A quick post letting you know that I’ve been blogging over at Vulpes Libris again (I’ll keep alerting you to my posts there, as they will often be of a similar variety to my posts here) – this time a review of the fantastic Mr. Tibbits’s Catholic School by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, published by the ever-wonderful Slightly Foxed.
I have been meaning to write about That Sweet City: Visions of Oxford by John Elinger and Katherine Shock for ages – ever since I was kindly given a copy by Signal Books in May – but somehow it hasn’t happened before today, for which I can only apologise. But it is a timeless book, so a few months here or there shouldn’t make much difference. It’s a clever mixture of art book, guide book, poetry volume, and a celebration of Oxford.
Full disclosure time: I have known Kathy all my life, as she is my Mum’s best friend from school, and my first trips to Oxford were to the house in North Oxford where Kathy and her family have lived as long as I have known them. Little did we think, back then, that I would eventually call Oxford home too – for nine years now – and, if I do not have Kathy’s familiarity with the city yet, I certainly share her love of it.
And, as long as I have known Kathy, I have known that she is an artist. I remember Mum, Kathy, and their respective children (including me) sitting by a river bank and painting the view, with varying levels of success – and I’ve had the privilege of seeing examples of Kathy’s work for many years, and would recognise her work anywhere.
But it is not just partisanship which makes me say that the illustrations are the best part of this book – I’ve included a couple in the post, apologies for wonky camerawork. I certainly don’t know how to write art criticism, but I will say that Kathy’s watercolours have a wonderful vitality – sprightliness, even – which brings stone walls alive just as much as the river. Look at this lovely view into Worcester College (which is, in my very subjective ordering of Most Beautiful Colleges, in at no.4, after Magdalen, New, and Corpus Christi):
If you’re visiting Oxford, That Sweet City is available in a few of the bookshops – if you want to imagine you’re visiting Oxford from afar, you won’t be able to follow the walks in person (of course) but it’s the next best thing. Indeed, what fun it would be to get to know and love these pictures – and then, when you finally come to Oxford, match them up with the real places!
You should not read The Red House. Tell your friends not to read it. If people suggest taking it on holiday, don’t. If you find it in your holiday home, leave it there. It’s not a good holiday book. It’s not good literary fiction. No, it’s not lightweight, and yet it also doesn’t seem to mean anything. It’s shockingly dark in places (and shockingly dull in others) and it doesn’t seem to known what to do with that darkness. Curious Incident was (and still is) magnificent, thanks to an exceptionally strong narrative voice. A Spot of Bother was flawed, but still gripping and surprisingly visceral in places – and the characterisation was second to none. In The Red House, despite a couple of strong passages such as Richard’s disastrous run out on the moors, there’s nothing to make this stand out. It’s an ambitious experiment, and perhaps an admirable one; to his credit, at least Mark Haddon is still pushing his craft and trying new things. However, it’s a huge disappointment that in doing so he has moved so far away from his strengths.
Many of us sigh despondently when we reach the end of a much-loved book or series of books. It seems unfair, somehow, that there is no third book in the Winnie the Pooh series, or that Jane Austen wrote no sequel to Pride and Prejudice, or that E.F. Benson, despite being incredibly prolific, only wrote six books in the Mapp and Lucia series – and only three featuring both heroines together.
In each of these cases, other authors have stepped into the authors’ shoes. I wrote about David Benedictus’s Return to the Hundred Acre Wood earlier in the year, and of the writing of Jane Austen sequels there is no end. Some are brilliant (Diana Birchall’s Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma, for instance) and some are decidedly not. Our eagerness for more of our favourite characters is matched only be our wariness and trepidation that usurping authors will have made a mess of things. Thank goodness, then, for Guy Fraser-Sampson.
I adore the sniping, gloriously funny world of Mapp and Lucia, and I know I will read and re-read Benson’s books throughout my life. But it’s also wonderful to know that there are others to read when the series is complete. I’ve not tried Tom Holt’s two sequels, although they are waiting on my shelves, but I love and adore Major Benjy and (now) Lucia on Holiday by Guy F-S.
The reason they are so delicious is that Guy ‘gets’ the voice of Benson so perfectly. I can honestly say that, while reading Lucia on Holiday, I kept forgetting that it wasn’t Benson’s pen which had written it – and what higher compliment could possibly be paid?
Lucia on Holiday takes place after Mapp and Lucia, but it is not made clear exactly when in the chronology the story takes place. The ambiguity is bashfully explained in the introduction – because there is an event in the novel which dates it very precisely, but which would make it a touch out of kilter with the publication history of the original series – but, as Guy says in this introduction, since Benson moved his principal village from one county to another, he’d be very forgiving. It does not, in the end, much matter – Mapp and Lucia et al behave precisely as they would at any point in their history.
