2012

Miranda Hart – Is It Just Me?

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Another quick this-book-has-been-on-my-To-Review-shelf-forever review, I’m afraid – my reading has been so shamefully little recently – but that means you get to hear about some fun books in short bursts.  And today’s is Miranda Hart’s bestselling book Is It Just Me?  Note that I don’t say ‘autobiography’ – we’ll come onto that later.

I suspect you know who Miranda Hart is, but indulge me for a moment.  She is a comedian (we’re not saying ‘comedienne’ anymore, are we, please?) who sprung to fame in an eponymous sitcom where she falls over things, embraces middle-aged activities a little early, and generally makes fun of herself.  I’m always drawn to female-driven sitcoms, so I’ve been watching since day one – but the third series, which finished here about a month ago, was the one which really saw Miranda pull in enormous audiences of over 9 million.  One in seven people in the UK were watching, which is extraordinary.

The sitcom has the occasional dud episode, but generally I love, love, love it.  How can I not feel affinity with a woman who, aghast at the idea of going out clubbing, says: “It’s 9 o’clock! Four words: Rush. Home. For. Poirot.”  For those who don’t ‘get’ it, Miranda is just childish and meandering – but I really admire how she has made slapstick amusing to those of us who normally don’t care for it.  I adore her friend Tilly and her ridiculous expressions (I was saying ‘McFact’ before it appeared on Miranda: McFact.) Stevie (with her ‘allure’) and Miranda have a wonderful friendship, which is all too rarely shown in comedy.  And then there’s her Mum.  It’s all great fun, and very watchable.  And very British.

Which brings me onto Is It Just Me?  Although it is by Miranda Hart, about Miranda Hart, it’s only really an autobiography to the extent that the sitcom is – it feels a lot like it’s been written ‘in character’.  Presumably all the events she described happened, at least in outline, but it’s certainly selective.  Her tales of dating, office life, holidays, weddings… they’re all written as though outlining  an idea for a sketch comedy.  Which is fine – it’s more than fine, it’s great – but it isn’t really an autobiography.  She spends a lot of the time in faux-conversation with her 17-year-old self, disillusioning her of the idea that she’ll grow up into a graceful gazelle-type.  (Since I talked to myself in my first Vulpes Libris column – see yesterday’s post – I don’t have a leg on which to stand.)

Of course, having languished on my To Review shelf for so long, I can’t remember any examples to give you.  I chuckled my way through Is It Just Me? without making any notes on it, for reviewing purposes.  So I’ll borrow this clip of Miranda reading an excerpt herself…

I haven’t mentioned yet, but this was a gift from my lovely friend Lucy, whom I love even though she went and LEFT Oxford last year, to move to big old London town.

So, yes, a giggle of a book which does no more and no less than you’d expect.  Lots of amusing, light-hearted moments, and a surprisingly moving moment when she tells her younger self that her secret ambition to go into comedy has happened, and that she’s even spoken to her heroines French & Saunders.  I guess it’s the perfect Christmas book, but since that’s been and gone… Mothering Sunday?

(By the by, if you have watched the sitcom, and enjoy Sally Phillips wonderful turn as Tilly, may I recommend you seek out her sitcom Parents…)

Hallucinations – Oliver Sacks

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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…

Caitlin Moran is basically Dickens.

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I’m going to start this review by getting all hipster – bear with me one moment while I put on my oversized specs and dig out some ironic vinyl records – and say that I loved Caitlin Moran before it was cool to love Caitlin Moran. Granted, I don’t buy a newspaper myself, or subscribe to The Times online, but my father and brother regard The Times as second only to Scripture and I flick through it when I visit either of them. More specifically, I have read Caitlin Moran’s columns for years. I don’t always agree with her, but I always find her brilliantly, ingeniously funny. The sort of funny that makes reading a newspaper actually fun.

