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The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight #ABookADayInMay No.17

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The Premonitions Bureau: A Sunday Times bestseller: Amazon.co.uk: Knight, Sam: 9780571357567: Books

I didn’t know anything about The Premonitions Bureau (2022) by Sam Knight when it turned up in the Audible sale – but the title, the cover, and the unexpected subtitle telling me that it was a true story were enough for me to take a gamble on it.

The story starts with the Aberfan disaster in 1966 – I’m sure you all know about it, but
it’s when a colliery waste tip atop a Welsh hillside suddenly fell down into the valley with devastating effect. 144 people died, including large numbers of pupils in the village school. And several people claimed to have predicted that the tragedy would happen.

‘Claimed’ is perhaps the wrong word, since apparently two of the people who predicted it also died in the disaster – neither of them apparently having any sense that they were having a premonition. One of the children in the school told her mother “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Another had drawn a picture of people digging at the hillside, with the words ‘The End’.

John Barker, a psychiatrist who ran a mental hospital in an old Victorian asylum in Shropshire, was fascinated by the possibilities in this phenomenon. He had already been deeply interested in unusual psychiatric issues – such as Munchausen syndrome, or the idea that people could literally be scared to death.

Being a scientist, he decided to go about this systematically. He set up the Premonitions Bureau, inviting people to send in any premonitions they had – whether in dreams, visions, or convictions. They got hundreds of replies from all over the place – some trolling them, but others very serious. Few seemed to be particularly specific – more along the lines of ‘something terrible will happen to a plane’ – but each was catalogued carefully. The hope was to be able to present their findings to the Medical Research Council and perhaps, in turn, set up a system to warn people of impending disasters. (Though there was also a debate about whether you could have a premonition of an event that then doesn’t happen – a Catch 22 for any way of using this tool to save lives.)

I had never heard of the Premonitions Bureau, and I did find Barker a likeable, fascinating and curiously impenetrable person. And I found much the same with Knight’s book. It goes on so many tangents, exploring interesting side-roads to the main discussion – often spending large chunks of chapters talking about these other matters in great detail. And some of them are certainly interesting, but by contrast, the bits about the actual bureau seem a bit flimsy. We don’t learn much about the hundreds of contributions or contributors, or what happened when they were right or wrong (though, as an exception, we do get a lot of detail about a train crash that was apparently predicted and which one of the BeeGees survived). It does feel as though there isn’t enough material to give a thoroughly researched book about this bureau – that it is an enthralling and enticing topic which isn’t quite followed up by what we learn about it. The bureau is there throughout, but sometimes as a shadowy thread at the centre of a lot of other topics.

And Knight is careful in not committing either way to whether or not he believes premonitions can happen. There are moments which seem to defeat any scepticism, but not much on probabilities of success or alternative explanations of the ‘accurate’ premonitions.

I did finish The Premonitions Bureau having found it interesting and well-written, but thinking that I might prefer to read a fictional story that could equally well be invented for this eye-catching title. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, but I think fiction could have been more satisfying.

Foster by Claire Keegan #ABookADayInMay No.16

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Foster by Claire Keegan | Waterstones

Today’s book is so short that it is almost a short story – 88 pages, or an hour and half as an audiobook (which is how I read it – indeed, since I listen to audiobooks fast, it was a little under an hour). So many people have raved about Foster (2010) in the past couple of years that I couldn’t help downloading it when it was on offer.

This is a thoroughly Irish novella, Irishness seeped through every sentence – whether that be depictions of the County Wexford countryside, the turns of phrase like ‘It was a cottage she lived in’, or the open casket at a funeral that takes place halfway through. It is 1981 and the unnamed narrator (another one!) is a young girl who has been deposited with John and Edna Kinsella. They live on a farm in County Wexford, and she has come from Country Carlow – not knowing exactly why she is there, or for how long, or indeed if she is ever going to go home. Her father leaves with a warning not to fall in the fire, and departs with no kinder word of affection. He has also forgotten to leave any of her clothes – but the Kinsellas have some that she can use, until they can buy her some more.

