dovegreyreader scribbles

The Modern Library ~ The 200 best novels in English since 1950

I've had this book for years, The Modern Library - The 200 best novels in English since 1950 compiled by Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin, and published by Picador in 1999, countless 1p copies available though I see there is a newer version published last year and now Kindle-ified.

There's nothing like a good reading list, and whilst of course we might all compile different ones, and lists like this can't help but be subjective, I love them and have always liked this book for the variety it offers. Carmen Callil, founding editor of Virago and Irish author Colm Toibin make some really interesting choices between them, some years eight books other years perhaps just four but in the days when the e reader was something more likely to be seen on Star Trek and they could therefore state with some confidence..

'For the novel survives and flourishes : there are more bookshops than ever before, and wider choice...merchants of cultural doom are hostile to change. We are not: we embrace it, were brought up with it, wallow in it rather, fighting political correctness with one paw and gloomy ideologies with the other...'

Compare this boldly optimistic fin de siecle brashness with Robert McCrum's rather pessimistic take in the Observer last weekend where he seems to see the novel as a victim of its own success...

'The fiction boom popularised an aesthetic experience as never before. Everyone seemed to be writing novels: politicians, pop stars, journalists and even celebrities (hiring ghostwriters). By 2000, the novel was like a monastery invaded by a travelling circus....

Once upon a time, when the novel was young and self-confident, inventiveness was its raison d'etre. Telling a story was all it had to do and it celebrated being made up or, as Daniel Defoe put it, "lying like truth".'

Not any more. Not only has it lost its mojo, it often seems to want to be something else – a travelogue, perhaps, or a psycho-history or (ghastly term) a "meditation" on who knows what. The "baggy monster" of its 20th-century prime has become a neurasthenic wreck, prey to fears and self-loathing. Publishers, too, have become much less gung ho about launching new novels.'

He does pull himself round a little by the end, you can read the whole piece here.

So a book like this serves as a gentle reminder that there are plenty of good books out there that have passed me by, all of which fits with my pledge to find some of them this year and not keep my focus entirely on the bright sparkly new things. Authors I may only have heard of very vaguely right out on the edge of my radar, or authors I have forgotten about completely, or perhaps I have heard of them, but not the books that Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin have chosen. And a book like this always holds the promise of a reading project or two, perhaps in 2013 (big birthday) I'll go back to 1953 and read the suggestions for that year

Private Life of an Indian Prince ~ Mulk Raj Anand
Go Tell it on the Mountain ~ James Baldwin
The Adventures of Augie March ~ Saul Bellow
The Long Goodbye ~ Raymond Chandler
The Go-Between ~ L.P.Hartley
The Echoing Grove ~ Rosamond Lehmann
The Palm-Wine Drunkard ~ Amos Tutuola

...or perhaps I'll lay down in a darkened room and hope the date passes and no one notices.

 *pulling myself together*

I'm going to make a start some time soon with The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann, I'll let her into my Cabinet of Women Writers for this year because I had pulled the book off the shelf again when I was pondering the writers I would be reading, and the books I may choose. I  was faced with all manner of bewildering and ancient ticks, crosses and titles scored through with highlighter pen  ...books I own...books I've read... books I think I own... books I think I've read. And it is the 'books I think I've read' that all seems a bit blurred, so I revisited and did a Very Honest count up. No good if I read half and gave up, that doesn't count, so my current tally is about a quarter read and about half owned.

But every year springs some surprises...like 1979 for example, know of some of the writers but barely know some of the books..

The Year of the French ~ Thomas Flanagan
From the Fifteenth District ~ Mavis Gallant
Burger's Daughter ~ Nadine Gordimer
Sleepless Nights ~ Elizabeth Hardwick
The Executioner's Song ~ Norman Mailer
A Bend in the River ~ V.S.Naipaul

Let me know if there is a year you'd like a suggestion for and I'll choose one for you.

A Card From Angela Carter ~ Susannah Clapp

'The fin has come a little early this siecle...'

Angela Carter talking about her own life and impending death and I have her on my list of women writers to zone in on through 2012.

After tackling some of the Big Scary Male Authors last year, and all a bit half-heartedly, I have filled my chair-side cabinet with books by women writers I would really like to read more of this year.

Gathering them all in one place and keeping them in my eyeline works for me and I have had a lovely time pondering who to include. Tucked away in there now, everything I have by Elizabeth Bowen, A.S.Byatt, Joan Didion, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Fitzgerald, Hilary Mantel, Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter.

I've never really paid proper attention to Angela Carter's writing, by which I mean a good solid in-depth read of all her books (as I have done with say, Margaret Atwood or am in the process of doing with A.S.Byatt) so the arrival of A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp and published by Bloomsbury this very week, was all the encouragement I needed. I'm not a speed reader by any stretch of the imagination, but at a pocket-sized, well-spaced 103 pages this is easily readable in one sitting as I did, and it is a book that begs to be read in that way in the first instance.

Susannah Clapp was a close friend of Angela Carter and her literary executor, occasionally receiving postcards from her with wonderful messages on them and it is these that form the basis of this lovely little book.

I'm not sure people bother to send postcards now do they??

Unless you are me and can't resist buying them...and then they have to go to someone if they aren't in the bookmark box.

I had no idea that following her untimely death from lung cancer twenty years ago this month, it was outrage at Angela Carter's omission from the shortlists of any Booker Prize that led to the foundation of the Orange Prize, and whilst I have heard whispers of forthcoming biographies on Twitter, to date none has appeared. Within three days of her death Virago had sold out of every Angela Carter book.

Susannah Clapp positions Angela Carter within a literary timeline and context that perhaps explains why her writing went largely unacknowledged during her lifetime...

''...ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a youg pillar of British fiction...twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the 'alternate pantheon' of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark. in the forties, when 'in a curious way, women formed the ascendancy'..."

A Card From Angela Carter is a wonderful starter for ten, a funny and insightful window on a complex and gifted writer with an imagination to match. The spirit of a woman who it would seem didn't suffer fools or inequality gladly, fiercely outspoken in her politics and consistently courageous in her writing. If anyone can be guaranteed to burst beyond the boundaries and create new and more interesting ones it is Angela Carter.

The postcards are illustrated throughout the book, and along with the messages and Susannah Clapp's additional background knowledge and friendship, they provide a glimpse into the life and the mind of writer we most surely miss for what may have come next. Unexpected, unpredictable and quirky Angela Carter's final instructions about her estate were quite clear, provide for her husband and son, no holding back on the grounds of good taste, turn it all into an ice show if you want just don't let Michael Winner near any of it. Forthright and fearless critical faculties, subversive in the extreme and can I own up to ...er... a flicker of a smile (that Angela Carter would have noticed...she never missed a flicker of emotion) and one that barely concealed choking hysterics at this anecdote..

'The royal family offered Angela the pleasure of rolling-eyed ridicule. She liked to put it about that the Queen had a secret black love child, claiming that you could see the gleam in the monarch's eye when surrounded by Commonwealth heads of state.'

It's probably me who will end up in the Tower for quoting that...thanks Ange.

As I think I mentioned recently I have been desperate for new and special editions of Angela Carter's fiction. I'd love a hardback series but in the meantime I am happy with these which arrived fortuitously just as I was about to have a whinge on here about the lack of.

What a wonderful idea it would be to re-issue the tape that publishers Chatto & Windus compiled to coincide with the publication of Wise Children, just months before Angela Carter's death. I'm a sucker for music to go with books and would love much more of it. The tape apparently expressed the 'heart of the book' with Fred Astaire singing Let's Face the Music and Dance, Kathleen Ferrier singing 'Che Faro', along with recordings of 'My Heart Belongs to Daddy,' 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby' 'The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin'.(possibly not all sung by Kathleen Ferrier) and I want it yesterday.

Music played a large part at Angela Carter's memorial celebration too, 'expansive, inclusive and gaudy'  and held at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton because her very favourite building, Tooting Granada, was by now a bingo hall. The celebration took the form of the Desert Island Discs that Angela had eventually been too ill to record, and amongst her choices Billie Holiday singing Willow Weep because it reminded her of Streatham Ice Rink....wonder if we ever both skated there at the same time.

And Angela Carter's Desert Island luxury?

Well I couldn't possibly say, so you'll have to read the book to discover that one, but as you would expect, expect the unusual.

And my luxury in all this?

Well I was fortunate enough to win a book token in this year's Normblog Boxing Day Quiz, and having fallen in love with this Virago hardback edition of The Magic Toyshop it was that, and a collection of short stories Sugar by A.S.Byatt which both caught my eye on that trip to Foyles last week, so that was that.

Any more Angela fans out there with favourites to share??

Temple Place to Doughty Street...

The final destination for our day was the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, so we set off from Temple Place on foot, making our way up Chancery Lane and quickly realised that we were treading in the footsteps of the man himself, who probably did this walk across to Holborn and home countless times.

Cursitor Street chimed Bleak House bells with me, and with some slick map reading we were soon in Doughty Street, or so it seemed. More likely that having talked books all the way there we hardly noticed how long we had been walking, but it was good to pay homage to Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby's lodgings a few doors up before heading in for a look at the first Dickens homestead.

Now by this time, I'll be honest, Fran and I might have been a little over-Dickensed to the point where I completely forgot to take any pictures of the outside, but think typical four storey London Georgian.

The house is soon to close for major refurbishment (April Diana if you are reading this, should still be open in March when you visit) thanks to lottery funding which will sadly take the house out of action for the rest of this bicentenary year and also make it unavailable to the massive influx of visitors expected for London 2012.  Apparently this was a 'do it now or lose the grant' situation, so it was good to see the house before anything alters, though it would clearly benefit from a bit of an overhaul and perhaps more extensive exhibiting of the archives that are held there.

Anyway, probably no photos permitted but I sneaked a few for you and will risk the Tower if necessary as long as I can take books in with me...

The rat in the Dickensian wine cellar...

Not real of course or I'd have been out of there.
Then a rather snatched shot of the Dickensian wastepaper bin..

and finally the Dickensian night storage heater...

Sorry, yes, a bit Dickensed-out, but as we walked around it was easy to imagine the family living there and to feel the atmosphere in the first floor Drawing Room looking down onto the street below. Sadly the top floor, probably the nurseries where the children would have lived and played, were roped off as 'Staff Only', which always makes that the bit you'd really really like to see just because you can't.

Two Temple Place... Astor and Morris

Fran and I continued our London Day of Culture to Perk Up the Spirits in Dismal January (and which we enjoyed so much we might make into an annual event) with a short stroll from the Museum of London, along the Embankment to Two Temple Place and the William Morris exhibition. This had been in my sights on my last two London trips but William and I just couldn't co-ordinate our dates no matter how hard we tried... closed on Tuesday ...closed again for a private function on the Wednesday I had planned to visit a few weeks later, so I was relieved to get there just before Story, Memory, Myth closes.

The rest of London, if not the country, if not the world had had the very same idea, and on that day too would you believe it, so the place was heaving.

