Geranium Cat's Bookshelf

Divagations

2012-01-28T17:12:00.000Z

Oops, over the past week I seem to have acquired 14 books - how embarrassing. First I went to the Shelter shop on Forest Road during my Edinburgh trip. Because it's beside the University, you get a good class of second-hand book in there, and they have what they call their "vintage" shelf: not very large, but I've picked up some good things there over the years. This week I found:

The shop assistant, when I handed it over, said "Oh, I love this book!" - isn't it lovely when that happens? So much of the pleasure of reading is in sharing books. And then my mother said that she used to share a flat with one of the Frankaus (sister, I think) so she wants to read it after me - as the title suggests, the theatre figures largely.

E. Arnot Robertson wrote Ordinary Families, which is a lovely coming-of-age novel, although rather more "knowing" than some. I think this sounds more melodramatic, about a young woman who falls obsessively in love with a bad lot (never trust an author...).

I recently reviewed The Constant Nymph, and I've read another excellent book by Kennedy, The Ladies of Lyndon, so I picked this up without even stopping to see what it's about. It seems to be a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde novel about a Regency MP: intriguing!

LibraryThing very helpfully recommend this to me; pretty sure I read it as a child, the title seems very familiar. The four Gareth children are sent to Ireland for a holiday with their eccentric great-aunt. Can't go wrong really, and Streatfeild is such a sympathetic observer of children.

William Marshall wrote 16 Yellowthread Street mysteries. I reviewed The Hatchet Man recently. I've read maybe 7 or 8, and I have to have them all.

I went to hear the author, Jane Urquhart, talk about her new book, Sanctuary Line, with its beautiful cover, and of course I immediately wanted to read it.

I love Charles Williams - Narnia for grown-ups! And very much an acquired taste. It, and the remaining books, came from the Oxfam Bookshop in Bloomsbury - not quite the range of choice I'd hoped for (I wanted more old hardbacks, whereas its strength lies more in recent paperbacks, but I didn't have time to go further afield).

Whereas Dornford Yates is a giggle, Buchan without the seriousness, if you can imagine such a thing - which gives you some idea, perhaps, just what a bit of froth this is. There are lots of cars, and chases round an English countryside populated by yokels who touch their caps and answer respectfully when spoken to.

Anyone who's read A Dog So Small or Tom's Midnight Garden will know that Philippa Pearce writes magically for children. I expect this to be enchanting.

Robert Westall is a different kind of children's writer, and one who can be very frightening indeed - The Wind Eye was utterly chilling. I'd never heard of this, and have high hopes.

I don't know how many times I've read A Candle for St Jude, but I've never owned a copy.

This and the next are books I know nothing about - just that they are by authors I like.

Finally, I read this while I was still in London and, along with lots of other bloggers I know, loved it. What a glorious little book! I'll write about it during the week.

Several of this haul are immediately destined for the Century of Books, and I'm already finding myself checking the publication date to see if it's a year I need, and agonising if not. At which point I decided that, if I want to talk about more than one book in any year, I shall just go ahead and do so! The only requirement will be that every year must eventually be covered. I'm afraid the Century has become the latest obsession (I've read ten and a half books for it already), closely followed by Hurlyburlybuss, for which I can see a new list developing, of cross-over books like The Brontes Went to Woolworths, which I would have adored when I was 14 or so.

The Girls by John Bowen

2012-01-26T08:00:00.000Z

While I was still at school I went to the theatre a lot, and it was then that I discovered John Bowen, through a retelling of one of the mystery cycles called The Fall and Redemption of Man. I loved the play and saw it several times, and later OH, who was a then primary teacher, used a section of it as the basis for an improvised Christmas production with his class. There was also a television play in the '70s called Robin Redbreast, which was sort of The Wicker Man done right, with the wonderful Bernard Hepton (you may remember him as Toby Esterhase from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy...). Anyway, I found this book by chance, pounced when I saw who it was by, and had to read it immediately. It's the 1986 contribution to my Century of Books, which is a place where I'm unapologetically indulging my love of the obscure.

Subtitled "A story of village life", The Girls starts with high farce, an escaping pig in an English village, and gradually edges its way into black comedy, infidelity and worse. It's set in the village where Bowen lived, Tysoe in Warwickshire, and shows a great deal of affection for it. It's all very '70s (as opposed to the '80s, when it was written), I suppose, but I like it, and would have done when it was published. He didn't write many novels, so I may seek out some more.

It was a day in summer when the pig escaped, the time not long past twelve and a real scorcher. Janet had opened the shop door to let in a breeze, but there was no breeze nor any prospect of customers unless someone should come in for Elderflower Cooler or home-made ginger beer. The Elderflower Cooler, made with homey and lemon juice as well as elderflower water, was particularly refreshing and a new line, but its sale so far had been disappointing; the village children and their mothers preferred Coke and Pepsi from the Spar.

It's evident, I think, that this is a modern village; we've got a mixture here of bucolic - the elderflower cooler - and the dysfunctional - it doesn't sell. At every step of the way, appearances are undermined by the author, who comments on and questions his characters' actions and motives. We tell ourselves pretty stories, Bowen is saying, but the reality is much more suspect and may be much darker than we imagine. Susan and Janet, who seem such nice young women at the beginning, will soon have a nasty secret and, while they never really lose our sympathy, their actions are very questionable. Despite your sense of trepidation on their behalf you both want, and don't want, retribution.

There's just a touch of magic here too, a sense that the not-quite-real is immanent, somehow made even more so by the foreword which tells us that one of the characters was a real person. Mrs Marshall is one of those village stalwarts who knows absolutely everything and seems to have a sixth sense about village life. You could easily believe, reading this book, that she'd had a hotline to Old Nick, who would have treated her with respect. She was probably his auntie and had smacked him when he was a little devil. Bowen tells us that she is much missed since she died in 1982. Some of Bowen's other work explores more fully the ways in which myths may underpin modern culture, so it's not surprising to find echoes here, even if they are distant ones (perhaps The Bacchae is the most apparent - Bowen wrote a play based on it, The Disorderly Women). And the themes of fertility and its related ritual readily underlie any evocation of English village life. There's a fine tradition of it in English writing - John Cowper Powys and Sylvia Townsend Warner come immediately to mind, but it stretches down to the present-day - and Bowen is an interesting exponent.

Divagations

2012-01-22T15:20:00.000Z

Another weekend already and yet again, I'm reluctantly preparing for another part week in London. At least there's a small treat to look forward to: on Thursday morning - a slightly strange time to be going to a reading - I'm going to hear Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart talk about her latest book, Sanctuary Line. I read The Underpainter some years ago and enjoyed it, but I haven't read the new one yet (there's a review by KevinfromCanada here, though, in case you are interested). It may not be quite the high point that my visit to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the magnificent Painting Canada (now sadly over) was, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless.

After the Canadian exhibition I castigated myself roundly for not having bought the catalogue of what was evidently one of the best-attended Dulwich exhibitions ever, but I managed to find a copy. If you missed it, and are curious about the Group of Seven, there's some nice stuff at Dulwich on View.

I was lucky to go to the exhibition before Christmas when it was reasonably quiet, so that I could spend as long as I wanted to in front the pictures - the final room was devoted to the work of Lawren Harris and was sublime. Harris was the most spiritual member of the Group of Seven and, while his abstract land and seascapes aren't to everyone's taste, I fell in love with his work the first time I went to the National Gallery in Canada. Then, I found it sad that I had reached my forties without having discovered this remarkable group of artists, so I was delighted that they were to be exhibited in the UK and even more so when I discovered how sensitively it had been done.


Lawren Harris Lake and Mountains

From the catalogue I discovered that an early influence on the Group was an exhibition of Scandinavian art in 1912. I like some of this work almost as much as I like Harris:

Gustav Fjaestad, Winter Moonlight

Funny, I'm not that found of snow in reality, but I love pictures of it.

I've decided to allow myself a very small number of re-reads for the Century of Books, if they are writers I really want to talk about but have read all of their work. The first is likely to be The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge, which I felt a tremendous need to read again last week. It's not quite true that I've read everything she wrote, there are some short story collections, but I've read all her adult novels and feel that they're ingrained. I'm now so contently mired in the twentieth century that I feel no desire to work my way down the pile (fortunately fairly small) of review books which reproach me when I look in their direction. Ho hum.

The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy

2012-01-19T18:00:00.000Z

Warning: minor spoilers!

This is my first book for the Classics Challenge, hosted by Katherine at November's Autumn, and also a contribution to my Century of Books. The Constant Nymph was published in 1924 and, if you weren't expecting it, could be quite a surprise. It was a huge success when it appeared, and Kennedy adapted it as a stage play (one production included Noel Coward and John Gielgud) and in 1943 a film was made which starred Joan Fontaine as Tessa, the main character. The incredibly lush film score was written by Korngold - Tessa is the daughter of composer Albert Sanger, a Bohemian type with innumerable children by different wives, and the love to whom Tessa is constant is family friend Lewis Dodds, another musician.

I knew the play from my teenage years, when it was done on the radio, and I think both time and medium made the plot more accessible than it may be today. Because, for a twenty-first century audience, there may be a major stumbling block - Tessa is 14 when the book begins, and within a year the very adult Lewis is contemplating running away with her. Her (just) elder sister Tony has already been married in haste to her lover, Jacob Birnbaum. When Sanger dies, three of the children are "rescued" by their cousin Florence, who regards Tessa as a little barbarian and insists they go to boarding schools, where they are intensely unhappy - especially Tessa who, emotionally, is no longer a child, even though she has an essential innocence which is part of her immense charm; eventually, all three make their escape. Lewis, meanwhile, has married Florence and, under her influence, is finally enjoying a measure of success as a composer.

Here's a description of Lewis at the start of the book:

His young face was deeply furrowed, nor was there any reassurance to be found in his thin, rather cruel mouth, nor in light, observant eyes, so intent that they rarely betrayed him. His companion,distrusting his countenance, found, nevertheless, a wonderful beauty in his hands, which gave a look of extreme intelligence to everything he did, as though an extra brain was lodged in each finger. Their strength and delicacy contradicted the harsh lines of his face...

You can see from this that Lewis is an ambivalent character, someone we may only occasionally sympathise with - indeed, I found him pretty hard to like at all, although, in her introduction to the Virago Modern Classic edition, Anita Brookner thinks men may do so more easily. Similarly while the sophisticated Florence, pleasant if rather bossy at first, becomes increasingly unlovable as she grows more and more unkind towards Tessa, there are moments when her distress touches us.

Kennedy writes always with tenderness towards her characters, even when they are at their most despicable, so that the reader can understand them on their own terms but is never told what to think. Putting the age-disparity theme aside, this feels like a very modern novel: it's immensely readable with an intimate writing style that pitches you right in amongst Sanger's extensive, racy menagerie. I was so caught up in the story that I found Tessa's experience of boarding school utterly chilling, I could so readily put myself in her place.

A little more on the writer, for the Classics Challenge: Margaret Kennedy was born in London in 1896, and attended Cheltenham Ladies' College, a school not unlike her Cleeve in The Constant Nymph:

The staff were not at all strict; for the most part they were lively young women, fresh from the University, with a strong faith in hockey and the prefectorial system.

Margaret Kennedy

She was amongst the earliest of a line of notable novelists (Winifred Holtby and A.S. Byatt to name but two) who attended Somerville College in Oxford, where she read Modern History, but her first book was a history text. I struggled to find a picture of her. She seems to have been both a comfortable part of the establishment (she married a barrister in 1925) and a forward thinker: while her female characters aren't career women as, for instance, Sarah Burton in Winifred Holtby's South Riding, they are independent thinkers who expect moral autonomy even if their actions are circumscribed by society. She's a sharp observer of the foibles of both men and women - I can't help imagining that she must have had to bite her tongue a good deal in company, and it might have been something of a relief to write her incisive prose. Remarkably, considering some of subject matter she touches on, she always avoids the slightest hint of vulgarity or prurience (I can just hear a critic in the 1930s making that same assertion!) or even the suggestion that there are things a "lady" shouldn't know about; equally, however, there's no sense of a dispassionate detachment from her description of Sanger's menage, or Tony's behaviour with Birnbaum. With Kennedy you get a feeling that good writing transcends all.

The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble

2012-01-18T18:30:00.000Z

Some people do jigsaws only at Christmas, when they provide easy bonding with rarely seen family members. The Christmas jigsaw is usually a sociable jigsaw. It makes the ideally harmless opening conversational gambit, as safe as, but more interesting than, the weather. I've been collecting jigsaw testimony for the past few years, from fellow novelists, actors, children and scholars, and I'm hoping to catch a member of the royal family soon. There is a long tradition of regal engagement with the pursuit, from Queen Victoria to our present monarch, who is to be seen near one in her drawing room at Balmoral in the recent film where she is so well impersonated by Helen Mirren.

One witness tells me that in the festive season his family always embarks on an elaborate puzzle of many thousands of pieces. This keeps his mother-in-law happy and busy for hours, but alas, her eyesight is failing and she tends to misplace pieces with rash confidence, so he has to get up in the middle of the night, sneak down and undo the work she has done. (Margaret Drabble in the Guardian, 20 December 2008)

Nan recommended this book when I was struggling with The Sea Lady last year. It's subtitled A Personal History with Jigsaws - I suppose if you really hated jigsaw puzzles you might find it hard going, but it's so much more than that. I could have constructed an entire month's blogging out of things that Margaret Drabble reminded me of, as she talked about her family, and the house on the Great North Road where she spent many holidays (the road is the A1, the trunk road from London to Edinburgh - I grew up on its extension, the A9 from Edinburgh to Inverness, and like her I remember the lorries thundering south in the night).

Drabble interweaves her family memories with her investigations into the history of the jigsaw puzzle, a pursuit which takes her on a journey through childhood as a construct. From the very adult predilection for cutting out and assembling works of art - mosaic, for instance - to the more domestic but still adult hobby of découpage - to childhood pleasures such as the doll to be dressed in a variety of paper outfits (how I adored those when I was small) and, eventually to the early dissected maps (mentioned in Mansfield Park), notions of leisure and education are gently explored. Not that the book is without its challenges - family dynamics are probed too, and Drabble's inroads into her family's history and relationships make the reader stop and consider their own. But there's no breast-beating, even though we know that there is a famous rift with her sister, evidently over the rights of each to write about her mother - Drabble deals with this area with a scrupulous tact, I think, recognising that it's dangerous ground but nonetheless asserting her own choice in the matter. She's more concerned, anyway, with her memories of her mother's sister, Phyllis, who introduced her to jigsaws and who, as a spinster teacher looked down on by Drabble's mother, seems to have been a much better provider of entertainment, comfort and solace than her brighter, depressive sister.

This is a book full of digressions, and one of the most interesting for me was what she had to say about Alison Uttley. Like me, Drabble loved the Little Grey Rabbit books, and Uttley's enchanting memoir A Country Child - I think it came as a shock to many when a biography revealed that Uttley had been a difficult, if not deranged, woman who wrote because she was so indignant to see Enid Blyton making a living. There seems to be a parallel not-being-drawn here, because although Drabble describes jigsaw puzzling as an antidote to anger, and a means of avoiding unhappy thoughts (when her husband was taken ill puzzles again were to provide a solace), the reader cannot help but be conscious of a good deal of unhappiness at the back of this work. But it's not hard to read - it offers a coming-to-terms with the bits of family history which are apt to trouble and, as I've suggested, channels the reader's own experiences while gently wittering on about diverting distractions. It's both a history of jigsaws and of coping strategies and, as such, something unique.

Divagations

2012-01-14T13:38:00.001Z

It's the weekend and I'm back from a few days in London for work with not much to show for it on the books front. I did go to see a film (on my own, which is, I think, a first - I've done theatre, ballet and opera on my own before but never the cinema) and came home enthusing about The Artist, a modern take on the silent movie, funny and charming, perhaps not earth-shattering, but well worth watching. It's a hot tip for an Oscar, I gather, but although I thought it perfectly delightful, I can't help feeling that something slightly weightier should be the best film of the year. Best character for me, of course, was Jack the dog, played by Jack Russell Uggie, but his co-stars are pretty good too.

I'd happy to report that my Century of Books is off to a flying start with 1976 done and dusted. And I'm reading Margaret Kennedy's The Constant Nymph and Dodie Smith's memoir of childhood Look Back with Love in one of the delicious Slightly Foxed Editions simultaneously (I thought I'd read it before but it turns out not - it must have been the second volume). I've also posted on Hurlyburlybuss, on Fell Farm for Christmas. Since keeping up a second blog is going to make some time pressures for this one, I decided to introduce a weekend post here which will be bookish ramblings, hence Divagations, lifted from Angela Thirkell. For those who don't know AT, both the author and her characters (especially Mrs Morland, who is very much AT's self-portrait) are prone to divagating (digressing or wandering) at great length, as am I. Happily for those around me, most of my divagations take the place of internal monologues, often while staring out of the window of the train. This week I was so cross with East Coast for making the exchange of Rewards points for tickets so complicated that I just sat there and seethed, further irritated by the hideously uncomfortable seats - complicated by the need, presumably, for stock suitable for the non-electrified section between Edinburgh and Aberdeen, East Coast has acquired some very old carriages (from East Midlands, I think). All the support has long gone from the seats, mine wouldn't recline and the train was too busy to make moving an option. I shall be avoiding the Aberdeen train in future (I used to like them, because the first-class carriages had ducky little lights at the tables which looked very cosy - and before anyone splutters, I buy my first-class tickets ages in advance so that I get cheap ones, and don't travel standard unless I have to because the seats make my back agony for days).

Finally, for Jenny, another doggy picture. The Bolter is groaning with displeasure behind me, she thinks I spend far too much time extolling the elegance of the AP's "new" dog, who shall be known here as The Wisp. An ex-racing greyhound, she's lived with the APs for just over a year now, a gentle and graceful creature who is proof that greyhounds take to sofas like ducks to water.

The Hatchet Man by William Marshall

2012-01-08T15:40:00.000Z

"Hong Kong is an island of some 30 square miles under British administration in the South China Sea facing Kowloon and the New Territories areas of continental China. Kowloon and the New Territories are also British administered, surrounded by the Communist Chinese province of Kwantung. The climate is generally sub-tropical, with hot, humid summers and heavy rainfall. The population of Hong Kong and the surrounding areas at any one time, including tourists and visitors, is in excess of four millions. The New Territories are leased from the Chinese. The lease is due to expire in 1997, but the British nevertheless maintain a military presence along the border, although, should the Communists who supply almost all the colony's drinking water, ever desire to terminate the lease early, they need only turn off the taps. Hong Bay is on the southern side of the island and the tourist brochures advise you not to go there after dark."

The Yellowthread Street series is one of my absolute favourites of all time. There are sixteen altogether, and with this one I've read - I think - seven. I think, because I read most of the others as they turned up in the local library in the seventies, since when they have proved hard to find, although the first, Yellowthread Street, was reprinted in 1986. When I found that in the much-lamented Murder One bookshop on Charing Cross Road, I decided that I would have to read them all.

The Hatchet Man was published in 1976 and is set, like all of the series, in Hong Bay before the colony was handed back to the Chinese. The passage above appears somewhere in the first chapter of each of the books, so that you come across it with a smile of familiarity, because it is typical of Marshall's humour. The touch of insanity which pervades all of his writing lifts them from hard-boiled crime to create a roller-coaster which tips you back and forth between hilarity and holding your breath. One of the books - wish I could remember which - gave me the most truly heart-stopping moment I can ever remember reading, as I realised just ahead of Detective Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer precisely what danger he was in as he followed a murderer into a building. I won't tell you what, in case you ever read it, but it was genuinely horrific and terrifying, I can feel it again just writing about it.

Although you are not conscious of a huge amount of character development in each book, the reader quickly learns the idiosyncrasies of Feiffer's team (and their long-suffering wives). Feiffer himself is European, but Hong Kong-born, while Inspector Christopher O'Yee is Eurasian and was born in San Francisco. Detectives Spencer and Auden, who bear a distinct resemblance in my mind to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, always bickering, are very much the young British male abroad, very gung ho and ready, as soon as they have gun in hand, to blast away at felons, although Feiffer knows that he needs to protect them from themselves.

In The Hatchet Man the team are investigating a series of apparently random murders in cinemas; overstretched, tired and irritable, everyone is spending long hours in the station on Yellowthread Street sifting through the detritus found on cinema floors in the hope that it will yield some information. The all-seeing narrative style lets us follow the main characters, including the Hatchet Man himself - this is something I can find annoying, but I don't here, because there's a quality about Marshall's matter-of-fact voice which makes it work and you can be part, in turn, of Feiffer's worry about his team, Spencer's clumsy tactlessness, O'Yee's neurotic ramblings about whether his children will still recognise him when he's always out at work, even the Hatchet Man's psychosis, even old Mrs Mortimer whose dementia makes her unpleasantly racist. Each is a glimpse into a flawed person, some just bumbling along doing their best, some so damaged by time and events that they've moved beyond the boundaries that constrain the rest of us. Marshall's dialogue catches all the half-spoken thoughts, the miscommunications that are part of everyday life, too - a trait he shares with William Gibson, another "hard-boiled" writer with a gift for creating remarkably endearing characters - I find myself going back with pleasure over snatches of conversation to see if I've missed any nuances.

It's not the "whodunit" element that makes this series compulsive, although the plotting is tight enough for satisfying reading. Their charm is in their quirkiness, their delight in the idiocy of everyday life. Feiffer is plagued by a teahouse owner called Mr Lop who hates him (as we know from an earlier book):

"Who is the suspicious person?" Yan asked.
"He's gone now," Lop said. He said, "He was in my tea house. He looked very suspicious. He's gone now."
"Gone where?"
"Gone. How do I know? I'm not the police. That's Feiffer's job."
"Mr Feiffer isn't here," said Constable Yan patiently. "Does Mr Feiffer know you?"
Mr Lop said, "I don't like Feiffer. Feiffer doesn't like me. Feiffer got me into trouble with Tax." he said, "If it was the Hatchet Man and Feiffer was out when I rang up and he missed him I'll laugh myself silly."

It feels as though the narrative progresses by a series of snapshots of the team at work, rather than in a completely linear fashion, and the jerky shutter action provides verisimilitude, as if we were watching Sam Spade (who indeed gets a mention) in slightly stuttery black-and-white. In 1990 there was an abortive attempt at making a TV series, which stripped the stories of all the things which made them most special, and may have done the books themselves no favours at all by so grossly misrepresenting them.

If you come across one in a charity shop, do please give it a try! For my own part, I feel that my Century of Books has, to echo Simon, got off to a very good start.

...and looking forward: reading plans for 2012

2012-01-03T20:13:00.000Z

The Bolter doesn't think she appears enough here, so I've promised, with my fingers firmly crossed, that 2012 will be her starring year. She may let Senior Dog in from time to time.

It's going to be a big year for reading! It started well when I decided to celebrate New Year by reading Connie Willis's Blackout. I've seen some mixed reviews of this book - mainly about its length - but I couldn't put it down. I shall be more than happy to have another 400+ pages to read to resolve it in All Clear.

One of the big projects for this year will be my own version of the Century of Books that Simon is undertaking. I haven't really talked about that here, but I've been planning for it ever since Simon posted about his plans and I leapt in and said that I couldn't resist joining in. I've got an Evernote table with suggestions for books I might read and I've been itching to start (although now I can, I have a pile of 21st-century review books I ought to read first - ho-hum). I see Simon's already read his first book! The biggest challenge for me here will be posting about them - some of the results may be on the short side, but I'll do my best! My plan - unlike Simon - is to allow myself at least 2 years to complete the challenge, and I'm not going to read only literary fiction, because then it might easily become a chore. So there will be some themes to follow: crime fiction, children's books, fantasy and so on.

I thought I needed an auspicious year to start with, so I chose The Hatchet Man by William Marshall, published in 1976, the year my elder son was born. More about the book anon.

Alongside, and complementing the Century of Books nicely, is the Classics Challenge hosted by Katherine at November's Autumn, which I did post about. I've got a list of seven 20th-century classics, with a few extras to choose from. I'm starting with Margaret Kennedy's The Constant Nymph.

I get huge pleasure from Carl's challenges, RIP and Once Upon a Time - I may focus more than usual on books from the last century here, too, which might be fun. But I'm not going to read 20th-century books exclusively during the year, not least because I've got Christmas presents to read!

There's another project that I'll be undertaking, too - despite chronic lack of time, I started another blog! Hurlyburlybuss has been taking shape very slowly over the last couple of months and will develop further as I find time for it. It will be a very anglocentric blog about children's books, reflecting my enthusiasm for the books I grew up with and regard as formative - to which end, I'll be reading Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built, as well as trawling through my copies of Margery Fisher's Intent upon Reading and John Rowe Townsend's Written for Children. I foresee some expensive visits to secondhand bookshops as well! But there's no time limit here, I shall just add to it as I read and re-read. I've been cross-posting reviews of children's books from this site so there's a little there already. It's a piece of lunacy, really, but all my own...

