Secretum discubitus

The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey

Catherine Bailey read history at Oxford University and is a successful, award-winning television producer and director, making a range of critically acclaimed documentary films inspired by her interest in twentieth century history. She lives in West London.  She has written a compelling account of a dysfunctional family in the upper echelons of nobility.  The account reads like mystery and her research for the book, which flows like a novel, must have required superior detective skills.

...........At 6 am on 21st April 1940 John the 9th Duke of Rutland, and one of Britain's wealthiest men, ended his days, virtually alone, lying on a makeshift bed in a dank cramped suite of rooms in the servants' quarters of his own home, Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire.  For weeks, as his health deteriorated, his family, his servants - even the King's doctor - pleaded with him to come out, but he refused.

After his death, his son and heir, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, ordered that the rooms be locked up and they remained untouched for sixty years.  But what lay behind this extraordinary set of circumstances?

For the first time, in The Secret Rooms, Catherine Bailey unravels a complex and compelling tale of love, honour and betrayal, played out in the grand salons of Britain's stately homes at the turn of the twentieth century, and on the battlefields of the Western Front. At its core is a secret so dark that it consumed the life of the man who fought to his death to keep it hidden. This extraordinary mystery from the author of Black Diamonds, is perfect for lovers of Downton Abbey, Brideshead Revisited and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

.............. as I read the final pages I could only marvel at what I had read and what it tells the reader about the lengths to which members of a family will go to protect 'the firm', to connive, to deceive, to bring the privileges which birth has conferred on an individual to bear for personal advancement and preference.  Violet, the female protagonist in the story, is a scheming woman of the worst kind.  What she represents is the lengths to which mothers will go to protect their own. 

Locus fideles

Faithful Place by Tana French

The course of Frank Mackey's life was set by one defining moment when he was nineteen. The moment his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, failed to turn up for their rendezvous in Faithful Place, failed to run away with him to London as they had planned. Frank never heard from her again. Twenty years on, Frank is still in Dublin, working as an undercover cop. He's cut all ties with his dysfunctional family. Until his sister calls to say that Rosie's suitcase has been found. Frank embarks on a journey into his past that demands he re-evaluate everything he believes to be true.

I listened to this book as an Audible production and loved it.  What made it special is that the reader was Gerry O'Brien, a brilliant Irish actor.  It brought the quintessential Irish dialogue to life.  It's great that well-established actors share their talents in this way.  And the author had captured something of the claustrophobic nature of Irish families, the solid closing of ranks around the matriarch, against external threats. 

The Woman in Cabin 10

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

'Agatha Christie meets The Girl on the Train'
This was meant to be the perfect trip. The Northern Lights. A luxury press launch on a boutique cruise ship.

A chance for travel journalist Lo Blacklock to recover from a traumatic break-in that has left her on the verge of collapse.

Except things don't go as planned.

Woken in the night by screams, Lo rushes to her window to see a body thrown overboard from the next door cabin. But the records show that no-one ever checked into that cabin, and no passengers are missing from the boat.

Exhausted and emotional, Lo has to face the fact that she may have made a mistake – either that, or she is now trapped on a boat with a murderer...

......................... So what did I think?  The writing is of a poor calibre and the action stretches credibility in places.  But it is a crafty little plot and the book fulfils the function of a good whodunit.  Good holiday reading, I will give it to my daughter for her forthcoming holiday.

Orbis terrarum, et aliis locis,

From Jeanette Winterson's blog

The World & Other Places

March 4, 1999

In Jeanette Winterson’s first collection of short stories, we are confronted with characters so at odds with themselves and the world–whether our own, familiar world or one of the author’s invention–that it is difficult to truly empathize with any of them.

The first story, The 24 Hour Dog, is a lullaby of a tale compared to those that follow, yet still manages to leave behind the disconcerting notion that a human being who cannot even take responsibility for a tiny puppy has little chance of survival in the big, bad world.

From the voluptuous The Poetics of Sex, so flush with earthy imagery and erotically charged word-play that the fever of desire rises from the page in an uncomfortable steam, to the frigidity of the Stepford-Wife-like Newton, Winterson spins us around a breathless, off-centre world, leaving the reader dizzy and disturbed.

Why don’t you write more short stories?
The same reason that I don’t write poetry. I need the elbow room of a novel. Not because I want padding – all my life is spent stripping away what’s unnecessary – but because I want to unravel the thought and the emotion in a particular way. I don’t write long books, but I prefer not to write short stories.

