dovegreyreader scribbles

Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets - A New Commentary ~ Don Paterson

Now if I'm really honest there's nothing I like more than a bit of handbags at dawn among the literary cognoscente, and I have discovered the best vantage point for observing a rather quaint and comely exchange of this nature is on the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement.

I now 'take' (wrong word... 'pay for') the TLS and it plops into the postbox every other week, and my first port of call is the arena of gentle, gladiatorial combat which is the Letters to the Editor page. I like to see whose blood will be quietly spilt this week... who has come back, feathers ruffled with a robust riposte to a challenging review of their book, who has picked up one misplaced word in the second sentence of the third paragraph and is writing from Kyrgyzstan to point out the error, but best of all.. whose letter embraces the tree. This is the 'star' letter, the central motif on the page, the one that would win a nice Mont Blanc pen anywhere else, but this being the TLS it's the glory that matters. But the central letter usually carries the biggest handbag-iest clout and it is nicely wrapped around a picture of a tree bearing letters dropping from the branches instead of leaves... and I suspect we are all meant to feel equally 'shaken.'

So a few weeks ago a book arrived from Faber, Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets - A New Commentary by Don Paterson, and though it is no secret that I love Faber books and I met poetry editor Matthew Hollis recently, you'll have to trust me whan I say that is of little relevance here.

Because you see, Don Paterson and I go back a long way and are good friends, except he doesn't know this, but we 'met' (he doesn't know this either) at an Open University A319 Modern Literature Summer School at York University back in 2000. In which case this is also the Summer School that I truanted and ran away back home because of a very obnoxious group tutor... also a poet but of the minor variety. It's a long story best left untold but suffice to say that in my haste to escape, and fearing recapture, I parted with a mortgage payment in return for a ticket but then caught the wrong train and ended up in Weston-Super-Mare at 11pm, a hundred miles from home and Bookhound had to drive up and fetch me.

But before this hasty departure (and my complaint 'tutor not of merchantable quality' was upheld on appeal to the OU with a refund of the summer school fees) I went to a reading and discussion about their poetry with Matthew Sweet and Don Paterson. Truth was I loved the pair of them and that session remains a redeeming feature of the whole debacle so I bought their books and Don signed my copy of The Eyes

To Lynne, With love and best wishes, Don, York 00

...so you can see how that makes us good friends and when Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets arrived I thought 'Oh lovely, a book by my old mate Don', so I settled down to explore it and quickly bonded with the whole premise.

It felt like a bit of a restoration as I read Don's introduction, because any book that prises Shakespeare or any other author from the slender, gracefully inked fingers of the academics and returns him into the grubby mitts of the masses will always appeal to me, and Don Paterson's reasoning in his introduction confirmed his purpose here,

Poetry demands of us a personal response. The problem with a poem like the Sonnets is that most available criticism is necessarily impersonal in nature - otherwise it wouldn't count as scholarship.

And instantly I could see the appeal of a book that it was suggested might

'...involve you violently disagreeing with the reading of this reader .'

I was going to be allowed to 'enter into the picture', to argue and think around the Sonnets with Don and not assume I was being given an incontrovertible gospel account of meaning. Don was about to walk his own literary plank and impart the opinions and thoughts elicited by that all important first reading of a poem, the one that under normal circumstances he might be a little too guarded to share for fear that others would disagree with him and, by his own admission, he hates being wrong as much as the rest of us.

Brave nay plucky writing I thought from my old mate Don, but I would expect no less because I always think of him as one of our courageous poets-of-the-people. Here's a book that gives me permission to jump in with both feet and make my own interpretations, even if they are mistaken, but with no fear of feeling stupid (because by his own admission Don's gone there first) or that I am treading on hallowed ground where I don't belong. So heeding Don's advice that the Sonnets are 'next-to-impossible' to read in one sitting, I earmarked the book as one to keep alongside, one to dip into and read and enjoy a Sonnet every so often through the next year. The fact that my next OU course after A319 Modern Literature was A306 Shakespeare in Text and Performance is irrelevant, it was academic and objective and I have my annotated Katherine Duncan Jones's Arden Sonnets edition to prove it. In complete contrast Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets is about subjective enjoyment.

But where are the handbags you may ask? I definitely promised you literary handbags at dawn.

Well the next thing I read was a rather scathing and entirely dismissive if not derogatory review of the book in the TLS (Jan 14 2011 Canon Fodder) by Alastair Fowler, who may or may not still be, but was in 2007, Regius Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, whilst Don teaches at nearby St Andrews.
Do I sense campus handbags?
I actually wanted to wail because the venerable man has sadly fallen right into the trap, he shouldn't have touched this one with a pikestaff and in fact if I'm honest I wanted to shout out loud... '

'Oi, leave it out, this book's for us, it's not for you.'

Those of us who don't have that level of expertise can have a mess around with something we might like to get to know better, the academics have got plenty of books of their own after all, and what better way than via Don's challenging view of received opinion and his accessible use of language. There is plenty of friendly vernacular and banter here that I actually think the Bard himself would have appreciated, making the book feel refreshing and different, and it's in my grubby mitts for the forseeable future plus I've written all over my copy already.

This is not academia and it makes not a single pretension to be, so fancy giving it to a Prof to review... it's a springboard for some deeper thinking for ordinary readers, and to review in any other light, whilst suggesting that fault lies in leaving 'less than half the book for serious criticism', is plain daft. It was obvious Alistair Fowler would have to shred it in the light of his expertise and perhaps feel the need to defend eminent Shakesperian colleagues in the process; the ones who Don respectfully dissects as he dives into each Sonnet in his quest for relevance and meaning. So in a way I sense the Prof has been had by the TLS who I hope paid double the fee for his trouble, or at least sent him a nice Mont Blanc fountain pen or something by way of recompense.

But excuse me a moment while I go and find my best Mulberry and join in the handbagging, because it came two weeks later with a wrapped-around-the-tree letter in the TLS from Don Paterson and I heaved a sigh of relief. A robust defence of his book and the right of the individual to experience and voice a personal response to a poem without the weight of literary criticism bearing down on them, the opening gambit thus...

If Alistair Fowler had taken the trouble to read my book on Shakespeare's Sonnets in the context in which it was presented, he may have found it a less distressing experience...

and an argument that worked its way methodically towards a checkmate that had me feeling very sorry for the Prof whilst cheering ' Hip hip hooray it's ours again' on behalf of the rest of us.

And if poor Prof. Fowler had read the small print he would have known that none of this is Don's fault anyway because he cleverly says as much in his acknowledgements...

'Finally I would like to thank my partner Nora Chassler, who did her best to excise the larger stupidities; those that remain are her fault alone.'

 

 

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch Day

Glorious day for it, here's the view back to home from my daily tramp about and you'd think we'd be overrun with birds wouldn't you...

so it's S&*$d's law that on Big Garden Bird Watch weekend the flight paths around here would be frantic first thing when we weren't 'doing our hour' and very slow ever since, though we have logged a few visitors

plus this rather healthy looking specimen hanging around and no doubt eyeing the food recycling bin from the front field, which may explain why it's all a bit quiet.

Nuts and bolts and happy days...

Unless you are a Typepad user you may have little idea what this blog looks like behind the scenes, and indeed you might not even wish to know, for which I will of course forgive you...just scroll on, though what follows won't make sense unless you read this bit, sorry.

Being un-techy I have had to master the basics and I actually pay Typepad a monthly subscription to spoon feed me those and keep this show on the interwebs, free of unsolicited adverts and to be there when it breaks, much like I pay the RAC to do likewise with my car. I send Typepad a Help Ticket and they mend it all the way from Los Angeles and probably faster than the RAC but there are several little idiosyncrasies to the Typepad blogging platform not least the storage of draft posts.

Basically I see a box behind the scenes that looks like this...

I write posts when I want and Typepad then stores them in draft (orange pen) by date in amongst others that have gone live (green tick) or are scheduled (blue clock, in case you had wondered, no I don't sit here at 00:15:00 pressing a button).  I let the drafts settle for a while before editing them, re-writing and adding in pictures. I  tweak and think about timing and the general flow and balance of the blog and whether I've had too many books wherin people have died so I'll space them out a bit and add in some where everyone seems to live, or too much about cats, or nursing or knitting in which case I'll ration those a bit. The drafts quickly disappear off the front page so I sat down one evening recently and scrolled back through reims of past posts, (bearing in mind there are 20 per page and I now have 129 pages) pulling up about ten posts in draft about books I'd read last year, so there's a catch up going on, and then I found the post that follows laying dormant from last June.

It was cheering to see some sunshine and sea, and the garden in flower when it currently resembles a wasteland, and then I got to the final paragraph and had a real lump in my throat, but in the end I decided to leave it exactly as it was.

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I had a work-related day in London a few weeks ago which involved an early start and a 12.30pm arrival back home, but there are joys to behold on the 6.55am Plymouth to London train even if it's a little overcast and threatening rain.

I'm not sure there can be many places in the British Isles where the train travels quite so cheek by jowl with the sea as it does in South Devon, along the Teignmouth-Dawlish sea wall, tunnels carved through the red cliffs, and with the tide high it almost seemed to be lapping into the carriage, which actually it almost does on windy, wintery days. You need to be sitting starboard going up, port coming home and luckily I was.

And I caught a belated, fleeting glimpse of the White Horse too.

One of the delights of going to London for the day is always the coming home. Bookhound met me at the station at 11.30pm and as we drove in the gates and heaved that homecoming sigh after a long day the garden seemed to be aglow.

Pitch black it was, yet there was a ghostly white haze around the garden reminiscent of the Milky Way we are lucky enough to be able to see in the night sky, but at ground level...the Daisy Way. I've already mentioned this profusion but there is a little two month window in the life of our laissez-faire-just-mow-a-path-through-it approach to horticulture which could probably win at least the wooden spoon at the Chelsea Flower Show, and that window is now when the daisies take over, as far as the eye can see, masses of them.

Year on year they seed and spread a little further, this year in a sort of amphitheatre-style around the sides of my book room.

Every which way you look at them, they seem picture-perfect. 
For this two months the view from the kitchen door is balm to the soul rather than a guilt trip about everything looking a bit scruffy and untidy, and for which the word here is 'rural' and therefore allowed.

Even the steps with the Lady's Mantle and wild geraniums, also part of the laissez-faire scheme of things, can pass for pretty rather than neglected.

But if there's one thing better than getting home after a long day in London, it's the relaxing day I always pencil in afterwards and for which Rocky happily sets the mood.

