2010s

House of Silence – Linda Gillard

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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

What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty & William Maxwell

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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…

Caitlin Moran is basically Dickens.

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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.

Shrinking Violet

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cover design: Suzi Ovens

I have read my first Kindle book!  Before you ebook-fanatics get too excited, I should say that it was on Kindle for PC, and the only reason I read it was because it was written by a lovely friend of mine.  But if it weren’t good, I’d have read it on the sly, and never mentioned it here.  As it is, I can  happily and honestly say that it is brilliant – without any fear of compromising my integrity (which, post-Dewey, is probably in shambles anyway.)  It’s Shrinking Violet (2012) by Karina Lickorish Quinn, and the ebook is available for only 77p!  Considering how fab it is, that is a complete steal.

I was lucky enough to see an early draft of some chapters, because Karina wanted to know my opinion – I was a little nervous, in case it wasn’t good, but I was able to give her a double thumbs up with complete enthusiasm.  She has very sweetly given me a ‘thank you’ on one of the opening pages, which is rather thrilling!  Ok, now onto the book itself – I just wanted to lay all that before you, so you’d know in advance my connection to Shrinking Violet.  But I hope you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t say it was great if I didn’t believe it.  But I will be calling the author ‘Karina’ rather than ‘Lickorish Quinn’, because I’ve known her for seven years, and it would feel odd to call her anything except Karina.

Shrinking Violet could have been written to my requirements, so perfect is it for my taste.  It’s a quirky, slightly surreal but not macabre, novella about Oxford – and it’s heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice (as I will discuss later).  I also detected a lot of similarities with Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (one of my favourite books) but I know they were coincidences, since Karina didn’t read the Comyns novel until after she finished writing the book.  I love a quirky domestic setting, and I was drawn in by the lovely description of Violet’s house…

It was true that it was a most impractical house. Violet’s family lived in a higgledy-piggledy house with seven floors, because no two rooms were level, but each was connected by a set of stairs to the other. The house was also full of doors here and there of all shapes and sizes leading to cupboards and passages or to nowhere at all. There was not a single right angle in it. Under every piece of furniture was wedged a notebook or a folded handkerchief to stop them from wobbling on the uneven floors. Every breakable object was stuck down with glue or adhesive tape. Not even the pictures on the walls could be balanced in such a way as to hang straight.
Violet herself is an inquisitive young girl as the story starts, short for her age and with an unusual perspective on life.  Karina captures really well the disjointed nature of a child’s view – a determination to read some sort of logic into any scenario, alongside the readiness to accept or imagine anything.  Violet can be quite literal in her understanding of what people say, but lends her own enchanting interpretations to the world around her:

“What I do not understand,” Violet had said “Is that when you tell me I have eleven apples and to take five away, you do not tell me where those five apples should go.”   

Her teacher had given her five minutes standing out in the cloisters for that remark. Violet did not very much fancy the idea of standing out in the cloisters today, so when she was told she had five goats and she should take three away, rather than asking her teacher where she should put the three goats, she used her own initiative and sent them to wait in the quad with the other animals that were swimming and paddling there. I am very sorry to have to send you out, she explained to the goats. But you see my teacher does not have time for my questions and you know you cannot stay in the classroom, unless you want to do some sums, and I am afraid there aren’t any spare desks for you.  

Violet sighed as she turned the page to find that every question involved the taking away of a certain number of elephants and cats and ferrets from a larger group of elephants and cats and ferrets, so that very soon the quad was filled with her cast away creatures.
Onto that Alice mention I made earlier.  Karina uses the legacy of Alice very cleverly.  It isn’t intended to be a subtle background reference once or twice – it swirls and unfurls throughout Shrinking Violet, like the flood which carried the knitting sheep, perhaps.  Karina’s novel isn’t a sequel to or a retelling of Carroll’s Alice, but it could perhaps be found in the same universe.  The influence threads through the minutiae of the novel – there are mentions of a Dodo, jam tarts, pocket-watches, chess – but it is the feel of Shrinking Violet which truly unites the two.  Where Carroll’s books have their own curious anti-logic, Karina takes on the surreality of Alice, but mostly in Violet’s unusual view of the world, rather than that world itself.  The narrative slips into the little girl’s imagination, so that her curious conclusions and conversations with the inanimate sometimes seem to be coming true, but this simply indicates the vividness of the world she inhabits and creates.  As she grows older (and taller – like Alice, her height suddenly increases, although it doesn’t oscillate…) the world around her becomes less fantastic, but the tone never loses its wonderful surreal qualities – but a surrealism rooted in the domestic.  The events of the novel could certainly happen – a school day, a wedding, a funeral – but they take on their own peculiar, touching, curious character through Violet’s eyes and Karina’s words.

