And that’s what you are, the three of you. Parasites. The whole bunch. You always have been and you always will be. Nothing can change you. You are
And that’s what you are, the three of you. Parasites. The whole bunch. You always have been and you always will be. Nothing can change you. You are doubly, triply parasitic; first, because you've traded ever since childhood on that seed of talent you had the luck to inherit from your fantastic forebears; secondly, because you’ve none of you done a stroke of ordinary honest work in your lives, but batten upon us, the fool public who allow you to exist; and thirdly, because you prey upon each other, the three of you, living in a world of fantasy which you have created for yourselves and which bears no relation to anything in heaven or earth.
This book lacks the dramatic tension of du Maurier’s best-known (and loved) works, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who’s fascinated by du Maurier’s own life story. In Julia Myerson’s Introduction to my Virago edition, she says that du Maurier “apparently admitted that all three Delaneys were probably facets of her own personality” - and as a reader who has read a handful of du Maurier biographies, the parallels are obvious. Daphne seems to be most obviously the character of Maria Delaney, but perhaps other more internal dimensions of her character or her family dynamics reminded her of the other two siblings, Niall and Celia. Then there are the plot points: the famous father, who has a strong streak of emotional tyranny and neediness; the early exposure to the dubious glamour of the theatrical world; the three siblings, who are exceptionally close; the insecurity of imposter syndrome and nepotism, and the selfishness of the artistic life. Perhaps most obviously, the marriage of Maria Delaney and Charles has obvious parallels to Daphne’s own to Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning.
Daphne du Maurier devotees will also know of her fascination with the Bronte family, and perhaps will have read her biography The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte. The emotional connection between Maria and Niall - who are raised as siblings, but have no genetic ties - reminds one of Heathcliff and Cathy. Both characters are selfish to the core, and somehow only vulnerable and truly known to each other. Like Cathy, Maria marries an Edgar Linton character - but then doesn’t let that get in the way of her attachment to Niall. And the “world of fantasy” shared by the three Delaneys: one cannot help but think of the Bronte siblings.
But here’s the thing: it’s really a character study more than anything else. And if you aren’t interested in those characters - who aren’t particularly likeable - you may find the plot hard-going. Like Rebecca, it starts in the present and then reverts to the past, but there is never that same sense of mystery and drama. Yes, the reader will becomes more intimately acquainted with the three Delaney siblings, but I’m not sure they will ever become knowable. Perhaps du Maurier wrote this book as an attempt to work out something about her own character, but ultimately it struck me as a book about the disappointments of middle age. ...more
But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.
This book,
Like many others, I did not see it coming.
But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.
This book, which follows on closely (both in novel-time and publishing-time) from Oh, William!, begins in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic became - not just a news item from China - but a tsunami that was going to engulf most of the world. It was a strange experience to read this timeline of trauma; it felt both recent, and strangely distant. Coincidentally, I got my fourth vaccine booster the day that I began reading this book, although most people I know seem to think we are now in “post-COVID” time. What does that mean? Perhaps only that we do not fear the disease in the same way, despite the fact that we are just now beginning to properly deal with the financial and emotional fallout.
I suspect that most people who reach for this book are already devoted Lucy Barton - and Elizabeth Strout - fans. When Lucy realises that her entire childhood had been a lockdown - a parallel universe of loneliness, isolation, deprivation and fear - it’s entirely obvious why Strout made the decision to analyse the pandemic through this character’s particular lens.
The plot is admittedly a tick-box of every typical COVID experience, but Strout makes it work. It works because she is the most compassionate of writers. Lucy’s voice - her characteristic way of explaining things to herself, of musing, of connecting the past to the present, of exclaiming (!!) - might cloy under a lesser writer’s control, but Strout manages to make her a supremely loveable person. I use the word “person” deliberately because Lucy doesn’t feel like a character; she feels like a person to me. A dear, dear person.
The storyline takes place mostly in rural Maine, but also in New York City. That contrast is important, and it plays a key role in the plot in a variety of ways. Strout is telling Lucy’s story, but she is also telling the story of the US in the extremely tense and traumatic years of 2020-22. Like the author, Lucy is a writer and she explains her attraction to that profession as a profound curiosity and need to understand other people. If Strout has a project in this book it is exactly that: she wants to get at the combative and entirely opposed points of view that are battling it out in the US right now. If I had to pick one word to describe this book it would be humane. Lucy is like a bridge between the American people who are struggling for a toehold in the American Dream, and those who have reaped the rewards of American opportunity and prosperity.
I have to rate this book a 5; perhaps it will not be an enduring classic, perhaps it doesn’t rank amongst the great works, but Strout is peerless when it comes to creating living characters. I was stunned into quiet reflection after racing my way through Lucy’s experience of the pandemic. ...more
I listened to this book on audiobook over a period of several weeks - one long car trip from London to southwest France and then mostly on my daily waI listened to this book on audiobook over a period of several weeks - one long car trip from London to southwest France and then mostly on my daily walk. In my mind, the title was “Love, Marriage” - in other words, the two words and ideas were separated by a comma and very much separate states or entities. It’s only as I prepare to review the book that I realise it is also a phrase: a “love marriage” as opposed to an arranged one. It’s a phrase used repeatedly in the book, yet my imagined version of the title would work equally well.
The book begins with an engagement between Joe and Yasmin and then proceeds haltingly, and problematically, to . . . well, that would be spoiling things. When the book was first published, I read that the author was fond of Jane Austen and wanted to write a modern update on the Marriage Plot story. The relationship arc of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, complicated and ambivalent though it may be, has nothing on these two. In the opening scene, the prospective bride - 26 year old Yasmin Ghorami - is fretting because her mother is insisting on bringing a Bengali feast encased in Tupperware to the first meeting between her family and her fiancé Joe’s mother. The reader expects a culture clash: Primrose Hill intelligentsia vs South London immigrants. As it turns out, though, this is the least of it.
In many ways, this book is like that banquet of Bengali specialities and side dishes. There is a lot of it, maybe too much, and the story could have been a complete meal without quite so many condiments (characters) and spice (sexual content). The biggest problem, though, is that the main characters - Yasmin and Joe - are on the bland side, and even unlikeable. The secondary characters (particularly Yasmin’s mother Anisah and her best friend Rania) are far more interesting and intriguing.
Life isn’t simple. It’s a phrase that Anisah Ghorami repeats at various times in the story. It turns out that Anisah’s ‘love marriage’ is far more complicated than Yasmin has understood, and Yasmin’s own relationship with Joe (not to mention her parents) proves to be far from straightforward as well. She doesn’t really know or understand Joe completely, but then she doesn’t understand herself, either.
One of the most important subplots is Yasmin’s job as a Junior Doctor with the NHS. (Joe is a doctor as well, but not as conflicted about it as Yasmin is.) Yasmin has become a doctor largely because her father is a doctor and he wanted that for her, too. It’s the pinnacle of immigrant success. A lot of the book’s narrative is devoted to Yasmin’s days on the hospital ward: everything from her relationship with patients to her conflicts with other doctors and nurses on the staff. In some ways, Yasmin’s career story is a separate book: adjacent to the Marriage Plot, but quite separate from it as well. Perhaps that’s no accident and the author was deliberate in the way she weighted the story. In a modern love story, perhaps love marriage (or love, marriage) is only a smallish part of two enjoined lives.