As you may guess from the title, Lucia is on holiday – she cashes in some clever (if risky) investments, and heads off to Italy with husband Georgie in tow. But Elizabeth Mapp isn’t having that, of course – not for she to be gloried over forever in Tilling society. Luckily, her friendly Maharajah wishes his son to be accompanied on holiday to Europe… and Mapp decides that precisely Lucia’s hotel would be the best place. Mr and Mrs Wyse also turn up, as does my favourite character, insouciant opera singer Olga Bracely, so (with a few Bensonian coincidences) we have a microcosm of Tilling society gathered. If we miss Quaint Irene and Diva Plaistow, then, well, we’ve coped without Daisy Quantock for several books, and both ladies are much present in recollection and quotation.
What ensues certainly has a plot, and goes nearer the knuckle than Benson could possibly have done in the 1920s and 1930s (c.f. Georgie and his handsome valet), but is chiefly joyful for the constant oneupmanship and subtle bitchery between our heroines. Anyone who has read the original series will be familiar with the sort of thing – neither ever makes an outright insult (or, if they do, it is in an unguarded moment) – but there are plenty that hide behind the thinnest of veils. Lucia delights, for example, in making subtle references to occasions on which Mapp sabotaged someone else’s cake, and Mapp… well, Mapp, as always (sadly!) so rarely gets the overhand. And, as always, I cheer her on, hoping that Lucia will be smited just once.
As I say, Guy F-S has understood and echoed Benson’s tone so wonderfully – I especially like his moments of narrative bitching, exposing the self-delusion of the grande dames. This excerpt, early in the novel, was the moment I cheerfully knew I was in safe hands – it is perfect as a depiction of how ridiculous Mapp is, and how delusional:
“Benjy!” she gasped, clasping her hands together in what she felt sure was girlish glee. “But of course – that’s brilliant!”
My only reservations in characterisation were that things are pushed that tiniest bit too far for my liking. Georgie seems genuinely to hate Lucia much of the time, without the constant, grudging admiration and love he feels in the original series (although this does come out eventually in Lucia on Holiday). Mapp is a shade too monstrous, and Major Benjy a shade too lascivious – but these are only shades, and the fact that it comes down to tiny details is itself astonishing.
Of course, you must start with the originals. If you haven’t read them, do start with Queen Lucia (not Mapp and Lucia itself, which is the fourth in the series) – you may have to struggle past the baby talk, which is mercifully scarce in Guy F-S’s book, but it’s worth it. Once you’ve read and relished them – you can be overjoyed to know that these will be waiting.
Although I have never read any fiction by A.L. Kennedy (which is about as inauspicious a way to begin a review as any), I couldn’t resist when Jonathan Cape offered me a copy of On Writing to review. This isn’t so much because I intend to be a writer myself (although I have always rather hoped to be – and, I suppose, in some ways I am – just theses and blog posts rather than novels, at the mo) but because I thought it might reveal more about the author’s life and processes.
It’s just as well that I approached On Writing with this proviso, because it’s a bit of a misnomer – there isn’t a great deal about writing, particularly not about how to write, but there is a great deal about being a writer. A crucial distinction. Rather than giving step by step instructions, or even general guidelines, Kennedy writes about the life of a writer – which seems to consist almost solely of travelling, getting ill, and running workshops for other people who want to be writers.
No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better. Other people can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances. This gives you – slowly – an understanding of how you use words on the page to say what you need to.
So, that explains why she concentrates on other matters. If, however, you are desperate to read about the act of writing itself, in the minutiae of prose details, then turn straight to chapter 22. That’s precisely what A.L. Kennedy does there – building up the opening sentence to a story, rejecting versions, explaining why she doing so and what thought goes into the construction of each sentence. Granted, I didn’t much like the end result (it didn’t encourage me to read her fiction, I must confess), but it was fascinating to observe.
This early part of the book is a collection of blog columns Kennedy wrote for the Guardian, and I found them compulsively readable. I love her sense of humour, the dryness of her writing, and her obvious love for the craft of writing. Occasionally, I’ll admit, I wanted her to lighten up a tiny bit – as she often admits, writing is not back-breaking labour – but I suppose that’s better than flippancy about writing, in a book about writing. And while Kennedy writes about the horrors of appearing in public or having her photo taken – being very deprecating about her own appearance – she has the sort of face that, if you saw her on a bus, you’d say “By gad, good woman, you must write!” It’s so wry and cynical, and you get the feeling that it would be world-weary if she didn’t find every facet of existence ultimately so amusing.
