a gallimaufry

round-up: August 2024

This month I’m still not up to reading anything very challenging, but that doesn’t mean to say I haven’t read some excellent books.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (reread)

Still seeking something to quench my The Secret History thirst, at the beginning of this month I turned to a novel with some similarities in its set-up. Blue Van Meer’s life with her professor father has been peripatetic, with never more than a term or two in any one town. But then they arrive in Stockton, NC, where Blue is to spend her final year of school preparing for Harvard. Lonely Blue is flattered to be invited to join the Bluebloods, a group of students favoured by the film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider, who hosts them at her house every week. And then on a camping trip in the forest, Blue finds Hannah hanged from a tree. I enjoyed this novel a great deal more than when I first read it and it was massively hyped: now I can see it more clearly. Blue’s narrative is precocious, snobbish and perceptive, and the story twists satisfyingly, though I could have done with a lot fewer of the mainly invented bibliographical references with which the text is increasingly unconvincingly and annoyingly peppered. Also features probably the most insufferable father figure in literature.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt

Finally had the chance to fill the void left by The Secret History when this arrived in the post. Lacking the narrative drive of TSH, The Little Friend is a very slow and immersive novel to read, but I alone perhaps of all readers everywhere think it’s a better book, stuffed with extraordinarily vivid writing. When she was a baby, Harriet’s brother was murdered and his killer never caught. This summer, twelve-year-old Harriet intends to avenge him, a journey that takes her to dark places and dangerous people. Tartt explores the effects of the original traumatic event on Robin’s family and friends, and the deeply unequal society in which they live. Awful and amazing.

The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwoord (reread)

Marian is engaged to be married but her subconscious seems to have doubts. An entertaining look at the life prospects of a young female graduate in 1960s Toronto, it was Atwood’s first published novel and impresses with its wry, pragmatic humour. In some ways, life has improved so much for us since then. In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all.

Barbara Comyms: A Savage Innocence, by Avril Horner

I have been waiting for years for this, a life of one of my favourite writers, and this is a good solid biography. Comyns drew closely on her own life for some of her fiction, and that life was pretty colourful, which makes for an interesting biography: a childhood filled with animals and eccentric, neglectful parents; early artistic ambition blighted by extreme poverty and a useless husband; racketeering in World War II; marriage to a second husband who was suspected of being a spy; ex-patriot life in Spain. Even in the middle of the last century, publishing was fickle and it wasn’t until Virago championed Comyns’s works in the 1980s that her talent was properly recognised. Time to reread her novels again…

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (reread)

Read this first so long ago that I had forgotten most of it but odd whiffs came back to me, usually minor details. What a smart writer Chandler was, how ably he constructs his world, every word really works for its place. Not always convinced by his female characters, if I want to carp.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré

My first le Carré! Not what I was expecting, very cynical, very sordid, very good.

In the Forests of Serre, by Patricia McKillip

In every way, the diametric opposite of le Carré. McKillip’s fiction, especially her later works, are what I read when I am sad. They are magical, ambiguous, beautiful and hopeful. Even the villains are noble. It is quite hard to describe them, as they tend to have a chorus of characters rather than a central character, who must somehow achieve harmony together in order to resolve a problem which they may not even understand after it has been resolved. A big wallow in loveliness.

Cinderella is Dead, by Kalynn Byron, and A Study in Drowning, by Ava Reid

In Cinderella is Dead, a cruel king oversees a society where the legend of Cinderella is used to oppress women. In A Study in Drowning, a student of architecture is commissioned to design a house by the sea for the heir of her favourite writer. I’ve chosen to put these two YA novels together because I thought they both had lots going for them, considered theme both flawed, yet felt more forgiving of the flaws of one than of the other. And I have been wondering why that was, and yes it depends on the flaws. I suppose that it always comes down to a quality of the writing, that it does a bit more than just tell you a story but creates a mood or atmosphere, or conveys more than just what is on the surface. And secondly I suppose that if you have a mysterious dead author, Welsh mythic vibes, fairies and a vast, mouldering house, I am always going to cut you more slack.

Tidemagic: The Many Faces of Ista Flit, by Clare Harlow

There’s a lot of really good children’s fantasy being published at the moment and this is a prime example. In Shelwich, people have been being snatched by monstrous grilk, including Ista Flit’s father. And magic, which is fuller when the tide is high, is growing stronger. Can Ista and her friends find the missing people and discover the secrets hidden in the caverns under Shelwich before it’s too late? I think you know the answer, but it’s a fun adventure getting there.

