a gallimaufry

Castle Dor, by Daphne Du Maurier and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Only very belatedly did I discover that this week has been Daphne Du Maurier Reading Week, hosted by heavenali, so this, my contribution, is rushed. As it happens the last time I was in the UK I acquired a second-hand copy of Castle Dor; obviously it was destined for this moment. Appropriate, really, since the novel concerns a sort of predestination in the guise of the past replaying itself.

Castle Dor is set in Cornwall in the 1860s; events are set in motion when Linnet Lewarne, the beautiful young wife of a publican, first claps eyes on Amyot Trestane, a Breton sailor saved from a beating by a French notary. This notary, Ledru, has come to Cornwall seeking the ‘true’ locations of events in the story of Tristan and Iseult. With the local physician, Dr Carfax, he becomes convinced that in Castle Dor and its surroundings he has succeeded. But Carfax is increasingly concerned about the bond between Amyot and Linnet. Could the ancient story of Tristan and Iseult be repeating itself through them? And if so, can disaster be averted?

Like The House on the Strand, published eight years later, Castle Dor explores how the past affects the present, and how it is stored up in places. In The House on the Strand, Dick accesses the past by means of a drug, but it only transports his mind and not his body. If he takes the drug in an old farmhouse, he will witness what happened in that farmhouse. It is the place that holds the history. Amyot and Iseult, on the other hand, do not time-travel. They are possessed at certain moments by powers beyond themselves: they speak or even appear different to their normal selves but remain unconscious of the drama they are re-enacting. But their actions are governed by place and what happened in that place centuries before: were they not in this particular part of Cornwall, their behaviour would be quite different.

The genesis of the book is slightly unusual: it was started by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and after his death his daughter gave the half-finished manuscript to Daphne Du Maurier to complete. I should love to know how much of the published book is his work and how much hers; certainly it hangs seamlessly together and is perfectly paced. Although it isn’t one of her best-known works it is really very good with Du Maurier’s trademark atmospheric setting, convincing characterisation and whiff of the supernatural (how much of a trademark of Quiller-Couch’s anything I cannot say since I’ve never read anything else by him).

some short reviews

Time has passed and I haven’t written here.

I’ve been busy gardening...

...collecting some odd eggs from the hens...

...releasing a frog back into the wild (don’t be like Some People in my family and bring them home, leave frogs be where you find them)...

...attending to the whims of cats...

...and actually working too.

I have also been reading! But since my reviewing energies are all focused on preparing something for Shiny New Books, I thought I’d just mention some other books briefly here.

• Bath Tangle, by Georgette Heyer – If Heyer ever wrote an anti-Heyer novel, this is it. Her hero is so atrocious that you are simply begging the heroine not to marry him, quite opposite from the usual dynamic. He shares characteristics with some of her other, more likeable, heroes, but here we see only the dark side of them. Arrogant, rude, snobbish, bullying and guilty of sexual assault if not worse (his crime is alluded to in rather vague terms), Rotherham has not one redeeming feature and after reading this I doubt you will be able to look at Avon, Beaumaris and Alistair quite so indulgently ever again.
  (Though I did always worry about Avon and Léonie, even as a teenager that struck me as rather a dodgy relationship...)
• The Immaterial Murder Case, by Julian Symons – A rather brittle but engaging spin on the detective novel which pokes fun at the art establishment. Immaterialism is an art movement that believes in the value of what is not there, so the subject of a painting is what is omitted from it. During the opening of an exhibition of Immaterial art Stephen Follett, a universally loathed art critic, is found murdered.
  The case is narrated in turn by one of the suspects, a fairly dreadful amateur detective and a professional detective, somewhat in the manner of the multiple narratives of The Moonstone. The comedy is occasionally a little heavy-handed but I enjoyed Immaterialism a lot.
• Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden – I started this hoping for something Mary-Stewartesque and it had a good premise: Grace receives a letter from her cousin Willa, who now lives in Stockholm, which is signed with their childhood code for ‘help’. When she arrives in Sweden, Willa has vanished.
  Overlooking the rather leaden writing and uninspired characterisation I read on but the dénouement was disappointing and basically everyone was an idiot. The only surprise was Grace’s callous victim-blaming at the end. Eden seems to have been very popular so perhaps this is not representative of her work?
• The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge – I read this over quite a long time as it has a slow pace and bears being put down and picked up again well. It’s a historical novel set during the English Civil War, and explores how a group of characters are tested by the conflict: Robert Haslewood, the squire; Froniga, his cousin and the white witch of the title; and Francis, a nobleman masquerading as an artist in order to spy for the Royalists.
  Goudge shows how courage on the battlefield is only one sort of courage, and that those without much power – children, women, gypsies, the elderly – are no less brave than the rich men who are prepared to die for their ideals. It was very soothing while Brexit madness was whirling about and a helpful antidote to cynicism.
• Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi – As ever Oyeyemi’s work defies expectations, categorisations, and cleverly seduces you into accepting whatever she throws at you. A country that may or may not exist? Gingerbread that tastes like revenge? A childhood friend who might be secretly influencing every step of your life?
  I can’t even begin to summarise this novel and am still reeling from finishing it last night, it’s rich, playful and mysterious to the end.
• The Diaries of Sylvia Warner, edited by Claire Harman – I am slowly reading these for Sylvia Townsend Warner week and they are wonderful.