But you do write them.
Yes. If I am asked to do it I’m glad to do it. It’s a particular kind of challenge. And you know, in my books there are lots of very short stories – little stones to keep in a pocket. That kind of length, a couple of pages, I really like, it’s the in between size that doesn’t really suit how I work. I think I might put together some mini-stories.

Whose short stories do you like reading?
Somerset Maugham, Chekov, Sarah Maitland, Calvino, Ian McEwan, Ruth Rendell, Helen Simpson, Ali Smith, Blackwood, (those are very old-fashioned), Angela Carter, and of course, the best short stories of all – fairy stories.

Why aren’t the stories in chronological order?
I don’t know about you, but I never read a short story collection in any order, chronological or not. It doesn’t matter when a piece of work was written. What matters is whether or not it’s any good. I wanted to avoid the kind of tedious sub-academic sleuthwork that goes on, piecing together dates and writing and making inferences that just don’t add up. I just want you to read it. Simple. Easy. Yes.

Is this a good book to buy for someone new to your work?
Yes. If they don’t throw it under a train, you can safely move on to something longer.

De-Lection comment: "After the 24-hour dog which I found heart-rending, my second favourite story was Holy Matrimony..." 

Inferno

Inferno by Dan Brown

"Dan Brown's take on Dante's Inferno is the thriller-writer's most ambitious novel yet – and his worst."................. Yes, Daily Telegraph, nailed it in one sentence.  However for a fuller opinion on this dreadful waste-of-time read, try this:

As I sat in a coffee shop at the weekend with my copy of Dan Brown’s new novel, fully rotating it nine times in order to read a cryptic poem written in the form of a spiral, a possible explanation for Brown’s phenomenal popularity struck me.   Robert Langdon, Brown’s Harvard-professor hero, wears a Mickey Mouse wristwatch as a “reminder to stay young at heart” and “take life a little less seriously”. I suspect that scores of millions read Brown’s books for the same reason.

In a world in which most thriller writers feel obliged to engage with geopolitical issues, Brown has proved that people are desperate for a bit of preposterous Boy’s-Own-for-adults escapism that they have to turn upside down now and then. Brown’s enthusiasm for his material appears to be totally unfeigned and if the flip side of his engaging unselfconsciousness is stylistic gaucherie … well, the figures speak for themselves: nobody cares.

With Inferno, however, Brown seems to be doing something rather different. Admittedly it starts in familiar territory with an amnesic Langdon on the run in Florence, having no idea how he came to be in Italy or why a frightening spiky-haired female assassin is trying to kill him.

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Langdon discovers a tiny device sewn into his trusty Harris Tweed jacket that projects an image of a digitally altered version of one of Botticelli’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy. Deciphering the clues it contains sends Langdon off on the usual race round the tourist trail, doing a high-wire act in the Palazzo Vecchio before heading to Venice and the Middle East.  

Inferno draws heavily for inspiration on The Divine Comedy (in Brown's words “one of history’s most celebrated writings”). There is a long tradition of scholars drawing unlikely conclusions from Dante — in 1892 Gladstone published a bonkers article attempting to prove, based on evidence from the poem, the unlikely fact that Dante studied at Oxford — so I was expecting Langdon to unravel a few anagrams in the text proving that Pope Boniface VIII was a robot, or something equally shocking.

In fact Brown does not engage with the Divine Comedy as closely as he does with the Bible or the paintings of Leonardo in previous novels, and there is no centuries-old conspiracy to uncover: rather, a very modern threat.

Inferno’s villain is the most dangerous Langdon has yet encountered, despite the fact that he commits suicide on page 7. He is “lunatic genius” Bertrand Zobrist, a brilliant scientist who fears that overpopulation will cause mankind’s imminent destruction, and so has decided to “thin the human herd” by setting in motion a chain of events that will release a new plague he has invented. Langdon must untangle a series of Dante-based clues left behind by Zobrist in order to locate and contain the source of the virus.

What’s interesting about Inferno is that Brown introduces a new and welcome moral ambiguity to his work. Although Zobrist, as portrayed in flashback, talks and acts like a standard Bond villain, Brown repeatedly implies that there is something to be said for a comparably drastic approach to solving the global population crisis, when compared with the pitiful efforts of the World Health Organisation (and don’t get him started on the unhelpful interventions of his bête noire, the Catholic church).
Certainly there is no denying that the population forecast graphs Brown adduces make frightening reading — readers looking to Inferno for escapism may complain that Brown is giving them the wrong sort of heebie-jeebies.

