Other Stories

And Then There Were None

When I was in my late teens/very early twenties a girls' night out usually included copious amounts of alcohol, dancing till the wee small hours, and a cheeseburger from Mr Chips on Sauchiehall Street on the way home. Last night, we went on a girls' night out... to the Oxford Playhouse to see And Then There Were None. It was fantastic.

I have somehow managed to reach the age of 26 without ever having read an Agatha Christie novel, never seen a play based on her writing, or even sat through the entirety of an episode of Poirot. I have no idea why, it's not been on purpose. It was a bonus, though, last night because going into the theatre my only piece of knowledge of the play was that it originally had a rather less PC title. This meant that not only did I know nothing about the story, but that watching the the murder mystery unfold before was unhampered by vague recollections of whodunnit.

I'm probably the only person in the world who didn't know the basic story, but for those of you who need reminding, a group of 8 guests are invited by a Mr and Mrs Owen to Soldier Island for their summer holidays. When they arrive, they discover from the two recently-employed servants that the Owens will not be arriving until the next day. All is well and dandy, and they're all standing around having a drink when a mysterious voice strikes up, adresses them all by name, and makes very serious accusations against them. It seems that these people are all there for a reason... Going into anymore detail would be folly, because the joy of a good whodunnit like this is being completely open and innocent going in.

The production itself was a corker. The very slight tinge of ham at the beginning was quite obviously tongue-in-cheek, and contrasted nicely with a much more serious and understated finale. Stars of the show were Alex Ferns as Captain Lombard (evil Trevor from Eastenders!), Chloe Newsome as Vera Claythorne, and Denis Lill (Cassandra's dad in Only Fools) as William Blore. The show itself was wonderfully staged, with a wonderful set and bursts of creepy incidental music that made me jump in my seat more than once. In fact there were several jumpy moments.

Sarah, if you're reading this, I'm really sorry for grabbing you when there was that gunshot. Oooh, me 'eart.

Any quibbles with the night? Only the people in the row behind me who WOULDN'T SHUT UP. Some of us haven't read the book and don't know who the next person to die is. Hmph. Anyway, it was a fantastic night's entertainment - wizard!

Number-Crunching

I've been stealing memes off chartroose again.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Well, 10 years ago I was 16. In 1998 I sat my 5th year Highers (English, French, Geography, Maths, and a module in Italian) before going into 6th year and studying for Highers in Music and History, as well as SYS English and French. I was still a goth. I got my nose pierced. I painted my bedroom purple. I went to see the RSC perform Romeo & Juliet and thought the earth moved. I read the Brontes repeatedly, and Terry Pratchett. I went to nightclubs underage and probably worried my mother half to death.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect non-weight-gaining world

• cheese
• chocolate
• chips and cheese
• cashew and pistachio nuts
• parma ham straight out the packet

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world

See above. Did I mention I'm overweight?

Five jobs I've had

• barmaid
• waitress
• general kitchen worker
• bookseller
• publicist

Five of my habits

• sucking my thumb in front of the telly/when I'm sleepy or bored
• buying books
• counting stairs as I go up or down them
• singing in my car
• cuddling the cats even when they don't want it

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire

• give family and friends money
• donate a whole lot to charity
• buy a house big enough to have a dedicated library, then fill said library
• have lots of cats
• start a bookshop with a pub in the basement

Five places I've lived

• Milngavie, near Glasgow
• Barrhead, near Glasgow
• West End of Glasgow
• Oxford (but I've lived to two places in Oxford... does that count?)

Five fluffy things about me

• Hmm. By fluffy I assume you mean random. In which case look here.

The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett

I think it must be physically impossible to dislike Alan Bennett. Whether it’s his stage plays, such as The History Boys which deservedly won armfuls of gongs both here and in the States, or his televised monologues Talking Heads, he has the knack to present people in the most compassionate, human way imaginable. Characters in his hands have all the outside trappings of background or status – whether very low or very high – fall away until we are presented with the person themselves.