Friday evening and a glass of wine are calling. Happy weekend everyone! Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

goodbye to january

Hello and happy February!

Sorry I haven’t posted for ages. January and February are my least favourite times of year, dreary and grey, all the fairy lights have been packed away and winter seems to stretch on for ever. I did write a few half-posts, on Brexit, on a couple of the books I’d read, but I lacked the will to finish them.

Anyway, today the sun has been shining and I’ve just baked some flapjacks! Do have one. I hope your 2019 has started well.

(You’ll need a fork.)

I don’t know why I felt the urge to bake flapjacks. Previous attempts have always ended up with something that had to be ‘broken into bars’ with a hammer, proved impermeable to teeth and could have been used as flooring had they been more evenly shaped; the odd pan had to be binned too. But I was inspired by the surprise discovery of two tins of golden syrup at the back of the cupboard. The 2008 ‘anniversary’ tin had been opened and half-used, the contents were now completely hard and blackened, but the ‘use by 2013’ tin was still sealed and what was within looked as I imagined golden syrup to look, so off we went.

(For those who are interested, I used a Mary Berry recipe I found on the internet, but with my previous mishaps in mind I ignored Mary’s advice to cook for 25-35 minutes and instead removed them from our (tiny fan-assisted) oven after 20 minutes. Hence the need for a fork.)

(Also they are very sweet and all your teeth will immediately fall out in horror.)

The Christmas holidays were lovely and I had a fantastic time at New Year as well. I stocked up on some books in charity shops (my favourite find being a 1947 Cresset Press edition of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, which I’ve always wanted to read: this edition is illustrated with lovely wood engravings by Claire Oldham). I learnt that just because a ‘journey planning website’ gives you directions to walk along a road doesn’t mean that it’s safe to do so after dark (because it’s actually an A road with no pavement and cars whistling by at 70 mph). I visited Sissinghurst which might not seem the obvious thing to do on New Year’s Day but it is actually very beautiful with no leaves or flowers but patterns of branches. Of course, I had forgotten to bring my camera. It was nice to see Vita Sackville-West’s writing room again and I was charmed to see honey leaking down one wall of the tower – apparently from an old beehive that someone kept on the roof.

To get through this time of year I stockpile ‘easy’ reading, novels with compulsive narratives and not too much darkness, and I reread a lot too. Here are some of my favourites:

• Folk, by Zoe Gilbert
  I loved this, though much of it is very dark. It’s a collection of sort-of fairy-tales about an island community, focusing on different characters in turn and spanning a couple of generations. Like traditional fairy-tales, these are unsentimental and concerned with birth and death, sex, transformation, cruelty and strange kindnesses, but unlike fairy-tales the characters within them have individuality and when misfortune befalls them it is painful to read. The beauty of the natural world is celebrated even though the life scraped from its woods and seas is a hard and difficult life.
• The Gardener and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik
  Gopnik is a child psychologist and philosopher, and in this book she examines developmental psychology and evolutionary biology to demonstrate how modern-day ‘parenting’ is wrong-headed. She characterises a lot of parents as being concerned that they must develop a product: control pretty much every aspect of a child’s life so that it will become a happy, socially-acceptable and preferably high-achieving adult. Instead, parents should focus on their relationship with their children and on creating a ‘garden’ where children can learn and explore and become themselves. I was in agreement with her argument before she even made it, and I particularly enjoyed reading about all the evolutionary biology. It’s also made me very slightly less anxious about the amount of time my daughter spends in front of screens.
• The Dragon Hoard, Tanith Lee
  This was an impulse-buy in a charity shop and is a children’s book. On their seventeenth birthday, royal twins Princess Goodness and Prince Jasleth are cursed by Maligna, a distant relative and wicked enchantress. Princess Goodness becomes insanely good and starts giving away everything her family owns; Prince Jasleth turns into a raven every day, but at varying times and for varying durations. So the prince sets out to seek his fortune, which involves joining a quest to recover a dragon’s hoard. A cheerful, bouncing story, it put me slightly in mind of M.M. Kaye’s An Ordinary Princess.