Following on from the success of How To Be A Woman, which I have borrowed but have yet to read, a selection of her columns has been published under the title Moranthology. Geddit? Good. Her topics are widespread – a lot of celebrity-culture and arts & entertainment, but also just the world around her, from new dresses to Gregg’s pasties to tax (she’s pro.) Here’s how she glosses her inspirations in the introduction:

The motto I have Biro’d on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have – because it’s the only world we have. It’s the simplest maths ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the Moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment when you boggle at the world – at yourself – at the whole, unlikely, precarious business of being alive – and then start laughing.

And that’s usually when I make a cup of tea, and start typing.
Caitlin Moran and I are unlikely ever to be friends. This is largely – though not entirely – because all her friendships seem to be assessed on the willingness with which said friend will breakdance, drunk out of their minds, in seedy clubs at four in the morning – or how much they admire Ghostbusters, which I’ve never seen. But, should our paths ever cross – at, say, 7.30 am, as she is stumbling back from a faux-Victorian strip club with Lady Gaga, and I am blearily crawling to the corner shop to get milk for my morning tea, not wearing any glasses because for some reason that only feels like a viable option in a post-caffeine world – should we meet, perhaps we would bond a little. Bond about our love of books (she champions libraries wonderfully; ‘A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft, and a festival’) and our distrust of the Tory Party. Maybe even about how great Modern Family is, although that’s not mentioned here. But that might be it. I’ve never seen Sherlock, and I don’t much care for Doctor Who – these admissions are probably enough for Moran to cement-bag me to the bottom of the Thames, a la Mack the Knife. The columns where she reviews or goes behind the scenes of these shows are near-pathological in their adoration.

And, of course, there are plenty of other things we don’t agree about, or enthusiasms we don’t share. That’s beside the point. Moran could write about how much she likes dead-heading roses to make bonnets for foxes, and she’d make the hobby seem not only amusing, but rather bohemian and cool. Because Moran just is cool, without seeming to try at all. The sort of cool which entirely embraces self-deprecation and wears absurd foibles as badges of honour – and makes everything she writes seem adorable and awesome. (The only time I felt disappointed by Moran was when she referred to the ‘anti-choice’ movement. However strongly people may disagree over the issue of abortion, I’ve always deeply admired the almost-universal respectful use of ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ by those who oppose either one. Because, Moran – as well you know – absolutely nobody takes an anti-life or an anti-choice stance. That is never their objective.) But, that aside, she doesn’t put a foot wrong. She can babble about Downton Abbey, declare her hatred of children’s book/TV character Lola, or opine on her holidays to Wales, and it’s all just brilliant. And it’s brilliant because she has her tone down pat – a way with simile that is always innovative and hilarious (she, for instance, describes X Factor alum Frankie Cocozza as having ‘a voice like a goose being kicked down a slide’) and a clever mix of high and low registers which is positively Dickensian – throwing slang in with perfect judgement. Because (see above) she’s so cool.

And that mention of Dickens isn’t careless. Caitlin Moran is basically a 21st-century Dickens, with crazy awesome hair. In amongst all the hilarious columns on the ugliness of fish names or how someone stole her hairstyle, Moran gets in some serious social politics. So, like Dickens, she is incredibly funny – but uses the humour to slip in social commentary; the difference being that Dickens would give us a plucky urchin at the mercy of Sir Starvethechild. It would be glorious, but his point would be rather lost in a thicket of the grotesque. Moran, give or take some emotive wording, just tells it as it is.

Moran grew up on a council estate with eight siblings and parents who were on disability benefits. As she says, ‘I’ve spent twenty years clawing my way out of a council house in Wolverhampton, to reach a point where I can now afford a Nigella Lawson breadbin.’ But she still knows what poverty was like firsthand, and writes movingly, sensibly, and brilliantly about various issues to do with cutting benefits or alienating the poor.

All through history, those who can’t earn money have had to rely on mercy: fearful, changeable mercy, that can dissolve overnight if circumstances change, or opinions alter. Parish handouts, workhouses, almshouses – ad-hoc, makeshift solutions that make the helpless constantly re-audition in front of their benefactors; exhaustingly trying to re-invoke pity for a lifetime of bread and cheese.