October, October, by Katya Balen

Have been wanting to read this since it was first published and it was absolutely worth the wait. October lives an idyllic life in the woods with her father until he has an accident and she has to go and live in London with her mother, from whom she is estranged. Magical and astoundingly written in a child’s stream of consciousness, so hard to do well and this was just perfect.

 

round-up: July 2024

This month I stuck with easy reads but ventured away from rereads to new books.
Babel or the Necessity of Violence, by R.F. Kuang

After finishing The Secret History I wanted to carry on reading more of it but of course, that isn’t possible. Reading Babel was my attempt to stay in that mood. I admit, I started it anxiously, the subtitle and Kuang’s reputation suggested that my squeamishness would take a battering. Fellow wimps: it is not too graphic. The story is set in an alternative nineteenth century and it has a brilliant concept, which Kuang uses to explore both the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism. The concept is this: if you inscribe in silver two words from different languages with approximately the same meaning, the gap in meaning becomes charged, magical. So you can use these silver bars to power everything. Had Kuang left it at that, it would have been terrific, but she couldn’t resist elaborating on the idea at length, which (a) became a clog on the story and (b) resulted in some contradictions. I am not usually that bothered about show vs tell but there was an awful lot of telling in this book and this held it back from greatness, though it was good.

Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo

Like Babel, this is a novel which I think needed a few more edits to refine. This is the sequel to Bardugo’s first novel for adults, Ninth House, and again it’s set in a version of Yale where there are secret societies practising magic. The whole Yale university scene is so weird I was astonished to find elements I assumed Bardugo had invented are in fact true. There are indeed secret societies and they are called things like Skull and Bones and they do have special houses they call tombs… Anyway, Ninth House was clever and fun but Hell Bent, while very readable, is messy. The central problem is too much plot, with insufficient foreshadowing so it feels as if things are being made up on the hoof just to enable another plot twist, and characters reduced to mere puppets of the narrative. Plenty to enjoy but it did feel like a missed opportunity.

Five Bad Deeds, by Caz Frear

Married with three children, up for a good teaching job and planning the extensive renovation of her dream house, Ellen has an enviable life with solid friendships. Unfortunately, someone sets out to destroy it. Also unfortunately, pretty much everyone in this novel – which is told from the viewpoints of several different characters – loathes Ellen, and she’s pretty unkind about them too. Although the constant sniping did get me down a bit, this well-plotted thriller bowls along at a neat pace and gave a few deft swipes at middle-England’s values.

The Harp of the Grey Rose, by Charles de Lint

Loved this. Very much in the mood of The Hobbit or the Prydain Chronicles, it’s a gentle fantasy about a harpist who falls in love with a young lady who is not all she seems to be and embarks on a quest to save her and overcome an evil that will destroy the world. The music, the delicately melancholic feeling, the talking bear and magical creatures – this is a fantasy world you would like to live in.

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green

Although I’ve read Arthurian romances, lais and poems, I’ve never made it through a whole cycle and when I saw this in an Oxfam bookshop it just fell into my hand. A quick and easy read, as you’d expect. Surprises: Arthur doesn’t seem to be that great a king and just sends out his knights to sort out problems. It’s a relief when Nimue carts Merlin off, since as soon as anyone does anything, he bobs up and says, ‘Oh no you’re doomed now and Logres shall founder and the darkness will return,’ which has a damping effect one would imagine. Gearing up for Malory now.

Amari and the Night Brothers, by B. B. Alston

Amari joins the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs when her brother disappears, determined to find him. As a trainee, she’ll have to pass a series of competitive assessments. Since she is smart and possesses extraordinarily strong powers, this should be straightforward: unfortunately the sort of powers she has are reviled and make her an object of suspicion. Very Men in Black meets magical school story, this is funny and endearing.

High Rise Mystery, by Sharna Jackson

Meticulous Nik and her dramatic sister Norva are horrified to discover the body of their art teacher, Hugo Knightley-Webb, at the bottom of the rubbish chute in their block of flats. Knowing everyone in the Tri, they are ideally placed to solve the murder and make a perfect team. The story crackles along, and you will hear Nik and Norva in your head long after you’ve closed the book.