A couple of weeks ago we reached the end of a fifteen-week course I teach every year. It’s a course with fantastic students but I find it very challenging and I have to spend hours and hours finding and making material and preparing for it. So suddenly I have a lot of free time, and this free time I’ve been devoting to revising my children’s book at breakneck speed in order to enter it for The Times and Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition, the deadline for which is the end of February. I am now completely disenchanted with my book but I decided to enter it anyway, what the hell, sorry judges for foisting it on you but at least it’s quite short. Then I am going to get started on another book which I am very excited about writing.

So for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be revising my book. I’m also going to making some cushion covers as we replaced our existing but broken Hideous Sofa with an even more Hideous Sofa and I plan on disguising it as far as possible if I can just find the fabric I have in mind for them.

I won’t be baking...

Fairy Tale, by Alice Thomas Ellis

(Alice Thomas Ellis photographed by Derrick Santani, in the National Portrait Gallery)

The eyes of the watchers were cold and flat and incurious and the watchers were still. Whenever they moved – be it ever so slightly – there was a brief darkness, a shadow behind the leaves, a hint of something that humanity might call loss, equate with pain. But the watchers knew nothing of that, being indifferent to such matters.

With the illness of Mister Puss and worry surrounding it I’ve been comfort-reading, but before that I was feeling the urge to read about fairies, as you do, but spiky rather than sparkly fairies. I’ve been dipping back into Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s collection of short stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, and re-reading Fairy Tale, by Alice Thomas Ellis. Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s fairies are amoral and often cruel, but the horror of what they do is distanced by the cool impersonal tone in which she writes. Alice Thomas Ellis’s fairies are more disturbing because we find them in a novel with developed human characters. Furthermore, Fairy Tale is steeped in Alice Thomas Ellis’s pitch black humour, and it’s the often jagged juxtaposition of social satire with supernatural  horror that gives the book its disquiet. It’s as if Evelyn Waugh wrote an Edgar Allan Poe story.

Nineteen-year-old Eloise and her ‘nice’ boyfriend Simon have moved from London to a small house in the Welsh countryside, where Simon earns a living picking up agricultural work and Eloise stitches exquisite nightdresses and petticoats for a local boutique:

one of those exclusive little shops with a single garment and something imaginatively incongruous – a monkey’s skull or an old boot – arranged in the window. Simon took the clothes in when Eloise had made a dozen. They were all finished by hand, which made them precious and gave them a hint of pathos, as though child labour had been employed: the women who wore them might feel, at once, delicate and ruthless, like some hard-hearted princess.

Eloise is bored but does not wish to admit it because to do so would be to admit that her fantasy of living in the countryside has not worked out. She pricks her finger; she wishes for a baby. But what she does not know that she and her husband are intruders on fairy land. Peculiar visitors arrive at her door. Eloise’s mother and her friend Myriam arrive, bickering and criticising. Soon the cat is having a nervous breakdown, the house is full of branches and herbs and vegetarian Eloise is craving steak and taking long walks in the rain in which she remains bone dry.

I vaguely remembered reading this a few years ago but I had forgotten just how funny but also surprisingly unpleasant it is. If you prefer your novels to contain sympathetic characters and not to shred pretty much every aspect of modern life, this is not for you. Alice Thomas Ellis’s work is strong meat but she was a perceptive and elegant stylist with an eye for the absurd in modern life and a knifelike wit with which to fillet it.

Her fairies are ancient, alien, predatory:

The [fairy] gamekeeper found it incomprehensible – the conflict in the human race between its passion for interference and its basic indifference to its members. Not that he cared. He didn’t think in human terms. Humans were useful for breeding when you could catch one, and every now and then when it seemed safe he ate one, but otherwise he avoided them on the whole ...

There is little room left for them in twentieth-century Britain and they must fight against human encroachment. Underneath the humour and the folklore lurks an eco-fable, though I am sure Alice Thomas Ellis would hate it to be called so. Anyway, it has reminded me of her other novels, which I must re-read...