One of the stylistic traits which Karina uses wonderfully is the off-balance end to sentence or paragraph, often adding a little pathos to a quirky character or, alternatively, adding an unusual twist to an otherwise grounded section.  Here is an example of the former:

Aunt Dora was rarely awake and even then, barely. It was often said of her that she could sleep anywhere and did. When she was young she had found it impossible to sleep in silent or solitary places and so had paid to visit museums, watch films and take train journeys just to sleep where there would be noise and crowds. She had slept through an opera, a circus show and a riot. None of her family knew this about her because she saw it as a rather sordid secret. Her friends did not know it because she did not have any friends.
This pathos comes most affectingly with Violet’s grandfather Julius.  To my mind, he is the most delightful character in Shrinking Violet.  Somehow he is both eccentric and straight-talking.  He doesn’t beat about the bush, but his world is almost as fanciful as the infant Violet’s.  He once wrote a great novel, but now writes haiku on bits of paper and leaves them around the house.  His interactions with the everyday world – with his granddaughter’s wedding, or his wife’s illness – are fragmented and uncertain, but he is still in control of his personality and his opinions.  He’s a fascinating character – and it is with him and Violet’s relationship with him that the sadder, more serious undertones of the novel come to light.

For a short novel, an awful lot is packed in – but, unlike a lot of first novels, I didn’t feel that Karina was trying to put too much in.  There is a definite unity to Shrinking Violet, in terms of style and tone, which suggests a much more experienced novelist.  Perhaps it is not entirely clear how Karina will write when detached from the deliberate influence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but I think her ability to depict the quirky alongside the moving can be transferred to her next book, without the allusions to Alice.  I’m looking forward to finding out what happens.

As a friend of Karina’s, I want to say “Buy it! Read it! Blog about it! Tell your friends!”, but as a reader of books, I need no sort of nepotism simply to say “Buy it! Read it!”  It’s a really wonderful little book, and I’m proud to have any connection with it – Karina is a talented and imaginative writer, Violet is a wonderful character, and Shrinking Violet is a joyous, eccentric, thoughtful little beauty of a book.

Caroline by Cornelius Medvei

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Lest you get completely the wrong impression about Mel, who gave me Dewey (and thanks for your lovely comments on that!) and High School Musical: The Book of the Film, I thought I’d better review a really good novel that she lent me recently.  It’s become sort of a stereotype that when Mel gives or lends me books, it takes me years to read them.  Well, last Wednesday she lent me Caroline: A Mystery by Cornelius Medvei (can this be his real name?), and I started it at about 8.30pm while waiting for my train home – and by the end of the night, I’d finished it.

Mel knew I would love it for a couple of reasons – it plays with the fantastic, and it involves a donkey.  Donkeys are my second favourite animal, after cats (obviously) and I was definitely prepared to enjoy a novel where donkey takes central focus.

It actually kicks off with one of those layered narratives beloved of Victorian writers and earlier – the sort of thing we see in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights etc., of someone telling someone telling someone, all remembering things perfectly, etc.  So Mr. Shaw’s son is relating the story to someone who may or may not have a name.  Sorry, can’t remember.  I’m not entirely sure why Medvei did this, unless it’s to put all sorts of question marks about reliability and integrity into the narrative.  (It’s also a nice excuse to include photographs and scraps, apparently left behind by Mr. Shaw.)  Let’s skip past it onto the story proper.

Mr. Shaw is on holiday with his wife and child, from his job as an insurance broker, when they come across Caroline in a field.  They know she’s called Caroline, because it’s painted on her stable.  Mr. Shaw’s son gives this account of the meeting…

They faced each other across the sagging gate.  He saw a rusty grey, barrel-chested donkey, with pretty ears nine inches long (one cocked, the other drooping to the left), head on one side, flicking her tail to keep the flies away.  I noticed her shaggy coat and the pale whiskers on her upper lip, and wondered how old she might be.  I wasn’t sure how you told a donkey’s age; something to do with their teeth, I thought, but she kept her mouth firmly shut as she champed on a mouthful of grass in a manner that suggested intense concentration mingled with dumb insolence, like a bored teenager with a plug of bubblegum.