No party thrown by original owner William Waldorf Astor can ever have involved so many people trying to get up and down the staircase at any one time, and what the famously flamboyant carved Four Musketeers gracing the newel posts must have thought was anyone's guess. I don't know about you but I am fine in crowds until my 'elf and safety' lobe kicks in and I think 'what if there was a fire?'. I don't panic, I just want to clock the exits and start to make my way out quietly.

It happened to me once at a Boden Sale; those pop-up bargain days they used to hold in rural venues and for which they would send out about 10,000 invitations and 9,999 people would turn up. Powderham Castle near to collapse under the weight of loaded baby buggies being passed over heads in order for people to get a foot nearer tables piled high with...well, what looked like a load of jumble. I actually rang Bookhound from the corner I was trapped in to ask him to contact someone at Boden HQ, report the mayhem and send in the troops, and to tell him I may be some time making my escape so don't put the dinner on yet.

Fortunately common sense prevailed at Temple Place and as Fran and I burst out of the doors, carried in the general direction of the exit on a sort of mosh pit of Morris-mania, admission had been stopped and was being ticketed for later in the day. We did manage to get a glimpse of some fabulous tapestries, sketches, paintings, wallpapers and also the Astor house, the perfect setting. I would love a closer look at the house another day, so much carving and panelling, all very sumptuous and Fran and I were both drawn to this wonderful stained glass window.

A closer look reveals really intricate detail but having settled down on the surprisingly empty window seat to study it, only to find ourselves surrounded by the hordes on the guided tour, we quickly moved on and then bought postcards in the shop.

It was all enough to fire me up for the read of Fiona McCarthy's biography, Edward Burne-Jones, The Last Pre-Raphaelite as there was plenty of EBJ in evidence, but I also hot-footed to the shelves when I arrived home to find the book on the Astor family. I read When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan on a seven hour flight back from Houston a few years ago and it was good to remind myself of this excellent read whilst swotting up on the background... death of cousin Jack on the Titanic and dear old William Waldorf, described by Justin Kaplan as every Englishman's nightmare...

'the American invader who bought his way into society, bought estates that were part of the nation's heritage, denied the public access to them...and could outspend, outcollect, outentertain, and outbuild anyone in England.'

Two Temple Place was bought and renovated with added crenellations as William Waldorf Astor's London pied-a-terre and business HQ in the dying years of the nineteenth century.


Serving as a private museum for his art and books collection, apparently including Shakespeare folios, the house was a place where he could also escape his family back in the Carlton Square residence and entertain who he pleased. H.G.Wells who interviewed him there revealed the partial extent of the Astor wealth...

'he was drawing gold from New York - perhaps $6 million a year in rents...as effectually as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit...'

In fact William's inheritance from his parents was estimated at between $150 million and $300 million, give or take the odd million which all meant he could afford a really flamboyant weather vane for the roof as well...

Always fearful of kidnappers and theft, Astor kept a loaded pistol to hand and the building was apparently equipped with a state-of the art security system which at the press of a button would lock and bar all windows and entrances ..which always feels like another fire hazard to me. Of course the wealth also stretched to the purchase of Cliveden followed by Hever Castle, and you can't knock it, at one point he was keeping 840 workers employed in renovations.

Anyway the exhibition was fabulous in every sense, the tapestries especially breathtaking and it was thankfully possible (with elbows) to look at them very closely and see the intricate and complex stitching, as well as brushstrokes and pencil workings for the wallpapers and their designs, and whilst I don't want to be the instigator of a stampede, if you do live nearby it is the final day of the exhibition today.

 

 

 

Dickens and I... Stanley Wells

Professor Stanley Wells is a Shakespeare scholar and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and my grateful thanks to him for sharing his Dickens and I contribution today.

 

Although I’ve devoted most of my life to Shakespeare, Dickens was my first literary love, and provides my earliest bookish memory. It must date back to around 1940, when I was ten years old, a primary school child in Yorkshire. I remember spending much of a weekend sitting behind a sofa reading The Pickwick Papers to myself, constantly erupting into laughter and giggles, to the complete bemusement of the rest of the family. It was a pretty well bookless home, and I’ve no idea where the copy I was reading came from. But I do remember afterwards that a friend of my father’s, the editor of the local newspaper, offered to sell us a set of the novels for £5, and I suppose my father must have bought it for me.

   Since then I’ve read, and sometimes re-read, all the novels and much of the miscellaneous prose, and enjoyed them in a variety of ways. I remember writing an essay on Dickens and the drama when I was an undergraduate. In it I made much of the theatrical quality of Tulkinghorn’s melodramatic death: ‘Mr. Tulkinghorn's time is over for evermore, and the Roman pointed at the murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying face downward on the floor, shot through the heart.’ Joining the RAF for my National Service I packed Nicholas Nickleby in my knapsack along with Keats’s poems as consolatory reading. When I became a schoolteacher I often read extracts from the novels to my pupils. Sometimes I drew on the anthology compiled by the actor and playwright Emlyn Williams for
his dramatic readings. Again Pickwick came in especially handy - the skating episodes were great favourites - useful particularly for Friday afternoons when I no less than the pupils was too tired for clause analysis and parsing and comprehension exercises. And more seriously I taught the whole of Great Expectations for their Ordinary Level exam, reading it aloud with them, to the greater pleasure of some than of others.

   When I became a university teacher, though I never lectured on Dickens I gave tutorials on some of the novels. Once the BBC invited me to record a conversation about one with Edward Blishen, then a popular broadcaster and autobiographer, and again I chose Great Expectations. I suppose this has to count as my favourite, though over the years I have continued to read unsystematically through the canon, especially for my winter reading, sometimes at the same time as a friend has been reading the same novel, for the sake of sharing the pleasure. And of course I have often seen films and television dramas based on Dickens. James Hayter seemed a definitive Pickwick in the 1952 film; just to read its cast list, which includes such great performers of the past as Donald Wolfit, Joyce Grenfell, Hermione Baddeley, Hermione Gingold, and Kathleen Harrison is to be reminded of the wonderful opportunities Dickens gives to character actors. Now Simon Callow – a joyous Micawber on television - follows in Williams’s footsteps – and, of course, in those of Dickens himself as a solo reader. I have read biographies - Edgar Johnson’s, and very recently Clare Tomalin’s, as well as her book about Ellen Ternan. I supervised a Ph. D. dissertation on Dickens and Shakespeare, by Valerie Gager, published by C U P, which reveals well over a thousand quotations and allusions. Writing about Shakespeare in the nineteenth century in my book Shakespeare: For All Time (2002) I discussed the performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor that Dickens organized (and took part in - as Justice Shallow) in the hope of establishing Sheridan Knowles as curator of Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I have used extracts from the novels and the essays – especially from Sketches by Boz - for party readings, and I’ve taken part in readings, most recently a jovial pre-Christmas occasion when a group of us read the whole of A Christmas Carol, fuelled by mulled wine and hot sausages. And on a visit to New York last year, I had the pleasure of examining the precious original manuscript of the book, marvelling at the sense of a creative mind working at white heat revealed by the author’s cancellations and interlineations and substitutions. So far as I know, no one has ever undertaken what would admittedly be the heroic task of trying to trace his creative processes by unravelling them.  

    Dickens can be sentimental, diffuse, sententious, preachy, muddly in his plotting, overlong. But I value him for the abundance of his imagination, the variety and warmth of his characterization, his inconsequentialities, digressions and irrelevances, the resonance of his prose, the vitality of his dialogue, the piquancy of his observation, his depth of human feeling. When all is said and done, for me he’s second only to Shakespeare.

 

A bit of fun today...

Thanks to Harriet for posting this over on Facebook yesterday, just what you need in January when it's cold, wet and raining, and we all had such a giggle over it I had to share it with you all here...

I am coming to terms with my alter ego Pretty Gumbo Rivers nee Hopkins but wait until you hear who I am married to, I won't spoil his moment but do look out for Bookhound in comments... it's hilarious.

Over to you, and I'm also really hoping we have a Hollerin' Hips Hawkins in our midst.

Happy Birthday Virginia...

Celebration number two this week, and I'm not sure why January 25th and Virginia Woolf's birthday always sticks in my mind, but it always seems like a good day to reflect on her writing and her life a little.

Perhaps it is because each year I have just emerged from that really fulfilling reading phase that is Christmas and New Year. A mid-winter solstice break to stoke the boilers for whatever is to come until the spring and it usually involves some Virginia reading.

This year was no exception with Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris twinned with yet another trip To the Lighthouse which seems to have become the book I start every new year with. In fact my Forth Bridge painting book probably, because every time I get to the end, which is usually about August, I'm ready to start at the beginning again. And for those that may not know of the Forth Bridge (in Scotland) it is one of those jokes that has entered the every day here in the UK, so huge that by the time one complete coat of paint has gone on, the place where they started needs doing again.

Firstly To the Lighthouse and thank heavens you all told me how best to read this a few years ago, when I was struggling. Let the words happen, slow down and as Alexandra Harris says of any reading The Waves...

'Several of her key breakthroughs in the book came while listening to music. Because it is written to a rhythm, Woolf's readers have to beat time. It is no good trying to go too fast: Woolf slows us dwon to the pave of her characters' acute observations of the world. They watch and perceive with a childish wonder, long after they have grown up...'

And I am always amazed at the different threads I home in on with each read. Mrs Ramsay has my full attention this time and with Alexandra Harris's words and Virginia Woolf's own echoing in my mind...

'This novel was a laying to rest of ghosts from her family past... 'I wrote the book very quickly,' she said later, 'and when it was written I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.'

She has altered her memories of her father as well: 'now he comes back sometimes but differently....'

And a fascinating premise argued by Alexandra Harris, that this was Virginia Woolf confronting her parents as an adult, not as the child and younger woman she had been when she lost them.

Mrs Ramsay's sock knitting always fascinates me too. These socks for the son of the lighthouse keeper that she keeps measuring for size against her own son's legs (I just mis-typed that as 'lighthose' and almost left it in) and the anguish of young James who is so desperate in that way only children can be, to keep alive a glimmer of hope that the weather will hold off and the trip to the lighthouse will really happen. And in comes Mr Ramsay to ...well, with apologies to sensibilities, we'd call it 'p*****g on a bonfire here and Mrs Ramsay's work of nurturing that child-like hope is unravelled by forthrightness. I can almost imagine it, might Mrs R sacrifice one of her sock needles to poke him in the eye... she's certainly upset enough.

Meanwhile Alexandra Harris's book supplied the steady bass line that I love, some complementary reading that is adding richly to the mix, and whilst we might all argue that the world surely doesn't need yet another book about Virginia Woolf I would hope that it does and will continue to get them. It surely needs one that offers an interpretation of the books and the life within a new and updated social and cultural framework every so often. It is fifteen years since Hermione Lee's edition and Alexandra Harris offers a 2011 perspective on a life that still seems endlessly facinating and interesting (well I don't tire of it) as well as an appraisal of more recent books, plays and films since then.

