2000s

Simply Devine

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

31. Being George Devine’s Daughter – Harriet Devine

I haven’t told Harriet that I’m doing this, and I’m hoping she won’t mind, but I’m going to write about her (auto)biography Being George Devine’s Daughter because – well, it’s simply too good not to. Harriet very kindly gave me a copy of her book a few months ago, and (my tbr pile being what it is) I only got around to it the other day. I’m not often in a I-must-read-non-fiction sort of mood, but when I am, nothing else will suffice.

To those of us in the blogging world, Harriet is probably best known as writer of this blog, but to those with more knowledge of theatrical history than I, she is the daughter of manager, director, and actor George Devine. And that ‘(auto)biography’ label I used earlier was intended to convey that the book is about both the Devines, falling into neither camp. Being completely honest, I hadn’t heard of George Devine in any but the vaguest of ways before I ‘met’ Harriet in the blogosphere – so perhaps I approached Being George Devine’s Daughter in a different way from most of its potential audience. (And I’m going to call the author ‘Harriet’ throughout this, because it feels too odd to use just the author’s surname, as I normally would in a review). But I had definitely heard of lots of other folk mentioned in the book – without being remotely name-droppy, Harriet seems to have met just about every notable theatrical personality – she is Peggy Ashcroft’s goddaughter, after all. (And she met Leonard Woolf! In the words of teenage fans of American TV shows throughout the world, squeeeee!) For someone like me, who had a very happy but uneventful childhood, and whose nearest connection to fame was a distant ancestor had been dressmaker to royalty, this all seems incredible: Harriet, naturally, takes it in her stride. Don’t our childhoods always seem normal, to each one of us? I think it must be very strange, for instance, to grow up without a twin – and never know how to answer the question “How does it feel to have a twin brother?” But enough about me.

Being George Devine’s Daughter starts with a series of letters written between Harriet’s parents, George and Sophie, during Harriet’s first years. George was away at war in India, and didn’t meet his daughter until she was a toddler. The recent (when the book was published, in 2006) discovery of these letters seems to have prompted Harriet’s book – which follows a more-or-less chronological structure, looking at her parents’ relationship and her own life. An only child, the line between these aspects is necessarily not as demarcated as it would be for those of us with siblings. Her world is her parents’ world, in and out of the theatre – and she picks up on the emotional nuances of their relationship to a greater extent than most children would. And, not insignificantly, a discovery of Harriet’s plays a pivotal role in the house dynamics.

That sort of line sounds like I’m describing the plot of a novel, doesn’t it? I’ve never studied biography as an academic subject, still less as a biographer, but my experience of them leads me to suggest that the most successful biographies could equally be novels. That is to say, they are interesting in and of themselves. It must be tempting, writing about oneself and one’s family, to have all sorts of references to jokes the reader won’t understand, or people who are relevant for one story but never again. Harriet doesn’t do this – there is nothing here that would be edited out if the book were fiction; it all comes together to form a structured narrative whole. Throughout it all, Harriet’s tone is beautifully honest and thoughtful, without being unduly introspective or (conversely) coolly detached. It is the perfect tone for autobiography, I think – one seen later in Emma Smith’s The Great Western Beach, though without Smith’s deliberate naivety. Events are not callously laid out, but instead are considered; turned this way and that; reconsidered. Yet they also form a story rather than an analyst’s discussion.

We follow Harriet’s life as she tries to determine which path to take, which career to choose, and with which men to become besotted(!) There are dead ends, surprising developments, happy and unhappy accidents. There are (as in all lives) far too many stories and angles for me to even attempt to cover them all. So many have stayed in my mind – running away from school to attend the theatre; the house by the river; the laundry-van… The book does have a chronological structure (with occasional hints of what is to come, or skips backwards to fill in gaps) but there is an anecdotal feel to it all. As such, the passage I’ve chosen is one which is generally representative rather than especially significant. It’s this sort of inventive ingenuousness which threads through much of the book, and is a joy to read:

One day she and I devised a game that proved to be surprisingly successful. We got some empty bottles with good corks, and we painstakingly wrote out messages, which we put inside, sealed up, and cast into the river. The messages began like this:

We are two ladies in distress
9, Lower Mall (Hammersmith, London, W6) is our address.
With our tutor harsh and cruel
Our lovers dear did fight a duel…

