a gallimaufry

The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern

Sometimes I reach the end of a book and really don’t know what to make of it. The Starless Sea has been one of those books.

(Study of an owl, pen and ink, French school, late seventeenth century; found here)

Never having read Morgenstern’s bestselling first novel, The Night Circus, I had no particular expectations of The Starless Sea other than stronger wrists as it is a 500-page tome. However, the promise of a quest inspired by a strange book, a dangerous secret club and a ‘subterranean labyrinth filled with stories’ tempted me to borrow it from the English-language section of my local library. Wouldn’t you?

The principal narrative in the novel follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student writing a thesis on video games who is also a devoted reader, and his discovery of a mis-shelved old book with no publication information. When he starts reading it, he discovers an incident from his own childhood has been printed in it. How could that be possible? The book is decorated with symbols of a sword, a key and a bee, and soon he has left the university campus for New York and a masked ball and adventures. His story is interspersed with stories from the book itself, from other books, from a diary; despite this increasingly complex layered structure it is not difficult to follow what is going on.

For what is remarkable about this novel is its lack of tension and its promotion of symbolism. I know – how can a book including a dangerous secret club lack tension? It does. The club swiftly becomes irrelevant, its leader powerless. The quest plot mainly involves Zachary wondering what the quest is. I too wondered what was going on a lot of the time. The key to the book lies in the juxtaposition of the stories and the repeated use of the symbols, and to be quite honest by the end I was mentally exhausted from the sheer size of the narrative and wanted more help from the author in deciding what was going on. Lazy reader.

There’s a scene early in the book in which a class discusses gaming as part of an Innovations in Storytelling course. They talk about how video games balance the framework of their programmed story (pre-destination, if you will) with giving the gamer the freedom to make their own choices (or exercise some free will. There are options and different possible endings, but all have been foreseen. Now, if only I had ever played a video game I think I would understand this novel a great deal better, because I think that Morgenstern is using video-game conventions to structure her novel, and Zachary – a character who exhibits very little personality and could easily stand as an archetypal reader – is our – the reader-gamer’s – avatar in the story. Morgenstern’s refusal to offer easy explanations of her book’s meaning is part of the idea that we, the reader-gamers, must decide for ourselves. This is made more explicit in the recurring stories about Time and Fate, as well as the ending, which I shall nobly resist giving away.

Another element Morgenstern takes from gaming, though it is common to a lot of fiction too, is immersiveness. I didn’t read The Starless Sea exactly to find out what would happen next, I read it for the pure pleasure of being in the worlds that Morgenstern created. Painted doors which open, precocious cats, strange visitors at a wayside inn, jealous stars. Imagine a library filled with all the books ever and never published, a sea of honey deep in the earth which is actually a sea of stories, a forest of cherry trees blossoming at night, an Owl King. Some of Morgenstern’s ideas have literary antecedents, some seem purely her own invention, all are woven together to form a book-lover’s paradise. Every time I opened The Starless Sea, I wondered what marvel I would read next.

(Still Life with a Snake, Elias Van den Broeck; Belgium, seventeenth century; from here)

For some readers, the lack of tension or character development or explication may be off-putting; for me, some of the gnomic utterances grated, and Morgenstern did not always successfully navigate the line when it came to tweeness. (And the UK cover is hideous!) However, despite all this, how could I not enjoy this beautiful expression of love for stories? I shall definitely be re-reading it as there is a great deal that I missed. (Alas for now I must return it to the library.)

(Images of blocked book covers from here.)

Meanwhile, in ‘not-buying-any-new-books-resolution’ news, I have bought:

• Of Cats and Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (well, I do have to read it for STW reading week, so that doesn’t really count)
• Glass Town, by Isabel Greenberg (really I bought it for my daughter) (when she’s older) (but I’ll read it in the mean time, silly not to)

and I have pre-ordered:

• Medusa’s Daughters, edited by Theodora Goss (which has led me to covet Handheld Press’s Women’s Weird)
  The Tower of Babel, by Christelle Dabois (it’s the third in the series and I wouldn’t want to forget to read it the very moment it’s available)
• The Pure Heart, by Trudi Tweedie.