(Alice Thomas Ellis with Beryl Bainbridge, whose work she edited; photographed by Edward Hamilton West; from here)

The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin

‘The hands that wash dishes can be soft as your face,’ [the Major] suddenly sang at the Rector in a loud, crackling falsetto, ‘with mild green Fairy Liquid ... Liquid, Liquid,’ he sang. ‘I like that melodic turn, or whatever you call it, on “Liquid”. Very affecting.’
‘It’s your wits it’s affecting, if you ask me,’ said the Rector. ‘I suppose you haven’t been eating properly again. He doesn’t eat properly,’ he reported to Padmore.
‘Ah,’ said Padmore, pretending to have had a suspicion confirmed.
‘You’d better stay to lunch,’ the Rector told the Major. ‘Liver and bacon today, fill you up with vitamin B.’
‘Good,’ said the Major. He liked eating with the Rector, who not only had a first-rate cook but also declined to allow conversation during meals. Explaining this policy to his Bishop, who had been about to dine with him during the course of a visitation, ‘What is the good,’ the Rector had said, ‘of God giving us delicious-tasting foods, if every time we lift a forkful to our mouths we have to break off to cope with the inane prattling of our guest?’ [...]
‘A Dettol home is a happy home,’ the Major sang.
‘Can’t ask you other two,’ said the Rector, ‘because there’s not enough.’

The Glimpses of the Moon is part of the huge bookish plunder I dragged back to my lair with me after my holiday in England. It came courtesy of the Samaritan’s Bookshop in Ipswich, a place from where it is impossible to leave without at least one book, and on the cover the publisher has excitedly proclaimed, ‘Worth waiting for! His first novel for over twenty years’.  Does the book live up to this? Read on and find out, dear reader.

Edmund Crispin, pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, is best known for The Moving Toyshop, but during the 1940s and 1950s he wrote seven other comic detective novels featuring the Oxford professor of English literature, Gervase Fen. A friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, Crisping was invited to join the Detection Club – whose members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr. He was also, under his real name, a composer of film scores; his work includes the music for some of the Carry On films. However, despite early success, Crispin/Montgomery’s life was far from happy. He suffered from ill health, was a chronic alcoholic and was to die of heart failure at only fifty-six. (All of this biographical information is from The Passing Tramp blog, where you can also find discussion of Crispin’s other works.)

The drink and the poor health seem to be the reasons why Crispin’s fans had to wait twenty-six years for The Glimpses of the Moon. The Passing Tramp describes it as ‘a weak book, a succession of sometimes forced comic vignettes strung together by a frayed murder mystery plot’, so if you are new to Crispin’s work it probably isn’t the place to start. I have to say that I enjoyed it on the whole – though I felt the scenes with the hunt and the pylon were an unnecessary indulgence and dragged rather. It is certainly a very odd detective novel, perhaps not really a detective novel at all.

We begin in a Devonshire pub with Fen, the Major and Padmore, a journalist, eight weeks after the gruesome murder of Routh, a local farmer, for which an Australian farm-hand named Hagberd has been arrested and charged. Fen has with him a pig’s head in a sack. All of a sudden, an ancient man named Gobbo starts speaking to them, apparently providing Hagberd with an alibi; Padmore eagerly drags the Major and Fen off in pursuit of corroborating evidence. Soon there has been another murder and the pig’s head in the sack turns out to be not quite what it ought to be...

As The Passing Tramp notes, the structure of the book is indeed a series of comic vignettes involving ever more characters. Everyone is wildly eccentric and bizarrely named; the whole book is completely over the top. The solution to the murder is provided quite perfunctorily at the end of the novel and relies on information that has been withheld from the reader, thus making it impossible to work out in advance as in a more classic, puzzle mystery. Crispin holds back the details of Routh’s death until Chapter 3, which definitely feels like teasing. In a more conventional detective novel the amateur detective would be central; here, Fen is a minor character in the scenes in which he appears and absent for about a third of the book while the police detectives investigate, futilely. Although he does propose the line of inquiry which leads to the identification of the killer, he is hardly involved in the investigation and does not solve it himself – to the exasperation of the Major:

‘Well, my dear fellow, if you say so. But who is the Botticelli murderer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you must know by now, my dear fellow,’ said the Major plaintively. ‘We’re practically at the end of the book.’

There are similar metafictional moments spread out through the book, as when Fen tells Padmore that Crispin ‘writes up’ the accounts of his cases ‘in his own grotesque way’, and there are plenty of literary jokes too. Indeed, Fen explains that the solution to the murder relies on ‘the Chesterton Effect’, named after the author of the Father Brown mysteries. Crispin also pops in a surrogate-Montgomery character, Broderick Thouless, who composes scores for popular films – in this case horror rather than comedy. There is plenty of music in the novel too, from the singing Major to Fen deploring Mahler.

I couldn’t help but come away with the impression that in this book Crispin is really just playing about. The reluctance to divulge basic information about the first murder at the start of the book, the refusal to place his detective centre-stage or provide any clues and the constant divergence into comic scenes that have little to do with the murder plot, the abrupt solution at the end – all of these suggest to me that Crispin is deliberately toying with the reader’s expectations and indulging his own comic instincts (and also his wish to moan about various aspects of modern life, like pylons and hunt protesters). But as a result of jettisoning a more conventional plot Crispin I think loses drive and coherence in the book, and this is compounded by his inability to resist adding more and more characters. Still, it feels as if he was having fun writing it (I hope he was) and that sense of fun does communicate itself; I largely enjoyed it despite its weaknesses and I giggled a lot. It may not be up to his earlier work, but it is still very much worth reading.