The next section of the book has longer essays, significantly about running workshops – offering a really interesting insight to a world I know so little about, and showing how much thought Kennedy puts into preparing them (as well as her scorn for those who put on workshops without similar levels of thought.) There is also – of course – more about writing, and I particularly loved this paragraph, which brilliantly demolished a tenet of writing which I have always thought nonsensical:
Personal experience may, for example, be suggested as a handy source of authenticity, perhaps because of the tediously repeated ‘advice’ imposed upon new authors: “Write about what you know.” Many people are still unacquainted with the unabridged version of this advice: “Write about what you know. I am an idiot and have never heard of research, its challenges, serendipities and joys. I lack imagination and therefore cannot imagine that you may not. Do not be free, do not explore the boundaries of your possible talent, do not – for pity’s sake – grow beyond the limits of your everyday life and its most superficial details. Do not go wherever you wish to, whether that’s the surface of your kitchen table or the surface of the moon. Please allow me – because I’m insisting – to tell you what to think.”
And finally in On Writing is a piece she refers to often throughout – one which she takes to the Edinburgh Festival, as well as performing around the country. It’s very, very funny – in a rather broader way than the rest of the book, and if it feels less natural than her blog writing, then that is because it is a performance piece. Some of it repeats things she has mentioned earlier, but for a book which is compiled from various sources, and also for a blog-based book, On Writing is remarkably unrepetitive. I dread to think how repetitive Stuck-in-a-Book has been. I dread to think how repetitive Stuck-in-a-Book has been. (A-ha-ha.)
All in all, a great book to have on a bibliophile’s bookshelf – perhaps not the first place to go if you are penning your own novel – although if you’ve got past the ‘getting published’ stage, On Writing might well be an invaluable guide to the life of the writer. For the rest of us, it’s simply a great read.
Another quick this-book-has-been-on-my-To-Review-shelf-forever review, I’m afraid – my reading has been so shamefully little recently – but that means you get to hear about some fun books in short bursts. And today’s is Miranda Hart’s bestselling book Is It Just Me? Note that I don’t say ‘autobiography’ – we’ll come onto that later.
I suspect you know who Miranda Hart is, but indulge me for a moment. She is a comedian (we’re not saying ‘comedienne’ anymore, are we, please?) who sprung to fame in an eponymous sitcom where she falls over things, embraces middle-aged activities a little early, and generally makes fun of herself. I’m always drawn to female-driven sitcoms, so I’ve been watching since day one – but the third series, which finished here about a month ago, was the one which really saw Miranda pull in enormous audiences of over 9 million. One in seven people in the UK were watching, which is extraordinary.
The sitcom has the occasional dud episode, but generally I love, love, love it. How can I not feel affinity with a woman who, aghast at the idea of going out clubbing, says: “It’s 9 o’clock! Four words: Rush. Home. For. Poirot.” For those who don’t ‘get’ it, Miranda is just childish and meandering – but I really admire how she has made slapstick amusing to those of us who normally don’t care for it. I adore her friend Tilly and her ridiculous expressions (I was saying ‘McFact’ before it appeared on Miranda: McFact.) Stevie (with her ‘allure’) and Miranda have a wonderful friendship, which is all too rarely shown in comedy. And then there’s her Mum. It’s all great fun, and very watchable. And very British.
Which brings me onto Is It Just Me? Although it is by Miranda Hart, about Miranda Hart, it’s only really an autobiography to the extent that the sitcom is – it feels a lot like it’s been written ‘in character’. Presumably all the events she described happened, at least in outline, but it’s certainly selective. Her tales of dating, office life, holidays, weddings… they’re all written as though outlining an idea for a sketch comedy. Which is fine – it’s more than fine, it’s great – but it isn’t really an autobiography. She spends a lot of the time in faux-conversation with her 17-year-old self, disillusioning her of the idea that she’ll grow up into a graceful gazelle-type. (Since I talked to myself in my first Vulpes Libris column – see yesterday’s post – I don’t have a leg on which to stand.)
Of course, having languished on my To Review shelf for so long, I can’t remember any examples to give you. I chuckled my way through Is It Just Me? without making any notes on it, for reviewing purposes. So I’ll borrow this clip of Miranda reading an excerpt herself…
I haven’t mentioned yet, but this was a gift from my lovely friend Lucy, whom I love even though she went and LEFT Oxford last year, to move to big old London town.