The gist of the whole thing was that we were waiting to be rescued, but I’m not sure how seriously we believed that anything would ever come of it. Imagine our surprise when one day, well over a year later, a letter came from Belgium with a finely poetic reply. A covering letter explained that our bottle had been found by an old fisherman who had taken it to his local village schoolmaster for a translation. Intrigued, the schoolmaster had sent the response. Even better, some months later I was as usual hanging over the balcony watching the passers-by when a dapper, foreign-looking young man came by and accosted me: on investigation he proved to be the very schoolmaster who had written the letter, on holiday in London and curious to see the writers of the appealing poem. He came in for a cup of tea, but whether he had been expecting a real damsel in distress or not we never found out.
It’s always a bit nerve-wracking when a friend recommends a book, in case you don’t like it. It’s even scarier a prospect when the friend has written the book, but I was always fairly confident that I needn’t be worried. And I was right. Being George Devine’s Daughter is one of the best biographies or autobiographies I’ve ever read, and up in the top ten books of any variety that I’ve read this year. My only criticism is (despite great design by Harriet’s daughter Sophie, and lots of great photographs throughout) I think this book deserves a fancier edition and printing. For an honest, moving, and thoughtful account of an immensely varied life – you can do no better. Thank you, Harriet!

Books to get Stuck into:

White Cargo – Felicity Kendal: another daughter writing about her father, and also from a theatrical background – a very moving and well-written book.

The Great Western Beach – Emma Smith: surely a modern classic of autobiographical writing, and the antidote to misery lit.

The Behaviour of Moths

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

Thank you all for vindicating my purchase yesterday – you lot are probably a poor choice for the voice of my conscience, but I’m certainly happy to stick with it(!)
Ever onwards, ever in – and onto The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams. Everyone else read this ages ago, I think, and indeed I had a review copy from Virago languishing on my shelves – but it wasn’t until the novel was picked for my book group that I got around to reading it myself.

The Behaviour of Moths should have been a perfect novel for me – all about the tensions in families, Gothic houses, and an unreliable narrator: tick, tick, and tick. Ginny is a lepidopterist (moth expert, in case the title doesn’t give the game away) still living in the old family mansion in her sixties. The novel centres around her younger sister’s return home after 47 years – Vivien arrives, but there are all sorts of unanswered questions and secrets between the two, which the reader hopes to disentangle…

That’s the novel in a nutshell – I won’t elaborate, partly because there are reviews all over the internet where you can read about the plot; partly because not a huge amount happens. Instead, we are left to piece together the sisters’ lives (and try to understand their parents, from the piecemeal information which emerges) as the narrative jumps back and forth from present day to their childhood and adolescence. One of the first recollections is when Vivi fell off the bell tower:

My heart leapt but Vivi must have lost her balance. I watched her trying to regain control of the toast that danced about, evading her grip like a bar of soap in the bath. For those slow seconds it seemed as if repossessing the toast was of utmost important to her and the fact that she was losing her balance didn’t register. I’ve never forgotten the terror in her eyes, staring at me, replayed a thousand times since in my nightmares, as she realised she was falling.

The fall leaves Vivi unable to have children; another catalyst for the events which unfold. And so it ambles on, with secrets gradually becoming exposed, and the relationship between the sisters coming to light.

But I was unconvinced. And not just because it was set near Crewkerne, close by where I live in Somerset – which Adams claims is in Dorset, and has a bowling alley. No, it doesn’t, Poppy, love! No, the reason I was unconvinced is because The Behaviour of Moths tries to do the unreliable narrator thing, but it all comes in a huge rush with a big twist towards the end. And then you wonder quite how we were supposed to read the rest of the novel – but there weren’t enough clues laid down, and the picture isn’t properly developed. All the details about moths are doubtless engaging, but they seem to have taken the place of a coherent narrative arc.
The Behaviour of Moths has done very well, and my lack of enthusiasm for the novel won’t trouble Poppy Adams particularly, but I do wonder quite why it’s been so popular. I found the whole thing… how shall I put it… quite bland. The blurb talks about ‘Ginny’s unforgettable voice’, but that’s the problem: it wasn’t unforgettable, it was literary-fiction-by-numbers. The style is almost ubiquitous across novels of this type – and though there were Gothicky elements (especially in the depiction of the house) which impressed and set the novel a bit apart, for the most part The Behaviour of Moths was a common-or-garden specimen. Not a bad novel by any means, and passes the time adequately, but could have been so much better. I do look forward to seeing what Adams does next, but if she couldn’t win me over with a novel which has all my favourite ingredients, then I don’t hold out huge hope.