Langdon is aided in his quest to save the world by two glamorous assistants. Elizabeth Sinskey is the foxy 61-year-old director of the WHO (“a highly coveted and prestigious post”, did you know?), while Sienna Brooks is a foxy 32-year-old English doctor and former child prodigy who has a neurological condition that makes her both incredibly clever and bald as a coot (she doesn’t name it but I believe doctors know it as Alain de Botton syndrome).

I don’t think I am giving away anything the reader won’t anticipate when I reveal that at one point Langdon has to wear Sienna’s blond wig as a disguise, and that he feels very uncomfortable doing so. There is nothing kinky about Robert: the man is so vanilla that he must be part-descended from orchids. We can’t even be told that the Piazza della Signoria is one of Langdon’s favourite plazas without being reassured that this is “despite its overabundance of phalluses”.

As a stylist Brown gets better and better: where once he was abysmal he is now just very poor. His prose, for all its detailing of brand names and the exact heights of buildings, is characterised by imprecision. It works to prevent the reader from engaging with the story.

This mattered less in his previous novels, but with Inferno I sense for the first time that Brown is aiming at a tauter, better book, one more interested in the real world, longing to escape from the prison of his pleonasm.

But in the end this is his worst book, and for a sad, even noble, reason – his ambition here wildly exceeds his ability.

Gould's Book of Fish

Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan

Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer and forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish.

I read this book with Audible.  It was a tough listen.  As part of my Read Harder Book Challenge for 2017, I have to reread a book and this will be it.  In the meantime this is a review from The Independent..........

"A shoal of red herrings beached on Van Diemen's Land"

Richard Flanagan's latest novel, Gould's Book of Fish, tells old stories in unlikely places: the last pages are penned at the bottom of the ocean. Flanagan, a Tasmanian, has sought to tell the story of his homeland. His first novel, Death of a River Guide, is narrated by a drowning man as the story of the island is revealed to him. In his second, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, a woman discovers her and Tasmania's Eastern European inheritance.

In Gould's Book of Fish, Flanagan returns to the water to plunge us into Tasmania's colonial and penal history. Floating with him, like the corpse of Jorgen Jorgensen in the hero's prison cell, are the voices of, among others, Marquez, Borges, Sterne and Melville.

Flanagan's narrator, William Buelow Gould, is based on a historical figure who, in 1825, was condemned to serve 49 years on Sarah Island, a penal colony off the coast of what was then Van Diemen's Land. While imprisoned, he made watercolours of local fish which were collected into a book: 12 are reproduced here as plates that serve as chapter prefaces. The chapters are in turn named after them. Each is printed in a different colour ink, corresponding to the substances Gould uses to pen his account: red for kangaroo blood, blue for crushed stolen precious stone, brown for his own excrement and so on.

Billy Gould stands up to his neck in seawater, locked up in a cliff-side cage that floods with the tide. His jailer, Pobjoy, torments him; he also has to contend with the oppressive commandant. Also on the island is Twopenny Sal, an Aboriginal woman Gould falls in love with. None of these characters has much in the way of convincing personality; Gould himself is largely a blank. Unlike Peter Carey's Ned Kelly, Gould uses a language so self-consciously literary that there's little chance of getting close to him.

Character doesn't have much of a role in Gould's Book of Fish; neither do dialogue or plot. Billy can travel only in his head, as he recounts his own version of history while awaiting execution. The story aims to undercut the "official" history kept in the prison library: Gould's version, by contrast, is digressive and wayward. There are hints of Tristram Shandy, too, in the preoccupation with the dismembered, decaying body.

Through his insistence on "bends and diversions and sight-seeing", we learn about the forms of torture on Sarah Island. We witness the death of a Glaswegian machine breaker crushed by an instrument called the "cockchafer"; the prison surgeon is devoured by his giant pig, Castlereagh. There's no comedy in the barrels full of aboriginal heads.

Gould's Book of Fish gestures towards the pictorial in more than typographical ways, but in the end it's a game of words alone. After some 400 pages, the hero, now a fish, is able to say: "I am William Buelow Gould & my name is a song which will be sung." But this is too much a certainty, he decides, and the final lines turn again to babbling.    