The Christmas Appeal, by Janice Hallett

Not sure why I felt like reading about Christmas in July, but I did. How did a skeleton end up inside the Fairway Players’ panto prop beanstalk? This short novel follows a similar structure to The Appeal, with our two plucky young lawyers Charlotte and Femi once again sifting through emails, text messages and other documents to ascertain the truth. The solution is pretty obvious but this isn’t important as the pleasure lies in the Players’ constant backstabbing and sniping, culminating in an unforgettable performance of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Only proviso: read The Appeal first.

 

round-up: June 2024

This blog has been neglected too long!

I am busy wrestling with the children’s book I’m writing, and this takes up most of my spare headspace and time. The long book reviews I used to write here would take hours and hours. So! New plan. Every month I’ll write a round-up of what I’ve been reading – or a selection of it, anyway.

This month, for reasons I don’t intend to go into here, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything demanding or complex, and I started a lot of books I was unable to finish. Now I’ve typed them up, I can also see that most of them were rereads. So, essentially, this is a comfort-read edit.

Black Maria, by Diana Wynne Jones (reread). Delightfully bonkers Wynne Jones novel, one of the ones where she throws about a dozen plates in the air, keeps them spinning beautifully and then resolves everything in time for tea (see also: Archer’s Goon).

The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones (reread). Wynne Jones was unlucky with many of her covers; this one is, to my mind, genius, passing beyond the merely bad to a new level of marvellousness. I am confident I would never have picked this up as a child, and first read it as an adult. Quintessential Wynne Jones: multiple worlds, magic, at the centre, enterprising and realistically portrayed children.

Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer (reread). When you are in the mood for a Georgette Heyer, nothing else quite hits the spot, and this is one of her good ones. It is the one where Kitty will inherit nothing unless she marries one of Mr Penicuik’s four nephews; fortunately, she is in love with one of them; unfortunately, he refuses to play along, so she devises a Cunning Strategem. Spirited heroine (part-French, of course!), ridiculous intrigue, enormous good humour, nice frocks and a happy ending – all present and correct and great fun too.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie (reread). The first novel to feature Poirot, a Belgian refugee during the First World War to Styles St Mary, an Essex village, and narrated by a rather self-regarding Hastings. Who has poisoned the wealthy Mrs Inglethorpe, and how? A neat and excellent mystery which I failed to solve correctly (despite having read it in my teens) (that was a long time ago, in fairness) but which has a very satisfying ending.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (reread). Must have first read this shortly after it came out in paperback, when I was a student or recently graduated, and had forgotten all but the broadest lines. It still holds up! Richard’s enchantment with Henry, Francis and the twins is so convincingly rendered, the desperation and complicity, the slow unravelling.

Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge (reread). One of those books that just makes you feel happy. Old houses, beautiful countryside, animals, magic, humour and reconciliation. (I wrote more about it here.)

Shadowstitch, by Cari Thomas. This is the sequel to Threadneedle and evidently there is at least one more book to come. The world-building is as absorbing and imaginative as ever, but this instalment is a bit flabby, with the pacing too slow in the middle and too fast at the end. There are two main threads (ho ho). The first involves Anna and Effie’s investigation of their family curse, which drew out the best parts of the story and allows Thomas to explore her wonderful magical worlds. The second concerns the rise of an inquisitorial group; I found this thin and not really very believable. Still, I enjoyed it and I will be reading the next book.

 

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine-Year-Old Self, by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine years old I wrote a book called Tales of Narnia, and I still have it. In spiky blue ink, written in my best handwriting with only occasional crossings-out and spelling mistakes, it runs for eighty-six numbered pages and fills an old hard-covered notebook from front to back. [...] I covered the notebook with a paper wrapper which I painted dark blue, and stuck a poster-paint picture I’d made of Aslan on the front. He looks very stiff, very yellow and rather cross.

So begins this lovely ramble through C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is really for people who, like Langrish, adored the books when they read them as a child but perhaps have not revisited them since. So a chapter is devoted to each book, including a detailed retelling each story and extensive quotes. As we explore, Langrish considers how Lewis’s personal beliefs, the historical situation (shortly after the Second World War and during the Cold War) and literary and folkloric works contributed to each book. Her knowledge is impressive but lightly worn, so that it’s like reading along with a good friend whose ideas you mostly but not completely agree with.