Keegan’s novella is a masterclass in what is not said. We don’t learn a huge amount about the home that she has left, except that it is busy, crowded and not a particularly kind place to live. The narrator is used to incident. There is no space for rest, for simply being. And even while the Kinsellas’ farm is being productively run, there is peace and there is calm.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before.

There is a twist in the story, though it is one that simply deepens our understanding of character. It isn’t played to jar the reader; the plot is not as important as the people.

This is a beautiful little book, showing in not-many pages the richness of human kindness, the complex simplicity of country life, and the transformation that can take place when love is gently, generously shared.

People who got Stuck into this Book:

“Foster is a sublime novella, a masterclass in the ‘less-is-more’ school of writing – a poignant story, beautifully told.” – Jacqui Wine

“It is a very well written story, subtle and nuanced with a clear focus on the characters. I think I expected more from it, though.” – The Mookse and the Gripes

“Foster is as lyrical as poetry and has the depth of a full-length novel, yet it’s very brevity is what makes it so impressive.” – 746 Books

 

Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint #ABookADayInMay No.15

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I bought Making Love (2002) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint back in 2014, in an edition translated by Linda Coverdale – unusually, and pleasingly, her name even makes the cover. It’s a slim novella at only 114 pages, and I found it beguilingly beautiful… with some reservations. I’ve just learned, from the author’s Wikipedia page, that it’s the first in the ‘cycle of Marie’, of which there are four books so far.

Marie is one of the two main characters in Making Love, the other being our narrator – another unnamed narrator, which has cropped up a few times in May. It is set over the course of a few days in Japan, in Tokyo and Kyoto, and we are told from the outset that this trip is the end of their relationship. It hasn’t been planned as a final trip to say farewell to their love – and it is something the narrator slowly realises, with the sense of something inevitable.

That point comes at the end of this paragraph, though the reason I wanted to quote it is as example of Toussaint’s beautiful, beautiful writing. So much of Making Love is suffused with this sort of gorgeous, strangely elegiac writing. Whether the weather, the glowing lights of Tokyo, or simply the sight of a hotel room, Toussaint (and Coverdale) write prose like poetry – but very readable poetry, that doesn’t obstruct the sense:

From where we sat in the restaurant, the wooden window frame presented only a fragmented and incoherent street scene, giving onto a shadowy building with mysterious electric wires and a column of light made up of seven or eight superimposed illuminated signs rising vertically along the façade to announce the presence of bars on every floor. I watched the snow falling silently in the street, light and impalpable, clinging to neon signs, the contours of paper lanterns, car roofs, and the glass eyelets anchoring the wires of telephone poles. When the flakes crossed the bright zone of a street lamp, they whirled an instant in the light like a cloud of powdered sugar puffed aloft by an invisible divine breath, and that snow seemed to me an image of the passage of time, and then, in the immense helplessness I felt at being unable to keep time from passing, I had the presentiment that the end of the night would mean the end of our love.

Those reservations I mentioned earlier? I think the only thing holding me back from relishing every page of Making Love is clued in the title – there is a seamy side to the novella. Along the way, even as they approach the end of the relationship, the couple make love on several occasions – and I don’t object to that being in the novella. But the words and sentences used to describe those moments lose all gentleness. They tone becomes quite sordid and, dare I say, anatomical. It is at odds with the feel of the rest of the prose, in a way that doesn’t feel effective so much as inelegant.

I was more intrigued by the suspenseful subplot of Making Love – the little vial of acid that the narrator has packed with him on this trip, keeping it hidden in his washbag. He returns to it often throughout, whether in action or thought, and the reader can’t help thinking of it as a Chekhov’s gun – why has he brought it, and what will happen with it, if anything? Interestingly, this additional element to the story doesn’t feel at all jarring, even though it could have done. This part Toussaint managed to incorporate elegantly.

So, I was impressed enough by the writing that I will probably seek out more by Toussaint – and if the Marie cycle is chronological, it will be interesting to see what happens after the end of this relationship.

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills #ABookADayInMay No.14

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The Forensic Records Society: Amazon.co.uk: 9781408878378: Books

I love Magnus Mills and have been reading him for years, and have a few on the shelves that I thought would be likely to come up in my May reading. The Forensic Records Society (2017) was a gift last year from my friend Mel, who also introduced me to Mills’ writing in the first place.

