dovegreyreader scribbles

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece ~ Annabel Pitcher

I frequently get invitations from publishers to be part of something known as a blog tour. This is a chain of posts around a selection of blogs promoting a new book, or asking the author questions. I'm not sure I've often said 'yes' before either, because often the schedule is a bit tight for me to read the book and prepare for it, or I might just not be in the mood to have to read a book to order.

Today I have made an exception and of course this is nothing to do with the fact that David Tennant reads the audio version of a young adult book My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher. 

Or that Orion, the publishers asked if I would be interested in having a short audio excerpt from that reading included in today's post in celebration of the paperback edition now being published under their new young adult / crossover imprint Indigo.

No that's nothing to do with it what-so-ever...

Right, having ascertained that I might actually stoop to new and previously unplumbed depths in order to hear David Tennant's voice on here legitimately, I then realised that, in order for the planets to align, first off I'd actually need to be interested in the book, secondly a copy would need to arrive, thirdly I'd need to make time to read it sharpish and most importantly I'd have to enjoy it a lot.

In fact the minute I read the blurb I knew I had to read the book, David Tennant or no David, who incidentally loved the book so much 'he had to do the audio.'

Ten year old Jamie hasn't cried since it happened. He knows he should have - Jasmine cried, Mum cried, Dad still cries. Roger didn't, but then he is just a cat and didn't know Rose that well really.
Everyone kept saying it would get better with time, but that's just one of those lies that grown-ups tell in awkward situations. Five years on, it's worse than ever...'

Well I've lost a sibling too, and I recognise the challenges ready and waiting to ambush you throughout your life, so yes I'm very interested in the book by now, and to be honest who cares if the David Tennant thing doesn't happen because I can't load the file or something, I'll write about this one anyway.

And my chest went tight and my eyes welled up countless times as I sat alongside young Jamie and listened and watched as the chaos, in the aftermath of the massive tragedy that had killed his older sister Rose, unravelled his family, shattering it into fragments, and all narrated through Jamie's incredibly beguiling and natural children's voice.

Jamie had been five, his twin sisters Rose and Jasmine ten, when the tragedy happened, and in the intervening five years his parents have grieved separately, out of synch and very differently, eventually leading to the breakdown of the marriage, and a move from London to a cottage in the Lake District for Jamie, Jasmine, his Dad and Roger the cat. Whilst the remaining family are all five years older, Rose is forever ten, 'all dead and perfect' her ashes kept by Dad in an urn on the mantelpiece, and her possessions preserved and packed carefully in boxes marked SACRED for the move to Ambleside.

And whilst time may have moved on, heavens above, it hasn't helped one little bit. I often say to people if time is of any help at all it's not the actual passage of time that makes any difference but what you do in that time ... and for Family Matthews life seems worse than ever.

Mum has gone off with someone from her support group, Dad is drinking heavily and barely functioning, Jasmine, now fifteen is taking on the lion's share of the caring but also searching hard for her twin-less identity, and Jamie, starting at a new school, must find his own way as a fully-fledged but seemingly invisible mourner through a morass not of his own making, and most certainly not within the remit of his understanding.

But Jamie, like all children is very capable of feeling and sensing, he is earnest, wants to be a hero and tries desperately to be 'normal' whilst we, looking in, can see that all is very far from normal, and Annabel Pitcher captures all that perfectly in the thought and language of  Jamie. 'The dog in my chest had a droopy sad tale...' says Jamie, and somehow you immediately know exactly how this heart-melting boy, who you will want to hug (and he'll squirm out of it like ten year old boys do) is feeling.

But Jamie also has special powers in the shape of magical thinking and a vivid imagination on his side, to say nothing of his precious Spiderman tee shirt as he explores countless ways to try and mend himself and his broken family. It occurred to me as I read that Jamie had clung onto his capacity for magical thinking much longer than a child usually would, and little wonder. A child may grieve a loss at a young age many times over as they grow into adulthood, Jamie had unwittingly, but very sensibly, hung on to the very thing that could help him most.

Phyllis Silverman author of A Parents Guide to Raising Grieving Children, suggests that in these situations you need a 'road map for a long journey', and that whilst children may not look 'ashen and visibly shaken...inside they are a mess', and thanks to books like Phyllis's we know a great deal more than we ever did about how children react to loss, and what they may need in the aftermath. One thing we know for sure is that for the best outcomes they need reassurance that as a family they will make it through the tragedy, and thus gain resilience to take into adulthood with them, and whilst Jamie might not have the perfect set up, and the road map might be upsidedown, he does have his sister Jasmine. And though Jasmine is in turmoil too, grieving the loss of her twin and much more, she holds it together for Jamie and all mediated through Jamie's eyes, so I was delighted to find a short story at the end of the book, where Jasmine had her say too which offered some completeness...because I had been wondering.

As always I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but Annabel Pitcher draws in several other other themes beyond grief including racial prejudice (which will become clear when you learn how Rose has died) bullying at school and yes it will all be gut-wrenching and heartbreaking along the way, and with a few twists that subvert expectations too. Annabel is not afraid to confront everyone's grief and their actions head on, including those of Jamie's mum, and in a way that will definitely require hankies, as she explores the routes that grief can insist on taking on that road map, and within a family who have all seemingly lost the same person, but may have all actually lost someone quite different, and had to deal with it in their own way, no matter how painful.

So there you have it, lured in by the promise of David Tennant reading us an extract, and now I am so glad that I looked at this a little more closely and agreed to read My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece, it is an exceptional book, confident and accomplished writing tackling a really important subject but in a unique way, and I for one will look forward to reading anything else that Annabel Pitcher writes.

And if you've read this far, here's your reward... Chapter One, some beautiful music and to make David speak for you you may have to right click on this and 'Open in New Tab'

David Tennant reading on dovegreyreader... just for you:-)

and the the tour rolls on around the blogs through the rest of the week so do visit them to hear more thoughts on this book and listen to further extracts ..


PS News Flash :: Congratulations to Annabel Pitcher because My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece has today been shortlisted for the Red House Children's Book Award chosen and voted for entirely by children.

 

 

London calling..the train journey.

The train journey up to London is a bit of a distant memory now until I check out the pictures which I can never resist taking along the way, and don't you just love a good train journey in the middle of half-term week...

Somehow I ended up in a backward-facing seat which is never my direction of choice, but hemmed in on all sides, mainly by Child R, Mother of Child R and their dog, a large lurcher/collie cross called Chippy, I decided to stay put.

I had some nervous moments over R's very precarious and inordinately large cup of juice I can tell you...

And for some reason, probably because I was in the Entertainments Carriage again, I decided to watch something. I was glad of R sitting next to me who at the age of 4 & 3/4 proved completely techno competent on the screen buttons, so I watched out of the corner of my eye as she worked through the screens and lined up Angelina Ballerina for herself and then chose my film.

Now don't ask me why I chose This is It, the final Michael Jackson film, when Julie and Julia was available and I've really been wanting to see that, but I did, and it proved in strange ways not incongruent with the Paul Robeson concert I was to see that evening.

For all his flaws, what a consummate performer Michael Jackson was, meticulous and tireless in rehearsals on stage for the projected fifty venue concert tour he was about to embark on... and there we were, cynics all saying he'd never manage it. Well sadly he didn't, but had he lived, and having now seen this film, I have no doubt this would have been the slick spectacular to beat all slick spectaculars.

I can't believe I'm recommending it so highly but I am and I do, if only for its retrospective on music that, whether we like or not, has been part of our lives since the Jackson Five first hit the charts with I Want You Back in 1969. But also with the trial of his doctor in progress somehow Michael Jackson's tragic and sad demise is in the spotlight once again...and I look at him, gifted in so many ways and wonder quite how awful life and sleeplessness must have been for him to resort to what he did. What utter desperation he must have endured.

I'm not sure if I might have been singing along with my headphones in, which may be why Child R moved across the aisle to sit on on Mother of R's lap (leaving me to stress about the precarious cup of juice) but anyway we approached the sea wall at Teignmouth, and because I was facing backwards I had a completely different view of the sea. Now usually the tide is in, it's dank and overcast and it looks a little murky and menacing, but as Michael started singing I Just Can't Stop Loving You the train emerged from the tunnel and this is what I saw...

My heart wasn't downcast, but if it had been this sight...the beach we would walk along with small children and the Tinker and my mum (who lived for many years in Teignmouth)  plus the music would have been sufficient gladdening in itself.

Chippy (remember Chippy...the lurcherollie dog??) on the other hand was very downcast.

Sprawled across the aisle of the train people had to step over him and lift great huge suitcases over him precariously for the entire journey, and to the FULL VOLUME tones of Owner of Chippy and Mother of R exorting CHIPPY with much exasperation to MOVE...SHIFT...SORRY...STUPID DOG...C-H-I-P-P-Y each time, which was about every thirty seconds.

No matter by this time Michael was onto Thriller and I was gone... almost dancing perhaps.

 

 

London calling ... The Souvenir Press 60th Birthday Concert

Well London was predictably marvellous but after three full-on days, a lot of excitement and many miles walked I was ready for the train home and Devon, but plenty to tell you about.

Tuesday evening was a lovely way to kick off my week with an invitation to the Souvenir Press 60th Birthday concert. Hard to imagine an independent publisher with a more eclectic and unusual list, and run by one man, Ernest Hecht, now in his eighties, and I was honoured to have been invited. I use a lot of Ernest's books in my day job and wrote most recently about Jane Darke's Held By The Sea here. So we gathered for champagne and canapes (I'm boringly tea-total, and even more boringly am shedding some weight having decided that giving birth is no longer a valid excuse when it was twenty-six years ago, so I stuck with water) in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert hall at the Royal College of Music prior to a very special event in the Benjamin Britten theatre also in the college, and I didn't know a soul apart from Ernest. It's not something that bothers me because I'll just park myself next to someone and start a conversation and they can run when I blink if they want to.

Anyway the victims couple I plumped for turned out to be the widow and daughter of the man who discovered the Mary Rose, and what an incredible conversation we then had. Alexander McKee, whose books have been published by Souvenir Press, was long-denigrated for his supposed wild-goose chase which of course eventually found Henry VIII's flagship, and it was wonderful to reminisce about the day we all sat rooted to our TV screens back in 1982 as the ship was finally raised. Alexander McKee's daughter and widow were there of course, watching it all for real but none of us could forget that terrible moment when it all lurched sideways and almost sank again, and as of one the nation gasped.

Next it was into the theatre, an exquisite and intimate venue where we were treated to a performance by Sir Willard White and his 'Robeson Re-Explored' concert...well... quite astonishing. I hope you may be able to sense Willard White's stage presence from this picture, now add in a beautiful bass baritone voice...

Accompanied by a brilliant pianist and guitarist, Sir Willard White sang us through Paul Robeson's repertoire interspersed with dialogue about his life of which I knew very little, but now know a great deal more. There is so much more to the man than Ole Man River which Sir Willard sang as his finale before a much deserved standing ovation, but on the way he took us through spirituals, folk songs (had a job not to stand up and join in with Skye Boat Song and Joshua, both in Vocal Harem's repertoire) some Gershwin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and perhaps my favourite of the evening, Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo. A song I didn't know I liked until I heard it sung by Sir Willard White.

But how grown-up and twenty again did I feel, as I made my way back across London at 11pm to my room in The Penn Club in Bloomsbury, right opposite the old nurse's home I had lived in back in the 1970s. A good night's sleep was in order because if it was Wednesday tomorrow, then that means it was Team Edward Thomas Day.