Looking back....

2012-01-03T11:24:00.002Z

Devon, 2011

...with distinctly mixed feelings: 2011 was a slog. Not so much huge sloughs of despond, but just a long grind, too much work, financial uncertainty and several large and unexpected bills, worries about the health of OH and the APs being compounded by new anxieties about dogs (Senior Dog is mostly just getting elderly, while The Bolter has just had a second operation in a year) and no real let-up in sight. But reading has, as ever, kept me going, and book talk has been a pleasure. The two months of Carl's RIP Challenge VI in particular, when we read and talked about Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things - not always in agreement with each other, but with lots of stimulating ideas and a real sense of companionship. It's been followed, less cheerfully, by a real plummet in blogging time - I'm still getting through the books, but I simply haven't had a chance to talk about them. The intentions are good, but the only opportunity is just before bed, as a rule, and I'm just too tired then!

A quick summing up, though (the 2011 list is here):

Total number of books read: 110 (that's a poor year for me; August was the best month - the weather was bad and I used what holiday I had for reading)

Number of books by women authors: 89 (heavens! that's very pleasing)

Children/YA books: 19 (I'm surprised that number's not higher)

Non-fiction: 7 ( not so good, but I copyedited books on, amongst other things, history, middle-eastern politics, two on film - I get most of the serious reading I need there, and the degree of concentration required means I no longer apologise for reading frivolously the rest of the time)

Re-reads: 24 (I don't always remember to record whether I've read a book before, so the number doesn't actually tally with the list)

New-to-me authors: 35 (shows just how much I like to return to the familiar)

Worst book of the year? I don't record books I gave up on, so I can't answer this question. If I've forgotten a book altogether, I may start it again and enjoy it second time round; if I really hated it, I'll probably recognise it, if it's a library book; if it was on the TBR pile and I hated it, it goes on the Bookmooch list.

Best of the year? So hard to choose. Authors in 2011 who have gone straight onto the must-have list are: Ben Aaronovitch, Patricia S. Bowne and Kate Griffin - when did I start to like urban fantasy, I wonder? Anyway, they are all highly recommended. And my thanks to Nan who recommended Margaret Drabble's A Pattern in the Carpet, which I loved.

Literary highpoints? Going to hear Neil Gaiman at the Edinburgh Book Festival (and having him check personally that my 10th anniversary copy of American Gods doesn't include the editing error he mentioned in his talk); hearing Mervyn Peake's sons talk about their father and read his poetry and going to the exhibition of his work in the British Library.

I neglected the Canadian Book Challenge, and will have to read hard if I'm to make it to 13 books by Canada Day. 2010 was the only year I managed to complete it, but taking part does mean that I've read 45 Canadian books in five years. For the Once Upon a Time Challenge I read Troll Mill and Troll Fell by Katherine Langrish, and for RIP VI I read 16 books and reviewed five, as well as taking part of in the discussions of Fragile Things and Jim Butcher's Storm Front.

Tomorrow (DV) I shall talk about 2012!

Perfect Lives by Polly Samson

2011-11-27T13:50:00.000Z

Polly Samson, Perfect Lives

Polly Samson’s linked shortstories combine beautifully nuanced writing with sharp observation as shedissects present-day life in England.Perfect Lives opens with "The Egg", a portraitof an apparently successful marriage: the Idlewilds are a comfortable,privileged family in a desirable English seaside town but, under the malignpresence of a perfectly ordinary egg, we see Celia’s careful edifice shatter,and we become aware that the perfection of her surroundings, too, is marred.

As I read this first story Iwondered if there were going to be too many jolts, if the pitch of the writingwould be too erratic. I needn’t have worried, because it was followed by"Barcarolle", possibly my favourite in the collection. The power of this storylies in its physicality, as in the contrast between the lines of Anna’s back asshe changes a light-bulb and the longer lines of the piano, or the sea outsidejuxtaposed with the waves of music. The writing is at once delicate andmuscular, building image on carefully-chosen image to a sensory climax as theChopin Barcarolle that Richard has dreamt of all day can finally be played on the thirdpiano. The opulence of the Idlewild establishment, with its valuable, butlightly-owned instrument, is set against Anna’s colourful creativity and thebattered instrument she cherishes. Morganna’s home, too, has a richness ofdetail that contrasts with a paucity of affection, the garish parrot an objectof loathing rather than of love, as is the piano that Lola has damaged in herrefusal to do her 10 minutes of practice. Only the Idlewilds have the resourcesto train a pianist, but Laura is competent, not talented, while Anna has thenecessary passion but neither the ability not the instrument.

The stories continue,touching on past memories – Greenham Common in the 80s, Bobo’s stories of thewar: “Secondhand memories were blowing about the Hamburg streets like litter. Kristallnacht.”– while in the present day, Claudinefinds a father, Tilda discovers that it is possible to love her son.Earth-shattering events only happen offstage: these are the small, dailyagonies of ordinary lives, meaningful and worthy of note because we recognisethem in ourselves. And therein lies the pleasure, in the main – the careful,elegant enunciation of the trivial, like an embroidery of meticulous stitches,shot through with flashes of brilliance.

Perfect Lives was reviewed for the Virago Book Club.

A Classics Challenge

2011-11-20T12:57:00.001Z

It occurred to me this morning that this challenge,which I've come across in various places as people post their lists, might fit in very nicely with another project I have lined up for next year. It is hosted by Katherine at November's Autumn, and the challenge is to read seven classics in 2012. Each month there will be a prompt to encourage participants to write about their current book. Although only three re-reads are allowed, seven suitable books are easy to find, with several coming off the shelves. My chosen books are from the twentieth century, but I might allow myself a brief flirtation with the nineteenth if I feel inclined! In which case, Trollope, Mrs Gaskell or Wilkie Collins would be the most likely candidates. Some classic crime would also be a possibility, or even some classic science fiction!

The books I plan to read are:

Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph (1924): this is a re-read. I read it when I was in my teens, and loved it - having, I think, first seen it referred to in another book, though I can't remember what. But I seem to remember another character measuring herself against Tessa's behaviour, and being very influenced by her, after seeing the stage adaptation. I wonder who it was?

W. Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour (1935): I've read many of Maugham's novels, but had never seen this travel account before. The style looks very readable.

Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance (1953): I'm been saving this up for a while, it's one of the fist Persephones I bought. I think people would agree that, since its reprint, it has achieved modern classic status?

Sylvia Townsend Warner, either Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927) or After the Death of Don Juan (1928) - both are on my shelves.

Barbara Comyns, The Vet's Daughter: I don't think I've read this! I've loved her work ever since I came across a copy of The Skin Chairs and bought it for its title.

Elizabeth von Arnim: I like her writing, and there are several I haven't read. All the Dogs of My Life (1936) appeals to me greatly and, although I'd have to buy it, it would be easy to pass on.

Monica Dickens, Mariana (1940). Another book by an author I like, and another Persephone Classic. Dickens is a wonderfully immediate writer, and I rather expect to fall in love with this one. Also not on my bookshelf.

As an alternate, I'd like to include Rose MacAulay, possibly even a re-read of The Towers of Trebizond, which I adore, but perhaps Told By an Idiot, for the fun of something new.

I'm desperate to get on to my twentieth-century reading! Everything I want to read right now was published before 2000. Everything I ought to be reading, admittedly, because the TBR pile is mostly review books, is recently published and rats! if I haven't missed the publication date. Ho hum. Actually, I'm sure it's better for authors if there's still someone writing about their books after all the hype is over...

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A.S. Byatt

2011-11-07T17:24:00.000Z

This is a book of lists and names. In Norse mythology, everything has got a name, from the World Ash (Yggdrasil) to the magical rope, Gleipnir (fashioned by the dark elves from six impossibilities such as the sound of cats' footfalls and bird's spittle) that bound the Fenris wolf. At the start the author points out that there is no standard spelling for names, so she won't apologise for using variants, and I won't either. Lists and names are vital, of course, in mythologies, establishing the order of the world and demonstrating dominion over it, and as the beginning of the Norse world was marked by the naming of things, so is the thin child's in this book, as she moves from Sheffield to the country at the onset of World War II, discovering and cataloguing her new environment. Reading her bird and flower guides alongside her copy of Asgard and the Gods, she ponders Frigg's journey through the world asking every creature to promise not to harm her son Baldur:

She had bird books and flower books, the thin child, and noted them all, tree sparrow, bullfinch, song thrush, lapwing, linnet, wren. They ate and were eaten, it was true, they faded and vanished as the earth turned, but they came back at the solstice, and always would, whereas Baldur was doomed to die, for all the promises. If her father did not come back, he would never come back. [...]

The goddess called everything, everything, to promise not to harm her son. Yet the shape of the story means that he must be harmed.

For the thin child, the Wild Hunt still traverses the sky, in the form of Nazi bombers, and her father has gone to fight. The story of Ragnarök becomes her protection against the horrors of war, as Byatt put it, a counter-myth, that includes the possibility of renewal and regeneration. But, as Byatt acknowledges, this element of regeneration may be a Christian interpolation - Ragnarök was the end of the world, not the beginning of a new cycle, and a book written at the beginning of the twenty-first century is overshadowed by the knowledge of our destruction of our world. As with the Nazi erasure of other races (which started with replacing names by numbers), we are, with increasing rapidity, erasing other species, and no amount of clever science will bring back a species once lost. At the heart of Byatt's book is Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, whose poison kills Thor in the final battle - her once joyous exploration of the oceans, delighting in her fellow creatures, playing with whales, has become as much a prison sentence as her sister's or her father's - hounded and angered by Thor, she has become so vast that she reaches girdles the earth. The shape of this story means that the flat ocean which is all that will be left after the final battle will be an empty, poisoned waste.

Ragnarök is at once a gripping re-telling of the Norse myths and a warning that, as Asgard was doomed to destruction from its very beginning, so is our world. The feckless gods couldn't prevent their end, for all the promises. Neither, is seems, will we.

A final note: I was gratified to see, among the books cited at the end, under the heading, Warnings, is The Unnatural History of the Sea: The Past and Future of Humanity and Fishing by Callum Roberts- this is a book which, while laying out the damage we have done, offers a thread of hope for the future if we act decisively. I make no apology for mentioning it - indeed, I am proud to say that the author is my brother. I think it's an important book. Ragnarök, too, is both compelling and beautiful addition to the literature of mythology and a call to action. We can learn from Götterdämmerung - not least, that Ragnarök means Judgement of the Gods, and not, as the German has it, twilight of the gods. What will be the judgement on us?

September, October and RIP VI round-up

2011-11-03T17:38:00.001Z

October

The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne-Jones re-read
Charmed Life by Diana Wynne-Jones - re-read
Silvertongue by Charlie Fletcher
The Duke's Daughter by Angela Thirkell*
Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt - review pending
Jane Austen by Carol Shields - review to come
The American Boy by Andrew Taylor
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Arrival City by Doug Saunders (K)
Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym - re-read
The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble - review to come
The Girls by John Bowen - review pending

September

The Digital Wolf by Jon Rosenberg - K
The Wine of Angels by Phil Rickman - K
Ironhand by Charlie Fletcher
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
A Lovesome Thing by Patricia S. Bowne - K
Advice from Pigeons by Patricia S. Bowne - K (re-read)
Murkmere by Patricia Elliott
The Hanging Wood by Martin Edwards

* Books in blue were non-RIP reads

During both September and October I was busy reading for the RIP VI Challenge, but there were some good things I didn't have time to talk about, being too caught up in a very satisfying group read of Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things - in the course of which I discovered that the best way to read short stories is to savour them slowly. I got so involved in the group reads of this and Jim Butcher's Storm Front that I did less much reviewing than I intended!, but I had so much fun!

I did, for the first time, manage to do some suitable viewing: The Corpse Bride was a little disappointing, and I'm not too sure about the first episode of The Dresden Files - mildly enjoyable, I suppose. I also watched a thriller called Page Eight which I might have reviewed had I had more time - it was moody and atmospheric and for once, I wasn't on edge the whole way through waiting for gory deaths. I'll definitely do this part of the challenge again next year.

Finally, I read sixteen books which could have counted towards the challenge, and managed to review five, so I did complete Peril the First (and three of them were on the original list)! I also read all of Charlie Fletcher's Stoneheart trilogy, which was fun, though there were rather too many pitched battles for my taste (and endurance) - I think they would please a young readership, especially boys. The UK editions of this series start with a London map showing the locations of the most important statues, with a thumbnail drawing. I can't think why they aren't included in the US editions - you can Google all the statues, but that relies on memory while you're reading. The author makes brilliant use of London statues as characters and I don't think it's doing him any favours to leave out the maps - my copy of Ironhand was a Bookmooched US one, and I missed them all the way through.

Diana Wynne-Jones' Chrestomanci books are wonderful, too, with protagonists who face real moral decisions. They may not be the very best of her books (I'd be hard pushed to choose which were!) but they are full of warmth and humour, splendid cats and some very scary moments. I've gone straight on to volume 2.

I read Donna Tartt's The Secret History as a book club choice, having avoided her up to now because I don't get on with bestsellers. I was wrong, it was okay.

I've enjoyed the last two months reading so much that my intention is to carry on with it until the end of the year, perhaps not quite as exclusively as I've done for the last two months, but it's getting dark early now that the clocks have changed, and I'm in the mood for more crime, fantasy and magic. Thanks again to Carl for being such a wonderful host and for putting in so much work to make it such a success!

Advice from Pigeons / A Lovesome Thing

2011-10-31T14:00:00.002Z

This is my last post for the RIP VI challenge, and it's one I've been feeling terribly guilty about, because I've had two wonderful books on my Kindle for ages and haven't posted about them. A major part of that was because I wanted to do them justice, so I kept putting off writing a post about them.

Because what I most enjoyed about Patricia S. Bowne's Advice from Pigeons and its sequel, A Lovesome Thing, was how very different they are. They are set in the wonderfully realised Royal Academy of Osyth, the institution of choice for the study of modern academic magic:

The Royal Academy is especially known for its Demonology Department, in the school of Natural Magic. As traditional demon-binding is illegal in Osyth, the Academy's magicians have developed the world's only collaborative program. Using our state-of-the-art pentarium, they are able to safely summon and study the most dangerous of demons.

A new arrival to the Demonology Department is Hiram Rho, whose area of study is natural philosophy, a specialism rather looked down on by other faculty as it involves the ability to understand the speech of animals and suffers from an "oversweet" image. There's nothing appealing about Rho himself, however - he's disaffected, arrogant and unwashed, and his alienation from his peers endangers him when he accidentally binds a demon in the pentarium, an event which will have far-reaching repercussions, not least because it shouldn't have been possible.

It has to be said that modern magic is a pretty complicated area, and that you need to be an attentive reader - no coasting here. The rewards are great - this is a world you can get utterly caught up in, even though you'll be pushed to do any second-guessing about how they are going to get out of trouble. While I probably liked the pigeons best, Rho grows on you as a character - he's really barely civilised at the start, but surrounded by good people like Teddy Whin and Neil Torecki, he begins to integrate a little. The logic of the magic arts is challenging and thought-provoking, particularly as it relates to the study of demons, and this is expanded on in the second book, A Lovesome Thing, when Neil and Teddy enter a lost garden in search of Neil's partner, Bill. At times gently funny, this is a book where the use of language is of utmost importance, as a materialised demon is defined by the stronger will of those who surround it, through a charm of discourse, and exorcised by erasing its identity - a relationship which becomes infinitely more complex when the exorcist has to deal, not with a demon, but a person. Professional niggles are magnified into debilitating antipathies, more than a mere disadvantage when breaking the code can mean a death sentence, as Bill has cause to know. The lost garden turns out to be a prison where very, very bad things happen, not just once, but over and over again, and who you are is thrown into constant question.

Underpinning the world of academic magic is a very real institution, full of all the petty concerns with red-tape and accountability that anyone working in academe will instantly recognise. You'll find the exponents of sexy disciplines (like vampirology, of course), the under-funded poor relations, the quest for outside sponsorship with its never-ending grant applications, the competition for conference funding...it's a glorious, wildly sardonic in-joke, with really riveting story-lines. As another reviewer said, imagine Harry Potter told by the teachers...but, I would add, with grown-up characters with grown-up preoccupations.

Coming late to a review doesn't necessarily reflect badly on the book. I loved these and really can't wait to read more about the Royal Academy - in fact, I keep dipping back into them, which is another reason why it took me so long to write this post. I do hope that Teddy's new friend will make an appearance in the future (author, please note - I don't want to identify the friend in question as it would be a plot spoiler!). There's also a rather wonderful website where you can read extracts from both books and other stories.

Fragile Things group read - week 8

2011-10-30T16:22:00.000Z

Cape Wrath, Scotland

Over the past eight weeks I've found the group read and the attention we've paid to the stories in Fragile Things immensely rewarding, even though my comments about individual stories wouldn't necessarily always suggest it. After posting, I've gone back over and over, as we've discussed them, and seen, or had pointed out, new elements that I hadn't considered. Even when I haven't liked the story - or someone else hasn't liked it - there have been new insights; in fact, some of the most rewarding discussion has coalesced around stories that have caused offence.

I've also become convinced that Gaiman is an even better writer than I gave him credit for, and that although some stories look comparatively slight, there may be much more to them than I've seen at first glance. There are one or two exceptions: "Strange Little Girls" struck me as not entirely successful, for instance, although it was an example of the series of vignettes that builds to a greater whole. We seem to have been almost universally agreed that "Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot" was a much more successful version of this kind of story.

My comments on the stories are going to be brief - I was going to just say what I thought in the comments on Carl's post, because I'm having RSI trouble today, but then I decided there was too much I wanted to say!

"The Day the Saucers Came"
A nice little poem, thoughtful and effective - "the day / Animals spoke to us in Assyrian..." - full of lovely images. And containing an essential truth about the relativeness of everything, how one's own feelings can achieve such magnitude that everything just pales into insignificance. It doesn't have to be selfishness, there are times when self-centredness is natural and even appropriate.

"Sunbird"
This is a lovely, traditionally conceived story, and another that could have been an incidental story to American Gods (how I love that Gaiman keeps creating in that world, like ours but just slightly off-kilter). You can sort of see where it's going from the start, but that just adds to the pleasure. And it proves - if it were needed, that Gaiman can write the purely joyous in short story form, as well as novel-length. Knowing the story's history from the introduction, you can't help but see it as a wonderful a expression of love for his daughter, it simply sings out of it. Gaiman says it's an R.A. Lafferty story. I don't know Lafferty at all, though this persuades me that I should. For me, it was another that reminded me of my other American god (if we count Gaiman as one, despite his Englishness), James Thurber.

"Inventing Aladdin"
The Introduction says everything I could want to about this last poem - stories have to start somewhere. And many of the stories that are familiar to us, and that we re-work in various ways, originated with people who had a different world-view. It's hard now to imagine that Scheherazade might literally be saving her life with every hanging ending, every tantalising beginning. Even so, stories are still of immense importance, a fundamental part of our culture - the very fact that we continue to re-tell old stories is the proof.

"Monarch of the Glen"
I don't think anyone can have failed to spot that I regard American Gods as pretty much the pinnacle of story-telling. It is, quite literally, the book I wish I could have written. So a further installment in Shadow's journey (and I started missing him pretty much the instant the book ended), and one set in the Old World, is like birthday and Christmas rolled into one. It took me straight back to exploring the northernmost limits of the Scottish mainland, what different country that is, wild and treeless, and full of Norse names. The days when the haar (mist) never lifts, and you can imagine Naflgar, the ship made of dead men's fingernails, drawing up on the windswept strand - oh, the desolation of those men doomed to roam the seas for ever, you can feel the chill of the seaspray. (I've been reading of Ragnarök elsewhere this week, and it's on my mind...). Grendel's mother did much to exorcise the image I had of her from another retelling, which makes me like this version all the more. And Jennie is a delight.

I found "Monarch of the Glen" the perfect ending to the collection and to our group read. Huge thanks to Carl for being such a generous and attentive host. I'm already looking forward to the next one! But for now, I'm off to read what everyone else has to say on the last four stories.

The American Boy by Andrew Taylor

2011-10-27T08:00:00.004+01:00

Not long ago I proofed an installment of Dickens' publication Household Words for the Dickens Journal Online project, which invited volunteers to help that get a digitised run of that journal online (along the lines of Project Gutenberg's distributed proofreading). The first article in the one I did was about the quality of housing in an area of London which was greatly in need of improved sanitation. It could have been preliminary reading for The American Boy, which is set in London and Gloucestershire not long after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Household Words may have been published much later in the century, but conditions for the poor hadn't changed much in the intervening period, and the rookeries of St Giles, described in the book, had their equivalents in the city in Dickens' day. And that's one of the best things about TAB: although the research has clearly been meticulous, it doesn't intrude at all but is a natural and integral part of the story. I'm sure that the odd anachronism may have crept in, but I wasn't conscious, the way I often am, of reading and simultaneously thinking "Would he...?", "Was that really...?"

The American boy in question is Edgar Allan Poe, whose beginnings and ending were, as author Andrew Taylor points out in an afterword, somewhat shrouded in mystery. Taylor was intrigued by Poe's story "William Wilson" and took the idea of a boy haunted by his double to create two schoolboys who look alike, Edgar and his friend, Charlie Frant, pupils, for a short time, of narrator Tom Shield. Although he is only an impoverished schoolmaster, Shield's life becomes inextricably entangled with this pair when he is sent to London to collect Charlie and take him to school for the first time.

One of the things that I enjoyed was the setting in "my" bit of London - Russell Square and Southampton Row, where Poe lived when he was in England as a child. Some of the original Georgian houses in the area survive and, as with the descriptions in Household Words, it makes it easier to imagine the setting, with hackney carriages coming and going. The St Giles rookery was the area between Great Russell Street, where the British Museum stands and Seven Dials, now loomed over by the massive and ugly Centrepoint building - ironically, an area which is still a mess, thanks to reconstruction by Transport for London which seems to go on for ever. It was a terrifying place in the early nineteenth century, and it says much for Tom Shield that he was prepared to venture there as he tries to understand what has become of Charlie Frant's father.

The action moves from London, to Stoke Newington on the capital's outskirts, to Gloucestershire, where Tom accompanies the boys as their tutor. Over the course of a cold Christmas at Monkshill House, a dreadful discovery is made and Tom, a natural bystander who seems fated to be manipulated by those around him, finds himself caught up in accusations and lies. The atmosphere at Monkshill is chilly and oppressive, the unhealthy ice-house in the grounds casting a miasma that reflects the unpleasantness indoors, where Tom observes the machinations of the monstrous, self-made Stephen Carswell and his attempts to direct the future of his daughter Flora and his cousin, the widowed Sophia Frant.

This is a gothic novel on a grand scale, lending itself to comparisons with Dickens and Wilkie Collins, though it most reminded me of Charles Palliser's The Quincunx (but admittedly, not quite so tortuous). I'm not quite sure that all the ramifications of the complex plot worked for me, but Taylor handles class distinction well, persuading the reader by example that different standards applied then. It's full of larger-than-life characters, some of them attractive, some decidedly not, but it's also about a world of ambivalence where it's not certain who should be trusted as each person pursues his or her own ends. Don't be put off by mentions of Dickens (or Palliser): it's a gripping and readable story, and I rattled through it in three days. I read it for the RIP VI Challenge.

The Dresden Files

2011-10-24T18:08:00.001+01:00

This post is particularly addressed to my fellow readers on the Storm Front group read, which was part of the RIP VI Challenge, but I've avoided spoilers, so it's safe for everyone!

Well, it's a little late but I finally got round to watching Episode 1 of The Dresden Files. I wanted to be able to compare it to Storm Front while that was still fresh in my mind, so that I could make an informed judgment about whether it's a worthy adaptation of a fun book.

Hmm...well, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. Episode 1 is a story about a small boy who thinks he is being haunted by demons, and he asks for Harry's help because he's seen his ad in the phone book (we remember the ad, don't we?) - Harry's reluctant because he thinks the kid probably has too much imagination and he won't take money from a child. Meanwhile, Detective Murphy (who has long dark hair - what's with that?) has a flayed corpse on her hands and needs Harry's thoughts on who might be responsible, though she seems reluctant to act on his opinion when she gets it.

Left to right, Harry Dresden, Det. Murphy, Bob and someone we haven't met yet...

To set the scene in this opening episode, we get a bit of the back story about Harry and his dad the magician, and a hint that Harry's powers come via his mother. Bob the skull puts in an appearance - rather more of one than you'd expect, given that he's corporeal. He's also very concerned about the wellbeing of the small boy and makes it clear that he thinks Harry's made a mistake there - all very commendable, but where's the wisecracking lecher we all liked so much? (Looking at the picture above, I'm beginning to wonder if Bob is going to turn out to be a fallen angel...)

