A Bookish Lunch, Tolkien's Gown and The Laughing Academy

Here's a review by Danny Yee for a book that was brought by Annabel to a village Bookish Lunch to recommend.  Tolkien's Gown is, in my opinion, something to delight a bookworm and a real reader-friendly volume of bite-size chapters.  This little compendium has been written by Rick Gekoski, writer, broadcaster, rare book-dealer.  Let Danny Yee tell you about it:

'Each of the twenty essays in Tolkien's Gown is a mix of biography, literary history and personal memoir, focusing on a leading twentieth century writer and one of their key works, with details from Gekoski's own encounters with them or rare editions of their books.

Gekoski provides background for those who might not be familiar with his subjects, but doesn't attempt general biographies, usually treating one aspect of or episode in their lives. Similarly, he restricts himself to scattered critical comments on relatively minor topics. This is given some body by the inclusion of his own recollections — he knew personally many of the notables he writes about — and glimpses into the workings of the rare book market.

The result is very easy to read and good fun. I learned something both about the authors and works I knew well and about those that were largely unfamiliar to me. And I have no great interest in the rare book market, but Gekoski's glimpses into that were also interesting.

The authors covered are — in the fairly random order of Tolkien's Gown — Vladimir Nabokov, J.R.R. Tolkien, William Golding, Oscar Wilde, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, J.D. Salinger, T.E. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, John Kennedy Toole, Evelyn Waugh, Beatrix Potter, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, T.S. Eliot, J.K. Rowling, and Philip Larkin.'

Another recent read of mine is The Laughing Academy by Shena Mackay. 

Mackay is a Scottish novelist born in 1944.  Her writing career started with her winning a poetry competition in the Daily Mirror at the age of 16.  When interviewed for The Observer she is described as wry, funny but serious too........  is a witty, black and compelling read   The collection of short stories in The Laughing Academy takes the reader from antiques fairs to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, geriatric wards to Crystal Palace, and the collection offers a journey around the bizarre yet familiar characters and settings that Mackay has made her own. There are Roy and Muriel Rowley, the fun-running charity-junkies who give blood by the gallon (offending their daughter's religious principles); we meet Gerald Creedy who only loves three beings - his twin brother, Harold, and his two tortoises, Percy and Bysshe - and the mysterious lodger Madame Alphonsine who has the strange powers to make things (including tortoises) disappear; and then there is the rather arrogant bestselling novelist who gives a reading at a women's bookshop only to find, to her horror, that two of her old schoolfriends are in the audience.

This was another read to enjoy in bite-size pieces.

The Miniaturist

In 1686 in Amsterdam, 18-year-old Nella Oortman arrives at the grand house of her new husband, the wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt. The marriage is more arrangement than love match, and Nella is intimidated by her new home and her sister in law Marin.  Johannes does not come to her at night, and his wedding gift is a cabinet house – an exquisitely diminutive replica of his own property – which he now invites Nella to fill with miniature furniture at his expense.

What follows for Nella is a series of puzzles. How does the miniaturist know so much about her and her household.  What family secrets exist.  Luckily, the heroine is not at all the timorous type she seemed at first to be, and she takes the ensuing revelations – they come thick and fast, in the manner of biblical thunderbolts – if not exactly on the chin, then with a great deal more aplomb than you might expect.

The plot takes us through household tensions, family intrigue and secrets.  I listened to this book in audio version.  Two things were distracting.  The first concerns
the narrator who was the author herself, Jessie Burton.  I actually found her voice rather irritating and tended to think that someone other than the author would have been better.  Some of my audio reads have featured well-established actors and these readings have always been easier to follow, especially when different voices are crafted for the different characters.  It seemed to me to be something of a conceit to read one's novel if one has not had a drama training of some kind.  The other distraction concerns the dialogue Burton has crafted.  I did not always find it convincing  - there were times when the central character spoke with a 21st century turn of phrase and voice, as if she might have been educated at a good English school. 

The Miniaturist is Burton's first novel and she has clearly done a lot of research.  But sometimes I found myself thinking that some of the action did not ring true.  Towards the end of the book Nella's behaviour, actions and her reformed attitude to her erring husband were not convincing.  For all that though this was a good story.