A really lovely evening and my grateful thanks to Ernest Hecht for the invitation and a truly memorable concert and conversations.

 

Home again...

...and lots to tell you including the low-down on this,

and how I came by a bottle of Laureate's Choice, Carol Ann Duffy's sherry butt stipend,and which is now gracing my Bookroom.

But it's all about books and I was very excited to find a pile waiting for me when I arrived home including this which I have been waiting for with much antsinthepantsation and will be making a start this very evening...

Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport to be published next week. I'm going back to London for a whistle-stop and to hear Helen talking about this book at the V&A on November 15th...unmissable.

Charles Dickens A Life by Claire Tomalin. I saw Claire Tomalin interviewed a few weeks ago and she said quite clearly this will be her last biography, but both these books seem like perfect scene-setting for our forthcoming year of Middlemarch and George Eliot so I'm going to dive in.

Someone mentioned George Eliot's birth and death dates as November 22nd and December 22nd respectively... so shall we kick off on November 22nd as a start date for beginning the first instalment of our shared read of Middlemarch and we could aim to end the book on December 22nd 2012.

Happy Bee Day...

So I am still in London and tonight I am taking you all somewhere very special... I hope you have best frocks ready because we have been invited to the launch party for Carol Ann Duffy's latest poetry collection The Bees, so it's time for a Bee post.

I think I probably go on about it a little too much. In fact every time bee-keeping is mentioned by anyone I just can't stop myself saying it...

'I did a bee-keeping course you know, just never kept the bees.'

But I did and I would recommend a course to anyone who doesn't want to keep bees, as well as to everyone who does. The Tinker gave me the course for Christmas several years ago, and for ten winter weeks I trekked out to Duchy College for a course that taught me more than I could ever have imagined about a subject I didn't even know I was interested in.

I dug out my notes because I always take notes at evening talking things in order to stay awake, but in fact this was too interesting to fall asleep, and all over again I am captivated by the division of labour amongst the worker bees within the hive...

Age 0-6 days they clean the hive. From 3-9 days old they feed the brood... then they attend the queen feeding and grooming her, then they move onto honey processing. Between 15- 25 days they move onto hive ventilation (it's all in the wing action as I recall) and then guard duty, then onto nectar collection until death at about 6 weeks of age in summer. All 60,000 of them.

Then the queen, genetically identical to the workers but more developed because of the consumption of large amounts of 'royal jelly' in the larval stage. If the queen is lost from the hive the workers will sense the absence of her pheromones within thirty minutes, become agitated and start rearing a new one.

Easy come, easy go royalty.

As for the drones... their sole job is to mate with the queen and they will be ejected from the hive each autumn.

And then there are the hives, Nationals, or Langstroths or Smiths, it's all very technical and important and a whole new language of brood frames, foundations and supers will follow.

Then moving onto the beekeeper's year

January ~ leave alone
February ~  check if need supplementary sugar
March ~ remove the mouse guards, feed with syrup if necessary
April - July ~ main activity of the season
August ~ remove the crop
October ~ the bees will be bringing in a lot of stores mostly from ivy, time to settle them down for winter

Sadly I seem to have the most notes on pests and diseases and then you realise how near we have come to losing something so precious in the past, and how near we could come yet again right now with the potentially disastrous Colony Collapse Disorder. In the 1920s it was the monks of Buckfast Abbey who saved our bee bacon with their hives way up on Dartmoor and out of range of infection.

I have been welded to Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees. It is as rich and as golden as you would expect and I'm reading it daily, often the same poem several days in succession, and slowly working my way through a very beautiful book and identifying powerfully with the Poet Laureate's suggestion

'......bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.'

So all this shoud be leading to an appraisal on Carol Ann Duffy's collection but it's not because it is way too soon, her poetry takes weeks to sink in, absorb and surface for me, let alone write about, so instead it's about the email I received from Sean Borodale asking if I would be interested to see a copy of Pages From a Bee Journal, a sample of extracts from a poem-journal of beekeeping kept by Sean for two years after he took up beekeeping for the first time.

Well yes of course I would, I'm in bee-mood, and by return my copy arrived. What a wonderful evening I had with this little collection, just sixteen pages, hand stitched together (I think) and after reading the poems then digging back through all my bee books.

Based in Somerset, Sean chronicles the lives and work of the bees and the relationship between keeper and bees from the moment he collects the nucleus of his new colony from a farmer...

He wears a veil, this farmer, no gloves
and lifts open a dribbly wax-clogged
    blackwood box
We in our whites mute with held breath.

And I imagined them in their embarrassingly pristine brand new bee suits and that moment a week later when they pluck up the courage to have a look at their new bees for themselves...

Lifting the heavy brood frame weeping with bees
we are wax, translucent-feeling
The weight already promises.

Into June and using the bee smoker which stops the bees 'bubbling over' so Joe, our bearded, be-hand-knitted-jumpered, bee teacher told us.

Sean has doubts about the smoker...

Smoke language drifted unsaid. Will not
use the smoke again; it seems unkind

And then the swarm. Now swarming is fascinating. Inevitable with most colonies according to our man Joe and most commonly from the third week in May to early June and usually at about midday to 2pm. Always collect a swarm in the evening he told us (as if, I thought to myself)  find the queen and the rest will follow.

For Sean it's his poem of 14th June : Swarm?

...I did not expect that they would do this: go

Examine,
almost crushing
a thick slab of bees pouring out of the slot
They went south...
False alarm, what next?

Well I was riveted and perhaps my mind is also attuned to the whole bee thing from all those Sylvia Plath bee poems, and what about all the patchwork hexagons. I tend to spot them wherever I go and  they surely have their origins in honeycombs, so I wasn't likely to miss the little growing motif after each of Sean's poems as another hexagon is added.

Everything is conspiring to sit me down with a good session of hand-stitched English patchwork over papers this winter, I can feel it coming on..once I get back from this London jaunt.

But back to the launch party... OK stick with me everyone, let's go find the canapes and the Poet Laureate.

 

 

 

 

 

Team Edward Thomas ~ Fran's visit to Agny Military Cemetery.

Agny Military Cemetery ~ a visit by Fran September 19th 2011

Whilst on a road trip to relatives in France recently I was able to visit Agny Military Cemetery. Arras is a short way off the main A26 road from Calais, and with the aid of local maps I had the cemetery pin pointed, and the route written down. Although I had looked at the area on Google Earth and noted it's proximity to the road into Arras it never occurred to me there would not be an entrance gate in off the road. Spotting a signpost by a wall we stopped and discovered the small footpath seen in the photo. Of course it was then I realised that this is a WW1 cemetery so no longer used. There is no need for an entrance road.

I made my way along the backs of gardens, where cosmos flowered, tomatoes and courgettes grew and children played. Two stone pillars mark the entrance, and in front of me were six long rows of identical white stones, a cross halfway up one side and three short rows by the hedges. As with all cemeteries managed by the Commonwealth War Graves commission it was immaculately kept. Flame red roses still bloomed amongst the well tended graves, and on all sides it was surrounded by large trees.


Throughout my visit I was aware of the wind in the leaves, a gentle, soothing sound. Finding row C, grave 43 took no time for it is close to the entrance. I stood in front of Edward Thomas' grave. Like some of the others it bears his rank, name, regiment and the date of death. Right at the bottom, half obscured by the plants is engraved "POET".


I have seen the house where he was born, those he grew up in and the three in Steep he lived in with Helen. Now I stood at his final resting place. All I have read of this summer about this talented yet enigmatic man ended here. So far from home, from loved ones, from his beloved English and Welsh countryside yet this is quiet corner in France now; only trees, birdsong and wind here. He may have liked the solitude, I doubt he found any when here in 1917.

Looking around I noticed two large cherry trees planted near the entrance. Iwondered is their blossom white? Does it fall like snowflakes across the grass and headstones each spring? It brought to mind "Cherry Trees" written in May 1916

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

The day before we left for France I had gathered some rosemary from my garden along with marjoram, to lay on the grave as a tribute from the Adlestrop group . Rosemary for remembrance and the marjoram I chose as I knew it grew close to ET's memorial stone up on Shoulder of Mutton Hill in Hampshire. I had written out the last three verses of "Roads" to lay with the flowers.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living, but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

These I left on his headstone on behalf of us all.

I think I speak for everyone when I say how much I have learned reading Matthew Hollis' book, and the pleasures enjoyed on all the trails I have followed on from it. I have come to like the crisp, clean lines of verse which manage to convey so much, sometimes in not many words.

Turning back to the entrance I signed the visitor's book and photographed the entry for Edward Thomas for you all to see.

I then spent some time looking at the rest of the headstones. There are 413 burials here, and it did not take long for me to realise probably less than half had a name on them. So many simply read; "A Soldier of the Great War".

Some had a regiment added, but too many are simply unknown. I am not able to fully comprehend the horror of the trenches yet seeing row upon row of those who left no name has led me to have some awareness of the enormity of loss across Europe during 1914-1918. Agny cemetery is just one of so many all over this area. We passed at least another six on the road taken that day.

Then away we drove passing signposts with names I had read of in Edward Thomas' War Diary; Dainville, Mendicourt, Achicourt, Doullens. I was reminded of a description of the area Edward had written about in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon:

"This is a fine hilly country with trees on the roads and in a few woods. The
villages lie along the slopes above the streams, with tiled roofs and mud in
brick walls, and churches with towers and short spires something like
Sussex…...there are hardly any hedges".

The countryside around Arras is little changed today.

Team Edward Thomas update...

Team Edward Thomas, comprising a group of nine brave souls who volunteered for the experiment and have been reading and discussing Now All Roads Lead to France, Matthew Hollis's biography of the last years of Edward Thomas's life, have not been idle behind the scenes.

The book has opened innumerable reading trails for many of us, digressions through Helen Thomas's memoir Under Storm's Wing giving us completely new perspectives on her life now that we have more knowledge of Edward... explorations of the lives of some of the women with whom Edward had very close friendships, including the poet Eleanor Farjeon and the artist Edna Clarke Hall. Other biographies and diversions into collections of letters and other memoirs have come onto the radar too, and Fran has topped it all off for us by taking advantage of just about every location she finds herself in, unearthing an Edward Thomas connection and sending pictures.

Fran's father, Harold, who has just celebrated his ninetieth birthday and has also been on a walking holiday in the Lake District recently, is a retired British Rail architect. Into his eighties Harold took up calligraphy as a hobby (Fran and I do like to keep our respective octogenarian fathers busy) and he had already, by chance, done a beautifully illustrated and hand bound copy of Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop...our group's chosen working name.


Harold's exquisite illustrations have enchanted us and I am very grateful to Harold and Fran who have agreed I can post them here for you all to see.






The Team Edward Thomas project was all a bit of an experiment, but it seems to have worked and I know that I feel extremely fortunate to have been a part of it all because it somehow encapsulates what can be achieved... take one blog + one book + a group of enthusiastic readers, light the blue touch paper and off we go.

As we near the end of our shared journey with Now All Roads Lead to France, it has been a good time to reflect on what the book has done for me.

I feel I am nearer to the truth about a life that had been previously wrapped in some rather airy fairy romantic notions about a war poet tragically taken before his time and leaving us this wonderful legacy of words... well to an extent that is true, but my impressions are now tempered with the harsher and sometimes less palatable realities of Edward Thomas's life and loves. I won't reveal more because having finally sent our questions about the book off to Matthew Hollis, he may be addressing many of those issues in his responses which I will post here in due course.