Incidentally, the book seems to have no connexion with the Edith Wharton novel of the same title, which seems odd given how literary a writer Crispin is. I am not really sure what it means here, but I think it alludes to the moon as the source of lunacy and so is about flashes of madness.

on why holidays are good

Well, that was more of a break than I’d intended! It seems that even people who only work part-time sometimes need a holiday too, and I’m just back from two weeks of jauntering about England visiting unlucky friends and family and probably leaving a trail of odd articles of dirty laundry behind me. We learnt about the pioneering plastic surgery performed during the Second World War on pilots and aircrew who were badly burned at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead; we marvelled at Viking musical instruments and also a massive Viking poo at the Jorvik Centre in York; we revisited the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, despite the National Trust still a magical place; and we went several times to the Ipswich Museum, where the Egyptian Gallery has inspired my daughter to mummify the next unfortunate pet to die (she has even purchased a small canopic jar for the stomach; I am hoping that I can steer her more in the ship-burial direction, coward as I am).

Before my holiday I was tired, depressed and grappling with the problem I expect most of us deal with, of what is the point of any of this when there is so much misery, cruelty and destruction in the world. How can people bear such suffering as so many do, and how can we bear to witness it and yet do nothing effective to prevent it? Now I feel better but this is because I have distanced myself from it, and that feels wrong somehow, selfish and solipsistic. People who are fleeing war or poverty don’t have the option of taking a holiday, enjoying their garden, reading lovely novels or picnicking with friends. So although I feel happier at the moment, I do not know how to resolve this. Any suggestions gratefully received. :)

Anyway, back to the holiday and cheerier themes. As ever, I forgot to take any photographs. But! I also went a bit wild in the bookshops. For this we can all blame my parents who generously gave me a book token for Waterstone’s. (Although even I cannot blame them for the church-fête and charity-shop acquisitions.) So, I shall show you my haul and am keen to know which ones you have read and what you thought of them...

(The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson, because I love the Romantics and I love reading biographies of talented women; The Bedlam Stacks, by Natasha Pulley, because her first novel was fun; The Encyclopaedia of the Dead, by Danilo Kiš, because both Kaggsy and Nicholas Lezard recommended it; Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics, because how could I not after reading HeavenAli’s review? Starlings, by Jo Walton, because she seems an interesting writer and short stories are a good way to get to know someone’s work)

(Emily of New Moon, by L.M. Montgomery, because how is it I don’t have a copy of this already? The Storm Keeper’s Island, by Catherine Doyle, which is obviously for my daughter and not at all for me; Peter Pan and Wendy, by J.M. Barrie, this is actually really for my daughter and is illustrated by Mabel Lucie Atwell sentimentally but sweetly)

(Here is the frontispiece from Peter Pan and Wendy, how could I reasonably resist?)

(The Complete Fairy Tales, by Charles Perrault, which is a kind gift from Hayley of Desperate Reader and which I only just managed to prise from my mother’s hands; Folk Tales of the British Isles, edited by Kevin Crossley-Holland, my star score from the Samaritan’s Bookshop at only £2.50, I am still cackling with glee over that one how lucky am I? In the background a dragon made by my daughter is posing nonchalantly)

(And a handful of detective novels, The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin; False Scent and Death at the Dolphin, by Ngaio Marsh; I like to have a little pile of detective novels, children’s books and other easy reads for when I am lazy or tired and I now have definitely enough to keep me going for a while)

That is not all: I have forgotten to photograph another charity-shop purchase, Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman, which I am devouring at the moment. It is lovely. Meanwhile, as if that weren’t enough, I came home to find Theodora Goss’s new novel had arrived, yippee!

(There appears to be a Christmas decoration as well as a dragon in the background, oh dear...)

And while I was away, Shiny New Books had their Booker Anniversary Week, to which I contributed short pieces on Troubles, by J.G. Farrell (winner of the Lost Booker), The Sea, by John Banville, and The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. I enjoyed all of them very much but I have to admit my favourite was Troubles. The other reviews are excellent and it forms an interesting if partial survey of changing literary tastes and fashions.

