Book reviews coming soon, promise – and those replies to your great comments which I promised last week. But for today, I thought I’d show you the outcome of a road trip I took with my friend Mel recently. We go to places with absurd names, and wanted to visit Kingsbury Episcopi and Curry Rivel (both amazing, no?) We did manage to see both these Somerset villages, but also stumbled across somewhere rather brilliant on the way… and Mel took this photo:
Remember a while ago, when I told you about my addiction to buying different editions of the Provincial Lady series by E.M. Delafield? This was cleverly nicknamed an ‘ediction’ by Susan – and fed by lovely Agnieszka! This arrived in the post the other day…
Agnieszka, you are very wicked for being my enabler – but very kind as well! Thank you so much – my edillection (can you work out what that is?) is a step nearer completion…
I find the importance of places very interesting – as I’m sure we all do. In literature, I am particularly fascinated by the resonances of houses. I will rush towards any novel where a house is significant for itself, especially if staircases are involved (don’t ask me why I love staircases so much, I have no idea.) But recently I’ve been pondering about places which are neither very familiar nor unfamiliar – the sorts of places I go a dozen times over the years, but couldn’t be considered a home, and how they may thus witness different stages of life, quite coincidentally.
There are lots of places in Oxford which act as a metaphorical palimpsest in this manner, but I’ve picked Wellington Square Garden – tucked away parallel to St. Giles, it’s a neat, sweet little park – often filled with office workers enjoying their lunch in summer, or ice cream eaters on a Saturday – but, foolishly, with only one bench.
The first time I went to it would have been before I went up to Oxford as an undergraduate. Wellington Square is right next to Kellogg College, which runs courses and lecture days for non-students. As a sixth-former, I sometimes stumped up £30 to spend a day with my Mum and our friend Barbara, listening to lectures on various English literature topics – it’s how I first heard about my beloved Katherine Mansfield, for instance. It was an early sign of how much I loved studying literature – and my introduction to Wellington Square gardens, where we wandered in between lectures.
I’ve witnessed many strange and eccentric things while in Oxford, and probably done a fair few myself, so it’s only one example from many that I could mention (and the only one which happened in this park.) A pirate asked me to take his photo. Well, a man dressed as a pirate, I assume… but, still. I was innocently reading a book on the bench, and was approached… I expected to be asked to give money to a charity but, no, just the photograph, and… they went on their way.
Wellington Square Garden does have a literary connection for me, too – well, that is, I read a much-loved book there for the first time. Just around the corner, on Little Clarendon Street, there is a charity shop (I forget which.) In the basement, they have a selection of books – and in 2007 I decided to buy the slim Virago Modern Classic I picked up, because the synopsis sounded interesting and it was only about 50p. I toddled round to Wellington Square Garden and, since it was a nice day, lay down on the grass to read it… and was instantly in love. The novel was The Love-Child by Edith Olivier, which I have read many times since – and written about at length in my doctoral thesis, as well as putting it on my 50 Books You Must Read.
Most recently, a little over a year ago, I came here after I’d been told that the first test I’d done was positive, and I’d have to be tested for cancer. Everything turned out to be fine, but it was a terrifying and frustrating time. I walked from the GP down St. John Street to this park, sat on the bench and cried and cried. And then I mopped myself up and went to work, because it was 8am and I hadn’t taken the day off.
So, Wellington Square has seen quite a lot of disparate emotions and memories – and it’s still one of my favourite places in Oxford. Who knows what it’ll see in the future?
This isn’t the easiest meme to transfer to your own blogs, because it requires a bit of thought and memory – but I’d love to see other people picking a spot which has proved significant over their lives, but still not home or deeply familiar. Just a place you sometimes go, which has coincidentally been the site for different moods and different events. There’s your challenge – pop a link in the comments if you take it up.
I’ve never used a blog reader, but I know a lot of you do – and are probably aware that Google Reader will be shutting down soon. Well, I’ve seen a few bloggers link to Bloglovin’, which apparently does the same sort of thing (and you can import to it from Google Reader.) If you’d like to add my blog to a Bloglovin’ account, you can do so here.