This week a group of us (and we will be taking all of you along virtually of course) will be meeting up at Faber HQ in London to talk with Matthew in person... Nancy is flying over from the US to be there, so it will be our first and last gathering to talk about this book. Full report and pictures to follow of course.

I have come full circle and am back with the poems and not just Adlestrop, and remain grateful for the fact that, thanks to a combination of circumstances and friendships, Edward Thomas did allow that poetic grace to surface and make itself known.The poems really do reward close attention and I am getting a real feel for them now.

My current favoured one...

For these

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:

A house that shall love me as I love it,
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash-trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:

A garden I need never go beyond,
Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond:

For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
And also that something may be sent
To be contented with, I ask of Fate.

I have also emerged with a much clearer understanding too of the important context of the poems on a timeline, straddling the Georgian poets and their inclination for tradition and nostalgia, via the Imagists and their precise clarity through to the Modernists spear-headed by T.S.Eliot, who just broke all the rules because that's what rules were for.

Meanwhile the redoubtable Fran again, off to France to visit family a few weeks ago, made sure that her route took her to Agny War Cemetery and a visit to Edward Thomas's final resting place on behalf of all of us.

Fran's moving account of that visit with her pictures will be on here tomorrow.

 

 

Why Willows Weep - Contemporary Tales from the Woods

I've been in e mail conversation with Tracy Chevalier this last week about all sorts of things... our Girl With a Pearl Earring discussions on here, how Tracy and I had somehow missed each other at Port Eliot Festival on several occasions but would hope to meet there next year, about what I now hear is the fabulously quiet and peaceful Vermeer exhibition in Cambridge, and also about Why Willows Weep, the book of short stories that Tracy has just edited with Simon Prosser for The Woodland Trust.

Tracy then very kindly sent me a copy of Why Willows Weep (along with, in the interests of transparency, a copy of Girl With a Pearl Earring and Remarkable Creatures, having asked me first of course and to which I replied 'oh very yes please' inordinately fast.)

You may recall our wonderful afternoon with William Fiennes in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot, when amongst other things William read us his own contribution to this Woodland Trust collection..Why the Ash Has Black Buds...

'The trees have always had some idea of what happens to them when they die. In forests they saw their neighbours toppled by wind or age and rot into the earth, and their roots sent up descriptions of peat and coal in vast beds and seams...'

When the rumour reached the trees that some may be pulped into paper, and that paper could make books and how much more interesting that might be than becoming a boring old rafter and so the ash tree dreams...and I won't spoil the ending but it's beautiful, and we were very moved as we listened on that hot July afternoon.

A real galaxy of writers have come together to support this book and every copy sold will enable the planting of five trees..

Richard Mabey on 'Why Nothing Grows Under the Beech Tree (or Does It?)

'Don't believe what they say about the word becoming flesh. The word became wood...'

Tracy Chevalier's own contribution, Why Birches Have Silver Bark... a really 21st century twist on an old fairy tale of love and rendezvous.

Salley Vickers writes the title story Why Willows Weep, and I remember Salley telling the audience at a literary event that her name, spelt with that carefully placed 'e' meant willow, and perhaps that explained her affinity for Sylvia Townsend Warner's book Lolly Willowes which Salley recommended as a favourite and I rushed out and bought.

Other writers in this wonderfully generous volume include Joanne Harris, Phillipa Gregory, Maggie O'Farrell, Amanda Craig, Philip Hensher, Kate Mosse, James Robertson, Rachel Billington, Maria McCann, Terence Blacker, Catherine O'Flynn, Tahmima Anam, Ali Smith, Blake Morrison and Susan Elderkin all contributing to a legacy of wonderful grown-up fables about trees.

I didn't have to walk far to find the real thing either...





If you like tress you'll love these, the book is a treasure and available from The Woodland Trust here, and perhaps this quote from an interview with Jill Butler from the charity says it all...

"You can't create ancient trees you can only let them grow, and we need the new trees in the ground that will become the ancients of the future,"

 

and here's an out-take...

'I know where the holly berries are but I'll need some help.... can you just climb up there ...no...hold the book nearer the berries... no don't be daft, I've got to be able to see the title.....can you move your thumb...'

My thanks to Bookhound and Sticks for their assistance...

Arrivals in the fiction department...

Well, there have been quite a few but some that I definitely wanted to bring to your attention because they have certainly attracted mine, and for reasons various as you will see.

Apologies for Virginia, she's become a bit of a media tart, sneaking into all the pictures at the moment.

Blooms of Darkness ~ Aharon Appelfeld

I picked up a handful of novels by Aharon Appelfeld some years ago and knew that I would read these books by, in the words of Philip Roth, 'fiction's foremost chronicler of the Holocaust', all in good time. I see I managed one in 2007, The Retreat but none since, so I am grateful for the arrival of Blooms of Darkness as a timely reminder of a great author.... eleven-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to live in the comparitive safety of a brothel and with the prostitute Mariana, whilst the ghetto around them is being liquidated by the Nazis. Whilst Mariana's life spirals downwards, Hugo's need to protect her will grow into love....

The Wine of Solitude ~ Irene Nemoirovsky

I think I may have been begging for Sandra Smith to hurry up with the translation of The Wine of Solitude after I had read mention of it in various books about Irene Nemirovksy, and finally a copy has arrived. Considered to be the most autobiographical of Irene's fiction, this novel traces the troubled relationship between a young girl and her mother and via the Great War and the Russian Revolution as Helene rgows from an unhappy child to an angry young woman. I need to be in right frame of mind to read Irene (something saddens me every time I pick up one of her books) so next time I am this will be my choice. And my thanks to Nancy who sent me a link to this fascinating article about Irene's own daughters' experiences of growing up with her.

How it All Began ~ Penelope Lively

A new book from Penelope Lively is always a joy and this one, with its random event that sets off a chain of others, explores just how marriages can fracture and heal themselves, how opportunities may appear and disappear, how lovers who may never have met somehow do and I can't wait to read it...and gorgeous cover too.

It's Fine By Me ~ Per Petterson

More cause for celebration, a new novel from Per Petterson, a much-loved author here, I haven't read a duff one yet and still have Per Peterson's talk at Dartington a few years ago ringing in my head, about the way he just knows the very instant a book must end, and how tortuous the translation process from Norwegian to English can be when he is so attuned to sentence rhythm. Audun, starting in his new school is asked to describe his former life in the country...so will he reveal the times he has spent living in cardboard boxes, or the day his drunken father fired shots into the ceiling. Now living with his mother in the working class end of Oslo and happy to talk endlessly about Hemingway and Jack London, Audun will have to make some choices about which direction his life may go next.

Catch 22 ~ Joseph Heller

Well I've been meaning to re-read it for years after reading it when I was about eighteen purely to impress a then boyfriend who did eventually dump me, and even though I did read Catch 22 when I should probably have been concentrating on Hamlet or Our Mutual Friend. But a new fiftieth annivesary edition has arrived and I'm tempted...should I?? Will it still make me laugh??

Next to Love ~ Ellen Feldman

I really did enjoy Ellen Feldman's writing in Scottsboro so what will I make of Next to Love. Three friends, newly married to their first loves at the outbreak of World War Two and with the men away fighting are faced with the arrival of sixteen telegrams one morning bearing news...the promise is of a 'remarkable novel you are unlikely to forget.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm ~ Stella Gibbons

So even though everyone says there is nothing to match Cold Comfort Farm I'm still delighted at the thought of this collection of festive stories with Adam Lambsbreath handing out unpleasant gifts, and the half-crazed Starkadders searching for the symbols of ill-luck in the Christmas pudding... Reuben finds the bad sixpence which means he will lose his memory all year, but who's going to find the coffin nail... delicious, can't wait but will set this aside for December.

Silk Road ~ Colin Falconer

I've been eying this on the shelf since it arrived and even had a quick glance and I think I could leap into the world of the Knights Templar and survive if Colin Falconer is in the driving seat. It looks epic and big but it is a period of history I know pathetically little about, so in blank-slate-mode I would have no preconceptions about any of it. In fact I'll be fooled by anything in that case won't I. I do quite like the sound of a writer who was a cabbie before working as a journalist and scriptwriter, and who travelled the Silk Road through China for his research, apparently braving dog smugglers, projectile vomit and faulty streering rods whilst negotiating U-bends on sheer cliffs ... the man deserves my attention if only as thanks for his perseverance.

Nightwoods ~ Charles Frazier

Loved Cold Mountain, missed reading Thirteen Moons though have it here, and now Nightwoods has arrived and...er...er.. I really like the cover. Luce acts as caretaker to a dilapidated and isolated holiday lodge on the shores of a lake, her days are long and peaceful and solitary until the stranger children come, bringing fire, and murder and love. Right, I'm convinced I have to give it a go because it looks lovely next to the yellow in the kitchen.

Sebastian Barry @ Topping's Bookshop in Bath

Sadly I couldn't get there myself but I despatched an envoy to Sebastian Barry's event at Topping's Bookshop in Bath, and my thanks to Carol who has sent in her report of what sounds like a truly memorable event...

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So, there I was in a good seat with a small notebook, and trying to look as unlike a blog spy as I could (think I got away with it!). In came a tall, handsome (more handsome than the pictures) man who immediately engaged with the audience by telling us he was going to sing!

Sebastian Barry introduced On Canaan's Side and set it in the context of his other stories, saying he felt like the co-author or editor, as this was Lilly's history and he was just re-telling it. Incidentally, he always spoke of his characters as if they were real people, more than any other author I've heard - at the end he was recounting the day the Queen came to Dublin and said he knew that Lilly's house was just along the way in the precincts of Dublin Castle, but the Queen of course didn't know that!

 

He described Lilly and Tadg when they were first together and that time when we are just realising we may have met our life's partner, and we keep on darting little glances at them, wanting to see them, and half hoping to have the glance returned, but half hoping not to be seen. He then began to read the passage when Lilly describes the visit to the gallery in Chicago (will say no more for fear of spoilers).

 

Well, that was when the whole room came alight. Sebastian did indeed sing - a snatch of the the folk song from the book, in a real singer's voice, and then launched into Lilly's persona, voice, stance - it was much more than just a reading and as I felt a broad grin creep across my face at the sheer exuberance of it, I glanced to each side of me and many others were grinning too.He went on through this dramatic episode, raising the tension, raising, raising, until his voice dropped at the end of the passage, for reasons those of you who have read it will remember. He was visibly moved, wiping his brow before turning to the audience as himself again.

 

It's not many authors who gain ringing applause at the end of each section of their reading, but I think we were so affected by the drama it seemed the only thing to do. Immediately there was a question about the tradition of the shanachie or storyteller in Ireland. He said his mother had been an actor and he had learned about words from sitting in rehearsal rooms as a child.

 

Sebastian Barry then spoke about the theme of violence in history, quoting Desmond Tutu as saying there was nothing a man could do that he wouldn't have done in other circumstances. Then describing a relation of his a couple of generations back who had fled to America after being given a death sentence related to the murder of Michael Collins. This had been hushed up in the family and other family members had a quite different explanation (which they believed) for him emigrating.