I read Ali’s celebrated Brick Lane many years ago, and despite the similarities - the London setting, the Bengali culture - they didn’t really seem like books by the same writer. Certainly this is a very different London and it’s very much a second-generation immigrant story as opposed to a first-generation one. It’s far more light-hearted, too, despite the serious content. But for all the sprawling nature of Love Marriage, it’s also a story about a young woman growing into herself....more
At times immensely readable, at times a proper challenge - it can read more like an academic paper than a work of fiction - it’s difficult for me to fAt times immensely readable, at times a proper challenge - it can read more like an academic paper than a work of fiction - it’s difficult for me to form a coherent response to this book. I felt little emotional connection to it, and didn’t have much appetite for it, yet it certainly earned my regard and admiration. I read it with my Pulitzer Prize reading group, and probably wouldn’t have persisted with what felt like a task if that hadn’t been the case. It’s undeniably clever, but I constantly felt like I was missing the point or not quite in on the joke.
Let me give you a bit of the flavour of the writing, and this is an excerpt that I did understand:
Just about a decade prior to the autumn I am recalling, the State of Israel was founded. In that minuscule country halfway across the globe, displaced and refugee Jews were busy reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatred and subjugations of contrary regimes, in a mass-process of solidarity aroused by gross antagonism. Simultaneously, a kindred mass-process was occurring here in America, where Jews were busy being deinvented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market-forces, intermarriage and miscegenation. Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the proces, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all of the world’s Jews were involved at midcentury in becoming something else; and that at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them - of former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language and degree of religious observance - became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death-rattle gasp.
The narrator of the story is Ruben Blum, the first Jewish professor on the faculty of Corbindale College - a ‘sub-Ivy’ college in New York state. A former Bronx Jew, of Russian/Ukranian immigrant parents, Blum’s speciality is the history of American economics. His family is rounded out by wife Edith and teenage daughter Judy. During the school year of 1959/60, Blum is just getting a firmer toehold into the community; if asked, he claims that he would say that domestic life is ‘wonderful’, although he admits to himself (and confesses to the reader) that his wife is ‘bored’ and his daughter is ‘angry’. If Blum and his family represent the mid-century Jewish American experience - a state of semi-assimilation - then the Netanyahu family represent something far more intractable.
The first half of the book focuses on Ruben Blum, whilst the second half is given over to the visit of the Netanyahu family of the book’s title. (In the book’s Afterword - which Cohen titles ‘Credits & Extra Credit’ - it’s revealed that the Netanyahu visit is actually based on a real visit to an American university, as recounted to the author by the famous academic Harold Bloom. ) I won’t entirely spoil the narrative surprise, but let’s just say that the visit is intense, comic, absurd and grotesque. It has been proposed that Corbindale might hire Dr Netanyahu - and presumably because of their shared Jewishness, Blum is given the responsibility of vetting Netanyahu’s references and hosting him during his visit. Unexpectedly, he brings the family - wife Tzila and their three sons - with him.
I wasn’t sure, until the novel’s afterword, what was fact and was fiction. On reflection, it’s clear that the novel is attempting to elucidate how and why the United States became critical in the formation of the state of Israel. (At least that is one idea in the book, and there are plenty of others - most of them related to the Jewish experience, although Cohen is certainly very funny and knowledgeable about American academia.) The future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu- the middle son of the Dr Netanyahu featured in this book - is characterised in this way by Cohen:
His reign, marked by the building of walls, the construction of settlements, and the normalisation of occupation and state violence against the Palestinians, represented the ultimate triumph of the formerly disgraced Revisionist vision promulgated by his father.
Reading this book was, in a way, a history lesson for me; but if anything, Cohen’s book is also (always?) a reminder that ‘history’ is just a construct shaped by the storyteller....more
Most children grow up knowing only their own world, their own kind of people, their own way of life; we were lucky: there were many different threa
Most children grow up knowing only their own world, their own kind of people, their own way of life; we were lucky: there were many different threads, coming from many places, crossing for a while with ours, often in a state of love-war, sometimes simply love - as with Hannah - sometimes war - as with Abdul and Azad Ali.
Our house was English streaked with Indian, or Indian streaked with English. It might have been an uneasy hybrid but we were completely and happily at home.
In 1966, when they themselves were in their early 60s, Rumer and Jon Godden - the eldest two of four sisters - wrote this memoir of their childhood in Narayangunj. They tell the story of their years in this 'paradise lost' in the present tense; they become their youthful selves again; and if their understanding of what they write is in any way shaped or coloured by their adult experiences, and the passage of time, the reader does not know it. They seem to have reconstructed the past so completely that it lives and breathes, and their children's emotions and experiences seem entirely authentic.
Perhaps they were able to remember these years in East Bengal so clearly because they were, in a sense, 'paradise regained'. After a year of living in London - "it had altogether been a time of aunts" - Rumer and Jon were given a reprieve from the greyness and regimentation of English life and allowed to return to Narayangunj. Although it was the custom to send school-age children back to England, World War I had broken out and it was decided that they would be safer in India. On their return, their sensory and analytical powers were no doubt sharpened by the extreme contrast. When they next returned to England, they were on the cusp of adolescence and the idyll of their Indian childhood was truly over.
Their father, Arthur Golden, was the manager of the Brahmaputra River Steam Navigation Company, and their large home - staffed with Indian servants - was placed so near the river that the sounds of its activity and commerce are much a part of their immediate landscape as the house's interior and garden. It was a liminal place in many ways: British India when they were children, Pakistan at the time of their writing, and now Bangladesh.
In the background of our house in Narayanguj there were always three sounds: the regular puff of escaping steam from the jute works across the road, puff-wait-puff, like the pulse of our days and nights; then, from first daylight until dusk, the cawing of crows in the garden and, all day and most of the night, the tympany of the bazaar: a chatter like sparrows, street cries, a woman wailing, a baby's cry.
The writing is so evocative that the reader can easily imagine this enclosed paradise: the safety of the house, and the excitement of the pulsating, exotic world just on its boundaries.
Because of the location's relative isolation, the Godden family were not as much part of an Anglo-Indian community, with all of its rigid rules, as most of the British expatriates living in India. They were far more unto themselves: the children had to entertain themselves with their own imaginations and the landscape available to them. Also, one senses that the household servants had a larger emotional role to play in their world. Several of the servants were protectors, companions and even playmates.
Although it's a very personal sketch, the reader does get a strong sense of the complexities of the India just from the descriptions of the household servants. Muslims, all castes of Hindus, Catholics and even a 'Lepcha from Sikkim' Buddhist formed the household staff. The children learn, if only in a limited way, the various taboos and very different sensibilities shared by all of these people commingled in one household.