So, yes, a giggle of a book which does no more and no less than you’d expect. Lots of amusing, light-hearted moments, and a surprisingly moving moment when she tells her younger self that her secret ambition to go into comedy has happened, and that she’s even spoken to her heroines French & Saunders. I guess it’s the perfect Christmas book, but since that’s been and gone… Mothering Sunday?
(By the by, if you have watched the sitcom, and enjoy Sally Phillips wonderful turn as Tilly, may I recommend you seek out her sitcom Parents…)
Anne Fadiman wrote in Ex Libris that every bibliophile has a shelf (or shelves) of books that is somewhat off-kilter from the rest of their taste. Mine might be my theology shelf, or my theatrical history shelf, but I think the books (few as they are) most likely to surprise the casual observer would be those on neurology.
When I told my Dad I’d bought and read Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks (after he’d spotted a review and told me about it), he asked “But will you be writing about it on your blog?” “Of course,” thought I – it hadn’t crossed my mind that I wouldn’t. But I pondered on it, and thought – would blog-readers used to my love for 1930s novels about spinsters drinking tea also want to read about phantom limbs and Delirium Tremens?
Believe me, you will. I have almost zero interest in science in all its many and varied forms. I stopped studying it when I was 16 (except for maths) and found it all very dull before that point. (Apologies, science-lovers.) Biology was far and away my least favourite subject. And yet Hallucinations is absolutely brilliant, as fascinating and readable as his popular work The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. A predilection for scientific books is definitely not a prerequisite. Sacks is just as much a storyteller as a scientist.
Before starting Hallucinations, I thought they were mostly terrifying, felt real, and came chiefly with a fever or drug abuse. While hallucinations can be all these things, I was surprised to learn how often they are benign (even amusing or comforting) and easily recognised as fake. Strangest still, I hadn’t realised that (under Sacks’ definitions) I had experienced hallucinations myself.
That’s not quite true – I knew I’d had them when I had an extremely high temperature during flu, but I hadn’t known that what I’d had repeatedly as a child were hypnagogic hallucinations – those that people get just before going to sleep. Aged about 5, I often used to see chains of bright lights and shapes (and, Mum remembered but I did not, faces) in front of me – whether my eyes were open or closed – at bedtime. It turns out hypnagogic hallucinations are very common, and (Sacks writes) rarely unnerving for the hallucinator. Well, Dr. Sacks, aged five I found them incredibly frightening, and usually ran to mother!
There are so many types of hallucinations that Sacks has witnessed in decades of being a neurologist, encountering hundreds of people and hearing about thousands from his colleagues. This book just includes the ones who gave him permission. It would necessitate typing out the whole book to tell you all the illustrations he gives, but they range from fascinating accounts of Charles Bonnet Syndrome (basically seeing hallucinations, often highly detailed, for long or short periods) to hallucinated smells, sounds, and even a chapter on hallucinating doppelgangers.
Almost all of these hallucinations act alongside lives which are lived otherwise normally, and do not suggest any terrible neurological condition. It is somewhat chilling that Sacks recounts a study which revealed that 12 volunteers, with otherwise ‘normal’ mental health histories, were asked to tell doctors they were hearing voices – and 11 were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sacks is keen to point out how many patients with hallucinations, even when voices, are not suffering from schizophrenia or any other sort of mental illness. He is deeply interested in how people manage their lives when seeing hallucinations at any hour of the day, and offers up humble praise to those who take it in their stride.
This is what makes Sacks so special. A few of the blurb reviews describe him as ‘humane’, which I suppose he is – but the word feels a little dispassionate. Sacks, on the other hand, is fundamentally compassionate. He never treats or describes people as case studies. The accounts he gives are not scientific outlines, interested only in neurological details, but mini-biographies filled with human detail, humour, and respect. Here’s an example of all three factors combining:
Gertie C. had a half-controlled hallucinosis for decades before she started on L-dopa – bucolic hallucinations of lying in a sunlit meadow or floating in a creek near her childhood home. This changed when she was given L-dopa and her hallucinations assumed a social and sometimes sexual character. When she told me about this, she added, anxiously, “You surely wouldn’t forbid a friendly hallucination to a frustrated old lady like me!” I replied that if her hallucinations had a pleasant and controllable character, they seemed rather a good idea under the circumstances. After this, the paranoid quality dropped away, and her hallucinatory encounters became purely amicable and amorous. She developed a humour and tact and control, never allowing herself a hallucination before eight in the evening and keeping its duration to thirty or forty minutes at most. If her relatives stayed too late, she would explain firmly but pleasantly that she was expecting “a gentleman visitor from out of town” in a few minutes’ time, and she felt he might take it amiss if he was kept waiting outside. She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.
