2012

All Roads Lead To Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smart

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I can’t remember where I first heard about All Roads Lead To Austen (2012) by Amy Elizabeth Smart – but it certainly ended up on my wishlist at some point, and my parents kindly gave it to me for Christmas a couple of years ago. What a treat it is. In the apparently unending world of books about Jane Austen, I will always have time for unusual memoirs relating to her books – and this one, in which Smith tours various Latin American countries teaching Austen’s novels, is exactly the sort of hook that reels me in.

What is it about Jane Austen that makes us talk about the characters as if they’re real people? People we recognise in our own lives, two centuries after Austen created them? When my first development leave from the university rolled around, I decided it was time for me to try my own Austen project, just like my students do. Something creative, something fun. So I got to wondering: the special connection that people feel with Austen’s world, this Austen magic – would it happen with people in another country, reading Austen in translation?

And that is exactly the project that Smith undertakes. She is an academic at an American university, so she is approaching the task with a great deal of knowledge – not simply the amateur’s enthusiasm. But along the way she will be mixing the two with the people she meets: some are people studying from a literary background, while others are juggling reading the book with three jobs or full-time childcare. Smith’s book assumes we are already familiar with the plots of all of Austen’s novels – but are ready to question our assumptions about them, and how believable we think the characters and plots could possibly be today.

In the course of Smith’s travels, she goes to Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. Since she is travelling on her own, this does mean we have to get used to a new cast of characters ever time she lands in a new country. She does a very good job at making us feel familiar with the most important people in each location, and I didn’t find that I was confusing the different groups of readers.

While Smith is an academic, this is a book for anyone – and I appreciated that as much time was given to logistics and personal hopes as we get in the actual discussions and reflections on Austen’s novels. That might mean panicking that nobody is going to join the group, or being frustrated that someone dominant has decided they’re going to read a different book altogether, or how to manage her own expectations when the local cultural norm is to accept every invitation even if you have no intention of going. Smith manages to maintain a clear respect for each different culture she visits, never suggesting the American way is superior, while also conveying how comfortable she does or doesn’t feel in each place.

Sometimes she is literally uncomfortable – along the way, Smith has a number of health incidents that are also documented (including her unfortunate experiences with some of the healthcare professionals along the way – and much better experiences with others).

But fear not – we are not short-changed when it comes to Austen chat. Many of the groups of readers want to talk about the characters (and some have only seen an adaptation), whereas other groups are more interested in literary technique. Smith records all the conversations, so is able to reproduce them. Here’s a little bit from Ecuador:

“I like him just the way he is,” Meli insisted, unintentionally echoing Darcy’s literary descendant Mark Darcy of Bridget Jones fame. “I like him from the first moment.”

“But not that Bingley, ugh!” Leti grimaced at the thought of Jane’s gentle suitor.

“He’s a big nothing,” Fernanda agreed.

Wow! I’d never heard Bingley so maligned. I was reminded of the harshness of the women’s judgements in Guatemala on men perceived to be weak.

“The one that’s really the worst,” offered Meli, “is that cousin, Collins.”

Leti rolled her eyes and groaned. “All of his pontificating, his tackiness! Horrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiible!“

A colourful list of insults followed. Collins is un tarado (a cretin), un blando (a coward), un fofo (a wimp) – in short, ridículo.

It’s all great fun to read. And in each country, Smith asks whether they think the events of the novels could happen today – and gets an intriguing range of answers. She also asks for any early women writers in each country, often getting told household names who aren’t well-known outside of the country in question. I certainly came away with a wide range of possible books to try.

Smith is such a likeable narrator and has clear affection and respect for everyone she meets. There is even a little romance along the way for Smith, which lends the book something unexpected and rather delightful to follow. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this Janeite – an unusual and fun idea for a book carried out beautifully. Jane would have enjoyed it, and you can’t give a greater compliment than that.

Two Japanese books about cats #ReadingTheMeow

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Japan truly seems to love a book about a cat, and I am here for it. Two of the other books I’ve read for the #ReadingTheMeow themed week are short Japanese novels with ‘cat’ in the title – though arguably the cats are not the main characters in either of them. (Except in the way that any mention of a cat automatically makes it the main character.)

If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura

I was sent this as a review copy when it was translated into English in 2018, by Eric Selland – having originally been published in Japanese in 2012. And what an intriguing title! The concept is equally interesting. The unnamed (I think) narrator has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His life is quite narrow – his mother has died, he is estranged from his father and recently broken up from a woman he loves. The only creature in his life is a little cat called Cabbage. Reeling from this news, the narrator is visited by the Devil, who appears as his doppelgänger and informs him that he only has one day to live. But…

“There is something we could do…”

“Do? What do you mean?”

“Well, you could call it a kind of magic. But it might increase your life span.”