Many of the other reminiscences have to do with the things that children care most passionately about: food, games, holidays, treats, animals and the seasons that make up each year. There are also sibling loyalties and rivalries, and the moments of triumph and humiliation that stay embedded in the psyche forever.
One of the first Godden novels that I read was The River, and much of that story is drawn from the same well of material as this memoir. It's clear that this period of childhood, of India - with all of its strong flavours and contrasts - imprinted the Godden sisters so deeply that they carried it with them for the rest of their lives.
This is the most seamless continuation of Lucy Barton's story - although her ex-husband William Gerhardt gets top billing. At 70, William's l4.5 stars
This is the most seamless continuation of Lucy Barton's story - although her ex-husband William Gerhardt gets top billing. At 70, William's life has been torpedoed by two drastic events - both of which undermine not only his sense of who he is, but also his sense of security and sureness about both the past and the future. Lucy is first-person narrator, still, and so everything that happens is filtered through her consciousness. She is still working through the themes of her first book - mothers are still very important, as is the damage suffered in childhood - but there is a different slant because of the way that Lucy and William have aged. They are not quite old, but on their way to that estate. There is more of life's journey to ruminate over than to look forward to. They have both lost spouses, other loves, and yet have found themselves still bound together in friendship and shared parenthood.
Lucy is still prone to fearfulness and a persistent feeling of being 'invisible' in the world, but she is the most endearing and lovable of characters (to my mind). A kind, thoughtful and sensitive soul. Strout's subject is emotional damage - mostly the very ordinary kind - but, and this is not a paradox, her books are filled with the joy and hopefulness of healing human connection....more
We only ever see the second half of our parents' lives - the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together. It's hard to think of our p
We only ever see the second half of our parents' lives - the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together. It's hard to think of our parents as young - or maybe I mean young adults - when everything stretched out in front of them and was possible. The versions of them that we see and judge every day have been shaped by experiences they've had, but which we have never known: the times they were hurt; the days they won; the times they were compromised. For so much of it, we were simply not there.
Ben Watts prefaces this memoir of his parents, Romany and Tom, with this paragraph - and it's an excellent reminder, from the outset, of the limitations of a child's ability to ever completely know his parents. Watt seems to be reminding himself, and also his readers, that a memoir is ever only one's person's reconstruction or 'version' of a complicated story; and in this case, made more complicated because he is attempting to not only capture his parents, in their singularity, but also the dynamics of their long marriage.
His subjects are interesting people: they have both achieved distinction in their professional lives, and they have lived - if not at the centre, then certainly in something better than the margins - of the cultural world of post-war London. Tom Watt was a working-class Glaswegian and a precociously talented pianist and bandleader whose 'Tommy Watt Orchestra' enjoyed considerable success in the late 1950s and early 1960s - before rock and roll killed the jazz scene. Romany Bain was a RADA trained actress and then for 20 years a feature writer known for her 'showbusiness' interviews. Romany was descended from one of the most prominent British Romani clans, and her father, George Bramwell Evans, was famous for being one of the BBC's first wildlife programme presenters. Those are just the taglines, though of course they do add interest and lustre to the family story. I assume that most people who end up reading this book will also be aware of Ben Watt's fame - mostly because of being one half of the band Everything but the Girl.
Fame and ambition - and more importantly, their thwarted aspects - do play a role in the dynamics of this marriage, but the fact that both Romany and Tom had been married before, and left those marriages to be together, is also key to their particular marriage story. Ben is their one child together, and in many ways he both enjoyed and suffered from 'only child' status; but that role is certainly complicated by the fact that he has four older half-siblings from his mother's first marriage. (The younger three were triplets - such an unusual occurrence, that they were featured in various newspaper and magazine articles.) By the time Ben is old enough to be aware of his parents' marriage, he is aware of the tensions in it. His father's excessive drinking is part of the dynamic, and later becomes something that his parents do together. As his parents age, and begin suffering from bad health, their marriage seems like more of a claustrophobic cage than anything else. You sense that their son wants to understand a fuller picture of their marriage - to go back to its passionate and hopeful beginnings - just to find the missing piece that explains why the marriage has endured despite it all.
So far, the book's title and my review both imply that this book is about a marriage - and that's certainly true to a point. It's certainly about a son trying to understand his parents, and to uncover aspects of their lives together which had been obscured or hidden from him as he was growing up. But in a larger sense, this book is about a son coming to terms with his parents' old age and death. Much of the book is taken up with the awkward exchange of roles which occurs when a child is forced to take responsibility for his parents. Ben Watt details the frustration, pity, discomfort and inconvenience of 'looking after' - or organising other people to look after - ageing parents who can no longer take care of themselves. Although the narrative goes back and forth in time, it always returns to the present reality as its baseline: and that part of the story is really more about Ben than his parents. While Romany and Tom's story is specific to them, and to a cultural place and time, the overarching narrative of ageing parents and care-taking has a universal, albeit hugely melancholy, appeal.
I think that Ben Watt genuinely does want to honour his parents' lives - which were so much more than just the meagre sum of their later years - but clearly he also wrote this book for the therapeutic value of it. It can be grim subject matter at times, and although I believe that its natural audience is probably those who can most readily relate to it, the ability to relate will in fact make the book's painful aspects more acute. He is a wonderful writer, though - with a gift for precise description - and that certainly sweetens what is overall a painfully melancholy reading experience. ...more
Over the years, a wall of stone and beautiful ivy has grown up around me, and only family and wildlife are allowed in. Although shafts of light are
Over the years, a wall of stone and beautiful ivy has grown up around me, and only family and wildlife are allowed in. Although shafts of light are starting to get through all this, I am still wary and catch myself wondering how long it will last.
Unfortunately, for me, I'm different. Different from everyone in my class. Different from most people in my school. But at break time today I watched the pied wagtails fly in and out of the nest. How could I feel lonely when there are such things? Wildlife is my refuge. When I'm sitting and watching, grown-ups usually ask if I'm okay. Like it's not okay just to sit and process the world, to figure things out and watch other species go about their day. Wildlife never disappoints me like people can. Nature has a purity to me, unaffected.
As I read Dara McAnulty's diary of his 13-14th year, I frequently felt a sense of - well, awe. That's partly because of the quality of the writing and the observations, but it's also because of just how much this young teenage boy already knows about the natural world. I'm blown away by how much he has already committed to mind and heart.
This diary has three major strands to it: nature, autism and environmental activism. Actually, there is a fourth strand: Northern Ireland. McAnulty is Irish, and there is a strong flavour of the history, culture and flora and fauna of his native turf. He incorporates Celtic words and legends into his personal story, and I have learned more about the wild spaces of Ulster in this book than the sum total of all of my previous knowledge of the place.
McAnulty's family is exceptional in many ways and he is very conscious of the supportive web of family support around him. He, his mother and his two younger siblings are all autistic; their father is a scientist. The entire family is passionate about the natural world and they have been raised with a potent combination of intellectual curiosity and emotional concentration. Much of the diary highlights family trips to various kinds of nature preserves, walks in the forest and even bird feeding in their own back garden. He shares so many observations of the natural world around him - with some educating points for the reader. (This reader, at any rate.)