Simon S has started suggesting similar reads at the bottom of his reviews, and I love the idea – and asked him if he wouldn’t mind me nabbing it! So from now on, I’ll try and think of books which I think did similar things better – or, with positive reviews, do similar things equally well! And link to my thoughts on them, naturally…

Books to get Stuck into:

– Angela Young: Speaking of Love – family secrets and tense relationships are as subtle and engaging as they get in this wonderful novel
– Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle – the unreliable narrator and the Gothic house taken to a whole new level in this brilliantly addictive novel

Fragile Feet

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments
Better late than never, I have finally finished Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet – which I heard about because Simon S chose it as one of his books for Not The TV Book Group. I had nearly finished when I discovered that (a) Ali is a man, and (b) he worked for the Bodleian Library, like yours truly!

I don’t think it’s necessary for me to write a proper review, because there is such a good discussion over at Savidge Reads, so instead I shall offer you a link to that discussion and tell you that I liked the book a lot, with some reservations. Indeed, I shall give you a very, very short review, and tell you to pop over to that discussion.


I liked:
–the quirky ideas: glass feet! cow-moth-things! a bird that turns things white!
–a generally impressive and engaging writing style
–Shaw didn’t just use a crazy idea for novelty value, it was well developed and quite beautiful

I didn’t like:
–jumping around between narrative strands and not quite knowing where we were, or what the time setting was
–the dialogue felt a little clunky sometimes – too many ‘ums’

A quotation:
“She could feel the encroachment of the glass like an animal feeling the tremor before an earthquake.”

These quick reviews could be the way forward! I can go to bed now…

You wait all day for one book about buses…

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments

…and, to be honest, there’s still only one book about buses that comes along. Bloomsbury sent me a copy of The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills ages and ages ago, probably around the invention of the first bus, but somehow I’ve only just read it. Such is the state of my tbr mountains (which are already looking nervous about the idea of moving house in three months’ time.)

The Maintenance of Headway is a very short book (you know how I like short books) all about the politics of bus driving and the interaction of bus drivers. I really like novels about unusual professions – not that bus driving is inherently unusual, it’s just unusual for a novel to focus on a bus driver – and so was intrigued about how this one would work.

Well, the unnamed narrator works amongst a group of fellow bus drivers who must adhere to the various Bus Driving Rules. Mills was apparently a bus driver himself, so he should know what they are. Chief amongst them – and iterated as chapter headings throughout the book – is ‘There’s no excuse for being early’. And then, of course, there is the Maintenance of Headway, intended to stop that phenomenon where three buses turn up at once. These rules are sprinkled throughout the novel, and I’m certainly going to feel more sympathetic next time I hop on a bus – but any action that came alongside was so understated that I think I missed it. There are some interesting touches about the hierarchy of driving, about drivers’ various idiosyncrasies, and some nostalgia for old-fashioned buses. All understated. Understated seems to be Mills’ thing.

I hadn’t heard of Magnus Mills when I received this novel, but everyone else seems to have – he was nominated for the Booker, and has all sorts of accolades on the back of the copy I have. Indeed, he is variously compared to PG Wodehouse, The Office, Brave New World, the Coen Brothers, and Alan Bennett. What an intriguing mix. What do they all have in common? That they’re all funny – and that’s the thing, I just didn’t find The Maintenance of Headway particularly funny. Interestingly, the one bit I wanted to quote is the bit a few other reviews have quoted:

There was a man standing in the road holding a large key. He was surrounded by a circle of traffic cones, in front of which was a red and white sign: ROAD CLOSED. I pulled my bus up and spoke to him through the window. ‘Morning,’ I said. ‘Morning,’ he replied. ‘Busy?’ ‘Will be in a minute,’ he said. ‘I’m just about to relieve the pressure.’ His van was parked nearby. He was from a water company. ‘Would it be possible to let me go past before you start?’ I enquired. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘I’ve already put my cones out. Can’t really bring them all in again.’ I counted the cones. There were seven in total.
It had some interesting quirks, but it wasn’t quirky in the way that someone like Edward Carey is… somehow it just meandered. For a short novel, it went an awful lot of nowhere. Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it – I think it would be closer to the point to say that I didn’t understand it, or tune into its wavelength. Even after reading two brilliant reviews by Kim and John, I know I’m missing something – and I’d like to read some of his earlier novels to see if that ‘something’ doesn’t elude me there.