I'm intrigued to that The Years, despite being the best-selling of all Virginia Woolf's books on publication, is now the least read and the least studied, me included, so I might rectify that this year. But I loved reading yet again about the printing press and the painstaking process of teaching herself to set type that Virginia embarked on, and the freedom of expression it gave her ...and the fact that she adored gossip ' a precious currency to be banked' and 'wisely spent' when she met with Vanessa...

'I always keep a sort of pouch of gossip for you in my mind...'

The book itself is the thing of beauty you would expect from publishers Thames & Hudson who always win me over with paper quality and production values, (oh alright then...and the silver book ribbon)  and at £14.95 full price no more expensive than a read-once hardback fiction book these days. Whilst we all know that any self-respecting bibliophile and fan of all things Woolfian like me will have to have the book regardless, we can at least hope that it adds 'something extra' in the way of beauty to the shelves, and
this one most certainly does. There is a shade of pink that features large in Vanessa Bell's work, often alongside a shade of yellow with some grey mixed in.

It's a soothing, non-irritating shade that features on this book jacket too... something very calming about it, very gentle on the eye and the mind, so I wasn't in the least surprised to find it listed as Calamine on the Farrow & Ball shade chart. I was relieved it wasn't Ointment Pink or Dead Salmon truth be told or I might not have mentioned it. And yes I have so much time to waste I get the shade chart out to try and match the colours on book jackets, but Snake River Press use it on their little Bloomsbury in Sussex book, and it works... and makes my shelves look nice...

Book vanity, there are worse sins and it matters in these days of e-book competition where I don't even really 'own', and can't actually 'see' the book I pay money for.

What would Virginia have had to say about all that...who can know ... but happy birthday anyway Mrs Woolf.

 

 

 

Happy Birthday Edith...

So many big anniversaries to celebrate this year it's catching me out a bit. You know when you turn over the page of the diary and there's a birthday you've nearly forgotten...or worse do you stand in the card shop thinking...'January...right..who has a birthday/anniversary/important date  in January...' and then I look at the price of cards and decide to go home, sit at the kitchen table and make them myself instead a la cheapskate.com.

But in the literary world I did feel I wanted to mark two birthdays this week, so today it is a happy 150th to Edith Wharton, born this day in 1862, died in 1937, and whilst looking for pictures of her it occurred to me how strange it may have seemed to have dressed like this in your younger days..

to this much more relaxed style in later days...

Can there be any greater shift in fashions for women towards freedom of movement and through any single lifetime than the one Edith Wharton may have experienced in hers, and in that time from 1862 to 1937.

To celebrate our Edith's birthday I have read Ethan Frome for the umpteenth time, and out of my copy fell a 2004 newspaper clipping from a series Book of a Lifetime, in which Anita Shreve credits this book as the start of her life as a writer. Started grudgingly for a school assignment and quickly hooked in Anita Shreve recognised that moment, on reflection, as the beginning of a lifelong addiction to reading

Ethan Frome is my most favourite of winter novellas, whilst in contrast in the summer, rather than choosing the more obvious Summer by Edith Wharton, I may turn to The Awakening by Kate Chopin; neither guaranteed to cheer for subject matter, but for geographical immersion in place and season and mood I'm not sure I can think of better, though I will await your suggestions....perhaps I could do with some new ones??

The sense of place is profound and almost hushed in Ethan Frome as the tragedy plays out and told by an unnamed narrator, an engineer who is piecing the events together when severe weather finds him taking shelter at the Frome farmstead. Edith Wharton tips the reader into the novel via a prolonged ellipsis which looks like this in the book,

It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this version of his story ................................................................................................................... ....................................................................................................................................
..................................................................................................................................

Edith Wharton apparently fought hard with her publishers Scribner's to keep that extended ellipsis in place, she wanted an important break, immediately apparent to the eye and signifying a flashback of twenty-four years. That said the story is so convincingly told it became easy to forget this was flashback as I shivered to keep warm under the influence of Edith Wharton's wonderful 'snow' writing. An isolated community and a world muffled by some relentless New England weather which seems to intensify with every page ...

'The cold was less sharp than earlier in the day and a thick fleecy sky threatened snow for the morrow. Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push up over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.'

In the next line Ethan is, for reasons various, 'alert for the jingle of sleighbells' and that's me smitten and there listening and watching with him.

The landscape already offers the potential for some deliciously atmospheric cover designs ...

Poor Ethan, only twenty-eight, ambitions of education and travel thwarted by bereavement and the inheritance of the failing family farm, trapped for the past seven years in a loveless marriage with the older Zeena. Zeena equally trapped, by a state of chronic hypochondria, perhaps better known as hysteria in the nineteenth century but a martyr to her 'troubles'. Into this dull and monotonous arc of misery comes young Mattie Silver, Zeena's orphaned cousin, who is taken in as a maid and whose name perhaps suggests that potential to bring a glimmer of a shine to life... maybe.

Ethan's growing attraction to Mattie, though covert and barely acknowledged between them, does not go unnoticed by the eagle-eyed Zeena and you would not believe the trouble that can be caused by a broken pickle dish. When, after a visit to a distant doctor Zeena returns with news that her 'troubles' have become 'complications', she seizes her chance to oust Mattie from the home to be replaced by a more capable carer, which she will will surely need because when you have 'complications' you 'succumb'.

That resume gives very little away as always, and thus barely gives credence to the flesh that Edith Wharton adds to the bones here and yet, even knowing this story so well, I never cease to be shocked by the ending of Ethan Frome. Perhaps I almost revisit that first reading each time and the sense of growing tension as I realise 'something' is going to happen, and it is unlikely to be good. Hermione Lee, in her probably excellent biography of Edith Wharton, which I still haven't read, suggests that the ending of Ethan Frome is...

'one of the most quietly horrifying moments in all fiction...cruelly effective.'

Repeated readings never dull the impact or dilute the power of that cruelty either, yet on each reading something else glides off the page too, surely the sign of a brilliant book. This time around I felt some shreds of sympathy for Zeena...wondered what a book entitled Zeena Frome might reveal. Why has Zeena resorted to the world of hysteria... what has she been trying to escape from...what is the secondary gain involved...why has she stayed there, and the irony mixed in with the ending is equally powerful. Perhaps that's just me and a heightened sense that when I listen to someone's narrative in the real world I always have to remember I am only hearing one side of the story, yes... it's far too easy to loath Zeena, I'd love to know more.

Henry James applauded Ethan Frome for its 'kept-downess', no mean feat and Hermione Lee highlights the brushstrokes seemingly touched into Edith Wharton's novella that allude to the wintry romance of Keats's The Eve of St Agnes (actually January 20th) so all very seasonal and perhaps Keats offers a perfect note on which to end this post ...

St. Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

Well, almost end, because I need to know...have you all read Ethan Frome ??

And if you haven't and you have an e reader, it is free to download to Kindle or in formats various from girlebooks which I hope those of you with e-readers have all discovered and raided by now... you'll find Ethan Frome here and links to other free books here.

 

 

 

 

London calls again...

Thank you for all the Team Middlemarch discussions over the weekend. We are off to a flying start with our year-long read conducted at Victorian instalment speed. Some of us are loving it, others are persevering and if you fancy joining us on board the virtual brougham it is never too late so here are a few housekeeping arrangements.

'Joining' only involves getting a copy of the book, either real or digital, reading Part One Miss Brooke and leaving a comment with your thoughts, or discussing what others have written on this weekend's post here, and to read any previous posts in the build up just click on this Team Middlemarch tag. Part Two Old and Young arrived through Victorian letter boxes on February 1st 1872 so we will start reading that on the same day 140 years later and then gather here over the weekend of March 24th - 25th to share our thoughts.

So back to the real world and the training days last week were actually not as terrible as even the optimist in me had feared.

The course leaders were excellent; engaging, assertive, clear and unequivocal about the issues which is exactly what you need where child protection is concerned, and nicely terrifying enough for me not to even think about taking the prolonged blink which then has you falling off your elbow in the post-lunch session.

I was in a 4* hotel nearer Bedford then Luton so that could have been much worse, and working from home and online I only meet up with my work colleagues twice a year, so it was lovely to see them all.

I found myself sitting opposite a consultant gynaecologist on the way to London. Well the briefcase advertising a world conference suggested as much (unless he'd bought it on eBay of course) ... and his diary, though impossible to read upsidedown looked very full indeed. He was reading Colm Toibin's The Master just for your information, and making copious notes. I did take The Virgin in the Garden by A.S.Byatt and it was perfect reading, both on the train and at 4am in a hotel room with an inaccessible wireless signal and strange pillows that just refused to meet my exacting standards of comfort. Needless to say I dropped off at about 6.50am ready to be woken by the 7am alarm, but only a hundred fifty pages to go.

I had planned an overnight stop in London on the way home rather than arriving in Plymouth towards midnight and had scheduled in an evening of browsing in Foyle's and a day of exhibitions before catching a late afternoon train home the following day and it all went nicely to plan.

Undaunted by the weather on Wednesday morning...

The secret is to go with someone who has been sensible enough to bring a large-scale map which won't need glasses, and to have looked up the bus numbers beforehand...

And so it was lovely to spend the day in Fran H-B's company as we headed for the Dickens exhibition at the Museum of London, passing the London Wall, which to my chagrin I don't think I have ever really noticed before...

Early for our 10 am tickets we nipped into Postman's Park just opposite the museum and behind St Botolph-without-Aldgate Church (the other secret is to go with a professional 'Nanny' who has prammed her way around most of the city and knows these little tucked away corners)
A neat little pond...

and there, surrounded on all sides by the towering City of London, the G.F. Watts's Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice...

Everday heroes immortalised in a plein-air gallery of exquisite, Arts and Crafts-like tiles...




No pics allowed in the Dickens Exhibition but well worth a visit if you are interested, and especially if you want to pay homage to the famous desk and the chair. Given to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in 2008 to auction for funds and now in a private collection but on loan for this exhibition. The commentary of Dickens's essay Night Walks, narrated to a film playing on a loop in a side gallery, provided an interesting backdrop to the viewing, the occasional words would float up and out into the air... houselessness...Newgate... are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lay dreaming... and it would seem completely relevant to whatever I was looking at.

From there we were headed for the William Morris Exhibition at 2 Temple Place (more of which soon) and walked via St Paul's to get there. I pass no judgement whatsoever on the Occupation or the reasons for its existence, but suffice to say we were slightly dubious about a large container of very yellow-brown liquid outside one tent. Fran suggested it was beer, the nurse in me thought more a by-product of consumption.

Anyway here's a picture of the dome with a leafless wintery accompaniment and always a splendid sight.