His nature writing is filled with joy and reverence, for the most part, but his insights into the emotional and social difficulties he suffers because of his autism can make for painful reading. There is a lot of anger in this book, some of it directed to a world that despises and fears difference - and some of it more to do with the indifference of the world that does not care for or value nature in the same way that he and his family do. McAnulty is both detailed and eloquent in his descriptions of how he copes with the world around him, and the toll that it can take on him.
In the course of the year chronicled in this diary, two years ago, McAnulty's role as a passionate young advocate for the environment was obviously expanding quite a bit. He touches on subjects like social media - which has connected him to a like-minded community (good), but has also heaped judgments and criticisms upon him at times (bad). He also describes public speaking events and protests that he has been involved in - always asking of himself, what more can he do. He has an exceptionally strong sense of personal mission, but he also has a keen awareness of both the upsides and downsides of being a 'voice' for his cause, and he's not unaware of his own ego.
Altogether, it's an illuminating read in more than one important area. I will be watching his progress with much interest. ...more
I said Patrick. 'I'm the worst person in the world.' 'No you're not.' His hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. 'You're
4.5 stars
I said Patrick. 'I'm the worst person in the world.' 'No you're not.' His hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. 'You're not the best person in the world either, which is what you really think. You're the same as everybody else. But that's harder for you, isn't it. You'd rather be one or the other. The idea you might be ordinary is unbearable.' I did not dispute him. Only said, I'm sorry it was fucking awful. 'Some of the time.' He sighed and picked up the journal again and let it fall open anywhere. 'Most of the time it was amazing. You made me so happy, Martha. You have no idea. You have no idea how good it was. That's the part I'm finding hardest to deal with. That you were oblivious to everything that was good about it. You couldn't see it.' I told Patrick I could now.
In the 'Bonus Content' of my 'Waterstones Exclusive Signed Edition' of Sorrow and Bliss, author Meg Mason goes into some detail - an 'apologia' even - for the fact that she has written a book about mental illness (and its huge impact on familial relationships) without being an expert on the subject. She suggests that she created her protagonist Martha instinctively - not so much from a point of academic and board-certified expertise, but from a lifetime's experience of being interested in first-hand female accounts of struggles with mental health.
This book is a series of 'comic bits' which eventually piece themselves together and make up a story of how generations of mental health - controversially unnamed in the book - have impacted a family of women. Martha is a third-generation sufferer of depression, amongst other things, and her story begins at the point at which she has seemingly managed to destroy her 8 year marriage to Patrick - her long-suffering, devoted husband.
Martha's story is, in many ways, about unfulfilled potential - whether it be in the arena of career, motherhood or marriage. Although the book is told from her point-of-view, she manages to be both open and opaque - not just with the readers, but also, one eventually concludes, with herself. Her suffering is vividly conveyed, as is the frustration of knowing and loving her. By the end of the novel, Martha is no doubt that her family (even the most supportive members of it) are finding her both selfish and narcissistic. Martha's story then becomes a question of possibility: as in, is it possible to stop being so trapped by one's own mental illness? Or, as Martha phrases it: Is it possible to stop being 'hopeless'?
There are many wonderful characters in Sorrow and Bliss, including its sharp-tongued protagonist. Martha's sister Ingrid and her parents are particular stand-outs, and these characterisations definitely add a lot to the pleasure of reading this book.
The tone and voice feel very of-the-moment contemporary in the same way that the first Bridget Jones's Diary book did. I can't imagine this book being written even 10 years ago, and that is partly because of the approach to the subject matter, but also because the writing style seems to be shaped by the contemporary shorthand of memes and emojis. It was a fast-paced unputdownable read that seems somewhat glib and jokey at first, but deepens considerably as it develops as a story. The end was satisfying, and even though I was hooked from the first page, I was surprised by how much impact this book had on me. ...more
Some books are a pleasure to read, not necessarily because of the plot, but because of the voice and writing style. For me, this is definitel2.5 stars
Some books are a pleasure to read, not necessarily because of the plot, but because of the voice and writing style. For me, this is definitely not one of those books. I bought the book for its Cornwall setting, but neither the subject matter nor the writing style brought me pleasure. It's an easy enough read in terms of the language and short chapters, but I had to force myself through it. I found the subject matter quite grim, to be honest, but the grimness wasn't totally the problem. I just couldn't really believe in it.
I was interested in what I thought was the premise: a 19 year old girl wants to protect her patch of Cornish coastline from the encroachment of tourists (she refers to them as 'emmets'). It's a big issue in Cornwall, the poorest county in England. On one hand, the economy depends on tourism, but the pressures of tourism brings plenty of problems, too. Second home owners (absentee for much of the year) drive the property prices up so locals cannot afford housing - an issue that is touched on in the book, although that hasn't been the case for Melody Janie's family. (They own a house, a caravan and a cafe.) Tourists come for the beautiful natural landscape, but then they clutter it up in both senses of the word. They despoil it. Melody Janie's family have made their living running a cafe (the Cafy) for the benefit of tourists - mostly walkers on the coastal path - but for Melody Janie, at least, their customers represent a threat to her privacy.
I am interested in this problem, but it's actually just a side-note in the book. Indeed, it's almost a red herring - or at least a dead end. The real issue in the book is mental illness. At the very beginning of the book we learn that Melodie Janie is alone. She has an uneasy 'friendship' with another loner - a somewhat dubious character with a sweet dog - but except for the occasional visits from an old school friend, she is alone. The plot of the book gradually unravels the mystery of what has happened to Melodie Jane's family. To say much more would spoil the plot, but it turns out that Melodie Jane is not the most reliable of narrators.
The portrayal of mental illness in this book may be very well-done, but as mentioned before, I had a lot of trouble believing in the characters. There was something about the heaping of tragedies that I found very wearisome, although it wasn't nearly as intense as, say, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and I found that book very affecting. Perhaps my mood has been more to blame than the book, but it was certainly a flat reading experience for me.. ...more
She would learn that out in the world justice and mercy and pity are not easy, natural things. They must be found - fought for, insisted on. 'Mothe
She would learn that out in the world justice and mercy and pity are not easy, natural things. They must be found - fought for, insisted on. 'Mother,' she finished, 'has never fought for anything in her life.'
In an important sense, this book is about an emotional and intellectual awakening in the life of Mary Heyham: a middle-aged Edwardian woman, the mother of three grown children, and the wife of a successful business man. Published in 1914 - the very height of the Women's Suffrage movement, which was both put on hold and also advanced by World War I - the novel is also very much a 'state of play' about the changing relations between women and men. Although the storyline does focus chiefly on Mary and her marriage to her husband James, it does also address structural class differences and how they impact on women's choices and opportunities.