“Really?”

“On one condition: you’ll have to accept this one fundamental law of the universe.”

“And what is?”

“In order to gain something you have to lose something.”

“So what do I have to do exactly?”

“It’s easy… I’ll just ask you to perform a simple exchange.”

“Exchange?”

“Sure… All you have to do is remove one thing from the world, and in return, you get one more day of life.”

At first, he thinks he can simply get rid of things that don’t matter – the dust from the top of his bookcase, for instance. But he quickly learns that the devil is the one who makes suggestions, and he simply has to agree whether or not to take the bargain offered.

The first one, which he accepts, is phones.

I was a bit disappointed by this book, if I’m honest. My favourite bits were when (rather inexplicably) the cat starts speaking – there’s a lot of humour in the fact that he picked up language from period dramas and speaks very formally. But I don’t think Kawamura makes much of his premise. All the phones in the world disappear overnight, and the only problem highlighted is that the narrator finds it tricky to meet up with someone. Surely if phones stopped existing, businesses around the world would collapse, the economy would nosedive, all sorts of extraordinary things would happen. In Kawamura’s hands, it’s just as though the narrator is the only one to suffer an inconvenience – even though it is spelled out that it’s universal.

Towards the end, If Cats Disappeared From the World does take on the Alchemist-school of being basically a novelised fridge magnet. At one point, someone even says ‘Being alive doesn’t matter all that much on its own. How you live is more important.’

This could have been a really quirky, dark, strange little book – but it sort of ended up more like a Facebook inspirational quote. A shame.

 

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

The other one is The Cat Who Saved Books (2017), translated by Louise Heal Kawai in 2021 and given to me by my friend Lorna last year. Cats! Books! What a combo. And it’s set in a delightful old bookshop, run by a boy called Rintaro since his grandfather’s death. One day a talking cat gets him to go on various quests that mysteriously appear in the back of the shop, which expands out into unknown worlds…

There are various semi-nemeses to defeat, including this guy whose views on rereading hit a bit too close to home for me:

“The world is full of books, you agree? It’s impossible to count the number of books that have been, and are still being, written. To find the time to read the same books over again – well, it’s just inconceivable.”

And his views on book hoarding enrage Rintaro…

“But that’s how I’ve elevated my status – by collecting all these books. The more books you have, the more powerful you are. That’s how I got to where I am.”

“And is that why you’ve imprisoned them? To show them off as if their power belongs entirely to you?” Rintaro asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You think you’re so impressive – you built this ridiculous, pretentious showroom just so that everyone can see how many books you’ve read.”

I don’t think I have masses to say about this book. It’s basically a fun little quest-narrative which some enjoyable observations about readers and reading along the way, but felt very like a young adult book. It rattled along but didn’t leave all that much of an impression on me, if I’m honest.

Fingers crossed I can manage one more book for Reading the Meow before the week ends on Sunday…

Artful by Ali Smith #ABookADayInMay No.27

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I haven’t read any Ali Smith before, and I got sent Artful as a review copy when it was published in 2012 – and I decided on a whim this morning that it would be today’s book. And what a strange book it is.

It is based on four lectures that Ali Smith apparently gave at Oxford University (and since I was still a post-graduate student at Oxford in 2012, presumably I could have found my way to attending them) – On Time, On Form, On Edge, and One Offer and On Reflection. But this is not a collection of those essays. Or, rather, it is not just a collection of those essays. It hovers somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – and opens with a woman who is mourning their partner. It has been a year and a day since they left (originally I thought they’d just gone – but it becomes clear that they have died). (By the way, I’m writing ‘they’ because I’m not sure if we know if it’s a man or a woman – though I may have just inadvertently glided past pronouns.)

The narrator goes into the study. “I looked at your books, I took one of your books off a shelf at random – my study, my desk, my books now.” And the book is Oliver Twist. The title Artful suddenly takes on a new dimension when we realise it can refer to the Artful Dodger. And the narrator decides to re-read the book for the first time since university.

And then… the partner has come back. Or have they?

You were standing in the doorway. You coughed. The cough was you in a way that couldn’t not be you.

You were covered in dust and what looked like bits of rubble. Your clothes were smudged, matted, torn. You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Your skin was smudged. Your hair was streaked with dust and grit. You looked bruised. You shook yourself slightly there on the landing and little bits of grit and rubble fell off you, I watched some of it fall down the stairs behind you.

I’m late, you said.

And somehow all of this morphs into the essays. In the world of the book, the content of the essays has been written by the dead partner – and the narrator is reading them, occasionally (but not as often as you might think) responding to and commenting on them.