The Uncommon Reader is another sterling example of his skill. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is chasing the corgis, who have run off their usual path and found their way to the space outside the Palace kitchens. Here she discovered a mobile library, which visits every Wednesday for the staff. Out of politeness, she borrows a book by Ivy Compton-Burnett, even though HM is not really a reader:

‘What a treat!’ She hugged it unconvincingly before opening it. ‘Oh. The last time it was taken out was in 1989.’
‘She’s not a popular author, ma’am.’
‘Why, I wonder? I made her a dame.’
Mr Hutchings refrained from saying that this wasn’t necessarily the road to the public’s heart.

Though she struggles with the Compton-Burnett, she keeps going back and taking more books out, and suddenly she’s hooked. Reading starts to take over her life and her thoughts and her public duties begin to suffer. When she’s not hiding a book below carriage windows, she’s flummoxing her aides by veering off the usual meet n greet script:

It transpired that with no prior notification to her attendants the Queen had abandoned her long-standing lines of inquiry – length of service, distance travelled, place of origin – and had embarked on a new conversational gambit, namely, ‘What are you reading at the moment?’ To this very few of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects had a ready answer (though one did try: ‘The Bible?’).

Soon the equerries and other senior staff are plotting to bring an end to HM’s literary adventure: reading is seen as too remote, too exclusive. What would the public think?

Well, this member of the public was delighted by this slight flight of fancy from Mr Bennett (Sir Alan, one day, surely?). This isn’t a heavy-weight work in any sense of the word. At a mere 121 pages the book is tiny – I read it in one sitting, in a little under two hours, including sandwich eating – and elsewhere I have read the criticism that it was thus too expensive at £11 or so in hardback. I quite agree that that’s expensive, so I would beg you all to do what I did and get the paperback! £6.99 RRP, though last Sunday it was £2.99 if you bought the Sunday Times. Which I did. I don’t even like The Sunday Times very much. Good culture supplement but that’s about it, but I digress.

It’s also not heavy-weight in the intellectual sense, but that’s what I loved about it. Lionel Shriver is quoted on the back saying it’s a “bedtime story for grown-ups” and I couldn’t agree more. A surprising and highly unlikely ending works simply because it is obvious from the lightest of tone that this isn’t a true story; this is no work of ultra-realism. What Alan Bennett has done has drawn a portrait of a lady of pensionable age (as she points out herself to the librarian) who develops a reading habit that gets in the way of her job. He job just happens to be, y’know, being The Queen. He humanises her, as The Queen feels books help her make sense of herself in the story:

The Queen now found she was conducting lengthier discussions with herself and putting more and more of her thoughts on paper, so that her notebooks multiplied and widened in scope. ‘Once recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.’

This book won’t change your life, or even make you think differently about the world. But it will make for a fun couple of hours and will surely raise a chuckle or two along the way.

Guest Blog: The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry

As promised yesterdy, here is Academic Friend/Lauren's review of Sebastian Barry's latest novel The Secret Scripture, specially written for Other Stories. Am always happy to have different voices on the blog, so I was thrilled that she agreed. As I mentioned yesterday, Lauren has just started her own blog: Kudzu Quake.

You don’t have to know the sweep of the coast from Dublin down to Wicklow—the way the view of the sea changes from the window of the train and gives way to wildness—to appreciate the children’s journey in Annie Dunne. And you don’t have to know the cradle suspended between Ben Bulben and Knocknarea that holds Sligo town and rocks the Garravogue to walk with Roseanne the lonesome weary winding road from Strandhill to Sligo town in The Secret Scripture. The beauty of Sebastian Barry’s writing is his ability to transport, to transcend space and time and even—the hardest of leaps—experience. I know that stretch of coast in the east, and I have walked that road in the west, but I have never seen the townships of Africa or the trenches of France, yet I have been there with Eneas McNulty and Willie Dunne, and my experience of those places has been no less for it.

In Barry’s previous novels and plays, he invests the reader (or audience, as the case may be) in an individual’s history. We are aware that these personal histories are unreliable: pasts are malleable commodities; experiences are simultaneously shared and belong to no-one. These singular histories are situated in the broader landscape of a national history. Numerous critics have pointed out that Barry is interested in rescuing people from the margins of the Irish past, people who have been written out of the national myth: Protestants, soldiers in the First World War, and most recently, Republicans who continued to lodge their grievances in unfashionable ways long after the Irish Civil War was ended. A reader’s experience of Barry’s prose is enriched by an outside knowledge of this context, but never before in his novels—not in A Long Long Way, Annie Dunne, or The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty—has it been necessary in order to enjoy the beauty or the drama of the story. Why then, has Barry made the most enticing element of his fiction, its subtlety, so explicit now?

