I’m starting a new job on Monday (maternity cover) at Oxford University Press. It’s all happened very quickly – I applied for it two weeks ago – and I’m both excited and nervous. I might well tell you more about it in the future, once I’ve worked out how much distance I ought to keep between my job and this blog, but for now I just want to explain why posts will be a bit sporadic for the next week or two, as I get used to a new environment. But I’ve quite enjoyed posting every other day, for a bit, rather than everyday – because more people seem to interact with each post that way.
But don’t worry, I’m definitely not going anywhere! Stuck-in-a-Book is still very important to me.
Some quick weekend links…
1.)The book – is Jenn Ashworth’s The Friday Gospels, which I’m 50 pages into. I loved her A Kind of Intimacy, and have somehow still not read her second novel (bad Simon), but have gone straight onto the third, which Sceptre kindly sent me when I sent them a begging email. It’s about Mormons, and is from various different perspectives, all of which are wonderfully realised so far. More soon…
2.)The link – Radio 4 do a programme all about Nancy Mitford!
3.) The blog post – I’m trying to resist writing about The Lizzie Bennet Diaries again (IT’S JUST GOT SO EXCITING), but I’ve found my way around that by linking, instead, to Iris’s blog post about it, and about Pride and Prejudice‘s anniversary – have a gander here.
Anne Fadiman wrote in Ex Libris that every bibliophile has a shelf (or shelves) of books that is somewhat off-kilter from the rest of their taste. Mine might be my theology shelf, or my theatrical history shelf, but I think the books (few as they are) most likely to surprise the casual observer would be those on neurology.
When I told my Dad I’d bought and read Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks (after he’d spotted a review and told me about it), he asked “But will you be writing about it on your blog?” “Of course,” thought I – it hadn’t crossed my mind that I wouldn’t. But I pondered on it, and thought – would blog-readers used to my love for 1930s novels about spinsters drinking tea also want to read about phantom limbs and Delirium Tremens?
Believe me, you will. I have almost zero interest in science in all its many and varied forms. I stopped studying it when I was 16 (except for maths) and found it all very dull before that point. (Apologies, science-lovers.) Biology was far and away my least favourite subject. And yet Hallucinations is absolutely brilliant, as fascinating and readable as his popular work The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. A predilection for scientific books is definitely not a prerequisite. Sacks is just as much a storyteller as a scientist.
Before starting Hallucinations, I thought they were mostly terrifying, felt real, and came chiefly with a fever or drug abuse. While hallucinations can be all these things, I was surprised to learn how often they are benign (even amusing or comforting) and easily recognised as fake. Strangest still, I hadn’t realised that (under Sacks’ definitions) I had experienced hallucinations myself.
That’s not quite true – I knew I’d had them when I had an extremely high temperature during flu, but I hadn’t known that what I’d had repeatedly as a child were hypnagogic hallucinations – those that people get just before going to sleep. Aged about 5, I often used to see chains of bright lights and shapes (and, Mum remembered but I did not, faces) in front of me – whether my eyes were open or closed – at bedtime. It turns out hypnagogic hallucinations are very common, and (Sacks writes) rarely unnerving for the hallucinator. Well, Dr. Sacks, aged five I found them incredibly frightening, and usually ran to mother!
There are so many types of hallucinations that Sacks has witnessed in decades of being a neurologist, encountering hundreds of people and hearing about thousands from his colleagues. This book just includes the ones who gave him permission. It would necessitate typing out the whole book to tell you all the illustrations he gives, but they range from fascinating accounts of Charles Bonnet Syndrome (basically seeing hallucinations, often highly detailed, for long or short periods) to hallucinated smells, sounds, and even a chapter on hallucinating doppelgangers.
Almost all of these hallucinations act alongside lives which are lived otherwise normally, and do not suggest any terrible neurological condition. It is somewhat chilling that Sacks recounts a study which revealed that 12 volunteers, with otherwise ‘normal’ mental health histories, were asked to tell doctors they were hearing voices – and 11 were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sacks is keen to point out how many patients with hallucinations, even when voices, are not suffering from schizophrenia or any other sort of mental illness. He is deeply interested in how people manage their lives when seeing hallucinations at any hour of the day, and offers up humble praise to those who take it in their stride.