A similarity to the books was that the story was launched into without too much preamble, and there weren't many explanations about the rules of magic, or the White Council. In fact, there was only one mention of the Council that I can remember, and I missed the explanations, because they were fun to read. Although Harry narrates, the Chandleresque noir atmosphere was almost entirely absent, and Harry seems to have gained a nice, girl-next-door sort of girlfriend. No chemistry discernible between him and Murphy.

When we were discussing the book Castle was several times mentioned as being like The Dresden Files. A bit of the sharpness and sassiness that went into Castle would have been very welcome here (so would Nathan Fillion, and not only because...well, we won't go into that). But I think we were all agreed that TDF ought to be Castle with magic, and unfortunately, Castle's magic was missing. So was Mister the Cat.

This first part seemed very short - an American TV hour doesn't offer a lot of time to pack in an elaborate plot, but there's plenty of evidence that it can be done (especially by Joss Whedon and his team). Maybe this will get better - I'd love it if it did, but I'm not holding out much hope. The best I can say is that it's amiable. I'll keep watching it, and OH quite enjoyed it, but he hadn't read Storm Front, of course.

Fragile Things group read - week 7

2011-10-23T10:48:00.000+01:00

Only one more week to go, we're on week 7 of the Fragile Things group read for RIP VI - what am I going to do when we finish talking about these stories? Although I had less time to discuss last week's reading, sadly, although I managed to check out everyone's posts in the end, I think. There seemed to be quite a consensus that last week's stories were much more successful, with all of them being tightly written except maybe the last (and even with that one, which some of us were more doubtful about, Carl said that it was better for listening to).

"In the End"
Is this what would be necessary for a return to innocence? I wondered at the taking away of the animals' names, which at first seemed harsh, but of course, it was what gave man dominion over them - it's not taking anything away, it's relieving them of the burden that we imposed on them. As someone who's been known to say that the world would be a better place if there weren't any humans in it, I guess I have to agree with Gaiman's version of the End. Frankly, I'd like to see humans redeem themselves without recourse to any god, but that would have been harder to make story-shaped.

"Goliath"
A nice, straightforward, old-fashioned, well-told story. If you've seen The Matrix (and I guess most people have) it resonates, of course, but it's nice to have an associated story with a British setting - it kind of adds to the reality, somehow. There's Keanu Reeves doing his ninja stuff, and a 7-foot-tall British nerd running a computer shop on Tottenham Court Road...I wonder which one it is, and whether I've shopped there? I really, really hate it when the tube stops outside the station like that. it kind of reminded me of an old William Gibson story called "The Gernsback Continuum", though it's so long ago I read it that I've no idea whether it's really justified or not, except that it deals with alternative realities - but, as I say, it felt like 60s scifi, somehow (which the Gibson story did too, although it heralded something new and wonderful).

"Pages From a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky"
This title may, or may not, refer to one of the oldest science fiction novels of all, James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, which was published in 1888. But, as I said last week, Gaiman reminds me of a lot of things - we seem to carry around a lot of the same cultural baggage and, listening to him talk, it's clear that his knowledge of the subject is extensive.

I tried to be too clever with this story - I started looking for a reference to red in every section, which I thought might be the kind of conceit Gaiman would go for. But I lucked out around the fifth section and had to start over, to gradually discover that Scarlet was possibly a ghost, but at any rate something unattainable, which is why she could always stay ahead even though she was walking...and, of course, it wasn't until the end that I saw it was another Mobius story.

"How to Talk to Girls at Parties"
I don't really have a lot to say about this one. It feels as if it starts out being drawn from real memory, and then it turns into something else. It's a good story, it's nicely done, it's very good on that sort of tremulous anticipation about getting close to someone of the opposite sex in dark surroundings that characterises one's early teenage years; I liked the idea behind it and the contrast with the nicely prosaic title - maybe I was just too tired when I was reading it. Maybe it's just a perfectly good story that I don't have anything more to say about.

Scene of the Blog

2011-10-19T11:20:00.000+01:00

Something different today - GeraniumCat's Bookshelf is featured on Scene of the Blog at Kittling: Books. When Cathy asked me to appear I was immensely flattered, because I'm always rather surprised that anyone actually reads my blog. I really started it to keep track of what I'm reading, and I wondered at first whether to make it public at all. Then I discovered book challenges and the question became irrelevant! And the other reason I started blogging was because, for years, I really had no one to share books with - both sons do read, and we share recommendations and pass books around, and I have discovered some great authors that way, but they don't read as much, or as widely as I do. But now there's someone, somewhere, to talk about almost any book with. Isn't that wonderful?

Fragile Things group read - week 6

2011-10-16T16:38:00.002+01:00

Week six of the Fragile Things group read - we're kind of on the downhill straight now. It's unlikely that I'll ever attempt to read it in French, but I like this version of the cover, and I seem to be running out of versions in English - I suppose if I were to try, with a English translation to hand, it might be very good for my French, in fact, and rather more fun that most of the things I have to read in that language, but I'm not sure that the lexicon of un-ease that's Gaiman's métier is the most useful to me in my everyday life. But it might justify a longer lunch-break, perhaps: "Oh, I'm just polishing up my French, won't be long..."?

More germanely, this was a much better week for me, no agonising this time over whether the end justifies the means. I wonder if we'll all be able to exchange comments in a mood of harmony, or if we'll still find things to divide us?

"My Life"

The choice of prose poem here was quite surprising, and Gaiman does remark that elsewhere it was published as prose, but that he prefers it with the line breaks, which poses an interesting question about the effect they have on the reader. I think I am probably disposed to read poetry more carefully, paying greater attention to individual words, although this may be more of a reflection on me, and what I believe to be involved in both the study and writing of poetry. It's certainly true that, in the far-off days when I did such a thing, I would craft a line of a poem more artfully than a line of prose, even though I like to think I paid close attention to the latter, too. And I've often been aware, during our six weeks of reading, of the close attention Gaiman pays to whatever he is writing, which is why he's so good at the kind that appears in the next story.

Before I get to that, though, a couple more thoughts on "My Life": I do like the contrast of detail here, the over-exactitude of the causes of his father's death, compared with Mary-Lou's deliquescence (very satisfying word, that). Gaiman sometimes feels very familiar to me - he's a bit younger, but we grew up reading the same things and apparently squirreling away the same kinds of apparently useless bits of information. The disease encephalitis lethargica, for instance, which Oliver Sachs treated with L-Dopa, so that some people woke up 50 years after having contracted it in an epidemic in the 1920s. I remember the news reports, and I'm sure Gaiman does too. That's what I thought of when I read about Mary-Lou's awakening, even though it's attributed here to ball lightning - and then I find that sleepy sickness, as it was called, features in The Sandman.

"Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot"

In this case, what I remembered was seeing a woman on a chat show - or was it a feature in a "lifestyle" magazine? The latter, I think, but she said she was a vampire...she dressed the part, but I thought she looked a little - well, opulent, for the real thing... The tarot has been endlessly invoked in fantasy writing, but here Gaiman seems to touch an essential truth, and the major arcana of the tarot and the vampire lend their imaginative power to each other, so that the sum becomes much greater than its parts, offering us a poignant history of vampires. They are like us, of course, but sadder, wiser, colder - and amoral.

"Feeders and Eaters"

This reminded me of that thing that people say about relationships, that there's always one who loves, and one who is loved. Not invariably true, but you can certainly observe examples of it in couple you know. It also reminded me of Edward Hopper's wonderful painting The Nighthawks, though I think that's actually a bit glamorous for the kind of greasy spoon caff evoked here. My favourite line is: Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way. The narrator has clearly lost several, he's so detached from normal human empathy, although he still retains an abstracted sort of curiosity about people, and he does do rather better with the woman on the train. Oh, don't you just ache to know that story?

"Diseasemaker's Croup"

One can only pity the poor writer and describer of such a disease, of which he is obviously a sufferer. It sounds as if there is little hope for the patient once the tertiary stage is reached. It's most unfortunate that the cure is so difficult to obtain and prepare when this disease is so highly contagious that the very act of classifying it is apparently sufficient to contract it, and all descriptions are necessarily tainted...another variant on the Mobius story, really, and cleverly done.

Four superb stories, I don't think I had a single quibble. Now to see what everyone else has to say...

Fragile Things group read - week 5

2011-10-09T16:02:00.002+01:00

I wasn't able to join in much with the conversation Carl's group read of Fragile Things last week, which was a disappointment to me, but two weeks away from home made it difficult. And my reading time this week has been a little curtailed. How dare work interfere with the important things in life, like talking with friends about books?

On to the stories:

"Locks"
These days my sympathy's with Father Bear: oh yes, I do get that, and I love the way the double meaning of locks comes into play there. Goldilocks has never been a favourite story, but I like it better for this poem, that articulates our wishes as parents to protect our children early on, by the telling of stories and later, by wishing that they could learn from our mistakes, though there's also the over-protectiveness of "lock up your daughters", too - I've commented before on how good Gaiman can be at getting a lot into a small space.

"The Problem of Susan"
We know that C.S. Lewis wasn't at all comfortable with women and, indeed, probably disliked them for the most part. But his dismissal of Susan in The Last Battle seems out of all proportion, a petulant expression of hatred for all adult women, a statement that there wouldn't be any of them in his heaven, thank you very much! Since he portrays women pretty misogynistically in his adult fiction, I don't think I'm going out on a limb here (they are just about admissible if deferring absolutely to their husbands, but otherwise they are she-devils). So I'm glad that Gaiman set out to write something that would address the awfulness of what was done to Susan, left alone without her family and very unlikely to feel that a new lipstick was consolation for her loss. And there's something about the nastiness of the Narnia sections that fits with the nastiness of Lewis ridding himself of the nubile, no-longer-innocent (in his terms) Susan, but it's for people with stronger stomachs than me. I don't like it. But maybe I don't like it because Narnia is part of my innocent childhood and I don't want to be made to see the worm in the apple.

"How Do You Think It Feels?"
In the introduction to Smoke and Mirrors Gaiman says he was feeling rather blank when he wrote this story. Right. For the first time, I didn't read the whole thing but skimmed to the end. Okay, I'm a prude, but I don't want to read about sex. This reminds me (she says, changing the subject hurriedly) of when I got to know an author (whom I'd invited to speak at a conference) and his then girlfriend. The author, enjoying a spring break in England when his corner of the Atlantic seaboard was still huddled behind icebergs, very kindly gave me a copy of his latest crime novel. All I could think when I read it was, if he can imagine this sort of thing, I wouldn't want to be his girlfriend!

"Instructions"
Oh, what a relief, I love this. All the fairytale pieces rolled up into one perfect whole. It should have been in the possession of every one of the characters in Grimm's Household Tales, required reading. It brings back so many treasured images, and there is something about the patient tone that meshes perfectly with all the wise old men and women in the stories, who would tell you, if only you had the inclination to hear. Wish I had the audio-book!

As ever, I'm eager to know what other people thought, especially about "The Problem of Susan".

The Wine of Angels by Phil Rickman

2011-10-06T08:00:00.000+01:00

A very long time ago I worked in a bookshop run by a publisher of religious books. In those pre-credit card days all the local clergy had an account with us and it was inevitable that the bookshop staff got to know them reasonably well, from curates all the way up to bishops (so when my stepfather rang up one day and said "Good afternoon, this is the Bishop of Birmingham and I'd like to order a book" I wasn't at all surprised...at least, not until he'd said actually, it wasn't, at which point I got very flustered!) Anyway, that's all by way of preamble - the point is that definitely the most romantic and intriguing title I came across in those days was that of Diocesan Exorcist, and very occasionally we used to sell a copy of a report written on the subject by that very diocese, which made it feel either terribly cutting-edge or frightfully medieval, I could never quite decide which.

At least according to the Merrily Watkins series, the Church itself still hasn't made up its mind on this question either and when, as the new Priest-in-Charge of the Herefordshire village of Ledwardine, Merrily finds herself in possession (sorry!) of an apparently haunted vicarage, the message she gets when she asks for advice is dismissive. Essentially, official policy is to ignore the paranormal. Of course, it's all more complicated than that. Merrily's failing marriage was abruptly ended when her husband died in a car crash, something neither she nor daughter Jane have entirely come to terms with. And Jane, at 15, is just beginning to test out her independence and to chafe under parental constraint, and anyway she's not entirely happy with Merrily for exchanging marriage for God. As far as she's concerned, the whole religion and prayer thing just makes her thoroughly uncomfortable.

Ledwardine itself adds to the complications. One of the county's most attractive "black and white" villages, its church was at one time entirely situated within a cider orchard, and it's still partially surrounded. Incomers to the village, with an eye for the picturesque and to increasing the tourist trade, want to exploit local customs and traditions, but without regard to their specificity - surely, they consider, wassailing is just that, whether it's the Devon tradition or the Ledwardine one? A local woman, Lucy Devenish, warns that deep offence will be caused to the apple trees, but she is disregarded. Strange things happen in the orchard: there's a death, and a girl disappears, and intense local feeling is stirred up over a tragedy that took place over 300 years earlier.

Merrily's position within the community causes her to feel some anxiety. As an incomer (albeit one with local credentials) she must tread carefully. At the same time, she must establish - and maintain - a degree of spiritual authority in the village. She quickly finds herself having to make decisions which will bring her into opposition with leading local figures, at the same time as she is confronting her own fears. Worries about Jane only add to her burden.

The Wine of Angels is the first of a nice long series of what have been described as "spiritual thrillers", and if you like this one you'll be happy, because there is no falling off as the series continues. If anything, they get scarier. The frights depend on your involvement with the characters - and perhaps, on your fear of the dark: expect cold chills rather than ravening demons. Merrily and Jane are complex and interesting people; though occasionally you want to give one or other of them a good shake, they have a strong moral sense that can be lacking in contemporary fiction. There's a good cast of locals, too, both lovely and unlovely, much as you would find in a real community. And although Ledwardine itself isn't real, the legends, history and literature of Herefordshire are - they combine to provide a rich canvas and are well worth investigating in their own right.

I usually recommend, at this point, settling down with a nice cup of tea to enjoy the book, but in this case it should be the brew for which it is named, cider - but don't forget, the real stuff is very potent!

This was a selection for the RIP VI Challenge.

RIP VI: Fragile Things group read - week 4

2011-10-02T10:00:00.000+01:00

Last week the reactions to "Keepsakes and Treasures" varied widely, with some people absolutely loathing the story because it was really very nasty and perverse while others agreed that the subject matter was unpleasant but thought that it worked as a story. Some really thoughtful posts provoked an excellent discussion, not just of this story but of the very unsettling "Other People", and about whether the fantasy elements really added to "Bitter Grounds", or whether it would have worked better without them.

I suspect that this week's responses will be more positive - I certainly enjoyed our reading, and am dying to know what everyone else thought.

"Good Boys Deserve Favour"
I don't really have much to say about this one - quite a nice insight into the workings of a young boy's mind, all that sitting in a music room with a book and not practising (that must be why my school had a glass panel in the door of the practice room!), and I liked the explanation about the double bass really being a bass viol, which is why it has such wonderful sonority...not new, but Gaiman's so good at introducing those little details which enrich his stories. In similar fashion, I like to know that it was inspired by a sculpture.

"Strange Little Girls"
Very short stories have rather taken off since the advent of Twitter and, by those standards, the stories here are quite epic! I like "Heart of Gold" - Mobius again, and rather clever. "Bonnie's Mother" and "Monday's Child" compress a huge amount of narrative into a tiny space - the latter reminded me of Gus van Sant's film Elephant which took 81 minutes to convey the same message (admittedly extremely effectively!).

"Harlequin Valentine"
Alas, poor Harlequin, to have the tables so neatly turned on him. But the harlequinade is a story that is constantly remade - the commedia dell'arte has been with us for hundreds of years (and I doubt if it sprang new-made into classical theatre where its roots lie) and transformation is part of the story. This is another that could very easily belong in the American Gods world. And on Etsy I found a Lisa Snellings carousel rabbit that I lost my heart to.

"The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch"
Grumble, grumble, grumble, I had to buy a copy of Smoke and Mirrors to read this, because of the differences between the US and UK editions of Fragile Things, but then I found that S&M (oh boy, only just noticed that!) contains possibly my favourite Gaiman poem, "Reading the Entrails", especially as I am so caught up in reading the stories and our discussion that I couldn't bear to miss one. Anyway, to "Miss Finch" - if this turned out to be the only story I liked in S&M it would have been worth the purchase - what a wonderful piece of writing! For a start, there's a sort of companionableness about it, you really feel as if Neil is telling it directly to you. The inclusion of two real friends adds to the effect - perhaps not so much Jane, as she's less-known, but here in the UK Jonathan Ross is more famous than Gaiman, a person liked or loathed (depending to some extent on your sense of humour), an instantly recognisable face and (undisguisable) voice. Miss Finch's continual lecturing is funny and plausible (I know people who would never eat sushi), as is her determination not to enjoy herself. The cavernous spaces where the circus takes place are superbly evoked (indeed, such a setting was used for a scary circus performance in an episode of Sherlock quite recently - and I saw the Cirque du Soleil myself at Battersea Power Station, which perversely I found much more satisfying than the alternative location of the Albert Hall). I'd love to hear Neil read this one aloud, and if my dad, who genuinely did run away to join the circus as a boy, had still been alive, I'd have given him it to read. I'm not sure that we are ever going to get Kristen m's "bright and beautiful" from Gaiman, but here we got close to perfection. Didn't we?

The Corpse Bride

2011-09-30T17:08:00.001+01:00

Well, this is new for me, it's a rarity for me to review anything other than books and I think this is definitely my first ever film review. I usually leave that sort of thing to my sons, who can talk intelligently about camera angles and framing shots and I-don't-know-what's. I'm more comfortable with people standing (or hopping) about on stages. But nothing venture, as they say, and you won't be at all surprised that it's RIP VI that made me take the plunge.

Anyway, after years of not quite getting round to it despite having recorded it, we finally watched The Corpse Bride. Now, this may be controversial, but I think my expectations had been a bit too high - for a start, you'd think I might have remembered that I'm not a huge Tim Burton fan - but my overall feeling was of slight disappointment. I never felt really involved with it, and OH, who was watching with me, felt much the same. We agreed that there were things we had enjoyed about it, and that it had made an agreeable evening's viewing, but not a standout one.

What were our criticisms? Well, it wasn't dark enough, it wasn't funny enough (I thought some of the jokes were quite lame) and sadly, it wasn't beautiful enough. The characterisation was too minimal - the most well-rounded character by far was the Bride herself, followed by Scraps the dog, who was admittedly very sweet. OH complained that it was too Disney-ish, me that, despite its cast of voices being largely British, it wasn't European enough (though I doubt if Burton had ever meant it to be that...). We both compared it unfavourably with other films - OH with Miyazaki's Spirited Away (which we loved), me with Coraline and Mirrormask, which we agreed to be both beautiful and dark - and that the use of stop motion in the latter two made it a fairer comparison. We were unanimous that The Curse of the Were Rabbit had been funnier and more engaging, and that we'd both enjoyed that film far more than we'd expected to.

OH gave some thought to the music, which he described as Gilbert and Sullivan for the living, and jazz for the dead. Was there anything about jazz at all, he wondered, which made it an appropriate choice? I thought that perhaps it tied into an American association of death with mardi gras, where jazz is the music of choice. The use of the piano was nice. I was impressed by the treatment of fabrics, particularly the attention given to the way skirts would slide down a staircase, a severally-repeated trope. OH said that he'd been in love with Helena Bonham-Carter ever since Room With a View, so she couldn't really go wrong for him. We both liked the dog.

We couldn't entirely agree on whether it was a good thing that the denouement had been clearly flagged so early in the film. OH thought not; I suggested that it had to be seen to be following the proper arc for what is essentially a fairytale. We established that OH hadn't remembered Tim Burton's oeuvre, so he hadn't really known what to expect anyway, and that the way in which Johnny Depp's character grew up throughout the film was quite appealing, if relatively straightforward. We concluded that it had been a perfectly pleasant film, and that we were glad we'd finally got round to it.

Did I mention that we liked the dog?

RIP VI: Storm Front group read - week 2

2011-09-26T13:00:00.000+01:00

This is emphatically not how I imagine Harry Dresden...

Storm Front is a very entertaining read, and I shall actually be rather sorry to finish it next week (balance that against how eager I am to be getting on with the story, though). Here are my answers to Carl's questions:

1. What are your thoughts on the pop culture references Butcher includes in his work, largely coming from Harry himself?
Um...gosh...were there? Perhaps, being English, I just failed to recognise them! Shall have to see what other people think...

2. As I finished part two of Storm Front I realized that each section of the book thus far feels like a distinct act in a three act story arc. How do you compare the events in this second section of the book with what happened it part one? Is there a mood or theme or such that you feel is embodied by part two of Harry's adventures?
This section gets really intense - we reached a real high pitch at the end of chapter nine, with Harry's visit to Bianca, and we've just got to another real cliffhanger, and another death. I don't think it's cheating to say that I looked at the start of the next chapter and the first sentence was "Have you ever known despair?" - which seems exactly right, given Harry's situation. Things are really, really bad, and there's meeting the White Council still to come.

3. One of many things Jim Butcher demonstrates in Storm Front is a healthy sense of humor. Share with us your thoughts on one (or more) of the humorous moments in the story thus far.
You've got to laugh at the shower scene - he's not just naked, he's soapy! And then there's an "accident" with a love potion! (I do hope in the TV series he was at least wearing a towel, I'm getting quite maiden-auntish these days.) I think we can expect that, whenever Bob's involved, things are going to go wrong, probably hilariously so.

4. Our hero Harry had disastrous interactions with the women in his life in section two of the book (four by my count). For first time readers, were you surprised by any of these and what are your thoughts? For those who've read the books before, had you forgotten about any of these? If so, or even if not, share your thoughts on Harry's luck with women.
Poor Harry, I'm afraid he's going to turn out to be one of those guys women like to talk to, while they fall in love with someone else. And he's doomed, really - whoever hard of a hard-boiled hero with a comfortable domestic life?

5. A few other popular characters have been brought up in the first round of discussion about Storm Front. What books, films, tv shows, etc. does this story/these characters call to mind and why?
I'm probably a bit short on cultural references here, but I'm not surprised that Firefly came up, because Harry has quite a bit in common with Mal (not being good with women, in particular). But Philip Marlowe's an obvious literary precedent. And I would guess that maybe there's a hint in the series title The Dresden Files that Jim Butcher might have a soft spot for The Rockford Files?

6. For new readers, what is your overall assessment of the story thus far? For re-readers, what have you picked up on this time that you either forgot about or don't remember seeing from your first trip through the book?
I'm managed to forget most of the detail, which is great, because I'm enjoying it all over again. I'd especially forgotten how different the vampires are here - it makes them extra threatening, because they seem really alien. I'm curious, too, about where Harry would draw the line at using his power if it weren't for the White Council.

RIP VI Fragile Things - week 3

2011-09-25T07:30:00.000+01:00

I had been going to say that this was a slightly less satisfactory week for me, and that I was going to be reading other people's responses avidly, because I wanted to be persuaded that I was wrong. But, as happened in weeks one and two, the more I thought about the stories, the more I was convinced of their quality and, in the end, there was only one I had real reservations about.

'Going wodwo'
I always feel that I should like this poem more than I do: the subject matter is one that I feel most strongly about, having spent many years studying (in a non-formal way) the Green Man and associated legends. It's probably the aspect of British and European mythology closest to my heart, emerging from my childhood love of the Arthurian cycle and legends of the wildwood. Maybe that's why the poem doesn't work for me, because it's simply not intense enough - I feel that if anyone can express that visceral connection with land and forest, then Gaiman ought to be able to. And he does in American Gods, in prose. But sadly, not here, and although I like the final image which juxtaposes silence and language, my main emotion when I read it is disappointment. I shall be very interested to see what other people make of it.

'Bitter Grounds'
This could have been one of the incidental stories in American Gods, since it deals, like that novel, with the gods that people brought with them to America. I don't know a great deal about Haitian legends - somehow Vodun didn't get into the Arthur Mee Children's Encyclopaedia stories from other nations pages, and the Larousse World Mythology has an embarrassingly slender section on African legends, with nothing on the Caribbean at all. But it seems to have the right "feel", and it's one you can get your teeth into. The subheadings include quotes from Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin, too - that's got to be good! As usual with Gaiman's stories, there are question marks - for instance, two men disappear: what happened to them? It's kind of a perfectly-formed mini road narrative, which is very cool indeed. I really like this one.

'Other People'
In the Introduction Gaiman calls this a "Mobius" story, which is a good description. It's pretty bleak, and unsettling both because it's about torture and also about all the bad things we don't like to think about: self-deception, the harm we do to other people, and both deliberate and inadvertent wrongdoing. It's effective and well-crafted, but it's never going to go on my list of favourite stories.