Magnus Mills has a whole raft of interesting-looking novels in fact – All Quiet on the Orient Express, although I know little about it except its title, has already found its way into my Amazon wishlist. Although The Maintenance of Headway didn’t bowl me over, I’ll certainly be looking out for more Mills in the future…

Grace

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

I’m getting lazy in my old age, and always on the look out for friends to write guest posts here – especially when it means getting down my piles of review copies. A while ago I mentioned Grace by Alex Pheby in one of Stuck-in-a-Book Weekend Miscellanies (which never happened at the weekend when I remembered it was my Blog Birthday, sorry!) – well, it sounded like it would suit my housemate Mel, who has written a great review, below… (Oh, and do comment and say whether or not you’re intrigued, because I definitely am!)

I’m not really sure how to review a book, so I’m tempted to say: ‘it was good’ and leave it there. But I think Simon will give me a withering stare.

So…. Grace tells the story of Mr Peterman (his first name has become irrelevant), who has been in a secure psychiatric hospital for a long, long time. He escapes, is badly injured, and is nursed back to health (and sanity?) by the reclusive occupants of a weird, filthy little house in the middle of a forest, full of animals, dirt, and the clothes of dead Nazis. They are ‘Granny’, an old lady of ninety-nine who is a no-nonsense communist philosopher:

“I see you are shocked,” the old woman smirked, “but I will not apologise for the squalor. I have long since passed the age when I had energy to waste maintaining an illusion of cleanliness, if indeed I ever had it. Even the most pristine home is, in truth, a swarming mire of microscopic filth… The body must acclimatise to this fact, not deny it. Do you agree?”

Peterman clutched his leg defensively.

“I don’t know.”

…and her nameless twelve year-old ‘granddaughter’.

Being treated like a normal person in their house, away from his medication, Peterman becomes quite sane, recovers his character, and begins to tell them his story in return for theirs. I don’t want to ruin the whole thing for you. But the distrustful old woman and the innocent girl come to trust him, believe he is sane, and believe he is innocent, and eventually he starts to agree with their opinion. And most importantly, love comes back into his life.

I love books about crazy people. Let’s put that another way: I love books that deal with the issue of whether or not somebody is sane, where you can never quite be sure whether to trust the narrator and what is true and what is imagined. Maybe it’s the psychologist in me. Anyway, this is one of those stories, skilfully done.

‘Part Two’ of the book was my favourite – it’s a graphic portrayal of life in the secure hospital, and so well written that you start to doubt Peterman’s sanity yourself, even though for the first half of the book you have been totally convinced that he’s okay. Everything you’ve just read is thrown into question. These chapters made me worry that a sane person really could end up trapped in a world that believes they’re crazy. Once Peterman is inside and everyone believes he’s delusional, there’s no getting out by telling the truth…

Or IS it the truth?!

At this point, the book was so good that I almost missed my stop on the train.

So, my only slight reservation about this novel is that I was a bit disappointed by the ending. I’m not going to give it away. Upon reflection, this must have been a pretty difficult novel to end – Pheby was left with a choice between twee and unbelievable, devastatingly tragic, or some ambiguous third way. I won’t tell you which he chose. But I’m not sure what else he could have done. Oh, and I was also irritated by not being able to work out which country it’s set in. The UK, I think, but there seems to be way too much snow. I probably needed to just let that go… The ending aside, this is still a book that will really stick with you for a while… I am still thinking about it and it paints some vivid pictures you won’t forget in a hurry.

It’s a bit depressing when someone write a first novel this good. Basically, read it, it’ll be a worthwhile use of your time.

