Patres nostres

Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan

Jamie returns to Scotland with his grandfather, the legendary social reformer Hugh Bawn, now living out his last days on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise.  The young man is faced with the unquiet story of a country he thought he had left behind and now he listens to the voices of ghosts, and what they say about his own life.  It is a story of love and landscape, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old left.  It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses - of three men in search of Utopia.  Jamie Bawn's journey home will leave him changed beyond words - beyond the words that darkened his childhood.

The story, set in post WWII Scotland, is also about the “coming of age” of Jamie, a young boy growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a weak, ineffectual mother. One day, after a brutal beating of his mother by his drunken father, thirteen year old Jamie realizes he can no longer tolerate his home environment and moves in with his father’s parents, who have provided the only source of stability throughout his young life.

Jamie remains with his grandparents until he finishes school and then moves to England to strike out on his own. He returns to Scotland ten years later for an extended visit when he learns that Hugh, his grandfather, is dying. As he and his grandfather reminisce about the past, Jamie thinks to himself: “Once upon a time it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.”
Ultimately, this is a story about forgiveness because, in going through this process with his beloved grandfather, Jamie comes to the realization that his parents too were victims of their own personal torments and did the best they could with what they had to work with at the time – which is all any of us can do.

Such is the quality of the writing, the verisimilitude of the narrative, that the novel reads like an autobiographical memoir.

This was O'Hagan's debut novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize.  He went on to write four more novels and all five have either been nominated for Awards, or received literary prizes, or both.  The fifth novel, The Illuminations, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Man Booker.

Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott

Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott

Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage and accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn't his. Yet when he tried to trace his intellectual forebears, he found that history had already forgotten them...

During the Christmas celebrations of 1860 Charles Darwin sat down to try to assemble a list of his predecessors, the men who had held evolutionary ideas before him. But as he was such a poor scholar of history, he told his friends, he failed to find more than ghostly presences and vestiges of their lives.

In this chronicle of scientific courage and insight, Rebecca Stott goes in search of those first evolutionists whose intellectual originality and daring have been lost to us and to Darwin. She rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine-shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Darwin’s Ghosts is a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, as well as the history of a profoundly dangerous idea.

This a masterful and thoroughly engaging retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political and religious orthodoxies and laid the foundations for Darwin's revolutionary idea.

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. 

Cold War Themes

Utz by Bruce Chatwin

Charles Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989) was an English travel writer, novelist, and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia (1977), established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982) and his novel Utz (1988) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times named Chatwin no. 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."

Chatwin was born near Sheffield, England. At 18 he went to work at  Sotheby's in London, where he gained an extensive knowledge of art and eventually ran the auction house’s Antiquities and Impressionist Art departments. In 1966 he left Sotheby’s to read archeaology at the University of Edinburgh, but he abandoned his studies after two years to pursue a career as a writer.

The Sunday Times Magazine hired Chatwin in 1972. He travelled the world for work and interviewed figures such as the politicians Indira Gandhi and André Malraux. He left the magazine in 1974 to visit Patagonia, which resulted in his first book. His work is credited with reviving the genre of travel writing, and his works influenced other writers.  Married and bisexual, Chatwin was one of the first prominent men in Great Britain known to have contracted HIV and to have died of an AIDS-related illness, although he hid the details. Following his death, the gay community criticised Chatwin for keeping his diagnosis secret.

Utz follows the fortunes of Kaspar Utz who lives in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. Utz is a collector of Meissen porcelain and finds a way to travel outside the eastern bloc to acquire new pieces. Whilst in the West, Utz often considers defecting but he would be unable to take his collection with him and so, a prisoner of his collection, he is unable to leave.

Continuing with the Cold War theme, in The Noise of Time Julian Barnes gives a short fictional account of the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. It is a narrative in which nothing much happens: a man waits for a lift; a man sits on a plane; a man sits in a car. All the action takes place in Shostakovich’s head; in each of these three sections we find him at a moment of reflection amid a larger crisis, the “skittering” of his mind represented by short bursts of text that flit between memories and the present.

Crisis Number One is the Great Terror. The story begins with Shostakovich on the landing of his apartment block in the middle of the night waiting for the lift that will bring the secret police. This is 1936 and Stalin’s great purge is under way. Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has met with Stalin’s personal disfavour and the composer has been denounced in the press: a clear sign that the cogs of murderous bureaucracy have been set to grind. It can only end one way: in an interrogation cell in which a “confession” awaits a signature, and a bullet the back of a neck.

As Shostakovich waits, he thinks of his childhood, of past lovers and, compulsively, of the train of circumstances that led to his fall. He remembers the disaster of the debut of his First Symphony at an open-air venue in Kharkov, when the music had set the local dogs barking. The louder they played, the more dogs barked. “Now his music has set bigger dogs barking,” Barnes writes. “History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”

Waiting for the lift, Shostakovich recalls being summoned to “the Big House” where he is interrogated by an agent called Zakrevsky. They want to know about his relationship with his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky, who stands accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin. Shostakovich realises that he is a dead man. But even during the Great Terror you can get lucky; Zakrevsky is himself purged, leaving Shostakovich reprieved, for a while at least.