I believe the answer is inextricably twofold: Barry’s international recognition as a writer and the progression of his historical project. The success of A Long Long Way meant that Barry could no longer be dismissed as simply an Irish writer (a classification that is still too often and incorrectly regarded as provincial). Perhaps the new, wider audience elicited the need to give a non-Irish readership a thorough gloss on Irish history so that they could understand the course of his plot and the behaviour of his characters, both of which might seem peculiar to an outsider. Enter Dr Grene, who provides just such a commentary in The Secret Scripture. This novel is told from two alternating perspectives: the twenty-first century psychologist, and Roseanne, his patient, who embodies one-hundred years of Irish history. The asylum in which Dr Grene works and Roseanne lives is closing, and Grene must decide whether or not Roseanne belongs in the new facility and whether or not she was justly committed to the institution in the first place. He keeps a written record of his visits with her alongside his personal reflections on grief, spirituality, and his changing perspective on the nature of truth. Roseanne keeps a written record as well, and these alternating perspectives mean that the narrative never goes too long without being interrupted, reinterpreted, re-structured. Ultimately, we are left with the old theme of unreliability but without the grace and insinuation of Barry’s past incarnations:

I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.

While I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment and admire—as ever—the precision of the prose, the ideas themselves are interruptions, and these interjections are unnecessary, as Barry’s previous works have demonstrated. Where ambiguity— and beautiful mystery—has been allowed to reign in previous novels, in The Secret Scripture, Barry ties the bow. He smacks us across the face with his historical theory and gives us a nice neat resolution to the plot as recompense. This is not what I want from him, nor is it what I think he does best. Lest this critique put anyone off, let this haunting passage from the first page serve as an enticement:

There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animals, in floods. The river also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled from the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. The speed and depth of the river would have been a great friend to secrecy.

Academic Friend blogs!

Go and say HELLO and WELCOME TO THE BLOGOSPHERE to my dear Academic Friend, Ms Lauren. Is there no end to this fine girl's talents? Encyclopedic knowledge of Irish theatre, a natural knack with the fiddle, and now she enters the blogosphere too; I'm so proud.

Kudzu Quake is her blog, and it promises to be mighty. Add her to your blogrolls immediately. And as if that isn't enough, tomorrow on Other Stories I'll be posting a book review by Academic Friend for your delight and delectation. Don't miss it.

Now, I have the cold, so I'm off to find more anti-viral Kleenex.

Musical Interlude

A musical interlude today on Other Stories. Here is my own personal goddess KT Tunstall doing 'Stoppin' the Love' (from the first album).

PS launch party went very well. Met some very exciting people including ex-Booker judges, a rather eminent novelist, and other assorted bigwigs. Knackered today though, and suffering from blistered feet from hell. Stoopid shoes.

Link Love du Jour

You'll have to forgive me. I am the sleepiest Kirsty in all the land. Last night was one of those nights wher I was really tired but I just couldn't sleep... until about an hour before my alarm went off. Urgh. I am incoherent, and I didn't brush my hair this morning. Typically, this is the day where I have a full day of usual work topped off by a journey into London for a launch party and won't get back home to bed until god knows when.

*sigh*

Anyway. Here are some lovely links that have been entertaining me, cyber-wise:

• First up, my latest addition to the OUPblog: Science and Religion in American Politics
• Say hello to the Two Ravens Press blog and their new literary web-mag
• Speaking of online periodicals, Five Dials is a new literary periodical from Hamish Hamilton, and anyone can just download and print it for nada. Me likee.
• Andy Gill hates Coldplay. Yeah, me too.
• Boyfriend and I are going to the Cornbury Festival in a couple of weeks. V excited. And it's in Oxfordshire so we don't have to do the whole manky camping bit.
• I don't care how juvenile it is, FailBlog makes me laugh.
• The Daily Mail thinks women should "step back and shut up". Er, no thanks.
• A Chinese policewoman breastfed nine orphans she found after the China earthquake, and was rightly promoted for good deeds. Some people have been complaining. These people are idiots.