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| [cartoon by John Taylor, borrowed from OxfordDictionaries.com] |
The other link is from work – I put together a quiz called Bible or Bard? As you might be able to gather, you have to work out whether a quotation is from the King James Bible or the works of Shakespeare. I had great fun putting it together – and it’s pretty difficult, I have to say! There are 30 quotations to test you… have a go here, and let me know how you do.
[Oops, link was to the wrong site – have fixed it now!]
I’m off home for the weekend, so I’ll be back blogging next week! (And that’s when I’ll reply to your lovely comments too – sorry I’ve left it for a while…)
You know how I don’t shut up about Miss Hargreaves? (Have you read it? It’s great.) Well, Hayley is (in a rather better mannered way) equally enthusiastic about Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. Since Hayley and I often enjoy the same books, I’ve been intending to read it for ages – but every copy I’ve stumbled across in charity shops has been rather ugly. I wish I’d seen the beautiful cover pictured. When Hayley lent me her copy (as part of a postal book group we’re both in) I was excited finally to read it.
Well, I say ‘excited’. There was a part of me that was nervous – because I rarely read non-fiction when it’s not about literature, and I have no particular interest in wildlife rearing. If it didn’t come with such a strong recommendation from Hayley, I doubt that I’d ever have considered reading it. And I would have missed out.
Gavin Maxwell doesn’t really structure Ring of Bright Water in a traditional beginning-middle-end sort of way, which I imagine the film adaptation probably does – it isn’t encircled by the life of any single animal, or his occupancy of his remote Scottish home, but instead meanders through many of Maxwell’s countryside adventures.
I’m going to concentrate on the ones which made Ring of Bright Water famous – the otters – although (cover aside) you wouldn’t have much of a clue that they were coming for the first section of the book, which looks at the flora and fauna of the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and such matters as whale fishing (Maxwell is strongly against, despite having run a shark fishery – there is a constant paradox between his love of his animals and his killing of animals). The only cohesion (and it is quite enough) is that it’s Maxwell’s opinions and voice, and connected with marine and rural life.
And then the otters come along.
The first otter only lives for a day or two, but after that comes Mij. He is really the star of Ring of Bright Water, and the high point in Maxwell’s affections. I can’t give any higher praise than to say that someone like me, interested in the animal kingdom chiefly when it concerns kittens, was entirely enamoured and captivated, and briefly considered whether it would be practical to get a pet otter.
Otters are extremely bad at doing nothing. That is to say that they cannot, as a dog does, lie still and awake; they are either asleep or entirely absorbed in play or other activity. If there is no acceptable toy, or if they are in a mood of frustration, they will, apparently with the utmost good humour, set about laying the land waste. There is, I am convinced, something positively provoking to an otter about order and tidiness in any form, and the greater the state of confusion that they can create about them the more contented they feel.
Er, maybe not. Maxwell sets out to tell you how incomparable the otter is as a pet – cheerful, companionable, spirited – and only slowly does he reveal that they are completely untameable, very destructive, and occasionally (if repentingly) violent.
But Mij is still a wonder – or, rather, Maxwell is a wonder for the way he tells his story. He is certainly a gifted and natural storyteller, and the reader is easily lulled into similar levels of affection towards Mij, and a complicit sympathy with Maxwell (and never for a moment what a novelist would subtly ask – that we would pity the loner, or wonder at his isolation.)
I don’t want to spoil the high-jinks (yes, high-jinks – and tomfoolery, mark you) of the book, and I don’t think I can capture Maxwell’s tone – so I will give my usual proviso for books I didn’t expect to enjoy so much: read it even if you don’t think you’ll like it! (And if David Attenborough is your bag, then you’ll probably love it even more.)
It is a beautiful book, for the rhythm and balance of its prose alone, quite apart from the topic or the setting. I’m really pleased that, years down the line, I’ve finally taken up Hayley’s recommendation – even if she had to lend Ring of Bright Water to me to make that happen.