And with this respect and kindness definitely comes a sense of humour – the sort of humour exemplified by many of the people he met. This detail, in a footnote, was wonderful:
Robert Teunisse told me how one of his patients, seeing a man hovering outside his nineteenth-floor apartment, assumed this was another one of his hallucinations. When the man waved at him, he did not wave back. The “hallucination” turned out to be his window washer, considerably miffed at not having his friendly wave returned.
Although Sacks does not compromise his scientific standing, Hallucinations is definitely (as demonstrated by me) a book which is accessible to the layman. In the whole book, there was only one sentence which completely baffled me…
When his patient died, a year later, an autopsy revealed a large midbrain infarction involving (among other structures) the cerebral peduncles (hence his coinage of the term “penduncular hallucinations”).
I’ll take your word for it, Oliver.
But, that excerpt aside, Hallucinations was more of a page-turner than most detective novels, paid closer attention to the human details of everyday life than much domestic fiction, and certainly left me with more to think about than many books I read. I hope I’ve done enough to convince you that, even if you think you won’t be interested, you probably would be.
I have wondered whether my interest in neurology might, in fact, just be an appreciation of Oliver Sacks. I’ve started other books in the field and not finished them, though I will go back to one on synaesthesia that I recently began. Perhaps no other author combines Sacks’ talents as scientist and storyteller… but I’m happy to be proven wrong, if anyone has any suggestions?
For now, though, I’m going to have to hunt out my copy of Sacks’ Awakenings…
The aftermath of A Century of Books definitely seems to be a sudden dash towards 21st century books, particularly those I’ve had on hold for a while. And few books have hovered more determinedly around my consciousness than Linda Gillard’s House of Silence (2011). I’d read her first three novels, and enjoyed them all – one to this-is-incredibly-I-love-it standards. Although I’ve never met Linda Gillard, we used to be in the same book discussion list, and we’re friends on Facebook, so I’m putting this kind gift in Reading Presently. Them’s my rules. And it’s not even the first time she’s given me a copy of the book.
As many of you will know, Linda Gillard is a runaway Kindle bestseller – we’re talking 30,000 copies of House of Silence here, let alone her other Kindle titles – and has a devoted audience around the world. And then, lolloping up behind them, wearing too many belts and clearly thinking the calculator in his hand is a mobile phone, comes me. I don’t have a Kindle, or any of the other-ereaders-are-available. I don’t want one even a tiny bit. The only advantage they have, in fact – and this has quite genuinely appeared on my mental pros/cons list – is access to Linda Gillard’s novels.
Yes, yes, I know. Kindle-for-PC. I downloaded it; Linda kindly gave me a download of House of Silence. I tried to read it. I read the first page every now and then… and got no further. It was like standing outside a bank vault and not having the combination – because, try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to read an e-book. It took me months to read the one my good friend had written, which even thanked me in it.
And then – praise be! – Linda published it as a POD paperback, and sent me a review copy of that. Huzzah! I read it, and, dear reader, it was good. Which is just as well, after all that.
(Incidentally, isn’t the cover gorgeous? Unlike most self-published authors, Linda Gillard goes the extra mile with design and aesthetic, paying a designer for this beautiful look. What a shame that easily her best novel, A Lifetime Burning, should also have easily her worst cover… but the new cover for the Kindle edition is beautiful.)
House of Silence has been advertised as Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm – both traits I could identify, and which can definitely be no bad thing – but, more than that, it felt reliably Gillard to me. In terms of period, event, and even genre Linda is versatile – but certain ingredients stand out as characteristic. The most dominant of these is the feel of the book and the characters, vague as that sounds – with Linda Gillard’s novels, you know you’re going to get strong emotions and passionate people, trammeled by everyday experience, but refusing to lie entirely dormant…
Guinevere (known as Gwen) works alongside actors, in the wardrobe department. Already, I’m sold – you might know how I love books which feature actors, and Gillard uses Gwen’s knowledge of fabrics to ingenious effect as the novel progresses. It is in this role that she first meets Alfie, who is having some issues with his breeches… one thing leads to another, and they end up dating. Which, in turn, leads to her spending Christmas with him and his family, at beautiful old Creake Hall in Norfolk. He’s a little reluctant for her to join him, but eventually is persuaded.