He's much recovered from the 'cough' but at fifteen going on sixteen is definitely feeling his age... a swallow flew into the sitting room this week and he just gazed at it (from his highly illegal snooze on the chair) and clearly wasn't thinking 'mmm dinner'. To know your cat's age in human years is to understand him apparently...the received opinion is that the first two years of a cat's life get him to twenty-five after which you add four for every year which makes Rocky our other octogenarian.

RIP Rocky x

My Old Sweetheart ~ Susanna Moore

I'm cutting back on time spent social networking this year. Not that I did a vast amount anyway but for all the time I spend writing a blog it would still be a drop in the ocean of o'clock compared with the hours that can pass when Twittering and Facebooking, and I want and need that time to read.

I have quietly un-Twittered but then there's still Facebook. Dovegreyreader goes out on there automatically too, but it is also a much less time-consuming and pleasant way to keep in touch with friends and work colleagues. So there I was idly reading late one night here in Devon when a note popped onto one of my posts from Cathy St Germans, of Port Eliot and currently very sensibly wintering in Hawaii. I replied, Cathy replied, I replied and there we were having a lovely world-shrinking 'conversation' ... Cathy telling me it made the news there if the temperature went below 60 degs, me frozen solid, and some of that warmth seemed to come my way as I looked at her pictures of Hawaii.

Cathy also reminded me about a book she had recommended to me some time ago,

'Have you read My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore yet?'

And I'd really been meaning too, so I nipped to Amazon there and then, picked up a copy for 1p and the world suddenly felt very tiny indeed.

Susanna Moore now lives in New York City but grew up in Hawaii and though I have been able to find out very little about her beyond one 2007 interview, I hope I have discovered correctly that My Old Sweetheart is the first of a trilogy, if so I am very happy about that.

Set in the sumptuously scented location of Hawaii, 'my old sweetheart' is Anna's pet name for her twelve-year old daughter Lily, and it seemed of increasing significance as I read on about this young girl who becomes the parent to her mother, burdened with the anxieties of Anna's distress and eventual mental illness that is slowly revealed as the book proceeds. That pet name somehow assumes the old head on young shoulders, a girl who would try to make things as perfect as she could for the mother who confides in and relies on her...

'...Anna had few secrets from her. This intimacy was,perhaps, Anna's way of shifting responsibility from herself to Lily,for it was certainly Lily who resided in the real world, alert and watchful, while Anna passed her long days on an island all her own.'

Meanwhile husband and father, island doctor Sheridan, remains objective and one step removed from his own emotional responsibilities towards his wife 'the stranded mermaid' and his children, Lily and her younger brother and sister...

'He was affectionate and fair-minded, but these were not qualities particularly adequate to rescue a woman in enormous trouble and the child she had taken along as her companion.'

Set against the unrivalled backdrop of Hawaii with its constants of warmth and the scent of the flowers, gardenia, tuberose, jasmine, pakalana, a scent sufficiently overpowering that even the emotion could be smothered and blanketed and muffled. There is an element of reading in the dark here, in the shadow of something unseen, knowing that all is not as it seems, but Susanna Moore slowly reveals at a slant, with those precious gaps and silences that give free rein to the reader's intuition, quite where Anna's distress may be coming from, what is fuelling it and ultimately, despite her 'little optimisms' were it may lead.

For geographical location destined to give a book its atmosphere, think Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys for comparable heat. The sheer effort that seems to be required for every emotional response somehow offers a pace to these books that always reminds me of those slow walks on those hot summer days.

I always think as I read a book like My Old Sweetheart that I want to read many more books like this. Spell-binding and measured books with a store of quietly held revelations kept in reserve, that make me gasp a little, novels that countenance no interruption and make you look up to think and then feel quite surprised to find that the world is still there happening around you. This felt like a book of blessed quietness, it has a quality of stillness and fragrance about it, created  in part by the heady langour of the heat with its power to oppress and stifle, but also to radiate and infiltrate. There is a certain  light that shimmers here, and a moment when Anna and Lily swim to an underwater cave that actually transported me there....yes, holding my breath to dive and everything and feeling that slight sense of panic about getting out again, even if I was sitting here in my thermals.

My Old Sweetheart has been one of those perfectly well-rounded reading experiences giving me much more than a good read, perhaps because it's January and I'm always ready to be transported somewhere warm. On starting the book it did feel as if I was walking on Hawaii's jagged lava fields, there is a quiescent volcano just beneath the surface of this writing which Susanna Moore keeps perfectly in check, but you are left in no doubt that at any moment it could gently erupt. Initially the reading feels sharp underfoot, it's unsettling hard-to-balance reading, but compulsive too. A world I couldn't wait to get back to each time I picked the book up and a writer who I knew I could trust as the secrets slowly seeped out.

There will inevitably be consequences for Lily when she grows up and has children of her own, she has effectively been a mother all her life and to the detriment of her own childhood, and quite where this places her own inner child will take some hard work to discover in the years to come. Lily does her best and I found myself wishing her a much deserved, gentle and happy life as I reluctantly turned the final page.

So a book that comes with two recommends, from Hawaii via Devon to you and just a final tantalizing snippet from Susanna Moore that explains a great deal and makes me want to read the book all over again.

In the very beginning when I wrote the first book, My Old Sweetheart, I had no notion it would be published. In a way what I was doing, because I had come from a somewhat crazy family and I had just had a child, a little girl, I began My Old Sweetheart as a kind of explanation to her—and it’s dedicated to her. So that someday she would, there would be a record of my childhood, her grandmother’s life—my mother died young—and even though it’s fictionalized, what had happened to us.

 

 

 

 

It's raining men...

Well only in a literary way, still just the usual ones wandering (or hopping) around chez dovegrey, but having made a concerted effort to read some of these Big Scary Male Authors in 2011 I have been looking much more closely at my reading trends.

This being me I'd thought about this project and found a buddy or two to do it with but had no firm plans in mind, very relaxed, it will just happen. Kirsty at Other Stories was on board and I had someone else in mind too but first I had to persuade them to start a blog. It's been a long old haul people, drip-drip-drip... you know you want to... you read so much and write such lovely comments on my blog... of course people will want to read it.... you write sermons every week a bit more won't hurt.
By now you may have guessed who is the latest addition to the blogging firmament.
I've allowed a few weeks to account for mastery of technology and finding of blog feet but I can't wait a minute longer ...you will thank me for this I know ....big drum roll.... RevCherylReads

Kirsty, Cheryl and I are going to read who we like within this project but it's a new direction for me to even consider because to be honest I pay little attention to author gender. I just read what I want to read when I want to read it, but I have always been under the impression that I am reading and writing about considerably more books by female authors than male, so no one was more surprised than me when I did last year's tally. It does work out at a 45% - 55% split in favour of women authors, but nothing like as unbalanced as I had expected.

So having embarked on my foray into the writing of Philip Roth I had been searching around for a new-to-me UK male writer to add in. One to offer some home comforts, some familiar turns of phrase and scenery too, because at the moment I'm having to do things like imagine what the New Jersey Turnpike looks like for real. The dissipation of a decades-old image has been quite a trauma because I only know of it in the vaguest of terms thanks to Paul Simon and his song America, first heard on my Bookends LP bought for 24/6d in 1968.

...Cathy I'm lost I said though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America

I have now discovered that in my imagination the New Jersey Turnpike consisted of a man in a little booth sleepily raising a bar to let the odd car through whilst Paul Simon sat on the grass verge nearby strumming and humming away to a dozing Cathy and Art threw in some nice harmonies. Subsequently and thanks to Philip Roth, I discover that it's like the Tamar Bridge in that you have to pay,

but considerably larger and more complex than I had first imagined.

I'm not ready for Martin Amis yet but I thought I might be able to cope with William Golding, and as it's his centenary year and John Carey had very kindly sent me a copy of his biography William Golding The Man Who Wrote Lord of The Flies, my choice was made. Faber are also re-jacketing all William Golding's novels this year as well as publishing a memoir by his daughter Judy, (The Children of Lovers due out in May) so it seemed like a good opportunity to explore someone home-grown and with West country links too. William Golding's family hail from Newquay where he was born and he spent the latter years of his life back in Cornwall.

There are a couple of other little synchronicities... William Golding's birthday 19th September falls on the date I gave birth to the little baby Gamekeeper so I won't forget that in a hurry. Then September 1953, the month I was born, is the month William Golding had sent the manuscript for Lord of the Flies to Faber where it was initially rejected by the first reader, that book's as old as me.

Like most of the nation I think I studied Lord of the Flies for O Level and though a desert island is hardly familiar surroundings the book itself feels more than familiar having left the lasting impression I suspect it was meant to leave at that age. I am quite excited about how I will interpret Ralph and Piggy some forty years (and a little bit) on, and with a whole load of work and home-related child development experience tucked under my belt. I have a copy of the book in a beautiful Folio edition so I will give that an airing.

But I haven't read a single other book by William Golding so when a box of William Golding arrived last week I did the usual. It would be far too sensible and orderly to start at the beginning of the Golding oeuvre and work through each book in turn identifying changing style and writerly development, so having calmed myself down at the sight of a box of new books I  then plumped for the one with a nice cover.

I made a start on The Spire and, with no idea what to expect, to my surprise I couldn't stop reading. I'm reminded of elements of The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner and that most of the books I have read about religious communities have been by and about women, so already I am fascinated at the male spin on this, and the inevitability that the spire would assume phallic significance, which dawned on me only moments before William Golding confirmed it.

So whilst I'm avoiding the word 'challenge' this year for all its connotations of 'contest' and 'difficulty' and 'must', I'm not avoiding the words 'enjoy' and 'variety' and 'new reading trails' with like-minded blog friends and all of you, so any William Golding fans out there? Any recommends?

 

Caribou Island ~ David Vann

If you visit here regularly you may recall that one of the many literary highlights of 2010 for us was the day that David Vann and his wife Nancy, travelling around the West Country last summer, called in and had tea with us.

He is the funniest, most self-effacing man with a highly infectious laugh and Nancy is an absolute delight, so just imagine us all eating a Devon cream tea and David, Bookhound and the Gamekeeper all talking about their hunting, shooting and fishing experiences while Nancy and I looked at each other and pulled grimaces of the highest order. Nancy, like me, is not really au fait with the ins and outs of gralloching a deer.

David had very kindly done dovegreyreader asks... last year in two parts, but it was good to talk to him for real about Legend of a Suicide, a book I read and had really invested with time and reading energy. It had moved me tremendously, I found it to be a profound and meaningful book and David signed my copy with a really lovely inscription. But last August, January and Caribou Island seemed light years away, yet here we are, publication week and though my copy duly arrived a few weeks ago I was almost too nervous to read it.

What if I didn't like it?

What if David's first novel didn't match up to the extraordinary experience that had been Legend of a Suicide?

