plate to create the foundation for the prints, in many ways the words etch something equally permanent into the soul. I'm trying hard not to get purple prose about all this and do the book a huge disservice, but the way Alice etches and 'summons up the flora of the psyche' whilst Jessica somehow transmits that visually works on many levels and has had me entranced.

I am constantly picking this book up to read and look at, to re-read and look again, keeping it by my side and I think I'm on at least my tenth journey through it.
As I'm newly discovering daily with Alice Oswald's poetry, she gives a voice, character and personality to the unusual and I seem to have a different favourite each time I read... perhaps it's this one...

First of April - new born gentle
Fleeting wakeful on a greenleaf cradle.
Second of April - eyes half open,
faint light moving under lids. Face hidden.
Third of April - bonny and blossoming
in a yellow dress that needs no fastening.
Fourth, fifth sixth - she somehow stands
clutching for balance with both hands.

 

No, no, I think it's this one...

A pale and pining girl, head bowed, heart gnawed,
whose figure nods and shivers in a shawl
of fine white wool, has suddenly appeared
in the damp woods, as mild and mute as snowfall.
She may not last. She has no strength at all,
but she stoops and shakes as if she'd stood all night
on one bare foot, confiding with the moonlight.



Scroll on down for the chance to win a gift you might not want to miss.

Prize draw copies of Weeds and Wild Flowers ~ Alice Oswald

Four copies of Weeds and Wild Flowers - Poems by Alice Oswald Etchings by Jessica Greenman there for the picking of today,

and a chance to bring the hedgerows into your psyche in a way that they may never quite have done so before...meet Stinking Goose-foot

Stinking Goose- foot has grown human.
It could happen to anyone.

Has no bath.
Hangs his socks in a bag
that he hangs on a nail by the door...

Names in comments as usual and the catnip king himself will choose ...when he can be bothered that is.

The Longest Day

I'm so sorry, it's more blue sky pictures... just move on if you're fed up with them, I won't be offended honestly...  but it's too perfect not to shout from the hillsides how beautiful Devon is looking right now, and it really was the most perfect and longest of long days on Monday, still light at 10.45pm down here.
We walked up the back field in the evening sun, and just for a change we thought we'd head down to the bottom of the front field too, the one you can see on the window picture. It usually has stock grazing so we don't often go down there, preferring to nip through the garden gate and into the back field rather than cross the lane and risk meeting one of the three cars that pass each day ...heck it's busy out there.
Before we reach the back field we are confronted by the daisy profusion which is looking so fine this year I want to stare at them all the day long...this is the view from my desk so I can, and note the elderflower tree in the background, it's almost cordial time again.

The soft,swishy back field grass, which had been lovely to walk through, has just been shorn and gathered up for silage this week so it's looking a bit rough in there. Once cut something akin to a mammoth hoover combs the field slurping and sucking up the grass and digesting it down to fine clippings before a sort of well-aimed projectile regurgitation into a trailer driving in tandem alongside. It was a hopelessly windy afternoon and somehow I dozed through it on the front verandah but woke up covered in a fine layer of grass...all the windows were open so it was in the bath, the beds, everywhere.

The front field on the other hand is usually left as pasture for grazing. Bookhound kindly said he'd rescue me if a bull suddenly appeared from nowhere, for which I was grateful and we also hoped no one was out shooting rabbits, also a possibility.
We walked down to the sycamore tree and then the ash tree in the foreground here, and I'll be honest I didn't know exactly what brands of tree they were having looked at them from the bedroom window for sixteen years. Looking back we enjoyed a completely different perspective on home and the Bluebell Woods.

and just kept on looking.
Someone's written a book on how to navigate by the features of the landscape, citing trees as a really useful indicator of compass direction and I can't for the life of me remember where I read about it (can you?) but seeing that tree in profile reminds me, because it's clear our prevailing weather comes from the south west.
There is no picture of the deer that had fled before I could get my camera switched on.
Or the hot air balloon that passed behind the house as we stood there, because that just looks like a blob.
But it was lovely to note exactly where the sun goes down on the Longest Day and now we wait for it to come back round to the Shortest Day Woods.
The swallows have been busy but not in their usual places. We're still not sure if they are going back to their nest over the front door which they add an extension to each year, or whether this little Baby Biggles just had a panic attack and had perched there in terror or was he asserting squatters rights...bagsie this one, it's mine. The swallows were frantically dive-bombing me as they tried to persuade him to fly.

That cable hanging down on the right is not supposed to be there, it's for an outside light but the swallows beat Bookhound to it and now we can't bear to disturb it, so no light just a dangling wire which if you ever come to visit please don't mistake for a bell pull and get 240 volts instead.
I stood quietly inside the front door and just clicked away until I eventually snapped one of the swallows flying by.

But still the Baby Biggles wouldn't budge...petrified and rooted to the spot until I went out and had a chat with him and said
'Come on mate, it's easy'
Still he stared at me all shivery and quivery, bless...until I said 'Shoo' and suddenly off he flew.

The first million...

I mentioned it on Facebook today and I should probably mention it for posterity here too.
dovegreyreader scribbles passed the millionth page view a while back...I've just checked and it's 1017919 as of 8pm this evening...and I think the Tinker might be 250,000 of those and Rebecca tells me she's a close second:-)
Rocky as you can see is unimpressed with all of it.

I'm not very au fait with stats beyond looking at the total and thinking 'that's nice', mainly because it's all a mystery of maths and numbers, but also because I think blog stats can be very variable and misleading depending on how they are collated and who collates what.
But I had been watching and waiting for the counter to pass the million mark and note the day... and then I missed it, but anyway it feels like a milestone reached and and my thanks to everyone who keeps on visiting.

The Barn Owl Diaries

Chez dovegrey has been chosen and this is very exciting (well exciting for Devon that is)
You could definitely be forgiven for not recalling the picture I put on here early last year of a barn owl perched outside my bookroom window, but it happened to coincide with a local news item about a survey being conducted by the Barn Owl Trust into dwindling numbers of barn owls in the Tamar Valley.
'Not dwindling in our garden' we said and sent them this picture with news of our regular local sightings, usually at dusk and sweeping majestically around the front field...and if you catch sight of their faces, just beautiful.
So backalong (as we says down y'ere) The Barn Owl Trust came to visit us and the local area as part of the survey, asked us lots of questions and had a good look around. Well just imagine the excitement when a letter arrived a few weeks ago to say they have funding for one new barn owl nesting box in the South West, and having decided to place it in the Tamar Valley would we mind having it in our garden.
Would we mind...
It's like being chosen to be parents for adoption honestly we were that excited.
Out came our ancient copy of Eric Hosking's Owls in much the same way that I dashed off to buy Hugh Jolly's Book of Childcare all those years ago, the Barn Owl information file was opened and the diary started.. handwritten...fountain pen..Prussian Blue Diamine ink.
Then I was on the lookout for Barn Owl poems and this was the best I could find...

A love-sick young barn-owl in Kew
Had a pretty young she-owl in view.
    He twittered, "I oughter
    Endeavour to court 'er
But I don't have enough wit to woo!'

Surely Laureate Ted's written something better than that, I'm on the case.
Anyway last week was the all-important final adoption inspection decision meeting with site survey to decide where best to place the guest accommodation, a 4m high telegraph pole with a luxury chalet (with verandah) on the top, and then figure out the access for the big machinery to do it.

It's all a bit technical and there was much discussion about visibility of the entrance to the box and me apparently saying 'Be nice if we could see it from the house'  far more than was necessary which I don't believe for one minute.

The box needs to face onto the panoramic vista so the owls will spot it,

'Be nice if we could see it from the ....'

And safety for the owls is paramount so not near the electric cables...

'Be nice if we could see it from...'

Prevailing winds are an issue...

Be nice if we could see it ....'

As are available feeding grounds...

'Be nice if we could...'

And in the end a boundary spot was agreed on, in fact the exact same spot where the 4m high electricity pole with paraphernalia used to be, but we had it moved and the cable sunk underground because it was an eyesore....and we could see it from the house.
In contrast a Barn Owl box is a thing of beauty and a joy forever and even better...well we'll be able to see it from the house.
So now we await a construction date and meanwhile we're out on barn owl-watching duty every night and whispering 'Come live with us...we'll be able to see you from the house' as they sweep by on their nightly hunting rounds. We're brushing up on our owl facts ready to become owl bores and getting very excited because who knows, perhaps we'll be able to announce we're expecting some of these,

You'll be the first to know of course because I'll be able to see them from the house.

Hancox Half Hour...