Shostakovich’s next crisis – his second “conversation with Power” – occurs 12 years later, in 1948, when he is blackmailed into attending a Soviet-funded Peace Conference at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. As the star of the Russian delegation, he is a target for the anti-communist intellectuals who have infiltrated the conference, specifically Nicolas Nabokov (the novelist’s cousin), an exiled Russian composer who humiliates Shostakovich by asking questions that expose how obediently he is forced to follow the party line.

The third crisis occurs after a gap of another 12 years, in 1960, by which time things have loosened up a little under Khrushchev. Shostakovich no longer fears for his life but faces a new attack on his integrity. It has been decided that he must join the Communist Party as an endorsement of the new direction taken by the Soviet Union. He had avoided joining the party while Stalin was alive but now, try as he might, he cannot escape what has been ordained.

In writing his account of Shostakovich's life Barnes does know what he is talking about. While Barnes is known for his Francophilia, he also studied Russian at school and university. Soviet Communism was a subject of frequent debate among his famous Friday lunch club. In the late Seventies a group of ambitious young writers assembled for boozy lunches at a Turkish-Cypriot kebab house on the fringes of Bloomsbury distinguished by its proximity to the offices of The New Statesman. The literary editor of that magazine, Martin Amis, was by all accounts the star of a show that included James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and Ian McEwan.

Barnes, for his part, had first-hand experience of what life was like in the Soviet Union, having taken a road trip through Eastern Europe to Leningrad in 1965. He continued to visit the Warsaw Pact states in the following decades.  

In The Noise of Time, Shostakovich is forced to reconcile his own fragmented memories of his life with the story the state wants to tell about him. He is forced to participate in the degradation of his public self, as his family and his music are held hostage, and is tormented by his own complicity and duplicity. He clings to his music, hoping it will drown out the noise around him.

Towards the end, Shostakovich realises “he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself”.This was often the way with artists,” Barnes writes, “either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment… The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old.”

De ecclesiis,

Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd and A Month in the Country by J L Carr

Two novels, each written by a Booker award-winning author.  The former title failed to receive a nomination although it seems every bit as good as Chatterton which did get picked in 1987.  Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. A novelist, biographer and historian, he has been the literary editor of The Spectator and chief book reviewer for the The Times, as well as writing several highly acclaimed books including a biography of Dickens and London: The Biography. He lives in London.

'There is no Light without Darknesse
and no Substance without Shaddowe'
So proclaims the architect, Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment.

Set in the early 18th century, Dyer is progressing work on the churches which are all set in London's East End. He is, however, involved in Satanic practices (something inculcated in him as an orphan), a fact which he must keep secret from all his associates, including his supervisor Sir Christopher Wren.  This is all the more challenging since he indulges in human sacrifice as part of the construction of the buildings. Dyer's simmering contempt for Wren is brought closest to the surface in discussions they have concerning rationalism versus Dyer's own carefully disguised brand of mysticism. 

In the 20th century, a detective,  Nicholas Hawksmoor is called in to investigate a bizarre series of murders by strangulation that have occurred in and around the churches designed by Dyer. The murders are all the more mystifying since the murderer appeared to have left no identifying traces, not even fingerprints on the victims' necks.  However the area is stalked by mysterious shadows, and it becomes clear that not only the weight of the investigation, but unseen forces from the past come to bear on Hawksmoor in a powerful, destructive manner.

'Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed' Independent on Sunday

A Month in the Country  by J L Carr was nominated in 1980 for the Booker Prize.  The plot concerns Tom Birkin, a WWI veteran employed to uncover a mural, that was thought to exist under coats of whitewash,  in a village church. A Month in the Country is tentative, aware of its temporality. When he arrives in Oxgodby, Birkin knows very well life is not all ease and intimacy, long summer days with "winter always loitering around the corner." He has experienced emotional cruelty in his failed marriage. As a soldier, he witnessed death: destruction and unending mud.  It transpires that many of the incidents in the novel are based on real events in Carr's own life, and some of the characters are modelled on his own Methodist family

 At the same time another veteran is employed to look for a grave beyond the churchyard walls. Though Birkin is an atheist there is prevalent religious symbolism throughout the book, mainly dealing with judgment. The novel explores themes of England's loss of spirituality after the war, and of happiness, melancholy and nostalgia as Birkin recalls the summer uncovering the mural, when he healed from his wartime experiences and a broken marriage. The happiness depicted in A Month in the Country is tentative, aware of its temporality. When he arrives in Oxgodby, Birkin knows very well life is not all ease and intimacy, long summer days with "winter always loitering around the corner." He has experienced emotional cruelty in his failed marriage. As a soldier, he witnessed death: destruction and unending mud.............  Many of the incidents in the novel are based on real events in Carr's own life, and some of the characters are modelled on his own Methodist family.

A Paris Wife, a Colourful Life.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

I was unfamiliar with the story of The Paris Wife, not having read A Moveable Feast which is Hemingway's memoir of the Paris he knew in days when he and Hadley were "very poor and very happy."  A Moveable Feast was written some 30 years after Hemingway left Hadley for her friend Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become the second of his four wives.

