dovegreyreader scribbles

Please may we buy...

So we are well and truly into our Miele appliance meltdown to the tune of three, there's no going back now.
First the washing machine and now the dishwasher, both bought sixteen or so years ago when we moved here and according to the man in the shop, whose eyes went like saucers when we told him its age, apparently we can't complain. In human years that's about 350 years old for a dishwasher which has seen faithful service to the dovegrey crockery.
Our old faithful has developed an earth leak that creates an explosion and takes out the entire electrical circuit every time we switch it on and, to be honest, we're there again; it's not worth paying the call out charge and messing about with incontinent elderly appliances that mix electricity and water.
So we went back to the shop and saw the cheery chaps yet again who are almost on our Christmas card list now,

'Please may we buy a dishwasher this time?' we asked and did the rounds of what's available.

Bookhound having been 'in the trade' and the designer and fitter of our kitchen had installed a very nice integrated affair that sported a maple door to match the rest, and of course when you buy it from yourselves you don't really notice the cost. Here it is on one of the kitchen's better days, I wouldn't want you thinking it always looked like this.

Lovely but replacing like with like now prohibitive, almost £200 more for a dishwasher that you have to fix your own door onto. Ridiculous, so it's farewell to the one disguised as a cupboard, and hello to the bog standard white thing that shouts 'I'm a dishwasher' the minute we walk in the kitchen. That's all fine with me because sixteen years on the kitchen is as intended, not immaculate but simple Shaker style, lovely Cornish Delabole slate worktops that have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous teenage cooking marathons and parties for 150 and survived.
Top marks and thank you Jamie Oliver for inspiring boys to cook, slightly fewer marks for the mess and your bright idea of dispensing with the bowl when making pizza bases and just tipping the flour and water right onto the work surface... Jamie that just doesn't work when in the hands of teenagers.
Then the lovely oak chairs that we spotted in the cafeteria at the Eden Project when it first opened, tracked down the maker and bought ourselves six. The seats now all gouged with scratches from slouching kayakers with rivets on the back pockets of their jeans, so all very lived in and homely and as you can see dear old Rocky was very at home here too, even though kitchen table reclining for cats has always been forbidden.
It's the petrified student nurse in me, I can't help but think what Sister Beech would have said... 'Nurse! Just think of the cross-infection.'

The Canadian maple kitchen has mellowed beautifully, a brilliant glow shines in from the west at sunset and the room, now much in need of a new coat of the Farrow and Ball Chiara yellow that just works, radiates something very warm and special and it's a space and colour I never tire of.
But I'm afraid a week of washing dishes and that's me done with all this born-again Marigold gloves stuff.
Mind you, I'm saying 'I' when in fact I should be saying 'he', because Bookhound has done most of it... just off to choir practice... just off out to lunch... better do some work... must finish this book... and is now trying to convince me that he really enjoys washing dishes.
Whilst this is an honourable admission I feel it's a habit best broken before it becomes too entrenched and the space in the kitchen is rapidly usurped by something else, leaving us destined to handwash for evermore. I sensed, in that way that people who have been married a long time have of knowing what the other one is thinking, that this was leading to the  'Let's not have a dishwasher' conversation, so I cut that idea right off at the pass.
I'm sure plenty of you do hand wash dishes and love it for all that thinking time and sociable chat over the tea towel, but after receiving my first dishwasher as a Christmas present (can't believe how thrilled I was, but I was) about twenty-five years ago, I'm thoroughly convinced of its rightful place in our family. In fact that was the year Bookhound gave me one of those squidgy things for cleaning windows and some kitchen scissors as what I thought was my main gift (and I feigned gratitude as you do) and then several hours later said 'Oh I almost forgot, go and look in the garage...'
As punishment I insisted on having the thing fitted and working by Boxing Day at the latest.
Anyway we are almost transmogrified into a Bosch household now, only the Miele tumble dryer hanging on to life by the seat of its bearings, the gleaming white dishwasher is in and my brain is having to readjust to its different plate and cup positions after doing the other one eyes shut for so long, and please could you now spare me any disaster stories about Friday afternoon Bosch dishwashers too.

Reasons to be Cheerful about Publishing

I'm ignoring all talk of slumps and despair in the world of publishing. It might be wretched at the coal face but from where I'm sitting there is a massive slew of very enticing books coming up in early 2011, by a variety of authors I have enjoyed and whose next novels I have been anticipating eagerly.
I mentioned last week that the Spring 2011 catalogues are arriving from the publishers and that I spend ages poring over them, and you asked in comments if I could share a few titles.
So the question I asked myself was, am I selling my soul to the devil by advertising, or heaven forfend being a marketing tool?
Or am I just too excited to keep quiet about what's in the offing and can't stop myself sharing the sense of anticipation I feel about some of these books?
Well I have nothing to gain by advertising and plenty for all of us to gain by knowing what's on the way so start plaguing your local library in advance, besides which I hope you know me well enough by now.
Apart from the fact that the catalogues are usually very plush books in their own right, it's the surprises over every page that enthrall me, I sit there with my pen ticking away the books I like the sound of, then I go back and read more carefully and gather in a few more that might be a bit of a challenge, or might take me somewhere new. Then, usually feeling rather embarrassed I send along wish lists the length of the M1 to the publicists and as the books are published miraculously copies appear, often early proofs, sometimes the real thing, occasionally both.
Many of you will have benefited from this whenever I meet you as I try to pass on duplicates or sometimes post them off to those of you for whom I have addresses if I think it's a book you might enjoy.
So notebooks at the ready for some books that sound so good on paper we can but hope they live up to that promise in the writing of, and here are my first choices from the Faber and Quercus catalogues with more to follow from others in the weeks to come.
I think 2011 might just be a very rich year for fiction.

Faber & Faber

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest by Richard T.Kelly (May 2011)

Author of Crusaders which I enjoyed very much...this one a chilling modern-day Gothic fable, Dr Jekyll meets Dr Faustus and all translated into the 'immaculate world of twenty-first century medicine' and then insinuated into the lives a psychiatrist, a paediatric surgeon and a cosmetic surgeon.

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (May 2011)

I was late getting to Jane Harris's first novel The Observations, but when I did I loved it so what's not to anticipate about an elderly woman sitting in her Bloomsbury home and relating the story of her acquaintance some four decades earlier with famous artist Ned Gillespie in Glasgow, 1888 and the International Exhibition.

The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block (March 2011)

I was completely engaged with this young writer's talent in his first novel, The Story of Forgetting and it looks as if this might be a return to similar and very challenging territory as Stefan Merrill Block examines his grandparents story, and in particular his grandfather's stay in a mental hospital which cast a long shadow over his own childhood. A mix of imagination, historical fact and storytelling.

Small Bird, Beating Heart by Miriam Toews (May 2011)

Yesssssss! Any new novel by Miriam Toews has my undivided attention here and here, and it's back to the Mennonite territory of  A Complicated Kindness in this novel as a film crew arrive in this isolated community based in rural Mexico and nineteen-year old Irma finds herself drawn towards the outsiders...well her father's having none of that. Apparently darker than we are used to from Miriam Toews, but still laced with her familiar dry wit, I'll be there.

Saints and Sinners by Edna O'Brien (Feb 2011)

OK hands up, have never read any, but many of you have and I suspect this collection of short stories will be eagerly awaited by her fans, her first book in ten years, we are promised passion, pain and beauty, that's enough to make me explore a writer I should definitely have read by now.

The Path of Minor Planets by Andrew Sean Greer (Mar 2011)

Well The Story of a Marriage had Mark Thwaite and I in a friendly bout of blogging repartee, I was for he was agin, so it will be interesting to see how we feel about a group of astronomers gathered on a Pacific island to witness the passing of a comet with a tragic event during a meteorite shower about to change every ones lives.

Edward Thomas - The Final Years by Matthew Hollis (May 2011)

I'm hoping to pay particular attention to the life and writing of Edward Thomas with some Remembrance reading this November and will therefore be on the edge of my seat waiting for this one.

Now to Quercus, a publisher who hadn't really knowingly come to my attention until I read Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel and then I notice that they also published Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves. I'm currently reading Diana Souhami's excelent new biography, Edith Cavell so Quercus are firmly on my radar and plenty here to tempt the reading taste buds and by authors who are new to me.

The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter (Jan 2011)

This is being likened to Donna Tartt's The Secret History, as Ingrid inherits a fortune, heads to New York where she settles, leaves for an appointment at 9am on September 11th 2001 and is never seen again...or is she?

The Black House by Peter May (Feb 2011)

Set on the Isle of Lewis, this murder mystery will offer detective Fin Macleod for our delectation as he returns to his home island from Edinburgh to investigate the slaying. If there's one thing I like it's a new detective to get to know, will he be surly and troubled, unkempt, divorced, now married to the job and the bottle. The storm and croft-laden monochrome cover suggests all manner of darkness and menace to come.

Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran (Mar 2011)

Well, just what will our regular Tussaud commenter make of this? The family fictionalised as a young Madame T heads off to Versailles to teach Marie Antoinette the art of wax mask making. Expecting to loath her, she finds someone quite different and a firm friendship ensues which can only mean trouble for Madame T and the death masks are sure to follow.

Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen (Mar 2011)

An early 60's childhood in Oslo and Finn has to grasp a strange, adult world as a mysterious half-sister appears with something even more mysterious in her suitcase. We are promised a powerful, unsentimental evocation of childhood from this Norwegian author who has previously been shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Award... talking of which that might be a prize list I follow more closely next time around.

Island of Wings by Karen Altenberg ( Mar 2011)

A first novel and set on St Kilda in 1830 as Lizzie, pregnant with her first child and her husband, minister Neil McKenzie, head to this remote island and their new parish. That's all it took to sell this one to me but add in natives living in squalor and babies perishing mysteriously, plenty of zealous Christianity and  threats to sanity and a bit of haunting of the cliff tops and I can hardly contain myself.

Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel ( Mar 2011)

Many of us really enjoyed Brodeck's Report so how about this... ' Traumatized by memories of his war-ravaged country and with his son and daughter-in-law dead, Monsieur Linh travels to a foreign land to bring the child in his arms to safety' and there is the added promise of an extraordinary twist.

Foxes in the Night and Other Stories by Cees Nooteboom (May 2011)

A.S.Byatt rates Dutch author Cees Nooteboom as 'one of the greatest modern novelists' and this collection of linked short stories that read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death sounds like a must...' the world observed with a combination of melancholy and astonishment'.

Well that was our starter for ten and plenty more to come from the other catalogues.
Any there that take your fancy?

 

dovegreyreader asks...The Author

So what does it really feel like to have your book reviewed?
I mentioned a series of interviews I would be doing on here as a follow-up to the recent Everyone's a Critic debate at PEN, thinking that having slipped a foot in the door on that evening it would be interesting to get a glimpse behind the scenes in the world of book reviewing. So I have been slowly compiling a series of questions which various people will be answering for us, and today I am very grateful to Amanda Craig who has very kindly put on the author's hat.
As well as being the author of several novels, Amanda is also a reviewer and so has an in-depth knowledge of this world from from both sides. We often meet up when Amanda is staying down in Devon and have had some fascinating discussions about all this in the past, so it's good to be able to include all of you too, and Amanda has agreed to respond in comments if you want to ask anything else or comment on her replies.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I am the author of six novels, including A Vicious Circle (which was very much inspired by the experience of being reviewed, and then reviewing other works of fiction) and most recently Hearts and Minds. I review literary fiction for a number of national newspapers and magazines, and am children’s critic for The Times

It seems an obvious question but what do reviews mean to an author?

