Hill

Two wintery novellas

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 11 Comments

I hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas! Perhaps I should apologise for being quite an intermittent blogger for the past month or two, but those sorts of apologies always presuppose that anybody has noticed! Let’s not flatter ourselves that your festive season was spoiled by my absence.

And since the festive season is not over, I wanted to share a couple of wintery novellas that I read recently. It’s a bit late to get in the mood for Christmas, but I think these would be rather lovely at any point during this time of year.

Lanterns Across the Snow (1987) by Susan Hill

There is a real luxury to this book – or at least to my 1987 edition from Michael Joseph. It’s less than 80 pages, but the wide margins, hardback cover, and occasional woodcut-esque illustraiionss by Kathleen Lindsley make it feel precious. I don’t doubt that it was designed to appeal as a Christmas present – and that is exactly what it was for me in 2019. This is how it opens:

Last night, the snow fell. And then I began to remember. I remembered all the things that I had forgotten. Or so it had seemed.

But not forgotten after all. They were all there, stored away like treasures.

Last night, the snow fell.

Fanny is an old woman. There is nobody left who remembers her childhood – which must be around the turn of the century. But she remembers – and she settles down to reflect on one particular Christmas, when she was nine years old.

Her father was a rector, and so Christmas is a time where the whole household is busy: not just the busyness of celebration and family, but the high point of the church calendar. While there will be a church-full on Christmas Day, the first day that Fanny remembers is Christmas Eve – and she slips down the path between rectory and church to join in a service that her father is giving to one man, the verger. Nobody else has attended, but Fanny’s presence is noticed by her father, even if he doesn’t comment. The words of Evensong are there in the dialogue – “O Lord, save they people / And bless thine inheritance” – that have a beautiful timelessness to them. They are words I say and hear once a month in our local church still, and they are woven into Fanny’s memories as the rhythm of everyday life – and communication with a much-loved, now long-gone, Father.

Over Christmas Day itself, two important things happen to people in the parish. A baby is born; an elderly parishioner dies. We see them through the excited, cautious, wondering perspective of young Fanny – filtered quietly through the distanct perspective of old Fanny. Though birth and death are, of course, defining experiences, this particular birth and death do not define Fanny. These are important things that once happened to other people, near her – remembered as a particularly significant Christmas, but moreso as representative of a world that she once lived in that is far away now.

Lanterns Across the Snow is a simple story, simply told, but more than the sum of its parts. Hill laces it beautifully with emotion and reflection that is too subtle to be simply nostalgia – and yet, nostalgia is the best word I can think for it. The novella is moving and poignant. There are no surprise twists or sudden ironies. It is a beautiful little tale and perfect for a cold winter evening.

Snowflake (1952) by Paul Gallico

There is something about Michael Joseph and beautiful little wintery books, as they also published this 64-page novella by Paul Gallico. If you have much familiarity with Gallico, you’ll know that he can veer in different directions. Some of his books are fey, whimsical, and maybe even sickly sweet. Some are vicious, dark, even shocking. And many combine elements of the two in a way that feels distinctly Gallicoian.

Here’s how the story opens:

The Snowflake was born on a cold, winter’s day far up in the sky, many miles above the earth.

Her birth took place in the heart of a grey cloud that sswept over the land driven by icy winds.

It all came about from one moment to the next. At first there was only the swollen cloud moving over the tops of the mountains. Then it began to snow. And where but a second before there had been nothing, now there was Snowflake and all her brothers and sisters falling from the sky.

The rest of the novella follows Snowflake’s life – and Gallico does lean into anthropomorphism. Depending on your taste, he may lean too far into it. It’s this element of the story that brings both the fey and the occasional shock. Snowflake finds herself lying on the ground, enjoying the beautiful surroundings – then in sharp pain when a sledge cuts through her. Being piled on by further layers of snow crushes her shape and makes it hard to breath. Respite seems to come in being massed into the form of a snowman – but it is also humiliating and sore.

Who would ever think of snowflakes feeling pain? There is much that is about beauty, performance and sparkle – the sort of things you might expect from a Disneyfication of snow – but Gallico insists upon the rough with the smooth. Melting is next – but don’t worry, it isn’t armageddon for little Snowflake. Instead, she meets Raindrop in a stream. They marry (!) and have children (!!) and despite how ridiculous that sounds, there is something curiously magical in the way Gallico describes their contented time living together in a lake.

But this is temporary. They eventually are siphoned out of the lake – and, worst of worst fears, used in a firefighter’s hose to be sprayed into a fire. And so the exciting, unexpected story continues.

If someone described Snowflake to me, I’m not sure I would rush towards it. But Gallico is so unusual and excellent a writer that he persuadses the reader – this reader, at least – to come along for the ride in the most unusual of stories. It is curiously emotional, and he whirls together the beautiful, poignant, fanciful and dark into one surprisingly successful mix.