The Haunted Bridge

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

First things first, thank you for all your lovely birthday wishes! And now onto another review…

Despite having a card index system of all my books (yes, sorry, I do) I am usually a disorganised person. Just ask my family, who claim to love me, disorganisation and all. Some bloggers have very complex systems with the books they receive for reviewing – shelved in date order, say, or kept in a separate part of the house from their other books. I sort of have a shelf for them, but the shelf was filled about a year ago, and the rest get put wherever I can find some space. And so, of course, I often forget I have them. Ironically, something placed on my ‘must read very soon’ shelf (only it’s not a shelf, it’s a bit of my desk next to a CD player and a mug-in-a-jumper of pens) is likely to be overlooked for a long time.

This is all a long run-up to saying that, somehow, it took me ages to read Jane Gordon-Cumming’s The Haunted Bridge and Other Strange Tales of the Oxford Canal, despite the fact that it appealed as soon as it dropped through the letterbox. Jane G-C, you may remember, wrote the funtastic [spelling error deliberate on my part, in an attempt to be youthful and hip] A Proper Family Christmas, which I reviewed back here. This time she has turned her attentions to ghost stories…

Now, if your first response to the words ‘ghost stories’ is – like me – to curl up under a duvet and repeat happy thoughts to yourself over and over again, then fear not. The stories in this collection – well, except ‘Landscape of Ghosts’, the final one in the book – aren’t scary. They’re interesting and fun and send a tiny little shiver down your spine, but not in a hide-behind-the-curtains way. This coming from a man who was incapable of watching Scream 2 – and, indeed, the spookier episodes of Doctor Who. So, fear not… and read on, as Mr. Bennet would say.

Each story is nice and short, quick impact, and takes place along the Oxford canal. There is a nice touch (suggested by Colin Dexter, no less) of a map in the front, indicating where each story takes place, and the collection is organised geographically – moving up the river.

My favourite story is ‘Flying With The Angels’, which takes place at Shipton-on-Cherwell (drove past there today on a return visit to Jane’s Teas) which has parallel stories of a Victorian girl and a modern woman travelling along the same track on Christmas Eve in 1874 and ‘today’ respectively. I wanted to type out a section for you, but I think any chunk would actually spoil the impact, so I shan’t…

All in all, this is a fun little book – especially for anybody who knows the canal or Oxford, it would make a great gift or souvenir. And Jane Gordon-Cumming is a natural storyteller who, thankfully, cannot resist a light and humorous touch even when she’s writing scary stories. Take note, Stephen King, take note.

(If you want to hunt down a copy, try Amazon or, even better, Jane G-C’s website directly…)

Can Any Mother Help Me?

StuckinaBook All , , 13 Comments

I don’t remember where I first heard of Jenna Bailey’s book Can Any Mother Help Me? but it has been across the blogosphere like wildfire over the past year or so. Ironically, a few people bought it because of a mention or two here at Stuck-in-a-Book in the past – because I got my copy in mid 2008. It was one of those titles I just *needed* to own immediately, had to read immediately… and then, of course, it somehow languished on my bookshelves for the best part of two years. But no longer!

Can Any Mother Help Me? tells the story of the Cooperative Correspondence Club – known to its members as CCC – which began in 1935 when a young woman wrote to Nursery World:

Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbours. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books. I dislike needlework, though I have a lot to do! I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I’m alone in the house. I sew, read and write stories galore, but in spite of good resolutions, and the engaging company of cat and dog, I do brood, and “dig the dead.” I have had a rotten time, and been cruelly hurt, both physically and mentally, but I know it is bad to brood and breed hard thoughts and resentment. Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude “thinking” and cost nothing!

The solution was to set up a collective magazine (of which there were apparently over two hundred that are known about) to which women would contribute, under pseudonyms ranging from ‘Sirod’ (Doris backwards) to ‘Cotton Goods’ (for the proudly working-class) to ‘Elektra’ and ‘A Priori’. The members came and went, but over half a century these women sent around their contributions on all manner of topics, but mostly simply about their own lives. Ad Astra organised it all, and sent them out in the beautiful homemade covers shown in a picture below.

The book is essentially a selection of articles from different magazines, with editorial material provided by Bailey. She has grouped the articles thematically: issues of raising children (members had to be mothers – the issue was raised of allowing non-mothers to join, but it was decided against); the war; everyday life; marriage; working; hard times; growing old. There are quite a few ‘voices’ in the book, and only a few become really familiar, but it’s certainly an interesting sample and cross-section of a fascinating project.