The narrator (I think unnamed, though all the men’s names in this book are so bland as to be deliberately forgettable) is chatting one night with his friend James. They are listening to a record that they enjoy but is no longer in the limelight, and decide that probably nobody else in the world is listening to it – one thing leads to another, and they come to a decision about bringing together record-lovers. Or, at least, James has the idea:

“We could form a society for the express purpose of listening to records closely and in detail, forensically if you like, without any interruption or distraction. There would be regular gatherings, and membership would depend on some kind of test to make sure people are genuinely interested.”

“You mean a code of conduct?”

“Certainly,” said James. “We don’t want any charlatans.”

They decide to hold the inaugural meeting in the backroom of the pub. Landlord George, affable and largely unquestioning, is happy for them to hold it there rent-free for a trial period. The only rules of the Forensic Records Society are to turn up on time, bring three records (not LPs) and then listen to them in turn, without comment or judgement.

The group is small at first – and one man, in a long leather coat, is turned away because he arrives a few minutes late. James is firm on that front. The others listen to their records, not making comments or judgements, though one of the men (Chris) often quotes one of the lines from a song that seems to summarise it. Another (Mike) is fixated upon how long each record is, and considers three minutes the perfect length – almost as though it were a holy grail. Curiously, when they leave the room, more time has passed than the number of records played would allow for.

There are a few things that threaten this small group of like-minded men. One is James’s insistence on rules – and using the narrator as a lackey to enforce them, including shutting out the barmaid one evening. The other is the rival groups that start up.

The first is formed by that rejected man in the leather coat – a Confessional Records Society, where people go one at a time to play a record and make a confession. Most seem to leave in tears of joy, though the Forensic Records Society’s attempts to infiltrate don’t go to plan. But that’s not the final rival group that emerges in this ordinary pub, much to the delight of landlord George with his eye on the profit margin.

Along the way, Mills incorporates many names of records – most of which I hadn’t heard of, though there is a playlist you can use alongside. The first edition of The Forensic Records Society (pictured above) even came in the shape of a record, though my paperback is a little more plebian. The text suggests that there is a wide range of styles, artists, and eras featured, though looking through the playlist it definitely leans towards the taste of middle-aged men – which certainly fits the characters.

As so often with Mills, there is a lurking sense of menace throughout. He is so careful never to overstate anything, and it’s the reader who brings all that foreboding to the novel. It’s just about a bunch of blokes listening to records – on the surface. But you can’t help think that it’s about something else.

There are always analogies and parallels floating about when you’re reading Mills – is it all about the October Revolution, as one reviewer suggests? Or is it about religious schisms? Or cults? Mills is too clever to ever let you pin anything down. He is a master of short, sharp dialogue that doesn’t say much. But he simply invests the everyday with an uneasiness that makes each of his novels feel quite powerfully dark – unsettling in the best possible way.

It’s always a discomforting pleasure to spend time with Mills, and there is nobody like him.

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor #ABookADayInMay No.13

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A short review as I’m just off to a Eurovision party!

I think Palladian (1946) might be my final Elizabeth Taylor novel (though, now I write that, unsure I’ve read In A Summer Season) – it was one of her first and, as the Wikipedia page tersely notes, most clearly shows the influence of Jane Austen.

That’s evident from the name of the heroine onwards: Miss Dashwood (Cassandra) is a young woman whose parents have both died, and who goes off to be a governess at Cropthorne Manor. Governesses in the mid-1940s are not quite what they were in the 19th-century, of course, and she is part of the eccentric family quite quickly.

Who is there? Precocious young Sophy, who will be Cassandra’s pupil and who speaks of missing her mother, though she died in childbirth. There is Sophy’s father, Marion (!) Vanbrugh who is a charming, slightly selfish widower. His cousin Margaret is there, a woman keen to shock others, particularly her mother Aunt Tinty – the housekeeper, of sorts, who is plagued by any number of anxieties. And finally Margaret’s brother Tom, who drinks voraciously and with occasional melancholy. Between them, they feud and make up, they reveal secrets and conceal others, they make life hard for each other for both good and bad reasons. Plenty of incidents happen, but it is the sprawling dynamic between these well-drawn, infuriating and fascinating characters that makes Palladian interesting.

