2000s

With a Twist

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

Hello, hello. A nice (but busy) weekend in London – met up with blogging friend Angela, and with university friends Lorna and Phil, saw the Tate Modern and the locked outside of the British Library, bought some more Persephone books (Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson; A Woman’s Place 1910-75 by Ruth Adam; A Very Great Profession by Nicola Beauman), and a non-fiction book called Identical Strangers which is by and about a pair of twins, separated at birth and reunited at age 35. As you might know, I’m fascinated by all things twin, and have already read most of this fascinating book – will be writing about it soon.

It feels a little mean to review a play which is only on in London at the moment, because getting to London isn’t feasible for many of my lovely readers, but you might derive vicarious interest – and some of you, like Stuck-in-a-Book’s favourite feline, Dark Puss, are City dwellers.

On The Rocks – at Hampstead Theatre until 26 July – is by Amy Rosenthal – if you recognise the name, it’s probably because her Dad is the late Jack Rosenthal, and mother is Maureen Lipman. She probably hates being introduced like that, but… well, I’m sure she’s proud of it too. Her play is a comedy about… actually, I’ll copy the blurb from the advertisement I picked up:

Spring 1916, DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda have found a new life for themselves in the remote Cornish village of Zennor. Rejuvenated by the wild beauty around them, they persuade close friends Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to join them in their Cornish idyll. But no sooner have Katherine and Jack arrived than long-simmering tensions bubble to the surface, and Lawrence’s dream of communal living starts unravelling before his eyes… Based on true events, this is the story of women, and men, in love. An uplifting and passionate comedy about four friends trying to live together, two marriages struggling for survival and a group of writers striving for creativity in the midst of war.

That doesn’t make me sound uber-highbrow, does it? On The Rocks has its philosophical moments, and is a thoughtful examination of disparate ways of life, but above and beyond that it is a comedy, and a very successful one. I urge anyone with the chance, do go and see it. Then read The Garden Party and Pencillings and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and… whatever Frieda Lawrence would have written.

Oxford Revisited

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‘Oxford’, the word, is a powerful thing. It means so much to people; it means different things to different people. There are oceans of myth and speculation, assumption and history – almost anywhere in the world you’ll find someone enthralled by the idea of Oxford. Oxford University, I should say, but the two are so closely linked (especially in reputation) that extricating them is difficult and almost pointless.

I spent all my first year here pinching myself (metaphorically…) thinking “I’m at Oxford! Me!” – mostly, perhaps, because the myths are not reality. I had to keep reminding myself that this was Oxford, perhaps also because I’d never before lived somewhere significant in the eyes of the world. Is there anywhere else in England, excepting London, which holds such a place in people’s imagination? Sadly, this goes both ways. The long-dead ideas of privilege and idle rich boys are persistent, as are all sorts of unfairly derogatory things. One of things which saddens me most is that some of my closest friends detest my student life in Oxford – and thus, unwittingly, detest the way I choose to live. The city and the university are swirls of academic ativism, tradition and learning, fun and fantasies.

So I couldn’t resist when I was offered a review copy of Justin Cartwright’s This Secret Garden: Oxford Revisited. It’s a non-fiction account of novelist Cartwright returning to his alma mater decades after studenthood, wandering through the streets and colleges, reminiscing and presenting a history of this fabled city. But, oh, that someone else had written it. There is certainly enough of Oxford in this little book to engage me – interesting history, and occasionally a rather winning sympathy with natural and academic Oxford… but there is so much else. Cartwright can’t stay on topic for more than a few moments, and wanders off into his own, fairly irrelevant, thoughts and opinions. Like many of those who most fervently proclaim open-mindedness, Cartwright is as close-minded as they come – his rhetoric frequently strides between psychobabble and bland – but strident – atheism. (One of the things I love about Oxford University is that it was built to the glory of God – just look at the college names! Jesus, Trinity, Corpus Christi…) Cartwright labels a rather witty joke about evolution as indicative that someone may be a ‘religious bigot and sneering oaf’, and… oh, if I have to read Isaiah Berlin’s name again! Cartwright states, unnecessarily, at one point: ‘I have often thought of Berlin and Oxford as one’ – unnecessarily, because Berlin is mentioned on almost every page. I’m sure he’s an admirable chap, but he’s not the reason I was reading this book.