In the waiting room

I have had a poem stuck in my head since yesterday evening. 'In the Waiting Room' (I think that's the title, it may be a slight variation on that) by Norman MacCaig. I first read it at school when we did Scottish poetry for our Higher English, and it's about the poet sitting in the hospital waiting room while his wife is being treated for cancer. I can't reproduce it here because of (a) my inability to remember the whole thing, just the odd line or three and (b) I wouldn't be allowed to anyway because of copyright. All I can say is that you can buy his Collected Poems here.

Anyway, it was in my head as I sat in the waiting room of the emergency clinic in Oxford last night, while Boyfriend was shut away in a room, trying to find out why he suddenly couldn't breathe properly. Obviously the cause for my waiting was nothing so serious as Mr MacCaig's, but the poem stuck in my head nonetheless. Boyfriend's OK now, by the way, he has a chest full of infected ming, but now he also has antibiotics and an inhaler, and he can - y'know - breathe now and everything.

But it made me think about how evocative places are. I hadn't thought about that poem for years, though I love it, but as soon as I was sitting about with months-old copies of Bella magazine it was buzzing around my head. Waiting rooms are just so... scary. Even when you know it's not life-or-death, there's something oddly sinister about the whole thing. Just a thought.

We'll Meme Again...

Oh the punnery. I'm hilarious.

Chartroose and her Book Barrage posted this meme yesterday and today I'm taking on the mantle. A lot of it may be ground I've covered before, but since when have I let that get in the way of some good, solid, memery?

1. Who is your all-time favourite author, and why?

I can give no one answer to this: instead, I am giving two. Virginia Woolf is the first. My love of Mrs Dalloway is well-documented and it is no exaggeration to say that this book changed my outlook on life when I read it at 19. Being of the age when Mrs D believes herself to have been happiest, I could relate on a number of levels to the way she talked about her magical summer. But then, in the book, she's in her early 50s and still trying to recapture the person she was at 18, she is wondering when everything changed, and why it all changed. I didn't want to be like that. It sounds corny, but I decided after that fateful reading to find happiness where I could, to take life as it comes, and to make the most of everything. I hope I've stuck to that. I try to, at any rate. I don't want to wake up one day and wonder where my life went.

And, of course, there is A Room of One's Own, which is just an incredible rallying cry for women to assert some of their independence through writing (amongst many other things). I have a beautiful little embossed paperback edition, which was the first present Boyfriend ever bought for me, and I love it. I was wondering whether there was irony in the fact that a man - whoever that man may be - having bought me my favourite edition of that particular book, but I've decided there isn't. He knew it was a book I loved, and which meant a lot to me. It was an extremely thoughtful gift.

Then there's Orlando, which is much overlooked I think. There's a boy in the 17th century. He grows up. Then he turns into a woman. And lives for hundreds of years. It's brilliant. Chameleon nature of sexuality and all that. Lots of pictures of Vita. Love it.

My other favourite author is Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre is simply an amazing book and I have no earthly idea how many times I've read it. Villette is also fantastic and I remember as a teenager sitting on my bed with a French dictionary trying to translate the French passages.

2. Who was your first favoutite author? Do you still consider them amongst your favourites?

I'd love to be able to give some incredibly precocious answer to this like "Oooh, yes, I first appreciated the majesty of Dostoyevsky at 3 and a half" but I can't. The honest answer is Ann M. Martin, author of The Babysitters Club series. I devoured those books! I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, and every weekend when I went to the West End of Glasgow to see my dad, he would take me to John Smiths on Byres Road, or the big John Smiths in town, and he would buy me another Babysitters book. Without fail I'd have finished it by that night. I just could not get enough of them. I wanted to be beautiful and artisitic like Claudia with her big, almond-shaped eyes, but instead I was undeniably more like the tomboyish Kristy. Hey, at least the name was close.

The first time I went to America, when I was 9, we went to a book shop in some mall somewhere, and I discovered that they had lots of Babysitters books that were much further on in the series than I could get in Britain, it being an American author and all. I came back with stacks of the American editions and let me tell you I was quite the envy of my friends when I produced number 63 in the series. We were only up to 49 in the UK! Thank god my parents encouraged my reading, even when my dad wasn't a reader at all. They realised pretty early on that books (and music) were more or less the only things I was interested in as a kid, and nurtured accordingly. Thanks, mum and dad.

