dovegreyreader scribbles

A Boy at the Hogarth Press ~ Richard Kennedy

Talk of the book and film of The Hours earlier this week, and mentions in comments of the film and the 'nose' and the rather intense and relentlessly humourless portayal of Virginia Woolf, all reminded me to pull this post out from 'draft' and spruce it up, because in another batch of books from Hesperus Press came a copy of A Boy at the Hogarth Press.
I'd heard of it but hadn't realised quite what a wonderful little gem it is. A perceptive behind-the-scenes look at the working Woolfs by a disinterested observer. One with no axe to grind or mark to make on the literary world, just a young lad seeing their lives for what they were; recollections of his time spent working at the Hogarth Press as an impressionable sixteen-year old, and recalled in later life by Richard Kennedy.

Bad luck stalks young Richard from the typing errors to the saga of the shelf ..

'Today the trumpet blasts. I put up my shelf. It proved to be a much harder job than I thought. In the first place I had to walk like Jesus carrying the Cross practically the whole way to Tavistock Square because the conductor refused to let me on the bus with the wood...'

and said shelf which finally comes crashing down, showering its contents on an unsuspectiong Leonard, he of the legendary temper, the 'towering rage' and a withering look that could seemingly remove a layer of skin.

But it is Richard Kennedy's eye for the details which add to the enjoyment of the whole; the smelly drains at Rodmell, or sitting next to Virginia while she knits for the first time.

Is it recorded anywhere else that Virginia at least attempted knitting??

Or Virginia rolling her own cigarettes, and then Richard's perceptive observations about the Woolfs as people..

'LW...He is the magician who keeps us all going by his strength of will..and Mrs W is a beautiful magical doll, very precious, but sometimes rather uncontrollable. Perhaps like the doll she hasn't got a soul. But when she feels inclined, she can create fantasy and we all fall over ourselves, or are disapproving.'

And now I'm trying to remember...I watched The Hours very carefully for this detail, having noted from Richard Kennedy's drawings that Virginia Woolf was of a sinistral persuasion, very definitely left-handed in all the illustrations.

And I don't think the film recognised that.

Does it matter?? Probably not in the grand scheme of things, but being both the daughter and the mother of sinistrals, it's something I always notice, finding it an endless fascination to watch a left-handed person write.

If you are left-handed I'd happily sit next to you and watch you do likewise.

Having raised a southpaw and knowing the unusual difficulties it can throw up, I'm trying to decide whether daily life for a left-hander may have been more awkward back then, or of no noticeable difference. I doubt Virginia had the trouble we had the day Offspringette decided she wanted to pick up one of our guitars and learn to play it, or the school lunchtime Knitterbug Club which had the teachers on the brink of a nervous breakdown trying to succeed where I had failed and teach her to knit. Perhaps this is why Virginia is not famed for her knitting either.

The icing on the cake in this book ...or perhaps even the cake itself are the illustrations because every page holds a wonderful sketch of the office or the people along with some wonderfully funny anecdotal moments.

Aware that this wasn't written until forty years later, and that these are 'recollections', I'm wondering whether some allowance may need to be made for any influence of growing reputation that may have coloured Richard Kennedy's memories, but setting all that aside this book was a really very pleasant surprise, and if you have a Virginia Woolf shelf you might want to add a copy of A Boy at the Hogarth Press if you don't already have it.

 

The Shadows in the Street ~ Susan Hill

It was the arrival of the sixth novel in Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler series, The Betrayal of Trust, to be published on October 6th, that reminded me I still hadn't read the fifth in the series, The Shadows in the Street.

It arrived backalong and vanity had me swiftly turning to page thirty to read my on-the-other-end-of-the-phone cameo appearance in the book, and I was so overcome with a sense of greatness that I forgot to read the rest of it. I mean there were decisions to be made... who would I want to play my part in the TV series for a start, and surely it would be need to be elevated to a walk-on given the importance of the role of the health visitor.

Well I watched The Hours recently, having never watched it before, and it was clear that Meryl Streep would be perfect so I have put in that request.

Incidentally, why have I never watched The Hours before??

Perhaps because I just couldn't get along with the book many years ago??

But the film seemed of an entirely different mettle, those intertwining lives and the connections between past and present, and the over-arching presence and influence of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and that oh so clever twist at the end. Though I'll admit I did find Nicole Kidman's Virginia get-up quite astonishingly real, remembering all that talk of the 'nose' at the time, but I was a little wary, if not weary of the constantly harrowed look on her face. The tucking in of the chin and the raising of the eyes... a bit like the posture and neck alignment of women wearing large hats at weddings if they want to see where they are going. But anyway, I've plumped for good old Meryl, she can turn her hand to just about any role so I'm guessing she'd do me just fine.

Anyway, what will be clear to those who read here is that I know Susan Hill well-enough to be able to tell her that she has promise as a writer and will do well if she keeps at it, but also well enough to tell her if I don't like a book she has written, and which she never seems to mind, because let's be honest, they will sell in their tens of thousands whether I like them or not. But in the interests of transparency I tell you that before declaring that actually I have thoroughly enjoyed The Shadow on the Streets, a real asset to this series which is shaping up to be quite something. This one a good solid crime read read that had me eager to pick the book up at every opportunity, and all aided and abetted by some really good cohesive and atmospheric cover design as you can see.

Interestingly one of those books that Alan Jacobs talked about in The Art of Reading in the Age of Distraction, where to make notes, and stop and start and think, would make for a completely dissatisfying read, I just wanted to storm through to the end and find out whodunnit.

Blonde, floppy-haired Simon Serailler (heck do any of us really know how to pronounce that...Susan won't say, I've asked... Serailer, Serrayer...) had been mooching around the Scottish island of Taransay,(yes the one where the BBC series Castaway was filmed) trying to get a bit of peace and quiet whilst recovering from the trauma of his last case. In fact he's doing alright because it is chapter ten before he makes an appearance and wouldn't you know it, he's in bed with a bonny local lass having seen the last failed romance off to Nepal at the end of the last book, and the one before that... Diana, whatever happened to her... and then there was the tragedy of Freya in volume one, a master-stroke that took everyone's breath away. I mean how could Susan do that to Simon and to us.

Meanwhile back in Lafferton prostitutes are being murdered, and as you'd expect our DCS, head of SIFT, the Special Incident Flying Task Force, is needed back at base to sort it all out.

I love the way that Susan writes perfectly-sized chapters, rarely more than ten pages in length thus allowing the action to range widely across the life and the inhabitants of the city, and move easily from one to the next, no wonder this has been snapped up for television.

The Shadows in the Street focuses on a varied selection of them all .

Firstly the cathedral and the arrival of a new happy-clappy Dean and his troubled wife, both hell-bent on modernising the liturgy and dragging the place into the twenty-first century, and setting up a nice drop-in centre for the street girls. Simon of course lives in a flat along Cathedral Close, but it a bit of a lapsed C of E man

Then there's the university library and a rather old-fashioned, unmarried librarian called Lesley who still lives with his disabled mother and regularly takes flasks and sandwiches out to the street girls...and who can know how he is paid.

The GP's surgery of course, most crucially the very place where Dr Cat Deerbon makes that all-important call to the health visitor called Lynne who's a bit disillusioned with the NHS (hoping Meryl can pull that one off) to ask about the children of one of the street girls.

The extended Family Serailler with all their little foibles, and of course Simon's mother has died and his stern and rather forbidding father has re-married. Tantalisingly we still don't know why Simon and his father have such a difficult relationship, Susan still keeping that one close to her chest.

And then of course there are the streets and the girls who work them, and the grizzly murders that keep happening whilst the police team seem to be making little progress.

Nice red herrings a la Susan, her favoured dish I think, and enough to keep me guessing to the end, and I wasn't going to fall for any of it because I know what Susan's like, there will be a sudden and devilish twist, or she'll pull the rug out from under your reading bottom.

So I wasn't disappointed and now I'm going to treat myself and motor straight on into The Betrayal of Trust whilst I have Lafferton on the brain. And I'm in the next one too...as me rather than a character in the novel given that Susan has named, in her acknowledgements for this book, each and every one of the people that she chats to on Facebook as respite and company during a writing day.

What a lovely gesture.

 

 

Reading Magic...

No I don't mean the place near Slough in case anyone was wondering, just the usual sort of thing that goes on here with a book in the hand.

'The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it... it is simply there when yesterday it was not.'

So I have just read and thoroughly enjoyed The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and I was reminded of the last book I read that had a magical flavour to it, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke, and that was over six years ago. All an indication, lest there be any doubt, that this is clearly not a genre of preference in my stable of good reading, so a 'magic' book has got to be pretty darned good to keep me interested.

One written in the present tense has got to be even better if it is to get me past page ten

And had I read the reviews before I read the book I may never have given The Night Circus a second glance, because plenty of critics and reviewers are taking a knife to it and finding it wanting.

So perhaps I picked this up on a day when I was fed up with literary doom and gloom and needed some magic.

Perhaps disbelief was easier to suspend that day because I'd just had a very 'real' day at work, and running away to the circus for a few hours seemed like a really good idea.

Perhaps I've been to Port Eliot Festival this year and had a happy and glorious weekend of near-magic for real, complete with Big Tops and stripy tents, whacky clothes and surprises around every corner. Watched everyone give free rein to their imagination and play, and somehow make the impossible seem possible.

Apparently the book has been the subject of a massive publicity campaign all of which passed me by, as did the internet game site, and don't you think it's a shame that no one is allowed to write a book about magic without it being touted as the next Harry Potter, and the author the next J.K.Rowling, as if this has become the only holy grail of the literary world worth seeking. And then when the book is reviewed of course quel surprise, it's not Harry Potter and everyone takes a pot shot at it, citing the reasons why.

Or if you write a book with 'night' and 'circus' in the title comparisons have to be made to Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Pointless all of it, Erin Morgenstern is Erin Morgenstern and as far as I can discern not trying to be anyone else.

The upshot of all this is that I have had a wonderfully gentle re-introduction to magical realism and I immediately did pick up Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, realising I had never read it and perhaps it was time for some Angela reading.

So as you can see there may be plenty of you out there who will side-step The Night Circus, perhaps avoid it like the proverbial and that's fine, because magic's not for everyone and only seems to be for me about once every ten years or so.

I was reminded of a another piece I wrote pre-blog on how to succeed at reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell if someone decided to pick it up, so I thought I'd dredge it back up for a glimpse of daylight again  if only to help me explain to myself, and to all of you, why sometimes, just sometimes, I need a a bit of reading magic.