 

Team Middlemarch - Book One ~ Miss Brooke

'Things which have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant relation to each other'

Herbert Spencer thanked George Eliot for that phrase, describing her as '...the most admirable woman, mentally I have ever met.' Which seems like a bit of a back-handed compliment that obviously does not take looks into account. They were rumoured to be engaged apparently and George Eliot's letters to Spencer, only made public in 1985, reveal a woman 'passionately and self-abasingly attached, begging for crumbs of attention if not love.' This according to A.S. Byatt in a piece about George Eliot. Spencer spurned her affections and made no secret of the fact that this was because she was ugly, and it is to her credit that George Eliot remained on good terms with Spencer when this became apparent. Me...I'd have done damage, but I thought it might be something to keep in mind as I read Miss Brooke with its accounts various of women various.

So the Brougham is in the coach house, the horses are blanketed and stabled, the groom has nipped off to do whatever grooms do and it's time for us to take tea and talk about our first instalment of Middlemarch, Miss Brooke.

How are you all doing Middlemarchers??

As on previous team reads I will offer a few reading moments that have chimed with me and be warned it won't be a deep and meaningful resume, and I usually let my thoughts jump all over the place so there will be plenty I miss, but hopefully all enough to trigger your own thoughts about favourite moments and wider thoughts too. I tend to jot down a few as I read to start the ball rolling  and please do add your own in comments here, so that we can have an ongoing natter, and not only today but perhaps bookmark the Team Middlemarch link and come back to this post until the next one arrives (schedule at the end)

I've had a lovely time since the arrival of Book One, primarily because in the past I have only ever read Middlemarch with a view to having to write an essay on it and then sit an exam, but with all that consigned to the mud at the bottom of the pond what has risen to the surface as I read Miss Brooke is how funny and dry is George Eliot's humour. Small unobtrusive moments I know I never spotted during those intense and pressured reads ten years ago, this is subtle humour unlike Dickens who, dare I suggest and by comparison, does a lot of look-at-me arm waving to draw attention to his funny moments, and then eggs the comedy pudding to the limits, and how much I am enjoying getting to know the community that is Middlemarch and in this very different frame of mind.

Dear earnest Dorothea, no time for 'guimp and drapery' and not to be found stitching a sampler but head down over some architectural designs for worker's cottages, whilst sister Celia is far more focused on dishing out Mama's jewellery. I never drive past these old cottages in Tavistock (built for the workers by the Duke of Bedford in 1850) without thinking of Dorothea, she would have been as thrilled with these, as I am with my little ceramic tile depicting them.

I love Celia this time around, especially that moment when she hurls the 'light javelin' of disparagement about Mr Casaubon's noisy soup-eating in Dorothea's direction, having already said that she can't bear his moles with hairs. Dorothea's feelings meanwhile 'gathered to an avalanche.'

And Mr Casaubon, that 'ghost of an ancient' with the 'smile like pale wintery sunshine', whose entreaties of love in Dorothea's direction resemble the 'cawing of an amorous rook.'

I was constantly smiling at George's (I'm sticking with George) humour... what about that hilarious moment when Sir James Chettham, courting Dorothea's attentions, arrives with a lap-dog 'one of nature's most naive toys' under his arm. Clearly meant as a gift for Dorothea but consigned to the groom when Dorothea professes to hate them

'I am so glad I know that you do not like them...here John, take this dog, will you...'

And Mrs Cadwallader and the matriarches of the community discussing their medical symptoms and offering their scathing verdict on the engagement...

'Really, by the side of Sir James he looks like a death's head skinned over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hate him...'

And so the scene is set. George Eliot has started to populate her community. Rosamund Vincy and her mirror, Tertius Lydgate and his ideals, Mary Garth and Mr Featherstone and his money, Fred Vincy and his debts and the community elders, Bulstrode et al with their opinions and their resistance to change.

As a nod to serious comment I had treated myself to a read of A.S.Byatt's essay in her collection Passions of the Mind entitled George Eliot: A Celebration and to remind myself why I chose this book when everyone else might more appropriately be reading Charles Dickens in this bicentenary year. A.S.Byatt outlines her own encounters with Middlemarch...

'I taught it with a passion because it I perceived it was about the growth, use and inevitable failure and frustration of all human energy - a lesson one is not interested in at eleven, or eighteen, but at twenty-six with two small children, it seems crucial. George Eliot's people were appallingly ambitious and greedy - not always for political, or even exclusively sexual power...they were ambitious to use their minds to the full. to discover something, to live on a scale where their life felt valuable from moment to moment...'

A.S.Byatt goes on to argue with admiration and respect for George Eliot...

'She had no real heir as a 'novelist of ideas' in England...her heirs are abroad, Proust in France, Mann in Germany. Which brings me to another reason for loving her: she was European, her roots were Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac...not just Jane Austen. She opened gates which are still open.'

It is evident as I am reading A.S.Byatt's novels, and as she herself admits, that she has imbibed those lessons about populating a novel with a wide variety of interrelated people,

'whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can be made most scrupulously available to readers...'

to say nothing of the technicalities and scope offered by George Eliot's speciality, the intervention of the authorial voice, all things I am noticing whilst marvelling at the serendipitous way all these reading planets have aligned.

But that's for another day, now it's over to you Team Middlemarch, settle down and make yourselves comfy and do converse in comments while I hand around the napkins, the dainty china and the comestibles, today a receipt from Mrs Beeton's for Honey Cake.

If you are reading to the nineteenth century schedule we start Part Two Old and Young on February 1st

Next Brougham halt :: W/E of March 24th-25th

 

 

 

Dickens and I... Erica Wagner

My thanks to Erica Wagner, Literary Editor of The Times, for her contribution to Dickens and I, My Favourite and Why.

Erica Wagner's latest book, Seizure: A Novel, is published by Faber & Faber and she is now working on a book about the Brooklyn Bridge.

www.ericawagner.co.uk

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

I hated Dickens. Don’t get me wrong – I tried, I really did, to love him. I still have the copy of Oliver Twist I asked my Dad to buy me when I was, I think, about my son’s age now – eleven. It’s a Signet Classic and its spine is cracked from my repeated attempts to read any of it at all. Ugh. One year later, when I was in 7^th grade, our class read Great Expectations. Hated that too. I could not make any connection between  my New-York-Upper-West-Side life and Dickens’ world. I thought there was no hope. And, frankly, I was fine with that.

And then. And then the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby came to Broadway in 1981. Another year had passed: I was thirteen. The stories surrounding the show were unprecedented. It was eight and a half hours long! The tickets cost – gasp -- $100 each! (Look at Broadway prices now and this is really quite hilarious, but trust me – it was a ton of money in those days.) My parents – not wealthy people – bought tickets for us, because this was a cast-iron Event, something not to be missed. I thought this to be a colossal waste of money, and went along on the first night (you could see it all in one day on a Saturday, or over two nights) wearing my most grudging and dismissive face.

But now, three decades later, the opening lines of the play – and of the novel – ring clearly in my head.  “There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr Godfrey Nickleby…” I’ll tell you the truth:  tears come to my eyes. I suppose those tears are in part for a lost childhood (and Dickens understood better than most what a lost childhood could mean) but they are also for the real force of the transformation I underwent over the course of two evenings in the Plymouth Theatre. That was it. I was hooked. I got it. There was no turning back. I was no longer excluded and mystified: I was enraptured and involved.

No, Nickleby is not, now, my favourite novel of Dickens’s, by a long shot – it is a testament to the power of Trevor Nunn and David Edgar’s production that in certain respects it brought more depth to the novel than it actually possesses. (Roger Rees’s Nicholas surpassed Dickens’ callow youth, for instance, by a long way.) Great Expectations is my desert-island Dickens, 7^th grade notwithstanding; it speaks to my love not only of its author but of myth and fable too in its structure and themes. But I’d also say that of A Christmas Carol, and then the list would begin to grow long. But Nickleby – and the Royal Shakespeare Company – will always have a very special place in my Dickensian heart.

 

Effie : A Victorian Scandal, From Ruskin's Wife to Millais's Muse ~ Merryn Williams

'Victorian scandals don't come much more intimate and revealing than a wife seeking annulment from her famous husband because their marriage has not been consummated...'

Effie Gray was the wife of two distinguished Victorians, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais and that was about all I knew as I read the opening sentences of Merryn Williams's excellent book, Effie : A Victorian Scandal, published by Book Guild and sent to me by them some time ago. I get there eventually and I think it was a prompt from 'someone' in comments here over Christmas ( thank you...whoever it was), coupled with the tempting sight of the biography I am planning to take a leisurely stroll through this year, that all led me to find the book on the shelves.

The biography in case anyone else has a copy and is interested in reading along is The Last Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne - Jones and the Victorian Imagination by Fiona MacCarthy more of which soon, but I fully expect the reading and looking trails to be meandering and colourful, involve some lovely visits and to be conducted at a snail's pace, there will be plenty of time to admire the scenery and talk as we walk.

But back to Effie.

Poor Effie I think may be a verdict others will share after reading this book. Young and sexually naive, pretty, fair-haired and intelligent, well-educated and very happy, and it was at the age of thirteen that Effie found herself staying with the Ruskins of Herne Hill. Mr and Mrs and their son John, accommodated Effie during the summer holidays of 1841, rather than allowing her to go home to Perth where scarlet fever was decimating her family. The families were distant friends, John born in 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria and George Eliot and now an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford and a great friend of Lewis Carroll...

'...tall, thin, narrow-shouldered...a beaky nose, intense blue eyes...attractive smile and charming manners...'

John and Effie soon became great friends. John write her stories (does that sound familiar?)  and over the next few years they would meet on occasion. After one or two misunderstandings and a great deal of Ruskinian parental meddling agin the union, the marriage would eventually come to pass in 1848. John Ruskin now approaching thirty, Effie almost twenty-one. A honeymoon in Europe with Mr and Mrs Ruskin Senior was on the cards and only avoided thanks to a bit of revolt around the continent, so the couple set off alone (but for Ruskin's manservant, whilst no maid for Effie) for a tour of the Highlands.

What really happened on the wedding night at Blair Atholl, and what didn't has all become legendary... did Ruskin blanche and 'fail' at the sight of a naked Effie... if exact records exist they are lost, though Effie was to write six years later 

'that he had imagined women were quite different from what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person that first evening...'

What does remain is a vast collection of letters, along with legal documents surrounding the divorce which Effie eventually sought from the church on the basis of non-consummation, and it is these that Merryn Willams uses to great effect as she plots the dire years that were to come.

There follows a catalogue of emotional abuse and hints of violence perhaps as Effie becomes John Ruskin's possession, legally 'owned' by him ... his 'foolish little puss' , there to serve the needs of a complex and seemingly cold and heartless man. Whilst Merryn Williams makes a plea in her introduction that the book is not seen as an attack on Ruskin, it is very hard for the book to follow any other course when the evidence of the letters is so compelling. 

The arrival of Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais on the scene is fascinating, propelled into Effie's company by Ruskin who encourages Millais to use Effie as his model in this painting, The Order of Release, and going out of his way to ensure that they are able to spend time alone together. Millais suspected a trap, perhaps Ruskin paving the way for a divorce on the grounds of adultery. What is without question is that Millais was a diamond, the perfect gentleman who did nothing to compromise Effie's situation, steered clear until the dust had settled on the divorce (prior to which Effie had to submit to an internal examination by two male doctors) before marrying her and raising a family together.