Is she still a favourite? I can't say I read her anymore but I have very fond memories of them.

3. Who is the most recent addition to your list of favourites?

This is a toughie. I think probably Brian Moore (thanks to Palimpsest), or Nicola Barker. Rather different authors, but both excellent.

4. If someone were to ask for your favourite authors right now, who would you say? Who would you add after reflection?

Well, obviously all those mentioned above. Add to them some Dickens, some Sarah Waters, some Ali Smith, some Michel Faber, some Margaret Atwood, some Wilkie Collins, and some Armistead Maupin, and you've covered much of my range.

After thinking for a second, I'll add Iain Banks (no sci-fi M for me) because of a long-standing love of his writing (even his slightly ropier recent stuff), and I'll add Sylvia Plath because her poetry is astounding and gets a bad rap as really depressive when in reality the majority of it really, really isn't, and I'll add Katherine Mansfield because her short stories are sublime, and I'll add Rebecca West because The Return of the Soldier is an amazing book, and I'll add Emily Bronte purely and simply because of the masterpiece that in Wuthering Heights.

So, that's your meme for today. Tag, you're it.

Hello, and welcome

Just wanted to greet anyone who came here through the Guardian website. I appear to be listed in their internet "Brit Lit" blog roll. So... hi! I feel I should up my game.

Except I got hardly any reading done this weekend again. On Saturday I was off learning how to taste wine and champagne like a pro at a friend's hen party. Turns out you're meant to do this slurpy-sucky thing - not the technical terms, I am quite sure - except when I tried to do it I nearly choked myself. Decided just to stick to drinking the stuff. It's not good form to choke to death at someone else's hen party.

Yesterday I was mostly just tired. I slept half the afternoon, and only managed to digest three Grace Paley short stories in the evening. That said, one of those stories, 'Want', is one of the best by her I think I've read, if not one of the best short stories I have ever read. It really is incredibly short - only three pages - and is a portrait of a woman who bumps into her ex-husband at the library while she is returning some Edith Wharton books that are 18 years overdue. A conversation with him makes her think about all the things she has wanted in life, as opposed to what she actually has. This is a deliberately vague description of the story just because to say much more I think would detract from the impact of the final paragraphs of the story. I shall just say this: go seek it out. It is one of the most powerful stories I have read in some time.

Black Books

For no other reason than because I think this is one of my favourite ever sitcom moments, here is Manny discovering he can play the piano.

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Today on Books I Have Loved, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

I first read this book when I was 16, and at high school. I was studying it for my CSYS English dissertation on alternative worlds. I loved it from the word go, and have read it countless times since.

The novel is set in a time chronologically contemporaneous with now (or with 1985, when it was published, but it could equally be 2008) but in an alternative world where America has been overthrown by a theocracy and it now The Republic of Gilead, and lives are now to be lived according to strict rules. People are divided and alloted social status on the basis of gender, colour, caste, and fertility. Men are the important ones - all men are now in the military with the top rank being Commander of the Faith. They are given Wives who have to dress in blue, like the Virgin Mary. If they have Daughters, the Daughters must dress in white until marriage. These men, too, are given a Handmaid, who dress in red with a white head-dress that obscures their periphiral vision: they can only see directly ahead, or down. Handmaids tend to be women who have broken "gender laws". They have complained, they have protested, but they have to be fertile. They are there to bear more children for the Husband. They have no identity of their own, they take the names of their masters. Our narrator, our Handmaid, is Offred. Of-Fred.

For those women who break more serious gender laws, are lesbians, are sterile, are widows, or were nuns are officially Unwomen. They are not useful to the regime - they can't bear children. They are sent out into the Colonies - the wilderness - to die a slow death from radiation sickness. Homosexual men - gender traitors - are also sent out there to die with them. All of them, men and women, have to wear grey dresses.

There are Jezebels. They are confined to secret clubs for the pleasure of the Husbands and their guests - they dress in provocative outfits from the Time Before. Cheerleaders outfits, school uniforms, and so on. They have make up. There is The Wall, where dissidents uncovered by the Eyes (the secret police force) are hung as a deterrent to other possible rule-breakers.