 

He clearly has an interesting history himself, with forebears on both sides of the divide and he spoke a lot about the theme of forgiveness. In a 'grown up' country there is a hunger to delve back into the secrets as it is only by knowing about the roots that you get rid of the lingering fear.

 

After reading two more passages and singing a little more we had to be dragged back to reality by the clock. This was a truly bravura performance by a very warm, engaging, funny and emotional man and made me realise, not for the first time, how very lucky we are in Bath to have Topping's and their commitment to bringing the very best authors to speak.

My thanks to Carol, blog spy extra-ordinaire for taking the time and trouble to take notes for us all,  and for the rest of us who couldn't be there here's a treat, make a pot of tea and settle down with this... an interview that Sebastian Barry recorded just before that event at Toppings in Bath and with singing...

 

1Q84 progress report...

Sorry to go on, but what a glorious surprise this book is proving to be. I hadn't realised quite how ready I was for a completely new reading direction, or that I would be totally and utterly mesmerised by Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, and I can see the sense and pleasure, if only it were possible, of this approach to reading it as recommended by the Los Angeles Times...

Here's an unorthodox suggestion: Try to read Haruki Murakami's "1Q84" in as close to a single sitting as you can. It won't be easy — the novel clocks in at 926 pages and is often densely allusive, if readable throughout. Still, there's something about the book that requires the deep immersion, the otherworldly sense of connection/disconnection, that only an extended plunge allows. You want to get up from these pages feeling groggy, as if you've been wrenched out of everyday experience, drawn into a landscape where the boundary between reality and imagination has been rendered moot.

I can see exactly how that would work here because 150 pages in the book is completely hypnotising and has been very difficult to put down, it really is a wrench to leave this increasingly strange world that Murakami describes, peopled by even stranger, slightly off-kilter characters doing even more slightly off- kilter things

I'm not sure if this is typical of his style or not, I'll leave that to all you experts out there, but what should at times be seemingly monotonous if not boringly excessive detail has me gripped and engaged at every level and with a narrative voice that I love. Every detail matters and I don't want to miss a single thing.

Thankfully all this coincides with a week off work and some travel, so plenty of reading time to come and thank goodness there will be no year-long-interest-sapping wait for Book Three, out next Tuesday.

1Q84 day... the Indie Bookseller comes to dovegreyreader...

Right, look, now I know I am the worst offender...

• Yes, I do get free books
• Yes I can ask publishers for copies of books I would like.
• Yes I will often feel a little too embarrassed to do that (even after all this time) and if it is something I really want I will buy it.
• Yes I will then hunt around for the best value.
• Yes that is often on Amazon.
• Yes I do have a Kindle.
• Yes I do love it.
• Yes I am on a limited book budget

Oh I could go on and on offloading the guilt-ridden confessions but when Ron of the Plymouth Bookshops (and who we see at Port Eliot each year)  put out a tweet that he was really excited about Tuesday 18th October, and not because it was the day of the Booker Prize,

looking forward to murakami day tues can't wait free cd janacek sinfonietta with each book. Its the music which binds your soul to 1Q84

So publication day for the latest offering from Haruki Murakami and 1Q84 clearly a book that Ron rates very highly and with which there  would be a free CD with very copy bought.

Now I've had my eye on this one. It sold over a million copies in the first month of publication in Japan, and whilst I have never really focused my attention on Haruki Murakami I had always planned to one day. But this sounds like a real epic and I love the sound of it...

The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.

Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.

Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?

Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.

I half wondered whether a gift-wrapped copy might appear in the post from the publishers, which it hadn't... not even an un-gift-wrapped one. I'm sure I could have asked for one and it would have arrived, but I had decided to have the buying pleasure and nab it at £9.99 on Amazon, or perhaps the £8.99 Kindle version, until Ron's tweet that is.

Then I thought perhaps I'd actually buy into the publication day buzz and drive into Ron's shop in Plymouth, The University Bookseller.. and buy a copy there.

Hmm this is the problem...

£8 for petrol, £4.50 to park, £10 for lunch, £30 for things I didn't really need in M&S but might as well get while I'm in there, ditto £20 in Boots, plus £20 for the book, and probably £20 for another couple that I saw and liked the look of but didn't really need (that new Alexandra Harris biography of Virginia Woolf probably) so over £100 for a book.

Does anyone else have this trouble.

That's why I sometimes shop on Amazon.

Anyway  I tweeted back (and bearing in mind I am a very recalcitrant tweeter because I just can't believe people are interested in my 140 letters + spaces epithets) 'Will you have them in the Plymouth shop.' and it's true, not many people would be riveted by that.

'Yes' replies Ron 'shall I drop you one round?'..again not of international interest or likely to 'trend' ( which is what happens when you stir up a twitter storm and everyone's talking about you,) but Ron lives just over the way from us on the other side of the Tamar Valley.

'Oh yes please, as long as I get the free CD, and you are faster than Amazon?' (73 characters)

Incidentally Ron did tell me to look at Hive as an alternative place to buy online and I am...

Anyway true to his word the Bookseller came to dovegreyreader bearing the book on the morning of publication day, and I now have it in my hands (incidentally there was no way the cat was moving from that spot.)

Now that's what I call good, old-fashioned 5* service.

Cheers Ron, you're a legend.

And is anyone else planning to read 1Q84??

Any Murakami fans out there with other recommends??

 

and the winner is..

The Random Number Generator declares No 46 Carol..the one who wrote this comment in case that helps sort out which Carol...

Carol said...

I know I would enjoy the book. Please include me in your draw.

Your blog is a daily read for me. Thanks for all the very enjoyable posts - and it's because of you that I finally read WAR AND PEACE!

A lovely copy of The Sense of and Ending on its way to you as soon as we have your address Carol, so send it to me dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and we will whisk the book up to Hilary in the village post office soonest.

The Sense of an Ending ... and a prize draw.

So the skirmish is done for another year and I think we might all be heaving a sigh of relief that it's over. The judges didn't think Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side was as good as I did... a travesty, and we will all have one, but they did like The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes and thankfully so did I ... very much indeed.

KevinFromCanada liked it too and don't miss his CBC radio interview with Shelagh Rogers where he talks about blogging, the Booker and the Giller and books books and more books.

So The Sense of an Ending  just in case you need a reminder...

... 150 pages of incrediby valuable writing, less is more, the writer who trusts the reader to 'get it' even if poor Tony can't; an elegiac novel about ageing and time, and the cover with its slightly rain-washed look, the feel of an over-exposed photograph and the dandelion head with the drifting seeds somehow all felt right too ... didn't we as children  blow the seeds away as a means of telling the time?

For me a book about life's expectations and definitions of happiness, about nostalgia and Tony's take on it...

'But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions - and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives - then I plead guilty.'

The rest of my thoughts are here, and I am immediately cast back to a very hot August afternoon in that post-Port Eliot Festival haze, when I sat in the shade of the apple trees and read this book for the first time and marvelled, yes a really much-deserved win for Julian Barnes.

And I have a spare copy of The Sense of An Ending sitting here, so names in comments if you would like to be in with a chance of winning this year's Booker Prize winner, and let's push the boat out and make it worldwide and give Hilary a challenge in the village post office.

We'll do the draw very soon.

Booker Day & a letter to authors...

So it's the sixth year that I have covered the Booker on here, except this year I've hardly covered it at all. Time and whim have run away with me as my reading has dashed off on a frolic of its own.

But what a strange and controversial Booker year we are in the midst of, what with internecine combat over on the Man Booker forum and then the usual bold pronouncements that the longlist has sold the most copies ever...a bit like A level results really, year on year it has to be more to prove it's doing a good job.

Now there's been all the kerfuffle and hot-under-the-collar chestnuts (let the hedgerows speak... picked this bowlful along the lane) about quality and standards, and what's literary and what's not and who decides what exactly is 'a readable book'...

"For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize. But as numerous statements by that prize's administrator and this year's judges illustrate, it now prioritises a notion of 'readability' over artistic achievement," 

Hmm, 'readability'...'artistic achievement'...this could get messy because now everyone out there is trying to define what that may mean. Personally I would be more inclined to make a rather foggy distinction about a book where what happens is all that happens, versus a book where most of what happens doesn't happen where and in the way that you first think it has, and that may only dawn on you days if not weeks later and you know the book is a keeper because you would read it again...and again ... muddled, yes, but I think I know what I mean.

So column inches now adding up to several miles plus a great big debate over at the Bookseller about the possibility of a new prize to uphold these standards whatever they are...

The Literature Prize, for which funding is "currently" being procured, will be awarded to the best novel written in the English language and published in the UK in a given year, with the writer's country of origin not a factor.

Hilary Mantel, talking in that recent TV interview, felt that she could never become the writer she was meant to be until she had won the ultimate recognition of the Booker Prize. That recognition meant everything to her, and I can't help but wonder about the impact of all this argy bargy on the authors. I'm sure only a small proportion of us work in such an overtly prize-driven environment... I have never won anything in about thirty years in the NHS apart from hyacinth-scented bath cubes in Friends of the Surgery raffles.

I have this sad, and I hope misplaced vision of writers out there whose writing lives may be predicated on the dream of prizes, because the industry almost demands it, and who are sitting in their writing sheds thinking...

'So what do I have to do to win this thing... to win anything...'

And feeling demoralised.

Well I suppose you've got to write a prize-winning book, but I'm not sure anyone can know what one of those might be. Literary prizes largely funded by private money will surely always be about judges various and their own personal literary background and subjective personal taste, all laced with a big dollop of compromise I suspect, so no point in second-guessing though we all love to stick an oar in.

But feel the need to fly the flag for the authors and I'm not sure many of us write actual letters to them these days, real paper ones. I'm wondering if any of you do.. or may have done in the past, and if so did you get a reply??

I'm starting to feel I should because it gave me great pleasure to write proper paper thank-you letters to all the writers who visited the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival this year, and it's something I don't do often enough in these days of e mail.

And I wonder too... if there are any authors reading this, what does receiving a real letter mean to you??

If I wrote to an author right now, this very week, I'd be sitting here at my tiny Emily Dickinson-sized writing desk at the bedroom window. I would of course want to thank them for their book and tell them why, but I hope it wouldn't be seen as impertinent or patronizing to then urge them not to be downhearted about all this Booker (and Literary Prize) shenanigans, which all seems in danger of  own-goaling and damp squibbing itself  from where I'm sitting (which is a very long way away). I'd want to say please just ignore this prize lark and get your head down and keep writing, because for all that I witter on about prize lists here, my preference rarely wins anyway so perhaps they aren't worth a fig when you are giving me the books you do.

Were Michael Mayne alive I would have been writing to him for sure because having quoted him last week and written about The Enduring Melody yesterday I'm about to repeat that and add more, because a man nearing the end of his life seems to have cut to the essence of what I would like my reading to give me...

'Life in all its messiness...characters allowed to make moral choices which may or may not be the author's and shaped by those choices for good or ill...Where everyone has a right to be understood : that's what impels the creative imagination of the writer and the empathetic response of the reader. The possibility, through a listening that is not judgemental, of getting inside another's skin, the enlarging of your own understanding of what it is to be someone else... an awakening of an awareness of other realities, other personalities, other people's lives.'

And  he quotes Seamus Heaney who talks of...

'writers who can lift the reader's hand and put it down on the bare wire of the present': an image, a phrase, an idea, that strikes us as true, even universal. No matter when or where a writer lived his or her life he or she may tell you something you need to know about your own.'