More thoughts about The Night Circus will appear on here eventually I'm sure, but in keeping with the mysterious appearance of Le Cirque des Reves, well... we won't know quite when.

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Preservation Day...

So Book hound was away and I have days and days to do things, so I reached up to the shelf for my WI Book of Preserves and my annual reminder of the proportions of fruit and sugar in blackberry and apple jam and out fell this picture.
1977, our little flat in Plymouth, blackberries picked from the disused railway viaduct alongside, and the old preserving pan 'bought' with Green Shield stamps (remember those)  so you'd think, considering I've been doing this almost every year since then that I'd remember it by now.

And thus began the peeling, stewing and boiling to the accompaniment of Radio 4 until three hours later, and with the kitchen looking like an abbatoir, I had my fifteen and a bit jars of best Blackberry and Apple jam. The poor old Aga couldn't hack the rolling boil after so much use so I headed to the hob.


I'd taken the precaution (after the strawberry jam still not set at midnight and throwing in a packet of Quick-Jel fiasco) of having a bottle of Certo to hand, and when the setting just looked like it was never going to happen I tipped in half a bottle, and then the whole lot, so there's nothing runny about this jam. Could probably have turned the preserving pan upsidedown and nothing would have shifted so might need to take a carving knife to it.

Anyway now I'm in the kitchen and in the swing of it and though I'm not known for my culinary expertise on here, I can do it, so I knocked up a cake and shoved some jam in and it tastes fine....

and no I didn't eat all that myself, the Gamekeeper nipped home quickly and helped.
Incidentally, if you look out of the kitchen window there you can you just see the flourishing resurrection of the deceased escallonia hedge.
Remembering how terrible it looked a few months ago.
But my day is not yet done because, with Bookhound away fishing cometh more responsibility for me...

In fact this bit was surprisingly enjoyable though Rusty initially looked at me with great incredulity. Three dogs needing regular walks which Bookhound usually does if the Gamekeeper isn't around, and I have throughly enjoyed the sunset run around Rocky's field behind the house.
Looking back towards the village church...

Then west towards the setting sun..
 
Whilst behind me the house is now bathed in the most eerily beautiful lilac blue sky, a colour I almost want to go indoors and match to a piece of fabric (but I didn't, enough creativity for one day) ....these pictures taken within minutes of each other.

But back to jam, anyone else made any this year?

 

Meltdown...

This post is going to about as interesting as watching ice melt.

I'm sure this thing that has just happened to me never happens to any of you, because I feel confident you are all the sort of people who would put down a book mid-sentence having thought...

'Goodness me, I must de-frost the freezer, because surely the last time I opened it weren't the drawers a little difficult to close... and that will mean that very soon the door won't close either, and then there will be trouble.'

Or perhaps even more sensibly you put it in the kitchen diary every three months...worm cats...defrost freezer.

In fact I had sympathised with the Tinker who had done the de-frosting thing but a few days previously, rating it as the worst job he has to do in a small first floor flat with no back door to hurl the ice through.

If only I was so sensible and wise.

I had better plans for a Sunday afternoon with Bookhound still away fishing, the wind blowing a hoolie outside and my new little woodburner lit and warming the Book Room to toast.

So in a way I wish I hadn't walked past the freezer and noticed that the door was ever-so slightly ajar.

When I prised it open, and it needed the help of my foot, there it was...

Narnia.

Very pretty but not what I wanted to see, and I'll own up that had I been able to get the door shut what followed may just have been able to wait in the hope that Bookhound, returning, envigorated from three days wading in a river, was the next one to open the freezer door and say,

'Goodness me I must defrost this freezer.'

He's got the waders after all, but no such luck that door was going nowhere.

I'll now admit I said one or two naughty words which I doubt any of you would have done either and I set to. It was quickly apparent that several weeks of heaving the drawers shut, cramming more food into a smaller and smaller space (I have frozen enough apples to see us through to 2020) and the laissez faire strategy of Hoping it Would Sort Itself Out, was about as successful as Napoleon leaving the French army in Moscow and hoping they'd take the rest of Russia once they'd had a rest.

Nor was bayoneting going to yield satisfactory results, this needed heavy artillery so it was time for the saucepans of boiling water. First I had to heave the drawers full of food into the garden and just hope nothing came along and helped itself to a free and softening meal, and that I could get all this done before meltdown. I covered the bounty with a blanket in the hope that would keep it cold, if that makes sense.

The shelves are in fact a really satisfying task aren't they.., not that I feel sure any of you would  know because I know your freezers are perfect, just a light film of essential ice akin to a frost. Anyway, let me explain; great big chunks of tube-shaped ice drop at the first hint of a hot saucepan (please don't anyone tell me this damages the elements, I don't want to know) it's the berg on the roof that is the challenge. And of course this is the one that juts out so far the door won't shut again until it has gone, and true to the principle of all icebergs 9/10ths of it is hidden.

Now from my recent experience I can share with you a little nugget of wisdom, a watched iceberg never melts, and I can't believe I was so thumb-twiddly waiting on the crash that I took photos, which I show here in shame, and for you all to witness the horror that I feel sure your own freezers never display.

So with all that boiling water around I made a pot of tea and waited for the satisfying thud of the ice roof which came eventually after a little bit of prising, and doing things with a hot knife having decided the hairdryer was tempting but unthinkable (no honestly I'm joking, I didn't even think of it ...really don't try that at home)

I can't tell you how righteous and uplifted this sight made me feel...

By this time it was really pouring with rain and I am drenched anyway because a defrosting freezer, like the polar ice cap, creates a run-off of gargantuan quantities, so surrounded by wet towels, wet newspaper, wet everything and mid-dragging in the food from the garden the phone rang and it was Bookhound, now north of Birmingham and home later that evening.

'I've defrosted the freezer,' I declared.

'Oh good,' he said 'that's needed doing for ages.'

 

 

Engineering works...update

Well thank you so much for all the invaluable feedback and e mails, that is exactly what I needed to know. I've tinkered away at it all so please do let me know what you think.

Firstly is it faster to load for the people who were washing the dishes and hoovering the house whilst waiting??

I've tested it on Pingdom and it's coming up with an 11.5 10.9 second load time now, I'll be drug tested for such an improvement on 27 seconds if I'm not careful, especially given Devon broadband speeds.

What about the design...does it feel balanced and in an order that seems practical?

I still have some tweaking to do there so let me know what you think... you are the ones who read this, I only write the thing, so it needs to work for you not me, so for example, what is most useful information to have near the top?

Have I got that right??

I have to admit I feel a bit lop-sided with all the book covers over here>>> but it makes complete sense as they are the last things to load.

To clarify, the images in the posts won't be going anywhere, but there is a method of making them smaller and thus speeding up the loading time, and you can then click on the image to enlarge...does that sound feasible?

I've cleared out all the gizmos and widgets too, and reduced what Pingdom calls 'objects' from 500 to 170, which must be progress, but if anything that you loved dearly and can't live without seems to have vanished please do let me know, it's all soft-deleted and I can find it again, and as Kevin mentioned, the Search box (top right>>>>) is really excellent and I use it all the time when I want to find things and link back.

Having sent hearty and well-deserved congratulations to Kimbofo over at Reading Matters this week for her 600th book review, plus as I always say, what you read here about books is not a review as much as thoughts and reading as experience... and this isn't a race after all, but I was a little suprised to discover I have written about 730 books, and those are now all over here <<<< listed alphabetically by author surname and year.

I'm going out to pick more blackberries now... over to you once more me old muckers, and thank you again for all your help

 

 

Planned engineering works...

I have made almost no changes to the basic design of dovegreyreader scribbles since its inception, no messing about with colours or fonts, pictures always aligned to the left with a white five pixel border, that sort of thing, and all on the principle of 'if it ain't broke. don't fix it'. And I have no plans to do a Facebook and upset the world... for those that don't know FB has made huge changes this week and everyone's flummoxed and tetchy.

But I am very grateful to a very patient reader in the US who let me know that the site was taking a very long time to load, eventually timing out or just hanging, and she was trying to log on upwards of fifty times a day with little success. I'm guessing she might not be alone....well perhaps in a minority with the dedication of the fifty attempts for which I am very grateful, but it seems logical to think that, whilst all seems up to speed here chez dovegrey, things may be slow for others too.

Now I don't know about you but I think such loyalty demands my attention, and I am very grateful to Typepad who have done a very thorough investigation and come back with a report which suggests there is five year's-worth of accumulation down the sidebars, 500 things have to load each time and in fact the whole caboodle is starting to look as cluttered as our loft.

So an autumn clean-up is required and I have to send a load of stuff to the jumble sale. One thing that will apparently make a big difference is if I reduce the number of images (goodbye book covers 2008, 2009, 2010) and then shift those remaining from this sidebar <<<<< on the left, over to this one on the right>>>>>> because with the three column layout the one on the left loads first and with only text this will speed things up... are you with me??

Links to outside sites may also slow me down, so I'm going to weed out those down in the basement which probably no one ever sees anyway...speak now or forever hold your peace over the flags of the nations of visitors....

And what about the You Might Also Like... at the end of each blog post...good??

Rubbish??

Unneccesary??

I will descend into the labyrinth that is the design drekkly and perform some technical wizardry, so please bear with me while I hopefully get this right, it may take several major wallops with a spanner and a bit of cussing, and I really hope you can all adjust to cover pictures over here >>>> and not over here <<<<< and lists that were over here >>>>> will now be over here<<<<<.

Apart from that I can promise that nothing else will change because simple seems best, and who knows what a pickle I'd end up in.

Any feedback on loading times, better or otherwise would also be very gratefully received. Typepad suggest it is taking about twenty-five seconds...that seems like quite a long time to me so I'm looking to improve that somehow.

If I do 'hang' can you let me know at what point in the loading process, by looking at the bottom left of your screen on Firefox, and heaven knows where for any other browser.

Today is...

National Wear a Tea Cosy on Your Head Day...so I hope you are..

Dorothy C.P. Ward

Unless you have lived in Tavistock in Devon or the surrounding area for several decades you could be forgiven if the name Dorothy C.P. Ward means nothing to you. I feel sure those of us who know of Dorothy and her paintings are in the minority, and it seems sad that her work is so little known even here in the town. In fact to my knowledge, and to date, the Town Council have not recognised Dorothy's life or her work in any way.

Dorothy Cordelia Phyllis Ward was born in Plymouth on 17th November 1909, the daughter of an eminent and respected doctor and his wife who were sufficiently well-off to move from the city to one of Tavistock's grander houses, in Whitchurch on the outskirts of the town, in about 1930.