With sincere apologies to Family Moore but someone had to do it and it might as well be me, sooner rather than later and doubtless it was probably said ad nauseum at Hancox through the 1950s, bless Tony, the old ones are always the best.
But I've been having a Hancox Half Hour of my own each evening and I'm starting to get that feeling that I'll be bereft when I finally turn the final page of this book. 
'Off to Hancox' I say after dinner  as I settle down to my daily rummage through another few drawers in Charlotte Moore's house and continue my acquaintance with her ancestors.
Two hundred pages into Hancox A House and a Family and I'm part of the furniture now.
Aunt Barbara Leigh Bodichon has just died (sorry...spoiler) and that was enough to send me dashing of to the Womens' Lives shelves to seek out  Pam Hirsch's biography, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon Feminist, Artist, Rebel, bought for £1.99 knowing that a book about the life of the woman who set up Girton College and advanced educational opportunities for women would come in useful one day.
I'm sure our Head Teacher was an Old Girtonian (someone will confirm, or correct I'm sure) and I've got a feeling the Head Girl in my leaving year followed in her footsteps. I know she got 100% in a history exam which probably helped but I always used to feel sorry for her. Heavy must have weighed the enamel badge when part of the Head Girl's remit was the daily task of collecting the fully-gowned Head Teacher from her study and escorting her around the corridors of the quad towards the hall and onto the platform for morning assembly.
What on earth did they talk about on the way round?
I couldn't have imagined anything more daunting, best to be pond life.
The Prefects and Captain of School would all be seated up on the platform while the rest of of the school grubbed around on the hall floor, and somehow a magic signal would be given as they approached so that we'd all be on our feet in time for the entrance.
The daily ceremony and ritual of a girl's school in the 1960s, but doubtless Barbara Bodichon would have been delighted to see us all there and perhaps we owe her a small debt of gratitude that we were and Hancox has led me onto the Barbara Bodichon trail in earnest.
I knew of her Girton connections so was unsurprised to discover that Aunt Barbara was a feminist force to be reckoned with in the confines of a patriarchal Victorian family, and numbering Florence Nightingale amongst her cousins too.
There's a heartbreaking tale of a love affair between twenty-seven year old NM (as Charlotte Moore's Great Grandfather Norman Moore was known) and the love of his life Amy, who at seventeen was forbidden any contact with NM until she was twenty-one in the family's vain hope that the love between them would starve and die. NM considered impoverished and lacking in social status, despite being a respected doctor at Bart's who was eventually to become President of the Royal College of Physicians. Barbara, for many years acted as a go-between for the couple, doing what she could within, and slightly without, the rules to keep their love alive.  The pining, lovelorn NM meanwhile, and doubtless in between the 2360 post mortems he performed, filled twelve notebooks of daily writing to the woman he would eventually make his wife only to diagnose her with TB months after the wedding.
I give nothing away that isn't written on the dust-jacket, yet reading Hancox is like reading a sort of real-life version of The Forsyte Saga, with Soames and Irenes and Jolyons around every corner and Charlotte Moore (and her mother who started the chronological cataloging) has done the most incredible job  of extracting the story from the copious journals and correspondence at her disposal. The writing is all-consuming with that happy knack of frequently letting chapters rest on little cliff-hangers which add to the interest and have me rushing back for my next Hancox Half Hour....

'Can't stop, Aunt Barbara's support is about to be 'suddenly and shockingly removed...'

'I'll do the dishwasher later, Uncle Ben's ship's stuck in the Arctic, he's eating polar bears....'

'Can you get the washing in ...Uncle Ben's about to marry a woman forty years his junior...'

Queen Lear ~ A play by Eugene Stickland

Feeling some thespian tendencies of mine own coming on after that last theatre debacle, I've added a season of plays into my regular reading round (again) opening with Queen Lear by Calgary-based Canadian playwright Eugene Stickland and my copy published by Bhouse publications.
If you are a regular visitor here you can probably guess who sent it to me and over a year ago now (thank you again Kevin, I get there in the end) and you can read Kevin's own thoughts on the play here...and much as I want to read them right now and get all the answers I have to write this first and find my own.
Though I say so myself I think I did a pretty good job of producing, directing, stage managing and acting on my own, and with not a moment's screaming from the audience either, just rapturous applause.
Rocky knows how to behave.

Just three parts for me to play ~

Jane :: a well known actress in her day whose confidence in her ability to memorise lines has dissipated in line with the lack of available stage roles for older women. Jane is emerging from that retirement to play the part of Lear in an all female production of the play to be staged by a women's collective.

Heather :: the young teenage daughter of the business partner of Jane's late husband who Jane is paying to help her run through her lines.

and I'll admit it, the next one did give me a bit of bother.

A Cellist :: The cellist in fact seems to play the role of a chorus, commenting musically and perhaps (or perhaps not) only heard and often to her annoyance by Jane, though Eugene Stickland offers much leeway in this interpretation and on how visible the cellist needs to be.
I sat her in the kitchen and let her get on with it as I had enough to contend with, and though Stickland suggests Bach I stuck a CD of the Elgar on as that's all I could find, and then curled up on the sofa with a noisy packet of sweets and a bottle of water (joke)
The stage setting caused me no trouble, a living room. A fireplace. Some good art on the walls...well we like ours, it's good enough art.
So as Jane and Heather meet regularly over a period of several weeks for Jane to rehearse her lines it emerges that two women at opposite ends of their lives have much to offer each other. Both need nurturing in their own way and as the play progresses that nurturing becomes a two-way process.
Heather's mother has died recently and she is living alone with her father who has become increasingly over-protective,

HEATHER: He wants me to stay just like the little girl I was when my mom died. But I'm not a little girl any more. And he feels bad because my mum will never have the chance to know me as a grown up so he doesn't want me to change...

Whilst Jane, widowed and alone, who knows, perhaps she craves someone to protect her.
The expectation that Jane's wisdom alone will prevail is keenly set up in the early scenes as she lectures Heather on the changing face of language after a teenage 'whatever ' moment,

JANE: ...you use language that is hurtful...we believe in a relationship between our intellect and the words we say, even between our soul, and our expression. If we give up on that, then we will live in a world where no one really says what they mean, and no one will really understand what is being said to them...you as a bright and educated young woman are one of the keepers of the flame.'

Jane sends Heather off to an evening with friends instead of running through the lines one evening, something her father wouldn't countenance, thus investing some much needed trust in Heather's ability to look after herself, whilst Heather very movingly fires a rocket across Jane's bows when she hints that learning these lines might all be too much for her ageing mind and perhaps she'll pull out.
When the part of Cordelia suddenly becomes vacant because the incumbent has gone off to be a carpenter, Jane uses the vision of Heather's deceased mother to prevail on Heather's emotions...a trick that Heather has likewise clearly been using to excuse herself from all manner of situations.

HEATHER: That's my mother. I can use her if I need to. I don't think it's fair of you to use her.

I suspect that the conversation that follows is one of those pin-drop moments in any stage production of Queen Lear.
There are some gentle and surprising twists in the action slowly revealing the multiple intentions of the playwright, and all set against the wider backdrop of a life dominated by the potential for fewer and fewer opportunities for the generations to communicate with each other. The danger that those means of communication increasingly become the coded text speak domain of the younger generation is self-evident, and interestingly it takes the most complex and lengthy work of a 16th century male playwright to bridge that gap.
Themes of ageing women, of language, of that generation gap and the expertise that women have in bridging those chasms all seemed part of Eugene Stickland's plan here, and the irony of Jane's explanation that there weren't that many old men around who could remember the lines for King Lear either, or that the women's collective would forgive Shakespeare for being a man, wasn't lost on this audience.
It can be hard to know when an audience might laugh when you're reading all the parts yourself but I think those might have been two of them...or else I'd have been the only one chortling and people would have been doing the 'looking over the shoulder' thing in my direction.
It's difficult to convey the absolute pleasure that reading this play gave me or how much it has lingered and grown in my mind since. I read the sixteen scenes over two sessions, visualised what was happening, facial expressions and body language all seemed to appear readily and now of course I see the downside to all this... I'd actually give my eye-teeth to see Queen Lear by Eugene Stickland on the next Theatre Royal programme that lands in the post box.
Currently the play has been running for several months to packed houses in Istanbul, starring Yildiz Kenter, an 81 year old actress who is considered by many to be the Elizabeth Taylor of Turkish screen and stage, and I can see no reason why it wouldn't run to packed houses here in the UK.
Who decides these things? Someone tell them... it's crying out for Dame Judi, how many good stage roles are there for older women, she's 75 and may slap me for revealing that, but this would be right up her alley.
The Canadians and the Turks clearly know a good play when they see one, meanwhile the Lloyd Webber army marches on here in the UK (and don't get me wrong, I love him too, it's just that...well you know) as London braces for The Wizard of Oz after the TV search for a Dorothy, and Plymouth's getting all excited about The Sound of Music yet again.

Happy Father's Day...

...to all of them everywhere.
and to the Tinker... thank you for being there Dad x 

and of course to Bookhound,

With love from Offspringette, the Gamekeeper and the Kayaker xxx
who I'm sure won't forget...

dovegreyreading...

Some interesting new arrivals and real reading pleasure this week so I thought I'd share a few with you all in case anyone's short on ideas for a good book to read at the moment...as if.
I'm convinced I read differently in summer to winter and it's the arrival of some new Irene Nemirovskys that have made me realise that for reasons undefined, I store her up for the autumn.
Time to ring the changes in that case so I have two novels, The Dogs and the Wolves and Jezebel  and the short stories Dimanche lined up, along with the recently translated biography The Life of Irene Nemirovsky by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt.

 

You may recall I was slow to warm to Suite Francaise, but once I'd bypassed the hype and found my own way in, and all about a year after the rest of the world, I became a fan of Irene Nemirovsky  for life.