No worries, I think Caribou Island might be even better because I've met the unforgettable couple, Gary and Irene. Set in the challenging outpost that is Alaska (well it feels like a challenge from the comfort of the comparitively temperate Tamar Valley, though I think David did find our single track lanes quite a torment) Gary has entered his moment of life crisis and decides, in his retirement, to build a log cabin on an off-shore island for himself , and perhaps, but not definitely, his wife Irene to live in. Now we are not talking Hawaii here (but we will be later this week) we're talking way up off the coast of Alaska and an island in a glacier-fed lake, so I vow you will never meet a more long-suffering martyr of a wife than Irene.

If the marriage is failing and this log cabin is Gary's way of salvaging it then really you'd have thought Irene would have got the message by now, and thankfully she almost has. Clinging on to the last vestiges of hope, Irene suffers from agonising and excruciating headaches which no one, least of all Gary takes much notice of. Eventually Irene's internal pain becomes her voice, the expression of all that is wrong and intolerable about her life with Gary, but meanwhile you can only feel for the poor woman, dragged along by habit and loyalty and the feint and occasional hope that things might get better. Poor, poor Irene I thought, as she perched in the boat balancing logs and roofing sheets in a force ten gale and lashing sleet and snow, and camped out for days on end as they travelled back and forth to the island, because Gary isn't doing this in summer, no, it's autumn so it has to be done in a hurry.

This felt like brilliant and gifted writing, no question, and as always with David's writing there is plenty to dwell on, this time I was acutely aware of all the food. No Devon scones feature but David uses food to good effect ...as solace with warm nourishing pies, in times of stress his characters turn to cold shredded salads and raw ingredients and when things are downright dreadful, David goes to source and working in a fish factory, which for someone like me who can't abide fish really did take some stomaching.

But let's get back to Gary's build.

This is what a nice cabin looks like on the real Caribou Island. It's got 90deg corners, the logs meet roughly where they should and the window and the door are in the right-ish places. There's a whole roof and a chimney and everything, all mod cons, Irene would have loved this... even I might have hacked it for a week, and indeed this could have been the cabin that Gary keeps going to look at to see what he needs to do next.

The consequences of Gary's epic-build, were the book not so overlain with the potential for tragedy, are actually verging on the hilarious, and I could almost hear David's voice and laughter as he describes the Heath-Robinson, lop-sided, draughty hovel that starts to emerge. This is definitely not Grand Designs, (Bookhound's favourite TV programme,) Kevin McCloud would be shaking his head in disbelief because there are no plans, and with only a cursory measure and site check, Gary hasn't thought a great deal through, and nor does he have the first clue about building (he could have used some lessons from you-know-who How to Build...) so he makes it up as he goes along with the inevitable disasters. The moment when Gary has roofed himself into an impossible corner is the essence of farce but the situation for Gary and Irene is way too serious to laugh... though David Vann describes it in a way that really makes you want to.

By this stage the couple are barely communicating, things have reached that point of no return and as Irene valiantly props up the heavy roof sheet you sense she is propping up a whole lot more besides and she won't be able to take the weight much longer. Whilst from Gary's point of view perhaps his impasse with the roof resembles the place he and Irene have reached in their lives and their marriage, cornered, no plan, no solid foundations, no way forward, no way back and no amount of re-thinking seems likely to sort this one out. This marriage is as draughty and leaky and unstable and cobbled together as this cabin, one big huff and puff from the wolf would see it off, and no warmth is ever going to remain inside with those great huge gaps between the logs anyway. Likewise nothing will staunch the massive haemmorhage of Gary and Irene's love.

Hovering around in the background are Gary and Irene's children, Mark and Rhoda. Mark a bit of a casual and carefree spirit, Rhoda quite the opposite, a perfectionist and a worrier especially with regard to her parents (and rightly so) and a traditionalist having cornered her partner Jim the dentist into committing to a marriage he is very uncertain about. Jim has decided he will go through with the marriage but at the same time he'll commit to a life of infidelity and womanising, and as he starts to keep fit and to rid himself of his 'muffin top'  to cope with the demands I suddenly wondered if I already knew Jim the dentist. Was I reading a prequel to those events in Legend of a Suicide?  If so this adds a whole new and exciting twist to this book.

In any case I was always bracing for that David Vann 'moment', which anyone who has read Legend of a Suicide will know to brace for... and in the same way that I took that vow of silence and non-disclosure then, I'm taking it again now, so not another word except to say you might not want to miss Caribou Island.

And for anyone in London, if there are tickets left, you also might not want to miss David Vann at the LRB Bookshop tomorrow evening.

Water and The Knee...

"Horse trainer killed lover and put body on bonfire as she sipped wine on patio with friend."

Sorry, that's a bit awful for a Saturday morning but it only takes a glimpse of newspaper headlines like that to make you realise that a week which has left you feeling a bit frazzled (sorry, probably the wrong choice of word) was in fact quite run of the mill and ordinary in comparison to the lives other people must lead.

We've been building up to the Kayaker's knee surgery for a while because given his lifestyle it was an inevitable consequence, and it had been scheduled for Friday, but bless the NHS ( who praise be have been swift and efficient from the off) for bringing it forward to Thursday, which gave him one less day to fret over it. It also gave us less time to ponder the fact that this twenty-seven year old 'child' of ours, who hasn't sat still since the day he first figured out that moving your four corners in sequence got you across to the video machine and you could put a sandwich in it, was going to be not very mobile and on crutches for at least two weeks. Even he agrees this is not a winning combination so we are grateful to the Tinker who has also offered to have the Kayaker over to play for the day to give us some respite.

Bookhound delivered the Kayaker to the hopsital (as he used to call it) for 7am with a bag of things to play with. The nurses were very nice and friendly and said don't worry we'll look after him and so Bookhound dashed home to meet the Water Man.

Water's lovely when it comes out of the taps isn't it, but this week ours decided not to and that hasn't happened for ages. It's usually a simple trip switch problem and all to do with the electric pump 120 ft down the bore-hole which has to 'talk' to the pressure vessel which stores the water, and the neutraliser which stops it eating away at the pipework. Sometimes the communication breaks down, we stroke them all nicely and all's well, and to our surprise we had no problems with any of it freezing during the very cold weather either. This might be down to the fact we have all the tanks snuggled in 13.5 tog duvets. Anyway, this week the three of them were having none of it, no amount of pleading, persuasion or trickery would work and the only solution involved someone running out to the shed and 'wiggling' the black box and switches on the top of the tank , which is less than satisfactory should you be home alone and in the shower and it's -10 degs outside. By 5am on Thursday morning and trying to get the hospital run underway, we were very fed up with it.

The Water Man was called and thankfully sensed 'emergency' and 'stress' and 'she won't cope' in Bookhound's voice and slotted us in to his morning rounds. It's true, I'll admit it, I don't cope at all well with no water coming out of the taps, my hair unwashed and dousing myself top to toe with a wet wipe, to say nothing of tipping buckets of spring water down toilets and no dishwasher/ washing machine.... I'd go camping if I liked that sort of thing.

There was much shaking of heads and draining down and stripping of electrics out in the freezing cold before the news came through from outside...

'It's the switch.'

Ah yes, as we thought, that thing we've been wiggling, jolly good, simple mend and go and thank you Water Man.

'Hmmm well I've mended that, but listen to that noise... hmm, think you've got a dodgy return valve on the electric pump.'

We morphed into a state of frozen awareness because the pump is 120 ft down the bore hole and it is a right old palaver to raise it. Once you (as in they, I watch) have raised the pump, the pipework then has to be laid out across the garden, and you get bits of grass and mud on it and all sorts which you don't really want going back down into your nice pure water supply, but basically it seems we have been busily pumping water up ...and then back down again.... and up ... and then back down again... and for who knows how long.

'Have your electric bills been a bit excessive?' the Water Man asked.

Bookhound and I looked at each other knowingly and would now like to apologise to the Kayaker having blamed him for constant recourse to the tumble dryer instead of the washing line since he returned from New Zealand.

In fact disaster was averted because a new return valve could be fitted at the well-head rather than pulling the whole shenanigans out of the ground and we heaved a very big, but still expensive sigh and made the Water Man a cafetiere of proper coffee as a reward for his trouble.

The Kayaker was home remarkably soon having troughed a plate of sandwiches the minute he came round and the surgeon is hopeful that one lot of surgery will suffice. Predictably it took him all of ten seconds to master the art of crutches, the water is coming out of the taps again and we now have a quiet weekend planned to recover.

On a happy-happy note choir practice is in full swing after the Christmas break and I am loving this season's new music. We are singing this with some great harmonies..

in amongst some other really wonderful songs for the Vocal Harem Gala Concert in May. How can you not smile when you sing that... and that was our incredible accompanist Jaemus playing the piano in the final episode of The Edwardian Farm if you saw it this week .

And the walking across America is going well because I am on my way to Jamestown by just power walking the mile and a half to the top of the lane and back at least once but preferably twice a day.

I hope you've all had a good week, do have a moany or a cheery moment in comments if it helps, we'll understand....

 

 

What is this life...

... if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

I think that poem by W.H. Davies might sound a little hackneyed these days, but it's still a favourite and we say it to ourselves often in that 'permission granted' sort of way. It's been a very busy week chez dovegrey, so as we rev up for our RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch session next week, we've been putting in some standing-staring practice at the kitchen window...

Dark Matter - A Ghost Story ~ Michelle Paver

I developed a slight penchant for a good ghost story as the days shortened towards the end of the decade. Most unlike me because one a year is usually plenty, not three in a row and counting, and when the theme comes up as a choice at the Endsleigh Salon, I'll be honest I'm the one who groans.

I was meeting a friend for lunch a few weeks ago, and reading a post-Booker success interview with Howard Jacobson while I was waiting for her to arrive in which he said if there was one thing he hated it was people saying a book was a real page turner. That had me looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was giving me the evil eye because, with apologies to Howard and everyone else who hates the expression,  I know I use it a great deal. But some books just are page-turners aren't they, you're not meant to be digging deep for meaning or significance, you're meant to be enjoying a jolly good story, and I need them as much as I need the ponderous ones. To be fair I think Howard Jacobson was actually asking the reader to be more contemplative where his novels were concerned, in the hope that they would find that his books required regular rest and ponder breaks.

I meanwhile, having galloped through The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor (another cracking good read, excellent and recommended) with what must seem like indecent haste, have likewise done more of the same with Dark Matter, Michelle Paver's first adult ghost story after her best-selling children's series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. Nor have I read any of the Chronicles though I do have Wolf Brother and I may just embark on that now because there is much that I have admired about Michelle Paver's writing. Do they come recommended from anyone out there?