So that resolution has proved strong.

But in other news, while excavating a corner of the study I found my copy of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, which I thought I had rashly given, unread, to a charity shop. It turns out that tidying up occasionally has its uses.

Diaries, by Alan Clark

The PM made a point of seeking me out in the pre-drinks throng before the meal. She thanked me for my help, said she was going to press ahead with the Bruges notes virtually unchanged, in spite of FCO complaints. [...] ‘You and I agree on this, but Douglas Hurd is completely committed.’
‘Bugger Douglas Hurd,’ I said. ‘He’s only the Home Secretary.’
She looked away with that lovely, distant smile she puts on when I ‘go too far’. (16 September 1988)

Perhaps you may remember Alan Clark, son of the art historian Sir Kenneth. Conservative MP for Plymouth (Sutton), for whose inhabitants he reveals a deep loathing, he served in Mrs Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. These Diaries cover that period, from his promotion to ‘Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Employment’, in June 1983, via three years as Minister of Trade, to his apotheosis as Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence. I have had this copy of his Diaries since shortly after their publication in 1993 but it’s only really now, as Britain faces an ever-longer stint of Tory government, that I have felt the urge to read it.

(AC in 1993; from here)

Clark, or AC as he refers to himself, is less than overjoyed by his first appointment in the Department of Employment and he is poorly suited to it. He is contemptuous of the unemployed and indeed struggles to imagine the lives of those below him on the social scale:

I went on a ministerial visit to Wrexham. A pretty, peaceful town, with the sun shining. How fortunate are the contented bourgeoisie in such places – or are they too racked by pressures and frustrations? They certainly didn’t look it. (24 April 1985)

His work (the ‘boxes’) is boring and voluminous. His personal private secretary, Jenny, hates him. Almost his first duty in the Commons is to put through an Order on Equal Pay. Alas! The Order is to be put through after ten o’clock in the evening, and AC pops out for a wine-tasting beforehand and gets sozzled. He stands up in the Commons with the text of his Order in hand:

As I started, the sheer odiousness of the text sank in.[...] I found myself dwelling on, implicitly, it could be said, sneering at, the more cumbrous and unintelligible passages. Elaine Keller-Bowman, who has a very squeaky voice, squeaked, kept squeaking at me, ‘Speed up!’ [...] I did speed up. I gabbled. [...] Sometimes I turned over two pages at once, sometimes three. What did it matter? There was no shape to it.

Challenged over what the last paragraph ‘means’ (‘How the hell did I know what it meant?’ complains AC to his diary), things quickly fall apart. It seems that one MP may not accuse another of being drunk, but Clare Short accuses him of disrespect to the House. AC isn’t sacked over this and is careful not to repeat his mistake, but although he does go on to become a minister he never really achieves the heights that he at least considers himself capable of reaching. Perhaps, if he had, we might not be reading his diaries. In any case, it’s an incident that encapsulates a lot about AC: his appreciation of the fine things in life, his refusal to kowtow and his staggering arrogance.

The entries included in this volume are mainly, of course, concerned with politics. AC is on the right wing of the party; he is gossipy, ambitious, intermittently deceitful and back-stabbing.

One should not take pleasure in the discomfiture of colleagues, I suppose. But without question it is one of the more agreeable bonuses of the sport of politics. (1 February 1990)

He complains and complains about his ministerial work and yet he cannot resist the lure of power. He characterises Tories as ‘mulishly vindictive’ (19 September 1990) and the party that we see through his eyes is factional, power-hungry and treacherous. Mrs T’s greatest threat was always from her colleagues rather than from the Opposition, and of course they do get her in the end. The section of the Diaries that covers her fall from power is pretty exciting, even when you know what’s coming. AC sees himself and a few friends as her ‘Praetorian Guard’; he refers to her occasionally as the PM but mostly as The Lady. He seeks her attention and favour; he deplores her rages and indecisiveness; he notes how she wept when the first casualties of the Falklands were announced. There is a quantity of plotting and lamenting and hating of Michael Heseltine. How AC hated Heseltine!