And we'd all probably add a zillion more ideas of our own to that suggestion, but I hope we'd all agree that we find that very extra something in novels various on a regular basis. Michael Mayne, whilst feeling 'overwhelmed by the sheer weight of books demanding attention and the shortness of time ahead', freely admits...

'I have learned much more about human nature and, I believe, about the transcendent, about good and evil, sin and grace - from the novelist and the poet than from the theologian where only rare writers combine the insight, the humanity and the sheer readability that draw you back to them.'

Perhaps that's what matters to us ordinary readers me hearties, the insight, humanity and sheer readability that draws us back time and again... not the prizes.

 

The Enduring Melody ~ Michael Mayne

'There is a different country we enter when we suffer, and that those who have learned to feel their way through different forms of darkness, and spent time - for whatever reason - treading its paths, recognise each other and are more likely to turn to those who have been there too. The gift of empathy is all the better for being hard-won,'

...the words of Michael Mayne in his introduction to The Enduring Melody.

It is several years since I read Susan Hill's staunch and sincere recommend of  Michael Mayne's book, in the days when she wrote a blog on her website. Michael Mayne had been a personal friend of Susan's, the Dean Emeritus of Westminster and former Head of Religious Programmes (Radio) at the BBC.

I swiftly bought the book and then couldn't read it.

My early edition has the lovely Samuel Palmer pen and ink wash painting The Bright Cloud on the cover which I thought apt and which made the book seem very enticing, but perhaps Ronald Blythe in his 'puff' on that cover  encapsulates why I may have bottled out..

'An autobiography of dying. It was brave to write it and it needs courage to read it, but the benefits are enormous...'

Clearly and despite all the benefits therin my courage failed me back in 2006, but that was before I had embarked on the day job I do now which has involved intensive revision and updating of my training as a bereavement counsellor in the early 1990s.

So when I picked up The Enduring Melody again last week I shouldn't have been surprised to find it was like a completely different 'me' opening the first page, because I now see I have developed the strategies that give me that courage to proceed.. so this is not a health warning exactly, but you may want to be aware that whilst the book starts in health, and that was the intention throughout, it becomes something very different and at times distressing when Michael Mayne is diagnosed with what proves to be a highly malignant tumour of his jaw. He finds himself navigating his way through the 'questioning country of cancer' and that was not on the itinerary.

Ronald Blythe goes on to say...

'Michael Mayne belongs to the great priest-writers. He takes on the issues of mortality, both in religion and literature, and makes us all discover what pain has taught him. It is a wonderful achievement.'

I don't know many priest-writers but I'd put Gerard Hughes and Thomas Merton on my list for sure.

Alan Bennett, another close friend of Michael Mayne's describes the book thus

' An heroic book.... his courage, his humour and his tone of voice do not desert him; humbling and inspiring, it is a validation both of his faith and his humanity.'

I should comment on the 'faith' aspect too.

I would not normally pick up a book that described Christianity in quite so much depth, and I will admit that I skimmed a few parts. Whilst I know they were an essential part of Michael Mayne's journey, and a real questioning and affirmation of his lifelong beliefs when put to the test, for a lapsed Anglican like myself the theology seemed of less relevance on this reading. For anyone with a particular interest, that will be essential reading whilst the medical and literary content may not... so this is a book that can be read selectively.

That is in no way to detract from all the threads of his life that Michael Mayne skillfully weaves together as he explores the ways in which the kaleidoscope of his life 'has slipped a little,' and what subsequently supports him through the harrowing process of the surgery, the treatment and the pain of his final illness. Not only his faith, and prayer as stillness rather than supplication, but his family, his marriage, his music and books and a wonderful selection of old films.

He watches Casablanca, Top Hat, Cinema Paradiso, and The Big Sleep and his diagnosis comes just before the BBC Proms season so there is the readily available music too.

I was a first time Prommer proper this year in that I made a point of checking what was on each night and listening if I wanted to...never again will I miss the Proms, and fancy it taking me so long to make them a part of my summer.

And Michael Mayne's reading is far-ranging...

The Mysteries of Glass by Sue Gee

Findings by Kathleen Jamie

Making it Up by Penelope Lively

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Author, Author by David Lodge

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

After the Victorians by A.N Wilson

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

Grace and Truth by Jennifer Johnston

The short stories of William Maxwell help him through the sleepless hours before his surgery, and for which he was in the operating theatre for twelve hours. And then countless authors and poets are mentioned in more general terms, Edward Thomas, Vikram Seth ( a close friend and confidante), Carol Ann Duffy, D.H.Lawrence, John McGahern, Hilary Mantel, John Burnside, Andrei Makine and many more.

There is frequent reference to T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets, a book I read carefully for the first time only last year, but I have a recording of Ralph Fiennes reading it which I will now listen to because somehow The Enduring Melody is also about the transcendence and transforming power of words and how much they can achieve, and about what Michael Mayne calls the Cantus Firmus of his own life, the fixed ground of a lifelong melody.

And whilst that may all sound horribly pretentious taken out of context, it is not in the slightest in this book, more a real testament to the power of this book that I felt such a genuiness about those foundations, and in ways that I could indentify with whilst formulating my own version.

Michael Mayne's voice is deeply self-effacing and honest as he faces up to a devastating final illness, and I think different aspects may shine through for different readers here, but above all what will shine through for everyone is a man of limitless spiritual and personal humility who has left us a wonderful legacy with this book, a melody I have finally listened to and heard and one that will most certainly endure.

 

Red Admirals

They don't stay still for very long, especially when I'm trying to take a picture...

But there seem to be hundreds of Red Admirals sunning themselves in the garden this weekend..

Or maybe it's just the same two keeping me on my toes.

Any butterflies down your way?

It's a puppet...

Some comedy catch phrases have just found their way into our family vernacular and I'm wondering if your family might be similar??

'Fork 'andles' from The Two Ronnies can start us off on a trail of helpless laughter...

'There's a dead bishop on the landing' from Monty Python...

'It's a Norwegian Blue' ....more Python.

And for some reason 'It's a puppet' from Brian Conley. Who can know why but it crops up from time to time, and usually never in relation to anything remotely puppet-like, but we all latch on, it was the way he said it I think.

So imagine my delight when Offspringette, returning home this week from her nomadic travels around New Zealand and the US, presented me with my gift(s)

It's four puppets and my delight knew no bounds, sitting here doing little plays while I think what to write.

The Night Circus ~ Erin Morgenstern

I'll bet you didn't see it arriving did you?? 

I did say it would just mysteriously appear...the circus quietly settling into place overnight, and don't miss Kimbofo's evening of adventure at the fabulous launch party for The Night Circus earlier this week. There is a raft of publicity for this book most of which has passed me by down here where we are much more exercised about the fact that dogs may be banned from Tavistock's Pannier Market, and Seth Lakeman says this is ridiculous because the market was built for animals in the first place and his dog Bernie wouldn't be able to get his sausage from Bob's Cafe... and I didn't get the gift-wrapped edition of the book either so wasn't particularly alerted to anything special about this one.

But I think backalong we had safely ascertained that Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus is not Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and that to make any comparisons would be plain daft.

Nor did we think that anyone who writes anything that even vaguely tiptoes around the magical realism genre harbours ambitions to create another Harry, or is attempting to be the next J.K.Rowling

Good.

But I probably would make comparisons with Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (and you can read why I loved it here) if only for trying to decide what may be the allure of the book with the black-edged pages. They don't all work their magic, but when they do, and the contents have that genuine feel of the night, and mystery and darkness about them I'm a sucker. But then turn the page and find a black page with a burst of stars across and that feels like a little bit of a magical invitation too.

Marco, the 'sorcerer's apprentice' and Celia, the 'enchanter's daughter' are to be opponents in a contest of magic not of their own choosing but of their respective masters, and one that will be played out within the mysterious confines of Le Cirque des Reves. The circus that appears at night, opens to the public only at night and mysteriously moves on at night,  constructed only in black and white and who can know where the train that glides smoothly and quietly may pitch up next, perhaps Dresden but might be Concorde, Massachussets, as it strives for 'uniqueness in a world of sameness'. 

And sometimes I realise I want that 'uniqueness' from a book too.

Incidentally I don't often read a book without a dust jacket but this one I did because a really nice surprise lies beneath the UK edition (and my apologies to Erin Morgenstern, I'm afraid I stole this picture off your blog and without even asking)

It is 1886 and The Night Circus requires some sharp attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter. Expect yourself to be whisked forward and then backwards in time as Erin Morgenstern weaves and unweaves her tale and then blends it back together again, as Marco and Celia aim to outwit each other with their magical powers. The fin de siecle setting gives the book that perfect sense of uncertainty and revision, a time of change with the unknown promise of the future, and as time is manipulated around a central motif of the circus clock, a fantastical 'dreamlike' apparatus, and clock-making generally, the book seemed to create its own time warp around me.

If I'm honest I can't say I was completely won over by the 'life-affirming love story' or even 'the deadly contest' because in many ways for me the plot was buried so deeply in all this magic and nipping back and forth in time, that I was hugely and pleasurably distracted. Especially by the way in which Erin Morgenstern's astonishingly vivid imagination made the unbelievable believable...in other words I fell for it all, and how I wish Great Western could sort out the Entertainments Carriage on their trains like this...

Inside the train is opulent, gilded, and warm. Most of the passenger cars are lined with thick patterned carpets, upholstered in velvets in burgundies and violets and creams, as though they have been dipped in a sunset, hovering at tiwlight and holding onto the colours before they fade to midnight and stars...'

It would just make the trip to London so much more enjoyable.

The book is incredibly visual, rich with imagery and blazes of colour against the black and white backdrop of the circus with its occasional accents of red, so no surprise that the film rights have been snapped up on this sensory reading experience. If it goes into production it will be a sumptuous extravaganza of a  film and I'll be there, because it has doves in it of course and I will be wearing a red scarf with cables for sure (I predict a craze and a Debbie Bliss pattern for one any day)

There is illusion and delusion, shape-shifting, manipulation and deceit, misdirection and more often than not all is definitely not what it seems as the story unfolds, and if you are as unforgiving as I am of entire books written in the present tense, in this case, as you read you will see why it is necessary. The present tense embraces shifting time whether past or future, it is actually always the present ...see I can hardly make sense of it myself, you need to read it to see how well it works.

And yes I was enchanted, and I did run away with the circus as young Bailey does, and as I closed the book of course I came back to reality gently wondering whether I was supposed to be thinking, how long before Bailey meets Mr Barnum.

Erin Morgenstern acknowledges several influences at play here...The Tempest, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and she does pay homage to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and its battle of the magicians which I am delighted about...I still recall the Christmas that nearly never happened here because I picked that heft of a book up about a week before and disappeared into it much as I have done with The Night Circus.

So there you have it, if magic's not your thing then worry not, but if you are in the mood for some enchantment keep an eye out, the Le Cirque des Reves might just be heading your way once it moves on from here.

 

 

 

Vermeer's Women - Secrets and Silence ~ Marjorie E. Wieseman

A really stunning succession of books are arriving from Yale University Press at the moment, the art books in particular unsurpassed in their quality, so I will try and share one every so often over the next few weeks. Production values are always high with a Yale edition and that is often reflected in the price of the books, but at £20 in hardback Vermeer's Women - Secrets and Silence feels like exceptionally good value if you like your art. The reproductions of the paintings are sensational for their detail and colours and Marjorie E. Wieseman's text is facinating and highly informative.