And what a group of eccentrics they find! Chief amongst them – although appearing very little on the scene – is Alfie’s mother Rae. Her mind is wandering, and her grasp of time and people is never strong, but she is still regularly producing her series of children’s books about Tom Dickon Harry. This little chap has made her famous – and is based on Alfie himself, who (in turn) rose to notoriety after appearing in a documentary about the books when he was eighteen. The irony is, Alfie explains, that he actually grew up with his father, who divorced Rae – and now he only sees his sister and half-sisters once a year, at Christmas.
Those sisters include loveable, scatty Hattie – who is forever making quilts, and babbling away without any real sense of boundaries. Viv is less open, but still welcomes Gwen into the family. Throw in two visiting sisters, in varying states of life-collapse, and things are bound to be interesting. And Creake Hall is a wonderful setting. Who doesn’t love an Elizabethan manor for a mysterious, slightly unsettling novel? What makes it most unsettling is that the reader shares with Gwen the feeling that Alfie isn’t telling us everything… why was he so reluctant for her to stay? What secrets does he hide? What secrets are hidden by the house of silence?
Gwen is rather younger than Linda Gillard’s previous heroines – she is in her mid-twenties, in fact. At no point does she come across as that young, though – which I thought might be a failing on Gillard’s part, until I got to the part where she asked Marek to guess her age:
“Older than you look. Younger than you sound.”
One of the main aspects of Gwen’s personality is that she has had to be old before her years. I suppose that’s what happens when you lose your entire family during adolescence – to drugs, alcohol, and AIDS – including finding your mother, dead, on Christmas. Yup, Gwen has had it tough.
Oh, and Marek, you ask? He is the gardener, known as Tyler to everyone (because every gardener has been known as that) and is warm, a good listener – he used to be a psychiatrist – and generally a safe place for Gwen to retreat. He’s also (I quote Lyn’s review) ‘gorgeous, sexy, and irresistible.’ I have mental blocks for big age gaps with fictional couples – even Emma and Mr. Knightley is a combination which makes me wince a bit – so I’ll sidestep any potential entanglements here, and leave those quandaries to your imagination. I will say that Marek reminds me a lot of Gavin from Gillard’s Emotional Geology, that he lives in a windmill (far from the only thing which reminded me of Jonathan Creek), and plays the cello – which led me in the direction of this beautiful piece. It’s Rachmaninov’s Sonata in G Minor, Opus 17 No.3, Andante. (Sorry, I have no idea how one is supposed to phrase the titles to music.)
I refuse to give any more of the plot away. I’ve left it all deliberately vague, because it’s the sort of novel where the plot does matter. One of the reasons it reminded me of an episode of Jonathan Creek, in the best possible way, is that you’re desperate to find out what happens – and twist upon twist come, so that everything is plausible but unguessable. The ‘reveals’ are entirely consistent with people’s behaviour throughout the novel; character is never sacrificed to plot – indeed, the explanation of what has happened is also an explanation of why the members of this family are the way they are.
It’s all beautifully, addictively done. I stayed up far later than I should, devouring the second half of the novel. I was unsure, in the beginning, whether it would match up to the compulsive quality of Gillard’s other novels, and the action doesn’t quite kick into gear until we’ve arrived at Creake Hall – but, after that, hold onto your hats. It is a mark of Linda Gillard’s talent that her novels are both versatile and identifiable – no matter what genre she turns her hand to (and I believe her next was a paranormal romance), I would be able to recognise a Gillard at a hundred paces. And, although she may be one of the new wave of successful Kindle authors, thank Heaven she’s found a way for the Kindless to enjoy the dizzying, thoughtful extravaganza that is House of Silence.
Others who got Stuck in this Book:
“House of Silence is a compulsively readable book. It’s a compelling story of family secrets & lies, set in a crumbling Elizabethan mansion at Christmas in the depths of a freezing Norfolk winter.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading
“This is a book in which it is so easy to lose yourself, at once emotional and mysterious.” – Margaret, Books Please
“The book has romance, bubbling away underneath, it deals with mental health issues so effectively and considerately that you actually do not realise until reflecting back on the book.” – Jo, The Book Jotter
The third Reading Presently book was a really lovely surprise gift from Heather, who reads my blog (but doesn’t, I’m pretty sure, have one herself.) She saw how much I’d loved the letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and decided (quite rightly) that I should also have the opportunity to read William Maxwell’s letters to another doyenne of the printed word – Eudora Welty.
Although no collection of letters is likely to compare to The Element of Lavishness in my mind, this is still a really wonderful book. The dynamics are a little different – both are on the same side of the Atlantic (Maxwell can write to Welty ‘And warm though the British are, one needs to have them explained to one, and everything is through the looking glass’) ; both go more or less through the same stages of their careers – with Warner, Maxwell was always the young enthusiast, even when he was essentially her boss. Here is more a meeting of equals, sharing some literary friends (especially Elizabeth Bowen) and loving and respecting each other without the need to impress (which brought out the very finest of Maxwell’s writing, to Warner.)
