dovegreyreader scribbles

The True Deceiver ~ Tove Jansson

Sailing along happily with my Tove Jansson reading, I picked up The True Deceiver.  First published in 1982 and translated from its original Swedish by Thomas Teal in 2009 for Sort of Books, this is a little gem of a novel. So much tightly bound into one narrative as Katri Kling decides that she and her brother Mats, a boat-yard worker, need money and perhaps the best way to achieve it is to inveigle their way into the life of famous local artist and illustrator of children's books, Anna Aemilin. 

'Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness,' thinks the socially awkward Katri as she lies awake at night...

'...going on and on, like living in a tunnel where dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you're screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree...'

And , as winter cloaks the remote fishing and boat-building village of Västerby, Katri plots a credible route into vulnerable Anna's life. There will be coercive control and gas-lighting as Katri homes in and slowly takes over the house, the cooking and the administration of Anna's working life, eventually even answering her copious correspondence for her and it's hard not to fall into the trap of judging Katri's actions...but don't.

There was a moment in the book when the whole premise and my assumptions flipped and Tove Jansson gently and cleverly suggested that I have a rethink.  I had to ask myself who was the 'true deceiver' Katri or Anna, and for fear of spoiling not a word more about the plot.

I can think of another book that did this, The Beacon, to my mind one of Susan Hill's finest novellas. Susan sent me a very early version of this many years ago. I read it and sent back instant thoughts...it was a good read, I'd really enjoyed it. Then, at about 3am I woke up with a start and thought 'Blimey...so THAT'S what this book is about.' The massive and unanswerable conflict had initially passed me by, only dawning when I let the book settle in my mind. I've never forgotten my first reading of The Beacon and if you haven't read it maybe seek it out.

There are some wonderful motifs in The True Deceiver...the old furniture, the piles of Anna's belongings that Katri unilaterally dumps out on the winter ice until the spring thaws when the detritus will sink out of sight...

Slowly it degrades within sight, slowly Anna's past life disappears.

And then here is a dog. Katri's unnamed dog with its menacing yellow eyes. From the off I sensibly didn't take my eyes off that dog...

Given that the book was written before all the current research and knowledge about the autistic spectrum Tove Jansson may unwittingly have written with great insight into some aspects of the condition. I found myself asking (myself) whether in setting out to deceive, had Katri done so by simply being herself. This was how she thought, this was a perfectly right way to proceed and ultimately it will become clear that her motives were...well I'd better not give that away.

Incidentally, in the quest for the Perfect Bookmark for my Tove Jansson reading I have settled on this, a favourite postcard from the National Gallery...'Lake Keitele', by Finnish artist  Akseli Gallen-Kallela and painted in 1905. I go and look for it every time I visit and buy a postcard every time I visit.

Doesn't it create the most incredible atmosphere and likewise The True Deceiver took me to an unusual place and made me flex my mind around strange and unusual ideas; no answers, no definite conclusions at the end beyond that old saying 'there's nowt so queer as folk', and Tove Jansson knew it too.

The Remedies ~ Katharine Towers

You might remember that I had a moment of great fortune in one of the town's charity shops backalong. Someone had donated their entire collection of poetry books and I might have been the first in the door, who knows, but I scooped up a few gems for 50p each, poets I'd always meant to explore, along with a few new names that had drifted onto my radar.

I started my reading of this bounty with The Remedies by Katharine Towers and it resonated with me from the first page and the first lines of the first poem The Roses

Because my father will not stand again
beneath these swags of Himalayan Musk
nor  stare for hours to see which stems are safe

and which need tying back...

When the Tinker first moved in with us here, Susan Hill, who had published his memoir, bought us both a rose to celebrate the moment. It was a lovely thought and my dad spent several days deciding which one he would like. He eventually chose Highgrove for its royal connotations, and the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh had written the introduction for his book, something of which he was inordinately proud. Highgrove and my choice Lady Sylvia, duly arrived and were planted with much ceremony and mychorizzal powder to help the roots. Highgrove launched itself up the wall at Olympian speed, (Lady Sylvia was much more sedate) but my dad would spend hours coaxing it along, tying in the right direction and it flourished. A profusion of deep red flowers year on year since, and every time I go to tidy up I find a little piece of the wire he used.

Isn't this one of the great gifts of poetry, its congruence with experience.