In January 1930 Dorothy started a Diploma in Design at the Royal College of Art in London, she served in the WRNS during the war returning to Tavistock and taking up the position of art teacher at a little private school in the town. Dorothy died in a local nursing home in 1994, she never married and lived all her life in the large family home in Chollacott Park with her sister Claire, also unmarried, who died in 1992, and with them perhaps has gone much of the vitally important history. The house and contents were auctioned and dispersed years ago and thus far only two photos of Dorothy herself have come to light.

Bookhound, with his usual eagle eye, had been on the DCPW trail for many years, buying a couple of pictures when he saw them for sale and more recently snapping up a collection of Dorothy's Royal College of Art sketchbooks from a market stall here in Tavistock. So when Jane Miller's letter requesting information about Dorothy appeared in the local paper he was soon on the phone, Jane came to call and we shared all our treasures with her.

Jane first saw this remarkable 1933 gouache painting Map of Plymouth and District (190 x 121 cms) in Plymouth Museum (currently not on display and to our dismay we now hear it has 'gone missing') and like the rest of us fell in love with Dorothy's work.

I've had a postcard of this near my desk for years, and we have since discovered a page of working drawings for it in one of the sketchbooks. These were the days when Plymouth still had its pier (destroyed by bombing in WWII and never re-built) but it's the cleverest most intricate and uniquely proportioned 'map' of the pre-war city and the surrounding area, and with just a glimpse of the Brunel Bridge across the Tamar over to the left. Even more unique considering its aerial perspective which Dorothy seems unlikely to have sighted for herself.

It is since her first meeting with this painting that Jane has worked diligently and steadfastly (for example we had no idea Jane had no car and thus came to see us by bus and then did two miles on foot) to try and reclaim and bring to public attention the work of Dorothy C.P. Ward. So when the invitation came to attend The Tavistock Group of Artists annual June exhibition in the Town Hall, a group co-founded by Dorothy in 1953, and also to see a small retrospective of Dorothy's work we were there.

We have a couple of paintings, one is of the North Cornish village of Boscastle dated 1962 and which I've always felt was a bit  'twee'. I'm reliably advised that I know nothing about perspective, which we know to be true, and should appreciate this egg tempura painting for that if nothing else, but I'm sorry to admit that it has spent some time in the loft at my behest. I've now eaten humble pie and it has been rehabilitated to a wall spot in the sitting room, because I can see that though not to everyone's taste, Dorothy Ward is an artist whose work needs to be viewed in the context of the time when it was painted, and as part of her entire oeuvre.

The entire oeuvre is another question entirely because it must be scattered to the four corners. By all accounts Dorothy was a prolific artist who gave a great deal of her work away so there must be some gems tucked away in houses somewhere.

So we went to the exhibition back in June and one painting stole my heart. I was camera-less on the day we went ( a first) and when I got home was so worried by the thought that I may never see this picture again, that I went back the next day and made sure I had, with permission, recorded it and a few others for my own enjoyment and yours.

It's entitled Washing Day 1934 and I spent ages looking at it, fell in love with it and would have happily tucked it under my arm, brought it home and decorated a room to match if I could have done. The setting is local but with some artistic licence and demonstrates Dorothy's fine art skills and attention to the most delicate details, and all combined with her happy knack of telescoping a view to encompass distance whilst always maintaining perspective and proportion.

The close detail is incredible...

More from the sketch books to follow, Dorothy was an accomplished calligrapher too and also wrote and illustrated her own children' books. They were never published and, though very of their time, the pictures are quite exquisite.

How sad it would be if all this had just disappeared, and congratulation to Jane for all her hard work in ensuring that hopefully it won't.

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The TLS blog...

...at last

The German Boy ~ Patricia Wastvedt

Before I write about The German Boy I'm afraid I need to digress and check out a few things first because, though I definitely read Patricia Wastvedt's first Orange longlisted novel The River, I haven't written about it here, which means it must have been pre-dovegreyreader, pre-2006, so I have forgiven myself for not remembering too much about it. In fact it was July 2005 and Patricia was then Tricia, and getting the book off the shelf (it was good...a keeper) I see that I had meticulously noted inside that I bought it in Daunt's, London on May 12th 2005.

So now another diversion because what on earth was I doing in London on May 12th 2005, cue the reading journal for any clues.

Well who'd have thought it... I was recording a session for Open Book with Marielle Frostrup having penned off an irate sunday afternoon e mail to the programme over a rather unbalanced slating of the whole HenLit / Transita books debate. Some may recall Transita, the publisher who decided to challenge the supremacy of chicklit with some fiction geared towards women of a certain age. I was fine with the whole idea...why ever not, but I was more irate over the biased discussion on Open Book

Good said the BBC...would you read six in a week and come on the programme and talk about them...which I did.

So Patricia Wastvedt and I have already been on a quite a long journey because a few weeks later, in July 2005 I read The River and wrote this in my journal..

'Billed as a book that would do Du Maurier proud meant that I spent the entire book waiting for it and trying to figure just how horrific it could possibly be.
Anna, pregnant arrives in the village of Cameldip in Devon where she decides to settle and is immediately taken in by the mysterious but seemingly pleasant Isabel. The book stretches the idea of the non-linear narrative to its limits and this reader had to backtrack to get her bearings. A gripping book and one I read far too fast 4*'

In fact now I do remember...a double drowning tragedy thirty years earlier, both Isabel's children lost so when Anna arrives there is a barely concealed wound of grief and heartbreak ready to be rent asunder and the arrival of Anna's baby seems likely to do it....and it's obvious why I needed a blog now I look at that journal.

So finally to The German Boy and oblivious to all the above I jotted down in my marginalia details of the 'clever structure' ...of the pre-knowledge before the event which leads a reader along a trail of supposition before what actually happened is revealed. An assumption is forced out of the reader only for it to be dispelled and judgements confounded (remember George Eliot and her 'Why always Dorothea' moment, this reader manipulation was her forte)  as Patricia Wastvedt's plot twists and turns and played with this  reader yet again, and in a style that felt beautifully paced and seemed to somehow mirror real time lapses.

The book opens in 1947 as Stefan, Elisabeth's teenage nephew, the son of her English sister and her German husband, arrives in England in his Hitler Youth uniform as a war orphan. By the time you reach the end of the book it is only a little later that same year but on the way Patricia Wastvedt has taken her narrative back 1927, working her way to and fro through the history of the family, the loves, the losses, the relationships and all those deliciously painful lies and secrets; the skeletons in cupboards that make a book like this so enticing.

I've clearly moved on with my reading because I love the non-linear narrative these days, a book that makes me work to figure out what's happening, and I like it even more if the writer has that sleight of pen that produces exquisite sentences, and time again I had to pause and take in this writing ...

'The perfume of the earth fills his head with lamentations...

'...the wind had flattened out the creases in his heart...'

' ... the heart is slow to know itself...'

No plot because I don't want to spoil the experience but there will be Nazis, there will be the heartbreak of children, the aftermath of war in Dresden, prejudice and anti-semitic brutality, art, the passion of a brief encounter, and above all there will be the impossibility of unknowing a memory, as well as quite unexpectedly one child's grief for a past that was lost, a past that should have been but wasn't.

Much of the book is set around Dungeness and I loved the imagery that the pre-nuclear power station location conjured in my mind, miles of unforgiving shingle with Romney Marsh sheltered behind it, the tides and the turmoil that had been Hitler's Germany just across the Channel. Now an RSPB sanctuary and the location of  the famous Prospect Cottage, one time home of film director Derek Jarman.

There are also several handy long arm of coincidence moments in the novel that assist the progress of the plot, and like most people I am no stranger to them in real life, but in a previous life I may have been cynical about these chance meetings in fiction. Well cynical no more after our last trip to London when, having rounded the corner into Trafalgar Square on the Sunday morning we bumped headlong into our neighbours from the village two miles away who we don't see for months on end here in Devon.

So my apologies if I have made The German Boy sound a little ambiguous and I can't say more without giving away too much, but if you read this one I do hope it all slowly shapes and descends on you as it did on me. I don't think you'll be disappointed and this might be yet another one for some 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction speculation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday to...

It's embarrass a child day and I have to quickly say a very Happy Birthday to the Gamekeeper...
Here he is on one of our summer walking holidays in the Swiss Alps and proudly carrying his stick with the badges on, which now just about reaches to his knees.

Hilary Mantel...

I just have to say it, brilliant, brilliant Hilary Mantel interview on last night's Culture Show did you all watch it if you could ??

Perfectly pitched extracts from a selection of the books and read by Hilary Mantel interspersed with her life history accompanied by contemporaneous film footage alongside intimate and enlightening conversation.

'Trust your reader, cut each page you write by a third...'

'As soon as we learn history we should learn to be suspicious...'

' I don't ever want my readers to feel settled...I want to disconcert them...'

Talking about her transformation from pencil thin to

'..the blossoming sofa-like creature you see before you'

as she explained her weight gain through drug treatment for endometriosis and it's impact on her self image.

How the pain of a surgically-induced early menopause (at the age of twenty-seven) and subsequent childlessness was partly addressed by 'writing them into being.'

' Day to day life is boring, bland, niceness, routine, security, safety...' because her mind is so full of exciting things, and a person can only have so much of that if they want to write.

'The Man Booker prize is the ultimate recognition. once won a writer can be the writer they always meant to be...'

And now Hilary Mantel, currently writing the sequel to Wolf Hall, The Mirror and the Light,  has very sensibly moved to Devon, to Budleigh Salterton, fulfilling a lifetime's wish to live by the sea, and learn from it, a place where she wants to find peace and hear her heart beating.

I could hear mine beating at the end of this incredibly moving and sincere interview, and hats off to interviewer James Runcie for his quietly sensitive, revealing and above all unobtrusive questioning.

 

 

Waders, Whipple, Hilary Mantel and sloes in that order

I am not sure there is anything funnier than watching a man trying on a pair of chest waders in a very warm shop on a hot day.

Bookhound is currently on a salmon fishing trip to the River Dee up in the depths of Scotland, and a pre-trip inspection of all fishing equipment revealed it to be in good working order but for the chest waders which had suffered from rodent activity and anno domini in the shed. So off we went to the fishing department at Homeleigh Gardens to buy a new set, and I shouldn't have gone really because I wasn't much help.

'I'll meet you in there,' I said because I wanted to go off and find some prepared hyacinths, because this really is the year that I do what I always wish I had done and have some bulbs ready for Christmas.