The cod-chivalry of calling Mrs T ‘The Lady’ is very much of a piece with a rather romantic and nostalgic outlook on life which regrets the decline of the upper classes. How few of them now walk the corridors of power! How poorly educated most people are! How expensive ‘staff’ are these days! AC was a multi-millionaire who lived in a castle (Saltwood, in Kent), yet he constantly moans about his poor finances. In May 1990 he writes:

Poor darling Jane drained and cleaned the pool herself yesterday. Of course she felt utterly exhausted.

I am afraid at this point (as at others) I guffawed unfeelingly. The reason his wife had to clean their own swimming pool is because their 78-year-old man William was too ill to do it for her. Only a couple of weeks earlier AC had noted that he had won £1000 off someone at backgammon...

(AC was a collector of cars; from here)

Of course it is easy to sneer at elements of AC’s character and it’s to his credit that he retained unflattering whinges like this in the published version of his diaries. (If, of course, he recognised them as unflattering whinges...) The flip side, the attractive side, of his romanticism is his love of nature and beauty. He writes an amazing piece about how he becomes enraged by the repeated theft of his fish by a heron, runs out one day and shoots the bird, and then weeps with remorse at having destroyed something so wild and lovely.

He includes an anecdote about a charitable evening to support the Friends of Charleston:

Bloomsbury evening at Saltwood. We entertained the ‘Friends of Charleston’. I don’t know what they charged for tickets, but I hope they made money. [...]
I made a little speech of welcome, fraudulently and bogusly referring to my father’s death as ‘falling from a tree’. What mischievous impulse made me do this? [...]
Olivier Popham [mistress of the artist Graham Bell] materialised; benign and knowledgeable. I remember her, just, at Portland Place. Very sleek and dark like a young seal. She asked to see Graham’s pictures, and chided me gently for selling her portrait which he had painted in 1939, in the great Death Duties sale. I could hardly say, ‘I thought you were dead.’ (21 October 1990)

It’s an interesting experience, reading the diaries of someone who is so utterly alien to oneself in terms of outlook and experience. I finished them aware of AC’s good qualities as I had not been before, but not wildly fond of him. He could be downright nasty (and why did he hate overweight people so much?). Still, politics can be stodgy fare and bitchy as his diaries often may be, there is no denying that they are generally perceptive and entertaining, very much worth reading for a glimpse of government behind the scenes.

ignoring it

Today is, of course, the day that the UK officially leaves the EU.

I don’t wish to say anything other than this is a sad day for us all, and thank you to all our friends in Europe for a rich relationship which I hope will continue.

(Turner’s The ‘Fighting Temeraire’, found here)

sylvia townsend warner reading week 2020, join in, all the best people are!

Cunningly timing my announcement for the later part of January and thus after everyone has already made lots of resolutions and reading plans for the year, I am delighted to tell you that once again I intend to spend the first week in July reading and writing about the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner and I invite you to join me!

As an added lure, a new selection of her short stories has just been published, Of Cats and Elfins, by Handheld Press. The Guardian reviews it briefly here. According to Handheld Press’s website (from which you can order a copy), it brings together four of STW’s Elfin stories that were not published in The Kingdom of Elfin with the collection The Cat’s Cradle Book. It is putting my vow to buy no more books under considerable strain just days after I made it.

Here is a link to my introductory post to last year’s reading week, with a list of her books. And here is a round-up of everyone’s reviews from last year’s reading week, and here are all my STW posts. Here is a link to the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, which is packed with information about her.

Readers, you have plenty of time to track down one of STW’s books and read it. Last year, many people* wept bitter tears over missing the Reading Week. Don’t let that be you this year! If you have never read her before, this is your moment!  And if you have – well, it’s a FACT that no one has ever disliked anything she ever wrote, so treat yourself to some more time with one of her lovely books.