And she, fixing my father my her great, dark, limpid eyes – “eyes a man could drown in”, as he later described them – took in the hair thinning at the temples, his nose reddened with sunburn, his stomach bulging slightly over the waistband of his shorts (like all his colleagues, my father always wore shorts on holiday, regardless of the weather; shorts were not allowed in the office).

I suppose this was the moment the whole strange affair began; the moment, so well documented in classical poetry and TV soaps and sugary ballads, when two strangers come face to face; the heart thumps, an overpowering force shakes them, like the wind in the birch trees above the stable – in short, they begin to fall for each other.
One interesting result of Medvei giving the focalisation to Mr. Shaw’s son is that we never really know what Mr. Shaw is thinking, or quite what level of affection he feels for Caroline.  His son describes it as a love affair (er, non-physical of course.  It’s not that kind of book) but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it isn’t – that Mr. Shaw simply thinks Caroline is incredible.

And it’s hard not to agree.  Mr. Shaw manages to persuade Caroline’s owner – and his own wife – that taking Caroline home with him is a good idea.  Once established in the backyard of their terraced city house, Caroline becomes something of a nuisance to the neighbours with her eeee-orrrring.  (We used to live a few metres away from a field of donkeys (known as the ‘donkey field’, demonstrating an early flair for linguistic manipulation) and, believe me, some donkeys make their presence known.  There was one called Charlie Brown who was LOUD.)  Anyway – Mr. Shaw’s solution to this predicament is somewhat unorthodox.  He decides to take Caroline to his office.

After initial protests, Caroline becomes an integral part of office life.  Eventually, even though Mr. Shaw is only a few months away from retirement, she even takes his place.  It isn’t clear whether the office staff are having a joke at Mr. Shaw’s expense, or whether Caroline somehow does perform adeptly at the job… but these ambiguities aren’t practicable once Caroline begins to play chess…

This is where the potential element of the fantastic comes into play.  It’s possible that delusion is at work, but it seems more likely (within the context of the story) that Caroline can play chess and look after financial clients.  She never speaks or writes, or anything like that – Medvei is much cleverer, by giving her a curious form of communication which centres around the chessboard.

Caroline: A Mystery has the feel of a fable, but without any moral or message.  But with, so the subtitle proclaims, a mystery.  What is it?  Her unusual abilities, or his unusual affections?  Or simply the suddenness of it all, without any connection to Mr. Shaw’s previous life?

As I said before, I read this in a few hours.  It’s short (around 150pp) and definitely a page-turner – but with lingering thoughtfulness, rather than the rush-through-discard-immediately feel of some fast-paced books.  Medvei isn’t particularly a prose stylist – there is no bad writing though, it’s just secondary to the plot and the characters – but he certainly knows how to craft a novel so that the reader rushes through, loving every moment, curious as to what the next page will hold.

I know it’s still early to mention the C-word, but I think this would make a lovely Christmas gift for the animal lover in your life.  If that person happens to be you, then… what are you gonna do??

Others who got Stuck into it:


“This is a lovely little book!” – Jackie, Farm Lane Books


“a small but finely wrought – and very enjoyable – read.” – David, Follow The Thread


“Sheer delight from start to finish, amusing, sad and wonderfully written, with great economy of style.” – Elaine, Random Jottings

A Card From Angela Carter – Susannah Clapp

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When I was given A Card From Angela Carter at a Bloomsbury party a while ago, I was excited to read it – but, at the same time, I worried that it might be a bit barrel-scrapey.  The barrel that, as far as I know, has in fact scarcely been investigated.  The publication of some of Carter’s postcards seems as though it would be the afterthought to a long series of edited diaries and letters – none of which have been published (or have they?)

But I needn’t have worried.  The selection of postcards Angela Carter had sent to Susannah Clapp was really just an ingenious way for Clapp to organise her thoughts about a dear friend, and a refreshingly original take on the memoir genre.