Normal service here will be resuming, in the mean time please do comment with your opinions and advice and I hope that you have been enjoying the summer so far.

what shall helen read? May edition

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and my roses are blooming! In the chicken run, peace and joy (mainly) reign. Daisy and Fluffy now positively like Speckle and no longer positively dislike Frosty; nobody has been chased for a while and languid communal dust baths are a frequent occurrence. Excitingly, Speckle and Frosty have started laying eggs. Their eggs are still quite small, here is one beside one of Fluffy’s productions:

Clara, as you see, is very busy. (Actually, if anyone has some advice on what to do with cats who over-groom, please give it! Her poor tummy is getting quite bald.)

Anyway, it’s definitely time for the May edition of What Shall Helen Read?, and this month we’re travelling back to the 1980s. Here are the candidates:

Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey – a young Australian heiress bets an Anglican vicar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement called Bellingen.

Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth – set in the fourteenth century, a group of travelling players stops in a village and stages a play based on a local murder: the killer has already been found but through the play it becomes clear that the facts don’t fit and that someone else is responsible.

Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavić – this is difficult to describe but it consists of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopaedias, each based on one of the Abrahamic religions; in the introduction the author explains there is no chronology and that it is like a mirror, you will get from it what you put into it, for ‘you cannot get more out of the truth than you put into it’.

The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick – this novella describes the march of three characters to a Nazi concentration camp and their internment there.

What should I read? Have you read any of these?

Beside the Ocean of Time, by George Mackay Brown

Shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, this was the last novel that George Mackay Brown published before his death. However, it is not exactly a novel, and not exactly a collection of interlinked short stories, it is something very slightly different.

There are eight stories, all centring on the imaginary Orkney island of Norday. In the first four stories, a young boy in the 1930s, Thorfinn, dreams of episodes in the island’s past, often inspired by the history lessons of his bête noir, Mr Simon.

Of all the lazy useless boys who ever went to Norday school, the laziest and most useless was Thorfinn Ragnarsson.

Curled up in his father’s fishing boat, Thorfinn dreams of sailing to Byzantium with Vikings; dozing in the smithy, he fancies himself riding to Bannockburn as a squire; perched on the kirkyard wall while a grave is dug, he imagines the biography of the old man who will presently occupy it; on a school trip to a broch or circular fort, he thinks about the people who might have taken refuge there. But the next story, ‘The Muse’, switches focus slightly; although Thorfinn is entranced by the sight of a yellow-haired girl riding a horse at the beginning of the story and is given her horse at the end, this is a tale about the laird in the hall and the minister in the Manse and the yellow-haired girl in Thorfinn’s present, not one of his daydreams.

Its stitching together of Norday’s past and present continues in the story which follows it, ‘The Press Gang and the Seal Dance’, which lays ominous visits by the Ministry of Defence in Thorfinn’s present beside a tale of how the islanders outwitted a press gang in the early nineteenth-century and a selkie tale which perhaps represents Thorfinn’s claim to an imaginative heritage, one that makes him different from the farmers and fisherman around him. ‘Aerodrome’ describes the annihilation of Norday’s culture, history and way of life as it is turned into an RAF airstrip at the outset of the Second World War; it is a distressing chapter to read. Finally, ‘Fisherman and Croftwoman’ charts Thorfinn’s return to the now uninhabited island, his wartime experiences as a POW and his first literary successes, his possible future.

(George Mackay Brown and his father; photograph taken in c. 1926; found here); according to the caption young George’s clothes were made out of postman’s uniforms)

It is in Stalag 29 that Thorfinn writes his first novel, a ‘romance’ or ‘historical thriller’ about ‘the navigation of the Dnieper by Norsemen in the Dark Ages’ – in other words, the first story in Beside the Ocean of Time. His second novel, another ‘historical thriller’, is ‘about the Scottish War of Independence culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314’ – the second story in the book. But by the time he has returned to Norday after the war:

He is sick to death now of historical thrillers. He is trying to dredge something rich and strange out of the mythical past of the islands – the selkies who shed their coats on the moon-bleached sands and danced; the trows who live under the green knolls and love above all the music of men, so that they cajole young fiddlers to their courts inside the hill and keep them there for fifty winters; but the young crofter with the fiddle, having drunk from their silver cup, thinks he has been among the roots and sources for half an hour, no more. And so there is a great mystery in this connection between music and death and time and the food that the Earth yields for the nourishment of men...

Through this final story, the book transforms: it becomes not only stories about Thorfinn and his physical life, but also stories by Thorfinn and about his imaginative and literary development, and stories about the essence, the soil and the water and the spirit, of the island of Norday. All of these things are woven together so that the individual stories form a greater whole.