Don’t be fooled by that lovely cover. This isn’t a story for children. Rather, it ends up being a strangely affecting take on the highs and lows of almost any life – and the hope for satisfaction when it is all looked back upon as one whole.

Novella a Day in May: Days 9 and 10

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 11 Comments

I will try to keep doing these daily, and I am reading novellas daily, but I had so little to say about Day 9 that I thought I’d better roll these into one…

Day 9: Every Eye (1956) by Isobel English

One of the shortest Persephone books, I’d somehow started and quit this one before. And I thought I’d go back and… well, I can see why I didn’t much bother about it before. It’s about Hatty going away away on honeymoon with a much younger husband, Stephen. That’s the present day plot, but much of it looks back at previous journeys, previous relationships, and particularly her aunt Cynthia and Hatty’s ill-fated relationship with a man called Jasper.

Some people really love this book, but I found the whole thing both confusing and negligible. I often didn’t know which timeline we were in, as it flitted back and half between paragraphs, and there was nothing in it to capture my attention. The writing, in isolation, is precise and rather lovely – but in such a way that I never felt particularly keen to look at sentences out of isolation. As a whole, it felt like a stagnant 119 pages to me.

A Change for the Better - WikipediaDay 10: A Change for the Better (1969) by Susan Hill

I had much more success with today’s novella, which I loved. Hill was still only her mid-20s when she wrote this story of people in a seaside community – and if you are immediately reminded of Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, then keep that comparison in mind. If Hill’s writing is not quite like Taylor’s, being here a little less piercing and a little more comforting, these characters and stories could easily have been lifted from a Taylor novel.

The canvas is a little less wide, and I think that is to the novel’s advantage – many books that take a small society as their scene end up cramming in too many characters. Here, it is really two households that are focal. One is Deirdre Fount and her mother Mrs Oddicott, who run the draper’s, and Deirdre Fount’s 11-year-old son from her brief marriage. The marriage had been impetuous and ended in a wise divorce, with the absent Fount mentioned as seldom as possible.

Deirdre Fount had never questioned her mother’s view of the whole affair, had been entirely influenced in her behaviour and beliefs by Mrs Oddicott. She found it hard now to separate what actually had happened from what her mother had always predicted would happen, and she could remember no conversations with Aubrey, no relationship, no intimacy, that was not intruded upon by her mother. It was as though, having used men to provide them with a status and offspring, to ward off the shames of spinsterhood, they were ready to discard them and sink back into their closed, female society.

As you can see, they don’t have the healthiest relationship – but Hill gives subtlety to the usual portrait of a domineering mother, because the power shifts back and forth between them. It even passes to the 11 year old. Each needs the others, but also needs freedom, and the uneasy dynamic never stays still.

The other household is an older couple living in a hotel – Major Carpenter and his wife Flora. He is one of the most realistically infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His life is spent in selfish complaining, but each complaint is phrased in a way that makes Flora seem selfish, thoughtless or hectoring. Throughout the book, but particularly in scenes with these characters, Hill is brilliant at dialogue. It’s impossible to refute what Major Carpenter says, because he uses logic like a weapon. But, oh, he is appalling. But even he is treated with some sympathy – part of his unkind and self-centred nature comes from a terrible fear of illness and death.

Alongside nuanced character portraits, there is plenty that happens in A Change for the Better. Nothing is static, even in lives that don’t feel like they are developing. It all reminded me a little of the ‘well-made play’ – characters neatly doing enough to make a good, solid plot. And I found it absolutely enthralling and wonderful, a perfect balance between event and observation.

The only thing I would add, which could be either criticism or praise depending on your point of view, is that A Change for the Better feels very like a novel by someone who has learned more from reading than from life. I suppose most of us end up learning more from reading, since it encompasses much wider experience – but this feels especially like a novel built from reading many other novels. A few details suggest that it’s set contemporaneously, in the 1960s, but without those I could easily have believed it 1930s or even earlier. All this means that it doesn’t quite have the vividness of lived experience, but that is a quality that I am willing to sacrifice for something as satisfying as A Change for the Better.

The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

Occasionally I post a book on Instagram which gets a chorus of approval from people who’ve loved it. Never more so than when I posted that I was reading Susan Hill’s 1982 The Magic Apple Tree. It sounds like a children’s book but it is not – the subtitle ‘A Country Year’ gives a bit more of a clue about what you’ll find inside. This is a non-fiction look at life in Hill’s Oxfordshire village – called Barley here, though I imagine that’s a pseudonym – over the course of a year.

The book is divided into the four seasons, and each section starts with a description of the titular apple tree (after, in my edition, a beautiful full-page engraving by John Lawrence. They look like woodcuts but are credited as engravings, so let’s go with that. Here is the opening to the section on spring:

The blossom opens slowly, slowly on the apple tree.  One day the boughs are grey, though with the swellings of the leaves to come visible if you look closely.  The next day and the next, here and there, a speck of white, and then a sprinkling, as though someone has thrown a handful of confetti up into the air and let it fall, anyhow, over the branches.