Now set a ghost story in the Arctic and you're home and dry as far as I can see, if a little cold and wet in the process but with every ingredient present and correct. Plenty to choose from, the constant darkness, perishing cold, snow-blindness, potential to get lost and run out of food, get trapped, attacked by hungry bears, spooked by the aurora borealis and the sounds of cracking icebergs and glaciers, but let's take nothing for granted, the mix will still need to be just right.

Michelle Paver chooses her era carefully in Dark Matter, 1937-8, war brewing in Europe, and an expedition that will spend a year in the remote and forbidding Arctic wastes, running a series of experiments. Bringing together a socially disparate group of young men immediately creates an imbalance and a tension that warrants some exploration and immediately had me wondering... would or could it be offset by the great leveller of the Arctic conditions?
The 'everyone's in the same boat' approach?
Inevitably each is going to bring his own to this team so I was interested to see who was best equipped to deal with the deprivation.

Narrated by Jack Miller, whose journal forms the basis of the book so a first person narrative which offers all that scope for a mind to go a-wandering on flights of fancy and imagination. But Jack is also the team member with most to lose, an impoverished upbringing that places him at a social disadvantage to his colleagues, Algie ( who likes killing things) Gus and Hugo (who don't) . Pride will be at stake if Jack shows any sign of fear or weakness but there is much to be afraid about and Michelle Paver slowly shores up those fears with a succession of incidents.

As the team come ashore at Gruhuken, and their ship bids them farewell for a year, it's not hard to imagine the sense of isolation and mild panic that might creep in, all coupled with a sinister but unspoken history to this god-forsaken outpost, echoes of the past which will become increasingly malevolent. When one by one Jack's team has to leave the camp and return to Norway, Jack by now vulnerable and increasingly obssessive is left alone to face down his sinister demons whilst clinging on the last vestiges of his pride.

There is only so long Jack can possibly tell himself everything is fine and herein lies Michelle Paver's skill, because as a reader Jack's anxieties became mine, his reasoning and self encouragement assuaging my own fears as if I was with him. There is a single moment of terrible indecision for Jack, a moment that could have helped him enormously and there was I almost shouting encouragement at the page as Jack's courage failed him and slowly his mental processes descended into ....
Enough of the plot but I hope you can see that it all has the essence of a great ghost story, one that rockets along and which I enjoyed tremendously, all those ingredients that had me turning those pages in a way that would probably have Howard Jacobson tutting.
Needs must etc.

Sunday Confessions...

I know it's Tuesday but I haven't done Sunday Confessions for ages... that owning up to all the books that were arriving, because in the end it just seemed like bragging about the number of books that had come through the door. However some of this week's are too luscious-looking not to mention, so please forgive more indulgence and actually I have paid for a few of these too... no chance of a year of not buying books for me.

I have to shout from the rooftops because some of those 'reasons to be cheerful about publishing' have arrived. A parcel from Faber included a proof copy of On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry, not published until August, but all bets are off that I won't have picked it up before the end of January. An epic spanning seven decades as Lilly Bere mourns the loss of her grandson...memory, war, family-ties and love. I came across this quote in an interview with Sebastian Barry as he talked about A Long, Long Way and I knew exactly what he meant,

'Any half-decent book has a secret that the reader recognizes and, like the writer, can never completely say what it is—which I think constitutes the pleasure of a book. It is saying something, but the thing left hanging in the air, the thing unsaid, is what the reader takes away.'

Likewise I am eager to read Irma Voth the new novel from Miriam Toews and a return to  the fundamentalist religious community that she portrays so well. As a film crew move in recently married and deserted Irma starts to question the secluded life she has led.

In the same parcel, Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica edited by Anthony Thwaite...

'My holiday was rather as I expected - my poor father grew steadily worse & died on Good Friday. Since then mother and I have been rather hopelessly looking at the stock in the house - this morning I shifted 100lbs of jam - 1945, 1946, 1947 years - and about 25 Kilner jars of bottled fruit. Seventeen dozen boxes of matches, a shoe box of chocolate - all this from one small cupboard. I don't what will happen to it all - I don't like sweet things  you remember.'

I'm going to add this to my pile of letters to dip in and out of, The Letters of T.S.Eliot arrived a while back too, so much to enjoy.

Not forgetting either Saints and Sinners by Edna O'Brien, also from Faber and this the first collection of her stories for some years, I haven't read anything by Edna O'Brien at all so this will be my starter for ten.

My three purchased Philip Roths have arrived along with another good spot on Amazon, a collection of three books by Tarjei Vessas, Spring Night, The Birds and The Boat in the Evening published by Peter Owen and which I snapped up in the Marketplace. It is a while since I read The Ice Palace but memories of that book etched into my memory so I am looking forward to more by this Norwegian author.

I was also delighted to receive a copy of Old Man Goriot by Balzac from Penguin, in a new translation. Perhaps better known as Pere Goriot to me but mention of Balzac when I was writing about Penelope Fitzgerald this week had prompted me to plan a sidetrack in his direction after that single blaze of glory I experienced with Eugenie Grandet, so a fortuitous arrival.

Just as timely, a copy of Daisy Goodwin's My Last Duchess which has been getting great reviews. I missed it in hardback so my thanks to Headline for a paperback edition because I think this will segue nicely into my reading of Searching for Grace by Carol Henderson. I'm really hoping the allusion to Browning's wonderful poem quoted is setting me on the right track with this one. A Level English, rainy day huddled over books in a classroom and I knew that I would love his poetry for ever when I read this poem, and slowly its haunting meaning dawned...

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands
Will't please you sit and look at her?...

It will please me to sit and read this book for sure.

 

 

The Truth About Love ~ Josephine Hart

We talked some time ago about books having that little window of publicity before they may pass us readers by, and The Truth About Love by Josephine Hart, published by Virago in early 2009, did sail right on by without my noticing. It was only a half-mention somewhere that had me reading this novel a few months ago and perhaps that all begs the question, why so long before any thoughts have appeared on here?

The Truth About Love has proved to be a book that has revealed its strengths very discreetly because I'm editing this piece two months after I first wrote it and knowing full well that something was eluding me about the novel, but equally confident that the final piece of the jigsaw would pop up somewhere.

Misleadingly I do still have this nostalgic image of Ireland as a wistfully green and pleasant place despite all the years of violence that I have grown up absorbing by osmosis and still reluctantly associate with the country; something delicate, intrinsically soulful, beautiful and fragile about it. Something easily broken, and much less easily put back together, and whilst the troubles are certainly evident in The Truth About Love it is in an oblique and understated way and from a different perspective.

'After a tragedy many survivors are lost ' says one of Josephine Hart's characters and the full import of that will become apparent.

The book opens with a death and the suggestion that Tom and Sissy O'Hara's son has been making a rocket in the garden shed belies the nature of his injuries when he is caught in the blast and, to put it bluntly, scattered to the four corners of the garden. Clearly he is working on something far more sinister. It is the son on his way to hospital and certain death who gets first pickings at the first-person narrative. Grief at this unnamed son's loss and how it impacts on the each member of the family and the wider community will permeate the rest of the book.

That grief may well be symbolic of a nation's grief too. A grief that when walled up and enclosed spills out around the sides and seeps through the cracks, as Josephine Hart cleverly hands the narrative baton from one character to the next thus allowing successive generations to take up the story-telling and lead it into the future. It's like reading a contemporary and written form of the ancient craft of oral story-telling which for some reason sits comfortably with all my pre-conceived notions and expectations of literary Ireland if there can be such a mixed up thing. Now two months after first writing that I read Ann Enright's introduction to The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story and subsequently also in The Guardian here, (accompanied by the usual excoriatingly brutal Graun comments) and realise that I am on the right track.

'...the short story has flourished in those cultures where older, usually oral forms are met head on with the challenge of new literary forms ... the story is born from the fragmentation of old certainties and the absence of any new ones...'

The Truth About Love may not be a short story but I think the same principles will pass muster in this context and we'll just have to hope no Guardian commenters stray over here.

Looking on as the all-seeing observer, who moves on the periphery of Josephine Hart's fictional community, is writer Thomas Middlehoff, 'the German' who potentially carries the unspoken burden of his own nation's post-war guilt on his shoulders and into the midst of this sorrow.
Detached, seemingly unemotional but a pragmatist, and a sensitive one at that.

'My father said there were four things a man or a nation could do with their history, which is after all, their collective memory... a nation could forget, exploit, obscure or live with its history.'

As Tom and his children, Olivia and Daragh, though grieving themselves, pull together to try and contain Sissy's grief at the loss of her son, (and we know she has already lost a daughter,) it's clear they cannot stem the tide of her mental anguish. Tom and Olivia approach Sissy to tell her the awful truth about her son's death from which they have tried to shield her and Tom says to his daughter,

'We'd better face it now Olivia. There is no waiting now. No way out of this one, is there Olivia? Listen child, whatever you're about to see - after all you've seen today - know it can be survived.'

For me it was the rawness and ultimate irresolution of a mother's mourning that seared its mark throughout this book, and it was the debate about John McGahern's The Barracks over on KevinfromCanada, and the trend identified by commenters there that finally helped me to crystallize my thoughts on The Truth About Love....

' Meanwhile, the mothers and wives pick up the pieces, mourn and raise the next generation of “heroes”.'

The suggestion that traditionally, in reality and in much Irish fiction, it is the women who carry the burden and soldier on, yet in Josephine Hart's novel that trend is completely and utterly subverted. How can anyone possibly 'recover' from the loss of a child under any circumstances let alone such brutal ones, and the son's death seemed to become a form of universal allegory for all those individual mournings. Devastated and unhinged there is no consolation capable of  assuaging Sissy's grief, and Josephine Hart's delineation of this is beautifully and deeply perceptive. But then thinking back to that conversation between father and daughter, there it is... that burden subtly still being passed down to her ... this is our expectation of you as a woman.

So, having in my usual fashion written this and then nipped to Amazon to steal the cover image (sorry, but sometimes true) I was very surprised to discover several one and two star reviews, some finding the narrative unconvincing, the dialogue clunky, skims over the facts etc. No, no and thrice no I found myself muttering and all proving there's nowt so different as readers, because there was me weeping and loving every finely nuanced word, and how much this book has continued to give me months after I first read it.

The wisest of those words perhaps uttered by the Bishop, Thomas Middlehoff's unlikely regular chess opponent, famed for being a bit of a talker ...

'His conversational ship has left port. It will take time to anchor him again...'

But once anchored some moments of deep lucidity emerge from the Bishop and herein perhaps lies one answer to so much endless tragedy,

'There's a world of difference between a free nation building its soul on the tales of men who fought hard and long against a ruthless oppressor and breaking young minds with the weight of old sadnesses and burdening young shoulders with an unpayable debt to ghosts.'