STW wrote novels and stories that are witty, melancholic, waspish, fantastical and beautiful, and she was also a formidable poet. She wrote about cats, fairies, nuns, revolutionaries, aristocrats and stifled women. Her fans include Sarah Waters and Neil Gaiman. She is the antidote to all that is plodding, dull or hypocritical. She deserves to be wider read, and you deserve to have her in your life. Joining in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week this year is thus a win–win situation for all concerned!

* Actually, no one.

brian wildsmith

One of my very favourite childhood books (admittedly, I have a lot of favourite childhood books) is a picture book called Blue Bird, which my parents gave me for my birthday when I was five. The story is a simplified version of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird and is wonderful, but what makes this book special is the beautiful, beautiful pictures. I loved it so much I devoted not one but two Puffin Club bookplates to it.

(Illustration of one of the secret rooms in the Palace of the Night, from Blue Bird, OUP 1976; from here)

(Madam Berlingot, from Blue Bird, from here)

(The Fairy Bérylune, from Blue Bird, from here)

If you are a child of the 1970s like me, you will almost certainly have recognised the unique style of the illustrations even if you don’t remember the name of the artist. He was Brian Wildsmith, and although he died in 2016 today is his birthday and he would have been ninety years old. Tamsin Rosewell (@autumnrosewell) and James Mayhew (@mrjamesmayhew) are organising a Twitter celebration (#wildsmith90) so I thought I’d add something here, as a tribute to one of the greats of illustration. I have drawn on his Wikipedia entry as well as other sites and interviews to which I’ve linked.

Brian Wildsmith was born in 1930 in Penistone, West Riding. He went to school in Sheffield and at seventeen, determined not to follow his father down the mines, studied at the Barnsley School of Art, from where he won a scholarship to the Slade in London. During his time there (1949–52) he was something of an outsider, unable to afford oils and canvas so spending his lunchtimes drawing and studying the Old Masters in the National Gallery. In 1955, after his National Service (he taught music at the Royal Military School of Music), he got married, started teaching art at Selhurst High School and began designing book jackets for John Murray and drawing line illustrations for publishers including Faber and Faber and Oxford University Press.

(Brian Wildsmith at work; photograph from his obituary in the Guardian by Julia Eccleshare)

Wildsmith was foremost a painter and loved colour, and it was his great good fortune that the 1960s saw enormous improvements in colour-printing technology. His other piece of great good fortune was Mabel George, of Oxford University Press, who gave him his first chance to illustrate a children’s book in colour. Mabel George was a brilliant editor who took over the children’s department of OUP in 1956 and also launched the careers of Charles Keeping and Victor Ambrus as well as many writers. As an experiment, she commissioned Wildsmith to illustrate the Arabian Nights (1961). The TLS review savaged it:

‘We now descend to the lowest depths with Brian Wildsmith's vicious attack on the Arabian Nights [...] these pointless scribbles, which do duty for drawings, wander aimlessly about the page[...]’

Mabel responded magnificently:

‘Take no notice, Brian. We make up our own minds here. We’re now going to do an ABC.’

Brian Wildsmith’s ABC went on to win the Kate Greenaway Award in 1962 and his career was made. (I learnt about Mabel George, who was a truly impressive person, here.)

But according to this lovely interview he gave to Joanna Carey in the Guardian, that horrible review remained engraved on Wildsmith’s heart for ever.

(Illustration from Fishes, OUP 1968; from here)

In 1971, Wildsmith and his family – he had four children – emigrated to France with a grand piano and settled in a house in an olive grove in the south. The Blue Bird, my beloved picture book, was published in 1976. It sprang from an invitation Wildsmith received from George Cukor two years earlier: Cukor was going to film Maeterlinck’s play in the first ever US/Soviet co-production in cinema: would Wildsmith like to design the sets and costumes? I had never even heard of this film which apparently was a flop; a pity, but still it gave rise to this marvellous book.