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| the photo isn’t relevant… I just like the colours… |
I had great fun writing these before, and really appreciated the comments people left. I’ve spent a bit less time constructing these, but… well, I had fun! I hope to make this a bit of a series. Let me know if you have any ideas for others, or authors you’d like to see…
What the dickens?
Oh Charles, you saw
The humble poor
In such disarming detail –
But somehow missed
In all of this
A single real female.
Mary, Mary
For dangerous and wild men you had a predilection.
You may have written Frankenstein, but – truth’s stranger than fiction.
Dear Aunt Jane
“Sweet, ineffectual Jane, the dear!”
Of all misreadings, wrongest.
Her barbs will last two hundred years;
Her laughs, both loud and longest.
DostoyWHEVsky*
If reading should be nourishment,
Your book’s not worth our time:
An awful lot of punishment
And hardly any crime.
*I have to admit that I’ve never read it…
It’s no secret that I loved the BBC’s The Great British Bake Off – indeed, I’ve loved it since the first episode of series one – and my irreverent recaps proved surprisingly popular here last year. I was a little more dubious about The Great British Sewing Bee, but I decided to give it a whirl… and got hooked.
It’s already three episodes into a four episode series, so there’s not much time to get on board – but those of you in the UK can catch up on BBC iPlayer. I won’t be doing proper recaps of the episodes, but I felt that it warranted at least one post.
So, why was I dubious? Well, for a start I don’t know the first thing about sewing. I can sew on a button, but that’s it. With baking, I know my croquemboche from my croque monsieur, and my Bakewell from my baking beans. The finer points of French stitching, however, are a total mystery. Would I find it interesting to watch people do something I couldn’t objectively assess, and had no interest in doing myself?
Turns out, yes. Because any reality competition of this sort stands or falls based on the people, not the activity. And the people, of course, fall into three categories: the presenter, the judges, and the contestants.
Claudia Winkleman is the heavily-fringed presenter – she has spent more than a decade bobbing around the lesser-watched BBC shows and second-channel spin-offs (what a lot of hyphens for one sentence) and more or less copies the presenting style of Mel & Sue from the Great British Bake Off – which is fair enough, since almost every other element, from the title to the opening titles, are shamelessly copied too. Claudia is shunned and giggled with in equal measures, again much like Mel & Sue – but manages to hold her own rather well.
The judges buck the usual trend of gruff man and lovable woman, by having a woman (May Martin) who looks like a sullen Delia Smith and is apparently the ‘country’s best sewing teacher’, although I don’t remember being polled, and Savile Row’s Patrick Grant, who is quite sweet (although his beard makes him look as though he’s been hurried into a witness protection programme). Both are rather unduly critical, and don’t have close to the same chemistry that Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood have, and May Martin is ruthlessly unhumorous, but perhaps they’ll improve if this gets another series. They have potential.
Before I get onto the contestants, I should explain what they do. The first challenge is always creating something from a pattern (a child’s dress; an A-line skirt), the second is adorning or transforming a plain high street item (blue shapeless dress; white blouse), and the third is creating something more complicated for a specific model, rather than a mannequin.
What’s quite curious is that they are never judged on their taste, or the success of their design – just their sewing ability. Yes, that’s what it should be about primarily – but The Great British Bake Off is always about the choice of flavours and the appearance of the product too, rather than simply baking skills. So Sandra’s madly dated designs do ok, because she is an adept seamstress, whereas Michelle (say) gets little credit for having stylish ideas.
Yes, the contestants. There’s a few who are clearly there as characters – and, let’s not forget, having a regional accent is enough for a BBC reality show to consider you a wacky character. So we have Lauren, who would fall into the Danny-school-of-boring if she weren’t lucky enough to be Scottish; Sandra, with a broad Brummie accent, lots of laughter, and the general appearance and personality of everyone’s favourite dinner lady. She’s great fun. Michelle and Jane rather blend into the background (I don’t even remember who Jane is, actually) and Tilly thinks she lives in the 1940s, but with a bit of a temper. Oh, and Mark is the token men-with-piercings-can-do-domestic-things-too man. Except his sewing is all for historical reenactments and Steampunk days, which has little bearing on the creation of an A-line skirt. As he points out, the eighteenth-century didn’t have zips.