These irksome traits aside, This Secret Garden has its high points. The tutorial Cartwright takes with an English tutor (despite never, as far as I could tell, studying English as a student) is diverting, and the meandering through Oxford’s spots of beauty is touchingly told. I had a couple of serendipitous moments whilst reading the book – I’d got to a bit about the statue of Cecil Rhodes on the exterior wall of Oriel College, only to realise I was standing immediately beneath it (yes, I was reading whilst walking, again). And there are interviews with Clive Hurst, one of my colleagues in the New Bodleian, in the room where Justin Cartwright looked at a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

In the end, like the temporary footprints each generation of undergraduates makes on the sturdy permanence of Oxford, the city and the university are able to outweigh their narrator. Cartwright’s opinions are overshadowed by the mystique of Oxford – and you could do worse than find it in these pages. If nothing else, it has offered the finest epithet for Oxford that I’ve found: ‘In Oxford you can read a book anywhere you like, without attracting attention.’

Star Gazing

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I get sent quite a few ‘first novels’, so it’s a pleasant change to receive a novel which is the third from an author’s pen. Of course, I love seeing the first-offs too – but when Star Gazing by Linda Gillard arrived, I had the experiences of Emotional Geology and A Lifetime Burning to which to compare it. Plus, Linda has been an e-friend for a few years now, and it’s always lovely to hear from her.

I was in a position of knowledge when it came to Linda’s second novel, A Lifetime Burning. I wrote about it last year, and though there were obvious aspects of the book which I hadn’t experienced (shan’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say I might have a criminal record if I had experienced them) I am a twin and in a vicar’s family, and so could understand those. I’ve never been so impressed by any literary portrayal of being a twin – Linda understood it so well. I can only assume she has found a similar level of empathy and recognition with blindness. Marianne, the central character of Star Gazing, is blind.

Blind, but not a victim. Bolshy, is our Marianne – “crabbit”, to quote Keir. Keir is the man in the novel – an oil rigger who spends his time away from work living on Skye, he’s a heady mixture of shy and sensitive and rugged and… does he exist? Linda has said that she was intrigued by the idea of writing a hero who might not exist – since Marianne has to rely on her other senses, she can’t be sure that Keir isn’t a projection of her imagination, and the reader spends quite a few chapters equally unsure.

But I haven’t said much about Marianne, yet. She’s middle-aged, and has been blind since birth. A widower, she lives with her vampire-romantic-novel writing sister Louisa (sisters Marianne and Louisa… the influence of Jane Austen hovering somewhere, perhaps?) and is a very determined woman. I always have a little trouble with people who are desperate to be independent – the sort of person who complains that people are being ‘patronising’ to them – but perhaps that’s because I function best in a unit (back to the twin thing, mayhap). With Marianne, she has enough endearing features that I rarely wanted to throttle her. I can’t be cross with a woman who says “Pure Enid Blyton – a much maligned author, in my opinion.” My only criticism is that she so often mentions that she is blind. Her prerogative, I suppose, but I’m sure most visually impaired people can let the expression “You see what I mean” pass, without pointing out that they can’t…

Star Gazing uses three narrative focalisations – Marianne, Louisa, and a third person narrative. Linda uses this skilfully, as she has done before, and the transition from Marianne’s internal view to an external perspective highlights the smallness of Marianne’s world – as she says, her experience of it stretches only as far as she can hear, smell or touch. The success of Star Gazing must ultimately hinge on the story, and the portrayal of blindness. As I said, I can’t judge from my own experience – I’d love to hear from someone who can – but I was fairly convinced. It must be such a difficult task: how to describe the absence of sight from the perspective of one who doesn’t know what she hasn’t got? There is a strong theme of music throughout – I hardly knew any of the references, but visual things, especially scenery and natural phenomena, are often described to Marianne by their musical equivalent. The beautiful intricacy of a cobweb, for instance – which Marianne has only experienced as sticky and unpleasant – is compared to The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Star Gazing is not as ambitious or controversial as A Lifetime Burning – and consequently, where A Lifetime Burning was a great novel, Star Gazing is a good one. A very good one. It would be surprising if an author had two novels of A Lifetime Burning’s power in them, let alone consecutively. Star Gazing, though, demonstrates Linda Gillard’s continuing power as a storyteller, a creator of vivid and unusual characters, and a novelist who will hopefully soon get the recognition she deserves. I’m delighted that a fourth novel has already been written – can’t wait.