It was a delight to ‘meet’ Maxwell’s wife and children again, and to see the girls grow up once more – and fascinating to see how this is framed a little differently in the different books. For her part, Welty’s relationship with her homeland (Jackson, Mississippi) is really interesting – a definitely conflicted relationship, cross with the attitudes of her neighbourhood, but loving home. It’s pretty rare that ‘place’ makes an impact on me, let alone somebody’s engagement with their individual city, but this was certainly one of those occasions.
Just as Warner’s letters stood out more for me in The Element of Lavishness, it was Maxwell’s turn to take the foreground in What There Is To Say We Have Said (which is a lovely title, incidentally – a quotation from the penultimate letter Maxwell sent.) So I jotted down a few Maxwell excerpts, but nothing from Welty – who, though wonderful, turned out to be less quoteworthy. I love this from Maxwell, about wishing for a Virginia Woolf audiobook:
What wouldn’t you give for a recording of her reading “To the Lighthouse,” on one side and “The Waves” on the other. It’s enough to unsettle my reason, just having imagined it. I’ll try not think about it any more.
I mostly love how impassioned (and funny) he is – and I’m probably going to be peppering my conversation with ‘it’s enough to unsettle my reason’. It rivals that immortal line from the TV adaptation of Cranford: “Put not another dainty to your lips, for you will choke when you hear what I have to say!” (Note to Self: I must watch Cranford again…)
Maxwell is, of course, a great novelist on his own account – but I think one of his most significant contributions to literature is his panache as an appreciator. Even when he was turning down Warner’s stories for the New Yorker, he managed to do so with admiration dripping from every penstroke of the rejection. He so perfectly (and honestly) identifies what the author was hoping would be praised, and describes the raptures of an avid reader. Here is his beautiful response to Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples:
At one point I was aware that I was holding my breath, a thing I don’t ever remember doing before, while reading, and what I was holding my breath for is lest I might disturb something in nature, a leaf that was about to move, a bird, a wasp, a blade of grass caught between other blades of grass and about to set itself free. And then farther on I said to myself, this writing is corrective, meaning of course for myself and all other writers, and almost at the end I said reverently This is how one feels in the presence of a work of art, and finally, in the last paragraph, when the face came through, there was nothing to say. You had gone as far as there is to go and then taken one step further.
Which author would not thrill to this letter? Can a better response be imagined? There is never any sense, in his praise to Welty or Warner, that he is exaggerating or being sycophantic – he simply expresses the joy he feels, unabashed, and the women he writes to are sensible enough to accept his praise without undue modesty. Welty returns compliments on Maxwell’s writing more than Warner ever did – c.f. again the youthful admirer / fond sage dynamic which was going on there.
If this collection does not match up to The Element of Lavishness, it is because it does not have the magic of Warner’s letter writing. But to criticise it for that would be like criticising chocolate cake because it wasn’t double chocolate cake. This is a wonderful, decades-long account of a friendship between literary greats – and is equally marvellous for both the literary interest and the testament (if I may) of friendship. Thank you, Heather, I’m so grateful for this joy of a book it, and they, will stay with me for a while. Now, did William Maxwell write to anyone else…
I’m going to start this review by getting all hipster – bear with me one moment while I put on my oversized specs and dig out some ironic vinyl records – and say that I loved Caitlin Moran before it was cool to love Caitlin Moran. Granted, I don’t buy a newspaper myself, or subscribe to The Times online, but my father and brother regard The Times as second only to Scripture and I flick through it when I visit either of them. More specifically, I have read Caitlin Moran’s columns for years. I don’t always agree with her, but I always find her brilliantly, ingeniously funny. The sort of funny that makes reading a newspaper actually fun.
Following on from the success of How To Be A Woman, which I have borrowed but have yet to read, a selection of her columns has been published under the title Moranthology. Geddit? Good. Her topics are widespread – a lot of celebrity-culture and arts & entertainment, but also just the world around her, from new dresses to Gregg’s pasties to tax (she’s pro.) Here’s how she glosses her inspirations in the introduction:
The motto I have Biro’d on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have – because it’s the only world we have. It’s the simplest maths ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the Moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment when you boggle at the world – at yourself – at the whole, unlikely, precarious business of being alive – and then start laughing.
And that’s usually when I make a cup of tea, and start typing.