Part of the problem with being reviewed is that they mean so many different things. Firstly, that you and your book exist – all reviews, good or bad, being a form of advertising. Secondly, they give a public response to what you have spent years writing, in isolation. Thirdly, if intelligent, they give an indication of the merit of the story and its execution. Fourthly, they may help you sell hundreds or thousands more copies of your book, thus enabling you to continue both in terms of morale and contracts. You become hardened over time (see below) to the extent that a bad review can spoil your day but won’t cause a total crisis, but in the beginning they are hugely important.

Whether favourable or unfavourable, what is it important for you to sense about a review of your books as an author?

Firstly that it’s written by someone whose intelligence and aesthetic sense I can respect. There’s almost nothing worse than a review by someone who has just not “got” your book, whether they like it or not. Accuracy matters. Having someone so careless that they get the plot or the character’s names wrong is especially galling. Fair-mindedness, political neutrality and lack of spite matter. It’s fine for someone not to like what you’ve done, but it’s not fair to give the thumbs down from personal grudges, imaginary slights or their own conception of how you should have handled your material.

Equally, the rave review from a friend, though extremely rare in my own experience, never really counts, either privately or in the circle of those who know.  

The stinker... does it help or hinder an author, or is all publicity good?

In theory, reviews being a form of advertising means that it is worse not to be reviewed than to get a stinker. The Literary Editor who tried to stop A Vicious Circle being published never, for instance, had any of my novels reviewed before or after, no doubt with this in mind.  Very occasionally I think a stinker can be so funny that it arouses curiosity and produces the opposite effect to making a book drop dead. Mostly, people are only too glad to be alerted to yet another book they don’t have to read....and even one stinker tends to stop a novel from getting onto the all-important submissions for prizes. So a stinker is almost always instant bad news from a publisher’s point of view even if they pretend it’s not. Publishers, too, have to have quite a lot of guts – especially nowadays.

Another obvious question but is it possible to define how those 'stinkers' really make you feel and how does an author deal with these and still carry on writing?

A real stinker is a form of public flaying, especially if you’re new to being published. For my first novel I got such venomous ones that I miscarried a baby at three months. It was one of the most terrible times of my life; I was completely defenceless, I was in tears every day for two years, despite writing a second novel that was better-received, and it also meant that I never had any of the encouragement that new novelists of any talent usually get.  I always remember this when reacting against a novel I’m given to review, especially if it’s a debut. Of course, over time you get tougher. A bad review now is not nice, but it’s not something to brood over unless very silly and a bit mad.

How do you feel the litblogs sit alongside the review pages?

I tend not to read blogs on newspaper websites, but I really like the good ones like yours, John Self’s, Kevinfromcanada, Susan Hill, Danuta Kean and Norm Geras; and, in the children’s sphere, Katherine Langrish’s Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, Lucy Coats’s ScribbleCity and Meg Rosoff. I like the way litblogs respond to novels much more as readers do, as a part of life and often as the start of a debate between readers. What worries me about print reviewing is the way critics so often act as “gatekeepers” and stop people getting through. Sometimes that’s due to shortage of space (my own problem on the Times) and sometimes it’s because some critics ascend to a kind of Olympian cloud, from which they dispense judgement. Blogs are more leisurely and earthy. Above all, they seem to be written by people who still love reading for pleasure, rather than seeing it as a way of earning an increasingly poor living, or operating what I called (in A Vicious Circle) “the fear or favours market”, or reminding their own publishers of their existence.

Amazon reviews? Helpful or Unhelpful to an author? To be trusted or not?

Amazon reviews, long or short, are incredibly helpful. I now ask readers who say they’re liked my books to write them, which may be why mine have shot up – and believe me, they’re read not only by publishers but by talent scouts. In fact, I probably have my Amazon reviewers to thank for my just getting an option to have Hearts and Minds adapted as a TV series by a company called Hat Trick. I’m always grateful to anyone who tries to help. I review lots of other books on amazon if I think they are good, or interesting, and I happen to have the time. Apart from buying a book, it’s the best way readers can help each other, and writers.

I think amazon reviews can be trusted if the reviewer has clearly read the book and gives reasons for liking or disliking it. We probably all know about the notorious Orlando Figes case, now in the public domain, in which he gave rivals 1*, and his own work 5* (adding, hilariously,“may he live forever!”) on amazon. He then threatened those who exposed him for doing this with libel, got his wife to claim she had written them on his account, and finally, after being forced to make an admission and an apology, claimed to be having a breakdown after studying Stalin’s Terror.  This is an extreme case. However, I’m pretty sure there are a number of authors who review their own books in ecstatic terms, just as there are those who hate someone and give them 1*. If you read amazon reviews, it’s nearly always obvious – they’re the stuck clocks striking twelve or one. The reviews I trust are the 3* or 4* reviews. There are no such things as perfect novels, I fear, and if you want one you’ll be stuck re-reading the same handful of classics that achieved this. Anyone who reviews, or is reviewed, does well to remember this.

Mr Chartwell ~ Rebecca Hunt

There is no question about it, if you decide to read Mr Chartwell it will be necessary to suspend disbelief, in fact leave it way back around the corner and just immerse yourself in Rebecca Hunt's highly original and very imaginative conceit, which, for all its eccentricities and at times a faint hint of whimsy, does something very clever that for me made this a really worthwhile read.
You can either read this as a talking dog book with a simple, gentle but unassuming story, or you can read it as a book that crazes the surface, creating those hairline cracks which allow a reader to delve far deeper if they choose.
True, there were some elements that didn't quite work for me, one character whose name and personality didn't quite make it off the page, though that might have been the point and I may have missed something, because Mr Chartwell has hidden strengths which have really only become apparent since turning the final page, and for a debut novelist Rebecca Hunt shows much promise, witness the seven publishers bidding for this one.
Now in the telling of, it's nigh on impossible for me to share thoughts on the book without giving away the central premise and every review I've looked at does likewise, but as always, if I'm sharing my thoughts here, I offer you the chance to look away now if you think you'd rather read the book and let it dawn on you slowly.
So here's the cover so you know what the book looks like...



... now you can pootle off and find it. Penguin would doubtless hope I'd urge you to buy it but hopefully it will be in your  library, Devon have thirteen copies which bodes well and please, please come back and let us know what you think.

 

Righto, for anyone who is still here...

Mr Chartwell seizes the very common condition of depression, anthropomorphizes it (never thought I'd use that word again after the OU exam when I mentioned Black Beauty) into the shape of the ubiquitous black dog Mr Chartwell (one that talks and is called Black Pat by his close acquaintances) and then has said dog knocking on the door of Esther Hammerhans home asking to rent a room because he has an assigment nearby.

'Mr Chartwell was unmistakably a dog, a mammoth muscular dog about six foot seven high... he did look similar to a Labrador...but a heavier set and strikingly hideous Labrador. There was nothing decorative about him...the monstrous grey tongue dangled, droplets of saliva spilling onto the floor.

Central to the structure and ultimate success of the novel, which sits alongside Ned Beauman's Boxer Beetle on this years Guardian First Novel Award shortlist, is the plot woven around Winston Churchill who famously named his own depression Black Dog, and it is this theme that Rebecca Hunt has mined in what seems to me a completely new and innovative way.

'It spoke again, quieter and closer now, close enough for him to feel that warm carniverous breath.'We both know why I'm here,'
    'Bugger off, you tiresome bastard, ' Churchill said viciously.
    The hot breath blew across his cheek, across his neck, 'We have an appointment.'

And it is an unlikely meeting in 1964 between Esther, young and widowed, and a House of Commons library clerk, and Sir Winston Churchill on the eve of his retirement from politics, that offers Churchill the chance to vanquish another enemy as Mr Chartwell starts to get a foothold in Esther's life and her home.

'Esther was fascinated to discover she secretly wanted Mr Chartwell to come to the house... ransacking her forlorn routine. It was a tonic of acid vibrancy and nerves...'

The dog is a strange mish-mash of complete disgust and slobbery and drooly loathing, mixed with some rather endearing qualities, a ticklish sense of humour and a lovely and very persuasive way with words, and besides, we all want to love a black labrador. However Rebecca Hunt slowly turns reader attentions away from the havoc that Mr Chartwell creates and points them towards what lies beneath, the insidious, destructive and damaging havoc of depression on people's lives.
Witnessing and laughing at the chaos a six foot seven high dog causes in Esther's home and I realised that I might also be close to witnessing the turmoil and wanton destruction that depression causes on the mind, no laughing matter.
There's a real and tangible sense of something indefinable being given shape and form, depression posing as the unwelcome but somehow insistent companion who becomes impossible to shake off, the one that assumes its place as a right, creeping in menacingly and unexpectedly at the most inopportune moments and refusing to budge.
The faithful dog that is just a little too faithful.

'Black Pat was baiting her and she was afraid of the intention behind it. But then this was replaced by a type of flaccid affection. He was her disgusting companion. Company, it was company.'

For Churchill that depression

'...churned the heart with thistles,'

and it is with a wealth of these brilliantly evocative descriptive moments that Rebecca Hunt digs deep into the mindset of depression giving what appears to be that seemingly naive and whimsical plot real hidden depths.
I had little idea that Churchill suffered from depression, or that it is now suggested that he may have had Bipolar disorder, so I have done a little exploring since and probably now have to read Anthony Storr's book Churchill's Black Dog because it is much-lauded and quoted everywhere and advances much evidence that Churchill's depression and its impact on his personality from a young age, with its possible origins in the circumstances of his childhood, served the nation uniquely and well,

"The kind of inspiration with which Churchill sustained the nation is not based on judgment, but on an irrational conviction independent of factual reality. Only a man convinced that he had a heroic mission, who believed that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he could yet triumph, and who could identify himself with a nation's destiny could have conveyed his inspiration to others."

"...in 1940, his inner world of make-believe coincided with the facts of external reality in a way which very rarely happens... (he) became the hero that he had always dreamed of being. It was his finest hour. In that dark time, what England needed was not a shrewd, equable, balanced leader. She needed a prophet, a heroic visionary, a man who could dream dreams of victory when all seemed lost. Winston Churchill was such a man; and his inspirational quality owed its dynamic force to the romantic world of fantasy in which he had his true being."

The Black Dog with its connections to depression and melancholy has its antecedents way back in history, it wasn't a Churchillian invention, but it certainly had Churchill by the scruff,

"I don't like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible get a pillar between me and the train. I don't like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything. A few drops of desperation." - Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

So Mr Chartwell, a book that perhaps some may dismiss as a bit quaint and fanciful, but to my mind a clever and innovative debut novel, and one that leaves me eager to read whatever this writer turns her vivid imagination to next.
Like Ned Beauman, Rebecca Hunt another writer to watch.

It's all very complicated...