The plot does lean a little towards melodrama, and perhaps the influence of Northanger Abbey is as present as any other of Austen’s novels. But what makes this novel so quintessentially Elizabeth Taylor is her brilliant prose. There are lovely scenes of nature, and then there will be a slyness that undercuts every pose the characters try to adopt. Not many other authors would write ‘Mrs Turner smoothed – or hoped to smooth – her skirt’, or ‘”She has a heart of gold,” she added unkindly’. It was those moments that made this novel most special to me. Another example:

“Did you do all your cooking on it?” She looked at Cassandra with a new expression on her face, of wonderment, perhaps, or respect.

“Well, after my mother died, my father and I seemed to live on bread-and-butter.”

The look faded.

I don’t think this is among Elizabeth Taylor’s very best novels, and I will admit that a lot of the very-good-but-quite-similar ones have merged in my mind, and this will join them. But as I re-read her works, I’m sure they will each become more distinct – and now that I’m getting to the end of my Taylor shelf, it won’t be long before re-reading starts.

Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier #ABookADayInMay No.12

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I usually try to join in Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it work with finishing a book a day in May, since none of the candidates on my shelves were very short. Then I had a brainwave – I could finish an audiobook one day in the car, and spread reading a Daphne du Maurier out over two days.

So, which to choose? Eventually I alighted upon Gerald, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father – published in 1934, the year that Gerald du Maurier died. Daphne du Maurier was only 27 – she’d published three novels, but none of them are the ones that would make her name as a writer of fiction. According to the not-too-subtle cover of my 1950 reprint, it was apparently Gerald that initially brought her fame as a writer.

And it really is a marvellous book. It has been sitting on my shelves for a very long time and I had never been particularly tempted by it, but it is an exceptionally good read. It is not a biography in any traditional sense of the word – certainly she does not treat Gerald du Maurier with any criticism, which is unsurprising from a grieving daughter. But this is not even a hagiography – it is a novel, based heavily on fact, in which Gerald is the flawless hero. And because it is a fantasy of a person, it doesn’t matter that we only see one side. There is something in the tone that goes even past novel. It is a fairy tale of a person’s life, and enveloping in that way that only a fairy tale can be.

Daphne du Maurier starts even before Gerald is born, and we see scenes of their childhood – anecdotes that were clearly passed down through the generations are turned into stories told by an omniscient narrator. This continues as Gerald gets older – his unsuccessful engagements and his eventual courtship with Muriel (‘Mo’) are shown with a novelist’s detail. Woven into the narrative are letters that may well have been preserved, but they sit alongside full conversations that du Maurier must have made up. Here, she pictures her only parents in their early days of romance (where ‘Mummie’ is Daphne du Maurier’s grandmother):

Up to the present they had been in rooms, and during the early part of the summer had taken a cottage at Walton-on-Thames, which was a happy refuge from the from the hot weather. “When I’m not picking green-fly off rose heads, I’m picking the black fly off dwarf beans,” Gerald gravely wrote to Mummie. “Everything is doing very well except Japanese iris and parsley. I haven’t been outside the estate yet, but Muriel manages both indoor and outdoor servants with marvellous tact, and even the stable-boys worship here.” (The cottage really had about three rooms, and a tiny square of garden.) Mummie nodded her head an smiled. Darling Gerald was so funny. And it was a wonderful thing to see him happy like this.

Dear Muriel was obviously taking great care of him. She had not seen him looking so well for years. He had got quite brown, too, not that horrid washed-out colour she was used to. Her never took his eyes off Muriel.

The bulk of Gerald, though, is about his acting and theatre producing career. I had always thought of him as primarily a theatre manager, and hadn’t realised how much he had acted – and how influential he had been in this world. But Daphne du Maurier takes us through his ascent to fame, and then his triumphs and failures, each considered as though she had seen the play in question – even when that would be impossible. His big break-through was playing a villain in Raffles in 1906.