Langrish is even-handed, although she admits she likes some books more than others (and does anyone truly love The Last Battle?), she is alert to beautiful writing wherever she finds it. She considers the darker side of the books: racism? Yes, definitely. Misogyny? More mixed. There are strong girls in every book, and some great villainesses; but on the other side there is the Susan problem and, though I don’t think Langrish mentions it, no strong and likeable adult females. Do these problems mean that we shouldn’t read the books any more? Of course not!

And I had not realised it, until Langrish pointed it out, how thoroughly Lewis loathed schools. There are plenty of references to them in the books and they are always awful places.

I was impressed by Langrish’s tracing of motifs and plots to their source material. This includes Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and fantasy literature, Mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse myths, the Arabian Nights, Christian theology and of course the Bible. Lewis’s uses of these gives different flavours to the books: for instance, there is a strong debt to E. Nesbit in much of The Magician’s Nephew, but more of a Mediaeval romance feeling to The Silver Chair. Langrish also argues persuasively for the influence of more recent history on some of the books. So Maugrim’s secret police surely draws on the Cheka and the Stasi, Nickabrick on the struggles of Irish revolutionaries, and the silver chair on the horrors of trench warfare.It is all very illuminating and gave me a new respect for Lewis’s skills as a children’s writer and as someone who understood children. (The only real remaining mystery: why did Edmund love Turkish Delight so much?) Langrish’s emphasis on her own responses to the books keeps it from ever threatening to become dry. Passages such as Aslan’s death and rebirth, or the creation of Narnia, still move and delight her; Caspian’s lengthy back story bores her.  A particular joy is how she contrasts her adult reactions with her child ones. At the end of The Silver Chair, grown-up liberal Langrish disapproves of the way Jill and Eustace deal with the bullies but nine-year-old Katherine loved it.

This is the kind of book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kind of tea and toasted muffins you would eat in a faun’s cave in Narnia. Although you will then spend your Sunday evening grubbing about in the attic looking for your battered Puffin paperbacks...

(All the illustrations on this page are by Pauline Baynes; this last one is the cover illustration for The Last Battle - rather different from the one on my Puffin edition!)

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White

I’ve had a copy of The Once and Future King hanging around for several years now, and every time I see it I think, ‘I really want to read that!’ and then I don’t. And I feel a little guilty because when I finally picked it up it wasn’t really to read it in its own right, as it were. As I may have mentioned, the third and last Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week is coming up. Since STW was accomplished at so many forms of literature, I’ve always tried to include a variety in my reading for this; she wrote a biography of T.H. White which I thought would be nice to write about for this year.

Alas, second-hand copies including delivery to Belgium are now so expensive that I have changed my mind. The very least I could do to make it up to T.H. seemed to write a post about this, his most famous book in his Arthurian quartet.

The Sword in the Stone is about the boyhood of King Arthur; specifically, his education. The boy Wart has been fostered by Sir Ector and brought up alongside Sir Ector’s biological son, Kay, in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage. Lost in the forest one day, Wart stumbles across Merlin’s cottage and Merlin decides to become his tutor. Naturally the lessons Merlin teaches are not the tedious grammar ones to which Wart has been accustomed up until now. He is transformed into different animals and birds and in one of my favourite episodes he and Kay meet Robin Hood and rescue Friar Tuck and the Dog Boy from Morgan le Fay’s fortress, CastleChariot. Finally, on a trip to a jousting tournament in London, Wart draws out a sword from an anvil because Kay needs it. This sword is the magic one which proves he must be the next king of England.

(John Lawrence, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Once and Future King, 2013)

I will quote the description of Morgan Le Fay’s castle here because I love it so much:

It was a castle made entirely out of food, except that on the highest tower of all, a carrion crow was sitting, with an arrow in its beak. [...] It rose from its lake of milk in a mystic light of its own – in a greasy, buttery glow. It was the fairy aspect of Castle Chariot, which the Oldest Ones [...] had thought would be tempting to the children [Wart and Kay]. It was to tempt them to eat. [...] They plodded over the filthy drawbridge – a butter one, with cow hairs still in it – sinking to their ankles. [..] In the end they came to the inner chamber, where Morgan le Fay herself lay stretched upon her bed of glorious lard.