The weather is grey, it is cold still. The blossom looks like snow against the sky. And then, one morning, there is snow, snow at the very end of April, five or six inches of it, after a terrible stormy night, and rising from it, and set against the snow-filled sky, the little tree is puffed out with its blossom, a crazy sight, like some surrealist painting, and all around us, in every other garden, there is the white apple and the pink cherry blossom, thick as cream, in a winter landscape.

And another day, just before the blossom withers and shrinks back into the fast opening leaves, there is the softest of spring mornings, at last it is touched by the early sun, and the apple tree looks as it should look, if the world went aright, in springtime.

Though Hill is writing about one particular year, much of the book could be about any year. The seasons are, of course, roughly the same – though with enough differences to make each year distinct for a bit, before they all fade into one. But there is no plot that puts The Magic Apple Tree specifically into any particular 1980s year. In any approximate time could Hill have discussed what she grew, what she cooked, which village events she attended, how her neighbours dealt with cold weather and unpassable roads, and so on and so forth. In some ways, it could be similar to 40 years later – though now, living in my own Oxfordshire village, I am rather more easily connected with the outside world.

What I most loved in the book were flavours of the village community. The brothers who lived in a run-down house, selling illicitly made cider and completing each other’s sentences. The amiable rivalry at the village flower and produce show. The bartering system of goods, and the friendly competence of villagers who’ve lived in the same spot for decades or generations.

Hill and her then-husband Stanley Wells are not among those who’ve lived there for long. They are relative newcomers – and I can attest that it is quite easy to become part of an Oxfordshire village on short acquaintanceship. Certainly, Hill seems at the centre of activity. There is an element of sharpness that those of us who read her book blog will remember. She is certainly sure of her views, and offers them decidedly. It makes The Magic Apple Tree all the more distinct, as nobody else would or could have written this sort of book with precisely her perspective. Sometimes she offers her opinions as fact, but that is all part of the character of spending the year in her company.

Large sections of The Magic Apple Tree are about gardening and cooking, and these are the parts that I enjoyed a little less. Hill includes recipes and, while some recipes are eternal, others are curiously tied to their decade. And I am not a gardener, so am unlikely to take any of the advice she gives in that quarter – most of her advice being about the growing of fruit and vegetables, which she much prefers to growing flowers and non-edible plants.

But there is still plenty to delight, in the less practically minded parts of the book. Hill’s perceptive eye is turned not just on her fellow humans but on all the other living beings around her. Any description she gives of flora or fauna is done with beauty and accuracy, and without the cluttering of undue sentiment. She is able to delight in the active world of nature around her, and we can share in that delight, without it ever stepping in the fey. For example…

On the last Sunday in August, at about eleven o’clock, in the morning, I carried a pile of bolted lettuces and old pea haulms down to the compost heap, and, as I was stuffing it down, I glanced up into the Buttercup field. It was a fine morning, the early mist was rolling back across the Fen and cows and trees and fences were emerging from it in the sunshine. Near at hand, the grass was glittering with dew. And not ten yards away from me, looking straight into my face, was a dog fox, big and bold and handsome, sniffing the air. I waited. He waited. He had been on his way to our garden, there was no doubt, at all, he would have been up and over the stone wall and among the hens in seconds. And the hens were all out of their run and scratching about the garden.

Then the fox caught my scent and turned and went streaking away down the slope towards the willows and up the Rise on the opposite side, brush up, ears pricked, and I called the hens in with a handful of corn, and shut the gate on them, just in case.

I really loved The Magic Apple Tree. I might have loved it still more if there had been a little more on fellow villagers and less on practical advice, but that is by the by. It is charming and honest and vivid, with much to recognise and to remember.

H is for Hill

StuckinaBook All , 20 Comments

This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

How many books do I have by Susan Hill?

As always, I haven’t quite remembered to include all the books I have in the photo. Every time, I vow I will… anyway, there are 16 books in the pic, but I actually have 17 because I forgot to check my memoir shelves, where I would have found The Magic Apple Tree.

How many of these have I read?

Only seven of the ones that I own – Howards End is on the Landing, Jacob’s Room Is Full of Books, A Kind Man, Black Sheep, The Beacon, In the Springtime of the Year, and The Bird of Night. And a couple of the short stories from The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read but I don’t remember which ones…

How did I start reading Susan Hill?

Quite unusually – it was actually a book called The Battle for Gullywith, which I was sent as a review book in the early days of this blog. I don’t think it has been one of her greatest commercial or critical successes, and it certainly wasn’t aimed at me and my age group. But in that era of blogging, Hill was herself quite active – and, indeed, linked to my blog and occasionally commented on it. She was a forthright presence, for sure, and at some point decided it wasn’t for her – but she is the only author I’ve known to be a real part of the book blogging world. Her most iconic moment was doing a reply to a student who’d been asked to compare The Woman in White and its influence on The Woman in Black – and said ”I’ve never read The Woman in White.”