And yet there were those who believed that because Gerald did not hump his back, cover his face with hair, wear tights, and speak blank verse, he was therefore no actor. How many times, then and afterwards, did people exclaim, “But du Maurier, he does not act; he is always himself.” To act is to portray an emotion; to show the feelings aroused by some sensation, whether joyous or traffic; to make the man in the audience feel, either uncomfortably or happily, “That might have been me.” This is what Gerald, who started the so-called naturalistic school of acting, tried to do.

There are some famous names in du Maurier’s milieu, and it’s entertaining to read about how J.M. Barrie’s plays went over – and, indeed, how the adaptation of Trilby by George du Maurier (Gerald’s father) became such a sensation. Other of the plays mentioned were already fading from popularity by 1934, and have disappeared altogether now. Similarly, some actors mentioned would still ring bells – Gracie Fields, Gladys Cooper, Irene Vanbrugh, Celia Johnson – while others are no loner discussed. But to be still well-known a century and more later is quite the feat!

I love anything about the theatre, fact or fiction, so lapped up all of this. The brief interlude when Gerald becomes a soldier in the First World War is, indeed, brief. Partly because he didn’t enlist until 1918 and never left England, but also because it doesn’t seem like part of the life that Daphne du Maurier wants to focus on. For her, and for her implied reader, Gerald is a brilliant theatre impresario – and she also wants to show the great man at home. This does mean we get slightly curious, but still delightful, sections where Daphne du Maurier refers to herself in the third person:

As they grew from babies into children, and occasionally the little nursery storms came to his ears, he would settle disputes in strange, amusing ways, turning a scolding into a game. There was the famous time when Daphne pulled Angela’s hair and trod on her face, Angela replying with her peculiar death-grip like a bear’s hug. The joint shrieks of rage reaching Gerald in the drawing-room, he had them brought downstairs, and, dressing up as a judge, staged a court of law with the children as prisoners at the bar and witnesses in one. It lasted until past bedtime, and, when the nurse came to fetch them, the original quarrel had been long forgotten.

These sweet stories are enjoyable fluff – but there is a definite poignancy as she writes about her father when she is a bit older. A tell-all memoir wouldn’t reach the same level of emotion as this:

There is, alas, a world of difference between the girl of eighteen and the man of fifty, especially when they are father and daughter. The one is resentful of the other. The girl mocks at experience and detests the voice of authority; the man yearns for companionship and does not know how to attain it. They stand side by side, with the barrier of years between them, and both are too shy to break it down; both are too diffident, too self-conscious. They chant about superficialities, and avoid each other’s eyes, while all the time they are aware that the moments are passing, and the years will not bring them nearer to one another. Gerald was hungry for companionship; he longed for Angela and Daphne to tell him everything, to discuss their friends, to solve their problems, to share their troubles; but the very quality of his emotion made them shy/ They could not admit him into their confidence, and they drew back like snails into their shells.

It was not only Gerald’s tragedy. It is the tragedy of every father and every daughter since the world began.

What really sets the book apart, alongside Daphne du Maurier’s unique perspective, is her exceptional writing. That’s one of many things that make it feel more like novel than biography. From an objective biographer, these sorts of passages might be struck out as purple prose – in the world that Daphne du Maurier has created for us to enter, they are beautiful:

Gerald belonged to Wyndham’s; he was as much a part of it as the boards, the curtain, the heavy swing door, the row of stalls shrouded in their white and grimy covers, the cat in the dress circle, the backcloth and the false movable walls that were not walls, the dust in the passages, the intimate, indescribable, musty, fusty smell that was the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms and the front of the house in one.

Much of his personality is embedded in those walls. His laughter is still in the passage, his footstep on the stairs, and his voice calling for Tommy Lovell when the curtain falls. For all their passing away and the coming of other sounds – new voices, new laughter, other men and other memories – something of himself remains for ever amidst the dust and silence of that theatre; a breath, a whisper, the echo of a song.