'Keepsakes and Treasures'
At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year Gaiman was asked about his characters - did they ever dictate the action? He answered that many of them seem to have independent existences which he just looks in on from time to time (this might be a function, I suppose, of writing a longterm graphic novel like The Sandman, or it might be why he was disposed to embark on such a project in the first place). This story is one of those occasions, because it introduces two characters who appear later in 'Monarch of the Glen', which is in turn about Shadow from American Gods...I love that he does this, and I am really hoping that he meant it when he said he planned to write more about Shadow. The two characters here, Smith and Mr Alice, are really very nasty indeed, and it's a dark story full of death, described dispassionately by a very cold-blooded killer.

I just want to add, here, that it's going to be a very busy couple of weeks for me, with lots of travelling and meetings, and I shan't have much time for reading and commenting. I'm enjoying our shared reading very much, though, so I will do my best to read everyone else's posts - it just may take me all week to do it! Fortunately, I'm going to be at home both weekends, so I can always catch up then.

Murkmere by Patricia Elliott

2011-09-23T07:00:00.000+01:00

It's really great when something a little different comes along, and this was one of those occasions. I think I had read a review of Murkmere somewhere, though I'm really not certain. Anyway, I was looking for a book swap, and decided to take a chance on it, and I'm really glad I did.

Murkmere is the story of 15-year-old Aggie, who is summoned to Murkmere Hall from her village to be companion to the Master's ward, Leah. Aggie's mother was once a maid at the Hall, but she doesn't know what to expect when she arrives, and she finds a strange, dilapidated house dominated by the compelling Silas Seed, the crippled Master's steward and right-hand man in everything. Not only is he in charge of all the Master's affairs, he oversees the moral welfare of the servants, ensuring that the dictates of the Ministration are adhered to. At first Aggie is overwhelmed by the charismatic Silas, but gradually, as she tries to meet the challenges posed by her position as companion to the troubled, wayward Leah, she begins to question his actions and, almost despairingly, her own beliefs.

What lends this book a haunting quality is its setting in the English fenland, and its bird-inspired religion. Although there's not the technology to make it fit into the category, there's a darkly steampunk feel to it nonetheless, perhaps because we don't really know how the world came into being - there's a hint that it might be our world, changed after humans had somehow transformed themselves into the mysterious and reviled avia; the hypocritical Ministration, constantly on the watch for rebellion, certainly have resonances of the post-civil war period in England and the puritan protectorate. And the author makes clear in a brief note at the start: "The superstitions in this novel are found in British folklore", which makes it, for me at any rate, all the more powerful, harking back to first hearing of the story of the Children on Lir, and the hair rising on the back of my neck, because it seemed more like a memory than a new story. Elliott says of writing the book:

all I had at first was the image of a girl, painstakingly sewing a swanskin back together. I had to find out why. Who was the girl, and why was the swanskin in pieces?

The winter fenland, the swans that Leah must be kept away from, the Master's painful yearning after forbidden knowledge, the Ministration's duplicity and decadence - all combine to create a lyrical, wistful novel.

There is a sequel, Ambergate, which I shall have to read. I'm sort of afraid that I shan't love it as much, because I find the sere countryside of the setting so compelling in the first, and I know that the second moves to the city. But the Ministration is tantalisingly portrayed in Murkmere, something nasty but intriguing, so I have to know more...

The Hanging Wood by Martin Edwards

2011-09-21T16:41:00.000+01:00

A new Martin Edwards book is a pleasure to be anticipated keenly, and The Hanging Wood doesn't disappoint. Mind you, I think Martin is setting up himself up as a contender for the "creative rural deaths" award, held until now, of course, by the ridiculously OTT Midsomer Murders TV series, which rarely looks at the harsh realities of country life when camp will do. This series, however, is set in the Lake District, which may look picturesque to visitors but is inhabited by a local population who are no strangers to the struggle of farming on marginal land and its concomitant high suicide rate (I've often thought that being a farmer ought to carry an automatic ban on owning a shotgun). Because it's a tourist destination with a long pedigree, though, culture sits side by side with poverty, and secondhand bookshops and private libraries plausibly rest alongside holiday parks - and it's these last which provide the setting for The Hanging Wood, when a young woman with a history of alcohol problems contacts Hannah Scarlett's cold case team to demand that her brother's disappearance should be re-investigated. Hannah finds herself once again comparing notes with historian Daniel Kind, who is researching his next book in the desultory way possible to a successful populariser of history, a pursuit which apparently leaves him plenty of time to indulge his curiosity about unexplained deaths. He's interested in Hannah, too, but they are both feeling a bit battered, and Hannah's ex-partner the bookseller doesn't consider himself out of the picture. Although Marc isn't as central a character as in the previous books, there's still plenty to please the bibliophile (those who read Martin's blog will know his predilections) and there's a nice comment about to-be-read piles guaranteed to make readers smile, rather making up for his incendiary plot device earlier in the series.

Not surprisingly, given the author's interest in classic and forgotten crime novels, this series is establishing a firm place amongst the best of British crime fiction, nicely but not tortuously plotted, with well-drawn characters and an excellent cast of regulars. Like the golden age classics they appeal to a wide readership, and I think they will wear well.

This book was reviewed for the R.I.P. VI Challenge.

Storm Front group read - week 1

2011-09-19T12:00:00.000+01:00

Last week was week 1 of the group read of Jim Butcher's Storm Front for the RIP VI Challenge. I read some of this fun series, the Dresden Files, a while ago, and then kind of lost the thread, so I'm really happy to start again at the beginning (I'm a great one for starting over). Although I've got some scenes from later books in my head, I really don't remember too much of the plots by now - for instance, I honestly don't remember who makes it through to book 2!

1. What are your first impressions of our main character, Harry Dresden?

I like the way he tries to be hard-boiled and never quite succeeds. You know pretty quickly that he’s a really soft touch and doesn’t mind being one, despite all his protestations. But he’ll carry on trying to persuade himself nonetheless. Oh, and you've got to have a good coat to be a hero, and Harry takes his seriously.*

2. In the first section of the book we are introduced to a large cast of characters. Some in support of our main character and others who are involved in the multiple investigations with agendas unknown to us. Are there any of these characters who stood out to you?

I’ve fallen for Mister the cat, of course, and Bob the Skull. Bob is a brilliant way of getting round the need for a reliable source of information! But I’m always wary of animal characters – authors too often decide that it’s okay for bad things to happen to them just as you get really attached, and I do hope that’s not going to be the case here. Karrin Murphy is obviously set up to be an important character, too.

3. Did you ever watch the Syfy channel's Dresden Files TV adaption? If so did it effect how you approached the novel? Were there positive and/or negative differences that stood out to you?

I’ve got the series on DVD, to watch when I’ve finished reading the books it relates to. I am really hoping that I’ll like it!

4. Any thoughts on Jim Butcher's magic system, Harry's Watcher, and/or the White Council?

The magic is very much the old-fashioned kind: the rules aren’t so clearly defined that contradicting them will become an issue, and the reader is not going to get hung up on checking for consistency. At the same time, it’s defined enough so that the author can’t just do anything, there’s got to be an internal logic to it, and I approve of that. The Watcher is obnoxious, but believable, and the White Council fits well with our preconceptions of a world where magic is part of the nature of things. An all-powerful wizard without the constraints of Watcher and Council would get dull to read about, I think.

5. Lastly, any guess on where Dresden's multiple plot threads will lead and/or any favourite scenes the first section of the book?

I’m not going to go down the where-will-it-lead route because I’ve read Storm Front before (albeit ages ago, and I really can’t remember that much detail) but I do like the scene with the fairy Toot-toot, with both Harry and the fairy playing their roles to the hilt. And there’s something oddly compelling about the potion-making – is it because I like reading cookery books, I wonder?

I’m really looking forward to getting on with the story…

* my son's got Vash the Stampede's duster from Trigun - I'd kill to have one like it, except that I would look ridiculous, it's one of those that you need to be over six foot and incredibly skinny to wear...

RIP VI: Fragile Things week 2

2011-09-18T15:12:00.001+01:00

The second week of the Fragile Things group read has gone really well for me, I'm getting so much more out of the stories by reading them at such a slow pace. I usually rush at collections of stories and it doesn't do me or the book any favours, because I can't step back far enough to see each one as a single entity. This time I've read and re-read, and stopped to consider and, as a result, I have time to see far more in them than I do as a rule.

'The Hidden Chamber'
This is a nice little piece that evokes the Bluebeard story effectively, while at the same time lifting it out of the expected gothic realm. We anticipate all the trappings and are instead offered washing machines and other mundane objects (which might nevertheless be rather useful for disposing of unwanted traces). Hidden chambers have developed resonances since Gaiman wrote the story, and we've become more aware that even the most prosaic suburban settings might house hidden horrors. Gaiman's known that all the time, of course, always having seen the skull beneath the skin.

'Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire'
My favourite of this week's stories is a real gem - I love the fantastically overwritten sections with their "little" jokes, several of which I'm still chuckling over. This narrative-within-narrative is like a series of Monty Python sketches, always spilling over into farce no matter how hard the young writer tries to avoid it. Meanwhile, the "outer" story, tackling its subject with a subtler humour, reminds me of Thurber's fairytales, and I can think of no higher recommendation:

Strange, scuttling things gibbered and cheetled in the black drapes at the end of the room, and high in the gloomy oak beams, and behind the wainscoting, but they made no answer. He had expected none.

I get a frisson of delight from "cheetled"...

The two threads really flow into each other with the interjection of the raven (and don't you just love the raven?) but the story's construction remains most unusual, with two streams of "reality" which raise all sorts of questions, such as why the families were cursed in the first place, or what the "unusual circumstances" which brought Ethel the maid to the house were. I could happily have read more of this inspired lunacy, but it's a wise author who knows when enough is enough. Apparently, he shortened the title to the one given here...

'The Flints of Memory Lane'
I do like the way Gaiman resolutely keeps to something that's not story-shaped. He could have made it much more so but, as it is, it reminds us that we do from time to time see things we can't readily explain - and afterwards we may not even be sure how much of what we've seen is real. Memory is a tricksy thing at best, and if we start to question the detail of what we saw, we may end up questioning the whole experience. In such circumstances it's best not to try to make too much sense out of it, to force it into a story mould.

'Closing Time'
I've always liked the stories of M.R. James, even though they do rather fall into the category of "bad things happening for no reason" that I complained about in my last post. It's partly because they also follow the rather successful formula of everyone sitting around (in a club, or after dinner) and one speaker relating a tale, a device also used successfully by Agatha Christie and Robertson Davies - there's something about the gathering of people which draws you into the circle, yet releases you at the end to go out into the crisp, cold night and home to comfort with the other listeners - the stories are made doubly safe by that extra distancing. So this rather nasty little story reaches us at a remove, while following the proper Jamesian conventions of the club setting, the mysterious stranger and the lingering doubt about what exactly has taken place.

RIP VI: My musings on scary reading

2011-09-16T18:11:00.001+01:00

In a recent post, Susan at You Can Never Have Too Many Books mused about reading horror stories. The questions she asked herself were picked up by Emily at Telecommuter Talk, and comparing their thoughts on the subject naturally led me to consider my own reasons for reading dark and scary tales. So I too have taken the questions Susan asked as the basis for my own musings on why I embrace RIP every year with such enthusiasm.

Why do I read scary stories?
Now, it has to be said right at the start that Susan is way braver than me when it comes to this sort of thing – I can’t really say that I read horror stories, or at least, not very often, and I’m really hopeless at horror films, but nonetheless I enjoy a good dark fantasy. One of my problems with horror is that often the bad things seem to happen for no reason, so a fantasy world in which demons or whatever are part of the fabric is more satisfying to me. I guess for many the breakdown of order in our familiar world is enough of a raison d’être, but I channel my need for this into crime fiction, which usually offers a logic for the eruption of disorder into everyday life (or enough of one for me).

Do I like being thrilled?
Almost all my favourite books from childhood involve magic, with the characters overcoming great obstacles to win through in the end. I graduated early to H.P. Lovecraft, finding one of his collections on my parents’ bookshelf, and to M.R. James. I prefer my thrills Victorian. Or, even better, rooted in the folklore that I began to feel was an essential part of myself.

Do I like being scared, safely in the comfort of my home?
Yes, and I think it’s immensely important for children to learn about dealing with the sense of fear in these safe circumstances. Why else are our oldest stories full of darkness and threat if not to warn us of the real dangers of the outside world, while at the same time reassuring us that resourcefulness will get us through? (Of course, this is often demonstrably untrue, but if we didn’t believe in ourselves to some extent, we’d never leave the house!) I think A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok is going to address this, and I’m looking forward to seeing how she does so.

All that being said, I usually used to watch Dr Who from behind the sofa, and once spilt an entire cup of tea over myself when a door was opened to reveal a cyberman and I jumped violently – I knew it was behind the door, but I couldn’t help myself. So I don’t watch anything too frightening (younger son makes the decisions for me) although I have a bit of a soft spot for the sillier end of the Japanese horror spectrum. Said son has nerves of steel, apparently, and can watch the most ghastly things and gleefully murders monsters by the legion (but he was upset for days when he ran over a rabbit).

Do I like that eerie frisson of chill running over my skin when I read a particularly scary line or scene?
An early addiction was the passage in T.H. White’s The Queen of Air and Darkness where Morgan le Fay creates a magical spell in order to seduce the young Arthur by cutting the outline of a man from a corpse. I read and re-read it compulsively, with a sense of thrill I’ve rarely found anywhere since. Even then I knew that it didn’t matter whether or not the spell actually worked – what mattered was the sheer evil of doing it, both the will to dominate and the contempt for the dead man. There’s a difference, though, between reading about an evil act in a real-world setting and a supernatural one: the first produces a feeling of revulsion, and perhaps anger or grief, depending on the degree of vicariousness; the second can evoke the delicious chill, because it’s safely distanced, even when we’re deeply involved in the book or film. It’s important that we don’t really believe it can happen – and we all – except, it seems, my younger son – know how genuinely unpleasant it can be when we’ve gone too far, reading alone in the house at night, and find ourselves too frightened to sleep, and jumping at every sound. Where one draws the line is a very individual thing, I suppose: I avoid anything really frightening if I'm alone but, tucked up in bed with a hotwater bottle and secure in the knowledge that my menfolk and dogfolk (though they are even bigger cowards than me)* are to hand, it's remarkable how comforting a bit of a chill can be.

...tucked up in bed with a hotwater bottle?

(with thanks to Gustave Doré)

* the dogs, that is, not the chaps.

Fragile Things - group read

2011-09-13T22:42:00.000+01:00

Sunday saw the end of the first week of the Fragile Things read along. For a variety of reasons I couldn't post that day, and it's taken until today to have the necessary combination of time and an internet connection - I'll do better next week! But here is my brief contribution, for what it's worth.

'The Fairy Reel' - not much of a poem, says Neil Gaiman, but I think it's better than he allows himself credit for, because it has such a wistful, yearning quality - it reminded me of the line from 'The Vicar of Bray', "and this the burden of my song" - burden actually meaning only chorus, but here it's a real burden, a heavy heart, or perhaps, a heavy absence of heart. It carries, too, the haunting tone of my long-favourite fairy poem, Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. You can imagine the subject of this poem "alone and palely loitering", in thrall to a wild-eyed elfin love, and the recurring heartstrings/violin strings theme is very strong. Those long lines are effective, too, conveying a sense of relentless and unproductive motion, only broken in the last line, where the caesura signifies the cessation of movement, and release.

There was one line I pondered over at some length:

Until one day she'd tire of it, all bored with it and done with it

I felt that "bored with it" was too modern an expression, and wondered how I would choose to re-word it - but I can't. And the more I think about it, the less I really want to...perhaps because "bored with it and done with it" has a feeling of capriciousness entirely appropriate, somehow foreshadowing "long and cruel and thin" in a way I can't really articulate, except for noticing - somewhat tenuously - the assonant linking of the "o" sound, which runs through the intervening lines.

This all made me remember, as I brooded on it, of how years ago I had an argument about the usefulness of literary criticism with a friend - he'd given it up favour of history, I was studying it at the time and struggling slightly to justify the study of a subject solely because it gave me pleasure (I too gave it up, in favour of philosophy, which some would argue was even more useless). Anyway, one of my gripes with lit crit was that the only way, really, to describe a poem is by the poem itself, which says exactly what the author means to say, and Gaiman makes this point precisely and elegantly in his tale 'The Mapmaker', which he tells in the introduction to Fragile Things, and which Carl made a particular point of encouraging us to read.

We read two other stories this week, and I don't really have time to discuss them here, except to say that the Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu cross-over works a treat, and that I loved October in the Chair all the more for having read The Graveyard Book since I first picked up my copy of Fragile Things. Carl talks about all of this week's reading very perceptively on Stainless Steel Droppings and I really can't add anything more, though I would like to second him when he urges us not to read too briskly through the collection, but to savour the stories at leisure.

More darkness - it's R.I.P. VI!

2011-08-31T18:19:00.001+01:00

It's been feeling pretty autumnal here for some time and the chickens go to bed earlier and earlier each day. I'd be feeling cheated of a summer except for one thing - Carl's R.I.P. Challenge. I've been looking forward to it for a couple of weeks now, and hoarding books until the auspicious day. Although I have to admit I've been keeping my impatience at bay with some pre-peril reading.

My book pool has been growing during the anticipatory period, and now shows signs of getting out of control (well, there's a surprise). So I'm going for:

which requires me to:

‘Read four books, any length, that you feel fit (my very broad definitions) of R.I.P. literature. It could be Stephen King or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming or Edgar Allan Poe…or anyone in between.’

One thing which will be different for me is that I shall mostly be reading on my Kindle this year. This might make it even more of challenge because, although I reckon that I can reader even faster than usual on it, I get tired more quickly, and bedtime reading tends to be an hour or so of Quoodle-reading, followed by 30 minutes' wind-down reading a "proper" book. On the other hand, I may get so absorbed that I don't notice, and I do find when I'm travelling, and only have the Kindle with me, that I cope quite well. Another difference is that I plan to embark on a series re-read and see how far I get - I'm feeling quite excited about this.

And the last new element is Carl's read along of Jim Butcher's Storm Front (I've already told younger son I'm reclaiming it for the two months) and Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. I'm warming up for the latter by re-reading American Gods - the end is in sight, which makes me sad, it's a near-perfect book for me.

My book pool is:

In book form:

A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok - I'm really looking forward to this! Should complement American Gods nicely.
Martin Edwards, The Hanging Wood - a new Hannah Scarlett book, lovely, who could resist?

On Quoodle:

Phil Rickman, The Merrily Watkins series. Starting with the first...I'll probably only manage a couple, but I've got three lined up.
Jon Rosenberg, The Digital Wolf. I liked his first book, and have been saving this one.
Frances Hardinge, Gullstruck Island. Love her writing.
Connie Willis, Blackout. Ditto.
Phil Rickman, The Bones of Avalon.
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind. Still on the TBR list.
Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard.
Patricia Elliott, Murkmere.

I think that's enough to be going on with, especially as Carl's very nice about rules and allows us to add things as we go along. However many I get through, the difficulty is always finding time to blog about the books, so I don't really do very well on challenges - but I'll be happy having my reading focused for me, enjoy a binge on dark matter, and write about them whenever I can. And I always enjoy finding new things to add to the TBR list. I think this year I'll start a separate list of recommendations from other R.I.P. readers - ready for 2012?!

Darkness at teatime

2011-08-25T18:16:00.000+01:00

As I started to write a new post late on Monday afternoon the power suddenly and unexpectedly went off - no thunderstorm or similar to explain it. It took my part-written post with it, and it didn't come back. Or at least, it didn't come back in a way that could be used, the lights were flickering dimly and most things, including the broadband, weren't working at all. Investigation suggested that a combine harvester had yanked the power line and stretched it - something hotly denied by one of the workers in the field! We rang the power company, who said they would send someone out, and in the meantime, our neighbour came home and confirmed that we had between 60 and 100 volts only, instead of the required UK 240v. The joys of country life, honestly - usually it's our water supply that gets ploughed up. Some hours later the lights came back on, in time for reading in bed, I'm glad to say.

The post I lost was only a reading update: despite the TBR pile being multiple, I of course came home from Edinburgh on Sunday with two books from my elder son and a determination to start re-reading American Gods instantly, having been to hear Neil Gaiman speak at the Book Festival. I could only make time to go to one event, and had been intending to go to hear A.S. Byatt, but then it was announced that Gaiman was doing a Guardian Book Club event, so that won hands down - it was worth it, too. Both sons came with me and we had very pleasant Thai food before heading home.

I had to go to the library as a book had come in for me - Margaret Drabble's The Sea Lady, which I'd read somewhere has a Northumberland connection. I like books with a strong sense of place, and I like living in the north-east, so one feeds the other, and if I'm not careful it will become the next obsession. I'd been checking exactly where in Northumberland it was that there was a Drabble/Byatt connection (Wylam, in case you're wondering) because I thought I'd read somewhere that Byatt's new book, Ragnarok, which I plan to read for R.I.P. is set on the north-east coast. I guess it will become evident - or not - when I read it. In the meantime, I'll read Drabble, with some trepidation - I used to love her in my younger days, but I haven't really enjoyed any of her more recent books.

Anyway, while at the library I also picked up a couple of books on Northumberland: one has lots of pictures and a bit of history, and the other is a complete gazetteer of churches. Lots of the churches aren't interesting at all, but a few are intriguing, and it's nice to be able to read about them all, rather than an author's selection, which may be favourites, but not necessarily my favourites (especially if I haven't yet discovered them!) Time to visit some soon, I hope.

Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardinge

2011-08-10T08:00:00.004+01:00

I was reading Ana's excellent (as ever) review of Fly by Night the other day and was very pleased that she'd enjoyed it so much, because I think it is one of those really original books that can make you feel happy that someone out there is writing such good fiction; however, I noticed that one of the commenters spoke less than enthusiastically about Frances Hardinge's second book, Verdigris Deep, describing it as Alan Garner/Diana Wynne Jones but not as good. I've had it on the TBR shelf for ages, and frankly, was doing my usual thing of saving it up for some unspecified special occasion - which, since such times occur relatively infrequently chez nous, is just plain daft).

It only took me a few hours to read and, at first, I thought it was okay but nothing special. I agreed about it being Garner/Wynne Jones territory - lots of echoes of Elidor and Fire and Hemlock in the mean streets of Magwhite and the scary way that things start to glow around Josh, the eldest of the three protagonists. The, about halfway through, I realised that I wasn't being disappointed any more, but had been drawn into the story completely, convinced by the way that Hardinge tackles the children's response to the disintegration of their already shaky world. Because, of course, they are all outsiders: Josh could be popular at school but doesn't choose to be, Ryan is small and speccy and worried, Chelle can't stop talking although no-one listens to her; she's pale and asthmatic and sort of just tags along with the others. They are all drawn to Magwhite precisely because they shouldn't be there and when they don't have any money to pay for the bus home, they know that there will be serious trouble. Which they need to avoid: Chelle doesn't know how to deal with being in trouble, Ryan doesn't want to provoke any more family rows, and Josh will be exiled to his aunts' house where he won't be allowed out. So they steal the money from a long-neglected well. And suddenly it's not just everyday trouble they have to contend with, because they are all changed, in frightening ways.

This book is aimed, I think, at a slightly younger audience than Fly By Night, but it doesn't pull its punches. Hardinge knows that there's a lot going on in children's heads that adults don't realise, and some of its because they don't have the experience to make sense of the adult world, even when to the grown-ups they look bright and manipulative and sometimes just plain bad. By the end of the story, it's all pain and rain and urgency - in 2007, when it was published, there were massive floods in England that summer and it must have seemed prophetic, with its images of rising waters.

The UK edition (it was published in the US as Well Witched) is a thing of great beauty. The picture here really doesn't do it justice, I think it's one of the loveliest book jackets I've ever seen. The back is as lovely as the front. I'd have included it here, but it's too dark to scan easily - what you can't see is that it really looks like tarnished copper. I'm tempted to take it off the book and put it on my wall.

To sum up, Verdigris Deep lacks the wondrous inventiveness of Hardinge's first book, but it's still a well-told story, atmospheric and exciting, firmly-rooted in a nice urban grittiness, and a classy example of the genre. I recommend it.

Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson

2011-08-06T15:57:00.001+01:00

This book has the feel, as it opens, of the beginning of the (written much later) Fairacre novels by Miss Read – the sun rises over a small village square with the baker at work in the early morning, an English idyll. Both have something to say about the disruption of that idyll – the Fairacre sequence is about a village dealing with the change brought about by the end of the Victorian era and descent into war. Miss Buncle’s Book hints at, though it does not directly mention, the Depression: Miss Buncle’s dividends, which she has relied on since her parents’ deaths, have ceased to materialise at regular intervals, and she is forced to consider the dire prospect of keeping hens. Chickens, in the numbers required to earn even a meagre income, are not such endearing creatures as a mere five or six may be, and Barbara Buncle turns in desperation instead to the pen, and writes a “novel” about the doings of her neighbours. Once the book is published, speculation about the anonymous author is rife and Miss Buncle watches the repercussions from the sidelines in bemusement.

I have a dilettantish sort of interest in books about women who have to earn their own living in an era when ladies didn’t, from Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey onwards. In the early 1960s my grandmother suddenly found herself coping first with a husband too ill to work any longer, and then alone with a young daughter and her own mother to support after his death. She was in her late 40s at the time, and in need of both income and home, so she went as a “cook general” to a succession of English country houses (inadvertently giving us all a glimpse of, and taste for, the sort of gracious living we could never afford). The pattern repeated two generations on when, without ever having had a “proper” career, I found myself with a disabled husband with a very small pension and two sons, suddenly thrust into the role of family wage earner. So I have a sympathetic interest in books about women thrown on their own resources, and Miss Buncle is an intriguing example (fortunately, despite childhood aspirations, I had no illusions about being able to support us by writing!)

The Depression may loom but Miss Buncle’s Book is really about transformations, and it has a delightfully sunny feel. D.E. Stevenson writes knowingly about people, but her wit is always tempered with affection rather than malice, and the same quality extends to her heroine’s portrayal of her fellows, even if they feel to perceive it. The stirring-up of the villagers works very much to their own good, even in the case of the least pleasant amongst them (although I doubt that Mrs Featherstone Hogg would agree).

Vignettes of village life abound: Colonel Weatherhead’s battle with the Bishop, the ghastly tea-party for the children, the earnest young vicar asking for the outside leaves of cabbage (as a young child I was sent to scrounge these from the grocer for our rabbits, and fish-heads for the cat, which came in a horribly smelly newspaper-wrapped parcel to be carried dripping up the High Street); it may be a work of fiction but it’s a true picture of life in a small community before and after the Second World War. You can’t help but wonder if D.E. Stevenson, too, had neighbours to avoid when her books were published.

The Persephone edition, with its pretty endpapers is, it goes without saying, a thing of loveliness. These beautifully produced books are a pleasure to handle and read.

Postscript: I'm sorry that when I lived a few miles from Moffat, I didn't know that D.E. Stevenson had lived there. I would have made a mini pilgrimage to her grave during one of our many visits there - we used to go to buy Moffat toffee, much beloved of one of the sons, and to take visitors, as it was our nicest local town. Once we went to buy hens, an appropriately Miss Buncle sort of activity.

Iris Murdoch Day

2011-07-15T18:49:00.000+01:00

No time to write today, but tonight I am going to crawl off to bed to celebrate the last hours of the late Iris Murdoch's 92nd birthday with another re-reading of one of her books. I'd rather wanted to go for The Sea, the Sea, partly for its narrator's obsession with eating (I've been cooking this week as OH hasn't been well; I find the planning of food very time-consuming now that I'm out of practice and I thought Charles Arrowby's musings might have helped), and partly because it came first in the Twitter poll for favourite IM book* organised by @IrisMurdoch, in honour of her anniversary. Anyway, a hunt of the bookshelves upstairs proved fruitless (the shelves are all double-stacked, and have become rather inaccessible, in part owing to OH's own obsession with acquiring cookery books, which are piled on the floor and spilling out of boxes), so it had to come down to a choice between what was available/not recently read: The Sandcastle or A Word Child.

Because her dogs are so wonderful, I feel the need of one today. Really, I should be reading Under the Net, in that case, but The Sandcastle has, at least, a late dog, Liffey, who is mentioned near the start, as Mor and Nan are sharing, in a desultory way, a cold lunch (and the temperature refers both to the unappetizing meal and the atmosphere in which it is being eaten):

"You remember how poor Liffey used to hate this hot weather," said Mor.
Liffey had been their dog, a golden retriever, who was killed two years ago on the main road. The animal had formed the bond between Mor and Nan which their children had been unable to form. Half unconsciously, whenever Mor wanted to placate his wife he said something about Liffey.
Nan's face at once grew gentler. "Poor thing!" she said.

How much information is conveyed by that exchange!

I have never much liked this cover, which dates from the late 60s/early 70s, the later Penguin covers are much nicer. I'd much rather have either of these, the later Penguin or the rather elegant Vintage one:

I think the Vintage covers are wonderful, and wish I were starting my collection with them, especially the cover for Under the Net, which I fell in love with the other day. Do have a look and see if you agree with me.

* I voted for The Nice and the Good, another lovely Vintage cover and, again, much better than my old Penguin one. I grew up at the wrong time evidently.

The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews

2011-07-09T13:16:00.000+01:00

As dysfunctional families go the Troutmans are particularly so. Hattie, the narrator, hasn't really got her life together - she's been living in Paris, mostly to get away from her sister, Min, but when Min's 11-year-old daughter Thebes calls and begs her to come home, there's not much to prevent it. Min, who's spent large parts of her life as an elective mute, will no longer get out of bed or talk, and needs to be in hospital, but Thebes and her older brother Logan are desperate not to go into foster care.

Thebes and Logan may be troubled kids, but they are used to having to care for each other, and for Min, so they're actually nice, with lots of redeeming features, although these aren't necessarily evident to many of the people around them, like teachers and neighbours. Hattie's had a similarly difficult background (she thinks Min tried to drown her once) so she mostly understands the reasons, if not always the actions. She's inexperienced at parenting though: "Do you ever wash?...Am I supposed to tell you to?" she inquires of Thebes, who has acquired a coating of crud - tears and candyfloss and tattoo transfers and general dirt - that makes her look as as if she has "some weird skin disease".

Hattie decides that they should look for the children's father, Cherkis, who was pretty much driven out by Min. She doesn't know exactly where he is, but he was least heard of in a town in South Dakota, so they'll take the unreliable van and head there, something made easier by Logan's expulsion from school. The journey takes up most of the book and, of course, as a metaphor it works on a number of levels as they all undergo voyages of self-discovery, and we learn the more about them as they look back into the past and Hattie tries to unravel the family history for the two children, and to show them that both their parents can love them, even if their father chooses to be absent and their mother chooses to die.

For me The Flying Troutmans seems haunted by another book, Marian Engel's Lunatic Villas, whose protagonist is another Harriet (I can't believe that the name is not an acknowledgement from Toews, even more so since in another of Engel's books the main character is Minn). Lunatic Villas is also full of dysfunctional families and precocious children - I can see both the lovely Simeon and the more troubled Mickle in Logan. Reviewing it in 2007, I said that "every parent knows that the weird and ridiculous are part and parcel of the process of bringing up children" and it's true here too, as Engel and Toews share an insight into the best and worst aspects of family life that enriches and enlightens. LV marked the beginning of my love affair with Canadian literature and its presence in the background resonates and complements this book. Until now I haven't loved Toews as much as I (and other people!) thought I should, but this is a stunning piece of writing and I know that it will be alternating with Lunatic Villas for re-reads from now on.

The Cruellest Month by Louise Penny

2011-06-26T18:27:00.005+01:00

The third of Penny’s Inspector Gamache books, we’re back in Three Pines with another murder and the simultaneous playing out of the story that’s overshadowed Armand Gamache’s working life from the start of the series. Things were looking tense by the end of the previous book, so we know that poor old Gamache is probably in for a bumpy ride.

First, though, and somewhat rashly, readers of the earlier books might think, the inhabitants of Three Pines set off for the old Hadley house to exorcise its ghosts. They’ve got a visiting medium and they think holding a séance will be a good idea. It’s not, of course, because one of their number winds up dead, apparently frightened to death. Inspector Gamache doesn’t mind too much when he’s sent for, because he’s got fond of the village, and he looks forward to a welcome at the B&B run by Gabri and Olivier, where the food is good and the fires are always burning (well, Easter in Quebec is on the chilly side). With him he brings his assiduous sidekick Jean Guy Beauvoir (a man you can be assured will be well-turned out and wearing impractical shoes) and the rest of his team – which includes, again, the thoroughly unlikeable Yvette Nichol. Of course, we’re quite pleased to see her back, really, because we know there’s unfinished business there.

The Cruellest Month is as atmospheric as its predecessors, and of course, we’re as attached to the village as Gamache is by now. We might think it’s a rather dangerous place to live, and wonder how the residents continue to feel positively about their lives being continually disrupted by violent death, but we want to be there with them. (Well, they’ve got a good bookshop, for a start, and a resident award-winning poet!) The regular characters continue to grow, too, so that we feel we’re getting to know them better – Clara and Peter, who don’t always get everything right, are still working on their marriage. The alarming Ruth is still insulting everyone and getting away with it. And Penny’s writing, just a touch uncertain in the first book is, by the third, deft and assured. I like this series a lot.

The Flourish by Heather Spears

2011-06-25T18:02:00.002+01:00

This rather interesting venture into the world of fictionalised historical reconstruction, somewhat reminiscent of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, is sadly out-of-print, although secondhand copies can be found on the usual sites. Unlike Kate Summerscales’ book, though, it doesn’t seek to reproduce the investigation, but the events leading up to the murder of Charlotte Spears in the small Scottish town of Kirkfieldbank, near Lanark. In the nineteenth century small-town Scotland was prim in the extreme and on her arrival from Glasgow to keep house for her aunt and uncle, Charlotte quickly finds herself the object of her neighbour’s scrutiny. A young woman of determination and independence of spirit, she nonetheless sets herself up as a music teacher and appointed to take charge of the kirk choir (the detail on the modern, “scientific” approach to music teaching, and its use of tonic solfa, is fascinating). Before long she catches the attention of a young local minister, in whom she quickly recognises a kindred spirit, but she’s also subjected to the attentions of a much less amenable man, the decidedly oily Mr Weir, a member of her choir. And then Charlotte’s cousin Willy comes home from Glasgow to convalesce from a fever, and she, alone in the house while her uncle and aunt attend their draper’s shop, must nurse him during his recovery.

There is a tremendous immediacy to The Flourish, reinforced by the knowledge that

The events in this story are true. The characters all lived. My task as storyteller has been to provide motives, particulars and narrative continuity, always and necessarily convinced that the parts I have imagined are true as well.

The author, Heather Spears, is Charlotte’s great niece, a Canadian poet whose love of language is evident in her handling of nineteenth-century Scottish idiom, which she wields with startling flair. Words which might be unfamiliar to the reader fall naturally into context and become, I suspect, self-evident (and a quick online search will anyway provide the answer to any problematic expressions) while the minutiae of daily life provide an ground bass above which the over-arching story flows:

Charlotte took her early walk in all weathers. The ways still hung with tawdry bits of ribbon over the dykes and among the hedges. Helen’s red sateen had been found not to be fast; when they came to pull it down, the doorstep and some of the roses were spotted from it, which looked very odd. Margaret Tennant scrubbed the porch, and Maddie gathered the affected petals up as they fell, for a pot pourri.

Willy fails to recover, his fevers “returning and returning”. With Charlotte’s murder foreshadowed from the start, there begins to be a dreadful inexorability to the pace, a strong contrast with the lack of event which mainly characterises her everyday life. While she washes the bedlinen and teaches her pupils, moving quietly about the house and village, we know that Charlotte is doomed, that no choices she can make can prevent her terrible end. Even so, you can’t help hoping for some way out. An unforgettable book.

CanLit again - Annabel and The Bishop's Man

2011-06-24T11:56:00.000+01:00

Annabel by Kathleen Winter

This is a thoughtful and often lyrical investigation into what it means to grow up different from other children. It’s 1968 in Labrador, and Jacinta, at home and surrounded by her female friends, gives birth to a baby who has both male and female characteristics. But only the baby’s parents and a close friend, Thomasina, know it, so it’s straightforward enough for Treadway, the baby’s father, to decide that he’ll be raised as a boy. Wayne grows into a solitary child, close to his mother, but generally comfortable enough with his father, and all is quiet enough until Wayne reaches puberty.

I enjoyed this novel which is, in many ways, as sparse as its Labrador setting. At the end I felt that, if you were prepared to suspend disbelief (and I usually am, as a reader, happy to take a work very much on its own terms) it works well as a study of loneliness: I’m not sure that it really said much about gender ambiguity, except that it makes it difficult to find friends, something we could probably have guessed. Perhaps it’s too delicate, and a few more rough edges in the writing might have made it more immediate, made you care more deeply about the characters. Your heart should be in your mouth at Wayne’s plight, but instead you just drift through, pausing only momentarily to wonder at this or that. When I finished the book I found I was left with a sense of wistfulness and an overall feeling that my emotions had had too easy a ride for the subject matter.

The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre

Another slightly anomalous read. This time it was mainly because I quite disliked the main character, the rather prissy Father Duncan MacAskill but, that apart, I was impressed by this 2009 Giller Prize winner. It’s no spoiler to say that the plot turns on the difficult subject of child sexual abuse, and as I read I found myself thinking a good deal on the questions raised: on the church’s attitude to it and failures to address it, on the nature of victimhood, and on religious vocation.

"The night before things started to become unstuck, I actually spent a good hour taking stock of my general situation and concluded that, all things considered, I was in pretty good shape. I was approaching the age of fifty, a psychological threshold only slightly less daunting than death, and found myself not much changed from forty or even thirty. If anything, I was healthier. The last decade of the century, and of the millennium, was shaping up to be less stressful than the eighth — which had been defined by certain events in Central America — and the ninth, burdened as it was by scandals here at home."

Father MacAskill quickly finds the complacency of the opening pages to be misplaced as, not long after he moves to his first actual parish, a young boy he befriends there kills himself. As a result, MacAskill finds himself facing his own demons as well as those of the church he’s served so assiduously. His time as, in essence, inquisitor for the Bishop he admires, the period he spent in Honduras, his childhood in Cape Breton, all carry their attendant pain that he’s avoided dealing with until now.

Despite my dislike of MacAskill’s prissiness, this is muscular writing, born of a tradition of novel writing which I associate with men of a certain generation (Robertson Davies comes to mind). It’s firmly rooted, with an introspection and clarity that roots it in the real world, even when it deals with evasions and avoidances of the truth. The Bishop’s Man does what Annabel fails to: it’s a challenging and serious book, painful at times, but it’s one I’ll be glad to return to.

Troll Fell and Troll Mill by Katherine Langrish

2011-06-20T19:59:00.002+01:00

Troll Fell is the first of a trilogy by Katherine Langrish who blogs at the fabulous Seven Miles of Steel Thistles. So it's no surprise to find it full of familiar tropes and characters, but I love the new directions in which these are taken. On one level this is conventional fairy story, on another it's immediate and relevant to a modern-day audience.

When his father dies, Peer Ulfsson is sad and lonely, but preparing to make the best of things by moving in with family friends and continuing his training as a woodcarver. So he's appalled when a hideously brutish uncle turns up at the funeral and claims him as kin. Peer is taken back to his uncle's mill on the edge of Troll Fell, where he's neglected and mistreated. But at least he has his dog Loki with him, and he does manage to make new friends - with young Hilde, a neighbour, and with the Nis, the household bogart, who is equally neglected (and we all know from fairytales that that's not a good idea!). The Nis is sly and mistrusting, and often sulky, but at least he's a source of information about what's going on outside the mill. It's important information, as it turns out, because the trolls who live under the Fell are expecting to celebrate a wedding between their prince and the daughter of the king of Dovre Fell, an event of great significance and one which will have enormous repercussions for Peer and Hilde.

Troll Mill picks up the story some time later, and I don't want to say too much about the plot, except that new characters are introduced while old ones return in a deliciously scary and atmospheric story. Along with Hilde I agonised for Kersten and Bjørn, and I thought the troll baby was tremendous! Peer and Hilde are both struggling with the pangs of growing up and undergoing all sorts of feelings which will be familiar to a young audience. The action is fast-moving though, and these are books which would be wonderful to read to a younger child -- scary, but not oppressively so, exciting and funny, and with the true fairytale emphasis on the resourcefulness of its young heroes. An adult reader, meanwhile, can appreciate the deft interweaving of the elements of the folk tales on which Langrish draws, and the light touch she brings to the exploration of the feelings of her main characters. There are some superb writers working with this traditional material these days - what makes Langrish stand out, I think, is that her love for it shines out of her writing and lends a wonderful freshness and authority.

The trilogy continues with Troll Blood, which I haven't had a chance to read yet. The first two, however, I read as part of the Once Upon a Time V Challenge. I'm not going to do a wrap-up post for the Challenge because, although I read several books, I just didn't have time to write about them here (and, in one case, I didn't feel all that much inclined!). I did enjoy the challenge all the same, so thanks to Carl for hosting it. Oh, and I read them both on my Kindle. And, I should add, I enjoyed Troll Fell so much that I downloaded Troll Mill straight away!

The Great White Bear by Kieran Mulvaney

2011-06-02T16:49:00.000+01:00

The Great White Bear is a natural history of the that iconic Arctic animal, the polar bear. It makes fascinating reading – I wanted to quote so much from it, my copy is full of highlighted passages that I want to make everyone in the world read, because the polar bear in peak form is a muscle-bound miracle of evolution with a four-and-a-half inch layer of blubber, black skin and translucent hair that works so efficiently that, far from struggling to keep warm, the bear actually has to stay cool. It can smell a seal for miles, has been known to leap on the back of a beluga whale, and spends four months under the snow to rear its young.

Kieran Mulvaney has written for, amongst others, New Scientist, BBC Wildlife and Greenpeace, lived for seven years in Alaska and brings a lifetime’s interest and understanding to his subject. His book covers all aspects of the bear’s life (including the answer to the hoary question about why they don’t live in the Antarctic) from evolution and physiology to its future. Most important of all, though of little practical interest to most bears, is the unequal relationship with man, and Mulvaney demonstrates beyond question just how unequal that is: despite its being admirably equipped to kill, encounters between bears and humans are much more likely to result in the bear’s death. And bears are still hunted, of course, both legitimately by indigenous peoples, and illegally, even in Russia where hunting has been banned for longest.

In this accessible and readable book, Mulvaney combines history, mythology and science with his own first-hand travels and experience of “bear tourism” with Canadian polar bears in Churchill, and an attempt to offer a deeper understanding of the bear’s experience as he describes its life through the course of the Arctic year. Thus it’s rather reminiscent of Kingdom of the Ice Bear, the hugely successful television series which followed a family of bears, and readers in search of “hard” science may be surprised at the degree of intimacy the approach offers. There’s no lack of solid information, though, and Mulvaney examines and presents it thoughtfully. I felt enriched as I read, intellectually and emotionally.

The final chapter is a consideration of the threat of global warming on the Arctic, an environment extremely susceptible to change as the sea ice declines, taking with it the algae that drives the Arctic Ocean’s complex ecology. While migrant species may benefit, at least in the short term from these changes, the species which are dependent on the ice for breeding are already under threat, in the case of the polar bear doubly so, since the seals which are its prey are its companions in ice-dependency. We’ve all seen the film of a polar bear swimming in an ocean bereft of ice, and realised that the creature is almost certainly doomed to swim until it drowns – and indeed, the book’s US cover image is of a swimming bear (I’m not sure why the UK publisher decided to go with a less effective image). It may be as little as twenty years before the ice fails to replace in winter what has been lost in summer and our descendants will only know the polar bear on film, or as a sad creature in a zoo with concrete beneath its paws. We have evidence that the bears are already showing signs of decline both in size and numbers, and it’s more than time that the polar bear was declared an endangered species (rather than “threatened”, its current status), so that its welfare must be take into consideration and its habitat protected. Mulvaney’s book is timely and essential.

Note: The Great White Bear is published in the UK as Ice Bear: A Natural and Unnatural History of the Polar Bear. This review refers to the US version, which came from NetGalley. You can learn more about polar bears from Polar Bears International and both they and The Great White Bear have Facebook pages. Not a Canadian book as such, but one with extensive Canadian subject matter, I'm counting this book towards the 4th Canadian Book Challenge.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages by Tom Holt

2011-05-26T16:16:00.000+01:00

It feels as if this book has a cast of thousands - appropriately enough, since it's one of the ways in which the writing reflects the book's structure and theme, which unfolds gradually, although the reader begins to suspect what's going on well before the characters do.

Polly is a conveyancer for property developer Mr Huon. Her brother is a musician. When Polly notices that strange things are happening in her office - including the appearance of the word HELP in her diary - she turns to her brother for assistance, but he's preoccupied by his own problems. These began after he found a pencil sharpener in the pocket of a coat he'd collected from the dry cleaners. He tries to return it, but the dry cleaners has disappeared. Actually, we learn, the shop has moved, rather to the surprise of its owners, but they soon learn to adapt. Oh, and there's something nasty happening in the downstairs loo. It happens every day, at the same time. There's quite a few disappearances, in fact - piglets, people, a housing estate - and appearances can, of course, be deceiving.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages is familiar fare from Tom Holt, right down to the amusing title - if you know and like his work you're on safe ground, because this is a good one (for me, at least, he can be just a little hit or miss, though there are more hits than misses). You're not going to get to know the characters as well as in some, because it's not a very linear story, but he's good at creating people you like at once - here, the white and black knights are a good example, you're immediately caught up in their dilemma, and in how it links in to the rest of the story.

What all this reminds me of most - even down to the title - is Douglas Adams. Holt has been moving in that direction for some time - ever since, I think, The Portable Door (which is very good). I don't mean to imply that his writing is derivative - it's not, his voice is quite definitely his own - but that the philosophical bent feels like Adams, and the explorations of the possible permutations of a recognisable universe. Because it is recognisable - people react in familiar ways, so that it's easy to imagine yourself in place of Polly, or of Kevin who suddenly finds that he's a chicken. (If you were ever curious to know how that would feel, look no further!) Okay, Kevin's no Gregor Samsa - it's more Chicken Run than Metamorphosis - but Holt's not aiming for profundity, just fun with a little wry social comment on the side. And he does that very well.

This was a review copy from NetGalley, read on my Kindle. I downloaded it just before that option was disabled. I'm very happy to see that it's now back - thanks, NetGalley, that's good news.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

2011-05-05T18:05:00.001+01:00

Although there was a sliver of gold in the eastern sky, the sun was not yet up as I barrelled along the road to Bishop's Lacey. Gladys's tyres were humming that busy, waspish sound they make when she's especially contented.

Low fog floated in the fields on either side of the ditches, and I pretended that I was the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw flying to Heathcliff (except for the bicycle) across the Yorkshire moors. Now and then, a skeletal hand would reach out of the bramble hedges to snatch at my red woollen sweater, but Gladys and I were too fast for them.

In The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, the second Flavia de Luce mystery, Alan Bradley has come up with another book that I desperately didn't want to finish - young Flavia is so refreshingly acerbic about everyone around her, yet at the same time beset with private fears. Was she, as her sisters claim, responsible for her mother's death? She's had to develop a tough exterior to protect her against such accusations, and some readers have complained that the apparent malice between the sisters is unconvincing or unpleasant, but Flavia comes from a more buttoned-up era when it was quite usual for all sorts of resentments to fester beneath the surface (actually, a good deal of festering still goes on, viz. any agony aunt's advice about the dangers of family get-togethers like Christmas, but these days we are encouraged to express our feelings more openly, which may or may not be a good thing). Domestic tensions aren't helped by a father who is largely disengaged, a family retainer with a tenuous hold on mental health and a Wodehousian aunt. Add a rather nasty suspicious death, a policeman who's keen to discourage amateur interference and some dodgy substances, and you have a recipe for a classic crime story.

The precocious Flavia's voice carries the action deliciously - Bradley so evidently adores his young heroine, and his writing resonates with the atmosphere of a bygone England. I suspect Bradley might have spent the odd happy hour, himself, absorbing the acid delights of Nancy Mitford, because I detect in Flavia and her sisters a blood-tie with the young Radletts, while their ex-army Father is clearly an admirer of Lord Alconleigh. Inspector Hewitt, on the other hand, might have emerged from the pages of Georgette Heyer or Marjory Allingham, and is a worthy adversary for Flavia - he'd be an evener worthier ally, if only he could see it, because he infuriates Flavia by thwarting her attempts to help, thereby forcing her to embark on her own investigations, which she pursues with dogged determination and considerable deviousness. She is pure joy.

Gulliver's Travels

2011-04-17T08:00:00.006+01:00

Callmemadam blogged yesterday about Girl, the comic she read as a child. This took me through two stages of reminiscence: first, back to the comic I read, Look and Learn, which began in 1962. I hadn't been allowed a regular comic before that - too frivolous - but L&L was educational, and that was considered A Good Thing. I quite enjoyed it, and it introduced me to a lot of famous books in curtailed form. I remember The Scarlet Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities, The Hobbit, all of which I went on to read later in unexpurgated form. What I remember most, though (and I was always underwhelmed by the educational stuff, though I'm sure that much has come in useful since for answering questions on QI), was the comic strip The Trigan Empire, which both fascinated and repelled me, and had in spades everything I later didn't like about Star Trek and every space opera since (and before I'm attacked by ardent Trekkies, I watched it for years...)