I loved the idea of the CCC, and did enjoy reading the book, but somehow it didn’t *quite* match up to what I was expecting. Or rather, what I was hoping – because I didn’t know how I expected Bailey to arrange the material. She could only really pick and choose certain pieces, it would be impossible to give the feeling of belonging to the group – instead, I felt a little like an eavesdropper. Also, once all the articles were typed up, with marginalia noted in neat little font, the feel of the magazine was lost. I’d have loved a facsimile edition of one or two copies of the magazine – so that all the original handwriting and margin notes and crossings-out would have been reproduced. But perhaps that wouldn’t be possible, or too expensive, or even illegible.
When Claire reviewed the book, she pondered over blogging as a modern equivalent of the CCC. In a way it is, but much closer (in my experience) is the Yahoo Group I’m in. Are other people in these sorts of email groups, where people send out emails to a whole group, and correspond that way? They’re not as popular as they once were, but the one I’ve been in since January 2004 (a quarter of my life!) is incredibly dear to me. The experiences of the CCC sounded very familiar – the cautious and slightly nervous initial face-to-face meetings, which become regular and joyous occasions; the feeling that you can share close, personal events with people you’ve never had the opportunity to meet; the joy of kindred spirits. Who knows whether we’ll still be going in fifty years’ time (with some record-breaking-aged people, if we do) but I know that it has been, and will continue to be, a very special part of my life.

If Bailey’s book couldn’t quite convey this sense of intimacy and special-ness, that’s only to be expected, because the reader must remain an intrigued outsider to the group. At the same time, it is the only way that we can now remember such wonderful groups and I applaud Bailey (and the Mass Observation project which held the material, and also gave rise to significant books like Nella Last’s War) for immortalising the CCC and making their venture accessible to many.

Oh, and for anybody reading this in Oxford… the £2 bookshop has a number of copies…

Beside the Sea

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

Continuing in the books-in-translation theme, but moving to the other side of the Channel, step forward Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi. Yet again, imagine the accents. This novel, published as Bord de Mer in 2001, has been translated by Adriana Hunter and is one of the first books from new publishing house Peirene Press.

Let’s talk about Peirene first, for a moment, actually. They translate and publish contemporary European novels, giving those of us with zero language skills a chance to experience the best of continental literature (n.b. for American readers, British people rather oddly refer to ‘Europe’ as though we weren’t part of it. That’s the ego of an island, that is). Best of all, for me – they don’t publish anything over 200pp. Oh, Peirene, how I do love thee! It is not just yours truly who likes his books short and sweet. Their line is: bored watching films? Read a two-hour book instead. (Oh, and see their rather witty blog too).

But Beside the Sea, though short, is not sweet. That is to say, it’s a pretty devastating read. From the beautiful cover, lovely thick pages, and generally pretty luxurious feel to the physical book, I was expecting the novel inside to be equally elegant. The written version of Audrey Tautou or Marion Cotillard, wearing a beret, sipping from a champagne flute and eating vol-au-vents. That sort of thing. So when the protagonist said that she ‘didn’t give a stuff’ on one of the first pages, I was a little taken aback. So she’s not elegant; this is not an elegant book. Ok.

Instead, we have a mother taking her young boys, Stan and Kevin, away to a grotty hotel by the sea. It’s not lived up to her expectations, but she is determined that they will enjoy their stay – even with hardly any money, and rain, and fears continually crowding into her mind. Throughout all the activities, her main worry is that she isn’t good enough as a mother, and that her children will outgrow her and leave her behind. She loves Stan and Kevin desperately, and tries to show this affection, but never feels that she is getting it quite right: Maybe the only real cuddle is in your tummy, when you’ve still got the baby in your tummy, I mean. No one to tell you what to do, to say you’re pampering it too much or not enough or not at the right time. You mustn’t wake a baby. You mustn’t ruin his appetite. You mustn’t hurt his head. You’re just with him. That’s all. You’re with him.
For their parts, Kevin and Stan try to cope well with the situation, but everything is a little fraught, detached, anxious. Stan takes refuge in words…
Are they good? I asked Stan. He didn’t answer. He’s gone off somewhere, he’s good at that, Stan, slipping his moorings – oh, he’s mine alright. The teacher lends him books and it’s the same when he reads: he leaves us. Sometimes I think he carries on reading his books when he’s given them back, he still thinks about them, he can read them even without the words, he’s really very good at being somewhere else.I was initially thrown by the tone of the novel, being so different from what I expected – and I did worry that it would be like so many other novels, in a ‘real’ voice which is so jarring and unsatisfying. But Olmi is much cleverer than that – though the reader might think at the start that this is an average mother, it is soon obvious that she is not. Unreliable narrators always make for interesting reading, and this one gives away only so much – and how much of that is true or reasonable is difficult to gauge…