Anyway, it wasn’t much later that I read the wonderful Howards End is on the Landing, and that sent me off on a hunt for more.

General impressions…

I could be wrong, but I think Hill is best known for I’m the King of the Castle and The Woman in Black, and I haven’t read those. She is an astonishingly prolific author, and writes in quite separate genres and worlds. I don’t have any interest in her crime fiction or her children’s fiction, but I love the short literary novels and, of course, her books about reading. In the former category, In the Springtime of the Year is a brilliant book about grief, and I also really got a lot out of the spin on misery memoir The Beacon. I haven’t read a novel by her that I haven’t admired.

But the books for which I love Hill most are, of course, Howards End is on the Landing and, to a lesser extent, Jacob’s Room is full of Books. Reading memoirs are everywhere nowadays, and I will continue to lap them all up, but Hill was among the first and among the best. Neither book quite does what it says it’ll do, but they are wonderful nonetheless.

Any recommendations from the Hill books I have waiting?

Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill

StuckinaBook All , , 17 Comments

Jacob's Room is full of booksI was an enormous fan of Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill – a book all about her year of reading only books from her shelves that morphed into a series of short essays about anything and everything to do with reading. It was bookish, opinionated, and (I thought) an inevitable delight to anybody who loved reading. About that I was wrong – it divided people – but I have re-read and re-loved it, and have been waiting eagerly for the sort-of sequel for as long as I’ve known it might be a thing. Jacob’s Room is Full of Books (2017) was never in doubt as one of my Project 24 books.

I’ve been following the development of the book with interest. Ages ago, I saw Virginia Woolf is in the Kitchen listed on Amazon, and asked Susan about it on Twitter – yes, she confirmed, it was sort of a sequel to Howards End is on the Landing, but only about women writers. At one point it became Jacob’s Room is Too Full of Books, with a cover design on Amazon. Who knows when that changed, and when the title was changed, but what we’ve got instead is ‘a year of reading’ – she follows the calendar from January to December, talking about what she’s reading and what she’s thinking about, interspersed with notes on nature and life. The title doesn’t make sense (yes, Jacob’s Room is a novel by Woolf, but where Howards End is on the Landing and, indeed, Virginia Woolf is in the Kitchen can describe the place of books in the house – Jacob’s Room is Full of Books doesn’t mean anything, and will confuse anybody who doesn’t know the Woolf novel) – so, yes, it doesn’t make sense. But I don’t care. I still loved this book and raced through it in a handful of days – even while trying to savour it.

Though the calendar year structures the book, Hill darts all over the place. Sometimes for a moment merely – she throws in the thought ‘does Donald Trump ever read books?’ in a line or two – sometimes at greater length. She talks about the authors she loves, from Dickens to Ford Madox Ford to Ladybird Books. She talks about the literary scene – judging book prizes, getting into hot water in columns. She writes about the writer’s life. She writes quite a lot about things that aren’t connected with books, particularly flora and fauna. It’s wonderfully conversational and far-ranging – not as siloed as Howards End is on the Landing, but equally delightful to dip in and out of. Every page will have something to engage with. I couldn’t help picking it up and indulging when I should have been reading something for book group or the podcast. I loved it.

There are definite flaws. Hill repeats herself – the same points come up almost word-for-word at different times about (say) whether or not you can ‘catch’ a writing style – and there are silly errors (88 Charing Cross Road should have been caught – and somebody at the publishers will feel red-faced about putting an apostrophe in Howard’s [sic!] End is on the Landing on the dustjacket). Some of the paragraphs end in with that sort of trite beat that I find so frustrating in fact or fiction. This kind. To prove an argument. Perhaps.

And, yes, Hill is extremely opinionated – which is anybody’s prerogative, of course, though it is refreshing when she admits that she could be wrong about something. I can be very opinionated about books myself, but the only times it annoyed me a little were when Hill seemed to think her opinions were fact – or when she claimed that ‘nobody’ read such-and-such author. On almost every occasion, I had read that author. And this… well, gosh.

The Olivia Manning trilogies have grown in stature since they were first published – as some books do. They have already stood the test of time and I am sure they will go on doing so, while novels by many of her female contemporaries have all sunk without trace. Ivy Compton-Burnett, anyone? Kay Dick?

What a bizarre thing to say about Ivy Compton-Burnett! Not only is she (to my mind) one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, she is also in print with NYRB Classics. No mean feat, so many decades after she wrote – and hardly sinking without trace.