The essays themselves are much more what you’d expect. Well, at least what you’d expect if you’ve been to a lot of literature lectures – they are the sort of reflections on literature that tread the line between general and specific, and take in a wide world of books from across languages and centuries. There’s far too much content to even give an idea of it, really, and I did enjoy Smith’s way of moving from idea to idea, encompassing so much. At times it does become little more than a series of quotations with a word or two of commentary, often linking to the previous and next quotations only tangentially. There were certainly times where I wish she’d lingered more on one thought, fully exploring it before going onto another.

I think ‘On Time’ was my favourite of the four sections, perhaps simply because it was the first. And here’s a section of it:

The difference between the short story form and the novel form is to do, not with length, but with time. The short story will always be about brevity, ‘“The shortness of life! The shortness of life!”’ (as one of Mansfield’s characters in her story At the Bay can’t help but exclaim). Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot. It is an elastic form; it can be as imagistic and achronological as it likes and it will still hold its form. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment. At the same time it deals in, and doesn’t compromise on, the purely momentary nature of everything, both timeless and transient.

The story can be partial, can be a piece of something and still hold its own, still be whole. The novel, on the other hand, is bound to and helplessly interested in society and social hierarchy, social worlds; and society is always attached to, in debt to, made by and revealed by the trappings of its time.

Maybe a book with as many ideas in it as Artful shouldn’t really be read in a day, and I should have spent more time with each thought, rather than moving onto the next. There’s also the undeniable fact that I have read huge amounts of literary theory and literary criticism in my time, and most of it is not very engaging. Smith’s is certainly a cut above the majority, but perhaps I have reached my lifetime quotient of what I find interesting in this genre? Well, I did find a lot of Artful interesting, but often with a sort of jaded “Yes, I see; I’ve read this sort of idea before. I’ve heard an undergraduate talk about it earnestly at a seminar. I’ve witnessed the novel form be dissected in clever ways over and over.” (I do recognise that I am writing this on a book blog, but there is a big difference between a reader’s book reviews and a work of literary criticism, and often I think the main difference is the point behind them.)

If I came to the ideas in Artful here for the first time, then I suspect I’d have been blown away. As it was, I did appreciate a lot but with a certain weariness. And I preferred the more fictional sections – the two characters she creates are very much enigmatic, but also intriguing and compelling. I enjoyed finding out more about them, even in the shadowy way they are revealed.

Did the merge of fiction and non-fiction work? I think so, more or less. It’s unusual and perhaps unnecessary, but does make Artful a more interesting and characterful book than it would otherwise be. Or perhaps just more artful?

25 Books in 25 Days: #11 The Other Mitford

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I’m so glad people are enjoying these posts – I was a bit worried the flurry would get a little much. And I think today’s is among the longest I’ve read this week – I hadn’t realised quite how many words were on each of the 180 pages. The book in question is The Other Mitford: Pamela’s Story (2012) by Diana Alexander, given to me for my birthday last year by my friend Malie.

My Mitford mania started back in 2008, when I read the collection of letters between the sisters – still one of my favourite books. Since then, I’ve read bits and pieces by many of them, though never actually any of those long books devoted to all the family. Still, the details are ingrained in my mind – Nancy the novelist, Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Nazi, and Debo the Duchess. In the background, quieter the rest, is ‘the other Mitford’ – Pamela, who was a countrywoman at heart.

The Other Mitford is very engagingly written, and it certainly helps that the author knew Pamela personally (initially as her cleaner, and then as her friend). I really enjoyed it – but the structure is odd. Huge amounts are about the other sisters, often having a chapter about them followed by a chapter looking at Pamela during the same period. It’s useful for those who haven’t read anything about the Mitford sisters before, but a little redundant for those who have. And then there are a handful of chapters at the end which look at different aspects of Pamela’s personality – which means there are some aspects of her life that end up being repeated three times.

Throughout it all, or almost all, Pamela remains elusive. I still don’t feel like I know very much about her, and crisis moments like the break up of her marriage to Derek Jackson pass by in a line or two. Only when she is an old woman, and Diana Alexander knew her personally, does she really become truly vivid – as a thrify, kindly, stubborn grande dame of the village. The book is worth reading for those sections alone – but, as I say, enjoyable throughout. I just wish it had been a bit more about Pamela who, even here in her own book, remains rather overshadowed by her more dramatic sisters.

Coral Glynn by Peter Cameron

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When I was staying in Toronto, Darlene (of Cosy Books) very kindly gave me a couple of books – one of which was Coral Glynn by Peter Cameron (2012). The book rang a bell from her blog and from Thomas/Hogglestock’s, and it sounded like it should be up my street – though there was always the danger that (being a modern novel written by an American about 1950s England) it might wander into the sort of England only seen on BBC America. That is, would it be too Downton for its own good?