This is what makes Sacks so special. A few of the blurb reviews describe him as ‘humane’, which I suppose he is – but the word feels a little dispassionate. Sacks, on the other hand, is fundamentally compassionate. He never treats or describes people as case studies. The accounts he gives are not scientific outlines, interested only in neurological details, but mini-biographies filled with human detail, humour, and respect. Here’s an example of all three factors combining:
Gertie C. had a half-controlled hallucinosis for decades before she started on L-dopa – bucolic hallucinations of lying in a sunlit meadow or floating in a creek near her childhood home. This changed when she was given L-dopa and her hallucinations assumed a social and sometimes sexual character. When she told me about this, she added, anxiously, “You surely wouldn’t forbid a friendly hallucination to a frustrated old lady like me!” I replied that if her hallucinations had a pleasant and controllable character, they seemed rather a good idea under the circumstances. After this, the paranoid quality dropped away, and her hallucinatory encounters became purely amicable and amorous. She developed a humour and tact and control, never allowing herself a hallucination before eight in the evening and keeping its duration to thirty or forty minutes at most. If her relatives stayed too late, she would explain firmly but pleasantly that she was expecting “a gentleman visitor from out of town” in a few minutes’ time, and she felt he might take it amiss if he was kept waiting outside. She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.
And with this respect and kindness definitely comes a sense of humour – the sort of humour exemplified by many of the people he met. This detail, in a footnote, was wonderful:
Robert Teunisse told me how one of his patients, seeing a man hovering outside his nineteenth-floor apartment, assumed this was another one of his hallucinations. When the man waved at him, he did not wave back. The “hallucination” turned out to be his window washer, considerably miffed at not having his friendly wave returned.
Although Sacks does not compromise his scientific standing, Hallucinations is definitely (as demonstrated by me) a book which is accessible to the layman. In the whole book, there was only one sentence which completely baffled me…
When his patient died, a year later, an autopsy revealed a large midbrain infarction involving (among other structures) the cerebral peduncles (hence his coinage of the term “penduncular hallucinations”).
I’ll take your word for it, Oliver.
But, that excerpt aside, Hallucinations was more of a page-turner than most detective novels, paid closer attention to the human details of everyday life than much domestic fiction, and certainly left me with more to think about than many books I read. I hope I’ve done enough to convince you that, even if you think you won’t be interested, you probably would be.
I have wondered whether my interest in neurology might, in fact, just be an appreciation of Oliver Sacks. I’ve started other books in the field and not finished them, though I will go back to one on synaesthesia that I recently began. Perhaps no other author combines Sacks’ talents as scientist and storyteller… but I’m happy to be proven wrong, if anyone has any suggestions?
For now, though, I’m going to have to hunt out my copy of Sacks’ Awakenings…
Do keep discussing in the previous post – a fascinatingly wide range of opinions there, all supported with excellent points – and here are a bunch of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding reviews appearing around the blogosphere. If you link to your review in the comments on the previous post, I’ll add them here…
Right, books at the ready! I’ve re-read Cheerful Weather for the Wedding ahead of seeing the new film (which I’ll be doing in one week’s time, at The Phoenix in Oxford, which has a one-night-only screening) and I’m opening up this post for discussion. It won’t be one of my usual reviews, because I’ve actually already reviewed the novel (novella?) here, but more of a hub for conversation about it.
But I’ll give you a quick overview of my thoughts on re-reading Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. It might be worth popping over and reading my thoughts in 2009, if you’d be so kind… basically I loved every moment, particularly the hilarious secondary characters. Most memorable were mad Nellie (who spouts irrelevant conversations she has had with the plumber, while addressing the tea-tray) and brothers Tom and Robert, who come to a contretemps over the latter’s unorthodox emerald socks. (I’m assuming that everyone knows the basic plot by this point – Dolly is uncertainly preparing for her wedding to Owen, with a houseful of eccentrics helping and hindering her – and a bottle of rum within reach.)
This time around, I found the novella a little less amusing, but mostly because I already knew where all my favourite bits were coming. It is testament to Strachey’s humour that Nellie, Tom, and Robert have remained firmly fixed in my mind, down to their individual lines (“Put your head in a bag” still makes me grin) but inevitably surreal moments of humour heavily rely upon novelty. Her cast of near-grotesques were still a delight, but not quite as much the second time around.
This, however, left me more able to appreciate other aspects to Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (and not just that sublime cover – I kept closing the book just to stare at it for a bit longer.) I’d appreciated Strachey as a comic writer, but hadn’t really noticed how gorgeous some of her other writing is. Her propensity to describe every character’s eyes when they arrive on the scene was slightly unnerving, but depictions of buildings and countryside were really lovely, and contrasted well with the surreal descriptions of people. I couldn’t resist this excerpt…
Dolly’s white-enamelled Edwardian bedroom jutted out over the kitchen garden, in a sort of little turret. It was at the top of the house, and reached by a steep and narrow stairway. Coming in at the bedroom door, one might easily imagine one’s self to be up in the air in a balloon, or else inside a lighthouse. One saw only dazzling white light coming in at the big windows on all sides, and through the bow window directly opposite the door shone the pale blue sea-bay of Malton.