Wildsmith was prolific: he published 82 books, mainly with OUP. Many of them he wrote himself, despite initial reservations which he expressed to Mabel George. In an interview for the Independent, he told Susie Mesure:

‘I said, “But Mabel, my English is terrible. I always got terrible marks at school.” But she said, “Brian, I have editors with inkpots full of full stops and commas. It’s ideas that count and you’ve got them.” And it took off from there.’

I have a couple of other books he illustrated, which I also love very much:

(Illustration of Mother Goose from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, OUP 1964; from here)

(Illustration from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, from here)

(Illustration from The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, OUP 1963; from here)

Looking at his pictures on the internets, I recognise others that we must have borrowed from the library:

(Birds, OUP 1967; from here)

(The Lazy Bear, OUP 1973; from here)

His use of colour is striking; it can be bold or subtle, but he’s also acutely aware of pattern and uses patchwork a lot in his pictures of houses and landscapes. The colours can be very intense but are often balanced by large areas of white space. You can see the influence of 1960s psychedelia in some of his work too. The other very striking element is the texture of his pictures. They are very painterly, and again vary from thickly laid swirls and dabs to delicate washes and splashes, given extra clarity by the pencil drawing beneath, embellished with waxy strokes of pastel or layers of collate. When you look at his pictures, they are alive and joyful.

As they sing, he is big in Japan, where a museum dedicated to his work was opened in 1994 and in 1996 he illustrated Katie and the Dream Eater, written by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamodo of the Japanese Imperial Family. But he is not so big in the UK and many of his books remain out of print; perhaps today’s celebration will go some way to rectifying that.

(Illustration from Wild Animals, OUP 1967; from here)

In the Guardian interview with Carey, Wildsmith said this, which seems a good note to end on:

‘Children are all-important, and so is art ... Art is food for the soul. And books are a child's first encounter with art so I felt it was a way I could make a contribution to the world. A drop in the ocean maybe, but picture books offered a chance to communicate the importance of things such as kindness, compassion, friendship, beauty.’

(from The Lion and the Rat, OUP 1963; found here)

EDITED TO ADD: fellow Wildsmith fans, there is a new website devoted to his work here! His son has also set up a Twitter account, @brian_wildsmith, and you can see all the pictures posted by readers in celebration of his birthday if you follow the hashtag #wildsmith90. Joy!

new books in 2020: what are you excited about?

It is only comparatively recently that I have noticed a trend: looking forward to books that are to be published in the near future. Pre-Internet, young Helen would be pleasantly surprised to walk into a bookshop and see a new book by a favourite author. Now the publicity machine never stops grinding on, and every new season brings articles on ‘forthcoming releases’ (which inevitably makes me think of the poor books as prisoners).

Never one to leave a bandwagon in peace, I thought I’d ask you, dear readers, if you pay attention to this advance title information and what books are being published in 2020 you’re feeling excited about.

For me, it’s Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (currently scheduled for the middle of September which is deeply frustrating as it’s at my annual Peak Busy but I expect I’ll bravely find a way to neglect my paid work and devote myself to it). At last! I have loved everything she has written and I cannot wait to see what she’s done next. Fellow Clarke fans: you can read about it here on the Bloomsbury website. I defy you not to be intrigued.

(Me being excited about Piranesi, not really, a photograph from Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter, found here and slightly cropped)

What about you? What are you looking forward to this year? Or do you ignore all the advance publicity and prefer to be pleasantly and serendipitously surprised?

hello 2020!

Happy New Year (belatedly). I hope that you all had lovely holidays. I did!

I don’t usually make New Year’s Resolutions because in the past I tended to make a massive list which was a complete overhaul of all my foul habits and terrible personality traits, and then after two days I’d have failed massively and would spend the rest of January, generally my least favourite time of year, feeling depressed and frustrated at what a total LOSER I was. (In addition to all my other terrible personality traits.)