Well, luckily, I really enjoyed it. That is more to do with Cameron’s writing and subtle, gradual depiction of character than about his version of 1950s England – which is, indeed, rather like a picture postcard (though there is the threat of new semi-detached houses encroaching in the environs of the colossal house that the hero, naturally, lives in).

But I am getting ahead of myself. Here are the opening paragraphs of the novel:

That spring – the spring of 1950 – had been particularly wet.

An area at the bottom of the garden at Hart House flooded, creating a shallow pool through which the crocuses gamely raised their little flounced heads, like cold shivering children in a swimming class. The blond gravel on the garden paths had turned green, each pebble wrapped in a moist transparent blanket of slime, and one could not sit on either of the two cement beaches that flanked the river gate without first unhinging the snails and slugs adhered to them.

The excessive moistness of the garden was of no concern to anyone at Hart House except for the new nurse, who had arrived on Thursday, and had attempted, on the two afternoons that were somewhat mild, to sit outside for a moment, away from the sickness and strain in the house. But she found the garden inhospitable, and so had resolved to stay indoors.

The new nurse (as you might have started to suspect) is Coral Glynn – she is there to care for the old lady of the household, who has a terminal illness. She is greeted by the taciturn son and heir, (Major) Clement Hart, and the ill-tempered, suspicious housekeeper. In rather an unexpected manner, Coral becomes key to the household – though local tragedy causes disruption here. And with those coy words I shall say no more about the plot.

Despite being light and endearing, there is a sensitive portrait of loneliness and uncertainty at the centre of the novel. Coral is brave and headstrong in some ways, but is orphaned and alone, and unaccustomed to friendship. Besides the Major are his married friends Dolly and Robin – Dolly is a vivacious type who immediately becomes bosom buddies with Coral (or tries to) while Robin is affable but has his own burdens to bear. We soon learn, in a touching aside-scene, that Robin and Clement had once been in love. It adds further dimension to the novel, but it does throw the novel a bit, since scenes between Robin and Clement are the only ones which aren’t focused through Coral’s perspective, so far as I can recall.

The plot rolls on, and Cameron combines the nuance of the characters’ relationships (and, particularly, Coral’s attempts to understand the world she finds herself in – and develop a personality that she feels comfortable with) with an intriguing story. The latter rather collapses, and I wasn’t convinced by the ending, but the journey was rather wonderful – it feels nostalgic without being too fey, and Cameron is a really good storyteller. It’s rare that I prefer a book set in the 1950s to one written in the 1950s – the same goes for any decade, not just the ’50s – but I did rather love reading this one. I’d be interested to see how Cameron writes when he’s not looking across an ocean and into the past, but if his understanding of character is maintained, then I’d like to read him writing about 21st-century America. If he has done?

On Wheels by Michael Holroyd

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On WheelsI’ve still only finished one book in 2017 – I do hope this trend doesn’t continue throughout the year – and it was on 1 January. The book was On Wheels (2012) by Michael Holroyd, which I picked up in a charity shop in Oxford on a whim. And it’s a curious little book.

I read Holroyd’s memoir Basil Street Blues, published by Slightly Foxed, but didn’t know all that much about his career as a biographer. He seems to have made a career out of writing repeatedly about George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, and Augustus John. Scroll through his Wikipedia article to see how many times he’s written about ’em all – a trio that, I have to admit, I have very little interest in reading about.

BUT I was intrigued by this little book about how his subjects have dealt with cars, along with his own history of driving. Learning to drive was among the less enjoyable experiences of my life – basically a year of low-level dread – so I quite enjoy the empathy now of reading about others who found it difficult. It’s one of the reasons I like hearing Tom Allen on his podcast. And, yes, there is plenty to enjoy of this. But Holroyd talks more about his post-learning experiences – most memorably about getting his car vandalised when Ireland played England (because he lived in Ireland and had an English licence plate), then having his car repeatedly searched by English police when he’d switched to an Irish number plate (because it was during the peak of the IRA’s terrorism).

Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw seem to have been equally reckless and enthusiastic drivers – a terrible combination, really – and there are some amusing and illuminating anecdotes about these.

The hints given to him on the art of reversing were of little use, Shaw taking half an hour to turn a corner backwards and demolishing some flowerbeds in the process. But the village grew proud of his road exploits. Local dogs, knowing him well, would play dead under his car while he anxiously crawled after them – when they would bounce out, barking triumphantly. Though reckless, he was always considerate, leaping out on to the road after a bump or crash and offering to pay all expenses and drive people home or to the hospital. He was especially chivalrous to the injured when the fault was theirs.

Overall, this is a fun book to flick through. It feels rather as though it started as a few notes jotted down from his other researches, and those notes don’t become much more – it’s a series of thoughts, rather than a study. But it doesn’t have any aspirations of being more than that, which I admire; better a chatty 104pp than a bloated book with only the kernel of those hundred pages in it. Give it to the car enthusiast in your life, if they enjoy reading. Or stick it (as I will) on that shelf for quirky books that don’t quite fit into any other category.