Sanguine Malum

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

"Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read, save Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be or describes so well the way in which rage, grief and frustrated desire are passed down the family line like a curse, leaving offspring to live out the inherited, unresolved lives of their forebears."  So reads the review of this book in The Guardian.

In a sense this is what autobiography is about: the ways in which your own story is not really yours at all, but a version of the tale of your parents or grandparents. These are the ways in which you become, as Steedman puts it, "not quite yourself, but someone else", and this is what makes it such a dissatisfying genre for those wanting a reassuring or comfortable description of the growth of an individual mind.
      

Tales of disappointment form the bedrock of Lorna Sage's story. Her embittered grandmother, 4ft 10 and round as a barrel, longed for her hometown of Tonypandy, where she had some class as the daughter of a shopkeeper. She was consumed by an apoplectic hatred of all men, particularly her husband, whom she blackmailed from the other side of the house. Sage's mother swiftly retreated from the "violently unhappy" marriage of her parents into the "magical world of unreality", assuming a fey impracticality far from the model of the super-efficient 1950s housewife.

The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood.

It is Sage's Byronic grandfather, the local vicar, who provides the centre of the story, and around whom Sage forges her identity. Cursing a marriage that has neither love, understanding nor imagination, he turns to a life of unabashed wickedness. Indulging in lust and drink, he becomes for his granddaughter a "defiant and grandly outrageous" figure in his self-defeating recklessness, a Gothic outsider with all "the glamour of the undead".  (I despised the man as I read about him).

In Sage's celebration - or invention - of the glamorous alter ego beneath her grandfather's desperately limited life, Bad Blood is at its most gripping, and its most moving touch is her tribute to his thwarted ambition and ridiculed desires. Finding an old pocket diary for 1934 and decoding the banal secret life it records -"It was the diary of a nobody" - she quotes his hurt at being "taunted" by his teenage lover, a friend of his daughter, for resolving to escape the philistine values of the parish and the vicarage and to start a new life as a writer. "That freelance existence never materialised for him," his grand-daughter writes; "here are his words, though, in print at last." The vicar of Hanmer is redeemed from the "squalor of insignificance" he fought against. The heir of his bad blood has rewritten his story, giving to its grim drudgery the grandeur and dignity of a Greek tragedy.

A central theme in Bad Blood is places and spaces, and how we learn to shape ourselves around them. Hanmer, on the borders of Wales and England and where Sage spends the first part of her childhood, becomes a metaphor for the suffocation of living "in-between": between the second world war and the 1960s, between the covers of books when there is no space left elsewhere, in the limited space between other people's lives. People and houses are imprisoning.

It is only in the printed word that Lorna can breathe; even then she feels Grandpa looking over her shoulder as she reads.  Sage is interested in lives that don't fit: family black sheep, misshapen marriages, homes too small to house either the hatred of their inhabitants or their exclusive love. Either way, other people are hell. Having lived sandwiched between these two marriages, Sage, believing she is still a virgin, unwittingly finds herself pregnant at 16 and embarking on her own marriage. Both she and Victor, the child's father, are doing their A-levels.

It is here that the story closes, and it is given a happy ending. A daughter, Sharon, is born; Victor and Lorna both gain firsts in English from Durham University, and both join the English department at the new University of East Anglia. There are no doubt many other endings she might have chosen, but Sage breaks off at the point at which her life, if not her blood, became her own.

PS  Sage's era pretty much echoes my own.  She was born four years before I was but her life and mine are divergent. Such grandparents as I knew were principally my paternal grandmother of whom I was so very fond, and a maternal stepmother with whom I never connected.  She was rather distant, and cold.  My family life was dominated by the father figure, my mother being the ultimate home-maker but with no encouragement to have a life, however minor that component might be, of her own.  A few aspects of Lorna's teenage life echo my own though.  I also met my husband at a tender age, seventeen, and he was eighteen.  We had hiccups but married when I was 21 and after a very brief working life I was confined at the age of 24.  With two more children before I was 29, I never went back to a conventional working life.  Lorna Sage discovered her ability and passion for words at a very early age, it would be years later before I would discover the real delight in reading and writing a little bit of prose.  I also got science and that is a whole other story...........

My favourite line from Sage's book:
"Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads in the fairy tale before I knew it."