However, 2020 seems rather a special moment, perhaps it’s the pleasing rhythm of the digits. It may be counter-intuitive to be cheerful when the year has begun with climate apocalypse, Australia on fire, Iraq and the US squaring off and authoritarianism on the rise around the world, and yet I am. And in this cheerful mood I have made some Resolutions! My cunning plan: to keep them small and on the vague side.

1. give more attention to a gallimaufry

I am going to find more time for this blog. Writing book reviews is very time consuming and I find mine tend to plod rather, and in any case I like the conversational aspect of blogs. So I might change what I write about a bit. (All right, this is VERY vague but I think it’s something that will evolve rather than be imposed.)

I also intend to run Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week again – watch this space!

2. read more widely

To break out of my fiction addiction I am going to read one non-fiction book, one long poem or one play a month. (At least one – I can read more.) This month I finally opened Alan Clark’s Diaries, which has been sitting shrink-wrapped on my shelves since 1994. (Alan Clark was a Tory MP who served in Mrs Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments, during which time he kept diaries which he subsequently published, I wouldn’t say they were scandalous but they did ruffle a few feathers as I recall.) I intend to post about this.

Loosely associated with this plan is a resolution to go as long as possible without buying any new books! This is actually Chris’s idea, which I have filched. (I had already bought a book when I read his post, so I am starting now BUT I am not sure I shall publicly announce when I do buy my next book because it might just be too shaming. I am a very weak person.)

3. finish my novel

I’m going to finish writing my second book (I started it in the summer holidays but have had so much work to do I’ve been unable to touch it since). Perhaps it will be better than the first one!

4. have more fun

It occurred to me that I am turning into a boring humourless middle-aged git. Oh no! Therefore, I am going to spend less time obsessively reading and ranting about politics and more time having fun. To this end I have already got drunk on fancy beer (the cats were very lucky that I couldn’t find the Marmite when I got home as I intended to smear them with it, one of my friends told me it was a flea-deterrent, though since then I’ve discovered that the cats are supposed to eat it not wear it) and bought some sheet music so I can start playing the piano again. This has got off to a good start.

What about you? Do you ever make New Year’s Resolutions – or are you already perfect? Heheh. If you’ve made any this year, what are they (or the ones you’ll publicly confess to, anyway)?

merry Christmas and a happy new year!

(David Jones, Nativity with beasts and shepherds, drypoint etching, 1940; from here) 

To all of you I wish a very merry Christmas and a joyful and healthy new year. There is always hope, and things can always get better. Let us make it so.

The Owl, the Duck, and – Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!, by John Cowper Powys

Like, I suspect, many of you, I have spent most of the last week digesting – or trying to digest – the results of the election last week. And I have many Thoughts. But none that you cannot read elsewhere, better expressed, by more knowledgeable people. I have also read The Owl, the Duck, and – Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!, a novella? – short story? – reissued by Michael Walmer Publishers, in which fantasy, existentialism and quantum physics unite to beautiful effect. And this I recommend to you, very strongly, if you are a fan of these things.

It is spring in a filthy, ‘clanging’ city, ‘littered with sordid lives, strewn with wind-tost debris and bitter dust, exhaling mephitic stenches and corpse-chills’. An old couple, former circus performers, eke out their last days in a flat at the top of a house in a blind alley, poised between the railway and the Old Market Prison. Battered intermittently by the ‘howls of prisoners’ and the ‘mitigated thunder’ of the trains, which cause the flat to ‘shiver and shake’, the sole note of beauty is provided by several ailanthus trees, rooted in ‘the dusty ground’. The old couple live in fear of the Authorities, who periodically invade their flat to threaten them with being taken into a Home:

Had these days, which were marked, not in the Catholic but in the Commercial Calendar, been more frequent than they were, the old couple [...] would doubtless, like many other old couples in our energetic Civilization, have turned on the gas and laid themselves down to die.

(The picture of the New York tenement is from here.)