The Fault in Our Stars – John Green

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When I’m not reading book blogs (or, y’know, engagingly actively with the outside world, whatever that is), you’ll probably find me watching vloggers on YouTube.  I don’t watch any of the book vloggers any more, as they rarely talked about any books I’d be interested in (other than the one I’m going to write about today), but I do watch a lot of funny people, generally just talking about things that have happened to them, or opinions they hold.  One of these channels is called the vlogbrothers, where brothers John and Hank Green each make weekly videos addressing each other, but also addressing all their audience (whom – which? – they call ‘nerdfighers’, which is a little too high schooly for my liking, but I’ll let it pass).

Anyway, John Green is not only a YouTube star, but a bestselling author.  He’s written a few books, but it is his most recent, The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which caught my attention, and which my friend, ex-housemate, and self-proclaimed nerdfighter Liz lent to me.

Now, The Fault in Our Stars is teenage fiction.  I’m afraid I hate the term ‘YA’ (‘young adult’) because it is always used to refer to teenagers who are not young adults.  I am a young adult, being about a decade into adulthood.  The demographic of most fiction encompasses my age group.  Teenage fiction is for younger-than-adults, or old-children, but not for young adults.  Vent over.  Anyway, I haven’t really read any teenage fiction since I was a teenager, and I didn’t really read much of it after I was about 14.  I know a lot of grown-up readers (including bloggers) engage with it a great deal, and that’s fine with me, albeit a little confusing.  (People often say something along the lines that it “deals with issues that adult novels wouldn’t cover”, which simply isn’t true, since adult novels cover pretty much everything between them.)

I could turn this post over to a discussion for and against teenage fiction (and feel free to chime in on that, should you so wish) but instead I want to talk about The Fault in Our Stars specifically.  It was immediately obvious to me that it was teenage fiction, and I’m not sure why – partly, of course, because the protagonist Hazel (a girl with terminal cancer) is a teenager, but also the style.  Its simplicity, maybe?  Pass.  A few pages in, and I could cope with that, though, and didn’t remain at my initial psychological distance from the book.  Indeed, I embraced it, and was swept along.

Hazel is 16 and she is dying of cancer – more precisely, she has Stage 4 thyroid cancer with metastasis forming in her lungs. Green had spent some time working as a student chaplain in a children’s hospital, years before he wrote this novel, and you can tell that he is familiar not only with the goings-on of support groups and medical procedures, but the dynamic of teenagers living with cancer.  Somehow it is not an outsiders’ book – although Green has not had cancer, and I have not had cancer, I didn’t feel like their was a barrier between Hazel’s experience and my understanding of it.

Green presents a girl who is sarcastic, witty, secretly a bit sappy, and rocketing along a path of self-discovery, finding her place in the world – she is like every teenage girl in the West, then.  Except she has cancer.  It is an intelligent portrait because, although cancer is (obviously) the overriding focus of her life and those of her family, it doesn’t seem to be the starting point of Green’s creation of the character – instead, it is something that happened to a character he created, even if it happened before the novel began.

The main thrust of the plot, indeed, is more typical of teenagers’ novels – and adults’ novels – that is, love. Hazel meets Augustus (Gus) Waters, a heartthrob teenage ex-basketball player – who is in remission from osteosarcoma (to which he lost a leg).  He is suave, funny, handsome, muscular, sweet etc. etc.  I.e. he’s not as realistic as Hazel, in my book; he reminded me a bit of Todd from Sweet Valley High, if that oh-so-literary reference means anything to you.  Their relationship is cotton-candy sweet, of the variety which comes with passionate kisses being applauded in public.  Yes, that ‘public’ is Anne Frank’s house, but it works in context… just.

A more nuanced subplot is the shared love Hazel and Gus have for a novel called An Imperial Affliction by Peter von Houten (which doesn’t exist in real life, but Green’s novel seems to have spawned dozens of fake cover art attempts – just Google Image Search it.)  Of course, the author is not all he seems… but it’s a nice, interesting story – and goodness knows I’m a sucker for a character who loves books and reading, in any novel.

Ultimately, this is a book aimed at teenagers, and I believe they are the readers who will most benefit from it.  Hopefully it will inspire a love of reading in people who watch the vlogbrothers channel and, acting in the same way as Point Horror and Sweet Valley High for me, lead them eventually onto adult novels and older literature.  But it is not simply a gateway to later reading; for its intended age group, and for anybody being indulgent for an evening, it’s a fantastic and well-crafted novel.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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Believe it or not, I’m reading a proof copy here… oops.  I started The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey more or less as soon as the proof copy arrived from Headline, back in 1884 or whenever it was that it was sent (erm, 2011?) but wasn’t in the right head space to be reading it, and popped it back on the shelf, knowing I’d go back to it.