When the book begins, Mary's youngest daughter Rosemary is informing her mother that she has fallen in love with a suitable young man named Anthony. Mary's ambivalent reaction to this news is mostly one of dismay - both because of her daughter's young age (18), and also because of her own change of status. "What do other women do when the children go? How do they fill their days?" Her daughters, Rosemary and Laura (already married) and her husband James become aware of Mary's lassitude and low spirits, and Rosemary - who thinks of herself as a 'socialist' - comes up with a plan to address her mother's lack of purpose. Rosemary, in her youthful arrogance, decides that her mother's problem is that she has been too sheltered. Money, and her husband's protection, has insulated her too much from the hard realities and bracing challenges of life. Rosemary decides that her mother should "take up some sort of work among her father's employers" and commit herself to a new path, one that will be "revolutionary and high-minded". James, who owns a group of Imperial tea shops, takes up the idea as well. He is complacently proud of his role as an enlightened business owner, but he is willing that his wife should take notice of his waitresses and see if she can find some small means of improving their working conditions. To this end, a secretary named Miss Percival is hired and Mary makes her first tentative steps into the world of business.
Men, for her, had been creatures to be pleased and to be cared for, and men had loved her and been good to her precisely because of this attitude of hers.
When the novel begins, Mary and James are a harmonious, loving couple, but it doesn't take long for the reader to discern that this is partly because they have not previously had any grounds for disagreement or contentiousness. Mary has been the sort of soft, dutiful and compliant woman that James has found it easy to admire and feel protective of. For a modern reader, his attitude towards his wife is terribly grating. She speaks to her with jocular condescension, although he means to be affectionate:
'Tyrannous young bluestocking!' he said. "I don't think we need bother our old lady with books. It's just where books fail that we want her to come in. (. . .) I don't she's as happy as she ought to be. She's an active old thing, and it's no use her pretending that she can settle down to knitting. (...) So we thought that if she were to give some of her time to combating the firm's ruthless oppression it would be a new interest for her, besides putting an end to one of the worst excess of of the capitalistic regime!'
When Mary discovers that James's employees - the young waitresses that make up a large portion of his workforce - are not so happy and comfortably situated as he believes them to be, she suggests certain reforms. These reforms will cost money and affect the profits of the business. At this point, the trouble begins.
Miss Percival, at first a quiet, shadowy figure, is instrumental in opening Mary's eyes to the harsh reality of women's lives when they are unprotected, and distinctly not cosseted, by men. Although Miss Percival is a minor character in the story, she serves an important role. As the novel reaches its climax, Miss Percival gives an impassioned diatribe against men and their dominance over women.
I meant to open your eyes, to make you understand the connection between your luxury and the sweating of those underpaid, exhausted girls.
I hate all men when they're powerful and using their power to be cruel to women. And that's most of them - nearly always, whether they mean to or not.
I hate them most for what they've made of us. We love them and their children, so we are at their mercy.
At first, Mary seems like a frail and rather spineless woman, but she has a strong moral compass that guides her in both her reforming work and her relationship with her husband. The novel touches on all sorts of feminist and socialist issues - including the conflict between management and labour, profits and people - but it never strays too far from its central project: the enlightenment of a middle-class wife.
Although the book is more than 100 years old now, I wouldn't describe it entirely as a 'period piece'. It's actually a decent yardstick of what women have achieved in 100 years since first being granted a limited right to vote (1918), and what work still needs to be done. I read this novel as women gathered to protest Sarah Everard's murder by a policeman, a rather brutal reminder that there are still important inequalities between men and women. As a final note, current outrage at the way the Sarah Everard vigil was 'policed' has some striking parallels with the women's protests of 1910-14....more
This novel begins with the death of the family matriarch, a woman named Dot. Later, as I was thinking of the word 'Dot' it struck me as exceptionally This novel begins with the death of the family matriarch, a woman named Dot. Later, as I was thinking of the word 'Dot' it struck me as exceptionally appropriate. Its various meanings - a small spot, a musical notation, a dowry - could all apply to this character in some way. She barely features in the novel, there for only a few pages, but her beliefs and her choices affect everything that happens in the storyline. Dot has kept her children - 51 year old Julius and Jeanie - close to her, and by doing so she has warped their lives.
At first the novel reminded me of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, as the initial chapters revolve around the children's efforts to bury their mother - not easy in the modern world, where all of the formal apparatus of body disposal requires significant sums of money. The one thing that this family is completely short of is money. They are the rural poor, living 'off grid' and literally hand-to-mouth. They get by on the paltry proceeds of Dot and Jeanie's garden and the odd jobs that Julius can pick up in the community. They have no bank account, they don't take any form of public assistance, and they avoid all attempts (both government and business) to track their movements. Their adherence to the living habits of a previous age is underscored by their consuming hobby and passion: folk music.
As in Faulkner's novel, there is a comic grotesque element to the burial. But perhaps the most important thing that the two novels have in common is the fierce, unyielding pride of main characters Jeanie (in this novel) and Anse (in Faulkner's novel). Even when they are offered help - assistance they desperately need - they refuse to take it.
I've read Fuller's previous novel, Bitter Orange, and the thing that really strikes me - the one thing that the two books have in common - is the loneliness of the main characters. Fuller is unafraid to write unlikeable and in some ways unsympathetic characters. Her characters make make bad choices, not even quixotic so much as perverse. Yet, I did have great compassion for Jeanie - somewhat less for her brother, whose life is arguably even more tragic, and yet not so central to this story.
This book is set in the present, in a small village in the English countryside where Hampshire and West Berkshire meet - and the county of Wiltshire is just west. A well-known landmark of the area, Combe Gibbet, is mentioned in one of the first chapters. The gibbet, a replica of which is still there, is high up on the Test Way. It was used to hang two men in the 17th century, and remained there as a warning to deter other criminals. It's still a rather eerie sight, built on the top of an Early Neolithic long barrow - a sort of burial ground. It's an area where prosperous landowners, like Spencer Rawson in this book, have Range Rovers and beautifully refurbished large houses. Dot and her family live at the very other end of the spectrum, though. They are both a part of the village and not; known, yet unknown. They keep to themselves mostly, although Dot had a number of friends, including Bridget, who works at the doctor's surgery. The children live more on the fringes than their mother did.
When Dot dies, the consensus of everyone who knows her is that is a 'good' and 'honest' woman. It doesn't take many days, though, before the children discover that she is in debt to a number of friends in the village. Even worse, they are informed that the cottage they live in - a property which they have always assumed to be entrusted to them as a sort of reparation, a blood debt - can no longer be considered their home. As Jeanie and Julius's condition goes from bad to worse, they begin to question everything they thought they knew about their mother. Most of the storyline is taken up with their attempts to figure out what, if anything, can be trusted. The very ground they live on, the beliefs that they lived by, are suddenly shaky and unsettled - hence the title.
I found this book utterly absorbing and read the entire thing in a day. There are aspects of both mystery and crime in the storyline, but this book belongs to neither of those genres. It's grimly realistic, although not without moments of grace and forgiveness.
Thank you to Penguin Random House (Fig Tree imprint) for a free copy of this book. ...more
Harriet's river was a great slowly flowing mile-wide river between banks of mud and white sand, with fields flat to the horizon, jute fields and ri
Harriet's river was a great slowly flowing mile-wide river between banks of mud and white sand, with fields flat to the horizon, jute fields and rice fields under a blue weight of sky. 'If there is any space in me,' Harriet said, when she was grown up, 'it is from that sky.'