Olmi manages to build tension without explaining much – the novel is haunting and continually advancing towards an unknown climax. The writing also gets better and better as the novel progresses – I loved the section where they visited the fair:

I’m taking you to the fair, I said. My voice was wrong, I didn’t want to say it like that, in a whisper, I’d like to have said it all loud and happy, the kids didn’t react. I took a deep breath and tried to shout, I’m taking you to the fair! but it came out faded and tired… the boys didn’t move. Mind you, I’d have sworn they’d have followed me to the ends of the earth, but I realised the three of us didn’t need to talk to each other any more. We could do things. Anything. The weirdest, craziest things. But without talking. We followed each other instinctively. We were sure of ourselves, like animals who never question, who just know what you should do and what you shouldn’t.But far and away the best writing comes in the final ten pages. The climax has arrived and, though perhaps the reader has predicted it, that doesn’t make its arrival any less affective. Like Susan Hill’s The Beacon, it’s one of those gasp-out-loud-stare-at-for-five-minutes final pages, final lines.

Obviously I’m not a mother, and I think being a parent might make Beside the Sea even more arresting – but, though it was not the novel I expected when I turned the first page, this is a very good portrayal of quiet desperation and irrationality in a dark, dismal, but real world which never crosses the line into the gratuitously macabre or seedy. Peirenne Press are obviously a publishing house to keep an eye on…

The Blue Fox

StuckinaBook All , 13 Comments

My weekend of reading those short books in translation is going apace, with two and a bit down. I also read possibly my first book by an author with only one name, since I’ve never read anything by Cher… oh, wait, no, there’s Saki too. Anyway. It’s definitely the first Icelandic book I’ve read, The Blue Fox by Sjon. Imagine the accent on the ‘o’, if you will – apparently this penname means ‘sight’.

I’d heard about the novel (novella?) in a few places – first at dovegreyreader, methinks, then later when Scott Pack chose it as his first Blogger’s Book of the Month – and Claire at Paperback Reader has also written about it – there you go, three reviews to read before I even get past a weak Cher joke. And they all liked it – you can add me to that pile.

Published in Icelandic in 2004, Victoria Cribb’s translation was published by Telegram Books in 2008. I always make sure to credit translators, because it is one of the jobs which impresses me the most, being about as far away as possible from own (incredibly limited) skill set. And, though I cannot compare Cribb’s translation with Sjon’s original, I’m pretty certain that the atmosphere of the book has been carried across.

The Blue Fox takes place in January 1883, and the first section follows the priest Baldur Skuggason as he is on the trail of the elusive blue fox. Each page has a paragraph or two of text on it, slowing down the reading process and giving the words the form, as well as the language, of poetry. Not that it is overly full of imagery or anything like that – rather, the language is sparse and deceptively simple. And there is a subtle humour throughout. One page reads simply: ‘The night was cold and of the longer variety.’ We follow the slow and careful hunt, and even if (like me) you’re willing the fox to escape, this is still beautiful writing. Completely unlike anything I’ve read before.

Just as the trigger is pulled on the gun, we jump back a few days, to the world of Fridrik B. Fridiksson and his charge Abba, who has Down’s Syndrome. Apparently it was rare, in the mid-19th century in Iceland at least, for babies with Down’s Syndrome to be left alive. No witnesses were needed; before the child could utter its first wail, the midwife would close its nose and mouth, thereby returning its breath to the great cauldron of souls from which all mankind is served.Once more the structure is strange, as it’s going backgrounds. We meet characters before we know their histories; sometimes we are told they are dead before they even appear. It all lends a disorientating feeling, but fairy-tale-like rather than sinister. Perhaps it is the mediation of translation, or perhaps it is in Sjon’s writing, but The Blue Fox feels almost mystical, as though it is read through a glass darkly.