But this is, really, one of the things I find so beguiling and enjoyable about Jacob’s Room is Full of Books. Hill may be a little more strident than I can bring myself to be, but it’s still wonderful to hear from somebody who cares so passionately about books, who has read avidly for so long, and (incidentally – but truly incidentally) has met so many of the people she’s talking about. Some people complained that Howards End is on the Landing felt name-droppy. It didn’t to me, and this doesn’t, but perhaps others would find it so? Anyway – Hill and I do not share a taste at all, though there are overlaps. We both love Dickens and Woolf, for example. Our experiences with To The Lighthouse are so similar that I wrote ‘yes! yes! yes!’ in the margin. But there are definite divergences. She writes so enticingly about The Masters by C.P. Snow that I almost wanted to go and hunt it out – despite having read it earlier in the year and finding it one of the most boring, pointless books I’ve read in years. She – as mentioned – does not properly appreciate the genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

But disagreement makes bookish discussion all the more engaging. Obviously it’s not a duologue – though I suppose I could reply on Twitter or something – but it feels like a deep, thorough natter about books. I could have done with more about reading, more specifics about books, and perhaps a bit less about birds and whatnot (though plenty will welcome those seasonal variations) – but I loved what I got. Susan Hill has a strong personality, or at least a strong persona, and this book couldn’t be written by anybody else – but I hope she writes at least one more in this series. For now, I’m thrilled to be able to put this one next to Howards End is on the Landing on my books-about-books shelf.

 

The Bird of Night by Susan Hill

StuckinaBook All , , 9 Comments

My theme of paperbacks-I-took-to-Edinburgh continues; on the way back, I read most of The Bird of Night (1972) by Susan Hill, and then finished it later that weekend.

The Bird of Night

I’ve read quite a few of Hill’s novellas over the years, though mostly the ones that have come out more recently – so it was interesting to see how she was writing 40+ years earlier in her career. There is even a very young, quite morose, picture of her on the back of my 1976 Penguin paperback, when Hill was presumably around my age. Unlike me, though, Hill had already published six novels by the time The Bird of Night hit the shelves.

The opening sets the tone of the novel:

Once, during the summer we spent at Kerneham, Francis locked himself in the church for a whole night. I found him there, at five o’clock the next morning, huddled up beneath the pulpit. It was cold. He could not feel safe anywhere else, he said, and then he began to weep, as so often happened, and shouted at me through his weeping, to understand the truth, that he deserved to be locked up, why would I not admit that and see to it, why had I driven him to do it for himself?

That is what I remembered this morning but I do not know why one bubble should break upon the surface rather than another. I should be content that I remember.

Francis is Francis Croft, a renowned and garlanded poet (though Hill wisely gives us, as far as I can recall, no lines of his poetry – his greatness is not tested on the page); the narrator is Harvey Lawson. He is describing their relationship from the distance of years – where he is the protector of Croft’s reputation. Or, rather, he keeps mostly schtum about Croft and insists that there are no papers to share (though there are). And his reflections take him back to their shared history: they meet incidentally, and develop an intense and restless friendship. It is intense chiefly because of Croft’s mental illness and descents into madness.

And this is the trajectory the novel follows. Somehow it is hard to describe the plot; it is more a portrait of a friendship (or more? It is never clear). But the faint structure matters little, and that is because of the strength of Hill’s writing here. I always think she’s at her best when she is looking in detail at the minutaie of relationships between individuals, or characters’ introspections and self-analysis (and how rare is that? Usually that’s where authors fall down). Here is Harvey describing looking after Francis during his most troubled times:

But the cycle of Francis’s madness was never a regular or predictable one. I had prepared myself for days, perhaps weeks, spent closeted in that dismal flat by candlelight, having to comfort and support him through his deepest apathy and depression. Certainly, for the next two days he stayed in bed or sat slouched in a chair looking as though he were half drugged, his eyes blank and all his attention turned inward upon himself. He hardly spoke to me and when he did answer a persistent question, it was with a monosyllable. He would not shave or eat or read, but only sat up once in a while and muttered to his own hands. “It’s all wrong, I tell you, it’s all wrong.” Once I caught him staring at himself in a mirror, his face very close to the glass. He looked puzzled. “I’m afraid we have not been introduced,” he said to his reflection. “I do not know your face. Should I know your face? Is this a good party?”

Much of the novella follows this pattern – a detailed, nuanced, and interesting depiction of mental health and a troubled friendship.

Of the many ways in which Hill writes fiction, I think this might be my favourite – something like an extended character study. I have read somewhere that Hill doesn’t rate this amongst her best novels, but I would put it up with In the Springtime of the Year as containing the best of her writing that I’ve read.

Diana Athill and Susan Hill

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , 5 Comments

These two books (Midsummer Night in the Workhouse and other stories by Diana Athill and Black Sheep by Susan Hill) have very little in common, other than that (a) the authors have ‘hill’ in their name, and (b) they are the final two books for my Reading Presently project and this is the last day of the year.  So I shall consider them in turn, and only if I’m very lucky will I find anything to link them…

Mum gave me Midsummer Night in the Workhouse as a cheer-up present a few months ago, and a Persephone book is (of course) always very, very welcome.  One of my very favourite reads in 2013 was Diana Athill’s memoir about being an editor, Stet (indeed, I claimed in Kim’s Book Bloggers Advent Calendar that it was my favourite, but while compiling my list I remembered another which beat it – full top ten to be unveiled in January, donchaknow) so I thought it was about time that I read some of her fiction.  Turns out there isn’t that much of it, and she speaks quite disparagingly of the whole process in Somewhere Towards The End (which I’m reading at the moment; spoiler alert, it doesn’t compare to Stet in my mind).