The second strand of memory, though, was that my younger brothers were the ones who really won on the deal: since I was getting a regular comic, it was only fair that they should too, and Playhour was ordered for them. It's true that we were an eccentric bunch to say the least, but Playhour quickly became weekly reading for the entire family, thanks to the glorious back-page strip, The Travels of Gulliver Guinea Pig. This undoubtedly contained some of the most beautiful artwork ever seen in a children's comic, and I think it later moved to the centre pages as a double spread.

The original artist was Philip Mendoza, and I'm really delighted to find that, thanks to the wonder of the interwebz, I can now look at his lovely paintings again. I can see that my walls are going to be covered with Gulliver prints shortly. When, overnight, the art changed, my parents, brothers and I were so upset that we wrote to Playhour to complain, and received a very nice letter back, saying, I think, that the artist had been taken ill and had to retire, and that they had done their best to find a worthy successor. It's clear now that many people remember the second artist, Gordon Hutchings, with equal affection, and his work was very attractive, but it was a bit more cartoon-y, and lacked the delightful subtlety of Mendoza's. Looking now with a fresh eye, I can see that some of his paintings for Gulliver are very lovely, but it was never again quite the must-read that it had been. Both examples here are of Mendoza's work (I love this train, with its proper windows, and the ashtray you were always told not to fiddle with).

Illustrations from the strip are available as prints from The Book Palace and in various formats from Magnolia Box.

Once Upon a Time V

2011-04-11T16:39:00.000+01:00

I've been suffering from such acute tunnel vision for the last few weeks that the Once Upon a Time Challenge snuck up without my noticing - I'm so late that 111 people have signed up ahead of me! So my wishlist is going to be rather thrown together, and I haven't really decided whether I'm going to aim for one of each of the sub-genres - fantasy, folklore, fairytale and mythology - or just as many as I can blog about between now and June 21st. I do like to stretch my reading for Carl's challenges if I can, so I'll probably include at least one non-fiction book, and I'll try to fulfill the requirements for Quest the Third, which includes either reading or watching A Midsummer Night's Dream. Some of my reading will be on my Kindle this year, and some of the possible choices will include titles off last year's list!

Here are my options for this year (it's not exclusive - if you can't indulge a whim in a Once Upon a Time Challenge, when can you?):

Spellwright by Blake Charlton (Kindle) - I like the sound of this, which focuses on the power of words.
Troll Fell by Katherine Langrish (Kindle) - an author I discovered last year, through her fascinating blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, perfect reading in itself for the Challenge. Her book Dark Angels was one of my five best in 2010.
The Poisoned Crown by Amanda Hemingway - this is the final part in a trilogy I enjoyed so much I can't quite bring myself to finish it! Wish she'd write some more.
Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardinge - another I've been saving up, but now there's a sequel to Fly by Night, so that's okay!
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss - I see Carl has just reviewed this, and he's pretty enthusiastic about it, which bodes well. Have to buy this one, though.
The Midnight Mayor by Kate Griffin - another new favourite. I took a couple of runs at A Madness of Angels and it proved well worth the effort.
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Words by Marina Warner - this was a Christmas present from OH, who knows my obsessions well! This will be the non-fiction choice.

I'd like to read some Diana Wynne Jones for the Challenge, too - maybe The House of Many Ways, which will be new to me. I'm so sad she's gone, I can think of few writers I admire so much. I might also include either one of the Canongate series of retellings of myths (I read Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad for an earlier Challenge) or one of the recent re-tellings of stories from the Mabinogion, when I remember who publishes them! And, of course, there will be impulse reads, triggered by reviews from other people in the Challenge, which is one of the pleasures of taking part.

Now, where shall I start?

Ankle Deep by Angela Thirkell

2011-04-08T17:24:00.000+01:00

Warning: this does contain plot spoilers, for which I won’t apologise, since I talk about the novel in relation to the author’s own life.

Ankle Deep was a first novel, and not one of her Barsetshire series (it followed her memoir of her early childhood, Three Houses). It’s a clearly autobiographical story of a young woman trapped in a marriage which isn’t on the surface particularly unhappy, but leaves Aurea deeply unsatisfied. Her new friend Fanny, frivolous, manipulative, and married to Aurea’s first love, decides that a mild flirtation is just what both Aurea and Fanny’s husband Arthur need to while away the period of Aurea’s visit from Canada, leaving Fanny free to continue her own harmless flirtation with their friend, Valentine Ensor. Of course, Valentine and Aurea fall painfully in love; in the end, only the rather wet Aurea is damaged, as Valentine is far too shallow to suffer greatly. I spent much of it wanting to give Aurea a good shake and to lock Fanny up where she couldn’t do any more harm.

I found it interesting that Aurea is a self-portrait, since Thirkell’s other alter ego is Mrs Morland in the Barsetshire novels, and you couldn’t have anyone more unlike Aurea. Mrs Morland is clearly Thirkell as she would like to be, but Aurea is much more surprising. Ankle Deep was written hard upon the break-up of Thirkell’s marriage, and acknowledged as autobiographical by both the author herself and her closest friends, but it’s not especially flattering; it’s interesting that the working title of the book was "Three Sillies". Aurea, although married, is naïve and inexperienced, and her refusal to embark on an actual affair serves to emphasise these qualities. And the close identification of Angela with Aurea, lends veracity to the characterisation. However, if Valentine Ensor depicts a real person that Thirkell fell in love with while she was home from Australia on a visit, she chose a wise course in not succumbing to temptation. Not that he’s a seducer and a cad, or anything, just that he’s weak and self-centred, and the charm would soon wear off. But then, after two failed marriages, Thirkell just might have started to learn about such men.

According to Thirkell’s biographer, Margot Strickland, in the senior Howards Thirkell paints a recognisable picture of her own parents, and apparently suffered some trepidation before publication. In many ways I think they are the best of Ankle Deep, affectionately portrayed in both their strengths and foibles, and a clear indicator of Thirkell’s potential as a novelist; elements of both recur in the Barsetshire novels, where she honed the gently irritating ways of Mr Howard is something much sharper and funnier. In the same year (1933), she published the first of the Barsetshire books, High Rising, and then she settled down, like Mrs Morland, to writing “the same book every year” until her old age.

Toblethorpe Manor by Carola Dunn

2011-03-30T17:51:00.005+01:00

Finding myself recently in need of a very quiet day of convalescence (OH said I must have been ill, because I hadn't read anything for almost 24 hours), I turned to the Kindle in search of something soothing. Happily, an earlier trawl had turned up the information that Carola Dunn, in addition to the Daisy Dalrymple series, was the author of a long list of regency romances. Just the thing, I reckoned.

My first foray into the list, Toblethorpe Manor, did not disappoint. Richard Carstairs, the rather aloof owner of a substantial property in Yorkshire, finds a young woman lying injured on the moors, evidently thrown from her horse, and concussed. Quelling his momentary qualms, he takes her home to his family, where they discover that she remembers nothing of her past. Lady Annabel, Richard's mother, takes to the young woman, however, while his sister Lucy sees Clara Fell, as they call her, as a romantic heroine, probably escaping from nameless Gothic horrors or oppressors. From there the story unfolds in familiar Georgette Heyer style, coach journeys, London season and all.

One of the qualities which Dunn shares with Heyer is the ability to create genuinely likeable people - even the relatively minor characters such as the agent Mr Dennison and his comfortable wife are warm and attractive. The pleasure afforded by the Daisy Dalrymple series is to be found here also, and I'm delighted to have acquired a new source of comfort reading for those days when it's necessary. If they fall a little short of the deliciousness of Heyer, they still offer the chance of a couple of hours of escape. If you're not being ill then a cup of your favourite tea and a packet of chocolate biscuits should prove an excellent addition.

Murder on the Flying Scotsman by Carola Dunn

2011-03-23T17:33:00.005Z

I've grown immensely fond of Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple series: they are frothy and light and fun, excellent to read when you want to be with someone you like. Daisy is a thoroughly nice young woman, intent on earning her own living at a time when it was still rather frowned-upon for well-brought up girls to do so. Carola Dunn was born in England but lives in the US, and it's a pity that not all of this long series is available here yet. They're worth reading in order as far as possible, starting with Death at Wentwater Court, the first of Daisy's country-house forays both as journalist and amateur investigator, which introduces the regular characters, including Daisy's reluctant collaborator Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard.

Murder on the Flying Scotsman makes a brave attempt at a sense of place, though I got more of that from the last in the series that I read (actually later in chronological order, I think), Dead in the Water, set during Henley Regatta. The Flying Scotsman, as is well-known, travels between London and Scotland (the name applied to the service, but there was also a locomotive of that name), running, in part, up the East Coast of England, with some spectacular views. I've travelled the route regularly since I was five, so I could easily imagine Alec's young daughter Belinda's trips up and down the train, along narrow corridors and through those terrifying intersections between carriages that heaved and rattled and shook their concertina walls like some hideous sphincter intent on engulfing small girls. Dinner on the train always seemed like the height of gracious dining, all crisp white linen and sparkling silverware and, in those far-off days, train crew who always seemed to have a kind word for young travellers, as Belinda's avuncular ticket-inspector does (although he unwittingly frightens her). I feel that Dunn catches the train's atmosphere perfectly - perhaps she was another regular on such journeys, another relic of a time when it was quite usual to walk along when you reached your destination to thank the driver, who was usually delighted to have his locomotive admired.

Not quite as satisfactory, in my view, is the novel's second half, set in my local town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The descriptions are admittedly accurate enough, and I loved the way the author had evidently woven genuine local newspaper reports of the 1920s into the story, but it lacks the immediacy of the train section. There's a bit too much of the gazetteer about it: ruined castle, Elizabethan walls, King's Bastion and bridge across the street all ticked off, along with Berwick cockles - but of course I smiled at the coldness and surliness of the Berwick Walls Hotel. It must certainly be admitted that Berwick's not the warmest place to live!

The murder story itself is entertaining, a tangle of would-be heirs all vying for the favour of cantankerous old uncles, with lots of bickering and snarling, and the necessary nice young family members for you to warm to, and hope it's not them who are responsible. The central pairing of Daisy and Alec is strong, and they are well-supported by policemen Tom Tring (mature and comfortable, with the wisdom of a long career in the force) and Ernie Piper (all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with nice sharp pencils); I have no doubt, too, that Belinda will feature again in later books. It's becoming evident, too, that the English countryside will provide a broad canvas for Daisy's perambulations, and that there are plenty of quirky places still to draw on: in the next - as could be seen in one of those irritating extracts in the back of the edition I was reading - Daisy will visit Great Malvern, a watering place on the Welsh border. It makes a refreshing change from the frequent focus on one small area (Midsomer, Oxford, etc.). It's all jolly good stuff.

As a postscript, the National Railway Museum in York is currently working on the restoration of the 88-year-old Flying Scotsman 4472, the first locomotive to have been clocked at 100 miles per hour - they have an appeal to raise money for the restoration (they've raised £210,000 of the necessary £250,000). There's lots of information and you can even download a simulator so that you can drive the train on your PC! The Flying Scotsman ran on the London-Edinburgh route until 1963, and I like to think that Daisy and I may have travelled on the same train. The locomotive will pull rail tours again when she is fully restored, so I'll be keeping an eye out for her when I go through York station.

Clerical Errors by D.M. Greenwood

2011-03-19T17:00:00.002Z

What a delicious discovery! Ostara Publishing (wonderful name!) has a whole list of “clerical crime” so I chose to start with D.M. Greenwood’s Clerical Errors, and I couldn’t be happier. Julia Smith decides to begin her working life as junior secretary to Canon Wheeler, at Medewich Cathedral. Julia’s bright, but young, and ill-qualified, and she’s mystified by the workings of the Anglican church. For me it brings back an earlier life: at around Julia’s age I found myself, with an austere Church of Scotland background, abruptly pitched into the midst of Anglicanism in a cathedral close. For a little more than a year I resisted the lure of ritual, the daily call to evensong, the canons in their red cassocks against the green grass and pale stone – if I hadn’t been living with an atheist my own agnosticism would have been swamped. Unlike Julia, I didn’t find a severed head on my first day (though I did meet a couple of light-fingered clerics over the course of the next year), but nor did I meet the charismatic Theodora Braithwaite, deaconess, for whom I instantly fell. Because it’s a world to which I’m still susceptible, on the page, at least - I adore the in jokes, the ramifications of the church’s workings, the Trollopian dramatis personae ... I lap up clerical crime the way others do school stories.

Canon Wheeler, Julia’s employer, is odious, a bully, an ambitious manipulator. Fortunately, Julia can see through him from the outset, and though her lack of self-confidence won’t allow her to trust her own judgement, she has allies within the cathedral administration, including the redoubtable Theodora. There may be loathsomeness here, but the author also creates characters whose goodness shines, a real reward to the reader. I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to read about truly good people, but if you’re reading this, then I suspect you are probably similarly predisposed.

I read this on Quoodle-the-Kindle, and have another three in the series still to come, which pleases me enormously. My only problem is whether to rush ahead and read them all now, or to intersperse them with others from Ostara's list. If I have a single regret with Clerical Errors it's that I can't enjoy its pleasant cover on my bookshelf.

Aboard the Unstoppable Aerostat Fenris by Cameron Chapman

2011-03-13T15:40:00.000Z

This is an interesting start to Cameron Chapman's Steam and Steel Chronicles, introducing us to her alternative Edwardian steampunk world on the verge of war. Sixteen-year-old Isabelle has been living rough on the streets of Guryev - for some time, we gather, though we're not sure how she got there, not how she came to lose her parents. It's clear, though, that her upbringing has been respectable and, if she's had to learn to live by her wits, there are very distinct lines that she's been able to draw so far. So she's cautiously grateful when airship captain Stig Rayner offers, against what he thinks is probably his better judgement, to take her home to London, where she hopes to find her brother.

This novella-length first instalment sets up its steampunk environment very effectively - there's a lovely Jules Verne feel to the airship Fenris, for example, you could almost see the brass, and feel the woodgrain of the floor, I immediately wanted scale drawings and cutaways, and to know how the engine worked! There's much potential for exoticism when protagonists are as well-travelled as this pair: Isabelle is familiar with India, we learn, while Stig got his striking tattoo in Borneo. His experience extends to dealing with the Sirens, too, creatures was ethereality belies their predatory nature. As they get closer to their first port of call, the Northern Lights evoke the coldness and clarity and beauty of their airborne world, a contrast to the real fear of pirate attack. And then there's the mysterious cargo...

I'm very pleased to see that Cameron Chapman is already working on the next instalment - there's so much history to discover about her characters, and so much more to explore, and she's created a world I want to immerse myself in (though perhaps I'm glad not to have to try to survive in it myself!). My appetite for airship travel has been whetted and I'm longing to climb back aboard the Fenris. I rather hope the cargo turns up again, too.

Lines to draw you in (for World Book Night)

2011-03-05T18:32:00.002Z

(Illustration by Johfra Bosschart from

The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, published by Lectorium Rosicrucianum)

In that part of the world the sky is everywhere, and the entire landscape seems to lie in abasement under its exacting light. It gets into the church towers and between the narrow reeds along the river's edge. It glances across undulant acres of barley and beet, and takes what little the flints have to give. Everything there feels exposed, so keeping secrets is hard. It's not the easiest place in which to hide.

Also, if you don't have a car, it's quite difficult to get about. In fact the journey to Munding was simpler a century ago. These days the train takes you only as far as Norwich, then it's a leisurely bus-ride through some of the roomier parts of the county to the market-place at Saxburgh, and there's still a four-mile walk along the lanes to Munding. Just outside the village you cross the old branch-line: its rails have been scrapped, its sleepers disturbed, and the small halt closed. So much for Victorian progress!

I was in no hurry. Looking down from the bridge at the silent gravel-bed I reflected that the journey across England had been quite long enough to make specific a sense of banishment. By the time I reached the village my defection was complete.

It was a late Spring afternoon in the early '80s. I was 27 then.

(The opening lines from The Chymical Wedding by Lindsay Clarke)

The Twinning Murders by Shelly Frome - review and interview

2011-02-22T01:16:00.001Z

Now here's something out of the ordinary (for me, anyway!). I'm delighted to welcome an author today – someone entirely new to me – and to have the opportunity to ask him some questions. Shelly Frome is a professor emeritus of dramatic art at the University of Connecticut and his latest book is a mystery set, intriguingly, between New England and Dartmoor. How could I resist? My review of The Twinning Murders follows, but first of all, this short interview.

To start with, here’s one of those questions everyone asks – are you immensely disciplined, writing a set number of words every day, or are there times when you just can’t get started?

When I get to the point that I’ve done all the groundwork and the dynamic is percolating, I have to put in at least two hours a day. When this time slot is drawing to a close, I always leave the narrative in the air, sometimes at an unfinished sentence so that I can’t wait to get back to what’s unfolding. This way of working also seems to tap my subconscious in some mysterious way so that, more often than not, I discover before I go back to the rough draft or what-have-you, I haven’t taken into account some vital factor—e.g., as a professional tour guide, Emily would have to make certain each and every one of her charges were prepared in case of all possible contingencies while in the U.K. And that is why she has to check up on scatterbrained Silas in the dubious confines of his home.

I’m always fascinated by the urge that amateur sleuths seem to have to investigate – my instinct would be to stay out of trouble, I think! If you stumbled over a body yourself, can you imagine yourself setting off in best amateur detective fashion, sleeves rolled up, Boys’ Own magnifying glass clutched firmly in your hand, getting stuck in?

What fascinated me about this venture, in fact part of the reason I wrote the story, was the fact that Emily had no intention of becoming an amateur sleuth. She set out to right a great wrong and did all she could to get the powers that be to take over. Unlike the standard amateur sleuth, Emily was personally involved with what befell her mentor. After all, he was a father figure since the time her own father walked out on her when she was very young. In this way, the story becomes character driven and, hopefully, engages the reader who may very well empathize with Emily’s plight.

Distinctive settings like Bath and Dartmoor mean that getting things right is tremendously important – readers do so love to catch an author out! Some authors claim that desk research is enough to get the important detail right (I’m thinking here particularly of Costa winner Steph Penney, who’d never been to Canada when she wrote The Tenderness of Wolves, but was congratulated on the vividness of her depiction). Have you worn your feet out on the pavements of Bath, or does Google Street View offer all you need?

For me the setting and the springboard have to be real, part of my actual experience. I can take it from there. However, my muse, or whatever it is that compels me write, always balks and the characters refuse to go on if I try to fake anything or rely on Google Street for more than passing information like, How many blocks away is the bus station from the Randolph in Oxford?

I’m guessing that your unusual surname has a west-country pedigree? Does that have anything to do with your choice of setting for The Twinning Murders?

Actually not. I will admit that my wife and I are incurable Anglophiles and spend a great deal of time watching Masterpiece Theatre and countless other programs emanating from the BBC. The setting was prompted by the time I spent in Widecombe-in-the-Moor.

Finally, which is your favourite, please – Poirot or Miss Marple? And, of course, why?

I have to admit I loved Joan Hickson’s portrayal of Miss Marple because she humanized the character and imbued it with sensitivity, caring, thoughtfulness and warmth. On the page, Miss Marple, like her author, is solely preoccupied with the puzzle at hand and restoring peace and harmony to the village. If I had to choose, I would opt for Miss Marple with Joan Hickson in my mind’s eye. Try as he may, David Suchet’s Poirot is still a fussbudget who is mainly at home away from nature, inclement weather and the countryside, snug in his upscale flat, following his beloved routines while, at the same time, solving murders and conundrums “most sinister.”

Thank you very much, Shelly! I rather hoped you'd choose Miss Marple as played by Joan Hickson, as she's my favourite. And now, my thoughts, and a little extract to whet the appetite:

Ordinarily, Emily would have enjoyed the train ride from Paddington. Rolling west, seated comfortably next to a wide picture window, a smiling young mother holding her sleeping two-year-old across the way, a gaggle of passengers behind her chatting amiably, the deep green landscape dipping and rising, each expanse marked off by neat coloring-book hedgerowsall of it ideal for a tour guide headed for the center of Bath on a nice early Wednesday afternoon. Then a short cab ride to pick up her rented Vauxhall station wagon, then lazily wending her way to Darlington House to meet up with her clients. Ordinarily, Emily would have also been looking forward to a little marketing to pick out her trip-snacks of fruit, nuts and assorted biscuits followed by a leisurely exploration of the ancient city. Next, a pleasant early supper at a favorite spot near the Roman Baths, going over plans for the upcoming Twinning and fete: talking to Harriet about the flower judging, Silas about his lecture on the Lydfield and Lydfield-in-the-Moor heritage, Pru about her storytelling stint and foraging for authentic tales of the mist-sodden moorland. Ordinarily, Emily could have settled back into her role as a seasoned rambler.

I’m always curious to read authors new to me, and I also find it diverting to read accounts of visiting Britain from writers from elsewhere – not always entirely flattering, it has to be said. So the opportunity to read Shelly Frome’s The Twinning Murders, with its settings in New England and Dartmoor, was too good to miss. Emily Ryder, who organises tours to ‘Hidden Britain’ for Americans, has reason to regret taking on the eccentric Curtises. Not only has she just lost a dear friend in a suspicious accident, her hometown of Lydfield is the centre of some very dodgy real estate dealing – not the best time to find yourself the other side of the Atlantic with one of your clients intent on running out of the tour! Worse still, she seems to have been followed to Devon by a thoroughly unpleasant man who is working for the developers back home.

One of the things I liked about Shelly’s writing was that he doesn’t find it necessary to shock his readers: when you settle down to a cosy mystery that is often exactly what you want, and you don’t need to find that your quaint English village is awash with blood à la Midsomer Murders. And once Emily and her charges get to Dartmoor, the story really takes off, as the focus tightens, her charges disappear like stray cats and her anxiety that another mishap is simply waiting to happen is proved correct.

There are some nice touches: he’s really caught the randomness of village fetes, all sorts of loosely connected activities happening in a completely anarchistic fashion, but everyone enjoying themselves. The difficult clients, too – Harriet is so wayward it’s quite unsettling, Silas seems barely compos mentis (I would never have agreed to take him abroad!) and Pru is convincingly fey, preoccupied by hunting for witches and pixies and apt to wander off in search of anything that takes her fancy. I thought I detected a real affection for Dartmoor, even if there are no illusions about the awfulness of its weather. The English idiom isn’t quite there, but I’ve seen people who’ve lived here for years not quite get it, and it’s with the introduction of the English characters you start to get that sense of how others see us. To most of Shelly’s readers, I imagine, the US setting will seem familiar and safe, whereas to me it’s exotic, and Devon, and the moor, is the place I know – the disjunct is something I find interesting, so that something seemingly straightforward has a slight off-balance feel. This is reflected in Emily’s situation: you really feel that she is struggling to make sense of what is going on around her, impatient with half-answers and evasions.

I also learnt something about New England architecture – the description of the Curtis house was so detailed that I had to know more, which led to a fascinating diversion into the intricacies and regionalisms of Federation style.

Check out the other stops on Shelly's virtual book tour which continues until 3 April.

Murder Fortissimo by Nicola Slade

2011-02-13T12:14:00.001Z

Retired headmistress Harriet Quigley decides to take advantage of recently opened, upmarket convalescent home, Firstone Grange, while she recovers from an operation. Plenty of time to recuperate without relying in help from her neighbours, she thinks, and at first she’s very pleased with her decision, if slightly disconcerted by the number of acquaintances who also seem to be frequenting the home. Rather more perturbing, though, is the sudden and shocking death of another resident, a thoroughly unlovely woman who seems to delight in needling others and taking advantage of their frailties.

Harriet is a really likeable and convincing protagonist, not rashly rushing in, but considering eventualities carefully. Her (and the reader’s) sympathies are engaged by the plight of some of her fellow residents, and she’s quite clear – as we are – about the people she doesn’t want to be responsible if the death of the most unpopular resident really turns out to be murder. Her clear-sightedness makes her cautious (welcome in a genre populated by women given to the let’s-split-up-and-go-into-this-dark-building school of investigation), and her experience of handling people is evident, and believable, as is her cousin Sam’s. She’s obviously used to being the sort of person who is confided in, someone generally respected and trusted by her fellows. Altogether, Harriet is admirable, rather the sort Miss Read would have been if she’d found herself caught up in a murder mystery, if perhaps a little sharper – even a little vainer – and more prone to seeing the funny side of things. Because, as usual with Nicola Slade’s books, her obviously irrepressible sense of humour is firmly there.