I’ll be honest – I wasn’t *as* bowled over by the novella as Scott Pack was, but I am very glad that I’ve read it. The sections of the hunt, especially – which continue at the end of the book, increasingly and beautifully surreal – were haunting and mesmeric and so different from anything else I’ve read. For a taste of Icelandic literature, and a glimpse of a wholly different world and time, I suggest you pick up The Blue Fox – you’re unlikely to read anything else similar this year.

White is for Witching

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

You may remember that I was feeling all smug and public-service-using the other day, when I got White is for Witching out of the public library – my first public library book for about six years, I’d imagine. I *had* asked for it from Picador, but not heard from them for a few weeks, so off to the library I went… and, when I was halfway through the book, guess what came through the postbox? Thank you, Picador, I now own my very own copy. Sorry, library. But I did go and get another one out – Identity by Milan Kundera. Having decided not to read another Kundera for a while, I realised I was missing his writing, and that he’d written something nice and short…

Anyway. I was very impressed by The Icarus Girl – my first encounter with Helen Oyeyemi – back in August 2008. I was also a little sickened that she wrote it during her A Levels, got another novel out during her time studying at Cambridge, and now seems unstoppable. And then I read Eva’s lovely review of White is for Witching, which (a) was very enthusiastic, and (b) mentioned Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a point of comparison. Yes, the very same novel which is in my 50 Books You Must Read list. I couldn’t not read it, could I?

The novel follows Miranda, from her sixth-form to Cambridge – she has a twin brother [twinlit – check], has pica and thus eats chalk [quirky and original – check], and seems to be in tune with her dead ancestors and her very human house [weird houses – check]. All very Gothic and haunting. I’d love to explain more about the plot, and the characters, but I don’t think I can… despite all those ‘checks’, I was disappointed by White is for Witching. Mostly because I hadn’t got a clue what was going on.

I was a bit confused by the ending of The Icarus Girl, but I liked the ambiguity – the climax of Jessamy battling her double – but this seemed to seep through all of White is for Witching. Was this just me? Was it just because I was reading it while a bit tired, and later when I had a headache? Or did the novel give me a headache?

There are various narrators – Eliot, Miranda’s twin brother; Ore, her friend and sometime-lover at Cambridge; a third-person narrator; the house; maybe her dead mother? But they were never announced. I was usually halfway through a narrative chunk before I’d identified the person who was speaking. It didn’t help that I thought Eliot was a girl and Ore was a boy, when in fact it’s the other way round. What I did like was that narratives would blur into each other, connected over a word that they both use, for example:

‘I can only explain it in comparison to something mundane – my adjustment to Lily’s ghost was sort of like when you’re insanely thirsty, but for some reason you can’t get the cap on your water bottle to open properly so you tussle at it with your teeth and hands until you can get a trickle of water to come through. A little water at a time, and you’re trying to be less thirsty and more patient so that the water can be enough. The thing with having seen Lilly was just like that, a practical inner adjustment to meet a need. At least she is there, I’d thought, even if she is just a ghost and doesn’t speak, at least she is

there

was a bird on the windowsill later in the afternoon. I looked up from Thus Spake Zarathustra and saw it sitting motionless. [etc.]’

But there was a little too much structural experiment for my liking – I love experimental writing, but doing it with the way words are laid out on the page always seems, somehow, like the laziest method.

And there are all sorts of unexplained things – or, at least, things I didn’t find explained. The novel opens with Miranda disappearing completely, and tracks back to find out why – which is deliberately not resolved. But what was the bizarre stabbing incident? Why does she not look like her old photographs? Why does she think she is dead? What was that bit about someone being kept in a walk-in closet for years? SO CONFUSED HEAD EXPLODING EYES POPPING OUT OF MY HEAD. Ahem.

I haven’t read Oyeyemi’s second novel yet, The Opposite House, but I’d be interested to see the progression. For me, White is for Witching took all the elements I really liked in The Icarus Girl, and then went too far with them.

I really wanted to like this novel, and so I’m waiting to be convinced… did I just read it in the wrong frame of mind? Or has Oyeyemi got too experimental for her boots?