Much to think about here, a book that will bear a re-read very soon and if you've read it I'd love to know your thoughts too.

 

Teabags and the Tamar...

Here in West Devon we have all taken to the whole recycling thing as if we are single-handedly saving the planet, which surely proves that the key to successful compliance rests in holding off participation in any scheme until such time as an excruciating level of pent-up guilt has been achieved, then everyone swoops on it with an extraordinary level of guilt-assuaging enthusiasm. We can sleep easy at night now because we're doing our bit really can't we...when climate-change-getting-worse stuff comes on the news we can nod sagely and say we're helping to reverse the effects by washing out cat food tins and putting them in the green box (heavens, not the blue bin or the black bin liner) so that they can be turned into Porsches. We tried putting two old frying pans in the green box but they clearly can't be turned into Porsches as they were very pointedly left behind, I'll bet they'd have been good enough for Spitfires in the war.

Or we would sleep if the impact hadn't been so profound that ordinary people like us are lying awake at night worrying at the thought of a used teabag mistakenly ending up somewhere other than in food recycling ( O...M....G... I PUT IT IN THE BLACK BIN LINER!!!!!) and can't rest until they've gone down, fished it out and placed it in the appropriate receptacle (the blue bin for goodness' sake.)

However this recycling lark is all well and good until you get 'forgotten' by the collecting people. So when there had been no sight nor sound of the lorry since before Christmas and before the snow, and now we're on January 14th it was starting to look more like the council tip here than... well than the council tip.

So I took a wide berth around the growing stack threatening to block the gate (and probably providing a sweet little home for a rat commune) and headed off on what must now needs be one of my Daily Power Walks yesterday, even though it was pouring with rain and the lane was a river of its own.


I have decided this Power Walking thing to get fit and shed a few pounds doesn't actually happen if I sit here and think about it, I really need to put on my walking trousers and my shoes and just do it, and nor can it be put off just because of a bit of rain, or I will be the size of a ... well a council tip by Easter. Besides which I had opened the bedroom windows on Friday morning and could hear the roar of the Tamar from here so it's always worth going down to have a look. And on the subject of rain I hope anyone who might be reading this from the heavily rain-sodden territories around the world is safe, and if you have family and friends there I hope you have had news of them... we are talking mere puddles here in comparison to La Nina.

As I headed down to the river, past the ends of farm driveways and isolated cottages like ours, it became clear that we weren't the only residence in trouble. In fact if we were angling for the 'Recycling Debris on Public View' of the Year award we were mountains behind, (thanks no doubt to a few timely bonfires when it was clear our gateway was disappearing.) Goodness me what an embarrassment of alcoholic beverage drinking seems to have gone on around here over the festive season and, as predicted, what larks the foxes have had with the bins.

I reached the river in 30 minutes, which at approx. 120 paces per minute = 3960 paces less 1000 for uphill slowness and time spent gasping over a gate  = say 3000. Apparently 10,000 a day in total is the aim but that was enough for the time being, and The Tamar was not as furious as we have seen it in the past..

but still fierce enough to make me feel giddy as I leant over the medieval crossing down at Horsebridge...

and enough to make me almost drop my camera as a very large-winged black bird flew under the lessening span of the bridge and down-river right in front of me.



All of a fluster I managed to catch it as it landed on the water...
 


and grainily again as it flew back upstream.

The verdict here is a 'Cormorant'...what do you bird experts think?

I was supposed to walk 3,000 steps home too but the Kayaker drove past and I couldn't resist a lift so we arrived home in time for soup (carton in green bin) and I presented my detailed report on locality debris distribution over lunch (you should see how much Port they drink at ....) which prompted Bookhound to make his third phone call to the council on the subject this week. After a bit of fobbing off on their part, I could hear words like 'complaint' and 'council tax' until he extracted the well-guarded name and number of the 'man responsible'. 'It looks like Beirut'  I heard him say, which actually I think might have been a bit of an unfair comparison, because Beirut is probably a whole lot tidier and cleaner than the Tamar Valley has been looking, but anyway most apologetically a lorry was dispatched at 3pm on a Friday afternoon and the clearance has happened.

 

 

The Bookshop ~ Penelope Fitzgerald

'You must ask yourself, when you envisage yourself opening a bookshop, what your objective really is.'

I'm losing count of the number of times I have read The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, but I had read it again prior to my recent trip to London and the wander around Hampstead with Justine Picardie which included paying homage at Penelope Fitzgerald's grave, and I've just read it yet again because I didn't write my thoughts down at the time, and each time it's as if I read a new book.

I think I might be in danger of repetition to the power of ten here about the moment in my reading life when, back in December 2003, The Bookshop was my introduction to the writing of an author who I think you all know by now I admire most above all others. I have also taken that adulation as far as creating
a file for snippets and articles, and building up a set of hardback first editions. Several of those signed in Penelope Fitzgerald's very distinctive handwriting, which is the highest accolade that can be bestowed in the dovegreyreader pantheon of greats when there are also eye-wateringly steep gas bills to be paid.

Self-effacing and modest Florence Green, acutely aware of her own failings, decides against all the odds to open a bookshop in the East Anglian market town of Hardborough. No push over and doggedly determined when she needs to be, Florence also knows when it is time to retire gracefully, eventually defeated by the community but never cowed by it. That's the plot in a tiny netsuke, (can you tell I'm reading The Hare With Amber Eyes and learning to pronounce it as netskeh) a plot I know so well, but if you've read it you'll know that much more happens than this and I am always amazed at how successive readings can also be completely different readings of the same book. Previously unnoticed nuances emerge, perhaps subtle and gentle (and to me Penelope Fitzgerald is always both of those) developments of character or plot that I may not have appreciated before. This time  I was marvelling at the trickle of characters whose presence is firmly established by page twenty one as the world surrounding Florence Green is effortlessly populated.

It's seems to have been the week of the child on here and I've really enjoyed reflecting and writing about a child's point of view in recent reading, so in keeping with that the character who I indentified with most on this reading was by chance a ten and a half year old girl. Christine arrives brimming with that confidence that only ten and a half year olds can have as she offers her services to Florence in the shop, coming to work for her after school each day.

' Christine liked to do the locking up. At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done. This would be her last year at Primary. The shadow of her eleven plus, at the end of the next summer was already felt.'

I wonder if you can remember being ten and a half?

Please forgive the self-indulgence because funnily enough I can, and with crystal clarity after Penelope Fitzgerald had described it so succinctly, and I  would have given away my roller skates to work in a bookshop. It's that year when you are top dog at primary school but about to embark on the great leveller that is secondary school and have to start working your way up all over again. I might have been the fastest runner in the school but I was about to become the slowest, I might have been one of the best readers and spellers coming top in everything, but I was about to be suitably cut down to size, and apart from the occasional fluke I'm not sure I ever came top or excelled in much again except for one season as hockey captain and holding the school record for running 150 yards for about a week.

This being me I have the embarrassing photographic evidence which I think demonstrates that transition...

Me at ten and a half...

and then about a year later and in my first term at grammar school...

Apart from the fact I had sensibly ditched the alice band, something very subtle seems to have altered, about my face, my eyes and my smile. It's always hard to see it in yourself but the closer I looked the more I could sense the older me, more cautious, more reserved, perhaps more guarded and nothing like as confident as I was when sporting that orange jumper my mum had made me. I'm definitely back down in the pecking order again.

Penelope Fitzgerald does fictional children so well. You only have to read her collected letters to sense how close and involved she was in the lives of her own children and grandchildren and Christine is a perfect example of all that observational skill used to good effect yet with much economy of detail.

I browse Penelope Fitzgerald's letters almost constantly to discover her thoughts about everything, it's all in there not least her thoughts about her own books, and of The Bookshop she cites Balzac as the 'presiding genius of this little book'. I'm thinking back to my reading of Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, simple characters and plot yet complex and dynamic for all that simplicity, and dare I say how much better Penelope Fitzgerald is at those gaps and silences than the rather garrulous Monsieur Balzac.

The letters display the customary modesty that I associate with Penelope Fitzgerald, humble to the point of feeling unworthy of the attention but always with a wonderfully droll edge to the humour.

This in a letter to her editor at Macmillan, Richard Garnett,

'It worried me terribly when you told me I was only an amateur writer and I asked myself, how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose your amateur status?'

and this to Richard Ollard her editor at Collins, where Penelope Fitzgerald had moved with her subsequent Booker winning novel Offshore after feeling unwanted at Duckworth

'The TLS was also very kind to The Bookshop and said it was a novella in the tradition of Henry James, not a selling point perhaps.'

I'm now very wary of setting myself New Year reading challenges which have faded and dwindled by the last week of January, but I can see no harm in promising myself  a timely re-read of all Penelope Fitzgerald's novels through this coming year, because having re-read The Bookshop I think new and unknown delights wait me, but hopefully no more embarrassing pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Downton Abbey redux... Searching for Grace ~ Carol Henderson & Heather Tovey

It's Endsleigh Salon this evening with the delicious theme of 'Guilt' and I have decided that I will make this book fit the theme because I think it's clear for all to see that several people may... just may, have felt enormous guilt about their part in the story I am about to recount.

We'll be sipping tea ourselves down at Hotel Endsleigh and you might also need a pot of your own for this one, and you'll have to concentrate for this first bit because I need to explain quite how this book arrived in Devon because I was asked if I would like a copy of the memoir Searching for Grace by one of the authors, Carol Henderson. Carol is a friend of the daughter of a retired GP fisher-friend (whose family are mentioned very briefly in the book) of Bookhound's...are you with me? Carol e mailed me about the book from her home in Wellington, New Zealand and then very kindly sent a copy which duly arrived in that huge sack of post we eventually had to drive through snow to collect for ourselves on Christmas Eve, and I was delighted that it did because here was more lovely Christmas reading.

Searching for Grace a book I'm about to explore in more detail than usual here because it is currently not readily available in the UK, (though if you're in New Zealand you're in luck)  but one that definitely should be for the light it shines on a period of time that's much in our national consciousness right now, with Downton Abbey conversation everywhere and a second series to come. Reading it proved to be the perfect adjunct to all that Christmas watching, because it's not only contemporaneous with the era, thus offering further fascinating insights into the lives of the privileged, but it's an extremely well written memoir and I couldn't put it down.

Have you ever wondered about the fate of those children born out of wedlock to the Edwardian aristocracy who were then silently whisked away into obscurity so that the season could continue, the presentations at court needn't be interrupted, the lovers could still be bedded and the summers could still be spent languishing on the Riviera? I'll admit I hadn't given it much thought at all until Carol's book arrived and I settled down to read the poignant story of her mother Heather Tovey's life.