People sometimes talk about ‘comfort books’, and this is a comfort book. A ‘bed of glorious lard’! It is a comforting book to read, because it is amusing, it is about childhood, it is grounded in a wonderful natural world and it allows wish-fulfilment. Like Narnia, the world of the Castle of the Forest Sauvage is a place we long to visit. It is a self-consciously ‘hyperreal’ version of the Middle Ages, with proper snowy winters and old oak trees and feasts and jousting, all the Middle Ages one could wish for. Society is ordered and dangers are successfully overcome. And it is funny. However, it was also a comforting book for White to write. According to Kevin Crossley Holland, in the foreword to my edition, White had a miserable childhood and for the rest of his life used education as a means of comforting himself. So in this novel Wart learns what it is like to live in an ant society and a goose society; when to fear a pike; what falcons discuss at night. And we learn how to shoot a bow and joust a knight on horseback and hunt a wild boar – but like Wart, we have fun while we learn.

White writes in a dry, amusing tone and there are great comic moments in this novel. He also has a lot of fun with the concept of historical fiction, throwing anachronisms around gleefully to underline the fantastical nature of the book. Look, he seems to be telling us, it’s just a story, let’s enjoy ourselves! And we do.

(Photograph of T.H. White, found here)

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

ENTRY FOR THE NINETEENTH DAY OF THE SIXTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
[...] On the way, the House showed me many wonders.
In the Forty-Fifth Vestibule I saw a Staircase that had become one vast bed of mussels. One of the Statues that lined the Wall of the Staircase was all but engulfed in a blue-black carapace of mussels with only half a staring Face and one white, out-flung Arm left free. I made a sketch of it in my Journal.
In the Fifty-Second Western Hall I came upon a Wall ablaze with so much golden Light that the Statues appeared to be dissolving into it. From there I passed into a cool little Antechamber with few Windows, where it was cool and shadowy. I saw the Statue of a Woman holding out a wide, flat Dish so that a Bear Cub could drink from it.

I have now read Piranesi and I am ready to tell you that it’s just as good as everyone says, albeit very different to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

It is impossible to write very much about it without spoiling it, and one of the pleasures is that you really don’t know at first where it’s going. So I’ll just explain that it takes the form of a series of journal entries by Piranesi (not his real name) who inhabits a vast labyrinth of abandoned stone halls. Seas wash the lower ones and clouds float through the higher ones. Many of the halls contain statues, but apart from the birds and the fish Piranesi lives alone. He has explored many of the halls and noted down his observations of them, but he has not found their limits. On his travels, he has found the bones of thirteen different people, and he cares for them, bringing food, drink and lilies as offerings. Piranesi loves the House and appreciates its beauty. His observations are a tribute to it; they are also essential to his survival since he records the tides which sporadically sweep through and would drown him if they caught him.

(Piranesi, ‘Via Appia and Via Ardeatina’, etching from Le Antichita Romane, 1756; from here)

However, there is something unsettling about the world from the beginning. Piranesi does not seem to belong there. Among the marble and the fishes, he sniffs the smell of petrol, which is out of place in this car-less place. How does he know the smell of petrol? He finds crisp packets. He is visited twice a week by the Other, who gives him a pair of brightly coloured trainers. He has a sleeping bag, a torch, plastic bowls to catch rainwater. Despite his meticulous record-keeping, there are holes in his memory. His innocence is both charming and odd; is it the result of some trauma?

Do you trust the House? I ask Myself.
Yes, I answer Myself.
And if the House has made you forget, it has done so for good reason.
But I do not understand the reason.
It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.

The Other is the one who has named Piranesi. He does not seem to feel the beauty or the kindness of the House. He believes that that it is the repository of some secret and powerful knowledge which he intends to find and exploit. He knows that to stay too long in this world is to pay a price. He perceives the House as a prison, which presumably is why he has chosen the name Piranesi.

(Piranesi, ‘The Pier with the Chains’, etching from Carceri d'Inventione, 1750/1761; from here)

The question that the reader has is not, What will happen to Piranesi? but, What is this place and what does it mean? This places Piranesi in a tradition of Absurdist and Surreal literature in which characters are trapped in places that do not seem to be our world and are forced to reflect on themselves. I am thinking of Silvina Ocampo’s The Topless Tower, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, that sort of literature, though there are probably better-known examples which I just can’t remember. Unusually, Piranesi experiences the labyrinthine House as a benign, living entity. He feels a religious awe for it and his existence, his record-keeping, is a sort of worship. And without, I hope, giving too much away, it is a place that others long for even before they have seen it (this is explored in the interviews at the end of the novel). It is both a place of escape and a prison.