       

              

Dark Things in the Night and the Arctic Cold

So I press on with my Read Harder Challenge.  One item on the list is:

'Read a book with a main character that has a mental illness'

The Bird of Night by Susan Hill fulfils this category very well.  It also ticks a box on my Booker Shortlist Personal Challenge.  It is a bleak read and not a long one.  Unfortunately the author commented in 2006 "It is a novel of mine that was shortlisted for Booker and won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. It was a book I have never rated. I don't think it works, though there are a few good things in it. I don't believe in the characters or the story.  

Hill is known for her gothic style and penchant for a ghost story several of which she wrote in the 80s and early 90s.  Her 21st century novels are, in one way, lighter being thrillers written around her detective character, Simon Serrailler.  In terms of writing they are rather lightweight when compared to, for example, The Bird of Night.  But she has captured an audience with Simon Serrailler and this sells books and pays bill!

Moving swiftly on therefore I come to three detective novels written by Icelandic authors.  Two, by Arnaldur Indridason, are part of a crime fiction series written around the character Inspector Erlendur.

Strange Shores and Hypothermia are full of Icelandic atmosphere.  Having recently renewed my acquaintance with Iceland in general and Reykjavik in particular and rekindled my enjoyment of everything the country has to offer,
and given my fondness for a good thriller, these are books to enjoy for their page-turning qualities added to which there is an ongoing story surrounding
Erlendur and his early life, during which he experiences the death of his younger brother, in circumstances the nature of which he has not been able to establish. 

Another Icelandic writer, Ragnar Jonasson has also captured my attention.  His output is not quite so prolific but he is the author of the Dark Iceland series in which there are only two titles published so far but three further novels planned according to his website.  I've read Night Blind and I now need to retrace steps and read the first title, Snow Blind.   As with Indridason we are in the realms of Icelandic noir, atmospheric with good characterisation and plotting.  The tension sucks you into a claustrophobic story whose main protagonist is a novice police detective Ari Thor.  The peace of a close-knit Icelandic community is shattered by the murder of a policeman - shot at point-blank range in the dead of night in a deserted house. With a killer on the loose and the dark Arctic waters closing in, it falls to Ari Thor to piece together a puzzle that involves tangled local politics, a compromised new mayor and a psychiatric ward in Reykjavik where someone is being held against their will...

Ordo Equitum Solis

In four early books J G Ballard succeeded in making a kind of steely poetry out of the nastiest incidentals of late twentieth century life. So reads the Guardian review for 'Empire of the Sun'.   This novel however merits consideration as a work which distinct from that early, essentially science fiction, genre.

"Based on events which Ballard himself witnessed and suffered while interned as a boy in Shanghai during the Second World War, this is an extraordinary addition to our modern literature of war.

  Indeed, it could be said that if there is still room for a masterpiece about the Second World War, then this is it - and like other masterpieces it gains its initial effect in standing at a slightly oblique and unexpected angle to its subject matter.   By concentrating on the expatriate colony of Shanghai, and by showing us the events following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, Ballard achieves the creation of an amazing microcosm. Above all, the book is a triumph of truthfulness of tone. The boy, Jim, separated from his parents, camping out first in his own empty house and then in the deserted house of his parents' friends, eventually interned for four years in the camp at Lunghua, becomes an admirable clear-eyed guide to a most peculiar inferno.  This, Ballard convinces us, is how it was. No heroes, no heroics, just war as the normal condition, and the only battle that to survive."

The tone of the narrative of Empire of the Sun sounds authoritative and, lacking the need for imagination in the events which take place between the pages of the book, it is completely convincing. I 'read' this novel as an Audible experience.  The narrator, Steven Pacey, made an excellent job of characterisation, finding voices and accents for the cast and in particular for Jim, the young and naive ingenu who is caught up in the adult folly of war. 