I'm trying hard to keep my 'reading in progress' as varied as I can at the moment and that takes a bit of discipline. Before I knew it recently I found myself reading six books, all fiction, all by men and all tangling with each other for plot lines and characters...is it me or are men starting to write more about the domestic sphere?
Usually the women stand accused of that but I've picked up several books recently where the men seem to be getting their hands dirty with the 21st century domestic detail and all with a great deal of intensity.

Sometimes I feel sated with that 'intensity' so if anyone feels likewise and is searching for a heart-warming, beautifully written and slightly unusual book, then look no further than Mr Rosenblum's List by Natasha Solomons. I can't tell you how much pleasure this gentle yet subtle book has given me this week, quite perfect for sunny day garden reading.
Jack and Sadie Rosenblum arrive in England as refugees in 1939 and attempt to assimilate according to the Helpful Information pamphlet they are given on arrival. What follows is both funny but with serious undertones as Natasha Solomons cleverly exposes the follies of the British class system through the very confused eyes of Mr Rosenblum. Poor Jack takes everything very literally and at face value and of course it's not quite a simple as that.


Making sure I keep the non-fiction flame flickering in the reading pile, I love a good story about a house, its history and its residents; lived-in social history, the class system and its mores in action, such a good structure around which to drape the memoir of a family, and I was immediately drawn to Hancox, A House and a Family by Charlotte Moore.
The house is in deepest Sussex, not far from Bodiam, and still lived in by the author who has benefited, as does Port Eliot, from Hancox being large enough for everything to have been kept, nothing need be thrown away when you've got somewhere to put it...or as in our case, even when you haven't.
Bundles of letters turn up in long-forgotten drawers, or a photo suddenly examined closely reveals names and dates, and thus a story is fleshed out. I guess not every family has the potential to be interesting no matter how many letters turn up in drawers, but a family tree with Florence Nightingale and Barbara Leigh Bodichon gracing its branches, and Darwin and Kipling as friends, has potential, and Hancox is more than fulfilling that.
In fact I actually feel as if I'm prowling around Charlotte Moore's house and rummaging around in those drawers myself, I almost keep looking over my shoulder to see if anyone's caught me.
This one is proving perfect for those long sunny evenings we're having here in Devon at the moment, sitting out until dusk and really appreciating this run up to the Longest Day, the warmest in years. It's a happy moment when we remember at 11pm that the washing is still on the line and decide to leave it there until the morning, they probably did that at Hancox too.
So that's my reading week, how about yours...and all suggestions of gentle, subtle, undisturbing reads most welcome too.

 

Happy Bloomsday Team Ulysses...

" A long narrative requires impersonation, hallucinating when you don't know the answer, turning water into wine, making a silk purse out of a string of coloured scarves and extracting a white rabbit from a sow's ear, knowing how and when to hold the carrot in front of the donkey's nose and sublime confidence..."

William Maxwell on the raptures of reading per se, but somehow that feels like a perfect fit for this year-long reading of Ulysses, and I'm in raptures along with some of you today so please excuse the bling...

In fact I can hardly breath I'm so excited and I have to keep pinching myself when I look at this too...

This seemingly impossible book which has warmed and moulded to my hand (thank you OUP) and been seen all over the house for the last year and now we're there and soon I'll be putting it on the shelf...or will I?
I think I will dip into it for evermore and I may just buy the most beautiful edition I can find too.
I finished Ulysses...or Oolissays as I now discover James Joyce called it, reading Penelope on Saturday morning and very appropriately lying in bed, though thankfully and unlike Molly without a pair of smelly feet in my face.
What a sensational and fitting last section this proved to be, especially given my increasing awareness of the Odyssean connections as the book has progressed. To finally meet Molly and hear her side of the story, her life before and her life now with Poldy, and how odd that this wasn't the Molly that I felt I knew. Penelope was a complete revelation, Molly much more down-to-earth than the book had led me to believe
And I walked on a cloud for the rest of the day because I feel as I've joined a club... I've finally read it and as we strolled through Launceston I wanted to stop people and say

'...erm...excuse me but I've read Ulysses'.

Whilst casting no literary aspersions on the good people of Launceston I doubt anyone would have been impressed, so I didn't and the urge soon passed.
But I couldn't possibly have done it without the cheerful company of Team Ulysses.
Those who have read along too, those who have cheered us from the sidelines in comments and been there with the hot soup when we've needed it and all those lovely words of encouragement .
I must also thank Declan Kibberd who really cranked the whole thing into life for me with his book Ulysses and Us and its reassuring clarion call for the book to be returned to the ordinary reader, for pleasurable reading, not academic dissection.
The people like his Dublin-born father who had imbibed it throughout his life and the assertion that this is the work of a storyteller not a novelist.
Declan doesn't know it (he doesn't do the internet, though I did meet his editor when I was at Faber recently and asked him to convey my thanks and I will write to him properly now) but his encouraging words saved my bacon on several occasions.
There can be something daunting about knowing I have committed to reading a book like this and then actually having to.
Writing from the heart about it each month, especially on those months when I might not have felt like picking it up (and reader as you know, there were some, but I did) or when I hadn't really followed a word, just emerged with a mood rather than comprehension.
The chance find of a book by Frank Delaney has helped immeasurably too, and he does know because I e mailed to thank him very early on in the read. James
Joyce's Odyssey- A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses has added even more visual substance to this wonderful writing. Incidentally you might want to check out Frank Delaney's regular weekly five minute podcasts of extracts from Ulysses together with his sharing of the unraveling of it all and  starting on his website today...the lilting Irish accent .. oh you won't want to miss that.
I think I'm about to start all over again and for anyone who missed the 'off' last Bloomsday, well there you go, another chance perhaps?
Nor do I use 'wonderful writing' lightly or in a fawning way. Ulysses has been a memorable read, so much of the book, even the tricky parts, have harmonised their way into the deepest recesses of my memory. I have a strange feeling that when I'm tucked up in a nursing home at ninety I may have forgotten the name of the Prime Minister and be hopeless at counting backwards from a hundred and subtracting four each time, but I'll be loudly proclaiming

'If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock she was to blame'

and I'll probably be put on stronger meds.
It was William Butler Yeats's birthday at the weekend and The Writer's Almanac celebrated with his poem The Second Coming.  Now when I started this I had no idea beyond a vaguely confirmed assumption that Yeats and Joyce were contemporaries, writing at about the same time, presumably with their eyes fixed on similar worlds. Yeats I then discover born at Sandymount where Ulysses opens, and I discover late in the Team Ulysses day that James Joyce was his protege.

'Turning and turning on the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand....

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'

The Second Coming published in 1921 and in its entirety a poem of incredible beauty and potency that seems open to a wide range of interpretations, the obvious contemporaneous ones, but for me almost ninety years on, right now, this minute, I can allow it to hold relevant Ulyssesian ones.
If ever a book set the literary world aflame Ulysses was surely the one.
The book that upturned the tables in the temple and let loose something dangerous and seemingly uncontrollable on the literary world.
Things did fall apart, the 'ceremony of innocence ' was indeed drowned, the book's very style and explicitness opened new doors, new ways of thinking and writing; its detractors hated it with that 'passionate intensity', the censors thundered down from on high.
If ever a book rocked the gentle literary cradle to nightmare, dissent and a change of rhythm this was surely it... has there been one since?
I can't think of one.
Perhaps it's true to say that literature has indeed been unwittingly yet steadily treading and searching that path ever thereafter as it 'slouches towards Bethlehem'  and all thanks to James Joyce. From my lofty perch on the top of this mountain, with this flippin' flag flapping in my face, I understand that and so much more now.
Thank you Team Ulysses, it's been the most fantastic climb, you've helped me achieve one huge lifelong reading ambition and I've loved doing it with you.
So shall we reconvene here, rested and ready for Team Tolstoy and Anna Karenina (or do you want to do War and Peace?....No?....are you sure?) on September 9th 2010...Tolstoy's birthday.

An apology to Colman Getty...

dovegreyreader has been sitting on the naughty step today as per the Super Nanny guidelines, one minute for every year of her age, thus giving her four minutes shy of an hour in which to contemplate the wrong-doing and also to read a fair chunk of the Orange Prize winning novel The Lacuna.

This all deemed necessary following a rather terse e mail from the MD of Booker Prize PR company Colman Getty, who dovegreyreader thought made mustard and toilet bowl cleaners, but that's actually Reckitt & Colman.
No, Colman Getty they make ...er... well they...er... well what does a PR company make exactly?
On second thoughts don't answer that.
But anyway they were sufficiently upset not even to address one as Dear, or Hi, just ...

"I am not quite sure why you think Colman Getty does the PR for The Orange Prize for Fiction but we don’t and never have....etc'

In fact this was a genuine error in Amanda Craig's wonderful piece on the Orange Prize Party and based on the fact that she felt sure the invitations had come from that source when they hadn't.
Suffice to say dovegreyreader is now responding to this request...

"I would be very grateful if you could put a correction on your blog as there’s nothing worse than inaccurate information that is damaging to our reputation."