And it's hard not to cheer at the way that Effie eventually makes her actual escape, or to feel the heart sink when it becomes evident years later that, should Ruskin actually father a child, the divorce on the grounds of his impotence would be annulled and Effie and Millais's children would become illegitimate.

Villified at the time and since as something of a harlot and snubbed by Queen Victoria despite the enduring popularity of her second husband's paintings, it is heartwarming to read a book like this that redresses the balance and restores Effie's tarnished reputation...

'The real Effie Gray was a brave, gifted and essentially decent young woman who wanted with all her heart to be respectable...'

And forgive the indulgence but any excuse to get one of the my favourite Millais paintings on here... Mariana, not modelled by Effie but I'll bet she knew the feeling.

Everyone will draw their own conclusions from  Effie : A Victorian Scandal. I am not quite in the 'Ruskin as paedophile' camp, and nor I felt was Merryn Williams, even though when considerably older Ruskin set eyes on a fifteen-year old girl and the same disaster beckoned. Ruskin's relationship with his parents is complex, especially intense with his mother, and anyone with some Freudian analysis at their fingertips would be able to explore the Oedipal connotations at play here.

But I'm thinking too that Ruskin for all his flaws was also gifted, and a great and single-minded lover of beauty, whether that be in landscape, paintings, architecture or young girls, though nothing can excuse his behaviour towards Effie. Like Charles Dickens though possibly at the opposite end of the 'lust' spectrum, Ruskin also played the mental illness card in an effort to discredit his wife, but perhaps to his credit he did not allow ensuing events to cloud his critical judgement, continuing to both praise and pan the work of John Everett Millais accordingly.

So Team Middlemarch. It is early in the day and we have most of the book ahead of us yet but I wonder if you are already spotting the similarities??

The young woman marrying the rather dry and dusty self-absorbed older man...the appearance of a young artist on the scene, we have just had a glimpse of Will Ladislaw in Miss Brooke, so it will come as no surprise to learn that there may be connections which Merryn Williams also explores...

Millais knew George Eliot slightly and attended her funeral.

The Girlhood of St Theresa painted by Millais was based on the Prelude to Middlemarch.

George Eliot admired both Ruskin and Millais and would have been living in London at the time of the scandal and doubtless considering her own position with G H Lewes. Her sympathies towards Effie, though there is no evidence that they ever met, may well have been of the woman-to-woman variety. George Eliot hardly in a position to judge other women harshly given her own ostracism, and whilst she can't have known as much as we do now from the letters, we do know that there was, as much then as now, a huge appetite for 'celeb' gossip, so who can tell how much filtered through the novelist's sub-conscious as she wrote.

So a really fascinating book that has paved the way in all sorts of directions for my planned reading this year, and I hope this has put you all in the mood for the first Team Middlemarch Brougham stop this coming weekend. I will post on Saturday and let discussions then begin.

 

Lord of the Flies ~ William Golding

Hardly a seasonal theme but it's all in the luck of the draw, and at the Endsleigh Salon Christmas gathering last month we all pitched up ready to talk about our chosen Banned Book.

Some really great choices amongst the salonistas...
Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger,
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck,
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H.Lawrence,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou,
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury,
The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall,
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

We blessed the American nation for extended the range of our choice so wonderfully. Typing 'banned books' into Google and the list was endless, books banned by American schools in different states gave us plenty of scope, Plus those banned in this country too...hats off to Rebecca for tackling Lady C and talking us through it all. And the bonus of themed evenings because what interesting conclusions we came too when presented with the wide range of reading that we had tackled between us, how several of the books were about imaginary and dystopian futures, as if the potential was all too much to bear. Plus of course the context of the era, many of the old literary taboos challenged and broken, and much debate about what might constitute a ban these days.

Angela and I had both chosen (this happens sometimes) Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and both of us had read the Folio Society edition, though I had written and underlined my paperback edition (even I can't write in a Folio copy and I feel sure Angela wouldn't do such a dreadful thing either). The novel banned in places various including Canada and in Florida for profanity, lurid passages about sex, statements defamatory to minorities, God, women and the disabled, an indictment against the Christian church and for its depiction of religion as an uncivilising factor... much of which had us a little mystified when we tried to pin it down.

But we had a great discussion about a book most of us had read as teenagers at school as a set book, and how fascinating this re-read has been for me over forty years on, and with sons of my own. I also love the timing of the publishing arc behind Lord of the Flies, or Strangers From Within as it was originally titled, first submitted to publishers in January 1953 and, after doing the rounds of them all, finally read with interest and guarded enthusiasm at Faber in late September 1953, when I was born.

Both of us on a nine month journey.

When the book was eventually published a year later and after a great many rewrites and much editing (I meanwhile was still being edited and not ready for publication) sales were modest at 4662, but the reviews were stellar, not a single dissenting voice. There was huge interest in the film rights though the censors were insistent on an X certificate, and when the film finally arrived in 1963 it was low-budget and privately financed. My thanks to Professor John Carey's excellent biography William Golding - The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies which provided some fascinating background material to my reading

For anyone who may not have read Lord of the Flies the story centres around a disparate group of schoolboys who have crash-landed on a desert island during a nuclear war. Left to their own devices the boys create rules, and a society and a hierarchy of their own, eerily based on what the adults in their 'other' world have taught them by poor example perhaps... or is it all a reversion to basic instincts, and that seems to be the focus of any study of this book.

My centenary edition has a great introduction by Stephen King who suggests..

'...a successful novel should erase the boundary between writer and reader so they can unite...should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality. It glows incandescent and furious...'

Yes, yes and thrice yea, Mr King.

Some of our debate ranged around whether there was an ideal age to read Lord of The Flies, and is the book done a huge disservice by being thrust on as teenagers. What if anything do we take from it at that age, because for sure, we were given it to read as adolescents for a reason, but I would urge anyone to make room for a second read as an adult.

Angela and I both felt a little mortified for sharing the same 'most upsetting moment' in the book.. not the brutal death of some of the boys but the killing of the sow as she fed her piglets. I wonder why I had failed to be moved by that slaughter as a teenager whilst I had remember experiencing fully the impact of the other deaths. Yet despite knowing the ending I could feel my panic rising along with Ralph's as he, once leader, becomes the hunted. I was never so relieved to see that... well I won't spoil it for those who may not have read. And we wondered too how the story might have differed had it been a plane load of girls...

We also pondered how much scope there was a for a sequel and wondered why there hadn't been one. Having seen what the boys had endured there was much debate about the adults they may have become. Just what did they take from that childhood experience into adulthood with them, but given there has been a nuclear war who can know if there was a future waiting. Incidentally Faber are currently running a competition for 13-16 year olds to design a new cover for Lord of the Flies, the closing date is January 20th and there are some stunning designs in the offing one of which will apppear on the cover of the book later in 2012.

So a great evening as always, some in-depth discussion, plenty of laughter given the proliferation of festive earrings and antlers and a fascinating re-read for me... but would you tell us about Lord of the Flies and you ??

Never read??

Read at school??

Read again??

Memorable impact or forgotten??

.

 

Take it or leave it ??

I am packing today for two training days out in the big wide world and a day in London on the way home, so about ten hours of train travel ahead this week, and for reasons I feel sure you will all understand I am thinking far more about the reading than the clothes (clothes =what I'm standing up in and a few spares) and here's the dilemma...

There can be no more exciting picture ever to grace a blog than one of a book on the kitchen scales, but I travel very very light these days and have the Kindle with hundreds of books ready and waiting, but what if I get on the train and the only book that will do is The Virgin in the Garden??

I'm 340 pages in, about 220 to go and though I could race through it and probably finish it before I go tomorrow, I am enjoying it so much I want to savour it... but then if I don't take it with me I know I'd have it  to look forward to when I get home.

But what if I am holed up in the hotel room near Luton (yes really) and the ONLY book I want to read is The Virgin in the Garden??

What if nothing on the Kindle holds the same appeal??

What if this is the only book that will defend my inner optimist against the onslaught of safeguarding and child protection training days??

I am so involved in the lives of Stephanie and Daniel (just getting married) and Frederica, and poor brother Marcus and their cantankerous father Bill and long-suffering mother Winifred and then there's the philandering Alexander and the rather creepy Matthew Crowe, and words like 'pusillanimous' and 'sussurant' and the colour 'incarnidine' to describe Stephanie's blushing face...

So do I take it or leave it??

Do you have this trouble??

Could you decide for me please...

Some mid-January heart-gladdening...

Happy St Hilary's Day for yesterday, apparently reputed to be the coldest day of the year and true to form we awoke to one of the few thick frosts (sorry to start with a tongue twister) of this Winter so far, and I do hope you didn't miss St Distaff's Day on the 7th when all women are supposed to have resumed their spinning after the Christmas break. If any young men tried to steal your flax and then tow it and burn it I jolly well hope you retaliated by soaking them in water, and if perchance they scorched your placket then just carry on and drown them, and my thanks to Steve Roud and one of my most favourite 'desk' books,The English Year, or I wouldn't have known either.

For ever and a day the little picture over here <<<<< has been taken from the bedroom window. I take a new one every few weeks but it's the view we wake up to every morning. As we open the curtains there is Kit Hill and the Cornwall side of the Tamar Valley in the distance, this is actually another shot of last night's breathtaking sunset..

It's a sight to gladden the heart and I know some of you are ex-pats from the West Country or perhaps hoping to visit one day, so I hope these pictures will gladden your heart a little too if it needs such a thing in mid-January. I am always in need of some gladdening when I am in the midst of work-related mandatory training update days as I am this week and next...things like Safeguarding & Child Protection ...and Conflict Resolution... and Personal Safety, all enough to make you believe the world is a cruel and horrible place where nice things never happen, and cumulatively would be sufficient to challenge my inherent sense of optimism were it faltering, which thankfully it rarely does and isn't.

I have been reading Elizabeth Bowen this week and in particular an essay from her collection People, Places,Things entitled The Virtue of Optimism, wherein she explores the suggestion that whilst optimism may be interpreted as a rather lightweight approach to life adopted by people who say what is easiest, or what will make people like them, or for their own sake to have everyone in the best of moods, when in fact the reality for the optimist may be very different. Optimism, Elizabeth Bowen argues, is neither facile nor superficial, it is more often hard-won, needs courage and is based on staying power and perhaps more indicative of a deep-down and sober belief in life...

'The optimist does not merely believe that the good will win, he is intensely concerned that it should do so. One cannot stay passive and simply expect the best; the best needs active cooperation.'

The rest of the essay explores this in more depth but it was the final line that seemed to perfectly encapsulate Elizabeth Bowen's message...

'...Most of us are endowed with belief and hope; we not only should not deny these, we should apply them. Instinctively we are turners towards the sun; the sun may be hidden, but not forever.'