Anyway by the time I caught up with him the temperature was rising fast, the floor was strewn with waders that were 'coming up very small' and he was just pulling on another rather snug set of these neoprene rompers.

And I started laughing.

And for some reason I just couldn't stop.

I mean just look at the things...

'Do these look OK?'

'Well, how exactly are they supposed to look?'

'Well do they look nice?'

'Well yes they're lovely, will you be wearing them for dinner?'

'And are they supposed to be that difficult to get on...and can you breath alright and what if...you need to get them off in a hurry...I mean if it was me the sound of the tinkling river would all be enough...'

'Well I didn't give birth...'

'True and safety-wise you'll be OK if you fall over in the river, no room for any water inside those...'

By this time I'm comfortably esconced in a fishing chair (talk about comfort on the river bank) and near helpless with laughter and with tears running down my face and I'm less use than ever, so, leaving Bookhound to make an informed choice based on my wifely assessment, I took myself off to the adjacent reptile department to look at the snakes and the tarantulas which soon wiped the smile off my face.

Who knew you could buy this lot in Cornwall.

And to my complete relief, no I couldn't spot the Chilean Rose Tarantula either. Anyway Bookhound got his waders and I got my bulbs.

So where am I in my list of things to tell you...

Oh yes Whipple. Listen up because this is very, very good news if you love Dorothy Whipple's novels as much as I do.

Years ago someone told me that the very best of Dorothy Whipple's books was Greenbanks, so it's just been a case of waiting for Persephone to get around to it and at last here it is. To be published on 20th October and they have very kindly sent me an advance copy. It's a gurt geat big thick Whipple too, 387 pages-worth so if there are any fans out here, now you know and I've given you a sneak preview of the endpapers too... a 1930 worsted cotton damask by the St Edmundsbury Weavers, who seem fascinating enough in their own right.

Anyway Bookhound is away and having a whale of a time, waders and all, I'm whimming around at home with my Whipple, but now my entire weekend must be geared around making sure that I don't forget the Culture Show on BBC2 at 8pm this evening for the hour-long Hilary Mantel special with James Runcie.

From the programme details :

The Culture Show gains exclusive access to the life and work of Hilary Mantel as she writes The Mirror And The Light, the sequel to her Booker prize-winning novel Wolf Hall.

Mantel’s extraordinarily wide range of work stretches from childhood memoir to Irish giants; from the influence of the Roman Catholic Church to the growth of fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia and from the French Revolution to the Tudor court of Henry VIII.

Writer and film-maker James Runcie takes Hilary back to her childhood home and to visit the places that have inspired her.

He talks to her about the illness that has plagued her life, the ghosts from her past, the process of writing historical fiction, sex, jokes, life, death and the emotional cost of making things up for a living.

Intimate, exclusive and unpredictable, this Culture Show Special, which will be shown in the summer of 2011, is a revealing portrait of one of the bravest and most brilliant writers working in the world today.

I've got post-it notes in strategic locations and it's writ large on the kitchen board, next to those old pics of children on their first day at school and things...

But it's just like the thing that I'll be making jam or something and completely forget.

We currently seem to have picked our combined body weight in apples and blackberries so I must get preserving, but on my picking travels I notice what an incredible year it is for sloes.

Usually we would have to hunt for them but this year a glut taunting me with their year of plenty, and to date not a single other use known for them beyond pricking each one nine times and making some sloe gin. And there's only so much of that you can drink.

I have however found a recipe for Sloe and Bramley Apple jelly, apparently a good accompaniment to hare and rabbit so all other suggestions still welcome...

 

Wepyng and waylyng, care and oother sorwe..

Try as I might I can't make this post fit Canada week but we had a great time while it lasted, and I have no shortage of CanLit on the shelves so more soon. I'm looking at the Giller longlist and I had been meaning to read David Bezmozgis's The Free World, as well as Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers and Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan both shortlisted for the Booker as well.  And though many of the books are unavailable here for months there are a few listed authors with previous, so I'm looking in the direction of Guy Vanderhaeghe and Marina Endicott with renewed interest too.

Don't miss Kimbofo's thoughts as a shadow Giller juror this year; we had an unscripted blogendipity moment and both wrote about Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table on Wednesday:-)

But in a week when I have done a lot of fruit picking the cover of this next book somehow chimed with the mood, so needs must.

Every so often a really lovely batch of books arrives from Hesperus Press.

Most recently a little clutch of Chaucer which included Geoffrey Chaucer in the Brief Lives series together with The Merchant's Tale, this latter in a dual-language edition.

Hesperus books always have such a warm look and that 'right' feel about them. I could and have been enticed into reading just about anything if it comes with a French flap as you know, but the Hesperus covers always make me want to do a book display with added accoutrements in a shop window.

Sadly something entirely unnecessary chez dovegrey, but do you know what... I am almost tempted to have a lyttle delve back into Middle English, and I can't believe I am even consyderyng that given the weekly torture that was Troilus & Criseyde for A Level English. No dual language translation back then so we blyndly faffed around with it, wepyng and waylyng, loathyng and groanynge through every hye, herkke, hereby and helpe as we clawed our way stanza by stanza to the end. It was all terrible woe-is-me stuff as I recall, and we did an awful lot of unseemly snyggering and scoffyng..

       And in his walk ful fast he gan to wayten
       If knight or squyer of his companye
       Gan for to syke, or lete his eyen bayten
       On any woman that he coude aspye;
       He wolde smyle, and holden it folye,
       And seye him thus, `god wot, she slepeth softe
       For love of thee, whan thou tornest ful ofte!

I look at it now, read it fast and it almost makes sense, yet back then it was like a foreign language and we treated it as such, sweating accordingly and I could see little relevance to it. I'm trying to think what purpose it may all have served me through life to date beyond not being so scared to give Chaucer another go now, until I stop and consider that actually this is all probably quite significant in the transition to the English language from the dominance of Latin and French (thank you wikipedia, that most unreliable of sources... and by the way, am I the very last person to discover what wiki stands for?? 'What I Know Is' according to Stephen Fry, that much more reliable of sources.)

So any Chaucerites out there??

I have never read The Canterbury Tales so perhaps it would be good for the grown-up me to get a dose of bawdy Chaucerian humour.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Canada Day...

Well Canada Day dawned in Devon, probably not anywhere else as it's not July 1st, but after weeks of atrocious weather I had put in an order for hot sunshine for yesterday bearing in mind that I would be spending half a day with the Canadian walking party.

So good to meet up with Mrs KFC Sheila, and friends Gill and Sally, who had been walking strenuously all morning.

I found them holed up in the Drewe Arms.

No really they deserved a rest, they had already walked miles having visited the Lutyen's designed Castle Drogo that morning, and I can tell you these Canadians (Sally on the left is from Chicago so honorary Canuck status granted, Gill and Sheila the real deal) well they trek at a fair old lick, no slacking.

Incidentally, did anyone hear Great Lives on Edwin Lutyens (BBC Radio 4) a few days ago?? Ned to his friends and if he'd known us he would have given us nicknames (Gertrude Jekyll was 'Bumps' apparently) It was fascinating and as a result I was well up on my Drogo info, and NB above my short-sleeved faith in the weather.

So after a catch up over lunch we set off with the organised party, my faith in the weather vindicated and as you can see Devon was wearing her very best frock and looking resplendent in her late-summer-almost-autumn glory.
Absolute perfection...

 
We stopped en route for a really fascinating visit to Abey Smallcombe Earth Art, cob-makers extra-ordinaire Jill and Jackie. If you see a thatched cottage in Devon the chances are it is made out of cob, a sub-soil/straw and water mix that will very surprisingly withstand all weathers, and last for centuries as long as its boots (foundations) are solid, and its hat (roof) stays in place.

Hearing the wonderful story of traditional Devon cob maker Alfie Howard (pictured here) who died this year, it was a lovely surprise to discover that Mr Howard's working model of a cob cottage is now in Jackie and Jill's tender care, and it was an amazing creation to see in close-up...

The walls of a cob-built cottage, often two to three feet thick, will keep a home warm in winter and cool in summer and Jill and Jackie are keeping alive this ancient and traditional craft. They talked with so much genuine enthusiasm about their work that I think we would all have happily done some mud-slinging come the end.

To my surprise cob can also be used to make tiles, the colour of the sub-soil dictating the colour of the finished pieces, which are not fired, just sealed and polished with beeswax. Unsurprisingly solid and weighty and very strong, I'm now worryingly interested in all this 'new to me' information, coupled with the fact that the raw materials are freely and readily available if only I can persuade Bookhound to dig a hole in the garden; a skill not beyond his capabilities as we all know.

We trekked on and came across a dovegrey dovecot which necessitated a picture...

as did this waving of the maple leaf on Devon's soil

So eventually, once  Sheila and I had used up all the available oxygen in Devon talking and walking we made our farewells and I waved everyone off to their hotel, an evening of Dartmoor Broom dancing in store and which I hadn't actually heard of, but suspect could be a ruse to get the floor swept,and then onto the next leg of their journey today, but of course not without an exchange of gifts.

Kevin I'm *waving* and thanking you for the books you sent, I am truly thrilled with them all but especially A William Maxwell Portrait, and my thanks to Sheila who had put them in a Jimmy Choo cloth bag. There's no other way I will ever own a Jimmy Choo cloth bag, I shall flaunt it shamelessly.

In return it was more books of course, why ever not, and my thanks to Susan Hill who very kindly arranged for me to have three copies of the gorgeous new edition of The Woman in Black to send back to Canada. It's published by Profile on September 29th and includes a set of commissioned wood engravings by Andy English which add something very special indeed to this edition. The book not set on Dartmoor of course, but nice and spooky enough to read while you visit, and we all await Daniel Radcliffe in the forthcoming film version with bated breath, I hear from the oracle herself that it is f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c.

And of course having set the precedent last year with these...

How could I not, so I came right out of the village show last week with three gifts to stitch, so a busy weekend getting the miniature Liberty Tana Lawn 'windows' quilted and ready for their journey... and I had to remake this one because the binding wasn't right. I'm getting as meticulous as my mum these days which won't do me any harm.

All in all a perfectly lovely gorgeous Canada day.

The Cat's Table ~ Michael Ondaatje

'Oh, this older need for a lullaby not a storm.'