That’s why the invention of the Welfare State is one of the most glorious events in history: the moral equivalency of the Moon Landings. Something not fearful or changeable, like mercy, but certain and constant – a right. Correct and efficient: disability benefit fraud is just 0.5 per cent. A system that allows dignity and certainty to lives otherwise chaotic with poverty and illness.
Who but Moran could write about her hatred of creating party-bags, her love of David Attenborough and her friend with schizophrenia who has to move cities in order to retain state-given accommodation? Not in the same column, you understand, but I wouldn’t put it past her. Moran has won all sorts of awards, I believe, and I would say that she deserves them – but, quite frankly, she is the only columnist I ever read. I’ve been enjoying her columns for years (some in this book are, naturally, revisits for me) and I’m so delighted that they’re now available as a book. I’ve got my fingers crossed for another, since this can only represent a small percentage of her output. But I’ll count my blessings with this one (thanks Colin for giving it to me!) and urge you to seek it out. Like I said, Moran is basically Dickens. Hilariously funny, socially conscious, rocks some impressive sideburns. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

Shrinking Violet

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cover design: Suzi Ovens

I have read my first Kindle book!  Before you ebook-fanatics get too excited, I should say that it was on Kindle for PC, and the only reason I read it was because it was written by a lovely friend of mine.  But if it weren’t good, I’d have read it on the sly, and never mentioned it here.  As it is, I can  happily and honestly say that it is brilliant – without any fear of compromising my integrity (which, post-Dewey, is probably in shambles anyway.)  It’s Shrinking Violet (2012) by Karina Lickorish Quinn, and the ebook is available for only 77p!  Considering how fab it is, that is a complete steal.

I was lucky enough to see an early draft of some chapters, because Karina wanted to know my opinion – I was a little nervous, in case it wasn’t good, but I was able to give her a double thumbs up with complete enthusiasm.  She has very sweetly given me a ‘thank you’ on one of the opening pages, which is rather thrilling!  Ok, now onto the book itself – I just wanted to lay all that before you, so you’d know in advance my connection to Shrinking Violet.  But I hope you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t say it was great if I didn’t believe it.  But I will be calling the author ‘Karina’ rather than ‘Lickorish Quinn’, because I’ve known her for seven years, and it would feel odd to call her anything except Karina.

Shrinking Violet could have been written to my requirements, so perfect is it for my taste.  It’s a quirky, slightly surreal but not macabre, novella about Oxford – and it’s heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice (as I will discuss later).  I also detected a lot of similarities with Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (one of my favourite books) but I know they were coincidences, since Karina didn’t read the Comyns novel until after she finished writing the book.  I love a quirky domestic setting, and I was drawn in by the lovely description of Violet’s house…

It was true that it was a most impractical house. Violet’s family lived in a higgledy-piggledy house with seven floors, because no two rooms were level, but each was connected by a set of stairs to the other. The house was also full of doors here and there of all shapes and sizes leading to cupboards and passages or to nowhere at all. There was not a single right angle in it. Under every piece of furniture was wedged a notebook or a folded handkerchief to stop them from wobbling on the uneven floors. Every breakable object was stuck down with glue or adhesive tape. Not even the pictures on the walls could be balanced in such a way as to hang straight.
Violet herself is an inquisitive young girl as the story starts, short for her age and with an unusual perspective on life.  Karina captures really well the disjointed nature of a child’s view – a determination to read some sort of logic into any scenario, alongside the readiness to accept or imagine anything.  Violet can be quite literal in her understanding of what people say, but lends her own enchanting interpretations to the world around her:

“What I do not understand,” Violet had said “Is that when you tell me I have eleven apples and to take five away, you do not tell me where those five apples should go.”   

