Stuck in a Book

This was one of the books I picked up in Hay-on-Wye last year, and it’s going to be more or less impossible to write about in detail – so I’ll start with saying that it’s a fantastic book and anybody interested in biography and biographers should hunt down a copy.

It’s a collection of essays written about biography by the great and the good of that world. I won’t list them all, but Lyndall Gordon, Hermione Lee, Margaret Forster, Hilary Spurling, Claire Tomalin, Antonia Fraser, Frances Spalding, John Sutherland, Michael Holroyd, Jenny Uglow, Claire Harman… even, rather surprisingly, Beryl Bainbridge. It’s quite an impressive collection (originally compiled for the launch of a new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) – I’m not sure how many were written especially for this, but it’s absolutely fascinating.

The essays that work best are those that look at particular issues with the process of biography – whether that be antagonistic relatives, unearthing unexpected manuscripts, or racing against another biographer of the same subject. These glimpses behind the curtain are sometimes gossipy, sometimes moving, and always extremely interesting. #

There are a handful of essays that don’t work so well. The editor, Mark Bostridge, has rather bizarrely given himself 17 pages when everybody else gets around 6 – it feels rather vain, and his chapter isn’t especially interesting – and the essayists (notably Hermione Lee) who write about their subjects rather than writing the biography seem to have missed the point. We don’t need an abridged version of findings from the biography; much more interesting is how they chose the topic or the obstacles they faced.

Luckily, most of the chapters do just this – and whether or not you are particularly interested by the subjects or the authors themselves, I think you’ll find it almost all extremely engrossing. An invaluable accompaniment to any biography bookcase!

I set my book group a challenge recently, and we didn’t do very well. Could we think of novels about happy marriages?

The criteria were simple. The married couple has to be a central point of the novel, not just on the peripheries. They have to get married before the novel starts (or, at a push, in the first chapter). They have to be married after the novel ends – no deaths. Happy marriages, if you please, not just not-unhappy ones.

It’s harder than you think…

I can only really think of Greenery Street by Denis Mackail.

Over to you!

Here is another review in the series of review-copies-lying-around-my-house-that-my-housemate-picks-up. So I’ll hand over to Melissa and her review of a book that landed unsolicited on our doormat!

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But who is Lucy Daniels?

If, like me, you read the Animal Ark series growing up, and if you, unlike me, have moved on since then to grown-up literature, then you are the target audience for this book. Animal Ark is an ever-growing collection of kids’ novels with tacky alliterative titles like Puppies in the Pantry, Squirrels in the the School, and Lion by the Lake. They feature the adventures of vet’s daughter Mandy Hope and her best friend James, who spend their lives rescuing helpless animals (as identified in the title) in their friendly Yorkshire village of Welford.

Although we acquired a substantial collection of these novels when I was growing up and I faithfully read each one, I wouldn’t have caught on that this one was linked to them from the cover if it hadn’t helpfully spelled it out for me on the back: ‘Hope Meadows is based on the globally bestselling Animal Ark series’. At which point I decided I had to do the proper thing and read it, to find out whether I thought it was well done.

My first surprise was to discover under ‘About the Author’ that **Lucy Daniels is not real**. Instead, she is ‘the collective name for the writing team that created the best-selling children’s book series Animal Ark‘ – her name picked so as to place her beside Colin Dann’s The Animals of Farthing Wood, as I learnt from this revelatory article. I’m told Nancy Drew was also written by a similar concatenation of individuals. I had to go and check up on others such as The Babysitters Club; which I’m partially reassured to find out was largely contributed to by the person whose name is on the cover.

My second surprise was that Animal Ark, which I deemed a dated series from my childhood, is still actively growing and has already spawned several spinoff series (serieses? seriei?); but this is the first one for adults. It follows Mandy as she returns to Welford as a qualified vet to help out her parents in their clinic.

Having read it, it’s quickly summed up: Just like the rest of Animal Ark, but with relationships.

Without necessarily saying that predictability is wrong, this is one of those books which gives away on the back cover a lot of what is going to happen, and the names of the key players in the area of relationships are helpfully italicised. You’ll forgive me for a plot spoiler when I remark that they have chosen not to italicise the name of Mandy’s current boyfriend; and you’ll forgive me for being a little bit cross with the accepted practice, on page and even more so on screen, of using pre-existing relationships merely as the backdrop for complicating new love interests rather than as meaningful in their own right (rant over, at least for now). Mandy, whose character has not changed a bit, manages to fall out with every man in her life over their attitude to animals.