It’s a grim existence, but the couple are sustained by their love, their tenderness and grumpiness, for each other. And theirs is but one of several overlapping planes of existence in the flat. These are inhabited by the Other People, who comprise Inanimates, Gods, a ghost and a pair of fictional characters.

In the Living Room, the Stuffed Owl, the china Duck and Princess Olwen, the ‘beautiful young-lady doll’ occupy the mantelpiece. The Owl is anxious and prone to fretting. The Duck is obsessed with Princess Olwen and longs to touch her with his shining yellow beak, but, of course, neither of them can move and he is tormented with desire while she longs for ‘White Horses and Disguised Princes’. On the chest of drawers is a big glass Fish, devotee of the White Whale who wills everything, Good and Evil.

These Inanimates call the Living Room ‘The Known World’; they dream, they philosophise to each other without really listening. The other Inanimate in the flat is Falada, a ‘noble, melancholy’ two-legged wooden horse rescued from ‘Limbo’ (a rubbish bin on the street) by the old man and now living in ‘Hell (the Ante-room to the flat).

Standing on the old woman’s dressing-table in ‘Paradise’ (an Alcove), are the three ‘godlike inhabitants’ of the Known World. These are a blue statuette of Our Lady, ‘a minute image [...] of the great Chinese sage, Kwang-tze’ and a headless statuette of Lao-tze, who nevertheless continues to philosophise if not to speak.

The romantic, dreamy Princess Olwen is the only entity who can perceive two characters from an unfinished manuscript by a previous tenant of the flat. Lord Tormentil (a ‘dogmatic Materialist’) and Lady Potentilla (‘a High Church woman of strict piety’) are lovers divided by their beliefs. It has never been clear whether they were to be given a tragic or a happy ending, and so their characters and destiny are ‘frayed, ragged, blurred and indistinct’.

And Miss Rowe? Miss Rowe is the ghost of an old lady who was another former tenant of the Known World and who has become for the inhabitants of the Known World a sort of protective spirit. (‘Miss Rowe was not her real name.’) At times of desperation – when the Authorities are on the stairs – the inhabitants of the Known World cry out ‘in a thin, wild, wistful voice’ for ‘Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe!’

It is not clear to what extent the old couple perceive all these different beings living in their flat, but it is clear that all their existences are intertwined and necessary to each other at a fundamental level. Can Miss Rowe save them all from the Authorities and the Home? And what exactly would that mean?

Just like Karen, I have never read anything by John Cowper Powys before and jumped at this opportunity to try out one of his shorter works (and it is short!) as his more famous novels are massive. First published in 1930 as a limited edition of 250 copies, it seems it hitherto has not been widely available – another reason to get my paws on it. And I am so glad that I did! It is a strange, rich, beautiful parable about existence and belief and the importance of love; it is sad but also uplifting and enigmatic – weirdly perfect Christmas reading.

Thank you to Mike Walmer for sending me a review copy (and for those of you still hunting for Christmas presents, the Zephyr Books edition produced by Michael Walmer Publishers would make a very pretty and unusual gift). I shall be reading more John Cowper Powys now, for sure (but when, when, when?).

(The picture of the owl is a stuffed Victorian eagle owl by James Gardner. The picture of John Cowper Powys is from his Goodreads page)

A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day, by John Donne

(Aert van der Neer, Landscape with a mill in the moonlight, oil on canvas; found here)

’Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
         The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
         Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
                The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’ hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar’d with me, who am their Epitaph.

 

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
         For I am every dead thing,
         In whom Love wrought new Alchimie.
                For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse;
He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

 

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
         I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
         Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
                Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaosses, when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

 

But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
         Were I a man, that I were one,
         I needs must know; I should preferre,
                If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

 

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
         At this time to the Goat is runne
         To fetch new lust, and give it you,
                Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoys her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

(From Donne: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson, OUP 1929)

(Ferdinand Keller, Böcklin’s Tomb, 1901–1902; oil on canvas; found here)