The family memoir predominantly written by Heather (nee Campbell) who was born in London on... well when was Heather born? She thought it was March 3rd 1911 but had no birth certificate to prove it, and nor could Heather apply for one from Somerset House because they held no record of her birth. When Heather came to apply for a new passport in New Zealand in 1975, the country where she had lived for nigh on forty years, that lack became the focal point of her story as she proceeded to trace her life back to those earliest memories of growing up in Edwardian London in the care of three sisters, one of whom she knew as 'Mummy' and who had indeed been loving, but in a strangely remote way.

Slowly the mystery unfolds as Heather travels to England at the age of sixty-four to search for her roots and her past. What became apparent as I read was just how important known parentage and identity can be and how unsettled and rootless it is possible to feel without those constants in your life. Heather had grown up with secrets, a child's awareness that all is not quite right, the brick wall when the questions are asked and this coupled with the knowledge that Heather unearths, that she was indeed a child of the aristocracy, all had me deeply engrossed in this very readable book.

Heather had long suspected that she may be an illegitimate child of a daughter of the Maple family, the owners of that great furniture empire, in which case she had unwittingly met her mother Lady Grace Weigall in her Hill Street home in Mayfair on many occasions. The GP and family friend who seemed to have acted as her guardian and provider, Dr Leonard Boys, had more than a passing interest in her welfare too though he was not her father. Grace had been three months pregnant with Heather by an unknown man when she married Sir Archibald Weigall in 1910, and indeed there are pictures in the book of Grace, heavily pregnant with Heather, as she accompanies her new husband on the campaign trail that will see him elected as an MP.

Dr Boys had been present at Heather's birth and had then immediately taken her in the hushed hours of night, wrapped in a shawl and still unwashed and unfed from the delivery room, to the waiting family of spinster sisters with whom the care arrangement had been made. Most heartbreakingly Heather had also unwittingly played with and wrapped her dolls in that black shawl for many years without knowing of its greater significance.

Quite who takes responsibility for the non-registration of the birth is a debatable point, I have always thought it was the parent's responsibility but Dr Boy's collusion with the circumstances and his professional accountability is much-debated in this book, as is his role as the go-between. Forgive the pun but the saving grace is that Heather and her carers are well provided for and it is Dr Boys who keeps the supply of money flowing from an unknown source and maintains a watchful eye over proceedings in a sort of god-fatherly way, whilst taking his vow of secrecy concerning Heather's parentage to the grave. It is his widow who finally tells Heather the truth about her birth mother and as for Heather's father, his identity remains uncertain, though there was much speculation and plenty of titled men in Grace's life to choose from.The potential scandal can only begin to be imagined had it got out, and quite what everyone who knew her thought Grace had done with the baby born six months after her marriage remains open to speculation.

The book is full of deeply poignant reading as Heather imagines and describes some of these key moments in her young life and who can know how painful that may have been for her to recount.Then there are the ongoing uncertainties and insecurities that Heather has taken into her adult life, lying about her age and secretly marrying the New Zealand artist Gordon Tovey before emigrating to Plimmerton, north of Wellington in New Zealand, to start a new life with him at the age of eighteen. Except Heather has more baggage than she can have possibly imagined, and through her life the leaden weight of that starts to increase until it becomes an almost intolerable burden. The letters to Heather in New Zealand from Mummy urge her to put it all behind her but, as the written words traversing thousands of miles become the vehicles of confession and admission of so many of the secrets surrounding Heather's origins, she is most certainly unable to do that.

The veneer covering Heather's insecurities is often painfully thin and easily scratched to reveal the rawness of what lies beneath, as when she gives birth to her own daughter Carol, the co-author of this book who inherits her mother's cause and researches it further after her death. Or when Gordon sinks into alcoholism and takes a mistress to which Heather displays a limitless degree of tolerance and capacity in coping with his infidelity, perhaps deeply rooted in the infidelities of those who have treated her so badly in her own past. Whilst it's easy to read a book like this and impose your own emotional coping strategies, Heather clearly had her own methods too and used them to shore herself up and protect herself from further hurt.

Knowing and finding her family becomes an obsession that will haunt Heather for the rest of her life, and when she does find a sister, Priscilla once married to Viscount Curzon, and is initially welcomed but subsequently rejected, the pain makes for very sad reading. Priscilla's assertion that if only she'd known of Heather's existence she could have given her a great deal of money when it was distributed from the estate, to make up for the little that Heather had received, somehow misses the point entirely... this was about something no amount of money could buy, it was about belonging.

In fact Heather taps into a seam of sadness, despair, depression and instability within that extended family that perhaps has its deep roots in the fickle nature of those moneyed ancestors. Lady Grace Weigall,
Heather's mother, a wealthy serial adulteress with a string of country seats (now luxury hotels Petwood in Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire, Engelmere in Ascot) and plenty of lovers to meet there, reminded me slightly of Idina Sackville of The Bolter fame. When I read that at eighteen months Heather had almost been whisked back into the aristocratic fold but for Mummy's protestations at the damage it would do, I could only but think what a fortunate escape that had been for her. Whether Heather was ever able to see it in that light seems uncertain, and indeed it is Carol who takes up the burden of the past after Heather's death and finally achieves that search for a different kind of grace, along with some sense of closure for the family and in honour of her mother's memory.

So forget all the fictional accounts, here is a true story, wonderfully written and a brave and honest indictment of  a time when class was everything, when reputations and social standing for those classes in society took precedence over all else, when an unwanted child's life could be spirited away out of sight, when money could buy silence and secrecy and when lives could be cruelly manipulated beyond the grave. A powerful and really excellent read about Heather Tovey (nee Campbell) a woman of indomitable spirit, and my sincere thanks to her daughter Carol for sending me a copy.

Foster ~ Claire Keegan

If I look up from my desk and gaze around the room to have a think, which I do a lot, this sloping and helpfully magnetic board, my Ideas Board, is to my right hand and almost constantly in my field of vision, so after almost four months of looking at that headline it is almost branded into my skull

'I often have to write a story to make an image go away'

Claire Keegan's short story Foster, published as a stand-alone, long short story by Faber last September has been sitting on my shelf in proof copy for a very long time. So has the interview that Claire Keegan gave Sean O'Hagan that I had cut out from the paper ready for the day that I would read the book, and that snippet declaring that headline has sat on the board next to my desk as a prompt ever since.

Well eventually I had to read the story so that I could finally put that snippet away, clear the board and start a new year with some new prompts and ideas. You might be able to glimpse on there a list of books from BibliOz, enter your date of birth and see what was top of the NYT Best Sellers list for the date, second guess what the midwife might have been reading as you prepared to make your entrance, and I do fancy reading a few of them. You might also be able to spot some cartoons from the New Yorker which our Erika from comments very kindly snips out and sends me and which I love ...and that's enough of a diversion and all you need to know as to why I suddenly picked up Foster and read it as my first book of the new decade.

Foster is set in County Wexford, rural Ireland in 1981, and told in the first person and through the eyes of a young girl who is taken to spend the summer with distant relatives, the Kinsellas whilst her mother gives birth to yet another baby. The story is immaculately measured and boundaried by the limitations of a child's understanding, whilst teeming with those observational skills with which children are frequently not credited but at which they excel. Moments of uneasiness or awkwardness are never missed, nor are the moments of unexpected care

'Her hands are like my mother's hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.'

Slowly what has begun as a cautious and careful relationship between the girl and her carers becomes something much deeper as she settles into this loving and warm, yet inevitably temporary life. The bed-wetting is glossed over by her new 'mother' and it stops, but it is clear this is a home that has known abundant sadness; grief and loss are concealed here somewhere and little signals and hints creep into the narrative, much as they would trickle into a child's awareness.

As Claire Keegan goes on to say on the subject of having to write

'It's like an elbow nudging you into examining something you don't quite understand but need to. For me writing is a way of understanding something, and as such a journey into the unknown.'

I would suggest that reading that writing also becomes a journey into the unknown of the imagination, because I wasn't to know that this would all, at a slant, remind me of the story so well-known in our family... of how my mum at the age of thirteen was evacuated from her working class home in the Dingle in Liverpool at the beginning of the war and placed with a childless couple living in Chester. The couple had sufferred countless miscarriages and lost a baby at a few weeks old, so perhaps my mum fell into a deep pool of surplus love just waiting to be shared because they adored her. They settled her into the Queen's School and paid the fees and my mum was blissfully happy and my grandmother was decidedly not. Taking fright at just how happy her daughter was my grandfather was swiftly dispatched to bring my mum back to Liverpool just as the bombs started to fall and apparently the couple didn't give her up without a bit of a tussle.

Reading Foster suddenly opened up a whole breadth of new understanding to that tale now firmly entrenched in family folklore. I had never really considered the impact on my mum of all this but I feel sure she felt as torn as the girl in Foster, and that is all beautifully delineated by Claire Keegan. Because of the war my mum's education never really resumed, any chances of a career dissipated and her life took a very different path... well she eventually went to work in the NAAFI canteen and met the Tinker for a start... and then they had me so it wasn't all bad.

I'm not sure all this may be what Claire Keegan had in mind when she wrote Foster, and I don't want to elaborate further because to do so would spoil the ending of the book, but there was much more enlightenment for me about the depth of my mum's feelings as I read on. Claire Keegan also talks fascinatingly about the wealth of detail that was left off the page and had to remain so because the girl couldn't have known about it, and you can only wonder at the writerly discipline required to achieve that,

'It's essentially about trusting in the reader's intelligence rather than labouring a point. To work on the level of suggestion is what I aim for. There are so many things the short story cannot do; it's by learning those limitations that I am cornered into writing what I can.'

Oh allelulia to that, because in allowing those gaps and silences Claire Keegan offers her reader the space to expand on her narrative and even, as I have done, overwrite a narrative of their own if they choose and that remains one of fiction's mightiest powers for me. So in these days of stonking great big fat chunky contemporary novels I say three cheers for less is more and 57 pages that say as much as 570, and please can we have much more of this less is more, thank you.

 

 

Team Tolstoy - Troika Stop Four

'Kindle in all hearts the flame of virtue...' says the Grand Master to Pierre as he initiates him into the mysteries of the Masonic Lodge and I know we're a day early with Team Tolstoy but I thought we might as well have a sleepover and make a two day W&P weekend of it. According to my Kindlestats we are now 34% of the way there on our War & Peace travels and that's the news this month...  that I have read this entire section on my new contraption ( as far as p446 in the real thing.)

The Tinker has bought a Kindle too, being a confirmed lover of the e reader and hating to be left behind on the technology front at the age of almost eighty-six, so we've both been in the Kindlegarten (did you see what I did there? I can't take the credit, Bookhound's invention) figuring out the details and I'm almost ready to move into the juniors now that I've got the hang of mine and have bonded with it completely.