Well, with a repeat of A Century of Books lined up for 2014, I’m enjoying delving into 21st-century literature in my post-thesis binge.  Indeed, I finished reading this shortly after I submitted my thesis, and before I flew to America, so it’s taken a little while to review.  And it’s every bit as good as everyone was saying it was, back when it first came out.

 It’s your standard fantastic creation story… a lonely woman who longs for a child accidentally creates one, and then begins to lose control over her creation.  The story is remarkably similar to Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child – and even more similar, overtly so, to the Russian fairytale ‘The Snow Maiden’.  With my interest in novels of this ilk, it’s as though it were written for me.  But, as with any updating of fairytale, what is important is the way in which the tale is told.  Ivey does it beautifully.

Mabel and Jack have moved to the middle of snowy nowhere in Alaska, 1920, and live quietly, working hard to keep their farm going.  Both characters are quite shy and keep their emotions to themselves, but it’s clear at the same time that these silent emotions run deep – so deep that any hint of them is unbearably painful.  And yet, shy as they are, they somehow make friends with their jolly neighbours Esther and George.

“I suppose I’m the black sheep.  No one else in my family would think of living on a farm, or moving to Alaska.  My father was a literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” 

“And you left all that to come here?  What in God’s name were you thinking?”  Esther shoved Mabel playfully on the arm.  “He talked you into it, didn’t he?  That’s how it often is.  These men drag their poor women along, taking them to the Far North for adventure, when all they want is a hot bath and a housekeeper.”

“No.  No.  It’s not like that.”  All eyes were on her, even Jack’s.  She hesitated, but then went on.  “I wanted to come here.  Jack did, too, but when we did, it was at my urging.  I don’t know why, precisely.  I believe we were in need of a change.  We needed to do things for ourselves.  Does that make any sense?  To break your own ground and know it’s yours free and clear.  Nothing taken for granted.  Alaska seemed like the place for a fresh start.” 

Esther grinned.  “You didn’t fare too badly with this one, did you, Jack?  Don’t let word get out.  There aren’t many like her.”

Though she didn’t look up, Mabel knew Jack was watching her and that her cheeks were flushed.  She so rarely spoke so much in mixed company.  Maybe she had said too much.
These sections actually reminded me a bit of Betty Macdonald’s The Egg and I, although that is a comedy; the same hardships and marital tensions come about because of giving everything to a working farm.

It swiftly becomes clear that the thing missing the in the lives of Mabel and Jack is not simply money or an assistant, but a child – and, of course, one materialises.  A child made out of snow turns – it seems – into a real child, called Faina.  She is quiet and undemonstrative; Ivey cleverly changes the way dialogue is spoken in any scene in which Faina appears, so that it isn’t announced by speech marks but blended into the narrative.  In the same way, Faina seems to blend into the natural world, never quite leaving it to be their child, always disappearing into the snow.  She willingly wears the beautiful coat Mabel makes, but she is still wild – like Clarissa in The Love-Child, she cannot really be contained.

And then there is the question, unearthed by Jack, as to who Faina really is.  Is she a miracle, crafted from snow?  Or is she all too human, abandoned and homeless on the snowy mountainside?  Well, obviously I’m not going to tell you.  Nor am I going to tell you about the other complication that arrives, which again mirrors the plot of The Love-Child (and which, I realise, probably means that Edith Olivier probably read ‘The Snow Maiden’.)

Eowyn Ivey has met with a lot of success with this novel, and deservedly so.  The Snow Child is written with a beautiful simplicity – or a simple beauty, if you like – with emotions always playing out near the surface; there isn’t much introspection, or a web or words trying to weave a complex portrait of an emotional state, but rather Mabel and Jack’s urgent feelings are clear to the reader (even while they are hidden from others.)  What I mean to say is, sometimes the deepest and most complicated situations require only simple words; sometimes the simplest words can convey the deepest sorrow and be more moving than any over-wrought passage.  I know I’m not alone in being very affected by The Snow Child – my friend from OUP admitted that it made him cry, and I’ve got to say I liked him even more after that confession – and it is a novel which requires some sort of emotional stability in its reader, or it would be too heartbreaking from the outset.  But, oh, it’s worth it.

As I wrote earlier, this novel could have been crafted for me and my interests – and it got a mention in my thesis – and I was surprised, but pleased, to see how widely it was admired and loved.  Rightly so.  Eowyn Ivey is a significant new talent, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from her.