Caitlin Moran and I are unlikely ever to be friends. This is largely – though not entirely – because all her friendships seem to be assessed on the willingness with which said friend will breakdance, drunk out of their minds, in seedy clubs at four in the morning – or how much they admire Ghostbusters, which I’ve never seen. But, should our paths ever cross – at, say, 7.30 am, as she is stumbling back from a faux-Victorian strip club with Lady Gaga, and I am blearily crawling to the corner shop to get milk for my morning tea, not wearing any glasses because for some reason that only feels like a viable option in a post-caffeine world – should we meet, perhaps we would bond a little. Bond about our love of books (she champions libraries wonderfully; ‘A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft, and a festival’) and our distrust of the Tory Party. Maybe even about how great Modern Family is, although that’s not mentioned here. But that might be it. I’ve never seen Sherlock, and I don’t much care for Doctor Who – these admissions are probably enough for Moran to cement-bag me to the bottom of the Thames, a la Mack the Knife. The columns where she reviews or goes behind the scenes of these shows are near-pathological in their adoration.
And, of course, there are plenty of other things we don’t agree about, or enthusiasms we don’t share. That’s beside the point. Moran could write about how much she likes dead-heading roses to make bonnets for foxes, and she’d make the hobby seem not only amusing, but rather bohemian and cool. Because Moran just is cool, without seeming to try at all. The sort of cool which entirely embraces self-deprecation and wears absurd foibles as badges of honour – and makes everything she writes seem adorable and awesome. (The only time I felt disappointed by Moran was when she referred to the ‘anti-choice’ movement. However strongly people may disagree over the issue of abortion, I’ve always deeply admired the almost-universal respectful use of ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ by those who oppose either one. Because, Moran – as well you know – absolutely nobody takes an anti-life or an anti-choice stance. That is never their objective.) But, that aside, she doesn’t put a foot wrong. She can babble about Downton Abbey, declare her hatred of children’s book/TV character Lola, or opine on her holidays to Wales, and it’s all just brilliant. And it’s brilliant because she has her tone down pat – a way with simile that is always innovative and hilarious (she, for instance, describes X Factor alum Frankie Cocozza as having ‘a voice like a goose being kicked down a slide’) and a clever mix of high and low registers which is positively Dickensian – throwing slang in with perfect judgement. Because (see above) she’s so cool.
And that mention of Dickens isn’t careless. Caitlin Moran is basically a 21st-century Dickens, with crazy awesome hair. In amongst all the hilarious columns on the ugliness of fish names or how someone stole her hairstyle, Moran gets in some serious social politics. So, like Dickens, she is incredibly funny – but uses the humour to slip in social commentary; the difference being that Dickens would give us a plucky urchin at the mercy of Sir Starvethechild. It would be glorious, but his point would be rather lost in a thicket of the grotesque. Moran, give or take some emotive wording, just tells it as it is.
Moran grew up on a council estate with eight siblings and parents who were on disability benefits. As she says, ‘I’ve spent twenty years clawing my way out of a council house in Wolverhampton, to reach a point where I can now afford a Nigella Lawson breadbin.’ But she still knows what poverty was like firsthand, and writes movingly, sensibly, and brilliantly about various issues to do with cutting benefits or alienating the poor.
All through history, those who can’t earn money have had to rely on mercy: fearful, changeable mercy, that can dissolve overnight if circumstances change, or opinions alter. Parish handouts, workhouses, almshouses – ad-hoc, makeshift solutions that make the helpless constantly re-audition in front of their benefactors; exhaustingly trying to re-invoke pity for a lifetime of bread and cheese.
That’s why the invention of the Welfare State is one of the most glorious events in history: the moral equivalency of the Moon Landings. Something not fearful or changeable, like mercy, but certain and constant – a right. Correct and efficient: disability benefit fraud is just 0.5 per cent. A system that allows dignity and certainty to lives otherwise chaotic with poverty and illness.
Who but Moran could write about her hatred of creating party-bags, her love of David Attenborough and her friend with schizophrenia who has to move cities in order to retain state-given accommodation? Not in the same column, you understand, but I wouldn’t put it past her. Moran has won all sorts of awards, I believe, and I would say that she deserves them – but, quite frankly, she is the only columnist I ever read. I’ve been enjoying her columns for years (some in this book are, naturally, revisits for me) and I’m so delighted that they’re now available as a book. I’ve got my fingers crossed for another, since this can only represent a small percentage of her output. But I’ll count my blessings with this one (thanks Colin for giving it to me!) and urge you to seek it out. Like I said, Moran is basically Dickens. Hilariously funny, socially conscious, rocks some impressive sideburns. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.