Quite right too, corrections have been made and fulsome public apologies for the error are hereby offered.
Verily, dovegreyreader wouldn't wish to do anything to damage Colman Getty's reputation, and perhaps should be flattered to think they even thought her capable of such a thing. Indeed her support for, and thereby unpaid promotion of the Booker Prize is legendary, even spawning the word Bookerthon, (doubtless a derivative of bog-athon, and contrived during a moment of enlightenment whilst under the misapprehension she was cleaning her toilet with Colman Getty products.) Bookerthon a word now in common annual usage around the blogosphere.
However if content to dispatch abrupt e mails to people they perhaps think aren't worth addressing by any sort of name, Colman Getty and by association the Booker Prize, probably feel they need little help this end anyway.
I don't know about you but in these 'ere parts, and heaven forbid that any of us have the right to deem anyone beneath us, but we aim for politeness and good manners no matter who we may be addressing.
Anyone up for the Bogathon this year?

Still Missing ~ Beth Gutcheon

'These long empty days now, she rarely felt anger or fear or sadness. What she felt, with simplicity too profound to express, was a brimming love for him and no way to give it. There was a dim sense memory that haunted her nights, of flesh on flesh, the intense multiple impact of the smell of his skin, and the sight of his head pressed against her cheek so close that its outline became the curve of the earth, and the angular feel of limbs, all knees and elbows - that gave a pleasure too complex to recover or yet ever to give up, the deep unremarkable joy of hugging a child.'

So now I've read a trilogy of books, and in quick succession too, where for reasons various a child is lost.
The most recent Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon, first published in 1981, a best seller made into the film, Without a Trace and recently published by Persephone Books.
Beth my best patchworking friend back in the 1970s (though she doesn't know this) and I gather this is but one of a slew of good novels that she presumably wrote in between the piecing. A lost opportunity for some eighties patchwork on the Persephone endpapers, probably deemed too obvious, and my disappointment  slightly assuaged by the late 1970s ribbed knit fabric.
Anyway, today I've used a Baltimore block called Divine Guidance, (cut and sew applique in Liberty Tana Lawn) which seems about right for the subject matter.
Susan Selky, a professor in English at Harvard,(I'd love to read her book on Willa Cather) refuses to believe the worst when her nearly seven year-old son Alex goes missing on his way to school in Boston on May 15th 1980. Susan's marriage to Graham, Alex's father has recently broken down and Graham has left, so perhaps it becomes increasingly imperative that Alex...

'a small sturdy child with a two-hundred watt smile and a giggle like falling water, a child who saw Star Wars once with Mommy, twice with Daddy, and once again with TJ. Owner-trainer of Taxi, an oversized Shetland sheepdog'

...grows up a little faster. But for whatever reason, Susan and Alex have agreed that he is old enough and sensible enough to be left at the corner to walk the last two blocks to the New Boston School of Back Bay on his own.
On the day that Alex disappears, in fact never makes it to school, Susan doesn't discover his absence until that evening. The police hunt is slow to gain momentum, then massive and the publicity machine cranks into action, then, as time drags on, slowly scales down leaving Susan to function as a mother, with empty arms, without a child but always nurturing hope and often against all the odds.
Assigned to the case the hard-working, very human and long-suffering father of seven, Detective Menetti.
I don't want to linger over the plot a minute longer because there is far too much to give away here, and though there is much to discuss that would be fascinating, to do so would be to forewarn and to reveal the crucial clues to some very surprising twists and turns which Beth Gutcheon keeps very close to her chest . There are some shocks in store too, fairly explicit ones which all made me wonder how this book will be perceived by those perhaps expecting a more traditional and comfortable Persephone read.
Still Missing is much more challenging, courageously out of the ordinary and to be applauded for that. Persephone do this perhaps unnoticed from time to time, subvert expectations and bowl an un-nostalgic googlie to make everyone sit up and pay attention; Manja by Anna Gmeyner comes to mind as another challenging yet brilliant read from them. Still Missing, again unusually for Persephone, comes without the usual introduction or afterword and I suspect it's best left for each reader to write their own.
This book is however about much more than a missing child and I couldn't help but make comparisons to the disappearance of  Madeleine McCann three years ago, and which so dominated the news here in the UK.
With the missing child go those hopes and dreams for the future, put on hold yet somehow to be steadily kindled and kept alive, the pain of not knowing barely describable. Madeleine is still missing, her name mentioned much less and yet deeply embedded in the national consciousness, and I don't doubt the steadfastness with which the family trust that she will be found.
Suddenly everyone seems to have a right to the most intimate details of private lives, in Susan Selky's case the lies, the secrets, the uncertainties, the infidelities and Jo Public is suddenly permitted to make judgements and does. God knows for the McCanns it was and still is hideous, blatantly hurtful and frequently incomprehensible.
The depth of public sympathy sadly often rests on the circumstances of the disappearance, the slightest hint of parental culpability perhaps leading to a measuring and rationing of that sympathy. As if any parent ever needs to be told they may have made a wrong call, as if they won't have asked themselves those questions a million times over, and how Susan anguishes over that decision to let Alex walk to school, and suffers, whether real or imagined, the approbation of those around her. How the McCanns must have anguished over their own circumstances.
I'm not sure I understood that pain with quite such a piercing and crystal clarity as I do now. 
Susan suffers accordingly when she senses Alex's face may be disappearing from the public eye and her reactions and often desperate coping strategies are both brave and surprising... you might find yourself wincing and doubting, and yes judging on many occasions through this one before you reach the final page, and what a final page.
Still Missing reads like a thriller and I had no idea how Beth Gutcheon was going to bring it to a conclusion that would satisfy. When I got there it left me speechless, so my best advice is allow yourself time to read those final fifty pages in a single sitting; pointless to have anything urgent on the agenda, you'll just forget to do it and you won't be able to say anything coherent afterwards anyway.
The tension builds and builds, layer on layer, often imperceptibly but the psychological pressure is relentless and I hadn't realised quite how closely my breathing must have been mirroring Susan's until the end when I'd almost expired with anxiety and could have used some oxygen.
There are some wonderful touches that locate this book so beautifully in its pre-iPod era, people listening to disco music through transistors strapped to their backs, but much more importantly, to read Beth Gutcheon's book is to understand in some small part, the pain of a parent in this situation, and to a depth that you couldn't possibly come close to knowing unless you had suffered your own version of this anguish.
That's a huge achievement for any book.

A Homage to Alice...

There's really only one person to blame for all of this.
Flashback...
 May 19th 2010
"Mrs M (Alice) and I de-oxygenated Jericho's in Launceston with two hours of nattering."
dovegrey had never been there before.
 Bookhound and dovegrey have fallen into a bit of a habit.
Saturday morning.
A leisurely start.
  Launceston.
Stroll through town,
Picking up the papers en route
to

Jericho's.

  Bookhound and dovegrey are starting to get picky about wanting 'their' table.
With this perfect view of the castle.

They sip, sup and peruse.
dovegrey was a little annoyed not to have noticed the shadow of this designer gerbera
at the time

and got it all in the picture.
Bookhound does a quick round of the charity shops
while dovegrey pops into
The Cornwall Yarn Shop
to sniff the wool.

In charge of the shop today someone dovegrey recognises.
Thinks...
previous health visiting life...
Thinks...
The names come back.
This happens a lot.
dovegrey could really use that space for remembering
where she parks her car.
The baby is now nine years old and bounds down the stairs to say hello.
She's grown.
Bookhound is waiting patiently outside with arms folded.
This happens a lot.
He says 'Don't buy those geraniums for £2 each in the car park
I'll buy you some nicer ones in the week.'
She says
'Yeah...right.'

Watch this space.

Beth Gutcheon & I reacquaint...

A little bird had tipped me off  that one of the new offerings from Persephone Books is quite a good read, and so when I heard that Persephone were currently giving away a free copy of one of their Classics (apologies, I think the offer may have ended) with each purchase, my copy of Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon was quickly ordered along with a copy of Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, which I've actually read twice but who can resist a free book?
It'll make a lovely gift for someone someday.
The name Beth Gutcheon is forever associated with my earliest days of patchwork back in the 1970s, when scrap bags of fabric from Laura Ashley inspired us, though with a caveat that none of us knew then but may have since discovered; that if we were planning to make an heirloom from them we might come unstuck. The cotton and the dyes were reputed not to be of the finest quality and unlikely to stand the test of time... though I couldn't possibly comment.
In fact people say the same now about some of the modern and very pricey 'celebrity fabrics' and naming no names I can see which ones they mean...hankie-thin and dyes just waiting to fade.
Packs of pre-cut hexagons quickly followed from Laura Ashley and we all slavishly chopped up our bits of card and stitched English-style over papers little suspecting that there might be this great big universe of American patchwork out there waiting for us.

Beth Gutcheon set us on course with The Perfect Patchwork Primer, first published in the UK by Penguin in 1974 and I think perhaps one of the few books out there on the subject at the time. I loved Beth Gutcheon's take on it all, an attempt to preserve the traditions whilst dragging them kicking and screaming into the modern era.

'We can enjoy tradition without getting downright hokey...People talk a surprising amount of twaddle about the romance of patchwork, especially lately. ( "My don't you wish some fairy would set those patches talkin' - what a tale they could tell!") My foot. They could tell a tale of days and months of mindless, thankless tedium, cooking food of a depressing sameness...'