There’s a nice sowing of doubt about the other residents – plenty of motive and grounds for suspicion, as well as the persistent uncertainty that there has really been a murder at all. It has, after all, been filed under “accidental death” pretty rapidly. Perhaps, Harriet wonders, she has been just a little over-confident in her conviction that all is not what it seems? Perhaps, after all, it will turn out to have been a grisly accident? However, I think the reader can be fairly confident that a book called Murder Fortissimo isn’t going to lead us down any psychological blind alleys, that sooner or later Harriet will be on the track of a murderer and we can sit back and enjoy ourselves.

I did wonder at how quickly Harriet is whizzing about after her operation – I know she’s a determined lady but I think I’d have wanted to put my feet up a bit longer. On the other hand, one has to applaud her decision to go to a convalescent home in the first place – how eminently sensible. Again, in her place I think I’d have stayed at home and lived on beans on toast and whisky, but she’s clearly a woman of much more fortitude than me. Mind you, she has excellent taste in whisky, so of course I approve of her.

Harriet and Sam make an attractive pair of sleuths – they ought to have a long career of stumbling into nasty happenings ahead of them, it’s perfect Miss Marple territory. More, please!

The Fallen Blade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

2011-02-05T22:28:00.000Z

The setting is Venice, 1407. La Serenissima is effectively ruled by the Council of Ten, responsible for the security of the republic. Titular head is Duke Marco, descendant of Marco Polo, but the real ruler is his uncle Duke Alonzo, Regent because Marco is a halfwit. To maintain its role as one of the most powerful of the Italian city-states, alliances are necessary, and Duke Alonzo has the power to dispose - in all senses of the word - of family members to meet political expediency; to this end he has decided that his niece, 15-year-old Giulietta, will be married to the King of Cyprus. Desperate to evade her role as a political pawn, deserted, she thinks, by the aunt she has trusted, Giulietta flees, but is caught and returned by Atilo (until recently, Admiral of the Venetian Fleet, and still secret head of the Assassini), after witnessing a terrifying street battle. The night before she is due to sail to Cyprus, Giulietta, filled with horror by the knowledge that she is to bear a son to the King and then murder him, escapes again, this time to the Basilica San Marco, where she intends to kill herself. Instead, she meets a mysterious, silver-haired boy. We've already seen his arrival in Venice, incarcerated in the hold of a Mamluk ship, bereft of memory, nameless, and shackled with silver chains.

There are books that draw you in from the very beginning, and this is one of them. There is a flow to the story that keeps you turning the pages long after you should have turned off the light and settled down to sleep. The cords of the story are expertly woven, each character's thread - and there are more to follow than Giulietta's and silver-haired Tycho's - reappearing just when the need to discover what has happened to them becomes too insistent to ignore, so that you feel just one more chapter can't be resisted. If it lacks quite the savage brilliance of some of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's earlier books, The Fallen Blade is nonetheless very hard to put down, and as Act One of The Assassini, it promises great things. As usual the characterisation is excellent - he's particularly good at young women - and he has a gift for keeping you absorbed in the dangerous characters as well as the sympathetic ones: they might be brutal, ambitious and ruthless, often charming, sometimes appalling, but their motivation is always understandable and their single-mindedness can even at times seem laudable. In other words, they are complex, multi-faceted individuals, and your interest is held because they seem real and unpredictable.

JCG mostly eschews the long descriptions that some authors use for scene setting - where they are used they are sparing and always advance the action, or your understanding of it, but such description as is included builds a strong sense of place - at times, you can almost smell Venice. There's grandeur here, and squalor, and a cast of warring factions whose allegiances could never be relied upon, liable to turn at the slightest spark. It's an alternate history so close to reality that it's utterly plausible, and the reader slips between the real past and the imagined one as easily as Tycho slips between his real city and the invisible one which shelters him when he is first cast adrift in Venice. Vampires and krieghund seem native to this dark and watery city, where assassins lurk not only on every calle but also in the palazzi of the rulers, and poisoning is the quickest way to get rid of a rival. At the end of the book much about Tycho's nature, too, remains to be revealed - bring on Act Two.

We Had It So Good by Linda Grant

2011-01-29T17:09:00.001Z

Drugs, living in squats, Britain and the 3-day week, the family hamster - if, like me, you’re about the same age as the characters in We Had It So Good, it’s a book which leads to a great deal of gazing off into space while you ponder your own experience in light of the events described. Linda Grant chooses to make her protagonist, Stephen, an American, thus allowing her to consider happenings on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the second half of the last century – faced with the prospect of being drafted to fight in Vietnam if he returns to the States, he opts instead for marriage with Andrea and life in London.

The novel's events are seen through the eyes of various people: primarily, Stephen and Andrea themselves and their children Max and Marianne. Because Andrea has trained as a psychotherapist she has privileged access to other pasts, among them those of her friend Clare and Stephen’s father Simon. These lives reflect the major considerations of the era – the immigrant experience, isolation chosen and involuntary, the impact of war and terrorism – alongside the everyday domestic existence of the liberal middle-class (that is, the book’s natural audience).

In interviews Grant has talked about the “toxic legacy” of the baby-boomer generation, the complacency which accepted the advantages provided by a liberal postwar society while making little effort to pass on those benefits to future generations. What happened to turn the idealism of the sixties into the selfishness of the eighties? Grant thinks we got our comeuppance with 9/11, and the start of the disaffection of the rest of the world with western arrogance.

Along the way, Grant has much of interest to observe about the ills of the current day, and our inability to find solutions to them: our fear of ageing, our creation of a “victim” society, our obsessions with health and normality (the quiet Max who is almost assaulted, in his view, with grommets to cure the loss of hearing that he has accommodated to is especially poignant, I felt). I was puzzled that Grant had left out the event which was, for some of us, an earlier assault on US and UK complacency, the Lockerbie air disaster – the more so since I see from the afterword that she talked with a member of the UK family group about the aftermath of terrorist attacks. My own experience of the events of 1988 suggest that western arrogance is not easily rocked, and that as new towers rise on the site of the World Trade Center, 9/11 will be accommodated along with the other events we prefer not to think about.

As I said, We Had It So Good is a book which makes you think, and offers an absorbing story in doing so, but if Grant has set out to turn our eyes inwards, to make us consider ourselves and our society, I’m despondent about the outcome. But I applaud the attempt, and recommend the book.

We Had It So Good is the first book chosen for the Virago Book Club.

Other reviews:
http://forbookssake.net/2011/01/17/we-had-it-so-good-by-linda-grant/
http://davidhblog.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/linda-grant-we-had-it-so-good-2011/

A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin

2011-01-21T17:56:00.000Z

When Neil Gaiman wrote London into Neverwhere it made my toes curl with delight. This really was a novel with a sense of place, every greasy, gritty inch of it. A Madness of Angels does it too – as in Neverwhere you’ll find yourself on a disused underground station, or seeing a familiar building from a slightly different perspective. And it is only slightly different – Matthew Swift, sorceror and erstwhile corpse (except that his body was never found) is urban, contemporary, and could easily be someone you know. Like Harry Dresden, he’s a magic user who’s firmly rooted in the everyday world.

To be honest, this was my second go at the book, I’d picked it up once before and started it, and been put off by the use of “I” and “we” interchangeably in the opening pages. Just not in the mood at the time, perhaps, but since then I’d seen it mentioned a couple of times as something original and not-to-be-missed. And I’ll admit that even now, I found the beginning just a tad fey - the reader adrift with the newly-revived Swift, uncertain even whose head it is you are in - so that I fervently hoped that it would get down to something a little more concrete soon. Well, that concrete turned out to be the streets of London, dirty, familiar, infested with pigeons, reverberating to the distant thud of the underground, at once joyous and sinister in its squalor.

When Swift returns from death, somewhat augmented, to the discovery that all his friends have died horribly, he’s bent on revenge and prepared to make allegiances wherever he can find them. Recruiting an ad hoc army of bikers, religious fanatics and characters from the city’s own mythology, he starts picking off the henchmen of the man he holds responsible, a fight which escalates so rapidly that he fears there must be a traitor amongst his allies. But despite his resurrection, Swift knows that he’s not really hero material and his confidence in his magic is undermined by what he fears must be the eventual outcome. It’s this humility which makes him so attractive to the reader:

I felt that it should have been drizzling, perhaps with a thundercloud or two overhead; it would have suited my mood. As it was, the day was crisp and clean, a thing of bright light and cold, empty blue skies, big and pale. I sat with my arms curled around as much of my aching body as I could comfortably achieve, and tried not to wobble a newly loosened tooth. There was probably, I knew, some spell or other that could repair the damage, but I wasn’t about to try mystical dentistry and somehow felt the whole thing was beneath me. James Bond never had to go for emergency dental treatment; Jackie Chan never smiled a smile of gold crowns; Bruce Lee didn’t spend the final credits of any kung fu film sitting with his arms wrapped round his belly like he had food poisoning, feeling sorry for himself – therefore, neither should I. Besides, from what little we knew and what we could guess, dentists were a species we wished to avoid.

Swift is not the only appealing character. I was rather sad that Jeremy the troll made such a fleeting appearance, but there were others I liked too, including the slightly daunting Mrs Mikeda. People and events are described in a dense and lyrical prose which crackles with the electricity of the blue angels in Matthew's mind. Here, too, magic usage has a logical connection to the surrounding world - even down to power of the humble Oyster card - with an individualism which feels natural and right, and carries with it some striking images. It's a worthy successor to Neverwhere and, since the magic of a place is a creation of its locality, history, architecture, mythology and even its inhabitants, I wonder if Griffin can do this with other cities as well as London? That would be truly wonderful.

One Bloody Thing After Another by Joey Comeau

2011-01-18T13:39:00.002Z

I found it quite hard to know what to think of this horror story, more novella than novel, since my Kindle copy appeared to be haunted by faint lines of text which appeared, writ large, in seemingly random places, often apparently bearing no relation to the immediate events - they clearly were part of the story, but I couldn't decide who they were spoken by. Were they in the original, the non-Kindle version, or were they the result of some arcane glitch that appeared during conversion? The answer is that I'm not sure - I tried looking at the PDF version and couldn't find them there (but my access was limited and brief), and I am very aware that formatting seems to go a bit haywire when transferring to the Kindle, so I'm left wondering. If they were intended to be there they were mysterious and effective, puzzling until the end, when I finally worked out whose voice it was. (If anyone thinks I was being unduly dense, I should point out that there were other formatting difficulties, even more confusing - if it had been a longer work, I doubt if I could have stuck with it).

Jackie has a bit of a problem with anger management. Charlie can't guess what the headless woman is desperately trying to tell him and, anyway, he's more worried about his dog getting old. Jackie wants to tell Ann she loves her, but Ann is preoccupied because she's having trouble with her mom. It's a gruesome little tale, the story of people struggling to hold it together when really bad things happen. The writing both externalises their struggles yet makes them sympathetic - perhaps the brevity helps here, because I think it would be hard not to read it all in one gulp. It's a helter-skelter of a horror story, everything tumbling inexorably towards a conclusion which is more a muddled heap than a resolution, yet somehow breathlessly satisfying, even though you're not sure how you got there, or if it's really over.

Overall, I think it's a success - not quite my usual kind of thing, but funny, experimental and grisly. If the opportunity arises, I'll approach other works by this young writer with interest. It was read for the Canadian Book Challenge, via NetGalley (who have, I note, removed their Kindle option for the present.)

*Edited later to say that a review on LibraryThing makes it clear that all copies are haunted by apparently random words (as I'd hoped, because it's something that stays with me now that I've finished the book). I think the intention may be easier to follow in a printed version.

A life in books

2011-01-03T18:25:00.000Z

I saw this at Juxtabook and thought I would play before leaving 2010's books. She says "A nice end of the year meme pinched from Other Stories and Gaskella.

"Using only books you have read this year (2010), cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title. It’s much, much harder than you think!"

* Describe Yourself: Practically Perfect (Katie Fforde - don't I wish!)
* How do you feel: Ankle Deep (Angela Thirkell)
* Describe where you currently live: Log Hut (Thomas Firbank - and I did, at one time...)
* If you could go anywhere, where would you go: A Place of Fallen Leaves (Tim Pears)
* Your favorite form of transportation: Minnow on the Say (Philippa Pearce - Minnow is a boat)
* Your best friend is: The Invisible Girl (Laura Ruby)
* You and your friends are: Children of Chance (Elizabeth Pewsey)
* What’s the weather like: Acqua Alta (Donna Leon - my feet don't seem to have been dry for weeks)
* Favorite time of day: Before Lunch (Thirkell again)
* If your life was a: Tapestry of Love (Rosy Thornton - if only...)
* What is life to you: One Bloody Thing After Another (Joey Comeau - that's much more like it!)
* Your fear: Murder in the Garden (Veronica Heley - well, weeding's murder on the back)
* What is the best advice you have to give: Don't Tell Alfred (Nancy Mitford)
* Thought for the Day: What's Bred in the Bone (Robertson Davies)
* How I would like to die: Giving Up the Ghost (Hilary Mantel - I don't want to spend the afterlife haunting)
* My soul’s present condition: Shades of Grey (Jasper Fforde)

Who'd have thought I could start and finish with a Fforde? What I couldn't do, I'm afraid (and unlike both Juxtabook and Gaskella) is link to my reviews of the titles I chose, but I promise I didn't cheat, they are all from last year's list. And it was fun!

The year's books

2010-12-31T16:26:00.001Z

Photo credit

What have I read this year?

177 read
9 non-fiction
10 Kindle (since late September when Quoodle-the-Kindle arrived)
28 re-reads
and 1 graphic novel
112 by women; 65 by men*

At least 94 of the above involved violent death or murder! The ratio of fiction to non-fiction looked dreadful, until I thought about it: not included here are the books I have read, often several times over, because I have been copy editing or typesetting them. In the course of the year I've worked on various books on the Middle East, on literature and, most satisfying, landscape photography. Since I have another job for four days a week, and freelance in my "spare" time, that's a lot of non-fiction reading, and it occurs to me that I don't really need to feel guilty - as I had been - for doing so little "serious" reading. So 2011 is going to be guilt-free as far as books are concerned and if, at the end of a day spent poring over a work written by someone for whom English is not a first language and trying to reconstruct their sometimes tortured sentences into elegant prose, I can only face nefarious doings in rural settings, that's okay. (That was a pretty tortured sentence of my own, for which I apologise - and some of my authors write very well, and just need a bit of tidying up, it's the subject matter which is grim.)

The finds of the year have been:

Elly Griffiths, with her series about archaeologist Ruth Galloway - I'm really looking forward to the next one;
Alan Bradley - I read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie at the beginning of the year and fell for Flavia de Luce, and I'm just finishing The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, which had been sitting on the TBR pile for months because I couldn't bear to read it yet;
and thanks to Callmemadam, O Douglas - she sent me Priorsford, which I loved, though I haven't found time to write about (perhaps on the next reading) and since then, I have added a couple more to the waiting pile, including two, I think, on Quoodle. Not new, but new-to-me.

The year's other find has been Quoodle itself. Along with everyone else I know who has bought a Kindle this year, I shall still be buying books, but in three months it has effected a small transformation and is one of the best birthday presents I've ever had. I won't go so far as to say that travel has become a pleasure, but it's wonderful to be able to carry such a choice of books with me and to suit my reading to my mood.

My "best of year" list is limited to five, only one of which I've managed to write about here, sadly (memo to self: must do better next year). These are ranked (!) - number 5 being my book of the year:

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. I didn't like the much-vaunted The Time Traveller's Wife, and approached this book with some trepidation.
Dark Angels by Katherine Langrish - this was a delight, I ordered it from the library and liked it so much that I've bought it, and also the first in a series, Troll Fell. I promise a review when I've read both.
Thursbitch by Alan Garner.
The Android's Dream by John Scalzi - a birthday present, and another wonderful discovery, this book reminded me of several other authors, including Connie Willis. Scalzi's another I shall be reading more of during the year.
The City and the City by China Miéville - this was wonderful. Again, it was a library book, but I bought it for younger son for Christmas (and his more recent Kraken for elder son), and I'll be reading it again soon. It just squeaks ahead of Scalzi on the grounds of technical fireworks.

Honourable mentions to Rosy Thornton's Tapestry of Love, for sheer pleasure, Helen Grant's young adult novel The Glass Demon and Nick Lake's The Secret Ministry of Frost. The last gets my award for best cover.

Finally, I've also had lots of fun reading along with the Angela Thirkell group on Yahoo (mostly composed of members of the Angela Thirkell Society from both the UK and the US), where we read a book a month. The year started not with her Barsetshire novels, but with Ankle Deep, a loosely autobiographical work, then moved on to her delightful memoir Three Houses, about her childhood homes. I haven't managed to keep up completely but, along with these two and Margot Strickland's biography, Portrait of a Lady Novelist, I've read/re-read six of the Barsetshire books. The group spends quite a lot of time off-topic (we are much exercised by the weather, as befits Thirkellites!) but it's an excellent source of recommendations, since we're not only interested in reading around the subject but also tend to like a range of similar authors, old and new.

The list of the year's books is here, for anyone who is interested. I'll try to put in links to reviews at some point. I update the list at the end of each month, so I now have a constant record of the year's reading, instead of having to go back through the monthly round-ups. Tonight I'll finish The Weed that Strings... and then it's on to a whole new year's reading. I hope it's as good as this one has been.

Happy New Year everyone!

* Edited later to add this information

See Delphi and Die by Lindsay Davis

2010-12-29T16:15:00.001Z

The same weekend that I read Relics of the Dead saw me racing through a comparatively recent instalment of the Falco mysteries, Lindsay Davis's splendid evocations of life under the Emperor Vespasian. See Delphi and Die takes Falco and his wife off on the tourist trail to investigate the unexplained deaths of two young women. We know of old that Falco is an indefatigable, if complaining, traveller, and it's easy to believe in the miseries of sea voyages, the poor food, the vermin and the infuriating tour guides as described by our narrator (if he's unreliable, he'd be quick to, point out that it's endemic to informers). His journeyings would, of course, be much more wretched without the redoubtable Helena Justina to smooth the way. This time the family party consists of Falco and his wife, their adopted daughter Albia, Falco's nephews Gaius and Cornelius and Young Glaucus, aspiring Olympic athlete. Oh, not forgetting Nux, the dog. The family are travelling light, but there's a wonderful passage in which the accoutrements of a Roman touring party are described: mattress overlays, cooking utensils, even food, logistics by the unappealing Phineus and Polystratus, efficient but increasingly unpleasant. One of Helena's brothers is also in Greece - you can't help feeling just a little sorry for Helena's mother, Julia Justa, who disapproves of Falco but has to see all her children suborned by him. Falco is frequently scathing about Helena's brothers, but I rather like them.

I think my favourite Falco novel is the one I am reading at the time, and See Delphi and Die is certainly up to Davis's usual high standard. She has certainly coloured my view of ancient Rome and its history, which is otherwise a compilation of bits of Pliny and Julius Caesar from school Latin lessons and Graves' I, Claudius (or, as it seems to be known to all of us of a certain age, I, Clavdivs), with perhaps a less welcome addition of bits I can't erase from my mind from Satyricon (both book and film). There's slightly less poison around in Davis's version, which is restful, but there's always a diverting mix of pleasant and unpleasant people and, in the course of twenty books, some truly heart-stopping moments.

I complained recently about the lack of a map in an otherwise excellent book. We do, here, have a map of the Pelopponese, but the author informs us, rather severely, that maps of the various cities visited - Delphi, Athens, etc - are readily available elsewhere, and difficult to reproduce at a suitable scale. That's fine, I'm a reasonable person. I can accept that. How about a portrait of the dog instead?

Relics of the Dead by Ariana Franklin

2010-12-19T16:25:00.003Z

Relics of the Dead picks up fairly soon after the second in Franklin's series about Adelia Aguilar, The Death Maze, left off.* Adelia's friends are anxious to move her from the Cambridgeshire fens, where her medical practice has begun to attract unwelcome attention, and neither she nor Mansur are safe. Fortunately, her friend Emma - Lady Wolvercote - is about to set off for Somerset, to her mother-in-law's house, and it is clearly expedient for Adelia to accompany her. As they approach their destination, though, a messenger from King Henry arrives to demand Adelia's presence - his mistress of the art of death is needed again, this time to determine whether two skeletons dug up at Glastonbury are those of King Arthur and Guinevere. Henry wants to scotch the story that Arthur is not dead but merely sleeping, in order to keep the rebellious Welsh under control. Adelia knows that it is virtually impossible for her to prove that the skeletons are Arthur and his wife Guinevere but, recognising that she has little choice in the matter, agrees to examine them.

In Glastonbury she meets with hostility, as well as the unwelcome news that Emma has failed to arrive at her mother-in-law's Somerset manor, although she had only a short journey remaining when Adelia left her. Enquiries meet only with denial - she and her entourage seem to have disappeared without trace.

Although Ariana Franklin makes a reasonable case for her female doctor, you have to suspend a good deal of disbelief with these books. That said, there are plenty of rewards for doing so. You can't help but admire Adelia, for all her obstinacy, so that the loyalty of her friends, and even Henry's determination to keep her at his disposal, is convincing. All the characters, including Henry, continue to grow and develop - in the case of the king there are further insights into his ruthlessness, a necessary part of his desire to govern well. An element that caught my sympathy in this third book, already to some extent touched on in the first two, but developed and explored here, is that parallel between the fictitious Rowley, Bishop of St Albans, and the real Thomas Becket, murdered at Henry's instigation when he refused, once he became Archbishop, to defer to Henry's power. The very real dilemma of king's law versus church law makes Rowley's efforts to be a good churchman into a strong theme, although you wonder whether Henry would have been willing to risk creating another Becket. On the other hand, as depicted here, perhaps he couldn't afford not to. Incidentally, Franklin provides Henry with these strong, domestic - but fictitious - allies, without too much risk of changing the course of history. They were interesting times.

* I reviewed the first, Mistress of the Art of Death, here.

The Woods of Windri by Violet Needham

2010-12-14T13:38:00.000Z

I meant (but forgot, and it's in Devon) to scan an image from this book to show you – I used to love the illustrations so. I managed to find the original cover on the website of the Violet Needham Society, so I’m afraid that will have to suffice for now. I was pleased, though, to see that it’s still available on Amazon.

I first read Violet Needham while staying with my grandmother and aunt – according to my mother all the books were hers and my aunt had ruthlessly appropriated them. As a schoolgirl, my mother adapted The Changeling of Monte Lucio and the class at her convent school performed it, with her in the starring role as the unpopular Changeling, spitting cherry stones out of the window while her “brother” lay on his death bed. You can tell that high drama was involved and as the next generation along, I adored them too. My favourite was The Horn of Merlyns, one of my two most wanted books ever – and oh bliss! the wonderful Girls Gone By has reprinted it recently and my copy is on the shelf by my bed, waiting to be a Christmas read. I have a Boxing Day appointment with it, a box of chocolates and a warm dog.

Back to The Woods of Windri, and more high drama. Roger, Lord of Windri has two daughters and a properly feudal attitude to their disposition. When he receives an offer for the hand of Phillippa, the elder, from the Count of Monte Lucio, he is pleased that an alliance will be politically advantageous, even though Phillippa is so unhappy about marriage to a man she has never met that she declares she will enter a nunnery. Her younger sister Magdalen is unhappy too, but it doesn’t stop her going out in the woods where she meets a runaway boy. Apparently a foundling, he has escaped from the Abbey where he was destined to be a monk, and where he was ill-treated. Fortunately Magdalen’s father takes a liking to the boy, whose name is Theodore Felix Amadeus, and decides to employ him as a page – there is no love lost between Roger and the Abbot and besides, there are some doubts about young Theo’s origins – there’s the little matter of a distinctive birthmark, for a start. With the arrival of Phillippa’s suitor, the Count - that's him you can see on the cover - events are put in train which will demand that Theo risks his life and faces his greatest enemy. With a little help from Magdalen, of course.

Revisiting this book after some 40 years (it was a regular read until my mid-teens) , I was fascinated to see what a cavalier approach Needham had to the Catholic Church – there is scarcely a good cleric to be seen. She has a robust attitude, too, to her villains, cheerfully consigning one to be “put to the question”. I don’t mean to imply that authors in the 1940s should be mealy-mouthed about such things – these books are supposed to be set in a period when nasty things happened – but just to note that it feels rather surprising in these days of political correctness in children’s books. Heaven forbid that we should upset the little dears, or mention anything which might cause a sleepless moment. Actually, I do remember a growing impression that Needham's Stormy Petrel series was maybe just a trifle right-wing, although I can’t recall that it spoilt my enjoyment much.