Offred had a husband and a young daughter before the regime change happened. The three of them tried to flee to Canada but they were caught. Our narrator - whose real name we never learn, though it's suggested it might be June - is sent to be a Handmaid, their daughter is adopted by a Commander of the Faith and his Wife, and we never learn the fate of her husband, Luke. She watches everyday to see if he is hung on the Wall, but he isn't there.

Offred isn't getting pregnant and if she doesn't soon then there is a fear that she will be deemed sterile and an Unwoman. Men, you see, cannot be sterile. Only women. She is advised to secretly take another lover, Nick, to increase her chances of conceiving. But... is Nick an Eye? What about Ofglen, her neighbour Handmaid, with whom she has been illegally communicating?

It is too easy to say that this is a feminist novel, though it is. Not only does it make stark warnings about the position of women in society, but it also attacks religion, and the way that women are represented in the Bible and other religious texts, which is the reason that it is one of the Top 100 most complained about books in terms of studying it in school in America. The religious folk don't appear to like being poked. :) It is one of my most favouritest books in the whole world though, and opened the floodgates of my Atwood-Love. In The Handmaid's Tale she manages to show the full gamult of womanhood by showing everything women were and could be before the theocracy intervened. It showed the potential of power of women, and how they needed to be repressed for the ultra-religious society to work. Women, for the rulers, were always the spanner in the works. It's a call to metaphorical arms to women to reach their potential, and to make their own lives on their own terms. Much joyous fist-waving ensues from me.

I don't care if Margaret Atwood signs books with a fancy machine, I think she's amazing.

The Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber

The only bad thing about reading a big thick history book like The Victorians is that it takes a while. I am still thoroughly enjoying it, and would go as far as to say that it is quite probably the best history book I have ever read, but I'm not quite finished. Approaching three quarters of the way through though, so progress continues apace, but this leaves me conspicuously short of blog posts in the meantime.

So, I have decided to revisit some of my most favourite books, until I finish the non-fiction behemoth and get back on the fiction wagon. Today: The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber.

The title, as all good Victoriana-o-philes will know, comes from a poem by Tennyson called 'Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal' ("Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white"), a poem about love and longing, and to be frank, a little bit of lusting too. How apt this is for this wonderful, wonderful, all-consuming book.

"Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether."

So opens this novel set in the dark, dirty streets of Victorian London. The story follows a headstrong young man-hating prostitute called Sugar as she progresses through the rigid social structure of the times thanks to a liaison with William Rackham, gentleman and newly crowned head of Rackham Perfumeries. At home he has a daughter and a wife - his wife is confined to her bed, hysterical in the way that only Victorian women could be. She is, perhaps, his madwoman in the attic.

This is a chunky book - my paperback edition weighs in at 835 (very good quality) pages - but my word I zipped through it. The beauty of it is that Faber is a genius at character. Every single person, no matter how inconsequential, pops out of the page a fully formed human being, elliciting sympathy or derision or hatred as appropriate. And London herself becomes as much as character as any person in the book - the city is perfectly etched with no details left out. No dim corner is too dirty or deprived for our eyes, and this means that the social inequality of the Victorian class system is laid bare for all to see. We watch Sugar as she drags herself from 'The Streets' to 'The World at Large', but then what happens to her?

The ending of the book caused some controversy with readers when the book was published in 2000 because it... no, I can't tell you. All I shall say is that Michel Faber had enough letters (both pleading and admonishing) to write a follow up book of short stories called The Apple in 2006. I can tell you that when I closed The Crimson Petal and the White, I was bereft, and it remains one of the best books I have ever read. It, like the London, and like the characters it is populated by, is "vast and intricate", and leaves quite the indelible print on the memory.

I read that there is to be a film adaptation. I could see it working as a film, but I'm not sure I would want to see the film itself. I think I'm too attached to the book to be able to let go of the mental picture I have of the characters. *Sigh*. Wonderful book. Wonderful, wonderful book.

Top 20 Bestselling Books in the UK - week ending 7 June

I haven't done this for a while...