En Suite

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments


Sorry not to write anything yesterday – I was tearing through the book for tonight’s book group (metaphorically, you understand), having similarly dashed through one for Tuesday night’s book group. They’re not often on consecutive nights, so it was rather a challenge this time. Luckily both books were great – a re-read of Angela Young’s Speaking of Love (see 50 Books You Must Read….) and the book I’m going to chat about today – Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. Both her name and the title are calculated to defeat Blogger’s attempts to locate accents and cidillas (sp?) etc, so I’m afraid I’m going to leave the lot out. Sorry…

Suite Francaise has had a lot of publicity, in Europe anyway, so I shan’t say that much about the plot of the book – a lot of others have done so better than I could, anyway. I should, actually, say books – these are the first two of a planned trilogy (potentially even more) which Nemirovsky was tragically unable to complete, because she was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. The two books are Storm in June, which documents the invasion of Paris and the fleeing of many from it; and Dolce, about a village under Nazi occupation. Some characters overlap, especially in peripheral mentions.

I’ll launch right into my praise – Nemirovsky is an incredibly gifted novelist. Had these been further edited; had the trilogy been complete, this could have been one of twentieth century’s most important works, I think. The people at Book Group agreed that her greatest talent was the delineation of character, and making people unique and fully formed. A comparison of Dolce with the film Went The Day Well? is illuminating and quite amusing. Though I love that film, it could hardly be considered to offer sympathy to the German troops – it is a bitter irony that Nemirovsky could see these soldiers are people, with all their virtues and vices, and yet would die under the Nazi regime. Had these novels been written now, the French might be innocent victims and the German soldiers all baddies – Nemirovsky, especially in Dolce, is able to see them as humans, first and foremost. Perhaps Storm in June has one too many unpleasant rich men, but perhaps Paris had too many of them at the time. A pervasive theme is that money could help one escape most things. She laments the way those with no control over the situation are those to bear the brunt of the anguish:

‘But why are we always the ones who have to suffer?’ she cried out in indignation. ‘Us and people like us? Ordinary people, the lower middle classes. If war is delcared or the franc devalues, if there’s unemployment or a revolution, or any sort of crisis, the others manage to get through all right. We’re always the ones who get trampled! Why? What did we do? We’re paying for everyone else’s mistakes.’

Neither novel has a straight-forward, linear plot, and often novels which avoid these are difficult to keep reading. They don’t grab you. But in Suite Francaise, despite the episodic and patchwork-like writing, I always wanted to read on. There are sharp points of drama amongst less shocking narratives; it is an experience rather than a plot. I did prefer Dolce, as I didn’t lose track of characters as I did in Storm in June, and the central story between Frenchwoman Lucile and German soldier Bruno is touching and sophisticatedly complex – but both novels are evidence that Nemirovsky was a writer who should have had a very glowing future. Authentic, beautiful, understanding.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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If that title doesn’t make you want to find out more, then your natural curiosity is sadly deficient. Elaine at Random Jottings obviously felt the same, and I am indebted to her for asking Bloomsbury to send me a proof copy to review of Mary Ann Shaffer‘s novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. In fact, lovely Steph from Bloomsbury sent 12 books, but my Reader’s Block struck at the same time, and I’m only now able to pay proper attention to the beautiful pile of books. This one had to come first.
It’s been a while since I read an epistolary novel – I think the last was Fanny Burney’s Evelina, (that is letters, isn’t it?) or perhaps the joyous Pamela, which repeats the same letter more or less every page anyway (oo, almost caught by my master in some thin disguise; wasn’t quite…). My sentences do tend to wander off into the obscure, don’t they! ANYWAY, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society takes the form of letters to and from writer Juliet Ashton, in 1946. She has become popular under her pseudonym Izzy Bickerstaff, writing Izzy Bickerstaff Goes To War – which put me in mind of EM Delafield and The Provincial Lady in Wartime, which is all to the good. She describes herself in one of her letters, saving me the trouble of doing so:

‘I am thirty-three years old… In a good mood, I call my hair chestnut with gold glints. In a bad mood, I call it mousy brown. It wasn’t a windy day [in a photo]; my hair always looks like that. Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don’t ever let anyone tell you different. My eyes are hazel. While I am slender, I am not tall enough to suit me.’

I think I fell in love with Juliet when she revealed that a)she had also written an unpopular biography of my favourite Bronte sister, Anne – and b)that she broke up with her fiance when she found him ‘sitting on the low stool in front of my bookcase, surrounded by cardboard boxes. He was sealing the last one with tape and string. There were eight boxes – eight boxes of my books bound up and ready for the basement!’ What is more, he’d replaced her books with his sporting trophies. Obviously he had to go.

All this has happened before the novel opens – Juliet is in the throes of trying to find material for a new book. Her correspondance is with her loveable publisher Sidney and his sister Sophie, until out of the blue a letter arrives from a Guernsey farmer, Dawsey Adams, who has found her address inside a secondhand copy of Charles Lamb. Juliet gets the idea to write about Guernsey under Nazi Occupation – and strikes up a correspondance with several Guernsey residents (shy Dawsey; eccentric Isola; fisherman Eben) and decides to visit them to find out more. The letters continue to those back home, including would-be lover Markham Reynolds, and Juliet’s life becomes increasingly bound up in Guernsey and its inhabitants.

So what is ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’? To cover up the eating of an illicit pig (one of the things Nazi Occupants forbade) quick-thinking Elizabeth says that they were at a literary society – to make the story believable, they start one up. And the sustenance is in the form of potato peel pie, being all the food they could find. Elizabeth – who was sent away to a Continental prison during the war, and has not returned – becomes the central figure of these people and the novel, despite her protracted absence.

Like many people, I suspect, I knew little about the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands – Mary Ann Shaffer’s novel is so illuminating about the conditions and experiences of those being controlled, but more than that, she creates unique and sympathetic characters. There are some upsetting details, but never gratuitously harrowing – Mary Ann Shaffer obviously knows how much more affecting it is to give us lovable characters and then see how the situation changed them. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is full of such characters – I worried that there were so many letter-writers, but they swiftly became identifiable and dear to me. Above all else, the novel is warm, funny and lovingly written. Bloomsbury plan a large-scale advertising campaign for this novel when it is published in August (sorry! you’ll have to wait) and no novel deserves it more – it is sad that Shaffer passed away before she could see her novel published, but she died knowing that it would be, which must have been a great joy.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is something special – Juliet Ashton is a protagonist with just the right levels of humour, fondness and self-deprecation (‘Oh, I can see it all now: no one will buy my books, and I’ll ply Sidney with tattered, illegible manuscripts, which he’ll pretend to publish out of pity. Doddering and muttering, I’ll wander the streets carrying my pathetic turnips in a string bag, with newspaper tucked into my shoes’.) The characters are an ensemble cast, you’ll love the lot of ’em, and fall in love with Guernsey too. I confidently predict that potato peel pie will be plat du jour up and down the country all August. Maybe.

Truly, Madly, Deeply

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Flame Books are fast becoming one of my favourite independent publishers – perhaps this is a hasty decision to make on the basis of having read two of their output, but already I am sensing a definite Flamesque quality. They are novels of brave, textured writing, dealing with ordinary people experiencing the extraordinary. Confused, intricate relationships between flawed humans – with exceptional writing ability to boot.