Her teacher had given her five minutes standing out in the cloisters for that remark. Violet did not very much fancy the idea of standing out in the cloisters today, so when she was told she had five goats and she should take three away, rather than asking her teacher where she should put the three goats, she used her own initiative and sent them to wait in the quad with the other animals that were swimming and paddling there. I am very sorry to have to send you out, she explained to the goats. But you see my teacher does not have time for my questions and you know you cannot stay in the classroom, unless you want to do some sums, and I am afraid there aren’t any spare desks for you.  

Violet sighed as she turned the page to find that every question involved the taking away of a certain number of elephants and cats and ferrets from a larger group of elephants and cats and ferrets, so that very soon the quad was filled with her cast away creatures.
Onto that Alice mention I made earlier.  Karina uses the legacy of Alice very cleverly.  It isn’t intended to be a subtle background reference once or twice – it swirls and unfurls throughout Shrinking Violet, like the flood which carried the knitting sheep, perhaps.  Karina’s novel isn’t a sequel to or a retelling of Carroll’s Alice, but it could perhaps be found in the same universe.  The influence threads through the minutiae of the novel – there are mentions of a Dodo, jam tarts, pocket-watches, chess – but it is the feel of Shrinking Violet which truly unites the two.  Where Carroll’s books have their own curious anti-logic, Karina takes on the surreality of Alice, but mostly in Violet’s unusual view of the world, rather than that world itself.  The narrative slips into the little girl’s imagination, so that her curious conclusions and conversations with the inanimate sometimes seem to be coming true, but this simply indicates the vividness of the world she inhabits and creates.  As she grows older (and taller – like Alice, her height suddenly increases, although it doesn’t oscillate…) the world around her becomes less fantastic, but the tone never loses its wonderful surreal qualities – but a surrealism rooted in the domestic.  The events of the novel could certainly happen – a school day, a wedding, a funeral – but they take on their own peculiar, touching, curious character through Violet’s eyes and Karina’s words.

One of the stylistic traits which Karina uses wonderfully is the off-balance end to sentence or paragraph, often adding a little pathos to a quirky character or, alternatively, adding an unusual twist to an otherwise grounded section.  Here is an example of the former:

Aunt Dora was rarely awake and even then, barely. It was often said of her that she could sleep anywhere and did. When she was young she had found it impossible to sleep in silent or solitary places and so had paid to visit museums, watch films and take train journeys just to sleep where there would be noise and crowds. She had slept through an opera, a circus show and a riot. None of her family knew this about her because she saw it as a rather sordid secret. Her friends did not know it because she did not have any friends.
This pathos comes most affectingly with Violet’s grandfather Julius.  To my mind, he is the most delightful character in Shrinking Violet.  Somehow he is both eccentric and straight-talking.  He doesn’t beat about the bush, but his world is almost as fanciful as the infant Violet’s.  He once wrote a great novel, but now writes haiku on bits of paper and leaves them around the house.  His interactions with the everyday world – with his granddaughter’s wedding, or his wife’s illness – are fragmented and uncertain, but he is still in control of his personality and his opinions.  He’s a fascinating character – and it is with him and Violet’s relationship with him that the sadder, more serious undertones of the novel come to light.

For a short novel, an awful lot is packed in – but, unlike a lot of first novels, I didn’t feel that Karina was trying to put too much in.  There is a definite unity to Shrinking Violet, in terms of style and tone, which suggests a much more experienced novelist.  Perhaps it is not entirely clear how Karina will write when detached from the deliberate influence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but I think her ability to depict the quirky alongside the moving can be transferred to her next book, without the allusions to Alice.  I’m looking forward to finding out what happens.

As a friend of Karina’s, I want to say “Buy it! Read it! Blog about it! Tell your friends!”, but as a reader of books, I need no sort of nepotism simply to say “Buy it! Read it!”  It’s a really wonderful little book, and I’m proud to have any connection with it – Karina is a talented and imaginative writer, Violet is a wonderful character, and Shrinking Violet is a joyous, eccentric, thoughtful little beauty of a book.