Meanwhile any early notions I may have been harbouring about perfection were also neatly side-stepped and consigned to history, I have been happy with the odd mis-matched corner ever since

'Neither are we going to have any elitist hokum about its taking 70 years to learn to quilt well, or how you have to have 12 stitches to the inch, absolutely even on both sides of the quilt...the only essential criterion should be what will satisfy you.'

For years this was the only patchwork book I ever owned.
Clear guidance on 'how to', a plentiful supply of patterns and I'm not quite sure why I now have shelves of books on the subject, because on revisiting Beth Gutcheon's Primer this week I can see it's still the only book I would ever have needed...but knowing me and books are you surprised.
I took it with me into the 1980s and those childbearing years and was comforted.

'Working with your hands gives you a chance not only to restore an object, but also to restore and re-create yourself, for when you've finished you are not just the person who endlessly makes the coffee or treks to the laundromat...or buys the baby's shoes - you are also the person who made the thing. You have added something new, something possibly beautiful to the world, and to your life. You are what you do.'

Well yes, of course the babies were little creations of beauty that we had added to the world, but there was some succour to be had from the Dresden Plate quilt I made in those spare, sticky-finger-free moments through their babyhood as we approached our tenth 'tin' wedding anniversary and aptly named Tin Plate.

This one looks a little dated now and has been through the wash that many times its voice perhaps a little rinsed out, but if this quilt could talk it would probably scream shout whisper something highly embarrassing like 'I told you not to do that...now you can all go to your bedrooms and don't come down until you can say sorry to each other.'

Or the Mackenzie Star which never seems to date and is still in constant use, made from fabrics given to me by a visitor from the US in the days when different US fabrics were still quite hard to find over here.
 
This one likely to say ad nauseum 'You can go out on your bike when you've cleared up your room.'

Strawberry Fayre, the Chagford-based mail order company perhaps the first to bring us the US fabrics here in the UK, and still up there with the best. I have found nothing to surpass their finest US Muslin when a plain cream fabric is required and their sample packs still delight.
Beth Gutcheon meanwhile kept me on song and sewing and I look back fondly on those years when I used to meet weekly with two friends to quilt and chat.
Tuesday nights were sacrosanct.
The chaps took over the babies and we escaped from our nappy buckets and relished the chance of several hours of uninterrupted creating. A lesser known fact that the now very well-known local quilting group, the Goosey Quilters was set up by the three of us on the basis that there might be more people out there who'd enjoy doing this too. I'm no longer a member but the group is still going strong some 25 years later, still has an annual exhibition and a little bit of that is down to Beth Gutcheon's Primer and its influence on me.
And Beth's influence lived on in this wall hanging which I made for Persephone Books on the occasion of their fifth birthday, and which perhaps still hangs in the Lamb's Conduit Street shop somewhere. The names of the 6" quilt blocks all relate to Persephone book titles somehow.

And I think that might bring us full circle and back to where we started.
It's been delightful to touch base with Beth Gutcheon again, I had no idea she'd written novels so I am indebted to 'the little bird' because Still Missing is indeed proving to be an excellent read, much more about it soon.
 

The Orange Prize Party, what you really want to know...

How unlikely that I would ever gate-crash my way into the inner sanctum of the Orange Prize for Fiction awards party, so I have to tack dovegreyreader neatly and unobtrusively onto the haute couture coat-tails of someone else, and I was delighted that novelist Amanda Craig resolved her identity crisis in time to be there and report back for us. Royalty were in attendance so photographic evidence of existence required which Amanda will explain. Personally I find my Boots Advantage card has got me into all sorts of places (Dartmoor Prison...seriously, yes, with a book group) requiring ID but I doubt it would have passed muster for this.
There was much tongue-in-cheek talk on Facebook during the day about the reading habits of the Royals and curtsy practice, so it's good to have the definitive version of events, and my thanks to Amanda, long listed for the prize this year with Hearts and Minds, for taking the time to share her thoughts.
And congratulations to Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna and everyone at Faber for beating the odds and winning. Having decided just to read the winner this year and not the long list...and then not the short list, and thinking I'd be let off the hook because it would be Wolf Hall, my thoughts on the book drekkly, meaning all in good time.

What fun to go to the 21st Orange Prize party, the annual Walpurgis Night for women novelists! As ever, it was held at the “ballroom” of Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, next to the London Eye, and as ever the sun shone and the champagne flowed. I never get to enjoy the latter because I drive there, and the delicious pink ginger non-alcoholic cocktail ran out much faster – but the biggest cheer of the evening was for Tattinger, which provided the booze.

This may give you some idea of what the evening tends to be like. Although there are a handful of nervous men in suits – usually agents like Derek John and Ed Victor, plus a dash of male novelists like James Runcie, Russell Celyn Jones and Anthony Quinn – most are women. And what women! From the tiny, fiery Lisa Allardice of the Guardian Review section to the stately, revered Jenni Murray of Woman’s Hour, almost every woman involved in fiction tends to turn up. (Unless, that is, the PR firm has once again neglected to check its back-lists of founders, former judges and critics.)This year there was a particular fuss because HRH Camilla was the “secret” VIP. We all had to bring photo ID, said the invite sternly, which sent me into a panic because my passport is currently languishing at the Russian Embassy awaiting a visa.

This, plus a degree of Republicanism, made me and a lot of others very prepared to be cross about Camilla being invited in the first place. Apart from Prince Charles, whose susceptibility to the late Laurens Van Der Post is well-known, the Royal Family is not known to like reading. Every year, a selection of books is chosen to be sent to Balmoral, but we never hear a peep about how they go down; the comments of the late Queen Mother about TS Eliot as “such a gloomy man, looked as if he worked in a bank” still rankle. But – blow me down. The Duchess of Cornwall in person not only exuded raffish charm of the sort that made her instantly popular but made a long, lucid and totally believable speech about how much she loves reading the Orange short-list every year. She has a marvellously deep voice, and is the kind of person you could imagine curling up with a book and a tot of whiskey just like the rest of us.

The format of the party goes as follows: cram several hundred literary people in a low ceilinged room, with loud music, get them hot, drunk and excited and then make long anguished speeches about how grateful you are to Orange, and how all should have prizes but sadly can’t. Kate Mosse, the eternally elegant and energetic co-founder of the prize made her usual acknowledgements, the Man From Orange told us it was All About Communication, and then the prize-giving began. There are three – one for a short story by an unpublished writer, sponsored by Harper’s Bazaar, one for a First Novel and one for a Novel. This year there was a fourth, awarded by the Duchess, in which teenage judges chose their favourite from past winners and picked Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (against stiff competition from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, which presumably was a bit too close to the bone for them.)

Personally, the novel I’m looking forward to reading is the winner of the New Fiction award, Irene Sabatini. The Boy Next Door is a cross-racial love story set in Zimbabwe at the time of the Revolution. The judges of the New Writing Award passed on the two first novels that, to general surprise, made it onto the short-list for the Novel award – Rosie Alison’s (aka Mrs Tim Watersone) The Very Thought of You, and Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising, a thriller. Daisy Goodwin, the Chair, described five of them enthusiastically -  though she forgot to mention the sixth, Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on a Green Bicycle, until prompted by the audience. She then called it “a work of genius, of course.”

As everyone will now know, Hilary Mantel did not win, and neither did Lorrie Moore’s novel (generally agreed to be not a patch on her short stories) despite strong championship from the Guardian.  It went to Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna, which few in the audience had found palatable though there was general enthusiasm for her because of The Poisonwood Bible, and because she made a most graceful and touching speech about how, when the latter had been shortlisted eleven years ago, she had been unable to fly over due to having had a baby.

Despite the gruesome blasts of music that punctuated each announcement, and no sign of the gorgeous six-foot transvestite saxophonist who usually plays at the party, it was a good evening. Trays of salad in glass tumblers began to circulate (though few would touch the one with beetroot in, for obvious reasons), followed by dessert, but once the prizes were over the real business of the evening – gossip – began in earnest, and a good time was had by all. Even if far too many authors are now being forced to self-publish, the prize stimulates interest and investment in new fiction that, as the TV adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Small Island this year showed, is usually justified.  

 Many years ago, when the Orange Prize first began, I would be rung up by newspapers like the Telegraph and asked if I would care to attack it. Surely I, as a novelist, didn’t want any special pleading? They would offer me quite large sums of money, and I would always say, regretfully, No; as a feminist, I would not attack something which so clearly redressed an injustice.

As time has gone on, the attitude has changed to requests for pieces saying, Now more women have won the Booker, can’t the Orange go away? Again, the answer is No. The Orange has done immense good in promoting serious new literature by women in libraries and schools as well as in bookshops, and although five times more men than women still win the Booker and the Costa prizes, there is at least the Orange as a court of appeal. It is still a kind of Cinderella prize, but in the best way: Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door, which won the New Writer’s award, had not had a single review, for instance. Now, it will. What it has created is not a ghetto but a forum in which women’s writing is taken seriously, as an art as well as an entertainment. I think Angela Carter, who was one of a number of great women writers who died before its inception, overlooked and unrewarded, would have been as pleased as I was to see how something that began in a cramped flat in North London should see its 21st year in with such style.