I love biographies where the writer knew and loved the subject.  Indeed, I’m reading one at the moment that is a strong contender for my favourite book of the year.  So it is lovely to see Angela Carter as Susannah Clapp saw her – witty, a little rude, loyal, colourful, more political than I expected, and a lover of literature.  It is the last quality which I noted down most (perhaps unsurprisingly).  I was surprised, though, to learn that she didn’t like Dickens – that she didn’t find him funny.  I know some people do not, but having read Wise Children (which, thankfully, is the novel Clapp talks about most in A Card) I assumed Carter had been influenced by Dickens’ own extravagant joie de vivre.  But there are plenty of writers Carter did admire:

Yet for her deepest admiration she went further back.  Chaucer – who was “so nice about women” and who, in the Wife of Bath, created a character she loved – was to her the “sanest, the sweetest and most decent of English poets”.  She liked the idea that he wrote “before English became a language of imperialism”.  She liked the notion that The Canterbury Tales, coming from an oral tradition, had to be direct and forceful enough to transmit when read aloud to a room full of people who were busy “sewing or shelling peas”.  She liked the aspects of Chaucer’s work that pre-dated the novel, and half-disapproved of the genre in which she made her name.  “I’m sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class.  Actually.”  That ‘actually’ dangling from the end of a sentence was habitual when she spoke.  Dainty but adamant, it was like the flick of a heel or the toss of her head.  It warded off objections but also slightly invited contradiction.  It both emphasised and slightly undermined what she had just said.  Actually.
And then, of course – of course – there is Shakespeare.  Wise Children is a love letter to Shakespeare – and Clapp’s first-hand knowledge of Carter offers an interesting perspective:

She favoured the bland lines that moved the plot on: “a ship has come from France”.  She was dismissive of the routine idea that had he been alive now he would have been writing for television: he would more likely have been a used-car salesman.
As for the cards themselves – they’re reproduced in b/w in the book, and are mostly a little silly.  There’s the car which looks like a chicken; the myth of mountains in love; the Charles/Diana divorce card… the Statue of Liberty in a lake; Betty Boop as a geisha, and (but of course) Shakespeare.  Clapp uses these cleverly to organise her thoughts about Carter, only occasionally seeming to read more into the choice of card than was probably intended.

It could have all been the scraping of a barrel, but it actually turned out to be very innovative, and rather moving.  For a writer as unusual as Angela Carter, only an unusual form of memoir would do, wouldn’t it?

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

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On Tuesday night I went, with my housemate Mel and fellow book-blogger Naomi (aka Bloomsbury Bell – go check out her new WordPress style!) to hear Jen Campbell talk about Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops.  Quite a few of you will know Jen from her blog, and those of you who use Twitter more than I do might well know her as @aeroplanegirl.  One day I’ll fully understand Twitter, and then there’ll be no stopping me.

Jen had also been a writer in residence at Blackwell’s, writing a poem related to each of Blackwell’s five floors, and she recited these at the event – I’d love to read them again, so hopefully they’ll make an appearance somewhere.

But the main event was the book – having worked in a secondhand bookshop, and the Bodleian, I am familiar with some of the stranger comments and requests made by the Great British Public (calling from New York at 3am to tell the head of Rare Books your spurious theories on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays?  Sure, go ahead!) but I wouldn’t have believed she could fill a book, almost entirely from her own experience.  The back section includes other people’s contributions, but this is mostly Jen’s collection.  It’s hilarious.  I’d read all the entries on her blog, but there are plenty more gems.  Here are some from the blog, also in the book, as a taster:

Customer: Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?
Me: Er… do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?
Customer: No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.
Me: …..*headdesk* 

Customer: Hi, I’d like to return this book, please. 
Me: Do you have the receipt?
Customer: Here. 
Me: Erm, you bought this book at Waterstone’s. 
Customer: Yes. 
Me:…. we’re not Waterstone’s. 
Customer: But, you’re a bookshop. 
Me: Yes, but we’re not Waterstone’s. 
Customer: You’re all part of the same chain. 
Me: No, sorry, we’re an independent bookshop. 
Customer: ….
Me: Put it this way, you wouldn’t buy clothes in H&M and take them back to Zara, would you?
Customer: Well, no, because they’re different shops. 
Me: Exactly. 
Customer:… I’d like to speak to your manager. 
—
Customer: I read a book in the eighties. I don’t remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?

If this appeals, you should definitely get hold of a copy.  And once you’ve laughed your way through that, I suggest that you check out Bookworm Droppings by Shaun Tyas, from 1988, which is a less attractive title (and rather less well produced) but equally amusing – and essentially the same concept.  Also, I’ve copied this entry across from my brother’s blog – I worked occasionally in a secondhand bookshop during my sixth form, and when I couldn’t be there, Colin covered my shifts – and thus was left with this woman… (Hope this is ok, Col… yeah?)