From the title alone there is enough guidance for what may be to come. Remedies with their connotations of healing, solution and resolution, ways of making better and when I checked official definitions they added to the meaning with words like treatment and cure, redress for a wrong and recovery of a right.

There is a method and an order to the poems, one handing over the baton to the next. So Beautiful it Must be True explores the idea of a single note played perfectly, the next poem Tinnitus  when those notes are not quite so perfect...

'If only it were church bells
or the early morning chanting 
of choir boys in Latin.

You could even learn to love
your own inner sea -
swishing through the ossicles,

but not this round-the-clock
back-chat of an irritated nerve
that doesn't know it's time to shut up.

Perhaps the one connection that hadn't occurred to me was that of the Bach Flower Remedies.

I'll admit to buying the odd bottle of Rescue Remedy in the past, and thinking I maybe needed more than the standard few drops as I headed into court to give evidence in a child protection case, but beyond that I knew nothing about them so researching this has been fascinating.

Based on remedies created by Dr Bach in the 1930s, and apparently consisting of 50:50 water and brandy (50-80 proof) whilst the dilution means only a single molecule of the flower essence may remain. It is argued by many that the efficacy is purely that of a placebo, together with the benefits of a moment or two of calming introspection on an emotional state, and EU law changed the classification of the remedies to one of 'nutritional supplement'  thus ending medicinal claims, but many people know and believe differently and I wouldn't dream of denying that belief. If it helps, use it.

Katharine Towers explores each flower remedy... Aspen,Water Violet, Early Gentian, Willow, Cherry Plum and several more via the voice of the plant itself and the condition attributed to its efficacy.

Here's Hornbeam - a remedy for apathy

A rumbling in the bones
but I'm too tired for spring.
All winter I have been
as good as dead...

Treating like with like came to mind as human foibles are imposed on the plants, mental torture, pride, self-pity, hatred, jealousy, aimlessness, impatience, and the effect created by Katharine Towers is both haunting and salutary in itself; a chance to step back and ponder the human condition.

As the collection moves towards it conclusion there is Bluebells

'In the way that we cannot be other
than ourselves even in the deep of winter
these woods where bluebells grow

are always bluebell woods...

and I had to agree...our woods only have one name..

And a final poem 'for example' ,with its simple antidote to a fear of dying, somehow rounds off the collection quietly, thoughtfully and perfectly.

What a brilliant and unexpected find The Remedies has been, and reading it again now to write this post I am reminded of poetry as the greatest gift that keeps on giving.

If there is one sadness, and it's a great and miserable one, it is that this very same shop suffered a catastrophic flood a few months ago and the entire stock, including many more poetry books, a superb fiction section along with a fantastic collection of vinyl records, was lost, so I'm very relieved I gave my selection a  home when I did.

If you know The Remedies, or Katharine Towers' poetry I would love to know your thoughts...

Also news of any more good poetry collections that have caught your attention lately...

And Flower Remedies, what's your verdict...

His Dark Materials...

The TV adaptation of His Dark Materials has started here in the UK, to much-generated hype and anticipation  and I'm wondering whether anyone else watched the first episode on Sunday evening, and if so what did you think?

I'm deeply into The Secret Commonwealth and the world of Lyra and the Magisterium and alethiometers and dæmons, so it was an easy transition for me. Having loved La Belle Sauvage I have slipped straight back into the world that Philip Pullman creates. He makes it effortless for a reader prepared to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves, and I was reminded (thank you Kate in comments) to revisit his books of essays Dæmon Voices and now I'm intrigued by the connections between His Dark Materials and John Milton's Paradise Lost. I don't know Paradise Lost at all but have an inkling to explore those links. Philip Pullman offers a book by book resumé and I have a copy standing by so I may be brave enough to dip a toe in alongside a helpful book, The Essential Paradise Lost by John Carey.

However at 8pm on a Sunday evening Bookhound would be the ultimate test. Having no knowledge of the books would he be interested. Would he grasp the storyline which even to me, in the know, seemed a little obscure in the first instance.

Slowly it all became more evident as the episode unfolded and with very little explanation from me...

Daemons and their purpose...and the fact that they change until a child becomes an adult

A strange world familiar in many ways, but then a huge step removed from the familiar in others...

And who are all these people...the gyptians, Asriel, Mrs Coulter...

Who are the goodies and who are the baddies...