Another novel by Ballard, High Rise, was another Audible read.  A new high-rise block seems to give its well-established tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: swimming pools, its own school, a supermarket and high-speed lifts.  But at the same time, the building seems to be designed to isolate the occupants from the outside world, allowing for the possibility to create their own closed environment.  Life in the
high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty annoyances among neighbours escalate into an orgy of violence. Soon skirmishes are being fought throughout the building, as floors try to claim lifts and hold them for their own. Groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools. And party-goers attack "enemy floors" to raid and vandalize them.  It does not take long for the occupants of the entire building to abandon all social restraints, and give in to their most primal urges. The tenants completely shut out the outside world, content with their life in the high-rise; people abandon their jobs and families and stay indoors permanently, losing all sense of time. Even as hunger starts to set in, many still seem to be enjoying themselves, as the building allows them a chance to break free from the social restrictions of modern society and embrace their own dark urges and desires. As the commodities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities.

In time the tenants abandon all social and moral etiquette. As their environment gives way to a hunter/gatherer culture, they gather together in small clans, claim food sources from where they can (which includes eating the many dogs in the building, and eventually even the other tenants). Every stranger is met with extreme violence.

Ballard here offers a vision of how modern life in an urban landscape and the advances of technology could warp the human psyche in hitherto unexplored ways.  It is an allegory based on the tower block phenomenon, an architectural money-saving expedient in maximising potential accommodation over a given area.  But with this new approach to providing living space came various social problems which discredited this innovation.  Ballard's satire illustrates these issues in an extreme way.

As a postscript to the above reviews there are two further things to say about Empire of the Sun.  Firstly, in order to comply with a requirement of the Read Harder Book Challenge 2016 that I have embarked on, I sat down to watch the film of the book.   Steven Spielberg directed the 1987 American production with Christian Bale playing the role of Ballard as a boy and John Malkovich playing Basie.  Ballard chose Bale (who was 12 at the time he was cast) because he felt he bore some resemblance to himself as a boy. The casting was based on the recommendation of the wife of Steven Spielberg; more than 4,000 child actors were auditioned.

By and large I felt the film was fairly faithful to the book although visually it was heavily sanitised in comparison to the narrative of the novel.  To complete my understanding of the novel I also read Ballard's Miracles of Life which is a short autobiography describing his childhood and early teenage years in Shanghai in the 1930s and the early 1940s, when the city is ravaged by war.  Ballard is plucked from a happy and comfortable childhood to experience the horrors and deprivation of internment camp with his parents. 

After being liberated by the Americans in 1945, James travels to England with his mother and sister, but he finds the atmosphere of post-war Britain difficult to penetrate.  After his schooling he embarks on medical studies but throws this over to enlist in the RAF.  This also turns out to be a wrong move and subsequently Ballard marries, becomes a father only to be widowed unexpectedly.  Faced with bringing up his three children single-handed he embarks on his literary career and makes forays into the art world of the 60s and 70s.  The book ends with Ballard's return to Shanghai in 1991, and with a very short and moving epilogue, dated September 2007, wherein he announces that he is sick with a terminal illness

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.

A Sweet Caress, A Beating Heart: Lives lived to the Full – two engrossing offerings from Audible.

Sweet Caress; the Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

This title has been in my Audible Library for some months.  Somehow I had not got round to downloading it from the Cloud onto my Device, favouring more immediate urges for easy listening, by which I mean thrillers and stories that have a classic structure of a beginning, middle and end.  In point of fact once I settled to Sweet Caress I found that it had a coherent, compelling and chronological structure and was easy to get into. 

This is a story of a life lived to the full.  Through this life, that of Amory Clay, a brave, feisty, characterful woman who becomes a professional photographer, William Boyd tracks some of the defining moments of the 20^th century as told through her camera lens.

  Her professional life, during which she looks for life, love and artistic expression, spans the decadent demi-monde of late 1920s Berlin, New York in the 1930s, the violence of the Blackshirt Riots in London in the same decade and where she receives an injury that will dog her life, and to the Rhineland in the Second World War.  She also, despite her advancing years for a frontline photographer, sees ‘service’ in Vietnam. 

Amory’s father is a flaky paternal figure.  She is born in the decade before the First World War and her disappointed father gives her an ambiguous name and announces the birth of a son.  She has patchy memories of his intervals of leave and there is a bizarre and vivid incident when he drives to pick her up from boarding school, ostensibly to go off on a jaunt, and tries to drive himself and Amory in their car off a bridge to commit suicide.  It is her gay photographer Uncle Greville, who is a more stable and nurturing influence, who gives her a camera, this gift representing the defining moment of her life.

