2010s

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

Let Not The Waves of the Sea – Simon Stephenson

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

Jackie recently posed an interesting question about whether or not there had been any books published in 2011 which were destined to become modern classics.  I wasn’t much help… because I’ve only read three books published in 2011 (which is two more than I initially thought) – two novels (The Tiny Wife and A Kind Man) and one brilliant work of non-fiction, which I’m going to write about today: Let Not The Waves of the Sea by Simon Stephenson.

Quite of few of you were moved by this article, which I linked to a few months ago.  It’s by Simon Stephenson, about losing his brother in the 2004 tsunami, and acts as a very touching introduction to Let Not The Waves of the Sea.  It made me want to read Stephenson’s book (which John Murray had sent me, and was stashed in a pile somewhere) mostly because so few books, fiction or non-fiction, centralise the fraternal relationship or pay respect to the bond between brothers.

Dominic Stephenson was 27 when he and his girlfriend Eileen were killed while staying on the island of Ko Phi Phi in Thailand.  I’m sure we all remember the images and videos which were shown around the world – so shocking and appalling an event, which killed nearly a quarter of a million people, is difficult to comprehend.  Stephenson notes in the afterword to Let Not The Waves of the Sea that two people died for every word that is in the book, which brings it home a little.  But this enormous tragedy was a million personal tragedies, and Stephenson’s book is the result of just one of these.

This is not the sort of book I usually feature on Stuck-in-a-Book, where I am more likely to mention the casualties of the Second World War than the victims of a 21st century natural disaster.  But even if this sounds like something you would never choose, can I encourage you to read on – Let Not The Waves of the Sea is a truly spectacular book.  I am conscious of the need to write about it carefully and respectfully, and it feels almost offensive to make any sort of value judgement about so personal and painful a book.  But by publishing it, Stephenson obviously invites others to join him on his path – and Let Not The Waves of the Sea widens its scope beyond that of a grieving brother – or, rather, we see the widening path that leads the brother through grief.

Stephenson starts with the events leading of December and January 2004, as the news unfolds and the waiting game begins – his family had to wait some time for Dominic’s body to be identified, as the quotation below explains, and it is a moving exploration of one stage of grief:

It seems impossible that my brother could have left in such a way, even more so that he might have done so without telling me, that I will never now exchange another word with the only soul that was built from the exact same pieces as mine.  It seems impossible, and so at a certain point I once again simply stop believing that he is dead.  In this new world of chaos it seems no more implausible than any other explanation, and each day that passes without a call to say his body has satisfied the identification requirements only reinforces this.  Stories are how I have been earning my living lately and it seems clear to me that fate is playing this one with a twist: the dental records did not match because of any problem with the nomenclature, but because they were being compared to somebody else’s teeth; the body lying in the funeral home in Thailand is not Dominic’s, but that of a thief who stole his wallet shortly before the water arrived.  Dominic is safely marooned on an island or lying in a hospital somewhere with his transient but utterly fixable amnesia.  Soon a passing ship will spot his signal fire.  Soon he will come to and recall everything with a start.  Soon his name will light up on my phone and I will answer it to hear a voice that asks, “Alright, Si?”
But the phone call that arrives in the middle of March is not this one that I have again started to expect.  A fingerprint on a glass the police officers took from the kitchen of their flat has proven a match and the criteria have been satisfied.  Dominic really is dead, and his body is to be flown home overnight.

Let Not The Waves of the Sea is, however, far from being simply a diary of those awful days.  The blurb notes that the book ‘is something more than a book about what it means to lose a brother: it is a book about what it means to have one in the first place.’  The article I linked to at the top explores some of this aspect – Simon was 16 months younger than Dominic, and they seem to have always been close.  Even if tragedy had not darkened the Stephensons’ lives, this book would be a beautiful paean to brotherhood and childhood – in amongst arrangements for funerals and travel, Simon relates anecdotes they shared, from his earliest days to school days to the time they spent together at university.  There are plenty of memoirs which relate romances, many which document parental or filial affections, but very few which show how important siblings can be.  I’m sure Simon and Dominic argued and fought, but – even if Simon laments never having spoken it aloud –  they never doubted their mutual love.

But Let Not The Waves of the Sea adds another dimension to these facets – Simon, understandably, wants to visit Ko Phi Phi.  In the end he stays there for months, and returns for several anniversaries of the event.  His book becomes also the documenting of his travels, getting to know the locals and forming the deep friendships which can exist only between those who have suffered the same pain.  Foremost amongst these is Ben, a Thai man who lost his wife and daughters, and deals with grief in a way entirely different from Simon.  Although (as you know) I don’t usually read travel writing, Simon’s journey was far more than geographical – and the things he does and learns on the island are engrossing – sad, but with that irony of good coming out of bad.  Still, some of his experiences continue to be unsettling in new ways – the everyday can never be quite everyday, in a place still recovering from the extraordinary.  Here, Simon sees a bone which has washed ashore:

It is down on the water’s edge, nestled in seaweed and bleached by the sun, the tapering downstroke of a brilliant white exclamation mark.  I pick it up and turn it over in my hand: three inches by one half inch, S-curved along its long axis and gently bowed across its short one, it is a perfect match for the clavicle of a young child.
I tell myself that there are a hundred other creatures this bone could have come from, and yet when it comes to it find that I can name at most three: a dog, a cow, perhaps a goat, though in truth I have never seen either of the latter on Phi Phi, where even dogs are a rarity.  I run my finger along it, trying to think of reasons why it cannot be human, trying to recall my anatomy lectures from medical school, as if there were some fact that, if I only could remember it, would allow me to discard it.
I wish that I had not noticed it, wish I had not picked it up, wish that I could simply throw it back into the sea, but I cannot.  It might be nothing, but there is a chance that even such a single small bone could yield all the information that a family ever gets.  I wrap it in a tissue and put it in my pocket.

The book doesn’t always make for the easiest reading.  I cried pretty much every time I picked it up – including when I was reading it on the bus, in a cafe, and in a quiet ten minutes at work.  Partly that’s because my worst nightmare is something happening to my own brother – partly it’s because Simon invites us to join him in his journey.  Horrible expression, much overused by reality TV programmes, but it is fitting – literally and figuratively, the reader goes on Simon’s journey: around the world, through all the stages of grief, into his happy memories – and through two other medical crises he has to face along the way.  Note how I have unconsciously changed from calling the author ‘Stephenson’ to calling him ‘Simon’?  That’s the sort of closeness that develops, without ever feeling mawkish or as though the reader is intruding or rubber-necking.

And the title, Let Not The Waves of the Sea?  It comes from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, a sort of fable composed of essays (it seems) which was beloved by Dominic.  This passage provides the title, and were the words Simon read at his brother’s funeral:

Let not the waves of the sea separate us now, and the years you have spent in our midst become a memory.
You have walked among us a spirit, and your shadow has been a light upon our faces.
Much have we loved you. But speechless was our love, and with veils has it been veiled.
Yet now it cries aloud unto you, and would stand revealed before you.
And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. 
It is often said that first-time authors put everything into their book – with novels, this is meant is a criticism.  Every idea is thrown in, to the detriment of the structure and unity required of fiction.  With non-fiction, with Let Not The Waves of the Sea, putting everything in is what makes Stephenson’s book so special.  It is not a memoir, not a travelogue, not a work of philosophy – or, rather, it is all of these things.  Let Not The Waves of the Sea is a response to grief and the outworking of it – this book is as full and varied and complex as the life it commemorates, and I consider it a privilege to have been able to read it.

The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

Rebecca at The Friday Project, an imprint of Harper Collins, very kindly sent me a copy of a teeny tiny book called The Tiny Wife, by Andrew Kaufman – who is apparently famous for All My Friends are Superheroes, of which I have to confess ignorance.  It immediately ticked a lot of boxes for me.  (1) it’s short, (2) it’s fantastic-but-not-fantasy, and (3) it has attractive silhouettey pictures which remind me of that wonderful scene in the penultimate Harry Potter film where the story of the Deathly Hallows is told.

The novella kicks off with a bank robbery – of sorts.  As the opening lines say:

The robbery was not without consequences.  The consequences were the point of the robbery.  It was never about money.  The thief didn’t even ask for any.  That it happened in a bank was incidental.  It could have just as easily happened in a train station or a high school or the Musée d’Orsay.
The thief takes, instead, takes the item of the greatest sentimental value to each person – be it a photograph, a watch, a Camus book or even a calculator.  The thief explains that these objects contain some of their possessors’ souls.

“Listen, I’m in a bit of a rush, so let me conclude.  When I leave here, I will be taking 51 percent of your souls with me.  This will have strange and bizarre consequences in your lives.  But more importantly, and I mean this quite literally, learn how to grow them back, or you will die.”
And he’s quite right.  The strange consequences occupy most of the rest of this slim volume.  One woman’s lion tattoo leaps from her ankle and chases her everywhere, a man’s office fills with water, another man’s mother keeps subdiving into smaller versions of herself… and Stacey, the tiny wife of the title, is gradually shrinking.  She and her husband, who occasionally takes the first-person narrative, must discover how to halt the process.

I loved the idea, as I said.  It’s just the kind of off-the-wall thing I like when I’m not curled up with a cosier 1930s novel.  And I did enjoy it – Kaufman obviously has an incredible imagination, and even a touch of sentimentality which is all too often missing from surreal works (the final line of The Tiny Wife is brilliant).  His style is great – deadpan in the way I love.  The more fantastic a story is, the more matter-of-fact the writing should be.  Yet sometimes the story itself all seemed a bit too off-the-wall – as though he were putting down the next zany idea to pop into his head.  The overall concept was great, but the details didn’t seem to wholly cohere – why were certain things happening in relation to certain objects being given?  What role did the thief play?  I don’t need everything to be explained in a book, far from it, but I like to know that the author has everything under control – that his imagination won’t escape his grasp.  Take the ur-text of all fantastic books, for example: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.   It’s totally mad, nothing makes sense or seems to relate to anything else – but somehow Lewis Carroll weaves a distorted internal logic throughout, and is obviously in control.