That is the quote I used as I ended my shared  thoughts on here about the last Michael Ondaatje book I read, Divisadero. It seemed to say for me what I had come to understand as the essence of a book by a writer whose work I had slowly come to enjoy...and that enjoyment had been long-sought and hard won because Michael Ondaatje requires effort from his readers, and I had struggled until I 'got it'.

That place in my reading life for the quiet thoughtful low-octane-plot-with-great-big-heart novel that would make me pay attention is assured, but some writers have to work a little harder to persuade me of their methods and Michael Ondaatje was one.

Gorgeous cover eh, and the title says quite clearly The Cat's Table - A Novel, so any sense that this might be faction or memoir has had to be seriously driven from my mind, though with some difficulty given that this is a book about a young boy called Michael who becomes a writer. And especially given that our Michael in later life meets up again with another character from the book who...

'told me she'd read my books, and that whenever she browsed through she spent her time putting two and two together - some fictional incident with the original drama that has happened in her presence..'

He's a rascal isn't he, but I didn't fall for it because I know this is all destined to blur the boundaries and this is Michael Ondaatje, it's what he's good at. And look up the SS Oronsay and you will discover that there was one, an Orient liner being used as a troop ship which was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of West Africa in 1942... more blurring.

Looking back I see that I have read and written about several of Michael Ondaatje's books on here as well as Divisadero, there is Anil's Ghost and In the Skin of a Lion.

I wrote this about Michael Ondaatje's writing and Divisadero in particular..

Aha, I said as I reached that point on page 142, now I see what you're up to Mr Ondaatje. Intentionally I haven't read the reviews but I'll bet they are divided and polarised from brilliant to ghastly. I'm in the brilliant camp me because Michael can't put a foot wrong now. No word out of place, if Michael meant it to be there then that's where it belongs. If Michael wants to twizzle me round his little finger and tie me in knots with his divided story then I'll cope with that too.

And it all comes back to me, the reason why I love books like this, a writer who makes me think, makes me work a little, keeps me on the back foot, slightly off-balance if not mildly confused at times, often as confused as his characters, but it does all come right and The Cat's Table does all of those things yet again.

It is the early 1950s and eleven-year old Michael is travelling alone and unescorted from Africa to England by sea on the good ship Oronsay. He pals up with Cassius and Ramadhin as they explore the ship and take their seats each night at the very lowly Cat's Table. This is very far below the salt and the Captain's table, but the company of eccentric fellow-travellers is of far greater interest to three unsupervised young lads with vivid imaginations and an unruly sense of adventure. Free and feral in their floating paradise, the boys explore the ship and all the characters are seen through their eyes, the passengers, the crew, the entertainers and the stories are woven around them....and then there is the mysterious prisoner being transported to England who is escorted around the decks in chains at dead of night. Perfect fodder for young imaginations.

I'm not sure of the origins of the word 'carnival' and I'm sure it's not completely relevant here, but its meaning of the suspension of the normal rules came to mind as the ship set sail, a world afloat and apart from the jurisdictions of day to day life. I've only ever been on one proper cruise and had a fabulous time, but it is an odd place to be too, middle of the ocean, miles from land and to be told you are sailing over the world's deepest sea trench,  so there it is, the distance from home to town beneath you... well I thought it felt odd to me anyway.

The Tinker remembers diving off his ship and swimming in the Indian ocean during the war, and thinking exactly the same.

And it felt odd to young Michael too, left pondering the depths after the boys had lashed themselves to the deck during a storm to see whether it would be an 'exciting adventure' or not

'It was only then, in that peacefulness, that I imagined the full nature of the storm. Of being roofless and floorless. What we had witnessed was only what had been above the sea. Now something shook itself free and came into my mind. It was not only the things we could see that had no safety. There was the underneath.'

And to mediate his novel through the eyes of a child on the cusp of adolescence and in the first person offers Michael Ondaatje the perfect foil for that narrative voice that only knows so much and no more...so the reader only knows so much and no more too. Or else we get completely the wrong end of the stick as they do too.

But what marvellous spies children make. No observation too small for recounting, no detail too minor to be of significance perhaps... 'might come in useful' we used to say as a children when we saw a car we thought looked suspicious, and we'd memorise the number plate just in case (and of course it was easy then, three letters, three numbers). So information filtered through the sieve of a child's mind, everything soaked up like a sponge and then squeezed out, except often misinterpreted by these delicious little unreliable narrators...

'as children we were imagining and accepting all kinds of things...'

I immediately thought of another novel I had read about a child unsupervised on board ship and that was The Far Cry by Emma Smith, there is definitely something about this floating world that allows for freedom and discovery for children, and both writers exploit that completely differently but with very readable results.

I haven't gone big on plot description here, and nor does it need the likes of me dissecting or interrogating the writing or the style, leave that to the critics, I read for pleasure and this is just the wonderful Michael Ondaatje 'innit'. You need to dive in and swim with it and you'll soon find out if this is your bag or not.

Me I loved it.

 

 

 

 

Irma Voth ~ Miriam Toews

Here we go again, several weeks of me saying Miriam Toews to rhyme with 'toes', until I remember that it's Toews, as in Tâves.

Anyway here I am again with another book from a very favourite writer, our friend Miriam, author of A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, The Flying Troutmans and now Irma Voth.

I suspect Miriam Toews's writing is an acquired taste because I know plenty of people who find it all a bit perplexing. I know to expect different and quirky when I open the first page, to expect a different sort of book ride to the average and to be prepared to just go with the flow and see where Miriam takes me, and if you can cope with all of that then I don't think you will be disappointed with Irma Voth.

And what is it that is so endlessly fascinating to me about the Mennonite communities that Miriam Toews portrays so vividly?

I'm guessing it's the shelf full of quilt books like Mennonite Quilts and Pieces which portray such a homey image of horses and traps, girls in bonnets and of course the quilts.

Amish plains were the fashion back when I had my little quilt shop in the late 1980s. I used to sell them by the bolt with ease, and we all revelled in putting together our drab and sombre purples, deep reds and indigos into a large and simple geometric design. This in order to create the functional over the frivolous, but also deeply embedded was that sense of timelessness, tradition and permanency. The plainess offering the perfect backdrop for some grand quilting flourishes once we had the confidence not to be hiding our woeful and wonky stitches in the busy florals.

And I'd pore over my great big books of Amish quilt designs...

... and feel some strange sort of affinity, a thread of connection with a vast unseen heritage of quilting women; with Mildred Stutzman as I traced her designs onto my own quilts and wondered what Irma Gingerich's Peanut Butter pie tasted like.

Yes I bought into the whole Amish-Mennonite thing alright.

But illusions are there to be dispelled and Miriam Toews is devastating in her fictional verdict on religious communities now faced with subsequent generations of children much less ready to embrace the beliefs and austere lifestyle of their parents.

Irma, recently married and quickly deserted, 'lives' alongside her family in a Mennonite community strangely relocated overnight from Canada to Mexico. Under the patriarchal gaze of a cruel and despotic father Irma has married 'out' of the community and as such must be shunned, even if her husband Jorge seems to have left her. The family including Irma's silently crushed and dominated mother, always seemingly about to give birth to yet another child, live right next door but would and do, on her father's brutally enforced insistence, leave Irma to starve rather than have anything to do with her.

When a film crew arrive to make a movie about the Mennonite community Irma's duplicitous father takes the money whilst morally disapproving of the whole venture, and Irma seizes her chance and starts working for them as a translator. Her family, including her increasingly rebellious younger sister Aggie, watch on....and then there is the mystery of the disappearance of the shadowy older sister, Kate, snippets slowly dripped into the narrative.

Poor Irma, naive, child-like and fearful yet selfless when it comes to her family whilst equally capable of moments of rebellion of her own... not least the circumstances of her marriage, but some wonderful moments when she translates the director's instructions to his German-speaking leading lady as Irma would like to see the scene acted, not as the director has asked. Irma will have to step up to the plate and make some difficult decisions in order to keep herself and Aggie safe when the pair of them decide to flee the wrath and oppression of their father and head to Mexico city. As it happens, they have someone else along for the ride, some excess baggage of great import in the grander scheme of things and I don't want to tell you who for fear of spoiling, but when the final act plays out and the reasons for the family's sudden overnight move from Canada become apparent, a lot of plot pennies slip into place and much is revealed.

But not everything because Miriam Toews is good at silences, and concealment, the unsayable, whilst leaving the reader in no doubt about where she wants them to see the evil. And given the filmic nature of parts of the plot, there is something spliced and edited about Irma's version of her life too and in the end, like the director, Miriam Toews allows Irma to take charge and call the shots.

A book about the misappropriation of religious belief, the dangers and duplicity of religious extremism, but also a book about courage and self-respect and ultimately about redemption and forgiveness, and all pulled off in Miriam Toews's own unique and inimitable style.

Irma Voth may not be for everyone, but Miriam Toews writing will always definitely be for me, I am never disappointed and always prepared to be surprised...hurry up and write the next one Miriam.

 

 

Canada Week

It's Canada week here this week.

Probably not anywhere else, just here, but I happen to have read a couple of good Canadian books recently so my thoughts on those will appear, but also, Mrs KevinFromCanada is in the country, and even better than that is in the county. Sheila is on a walking holiday across Dartmoor and Exmoor with two friends Jill and Sally who we met on their visit here last year.

It's quite complicated this year because I am going to pick up with them for a half day's walking mid-Dartmoor, mid-week, but I am so looking forward to catching up with all the news, and I must remember to tell them that the blueberry bush they bought us did survive the harsh winter, just as Jill said it would,
and even better we harvested a little crop of fruit from it about a week ago.

So add in the Giller Prize longlist announcement which always shoots the CanLit onto my radar more than usual and it all seemed like a good week to fly the maple leaf.

Talking of KevinFromCanada, he and Mrs KFC have come up with something generous and innovative to celebrate Kevin's second year of blogging. An initiative in partnership with Calgary's up coming writer's festival which I'm looking forward to hearing about when I meet up with Sheila later this week.

So without more ado, let Canada Week celebrations commence.

 

And the answers are..

My thanks to Erika for her fiendishly difficult Literary Cat quiz and big congratulations to one very clear winner, Mary Green... Mary if you send me your address I will put a book in the post for you.

1. Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens
2. Edward Lear
3. Dr Samuel Johnson, for Hodge
4, Popes, in the Vatican. Leo XII and Benedict XVI, born Annibale (+ several more names) Della Genga and Joseph Ratzinger
5. Frederic Chopin; his cat kept walking on the piano keys
6. Sir Walter Scott, the painter was John Watson Gordon
7. Cardinal Richelieu, because she tumbled out of an upturned wig when a kitten
8. Charles Dickens
9. George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Dupin
10. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, by Thomas Stearns Eliot
11. Rocky!
12 Christopher Smart
13 Sir Isaac Newton

Do you think he's bought me a reef...