Always the Children ~ Anne Watts

Having trained in paediatric nursing and at a hospital where the motto was Children First and Always, the title of this book was always going to resonate deeply with me.
Then the cover...and this cover has entranced me throughout, though I suspect its traditional image is more about ensuring that Always the Children - A Nurse's Story of Home and War by Anne Watts take its rightful place amongst the plethora of nursing memoirs hitting the shelves at the moment.
The cover perhaps also slightly misleading when you delve into the content because Anne Watts is no traditional nurse following the path of starch and hospital hierarchy, charting instead a very different route for herself and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about her diverse and fascinating career.
Anne's childhood blighted by a terrible tragedy and ensuing sadness and it was much against her father's wishes that she entered nurse training in October 1958, and for some reason the month is always important in the old nurse training calendar. I have always been part of the Oct 72 set at Gt Ormond Street, Anne doubtless the Oct 58 set at Manchester Royal Infirmary. Nurse training hadn't changed that much twixt her day and mine so I identified with many of Anne's experiences in the School of Nursing and on the wards.
In 1967, and with some experience under her belt, Anne applies and is selected to work for the Save the Children Fund and posted to Qui Nhon in South Vietnam, 360k north of Saigon and a war zone comparable with the very worst the world could offer.
I was immediately interested because the family of one of my student nurse flatmates back in the early 1970s had adopted Vietnamese twin girls, deserted by their mother in a Saigon orphanage in 1969. Setting aside any ethical issues and controversy about the principles of adoption outside a home country, these two little girls (who are now in their forties) were rescued from certain death and raised in a family that loved them dearly and gave them a fantastic start in life. I knew them as very bouncy four year olds who were the delight of the little Yorkshire village they grew up in and yet somehow Vietnamese to their core.
As I read Always the Children I realised I could actually squeak it into this month's Endsleigh Salon theme of Plague and Pestilence. I'd been scouring the shelves for a good disease to catch my attention...Journal of a Plague Year or the History of Polio/ Cholera and nothing seemed to be working its contagion on me; but what bigger source of plague and pestilence if not the scourge, the stupidity and the futility of war and its associated viral spin-offs, genocide, massacre, displacement and the torture of innocent victims to name but a few.
On her travels Anne certainly meets plenty of disease...Malaria, Bubonic Plague (nearly)  Hansen's Disease (formerly known as Leprosy) and in the latter years AIDS, as well as the devastating injuries to be expected in the war zones in which she works. After Vietnam, Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and then Lebanon during the Israeli occupation.
There are some incredible photos too, several very moving and one in particular which relates to some school desks made for local Vietnamese children by the US Navy 'SeaBees'.
There's a little girl seated at one, a look of complete concentration on her face as she does a puzzle...you can see the words 'all interlocking' on the box on the desk and it's a beautiful little desk, no botch cowboy job this, and I looked at this little girl's face for ages until eventually I scanned the picture as a whole and my eyes caught the space beneath the desk where two little legs should have been dangling, and they were not.
But as I pondered the plague and pestilence theme in relation to Always the Children, so much more emerged too and often in the most surprising places.
A stint in between overseas placements spent working in an elderly care home in Wandsworth revealed shockingly low levels of care.
For all its wealth Saudi Arabian attitudes to women and their oppression seemed as pestilential and insidious as the worst outbreaks of any disease likely to be found in a war zone. As did the brutality of female circumcision in the Sudan, the results of which Anne witnessed, and over which I most definitely wanted to cry.
It seems like lazy recourse to a series of corny cliches on my part to say that Anne's indomitable spirit shines through the most appalling experiences of man's inhumanity to man, but they do, and all alongside her darker moments of doubt and fear mixed with anger, compassion and grief at what she witnesses. But there's black humour too, always in evidence in most nursing environments and essential when you've been there. So expect some refreshingly light-hearted moments, much laughter, a wonderful encounter with Bob Hope and a few high-risk mischievous adventures too.
And yes, Anne might have thrown up on the floor with fear but I was almost incontinent as she described the footsteps crashing and circling the hut in the middle of the night suspecting it to be...when actually it was... who'd have thought it!
Faced with overwhelming distress and sadness Anne's pragmatism also comes to the fore.
In my own experience you're completely scuppered without this capability in most nursing situations; there may be things happening around you that you detest with a passion, yet you cannot change them and to try, or to lose sleep over it all, is to waste precious emotional energy needed elsewhere and thus risk becoming increasingly ineffective. It's the quick road to burn out. Other things that perhaps you can change a little, and that little may actually become a lot in the bigger scheme and it's that old wisdom adage about knowing the difference.
Always the Children a truly worthy addition to those nursing memoirs currently so popular, Nurse on Call by Edith Cotterill ... Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth and who knows perhaps one day dovegreyreader's as you all keep urging me to do, though doubtless I'll miss the moment and find the publishing world is sated with them by the time I do. A few of mine own memories are on here, but the big ones, the majority are stored up for a future date (perhaps) because I think there is a right time in a nursing life to share them and mine are still too recent, the people far too local and far too alive and we still live here. I see most of them at the checkout in Morrison's for starters and no matter how deeply I buried the details, some of those really hair-raising moments out in the community are so one-off that everyone would recognise themselves. I'd be in terrible trouble with the NMC over confidentiality and probably be struck off or de-aproned or whatever is done to nurses these days.
If I'm still compus heapus at 70 I'll have another think about it.
Meanwhile I'm delighted for Anne Watts, she has a warm and sensitive voice and has found exactly the right moment for her book, and thank goodness her sister Joan motivated her to write it.

Endsleigh Salon update...London

I think I'm a few Salons short of a full house having sacrificed  May (theme ~ Road)  to the final pre-concert choir practice, and realising I still hadn't brought you news of April and the theme of London, and look it's June already which means Plague and Pestilence this evening.
Going back even further, here's a soothing picture of the recently restored Endsleigh rose walk taken last year, and don't miss the little bit of film over here >>>>under 'Seeing' if you missed it. The gardens have slowly been restored in accordance with Humphry Repton's original and very detailed early eighteenth century plans, a place of breathtaking beauty with surprises around every corner.

I do make a wild assumption that everyone knows what the Endsleigh Salon is... a monthly book group with a difference which meets at our local inn, the difference being that we read around a theme rather than a single book and it's a magic formula that works. It means you can read a book of your choice rather than have to slog through one chosen for you that may not be to your preference, and the discussion can lead off all over the shop and that's fine too.
So off to London and Linda kicked off with her choice Balthazar Jones & the Tower of London Zoo by Julia Stuart and gave it a real thumbs up. It's fiction, Balthazar, married to Hebe, is a beefeater at the Tower and keeper of the Queen's menagerie, it is the sudden death of their son Milo that forms the backdrop to the story and with it all the twists and turns of human relationships with some unusual animals thrown in. I'm feeling a bit vague all this time on but I'm sure a Lost Property Office features somewhere, but don't take my word for it, take Linda's, she really enjoyed it.
Next choice, City of the Mind by Penelope Lively also given a very enthusiastic resume. London as a character, through layers of history and time as the stories rise up through...you'll have to forgive this sparsity of detail, I was listening but I also had the chair facing the window and kept glancing out onto the parterre garden it was a glorious evening. Anyway, highly recommended.
Samuel Pepys -The Unequaled Self by Clare Tomalin also a fascinating read, the diary set in it's sociological context and much emphasis on the impromptu, spur of the moment life of the man as a focal point of interest for this reader. Highly recommended.
I think I'd taken along a Muriel Spark but I didn't write down which one and it's so long ago I can't remember which one...perhaps Memento Mori, someone will confirm or correct.
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd was proving a bit of a struggle for the chooser, but with pledges to finish it seemed all was not lost.

Oh dear, Saturday by Ian McEwan...a book I feel I've heard so much about I really don't need to read it and have never really wanted to either. Champagne socialism apparently featuring a 'smug b*&$%&*d of a neurosurgeon and the reader, not one to mince words, wanted him dead. Round-robin bragging letters featured in this discussion somehow, I have a feeling the neurosurgeon's family sickeningly won Olympic gold at everything.
We wondered how we felt about Ian McEwan on that recent TV programme where a clearly adulatory interviewer fluttered her eyelashes at him, declared him our 'national novelist' and asked how he felt about that.
We felt we'd like to have been consulted first.
Hmm again and thrice hmm and a lot of tutting over Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. Highgate Cemetery, surreal plot and it got a thumbs down but did have us discussing better books with a twin-ish theme like Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson....which if you haven't read, my saying that has just ruined it for you, forget I said and read it anyway.
Rebecca loved London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins, good story and characters, very enjoyable read.
Angela had us mesmerised by The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer who she and Linda had heard speaking locally but it had all been a bit rushed, he'd got lost and was late they had a table booked for lunch.
London we asked?
Oh yes, big chapter on London we were assured...
40,000 inhabitants.
Rat infested ditches.
Pig population out of control.
Forbidden to lob excrement into the ditch around Fleet Prison because all the prisoners were dying.
No stigma attached to brothels.
Lots of executions.
Oh plus ca change we all agreed, give us Devon any day.