So that leaves my two favourite contestants (or ‘sewers’ as they’re called on the show – a word which doesn’t work so well when written.) Stuart is a giggly man who was born to give witty soundbites on reality shows. He burbles nonsense about being nervous or having cut his fabric the wrong way, but will wrap it up with an intonation which sounds as though he’s made a helpful and pertinent summation of the situation. He’s a step away from Brendon on Coach Trip, and the expert flounce from camera.
Which leads, head and shoulders above the rest (in my affections), the wonderful Ann. I have such a fondness for old women with spirit – and Ann provides. She’s in her 80s, ridiculously pleased to be there, and very affectionate towards everyone. The show seems to think she’s been alive for centuries – I half expect her to lean over and advise Stuart on what people really wore in 1807 – and she cheerfully gets on with it while Claudia and the judges mumble about her Life Experience in the corner. She’s a wonder.
So, has that sold the show to you? They hope to get the nation sewing – well, I’m not a stitch nearer sewing than I was before I started watching, but I’m certainly entertained.
…Belle!
Congratulations, Belle – email me your address to simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk, and I’ll get Stet off to you soon.
I don’t think I’ve read any author whose work is as disparate as Paul Gallico (and I probably start all my reviews of his books by saying that.) I started with the novel I still consider his best, of the ones I’ve read: the dark fairy-tale Love of Seven Dolls. Then there is the whimsical (Jennie), the amusing and eccentric (the Mrs. Harris series), the adventure story (although I’ve not read it, The Poseidon Adventure surely falls into this category.)
I started The Foolish Immortals (1953) hoping that it would be in one category, it shifted into another, and then it revealed a whole new facet of Gallico’s writing arsenal. Confused? I’ll try to explain…
The concept of The Foolish Immortals immediately appealed to me, because it sounded like the sort of topic which could easily be given the Love of Seven Dolls treatment, revolving (as it did) around manipulation, wilful delusion, and a touch of distorted fairy-tale – the last of which seems to be the ingredient which appears, in some form or other, in all the Gallico novels I’ve read.
Hannah Bascombe is rich, old, American heiress, who has successfully invested the money her business man father left her to make herself one of the richest people in the world. There is only one aspect of her life over which she does not have ultimate control – and that is its span. She has, she notes, reached her three-score-and-ten, and cannot have many decades left to live. And yet… and yet, she hopes that money and power might be able to secure her immortality.
Enter, stage-left, Joe Sears. He is a poor man and a chancer, clever and manipulative, and sees an opportunity. Having enlisted the dubious help of a young (but visually ageless) ex-soldier called Ben-Isaac (in case Gallico didn’t signpost it well enough, he’s Jewish), Sears manages to get an appointment with Hannah Bascombe. To do so, he has to get past her beautiful, utterly dependent niece Clary – but, having manoeuvred his way to Hannah, he recognises her vulnerability, and thinks that it could be a good way to make himself some money…
“What if you were able to duplicate their years? Supposing you were able to outwit the Philistines waiting to trample your vineyards by outliving them, like Mahlalaleel, Cainan, Jared and Enoch, generation after generation down through the centuries until no living man would remember when you were born and not even unborn generations of the future could hope to be alive when you died?”
He offers Hannah this possibility, based on the ages to which people are described as living in the Old Testament (often many centuries) – suggesting that he knows where they can find a food which will give Hannah the same longevity. And it’s in Israel.
A bit of persuasion later, and they’re off. Nobody really trusts anybody else on this venture, and everybody is out for themselves. Things grow even trickier to decipher (for the reader too) when they stumble across a man purported to be Ben-Isaac’s missing, much-beloved uncle – a much-lauded academic who is, it turns out, working on the land. Sears is, naturally, suspicious of this stranger, particularly when he takes over and Hannah appoints him the leader of their venture. Who is scamming whom?