Bookhound and I went to the last Vermeer exhibition in London back in 2001 as did everyone else I suspect. It was staggeringly popular selling ten thousand advance tickets and I think the other 9,998 people were there the day we went too because we couldn't get near the paintings let alone spend time looking at them. The atmosphere of quiet contemplation that the National Gallery had hoped for by limiting visitors to a total of 270,000 during the exhibition's three month run sadly wasn't to be found on the day that we piled in. I had also gone armed with little foreknowledge beyond the fact that there are only about thirty four known paintings by Vermeer, most of them would be here and it seemed like a rare chance to see them all at once.

So I was delighted when Vermeer's Women - Secrets and Silence arrived, published to coincide with a new exhibition of Vermeer's paintings currently running at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge until Sunday 15th January 2012. If you can get there don't miss it.

The exhibition has been built around the loan of  Johannes Vermeer's The Lacemaker, the cover art for this volume, the painting on loan from the Musee du Louvre, and with its focus on the theme of Secrets and Silence, and immediately the forward to the book tells me something new... that the longer I look at the lacemaker the more I will see that her wrapt concentration evades any attempt I may try to make to know more about her. Her gaze won't meet mine and all amidst Vermeer's characteristic and deliberate blurring of fine details. Timothy Potts, Director of the Fitzwilliam goes on to elaborate on the cohesive factors surrounding these paintings...women in domestic surroundings, engaged in light household chores, or playing music  whilst offering only a  'tantalizing glimpse' of the subjects and giving the sense that the beholder has inadvertently wandered into the room.

'Vermeer's clear intention is to intrigue us with presences unseen - the things and identities just outside the picture or shielded from view, but alluded to by glance or gesture, or an open door.'

Other Dutch artists also feature in this exhibition and as I'm unlikely to get there, this book is the very next best thing, arming me with sufficient information to at least start appreciating more fully what I am looking at, whilst the essays it contains will expand on that understanding.

I did a year of Art History as part of my OU English Literature degree in the way that you can with the Open University. In fact that year proved that I knew even less about art than I thought when at the first tutorial I was asked to list my three favourite artists and I couldn't even think of three, let alone my three favourites. Shocking and I ended up having to read twice as much than in any literature year, but Bookhound and I went to masses of exhibitions and have done ever since.

So I don't feel quite as a clueless as I might have done when opening a book like this which may well be doubtless gracing plenty of coffee tables this year and I hope is read too, because the commentary and the essays look fascinating. 

I'm finding my eye is particularly drawn to the textiles in the paintings too, something I may not have taken in when seeing these paintings separately before, and certainly not on that London exhibition visit. But gathered together in this way it's possible to focus on themes of my own and follow them through... the curtains, the bed drapes, the tableclothes, the clothes and the casually placed shawl and the richness of colour and detail in the rugs and carpets.

The description and explanation of this picture A Maid Asleep, painted in or around 1656, Vermeer's first painting of a domestic interior and a woman alone, and the story that all the elements reveal is utterly fascinating. The maid dressed as well as her employers, and asleep where she shouldn't have been and in combination with the objects on the table could be interpreted as a

'housemaid who has succumbed to the sloth and melancholy brought on by lovesickness whether from unrequited love or just plain lust,'

Technical analysis reveals that a man and a dog had originally stood in the doorway but had been painted over, and it is this in depth detail, the sort of thing you would probably get on the guided tour headphones that you can hire and which I never do, which is making my sedentary visit to this exhibition so appealing.

Vermeer uses a particularly pleasing shade of ultramarine blue... would that have been lapis lazuli I wonder?? And I'm off looking for answers...yes it was and Vermeer uses it in copious quantities.

The Lacemaker herself is wonderfully analysed in the commentary... the quiet concentration giving rise to a beautiful product, but women's work all the same and therefore considered less of a craft or skill than that of the artist's. By privileging his subject perhaps Vermeer is giving her work and herself credence and respect.

Much more to see and read so whilst the book will be on the coffee table, I'll be reading it on those lovely winter afternoons when the fire is lit and I fancy a wander around the Vermeer exhibition.

And now you are all going to ask and I might as well tell you...no I haven't read Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracey Chevalier, I really should have done by now shouldn't I.

 

 

 

On Canaan's Side ~ Sebastian Barry

'To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of your sorrow. You have climbed it.'

Lilly Bere's voice towards the end of her long and deeply poignant memoir as recounted in Sebastian Barry's latest novel On Canaan's Side, and if you are au fait with all things Sebastian you may recall that Lilly was the youngest sister of Willie Dunne, the young soldier and the subject of the Best Book Not to Win the Booker (imho) A Long Long Way.

On Canaan's Side incidentally Another Best Book Not to Win the Booker (again imho)

I had been putting off reading this one. I love Sebastian Barry's writing so much but it's a love that comes with a fear attached to it... that the next book won't work the same magic. Needless fear, how could I have doubted an author I trust I now say, because as Lilly comes to life in her own right on these pages it was like slipping back into the fold of a family I already knew. The scene is soon set sufficiently for the reader to know that eighty-nine-year-old Lilly is mourning the loss of her grandson Bill, her breaking heart making 'a small slight sound' as it comes asunder from grief.

Each chapter is titled First Day without Bill, Second Day without Bill etc and if you can bear to read this book at a chapter a day as I have tried to (some days I just had to read the next one) you might find it pays you back handsomely. Allowing time to digest and understand the full import of all that happens to Lilly, whilst being alongside her over an extended period of time, turned this book into much more than another book read for me, it became reading as experience.

It is just after the Great War, Ireland is in turmoil and Lilly must flee Dublin with her boyfriend Tadg Bere when Tadg's loyalist part in an IRA ambush is discovered. Four of the IRA men are killed and Tadg will be the subject of a revenge killing for sure, and Lilly may be targeted for her father's police connections, so overnight Tadg and Lilly find themselves fugitives en route to the Promised Land that is America.

'Clothed in my American self' Lilly slowly comes into being in her own right as the story of her life unfolds, chapter by chapter and interspersed with the here and now of her most recent bereavement. The book will arc across almost a century of history, and Lilly's menfolk will play their part in the damaging conflicts of that century, from Willie's role in the Great War, to Lilly's son Ed's drafting to Vietnam, and grandson Bill's to Iraq.

Meanwhile Lilly must assimilate into a new country and several new lives throughout which she will know much hard work and tragedy. Lilly consistently makes the pact with life rather than death but her energy and resilience are running low...

I tend to write down single words as I read and my list for On Canaan's Side is endless... grace, memory, fear, terror, regrets, sadness, homesickness, grief, courage, humility, love, life, fate, danger. home, security, mourning, soul...

That's a lot to expect from one novel, let alone in any depth, but this is Sebastian Barry, one of those authors who makes every word do its work. All of my single words are completely encapsulated in Lilly's life, but especially fear, because who can know whether the unrequited revenge will follow them to America...

'Fear is a force like seasickness, could you call it a life-sickness, a terrible nausea caused by dread, creeping dread that seems to withdraw a little in dreams while you sleep, but then, just a few moments after waking, rushes back close to you, and begins to gnaw at your simple requirement for human peace.'

When you know what has happened to Lilly, and when you discover what is to come, you may just live and understand her fear as you read that, and perhaps then think of versions and moments of your own fear and really know.

There were moments when I was relieved to hold to my reading strategy of a chapter a day. Sebastian Barry is capable of delivering the emotional body blow that takes my breath away and needs time to recover. There are very few books that I have to set aside two chapters from the end in order to take in that emotional wallop, something that has undone me with its intensity, and for those who suggest the ending of On Canaan's Side seems rushed... well mine wasn't because I gave myself a day to absorb what I'd read so far and to prepare for it. The very next thing I would recommend when you finish the book is to try turning to the first two chapters and reading them once more. If you have read as I did it will be seventeen days since you were there, and I had been so deeply immersed in Lilly and her life that I had, like Lilly perhaps, almost forgotten how much I already knew.

It was hard to know what to pick up next once I had finished On Canaan's Side. It is one of those books that makes you dissatisfied with everything else you start, so I have hunkered down with some non-fiction and am reading Michael Mayne's memoir The Enduring Melody properly for the first time. Much more about this one soon; Michael Mayne, Dean Emeritus of Westminster and former Head of Religious Programmes (Radio) at the BBC, and a book 'begun in health, as a meditation on a lifetime's faith and experience' and ended in what Alan Bennet calls 'mortal sickness', as Michael Mayne faces death from an incurable cancer. It sounds morbid, but far from it. This is a book full of spirituality, joy and compassion but also about Michael Mayne's own reading life.

I had ended this post with some piffle thoughts about why I read, and why books like On Canaan's Side are so important for me, but I've crossed all that out because I think Michael Mayne says it too, and much better than I can...

'Life in all its messiness...characters allowed to make moral choices which may or may not be the author's and shaped by those choices for good or ill...Where everyone has a right to be understood : that's what impels the creative imagination of the writer and the empathetic response of the reader. The possibility, through a listening that is not judgemental, of getting inside another's skin, the enlarging of your own understanding of what it is to be someone else... an awakening of an awareness of other realities, other personalities, other people's lives.'

He talks further, quoting George Steiner on the limitations of words and how hard it can be to describe that experience we all know so well, of entering into a deeply personal relationship with a book, or a poem or picture.

Ultimately words may fail us, and indeed words may have their limitations, but thankfully not when it is Sebastian Barry who is writing them.

 

 

 

 

A Woolly Weekend...

Accustomed as I am to driving miles and miles to get to a woolly event ... I mean these things are usually in Wales or Cockermouth or across the other side of the county, imagine my delight at discovering one almost on the doorstep,

A Woolly Weekend at Kelly House,Lifton

Kelly House recently featured in the Channel 4 TV programme "Country House Rescue"

Kelly House is a Grade I listed building and has stood overlooking the mists of Bodmin Moor since the 1740s. But years of neglect due to lack of funds mean that behind its crumbling façade lie walls plagued by dry rot, ceilings bowed by damp and a roof that desperately needs replacing. Having survived countless wars and family tragedies, the Kellys are facing perhaps their toughest challenge yet, saving Kelly House from total dereliction and finding a way to somehow keep it in the family.

I checked on google maps just to see and I have a massive 6 miles to travel and it will take me all of thirteen minutes to get there in the car. I'd walk but for the fact I might have to carry 'things' home.

I found this card at the last one I went to..

The Wool Shop by Kate Lynch from the book Sheep - From Lamb to Loom.

Waterstone's redux...

'Good heavens ...just L-O-O-K at Waterstone's ' I exclaimed to Bookhound yesterday as we stepped out of Michael Caines's cafe in the Royal Clarence Hotel, and onto Cathedral Green in Exeter. We'd just had a light liquid lunch, and had it been anything stronger than the delicious vegetable soup I might have thought I was hallucinating.

Now I don't want to cast aspersions on the literary enthusiasms of the residents of Exeter, but it is very unusual... if not unheard of in living memory, for us to stumble across a queue to get into Waterstone's that snakes right along the road and curves round as far as the west front of the Cathedral.

For anyone who is not following Waterstone's news or has never heard of, I'd better do you a potted catch-up of the last thirty years.

Now the UK's last remaining high street bookshop chain, and my book-buying paradise back in the 1980s, with the black shelves (how I loved them and how I have hated the white make-over) that made the books look as distinguished as they were. An oasis for me because Waterstone's was the one-stop-shop to go to for an eclectic and unusual selection of reading.