I don’t know if anybody else has written a biography of Gerald du Maurier. There was definitely a vogue for a while of writing enormous biographies that didn’t spare the subject, and the more invasive and unpleasant the more they were considered to be authentic. The tide, thankfully, seems to have turned a bit. Since it is impossible to entirely know a person through a book anyway, I would rather we get this subjective, overly generous, loving portrait than anything more callous. Gerald is a wonderful book by a sublime storyteller.

 

 

History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera #ABookADayInMay No.11

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History Is All You Left Me: The much-loved hit from the author of No.1 bestselling blockbuster THEY BOTH DIE AT THE END! a book by Adam Silvera.

Today I finished the audiobook of History Is All You Left Me (2017) by Adam Silvera. I first came across his writing when I stumbled upon the title They Both Die At The End. It shows the power of a good title, because that made me read and race through the book – and, in fact, I’ve recently read its prequel too. I loved the premise and the inventive world he built. In History Is All You Left Me, though, we are in a very-much-entirely-real world.

Silvera writes young adult books, most (all?) with queer teenagers as their heroes. This book is no different – it is told by Griffin, a 17-year-old whose first love, Theo, has recently died. They were best friends for a long time before realising that they were (a) gay and bi respectively, and (b) very into each other.

Things are even more complicated than that, though, as Theo and Griffin weren’t dating when Theo died – he was, in fact, away at college and dating a guy called Jackson. The book jumps between ‘history’, i.e. the times when Theo was alive and the journey through their relationship, and the present day. In the present day, Griffin is reluctantly getting to know Jackson. He is very protective over his own grief, and doesn’t feel that Jackson has a right to feel the loss as deeply – though gradually his opinion changes.

There are a few twists along the way, and some things that aren’t twists but just aren’t revealed at first – such as the way in which Theo died – so I shan’t mention them yet.

The other major element of the novel to mention is that Griffin has OCD. I don’t know enough about it to comment in depth, but it did seem like he had compulsions rather than obsessions. He hates odd numbers (except seven), and has to be on the left-hand side when he’s walking with someone. But I don’t remember mention of obtrusive thoughts and worries, or fears for what will happen if these compulsions aren’t obeyed. Again, I am far from an expert, and I appreciated that it was part of Griffin’s character rather his whole character, but some pieces felt a bit lightly touched on to me.

So, there are some heavy themes in the book – and I think, for a teenage audience, they are dealt with well. Griffin is deeply immature, so his reactions and responses are unsurprisingly emotionally immature. He struggles to understand that anybody but himself can be affected, and even before Theo’s death he can only really see his own perspective. I wasn’t sure if this was all intended to be an accurate portrayal of a teenager or if Silvera’s audience are likely to be on Griffin’s side in everything. Perhaps both. (The audiobook is read well by Tom Picasso, though it wasn’t always very easy to tell the difference between the main cast of teenage boys.)

I thought it was a good book, but perhaps I am a bit too old to read it. The brilliant concept of They Both Die At The End elevated that YA book into something that would appeal to me. Without that, this one was enjoyable but not a stand-out for me. For teenagers, I suspect it’ll be a much bigger hit.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich #ABookADayInMay No.10

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I haven’t read any of Louise Erdrich’s novels, which I know are well-regarded, but that didn’t stop me being very interested in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), which Daunt Books have now republished and sent me as a review copy.

It’s a memoir-travelogue-history in which Erdrich takes her 18-month-old daughter to Ojibwe Country – the area in southern Ontario where her ancestors have lived for years, and where the father of her daughter lives (a man she calls Tobasonakwutiban). It’s never easy to arrange to meet up with him, but somehow they manage.

And it’s like entering another world – one more connected with the past, with the surrounding islands, lakes, and land, and with their identity. Perhaps it is the precariousness of that identity that makes it so vivid – it is an identity that had been routinely attacked by schools that sought to remove anything distinctive from this people, to quash out their language and force them to assimilate.

