a gallimaufry

on not posting and not reading Jamaica Inn

It seems a very long time since I last wrote here – first my daughter and I spent ten days at my parents’ house in England and then I came home to find computer problems and poor Typepad, mine blog host, under attack. If you have tried to read or comment here and been unable to see anything, those attacks are the reason; I think everything has been resolved now. So rather than writing anything here, or visiting those of you with weblogs, I’ve been rearing tadpoles…

visiting a castle…

(Orford castle, in Suffolk)

near which was a garage for an unusual form of transport, perhaps favoured by the inhabitants of the castle…

(you should click on the picture to make it better and see what is behind the doors...)

and even sewing a dress for Felicity Bunny (there are no bloodstains on it, but it was rather grubby by the time I had finished it) (I know you are all really interested in my handicrafts).

While in Britain I learnt that there was to be a new television series of Jamaica Inn and predictably from that instant the only book in the entire world I wanted to read was Jamaica Inn. How fortunate that my mother had a copy! I rushed to the bookshelves. Alas, there was a row of Daphne du Mauriers, but not the one I particularly wanted. So I consoled myself with Frenchman’s Creek. And then The Flight of the Falcon. And then My Cousin Rachel. At which point I was back in Belgium and with no further Daphnes so the binge had to cease, although my kind mother is sending me a copy of Jamaica Inn she bought online. I am coping.

(Photograph of du Maurier from her obituary by Richard Kelly on the Daphne du Maurier website)

I had forgotten just how good a writer Daphne du Maurier was. (So now I am going to bore on rather a lot about the three I read, and there are lots of spoilers, so if the sun is shining where you are as brightly as it is here, I should stop reading and take a book to a nice leafy reading spot somewhere.) She can write convincing characters and compelling plots, but it’s her ability to create atmosphere, ambiguity and place which really distinguish her writing. Frenchman’s Creek might be a fairly conventional romantic tale of an aristocrat and a pirate were it not for the lush descriptions of the Cornish landscape and the loving depiction of Navron, the house where the heroine, Dona St Columb, seeks refuge from her stale life at court in London and her dissatisfaction with her husband. At Navron and in her relationship with a French pirate she finds freedom and a better self. In The Flight of the Falcon, the murder of a beggarwoman drives Arminio Fabbio back to his childhood home in Reggano (a fictional Umbria), and du Maurier layers his present reality (post-war Italy) with his childhood, the more distant past of the Renaissance, illusions, dreams, fantasies, secrets and suspicions, so that the distinctions between them become more and more blurred and the unreal is real. My Cousin Rachel is set in nineteenth-century Cornwall, a less sensual Cornwall than that of Frenchman’s Creek, but one whose blustery sea views and rural isolation is contrasted with a nightmarish, torpid Florence of sinister inhabitants whose expressions, language and behaviour the narrator, Philip Ashley, cannot fathom. Philip visits Florence after receiving worrying letters from his cousin Ambrose, who unexpectedly had married an Italian woman during a sojourn in Italy for his health. When Philip arrives, Ambrose is already dead; shortly after Philip’s return to Cornwall Rachel, the widow, pays him a visit and Philip’s initial hatred of her turns into obsessive love. Philip’s home is old-fashioned, dusty and very definitely arranged to cater for masculine taste without ‘feminine’ comforts (although I can’t imagine anyone reading the descriptions of it who wouldn’t want, like me, to live there); Rachel’s villa outside Florence is beautiful but stripped bare when Philip visits it, its centre a space, a courtyard, containing only a dripping fountain and a poisonous laburnum. Do the houses accurately reflect their owners’ characters, or just Philip’s perception of them? And Rachel’s growing influence over Philip is mirrored by her improvements to his estate (whose name is never given), some of which may be unsuitable given the Cornish weather. Her death comes about through a combination of place and character: it is directly caused by an incomplete bridgeway in one of the improvements she had begun in the gardens, and less directly to the changes she’s wrought on Philip, inspiring first obsessive hate, then love, then hate again, so that he chooses not to warn her of the danger of stepping on that particular construction.

These two latter novels have much in common. Both Arminio and Philip have intense relationships with older brother figures, and both tell us about a charismatic central character whom they do not understand but whose actions they interpret for us anyway. Both stories bear an element of predestination. In The Flight of the Falcon, Aldo is explicitly linked with the fifteenth-century duke Claudio, who may have been insane and was certainly cruel, while Arminio is implicitly allied with Claudio’s younger brother, the ‘good’ Carlo, and the modern brothers suffer the same fate as their predecessors. Yet Claudio is associated both with Christ (when tempted in the wilderness by the Devil to seize earthly power) and with the Devil, while in Ruggano's annual festival both Arminio and Aldo play the part of Claudio. Du Maurier seems to be using the idea of predestination here to open up questions of moral interpretation. Is Aldo’s megalomania exonerated because his exercise of power has had ‘good’ results, and because his festival, which could so easily have become a bloodbath, has instead united the townspeople and the students? She also uses it to reveal Arminio’s complicity in what happens, his similarity to Aldo and his weakness. The drama of Philip and Rachel also contains an element of predestination in that Philip is so strikingly like his ‘guardian, father, brother, counsellor’ Ambrose in appearance and temperament he is bound to fall in love with Rachel too. But Philip’s identification of himself with Ambrose and his belief in their shared fate may encourage him to see connexions where there are none, to assume responsibilities which he does not have (giving his estate to Rachel because Ambrose should have done so) and to misread not only what happens, but also his own character.