...for our Coral Wedding Anniversary today??

Thirty-five years, and if no reef seems forthcoming at least I've made us a little quilt.


And just as we have every year since our Silver Anniversary ten years ago, our thoughts on our special day are also very much focused on the tragedy of  9/11 and all it has meant since.

and the Blatchford Cup goes to...

for Best Exhibit...

Placed into my hands by the Worshipful (apparently) Mayor of West Devon.

and I shared the WI Trophy for Most Points in Handicrafts thanks to...

and...

plus a second for the felted picture.

The Tinker gained two seconds for his tapestry and his picture, and we'd best not forget Bookhound and his Cox's Orange Pippins.

Or his highly successful, Guess the Weight and Length of the Atlantic Salmon, given that the theme of this year's show was the Tamar Valley, and a fly fishing demonstration may have resulted in casualties.

Roll Up...Roll Up...go on have a guess, what do you reckon, weight and length?

Sorry the prize has already gone, it was a lovely hamper of goodies.

And we won the local cider yet again in the raffle.

Meanwhile, our neighbour, as the crow flies, took a massive eight (or was it nine) trophies home in the fruit, veg and flower classes which serves him right because that's a lot of polishing, and also explains where all the goodness in our soil has leeched away to... even if his house is a mile away.

Right, you'll be very pleased to know that's an end to this shocking bout of bragging and boasting..oh  apart from one more little 'thing' tomorrow that is, and then we have an autumn of great reading coming up, and I am very much looking forward to settling down with it all.

 

Village Show entries

I hope you are not getting a bit sick of all this because I'm sorry but now it's the Village Show entries, and the hive has been very industrious this year.

The Tinker has entered that lovely railway viaduct in Class 74 Embroidered Article (we'll see if the WI judge lets it through...it looks more like embroidery than tapestry to us) and his William Morris wallhanging in Class 74 Tapestry Article. It was done some years ago, hangs in our sitting room but as yet un-entered in any competition.

I've gone for a whopping, most-ever entries this year, five classes in handicrafts and have had the loveliest time making...
A Hare With Amber Eyes of my own.. (Class 77 Any Handmade Article)

The stained glass piece now called 'April 27th' as that is the day we have agreed that the sun sets right in the 'V' of the bit of the Tamar Valley that we can look towards and down into Cornwall (Class 75 A Sewn Article)

Now the wet felting. Well the experimental pieces have ended up mounted on a machine quilted linen backing as something of a first attempt and I fancy I might just call this 'Edward Thomas' and think of that red flower as a poppy, because it was certainly the book in my mind as I made it. (Class 79 An Item of Felt)

As if I could pass up Class 76 A Knitted Article, and finally these socks are finished, using the ball of hand-dyed wool someone sent me, and the wool Offspringette (currently in Atlanta, Georgia after a very long Greyhound bus journey from Iowa) brought me back from her trip to Shetland. I have to admit these are a little unusual so who can know what the very strict WI judge will make of them. And the time lapse was so long between one sock and the next I had completely forgotten how I'd done that pattern around the top..

And lastly, and my goodness I have only just squeaked this one to completion, Class 72 Any Item of Patchwork.

Even though is is just 30" square there was much more hand quilting left to do than I had first thought,but I love hand quilting and I hate to skimp on it so I'm hoping I have done a proper job.

All was going well until I had a bit of an insurgency over the border. It did have a 3" wide calico border which I marked up with a chain design and had quilted half way round in brown before I woke up one morning and realised it ruined the whole thing. Out of proportion for the size and delicacy of the piece. I unpicked and thought easy, just trim the white and stitch it round to the back as binding.

Rubbish. Half stitched and it looked terrible, so I unpicked again and holding my breath, because this thing is getting smaller by the day, I took a rotary cutter to it, trimmed all layers back and machined on a much narrower coral pink binding. To my complete relief I woke up the next morning as happy as larry with it and strode onto to the finish line.

I'll tell you what it is called tomorrow. for reasons that will become clear.

So that's us entered, let battle for the Blatchford Cup commence, it's the taking part that counts

 

 

The Tinker's Tapestries....a few more

Ah yes the trains. The Tinker likens this to painting with wool.


and this one of  the Ribblehead viaduct which was my mum's favourite sight as she travelled on the Settle to Carlisle railway, from Liverpool to the Yorkshire Dales, for childhood holidays at a little place called Countersett Hall near Askrigg. The Tinker took my mum back there to visit in the year before she died, it was a place that brought back special and very happy memories for her of a past that had remained so vivid, whilst the near present had sadly started to fade. I love this picture and am always reminded of my mum telling us how she'd count the arches with great excitement and know she was getting nearer.

Then we must move onto the Ottoman empire because the Tinker did two lids for ottomans and one footstool for me (currently beneath my desk with my feet and a cat curled up on it) in this design which we all fell in love with

I think you've all seen this and the next one several times over but I could and do look at them all day so I'll add them here for completeness. The Elizabeth Bradley done in a single very large piece

and another piece also very large

and here is the Tinker with the coveted village show Blatchford Cup for it, which he won a couple of years ago.

The spin offs from all these are cushions various, smaller versions of the designs because I always love them so much and to use up the wool.
Coming next... all our entries for today's show which have to be staged by 12 o'clock so I've timed the post for then, plus a glimpse of the Tinker's new work in progress, because I had noticed some idleness which will never do for an 86 year old as talented as this, as I'm sure you will agree.

Clever Tinker xxx

The Tinker's Tapestries.

I promised you an exhibition of the Tinker's tapestries and as it is village show day today I thought you might enjoy a little exhibition of your own here with several posts through the day, whilst the Tinker and I fight it out with all-comers for Most Point in Handicrafts and The Blatchford Cup for Best Exhibit. The Tinker has won the cup before... I haven't, we are usually beaten by a galleon made out of three million matchsticks or similar.

So I took myself around his little apartment with my camera and we should probably start with my mum, because I think we all caught this love of needlecrafts from her... the Tinker made her these

My mum's embroidery was meticulous and exquisitely detailed, from The Wise Men..

To Widecombe Fair (incidentally, it's Widecombe Fair next Tuesday)

My mum then bought the Tinker this kit in a sale for £16 and in effort to keep him awake in the evenings after he retired. He calls it his early work and finds fault, but I'd be pleased enough to finish anything to be honest.

He moved swiftly onto this Glorafilia Doll's House and then did one for me as well...no that's a lie. I liked his so much I bought one for myself, did three roof tiles and he finished it for me.

Then it was time for some Kaffe...

Coming next, the trains and the Ottoman empire...

 

Team Tolstoy Troika Stop... the last... мы приезжали

That might say 'We've arrived' or it might say something else entirely, because you never can quite trust babelfish, but oh allelulia because I was seriously worried that the limping horses might not make it across the line but after a year on the troika

WE HAVE FINISHED WAR AND PEACE

Sorry to shout but it seems necessary

Did we agree last month that Tolstoy could write the battles and the drawing rooms but endings might not be his forte??

Perhaps he wasn't quite sure how to let War and Peace go. The tying up of loose ends was all well and fine and it was good to know what happened next, like Count Rostov 'going off his legs' as we used to say in old and probably very non-PC nursing speak. Then suddenly out of nowhere Pierre and Natasha have legions of children too, and so do Marya and Nikolai and I got the feeling that Tolstoy had just had enough of them all and couldn't wait to move onto the next thing. I'm not sure I can blame him for that after giving us 1358 pages.

Then how can I not mention Anna Makarovna's double knitting, producing two stockings on the needles, one inside the other at the same time. I found some details on Wikipaedia and am wondering if this might be how it's done...

An even simpler slip-stitch pattern generates two fabrics at once on the same needle. Consider the pattern: * knit 1, slip 1 wyif *. At the end of the row, turn the work. Then knit the stitches that were slipped and slip (again wyif) the stitches that were knitted. In the end, one should obtain a "pocket" that can be opened (be sure to use wyif slip-stitches during binding off as well!) The wyif slip stitch prevents the yarn from crossing over to the back fabric, so that only the front fabric is knitted in any row. This is probably the secret technique of Anna Makarovna from from Tolstoy's War and Peace who always knit two socks simultaneously

But much of this Epilogue felt rather uncomfortable too because wasn't the relationship between Pierre and Natasha mirroring that of Lev and Sonia?

And all the time I was reading and thinking... the mean old codger, your poor wife is reading this in order to write it out properly for you and look what you're saying...

So to the rest of the Epilogue... alright I skimmed and surfed so did anyone get anything from that??

If so I'm hoping you can enlighten the rest of us.

I'm not sure I have the same sense of rejoicing at reaching the end of War and Peace as I did with Ulysses. I emerged from Team Ulysses feeling elated and enthused, went shopping in Launceston and wanted to tell everyone I passed in the street that I had just finished Ulysses...

Ulywhat?

Yes Ulysses really, and I am about to pick it up and read some of it again, alongside Terence Killeen's book Ulysses Unbound, which came highly recommended during my visit to the 'Feel the Fear and Read it Anyway' session at The Flying Book Club whilst I was in Dublin.

But let none of that detract from what has been another amazing year long read with all of you, and how grateful I am to those who have joined in, read along and commented, or who have been cheering along from the sidelines, and had the samovar bubbling as the troika rolled in each month.

My thanks to Oxford University Press who helped us out with some prize copies of that gorgeous edition in the early days, and who have faithfully re-tweeted our troika stops to the masses over in twitterland.

To those who have fallen off the troika, don't be disheartened, at least you have a copy of the book for another day and the Team Tolstoy link , and not forgetting the helpful bookmark which has saved my bacon every month. So you could always follow our snow trails if you had the War and Peace urge anytime.

To those who fell off and climbed back on, Lev would have been proud of you.

And to those who stayed the course, well what can I say, have another blini...and go on add some vareneki to your plate, I've been up all night baking those, you deserve it. I know how hard this has been some months, because I've had a few dodgy ones myself... so how was it for you?

 

 

 

The Soul of Kindness ~ Elizabeth Taylor

An Elizabeth Taylor novel is not well-suited to quick call-in visits. I catch myself lingering on each page, stringing out the visit, hoping to be invited to stay for another cup of tea and most reluctant to leave. I end up having to drag myself away from a book where, if I'm honest, not a lot may be happening, but for some reason I'm always mad keen to return to the ordinary lives of these very ordinary people. If you like people-watching as I do, then this is people-watching on the page, and perhaps that may be like watching paint dry for many readers because the most exciting event by page 111 in The Soul of Kindness is that Flora has given birth.