I expect you've all been having to do this forever but here in West Devon we like to bide a while and see if a thing is going to catch on before we embrace it, so we've been a little behindtimes with our recycling efforts. Until now just a single box and it seemed that you couldn't put much in it at all, and if you did the lid blew off and it all ended up strewn across the Tamar Valley.
And if you put glass in it, the box emptiers (who drive past at about 60mph... we haven't been out for a walk at midday on a Wednesday for years now) would casually sling it all around the lane leaving a trail of puncture material in their wake, so we never bothered.
But now we're going to have to bother because the times they are a-changing and this week West Devon has gone large on the recycling thing.
Week One = Refuse Week recycling food waste and refuse.
This will alternate with Week Two = Garden Waste Week more food waste and garden detritus too, branches up to the thickness of your wrist, vase flowers that sort of thing.
We usually recycle food waste through the dogs who love the leftovers from a good roast dinner but now feel obliged to donate it to the council who will turn it into compost for local farmers and electricity for the National Grid, and it's all necessitated the arrival of more boxes and bags and caddies and bigger caddies and a roll of biodegradable bin liners for the food bin to get us started.
We don't have our own compost heap because it would rapidly become a seething-mass-of-rats heap and if there's one thing I can't abide it's wandering out to the washing line and passing a seething mass of rats.
But I can see all this is essential, we can't keep on dumping all this stuff for ever, but it's all going to be very time-consuming until it becomes a habit, much dashing to the leaflet to see if it includes aerosol cans...yes, batteries...yes, teabags...yes, building rubble...no, curtains...yes, spectacles...yes, yoghourt pots...no, mobile phones...yes.... and so on and on.
Already there's a big pile gathering daily in the kitchen that no one knows where to put or I'm walking to the box every two minutes holding a rinsed cat food tin, or a cereal box.
The cans will go to Llanelli to be made into cars, probably Ferraris or something posh.
The newspapers to Kent.
The plastic bottles will be made into street furniture.
Textiles will go to Birmingham and thence to developing nations.
Watch out Nottingham because you're getting our glass, and stand by Somerset, our thick card is on its way.
Thus far much debate about what constitutes thick card over slightly less thick card, one goes in the bag the other in the box.
We're fortunate to have the space in which to keep all these boxes and caddies and bags, in fact with his new-found building expertise watch Bookhound build us our own fox, rat, badger and weather-proof recycling storage depot any day now, and nor will they be too much of a problem out at the gate for collection unless we are in the teeth of a south westerly gale, but spare a thought for Tinker Towers.
Eleven residents in cosy little apartments in the centre of town who have to get their boxes, caddies and bags out on the pavement by 7.30 am, so sensibly the night before and waiting for all the inebriates to emerge from the bars and pubs looking for something to chuck up in or to use for a game of football up the main street.
The woman from the council expressed genuine surprise and amazement when the Tinker revealed this possibility to her.
To say nothing of the impassability status of a little market town with its narrow pavements and propensity for strong south-westerly gales, can you imagine it, a recipe for lid and box chaos bouncing along the road if ever there was one.
So Week One has happened and we awaited the arrival of whatever was going to collect our efforts with interest because we'd also heard that our lane was too narrow for the main lorry to access, so we were under 'special arrangements', as must be a goodly part of West Devon given that this is narrow-lane-land. When the men did finally arrive, it was five hours later than usual and on their knees because it seems that we are not the only ones taking this seriously, so a massive amount of sorting for them.
Anyway we are embracing this new venture with a glad and willing heart though we might sneak a bonfire occasionally, winter just wouldn't be winter without the cry of 'Anything for the bonnie?'

Whatever You Love ~ Louise Doughty

So after a long day in London way back in June, I boarded our train clutching the copy of Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty as my 'stay awake' read on the way home. Except I was so dog-tired after an early start and a long day walking around the metropolis I felt sure I'd  be sound asleep by Newbury and no book was going to work any magic at all.
I love that moment when the train pulls out, time to rummage through the purchases and in this case I'd been very naughty indeed in the shop at the V&A, so I had enough to look at plus the regular flow of  train refreshments until I eventually yawned and settled down with Louise Doughty's book.
It was not in the plan that I would be a hundred pages in and still wide-awake by Tiverton Parkway and slightly annoyed that it was Exeter next stop,  and nor was I phased by yet another book wherein a tragic death occurs, in this case a child.
That all has to be to Louise Doughty's credit because the planets were aligned firmly against this book, more harrowing fictional death, more grief, does it ever end?
Did I really want to read more?
When the knock comes at the door Laura senses that the shadowy figures behind the glass are the bearers of bad news. Her nine-year old daughter Betty, walking to a dance class with her best friend Willow... and the two of them walking alone for the first time, has been missing for several hours and when the tragic news is broken, Laura is understandably broken too. The presence of her little boy Rees is small comfort as the excruciating pain descends.
Enter Betty's father David, now estranged from the family, remarried and with a baby son of his own and watch as Louise Doughty skillfully peels back the layers of such a profound loss, exposing flesh and bone and beating hearts as she captures the essence of a tragedy.
Bereft and heartbroken, Laura makes a pledge of revenge on the perpetrator that you somehow sense she might keep

'I am calm as I make this promise: I am going to find out what you love, then whatever it is, I am going to track it down and I am going to take it away from you.'

So much of this grief so accurately portrayed, the numbness, that inability that the bereaved often have to read emotional situations with any degree of accuracy. Life can only be viewed through the distorting lens of the loss, paranoia almost becomes a comfortable bed-fellow, frequently easing the pain with an irrational explanation.
Then there's the emotional and physical depletion, the shunning by friends, that temporary displacement and exhaustion, it's all here, that bone-tired weariness of grief.
If I've made that all sound a fraction overwhelming don't be deterred because it isn't.
I have several friends who have been driven apart from those they love by their grief, when the mourning is out of tandem and a couple may never get back in step, but Louise Doughty explores from a different perspective. Laura and David are already set asunder so what can the bitter blow of the loss of a precious child do in these circumstances?
Who will blame who... who will forgive who... who will rescue who from the abyss.
Those thoughts all slowly emerged and I detected great swathes of accuracy and veracity as I read. This is a book written from the heart and with deeply perceptive attention to that fine descriptive detail that never feels overbearing but adds to the whole.
Sometimes the lightest of touches revealed so much as in the problem of dependency and the unlikely bond forged with the police woman who broke the news and who Laura subsequently insists becomes her liaison officer,

'I didn't tell her the real reason why I wanted her : it wasn't in spite of the fact that she had brought the news to my door, it was because of it. She and the young male officer together formed the bridge I had just crossed, from my old life with Betty in it to the new, unimaginable one without her. Bridges can be crossed both ways.'

I followed Louise Doughty's column in the press a while ago, A Novel in a Year which was so good it even made me think perhaps I could have a go one day, but having read Whatever You Love I think it might be best left to the Louises of this world and I'll stay here amongst the readers.

Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs...

I love surprises, and we have always gone to great lengths in our family to create them, but I have especially loved today's.
We had no idea what the Kayaker had planned after his year in New Zealand, he'd been keeping schtum and we hadn't wanted to be nosy or give the slightest hint that we'd really missed him, because after all he is twenty-seven and a travelling free spirit... but knowing he'd had such a good time we quite thought he'd snaffle two summers and head to Oz while he was near.

Wrong.
A knock on the door this afternoon...
'Surprise, surprise...'
and there he was on the doorstep having left Christchurch on Monday, flown to Hong Kong thence to London; trained it across London carrying four bags, a snowboard and a set of kayak paddles, train to Plymouth and taxi home all in the interests of seeing his parents faint on the doorstep.
Which we almost did.

Several people in on the secret and have been for a while, how Offspringette kept that one quiet I have no idea.
Anyway Bookhound, with some heavy lifting and a roof to look forward to on the building project now quite delighted to have a slave  co-worker for a while, and me... well I'm just thrilled to see him again.

Everyone's a Critic @ PEN London

It would be shame if the event at PEN was eclipsed by my Dublin visit and events since, so plans have been developing in my mind to try and bring some of that fascinating debate onto here for anyone who wishes to read and engage with it all.
The suggestion that Everyone's a Critic throws up interesting ideas about what 'is' a book critic, what do we expect from the review pages, how are those pages compiled, what are the pitfalls and where do the blogs sit in this no longer new but very democratic world of the internet. It's an endlessly fascinating topic and one that has most certainly moved on since John Mullen and I shared a platform with Mark Thwaite and John Carey to discuss this same subject at the Oxford Literary Festival almost three years ago now. Everyone expected blood to be spilt then and it wasn't but there may have been tensions, and John Mullen mis-hearing my blog name as Tough Gay Reader threw me ever so very slightly back then I must admit.
The evening's discussion at PEN between myself, Professor John Mullen, Sam Leith (freelance reviewer) and Erica Wagner (Literary Editor of The Times) and chaired by Alex Clark was most enjoyable from where I was sitting. 

and I think John Mullen enjoyed himself too.

Obviously I couldn't take notes but a couple of bloggers Hannah Stoneham and chasing bawa did, as we ranged across the subject of reviews and critics, blogs and reading and publishing in general, and for me what became evident is that if there is any supposed animosity between the blogosphere and the establishment then perhaps it's drummed up elsewhere by those who fancy a publicity-seeking spat.
I sense in the world of books we are almost batting for the same team and complement each other well, covering all bases as it were ... a simplistic argument I know, but we all love books and reading and we all want to share that in some way, we just have different ways and means of doing it.
That passion for books was never in doubt and perhaps the assumption is that because the bloggers are doing this for the love of it we are somehow entitled to be more passionate about books and reading than the paid critics or academics.
The evidence for all to see reveals that the bloggers are not handcuffed by the rules, can range subjectively across their reading and share those thoughts and can be innovative about how they do that.
The expectation is different for the professional reviewer who must adopt an objective and detached position, to my mind much more difficult to do. A position that I would now find quite frustrating having been able to give free rein to all those years of pent up subjective thought after thirty years of objective clinical writing.
An interesting question from the audience... would Erica Wagner and I like to do a job-swap for a week, drew an instant yes from Erica and a much more hesitant and eventual no from me.
I was watching a history programme on BBC 4 the other evening and the presenter was eulogising over documents that cited the views of the 13th century peasant, rare to know what Joe Public thought in those days; well there will be no shortage of Joe Public's valuable opinions from the 21st century, a point that Professor John Carey made so eloquently on that panel in Oxford three years ago and one that has stuck encouragingly in my mind ever since.
Sadly not a point of view appreciated by 'those who shall be nameless'.
It was lovely to meet quite a few of you at the event and I'm only sorry I didn't have longer to chat afterwards. I was taken off to a dinner with the panel and more bookish and literary chat which left me with a list of books to look out for, the courage gathered to finally read Philip Roth and I threw in a few of my own suggestions too.
So a few weeks on, and having pondered all this I have set up a few dovegreyreader asks... interviews , some detailed questions to allow the debate to find its way on here for the record and for you to contribute if you want to.
Amongst those I have asked about book reviewing in all its guises are the Author, the Literary Editor and the Professional Reviewer and I have a Blogger lined up too because I can hardly ask myself to answer my own questions, plus I'm working on a few more so watch this space, they will all be appearing soon.

Jezebel ~ Irene Nemirovsky

Each book I read by Irene Nemirovksy presents me with a happy dilemma, that of trying to decide if this one might be the best I've read to date, or perhaps nothing can surpass Suite Francaise, or Le Bal, or The Couriloff Affair, or David Golder (which I've read but don't seem to have written about here) or Fire in the Blood which I listened to on audio book, and I then have a merry little debate with myself over it all whilst stroking and admiring the beautifully cohesive collective design of this series.
You know an Irene the minute you see one.

A fascinating fact (to me) about this little contretemps is that I can remember all these books very clearly indeed, moments leap out at me, the tragic life of the father in David Golder, the unbridled hatred for the mother in Le Bal, the devious tutor and his bomb in The Couriloff Affair and of course my late-flowering love of the panoramic canvas of Suite Francaise which started it all eventually, long after the hype but with a permanence that never seems to waver or fade.
Then I do that ridiculously sensible thing of rationing the books because I'm reading them faster than Sandra Smith can translate them, except suddenly I have a little queue of three new ones on the shelf.
Right, just the one I think, except Jezebel was so good I haven't been able to stop myself picking up All Their Worldly Goods and I might as well give in and read The Dogs and the Wolves whilst I'm on the Irene trail.
And that unless I'm mistaken is the entire Irene Nemirovksy milieu currently available in English along with the recent edition of her short stories from Persephone Books. I keep seeing The Wine of Solitude mentioned and I'd like to think Sandra Smith has her head down and is busy translating that for me right now because I'll be needing another one soon.