1. Faces -- Martina Cole
2. The Forgotten Garden -- Kate Morton
3. Devil May Care -- Sebastian Faulks
4. Sepulchre -- Kate Mosse
5. Death Message -- Marl Billingham
6. Playing for Pizza -- John Grisham
7. Chasing Harry Winston -- Laura Weisberger
8. Step on a Crack -- J. Patterson; M. Ledwidge
9. Clean Cut -- Lynda La Plante
10. Crossfire -- Andy McNab
11. Bones to Ashes -- Kathy Reichs
12. Book of the Dead -- Patricia Cornwell
13. The Dark Tide -- Andrew Gross
14. Bad Behaviour -- Sheila O'Flanagan
15. The Woman in the Fifth -- Douglas Kennedy
16. On the Edge -- Richard Hammond
17. Sniper One -- Dan Mills
18. Strike Back -- Chris Ryan
19. Dead Heat -- D. Francis; F. Francis
20. Overheard in a Dream -- Torey L. Hayden

Same old, same old, really.

This made me smile today

more cat pictures

A Conversation

The following scene took place yesterday afternoon, in the office. Our players are me, Kirsty, aged 26, and Work Experience Boy, aged 17:

• WORK EXPERIENCE BOY (WEB): So, Kirsty, do you have a boyfriend?
• KIRSTY (ME): Yes I do.
• WEB: Is he the same age as you?
• ME: Well, no, actually, he's a bit older.
• WEB: Oh right. How old is he?
• ME: He'll be 42 next birthday.
• WEB: That's quite a big age gap.
• ME: I suppose. I don't notice it to be honest.
• WEB: Yeah... guess it's different like that when you're older.

OLDER???

Whooooosh!

42 days! What's that whoosing noise? Civil liberties flying out the window? I do believe it is.

*** *** ***

I need some cheering up. I have not been feeling terribly well for a few weeks, and on top of that I found out on Saturday that my aunt has breast cancer, which had already started to spread by the time it was detected. It's a sad time, but everyone is trying to stay positive.

Breast Cancer Care

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So, happy things to read. I have to say there are few more joyous things than Ali Smith's prose. While sitting for an inordinately long time in the doctor's waiting room on Tuesday I read her addition to the Pocket Penguin 70s boxset: Ali Smith's Supersonic 70s. This is another 50-odd page collection of short stories and extracts from novels that span her career to date, including one story written exclusively for the collection. Undoubtedly the highlight for me was the extract from her 2005 Booker-shortlisted novel (it woz robbed, by the way, by John Bloody Banville) The Accidental in which her prose just... flies. Love or hate Ali S, you can't deny that her writing just zips about the page. I *heart* her.

Also in the collection, a story called 'The Theme is Power' which, on the surface, is a series of disjointed memories from the life of our narrator, but which when you step back from it and look at the broader picture becomes a linked set of tableaus, strung together by various power struggles. One of her best stories, in my opinion.

I know I keep saying it, but if you haven't read her, you really are missing out on something quite special. The word "unique" is bandied about with gay abandon, but her narrative voice is unique, and strong, and incredibly distinctive.

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Another thing which brough a smile to my face happened on Tuesday evening. Boyfriend and I went to a pub with a view to hearing some blues, and in Boyfriend's case, playing some. Turns out the jam had been cancelled, but as we were sitting having a beer, I spied a shelf containing books. It was part of a campaign by the BBC to encourage adult literacy called RAW, and it was a shelf for book swapping. Hurrah! I snagged three freebies: A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing, Remember Me by Fay Weldon, and The Rendezvous and Other Stories by Daphne Du Maurier. I've been meaning to have a small booky clearout for sometime, so next time we go to the pub I'll take three back in their place. Inspired.

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Lastly, my latest OUPblog offering is up: Sir Walter Scott and Scotland.

My Side of the Matter - Truman Capote

Truman Capote is one of those authors that I keep meaning to get around to, but never quite manage it. However, I finally broke my duck, albeit in a tiny way.

For Christmas 2005 I was given the box set of the slim little Penguin Pocket 70s books they released to celebrate their 70th birthday, which contains - as I'm sure you all know - 70 little books by Penguin authors of all vintages and genres. The box set is something I dip into every so often, and after a prolonged perios of finding it difficult to settle on anything, I picked a "70" at random and ended up opening My Side of the Matter, a collection of four short stories by Mr Capote.