And this is where Gallico’s other genres come into play. There is a sizeable amount of what I admired in Love of Seven Dolls, but Sears is never quite as credible a villain as Monsieur Nicholas – in neither a fairytale nor a realistic way – simply because Sears is quite an inconsistent character. Which matches the change in genres – in Israel, things turn rather ‘adventure novel’ for a while, as they caught up in a shoot-out. I know this sort of thing is supposed to be very exciting, but I find it unutterably tedious, and ended up skipping most of that section.
So we come onto the genre I’d yet to encounter in Gallico’s novels – the spiritual or religious theme. As you might know, I am a Christian, but I don’t often read novels which feature faith – and, I have to say, I was a bit nervous to see how skilfully Gallico would handle it. And, I’ve got to say, I was quite impressed – both the Jewish and Christian characters experience direct or indirect encounters with God while travelling through Israel, and these sections were moving (although, it must be conceded, entirely out of kilter with the rest of the novel.)
There are a few more twists and turns, a few more rugs pulled from under feet, and The Foolish Immortals concludes. It is a very interesting, but maddeningly inconsistent novel. Not inconsistent in quality (perhaps), but in style and tone. It’s as though Gallico wanted to write a novel which took place in Israel, and couldn’t decide whether it should be about faith, boyish adventure, or unsettling manipulation – and so threw all of them in together.
Yet again, this is a book I’m criticising for not being written in the way I’d hoped it would be – but with, I think, greater justification than with yesterday’s post on Consider the Years, because in the case of The Foolish Immortals, it started off in the way I’d expected. With this ingenious idea, Gallico could have written one of my favourite novels. As it turns out, he’s written a good book, which I find quite intriguing, a little bewildering, and not insignificantly disappointing.
You’ll see that I’ve tagged this as post as ‘Persephone’, for this Consider the Years (1946) by Virginia Graham is available in a dove grey volume – but my copy is the beautiful one you see below (and the gorgeous bookmark was made by my friend Sherry):
Having read, and loved, Virginia Graham’s hilarious spoof etiquette and ‘how to’ books Say Please and Here’s How (click on those titles to read my reviews – or here for an excerpt from the latter on ‘How to sing’), I thought I’d branch out and read some of her poems. Consider the Years is a collection of poems which were written between 1938 and 1946 and so, of course, primarily concern the Second World War.
Dear reader, what we have is a case of frustrated expectations. Having read Graham in fine comic mode, I was hoping that Consider the Years would be a collection of comic verse. And, goodness knows, many authors have found much to laugh at amidst the horrors of wartime. Unfair as it is to judge an author by standards which they they didn’t agree to, the only poems I really loved in this collection were those that were funny. Here, for example, is one called ‘Losing Face’:
This is my doodle-bug face. Do you like it?
It’s supposed to look dreadfully brave.
Not jolly of course – that would hardly be tactful,
But… well, sort of loving and grave.
You are meant to believe that I simply don’t care
And am filled with a knowledge superal,
Oh, well… about spiritual things, don’t you know,
Such as man being frightfully eternal.
This is my doodle-bug voice. Can you hear it?
It’s thrillingly vibrant, yet calm.
If we weren’t in the office, which isn’t the place,
I’d read you a suitable psalm.
This is my doodle-bug place. Can you see me?
It’s really amazingly snug
Lying under the desk with my doodle-bug face
And my doodle-bug voice in the rug.
Would that the whole collection had been along these lines! And I mean that both in tone and metre. I know it’s a terribly unscholarly thing to say, but I have to confess a fondness for poems with rhyme and scan. (This is why I have only studied prose at graduate level, I suspect.)
When Graham wanders into free verse, or to scanning verse that doesn’t rhyme (or, sometimes, rhyming verse that doesn’t scan), I lose interest. Her poems are never particularly experimental, I should add – her free verse isn’t unduly free – but I, with my reluctance to read poetry, had come hoping for pages of poems like ‘Losing Face’, and Graham does not intend to provide that.
But… it’s is a beautiful little book, isn’t it?