August 31st 2004
Here I am, working at the book shop again… much better than last time, since I’ve got about three and a half hours left and I’ve already made £36.25, more than covering my £20 wages. But the last customer I had was rather strange (before you get confused, I’m writing this on my laptop, which I brought into work). I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but it’s unlikely that she’s heard of the internet. […] Anyways, she came in and asked me if Ian (my boss) was here. I said he wasn’t. She said ‘What?’ and I repeated what I said – this was more or less the pattern whenever I said anything, actually – so she asked me what our phone number was. I didn’t know, so I phoned up Dad, and he knew, so I wrote it down on a PostIt. She asked me if the fives were fives, I said (and repeated) that they were. Then she decided she didn’t want the phone number on a PostIt, because it was sticky, so I tore part of another PostIt (ie not the sticky part) and wrote it again. This time she said it was too small, but accepted it anyway. After this she left the shop and, I rather hoped, my life, having told me twice that she would like to see Ian’s daughter and dog. A few minutes later she came back in and asked me how much the books outside were, so I came outside and told her about four times that they were individually priced, interrupted while she told me the man nearby had just stolen a book. I mumbled something along the lines that he probably already had the book in his hands before coming to the shop, but she probably didn’t hear me because she didn’t say ‘What?’ Satisfied that the books did actually cost what they said they cost, she said she’d be back in if she found any books she wanted to buy. Okay. So I went back in, and soon enough she was back, clutching two books and telling me that she’d read one of them (A Tale of Two Cities) in school, but wasn’t sure if she’d read the other (Crime and Punishment). I took the books, told her the price (£1.75), and she asked me ‘Are you busy?’ I wasn’t sure what to say – did she mean the shop? Or me? The shop, I assume – so I told her we were quite busy. She made her usual reply, so I told her we were quite busy. Then began the long process of paying – one pound and seventy-five pence – in which she decided to get rid of as many coppers and small coins as possible. When she’d got to about £1.30, the phone rang, so I answered it, but got no reply, and got no number from 1471. Is it just me, or has prank calling never really reached the level of sophistication that it could have done? There are some artists out there, but silence is about as rubbish as it gets. Anyway, she’d got to about £1.35 when I’d said ‘hello’ several times and hung up… eventually she got to the full one seventy five, and as I was putting the money away in the money-box, she asked me again if I was busy – me personally. Sensing she wanted me to help with something, perhaps along the lines of lifting boxes, I said I had a bit of time. It turned out she wanted me to hold A Tale of Two Cities while she recited from it. She marked the place in the book, read two words, and then asked to see it again. This time, after reading the first line, she was able to recite the last two pages of the book with only minimal errors (which I didn’t point out, judging that to do so would bring more trouble than it’d be worth)… well, congratulations to her. She told me that she’d memorised it when she was a girl, and that she was also able to recite pages from Wuthering Heights. It was about this moment that I silently thanked Ian for not putting Wuthering Heights out for sale. Anyways, I told her that it was very impressive (what?) very impressive, and she asked me if I would listen to my grandmother do the same thing… I told her my grandmother was dead, but that I probably would do if she still lived. This was far too confusing for my customer, who simply ignored it, and told me that her grandchildren soon got bored when she tried to recite from nineteenth century classics. Rather than proclaim my astonishment at the foolishness of youth, or point out to her that, as an employee at the shop, I could hardly tell her to shut up, I mumbled something and she shook my hand. Now she’s gone, and hasn’t come back in the last thirty minutes or so, so I think I’m safe.

The Wrong Place – Brecht Evens

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I’m on some pretty heavy-duty painkillers at the moment, having managed to damage a muscle in my chest (by the extreme sport of sleeping, it seems) so I’m not up for reading anything particularly complex at the moment.  So it was in this mental state that I decided – as I mentioned yesterday – to read my first graphic novel: The Wrong Place by Belgian writer/artist Brecht Evens, sent to me for review by Jonathan Cape months ago.  By the by, I’m not suggesting that graphic novels are less intellectually valid than traditional fiction (although that could be a point of discussion?) but they certainly use fewer clauses, and that was what my brain needed.

Colour me surprised, I absolutely loved it.