The first story in the collection is, IMHO, by far the best. 'Miriam' is a ghost story, or perhaps ghostly story,  about a widow (Mrs Miller) who lives alone, and a strange little girl called Miriam who starts turning up uninvited at Mrs Miller's apartment.

At first glance the writing seems to break every single "rule" of what constitutes "good writing": lots of descriptions of physical appearance and short sentences. But it all seems to work somehow. The simplicity of the (very) short story is actually what makes it quite disturbing:

"The other people in the house never seemed to notice [Mrs Miller]: her clothes were matter-of-fact, her hair iron-gray, clipped and casually waved; she did not use cosmetics, her features were plain and inconspicuous, and on her last birthday she was sixty-one. Her activities were seldom spontaneous: she kept the two rooms immaculate, smoked an occasional cigarette, prepared her own meals and tended a canary.
Then she met Miriam."

For all that I've read a lot about Truman Capote's real life gregarious personality, he manages to not be detectable in the story at all... there are now judgements, there is no defined moral viewpoint, if that makes sense. 'Miriam' is a fantastic little story.

The second story is the 'My Side of the Matter' from which the collection gets its title. This is much more playful, and I could see Capote having some fun with the protagonist, a recently married teenager whose pregnant wife wants them to move in with her spinster aunts in a small American town/village/house in the middle of nowhere in the wilderness. The two aunts detest him and don't even let him share a bedroom with his wife, instead making him sleep in a cot on the back porch:

"May, June and July and the best part of August I've squatted and sweltered one that damn back porch without an ounce of screening. And Marge - she hasn't opened her mouth in protest, not once!"

And this seems to be when the switch comes between our narrator being someone who is cocky, sure, but who I ultimately felt sorry for - he had to give up his "perfectly swell" job at a cash n carry to live with these two cartoonish harridans - into a young man who is bitter, twisted, and not a little malevolent. His language about his wife becomes more and more offensive, and he tries to blackmail until all descends into violence. Of course, his "side of the matter" is that he is perfectly innocent, but it's plain that that's not what Capote wants us to think.

It's another accomplished story, though completely different to 'Miriam'. The other two pieces are less stories that portraits: one of an elderly woman in Martinique talking to an American tourist called 'Music for Chameleons', and another about a mysterious cripple who is perhaps not what he seems, 'Mr Jones'.

As a taster of Capote's writing, I think it's a very well put together little package, and if the rest of his writing is anywhere near as good then sign me up as a fan now.

Victorian Feminist Addendum

Just as a brief follow up to all the debate about calling Victorians "feminists", I've just checked the OED, and the first recorded written use of the word is from 1894. "Feminism" turns up in 1895.

So presumably it was bubbling around earlier than that, if only spoken.

Feminism: Officially Victorian.

Facts and Links

Fictional reading is still taking somewhat of a battering, and at times like this, poetry is a god-send. Recently I have been reveling in Emily Bronte's poetry, especially "No coward soul is mine", which in itself is very high up in my list of favourite lines from poetry.

I'm still ploughing on with The Victorians by AN Wilson, which is proving to be one of the very best history books I have ever read. The scope is incredibly far-reaching without the reader feeling short-changed on any particular topic: it really is an incredibly well-written book - and much funnier in places than you might expect. If you've any interest in the Victorian period, then I implore you to look past its bulk and settle in.

Did you know that during the Irish famine, many adults starved because potatoes were the only crop they were able to grow, and even then they could only grow enough for personal use? Many people ate literally nothing but potatoes - up to 13 or so POUNDS per day - so no potatoes = no food. Meanwhile, the UK government were still having Irish corn exported. Tragic stuff.

My other fact of the day - and this is nothing to do with Victorianism - is that today in the UK there are more members of the National Trust than of any political party. How awfully British.

In other news, here are some links I have loved recently:

• Literary tattoos!
• Bookmooch rocks. Free book swaps mean new books without the environmental impact of making more paper. Have picked up some excellent Virago Modern Classics in original green livery.
• Really interesting F Word discussion on having children late in life.
• This is a BRILLIANT piece from The Observer about Fern Britton and her gastric band.
• Freelance Mum is one of my new favourite blogs.
• Lorrie Moore: A Life in Books.

Right, I'm off back to the 19th century.