McLain's story opens in Paris, before an extended flashback in which Hadley remembers her early years in St Louis, her meeting with Hemingway, and their brief courtship. Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship they married in September 1921 and within months had moved to Paris, the magnetic centre of artistic life in the west in the 1920s, in part because it was comparatively cheap for expatriates just after the First World W. The young Hemingways were soon befriended by Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, James Joyce, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Modernism was taking flight: in February 1922 Sylvia Beach would publish Joyce's Ulysses, and in December 1922 TS Eliot and Pound published The Waste Land.

McLain's account is true to known facts, whilst at the same time she employs some fictionalisation.  She conjurs up the atmosphere of the garret apartments in which they lived; the notorious trip to Lausanne during which Hadley lost all of Hemingway's drafts, three years' work; the outings to the Paris races, skiing in Austria and bullfighting in Pamplona – the trips that would inspire The Sun Also Rises. It was an era of "open" marriages, although the openness was often one-sided.  McLain resists the facile idea that such ménages were a jolly party in the first era of free love: as Hadley gradually becomes aware that Hemingway might be unfaithful, first with Lady Duff Twysden, the inspiration for Brett Ashley, and later, much more seriously, with her friend Pauline, she must decide how "modern" she's prepared to be.

McLain portrays Hemingway's legendary charisma, whilst at the same time revealing his tendency to bully and boast.  But the book is principally about the Paris Wife and McLain attempts to flesh out her character by imagining Hadley's feelings, and depicting facets of her character. For example she describes Hadley's enjoyment of accompanying Hemingway to Spain to attend bullfights whilst at the same time sewing baby blankets between the fighting. .

The Paris Wife was popular with readers, and made the top of the New York Times best-seller list soon after its release in 2011.  Reviews however were mixed: Sarah Churchill of The Guardian and Helen Simonson, an Amazon reviewer,  praised the book.  The latter wrote "I loved this novel for its depiction of two passionate, yet humanly-flawed people struggling against impossible odds—poverty, artistic fervor, destructive friendships—to cling on to each other."  However the New York Times criticised McLain's characterisation of Richardson, writing, " She’s thick, and not just in physique. She’s slow on the uptake, and she can be a stodgy bore."

I came across a short biography of Hemingway by Anthony Burgess. In Ernest Hemingway and His World Burgess writes from a position of authority and brings insight into a life which moves from a happy childhood into the reality of the First World War, and later his experiences in the Second.  We learn of his literary life in 1920s Paris, his reporting of the Spanish Civil War and the excitements of African safari and finally to the sombre last years in Cuba. Hemingway was rich and successful from an early age, but yet public acclaim for his writing and even the Nobel Prize could not disguise the fact that he was a moody, suffering, and sometimes vicious figure -- a man who, in the view of Burgess, was finally unable to live with his own image.

 

In Ore Pomarii

Tracy Chevalier is a very readable author, her books though are far from lightweight and I like the way she researchers thoroughly in order to introduce real people into her narrative.  These real life characters from recent history, as well as the drafting of stories of documented human, family dramas mean the book you read holds the attention and engages you in something beyond a complete fiction.

I really enjoyed 'Beautiful Creatures' because it told a story based on the life of fossil-hunter Mary Anning of Lyme Regis.  Within the pages the reader learned about some of the fossil remains Mary found and sold. We met the palaeontologists, geologists and unscrupulous fossil dealers and collectors with whom she came into contact as they are woven into the novel.  It was a Winterborne K book group choice and at a later gathering, using shells and fossils I have at home in my collection, I gave a show and tell session to my fellow groupies which was a pleasure for me and enlightened the others.

I won't be able to give a show and tell session for At The Edge of the Orchard because our biologist from history is the botanist William Lobb and I don't have an authentic collection of pine cones.  Lobb was a Cornish plant collector, employed to collect for an Exeter nurseries and was responsible for the commercial introduction to England of the monkey puzzle tree, the Sequoia and the Redwood. I see that he is also responsible for introducing Desfontainia spinosa,  a pretty shrub with holly-like leaves and with small deep orange and yellow trumpet flowers, which Andy Doran persuaded me to plant in the newly-designed garden at Godalming.  

The novels tells the story of the Goodenough family who battle to establish a plantation of 50 trees in order to secure a plot of land in Ohio’s Black Swamp in the mid 1800s.  The pressures of poverty, illness and the grind of working land that was never meant to be farmed are intensified by the simmering hostility between James and Sadie Goodenough.  Really the novel tells the story of Robert, one of the sons of the warring parents who heads west and keeps on running.  But there is a cast of memorable characters the most memorable being some of the feisty women with whom the passive character of Robert comes into contact.

Robert's encounter and employment with William Lobb allow Chevalier to provide the reader with the benefit of her research into the  life of William Lobb and plant collection practices which took place in order to bring exotic species to the British Isles for introduction into prestigious gardens and estates.  

The narrative ducks back and forth between time frames but is always fluent and manages to keep the reader firmly rooted in the moment.  Above all this is a book with a good ending which does justice to the foregoing narrative and this leaves the reader with a feeling of full circle.