Those felt like the days when Waterstone's seemed 'bothered' about its customers, not bothered by them, and of course the Indies were up in arms about the competition little knowing what was on the horizon, and who'd have thought so many of us would now be rooting for this national institution to survive. I've done my bit for them over the years, in fact you know it's me you have to thank for supporting the Loyalty Card pilot scheme in the Plymouth store so assiduously that it was probably rolled out nationally way ahead of schedule.

The Waterstone's salvation buy-out this year has been with Russian money, but the captain charged with turning the shop around is James Daunt, he of Daunt's bookshops in London. If I confess anew that I now have some of my own shelves nicely organised according to country of author, that should tell you how influenced I am by all things Daunts, which does likewise (they thought of it before I did.)  I go out of my way to spend an hour and some money at 83 Marylebone High Street whenever I am in London, but also for an hour in Foyles and the Waterstone's flagship store in Piccadilly.

So back to Waterstone's in Exeter and it was obvious the two very large bouncers on the door, to say nothing of the law of the queue, were not going to let me in the back way, so I wandered around to the front entrance on the High Street for my customary browse and to see what all the fuss was about.

In fact it was .... er ...er James Corden doing a book signing.

If you are asking James Who, it's all here and I do enjoy his humour. He's starring in a play that is getting rave reviews and is on in Plymouth at the moment and we should have booked tickets. So I am not in any way denigrating his presence, or everyone's rather hysterical reaction to it, because let's be frank, if it had been say Sebastian Barry I'd have been the same.

Anyway, I kid you not people of all ages were ecstatic, apart from one elderly couple who were far from, and could not understand why a book signing by someone they had never heard of meant half the shop had to be shut off and they couldn't get to the books they wanted.

I had actually been planning to buy Meg Rosoff's There is No Dog, and would have paid full whack too... but the shop was 'cordoned' off (sorry couldn't resist) .

'Oh my God, did you see the way James smiled at me??'

'I can't believe I have been in the same room as James Corden....this is amazing. James Corden in Exeter, that is fantastic'

'Did he give you a sweet....no? Oh he gave me a sweet...'

And it wasn't pretty to see the woman who dashed in the front door thinking she could walk through only to be told she would have to go around to the back door, and in any case the signing queue was now closed because James Corden had to be somewhere else by next Easter. I'd not seen someone have a nervous breakdown in a bookshop lately, she'll probably need counselling.

Hands up, I've just finished On Canaan's Side, I'd be the same about Sebastian Barry, really I would, it's all relative.

So the shop was busy and everyone was clutching cuddly James Corden's book to their bosom except me, but I did manage to have a good look around, because I am interested to see how the new Waterstone's will shape up and will I notice any changes. Might it even start to look and feel like a 21st century version of the bookshop I remember that launched me on a wealth of new and exciting reading trails back in the 1980s, and at a time when I desperately needed them after those years of having babies seemed to have turned my brain to mush.

It's early days but the message must be filtering down from on high because I can see immediately it's starting to look more like a bookshop again and much less like a bazaar.

The 3 for 2 tables have gone for a start, and the pesky stickers, what a blessed relief that is.

Gone is the temptation to buy one book I may want and two I don't, and that I know are only there because publishers have paid for them to be so.... and I don't blame them, they had little choice. I'd like to believe that all publisher payments of this kind have vanished from the Waterstone's coffers, but I'm not sure.

So we have a return to good old book egalitarianism, everything in its proper place on the shelf and the tables are back to the old ways... selections of books...literary fiction, books in translation, short stories...

I did a dovegreyreader shelf in the Plymouth store for a while, it was great fun to do but it fizzled, probably because my choices looked a little too esoteric next to the 3 for 2s. It took a lot of time and thought too and for no payment, so I couldn't sustain that when there is the gas bill to be paid.

But there were some special displays in the Exeter store that really warmed the cockles...

Little Toller Books looking perfect...

A William Maxwell shelf, can you believe that, having barely found a William Maxwell book in the shop before now they have all of them, and with the bookseller notes too.

A really stunning table by the door featuring amongst others a selection of these books on the painting of Eric Ravilious....want...all.

And prominence given to the classics as never before, though personally I think I like to see them mixed in with everything else rather than having someone define the canon for me (what do you think?) but mustn't grumble, the range was extensive and far greater than anything I have seen in Waterstones for a long time. Stock lists seem to be widening and the chances are you could now find a much lesser known classic on the shelves...Theodor Fontane for example, and not just Effie Briest, though I'm reminded it's time I read that.

And a conversation between two fresh-faced looking students overheard next to those very shelves which I was surreptitiously stroking (the books not the students)...

'Oh God, we haven't got to read this Hardy rubbish have we??

'This is going to be f ***** terrible, look at these books, all these people are so old.'

'Well I've always just watched the film the night before an exam and passed ...'

So a way to go, but setting that little exchange aside, if you frequent the stores is anyone else noticing Waterstone's improvements lately??

We could conduct a national audit, I know I shall certainly be keeping an eye on them and with my fingers crossed.

Cry, the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation ~ Alan Paton

'Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of it all if he gives too much.'

You wait for that moment to come in the book as you surely know it must, because the title quote has to be in there somewhere, and when it did I was poleaxed.

It is The Reader magazine  (now can you believe on issue 43 and with each one I love it more and more) I have to thank for finally making me settle down to read Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. A book arrives from them each quarter, a nice surprise, and I read and write fifty words on it, give it a star rating and it goes in the magazine on the Reader's Connect page.

So the dust had barely settled on Port Eliot festival and I knew I had a scant week to read this one before the deadline, and at a time when the whim was rising and the very last thing I wanted to do was read to order, so half of me was Mrs Very Reluctant and feeling a bit flopdawdle (new word) about doing anything..

But the other half had just experienced that amazing conversation with Gillian Slovo, so that half of me was Mrs Keenasmustard and fortunately she won the day, but a mere ten pages in and I was already thinking 'why on earth haven't I read this before?'

Stephen Kumalo, a minister in a remote church, who heads for Johannesburg to track down his missing son Absalom. What gradually becomes clear is that all is not well and Absalom is in serious trouble. The 'trouble' becomes increasingly serious with each place that Stephen arrives at, only to find each time that his son has moved on until eventually it is apparent that Absalom has killed a white activist during a bungled robbery. The irony of that is not lost in a city where few white people seem able to see the evils of apartheid, or the fundamental damage that has been done to 4/5ths of the people who have been given just 1/10th of the land. A people who slave to provide the gold from the mines for the remaining 1/5th living on their 9/10ths. Arthur Jarvis was one such white man and his death will have profound repercussions not least because his father is the landowner on which Stephen Kumalo's church and livelihood rest.

Writtern in 1946 and published in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and imposed apartheid, Cry the Beloved Country is a story of not only the greater broken tribe that is apartheid Africa, but also of the smaller one, the nuclear family, as two fathers mourn the 'loss' of their sons whilst striving to mend what is broken in their own lives in order to start to heal the greater damage. It is about being a parent, about internalizing the trangressions of the children and making reparation, and on a greater scale about a splintered, corrupt and fractured society in desperate need of some humanity. My eyes welled up frequently as I read Alan Paton's beautiful portrayal of two men on opposite sides of the divide struggling to make sense of what was happening around them, and both with bucketfuls of compassion for each other.

And if you haven't read Cry, the Beloved Country yet and decide you might, I wonder if like me you will find Kumalo's lone mountain vigil at dawn, at the exact moment his son is due to be executed, among the most moving of scenes you may ever have read

As Kumalo tries to imagine what his son may be thinking and doing he sets out his meal which Alan Paton then invests with a deeply Biblical significance akin to the Last Supper...

'He looked out of his clouded eyes at the faint steady lightening in the east. But he calmed himself, and took out the heavy maize cakes and the tea and put them on a stone. And he gave thanks, and broke the cakes and ate them, and drank of the tea. Then he gave himself over to deep and earnest prayer....'

Communion as Kumalo's act of faith and to be with his son in spirit in his final hours, but also I sensed something greater, as an act of solidarity with the nation and with the rest of the world. Many have argued that the country of South Africa is one of the most important characters in this book, Alan Paton confirms this in his introduction, and I see it too.

There is far more in Cry,The Beloved Country than one read could ever hope to find which is why in the end I made it only my second (I think) 5* book for The Reader, and here are some of my fifty words...

'... The tribe may be broken but never defeated while it has its Kumalos, please please be sure to read this one.'

I'm sure many of you have read it and I'd love to know your thoughts.

 

 

 

Our 2012 Big Read ...Team???

I had a post ready to go live on Team Proust and the suggestion that we read In Search of Lost Time as our shared read, starting in January 2012...

I had pictures of madeleines and recipes all lined up, nearly bought the madeleine tins to make some in

But...

I have been harbouring doubts and several of you have also kindly e mailed with reservations about the viability of Proust on a monthly reading schedule, and a bit of me is also hesitant for several other reasons.

Firstly Port Eliot Festival and London 2012 are going to consume much of my summer with reading and watching next year, so tackling something so unknown, staying the course cheerfully and keeping everyone enthused and on board may be a tall order.

Secondly, and though this really shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but why are the writers of these chunksters invariably rather unpleasant people??

James Joyce wasn't that nice to his wife and family, Tolstoy it could be argued considerably worse but all surmountable in the face of such good reading, and so I settled down to read a little background about Proust's life. Now I'm sure In Search of Lost Time is brilliant, essential reading that I would probably enjoy once I got past the first forty pages which apparently focus on a  young Marcel lying in bed waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight.

But I'm afraid I wish I hadn't read about him masturbating in front of a cage of rats intent on eating each other alive.

Or the shuffling around in the coat in a drug-fuelled haze.

Tolstoy and James Joyce probably did the same or worse every week too, who knows, but I didn't know that about them then, but I do know it about Proust now ...too much information and somehow I can't undo that knowing, each time I pick the book up...well all I can see is...er, the rats.

So moving swiftly on what to do.

It was a lovely meet up with Carol, who comments here, passing through on her return from a holiday in Cornwall, and we sat and used up all available oxygen in Jericho's and then ambled through Launceston on a sweltering late-September afternoon. The conversation turned to the next Big Team Read and Carol made an impassioned plea for a particular book.

In fact it was like someone definitively switching of a flickering and uncertain lightbulb and switching on a bright and dazzling one, and I drove home full of the enthusiasm I had felt for both Ulysses and War and Peace, which is something I absolutely need in order to commit to a project like this on here.

So with Carol's suggestion growing on me by the day here's why I think it would work...

• We have given over two years to books by the boys, it's the girls' turn.

• The book was originally published as a serial in eight books of about 100 pages each which suits our approach perfectly, we could follow that exact 1871- 1872 publication schedule 140 years later and see how it felt to be a Victorian reader waiting for the next episode. Dec - Feb - April - June - August - October - November - December. So we could start our read in December.

• I've read this book twice already, for study, but had always promised myself that I would read it again one day purely for pleasure.

• When I did read it I absolutely loved it on both occasions and studying it was a joy....the thought of reading it again really does gladden my heart.

• This joy would definitely see me through start to finish and perhaps we could make the whole thing more collaborative??

• Perhaps some of you who decide to join in could facilitate the debate on here by writing the occasional blog post about whatever you like in connection with the book, and which I can use for those months when I'm in the dovegreyreader tent, or watching Britain win seven medals.