Ah Flora, dear child-like Flora, believing herself to be the soul of kindness, spoiled, cossetted and doted upon, she whom the world must revolve around; like a child she must be cared for, made to feel important at all times and everyone seems to help foster the illusion, often at great expense to their own well-being. And how Elizabeth Taylor excels at the miniscule observations, the superficial details that make up something larger. Life's tiny sadnesses magnified.

Take Mrs Secretan, mother of Flora, gazing out at her garden waiting for her newly-married daughter and son-in-law Richard to arrive for their first visit post-nuptials. The garden says it all...the daisies are withering, the leaves are tattered, a dirty yellow, and the tree limbs move like puppets, with silly erratic gestures, few guesses as to how well this visit will go in that case.

And yet for all that the reader might be expected to despise Flora's self-centred ways somehow I didn't. Flora serially disempowered, kept in her gilded cage by those around her and incapable of breaking out. The cast of characters that Elizabeth Taylor places in orbit around this sun seem to stretch across the social spectrum, the writer Patrick, Richard's rather 'common' father Percy who marries his mistress Barbara, the best friend Meg and her brother the failed actor Kit, and the rather earthy, grubby and Bohemian artist Liz all have their own shifting perspectives on Flora.

'I think loneliness is a theme running through many of my novels and short stories, the different ways in which individuals can be isolated from others - by poverty, old age, eccentricity, living in another country - even by having commited murder...'

A good thought to bear in mind from Elizabeth Taylor herself as I approach my reading, and with which Robert Liddell concurs in one of the only books that offers a glimpse into the real Elizabeth Taylor by someone who knew her well, Elizabeth and Ivy. And after the fact I find that Philip Hensher has also flagged up this book in his excellent introduction (but perhaps don't read it before the book.)

As Robert Liddell is quick to point out, and something else I must bear in mind, because how easy it is to drift into that search for the author themselves in their fiction

'the experiences in the book are theirs and not hers. And I am sure she knew that when the alternative to loneliness is boredom, which is frequently the case, loneliness is much to be preferred.'

I'm intrigued to see that in my well-marked copy of The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Nicola Beauman suggests that The Soul of Kindness, written in 1962, would have made a much better short story but that the market forces of publishing insisted it be spun out. It would seem the critics were divided too, some condemning the book as a failure, others arguing for its splendour, whilst the general sense in the 1960s was that, like her contemporary Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor was old-fashioned and somehow out of step with the zeitgeist.

So how fascinating that almost fifty years on the novel can read for me as a little microcosm of early 1960's married life. Women's lives on the cusp of change as the workplace and a career beckons, and how obvious it is that for many women this would be a step too far. Flora distraught at the fact she may lose her housekeeper and have to do her own ironing, in fact the bigger deal is that without Mrs Lodge's constant presence Flora will be lonely and at sea and yes, bored with her seemingly vacuous life.

I find there is often a little nod to redemption in any novel by Elizabeth Taylor, a tiny escape route that her characters can take if they so choose. The Soul of Kindness is no exception because Flora has her baby,

'The spring came, and Flora all the time was happy. The baby grew, her dark, puckish face delighting her parents, although most other people thought it was a pity 'With those other looks in the family. 'they said...'

Hooray, baby Alice is loved unconditionally, and whilst Flora's ethereal beauty may have ultimately been the millstone around her own neck, perhaps, just perhaps, she can achieve something entirely different and more fulfilling for her own daughter and thereby for herself.

Now I'm moving on to A Wreath of Roses.

Elizabeth Taylor redux

I have been invited to participate in several literary events next year which I am very much looking forward to, though of course I might have guessed that of the 366 days to choose from in 2012 two of the events would be in different cities and on consecutive days.

One is a day conference on the writer Elizabeth Taylor to be held in Reading (more details when I have them). 2012 will be the centenary of Elizabeth Taylor's birth and so I thought I would gently make my way through the books again in preparation. Not as a chore or a challenge, more a pleasurable meander much better suited to a writer whose books I find it impossible to rush, and also because new editions are arriving from Virago with brilliant new introductions.

I'll be sharing my thoughts on the books here as I read them, but it seemed like a good idea to resurrect a piece I wrote about Elizabeth Taylor back in 2006 and make sure it was on here for posterity. It was  pre-dovegreyreader, and published in Newbooks magazine, and I can't do any of this without resurrecting some of the old Virago covers at the same time.

And I'd love to know your thoughts on Elizabeth Taylor too... do you have a favourite novel of hers??

How about the short story collections??

Or perhaps she is unknown to you in which case where would those of us who love her books suggest others make a start??

                         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Taylor’s literary reputation is far from what it should be. For every reader who knows and deeply admires her novels there are four or five others who have never heard of her”

Thus spoke The New Statesman in 2001 and I must confess it is within recent memory that I was one of the ‘four or five others’ and I will feel considerably better if I know there are at least one or two reading this and asking themselves as I did just who is this Elizabeth Taylor?

Born Elizabeth Coles on July 3^rd 1912 in Reading, Berkshire, the daughter of an insurance inspector and his wife, the young Elizabeth was educated at The Abbey School in Reading as famously was a young Jane Austen. Austen is the writer that Elizabeth Taylor most admired and the one with whom she is frequently and favourably compared.

Prior to her marriage in 1936 to John William Kendall Taylor, the owner of a confectionary business, Elizabeth worked as a governess and then a librarian. John Taylor served in the RAF during the war and Elizabeth applied herself willingly to motherhood but also very professionally to her writing following the birth of their two children, Renny and Joanna. The family lived in the village of Penn in Buckinghamshire, still a peaceful and elegant setting with houses gathered around a picturesque village green complete with pond (and probably unwittingly known to many as the film location for the TV series Midsomer Murders).

Elizabeth Taylor was an intensely private person who apart from a few very close confidantes shunned the ‘literary’ life and carefully ensured that much of her correspondence was destroyed on her death from cancer in 1975. These days self-publicity is all, reticence just won’t do; we expect to know everything about an author and we expect them to tell us. We have come to believe that we have an unalienable right to the detail and without it we will somehow be a lesser reader and they will be a lesser writer. It was not ever thus.

Elizabeth Jane Howard recounts, in her memoir Slipstream, an enlightening incident where she had to review books and interview novelists on a live TV programme in the early 1960’s. Elizabeth Taylor was the guest and the book in question was In a Summer Season, her eighth novel. Howard had prepared thoroughly, or so she thought, describing the book as one that you enjoy reading very much at the time and one that leaves an impression on you long afterwards, it was funny, sharp and perceptive. Howard concurred with comparisons to Jane Austen and was confidently anticipating a good interview. Elizabeth Taylor invariably described as beautiful and elegant by those who knew her was sitting quietly attentive. As the questions flowed so did her replies, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to every question that Howard posed, twenty of them covered in less than a minute, five minutes left to fill and little personal information gleaned. By her own admission she felt embarrassed to be asked details of her life suggesting that “nothing sensational thank heavens, has ever happened”. A devotee of routine preferring predictability to uncertainty in her day to day life, Elizabeth Taylor was also notoriously shy, as noted by fellow novelist Barbara Pym in a letter of 1963,

“Elizabeth seemed very bored but knowing her it was her usual manner which conceals her shyness”.

Interestingly many of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels feature women who appear to be shy and retiring on the surface concealing an inner life of great imagination always sympathetically portrayed by an author who clearly understood their predicament. She herself said “I wouldn’t describe anything that was not what I had gone through and understood myself- in my experience or out of my imagination and other people’s words wouldn’t do” and somehow that sense of ‘quietness of self’ adds to the allure of her as a writer for me.

Elizabeth Taylor's first novel At Mrs Lippincote’s was published in 1945 her last Blaming was published posthumously in 1976. In the intervening years and effectively spanning four memorable decades there were ten other novels, four volumes of short stories and a book for children.

So how did I discover this wonderful writer? Well a recommend from a friend left me mystified, I had never heard of this Elizabeth Taylor, and until you know, for some reason, you never notice her books on the shelves; they are almost as quietly shy and retiring as the author herself. Rarely found in ‘new’ bookshops suddenly I was finding them in every second-hand bookshop I searched. I quickly found and read Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont and a serial addiction had begun. When presented with an author’s entire oeuvre, there is a perceptible sadness to know that what you have is all there is. It has been a wonderful reading journey to gradually work my way slowly through Elizabeth Taylor’s writing. Every book I read becomes my favourite and yet I find it impossible to choose one above another. In passing I must pay homage to the early Virago editions, now becoming increasingly difficult to find, which featured some of the most exquisite artwork ever to grace the cover of a book. Several use paintings by the Cookham artist Stanley Spencer and once seen they are instantly memorable.

So how did reading Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont aid and abet my instant conversion? It remains unusual to read a novel like this about old age and this book moved me immensely. It is a difficult subject handled with great sensitivity and not without its humour. The faded gentility of the disparate group of ‘inmates’ in the hotel struggling desperately to avoid the next move in the game that would signal checkmate - removal to the nursing home. Elizabeth Taylor quietly delineates many of the indignities of increasing age and
frailty and by bestowing the most undignified on the character we like the least we are putty in her hands as we examine the limited extent of our sympathies. Then the master stroke, I could have wept for the “indefinable melancholy” of poor, fierce Mrs Arbuthnot’s departure. Her skill here reminds me of George Eliot’s in Middlemarch. Eliot starts to weave the character of Casaubon into one of the most un-likeable and then offers the obverse and visibly takes the reader to task, suitably chastened we react with an outpouring of sympathies and much self –recrimination for being so judgemental. Elizabeth Taylor is subtle and clever and doesn’t need to tell us what she has done or tell us how to find it, we know for ourselves. We are never able to wholly dislike even her worst characters; there is always a little store of redemption, a saving grace in reserve somewhere.