'How beautiful it is,' said Harriet. Its beauty penetrated into the heat and the ache of the hollowness inside her. It had a quiet unhurriedness, a time beat that was infinitely soothing to Harriet. 'You can't stop days or rivers,' not stop them, and not hurry them. Her cheeks grew cool and the ferment in her heart grew quieter too, more slow.
This short novel, hardly more than a novella really, is intensely atmospheric - almost more like a rich fever-dream. Some of that has to do with the author's powers of description. Flowers, trees, animals, insects, the sounds and sights of the river, the sky: colour, scent, sound.
They lived in a the Big House in a big garden on the river with the tall flowering cork tree by their front steps. It was their world, complete. Up to this winter it had been completely happy.
The narrator is Harriet, the 2nd of four children - dreamy yet observant, a girl on the cusp of adolescence. Harriet already knows herself to be a writer, and she is both the centre of this story and a spinner of her own stories. (From what I've read of Rumer Godden's life, I suspect she drew on her own childhood experiences to create both the setting and the character of Harriet.)
It's a coming-of-age story in the sense that a tragedy will force Harriet to pass from her childish innocence to a more self-aware stage of experience. Just as in literal birth, which also takes place in the novel, change is accompanied by pain.
At the beginning of the book, Harriet and her older sister Bea are practising their Latin: the declension and conjunction of 'love' and 'war'. It's very much a foreshadowing of the events of the novel. The setting is Dhaka, Bangladesh; although Harriet knows no other home, the reader will be keenly aware that this colonial 'idyll' will not last much longer. Although the year is never explicitly stated, a young man named Captain John is recovering at their home from years of being a prisoner-of-war. It's obviously somewhere near the tail end of World War II and the colonial age of Britain's rule over the Indian sub-continent. Harriet's father is something high up at 'The Works' - a huge jute processing factory which is on the river, just adjacent to their own 'Big House'. His work is part of the sounds and the traffic of the river.
'Puff-wait-puff' sounded the escape steam from the Works, and the water ran calmly in the river.
I was completely immersed in the hypnotic rhythms of this story. It's a beautifully philosophical novel, full of symbols and metaphors, but gracefully so. 4.5 stars...more
What a pleasant leisurely meal was Sunday breakfast. There was no motor to be propitiated and all one's friends were in town and could be
3.75 stars
What a pleasant leisurely meal was Sunday breakfast. There was no motor to be propitiated and all one's friends were in town and could be visited later in the day, so breakfast could go slowly from sausages to scones and butter and honey, and then to strawberries and cherries. The little girl's mother would read aloud afterwards while we all sat at the table and pushing aside cups and plates drew pictures out of whatever book was being read.
This memoir of a few 'golden' years in Angela Thirkell's early childhood provides a vivid, if selective, view of social culture and family life in the last decade of the Victorian age. Thirkell organises her reminiscences around the three houses which made up the circuit of her days: The Grange, 27 Young Street and North End House. Two of the houses, The Grange (in London) and North End House (in the East Sussex village of Rottingdean) belonged to her grandparents: the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painter/artisan Edward Burne-Jones and his wife 'Georgie'. By far, the largest part of the memoir concentrates on the summer home of the Burne-Jones grandparents, perhaps because summer and holiday memories are the most 'golden' in a child's mind.
I was astonished by the detail of what Thirkell is able to recall of her childhood; even if nostalgia and faulty memory renders it more fiction than memoir, she must have been an astonishingly observant and perceptive child. She lovingly reconstructs North End Lane, room by eccentric room, with lots of references to her grandfather's art and the William Morris furnishings and bespoke furniture.
As I look back on the furniture of my grandparents' two houses I marvel chiefly at the entire lack of comfort which the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood succeeded in creating for itself. It was not, I think, so much that they actively despised comfort, as that the word conveyed absolutely nothing to them whatsoever.
Although the furniture may have been unyielding in the extreme, Thirkell describes a house filled with doting grandparents, delicious food, lots of freedom (mostly because Nanny was preoccupied with a baby sister) and the benefit of her grandfather's art everywhere. From the angel painted at the foot of her bed 'in our little attic night-nursery' to the 'birds and beasts and angels on a rough, whitewashed wall' where Angela and her brother were sent as punishment, they were surrounded by beauty and charm and generosity. I was intrigued by details about her grandfather, for instance the 'extravagance in his nature which loved to make pictures in a medium that would not last.'
The memoir also contains references to some of the other illustrious members of her family: her cousin Rudyard Kipling, who also lived in Rottingdean for a while, and her cousin Stanley Baldwin and his large family. She describes them within their context, though, and they are no more important or colourful than the other local personages belonging to the village and surrounding countryside.
Apparently this memoir was an immediate success and it helped launch Thirkell on what would be a prolific writing career. In 1931, at the age of 41, she was describing a vanished world - and I can well imagine that her Depression era readers shared her nostalgic for those more secure and carefree days....more
There wasn't enough time for her to get a sense of it all - it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than
There wasn't enough time for her to get a sense of it all - it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.
This is a novel about potential - what could be, what became, what never was - in which two male figures (a father and a son) orbit around the still centre of a woman/mother/wife.
Hamnet, the twin son of William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway, died age 11. That is a matter of historical record; there is a paper to 'prove' it, although no cause of death is listed. In this novel - a historical fiction hanging on a few facts, and then coloured in richly and persuasively by the author - Hamnet dies of the plague. Despite the novel's title, Hamnet is not really the central character of the story; it is his mother Anne, or Agnes (her true name, she says), who inhabits that role.
A few intriguing facts are known about the 'real' Anne Hathaway who was married to William Shakespeare in 1582 and outlived her husband by 7 years. First of all, she was 26 to his 18; secondly, she was three months pregnant. What ripe details for imagining what circumstances led to this unlikely pair being married, and the author makes the most of them. Author Maggie O'Farrell's imaginative suppositions are so persuasive that I suspect that Anne Hathaway will always live in my mind as the 'Agnes' of this story.
When the pair meet, William is the Latin tutor for the half brothers of Agnes. His father, a glover named John, has become indebted to Agnes's widowed stepmother and her brother Bartholomew. William - his knowledge, his talents - are the 'payment' for this debt. William and Agnes have one important thing in common: they are both unhappy in their homes. William's father is a domestic tyrant of uncertain temper, as is Agnes's stepmother Joan.
William is full of potential, but only Agnes can sense it in him. In their first meeting, she grips his hand and senses the depths and complexity not at all evident in the young tutor who others see as a wastrel with no real profession. Likewise, he senses her gifts - and unlike her stepmother and most of the other people in their community, he is unafraid of them. The omniscient narrator describes Agnes as having 'a certain notoriety'. "It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad." By contrast, William - as he tells his sister Eliza - sees a person 'who follows entirely her own course'. "She can look at a person and see right into their very soul."