I'm pleased to report that Bookhound loved it, remarking 'This is going to be huge,' after about ten minutes and loving the settings and the graphics as well as the characters. By the end of the first episode the atmosphere of this strange world was established and we both agreed that was Sunday evenings sorted for the forseeable.

Once I have finished The Secret Commonwealth I'm planning to re-read or listen to the first book Northern Lights and then  tackle (for the first time) The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass , having armed myself with a beautiful Everyman edition in readiness. (Titles corrected thank you for comments) 

Please forgive our second Philip Pullman conversation in as many weeks but I'd love to know your thoughts about the TV adaptation and whether it worked for you. It's getting great reviews but opinion on social media seems to be divided...

And what about Paradise Lost...

'The way poems and stories work on our minds is not by logic, but by their capacity to enchant, to excite, to move, to inspire...its primary influence is on the imagination...'

...suggests Philip Pullman who freely acknowledges its influence on him ever since he read it at school.

Did you read it at school....

I wish I had...

 

 

We need to talk about... Scent

I mean ‘smell’ too, but scent is a much nicer word.

My first deliberate memory of scent is probably the tin of Dust of the Stars talcum power that seemed to be bottomless, and sat in our bathroom for as long as I can remember. Oval shaped and rusting around the base, it seemed to go on and on. Growing up there'd be a lot of excitement about the box of blue hyacinth bath cubes for Christmas which segued into Aqua Manda...

and Kiku perfume (Kiku matching my bright yellow 1960s bedroom) but as I recall the scent was a bit overpowering.

I'm not a perfume person these days, though when I look back I have certainly had my moments. From 1970's Blue Grass (Elizabeth Arden) to 1980's L'Air du Temps, ( Nina Ricci) a Chanel No 5 phase in the 1990s through to Eau Dynamisante (Clarins) and then suddenly, for some reason that was me and perfume done with. I'm wondering whether it's an age thing... a sort of 'Can't Be Bothered' combined with a sense that, if I'm honest, it all seems to smell a bit rank (cats?) on me after a while. Or maybe it's because just one scent, more a smell really, and the memories it evokes, seems to have superseded all others.

On my first trip to New Zealand Offspringette took me on the road trip to beat all road trips and this included cycling the Otago Rail Trail through South Island. This would be the same me that hadn't even sniffed a bike for about twenty long years who would suddenly gird up in padded shorts and cycle a hundred miles. True, after Day One in thirty degree heat and no shade, and fearing I might breath my last somewhere on the Maniototo plains, my pleas to swap to an electric bike were heeded, but all the same you still have to sit on the saddle and work the pedals.

Mission accomplished and driving on to Queenstown, we pitched our tents in Glenorchy... 

Situated on the banks of Lake Wakatipu, Glenorchy is a beautiful stopping place, especially after four days of cycling...

Lakes, rivers, forest, snow-capped mountain backdrop, this is proper Middle Earth, real Lord of the Rings filming country...

...and even better, Mrs Woolly's Camping Ground had showers and a General Store.

This far into the trip, truth be told, despite lashings of Factor 50, my face was feeling like a bit of old leather, just a bit parched and in need of a high grade moisturiser. I browsed a while in the store and came across a stand with Apicare products. I'd never heard of it but if anything says manuka honey on the tube I'm convinced, so I headed into the bliss of the shower with some shower cream and a tube of the  'Saving Face' moisturiser, and to this day (three years on) I have accepted no substitutes. The shower stuff came and went but the moisturiser stayed. I stock up when I visit and Offspringette bought me another year's supply (three tubes) home with her at Christmas.

And every single morning I slap it on my face and I am back in Glenorchy. Every time, I only have to smell it and I'm there, walking lakeside, staring at the mountains...

It all had me wondering...

I can't be the only one who is transported somewhere by a smell...

And how about perfume...do you use it, and if so which one...

Was anyone else complicit in the 1970's Blue Grass movement...

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Here we are, on our way towards the Shortest Day, but it doesn’t take much to remind me of summer if it involves memories of a good book. A couple more of my summer deck chair successes, with thoughts from my notebook as I read, so not a full account by any means but hopefully enough to give you the gist. 