• In fact I think that's a really good idea, much better than me blabbering on all the time.

• To my knowledge there is no record of this author sitting and 'communing' with er ... rats etc.

• Though she did lead an interesting literary and personal life so there will be much to explore about that if we so wish.

• The book has been a BBC series so there's a lovely watchable DVD version, all 375 minutes of it currently selling for £5.49

• The book is available to download free for Kindle.

• If you are all thinking what a stupid dingbat I am being about Proust and the rats, and none of you want to join in with anything else, then Carol and I have agreed that we'll just do it on our own here anyway....and talk to each other in comments like two billy no mates.

So what do you think??

Are enough of you convinced??

Because if you're not quite, perhaps it might help to know that Virginia Woolf thought this "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

Emily Dickinson adored it whilst A.S.Byatt considers it to be ' one of the greatest novels of all.'

 

Oh yes the book, I almost forgot though I'm sure plenty of you wll have guessed already...

 

...Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

 

 

Talking of singing...

...as we were yesterday Vocal Harem choir practice starts again tonight, new season, new music, brilliant. I shall be singing Tenducci's line in the back row.

And now the weather has reverted to normal and it's cold and raining,  I just thought I'd share Sunday night's beautiful and balmy dusk looking across to Cornwall as seen from the front door..

Followed by the most incredible deep red sickle moon a few hours later...

A true Harvest moon is apparently the full moon closest to the Autumnal equinox, but with the farmers busy in the fields around us cutting and baling long into the night, a Sickle Harvest Moon seems just as appropriate.

The Castrato and His Wife ~ Helen Berry

'Historical facts about men and women born in obscurity are not easy to come by...[they] leave a body of historical evidence that is like a fine old musical instrument long infested with woodworm: some material traces of the original do survive, but these have become pock-marked with holes, till all that is left is a fragile shell and hollow space...'

Helen Berry's coda at the end of her excellent book The Castrato and His Wife is perhaps a salutory reminder of Hilary Mantel's assertion in her recent televised interview with James Runcie, that as soon as we learn history we should learn to be suspicious, that we should question. There is clearly much we cannot know for sure, but there are legitimate ways of constructing that history as Helen Berry elaborates.

'This book has endeavoured to squeeze a tune from ephemeral materials using the different varieties of time-tempered fragments that are left to us: not just the written words, but the objects, art, and the music that are the legacy of previous generations...

And Helen Berry offers a reference to an overview of this approach to history citing another book which sounds equally readable Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History by Mark M.Smith, and again I am reminded of Hilary Mantel showing us her shelf of reference files and reading out the odd but contemporaneously Tudor contents of one folder.

You may recall that a few months ago, the ink barely dry on the proof copy, I was waxing lyrical about this book  which had arrived from Oxford University Press, Well, it has just been published, so now you can find out the mysteries of the life of the castrato for yourselves.

I'm not sure what it may be about the eighteenth century that makes my eyes glaze over, perhaps a little too far back for comfort and not helped by the fact that the literature has always defeated me despite my best efforts. Clearly all that was needed was an angle that would interest me and this new world of surgical interference and musical intrigue was just the ticket.

Now let's be honest, the book is interesting on many accounts but it is the castrato aspect that intrigues isn't it, and Helen Berry offers a fascinating background to the history and the world of castration, illegal even when a young Tenducci was parted from his bits by an intinerant barber-surgeon wielding his special shears, which could and did double for animal or human use. And all sufficient to leave our lad singing higher up the register and it was off to music school he went. Women in this era banned from church choirs, so someone had to sing the top line.

Moving from Italy to England, Tenducci became quite the celebrity pin up boy, his picture adorning many-a young girl's wall, and when he started to sing in public he quickly established a fan base. The X Factor is clearly only a re-hash of what has been ever thus because with fame came the adulation for Tenducci that we associate with the celebs of today. And all this despite the castrati's barrel chest and

'disproportionately long limbs, making their heads look small in relation to their bodies...'

and the subsequent ridicule this attracted from the cartoonists of the day.

Yet the rumours of relationships with women were rife to the extent that Tenducci was even cited in marriage separation cases, having to flee the country on more than one occasion. He was also absolutely useless with money, so if he wasn't being hunted down by cuckolded husbands he was being chased to pay his debts. Heaven knows what they threatened him with because to be honest... thinking about the fate of poor old Abelard of Heloise fame, well the worst has already been done by the barber's shears hasn't it.

I'm giving a potted and populist version of a rigorous and scholarly work here, meticulously researched and referenced, but for all that the research does not weigh heavy, it is eminently readable. Helen Berry presents her information in the most accessible way, exploring a great deal in the process including fascinating attitudes to sexuality, male beauty and effeminacy in men, (to which women of the day were thought to be more attracted) and the assumed unconsummated love of the castrati...though having assumed they 'couldn't' it is never quite clear what they might have been able to do. It would seem no one thought to write it down in any detail.

So who'd have thought a book like this would prove to be a page-turner, but when Tenducci reached Dublin, well things were really about to hot up. At the pinnacle of his career in the mid 1760s, and invited to Dublin to sing operas in English, it is a meeting with the young Dorothea Maunsell, the daughter of a wealthy barrister, that will really put a bit of a spanner in Tenducci's works.

It was in Dublin some twenty years earlier that Handel's Messiah had received its world premiere to international acclaim, and brought with it a cultural fillip to the city, perhaps not unlike the one happening yet again and which I have witnessed on several recent trips. Eager to be in with the 'it' boy and rubbing shoulders with celebrity, the Maunsell's invited Tenducci into their home where he quickly took on the role of musical mentor to young Dorothea, and, on the basis that surely no mischief could ensue, they spent long periods of time in each other's sole company.

The ensuing elopement, clandestine marriage and quite how the family addressed the humiliating scandal kept me on the very edge of my seat. Dorothea had been raised to make a good society marriage and have children, not to run off with a eunuch, and hell hath no fury like a barrister scorned it would seem. And of course I won't reveal the shocking lengths (well I was shocked) to which Thomas Maunsell resorted in order to try and force his daughter into submission, because that would be to give away the most riveting part of the book. But never underestimate the power of a woman in love either, and when you know that Dorothea subsequently published an account of her ordeal that gives you some clue as to her resilience.

Oh yes, and if you read it for yourself you will discover the mystery of what Tenducci 'may' have carried in his breeches.

But the added reach and attraction of a book like this rests for me in the trails of interest that it opens.

I wanted to go off and look at paintings by Caravaggio,

I wanted to listen to the Scottish ballads.. 'Roslin Castle,' 'The Braes of Ballenden,' and 'Lochaber' made famous by Tenducci.

Is 'the witty Duchess of Gordon', who gets a mention, the same Jane, Duchess of Gordon as in mother of Georgiana, who married the 6th Duke of Bedford and built Endsleigh I wonder. If so I'm sure there is a painting of her in the collection at Port Eliot.

Tenducci sang in Plymouth in 1786 to great acclaim, and I wonder where exactly.

I hadn't listened to the Pergolesi Stabat Mater in ages, now I needed to.

And just what was this aria from Artaxerxes, the first all-sung opera in English, made so popular by Tenducci that even Jane Austen was a little sick of hearing it so many times.

And most of all, with a trip to Dublin coming up on Bloomsday earlier this year, I mapped out a little Tenducci trail around the city just to walk in his and Dorothea's footsteps. It's not hard, having read this book to visit Dame Street and imagine...

or wonder if Tenducci nipped in here for a quick chop after an evening performance...

and then to wander along here, the fashionable street that Dorothea's parents had moved to..

and wonder which house it may have been.
Which one had Tenducci visited and there courted his impressionable young fan...

I also like Helen Berry's next suggestion in her coda...

'By engaging with reconstructed sounds, visiting sites of interest, and touching material traces, as well as reading and looking hard in archives, both historian and reader may in future be able to gain a deeper insight into the long-forgotten cadences, the pulses and social rhythms of previous generations.'

So for all that a book like this is written to give us another version of a lesser-known history, perhaps it is also about sparking the imagination of the reader and letting them take their own journey with it. I know I have done exactly that, and how good to find that as a result, I am friends with the eighteenth century at last, though I haven't quite gone the whole hog and pinned a picture of Tenducci on my wall....yet.

 

 

A man at work in his garden...

I wandered up the garden this afternoon to encourage Bookhound in his orchard-tidying endeavours whilst I had been dead-heading things that looked like they needed it .

En route it's impossible not to take in the acres of clear blue sky and wonder quite where this plane is off to... the USA perhaps, there's nowhere else after Cornwall, and so far up in the sky the plane seemed non existent but the new camera reveals there really was one.

I then did a double take thinking the holly was plastered in berries already and we'd better just have Christmas now, until close up I saw it was a mass of hawthorn berries...

and next to it the elderberries..

Some of our trees have finished fruiting, others are still laden...

But hark...the orchard, a paradise of dappled shade, would seem to be very quiet... I heareth not the snip of the shears..

Sensible Bookhound.

All rise...

'Ah yes...I'm in court today.' he was telling everyone in his poshest voice

' Please could you not say that' I suggested.

Bookhound was summoned for jury service backalong which has proved to be an interesting experience for us devotees of Judge John Deed. Having spent half our lives getting out of jury service because of work commitments Bookhound decided it was time to fulfill his civic duty, and besides it would make a welcome change from mixing tons of concrete (floor was pending), so he set off with a little spring in his step.

Lest you may think he wasn't taking it seriously think again, trust me, it's been like living with...well not Martin Shaw exactly, perhaps more Kavanagh QC.

We have to say 'All rise' before we are allowed to leave the dinner table now, it's getting tiresome.

Of course I can't tell you a thing about the cases and indeed Bookhound couldn't tell me until they were over, but he was chosen for plenty, sensibly keeping the black cloth that I'd made him to put on his head at the appropriate moment in his pocket.

I've seen it done

'I sentence you to hang from the...'

Of course I know from my day job exactly what everyone gets up to so the majority of the cases came as no surprise to me; one of my team years ago was a magistrate so we were fully appraised of what went on between man and beast /sheep / horse / dog etc. But Bookhound did have a little corker in amongst the benefit frauds and inappropriate liaison cases and I'm sorry I couldn't possibly write about it here, but if ever you come for tea he may well tell you, and then just see if you can swallow that scone and cream without choking.

I nearly inhaled my bowl of Krave over the breakfast table when he told me, and can only begin to imagine what it must be like for twelve complete strangers to have to sit in a room together for several hours discussing... well discussing what they had to discuss and then offering a verdict. What goes on in the jury room stays in the jury room and is highly confidential so I am still just imagining, but even so...

By the way has anyone else discovered Krave??

I hardly like to do a free advert for Kellogs but it's a breakfast cereal reminiscent of those lovely Oat Krunchies which we can't find anywhere now, but Krave has added value because the little pillows are filled with something akin to Nutella. Absolutely delicious.

And has anyone else done their duty and served time on a jury?? I've always evaded it but the Tinker has fond recollections of his stint and of lengthy deliberations over an old lady's theft of a chicken valued at £1.46 (which tells you how long ago it was)

Anyway I can tell it's going to get even more tiresome here now especially when we are watching Judge John in the future.

'Hmm well of course had I been on that jury...'

'No he can't say that, they need to adjourn and take directions...'

'Well my judge wouldn't have said that...'

'Do you remember that case I had where the man was...'

'YES....'