This morning the countryside, through each and all of the big windows, was bright golden in the sunlight. On the sides of a little hill quite close, beyond the railway cutting, grew a thick hazel copse. To-day, with the sun shining through its bare branches, this seemed to be not trees at all, but merely folds of something diaphanous floating along the surface of the hillside – a flock of brown vapours, here dark, there light – lit up in the sunshine.
And all over the countryside this morning the bare copses looked like these brown gossamer scarves; they billowed over the hillsides, here opalescent, there obscure – according to the sunlight and shadow among their bronze and gauzy foldings.
It can’t just be me who wants to move in immediately? But I couldn’t leave you without a moment of Strachey’s wonderfully wicked humour…
“How are your lectures going?” asked Kitty of Joseph, a kind of desperate intenseness in her voice and face. This was her style of the moment with the male sex.
And now over to you! If you post a review of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding during the week, please pop a link in the comments (I’ll probably do a round-up later in the week) but I’d also like this to be a place for discussion – do reply to each other’s comments, and I’ll join in, and it’ll be FUN. I won’t post for another two or three days, to give everyone a chance to see this.
Here are some questions to start things going:
Did you enjoy the novel, for starters!?
What do you think Julia Strachey was trying to achieve – what sort of book was she trying to write?
Why do you think Strachey made it so short? Would it have worked as a longer novel?
Who were your favourite characters?
If you’re re-reading, how did you opinion change this time?
This week’s song is suggested by special guest Susan! You’ll probably know her as Susan in TX – one of most beloved members of the blog-reading community, I’m sure you’ll agree. Here is a song her family have been listening to, Kicking and Screaming by Third Day.
The aftermath of A Century of Books definitely seems to be a sudden dash towards 21st century books, particularly those I’ve had on hold for a while. And few books have hovered more determinedly around my consciousness than Linda Gillard’s House of Silence (2011). I’d read her first three novels, and enjoyed them all – one to this-is-incredibly-I-love-it standards. Although I’ve never met Linda Gillard, we used to be in the same book discussion list, and we’re friends on Facebook, so I’m putting this kind gift in Reading Presently. Them’s my rules. And it’s not even the first time she’s given me a copy of the book.
As many of you will know, Linda Gillard is a runaway Kindle bestseller – we’re talking 30,000 copies of House of Silence here, let alone her other Kindle titles – and has a devoted audience around the world. And then, lolloping up behind them, wearing too many belts and clearly thinking the calculator in his hand is a mobile phone, comes me. I don’t have a Kindle, or any of the other-ereaders-are-available. I don’t want one even a tiny bit. The only advantage they have, in fact – and this has quite genuinely appeared on my mental pros/cons list – is access to Linda Gillard’s novels.
Yes, yes, I know. Kindle-for-PC. I downloaded it; Linda kindly gave me a download of House of Silence. I tried to read it. I read the first page every now and then… and got no further. It was like standing outside a bank vault and not having the combination – because, try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to read an e-book. It took me months to read the one my good friend had written, which even thanked me in it.
And then – praise be! – Linda published it as a POD paperback, and sent me a review copy of that. Huzzah! I read it, and, dear reader, it was good. Which is just as well, after all that.
(Incidentally, isn’t the cover gorgeous? Unlike most self-published authors, Linda Gillard goes the extra mile with design and aesthetic, paying a designer for this beautiful look. What a shame that easily her best novel, A Lifetime Burning, should also have easily her worst cover… but the new cover for the Kindle edition is beautiful.)
House of Silence has been advertised as Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm – both traits I could identify, and which can definitely be no bad thing – but, more than that, it felt reliably Gillard to me. In terms of period, event, and even genre Linda is versatile – but certain ingredients stand out as characteristic. The most dominant of these is the feel of the book and the characters, vague as that sounds – with Linda Gillard’s novels, you know you’re going to get strong emotions and passionate people, trammeled by everyday experience, but refusing to lie entirely dormant…
Guinevere (known as Gwen) works alongside actors, in the wardrobe department. Already, I’m sold – you might know how I love books which feature actors, and Gillard uses Gwen’s knowledge of fabrics to ingenious effect as the novel progresses. It is in this role that she first meets Alfie, who is having some issues with his breeches… one thing leads to another, and they end up dating. Which, in turn, leads to her spending Christmas with him and his family, at beautiful old Creake Hall in Norfolk. He’s a little reluctant for her to join him, but eventually is persuaded.