The Red House – Mark Haddon

StuckinaBook All , , , 19 Comments
What with reader’s block, moving house, and not having internet for a bit, it’s been a while since you had a proper review from me.  And today is no different, because I’m handing over to somebody else to write about The Red House by Mark Haddon, which I was sent as a review copy.  Tom (who recently married my best friend) spotted it on my shelves, and commented on it, so I decided it would find a better home with him.  Whether or not he ended up agreeing, you can discover below… Tom, by the by, can also be found at the blog Food, Music, God.  Over to you, Tom!
I promised Simon a while back that I’d read Mark Haddon’s The Red House and review it for him, and have sincerely been reiterating that promise to him ever since whilst getting distracted by other tasks like getting married or trying to qualify as a teacher. However, the other day my mother rang me up and told me that my father had recently read The Red House and she had just started it, and so it occurred to me that now might be the time to take action and stop anyone else having to read it ever again. That way, we can pretend that it didn’t happen, that Mark Haddon can still write novels with razor-sharp characters and compelling narrative, and that this clichéd series of adolescent writing exercises is the work of someone else.
The novel is about two families united by estranged siblings who are trying to reconnect with one another after the death of their ferocious mother. There’s Richard, the hospital consultant who remarried recently but doesn’t really know how to talk to his new wife Louisa, and may have A DARK SECRET. His estranged sister, Angela, who’s haunted by the ghost of her stillborn daughter, but of course she can’t tell anyone about that, and married to Dominic, who seems reasonably normal but may also have A DARK SECRET. Richard’s kids – Alex, a sex-obsessed teenager; Daisy, a buttoned-up Christian who also thinks rather more about sex than she’d like; Benjy, who is eight (I think) and I can’t remember much more about. Angela’s daughter Melissa, who is a self-obsessed cow who’s kind of hot and whom Alex fancies, of course. Then there’s the house itself, allegedly the conduit for all of these stories for some reason, although that’s arguably just an excuse for the fact that Mark Haddon couldn’t decide which character to focus on. The house seems to know quite a lot of poetry, and it talks like a travel guide written by James Joyce.
If you think that sounds like a lot going on, you’d be right, and that’s part of the problem. It’s a shame, as there are some good ideas here, especially with the teenagers in the cast – Daisy’s struggle with her sexuality and where it fits with her faith is clearly aiming for some wider significance, for example. Alex and Melissa’s teenage angst is sharply drawn, if rather aimless, and the differences in Angela and Richard’s approach to their upbringing and the effect on their families could have been channeled into something effective in the manner of Jonathan Franzen. However, it just doesn’t feel like it’s been edited into any kind of coherent shape. It’s this huge splurge of styles and influences and this, rather than seeming ambitious, comes across as amateurish instead. It doesn’t build, it doesn’t have much of a climax to speak of, and the central narrative just isn’t strong enough to provide any real mooring.
It’s also overwritten and laden with unnecessary detail. What is one supposed to make of a passage like this:
Louisa works for Mann Digital in Leith. They do flatbed scanning, big photographic prints, light boxes, Giclée editions, some editing and restoration. She loves the cleanness and precision of it, the ozone in the air, the buzz and shunt of the big Epsons, the guillotine, the hot roller, the papers, Folex, Somerset, Hahnemühle. Mann is Ian Mann who hung on to her during what they called her difficult period because she’d manned the bridge during his considerably more difficult period the previous year.
It’s like Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”, that, only about photocopying. And that’s not even the worst linguistic crime in the book – reading about Angela reading modern poetry, with snippets of Robert Browning woven through the text, is pretty painful, as is Richard’s attempt at reading ancient Greek poetry, not to mention the inexplicable quoting of something that seems to be an encyclopaedia about lorries.
Or what about this:
Richard slots the tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and pre-molars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offence to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant’s arm no doubt. Ridiculous man.
If you can find another novel in which you can find a narrative reason to justify spending this much time on one of the characters brushing his teeth, I’d be interested to hear about it. It’s a testament to the way that The Red House is written that the author thought that this belonged, but it is apparently a novel about the mundane and the ordinary (or so the blurb says), and so there’s plenty of that. Again, perhaps it’s an attempt at being clever; to impart some wonder into the everyday processes of how peoples’ minds work. If you feel a sense of wonder at the above, I’d be interested to hear about that too.

You should not read The Red House. Tell your friends not to read it. If people suggest taking it on holiday, don’t. If you find it in your holiday home, leave it there. It’s not a good holiday book. It’s not good literary fiction. No, it’s not lightweight, and yet it also doesn’t seem to mean anything. It’s shockingly dark in places (and shockingly dull in others) and it doesn’t seem to known what to do with that darkness. Curious Incident was (and still is) magnificent, thanks to an exceptionally strong narrative voice. A Spot of Bother was flawed, but still gripping and surprisingly visceral in places – and the characterisation was second to none. In The Red House, despite a couple of strong passages such as Richard’s disastrous run out on the moors, there’s nothing to make this stand out. It’s an ambitious experiment, and perhaps an admirable one; to his credit, at least Mark Haddon is still pushing his craft and trying new things. However, it’s a huge disappointment that in doing so he has moved so far away from his strengths.