At the beginning of ‘The Press Gang and the Seal Dance’ Mackay Brown lays out his philosophy. It is Christian and ostensibly contrasts our search to ‘garnish’ ourselves with worldly possessions to the quest of our ‘real’ selves, ‘a soul that is seeking life-long for the true treasure, the grail’. He imagines a guardian angel beyond a distant star playing a pipe:

The music goes on and on, unheard for the most part. Through this lifetime of vanity we creep, stumble, march, follow plough and scythe, linger, hirple on a stick, until at last the feet are folded and lie still: but seen through the angel’s eye, it is an immortal spirit that dances from birth to death, all the way, from before the beginning till after the end.

Every dance, every lifetime, is unique, and that infinity of dances from every race and from every era, is of incalculable value, and comprehends the great ceremonial dance of mankind. But the music will not be known in all its glory until it is rounded with silence.

And it is this concept of the individual dance as part of the whole, of the harshness of physical existence illuminated by the dance of the soul, that informs the organisation and meaning of the stories in this book.

Thorfinn is deeply saddened by the destruction of Norday: ‘It should not have ended that way,’ says Thorfinn Ragnarsson. ‘I think the saga of the island can never be told now...’ But this book is the saga of the island, he has found a way to tell it after all. Thorfinn Ragnarsson is not George Mackay Brown but there are clearly parallels with his own biography and experiences, and this book seems a deeply personal expression of island life, personal philosophy and literary calling.

(George Mackay Brown writing, from here)

what shall helen read? April edition

A brief moment of sunshine here in Belgium! Everyone got very excited and rushed into their gardens; the air rang with the sound of lawn mowers and children, and in the evening barbeques were lit and cold beers enjoyed.

I planted some pansies from the market and did battle with weeds; I also washed a chicken bottom (Daisy’s, should you be interested). Clara pranced about with a pigeon’s tail-feather in her mouth, the closest she has ever got to actually catching one and you’d have thought she had slain an army of eagles the way she was carrying on, rushing up to people waving the feather at them and squeaking. She has now left the feather ostentatiously in the middle of the lawn and has been walking past it and then acting surprised and catching it again. I have not spotted the denuded pigeon yet.

 

So, back to ‘what shall helen read?’ The idea behind this reading plan is that every month I dig out a pile of books I’ve had for ages and never read, and you all vote on which one I should read. Then I read it and write about it here. I’ve been working in decades, starting with the 2010s (for which I read Hot Milk by Deborah Levy); last time was the 2000s and I read Andrea Levy’s Small Island.

Somewhat to my surprise this project has been encouraging me to read a lot more of my TBR books, not just the winners. I’ve now read two more of the 2010s novels (After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry and Small Change for Stuart by Lissa Evans: I enjoyed both of them) and one of the 2000s (Half in Love by Justin Cartwright, which was so good that I am keen to read The Song Before it is Sung). On the other hand, Olive Kitteridge is on the charity-shop pile: I have read a little and didn’t feel terribly excited by it, and I am sure that I can find another copy fairly easily should I ever change my mind.

We’ll skip over March, which never happened, ahem, and glide on to April and the 1990s. There are no Levys in this pile, which consists of:

• George Mackay Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time. I actually have no idea why I have never read this as it is exactly my cup of tea: ‘Thorfinn, a crofter’s son living on the remote island of Norday, is a dreamy boy [...] Closing his eyes in the 1930s he dreams of crossing the ‘fish-fraught’ ocean with Viking raiders. Falling asleep to the monotonous tones of a history lesson he finds himself running from the press gang into the arms of a beautiful seal-maiden who longs to return to the sea. War and adventure, the struggles of great men and the everyday toil of the fisherfolk, Thorfinn dreams the sweep of Norday’s history, its life and its inevitable death...’
• John Fuller, The Worm and the Star. According to the blurb, this book ‘pioneers a new literary form: the book composed of very short stories’ which ‘rove, with hurtling changes of perspective, over myth, sex, science fiction, the Middle East, boredom, beauty, grossness, global history, childhood, music and death’. Intriguing! But, it seems, not intriguing enough for me to have read it. Yet.
• Dominique Sigaud, Somewhere in a Desert. This takes place at the end of the Gulf War. ‘In prose of extraordinary clarity and power Dominique Sigaud tells [a] soldier’s story and those of the people who have encountered him in his last hours of life and in the days that followed his death. The mystery and horror of war are revealed through the eyes of this Unknown Soldier.’ I bought my copy from Ipswich Library for 30p, I see; its enthusiastic puffs include one by Beryl Bainbridge but my squeamishness has so far held me back from reading it.
• Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres. I don’t suppose this needs an introduction; it’s Smiley’s Pulitzer-winning re-telling of King Lear. I think I bought it (from a remainder bookshop!) because everyone else told me it was brilliant and not because I actually felt a great urge to read it. But perhaps now is the time to get on with it?
• William Trevor, After Rain. William Trevor was a Big Name in the 1990s; like A Thousand Acres, this book was bought because I felt I ‘ought’ to read it. Also the cover is very pretty and I have always been a fool for a pretty cover.