And what a group of eccentrics they find! Chief amongst them – although appearing very little on the scene – is Alfie’s mother Rae. Her mind is wandering, and her grasp of time and people is never strong, but she is still regularly producing her series of children’s books about Tom Dickon Harry. This little chap has made her famous – and is based on Alfie himself, who (in turn) rose to notoriety after appearing in a documentary about the books when he was eighteen. The irony is, Alfie explains, that he actually grew up with his father, who divorced Rae – and now he only sees his sister and half-sisters once a year, at Christmas.
Those sisters include loveable, scatty Hattie – who is forever making quilts, and babbling away without any real sense of boundaries. Viv is less open, but still welcomes Gwen into the family. Throw in two visiting sisters, in varying states of life-collapse, and things are bound to be interesting. And Creake Hall is a wonderful setting. Who doesn’t love an Elizabethan manor for a mysterious, slightly unsettling novel? What makes it most unsettling is that the reader shares with Gwen the feeling that Alfie isn’t telling us everything… why was he so reluctant for her to stay? What secrets does he hide? What secrets are hidden by the house of silence?
Gwen is rather younger than Linda Gillard’s previous heroines – she is in her mid-twenties, in fact. At no point does she come across as that young, though – which I thought might be a failing on Gillard’s part, until I got to the part where she asked Marek to guess her age:
“Older than you look. Younger than you sound.”
One of the main aspects of Gwen’s personality is that she has had to be old before her years. I suppose that’s what happens when you lose your entire family during adolescence – to drugs, alcohol, and AIDS – including finding your mother, dead, on Christmas. Yup, Gwen has had it tough.
Oh, and Marek, you ask? He is the gardener, known as Tyler to everyone (because every gardener has been known as that) and is warm, a good listener – he used to be a psychiatrist – and generally a safe place for Gwen to retreat. He’s also (I quote Lyn’s review) ‘gorgeous, sexy, and irresistible.’ I have mental blocks for big age gaps with fictional couples – even Emma and Mr. Knightley is a combination which makes me wince a bit – so I’ll sidestep any potential entanglements here, and leave those quandaries to your imagination. I will say that Marek reminds me a lot of Gavin from Gillard’s Emotional Geology, that he lives in a windmill (far from the only thing which reminded me of Jonathan Creek), and plays the cello – which led me in the direction of this beautiful piece. It’s Rachmaninov’s Sonata in G Minor, Opus 17 No.3, Andante. (Sorry, I have no idea how one is supposed to phrase the titles to music.)
I refuse to give any more of the plot away. I’ve left it all deliberately vague, because it’s the sort of novel where the plot does matter. One of the reasons it reminded me of an episode of Jonathan Creek, in the best possible way, is that you’re desperate to find out what happens – and twist upon twist come, so that everything is plausible but unguessable. The ‘reveals’ are entirely consistent with people’s behaviour throughout the novel; character is never sacrificed to plot – indeed, the explanation of what has happened is also an explanation of why the members of this family are the way they are.
It’s all beautifully, addictively done. I stayed up far later than I should, devouring the second half of the novel. I was unsure, in the beginning, whether it would match up to the compulsive quality of Gillard’s other novels, and the action doesn’t quite kick into gear until we’ve arrived at Creake Hall – but, after that, hold onto your hats. It is a mark of Linda Gillard’s talent that her novels are both versatile and identifiable – no matter what genre she turns her hand to (and I believe her next was a paranormal romance), I would be able to recognise a Gillard at a hundred paces. And, although she may be one of the new wave of successful Kindle authors, thank Heaven she’s found a way for the Kindless to enjoy the dizzying, thoughtful extravaganza that is House of Silence.
Others who got Stuck in this Book:
“House of Silence is a compulsively readable book. It’s a compelling story of family secrets & lies, set in a crumbling Elizabethan mansion at Christmas in the depths of a freezing Norfolk winter.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading
“This is a book in which it is so easy to lose yourself, at once emotional and mysterious.” – Margaret, Books Please
“The book has romance, bubbling away underneath, it deals with mental health issues so effectively and considerately that you actually do not realise until reflecting back on the book.” – Jo, The Book Jotter
Another rush by – just wanted to pass on the info (to which Linda Gillard alerted me) that Tove Jansson’s The Winter Book is Amazon’s Kindle deal-of-the-day, for 99p: click here. Unless you’re ethically against Amazon and whatnot, but at least you can make a fully-informed decision now!