Time Will Darken It ~ William Maxwell

My recent introduction to the writing of William Maxwell has seemed like a pure, self-indulgent pleasure because I think I've finally found a way into the writing of U.S. male writers. The ramparts have always felt heavily guarded from where I sit by the likes of Pynchon, Roth, Bellow, Updike et al and somehow I've never managed to skirt my way around them to find the writing that I truly wanted to read and could identify with in some way.
That's all highly judgemental of me because actually, of those four, I've only read one book by one of them (Herzog by Saul Bellow) so suggestions welcome because I have promised myself an exploration of it all one day, but perhaps it is also a demonstration of how tricky it can be to side-step the big shouty voices in search of the gentle whispers.
Everything has changed with the arrival of William Maxwell.
My introduction with They Came Like Swallows, a book which for me joins the honoured ranks of those which pitch a child's inner voice with note-perfect accurately, followed by So Long, See You Tomorrow and most recently Time Will Darken It.
Now I'm adding in some background reading, so alongside the very engaging Paris Review interview I also have Barbara Burkhardt's biography, William Maxwell - A Literary Life.
Whilst I have undoubtedly slipped into rocky crevasses in the past, with too much reading emphasis on the life and insufficient on the writing (Virginia Woolf) it is still proving a revelation to discover more about William Maxwell as I read along. He is a writer with immense and untold sensitivity and knowing where in his life those sensitivities may have come from feels quite essential for me now.
I was therefore interested to read of a serious suicide attempt in his sophomore year at university, a failed attempt obviously, but one which Shirley Hazzard referred to as she memorialized William Maxwell in 2001.

'Maxwell knew that quiet desperation can't be counted on to stay quiet, that heartbreak can grow irrepressible,"....An attempt at suicide "that extreme and most solitary experience must always be set, by survivors against subsequent distress. I sometimes thought it a spectral presence in Bill's equilibrium and in his greatest pleasures. Photographs of Bill and Emmy when their daughters were small have the radiance of a reprieve, as though Bill marvelled, like George Herbert, It cannot be / That I am he / On whom Thy tempests fall at night.' "

Reading that has given me a new perspective having just turned the final page of Time Will Darken It because I sense that 'spectral presence' radiating in William Maxwell's writing here too. I'll give nothing away but if you've read the book you will know the moment and if you haven't there is no way you will miss it.
This is small town America, and the home of lawyer Austin King, his wife Martha and their young daughter Abbey is open for a month-long visit from the Potters, relatives from the Deep South.
It's July 1912 and Elm Street, Draperville is about to host an invasion, and I always think of the sinking of the Titanic when I see anything set in 1912. It seems like an apposite and intentional choice of year in which to set a book where collisions with unseen hazards are rife, many of them hidden out of sight... that 9/10's worth below the waterline.
Yes, a month-long visit, think about visitors and stinking fish after three days and know something of the newly-pregnant Martha's dismay at her husband's unstinting offer of hospitality.
The fragility of the King's marriage is delicately exposed in the opening paragraph

'The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and neighbours he had invited to an evening party would be ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.'

By nuance and gesture, body language and small asides, the parlous state of affairs between Austin and Martha quickly becomes clear, whilst little Abbey brings a child's simple and straightforward perspective to the proceedings.
It is the unmarried adult children of Family Potter, arrogant and self-assured Randolph and breathy and impressionable Nora who cause the most disruption, with Potters Senior ranking a close second.
And poor Austin, or was it poor Austin?
Did I want to shake some sense into Austin...I'm not sure but Austin perhaps the definitive mystery to be fathomed throughout the book for me as I read.
Intrinsically good and kind-hearted or just plain foolish...
Passive and seemingly weak-willed or too well-mannered and tightly buttoned to stray beyond the bounds of politeness and social custom.
Thus far you can perhaps tell that William Maxwell is the master of characterisation and seemingly ordinary situations, there is no sitting back and feeling like the shy reader here, I knew these people and I wanted to know much more each time I picked up a book which I intentionally eked out over four weeks of slow, languid, involved reading.
But just wait until you meet Nora.
Nora, deeply frustrated by the constraints of the life of the unmarried daughter and the increasingly aged parents and the stifled, unreachable opportunities which suddenly seem within her grasp as her obsessive infatuation for Austin starts to blossom insidiously.
Meanwhile Martha, already less than enamoured with her own life and marriage, stands by and watches helplessly and may I say with remarkable control and restraint as Austin, flattered or foolish (reader's decision I think) seems to find the attentive preening of his feathers quite to his liking.
Enough of the detail I hope for you to see what a joyous month-long reading time I've been having with this one and why other books, read alongside out of necessity for deadlines, have fallen some way short.
But if I'm considering again those sensitivities that William Maxwell may bring to his writing from his own experience then this book is full of them.
There was that defining moment when I did know Austin's pain, that he did possess that self-awareness that I had been doubting and when I turned round all my thinking, I knew that William Maxwell knew that pain too.
Time Will Darken It has been one of those remarkable, unmissable reading experiences for me.

Rusty school...

You may recall the arrival of gun dog puppy Rusty just before Christmas.

Well he's eight months old now, out of the nursery, has been through kindergarten and is now into senior school and serious education...because there can be no messing about when this teenager goes to the theatre.

Rusty must have eyes and heart for only one master because obedience is crucial. He's going to have to work and safety will be paramount, the last thing required is an uncontrollable dog haring around with shotguns in the vicinity, so only the Gamekeeper is allowed to handle him at the moment and we mustn't do anything with him at all.

Not a thing...not even walk him on the lead, and definitely not let him out the kennel for a sneaky run-around...or go up and make a fuss of him when he does the doleful brown eyes plead...(yes Bookhound that includes you!)
The Gamekeeper comes in from work and takes Rusty out on evening training sessions and for such a young puppy he is proving to be top of the class, already walking to heel off the lead and doing some waiting, finding and retrieving even if he does occasionally overshoot the runway, which was actually my fault for being there...

The Privileges ~ Jonathan Dee

In keeping with my unwitting pledge to read books by authors called Jonathan I can now add Mr Dee to Messrs, Buckley, Coe and McGregor so far this year and his latest novel The Privileges published by the Corsair imprint of Constable & Robinson.
If every book I've read in recent weeks seems to have been about dying, then every other one seems to have been about couples in a fix.
So love and death still the common fictional denominators.
Then again plonk it all in Upper Manhattan and let me in those New York doors and I'm up and away, and I certainly was swept up by this one.
Are all fictional New York families dysfunctional ones?
Suddenly I can't think of a normal happy one can you?
Why does New York offer the perfect backdrop for domestic disquiet?
Adam and Cynthia Morey are actually the bees knees. The couple with the mostest even before their marriage which proves to be a winning combination, their love for each other knows no bounds and I really was predicting all that to go horribly off the rails etc etc.
Well they do have a few moments along the way, though only rich ones because Adam's confident flair for hedge funds and sniffing out the winners makes him and his company an absolute fortune, somehow Adam and Cynthia really are made for each other.
Brinkmanship, risk-taking and recklessness Adam's speciality it would seem with a bit of insider dealing to boot and all at heaven knows whose expense, and with that Jonathan Dee spells out not only the addictive nature of money-making but the cynicism, fatuousness and despair that can go with it, and no more so than when mediated through the lives of the children.
Because verily there are rich kids, April and Jonas who I wanted to hate (in fact I wanted to hate them all) but just couldn't quite bring myself to. Jonathan Dee does invest them all with the odd endearing characteristic here and there, for all their faults little glimmers of compassion and caring are there and my sympathies were oddly and consistently exercised in their direction.
An astronomical amount of money comes with its own Gucci baggage, privilege is not all it's cracked up to be and when high flyer Cynthia, capable and assertive, settles down to motherhood whilst at the top of her game, it's not long before she's on the losing side. Decimated, deskilled and defeated by her role, and prey to an insidious creeping depression I was constantly wondering where this might all lead.
Silly me, this is rich New York, it's into therapy of course.
April and Jonas emerge into their late teens as opposites, perhaps the polarised examples of what unrestricted wealth can do to children, either debauched, drug-fuelled licentiousness and off the rails completely, or a macrobiotic diet and trying to save the world. Oddly disenfranchised for all their wealth, detached from reality and hardly equipped to deal with the life as the rest of us know it, the bumpy ride is inevitable for both children from within the confines of a family who now have so much money they have to employ people to help them get rid of it via a charitable foundation.
When someone needs hospital care and no room is available it crosses Cynthia's mind that she might as well buy the place.
April, who finds poor people scary, nips into town and buys Jonas a painting by Picasso as a thank you for a weekend stay...as you do.
It's beyond unreal for most of us but all very real for Family Morey and as a result, if you decide to read this one, prepare to read a book that consistently subverted this reader's expectations whilst revealing both the decadence and potential rottenness at the core of unregulated wealth. But also expect to come away with an understanding of how impossible it can also be to actually be that rich...how the average man on the street really does like to see

'the high brought low...the bubble popped...would love nothing better than for you to turn out to be hypocrites and scumbags instead of the generous caring family you are...'