As my usual disclaimer, whenever I write about short stories – they’re very difficult to write about.  But they do seem the perfect medium for the expert editor, depending – as they do, more than any other fiction – upon precision and economy.  And I thought (says he, being very brief) that Athill was very good at it.  My favourite was probably ‘The Return’, about a couple of young women who are taken to an island by local ‘tour guide’ sailors – it was just so brilliantly structured, managing to be tense, witty, and wry at the same time.  But the last line of ‘Desdemona’ was exceptionally good (and you know how I like my last lines to stories…)

My only complaint with the collection is that they are a bit too samey occasionally – which might be explained by the new preface, where Athill explains that she mostly wrote from her own experience.  And her own experience seemed to be observing a fair amount of unsatisfactory marriages, and having a rather casual attitude towards marital fidelity (more on that when I get around to writing about Somewhere Towards The End.)

Her character and voice seem better established in her non-fiction, but this collection is certainly very good – and Persephone should be celebrated for collecting and publishing something which had been largely ignored in Athill’s career.  Hurrah for Persephone!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Colin (yes, he blogs too, and apparently will be doing so more regularly in 2014) gave me Susan Hill’s latest novella, Black Sheep (which was on my Amazon wishlist) for Christmas, and I read it on Boxing Day while laid up with that cold.  I’m always so grateful that I gave Susan Hill’s writing a second go, after being underwhelmed by the children’s book I read first – and I have a special soft spot for the novellas which have been coming out over the past few years.

Those of you who follow Hill on Twitter, or remember her erstwhile blog, will know that she seems to finish a book in the time it takes most of us to boil a kettle.  Well, more power to her, say I – and I’ve been impressed by The Beacon and A Kind Man.  I hadn’t realised that I read those in 2009 and 2011 – well, time flies, and perhaps Hill does pause for breath between books.  Black Sheep is not only being marketed in a similar way, with equally lovely colours/image/format, but does – whether Hill has done this deliberately or not – belong in the same stable.  The three novellas have definite differences, and possibly started from very different inspirations, but they also share a great deal – all three concern remote, almost isolated communities, the complicated lives of simple folk, and (it must be conceded) a fair dose of misery.  Or perhaps just a dose of hardship, because the three novels all seem to come near to gratuitous misery, and then duck away.

Black Sheep takes place in a mining community in the past… I’m not sure how far in the past, or if we’re told, but definitely an era when people rarely left their village and almost no outside-communication took place.  The village (called ‘Mount of Zeal’) is divided into the pit, Lower Terrace, Middle Terrace, and Upper Terrace (known as Paradise).  We follow the fortunes of one overcrowded family home as the children grow up.  Who to marry, whether or not to get a job in the mine, how to cope with illness and grief – these are the overriding concerns of the different children and their parents – but these topics are less important than the way in which Hill writes about them, and the community they live in.

It is such a brilliant depiction of a village.  Setting the community on the side of this hill, leading from Paradise to the hell of the mine, may seem like a heavy-handed metaphor – but more significant is the claustrophobia of the village from any vantage, whether in the pit or in the fanciest inspector’s house.  We follow perhaps the most important character, the youngest boy Ted, when he emerges from the village into the sheep-filled fields above – a journey seldom made by anybody, for some reason – and there is a palpable sense of narrative and readerly relief.  Even while giving us characters we care about, Hill makes the whole atmosphere suffocating and, yes, claustrophobic.

Of these three novellas, I still think The Beacon is the best – but the setting of Black Sheep is probably the most accomplished.  It lacks quite the brilliance of structure which Hill demonstrates elsewhere, and comes nearest to a Hardyesque piling on of unlikely misery, but that can’t really dent the confident narrative achievement readers have come to expect from Hill.  As a follow-on read from Ten Days of Christmas, it was a bit of a shock – but, if you’re feeling emotionally brave, this triumvirate of novellas is definitely worth seeking out.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

And there you have it.  No noticeable link between the two – but my Reading Presently challenge is finished!  I realise it isn’t as interesting for vicarious readers as A Century of Books, because (presumably) it makes no difference to you whether a reviewed book was a gift or a purchase, but I’ve enjoyed seeing what people have recommended over the years.  At the very least, it has assuaged a fair amount of latent guilt!  I still have at least 30 books people have given me, and I’ll be prioritising a few for ACOB 2014, but I’ll also enjoy indulging my own whims to a greater extent.