The novel abounds in literary allusions which give us further ways to understand the House. There is an epigraph from The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, and at the heart of that novel is the Wood Between the Worlds which contains the entrances to many different universes. Something similar occurs in this novel. There is also an abandoned city (although Charn is dead, and the House is living) and a magician who likes to experiment upon people, both of which may be relevant to Piranesi.

Near the beginning of the novel, Piranesi encounters an albatross.

Still it continued, straight towards me, and the strangest thought came to me: perhaps the albatross and I were destined to merge and become another order of being entirely: an Angel! This thought both excited and frightened me, but still I remained, arms outstretched, mirroring the albatross’s  flight. [...] The moment that he reached me – the moment that I thought we would collide like Planets and become one! – I gave out a sort of gasping cry – Aahhhh! In the same instant, I felt some sort of pent-up tension go out of me, a tension I did not know I had until that moment. Vast, white wings passed over me.

Far from shooting it with a crossbow, as did the Ancient Mariner, he feels kinship with the bird, concern for its chick. And the arrival of the albatross heralds significant changes for Piranesi.

(Piranesi, detail from ‘The Triumphal Arch’, etching from Grotteschi, 1748; from here)

A final literary allusion is to ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. In this story, two characters discuss the ancestor of one of them, who declared he would write a novel and create a garden labyrinth. When he died, his relatives found a jumble of papers which made no sense. Stephen Albert, the man who has translated these papers, explains that novel is the labyrinth. In most fiction, characters are presented with questions, they make a choice and the consequences of that choice follow. But in this novel, every possible choice is explored, every forking path, and the book just carries on expanding. This seems to me to bear a relationship to the nature of the House, which is endless and apparently living. Perhaps it is created by the collective imagination, constantly expanding, prison and freedom. It is, after all, an artifice constructed between the sea and the sky.

reading notes, 5th March 2021

(Dogwalking chez gallimaufry; French school, early nineteenth century, A Young Woman Standing Reading a Book in the Woods, her Dog beside her, oil on canvas; found here)

Writing about books takes me an insanely long time, and sometimes I don’t have an insanely long time to devote to it. Sometimes I read a book and I enjoy it but I don’t have anything to say about it. So I thought what I might do, fairly regularly, is write a short post about what I’ve been reading and what I’m looking forward to reading, no real analysis, no spoilers. And then I hope that in the comments, you’ll tell us what you’ve been reading and are looking forward to reading.

I have just finished...

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I found it in the library and for some reason I borrowed it. ‘For some reason’ because I read her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, and began by enjoying it but found the ending unsatisfying – annoying, even. And then I read her second novel, Bellman & Black, and did not like it at all. Still, there was something about the way she writes... So I’m very glad that I persevered because I really did enjoy Once Upon a River and it was exactly the right book at the right time.

One midwinter night a man bursts into The Swan at Radcot, on the Thames, carrying a dead child in his arms, and collapses. Miraculously, the child returns to life. But who is she? Is she Amelia Vaughan, who was abducted two years ago and never seen again? Her parents believe so. Is she Alice Armstrong, whose desperate mother has drowned herself? Her father claims her. Could she be Ann, Lily White’s little sister, even though Lily is now a woman in her forties? And how can a dead child revive? It’s a novel about the stories people tell themselves, as entertainment or exploitation or as a means of surviving, where they come from and how they can change. It brings a nineteenth-century community to life, it’s funny and sad but ultimately a cheering book, and it features a sapient pig.

I am looking forward to...

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. For reasons too boring to list here, I had ordered a copy of this before it was published but was only able to get my hands on it (thanks to my kind mother) yesterday. Entirely by coincidence, I had been having a tiny Susanna Clarke fest. My daughter had received the DVD of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for her birthday (yes it was from me, pretending to be the hens; I knew she’d enjoy it and I am of course softening her up for when she’s old enough to read the novel). We watched that, and I’d been rereading stories from The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Piranesi lives in a wonderful house quite alone, except for Tuesdays and Fridays when he’s visited by his only friend, the Other. But then messages start appearing, chalked onto the pavements: there is someone else in the house. A friend or, as the Other tells Piranesi, a foe?

What have you just finished? And what are you looking forward to reading next?