Lovely...here endeth the gospel according to Elizabeth Bowen. I am really enjoying this book and The House in Paris (it's a winner) along with it and am very much looking forward to the up-coming essay entitled How to Be Yourself- But Not Eccentric. I'll report back.

But back to Kit Hill, the summit of which is marked by the stack of the old mine, the area once rich in tin, copper, arsenic and wolfram and the hill itself a maze of paths, old mine shafts and spoil heaps. Now we don't often go up there but it was so glorious on Wednesday afternoon that Bookhound and I drove up, parked a little way up (alright...nearly at the top) and walked up to the mine stack to take in the air, the sunshine and the views. The vista on all sides is spectacular, on a very clear day it's possible to see the Eddystone Lighthouse as you look towards Plymouth but on the other side it is possible, of course to see home and Dartmoor in the distance.

If you take a line down from the 'e' before the full stop in that last sentence, we are the first white blob you come to, about a centimetre down from the skyline. That is the computerised version of marking the 'x' on the postcard and you can just imagine from that how annoying I can be when I'm map reading can't you..

Bookhound :  'How much further have we got to go?'

Me : 'About an inch and a half, then you'll be turning right ....no make that left at an orange thing...'

What makes the view more interesting for us is the perspective and the vast geography of the landscape of which it is easy to become unaware when you live slap bang in the middle of it. A bit of O Level Geography never goes amiss and it is amazing what you can spot.

And also how true it is when we say we have 'no neighbours.'

Thank heavens for the zoom on the camera which revealed all sorts of things when I loaded the pictures later.

The River Tamar heading out to Plymouth Sound...

Hotel Endsleigh cradled in a basin of trees slightly up and right of centre...

Tavistock nestled in the valley of the River Tavy with a Dartmoor backdrop...

The 'monument', as we have always called it, at the top of Kit Hill is now a complete mess of mobile phone transmitters..

And just to prove I was really there...

But my favourite picture of all...the zoom into home (there we are just right of centre with the Muffin-shaped woods behind)

and to the mid-left here, and there's the church we look across to from the kitchen window.

That church was looking very ghostly and ethereal yesterday. The mist didn't lift from above the course of the  River Tamar all day.

I think we know we are very lucky children indeed.

Hoping you are all managing to be a 'turner towards the sun' whenever it shines, and wherever you are.

Sunset... January 13th 2012

Dickens and I... Phil Davis of The Reader Organisation

My sincere thanks to Phil Davis, Professor of English at Liverpool University and editor of The Reader magazine who launches the Dickens and I... series here with this wonderful piece.

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

In his recent programme on Dickens, Armando Iannucci spoke of his experience of looking at the manuscript of David Copperfield in the V & A as being like that of a boy visiting a sweetshop. What is on offer though is something more than just sweeties. 

     Here is just one little example of watching Dickens in the act of writing. At the beginning of chapter 11, Dickens writes as the older David thinking back to the time when he was sent away from home, aged only ten, to work at his step-father’s warehouse:

I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age.

This is the manuscript’s first version. But then in the very midst of writing it Dickens added between ‘to me’ and ‘that I can have been’ one little phrase: ‘even now’. ‘It is matter of some surprise to me, even now’ - creating an adult vulnerable to his own memories and a writer vulnerable to his own words. ‘No one,’ confessed Dickens in his Preface to the 1850 edition, ‘can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.’ ‘Even now, famous and caressed and happy,’ he wrote of his own equivalent childhood trauma of being sent out to work at the blacking shop by his own parents, actually at the age of twelve, ‘I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life’ ‘Even now’ once again: it is one of Dickens’s sensitive little pressure-points.

A few lines later, the writer protests at the boy’s plight:

it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But there was nobody to make any, and none was made   . . .

It is at the proof stage this time that Dickens delicately subtracts rather than adds, taking out ‘there was nobody to make any’:

But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

That little comma-ed off phrase ‘at ten years old’ is another of those time-thoughts that was a later pained insertion. Yet when you see it in the manuscript, in the momentariness of Dickens’s own handwriting, from Dickens’s own secret autobiography, it is moving that what was inserted so apparently incidentally in the writer’s sentence was so central to the man’s existence.   

     But that is precisely Dickens’s craft: for those who dismiss him as just a popular Victorian serial-writer, please notice his care with small matters of language precisely for the sake of large emotional effects. The older David looks back at the younger almost as if he were now helplessly in place of the father that child never really had. Yet at the same time the man is also the hurt product of that childhood. This is the attentive reading which the manuscript shows Dickens was looking for.

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

Phil didn't ask for his own books to be included on this post but I have taken the liberty....

The Victorians 1830-1880, vol 8 in Oxford English Literary History series, Oxford: OUP 2002.

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, Oxford; Wiley Blackwell 2008

Bernard Malamud; A Writer's Life, Oxford; OUP 2007

Shakespeare Thinking, London: Continuum, 2006

 

Girl With a Pearl Earring ~ Tracy Chevalier

'I have written a whole novel about her, yet I still don't know what she's  thinking. She is a song that ends on the second-to-last chord, and remains unrsolved. I think all the best works of art are - it's what keeps us coming back to look at them again and again.'

We had quite a debate in comments about Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier after I had written about Vermeer's Women, and when Tracy kindly offered to send me a copy of her book, a special edition with illustrations and an afterword by herself I accepted gratefully. And that may have been the end of it had I not enjoyed the book.

Tracy, by her own admission knows that not everyone will appreciate having life breathed into a painting that may be a favourite for many, and happily reveals that she received one letter from a reader who wrote to say if she were a descendant of Vermeer she would sue her. Interestingly the book sits alphabetically next to Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman, another book I have loved which imagines an artist and their life.

Perhaps it was because Vermeer's Women and an afternoon of complete immersion in the silence and quietness of the paintings, and the life of seventeenth century Delft had captured and primed my imagination, but I could only think that Tracy Chevalier had done what we all may do when standing in front of a painting and imagined a life into it. This edition has some reproductions of all the paintings that are mentioned too which added immeasurably to my enjoyment.

Did anyone else see Andrew Lloyd Webber's really excellent TV romp around the Pre-Raphaelites a while back??

I sensed Andrew doing exactly that same imagining as he stood in front of those magnificent paintings. And, having seen the exhibition of his collection at the Tate a few years ago, how much we have to be grateful to one man for indulging his love of the pre-Raphaelites, and doubtless ploughing back the profits from Jesus Christ Superstar onwards back into the most astounding art collection, and at time when the critics were dismissing them. He played some rock and roll on the piano, decorated by Edward Burne-Jones; a piano, he said, whose tone was just made for such music, and all 'neath the gaze of Rosetti's A Vision of Fiammetta who he liked to imagine would have enjoyed it too.

We saw that same painting and the piano in the 2003 Tate exhibition, the Stanmore Hall Piano, made at 35 Queen's Square, London in 1894, and it all captured my imagination so much that I walked around it and wrote down the William Morris inscription painted around the frame..

'O Sun now thou wanest come back and see amidst all that thou gainest how gainful are we thy blooms art thou bringing back ever for men and thy birds are a singing each summer again.'

Who can know what that's all about, or whether I started writing it down at the beginning, but I have a go at imagining life into a painting too, and can't ever really seem to translate those thoughts into any coherence. But I'm in no way averse to others trying.

Whilst little seems to be known about Vermeer beyond birth (1632), death (1675), name of wife (Catharina) , homes, eleven children and thirty-six paintings I was intrigued by the trail that Tracy Chevalier's imagination then took as she breathed life into the subject of the painting and her novel. A housemaid who she calls Griet is her imagined subject and the story woven around Griet's life and family felt like a real honouring of the painting to me and I enjoyed the book immensely. How interesting too that Tracy subsequently and much later discovers that the name Griet is derived from Margrite, and the Latin Margarita which means 'pearl'.

As Tracy Chevalier points out, we may know precious little about Vermeer's life, but we do know a huge amount about domestic life in the seventeenth century Netherlands, where a period of peace after the Thirty Years war led to the emergence of a solid middle class, and with it the demand for paintings that showed people 'going about their everyday lives'. If Tracy wanted to know what the meat market was like, or domestic interiors she only had to examine the embarrassment of paintings of that genre.

Add in a writer's imagination and the sights, sounds and smells of the Vermeer household and 17th century Delft itself quietly came to life for me sitting here in 21st century Devon, and it was the gentle pace of this book that segued so well with my mood after reading about the exhibition.

And another mention for the Vermeer's Women Secrets and Silence exhibition on at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge which ends this Sunday, January 15th ...has anyone been to see it yet??

And the winners are...

It was a long night of torturous indecision for the Tinker who in the end wanted everyone to win, but he e mailed his decision across yesterday afternoon and here it is...

48-60-64-71-93 

Congratulations to the five winners of a copy of The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens who are as follows and with their comments...

48 - Hamish Jones... I am on a BA English Course and the close reading of Oliver Twist was a massive turning point in my 1st year during our Reading Literature Module. Now in my thrid year I am keen to do a final year project in my final year on Charles Dickens and this book would seem to offer invaluable assistance.

 60 - Pia... I'd love to read this. At school and university I've read a few, of which I liked Great expectations best. One of the books I'm reading right now is The Pickwick papers. Bleak house is on my reading list for this year and I would love to have the companion.

64 - Faith... I fell in love with Dickens when A Christmas Carol was given to me by a beloved aunt the Christmas I was ten years old. School assignments of Great Expectattions and A Tale of Two Cities increased my love of Dickens. Then an incredible live production of Nicholas Nickleby became highlight of my theater experiences. My all time favorite of the many film versions of Dickens I have seen is the BBC production of Bleak House with Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock. Bleak House is on my TBR shelf for 2012 and the book would be a welcome companion on my Dickens journey.

71 - Lisa Guidarini... Oh my goodness, WORLDWIDE?! Then I shall enter! Charles and I go very far back, to my days as a teenager (never mind EXACTLY how far back that is). I read his 'Pickwick Papers' and, at the time, found it one of the most hilarious books I'd ever read. Then I moved on to 'Oliver Twist' and read 'Great Expectations' in high school. We're old pals now! I've read some of his titles multiple times, especially GE, and my favorite would have to be 'Our Mutual Friend,' which I hope to re-read this year. Currently reading 'Bleak House'!

93 - Pye... Please enter my name in the draw for this delicious book! My acquaintance with Dickens goes way back before I could even read - my father used to quote from memory great chunks of the "Christmas at Dingley Dell" scenes from "Pickwick Papers", and when I was about 10, I read the book. I loved it, probably infected by Dad's enthusiasm, and the fact that the characters by then seemed like old friends to me. I think my favourite Dickens is "Hard Times", which I chose to present to my Book Group a couple of years ago. You should have heard the groans when I told them what we'd be reading, but imagine their surprise to find that they, too, loved it. It's so hard to choose though, and "Dombey and Son" also has a great chunk of my heart, as does "Nicholas Nickleby". It's the characters - their names, their speech, their utter individuality - that makes reading Dickens for me such a pleasure. I'd love to win this book in the draw and fill in so much background to the novels!