Both Arminio and Philip are unreliable, concealing secrets, failing to understand their own motives, passing off their perceptions, tainted as they are by suspicions and emotions, as fact. Philip is particularly culpable. (And he doesn’t like reading!) As readers, we’re locked inside his head and forced to look out of his eyes, but du Maurier gives us glimpses of alternative viewpoints and allows us to read against his narrative, for instance when he is incredulous that Rachel might be afraid of him after he attempts to strangle her. (!!!) Since facts are often hard to discern and emotions change so rapidly, clear distinctions between right and wrong are hard to make. Is Rachel innocent or guilty – or both? Is Aldo insane or wise – or both? On what terms can we judge either of them? I am now drumming my fingers with anticipation of the moment when our lovely postman delivers Jamaica Inn...

happy Easter!

(Fra Angelico, Noli me tangere, 1442, fresco on the wall of the Convent of San Marco, Florence; from here)

the last begijn

In Turnhout, a large Belgian town near where I live, if you walk a little way from the busy marketplace you will find a gate, and through that gate a green edged with cobbled streets, a church and pretty little old houses with painted shutters. It is a begijnhof, a feature of many Belgian towns (begijnhof in Flanders or béguinage in French-speaking Wallonia). One of the earliest is that of Mechelen, founded in 1207. Until recently, they were the homes of semi-monastic communities of women called begijnen or beguines.

(The begijnhof in Turnhout; photograph from here)

Begijnen (begijn in the singular) were usually unmarried women or widows who gathered together to devote themselves to prayer and pious works, such as helping the poor. They underwent a novitiate with their Grand Mistress but, unlike nuns, they took no vows, were able to keep their own property and could leave the community at any time. Those without private income supported themselves, perhaps through teaching. Some had servants; all had their own homes. Some communities restricted the social status of their members, allowing in only wealthy ladies or those in humble circumstances, but the largest begijnhoven admitted women from any social order. The movement spread through northern Europe, but started and was strongest in the Low Countries; it survived accusations of heresy, suppression and the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation. You can read more about it on Wikipedia here.

(The begijnhof in Lier; photograph from here)

On this day last year, the last begijn, Marcella Pattyn, died, and with her ended a religious tradition which stretched back more than eight centuries. The begijnhof offered women a life of purpose outside the family, a combination of socially useful activity and spiritual contemplation, in times when they had few options outside marriage. It is easy to romanticise the begijnhof – easy for me, anyway – as a less intense version of a convent, one which encouraged a sense of sisterhood and vocation but with a great degree of self-determination, and I wonder what it was really like. Improvements in the lot of women have made redundant many of the functions of the begijnhof, but there seems a spaciousness and beauty around such a life which I do not think have been replaced, at least not yet.

(Marcella Pattyn reading braille; from here)

shiny new shiny new books

Have you read about Shiny New Books yet? It's the new 'quarterly online magazine focusing exclusively on new and forthcoming publications that will help you decide what to read next and why', set up by four bloggers whom you might already know: Victoria, Harriet, Annabel and Simon. There are reviews of fiction, non-fiction and reprints – although they're recommendations rather than reviews, which sets Shiny New Books slightly apart from most other book magazines. But that is not all! There are also competitions, and in the BookBuzz section you'll find interviews with and posts by authors about their latest books and the writing processes behind them. In this issue there are interviews with Helen Oyeyemi, Jill Dawson and Sebastian Barry, to name just three, an article on translating Tove Jansson's biography and the editors of Slightly Foxed talking about what goes on behind the scenes of that lovely magazine.

Are you still here? Do go and check it out – it looks great! But I would say that, wouldn't I, because I have contributed a review. It's of Nanni Balestrini's novel Tristano and here's a snippet:

To give the reader the greatest creative freedom, Balestrini denies us a continuous narrative. The text circles round certain images, scenes and phrases, whirls away from them, rejoins them later. Some sentences connect to make a snippet of story, others are fragments isolated from each other. There’s a mixture of dialogue, domestic detail, scientific or technical information. Journeys which are usually interrupted, books which are endlessly being unpacked. Balestrini has also eliminated all punctuation bar full stops, apostrophes and hyphens, so that the reader decides on the emphasis, the tone of a sentence. The characters and place names are all indicated by the letter C. This sometimes leads to ambiguity: who crossed the room? who just spoke? The lines between the characters thus can become blurred. The narrative voice flickers between first, second and third person, perhaps to show characters, author and reader as complicit in creating the story and part of that story, as inseparable from each other.

If that hasn't put you off, you are a real die-hard and you can read the rest of the review here and find the publishers, Verso, here. I have to say, it's a novel that makes you work very hard to read it and writing about it was difficult too, but I thought it totally worth the effort. The book, I mean; I do seem to have wittered on rather in the review.