One of the fascinations about Violet Needham’s books was that they didn’t feel entirely English, and this seems to be borne out by her life – her mother was a Dutch heiress and she spent some time in Europe. Her books combine the exoticism of mid-European or Ruritanian locations with a Baden-Powell quality to her young heroes which brings them firmly back onto familiar territory, melodrama notwithstanding. Yes, it’s dated and no, I probably wouldn’t give it to a young reader, without a caveat, but oh, it was fun to explore the Woods of Windri again.

Virtual Advent Tour

2010-12-09T06:00:00.075Z

Welcome to the Virtual Advent Tour, Day 9! The Virtual Advent Tour is hosted by Kailana from The Written World and Marg from Adventures of an Intrepid Reader and is a way for bloggers to share gifts and memories with each other about our holiday seasons - a sort of grown-up advent calendar.

Hue and Cry by Shirley McKay

2010-12-06T16:57:00.000Z

I get an inordinate amount of pleasure from discovering a new mystery series. I’m not absolutely certain why this is: something to do with the way in which the reader is drawn quickly into the story and the knowledge that it will end with the necessary ends tied up neatly, but enough left loose to provide a way into the next one, perhaps? However, after I’d read my way through Brother Cadfael by the mid-1990s, library visits always began by returning a batch of imitations which had been found wanting.

Until recently, the only series I’d found which came anywhere close to satisfying were Fidelis Morgan’s – which started with Unnatural Fire and recounted the riotous adventures of Anatasia Ashby de la Zouche, Baroness Penge, Countess of Clapham and her maid Alpiew – and the famous one by Lindsay Davis starring M. Didius Falco, informer to the Emperor Vespasian and harassed paterfamilias. The library shelves offered more, but most of them left me disappointed, usually because I felt that setting and characterisation were lacking. So recent riches please me enormously and Catriona McPherson, Carola Dunn, Cora Harrison and Pat McIntosh all more than meet my requirements and I can imagine few greater treats than to settle down with a new book by any of those authors. (Nicola Upson and Jacqueline Winspear should get an honourable mention here.)

Hue and Cry, Shirley McKay’s first book about sixteenth-century St Andrews and lawyer Hew Cullan is another gem. In 1579 Hew has just returned to his home town from France, and he’s concerned to find his friend Nicholas not only ill but accused of murdering a student. In the small community that comprises town and gown Hew of course sets out to investigate, with the very necessary help of his sister Meg and physician Giles Locke, only to find that they are all at risk of bringing down the wrath of the Kirk on their heads.

What we have here is good plotting and characterisation, with the added interest of the technicalities of Scottish law which require extra ingenuity on the part of the author. There’s a leavening of humour (generally centring around the intractable horse Duns Scottis), and some period colour in the shape of James VI, just 14 here, but later notable for his views on, amongst other things, witchcraft. Language is used beautifully – there’s no requirement to understand dialect but the use of metre captivated me: the flow of dialogue often falling apparently naturally into the rhythm of the common metre which was to become the characteristic of the Scottish Psalter 50 years later. I thought, too, that McKay handled the thorny issue of modern sensibilities in period characters with great deftness

My only criticism? No map. I want a map. That apart, a stunning debut, and one to read again. The second book, Fate and Fortune is also out, with a third on its way.

Speculative Fiction Reading Challenge 2011

2010-12-03T12:52:00.000Z

Magemanda at Floor to Ceiling Books has just announced the Speculative Fiction Reading Challenge 2011. Okay, so I told myself I wasn't going to sign up to any new challenges for next year, but just keep going with the ones I always do, but I don't have to change any reading habits for this one. In fact, it looks like a good way to make some dents in the TBR pile, and some of the books can be shared with other challenges, so I'm ignoring the possibility that my impulse is borne of cabin fever because I haven't been able to get out since last Friday (when actually, I got in - just), and taking my mind of the duvet of snow outside by making that old favourite, a book list.

The challenge lasts throughout the year and all that's required is to read and post about 12 books which fit within the speculative fiction heading - surely even I can manage a post a month! There are several likely contenders for the challenge. These include Spook City by William Gibson which I've had for ages, but I love Gibson so much (I may have mentioned this before, like, ad nauseam?) that I can't quite bear to read it. When I do get to it, I'll probably read Zero History too. End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood is another that I've had for a while. Like Gibson, I tend to stockpile his books, because they're so good. Older son has just finished it and was raving about it.

Player One by Douglas Coupland - have a feeling I might struggle with this, but I want to read it. I like the idea of turning the Massey Lectures into a 5-hour, real-time novel, but I've read reviews that say it gets a bit bogged down. Hmm, we shall see. Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood) has been on the horizon for quite a time too. Started it once and it really is time I finished it. I feel there's an end-of-the-world kind of theme developing here.

Changing tack a little, there's also Old Man's War by John Scalzi - I've just discovered Scalzi, as younger son bought me The Android's Dream for my birthday last month. I needed something really gripping to distract me from my cold and it was the perfect choice, I loved it. Finally, Kraken by China Miéville has been on the wishlist since I read The City and the City earlier this year (another superb book).

Okay, that gives me seven probables, so there's plenty of room for impulse buys (memo to self: remember financial constraints i.e. impending poverty), library books and, if I'm lucky, the odd review copy. The only problem now is quelling the urge to get started this minute.

Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

2010-11-30T16:39:00.000Z

I wish I could come to terms with my own life and lyrically and gracefully as Hilary Mantel does hers in her memoir. I am only just younger than her, and can parallel many of the events in her life with the more prosaic elements of mine – and there are some clear parallels: book-ish misfit child of a broken home with overactive imagination, early marriage with its attendant poverty…I know well the tendency to a certain mordant humour when writing about the difficult times. Mantel has a secretiveness even as she anatomises her (literally) painful medical history, and I thought I recognised in her a child whose homelife was too complicated to ever be really happy, over-sensitive and too aware of difference: the stigma of a broken home was very real in the ‘50s and children suffered and wretchedness and, usually, silence. Being unpopular brings its own troubles, and the story of Mantel’s childhood is characterised by a small, carping, critical, puzzled voice, trying to understand the incomprehensible adult world. I can hear myself in it, too.

Reading this memoir I found many echoes of her superb novel, Beyond Black, a huge, compelling, agonising book that I read and reviewed here last year. There she transforms the pain of her own life into something specific yet universal, the ruefully amusing purchase of an “executive” home in the memoir becoming an excoriation of commuter-belt life. Similarly, her own weight gain due to chronic illness becomes something grimmer and darker in Beyond Black, while the “ghost” of the memoir materialises into a horrific familiar that dogs the footsteps of the protagonist. If Mantel’s own life left her mentally and physically scarred, I suspect she did much to write it out in Beyond Black, transmuting anger and grief into something equally durable, a book which tells of the hollowness at the centre of modern life and of the means by which we uncaringly damage those around us, or ignore the damage done by others.

It was hard to limit myself to a single passage to share with you, but I’d been thinking about feminism recently, so this stood out (Hilary, newly married, had just transferred from London to Sheffield University part way through her law degree, in 1971):

Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronise you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favour. The birth control revolution of the late sixties had passed our elders by – educators and employers both. It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of her mental life. It wsa assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book-learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for a job interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to ‘start your family’. Whether you were celibate, or gay, or just a sensible pre-planner, you had to smile and jump through the flaming hoops held up for you by some grizzled ringmaster, shifty and semi-embarrassed as he asked a girl half his age to tell him about her sex life and account for her next ovulation.

Giving Up the Ghost is a brave, darkly funny and beautifully written memoir. Highly recommended.

Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart

2010-11-24T19:22:00.000Z

I must have read Airs Above the Ground when I was 13 or so, quite close still to the horse-mad stage, and I adored Mary Stewart’s adventure story of a stolen Lippizan stallion. At the time I knew about the Spanish Riding School because my friend and I had been to see the Disney film, shown here as The Flight of the White Horses, about the evacuation of the horses from their stud near the Bavarian border during the War, and as I read, I could imagine the elegant horses dancing with that air of quiet concentration they have, executing pirouettes and caprioles for a spellbound audience in the pillared arena of the Winter Riding School in Vienna. So romantic!

Returning to the book all these years later, I found my enjoyment unimpaired. Vanessa March has been patient during the first two years of marriage about husband Lewis’s commitment to his job, but at long last they planning a holiday. So she’s furious when he cancels at the last minute because of a work trip to Stockholm, and then hurt and angry when he is spotted in a newsreel film somewhere in Austria, and apparently with another woman. She’s offered the chance to follow him to Austria, escorting her friend’s 17-year-old son Tim to meet his father, and before long Vanessa and Tim find themselves following a circus towards the Yugoslav border, intent on discovering the truth behind a suspicious death.

The story plays out in just a few days at a fairly breathless pace, with a denouement which begins in a suitably gothic castle. It’s delightfully exciting in a terribly decorous sort of way – it won’t make your heart race, but you probably won’t want to put it down. And you’d have to be pretty hard-boiled not to be caught up in the story of the horse who isn’t what he seems.

Just Another Backward Book Launch: a guest post by Scott Nicholson

2010-11-19T08:48:00.000Z

Something a little different today: a guest post by author Scott Nicholson, and I have the honour of having him visit here for the launch of his latest book. And if you watch this space, I'll follow it up with a review of the new book very soon!

Just another backward book launch

by Scott Nicholson

http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/

Used to be, the launch of a new book was heralded with great fanfare by the few dozen people who actually noticed—back when newspaper reviewers and Old media rolled out their publicity machines as obligatory partners for their hidebound brethren in the print industry.

Now, so many books are getting dumped out there each day, and so few get actual ink about their release, that it’s easy to just swim on through. But not only is it now easier to launch a book, it’s also possible to “launch it backwards.” In other words, authors now are so busy releasing material that they don’t even always worry about promoting it right away. Or, at least J.R. Rain and I are doing it that way.

The urgency—no, the panic—of the traditional print release is legendary, from the whirlwind jet-setting book tours of superstar authors to the street hustle of the midlist authors who almost certainly won’t make it past Book Two. It’s gotten even worse over my decade-long career, where industry insiders rave about “platform”—and why it makes perfect sense for a dyslexic rehabbing celebrity to get a book deal while career authors are doing something else for a career.

But one of the unintended consequences of “Bring me an audience before you bring me a book proposal” is that authors are now not only trained in building their own networks, they are more effective at it that publishers could ever be. Because no matter how hard the publicists, editors, and salespeople beat the drum, they will never be able to create that personal connection between reader and author. Sure, they can create the illusion of it, but I see it as yet another power slipping away from New York’s control. I wouldn’t be surprised to see in 10 years that an entirely new generation of bestsellers will emerge, ones crowned by consumers and not predetermined by book-advances, marketing dollars, and high print runs, not to mention the bribery that takes place to get a bestseller stacked at the front of the bookstore.

So J.R. and I are launching Cursed! backward. We’re both so busy we don’t have time for an outlandish promotional blitz that will leave our nerves frayed, exhaust our social capital, and flog our loving supporters into literary Amway ants. We both have people who like to read our work, and we’ve trickled out some review copies, but that’s the extent of our marketing budget.

There’s no need to panic. We have forever. Literally. We can build the book up over time, continuing the series, writing other books, and letting it seep out there to the far corners of the Internet. Here’s the pitch, as much hype as I can muster at this point (and I will even spare you an exclamation point—the one in the title will have to do.)

Albert Shipway is an ordinary guy, an insurance negotiator who likes booze and women and never having to say he’s sorry.

And he thinks this is just another day, another lunch, another order of kung pao chicken. Little does he know that he’s about to meet a little old lady who knows his greatest fear. A little old lady who knows what’s hiding in his heart. A little old lady who dishes up a big stew of supernatural revenge, with ingredients as follows: First you take one psychotic ex from a family of serial killers. Next add a pinch or two of an irrational childhood fear. Now thoroughly mix in an angry sister, a life-stealing great-granddad, and a notorious mass murderer—who happens to be dead but doesn’t know it. Let it stew and froth and bubble thoroughly....

In just a matter of minutes, Albert’s life turns upside down and he enters a world where magic and evil lurk beneath the fabric of Southern California. And all his choices have brewed a perfect storm of broken hearts, broken promises, shattered families, and a couple of tiny problems. Namely, killer mice and a baby.

Albert Shipway is finally getting a chance to right some wrongs.

That is, if it's not too late.

Okay. My work here is done. Cursed!

-------------

Scott Nicholson is bestselling author of 12 novels, including the thrillers Disintegration, As I Die Lying, Speed Dating with the Dead, Drummer Boy, Forever Never Ends, The Skull Ring, Burial to Follow, and the YA paranormal romance October Girls. His revised novels for the U.K. Kindle are Creative Spirit, Troubled, and Solom. He’s also written four comic series, six screenplays, and more than 60 short stories. His story collections include Ashes, Curtains, The First, Murdermouth: Zombie Bits, and Flowers.

To be eligible for the Kindle DX or Kindle 3, simply post a comment below with contact info. Feel free to debate and discuss the topic, but you will only be entered once per blog. I’m also giving away a Kindle 3 through the tour newsletter and a Pandora’s Box of free e-books to a follower of “hauntedcomputer” on Twitter. Thanks for playing. Complete details at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/blogtour.htm

Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton

2010-11-11T13:43:00.000Z

Every once in a while you find a book which is like a cool pool of water on a long, hot summer's day, the kind in which you can immerse yourself with a blissful sigh, secure in the knowledge that you can bask to your heart's content. Tapestry of Love is one of those books, total pleasure from start to finish.

Catherine Parkstone has achieved that enviable age where she is no longer immediately encumbered by her family, although unfortunately that includes her husband, from whom she is
– amicably enough - divorced. Seizing the opportunity for real change, she decides to move to the Cévennes where she will set up her own business as a needlewoman, making soft furnishings for income and needlepoint to feed the soul in the long evenings. Tentative first meetings with the neighbours turn into friendships and she is just starting to feel at home when her sister Bryony arrives to unsettle her again. I can fairly guarantee that you are going to want, very shortly, to bundle Bryony into a car and off to the airport, never to return (but a phone call at Christmas will be allowed, we want to support Catherine, not distress her). Families are a joy, aren't they? It's a good thing that Catherine's children are quite civilised and independent, although a worry to their mother at times. Her own mother is a cause for concern and some anguish, too. (A digression: I've commented before what a relief it is to read about interesting people who are past their thirties. I don't believe for a minute that authors think life ends at thirty, but publishers certainly seem to, which is crazy because we must be making up the majority of the book-buying public.) Anyway, Catherine rapidly becomes like an old friend to the reader - she's sensible, mature, she copes with loneliness without falling apart, she makes rational decisions - in short, she's good company, and the people she mixes with in her new home are pleasant and interesting too. It's refreshing, a story about people with generosity of spirit.

I'm fairly immune to the lures of the French idyll, but there's something in Thornton's writing that gets under the skin. There's a strong sense of place here, and of history of place: you are aware as you read of the continuity of care for the land, and of its past as hunting forest - a real evocation of the Cévennes countryside. Rosy has a website with pictures of the area, but her word paintings are so clear that you can imagine the house and surroundings and, even better, the rich harvest of delicious food made by Catherine and her neighbours (but just in case, like me, you are ready to start googling for recipes, she very kindly provides them on the website, too).

If I had a gripe, it would be that I wanted to know more of the detail about the work Catherine undertook. The descriptions are very satisfactory, you can certainly visualise the tapestries and other articles she produces, but I'd have enjoyed more of the everyday side of production, and more on the restoration of her house and garden, too. I quite accept that the book would have become unmanageably long were I to have my way, and that it's a wise author who knows what to leave out, but I was enjoying it so much that I could happily have spent twice as long with Catherine. As it was, I had to ration myself so as not to finish the book too quickly. I'm often wary of giving books as presents, mistrustful of my ability to judge what friends and relations will enjoy, but here's one I shall give this Christmas with confidence.

Allegra Fairweather: Paranormal Investigator by Janni Nell

2010-11-08T16:36:00.001Z

I was badly in need of a lighthearted read: at the end of a week of vet's visits and upset, I twisted my back getting out of the car and had to retire to bed with tea and painkillers (and a nice box of chocolates kindly provided by OH, who thought perhaps a small acknowledgement of our wedding anniversary might be in order). Was this the ideal opportunity to embark on Middlemarch? I thought not, a bit of froth was indicated, and there on Quoodle (the new Kindle), all downloaded and ready to go, was the perfect choice.

Allegra Fairweather is a sassy young woman, rather as if Jilly Cooper had teamed up with Kelley Armstrong, without quite so much sex or gore - think early Jilly Cooper, when those nice young ladies fell for brusque young men and all was neatly resolved in a couple of hundred pages without too much back-stabbing or adultery. Allegra has been invited to the shores of a Scottish loch to investigate a bleeding rose, popularly supposed to presage death. Douglas, her employer, is a nice young innkeeper, not at all brusque, and distinctly predisposed to like Allegra. Her own feelings are complicated by the presence of Casper (sic - it is a joke), her guardian angel, who's a bit of a hunk (is that word still used?) - she knows she can't have a relationship with him, because it will prejudice his chances of finally atoning for his past transgressions, but she can't quite close her mind to his charms.

Allegra is quickly caught up in events - not only is there the bleeding rose to worry about, but an elderly villager has been having prescient dreams about drowning. Then there's the laird's wife seen dancing naked in the woods, the banshee wailing outside the pub, and the haunted cairn...the village of Furness is clearly troubled, and no one is surprised when there is a death. Our heroine, conscious that she has a slightly less-than-perfect clear-up rate (she was unlucky with the White Lady of Willingthorpe Castle, she tells us), is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, with the intermittent help of Casper.
The first person narrative means that you can't help liking Allegra - her Australian father has clearly imparted more than just genes, because she's practical, down-to-earth, and doesn't have a fit of the vapours over fishy corpses or predatory ghosts. You can see that the villagers would respond well to her warmth and open-ness, although they don't all roll over and give up their secrets at once, so some good, old-fashioned poking of noses into corners and asking awkward questions is needed.

The odd bit of Scottish folklore crops up, somewhat randomly - I'd have to admit that this isn't one of those books which takes mythology and transforms it magically into something breathtaking, but it's a lichtsome thing, goodhearted and fun, ideal for winter evenings in front of the fire. Thinking back to my comparison with Jilly Cooper, I should think girls in their teens will love it. The author's website tells us that Carina Press have accepted the second in the series and she has started work on the third.

I received this book courtesy of NetGalley, a great site for book bloggers as it makes ARC's available as eBooks. I first heard of them when I reviewed a book for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, but since then I have occasionally directly requested titles that interest me. That first book had to be read on my laptop, but now that I have a Kindle, it's going to be a wonderful source of new books!

Creatures of the night - RIPV round up

2010-11-05T17:43:00.001Z

Throughout October I have read obsessively for Carl's RIPV Challenge. Something about my mood this year has needed a constant flow of dark, brooding literature - murder and mayhem, ghosts and ghouls. While progressing at an (unnaturally) stately pace through Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and apart from the books I have reviewed here, on the side I have lapped up Dorothy Sayers, Georgette Heyer, Elly Griffiths, Veronica Heley, Catriona MacPherson, Diana Wynne Jones...some of these may still be the subject of posts, because I have enjoyed them immensely, and feel very disinclined to leave off my dark reading yet. It may see me right through the winter.

There have been some discoveries along the way. Two new authors (to me) have been a real revelation: Katherine Langrish and Helen Grant. Langrish's Dark Angels is wonderfully atmospheric and compelling, with a medieval setting and attractive characters, while Grant's The Glass Demon is set in modern Germany. I want to talk more about both of these books at more leisure, as well as reading more by both authors.

I also read, but haven't had time to post on, the fascinating Worlds of Arthur, by Fran and Geoff Doel, in which the authors examine the evidence, historical and literary, for the real King Arthur. He was probably a war lord in what at school we were taught to call the Dark Ages, but which are increasingly being regarded as being the seat of a complex and varied culture - I am intrigued, and rather pleased, to see that even Tintagel (in Cornwall) is emerging as a probable Arthurian site, the setting for a tower and settlement much earlier than the castle ruins which caught the imagination of later generations. Some of the literature on Arthur suffers from an excess of enthusiasm on the part of its authors, but this is not the case here, and it's a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone interested in both early British history and our myths and legends. I borrowed it from the library, but I shall have to buy it now, dammit.

Another book which I'd been meaning to read for a long time is Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I'm not going to say much about it because I haven't finished it yet, but it's clear that we are in the presence of a thoroughly unreliable narrator in Merricat and consequently, the reader is kept constantly on the edge of her seat. The discomfort is partly to blame for my reading it slowly (the other reason is that it's on my Kindle, and at the moment I get tired reading that more quickly than if I'm reading a "real" book).

In all I reviewed nine books during the Challenge, a very satisfying start to the winter. Thanks to Carl, as ever, for the tremendous job he does hosting - 625 books were reviewed over the course of the two months it ran, and my TBR list has burgeoned. (The books I read and reviewed are listed on the sidebar.)

Jobs and books

2010-10-29T16:54:00.000+01:00

Tavistock Square, taken by C Ford March 04

Simon at Stuck in a Book asked today whether people really like to read books about their jobs? His post and the subsequent comments reminded of one of my favourite extracts, discovered not long after I had started my present job, and treasured ever since. By one of my favourite authors, it elegantly sums up the possible pitfalls of my role. Every time I read it, I think there but for the grace of God… Pym’s elegant prose always fills me with delight, but the book this comes from, Less Than Angels, with its impoverished postgrads anxiously hoping for travel grants, meagre receptions that take place in the same room as the lecture, and academic backbiting, is especially dear to me:

Esther Clovis had formerly been secretary of a Learned Society, which post she had recently left because of some disagreement with the President. It is often supposed that those who live and work in academic or intellectual circles are above the petty disputes that vex the rest of us, but it does sometimes seem as if the exalted nature of their work makes it necessary for them to descend occasionally and to refresh themselves, as it were, by squabbling about trivialities. The subject of Miss Clovis’s quarrel with the President was known only to a privileged few and even those knew no more than that it had something to do with the making of tea. Not that the making of tea can ever really be regarded as a petty or trivial matter and Miss Clovis did not seem to have been seriously at fault. Hot water from the tap had been used, the kettle had not been quite boiling, the teapot had not been warmed…whatever the details, there had been words, during the course of which other things had come out, things of a darker nature. Voices had been raised and in the end Miss Clovis had felt bound to hand in her resignation.

The Rise of the Iron Moon by Stephen Hunt

2010-10-22T17:53:00.000+01:00

This is the third of Hunt’s books set in the Kingdom of Jackals (I talked about the first here). It’s a while since I read the first two, and it took me a little time to get back into the convoluted politics of Hunt’s steampunk world. And now this whole world is under threat from an external foe, the terrifying Army of Shadows with its vat-grown slat soldiers, invincible as they sweep across the land draining its power and harvesting its inhabitants.

Molly Templar and Oliver both return in this book, Molly as the successful author of celestial fiction and Oliver as the sinister Hood o’the Marsh, a sort of dark Robin Hood in thrall to his brace of pistols. They are joined by an escapee from the royal breeding house, Purity Drake in a wild and desperate plan to defeat the Army, gathering together an unlikely cohort to embark on their mission: Coppertracks the steamman, Molly’s old friend, whose theories about the mysterious comet which has recently appeared in the skies above Jackals have been ridiculed; Commodore Jared Black, who led the u-boat expedition to search for Camlantis; Lord Rooksby, an autocratic scientist with a bitter antipathy towards Molly and her friends; Keyspierre and his daughter Jeanne, envoys from the neighbouring country of Quatérshift whose harshly utilitarian politics has long been the cause of tension between it and Jackals; and Duncan Connor, rescued after the Army of Shadows' first dramatic attack on Jackals. Assistance comes from the King of the Steammen in the form of a sentient – and short-tempered – rocketship, Lord Starhome.

As I approached the end of the 450-odd pages, I wondered how on earth Hunt was going to resolve matters in so little time, and recalled similar sensations from the two previous books. Were we going to be left with a cliff-hanger this time, I wondered, and would anyone survive? After three books I have some firm favourites among the regular characters, and would hate to lose any of them. But I don’t want to give anything away, so I’m not even going to tell you who they are, let alone whether they survive. I will say, though, since it’s clear to anyone who looks up Hunt’s books, that there is another in the series already published, and it’s going to be high on my TBR pile, because there is something very beguiling about the world he has created. It’s frequently harsh and cruel, even in the relatively peaceable Jackals, but it’s full of people you can care about. They are best read in order, by the way: worldbuilding of this complexity needs quite a bit of explanation, but in the later books Hunt keeps it to a minimum and new readers might find themselves adrift. Tom Holt describes Hunt as Philip Pullman on benzedrine; I thought more Jules Verne on acid, myself, though I continue to detect influences. I’ve already suggested Sterling, Gibson and Miéville. Here are elements of Dune alongside a bit of Star Wars and Michael Moorcock, all woven together to make something new and original. Such riches!