The winners have all been notified and four of the five addresses have already gone off to OUP (will hopefully hear from you soon Pye ) so the books will be on their way to them direct from OUP very imminently, and my thanks to OUP again for such a generous prize draw.

Here's what Charles Dickens himself had to say about winning prizes when he pitched up at Birmingham Town Hall to present the awards to the students of the Birmingham and Midlands Institute on January 6th 1870...

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ...We have now to bestow the rewards which have been brilliantly won by the most successful competitors in the society`s lists. I say the most successful, because to-night we should particularly observe, I think, that there is success in all honest endeavour, and that there is some victory gained in every gallant struggle that is made. To strive at all involves a victory achieved over sloth, inertness, and indifference; and competition for these prizes involves, besides, in the vast majority of cases, competition with and mastery asserted over circumstances adverse to the effort made. Therefore, every losing competitor among my hearers may be certain that he has still won much very much and that he can well afford to swell the triumph of his rivals who have passed him in the race.

I think that means everyone's a winner really, and victory over sloth etc so thank you again to everyone for entering and for sharing your Dickens and You experiences, and my thanks of course to The Tinker for putting himself on the rack on our behalf... that's probably going to cost me a lunch:-)

 

Still Life ~ A.S.Byatt

My 2012 resolution to occasionally glance backwards at the books radiating that quiet glow of longevity from the shelves, rather than being constantly distracted by the bright sparkly new things arriving every week was, in part, ordained by the arrival of a copy Still Life by A.S.Byatt a couple of weeks before Christmas. The Reader magazine's mystery book for me to read and offer a verdict on for the Reader's Connect feature in the next edition.

Well I looked and I'll admit to a little tiny inward groan at the 434 pages, but only a little one because I was actually quite pleased that someone was 'making' me read it at last. I am honoured to have been invited to take part in this series for The Reader, they have sent me some real challenges. and it will be wonderful piece by The Reader editor Phil Davies that will launch the dovegreyreader Dickens and I series next week.

I had an old yellowing unread copy of Still Life already. Bought back in the 1980s and those child-bearing days of brain mush, when I was probably thinking that to read A.S.Byatt might be good for my mind, at the time in need of some serious upgrading. I knew little about A.S.Byatt either, but the name alone sounded 'improving'. But there it sat, and slowly a quartet of books emerged. I had a go at The Virgin in The Garden in that first flush of ASB success after reading and loving The Children's Book followed by ASB's (we are moving to initials, hope that's OK with you all) sojourn in the dovegreyreader asks...armchair which after all had surely left us best friends. The failure was spectacular, twice I read to page sixty and twice I lapsed but now I discover that for me Still Life is the way in to this series.

I have spent too long thinking about the title too...Still Life...Still Life...Still Life..

The gifted and very intelligent Potter sisters. Stephanie nursing a hard-earned literature degree but all seemingly sacrificed in her marriage to the curate Daniel, the Parish, a faith which she doesn't share, a first pregnancy, the mother-in-law from hell and the mixed up younger brother, whilst younger sister Frederica is foot-loose and fancy free and just embarking on her own university life at Newnham in Cambridge.

This is the mid 1950s and here's the dilemma...

'Surely, surely it was possible, she said to herself in a kind of panic, to make something of one's life and be a woman.'

Frederica is having a fair old stab at it, Stephanie meanwhile is trapped and her family Christmas says it all..

'Sentence by meaningless sentence they held the occasion together.'

and here's a dinner to die for...

'In the kitchen, Stephanie struggled with the turkey, bloated and slithering in its fatty dish. Her face glistened with heat and effort...she felt every housewife's fury when the guests could not be got to the table and the food was ready. She felt irritable, tearful, contemned. She carried in sprouts and potatoes and smiled and smiled.'

It's not a typo, the word is contemn and it is indicative of something I love about A.S.Byatt's writing. Words like contemn and quiddity and declivity and plangent...words that I don't quite know the exact meaning of, but words which display something that ASB explores in much more depth throughout the book. The understanding and interpretation a reader will bring to bear on the writer's art of choosing exactly the right words needed to paint the picture the writer intends. Precision requires the writer to 'exclude and evoke' as they share the vision, and because parts of Still Life focus on Frederica's au pairing job in Provence, Gauguin and Van Gogh country, the Impressionist's paintings feature heavily. The perfect canvas for that permeation of colour that I loved so much in The Children's Book.

I suddenly yearned for a Paris Review Interview with ASB and when the published volumes 1- 4 yielded nothing I was delighted to find one from 1998 with Philip Hensher available online. Now don't read it if you don't want to read a great big spoiler for Still Life which I have avoided telling you, but this spoiler-free extract really resonated with me.

"I think the names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful. One of the things I noticed when I was working a lot on van Gogh in Still Life was how he doesn’t decline his color adjectives. It is as though all the colors remained things. So if you’re talking about quelque chose blanche he just leaves it as blanc.
Apparently you’re allowed to do this because it isn’t quite clear whether they are nouns or adjectives. That in itself is very beautiful. I also read and reread Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color in which he asks how do we know when we say red that we mean the same thing? There are no guarantees, in a way, that if you write something people will read what you wrote. I used to go round the department when I was teaching at UCL, when I was writing Still Life, and try out not the big color words but the little color words. There’s a particular very subtle English language expert and I would say to her, If I put in malachite, what do you see? She’d say, I haven’t the slightest idea, and she didn’t know what ocher was, or gamboge, or viridian. Those people who do will have a completely different experience of what I’ve written from those who don’t."

I have to concentrate hard when I read a book by ASB.

Speed is the enemy.

I have to be prepared to brake and re-read.

I have to think.

I expect to be challenged.

Still Life is interwoven with literary references, it felt intellectually rigourous and inquisitive but carried me along on a very inclusive wave... I felt as if my mind had been elevated to somewhere different and rather extraordinary by the end. A world beyond my ken but one which I had stepped into as if I knew it and belonged there

I have barely mentioned what happens because it would seem unnecessary to reduce a brilliant novel to its denominator of plot when there is so much more to focus on, but expect a rich and lusciously involving mix of the provincial and the rarified intellectual life as the two sisters tread their differing paths, and also be ready for that most devastating moment of which I will say no more. Except I will say that having read in that interview wherein ASB suggests her aim was for that event to "be one of the central consciousnesses, so that the reader will be upset"... as if it had really happened... well I thought it had and I was...very.

So I have dashed headlong into The Virgin in the Garden in a strange sort of deja vue time warp because now of course I know the characters and I know their futures, all of which I can now blend in with their pasts as they prepare to celebrate the Coronation of Elizabeth II. Not how I would normally choose to read a series of books, but it is working like a dream so far. I am way beyond page sixty.

I know there are hordes of fellow A.S.Byatt-ians out there, but if you haven't been tempted in yet and fancy making a start, I don't think you could go wrong with Still Life.

 

 

Thank you...

... so much for all the wonderful entries to the draw for a copy of The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens.

We have really enjoyed reading them all and I plan to edit some into a blog post soon to ensure that they are on here properly for posterity. One of the things I love about blogs, and with which Professor John Carey agrees, is that they offer a chance for the voice of the people to be recorded, and what we would give to have that voice from the 1800s and to know what the people thought about Charles Dickens back then.

As far as I am aware dovegreyreader scribbles is still archived by The British Library for future research (heaven help them) so let's make sure the voice of the 21st century is in with a shout on Dickens and You.

And I had completely forgotten about the play Andersen's English by Sebastian Barry which I have been reading this afternoon so thank you for mention of that..

Nor did I realise that Jack Maggs by Peter Carey is a retelling of Great Expectations from Magwitch's point of view, so that is off the shelf too...

Meanwhile the entries have made such magnificent reading  and given us so much pleasure over this weekend that we have given the Tinker (father of dgr) the task of turning himself into a random number generator and choosing the winners this time.

The Tinker, nearly eight-seven, is a huge fan of dovegreyreader scribbles (obviously) and I know he will have been following this one avidly, he loves Charles Dickens and has been reading him for many years, over and again, so we will await his verdict.

 

 

Prize draw copies of The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens.

Happy Epiphany, and I say that not only for those for whom the season has religious significance, but also for those who regularly feel those moments of secular epiphany as do I, and none more so than on my journey with Charles Dickens this year. For all that studying, and I have done my fair share with dear old Chas, this is a lesson in how there is always something new to see, revelations and insights flood in and differing perceptions are emerging. I'm not quite eulogising and I doubt Dickensian idolatory will become my creed, but I am having a great time.

The plan is for the "Dickens and I, My Favourite and Why" feature to run on Fridays through the year of the bicentenary for as long as I can persuade people to write 500 words or less for you all to read and enjoy. My  sincere thanks to everyone I have approached so far who has responded so positively... and to those who fessed up very honestly that they hadn't actually read any Dickens, I promise your secret is safe with me...to the grave etc

But I thought it would be a nice flourish to start off with a really, really great prize draw, and my thanks to Oxford University Press for a series of Dickensian related treats that will appear over the next few months.

I mentioned this book yesterday, now permanently by my side, and adding a huge amount to my enjoyment of the reading and the whole Charles Dickens party, an anniversary edition of The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens edited by Paul Schlicke, and with a forward by Simon Callow.

Entries in the book explore the private man, the public figure- his family, friends, colleagues and convictions.

The age in which he lived and worked - the people, the events, the institutions that informed his writing.

The places that were significant to him - his homes, his London, and the countries he visited.

The ideas and social theories of the time - the attitudes he satirized and the ideologies he advocated.

The works on which his reputation rests - their history, structure, inspiration and significance.

Additonal material includes a chronology of Dickens's life, a list of characters in his works, a list of entries by theme, a family tree as well as maps of locations.

In the words of Robert McCrum ...

'exemplary ...marvellous comprehensiveness in all matters Dickensian.'

and the Times Higher Education Supplement...

' as valuable a tribute to collective memory as one could wish for.'

So if you have read this far and decided you absolutely need this book at your right hand too, FIVE copies of this can go to lucky winners worldwide.

Names in comments as usual and please add a line or two about Dickens and You, your favourite perhaps, or a school day memory of reading Dickens, a TV production that has left a lasting impression... or why you might like to wade in and try some if you haven't already.

 

A Dickens of a year....

5th January... fed up with it and avoiding, or enjoying the Dickens 2012 so far??

The only reason I ask is that I hear plenty of people having a good old moan about it…and the Jubilee… and the Titanic stuff and the Olympics, whilst I sit here loving all the attention and debate these events generate because it makes a nice change from wall to wall everything else doomy and gloomy. Talking of which very word, I had to smile whilst reading Alexandra Harris’s biography of Virginia Woolf wherein she quotes Vita Sackville West’s assessment of Bloomsbury as Gloomsbury. The days feel grey and gloomy enough without adding to it, so I am lapping up the joy.

We will be having a dovegreyreader Dickens 200 celebration of our own here soon too.