Lucia on Holiday

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

Many of us sigh despondently when we reach the end of a much-loved book or series of books.  It seems unfair, somehow, that there is no third book in the Winnie the Pooh series, or that Jane Austen wrote no sequel to Pride and Prejudice, or that E.F. Benson, despite being incredibly prolific, only wrote six books in the Mapp and Lucia series – and only three featuring both heroines together.

In each of these cases, other authors have stepped into the authors’ shoes.  I wrote about David Benedictus’s Return to the Hundred Acre Wood earlier in the year, and of the writing of Jane Austen sequels there is no end.  Some are brilliant (Diana Birchall’s Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma, for instance) and some are decidedly not.  Our eagerness for more of our favourite characters is matched only be our wariness and trepidation that usurping authors will have made a mess of things.  Thank goodness, then, for Guy Fraser-Sampson.

I adore the sniping, gloriously funny world of Mapp and Lucia, and I know I will read and re-read Benson’s books throughout my life. But it’s also wonderful to know that there are others to read when the series is complete.  I’ve not tried Tom Holt’s two sequels, although they are waiting on my shelves, but I love and adore Major Benjy and (now) Lucia on Holiday by Guy F-S.

The reason they are so delicious is that Guy ‘gets’ the voice of Benson so perfectly.  I can honestly say that, while reading Lucia on Holiday, I kept forgetting that it wasn’t Benson’s pen which had written it – and what higher compliment could possibly be paid?

Lucia on Holiday takes place after Mapp and Lucia, but it is not made clear exactly when in the chronology the story takes place. The ambiguity is bashfully explained in the introduction – because there is an event in the novel which dates it very precisely, but which would make it a touch out of kilter with the publication history of the original series – but, as Guy says in this introduction, since Benson moved his principal village from one county to another, he’d be very forgiving.  It does not, in the end, much matter – Mapp and Lucia et al behave precisely as they would at any point in their history.

As you may guess from the title, Lucia is on holiday – she cashes in some clever (if risky) investments, and heads off to Italy with husband Georgie in tow.  But Elizabeth Mapp isn’t having that, of course – not for she to be gloried over forever in Tilling society.  Luckily, her friendly Maharajah wishes his son to be accompanied on holiday to Europe… and Mapp decides that precisely Lucia’s hotel would be the best place.  Mr and Mrs Wyse also turn up, as does my favourite character, insouciant opera singer Olga Bracely, so (with a few Bensonian coincidences) we have a microcosm of Tilling society gathered.  If we miss Quaint Irene and Diva Plaistow, then, well, we’ve coped without Daisy Quantock for several books, and both ladies are much present in recollection and quotation.

What ensues certainly has a plot, and goes nearer the knuckle than Benson could possibly have done in the 1920s and 1930s (c.f. Georgie and his handsome valet), but is chiefly joyful for the constant oneupmanship and subtle bitchery between our heroines.  Anyone who has read the original series will be familiar with the sort of thing – neither ever makes an outright insult (or, if they do, it is in an unguarded moment) – but there are plenty that hide behind the thinnest of veils.  Lucia delights, for example, in making subtle references to occasions on which Mapp sabotaged someone else’s cake, and Mapp… well, Mapp, as always (sadly!) so rarely gets the overhand.  And, as always, I cheer her on, hoping that Lucia will be smited just once.

As I say, Guy F-S has understood and echoed Benson’s tone so wonderfully – I especially like his moments of narrative bitching, exposing the self-delusion of the grande dames.  This excerpt, early in the novel, was the moment I cheerfully knew I was in safe hands – it is perfect as a depiction of how ridiculous Mapp is, and how delusional:

“Benjy!” she gasped, clasping her hands together in what she felt sure was girlish glee. “But of course – that’s brilliant!”
My only reservations in characterisation were that things are pushed that tiniest bit too far for my liking.  Georgie seems genuinely to hate Lucia much of the time, without the constant, grudging admiration and love he feels in the original series (although this does come out eventually in Lucia on Holiday).  Mapp is a shade too monstrous, and Major Benjy a shade too lascivious – but these are only shades, and the fact that it comes down to tiny details is itself astonishing.

Of course, you must start with the originals.  If you haven’t read them, do start with Queen Lucia (not Mapp and Lucia itself, which is the fourth in the series) – you may have to struggle past the baby talk, which is mercifully scarce in Guy F-S’s book, but it’s worth it.  Once you’ve read and relished them – you can be overjoyed to know that these will be waiting.