But it’s a faint criticism of a short, enjoyable (mad) read – I would love to read more of Kaufman’s work, and I can only see him getting better.

Others who got Stuck into it:
“Fun, cute, quirky and well worth a read.” – Boof, The Book Whisperer

“[…]what might have come across as overly whimsical instead becomes real, and carries the dramatic weight of a problem to be solved[…]” – David, Follow the Thread

Our Vicar’s Wife: Mr. Briggs’ Hat

StuckinaBook All , 9 Comments

Back in the spring my Mum/Our Vicar’s Wife/Anne featured in My Life in Books series chez Stuck-in-a-Book. The whole first series can be read if you click on the icon over there somewhere —–> and clicking on the link just above will take you to OVW’s particular one. OVW got a very enthusiastic response that week, and I’ve been hoping since then that she’d pen me a review for the blog. The good people of Little Brown kindly sent a review copy of Mr. Briggs’ Hat by Kate Colquhoun off to OVW and, without further ado, here are her thoughts. (As always, when I’m featuring friends’ and relations’ reviews, I expect my lovely, loyal blog readers to welcome them with open arms. This won’t be difficult with such a familiar figure as OVW, I’m sure).

Mr Briggs’ Hat by Kate Colquhoun: ‘A sensational account of Britain’s first Railway Murder’

From the moment I picked up Mr Briggs’ Hat I knew I was set on a truly Victorian quest. The dust jacket, with its ‘bloodstains’, black and red print, period font and perspective railway track was clearly going to draw the reader back to a time of sensational news reporting, embryonic police detection, circumstantial evidence and the hurly burly of 1864 London.

I settled into an armchair and began to read.

First, my eye was caught by a map of central London as it was in 1862. Smudged and dark, it was dominated by the river Thames, with narrow streets and alleys leading away into unknown territory. Having spent the past year researching into life in the London of this period I knew what I was likely to meet – but nothing prepared me for the matter of fact description of the ‘blood-drenched’ railway carriage on page 12. I read on, intrigued by the mixture of detective novel and historical guide to London. It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether Kate Colquhoun sought to give a factual description of events or whether what she had in mind was something in the line of a ‘Penny Dreadful’.

I read on.

The story is quite simple. Blood is found in a railway carriage. Murder appears to have been done, but no body is to be found. The only tangible clue is a somewhat battered hat. Upon this hat the entire plot pivots. Gradually details emerge about the victim. Against a background of respectable middle class contrasted with working class teetering into abject poverty and vice, the canvas is painted, the crime uncovered and then the race is on to find the murderer – or murderers. Everything hangs upon the circumstantial evidence of the hat – where it was bought, who bought it, who modified it, who left it in the carriage. As the police detective painstakingly works against the clock, a series of red herrings confuse the issue. The reader rises and falls with every new clue, new sighting, new evidence, new revelation or disappointment.

There is a phenomenal amount of detail in the book. Kate Colquhoun cannot be accused of skimping on her research. Perhaps from time to time there is a hint of repetition, a smidgen of ‘overkill’ in her style, but for the main part the author succeeds in maintaining the sense of a whodunit, rather than falling back into a less engaging stylistic form.

Halfway through the book I had a moment of uncertainty: was I reading fact or fiction? I turned to my husband for enlightenment. “Have you read the notes?” he asked.

Some people always flip to the end of a book before going to the front. I am not one of them. Others always look for a Contents page and muse long and hard upon it. Not I. If I had been either of these people it would have been obvious from the start that this was, if not a non-fictional historical account of the murder, at the very least a ‘factional’ one – with the very great quantity of fact made palatable by an excellent understanding of the need for narrative drive.

The notes are extremely helpful. Highlighted words and phrases from numbered pages enable the reader to unpick the finer detail. However, with nothing in the main text to hint at this largesse, it was lost on me during my first reading.

The case itself was of great interest to me as it contributed to significant changes in the law regarding the right of prisoners to speak in their own defence. I was particularly struck by the court scenes and the limitations of evidence at that time. I was also interested to see the prejudices at work at the time. With the rabble almost taking over the city every time there was a public hanging, it could be said that this book chimes with the spirit of summer 2011.

Did the power of public opinion make for a fair trial? Did the press conspire to rouse the feelings of the public against one man? Was nationality or class or level of education to blame for a miscarriage of justice? Did the representative of the Church tell the truth, or did he conspire with the powers that be in order to maintain the wider calm?

Read the book. Make up your own mind. Or not, as the case may be.

Mr Briggs’ Hat is published by Little Brown. They describe it as NON-FICTION.

Do you agree?