Jezebel opens with the trial of the ageing beauty Gladys Eysenach, accused of the murder of a young man of twenty Bernard Martin.

'Gladys may have been older and in decline, but she was still beautiful. Time had touched her reluctantly, with a careful, gentle hand...'

And as the trial and the mysterious and unexplained events unfold, and Gladys's character is slowly revealed through the evidence of those who knew her alongside her own hesitant and reluctant testimony, Irene Nemirovksy had this reader eating out of her hand. So sad was I for poor,poor Gladys, what a terrible fall from grace this seemed to be, what a tragic demise, and as the judge passes a fairly lenient sentence I found myself feeling quite relieved.
But this is only page forty, much has been left unexplained and slowly but surely Irene Nemirovsky turns it all around.
I don't really want to tell you any more because to read is to experience the escalating power of Irene Nemirovky's skills at psychological dissection, both of her characters and her readers. So if you read Jezebel, I'd love to know if you, like me, would have happily marched Gladys to the guillotine and let slip the razor-sharp blade as Irene astutely pecks away at those dwindling reserves of sympathy.
It's a book about ageing and the shallowness of physical beauty, the fear and the insecurities when a woman's life is heavily invested in that beauty, coupled with the insecurities of a wealth and love falsely predicated on youth and looks.

'Like all obsessions, this one did not give her soul a moment's peace. Just as a miser thinks only of his gold or an ambitious person of attaining honours, so Gladys was in love with the desire to be attractive and with her fear of growing old.'

And Irene Nemirovksy, with her gift for 'pitiless compassion', according to one critic in Le Figaro, is merciless in her depictions, brave and courageous I always feel about telling it like it is. There is nothing on which to hang any notions of sentimentality here, this is the depths of human nature, cruelly exposed with a searing honesty and about a stage in life that Irene had clearly thought about but sadly would never live to experience.

'She had reached that age when women no longer change: they simply decompose, but in a way that is hardly noticeable, beneath a mask of powder and make-up.'

Published in May 1936 with a print run of 15,000, 12,000 copies of Jezebel had sold by the end of 1942, the year in which Irene Nemirovksy tragically died in Auschwitz.
Biographically there is much evidence to suggest that the character of Gladys is based on Irene's mother Fanny, with whom she had a turbulent and troubled relationship, also remembering that it was to Fanny that Irene's daughters turned when needing shelter after the war and the death of both their parents. Fanny famously refusing to open the door to the fifteen-year old Denise and seven-year old Elisabeth who were then taken to an orphanage by their guardian.
Doubtless, though it can't have seemed so at the time, a lucky escape for the girls from heaven knows what, but interestingly this would have been an act entirely in keeping with the character of Gladys already portrayed by their mother in Jezebel.
Of this book Irene Nemirovksy would say

'I wanted to describe the moment when that hitherto innocent passion, since it has to do with a very natural wish to please and to be liked, invades the soul, blots out all other feelings, and eventually turns itself into a kind of madness...In fact this tendency of the female heart resembles, in its tyrannical strength, a man's ambition and avarice, and it deserves to be studied in the way ambition and avarice have been.'

And is if Irene's mother, sensed its relevance to her own life, Jezebel was one of only two of Irene's books found in her possession after her death in 1972, David Golder being the other, a book again based on Irene's parents.
So with the Nemirovsky spring running dry, I can happily re-read (but not for too long Sandra)  and now I remind myself that I had promised myself a read of the biography, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt once I had read all the available fiction. I find there's nothing worse, when reading a literary biography, than having to lah-lah-lah my way through the pages that detail the books when I haven't read them and don't want to know what happens.
So at least I have that to look forward to now.

and the winners are...

A glorious mid-October day, clear blue skies here and us foolishly having been a bit previous and put the recliners away, and then each time we think we'll get them out again we imagine we'll be jinxing the weather so we don't, so in the end I shunted an armchair out onto the verandah and have been out there reading the last few pages of Michelle Paver's forthcoming ghost story Dark Matter. It's a cracker of a read, set in the 1930s and a blisteringly cold Arctic winter so all a bit of an odd combination with me shedding layers and wondering if I needed to go and find some sunscreen.
Anway just to reassure you that Rocky's girlies, now looking more like dowagers with no man-cat around, are doing fine.

Muffin has taken to Bookhound's left leg like...well like a cat to a leg, and obviously as a comfort blanket substitute for Rocky. She's leaping up and snoozing  every time he sits down and blissfully unware that many light years ago this was the man who never wanted cats.

Tess just slouching around soaking up the rays and in a not dissimilar pose to her brother.
And we have five winners for the signed copies of Tamara Drewe thanks to the online number generator.
I pressed the button and wondered who would be lucky and no one could have been more surprised than me when the numbers came up... so surprised in fact that I thought I'd better take a screen shot to convince Rebecca that it wasn't a fix...Rocky has spoken:-)


3 - Rebecca

22 - Mark

68 - m

71 - Sarah Y

87 - Cathy

Check it's really you against comments here, send your addresses to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dotcom and Tamara will be squeezing through your letter box very soon.

Two more reasons to be cheerful...

One is the existence of the Persephone Diary, of which I promised you firm evidence. Persephone ran a competition on Facebook one day a while back; find the Persephone book with the shortest opening sentence and e mail them by 6pm to win a diary if correct.
I'm not sure whether I was correct or not but I can't believe I spent a whole morning looking through all the books I own just to enter, so they may have felt sorry for me, anyway the diary arrived.
It is as expected a thing of joy, a celebration of the ninetieth Persephone book therefore named The Persephone Ninety.

Every Persephone endpaper included along with quotes from each book plus a silver ribbon marker and the sort of smooth, matte paper that welcomes a fountain pen and ink like a long-lost friend.

I am most pleased, and writing in it already but even better I came across quite a few books during that morning of browsing that I had completely forgotten about, including Virginia Graham's book of poems, Consider the Years which yielded this little gem.

COMFORTLESS

(with apologies to Austin Dobson)

I intended a Sock
    And it turned to a Bonnet
It was rather a shock
It began as a Sock
But I just ran amok
    With the pattern, doggone it!
I intended a Sock
    But I have made a Bonnet.

Happens all the time here, currently socks are converting themselves into fingerless gloves before the heel is reached. Comfortless confirms what the preface says, that whilst capable of being very serious Virginia Graham also enjoyed being 'thoroughly silly' . There are some thoughtful and perceptive poems in this 1946 collection that reflect the times very astutely.
Secondly, don't miss Steerforth's discovery over at Age of Uncertainty, which he has kindly shared.
An album of the most fascinating selection of Victorian photographs unnamed and unknown. Some posed, as many photos of that time were, but plenty that reflect the everyday-ness of life, and so far the verdict seems to be narrowing the location down to the Lake District.
If only they'd all written blogs we'd know for sure.

Reasons to be cheerful...

It's been an interesting week what with the Booker Prize and BBC journalist Andrew Marr's comments about bloggers...and my thanks to the reader here who sent me the link to Mr Marr's outburst at the Cheltenham Literary Festival wherein he proclaimed most bloggers to be,

'"socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements."

and citizen journalism the

 “spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night”.

Well, we've all been having a jolly good chuckle about that and all hopefully avoided being hoisted by our own petards and not rushing to retaliate with sweeping statements that all journalists are... no I couldn't possibly be so rude. Anyway, I dashed out and bought some Clearasil just in case and wondered what it would be like to live in a house with a basement when you're used to having all your clutter over your head not underneath you. My thanks to the Independent who picked out a top ten blogs of their own to refute Mr Marr's assertions, and dovegreyreader scribbles found its way in there. But it's always good to be challenged in that way even if by a rather sweeping and judgemental statement made by someone whose wages are paid by...well by me, but he had a platform and he used it.
Sadly the blogosphere is akin to an elephant and unlikely to let him forget that moment.
Incidentally it's The 1960 Cheltenham Booker event at the Literary Festival this Saturday and the books to be voted on are Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Lynne Reid Banks‘ The L-Shaped Room, The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Sparks and Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls.
I'm sorry not to be there but I think I know where my vote would go, how about you?
Anyway several more uplifting things also happened this week as I search out reasons to be cheerful, things that really gladdened my heart, things to be pleased and happy about. I'll list mine and please do add yours in comments...

• The Chilean miners were all rescued safely, how amazing was that and who'd have thought we'd all sit up half the night watching?       

• Our dishwasher exploded and took out the electrics and we'll have to buy a new one because after one night of washing up we are fed up with it. This might seem an unlikely source of good cheer, but in my mood of optimism this means we are two into our three appliance malfunctions which means we are over halfway there. And it's another sixteen year old Miele, sixteen clearly the life expectancy of a Miele machine, only the tumbler dryer left to go.
  
  
• Plymouth's young diver Tom Daley won two gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and the TV programme the night before that revealed Tom's stunning string of A* GCSE results, his dedication to his sport and his Dad's battle with a brain tumour all had me shedding tears of utter admiration.
• I was disappointed that Andrea Levy and The Long Song didn't win the Booker Prize but actually also delighted for The Finkler Question and Howard Jacobson. It was the other book I fancied but didn't have and I was onto Amazon in a flash to order my copy.
  
  
• Fran HB has been to visit some Virginia Woolf locations in Sussex and taken some wonderful pictures for us, those will be on here in a series soon and Fran kindly sent me some postcards from her travels, I want a sitting room like Virginia Woolf's at Monks House and am telling Bookhound it could be done. If anyone else visits any literary locations and manages to take some pictures please do send them.
• I noted that a biography of Edith Cavell, written by Diana Souhami has just been published by Quercus and I begged a copy which they very kindly sent by return. I am 100 pages in and stalking the corridors of one of my old student nurse haunts, the London Hospital, right on Edith's apron strings because while I was there I lived in Cavell Home, and I have also made a fascinating and very local discovery about her too. I can't quite believe her life is going to end as it I know it does.
  
  
  
  
• The Spring 2011 catalogues are arriving from the publishers and we have some stellar reading to look forward to on here, I've been submitting wish lists as long as our lane.
• Endsleigh Salon on Tuesday evening and the theme I'd been waiting for 'The Book To Read Before You Die' and there was no stopping me, Ulysses was paraded and bragged about in all its glory.
• It was Goose Fair Day on Wednesday, the town is transformed all the children have the day off school, the sun shone gloriously all day long and I saw the best Unwanted Apostrophe ever.
  
  
  
  
• Offspringette had her plaster removed and all's good to go, her hand still works even if her arm looks a bit shrivelled.
• And I've left the special one until last because this is what you'd want Andrew Marr to know about blogs. That we can laugh and smile and that blogs can be a force for the good. That a blog gives an ordinary person the chance to write creatively when no other opportunities to do that seem to come their way, a chance to do something they really enjoy doing and that everyone can read, join in and comment. That you can write about a book that really touches your heart but you anguish about it and spend weeks getting every word of that piece right, all 1116 of them, because you feel it's important to convey as exactly and as accurately as possible how much the book has meant to you, how much the story has moved you and how much you want others to know that.
  And then a while later a comment is added to the post.
  The book in question was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and this is the comment,
  
  From Hope and Ron Lacks

"Ron Lacks, really enjoyed reading your post about his grandmother Henrietta Lacks,we are going to save this so that the rest of the family can read it. Thank you so much for caring."