This buying books from the sofa is way too easy but having bought an unabridged, complete and entire version of W&P for 74p I wasn't quite sure what might arrive into the machine. Thirty seconds later there it was and I was delighted to discover it is the Maude's translation, so it's almost 'as you were' for me. I say almost because it's a little light on the French so I have been referring back to the tome every so often to check, but I have generally been galloping along with the thing, light as a feather propped up on a cushion and hands free but for the occasional twitch of the page-turning thumb. I'm also delighted with the notes and highlighting facility which creates a virtual underline and then gathers all those extracts on a separate page making it very easy to recap the main events, whilst a quick click takes me to the page in the book and the original context.

And what a fabulously action-packed instalment this month's has proved to be, I think for me the best so far, really enjoyable reading and I hardly know where to start because there was so much to take in. I am starting to feel a real sense of immersion in the book, and that slow development of the characters is really taking hold. Natasha's going up in my estimation, Marya remains a favourite and I love the old Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky more each time I meet him. I almost feel this long run of the drawing-room battles will shore me up for the next big push on the battlefield.

I have also spent the last few days writing and honing a commissioned 2000 word book and work-related piece for the next edition of The Reader magazine (and trying not to cry when I discovered that the first 1000 words done before Christmas seemed to have been digested in the bowels of the computer never to return) so please forgive me if I seem a little words-and-ideas-depleted and resort to bullet points this month; it's 9.30pm on Friday night and I'm sure you will all make up for my limited insight with your reflections and observations in comments.

I think the moments that have left the deepest impression on me are as follows...

• The spectacular hero's welcome for the defeated Prince Bagration in the interests of salvaged pride, but which all had me wondering quite how far the Russians would have pushed the boat out if they had been victorious.
  
  
• The sad death of the Princess Lisa in childbirth and Andre's unexpected arrival as she was in labour when we had almost been led to believe he was dead (but knew he wasn't really) And then the incredibly emotional reunion with his father almost reduced me to tears
  
  'He was standing close to the door and as soon as it opened his rough old arms closed like a vise around his son's neck, and without a word he began to sob like a child.'
  
  
• The cuckolding of Pierre and the speedy breakdown of his marriage to Helene, giving us no chance to know them as a couple, and the ensuing duel with Dolokhov. Who ever would have thought the myopic Pierre would hit the target.
  
  
• The baptism of Andre and Lisa's baby and that moment when Andre, sitting in another room, 'faint with fear' lest the baby may drown in the font. I recall reading about this somewhere, the total immersion of the babies at Russian baptism and the parents not being present, or did I dream that? But I felt good early signs that Andre had bonded with his son.
  
  
• Now was that Mazurka jolly or was it jolly, I loved it as Denisov whisked Natasha around the room.
  
  
• I am very intrigued about Pierre's personal epiphany, the 'conversion' and admission to the Masonic Brotherhood and its subsequent philanthropic influence on those around him, namely the serfs who he thinks are getting a better deal but actually are not, and then Andre, who inwardly begins a new life as a result of talking with Pierre.
  
  And now I have my usual questions...

• What is a sterlet, a gigantic one presented as a second course and at the sight of which Ilya Rostov blushed with self-conscious pleasure?
  OK I've come back and bothered to look this up, it's a sturgeon so perhaps caviar on the menu?
  
  
• So what about Freemasonry? I know so little about it beyond the aprons and the secret handshake and the fact that membership often guarantees rapid and upwardly mobile progress in the job market as Masonic loyalty prevails ...but is all that a myth? 
  
  • How influential was all this in 19th century Russia?
  • Did Tolstoy belong to the Brotherhood?
  • Or did he disapprove?
  I can't quite decide, Tolstoy seems to keep his personal ideologies and judgements very well concealed... 

 So I hope that offers a few prompts if like me you'd forgotten quite how much has happened and I'm sure there is a great deal I have missed....over to you.

 

Next month's schedule :: Part Three (Chs 1-26) which takes me to p521 in my edition and probably a few % further along on the Kindle.

 

 

Team Tolstoy troika alert ...

...just to let you know that the troika will screech to a halt just after midnight tonight when this month's Team Tolstoy post will go up, a day early I know but so that we can enjoy a weekend of Tolstoyitis.

So much has happened in this section I think we probably have a great deal to talk about.

After You'd Gone ~ Maggie O'Farrell

I was so pleased to hear that Maggie O'Farrell had won her first major literary prize this week, the Costa Novel Award for The Hand That First Held Mine. Thoroughly well deserved and here's hoping it leads to an upsurge in  backlist exploration too because this one's a cracker.

Whenever I have written about Maggie O'Farrell here in the past, namely The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and The Hand That First Held Mine, you all come on in comments or e mail to tell me I must read her first novel After You'd Gone, so I have and most of it on the train up and down to London a while back, when I did the journey twice in a single week.

Train reading crucially has to have the power to engross me sufficiently that I don't notice anything going on around me, especially now I'm not in the Quiet Coach as per new strategy, so the mobile conversation snippets do their best to invade...
'Yes well I told him that was completely unacceptable....'
'We've had loads of complaints you know...'
'I've &*$%& missed the %&*$%& connection, I'm going to be %$&*$ hours'
Those books feel quite rare so all power to After You'd Gone and if you have a journey coming up, (or even if you haven't) here's one for your consideration.

Slowly but with great certainty Maggie O'Farrell sows the seeds of the dysfunctional Raikes family and misfit youngest daughter Alice, the family odd-ball, her mother Ann sparsely equipped by her own childhood to cope with parenting her own girls, Ben the shadowy and almost invisible father, Ben's all-seeing mother Elspeth, the lover John and there you have a seemingly ordinary cast around whom Maggie O'Farrell weaves her intricate tale.

It is no spoiler to tell you that this is a book that works back and forth in time and tense from the opening chapters when a distraught Alice steps in front of a car in London and is rushed to hospital where she lies in a coma. Ben and Ann rush down from the family home in Berwick to be at her bedside and there is much to be revealed and as Alice lies unconscious much of that past is mediated through her voice. Present tense writing is an entirely forgiveable (sorry, I still struggle with it) writing strategy in the hands of Maggie O'Farrell because she slips in and out of it for well-defined reasons that I quickly discovered offered me a compass bearing in the book. Where I was, who I was with and when instantly became clear and in amongst plenty of third person past tense reflections and recollections which make up a good deal of the novel.

It's almost impossible to say more about plot without giving away those special moments that make a good book so good, the dawning revelations that are held back, the reader drip-fed towards their discovery, but the age-old timeless themes of love, guilt and grief prevail and as a dissection of the excruciating agony of loss and the dark pain of mourning this book excels without being overtly miserable or even melancholy.

There are some stunningly clever little devices too, which only dawned on me as I thought about the book in those days after the final page is turned. Ann and Alice's fraught mother-daughter relationship connected by seperate and entirely different incidents years apart involving an envelope and its contents. The sudden and very definite redistribution of my sympathies days afterwards and the tiny slip of a moment, a glimpse of an event in the first few pages of such deep significance and one that slowly returns to haunt the reader towards the end of the book.

That's a lot of baggage and writerly skill to pack into one book, and though I feel sure I'm preaching to the converted, if you haven't read Maggie O'Farrell and you tend to enjoy the books I usually write about here, then I hope, to the point of almost being certain, that you won't be disappointed with this one.

Loved it.

 

Nemesis ~ Philip Roth

So I've cracked it.

I have finally read a book by Philip Roth.

Quite what has been scaring me off all these years remains a mystery, unless it's because Philip Roth is often mentioned in the same sentence as Saul Bellow and I had a very traumatising experience with him a few years ago which I think I've mentioned before on here.

Herzog by Saul Bellow chosen as the first read for a book group that was gathering at the GP surgery I was working in at the time. Largely populated by some rather seemingly erudite GPs one of whom had made the choice, so feeling I really couldn't let the nursing side down I ploughed on through Herzog largely in a haze of unknowing and had to work very hard to muster up a few intelligent thoughts on it all which I felt sure would be drowned out. I arrived at the meeting feeling very nervous indeed only to find they were halfway through the wine and had all given up because the book was 'too hard.' Please don't let that dent your confidence in your GP, they will read what they need to on your behalf I'm sure.

So striking while the Roth iron was hot I very nervously picked up Nemesis, prescribed for me by Linda Grant (her new book We Had it So Good, brilliant and published this week, more soon) when we met a while back as a good route into the novels of Philip Roth, and do you know something...she's right.

I have no Roth benchmark to go on so I'm looking forward to building up some form on him but what a cracking good read this one proved to be, and one that had the nurse in me hastening  to the epidemiology shelf for a quick revision of poliomyelitis, because Nemesis (published by Jonathan Cape) is set in Newark, New Jersey during an epidemic of the disease in 1944.

Eugene Cantor (Bucky to his friends)on first acquaintance is the likeable, conscientious and dedicated twenty-three year old playground director who is supervising the young lads of the Jewish Weequahic section through the searing heat of the summer vacation. Raised by his grandparents following the death of his mother in childbirth, Bucky has been imbued with a heightened sense of moral duty, via both his religion and his hard-working grandparents, but also perhaps in a sort of inverse proportion to his own father's lack of moral compass which has resulted in his father's imprisonment and subsequent estrangement. Turned down for war service due to his eyesight and mortified not to be fighting, Bucky nevertheless excels at sports with the perfectly compact build required to execute the precise dive or the far-reaching throw, all making him a popular role-model with his charges.

As the confirmed cases of polio rise alarmingly and several of his charges die, Bucky is fraught with a conscience that in striving too hard to do the right thing by everyone, including his God, ends up in a complete mess, eventually making a spur of the moment decision that he will live to regret and punish himself for mercilessly. Suffice to say that yellow cover has multiple interpretations.

Bucky is an interesting character and the first of the Roth males I have encountered, so I'm gathering my information portfolio slowly. For all his displays of adult maturity Bucky exhibits many childlike qualities, not least an assumption, if not a lifelong certainty, that he is the centre of his own world, one wherein everything that happens is down to him. A childhood trait that Bucky seems unable or unwilling (there's a difference I think) to shift, and what I saw as the egocentric consequences masking as guilt will be profound. In the end my sympathies were severely stretched and I'm afraid I ended up wanting to shake some sense into him before walking away muttering 'oh well, have it your own way.'