Appropriately enough, five of my Top Ten Books were gifts, and five were not – considering this year I read 50 books that were gifts and just over 50 that were not (finishing, because of DPhil, headaches, and new job, rather fewer books than usual).  All will be revealed soon, as promised…

A Little More Than Kin

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments

You know how I love novellas – the shorter and punchier the better – and might have noticed that I was impressed by Susan Hill’s The Beacon. Indeed, it’s my Bloggers’ Book of the Month choice for February, at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green.

That made me pretty excited when Hill announced that her latest novella was coming out – A Kind Man is obviously being marketed in a similar style to The Beacon (although, tut tut Chatto and/or Windus for putting an apostrophe in Howards End is on the Landing on the dustjacket. You win back some of those points for Mark McEvoy’s cover image. And for sending me a review copy – thanks!) If it could be as good as The Beacon, then I was very keen to read it. Also, fact fans, A Kind Man was published fifty years to the day after Hill’s debut novel. Gosh!

A Kind Man is something of a deceptive title, for most of the novella, as we actually see the world through the eyes of that man’s wife, Eve. In fact, the narrative opens with Eve making a solitary trip to an isolated graveyard – as the reader soon suspects, to visit the grave of her daughter, who died at three years old. We then move back to Eve’s family, and her courtship with Tommy – the kind man of the title – is outlined, as is their marriage. Tommy’s kindness is almost his only attribute, and certainly the most distinctive. He is made almost characterless in his ordinariness – rarely do we see anything from his perspective. This, of course, makes it all the more striking when we do; for instance, this excerpt from towards the end of the novel, retelling an event we had already seen from Eve’s perspective very early on:

As he had grown up he had watched the young men around him find girls and make them wives and start families and had naturally felt that he would do so too but not understood how to choose. He had looked at some and they were pretty, at others and they were pert, at the ones with kind faces and the hard ones, the laughing ones, the sad and those old before they had had time to be young, but walking by the canal he had seen Eve and she was different. How she was and why and what made him know it, he had wondered every day since.
I do not want to spoil this novella. Too many reviews give too much away. Plot is not the only reason to read fiction, far from it, but the novella which spins on an axis around a central point should not have that point disclosed from the outset; it tips the story off-balance. Suffice to say that is outside of the ordinary, although Hill wisely does not allow it to change the style or genre of the work. If the event would have performed better in a novel by Barbara Comyns (oh, how I would love to have read Comyns’ take on it!) then that is not Hill’s fault; I can’t think of any novelist who can approach the outlandish in so calm and involving a way as Comyns. Hill, however, finds the moral dilemmas caused by the strange and unusual (a thing Comyns would never do) and these form a central force of this beautifully forceful book.

Although this strange event would dominate most novels, and lingers longest in the mind, I think Hill is actually rather stronger at the more simple depictions of grief and mourning. These are emotions she dealt with brilliantly in In the Springtime of the Year, and in A Kind Man they play central roles, and are again shown convincingly and movingly – although (as is right) with a different slant from that previous novella. Everyday life and the dynamics of Eve being a wife, a sister, a daughter, a villager – these are the bread-and-butter of any work of fiction, and Hill is expert at them. I love Hill’s appreciation of the countryside, which comes through in occasional unusual and evocative phrases.

As she rounded the peak, she looked up and ahead to the far slope where the sheep were with their lambs, dozens of them scattered about the hillside like scraps of paper thrown up in the air and allowed to settle anywhere.If these strengths fade into the background once the twist of the novella arrives, that is to be expected – but we should not forget how rare it is to find a novelist who excels at both unexpected, and more predictable, narrative events. Far too rare.

A Kind Man is sombre and wise; it is almost delicate in its subtlety, but at its depth is a fable as sturdy as they come. Sorry to be vague about it, but you’ll thank me once you’ve read it. No other pen but Susan Hill’s could have written this novella in this way – and I hope there will be more in the same mould.

In The Springtime of the Year – Susan Hill

StuckinaBook All , 12 Comments

In the run up to Christmas, we briefly discussed Festive Reading, and I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t prepare that much, and had never really thought about it. It doesn’t get much more unseasonal than the book I was reading in late December – Susan Hill’s In the Springtime of the Year. Look, another season is right there in the title… and, do you know what, I rather wish I had read it in Spring now. (I also rather wish I knew whether or not seasons should be capitalised, so answers on a postcard please. Or, alternatively, in the comments box.)

I’ve made no secret about my love of Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, and shortly after reading that I made my first acquaintance with one of her novels, the captivating and unsettling The Beacon (more here) – I can’t remember who recommended I try In The Springtime of the Year next, but thank you whoever it was – it’s another short, sad, and often rather brilliant book. Published in 1974, it’s theme is eternal – the loss of a loved one. In this instance, it is the sudden and accidental death of a young man called Ben, killed by a falling tree in the opening pages of the novel. The novel follows his wife Ruth, in her early twenties, coping with his death, and coming to terms with it.