 

 

 

Tamara Drewe ~ Posy Simmonds

I have been a huge fan of the graphic novel since buying Offspringette a copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus many years ago and sneaking a quick preview of it myself. I'd got it all wrong and quite thought the 'graphic' meant something else entirely. My own copy of Maus wasn't far behind and I quickly fell in love with the melding of my 1950s and 60s childhood love of the comic with the more serious adult story. Sometimes fun, sometimes a way of recounting life's less palatable and difficult events.
Scanning the graphic novel shelf I see more books which do just that, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto to mention but two.
Posy Simmonds was always going to do something brilliant and different and I must be the only person on the planet who didn't really clock the long-running 110 episodes in The Guardian of Tamara Drewe. But that's all to the good because, having read this interview with Posy Simmonds and realising I had to read the book, I sensed  that this might be an even better experience for not having followed the column, a chance to approach it fresh and uninformed.
Not only that but I walked in on an event at Port Eliot this summer where the recent film version of the book was being discussed, and with someone who seemed very important in front of a huge and very appreciative audience, but I didn't have a programme nor a clue who he was.
I took a picture anyway because he was sure to be famous.

Truth will out, I'm embarrassed to admit that I really wanted to get a good seat for the Fisherman's Friends who were on next so I sat and listened. This by the way for the uninitiated is how Port Eliot works, you have a ticket for the whole day or weekend and pitch in and out of whatever you want for as long as you want, which is how I came to hear distinguished and much-revered film director Stephen Frears talking about his latest film Tamara Drewe.
So Tamara Drewe, the book, opens with a circled advert in a newspaper...

and one of Stonefield's owners, the nicely plump and matronly Beth, married to the suave, sveldt, full-of-himself but ageing celebrated novelist Nicholas Hardiman (yes, I did want to poke his eyes out) is collecting one of her residents from the station. Glen, an also-ran lecturer and thus far a failed novelist, books in for long stays to hunker down, be waited on hand and foot and get his masterpiece written, a sort of literary lookalike for Jim Royle of Royle Family fame if I dare be so bold, and with a similar penchant for trips to the toilet.
Beth the doormat, Nick the philanderer and I mustn't forget handsome,sensitive gardener Andy, and enter the ravishingly beautiful columnist Tamara Drewe wearing the shortest pair of shorts revealing the legs up to her armpits.

Here's Beth's take on it all in discussion with her daughter Lulu who is writing a dissertation on the Taliban..

'I found those shorts really irritating! So obvious!'
'What's irritating Mum?'
Dressing like a sex object...sucking up to male fantasies.'
'But you wore Hot Pants.'
'No I never did Lulu! I never went around with half my buttocks hanging out like that... I mean why do it?
'To annoy people like you...'
' Anyway, wearing tights things in this weather...she'll get thrush...'

Tamara not a local... from a family of incomers as we'd say in these parts, beautiful since the nose job, 'bit of a hooter' on her before that and now living in this rural community having moved into her recently deceased mother's house.
I have to add in the local youth which Posy Simmons has captured to their very essence, Casey and Jody who sit in the old bus shelter welded to their mobiles and bemoaning life in this 'boring bumhole of a village', where everything that goes well is 'omigod', and excitement is an upgrade on the mobile or the thought of 'doing it' with a rock star.

It is by turns hilarious, sad, and deeply perceptive of twenty-first century life and of course magnificently depicted as Tamara wreaks havoc amongst the local men making some Hardy-esque tragedy inevitable.
The unique quality of Posy Simmons illustration needs no illumination from me, they are recognisably hers and the colours are everything as they subtly steer the book through its many different moods and seasons, the gentle greens of summer give way to the mellowness of autumn and the icy hues of winter. Simultaneously the plot thickens and darkens, the character's facial expressions and postures shift, tiny elements of difference that didn't go unnoticed as I read because something three-dimensional happens to my reading brain as I read a graphic novel.
I was constantly looking for those elements of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, and they are all there for those who are familiar with the novel making the book something of a triumph here, Penny Perrick writing in the Sunday Times suggests,

'Posy Simmons is a true child of Hogarth, her accomplished cartoons a merciless commentary on the way we live now.'

Alphabetically Simmons sits right next to Spiegelman on my nicely ordered graphic novel shelf, which feels quite right too and now scroll down for gifts.
In the absence of our prize draw chum I just thought we'd better get right back on the prize-draw horse as quickly as we could or I'd never do another one....

Prize draw copies of Tamara Drewe

**Sniff**
Oh what a swansong of a prize draw for the dear old cat this is....and oh rats... how can I possibly do this without a mention of me old prize draw chum?
We'll do this gradually, he's here in spirit for now.
So not one but five prize draw copies of Tamara Drewe will be winging their way to five lucky winners and even better, they are signed by Posy Simmonds and even better than that, they can go worldwide.
Names in comments and by the time we draw the names I'll have gathered myself and thought how best to break the news to the psychicnumber generator that he's on his own....or I might go out and look at the numbers on the cows' ears or something.

More Booker cogitations...

" I certainly wish I hadn't taken on the Booker judging this year. I thought it would be a nice sedentary occupation, and after all I have done it before, but I've definitely gone downhill since then and I think the books have got longer - I've only done 35 so far ( I keep counting them) so 100 more to come, and already there's hardly any floor space in my little room. Also I drop off to sleep almost immediately when I start to read them - it's becoming an automatic reaction.'

I wonder if any of this year's judges have suffered as Penelope Fitzgerald did back in 1998?  Nigella Lawson was also a judge and 'looked stunning' and here Penelope's thoughts on the chairman..

'...Douglas Hurd... a marvellous hand at managing a commitee, but he admitted that his idea of a novel was a good read with a strong ending....As usual I didn't agree with anyone.'

And then what do the judges do with all the books...

'All the books (115 I think) are standing in piles on the floor of my small sitting room. Now I'm wondering who I can get to take them away.'

Or perhaps there's been a repeat of this, Penelope Fitzgerald's experience in 1991

'I've been one of the Booker judges this year and as always there have been alarming differences of opinion, and even one walk-out. the first in its history I believe.'

'I realised the dreaded Booker dinner was on that evening I hoped I might not be needed there, but now I see that because there's been so much trouble about the judging and I feel I'm more in trouble than anyone in some ways... I shall have to go.'

Those were the days, bit of a bun-fight, bit of genuine rather than some manufactured controversy, now we usually hear that the judges all got on famously and were unanimous in their decision, but Booker 2010 is here and we must pronounce.


It's been a sadly lack-lustre Booker year chez dovegrey after that initial excitement over a big pile of books waiting to be read.
So many books I have picked up and failed with, so many books that others have picked up and adored that have done nothing for me, with apologies to David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue, Christos Tsiolkas et al, I gave you a good innings but I'm sorry I just didn't get what you were trying to tell me.
The Man Booker debate forum, always a site for some great and forthright discussion about the books, and one with a loyal following, mysteriously collapsed and imploded on itself with the finishing line approaching and in the face of bizarre technical difficulties which everyone seemed to think a twelve year old could sort, but sadly no twelve year old available at Booker HQ.
Perhaps they just didn't want our predictions... something odd going on there surely, and if nothing else a really ungrateful way of saying thank you to all those who had partaken of the debate with such diligence and contributed so much and so freely to the Man Booker website.
A PR disaster if ever there was one...er... best not mention 'that' again.
Then there's been the hoo-hah about the suspended betting after one book attracted massive and suspicious attention, a real dilemma if that book happens to be the winner.
So the excitement, last year maintained right to the wire and intensely gripping, has fizzled like a damp squib for me this year with just one book radiating something special.
Before I arrived at the Everyone's A Critic evening discussion in London, more of which ever so soon, I had a Very Important Tea engagement to attend, and what pure pleasure it was to meet up with Linda Grant and Andrea Levy in a select little establishment in the depths of Crouch End for a good chinwag about books, the Booker and plenty more besides.
This all involved following very careful instructions involving both tube and bus across London which is always a bit of a culture shock for me the minute I step off the train from Devon, where we see one bus a week and the bus stop is three miles away. But have Oyster card will travel and it's only a matter of minutes before I'm up to speed and travelling in the right direction, doing all the right things, looking casual, reading my book on the train, not looking lost, coping with the fact that the tube exit Linda has told me to take was closed due to flooding and I had to find another one, and then find the bus stop furthest away from the exit I hadn't just walked out of but should have, and then get on the bus going in the right direction for about ten minutes and get off at Waitrose...or was it Budgens, and cross over and, oh all manner of unusual things for a country yokel.
But rising above all the Booker damp-squibiness, the very lovely Andrea Levy, and I'm not just saying this because we've met, she is warm, genuine and self-effacing and I am more than thrilled and delighted to have met her and to know that Andrea's book The Long Song is on the shortlist because it belongs there and would be a worthy winner. Good reviews around the blogosphere, hither and thither and for me, it is far and away the best of the Booker books that I have read, or tried to read, this year, though I think when I finally get my hands on a copy of Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question it might come close. I loved Kalooki Nights, I 'get' Jacobson's style of writing and his humour and think I will enjoy this one too.
But it was a real privilege to talk to Andrea about her golden book and hear about her and Linda's writing lives generally. I meet quite a few writers these days, mostly women it's true, but the ones I meet are wonderful, genuine unassuming people who love what they do, sweat blood over it sometimes but take their work very seriously. I'm sure the men do too but I just don't seem to meet many of them, and don't miss Amanda Craig's blog this week, she makes some very perceptive observations about author's behaving badly and it doesn't seem to be the women who have the hissy fits these days.
Having read Linda Grant's forthcoming novel We Had it So Good due for publication in January, I know you will all have a great read to look forward to in the New Year too, so I had a lovely afternoon, the chat and the cake was perfect.
Much good fortune to Andrea and The Long Song and the team at Headline this evening but meanwhile spare a thought for Penelope Fitzgerald the night she won the Booker Prize in 1979 for Offshore...all these extracts taken from the endlessly entertaining So I Have Thought of You - The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald,

'I couldn't help enjoying the dinner, though the Evening Standard man told me frankly they'd all written their pieces about Naipaul and felt they were free to get drunk, wh: he certainly was; I did notice the Spectator man, but thought he was perhaps dead...
When I got to the Book Programme, soaking wet because I'd had to be photographed on a bale of rope on the Embankment, R. Robinson was in a very bad temper and complained to his programme executive 'who are these people, you promised me they were going to be the losers'...
I'm afraid Booker McC rather wish they'd decided to patronise show-jumping, or snooker - the novelists are so difficult and odd, not appreciating their surprise announcements and little treats....'

I feel sure Andrea Levy will be looking fabulous and enjoying every moment.

 

Comfort reading...

Inevitably, we are missing the old thing terribly and I hope you won't mind if I mention him now and again and I feel sure there will still be the occasional picture of Rocky on here. He was a real tart in front of the camera and I particularly like this one with his ear on the TLS.