Scoop ~ Evelyn Waugh

I am deeply into Evelyn Waugh territory based on my success with Brideshead Revisited coupled with these irresistible new Penguin Modern Classics editions (soft floppy binding so the book stays open, 1.5 line spacing and readable-sized font). My next choice was Scoop the story of the mistaken identity of a hapless William Boot as a top flight journalist who then finds himself shipped off to Africa to cover a 'promising little war' that hasn't really started yet, and might need a bit of help to get going. Satire and irony are timeless, I suspect Scoop reads as well today as it did then and I loved every word.

I've since read the first book in the  Sword of Honour trilogy, 600 pages of pure reading pleasure ahead whenever I feel like picking it up again. More irony, more satire and a book I'd love to run in to the Tinker and say' You'll love this', because it's a world he'd recognise instantly. For the world-weary perhaps it also helps to look back and realise ‘twas ever thus, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well...eventually. 

 

The Offing ~ Benjamin Myers

I often wonder whether authors really like having their book compared to others but two novels came to mind as I started The Offing. The first A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr and the second The Triple Echo by H.E.Bates. Both books held in high esteem here. Pitch perfect sense of place which was no surprise given my thoughts on Benjamin Myers book Under the Rock recently, but here a place isolated and unchanged as sixteen-year-old Robert Appleyard sets out to walk south from the coal mines of the north for a bit of freedom. His childhood has been stolen by war and he needs to breath easy for a while before he to is expected to start his underground working life.

There is a sense of mystery too and whilst I feared one plot, when Robert alights upon the enigmatic but forthright Dulcie Piper on his travels, I was relieved to find it would be something entirely different. A novel about loss and its many guises and how optimism and kindness can triumph in the end.

'You never know what's around the corner. A morning's sunshine can harbour an afternoon's storm clouds. Life is long when you're young and short when you're old, but tenuous at any time.'

Isn't it just.

If you’ve read either of these, or other books by these authors, please do share your thoughts in comments...

And as always, any other good reading recommends too...

And please do tell us what you are reading now...

I’m happy to report that I am completely beguiled and entranced by The Secret Commonwealth. 

I’m going in...

Firstly, Happy Clock Going back Day UK and I hope you are all deciding when to have your special extra hour and what to do with it, as I do. The good news is that the clock in the car is right again for the foreseeable so there’s every chance we all be on time for things again. 

Having watched the rugby and cheered on both teams yesterday, but been very secretly pleased that England won (because, not getting into any debate about it, the nation surely requires a feel good diversion and a sense of recovered pride in ourselves right now) Bookhound and I headed off to Cowslip Workshops for refreshment. I’d actually started making a secret family C******s gift and had run out of fabric. My fault, I chose the fat quarters months ago to match some curtains and needed more, and of course luck was only partly on my side. No matter, we matched and I’ll make it blend, it’ll be fine.

We stopped off in Launceston on the way home, for papers and a wander, and I came away with the book (thank you Bookhound) I’d decided I might not read (reasons various and silly) but my Reading Friend had been adamant when we met this week...

’You have to...he really knows how to write a story, I can’t stop reading it...”

The Secret Commonwealth, Volume Two of The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman.

Suddenly I’m transported back to my last return from New Zealand, where half my heart had already been yesterday, as much so as on any other day, because I know just how much winning at rugby means to the Kiwis. Having said goodbye to Offspringette and flying up to Auckland two years ago almost to the day, I was waiting in the airport for the flight to Singapore. A young man sitting in front of me had in his hand La Belle Sauvage, published that very day and I was overcome by covetous thoughts, spending the next hour plotting how I could possibly relieve him of it without getting arrested....because I’d have given anything to have had it to read for the next twenty-seven hours of my journey and there was no bookshop nearby. As it is nothing came to mind but all was not lost because it was the book that served me so well through the weeks of jet-lag that are always my misfortune after the return home.

So I’m going in and no one can stop me.

How about you...

Any more Philip Pullman fans out there...

Has anyone else read it yet...

And what about jet-lag. I’m hopefully planning another trip to New Zealand next year (DV etc) and I wonder if anyone has any miracle suggestions. I suspect it’s all compounded by the farewells because I don’t get it when I arrive there, but does Melatonin work...should I seek some out...

Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters ~ Sarah Watling

My grumble back in 2006, when I started writing the scribbles, was how difficult it was, when you lived away from the centre, to find the good books to read and, though things have moved on a bit since then, I always seem to revert to one reliable source, Literary Review. I subscribed again last year on the basis that  £3.18181818 a month (£35 a year for eleven issues) represented a good investment if I was to keep up to speed with what is out there.