What has put me off graphic novels in the past?  Well, initially it was because I thought it meant the other kind of graphic, and was fairly shocked that the bookish types I knew were willingly discussing them.  (And, fair warning, there are a couple of pages in The Wrong Place which could be described under either definition of the word.)  Once I’d realised what they were, it was the aesthetic which alienated me.  Most of the graphic novels I saw in bookshops were stylised like superhero comics, using harsh block colours or manga, which simply didn’t appeal.  What drew me to The Wrong Place, and a strong contributory factor in my enjoyment of it, was the aesthetic.  It is created with watercolours, with colours swirling and overlapping.  As the blurb notes, ‘parquet floors and patterned dresses morph together’ – there is a (presumably deliberate) imprecision to each image which I loved, which helped give the narrative an almost Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland surrealism.

The narrative itself is quite simple – it is about charismatic Robbie, with whom everyone wishes to spend time, and his dreary childhood friend Gary.  The book opens with Gary holding a party which Robbie is supposed to attend – everyone asks after him, and waits for him, but he does not come… and then we see him on a night out, exploring secret hallways, dancing in a surreal nightclub… even queuing for his coat is depicted with such energy and colour that it was wholly engaging.

This is a new reading experience for me, and I don’t really know the right words to convey it.  Scenes and characters are, naturally, portrayed differently than they would be in a prose novel.  The visual and the verbal work together – and while I have had a lot of practice at describing the effect of words, I wouldn’t know where to start with appreciating how a swirl of a paintbrush, or choice of hue, help build up Robbie, Gary, and the others.  Without any narrative voice, the only verbal sections are dialogue – so in some ways it is quite play-like.  I admired this page, which seems perfectly and succinctly to encapsulate an awkward conversation, where someone joins the joke after everyone else, but still wants to prove they understood it, and dominate (I hope this is readable if you click to enlarge it):

So, this ‘review’ is really just a gesture of enthusiasm, without any real ability to justify that enthusiasm.  I know if I’d read a blog post about a graphic novel, I’d skim straight past it… but I hope you stop and check your local library, and give this a whirl.  Like me, you might well be surprised.

Enthusiasms – Mark Girouard

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Frances Lincoln Ltd. kindly sent me a copy of Enthusiasms (2011) by Mark Girouard after I spotted it in their catalogue and thought it looked really interesting – I read it; it was, and somehow I never got around to blogging about it.  Better late than never, of course, and here we are!

Enthusiasms is not unlike a literary blog – especially one as would be written by a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and Stephen Fry in QI-mode.  Girouard works his way through a disparate series of literary folk, debunking myths and investigating minutiae – and it’s a great journey to take with him.  I’m not going to give away all his discoveries, since you read the collection yourself, but the topics addressed are many and various, and of differing significance.  The dating of Jane Austen’s Catherine is an issue which would probably attract quite a lot of debate; fewer people would mind which castle Charlotte Mew is referring to in her poem ‘Ken’.  Other topics include the extent of Oscar Wilde’s poverty; the disinheritance of Tennyson; Vita Sackville-West’s novel Pepita and its historical influences… P.G. Wodehouse crops up, as does Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, and John Masefield, not to mention an anonymous pornographer.

But the essay where Girouard lets himself go most amusingly is in ‘Drooling Victorians: the strange story of Pet Marjorie’, about Marjorie Fleming – the topic, you may remember, of Oriel Malet’s biography, republished by Persephone.  Girouard’s summary of her writing career is (like that career) quite brief, but I did love his scathing overview of Victorian sentimentality – especially on the topic of Dr. John Brown’s Marjorie Fleming: A Sketch:

The existence of an inscribed copy of Maria Edgeworth’s Rosamund and Harry and Lucy given to her by Walter Scott encouraged him to invent several pages of nauseating twaddle about the two of them: “Marjorie!  Marjorie!” shouted her friend, “where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo,” and so on. He quoted copiously from her work, not hesitating to, in his view, improve it where necessary, and provided the essential end, a tear-jerking death-bed.
The final three chapters of Enthusiasms turn their attention to Girouard’s own family – discussing his grandparents, Aunt Evie, and The Solomons.  To be quite honest, my interest palled and I skim-read these chapters.  It’s his book, and he has every right to write about his family if he so wishes, but I was much more interested by his investigations into literary trivia – and I rather suspect that most of you would be too.