Agnes's pregnancy (with their first child Susanna) is the catalyst which enables their marriage, which forces their parents' hands despite opposition on both sides. There is definitely the sense that they are drawn together from mutual attraction and fascination, but there is some calculation, too - perhaps mostly on Agnes's side. She senses in her young lover "the need to leave, to rebel, to escape" and their marriage is the first step; however, his departure to London to make his career in theatre is the second step. Agnes is the one who stays behind, the one who tends her children, her home, and her community through her occupation as a herbalist/healer.
In this book, Agnes is an extraordinary person - and that is satisfying and feels right, because surely William Shakespeare (indisputably an extraordinary person) would marry someone with the emotional intelligence to understand what potential he had. In one of the most memorable exchanges in the novel, Agnes's brother tells William that she had defended him as having 'more hidden inside you than anyone else she'd ever met'.
The author finds such a rich seam to explore in the shadowy domestic arena of Shakespeare's life. Her prose style reminds me of the narration of a fairy tale - measured and controlled, precise in its details, not archaic exactly, but never feeling contemporary either. It has an emotional 'rightness' to it, even if we will never know how close she came to the mark of the 'real story' of Shakespeare, his wife, and the death of their only son....more
I, Penelope Taberner Cameron, tell this story of happenings when I was a young girl. To this day every detail of my strange experience is
4.5 stars
I, Penelope Taberner Cameron, tell this story of happenings when I was a young girl. To this day every detail of my strange experience is as clear as light.
I smell the hot scents of the herb garden drenched in sunshine, and the perfume of honeysuckle after rain, but stronger than these is the rich fragrance of the old house, made up of woodsmoke, haystacks, and old old age, mingled together indissolubly. All these scents and sounds are part of the story I have to tell, with light and darkness, shadows and tragedy interwoven.
For the contemporary reader, this is a time-travelling novel of stages - rather like a nesting doll. Even in her 'modern' childhood, approximately 1907 according to a clue hidden in the text, the main character Penelope and her ancient house in Chelsea, London will seem quaintly historical. Then when Penelope travels to Derbyshire, to stay with her Great-Aunt Tissie and her Great-Uncle Barnabas in the countryside, it is already like travelling into the past - for their house 'Thackers' is full of the belongings of accumulated generations, and their way of farming and keeping house is more early 19th century than early 20th. But there is still another great leap backwards into time, back into the days of Elizabethan England - when Thackers belonged to the Babington family, and Penelope's own ancestors served as housekeepers and custodians to the old manor house. For much of the story, Penelope travels between the two eras of Thackers - mingling with the households, alike and consistent in some ways and yet so very different as well.
Written in 1939, this children's classic has been continuously in print for several generations. (My edition is a Puffin book from 1977.) The intricacy of the story, and the historical plot involving a Catholic (or 'Papist') family loyal to Mary Queen of Scots, is possibly better appreciated by adult readers these days. Although perhaps there are still readers in the mould of the main character - solitary, bookish children who live largely in their imaginations. Children who are still described as 'dreamy' or 'fey'. That sort of child would probably find this beautiful and romantic story, one that combines a historical plot with the fantasy device of time-travel, deeply appealing.
It's also a book for those readers who love to read about old houses and feel sentimental about objects belonging to the past. It's antique shop and curiosity shop rolled into one, and a great treat for visual readers. Uttley's writing is sensual and atmospheric, and although the plot gets a big boggy in the middle, I was completely sucked in from the very first page.
Our house in Cheyne Row was little and old, with four steps leading to the green front door, and a little flight going down to the basement.
Ours was a steep, crooked stair, with a handrail on one side, very narrow, with rooms leading off it so suddenly that it was easy to fall headlong as one stepped from a doorway. We had a Morris wallpaper with leaves on it, like a green wood in spring, and I used to sit on the stairs, pretending I was in a forest far away from London with birds singing round me.
Such a dreamy book - perfect for those in need of a touch of escapism. ...more
There's one sound I've only ever heard in the gardens of Gloucester Crescent. And it goes on all day, every day of the week: the sound of grown-ups
There's one sound I've only ever heard in the gardens of Gloucester Crescent. And it goes on all day, every day of the week: the sound of grown-ups working. Lots of them work at home on typewriters which they sit at with the windows wide open. Dad And Alan talk about the other people in the street who do lots of typing, and how, when they eventually finish, their friends come over and they have a party to celebrate that they've stopped.
The first chapter of William Miller's memoir is called, appropriately, "Competitive Typing" and it recounts - from a child's point-of-view - the extraordinary literary culture which was concentrated on Gloucester Crescent in 1975. (As Miller explains, depending on what end of the street one lived on - and one's personal biases and pretensions - Gloucester Crescent was located either in Camden Town or Primrose Hill.) This particular street, this particular era (1960s to 1980s were its heyday), was the home of a cluster of famous friends - people who were very much at the centre of the cultural/literary life of London at the time. Some of the notable names include: the author's father Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, A.J. Ayer and Dee Wells, Claire and Nick Tomalin, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Beryl Bainbridge, Alice Thomas Ellis (Anna Haycraft), George Melly, Shirley Conran, Angus Wilson, V.S. Pritchett, A.N Wilson and Ursula Vaughn Williams. Unsurprisingly, Gloucester Crescent has been mined for story material before this memoir. In the last ten years, Nina Stibbe has written about her stint being a nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers in the early 1980s (Love, Nina), Alan Bennet has written about one of the most eccentric inhabitants of the street in The Lady in the Van and Claire Tomalin has touched upon this era in her recent biography: A Life of My Own. As Miller says, it was a unique conglomeration of Oxbridge-educated, left-leaning intellectuals who pursued their careers whilst having a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards child-rearing. William Miller was one of those children.
I was completely charmed by the first few chapters of this book, which mostly focus on the golden years of William Miller's childhood (ie, before he went to secondary school). The way he peers through the curtains of these famous homes - his studiedly naive perceptions of the familial and friendly dynamics of the adults on the street - is fascinating. At least it is fascinating to me, and probably to other people who like that sort of thing. But when I described this book to my boyfriend, who grew up in Hampstead - and knew lots of people with famous parents - he was totally dismissive about the interest value of this sort of memoir.
If the book is taken as a whole, it is really about William Miller's relationship with his difficult but brilliant father. It is about how children live in the shadows of their larger-than-life parents, and how they live up to the expectations set for them. It is also very much about William Miller's frustration with the education he was given.
We were sent to the local state schools, where we could mix with children from every walk of life, and were encouraged to be free spirits. They frequently left us to our own devices while they went off and expanded their utopian vision and pursued glittering careers. We all looked up to our gifted parents and hoped that one day we might be like them, but as we got older many of us found ourselves left behind and struggling to keep up. It began to seem that we'd been part of an experiment driven by their principles, rather than their care.