Expect also a few bizarre ( to me anyway) plots twists along the way with an ending that subverted all expectations, but which I think was all ultimately supposed to demonstrate that of course rich people have feelings too, and in the end also have to learn how to deal with all the dross that the rest of us do.
There's no exemption from some of the life and very gritty death stuff no matter how much money you may have.
In fact yes I'll confess I was the average woman on the street wanting them all to fall flat on their very perfectly straight teeth whilst conjuring up all manner of unkindnesses to befall them as I started to read, but only because the Calor Gas bill had just arrived.
In the end it all made this person happy to be average, confirmation that truthfully, and much as we might dream of it, let's hope we don't win the lottery (well if we ever bought a ticket that is) and my thanks to Jonathan Dee for revealing that lesser known fact about myself to me.

The Woman in Black @ The Theatre Royal

This is all my fault.
I'm an old curmudgeon who was clearly never cut out for theatre-going because every one else annoys me far too much, and perhaps on this basis, I'll throw in the towel and just perform the plays myself to an audience of me and then I can't complain.
I'd read the book and listened to the audio, so with one box left to tick we'd booked tickets to see Susan Hill's The Woman In Black at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth.

'It's really scary' I said to Bookhound and off we trotted, foregoing a pre-theatre meal because Bookhound is hoping to get some building work underway here soon, so we're on maximum economy and £40 on the tickets seemed expensive enough when a night out used to cost a fiver.
We settled into our Row C Dress Circle seats worryingly surrounded by an ominous number of teenagers waving to an even more ominous number down in the Front Stalls, and I could feel the tension creeping up the back of my neck, teeth starting to grit.

'The schools are in' I whispered...

though heaven knows why I was whispering, you couldn't hear yourself think.
Before I go any further we really must get several things straight.
I love teenagers.
After all I was one, and once upon a time I had three of mine own to play with, so I have nothing but kindly thoughts for the breed.
I'm also really thrilled to see teenagers filling a theatre, it's brilliant that books like The Woman In Black are on the curriculum and can be seen in performance, but perhaps it might be an idea to offer the schools their own performances...just a thought.
The performance began and as if by magic we were surrounded in an instant by quadrophonic sweet packets and synchronised crackling, slurping, hissing water bottles and much giggling and whispering and so it continued.
Bookhound did the 'look over the shoulder' thing and was most disconcerted to find that the teacher was making as much noise with his water and his Revels as his pupils.
So we soldiered on but it became increasingly difficult to lose myself in the mysteries of Eel Marsh House.
Sadly all was lost once the screaming started as Dress Circle tried to outdo Front Stalls and it rolled around the theatre in a sort of audible Mexican wave, any sense of dramatic tension dissipating in a flash. There are moments of gentle comedy in this production juxtaposed with that supposed serious tension, plus a couple of jumpy moments when anyone with a heart condition might need a de-fib, but as to whether it was 'scary', well it might have been given the right atmospheric conditions, who knows.
I can also see how nervous laughter may occasionally prevail but the hordes around us thought the whole thing was ridiculously hilarious comedy. Any pretense that we were attempting to watch something serious was finally shattered when the lead actor, pretending to throw something into the audience was greeted with a loud 'ouch' from some bright spark in the row behind us.
Actually the bright spark's timing was immaculate and completely spontaneous, the lad will go far.

'Siiiiiirrrr' went up the chorus, eyes down texting madly during the interval,

' We thought you said this was really scary?'

Sir managed to disengage from his whale-sized packet of Revels and his jeroboam of  Malvern Spring long enough to pronounce with authority,

'Oh just you wait until the second half...'

as if his troops weren't wound up enough already.
Eventually anything that moved was greeted with rounds of prolonged screaming, pin-drop moments required a sledge hammer to be heard, the actors valiantly kept acting, we valiantly tried to hear the words and couldn't, and in the end I think we were all mightily relieved to get to the end, out of the theatre and on the road home.
The moments of supposed high drama just had them rolling in the aisles around us and I suddenly had a vision of the roaring boys and the bawdiness of the Globe in its first incarnation, just when did it all become civilised and our expectation for silence rise accordingly?
Bookhound did ring the theatre manager the next day, not so much to complain about our hard-earned £40 down the drain as to ask for our thanks to be passed on to two superb actors who we guess couldn't wait to leave the city but still had several nights to go. In fact we were only one of hundreds of calls he had received through what had been a dreadful week, many performances greeted in this way apparently and as well as advising us to go on a Friday in future (no teachers will take school parties on a Friday) he very kindly offered us free tickets to a performance of our choice.

'He says would we like to see An Inspector Calls next month'

declared Bookhound when he came off the phone.

'You're joking' I said, 'have you seen the GCSE.syllabus?'

The Widow's Tale ~ Mick Jackson

'...I suddenly wake with a small piece of coal burning in my stomach, and another burning in my soul.'

In my continued and ongoing quest for books wherein no one dies, picking up The Widow's Tale by Mick Jackson wasn't going to help one iota and it is now several weeks since I turned the final page so heaven help me as I revisit now.

But perhaps the test of a truly good read is that stickability factor.
As I re-open it do I sense again the mood  that I was left with as I finished it?
Has the plot stayed with me?
Are the characters still real in my mind?
Do my truncated and shorthand notes make any sense whatsoever?
Have I got over the fact that I read it in proof copy and the dates at the head of the chapters were yet to be added which had me struggling slightly with the timescale...had there been a week or a month between this chapter and that?
I could easily have asked for a finished copy but I didn't because that lack proved to be beneficial, it turned me into a much more careful reader as I searched for those clues.
In fact there isn't much of a plot here, man has died woman grieves through series of events where man's absence is notable.
A very fiesty down-to-earth first person narrative voice and to the concern of her friends an unnamed (I think) widow has fled her London home for the isolated coast of Norfolk following the sudden death of her husband John. Perhaps one too many casseroles left on the doorstep, too much the centre of attention, but whatever it is some time and space is required to assimilate what feels like madness, but is readily recognised as the work of mourning.

'...on the inside it's non-stop barking. In fact I'm fairly howling at the moon.'

This a fictional grief observed in the tradition of those real ones so perfectly accounted by the likes of C.S.Lewis and then Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking.
Suddenly the widow becomes an expert on the subject with opinions on all manner of things previously of little personal interest, left unconsidered until now when suddenly all things grief-related seem relevant...like the proliferation of road-side shrines

'Call me old-fashioned, but, personally, I think floral tributes should be confined to the graveyard. Or the homes of the mourners. I think the front room curtains should be drawn according to custom, to signify loss, but also a desire for privacy. This is my grief. And my pain is not your pain. Go and get some pain of your own.'

I was impressed with several things. Mick Jackson's ability to write from a female perspective, albeit a fairly robust one and get it right. Then the very reader-friendly bite-sized chapters, most barely three or four pages long.
I wonder how an author feels about these?
Are they more or less difficult to achieve?
Not only do I like this format occasionally for ease of reading...more places to stop easily, draw a line and come back to later, but in this instance I also felt they perfectly reflected the inability of the grief-stricken mind to hold a thought or focus for any length of time, that butterfly-like concentration somehow imposed on the reader too.
The Widow's Tale is a personal hymn to grief, as the widow rents a cottage far from friends and home and battles her way through the demons of her loss as she contemplates a life now to be flown solo. As if it's somehow best to do these things unseen, like learning to ride a bike where no one can watch you fall off and say I told you so, or come up with helpful advice for when you get back on.

'My future it seems is frighteningly open to interpretation. On a bad day it is a bleak and empty desert stretching towards the distant horizon. On a good day it's the same desert with a few cacti along the way. Recently a friend suggested I might get involved in the 'voluntary services', as if I were some old neddy that should be put out to pasture....with the greatest respect I would rather chew off my own arm.'

There is a car to be bought, a meal to be taken alone, the search for a rationale for what has happened and alongside this all the imperfections and infidelities of the past shared life are there to be considered.
Anyone who works with the bereaved will know of the well-catalogued seven stages of the grieving process, useful only as reassurance in my experience because no one proceeds through them in an particular order or even through them all. It's more often like a whirlpool combination of several at any one time and Mick Jackson has captured that unpredictability here perfectly.

'...who knows if such a ravaged landscape ever really recovers. If I've grasped anything over the last few months it's that grief...or mourning...or whatever you want to call it, is not a continuum. Is not an arrow on a successful company's sales chart, rising inexorably towards the north-east. You don't wake up each day feeling a tiny bit better than the day before...'

This is no glorification of the deceased either, John rightly remains a shadowy, relatively unknown figure, this is a book about that essential selfishness of grief about what happens to the 'me' in all this. There is self-reproach, loathing, fallibility and imperfection but above all honesty as the unwanted freedom of being single is occasionally relished, and all in a narrative voice that I constantly warmed to. The widow tells it like it is, by turns blackly humorous at others melancholy, frequently angry, puzzled and bewildered but with an astute and reflective eye that meant for all its potential to be an utterly miserable book this thankfully never happens.

A book I recommend frequently and which I've written about here before, Don't Let Them Tell You How to Grieve by Gina Claye always says it gently and with huge sensitivity and sums up Mick Jackson's excellent novel too.

...And when it all breaks
and the weight of my world
forces me to my knees,
give me courage
to grit my teeth,
haul myself up,
and on the bare
unrelenting earth,
let me learn to dance.