So, no more thud of paws onto the worktop to help himself to a new dish of butter when the backs were turned (always a new one which then had to be thrown) and, despite having been 'done' as a kitten, no more furtive tom-cat marking along the lowest bookshelf in the right hand corner of fiction A-Z.
With apologies to Fay Weldon, her oeuvre has regularly suffered in this regard.
And now a sort of gaping space at the foot of the Aga as well.
This means you can now very easily get to the bottom oven, and likewise not fear dropping something on Rocky when you get a dish out of the top oven; you can cook without standing a foot away from the saucepan and gone is the fear that the boiling water might miss the teapot and go over his head.
All welcome anxieties that we'd become accustomed to.
But if we have been sad, that seems to be as nothing to the confusion of Muffin, Rocky's handmaiden, a year his senior but very much in his thrall, who would regularly curl up with him.
I'm not sure I had ever given much thought to how another cat might react in this situation... I mean how does it work?
What are they thinking?
Is it all about habit and a sort of sub-conscious constant proximity to something else warm and furry and purring?
If so Bookhound and I, and our other cat Tess (Rocky's sister, and seemingly OK with getting to the food bowl second rather than third now) seem to be poor substitutes, and Muffy has done a great deal of door-watching and waiting along with plenty of aimless wandering and pacing around the flower beds looking for him in all his old haunts since his departure. She even sat on his spot in front of the woodburner and watched the whole of Autumnwatch on TV the next night, perhaps in the hope he'd appear on the screen, and by this time I was beginning to hope he would too. We realised of course that they have never been apart, have been together here every single day for fifteen years, so it's hard to imagine what it must feel like, we can't ascribe human emotions to a cat but something must be happening in the pining department.
So we hunkered down last week and, with what must seem like indecent haste (on my part) had the big debate about when to start restocking our herd of ageing cats. It's all made us realise that our cat population is now reduced to two dowagers and we need to be thinking about kittens in the not too distant future, which has surprisingly cheered me up immeasurably, even if it also struck me very forcibly that when the next lot reach sixteen (deo volente) we will actually be seventy-three (more dv) ... tempus fugit very fast and it's pointless saying there's no use in thinking like that because I just couldn't help it. Not something that has ever occurred to me when thinking about pet acquisitions before, but the thought of a house without cats... well, living where we do it would be a house not a home.
Quite unexpectedly what happens next is that you then have no control over the direction your thinking travels. For several appetite-less days and wakeful nights there's no diminishing it or keeping it within the perspective of the loss of a much-loved cat, that is just the start of it because the sadness and melancholy rapidly connects to everything else that you love and treasure and have lost in the past, or may in the future.
I tell everyone else on a daily basis that that is normal, so I had to tell myself that too and howl it all out, and felt better for doing so, though poor Bookhound has had to keep his wellies on indoors and escape to his roof on a regular basis.
And, thank you again for all your comforting messages and e mails.
I know it's raised all sorts of old sadnesses for many of you, and for some a sense of dread that your own felines will be in this departure lounge one day, and I'm so sorry for those who have been really upset by it all as I know some of you have ((((((hugs)))))
The V.E.T. did several things that made a huge difference to our memories of that afternoon which are very quiet and peaceful ones, nothing traumatic, the gentle passing of a happy, purring cat in a warm sunny kitchen, and we did several things ourselves that also eased the way and I'm happy to share those with anyone off-blog, please do e mail me if you find yourself in that position and want to know more.
We've been blessed with an Indian summer here in much of the UK, and certainly in the Tamar Valley, since that day which has been really uplifting; a chance to sit outside and say 'serves me right for doing the summer-winter clothes swap,' time to get in the apples and do plenty of comfort baking and a bit of comfort reading which is really what this post was supposed to be about.
My huge thanks to Justine Picardie for answering questions in comments about Coco Chanel last week and thank you Team Tolstoy for a great discussion about our first thoughts this weekend, all fortunately prepared before the events of last week so ready to roll.
But it's all made me think about what makes a good comfort read and that has surprised me.
It's quite hard when your thinking is scattered with the distractions of a sadness that must be attended too, yet reading is a habit for me and one I can't quite leave behind, somehow I have to drag it along and make it fit the moment. Funny or light wasn't right at all, I needed a book that would chime with how I was feeling. I tried a bit of Barchester to no avail, War and Peace has been a comfort read before so I wasn't in the least surprised to find that ready and waiting, and I have decided to pick up and follow Roger Deakin's Notes From Walnut Tree Farm for another year having already done it once, but then I dabbled around with some new fiction.
To my surprise several very good books have emerged and seem to be working wonderfully which makes me think there's no rhyme nor reason to all this, no set reading recipe for melancholy moments, it's about what works for each person. I'd have put money on the English nineteenth-century novel but on this occasion I was mistaken.
Instead...
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, an Adele recommend when we met a few weeks ago, and I'm not sure I could have chosen something more melancholy and haunting yet so beautifully written, full of gaps and silences. The winner of the 2010 Impac Dublin Literary Award, a novel of 'restrained tenderness and laconic humour' according to J.M.Coetzee and the story of a man living on a remote Dutch farm with his ailing father.


Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt, so far an impressive first novel that is knocking my socks off for its originality and has completely captured my imagination, don't be deterred by the idea of a dog knocking on the front door asking to rent a room, I can't wait to see where this one goes.
And Dark Matter - A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver, a riveting read that has me putting my warm woolly socks back on again as a 1937 Arctic expedition sets off for the remote and uninhabited bay of Gruhuken, home to the explorers for the next year and eternal Polar night is about to descend, but it seems they are not alone.
So that's me feeling much comforted, but I wonder which direction you would turn to on your bookshelves for moments like this?

 

Team Tolstoy - Troika Stop : The First...

So how's it going Team Tolstoy?
Everyone warm enough?
The troika's been rattling along at a fair old lick here and congratulations to those who were upholding the tradition and singing along the way in the back seat....very... er... tuneful.
Despite a fragmented reading month with some Tolstoy-less travelling and a bit of a sad week too, I can report success and no problems picking the book up again after a reading gap, so I have really enjoyed reading Part One which in my edition is the first twenty-five chapters, taking me as far as p118.
My bookmark has never been far from my side as I've tried to lodge the characters and families various in my mind, and, largely thanks to the special and recognisable qualities that Tolstoy invests in each person, I'm getting there as I create my own first impressions on initial acquaintance... I'm wondering whether mine match yours, it would be interesting to compare.
I have Pierre down as the man with two size twelve left feet and he'll put them both in and consider the consequences afterwards, yet he's also quite capable of tripping very tenderly through some tricky moments. The words do seem to be into his head and out of his mouth before he has a chance to stop them and he seems clearly oblivious to the fact the ladies adore these slightly gauche and devil-may-care tendencies.
Prince Andrei, bit of a smooth-talker, confident, privileged, intense yet miserable in his skin and with the chatty but perhaps ill-matched and very pregnant wife Princess Lise, he seems quite desperate to head off to war.
The pushy mother with the acutely embarrassed son, now who can that be?
Of course, Anna Mikhaylovna, ambitious and impecunious and no slouch at putting on a show of whatever may be required whenever she needs some money, and then poor Boris. You can almost see him cringing as he backpedals furiously in the face of his mother's performance and what shenanigans around the death bed of Count Bezukhov as Pierre is declared the winner of the Battle of the Last Will and Testament.
The precocious and extrovert Natasha Rostov, still young and naive and a bit of a performer herself, not unused to being the centre of attention, everyone's darling but not mine yet.
I think the one who warms my heart the most so far has to be Andrei's sister, Princess Marya. Innocent and trusting and seeing the good in everyone around her, that moment when she gave Andrei her icon as he goes off to war was brimming with emotion, so much that even Mr Blase himself, Andrei couldn't help but be moved by it...and my thanks to Helen for this picture of an authentic war icon, not quite like Andrei's but worn and treasured by many soldiers.


The funniest character to date, the one who has amused me even more than Count Rostov and his Dad's Dancing moment at the ball (and not hard to see where daughter Natasha gets her centre stage personality from) is Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky.
He's my favourite.
Was there ever a man more prey to a grown up version of a Gina Ford Contented Baby regime than Prince Bolkonsky?
For those who don't know of it Gina Ford's is a very prescriptive routine for babies that states strictly what must happen almost minute by minute. Eat now, sleep then, play next and ridiculed by many, but never say never I used to say to mums when I visited them with their newborns, for those who need to get the chaos of life with a new baby under some sort of control, the Gina way can sometimes work like a miracle. Prince Nikolay likewise responds to cues and needs to know what will be happening next, if not every minute of every day, not only in his own life but with his daughter Marya's as well; if it's two o'clock Marya must be doing her clavichord practice and her father must be having his nap, but he will predictably be awake in twenty minutes.
Beneath that controlled exterior I have a feeling there is a strategically razor-sharp mind and a mass of contradictory emotion being kept strictly under wraps.
Well, who knows, I could be very wrong with all my first impressions, Tolstoy may have plans to wrong foot me as his characters grow and develop and are exposed to what we now know as history in the making, that will all be interesting.
Initially pledging to read every single solitary last word I will confess that about halfway through a lengthy letter in French from Julie to Marya I suddenly realised it might make sense to skip straight to the translation, just as the schoolgirl conversational level started to show some rather glaring gaps in the vocab, but that aside I have to say this is all pure pleasure.
So tell me, did you meet the same people I did... or were we at different parties?

And if you missed the start and want to hop on board the Team Tolstoy troika then it's never too late to get started and catch us up.
Next month's reading schedule for those like me on the Gina Ford approach to reading War and Peace:-) Part Two ~ Chapters 1-21 and back here on November 9th to compare our furs which we'll be needing by then, and could the singers in the back, (and I suspect one or two ringleaders there) perhaps pitch their songs a little lower, and here are the words of Kalinka so we can all join in...someone hum us an A would you...

Калинка, калинка, калинка моя!
В саду ягода малинка, малинка моя!

Ах, под сосною, под зеленою,
Спать положите вы меня!
Ай-люли, люли, ай-люли,
Спать положите вы меня.

Калинка, калинка, калинка моя!
В саду ягода малинка, малинка моя!

Ах, сосенушка ты зеленая,
Не шуми же надо мной!
Ай-люли, люли, ай-люли,
Не шуми же надо мной!

Калинка, калинка, калинка моя!
В саду ягода малинка, малинка моя!

 

 

dovegreyreader asks... Justine Picardie about Coco Chanel

For this special dovegreyreader asks... special because it has slightly more questions than usual and special because it is the first time a writer has done this twice, I have pulled out the even more special picture that Bookhound drew for Adele Geras when Adele sat in the virtual armchair as one of my first guests, and of course there's you-know-who sitting in the chair:-)
It was my pleasure to finally meet Adele last week when she was visiting the Appledore Book Festival here in Devon, more of which soon, but having been inadvertently blessed with a spare copy of Justine's biography of Coco Chanel I gave it to her, knowing what a fashion-lover she is and I really hope Adele enjoys this book as much as I have done.
Meanwhile my thanks to Justine who has taken time out of a hectic schedule to answer my questions, and how sorry I was not be in London for the launch party at Claridges, but all is not lost, Cornflower did make it to the Edinburgh event.

Why Coco Chanel and why now?

I've always been fascinated by her, for as long as I can remember -- all the way back to my childhood, when my mother had a bottle of Chanel no. 5, and it seemed to me to represent everything that was grownup and sophisticated -- the essence of what it might mean to be a woman. It's been bubbling away for a long time -- ever since I went to see Chanel's private apartment in Paris, at the end of 1997. So although the book has just emerged, the idea took root over a decade ago.

Your experiences whilst writing this book that takes you so close to such an iconic figure seem to have been full of memorable moments...

Writing and researching the book took me on an extraordinary journey -- from the Churchill archives in Cambridge, to Chanel's writing desk at 31 Rue Cambon, which is still preserved above her Paris boutique, to the bedroom where she died in the Ritz in 1971. There was such a palpable sense of her presence in the rooms she had inhabited -- I felt that if I turned around quickly enough, I might see a glimpse of her reflection the mirrored walls. And there were moments when the universe quietly chimed -- like the time I was talking to one of her oldest friends, and she told me that Chanel's favourite novels were Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Wuthering Heights. Both of those books seemed to provide a clue to the darker side of Chanel's life and her own self-created mythology, but the fact that I knew the narratives inside out, after writing 'Daphne', gave me hope that perhaps I might be on the right track...