I daresay that sounds quite slight as a synopsis, but some of my favourite writers are those who can weave an involving narrative without huge set pieces or plot turns. The biggest event having happened in the first few pages, this novel is more a study of grief than a rollercoaster of events. From the immediate aftermath; the funeral; Ruth’s difficult relations with Ben’s family; closer kinship with Ben’s younger brother; dealing with Ben’s possessions; moving onwards to the future without him – each stage is subtly and intimately shown – never too much introspection, and always writing of so high a standard that it doesn’t feel like cliche. This sort of writing (especially in the days of soap operas) must be incredibly difficult to do, for the path is so strewn with cliches, but Hill makes it look easy.

She thought suddenly, I am alone, I am entirely alone on this earth; there are no other people, no animals or birds or insects, no breaths or heartbeats, there is no growing, the leaves do not move and grass is dry. There is nothing.

And this was a new feeling. No, not a feeling. Loneliness was a feeling, and a fear of the empty house and of the long days and nights, and the helpless separation from Ben – feelings. This was different. A condition. A fact. Simply, being absolutely alone.
My one problem with the novel was that everybody in the village seemed to feel Ben’s death incredibly deeply – the novel states that even those familiar with death were especially affected by his. I suppose that isn’t a problem, but it might have been more realistic to contrast Ruth’s deep grief with those around who, though sad, cannot feel it to the same extent. For that is how such deaths affect neighbourhoods, is it not?

Nobody very close to me has ever died, not yet, and I still found this novel incredibly affecting. I also felt – though, again, I cannot support this from my own experience – that In the Springtime of the Year could be a huge comfort to anyone going through that. Or perhaps to those around them, to help them understand. I’m in danger of getting emotional here, aren’t I? And I shouldn’t forget that Susan Hill hasn’t set out to write a grievance counselling book – though there may be overlap, this is primarily a very well written, subtle, and touching novel, and that is certainly achievement enough.

Hilly Region

StuckinaBook All , 15 Comments

As you’ll have read, I’m rather a fan of Howards End is on the Landing – and it sent me off in pursuit of other Susan Hill books. I had read The Battle for Gullywith, which was ok, but nothing to set my reading pulse into overdrive… but now I want more and more. Spotting that The Beacon was just coming into paperback, I gave Vintage Press an email… well, they didn’t reply, and I gave up the idea, but then the book arrived so somebody must have read the email… thank you Mysterious Lovely Person at Vintage Press.

I’d had my eye on The Beacon for a while, mostly because of the stunning cover (Susan Hill does have some good fortune with these, does she not?) and because the premise sounds interesting. Essentially, it’s a response to the vogue for childhood misery memoirs. Made famous by David Pelzer and his A Child Called It, the genre has seemingly thousands of titles, all with more or less the same cover – a white background with a sepia-child on it. Three were written by people from a family who grew up in my village, in fact. Frankly, I haven’t the smallest idea why anybody publishes or reads these. I completely understand why people write them – it must be a great catharsis – but my only experience, with Pelzer’s first book, left me feeling voyeuristic. Many of them have been written, but I think Susan Hill’s novelistic response is unusual, maybe even unique.

The Prime family live in a small North Country village, in an old farmhouse called The Beacon. The narrative moves between two time frames – we see Colin, May, Frank, and Berenice as they grow up – and we see May, still living at The Beacon years later, dealing with the death of their mother. As one strand follows the children’s gradual maturing, moving away from home to marriage or college or the city, the other strand shows the same family on the other side of a life-changing event. Not the death of their mother Bertha – that is simply the catalyst for the novel’s action – but the book Frank published about their childhood. The Cupboard Under The Stairs tells of his childhood or neglect, torture, and misery – at the hands of his parents, and even his siblings.

Except none of it is true… or is it? Though the other children – now grown-up – come together in horror and denial, yet the doubt which spreads throughout their community is also planted in all of their minds. A very faint doubt, but doubt nonetheless. But for the most part, when the doubt does not assail them, they cannot understand the motives their brother had:

How can you grow up with someone from birth and know nothing about them, she thought, share parents and brother and sister with them, share a house, rooms, a table, holidays, play, illnesses, games and not know them?
The Beacon is a very clever, subtle novella. Like many short books, it packs a more powerful punch than a longer book could have done. The emotions of the characters are never over the top, but understated and quietly devastating. Hill wisely doesn’t ruin the effect by dwelling on Frank’s imagined torture – it is not that kind of book. Instead it is a novella driven by characters’ relationships with one another, and how much in them is unvoiced and unvoiceable. Hill also has the power to make the final few pages of a book – indeed, final few words – make you gasp out loud, and want to start the book all over again. Though I don’t love this book in the way that I love Howards End is on the Landing, that is because The Beacon is a book to be admired and appreciated, rather than loved – I’m definitely pleased I revisited Susan Hill, as I feel there’s a lot more for me to discover. Next up is In the Springtime of the Year.

Suggestions for more, please?