This collection of short stories is my favourite Jansson book, and she is one of my favourite writers, so you can imagine how much I love it!
Just to say, I’m afraid I’ve put word verification back on. I didn’t mind getting lots of spam when Blogger detected it (although it was tiresome deleting them all from my inbox), but now they’re getting through to the page. Sorry if word verification means some people have trouble commenting, but needs must!
Just so you know that I’m not dead in a ditch – just rather wiped out from a cold that doesn’t feel like going away – I thought I’d ask you all what you’re reading at the moment?
I’ve just finished a very gripping modern novel (more anon) and started Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, who is being reliably fascinating so far.
Be prepared for me to be pretty flexible in my Reading Presently project, folks. I mostly won’t be including re-reads, but I will be more inclined to if I’m reading the gift for the first time – i.e. first time in that particular edition, but not first time overall. And, in the first days of the new year, I re-read E.M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady for the umpteenth time, and loved it just as much as ever. I’m amazed by how consistently wonderfully Delafield writes it, with almost every line making me smile or laugh. Just flicking through a copy, here is an example, because I feel she should get to say something in this post:
Write letters. Much interrupted by Helen Wills [the cat], wanting to be let out, kitten, wanting to be let in, and dear Robin, who climbs all over the furniture, apparently unconscious that he is doing so, and tells me at the same time, loudly and in full, the story of The Swiss Family Robinson.
As I say, I’ve read it many times – this is probably the eighth or ninth time in ten years – but this is the first time I’ve read the particular edition given to me by (drum roll, if you will)… Thomas at My Porch! Yes, that adorable man knew that I had something of a collection of Provincial Lady editions, and sent me this beauty:
Isn’t it fab? I was so grateful, especially since it’s an edition I’ve never seen on my bookshop travels in the UK.
Whilst we’re here, I thought you might fancy a little tour around my other editions, no? If nothing else, it’ll make you feel better about your own book buying compulsions. You’ll feel a model of restraint and good sense, by comparison.
This is the first ever edition that I bought, having read The Provincial Lady Goes Further from the local library (large print edition – the only E.M. Delafield book they held). This is the edition I’ve read most often – in fact, it’s always on my bedside table – and the spine has fallen off. It’s all four Provincial Lady books in one, with an introduction by Kate O’Brien. It would have originally had a lovely dustjacket – like the one pictured in Christine’s post here – but mine came, instead, with a cup mark.
Over the years, I’ve bought up cheap editions of the various books in the series, when I’ve stumbled across them. That accounts for this little pile – two copies of The Provincial Lady Goes Further, and one of The Diary of a Provincial Lady – which, interestingly, has a bunch of pages duplicated in the middle, and thus must be worth…. um, nothing.
One of the reasons I buy these, other than because they’re simply lovely, is for the fantastic Arthur Watt illustrations:
And then, of course, I have the Virago Modern Classics edition, with Nicola Beauman’s introduction. I couldn’t not have that, could I? But… I suppose I didn’t medically need to get this two separate editions of this omnibus, simply for the different covers… (second photo not mine, pinched from Christine’s site – because I forgot to take a photo of it, and it’s in Somerset.)
And, finally, when shopping in one of my favourite bookshops – Malvern Bookshop in Malvern, Worcestershire – I came across the Folio edition of the first book. I don’t think the illustrator really interprets the book in the way I would, but Folio books are so beautifully produced that I couldn’t leave this one on the shelf now, could I? No. No, of course I could not.
Ok, dear reader, I know what you’re thinking… I don’t have the Cath Kidston edition which Virago published a year or two ago! And you’re right, of course. I imagine one day, when I find it cheaply, I’ll add it to my collection. ‘Collection’ sounds better than hoard, doesn’t it?
Well, my name is Simon, and I am addicted to editions of the Provincial Lady. Thomas is my enabler. I’m well aware that I couldn’t stop any time I wanted to. I’m not even trying to go clean. Don’t LOOK at me, I’m SO ASHAMED.
1.) The book – is Jenn Ashworth’s The Friday Gospels, which I’m 50 pages into. I loved her A Kind of Intimacy, and have somehow still not read her second novel (bad Simon), but have gone straight onto the third, which Sceptre kindly sent me when I sent them a begging email. It’s about Mormons, and is from various different perspectives, all of which are wonderfully realised so far. More soon…