Tru by Eric Melbye was sent to me quite a while ago, and it is through no fault of the book’s inviting (if slightly haunting) cover that it has taken this long to read. I just hope I can now do it justice, since I have been battling with a dreadful internet connection for over an hour, and have reached the end of my tether, as Our Vicar’s Wife occasionally says. [N.B. this was written yesterday, and I gave up…]

The ‘Tru’ in question is Gertrude Hayes, resident in an old people’s home and member of an amusing ‘gang’ there – a collection of disparate characters, levelled together by their grouping at this final home, waiting for the inevitable. Tru’s closest friend Agnes, dramatic and in the onset of dementia, gives her a journal for her birthday: “The journal is the destination”, as she says. Tru decides to record her history, her guilt about her family, the misadventures which led to this point in her life. From then onwards, the narrative is shown through journal entries (though this is rarely evident except at the beginning of chapters, and never annoying or intrusive as even Anne Bronte was when she used the device). This motley assortment of the aged occupy some chapters; the rest charts Tru’s childhood, through early tragedies and even earlier pregnancy; the fragile and mysterious relationship she has with her ethereal daughter, Maddie; echoes of longing and searching throughout the annals of her past. She lives in a dead-end town – ‘Delamondians don’t bother to understand a thing, only judge it’ – always known as The Hayes Girl, and cannot escape the unfriendly eyes of those surrounding her.

That sounds a bit glum, doesn’t it? In synopsis, it is rather – but Tru’s story, in its mixture of remembering and imagining, is told with a humour and understanding which captivate rather than repel, and feels more like truth than anything else. You can find truth discomforting, but cannot challenge the teller. Melbye’s writing is honest in a way which makes the title Tru so apposite, despite being fiction. In the old people’s home, Agnes ‘remembered days, or made them up. It’s all the same now.’ This threading of recollection and invention in Tru’s narrative creates an emotional honesty, which even an autobiography would rarely achieve. And there are also many beautiful images amongst the loss; I liked: ‘She was like a shard of broken glass, beautiful and dangerous and hardly there.’

A difficult book to categorise, and not like much that I’ve read before – except, as I say, similarites with The Bestowing Sun. I can’t wait to see what else Flame Books has to offer.

Welly-Throwing

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Today’s title is one of the suggestions I’ve had, in the face of Readers’ Block (or, since I’m just one person, Reader’s Block) – I *think* I did do welly-throwing – or welly-wanging – at a village fete once, but I’m probably not ready to take it up as an Olympic sport just yet. So I’ll carry on trying to shift the block, and get back to my normal Stuck position. Annoyingly, a headache has been added to the mix. On the bright side, today I completed my European Computer Driving Licence, which can be stuck squarely onto my CV, though it would be an exaggeration to say I yet understood Access or the finer workings of Excel. Part of the amusement of the course was trying to unlearn everything since about 1998, when the test was made. Formating a floppy disk, anyone?

The book I’m currently reading bits of here and there is The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee, which I bought when meeting online friends in London. It’s ‘a memoir, a history’ of Buzbee’s life with books – working in a bookshop, working as a publisher’s sales rep, just generally living and loving books – and interspersed with this is the history of books and booksellers. What a lot of times the word ‘book’ was in that sentence – what’s the opposite of aversion therapy? The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop isn’t overly sentimental, since Buzbee has had to understand the commodity aspect of books, but he speaks with a voice which every booklover will recognise and respond to:

When I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, first thing in the morning, I’m flooded with a sense of hushed excitement. I shouldn’t feel this way. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in bookstores, either as a bookseller or a publisher’s sales rep, and even though I no longer work in the business, as an incurable reader I find myself in a bookstore at least five times a week. Shouldn’t I be blase about it all by now? In the quiet of such a morning, however, the store’s displays stacked squarely and its shelves tidy and promising, I know that this is no mere shop. When a bookstore opens its doors, the rest of the world enters, too, the days’ weather and the day’s news, the streams of customers, and of course the boxes of books and the many other worlds they contain – books of facts and truths, books newly written and those first read centuries before, books of great relevance and of absolute banality. Standing in the middle of this confluence, I can’t help but feel the possibility of the universe unfolding a little, once upon a time.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is materially beautiful, with deckled edges and thick paper, but much more significant is the kindred spirit you’ll find inside. If anything can make me remember how much I love books, this should do it.

