1999

The Leper’s Companions by Julia Blackburn #ABookADayInMay No.26

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I normally have little interest in historical fiction, particularly set during the medieval period, but I decided to have a gamble on The Leper’s Companions (1999). That was partly because it is such a beautiful book, and partly (moreso) because I’d read and enjoyed Julia Blackburn’s very unusual biography of John Craske. I thought if anyone could get me to enjoy a book set in 1410, it would be Blackburn.

We are thrown into a community of people who are mostly poor and ill, and often on the edge of some disaster. The miraculous and unexplained is commonplace – whether that be a mermaid washing up on the shore or a baby being born with the head of a fish (because of the mermaid’s curse, they assume). Things we’d recognise as severe illness sit alongside things that don’t make sense to a 21st-century audience. What I appreciated about Blackburn’s writing is that we are in this world on its own terms. There aren’t attempts to show what was really happening now that we have more medical and scientific knowledge, or a rationalising of medieval stories – rather, we see it all in modern English but contemporary understanding:

I walked through the village. Walls were pulled back like curtains so that I could see inside the houses. In one there was a woman lying in the sour stink of a dark room while a mass of devils crawled over her naked body. Her husband was with her, and even though his face was turned from me, I was suddenly afraid of him.

In another room in another house a woman was sitting upright while all her life walked before her eyes, fast and then slow, the years unfolding into each other as she watched them.

I appreciated how connected everyone was to their environment, and how open they all were to signs – whether from nature, from God, or from a mix of local and international beliefs. For instance, even those who would dismiss various of the omens that matter to this community would respect their recognition of the following omens. For the community, there isn’t a distinction:

Everyone in the village was filled with a sense of impending dread. They knew that the approaching winter was going to be very severe because there were so many warning signs. The geese were flying off in great creaking crowds even before the month had come to its end. The trees were much too heavily laden with fruit, anticipating that they couldn’t presume to survive and so had to trust in the scattering of their seeds. There was a feeling of time itself closing in, of a gate being clanged shut while the world waited with growing apprehension.

After various traumas and tragedies, as well as vows and wonders, three of the community decide to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Off go the leper of the title, a priest, the shoemaker’s wife, and fisherman’s daughter and the narrator of the book.

Here’s where I confess that I didn’t really get on with The Leper’s Companions. In the early sections, thanks largely to no attempt to put it in Ye Olde English, I was quite enjoying it. But I don’t think the quest narrative is for me in any of its myriad forms. The second half of the novel is basically the people travelling (though surprisingly little is told about the mechanics of this), meeting various people often in states of extreme misery, and going on their way. I have to admit that I didn’t find it particularly interesting.

I think Blackburn is a really good, interesting writer and she certainly creates vivid scenes. For me, there wasn’t quite enough to sustain interest in what she then did with those scenes strung together.

But it’s quite likely that I’m the wrong audience for The Leper’s Companions, and the fact that she got me to read to the end of a book set in 1410 is nothing short of miraculous in itself!

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

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I had a credit to use on Audible a while ago, and was looking to fill either 1980 or 1999 in A Century of Books – but couldn’t find anything that appealed. So, naturally, I took to Twitter. Twitter has been a real help with the tricky years, and Gareth kindly stepped forward with a suggestion…

I’d already read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow – and the fact that I really liked it would have made me trust Gareth’s suggestion even if I didn’t already trust his taste (which I did). So I promptly downloaded An Equal Music (1999) by Vikram Seth and listened, without really checking what it was about.

Which is just as well. If I had looked up the plot or theme, I might not have bothered. Because it’s about ardent musicians, and I tend to find that difficult to read about. It’s the sort of novel where people non-ironically say “Oh, I’d love to study that score”, and spend years tracking down the perfect viola. I struggle whenever characters are snobs in any area of the arts, or have the attitude that being brilliant is more important than enjoying yourself. It’s why I really disliked Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows earlier this year (because the author seemed to share her characters’ views). And I would have been wary about it in Vikram Seth.

Well, it was certainly there, at least to an extent – and the main character (Michael) isn’t particularly likeable. He is obsessed with reconnecting with Julia, a woman he loved many years ago in Vienna – and has been trying to track her down, unsuccessfully, for some time. At the same time, he and his string quartet are preparing to perform… erm… some arrangement of some piece, I forget which. Or maybe it was something arranged for a quintet that is better known as a piano piece, or something like that. (Again, the problem of listening to an audiobook – I can’t go back and check!) Of course, he does find her – she is married, with a child, and there is a twist in the narrative that I shan’t spoil, but is done very satisfyingly and intelligently.

Lovers of classical music (and, dare I say it, music snobs) will get a lot out of this that I probably didn’t. I do also wonder how much one might miss if you don’t play the piano and violin – I play both, which helped me understand various discussion points and technical moments, though I don’t think any of them were particularly essential and could probably be skated through.

Why did I like it, when it had quite a few ingredients that turn me off? Partly it was the excellent reading by Alan Bates, who never tries to do “voices” (except where accents are needed for, say, the American characters) but manages to convey character entirely through tone. The audiobook also meant they could include sections of music when they were referred to as being played, which was rather lovely. But mostly it was Seth’s quality of writing. He is very good at detailed depictions of changing emotions and relationships, so that one is deeply interested even if not particularly sympathetic.