The novelist, Paul Bailey who has written many prefaces to Elizabeth Taylor’s novels sums up her writing succinctly when he refers to it as “her reports from the chintz-bedecked battlefields”. She is at her best when portraying the seemingly ordinary lives of the middle classes, writing about what she knows; however she knows much more than that. In her hands and of course in reality their lives are far from mundane or perfect as we are escorted  far enough below the surface to gaze at the cracks and then safely left there to explore them for ourselves. Elizabeth Taylor describes the difficulties of this process “I shut my eyes and tremble with the effort to get it vividly in my mind. It runs away and I pursue it until I’m worn out and nearly in tears”

As a microcosm of middle class life Elizabeth Taylor’s novels read as a priceless and unwitting social history of several decades of the twentieth century as she applies herself to the issues that arise in each one. In some of the novels of the 1940’s and 50’s she examines the austerity and dilemmas of post-war Britain and all its deprivations, nor does she shy from the issues of the 1960’s; illegitimate pregnancy and birth control (and lack of it) feature strongly. Hers was a remarkable literary voice but to me it is a voice that has endured and still has the power to speak and deserves to be heard.

Elizabeth Taylor’s final illness came as she was writing Blaming and it was a determined effort on her part to see it through to printing whilst facing her own death. As her daughter states in a preface that is a fitting and moving tribute to a wonderful mother, it is a book about so much in life, grief, anger, helplessness, boredom and selfishness; all familiar territory for Elizabeth Taylor in her novels. But she loved life itself, a keen sense of fair play and a sense of humour pervaded her approach but this from her daughter just confirms the Elizabeth Taylor I feel I have come to know through her writing

“It was great fun being her daughter – no one else has been able to reduce me to such a weeping state of giggles over the most ordinary everyday events”

It is the ordinary, everyday events that Elizabeth Taylor illuminates so brilliantly for her readers and thereby so much more about herself. Like Paul Bailey I am now quite envious of any readers approaching her novels for the first time, to discover this writer anew seems like a real gift.

January 2006

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Erika's Literary Cat Quiz ~ the clues...

As always Erika offers clues, but in the interests of fairness I'm making a note of entries which have arrived pre-clues, and there will be some magical computing of averages and unaided degree of difficulty or something....

1. Samuel. He gave elaborate names "So the children will learn to spell and pronounce long words'. He said "What is better than 1 cats? 2 cats"

2. Edward. Foss was a very runcible cat.

3. Another Samuel. He said "He is not the best cat I ever had. But he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed"

4. Annibale and Joseph. Chico 'wrote' a book called "Joseph e Chico"

5. Frederic

6. Walter. Hinx was painted, along with his owner, lying  on the latter's desk.

7. Armand. Perruque is the French word for a  wig.

8. Charles

9. Amantine who was married to Casimir

10. Thomas

11.No clues needed. The answer should be staring you in the face.

12. Christopher

13. Isaac. He once appeared on the British pound note.

The Literary Cat Quiz

It's ages since we had a good quiz so my grateful thanks to Erika for deciding it was time we had one and sending it through.

Famed for her fiendishly difficult questions Erika tells me this baker's dozen was inspired by a picture of dear old Rocky coming up in that 'You might also like...' link now appearing at the foot of each post, and if you can supply more than three answers without recourse to the internet Erika says you can go to the top of the class.

And here to help you, the late great Rocky with his thinking cap on

1. Who owned Sour Mash, Blatherskite, Beelzebub and others?

2. Who owned Foss?

3. Who went out personally to buy oysters for his cat and what was the cat's name also?

4. With what kind of inhabitants of the same famous place are Micette and Chico associated with and what is this place?"

5. Who was inspired by their cat walking on the keys to compose The Cat Waltz?

6. Whose dogs were terrorized by Hinx aka Hinse?

7. Who owned Perruque and why was this name given?

8. Who owned Master's Cat?

9. Who shared her breakfast plate with Minou?

10. Place Rum Tum Tugger in what book, by whom?

11. Who had a feline sister named Tess?

12. Who did my cat Jeffrey belong to? 

13. Who supposedly invented  the cat door for Spithead?

 

Don't put your answers in comments obviously, send them to me dovegreyreader at gmail.com and eventually we'll send a book to the first and most correct set of answers out of the hat.

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Victoriana...

I am always delighted to have much-anticipated books lurking on the literary horizon, and one of several I have been waiting for is Helen Rappaport's Magnificent Obsession - Victoria Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy, and reading the pre-amble it's not hard to see why...

"When Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died in December 1861 the nation was paralysed with grief. He was only forty-two and official bulletins had, until the day before he died, given no cause for alarm.

But in fact Albert had been in a progressive physical decline for years – worn out by overwork, stress and the exacting standards he set himself. His death was a catastrophe for the queen, who not only adored her husband but had, through twenty-one years of marriage, utterly relied on him: as companion, father of their children, friend, confidant, wise counsellor and unofficial private secretary. There was not a single aspect of public business on which she had not deferred to his advice and greater wisdom. She would even consult him on what bonnet to wear.

 Britain had lost its king. For that is the role that Albert had performed in all but name. Politicians and the press agreed that his death was a national calamity. The public, totally unprepared, responded with a massive outpouring of grief.

This royal death had a profound impact on Britain. Cast adrift and alone, the Queen donned the widow’s weeds that she would wear for 40 years, till her own death in 1901. Her grieving was relentless. Without Albert to guide and support her, with a feckless heir who had caused her nothing but anxiety, and a family of nine children to parent alone, she retreated into a state of pathological grief which nobody could penetrate and few understood. Her stubborn refusal to return to public life rapidly began to alienate even her closest family and friends and to bring a resurgence of republicanism. There was even talk of abdication.

For the 150th anniversary of Albert’s death, this book examines the circumstances leading up to it, the ritual of his funeral and obsequies, and offers new theories on what killed him. It will describe the overwhelming despondency of a country plunged into mourning: bells tolling, shops shuttered up, everyone – no matter how poor – clad in black. Albert’s death and the Queen’s demand for the most rigorous observance of mourning, while precipitating months of anxiety about its effect on business, also fostered an explosion in the funeral trade and mourning ephemera. The Whitby jet trade went into overdrive to cope with the demand for black jewellery. Over the next ten years, the Queen’s single-handed mission to memorialise and commemorate her husband in perpetuity set in train plans for a range of artistic and cultural monuments that would transform the British landscape and set their visual stamp on the second half of her reign."

I have kept in touch with Helen since writing about her really excellent book No Place for Ladies The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War. It was a book that offered me well-researched history in an entertaining and readable way whilst making no sacrifices to quality, and as a result I have read Helen's subsequent books, Dark Hearts of Chicago, Ekaterinburg, and Beautiful Forever.

It can be interesting when you semi-know the authors too, because you follow and hear snippets about the progress of the book. The highs and lows, the disappointments shared on Facebook after a hope-filled day spent poring over old letters or documents only to find nothing of relevance, or the joyous news of hitting the information mother lode. I still quote Helen's presentation on Ekaterinburg and the demise of the Romanovs all delivered with passion and emotion on the anniversary of the massacre, as one of the most moving literary events I have ever attended. As well as being a Russianist Helen was for many  years an actress and so brings something very unique to her live events, they are not to be missed (and I would say the same about Carol Drinkwater) so I am equally excited to be meeting up with Helen again this November when she will be talking about Magnificent Obsession at the V&A Museum, London on Tuesday November 15th at 7pm.

With all this revisiting of all things Victorian in mind I was therefore delighted when a copy of Letters To Vicky arrived from the Folio Society. This is the correspondence between Queen Victoria and her daughter Victoria, Empress of Germany, 1858 -1901.

The book is going to be sumptuous before I even open it in that case isn't it. The slipcase and the beautifully decorated and embossed spine and cover, fine paper, soft and silky to the touch, and nice bundles of glossy photographs plus an informative introduction from Andrew Roberts.

But the letters, oh my the letters.

What a prolific and wonderful letter-writer Queen Victoria was and how revealing this selection made from six available volumes are; the letters from a woman about whom so little was known by her subjects, and I will write more when I have read them in depth.
 
But it all leads me to think how, for all that we live in the media age wherein we expect to know every last detail, yet how little we know of the details of our own Queen's life.

I wonder  whether our own Queen is a letter-writer and might a volume like this appear 150 years from now with news of Philip's snoring or the rage over the corgis frozen dinner.

Did you hear about it?

Terrible kerfuffle, apparently the palace chefs are under strict instructions that the corgis must o-n-l-y e-v-e-r be fed freshly cooked meat and the Queen draws up special menus for Linnet, Monty, Willow, Holly, Cider, Candy and Vulcan each week. Imagine the chefs leaning on the worktops chatting on the day that Her Maj walks unexpectedly into the Balmoral kitchen and says she'll serve it up herself only to find ...oh heck this is awful... you'd better sit down... the meat was still partially frozen in the middle.

The truth slowly dawned, the corgis were eating re-heated meals... re-heated meals for god's sake. Royal tempers fugit big style etc and apparently no one has seen Her Maj quite so cross in a very long time.

A bit of me wants to laugh like a drain... but I won't because another bit of me admires the Queen's fortitude and commitment to public service so I can make allowances for foibles, and the last bit of me doesn't really fancy the Tower with autumn coming on.

 

 

Carol Ann Duffy's Bees will be wintering here...

'Here are my bees,
brazen, blurs on paper,
besotted; buzzwords, dancing
their flawless, airy maps...'

...The Bees, a new collection from Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, to be published on 7th October, but I just wanted to give you advance warning that this collection is everything and more, you might want to add it to your Christmas list and start dripping the hints in on a regular basis.

 'The Bees is a work of great ecological and spiritual power, and Duffy's clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as 'secular prayer, as the means by which we remind ourselves what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise.'

The book only arrived last weekend and I've spent much of the time since stroking the cover whilst stitching away at my Village Show quilt, so I've only had the briefest look at the poems knowing it can take me months, if not years,to fully appreciate a book of poetry, let alone a book of Carol Ann Duffy's, and given that The World's Wife continues to yield its secrets ten years on, and to a ten years older me.

This from the cover details has already hit home...

'...Duffy's point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect..'

And one poem has already stolen my heart, Last Post

'If poetry could tell it backwards..'

and Carol Ann Duffy does just that as she rewinds the tape for the soldiers of the Great War finally allowing the poet to

'tuck away his pocket-book and smile.'

The war poet spared the pain of bearing witness to the unsayable, of amplifying the truth lest we forget. It's much more subtle than I have made it sound, trust me.

So I know The Bees won't disappoint.

Well of course it won't... just look at it.

It's a thing of beauty, the colour of the cover fits right in with my favoured scheme and it's got a honey-coloured ribbon bookmark for goodness' sake, no book with a ribbon bookmark ever disappoints does it.

I can already feel a quilt coming on, hexagons everywhere... and a knitsuke bee of course.

'out of the silence I fancied I heard
                                                 the bronze buzz of a bee.'