I always sense your books take you deeply into uncharted waters and you emerge with new insights into yourself so where did Coco lead you?

Coco led me out of the despair that came with the end of my marriage, towards a deeper understanding of what independence might mean. You could say that in searching for Chanel, I found myself. But of course, it was far more complicated than that. There were times when all I wanted to do was curl beneath the duvet, and actually, I did spend a lot of time within the safety of my own home, writing this book, rather than presenting a brave face to the world. But I did do some traveling that was an essential element of my research: to the Chanel archives in Paris, and to Aubazine, the convent where Coco was abandoned by her father at the age of 11, after her mother died. And I also went up to Cheshire and the Scottish Highlands, where Chanel had spent time with her lover, the Duke of Westminster, It was in Sutherland that I found the crumbling mansion that the Duke had bought for her -- the ceilings were caving in, and the floors giving way, so it was literally terrifying going inside, but I couldn't resist tiptoeing upstairs to Chanel's bathroom, which still contains a 1920s bidet, apparently the first in Scotland.

Knowing what you already knew about Chanel before embarking on the book, where there any surprises in store as you researched? Any very unexpected revelations?

There were a great many unexpected revelations about Chanel that turned up during the course of my research. I don't want to reveal all the twists and turns of the narrative in my book -- it would be like giving away a spoiler in a spy story! -- but it does involve double agents and double dealings in the Second World War, that seemed to me to be as thrilling as a Graham Greene plot.
I was also surprised by the connections that Chanel had with the British -- I knew that her first lover was an Englishman, Boy Capel, but I hadn't realized that she had spent a great deal of time in the UK, until I started searching through various archives in this country, as well as the Chanel Conservatoire in Paris.

Do you know any more about her favourite books/authors? Did she read any of that Parisian milieu, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald etc?

She read certainly read Cocteau, and adored the work of Pierre Reverdy, a French poet who had been her lover in the 1920s. But when I spoke to the two women who knew her best -- and are still alive today -- they told me, separately, that Chanel's favourite novels were 'Rebecca' and 'Wuthering Heights'. As a passionate fan of Daphne du Maurier and the Brontes -- writers whose stories were central to my last book, 'Daphne' -- I felt really thrilled to discover that Chanel and I shared a taste for the gothic.

As for Scott Fitzgerald: I'm not sure, but they would have encountered each other on the French Riviera, and there is a reference to Chanel in 'Tender Is The Night', which I quote in my book (page 176). As it happens, I also bonded with one of the archivists at Chanel in Paris over our joint love of Scott Fitzgerald... so there is some resonance there... 

I have a feeling that anyone who is a fan of Chanel will also be a Fitzgerald enthusiast, and vice versa...

If you could meet and talk to Coco Chanel now, what would you tell her, what would you want her to know?

I would want her to tell me more -- about her childhood, about her nephew Andre, about the men she loved and lost, and those she walked away from... I'd still be the one asking all the questions.But if I were to tell her anything, it would be that her tenacity and unquenchable stubbornness is still inspiring. And that people still care...

Coco Chanel - The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie

I did that inevitable summer/winter clothes swap last week.
The right day dawns and it's time for the old heavyweights to emerge and opening the lid on the blanket box where I store everything was like saying hello to a load of good friends, all those jumpers I was sick of the sight of earlier in the year re-emerge, old faithfuls ready to do a turn through another winter.
All this annual perusal and culling of the wardrobe whilst I'm reading Justine Picardie's biography Coco Chanel The Legend and the Life wasn't good for me, and I couldn't help imagining what Coco would make of it all if she walked past...
Me muttering " er...je suis desole" whilst Mademoiselle tsks "c'est tres terrible".
I did go through a Chanel No 5 phase many years ago but I still don't think Coco would have been impressed.
First and most importantly I have to mention the book itself.
Harper Collins have really cut their cloth perfectly with this one, high production values, beautifully laid out, perfect weight matte paper with pictures throughout, not the predictable two chunks of glossies, it even smells perfect too. Also an interesting sans serif typeface more of which when I've finished Simon Garfield's fascinating new book Just my Type - A Book About Fonts, who would have thought such a book could be quite so interesting.
But likewise my knowledge about Coco Chanel as sketchy as that about fonts, so I was the blank screen  on which to be written and how fascinating to discover the girl and the woman behind the legend.
A childhood anchored in distress and desertion rather than the love of a family, having been left by her father in the care of the nuns at Aubazine in 1895 after the death of her mother, and at the age of eleven it's not difficult to imagine the impact this must have had on the young Gabrielle Chanel. Images forged in her mind that would emerge in her fashions many years later, but it also sets the scene for a sense of personal shame and embarrassment and a subsequent lifelong obfuscation of the truth about herself that Chanel maintained to her dying day.
How sad too that such humble beginnings lauded as something worthy of praise and mention these days were not so highly thought of in the social-class ridden era into which Chanel emerged as a young woman.
Few people if any knew any single reliable truth about Mademoiselle, so many versions of a life through which Justine Picardie has steered a steady course, via all the available sources, to offer an insight into this complex but ultimately lonely and seemingly 'unloved' woman. Justine draws on evidence from other biographies, sometimes gossip and rumour which has become fact whilst diligently exploring all the detail to arrive at new conclusions.


Coco Chanel's relationships always formed with 'incorrigible womanisers', wealthy ones mind you but mostly caddish and 'unavailable' men. Mistress to the charming and debonair Boy Capel and then after Capel's untimely death, a lengthy affair with surely one of the wealthiest men in Britain, the Duke of Westminster, so plenty of gossip to plough through there.
And I bet like me you'll cheer when you discover the fate Coco had in store for the sparkling emerald and the string of pearls, gifts from the Duke of Westminster as penance for his infidelities and Coco's subsequent humiliation. 
It's enough to make me think about taking up.... no I can't give it away.
Nor will I reveal all the other surprises and revelations but there are plenty in store if you decide to read this. As Justine had promised us at Port Eliot, Mademoiselle did indeed have a very interesting war, counting Winston Churchill amongst her close friends, and a nice little dovegrey family coincidence here too.
Mention is made of a meeting that was due to take place between Chanel and Churchill in Spain in December 1943 but

'..the British Prime Minister had fallen ill after the Tehran conference in December 1943... the meeting with Churchill could not happen - he was very tired... he cancelled his appointements in Spain and went back to England after stopping in Cairo and Tunisia.'

To Winston's rescue the Tinker (father of dgr) on board HMS King George V ...yes can you believe it, I turn to his little book Bugle Boy and there it is confirmed,

'I couldn't be returned to Eastney Barracks as we were in the Mediterranean and I would have to wait until we were sent home - I didn't know that we had the Sicily and Italian campaigns yet to come, so that wouldn't be until October 1943. Even then at Christmas we went back to the Mediterranean to fetch Winston Churchill after he caught pneumonia whilst at Marrakesh...'

Also perused with great interest here, Coco Chanel's salmon fishing records whilst staying on the Duke of Westminster's estates in Scotland. No messing about on the banks of Loch More for Coco. On those three days in 1927, Mlle Chanel upstaged both Winston Churchill and the Duke, none of hers got away, thirteen of the twenty salmon caught landed at Mademoiselle's feet.
The first day's bag for Coco, seven fine and good-sized fish totalling 122lbs in weight.
I was not surprised because there is one fishing book on Bookhound's shelves which even I find interesting, Salmon and Women The Feminine Angle by Paterson and Behan, which advances all manner of arguments about female pheromones being partly responsible for this success. Hugh Falkus, in his introduction, also cites the willingness to learn and the sheer determination of women when placed in a competitive situation at which they are supposed to be slightly less capable, all of which fits very powerfully with the character of Coco Chanel that builds through this book ... and who knows what perfume she was wearing too.
In the end I emerge with a sense of Coco as a chameleon-like figure, capable of blending to her surroundings whether it be the 1920s and 30s Parisian milieu of Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Picasso, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway or her post-war fashion revival in America, and you too may be as surprised as I was to read of the presence of Chanel couture at a very pivotal moment in twentieth century history. But Coco Chanel could blend whilst never losing sight of her individuality or an unshaken confidence in her own unique, sartorial style and sense of chic. Perhaps these became her defence mechanisms, her unchanging suit of armour, because scratch the surface and beneath I feel sure would be revealed a shaky sense of self-esteem and those self-doubts would become evident, that sense of unworthiness and a precarious dependency, but if Mademoiselle was good at one thing it was maintaining that armour intact.
Few people ever scratched beneath, but those who did later in her life saw her vulnerabilities,

'her emotional scars, her loneliness, her sense of loss and failure at never having her own children.'

Plagued by that loneliness, the end when it came was always going to be heart-rending and like Coco Chanel's life also shrouded in mystery and intrigue and Justine Picardie wisely leaves any speculation to the reader.
So a great read for me, the biographies are certainly winners this year, and any minute now Justine will be answering a few of my questions about the book and the writing of.

 

Thank you so much...

... for all your kind words and messages, I can't tell you much we have appreciated them.
I've come to the conclusion that sadness is sadness, there are no varying degrees of it and, though we have really missed that old blogcat today, we somehow sensed that this would be his last summer but what a lovely one he's had, and as so many of you have said what an idyllic cat's life Rocky has led here, as do your cats wherever they are. His girlies, Muffin and Tess are at a bit of a loss over their absent hotwater bottle but stretching out to help occupy the Rocky-sized gap he leaves behind.
Cats don't ask for much do they, they just want to 'be' around but we are going to have to learn to cook standing close to the Aga now instead of a foot away, which will seem very strange.
I was very grateful to Justine Picardie who sent me a link last night to a piece she wrote about the loss of her Jellicle cat Lizzie two weeks ago, which sums it all up perfectly, and talking of Justine my thoughts on her new biography, Coco Chanel The Legend and The Life, will be making an appearance here later today
and my thanks to Harper Collins for permission to use this stunning photograph of Chanel which I like so much I'm going to use it twice.
Hot on the heels of the leg lengthening, two- tone slingbacks, I will post Justine's wonderful dovegreyreader asks... on Mademoiselle so we can have ourselves a CocoFest, and Justine will be around in comments over the next couple of days to chat and answer any questions you may have.
The last time Justine was here to talk about Daphne I think she made lemon drizzle cake, and you all had a party while I was away, this time perhaps we'll have madeleines as well and I'm staying around to join in the fun.
So it's the moment you've all been waiting for... dust off the little black number or hunt out your chic striped tops everyone, and quilted bags on chains will also be allowed, and perhaps we'll really push the yacht out and have a scratch and sniff Chanel No 5 screen too.

Rocky's Farewell...

I don't quite know how to tell you this but...
Rocky died very quietly and peacefully in his very favourite spot in front of the Aga this afternoon.
He's now in his final resting place next to the gate into the back field, where he spent many a happy hour finding himself a take-away rabbit, and the autumn sun shone down on him as we tucked him up snugly in his box. We have sown all the Honesty and daisy seeds I had collected from our Port Eliot flower show installation on his little grave so he'll be putting on a good show next summer, bless him.
We'll all miss you me old chum, a great innings and happy hunting x
 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ~ Rebecca Skloot

'On October 4th 1951, a young woman from Baltimore died of cancer.
Her death changed medical science for ever.'

Perhaps the first thing I have to do, as someone who works daily with those either battling cancer or caring for those who are, is to issue a health warning. Only you can decide whether you want to read a book that dwells in some part on the virulence of cancer.
Everyone reacts differently to knowledge like this and the first half of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by science writer Rebecca Skloot may make for grueling reading if you, or someone you love, is fighting cancer.
Or perhaps think carefully if reading a book like this is likely to raise your own anxieties.