In the book, Erdrich has been running a bookshop in Minneapolis. It is a world away from Ojibwe Country, but she has some connection – she is Turtle Mountain Ojibwe (as well as half-German) and her grandfather had been a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. If there is a clash of cultures when Erdrich comes to visit Ojibwe Country, it is not the clash of an outsider coming to the place – the clash is within her. Here’s her reflection on the system of deities, and propitiating them with tobacco:

There was a time when I wondered – do I really believe all of this. I’m half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as it if contained sentient spiritual beings. The question of whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant. After I’d stopped thinking about it for a while, the ritual of offering tobacco became comforting and then necessary. Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

There are also elements that are unconnected with her tribal connections or her visit – the fact that, at 48, she is quite old to have a toddler. The girl’s father is in his mid-60s. Erdrich has three teenage daughters too. It’s an unusual life to lead, and Erdrich examines the situation and her reflections on it with the same respect and intelligence that she turns to Ojibwe Country and its customs and history.

My favourite bits of the book, unsurprisingly, were those that dealt with language. In the 2014 afterword Erdrich reveals that one of her teenage daughters (now adult) has invested many hours to a whole-hearted learning of Ojibwe, which is apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the hardest language to learn. I am very much not a polyglot, but I enjoy reading about language learning:

Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb, there are countless forms. This sounds impossible, until you realize that the verb forms not only have to do with the relationships among the people conducting the action, but the precise way the action is conducted and even under what physical conditions. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all of the time. Mookegidaazao describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold and a verb for what would happen if a man fell of a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and drove the stem of it through the back of his head. There can be verb for anything.

I found the historical sections a little less interesting, even though the explain the 11,000 books that were brought to the island, many of which are still housed in a custom-designed library island. It is the fresh immediacy of Erdrich’s experiences and responses that most captivated me.

Books and Islands of Ojibwe Country is an unusual little book. I like its brevity. This is not an exhaustive examination of the region – rather, it is a short and compelling snapshot of one woman’s reconnection with a shared past. And, because of her small daughter, also the forging of an understanding of a shared future.

Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley #ABookADayInMay No.9

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Last year everyone seemed to be reading My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. I couldn’t decide if it was likely to be my cup of tea or not, but I decided to take a chance on Cold Water (2002) when I stumbled across it in a bookshop in Cheltenham. It’s Riley’s debut novel, published when she was only 23.

It’s about a young woman called Carmel McKisco who works in a run-down bar in Manchester. She has recently broken up from a cheerful man called Tony, and she has vague plans of moving to Cornwall for a fresh start. She and a friend also make a plan to track down a musician they used to obsess about, after his bandmate turns up in the bar.

It’s hard to find much to say about Cold Water, if I’m honest. It meanders through different scenes and people, telling you about some of the locals, or what it’s like to walk the nearby streets. The Guardian review called it ‘a series of well-wrought sketches’, and that’s a good description. They are interesting, well-written vignettes that felt consistently like building up a world in which something could happen… but nothing really does. I think a certain sort of reader will love it. I’ve realised that I don’t need a lot of plot in a novel, but I do need some sort of momentum. And I suppose the absence of momentum is sort of the point of Cold Water, so it didn’t make a huge impression on me.

Here, anyway, is a bit I did like – to give you a sense of her writing:

Margi first started having nights out in Manchester when she was fifteen. At the Hacienda they called her ‘the garage flower’ and would let her in for free. Not unpredictably, she fast acquired a much older boyfriend. Mark Dalton. He was thirty-six. He liked people to see them out together at clubs so everyone would wonder what a pretty young thing like her was doing with him. And Margi liked the idea of this too. She liked him to look old, crumpled and unshaven. They went out together and had drunken, jealous rows. They caused scenes. She started staying at his place in Chorlton most nights, and she says every morning they’d take their caff breakfast, beans on toast in a polystyrene tray and cups of thick tea, into Southern Cemetery, sitting together on the wet grass and talking lofty nonsense. I’m sure it wasn’t every morning, but what the hell. And it was this Mark, so she says, taught her the importance of always making a good entrance and a better exit. “The entrance is important,” he’d say, “but the exit is crucial.” When he finished with her, unceremoniously, she returned to his flat and left an orchid on his doormat, with a note instructing him to think of her while he watched it wither and die. “Well, I was seventeen, I was a romantic…” she shrugs.