50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About

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It’s been a while since I added to the ongoing, no-particular-order list of 50 Books I think you’d love, but would be unlikely to see on 3 for 2 tables or even in bookshops at all. It’s a list of potential gems, but also gives you a good idea of the sort of books most at home here at Stuck-in-a-Book.

Today’s entrant was part of a Postal Book Group I’m in, where we pick a book and send it to the next person in the list. Every two months we post a book along, and at the end of the year get back our book with a notebook of comments. Fun, and provides such wonderful books as (drumroll, please) The Long Afternoon by Giles Waterfield. So, thank you Angela for bringing it to my attention.

The Long Afternoon (published in 2000) isn’t a riveting title, is it, but does work on two levels – it is the long afternoon of Henry and Helen Williamson’s marriage, in the long afternoon approaching the First World War, and between the wars, for the Brits too old to fight who took up residence on the Riviera. That is where this novel takes place – the first chapter opens in November 1912, in Lou Paradou, with Helen Williamson enthusiastically looking over a house with an estate agent.

Henry smiled so sweetly, and with such affection, and waved at her and left the carriage and called to her, “Jolly nice place, darling!” It was easy from this distance to communicate with someone below, however far they might seem. She called back, “Darling, I think it’s lovely,” and then, remembering the agent who though he said he did not speak English certainly must understand it, added, “I mean there are problems but it is very pleasant,” and felt absurd for having used such a limiting English word. Not just pleasant but exquisite, sheltered, pure…

It is from this beautiful home, with a third person narration still suffused by Helen’s uncertain personality, that we see the onset of the First World War and, later, the Second. The cracks show in the faux-English community on the Riviera, and the lives of soldiers overlap and challenge the Williamsons’ luxury.

More subtly, The Long Afternoon is a psychological portrait of Helen Williamson – who spends one day a week in bed, for the sake of her nerves – and as the novel progresses we hear more and more from her children and their Scottish governess, throwing complicating light upon her presentation of herself.

Giles Waterfield’s first novel is a gentle examination of large-scale tragedies and small-scale frailties – this is no simple dismissal of the indolent of the wars, but a beautiful and elegant portrayal of a very real couple in destructively surreal surroundings. The Long Afternoon is impossible not to admire, and difficult not to love.

Halfway to Venus

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Halfway to Venus sounds like a Science Fiction novel… but when the Venus in question is of the de Milo variety, things become clear. I don’t know how to introduce this non-fiction book, as… well, it is about living with one arm, and the history of amputation in literature and reality. But Sarah Anderson, the author, says how much she hates to be thought of as “the woman with one arm” – and Halfway to Venus shouldn’t simply be labelled “the book by the woman with one arm”.

Sarah Anderson (pictured below, in a photograph by John Swannell) had synovial sarcoma, a variety of cancer, as a child – which led her to have her left arm amputated at the age of ten. ‘I recall feeling that if I could only put into words how much I didn’t want this to happen, they would have to listen to me; and the fact that I obviously hadn’t been eloquent enough I saw as some kind of failure on my part.’ Anderson’s coping strategy, she writes, was not mentioning it; assuming others couldn’t notice. Amazingly, Sarah was 19 before she asked her parents, “What happened to my arm?” The central strand of Halfway to Venus narrates her experiences whilst growing up, and also career-wise and relationship-wise – from the travel bookshop which proved inspiration for Notting Hill to potential ‘acrotomophiles’, who are attracted to ‘amputees’. In fact, much of Anderson’s examination is not herself, but others – a refrain throughout is that other people are the major issue; trying to anticipate their reactions, but resenting having to be the one to smooth things along.