The other central relationship in the book is much more interesting; James, at the start of the book, is getting married, with Mandy as his best woman. He’s getting married to a man named Paul, who is terminally ill. Introducing a gay relationship adds very little of interest to the novel, and feels a wee bit like a ploy to make sure that James is out of the running for anyone who was still struggling to figure out after reading the back cover who Mandy might be interested in. Paul’s sickness, on the other hand, adds a serious theme to the novel which belies the otherwise incidental plot. In fact, the weighty themes of death, bereavement, and for-better-or-worse love, seem rather out of place alongside the still rather childlike idealism of Mandy’s care for animals, or for that matter her fairly adolescent approach to relationships. On the one hand, Paul’s sickness and his relationship with James are treated sensitively and certainly add more depth to the novel; on the other, it feels a bit unbalanced to make them the side-plot of much less weighty themes.

The Lucy Daniels representative who actually penned the book in this instance, Sarah McGurk, is a qualified vet herself, which I really appreciated as much of the story revolves around veterinary surgeries and their animal patients. It seems fitting that as Mandy returns to Welford with much greater knowledge and understanding of veterinary science, the author is also able to describe ailments and treatments with more detail and accuracy. The sections dealing with animal wellbeing, which is meant to be Mandy’s specialism, did give some measure of pause for thought given that we tend to treat animals for physical ailments and not pay too much attention to their experience. Perhaps Mandy’s idealism in wanting the animals around her to be happy as much as they are healthy is no bad thing, and suffers unfairly from its juxtaposition with Paul’s illness.

If you’ve read and enjoyed any of the Animal Ark series, I’d definitely recommend having a read of this; however, in spite of the presence of more adult themes, don’t expect it to be a much more grown-up read.

I quite enjoy the novelty value of reading obscure books by famous writers – particularly when it’s the only book I’ve read by them. It’s quite fun to say “No, I’ve not read Crime and Punishment, but I have read The Eternal Husband,” or “Not Lolita, but Mary,” and so on and so forth. Add Gabriel Garcia Marquez to the list. Because the only book I’ve read by him is the one I read for book group a month or so ago: Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004; translated by Edith Grossman in 2005).

I chose it for book group – or, rather, somebody recommended we read some Marquez and I wanted us to avoid the super-long books. This one certainly can’t be accused of that: it’s a novella of scarcely over a hundred pages – and the last book he published.

Marquez was in his late 70s when he wrote Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and the main character is a man approaching his 90th birthday. He is still active as a columnist for a newspaper, considered dated but so longstanding as to have nostalgic value. Outside of work, he doesn’t seem to have many companions, and certainly no partner. Most of his sexual partners have been bought. And he decides to ‘celebrate’ his 90th birthday by requesting a 14 year old virgin. (It is perhaps important to note that the age of consent in Colombia, where this is set, is 14.)

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin. I thought of Rosa Cabarcas, the owner of an illicit house who would inform her good clients when she had a new girl available. I never succumbed to that or to any of her many other lewd temptations, but she did not believe in the purity of my principles. Morality, too, is a question of time, she would say with a malevolent smile, you’ll see. She was a little young than I, and I hadn’t heard anything about her for so many years that she very well might have died. But after the first ring I recognised the voice on the phone, and with no preambles I fired at her:

“Today’s the day.”

So far, so icky, right? (And after I recommended The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, about a man in love with a young girl, my book group might view my future suggestions with mistrust.) Somehow, it isn’t. It certainly helps that the man and the girl don’t have sex, once she is procured; a faithful madam manages to find a willing prostitute, but she is asleep when he arrives. He lets her sleep. And the same thing continues on various occasions.

In all of this, we don’t see lechery from the journalist. I’m certainly not condoning his actions, but Marquez has not written a book of elderly wish-fulfilment, and there is none of the gross introspective fantasising that made me give up on Lolita after a handful of pages. Instead, we just feel that the man is sad and lonely and completely unfulfilled.

I don’t know what I’d expected the writing to be like – perhaps more ornate? But it is that sort of fluid, subtly beautiful writing that I love. Few sentences cry out for quotation, but there is a lovely lyricism throughout – captured by Grossman in her translation, presumably – that elevated the novella above it’s slightly bizarre themes. But it is really a consideration of age and of refusing to face the end properly – and of last minute changes. And I rather suspect (contrary to the opinions of some at book group, I should say, who took it entirely on face value) that it is playing with the critics and the journalists – pretending to be autobiographical, pretending to show his fantasies. But, as I said, there is no fantasising here – it seems to me like a clever authorial trick, and, though no plot summary would persuade me that I’d like this novel, I really rather did.