In January 1951 Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer.

A black American woman, born and raised among the tobacco plantations of Virginia, the thirty-one year old wife of David (her first cousin) and mother of their five children, (the eldest born when Henrietta was just fourteen,)  The treatment was surgery followed by local application of a very rudimentary form of radium and before the year was out, fifty-nine years ago today, on October 4th 1951, Henrietta Lacks died.

I will spare the details but again, this makes for very painful reading as does the fate of her children especially little Elsie, sent as a child to a Hospital for the Negro Insane.

During the period of diagnosis and surgery cells were collected from Henrietta's tumour for culture in the lab. Cell growth under laboratory conditions had thus far been a complete failure, no one had been able to replicate the growth of human cells in a test tube, so it was with a resigned air that lab assistant Mary Kubicek set to work when the cells arrived.
Within a week Henrietta's cells had started to multiply with a 'mythological intensity', doubling every twenty four hours, filling as much space as they could be given, growing twenty times faster than Henrietta's normal cells which quickly died, and the 'first immortal human cells' had been discovered.
Hard to imagine that those same cells are still alive today.
HeLa cells (pronounced hee-lah) have been the foundation of a vast amount of medical research and drug development ever since; the 'standard laboratory workhorse' for a wide range of diseases, leukaemia, influenza, haemophilia, Parkinson's disease, the development of the polio vaccine and countless others. Instrumental in advances in in-vitro fertilisation and gene mapping, HeLa cells are still likely to be found in their billions in just about every cell culture laboratory in the world, which makes the story behind the cells even more fascinating and often deeply disturbing.
Not only does this bring ethical issues regarding ownership and consent to the fore, but central to Rebecca Skloot's story are the Lacks family who have lived in near-poverty, and endured years of mental anguish over their misunderstanding surrounding the immortality of the HeLa cells. It is this fascinating human story that has been uncovered with some fairly strenuous and demanding research, much of it conducted with an understandably suspicious, fearful and at times aggressive family. Little had been explained to them about the exact nature of the cell replication thus wild assumptions had been made about cloning and Henrietta still being alive in some form, fears that had led to a great deal of hurt and in some cases serious mental illness as various family members grappled with the impossibility of the science, and all tangled up with ideas of immortality and fundamental religious beliefs.
Alongside this was a sense among family members that they had been duped; the cells were taken from Henrietta without her express knowledge and much seemed to have been done since without the family's permission. Though the now familiar notion of informed consent was unknown in the 1950s, there are some hair-raising episodes concerning breach of confidentiality, and further very dubious research amongst members of the family that was only very 'lightly' explained to them beforehand.
But perhaps even more disturbing than the racism that also emerges, is an issue that has caused the family further devastation. The irony of a situation where they have received no financial benefit from the HeLa cells, and could afford little or no health insurance to cover the cost of any life-saving treatment that Henrietta's cells alone have made possible.
Little wonder they were confused and angry over the duplicity of a system, one that has grown from the benevolent deception of the 1950s into a law declaring the possession of human tissue is not a right once it has left the body, but one that allows a vial of HeLa cells to retail at $167 a time. That's very rough justice indeed and Rebecca Skloots outlines the family's distress in their own words throughout the book which makes this a highly compelling read.
Rebecca Skloot's journey with Deborah, to trace details about Deborah's sister Elsie who had died in the Hospital for the Negro Insane at the age of sixteen, is unbearably moving. None of the younger family members had known she was there and Elsie saw no one again after Henrietta's death, it's hard to imagine what she went through.
The research whilst deep and at times highly scientific is essential to the whole and thankfully largely understandable, I think I only got lost once in the clinical depths of cell division, but that all serves to emphasise the complexities and confusion that this held for Henrietta's family. Once Deborah, Henrietta's daughter, had mastered the detail (and mastered it to a very high level) a calmness seemed to descend for the first time in her life, and when someone finally had the courage to apologise for past wrongs the family were largely at peace with themselves, their history and each other, allowing many restless ghosts to finally be laid to rest.
Reparation can sometimes consist of such a simple action.
That those apologies were finally forthcoming seems thanks in large part to Rebecca Skloots's tireless efforts and courage in pursuing this story so tenaciously in the face of frequent setbacks, and over many years, with both the family and the medical authorities.
So as aforementioned, if you can cope with the early part of the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is indeed a brilliant read and yes, as the blurb suggests, it was impossible for this reader to put down. Finally a fitting tribute exists to the contribution that this poor Southern tobacco farmer, buried in an unmarked grave, (though a memorial has recently been placed in the vicinity) has unwittingly made to the quality of all our lives.
May Henrietta Lacks never be forgotten.

And on the seventh day...

...she rested whilst the heavens opened and Man built his roof, and verily Man and Chippy were drenched and wished they had built an ark.

But Man has made good progress since his project beginneth and the dovegrey was pleased and saw the sign in the sky,

thus proving that at the end of every rainbow there might not be always be crock of gold, but sometimes there is indeed a  Branwolery.

Dublin & the famine ship

I couldn't have chosen a better book to read for the week of my trip to Ireland than Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor, with its cast of characters aboard a famine ship en route for New York in 1847; add in the unique narrative structure and a wide range of voices and this made the perfect travelling book for me through last week's Bristol, London and Dublin excursions. Trains and planes reached their destinations long before I was ready to arrive, buses came around the corner too soon. Each time I closed the book I would think ahead to my next reading opportunity... the Piccadilly Line to Finsbury Park, several stops time for a chapter, the 6am train to the airport, time for another one.
The only excuse I can offer for not reading it before might have been the Richard & Judy endorsement which seems to backfire a little here, slap that badge on a book and I'm afraid I don't feel tempted to read it. But in mitigation for that bout of book snobbery I do remember Bob Geldof jumping up and down on the R&J sofa, probably telling us all to $£%&*$  well go and read it, which might not have helped either.
A visit on the afternoon of my arrival to the National Photographic Archive in Dublin proved to be a fascinating introduction to a city and a country I've already confessed I knew little about beyond what I'd read in fiction, and try as I may I can't recall this being part of the school history syllabus either, probably quietly censored back in the 1960s. So Power & Privilege - Photographs of The Big House in Ireland 1858-1922 proved to be a very revealing glimpse into 'how the other half lived', especially bearing in mind that the following day I was deep into the history and distress of the potato famine and the mass emigration that was happening at about the same time.
The contrast could not have been greater and it all added to a slightly uncomfortable sense of collective and inherited national guilt that I felt as I looked at the pictures...to be honest I'm amazed the Irish Republic let the English in, let alone be so warm and welcoming towards them.
Between 1845 and 1851 the population had fallen from 8.5 million to 6.57 million as a result of the famine deaths and the exodus of survivors to the Land of Promise, the US and Canada, and by 1855 two million people are thought to have fled in that direction.
But there was life going on as usual in The Big Houses.
The posed photos of immaculately uniformed household staff, the lavish dinner parties, the hunting, shooting and fishing, with the life of indulgent privilege lived around the big estates which presumably had the wealth to survive the famine, which sadly many did not.
Not surprising to see that so many of the houses no longer existed, a large number seemed to succumb to fire.
So having taken the executive decision on Saturday afternoon not to take the trip out to Sandymount,  I trekked along to the Famine Memorial to catch the final tour of the day on the famine ship museum, the Jeanie Johnstone moored alongside, before leaving for the airport and home.
The memorial itself is as bleak and as stark as the event, if ever sculpture can convey history then that happens here. The height and thinness of the figures exaggerated in a way that conveys that hollowness of stomach and absent flesh, the defeated posture and the legs struggling to support the bodies, hands clutching at so little, barely holding onto life.

The Jeanie Johnston is a faithful reconstruction of a famine ship designed and built as a joint project by the Republic and Northern Ireland.

This time round a fully sea-worthy triple-masted tall ship with 21st century safety features, which then recreated the trans-Atlantic famine voyage with young adults from both communities as trainees. The hope is that the ship will be sailing again when the Tall Ships race leaves Dublin in 2012.
And yes, I was the muggins who asked the very informative guide how it got out under the bridges...the Beckett Bridge raises accordingly apparently.

Below decks a waxworks museum recreating some of the stories of those who sailed on this amazing ship... amazing because it is one of the few that sustained no loss of life on the trans-Atlantic voyages, thanks to a compassionate and caring captain and the very unusual presence of a competent ship's doctor.
Conditions below decks still cramped and uncomfortable and it's only as you sit down there that you wonder quite how they coped with this for the two months of the voyage, and with meagre rations and only the hopes and dreams to sustain them, but all tempered with the uncertainties that lay ahead.


Playing in the background a keening lament on the fiddle, the ships renowned for their music, singing and sometimes dancing to help keep the spirits up.
This was an incredibly thought -provoking end to my visit, and as I strolled back across the Beckett Bridge to my hotel I stopped and looked back for a moment at the city I'd done in a day...

and was just happily reflecting on what a wonderful visit this had been and how grateful I was to the Irish Tourist Board for taking such grand care of me when suddenly a sick feeling washed over me...hadn't I just spent all my euros and how was I going to get to the airport?
Never has a passenger watched the meter in a taxi quite so worryingly clutching her last happily discovered 20 euro note.
17.50 euros phew, just enough left to buy the Tinker a little gift.
Some Grow-Your-Own Shamrock.

dovegreyreader hits the pages of Vogue...

I just have to interrupt Dublin for a moment to tell you about a real first, we are in the October edition of Vogue.
Yes, really...
Well sort of.
My thanks to Cathy St Germans for sending me this because I have to confess I'm not a regular Vogue reader, but in the feature about this year's Port Eliot Festival, there it is, in all its glory and I've helpfully arrowed it for you.
Our Flower Show installation.

Dublin & James Joyce

My hotel was down on Sir John Rogerson's Quay, so walking to and from there took me right through Bloom walking territory and I took in quite a few of the streets, Lombard Street East, Lime Street, Hanover Street East but it was Eccles Street I really wanted to see, even given that No7  is long gone.

Hopefully this gives you the general gist

The Writer's Museum just along the way in Parnell Square was well worth the visit if only to lay eyes on one of 'these'

and capture in my mind's eye that unique shade of blue-green for fabric purposes, it's all begging for something to be made. A first edition of Ulysses, but of course plenty more to see here as well on other famous Irish writers, why hadn't I realised that Bram Stoker of Dracula fame was Irish,  and an intriguing group painting of them all... imagine finding all these in the same room.

Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett, Behan et al.
The lunch was good and my feet said thank you for the rest.
Next just a short walk to pay homage to the Eccles Street front door, as previously mentioned, now the property of M&S but on display at the James Joyce Centre.

Time also to take in the Joyce exhibition and more of my favoured mock-ups of original settings, and all very accessible, no roped off areas.


I find the whole idea of death masks both macabre but also quite intriguing, a sort of purge for my inquisitive nature. Being able to look on that face as it really was all these years later stirs up strange emotions and so I gazed for quite some time at James Joyce.

As I've said before this week, strange and ongoing things are still happening in my mind with regard to that reading of Ulysses. Not only do I want to read around it and dip into it again, but I now realise it wasn't just a box to be ticked, a book that had to be read. It's infiltrated at a much deeper level than I would have thought possible, all much enhanced by a walk around Dublin of course.
But time is moving swiftly on and I've now eaten into the three hours that I had been advised to allow for the trip out to Sandymount and the Martello Tower, so I opted instead to stick with Dublin city, because with a fair wind and sail I could get on the last tour of the day around the famine ship, the Jeanie Johnston, moored on Custom House Quay alongside Beckett Bridge, and near the hotel and my luggage.
Yes we're off to sea me hearties.