Endings are tricky.  If you have been held by a book all the way through you expect a ‘good’ ending.  It may be happy or sad but if you are me you don’t like ambiguity, you don’t like to feel you have been sold short either.  Boyd’s ending to Sweet Caress is a good one, with a twist of surprise at the very close.    

Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks                                                                               

The Literary Review has written that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; he has been named "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book".  He is best known for his three novels set in early 20^th century France: The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.  These were published in the late 80s and early 90s.  Fast forward to 2015 and in Where My Used to Beat Faulks returns to that wartime era, but has shifted his arena for the action. 

The novel contains more than one of Faulks’ main recurring themes, the World Wars of the 20^th century and he sheds a long and woeful light over the 20^th century as glimpsed through the life of Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has experienced the best and worst of times in that century.

  On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor is forced to confront the events that made up his life.  The agent of this process, Hendricks’ host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man who is living on borrowed time, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.


To try and make sense of events and people who have shaped his life Hendricks must explore events and his experiences during the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that is never resolved, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally – unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front.  Here Faulks has written an intensely vivid, insightful and heartbreaking passage of unbearable tragedy which epitomises the attitude of the higher echelons of military power in the arena of the First World War towards its ‘foot soldiers’, the millions of souls who were drummed up as little more than cannon fodder, whilst the generals parked themselves in their makeshift canvas headquarters at the rear of the battlefield and dreamt up new manoeuvres for their plans of campaign.

It is a complex novel, representing, in common with Boyd’s Sweet Caress, a commentary on the 20^th century.  Such a complex novel deserves a more detailed and insightful review and for this I attach the following link:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/01/23/struggles-heart/q8snoR1kLJN7i1gzzxaLTJ/story.html

A Double Billing: Double Vision and Border Crossing

Pat Barker is an author some of whose books I read in the early days of my Godalming book group.   We started with Regeneration, the first of her First World War trilogy.  It was the second book we read as a group.  Regeneration is a historical and anti-war novel first published in 1991. The novel was a Booker Prize nominee and was described by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication.  The novel explores the experience of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.  Inspired by her grandfather's experience of World War I, Barker draws extensively on first person narratives from the period. Using these sources, she created characters based on historical individuals present at the hospital including poets and patients, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, who pioneered treatments of posttraumatic stress disorder during and after WWI. The novel explores several themes around the effect of the War on identity, masculinity, and social structure.


I stumbled upon Double Vision and Border Crossing in a charity bookshop. Whilst war, atrocities
and war-reporting feature in Double Vision it is more a novel dealing with social issues such as stalking, the exploitation of a widow by her handyman, and the questionable relationship between a young woman in her late teens or early twenties and a man twice her age.  The text flows and the novel is discrete and contained.  I enjoyed it.

Border Crossing deals with other themes:  the novel explores the controversial issue of children who have committed murder, in particular the aftermath after their sentence is served out. A tense psychological thriller, Border Crossing investigates the crimes of a particularly violent boy and the possibility of redemption.  When the protagonist, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from suicide, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he had hoped to forget. The rescuer, Tom, already knows the young man as Danny Miller. When Danny was ten, Tom presented evidence that helped commit him to prison for the murder of an elderly woman. Danny, full of suppressed memory and now free from prison, turns to Tom to help him recount what really happened, and discover the truth.  The Border Crossing in the story takes place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt are blurred and confused.

Whilst reading Border Crossing my memory of a similar case of

murder by minors is triggered.  The events in Barker's novel are possibly inspired by the tragic murder of James Bulger in 1993.  Then a the two-year-old boy was taken from his mother's side whilst in a shopping centre, and suffered ten skull fractures as a result of an iron bar striking his head. His body was then placed on railway tracks and covered with stones. The two murderers were found to be Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both ten years old.  The case caused considerable controversy both in Britain and worldwide. Just like Danny in Border Crossing, Thompson and Venables were tried and sentenced as adults, served a sentence then were released under new identities.  Again this was a book that read itself: structured and with an almost unambiguous ending.  With his cover blown once you are not sure whether Danny will manage to escape the grip of his past.