An ongoing occasional series through the year that will be a variation on dovegreyreader asks… called "Dickens and I, My Favourite and Why”. I know it’s just far too poetic isn’t it… came to me as I trudged along the lane the other day in the teeth of a howling gale, and I am scouring the world for willing victims participants. I’ve exhausted my cache of authors and literary contacts, lots of whom have kindly agreed to tell us all, so now I am casting my net around and am sending letters of invitation to the world of celebs, royalty, presidents, archbishops… all suggestions welcome. I have already thought of Prince Charles and Mr Obama, their invitations are in the post.

Meanwhile some great TV programmes about Charles Dickens. Did anyone else see Sue Perkins present that brilliant programme about Mrs Dickens??

Such a telling and revealing visual insight into the woman behind the ‘national treasure’; silenced and marginalised in the most disgraceful way by a man whose behaviour Sue Perkins challenged openly and very honestly. Catherine sent into exile from her home and her children once Charles had found a newer, thinner model. It felt as if the man who could write the stories was writing one for real in his own life and somehow legitimising it in his mind.

And I persevere with my fifth and most realistic summit attempt on Bleak House to date. I was never going to finish it over the Christmas season, it’s not a book I can cope with in great long extended bouts of reading, and once I had realised that I knew I would conquer.

Am I allowed to say I weary of it occasionally??

That is was surely never written to be read in one long gorge??

That it is patently obvious that on occasions Dickens was padding out with words to meet his page count for the serialisation??

So taking all that into account I settle down to about fifty pages at a time and feel enjoyably satisfied with that, I'll probably be there by Easter.

Alongside I have the new edition of the Oxford University Press, Companion to Charles Dickens, billed as the ‘most informative and accessible guide’ available and I wouldn’t argue with that. As well as 600 pages of entries there are maps, glossy pictures, timelines, an index of characters and much more. It has been interesting to read what else was going in Dickens’s life whilst he was writing Bleak House in 1851… publishing Household Words, ‘barnstorming the country’ with his theatrical productions,fundraising, promoting Urania Cottage, his home for fallen women project, public speaking, supporting the Ragged Schools as well as coping with family matters. Catherine was unwell, Dickens’s father John died as did a daughter Dora, and when Catherine produced yet another child Dickens was heard to comment ‘on the whole I could have dispensed with him.’

The DVD of the BBC adaptation of Bleak House (3discs and a snip at £5ish on A****n) has arrived. I had forgotten quite how extraordinary the cast list was, not only Gillian Anderson, Anna Maxwell Martin and Charles Dance, but Pauline Collins, Johnny Vegas (who can forget his spontaneous combustion moment) Carey Mulligan, Alistair McGowan, Liza Tarbuck et al.

So this is all fuelling an unexpected London trip later this month very nicely. I will squeeze in the Dickens 200 exhibition at the Museum of London, and at last a trip to the house and museum in Doughty Street to make up for all those years I lived within spitting distance and never even walked past. Tsk.

And please do come back later for a very nice prize draw...

 

3.1.12 after the storm...

The first storm of 2012 and this house most certainly had one of those Ted Hughes-like encounters ... far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, winds stampeding the fields etc, and how we wished that 'someone' had climbed up on the roof during the summer to apply some WD40 to the lofty chicken which squeaked and rumbled painfully overhead...

The phone line has gone down and the broadband gasps into life for about five minutes at a time every two hours or so. But I finally managed to pull on the walking boots and dodge the rain later in the afternoon and head out for my daily two miler...

Always worth making the effort to see that glorious sky.

Hope you are all safe and warm.

Damage ~ Josephine Hart

'There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.
    Those who are lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home.'

Time to launch 2012 properly with a great book and those the opening lines of Damage by Josephine Hart. Now given that this novel was first published in 1990, has sold over a million copies and was made into a very successful film starring Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche and Miranda Richardson in 1993, there is every chance that many of you will have read it, seen it and been blown away by it already, but just in case not, here I am rushing in late to the party again.

I'm now trying to think of other books with a true and genuine 'gasp' moment in them akin to the one I have only just lived through in Damage without needing a defibrillator. Other books where what happens next happens so unexpectedly, or you are so deeply involved in the action, that you just didn't see that one coming. The ubiquitous We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver comes to mind, and I'd add in Legend of a Suicide by David Vann and Still Life, the A.S.Byatt book I have just read... but can anyone think of any more??

I'm not exaggerating when I say the shock felt so profound that I swear my heart missed a beat as I recoiled from the words in disbelief, and when but a moment earlier I had innocently turned the page. Or perhaps, in the case of Damage, I just knew this was all going to implode, had initially been on my guard and wondering what and when, but had been so drawn into the book that I had let my guard slip. Suffice to say I stood back and administered a few hundred volts, read on, finished the book and then lay awake half the night thinking about it... seriously it was as if this de-caffeinated light-weight had drunk a double Americano at about 10 pm.

The first person, unnamed narrator is a middle-aged doctor who makes the move into politics and the life of an MP, but a GP first and always, solid, reliable, formal, detached, yet faithful and operating within the parameters of his profession at both work and at play it would seem...

'An efficient dissembler, I gently and silently smoothed the rough edges of my being. I hid the awkwardness and pain with which I inclined towards my chosen outline, and tried to be what those I loved expected of me - a good husband, a good father, and a good son.'

Happily and conservatively married to Ingrid with the regulation two children, the nice house and the comfortable lifestyle, a relatively trauma-free life of service to others until the day his son Martin, a lothario accustomed to working his way through a rapid succession of blondes, announces he will be bringing home his new girlfriend Anna Barton to meet the family. Also a journalist on the newspaper that Martin works for, Anna is an enigma, a dangerous one, and it is at an art gallery that our doctor first hears her name and her voice...

'...deep, clear and unfriendly.'

When Anna finally recounts the story of her troubled past there is a line that sends shivers down the spine..

'Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.'

And Josephine Hart leaves the reader in no doubt as to how damaged Anna is, seeing it and knowing it, Ingrid senses it, our Doctor and his son are blind to it and what follows will be the most spectacular unravelling of lives and family as I have ever read on the page. An instant and fatal attraction tangled in the web of deceit to be woven between a father and his son's girlfriend.

It sounds such a bland and basic premise for a novel doesn't it...forbidden love...yeh yeh, tell me something I don't know, and 'tis true one or two Amazon reviewers took umbrage, Mrs P was not impressed...

"And the girlfriend! well she's a real weirdo she meets her boyfriends dad after several dates with his son and then invites the dad round to her place where they have awful sex within minutes of him getting in the door!(like you would!) But again even the sex is rushed and is written awfully. I have never read a book as vulgar. I would read another book by the auther [sic] if it was nothing like this one!!"

But to my mind that is to miss the point and focus on the wrong things, yes it is the erotic intensity and its forbidden nature that makes Damage so chilling, but there is so much more going on here. A man possessed and consumed by obsessive love, the boundaries of power and control blurred and behaviour distorted by a potent and slavish love affair. Lashings (sorry) of rivalry and jealousy and plenty of self-delusion that somehow those involved and bound to be hurt by this will accept and understand when they eventually find out.

I wrote about my first encounter with Josephine Hart's writing, The Truth About Love at the beginning of last year. Josephine Hart died of cancer in June 2011, an illness she had concealed from all but her most immediate family, but safe in the knowledge, and overwhelmingly honoured that Damage, and another novel Sin, were to be re-published as Virago Modern Classics. And just look at that cover... perfectly conveying what lies beneath. This edition now carries both a moving tribute to Josephine Hart from Lennie Goodings at Virago, and also an introduction from Josephine herself discovered after her death by her husband's secretary.

Lennie Goodings says this...

'She knew instinctively to look to literature, to words, in order to survive...she understood that we are nourished, at an elemental level, by words, by art. I believe that her novels came out of this same visceral understanding of human nature, of what we lack and what we desire...she was unafraid of emotion, of the elemental, real, stripped down stuff of human relationships.'

Josephine Hart knew terrible childhood tragedy in her own life but also knew that she had survived. That survival caused her a separate form of anguish and for various reasons this novel and others remained locked in her imagination until persuaded by those who knew her that 'you have no right not to finish it'... this from her agent after reading the opening chapters of Damage. It was time to release them and in Josephine Hart's own words

'Writes are predatory. They want to possess the minds of their readers...'

Damage has most certainly possessed my mind in the best possible way and if you've read it I'd love to know your thoughts. If you haven't and you decide you will, please please come back and tell me if you too read it long into the night, and also if you nearly keeled over when I did.

 

 

 

It was New Year's Day in the Book Room...

...and if you look carefully you will see that the lovely people at Slightly Foxed sent me my very own SF mug and I am much pleased.

One of The Dowagers watches over my first book completed in 2012,(though started in 2011,) Still Life by A.S.Byatt, and my very sincere thanks to The Reader magazine for sending it. This my mystery book for the Readers Connect feature in the next edition, and with a tight deadline for submitting my fifty words and my star rating I baulked ever so slightly at the prospect of 434 pages until I started reading it.

Still Life the second in the quartet published from 1978 to 2002 that comprises The Virgin in the Garden, Babel Tower and The Whistling Woman and I'm sure many of you will have read these.

I suspect Still Life may be a good entry point into this series if, like me, you may have passed it by, or struggled with it in the past...I know I have stalled several times . Still Life a breath-takingly good read with a devastating final thirty pages, intellectually stimulating and requiring focused concentration in parts but in a very inclusive way (none of that 'you're a numpty and I will make sure you know it' stuff) and I now can't wait to read the quartet in both directions. But with the Queen's Jubilee approaching and the 60th anniversary of the accession just weeks away, it seems fitting to read The Virgin in the Garden next for its account of life in the early 1950s and celebrations for the new Queen in the offing.

Talking of reading journals, I have done my end of year re-allocation of subscription budget assessment. Time for a change so it is a fond farewell to the Times Literary Supplement and back to the Literary Review for me. They sent me one of those 'you know you love us please come back' offers that was so tempting I couldn't resist.

As to reading resolutions I am being measured and pragmatic. As well as our read of Middlemarch and tagging along on the coat tails of all the Dickens 200 events and watching the Olympics, 2012 promises to be another full on dovegreyreader year. This year I have been invited to take part in a one day conference on Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist), also a panel event at The Biographer's Club in London, plus a talk for the West Country Writer's Association annual congress and of course the return of the tent at Port Eliot Festival, so enough preparation without adding extra challenges.

In amongst the new books I would like to take some time to read what has gone before. Endsleigh Salon have a couple of wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald evenings lined up so I want to re-read for those, but I would also like to turn my attentions to some women authors from the more recent past who I wish I had read more thoroughly by now but still haven't. On my list to date...

Definitely more A.S.Byatt...

Perhaps some Iris Murdoch...

Joan Didion beckons...

Maybe Doris Lessing...

Certainly Angela Carter...

Can I crack Elizabeth Bowen...

Why haven't I read Beryl Bainbridge...

Any more suggestions??

 

 

 

Just to say...

  

..everyone, and here's to a healthy, peaceful and book-filled 2012.