This, as I said, is the central thread – but Halfway to Venus is so much more. I was a little uncertain about reading the book, lest it be simply misery lit. of the variety which pervades all bookshops, but nothing could be further from the truth. Anderson embarks upon a fascinating and very readable history of amputation, lack of limbs, and the arm and hand as considered through time. As long ago as AD 80, Quintilian wrote ‘other portions of the body merely help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak’ So many facts leapt from the page – did you know, for instance, that nine out of ten people can’t identify their own hand from a selection of photographs?
Woven alongside Anderson’s autobiographical narrative, and this anatomical history, are excerpts from many other books, mostly autobiographical, concerning life without certain limbs or hands or feet. These offer a rich collection of viewpoints – and, unsurprisingly, those writing them are as different from each other as any other selection of people. Anderson’s own feelings towards her amputated arm aren’t clear cut either – sometimes she writes that she hates any reference being made; at other times she appreciates the directness of Americans she met. She enjoys participating in a One-Armed Dove Hunt (!!), but usually avoids any such grouping. A few things baffled me – she, and many others, consider prosphetics as trying to ‘be something you’re not’. I wear glasses – further down the spectrum, but still a prosphetic, in as much as it gives my eyes sight they wouldn’t have in my unaided state. Where can the line be drawn?

It is to Anderson’s credit that Halfway to Venus brings out so many questions and reflections and reactions. A very honest book of autobiography, it is also a fascinating compedium, and with an engaging writing style which is all too often omitted from well-researched non-fiction.

Before I go, must just mention a new blog – Oxford-reader – as you can see, from the same hallowed city as Stuck-in-a-Book, and with many of the same tastes. Do go along and toast her addition to the blogosphere.

Well-Tempered

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It is inevitable that any book where a pupil and teacher have a dalliance will be compared to Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. William Coles’ novel The Well-Tempered Clavier wouldn’t suffer in such a comparison – but it is rather more. Notes on a Scandal meets Othello, if you will. Let me explain.

Set in the most famous school in England, Eton (which the author attended as a pupil), The Well-Tempered Clavier sees seventeen-year-old Kim fall in love with his piano teacher, India. This simple love story is the central thread through an engaging and revealing narrative of Eton life – the customs and vocabularly; the friendships between boys and the near absence of girls (I didn’t realise before that masters’ daughters were allowed to attend). Oddly, something which really impressed me in Coles’ writing was how he gave the impression of heat – the stifling temperatures, especially under the layers of Eton uniform, was described so evocatively that I needed to fan myself while reading… But The Well-Tempered Clavier is never less than compelling. Documenting the Eton life from within, as it were, gives those of us who attended their local comprehensive a fascinating glimpse, without treating the boys like zoo animals. Having been to Oxford, goodness knows I understand what it’s like to have my home and place of work treated as a tourist attraction… but nothing like Eton. Personally, I can’t think of anything crueler than sending a child to boarding school, especially from the age of six, and can’t think of any situation, other than an orphan’s, where it could be thought the best option. I wonder whether any of you attended one? Or, even if not, what you think?

Anyway, that’s an aside. So why the title to Coles’ novel? Kim first hears India while she is playing from Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’, a selection of Preludes and Fugues for piano which range from approachable to impossible. Each chapter of the novel is subtitled by one of the Preludes, and in some way relates to it – usually Kim is playing it, or hears India playing. Since I have a copy of the piano music, I thought I’d play along with the chapters, which is a nice way to do it. If you can’t play the piano, try playing a CD or something, while reading the appropriate chapters. I was just very grateful that Coles hadn’t used Fugues for chapter headings… much more difficult.

Comparisons with Notes on a Scandal aren’t really just. There is nothing needy or sordid or demoralising about the nature of Kim and India’s relationship. It is a beautiful romance, in the true sense of the word ‘romance’, which takes only a frisson from the fact that they’re pupil/teacher. More sex than you might like in a book, but it is certainly secondary to the romance and genuine love. Sadly, this is where Othello steps in. The comparison is made quite overtly – Kim’s class are reading Othello, and Kim has more than a little in common with The Moor of Venice himself. An ineluctable jealousy stalks him – even his self-awareness cannot prevent it corrupting his relationships, and it looks as though it might infect even his reciprocated love for India…

The Well-Tempered Clavier is a beautiful book, managing to use a simple narrative voice without a consequently bland style – honesty, beauty, and passion pervade the novel, but so do humour, youthfulness and energy. Do go and get a copy, and pick up a Bach CD while you’re there.