As it turns out, William Miller grew up to have a successful career in television as a producer. He may not have been given an Oxbridge caliber education, but he did grow up seeing creative geniuses at work - and of course he was supremely well-connected. I didn't not feel empathy for some of his struggles - especially with having such a self-entered and neurotic father - but the truth is that much of his "coming-of-age" story is really not that interesting. His teenage years were almost boring, and I felt like the writing in this part of the book was not as strong as in the opening chapters. This book is most definitely a memoir of the growing-up years of William Miller. Unfortunately, his calling card - living in this extraordinary time and place - is the only thing that really makes his story interesting to read. ...more
Her tact, her charm, and her intelligence, backed by her formidable resolve to keep her life exactly as she wanted it, enabled her to sta
3.75 stars
Her tact, her charm, and her intelligence, backed by her formidable resolve to keep her life exactly as she wanted it, enabled her to stay clear of any of these entanglements.
"No flies on Miss Quin! She knows her own value, that one, but she ain't for sale!"
Published in 1976, this book features a female protagonist (Miriam Quinn) who values her own independence. She's a working woman, unmarried, who is quite content with her station in life. Miss Read books tend to be shrewder and more accepting of the broad church of human nature than one might guess on first acquaintance. Although Miss Read has the utmost respect for family life and feeling, she doesn't necessarily conclude that this is the only choice - or even the right choice - for all of the female characters in her books.
At several points in this book - first, with her landlord, the widowed Joan Benson - the reader might feel that she (or he) is being led to conclude that Miss Quinn is slightly selfish for not wanting to spend every free moment with her landlord, or with helping out with various committees and groups in the village. Later, when the illness of her sister-in-law means that she is drafted to help out her brother's family during the week of Christmas, we aren't quite sure if Miss Quinn will flounder in this position of responsibility - or perhaps grow to resent the intrusion on her solitude.
Yes, Miss Quinn softens; yes, there is genuine warmth associated with family, love and the Christmas season. But let it be noted that this book doesn't have even a touch of cloying sentimentality, and the storyline may not necessarily conform to the reader's expectations. The ending of the story - while it may seem unexpected, at least according to the conventions of the romantic novel - is entirely true to the character of its heroine. ...more
. . . the fact that you lose a family member in a shooting and the other shooters in the country pile on and threaten you with death, the fact tha
. . . the fact that you lose a family member in a shooting and the other shooters in the country pile on and threaten you with death, the fact that everybody hates on you, just for mentioning your loved one got shot, and for not immediately shooting the shooter back, the fact that it’s almost like we’re in a war or something, the fact that everybody just seems to bear a big grudge about something or other that they’re read to kill and die for, the fact that what ever happened to gentleness, kindliness, the fact that does life have to be like this, so black and white, lemon meringue pie, landfill, radioactive waste, Aurora shooting, aurora borealis, Littleton, Orlando, Pulse nightclub, Fort Hood, Texas, Carthage, Virginia Tech . . .
Lucy Ellmann is not the first person to write a stream-of-consciousness novel, but she has definitely achieved something original, striking and relentless in this 1000 page run-on sentence bullseye of contemporary American culture. The narrator is a 40 ish year old mother of four who lives in Ohio and bakes pies and cakes for a living. She is a bundle of anxieties, some of them probably universal and some of them quite specific. The author plays with the idea of ‘apple pie’ American domestic life, of motherhood in particular, and then muddies the stream (of consciousness) with a barrage of commodities, brand names, film plots, novelistic references and historical events mixed in with the narrator’s own personal history and a slender thread of a plot-line. After more than 900 pages, something dramatic does actually happen - so don’t just read 650 pages or so and feel like you have absorbed all the novel has to offer you.
Alongside the narrator’s mental flow is a parallel narrative involving a lioness (a mountain cougar, an endangered animal) and her cubs. The idea of ‘Mommy’ - the importance of maternal love - is absolutely central to the story. In contrast to the idea of the mother - to mother’s milk - is a barrage of information about the environment and the gun culture of the US. It’s the gun culture, specifically, which makes this an unmistakably American novel.
Once you accustom yourself to the unique style, it’s not ‘hard’ to make sense of the narrative; it is, however, despite its humour and flashes of brilliance, rather exhausting to read. I had to read it in small bits, sometimes in only 5 page bits. It was both entirely appropriate, and rather too close to the bone for the Trump-and-coronavirus dominated shitstorm that was 2020. I started it in February and finished it on the 5th of December. Definitely an unforgettable reading experience. ...more
There is a photograph of me, taken at my christening in the summer of 1932. I am held by my father, the future 5th Earl of Leicester, and surrounde
There is a photograph of me, taken at my christening in the summer of 1932. I am held by my father, the future 5th Earl of Leicester, and surrounded by male relations wearing solemn faces. I had tried awfully hard to be a boy, even weighing eleven pounds at birth, but I was a girl and there was nothing to be done about it.
My female status meant that I would not inherit the earldom, or Holkham, the fifth largest estate in England with its 27,000 acres of top-grade agricultural land, neither the furniture, the books, the paintings, nor the silver.
Like Vita Sackville-West, who never got over being deprived by the laws of primogeniture of her ancestral birthright to Knole, Anne Glenconnor (nee Coke) would have inherited a great house and title if she had been male. Unlike Sackville-West, Lady Glenconner seems to have calmly accepted her fate. Born female, she was consigned to more of a supporting role in life, but the stature of those she has supported has been far from average. Her life, by any measure, has been pretty extraordinary - but there is no doubt that most of its historical merit relies on her close relationship to two of the British 20th century’s colourful characters: her husband, Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconner), and her friend Princess Margaret. She served as Lady in Waiting (hence the title) to the latter for more than 30 years; she was married to the former for 54 years. Although Princess Margaret has always been known as a difficult character, compared to Colin Tennant she comes off as a sweetheart.
I read this book as a sort of biographical companion to the fourth season of The Crown. Actually Anne Glenconner features more prominently in Season 3, which delves into Princess Margaret’s years on Mustique. Lord Glenconner bought Mustique when it was a pretty threadbare island barely hanging on to its fading cotton industry. Over several decades, he turned it into one of the most exclusive holiday destinations in the world. Lord Glenconner was a savvy operator in many ways, and according to his wife he had good business brains and a larger-than-life personality. He was also a complete nutter in the high aristocratic style.
It might be going a bit too far to describe Lady Glenconner as phlegmatic, but a combination of her own natural temperament (no doubt) and some extraordinary difficulties have made her the most stolidly calm of narrators. She doesn’t avoid discussing some of the tragedies and melodramas in her life, but she is not one to wring her hands, either. Most of the tragedies are to do with the author’s five children, three of which suffer horrible fates, but her husband’s misbehaviour is pretty epic. She is more than fair, more than generous, in her description of him and his behaviour.
As for Princess Margaret, this book does provide some insight and detail into the royal’s life - but without ever ‘telling all’ or saying anything at all which might be considered disloyal. It’s a very watered-down portrait of Princess Margaret, but perhaps it does provide some counterbalance to the more typical biographical sketches of the younger sister of the Queen.
This could have been a far more colourful book. I suppose that Lady Glenconner felt, reasonably, that the facts of her colourful life didn’t need much extra embellishment. ...more
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