Was this a good exit from Margi? Maybe it was. Where was she? My heart thrummed in my stomach all afternoon. I felt uneasy and a little ashamed that I was thinking about it so much. I knocked on the door of her flat that evening on my way into work but there was no reply.

I don’t know how this sort of style and structure compares to My Phantoms or Riley’s other work – but she is good enough a writer here that I would try her again in a different mode.

How To Be a Deb’s Mum by ‘Petronella Portobello’ #ABookADayInMay No.8

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Hayley/Desperate Reader gave me her copy of How To Be A Deb’s Mum (1957) by Petronella Portobello a couple of years ago – she wrote about it on her blog – and rightly thought that it would be up my street. The author name sounds very unlikely and is indeed a pseudonym – albeit for the also unlikely name Lady Flavia Anderson. It’s told in letters from Petronella to an old friend, Pris, and does exactly what the title suggests: it’s all about being a Deb’s mum.

‘Deb’ here is, of course, debutante. And the book feels a little anachronistic since debutante balls were far less a feature of the 1950s than of the generation earlier. Indeed, Petronella harkens back often to her own debutante season in the ’30s – because, though often describing herself as practically decrepit, Petronella is only 38 herself. Though she is also a widow, and we hear very little about the departed husband.

There are some questions about why Petronella is bothering with this old-fashioned tradition – especially since she lives in the highlands of Scotland, and has to travel to London and rent a house to host all the requisite dinner parties of the season. The question comes chiefly from Alice Hardcastle, a friend who really seems to be a nemesis.

“After all,” I go on, “you may ask what it did for us, Alice, but we shouldn’t be sitting in this train talking, if we hadn’t got acquinated twenty years ago in the same racket.”

“Ah! Then you do admit it’s a racket?”

“No I don’t,” I protest. “I have friends in every corner of Britain, and I want Jane to have the same. Go to a cocktail party in Cornwall or take a job in Manchester, and there’s always someone you know to rescue you from being left high and dry.”

I realise too late that I am using just the wrong argument with Alice, because if we were both honest we should admit that neither has gained anything by association with the other, and that each would probably prefer the loneliest corner of the Midlands to making small talk together. But I cannot carry honesty far enough and say, as I am tempted to do, that only by making a large number of acquaintances can one weed out the incompatibles and cultivate the congenial among one’s fellow human beings.

If you’re sensing some Provincial Lady-esque tone from that, then I’m with you. There is a lot in How to be a Deb’s Mum that certainly feels in that world, with the same self-effacement and mild mockery of others, and ultimately good-humoured beneficence.

And, to be honest, a lot of the novel does feel very much older than the 1950s. There are a few stray things that date it to the period – the young women wear lipstick and nail polish without any fear of censure; somebody brings along a man who is a ‘bearded Existentialist from her Chelsea art class’ – but for the most part it does feel unaffected by anything else happening in the world in 1957. The focus is entirely on how to make this Deb season the perfect one for young Jane. I have to say that Jane doesn’t come off the page as fully as her mother, and I’d be hard-pressed to say anything about her character except that she is excited, a little overwhelmed, obliging and occasionally able to be swayed into something unwise by other people her age.

I thought the book was really fun. The only thing that stops it being a classic is that it is rather one-note – a steady walk through everything involved in the Deb season, and the politics of whom to invite to what, which invitations to accept, and how to be appropriately quid pro quo among the hundreds of young women (and their mothers) who are also fighting to give their daughters the best chance in life. ‘Chance’ does seem to mean social success and other opportunities, not solely a husband (and men are given rather a scant look-in in the novel). Though, of course, a good deal of consideration is also given to ensuring Jane dances with the right young men, and dodges the wrong ones. There is some japery about men who are Not Safe In Taxis, which feels rather dated and unpleasant.

The only other plotline is Petronella’s own relationship with family friend Freddy – who steadily goes from being a reliable friend to perhaps something more, and I was certainly more invested in this than in anything that might be going on in Jane’s life.

So, thanks Hayley for sending to me! It is rather a curiosity – a period piece that probably would have felt oddly out of sync with 1957 even in 1957. It is a window on a very small part of society at a time when their traditions were fading away from dominance – and a really fun time to be had reading it.