So, which of these should I read? All of them look good and I feel much more enthused about them than about the 2000s contenders I listed last time.

The Eildon Tree, by William Croft Dickinson

Having enjoyed Borrobil so much I splashed out and bought the sequel, The Eildon Tree. This was published in 1947 and unlike Borrobil it was never re-issued. It has a different illustrator too: James S. Richardson, who provides mediaeval-influenced line drawings, in place of John Morton-Sale.

The Eildon Tree begins with Donald and Jean standing beside the Eildon Stone which, they are assured by Andrew the ancient shepherd, stands by the spot where the Eildon Tree once grew. Ballad-lovers will know that it was by the Eildon Tree that Thomas the Rhymer first laid eyes upon the Fairy Queen riding by in ‘grass-green silk’. Andrew tells a version of the story of Thomas the Rhymer, who travels to Elf-land with the Queen and is given the gift of ‘a tongue that could never lie’ (hardly a useful gift, I’ve always thought) which here means that he can foretell the future. Thomas is then brought back to the ‘real’ world, a turbulent mediaeval Scotland which has been divided into three under three kings. However, Thomas remains a servant of the Fairy Queen and is eventually summoned back to Elf-land. Andrew concludes his tale by adding that at times of great need Thomas will return to Scotland.

(Meredith Morris Williams, ‘The Fairy Queen and Thomas the Rhymer’, illustration for Elizabeth Grierson (1910), The Scottish Fairy Book. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company)

No sooner has Andrew left them than Thomas the Rhymer arrives and the children find they are now sitting by the Eildon Tree, the stone having vanished. Thomas the Rhymer tells them some prophecies, one of which they are part of, and gives each of them a vision. Donald’s vision is of a black knight defending a besieged castle; Jean sees a ship leaving an island. These visions and prophecies are crucial to what follows, as the children find themselves in the Middle Ages during a power struggle between Gabran the Good and Maldred the Malcontent, a usurper. They are taken to the castle of Dunverran, captured, escape through secret passages and help to restore Gabran as the sole and rightful king. (In an afterword, Croft Dickinson explains that this part of the plot is inspired by events in Scottish history from the end of the thirteenth century, when the heir to the Scottish throne died aged eight and a number of men stepped forward to claim it.)

When The Eildon Tree was written, children’s time-slip novels were still quite unusual. Its predecessors are Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, but it is quite different from them: closer really to the Narnia books and The Lord of the Rings. Their portal to the past is not a house or an object but a person, Thomas the Rhymer: Thomas’s uncertain status as a ‘real’ person signals that the past the children will enter may not be the ‘real’ past, informed though it is by Croft Dickinson’s knowledge of mediaeval history. This is also unusual, since most authors of time-slip novels take pains to situate their stories in an accurately recreated past. Perhaps Croft Dickinson is making a subtle point about the impossibility of doing that.

The most absorbing parts of the novel, I found, were those in which the children played an active part: escaping through the secret passages, hiding in the heather and taking a boat down the river at night. The climax of the book is the siege of Dunverran which is probably more thrilling for children to read than me. As in Borrobil Jean is a slightly more compelling character than Donald although, older now, she has lost the charming habit of inventing words as she did in the earlier book. For much of The Eildon Tree they are under the protection of two knights, Hugh of the Hill and Gilbert of the Long Bow, both of whom are very brave but otherwise slightly bland; they speak in that slightly antiquated, ‘heroic’ way that the ‘high’ characters speak in the novels of Lewis and Tolkien.

They sat down beneath the green shelter of the trees. Everything seemed strangely still. No song of birds, no sound of scuttling small animals, no hum of insects came to them. No breath of wind rustled the leaves above. Of all of them, only Hugh seemed to be undisturbed and unaffected by the strangeness of it all. From time to time Gilbert looked cautiously about him, pretending to be merely curious; but Donald and Jean both knew that like them he was under the weight of suspense, that like them he was feeling that fro the surrounding stillness something unwelcome, something fearful might suddenly spring upon them and hold them powerless in its grip. Again Donald shuddered at the eeriness of it all. Jean began to draw closer to Hugh. And at that moment a long drawn-out cry broke the silence of the wood.

‘Four of you! Four of you!’

The Eildon Tree is for slightly older children than Borrobil. Not only are Donald and Jean a little older themselves, but there is some darkness here and the tone is less light-hearted and more adventurous. Magic has been replaced by mysticism. I have now discovered that there is a third novel in the series, The Flag of the Isles, which draws on the Battle of Culloden. Perhaps, if it’s not too wildly rare and expensive, I might read it...