Aren't viruses lovely things to look at, but nowadays it's hard to imagine the fear that polio engendered back then especially given today's climate of informed choice about immunisations, when parents often decline or don't bother. But once you know the facts it's also hard to imagine anyone not wanting to be first in the queue for protection from the scourge of Infantile Paralysis, once the vaccines had arrived. A virus that readily replicates in its victims for weeks after initial infection, and with 8000 notifiable cases a year in the UK in the 1950s, I'm pretty sure my mum had me in there and jabbed the minute she could. It is this fear that Philip Roth exploits within his characters and plot, skewering with precision every wild emotion that comes with it. Expect to be tripping over guilt, panic, anger, ignorance, discrimination, anguish and confusion at the turn of every page.

This being me I was bound to be interested in the poliomyelitis so I hastened to the medical shelves and The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks for its account of the use of HeLa cells in the trials of the Polio vaccine, and another book, A Summer Plague - Polio and its Survivors by Tony Gould (apparently bought by me for £1 thinking it might come in useful one day, which it now has) for a more detailed account of the history of the disease.

And that history is fascinating, polio apparently one of those diseases that thrived as hygiene standards improved, and thus natural immunity acquired from regular exposure to the virus dwindled. The first properly recorded epidemic didn't arrive until 1916 with the disease then settling in Philip Roth's fictional 1940's Newark like the unbidden, unknown and much dreaded guest it was. Thus a war to be fought on the domestic front while greater battles were being fought overseas. I did know something of the other embittered battle being fought elsewhere too; the one between Sabin and Salk for the race to find an acceptable vaccine and was interested to read Tony Gould's description with reference to post-vaccine problems...

'As surely as night follows day, Nemesis lurks in the shadow of hubris. Scarcely had the church bells ceased to ring, when worrying rumours of cases of polio unrelated to any natural outbreak began to circulate...'

It all brought my mind back round to Philip Roth's novel and the brilliant choice of title with its many interpretations around themes of retribution, many of which somehow link back wonderfully to notions of Greek mythology and Nemesis the goddess of vengeance. Now Ancient Greece is not my strong suit, but when Bucky Cantor is described in detail as an accomplished javelin thrower and mention is made of Hercules, the first lobber of the pointy stick, even I could make some loose connections, others may well make much tighter ones.... and then I somehow ended up thinking of Bucky and his unassuaged guilt as Atlas carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.... and then my mind strayed to thoughts of the polio virus itself as a revenge on the inexorable march of civilisation... at which point my knowledge of Greek myth ran dry and I stopped.

But there you have it, me and Philip Roth are now almost best friends, and if like me you may have crossed to the other side of the literary road when you saw him strolling along then I can certainly recommend Nemesis as a way of making Philip Roth's acquaintance.

Ring in the New...but taking the Old along too.

Is that it?
Are we done?
Is it over for another year?
Are we properly into the twenties yet?

Gone are the days when I anguished over these things but should I have finished up all outstanding reading by the end of the year, or just let it all dribble over the line and into another year?

In the end I have two books that are certain finishers eventually so they have bridged the decade and will come with me into 2011's reading lists, South Riding by Winifred Holtby and A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

But I do like to choose something gentle as my last read of the year, so I was in a bit of a panic on New Year's Eve when it looked like The Humbling by Philip Roth might be my final completed book of 2010.

Philip Roth is one of the Big Scary Male Authors that Kirsty 'Other Stories' and I are planning to tackle at our leisure through 2011, no pressure...just when we feel like it, but it does mean we will occasionally be foregoing our cherished Virago Modern Classics and our beloved 19th century women in the  interests of putting some girl-spin on these big guns and their books... except I've almost fallen at the first hurdle and had to pick myself up and dust off smartish.

So has anyone out there read The Humbling?

If so, and had this been your introduction to Philip Roth's writing, would you ever have picked up another one?

Would you want a wonderful year of reading to end with this book?

Are there some things you just don't want to read about too?

I might have thrown in the Philip Roth towel with immediate effect had I not read the other three in the Nemeses series since Christmas. Though I can see that the explicit content in The Humbling may all have been part of Roth's masterplan for the humiliation of his main character, and doubtless designed to shock and disturb the socks (at minimum) off his reader, I just couldn't take this part of the book seriously. I'm not a prude (I've worked in casualty after all...you'd be amazed) nor am I morally censorious, but I read on with eyes half-closed and therefore couldn't see past what seemed like the embarrasingly voyeuristic and dare I say silly, to get to the literary. It was all enough to put a girl off a nice pot of a tea and slice of marzipan Stollen. 

Everyman, Indignation and Nemesis, secured Philip Roth's redemption because I really enjoyed each one, so all is not lost and more about those soon but I can see that I may just have to pick and choose my way through his writing. On this basis I wonder if the Roth experts out there can advise which others I could happily avoid? I've already ordered The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral & The Plot Against America... will I cope? And I wonder too whether I might eventually see The Humbling's place within the greater Roth oeuvre when I have read some more, I'll let you know.

So on the evening of New Year's Eve I also set aside A Place of Greater Safety. I'm almost halfway (400 pages in)  and it's completely superb, the French Revolution a la Wolf Hall, but I was entering the early stages of head rolling with Hilary and I just knew she'd do it with some gusto. Our 'ilary's good on gore and the heads are taking their leave but without the help of a guillotine just yet, so it's all needing a bit of elbow grease through sinewy necks and arteries and other bits in the way, and thinking I didn't want to sully New Year's Eve with decapitations either I picked up Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell instead.

I was then a little perturbed to read on page six ...

'...I never thought of resisting, but went on my errand, though I remember feeling as I would rather have had my head cut off...'

and wondered briefly whether this might be a case of out of the tumbril and into the pony and trap, but of course it was fine, just Mrs G having her little joke. Cousin Phillis proved to be a perfect end to a perfect year of reading and more about it soon but might this be a first?

Mrs Gaskell and Philip Roth sharing a blog post?

 

 

 

Last call for World Book Night Givers...

You know how annoying it is when you seem to have spent days and days at home, then on the spur of the moment you go out and the DHL van chooses that moment to try and deliver a parcel.

So we'd gone out on December 15th and there was the note when we arrived home and then it snowed, and snowed and then Christmas, but what a lovely surprise when the box finally did arrive on December 30th... one of each World Book Night title.

The books will be published in unique World Book Night editions but it was quite special to see them like this and realise that some great titles are going to be handed out.

If you are in the UK and haven't signed up to be a Book Giver yet, it's not too late, applications close tomorrow.

Upstairs Downton Archers

Can it really be true that over in the US it is thought you might not be able to grasp the nuances of Downton Abbey so the series has been cut by two hours and simplified to help you out?

Apparently we are told that you have no concept of the laws of entail and would get confused about the fact there are three daughters who can't inherit, whilst you might also misunderstand quite how the wealth that US heiress Cora brought into the family with her marriage ceases to belong to her. In my experience you all know far more about our history, our Royals and our aristocratic eccentricities than we do, so how insulting for you. I'm a little embarrassed to say the least and almost feel I should be apologising, but nevertheless please don't miss Downton Abbey because you have huge treats in store.

Bookhound and I were late starters and so had missed the first three episodes when Downton Abbey screened back in the autumn, so we have taken full advantage of this New Year weekend's three consecutive afternoons of repeats and have settled down to watch the whole lot again and are enjoying it tremendously.

We also watched the new Upstairs Downstairs over Christmas and are thoroughly enjoying this ongoing surfeit of butlers and valets. Though pre-World War I Downton Abbey wins for its location (Highclere Castle) and the inimitable Maggie Smith as the Dowager, Upstairs Downstairs with its 1930's setting also had its merits. Eileen Atkins takes the Dowager role in superb style and to a backdrop that subtly introduces that element of social change amongst the servants who are much less willing to serve, far less subserviant and not afraid to speak their minds. Upstairs Downstairs captured that sense of those echelons of society about to enter their death throes with the Mrs Simpson - Duke of Windsor affair / abdication thread wonderfully woven in. It's hard to imagine how upset and shocked the nation was back then at such infidelity to the institution of the monarchy, but the emotion and distress was palpable.

Meanwhile the nation has been on the edge of its seats and glued to the radio this Sunday evening with the much, if not a little over-hyped 60th anniversary edition of The Archers. So hyped in fact that I was at least expecting a nuclear attack on Brookfield, but having been promised two 'big' stories in the double episode the game was up for me the moment the pregnant Helen's swollen ankles were revealed, and I was in there like a flash with my pre-eclampsia /emergency caesarian diagnosis. Whilst Bookhound was understandably onto the 'banner to be removed from the frosty roof of Lower Loxley' plotline in a nano-second. Now we are all in a state of suspended animation until Monday evening as we wait to know whether it was a double roll-over and did David Archer remember to let go of the other end of the banner, or did he slither off the roof in hot pursuit of the plummeting Nigel...

And my apologies to those of you around the world to whom all of this makes little sense, or is of no interest whatsoever. It feels as if it's been a very long, hard, cold winter here already and we still have months to go, we are clutching at all entertainment straws that come our way

 

 

Happy Birthday to...

....yes it's Bookhound's day.

If you add the numbers together he's only 13 really (no not 49 and not 67) and I will be likewise later in the year which surely can't be right, how did that happen when we still feel about 7 (25). But what a lovely post-Christmas ritual this has now become after 35 years together (how did that happen too) a nice extension to the festivities as we start each New Year off with a birthday, and you'll be pleased to know I've got the hang of it now.

Shove some candles in the left-over Christmas cake, figure out whether we remembered to save some presents back from Christmas, or did we give him everything on the day (he was thrilled with the kettle de-scaler by the way) unscramble some Christmas wrapping paper, make a card (he really hates fuss) and then pootle off somewhere to walk along a beach or something and blow out the cobwebs and be ready to start our new year.

I'm hoping we'll back in time to catch the episodes of Downton Abbey that we missed first time round and then, forget candlelit dinners in posh restaurants...  where else can we be in the evening but glued to the radio for The Archers 60th anniversary double-episode-much-lauded-disaster debacle. I'm a bit out of touch but can only lay the plot-line at the pregnant Helen's door, the BBC haven't been able to keep their hands off the poor babies this Christmas, however Nigel's untimely demise seems to be a close runner up with Lizzie dropping dead not far behind, or I suppose Brookfield or The Bull could spontaneously combust or something.

I've actually bought Bookhound 1500 roof slates (best Cornish Delabole, accept no substitutes) and I'm going to get him a special slating hammer too...not quite as posh as this $99 one, I'm thinking more £9.99 @ B&Q.

It has the look of the medieval weaponry about it don't you think... with a touch of climbing the North Face of the Eiger thrown in, but I know he'll be really pleased with it all because very soon he'll be back up on his roof ready for Phase Two of How to Build an Extension to Your Home and here's a picture I know he'll love...the suitably dressed Dad & Lads building crew on a tea break.