For a bedside book, to flick through, I thoroughly recommend Enthusiasms.  You’ll learn a fair bit about literary figures major and minor, but mostly it awakens deeper curiosity about literary ‘facts’ we take at face value – and one cannot help but wonder what would find its way into a sequel.

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

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I try to remember sometimes, when I’m waving my arms left and right, dividing books into sheep and goats and making my pronouncements about them, that quality is largely subjective.  We all know this, of course.  When I say a book is good, it’s shorthand for “I thought it was good.”  When I say a book is bad… well, sometimes it’s just bad.  But more often than not, I mean: “I didn’t like this book, and here are the reasons why.  If these don’t bother you, then you might still enjoy it.  Thanks, love Simon.”

I’ll be keeping all this mind when I’m writing about Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), kindly sent to me by Jonathan Cape.  Because Dame Stella Rimmington and her posse must have thought it the best book published in 2011.  Although I can’t imagine why.

Which is not to say that I thought The Sense of an Ending was bad.  It isn’t.  It is very, very average.  There were probably a thousand other books published in 2011 that were equally good, and many that followed a very similar pattern: lengthy biography of main character(s); twist; twist; end.

Normally I’d give you a brief outline of the plot, but to be honest the first half of the (admittedly short) novel seem to do just that.  It’s Bildungsroman by numbers.  We start with Tony Webster at school, with his friends Colin and Alex.  They’re something of a clique, but do open up to allow the entry of new boy Adrian.  He is very serious and deep etc.; they pretend to be deep, but are mostly Adrian Molesque.  Everything meanders along, we get the sort of coming-of-age stuff which bores me rigid, and Tony meets his first girlfriend – Veronica Ford.  Webster and Ford, geddit?  Ahahahah. *Sigh*

Big event happens, which I shan’t spoil.. fast-forward forty years, and Tony gets an unexpected letter from a solicitor which reopens a can of worms.  Cue all manner of reflection on the past, including trying to get back in touch with Veronica.  Towards the end there comes a few twists, which were executed rather better than the rest of the novel (thought I) and, indeed, the ending is, in general, the best part.  Perhaps that’s why Barnes chose his title; to draw attention to this…  I think The Sense of an Ending would actually have worked much better as a short story; it does all seem to lead to a single climactic moment, and could be condensed much shorter than its 150 pages.

He (Barnes? Webster?) if fond of breaking off into observations which teeter between the profound and the platitudinous.  Here’s one:

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Quick flick, and here’s another:

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we?  For instance, that memory equals events plus time.  But it’s all much odder than this.  Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten?  And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.  But it’s not convenient – it’s not useful – to believe this; it doesn’t help to get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

Hmm.  It does sound a bit like he’s deliberately inserting passages which can be whipped out for the blurb, doesn’t it?  The narrative is from Tony Webster’s perspective, and if these musings come from him, then that’s a legitimate narrative device – perhaps Tony is the sort to make these vague sort of summaries about the world.  But if they’re Barnes’ own pseudo-philosophical moments, then I am a little concerned.  Similarly, I’ve always disliked the “If this were a novel…” line of writing, ever since I read it in Enid Blyton’s stories, and it’s a trick Barnes uses over and over again.  His writing is, in fact, unceasingly self-conscious.  In general I found his writing passable – ‘readable‘ – but nothing more.  I might dip a toe into the readability/excellence debate at some point, but it is a debate already overpopulated with toes.

Perhaps my problem is that I’ve recently read Virgina by Jens Christian Grondahl, and William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, both of which are novellas concerned with the inadequacy of memory, and both of which are rather better than Barnes’ contribution to the field.  I asked people on Twitter yesterday (yes, I know, how frighteningly modern is that?) and consensus seemed to be that Barnes’ win was more of a Lifetime Achievement than anything else.  Since this is my first Barnes novel, I can’t comment – I can only say that I would be astonished if it were the best book written in 2011, under any criteria.  Since I’ve only read two other novels published last year (one of which was by a member of 2011’s Booker panel) I don’t feel qualified to say.  So I’ll hand over to those who might know better… (I picked three from many, many reviews.)

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“I was immediately captivated by the gorgeous writing” – JoAnn, Lakeside Musing

“Although it is very well-written, I thought it was ultimately an unsatisfactory and frustrating read.” – Mrs. B, The Literary Stew

“The writing is simply gorgeous, and it tackles one of my favourite themes and plot techniques, the human condition and the reliability of our distant memory.” – Bibliophile by the Sea