Each edition arrives and there's a bit of a fight for it. Bookhound, who would agree that he is not really a reader of anything unless it involves fish or catching them, loves it because it saves him reading the whole book. He reports back to me because I tend to skim the reviews and head to the final verdict for fear of spoilers in the first instance. I won't read it properly until I have finished the book and written my thoughts here.

'There's a book in here that you will really love,' he said after reading the June issue.

Coming from him it's a fatal statement that can only have one outcome, because I then want the book yesterday so, any excuse for a trip to a bookshop, we head off and I come home clutching a copy of Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. It prompted that post about Sisters a while back and we had an interesting discussion about their proliferation in dedicated biographies like this. 

Born at the close of the nineteenth century, sisters Margery, Daphne, Brynhild and Noel Olivier (Sir Laurence was a cousin and is barely mentioned) are raised as free spirits by parents who live and love by Fabian Society principles. The family are well-connected with in-crowd of the day which reads like something of a Who's Who of early twentieth century society... George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, Bunny Garnett, E. Nesbit and those connections expand as the girls get older to include Rupert Brooke (who was said to love all four of them, but in particular Noel) D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf (who couldn't get the measure of them at all). Meanwhile the sisters develop a seemingly unassailable solidarity... 

'The thing about being an Olivier...was that there were four of them, so they could afford to discard outsiders, knowing that isolation would never be absolute.'

However, times are a-changing for women, their voices are being heard and they are 'asserting a claim in the public realm' and it is clear that there is a world waiting out there for the Oliviers and it must be explored and embraced.

There will be family diversions to Jamaica, where their father Sidney was the governor, but ambitions would set each daughter on a different path and in some cases blazing a trail in a world riven by post First World War chaos and uncertainty. The expected role of women will be to step back, to surrender and sooth the men, and far fewer of them, on their return from the Front.

Daphne will embrace the burgeoning educational philosophies of Rudolf Steiner and eventually set up one of the first schools in the UK.

Noel, against all the odds will train in medicine at a time when many hospitals were closing their doors to women medical students and doctors...

For all the free-thinking upbringing some things hadn't changed and it is Brynhilde who narrowly escapes being the designated daughter who will care for the emotionally demanding parents. Described as 'the great beauty of the four' Bryn will marry (twice) and raise a family that will include a daughter Anne. Anne would marry Quentin Bell and as Anne Olivier Bell go on to edit Virginia Woolf's diaries (among many other accomplishments) 

And then there was Margery..

I'm guessing that 4/4 success stories would be too much to ask and sadly it is poor Margery who succumbs to mental illness and is hospitalised for many years. Sisterly solidarity is all well and good, and the motherly Brynhilde goes to extreme lengths to care for her, but Margery's obsessive, volatile and unpredictable behaviour when convinced that someone is in love with her, when really they are definitely not, will eventually lead to the family's heartbreaking and exhausted decision to have her committed into care.

Whenever I read a book like Noble Savages, whose timeline traverses those years of the First World War, there is always that sudden and overwhelming sadness in the run up that I know what is ahead and they don't. It still seems to be a fruitful source of investigation...everything seemed to be going so well...

'The present is amazingly ours, ' says Rupert Brook to Noel, ' we have inherited the world...'

Noel rejects Rupert Brook's desperate and obsessive love for her in the pre-war years and will have to live with that decision ever thereafter. 

An historian with a master's degree in historical research writing her first book and you'd think there would be endless traps there for the falling into, but to my mind Sarah Watling has sifted and handled her information adeptly. By cleverly marshalling her narrative into seven distinct time frames, omitting those years when life trundles on, because I was left desperate to know how life had treated the sisters in the interim. What had changed, who'd had another baby, who was still married, who was off on a frolic of their own, who had escaped a difficult situation, all making for one very  addictive and fascinating book. The book didn't leave my side for a week. Four women living through times of huge social and cultural change and, as a footnote to the book, I would add there is some interesting background information coupled with honest observations from Sarah Watling about the ethics of a biography like this, which had been resisted by the last remaining sister Noel for many years. 

I'm interested too...how do you find out about the books you might want to read (apart from here occasionally)...

Do you rely on newspaper reviews...bookshop shelves...the library...

And what about biographies...are the famous fair game for a reader’s insatiable appetite to know, or should their reticence be respected.