I don’t know if I’m ready for the doorstopper A Suitable Boy just yet, but I’m very glad Gareth suggested this one. And it’s a useful reminder that good writing can overcome all the prejudices I have in terms of topic and character. I suppose every theme has its variations.

La Grande Thérèse – Hilary Spurling

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La Grande Thérèse (1999) was one of those impulse purchases I sometimes make in Oxford’s £2 bookshop – the Matisse painting on the cover; the fact that Hilary Spurling wrote it; the subtitle ‘The Greatest Swindle of the Century’; its brevity.  I was sold.  And the book was sold.  To me.

La Grande Thérèse tells the true (amazingly!) story of Thérèse Daurignac, born into a fairly poor family, with no rich connections or impressive prospects, but who managed to become Madame Humbert, one of the most successful society women in fin-de-siècle Paris, with all the major players of the day visiting her home and paying her homage.  Three Frence presidents and at least five British prime ministers were amongst her friends.

How did she manage this?  By what talent or good fortune?

By lying.

Somehow, simply through deceit, ‘her ingenuous air and her adorable lisp’, and a ruthless selfishness, Thérèse elevated herself and her family to the highest ranks of society.  Spurling’s short book tells the story of her rise – and, in 1902, her catastrophic fall.   She started with small fry – in Toulouse she managed to outwit dressmakers and hairdressers with promises of an inheritance soon to be given her.   This was just small scale for what she would eventually do.  Thérèse married Frédéric Humbert, a shy man with a sharp legal brain, and together the plot continued apace.  Wherever she went, Thérèse spoke of a legacy that would be hers – over the years it escalated, until it was in the millions.  A strongbox, purportedly containing the legal papers of this legacy, was kept in its own locked room, occasionally shown to an important visitor.  Thérèse expertly built up a mystique around her fortune – and on the back of it bought an enormous home on the avenue de la Grande Armée.  She rarely paid for anything at all, and her family (including a rather violent – possibly, Spurling suggests, murderously so – brother) wangled loans of staggering amounts from people up and down the country.  Such were their powers of persuasion.

All her life Thérèse treated money as an illusion: a confidence or conjuring trick that had to be mastered.
Spurling goes through Thérèse’s family in a little more depth, exploring the characters of various siblings and children (and especially develops the nature of one relative by marriage, an avant-garde artist called… Henri Matisse!) but the outline is there – and, such is the brevity of La Grande Thérèse, that the outline isn’t expanded a huge amount.  It is astonishing that this trickster got so far – but, of course, it couldn’t last.  With hundreds of creditors wanting their money, it turned out to be a relatively minor court order (for the address of her mysterious American benefactor) which brought the whole house of cards down.  The family disappeared.  The nation was in outcry.  A lengthy trial eventually… but, no.  Although this is not a novel, I shall not spoil the ending.

The most curious thing about Spurling’s book is that such a thing could happen without everybody knowing about to this day.  She discusses, in an epilogue, the various reasons why this scandal has been covered up – ‘if the Dreyfus affair had knocked the stuffing out of the right wing and the army, the Humbert affair seemed likely to do the same for the Left and its civil administration’ – but   it still seems extraordinary that such a shocking tale could be all but forgotten.  The second most curious thing about Spurling’s book is the writing style she adopts.  From beginning to end, it is written almost as though it were a fairy tale.  Here is how it opens:

Thérèse Daurignac was born in 1856 in the far southwest of France in the province of the Languedoc, once celebrated for its troubadours and their romances.  Life for Thérèse in the little village of Aussonne, just outside Toulouse, was anything but romantic.  She was the eldest child in a poor family: a stocky, bright-eyed little girl, not particularly good-looking, with nothing special about her except the power of her imagination.  Thérèse told stories.  In an age without television, in a countryside where most people still could not read, she transformed the narrow, drab, familiar world of the village children into something rich and strange.
Our sympathies even seem to be nudged towards Thérèse and her family, admiring the audacity of her financial conjuring tricks.  In a fairy tale, perhaps she would be a heroine – because consequences in a fairy tale are not really consequences.  Yet her selfish ambition destroyed many, many lives – thousands of people were left ruined; a substantial number killed themselves.  They are not quite forgotten by Spurling, but this extraordinary tale could easily have been given a more tragic structure, rather than the they-do-it-with-mirrors account Spurling prioritises.

There are no footnotes in The Grande Thérèse, or even sourcing – no proper bibliography or indication where Spurling got individual facts and quotations from (although the illustrations are referenced properly.)  As I rather suspected, Spurling wrote The Grande Thérèse as a tangent while researching a book on Matisse, and perhaps she simply wanted a holiday from academic writing.  I was perfectly happy to be swept along by the bizarre facts Spurling presents – perhaps they suit this sort of storytelling, rather than a chunky, footnoted biography – but it does leave me with many unanswered questions, not least about Thérèse’s psyche and conscience.  But those are questions for the novelist, not the writer of non-fiction and The Grande Thérèse is far more striking as non-fiction than it could be as fiction.  If you fancy being shocked and surprised, and don’t mind being left a touch bewildered, then go and find this extraordinary little book.