Other Stories

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.

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.

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.

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

*** *** ***

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.

*** *** ***

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.

*** *** ***

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.

The Story of a Marriage - Andrew Sean Greer

For the first time since the 5th of May, I have finally finished a book! What a shame that this constitutes news in itself at the moment, but what is a girl to do?

Anyway, last night I stayed up until the wee small hours to finish The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer. As I said the other day, this book started out as something quite wonderful, and I can now happily report that the rest of the book didn't disappoint. It is the story of Pearlie Cook, who in 1953 is married to Holland, her childhood sweetheart, and living in San Francisco with their Polio-afflicted child, Sonny. America has lurched from World War II more or less straight into the Korean War, and a new generation of boys are being drafted into the Army and being told to fight for their country, no matter how "their" country has treated them.

Holland had served in World War II, and had spent time in hospital after his ship was hit. His room-mate in hospital, Charles "Buzz" Drumer, was placed in that hospital by accident: he was no injured soldier, he was a CO, a "conchie", who had been sent there from a camp for other conscientious objectors. The two men formed a unique bond, but hadn't seen each other for many years until Buzz turns up on the doorstep one morning in 1953. After that day, things change between the three people, that has effects that reach far beyond this odd marriage, this marriage of three.

It says here on the back of the book that the story is "heartbreakingly beautiful", which is one of those phrases that gets bandied about like no one's business, applied to everything from kittens to music to food (probably). However, I actually think that this time they've got it bang on. The writing is some of the most beautiful I have read in a long time, and I would love to give you some examples, but what I have here is an uncorrected proof and it says on the back "not for sale or quotation". I work in publishing, I know people check these things (sometimes). So, trust me when I say that the boy Greer has a fine turn of phrase, and like Brian Moore, gets into a woman's head with panache. The story, too is heartbreaking. Hearts do break, characters go through turmoil, and I defy any reader not to be affected by the emotional rollercoaster of the narrative. Surprises are thrown in along the way but with such skill from Greer that nothing seems out of the ordinary. I haven't read his first book, but if it is as well-written as this one, then I'll be in for a treat.

Not now though, there's no guarantee I'll be able to finish anything else any time soon at my current rate. That said, I'm still reading random bits and pieces. Yesterday I re-read the 19th century chapter in Margaret Walters's Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, and did some mental righteous table-thumping. :)

Feminist Feasting

Typepad seems to have undergone a transformation, so forgive me if this post takes on a random variety of incarnations before it looks like usual. There are all sorts of weird buttons here in the "compose" page, and it may take me a while to get used to it.

Of course I may get it right first time and you lot will never know the difference, in which case, ignore me.

I am not at work. I am at home. I am sitting on my bed with my laptop on my knee with an open notepad and a pile of table-thumping feminist books beside me. It's a beautiful thing. Having reached the end of my first year of the MA, I am being a disgusting swot and doing some reading around what I want to do for my dissertation next year, ie, Victorian feminist literature. My self-prescribed reading list between now and October includes:

• Cassandra by Florence Nightingale
• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar
• The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays
• The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle by Sally Ledger (who teaches on my MA, I am such a goodie-goodie)
• The Feminist History Reader edited by Sue Morgan
• A Widening Sphere edited by Martha Vicinus
• Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age also edited by Martha Vicinus
• Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Victorian Writing by Women on Women edited by Susan Hamilton
• A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson

Never mind some re-reading of various novels and short stories by Victorian women. There's no doubt I've set myself quite a task, and I fear that as a result there will be fewer contemporary fiction reviews within these blog pages, but this is nothing if not an honest account of what I read. I'm sure I'll manage to slip a few contemporary treats in along the way. :)

Nearly finished The Story of a Marriage - only about 60 pages to go. Had a busy day yesterday and so didn't get the chance to read quite as much as I hoped. Today, hopefully more. Am going into London soon and hopefully the journey each way will give me ample time to polish it off.

Progress!

I think I have finally found the book to yank me from the depths of my reading block despair: The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer.

The book isn't actually out yet - Faber & Faber very kindly sent me an uncorrected proof copy last week - but let me tell you here and now that on the strength of the first 70 pages alone (out of a modest 195 pages) this book is something quite wonderful. The writing is beautiful, and there are twists and secrets that made me gasp without it being hackneyed or ludicrous.

I don't know very much about Andrew Sean Greer. I do know, after a quick Amazon search, that he wrote The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which I actually remember from my book shop days (though I didn't remember who wrote it, if I'm honest). That seemed to be a quirky book about a man whose body ages backwards, if I remember right, though his mind ages forwards. I do vaguely remember it being applauded at the time, and if the critics have any sense, they'll applaud his latest book too.

The Story of a Marriage is published in July.

*** *** *** ***

Talking of marriage, some good Glasgow friends of ours got engaged yesterday. Congratulations D & E!

*** *** *** ***

From tomorrow, I have two whole weeks off work. Two. Entire. Weeks. It will be a beautiful thing, and I'm fully intending to have the time to power through a chunk of Mount TBR, in between having my mum to stay for a couple of days, and nipping around seeing some interesting places. Oh, the luxury of a late lie-in. Yum.

A duck on his own

I still can't seem to finish a book, though I promise I have been reading. This weekend, for instance, I read:

• two short stories by Grace Paley
• the first chapter of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing by Elaine Showalter
• the first chapter of Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler
• The Observer Book of Books, which came free with the newspaper, and was worth the cover price alone

So, reading continues, it just seems to be all over the place at the moment.

We had Boyfriend's mum and stepdad down for the weekend too, which is always nice. Lots of lovely food and wine and much laughter. On Sunday we went all went for a really long walk round Oxford, taking in the usual tourist sights such as the Radcliffe Camera, Christ Church, Botanical Gardens etc. Oh, and Blackwell's the book shop. I managed not to buy anything! Was tempted though. They have whole shelves JUST for Victorian lit crit. It's a beautiful thing.

Anyway, favourite sight of the day was when we were at Christ Church. We walked up through the Memorial Gardens, over the little bridge. And what should we spy as we did so? This fellow here:

There were no other ducks in the immediate vicinity, he was just there himself, having a bit of a sit down. He was a vocal little chap, no doubt wondering why all these people were idly watching him as he took a rest from his ducky business. Several minutes of quacking later, he took flight, almost cuffing Boyfriend right in the face, but to be fair, it's probably Boyfriend's fault for being so tall.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Other Stories and Other Stories - Ali Smith

Last week Sara tagged me in the Friday Forgotten Book blog. So,  today I have to post about a  forgotten book.

Which begs the question, forgotten by whom exactly? I certainly haven't forgotten about Other Stories and Other Stories by Ali Smith, and I douby many other Ali Smith fans have either. So, perhaps this book isn't so much forgotten as sadly neglacted in the face of her more famous recent novels.

However, Other Stories and Other Stories is a wonderful collection of, er, stories. In fact, it is where I got the name of this 'ere blog from. Also, in another weird reading link, the quote at the front of the book is from Grace Paley, whose collected stories I am dipping into just now:

"Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."

The "open destiny of life" is exactly what Ali Smith always bestows her characters, and is part of what I loved so much about Girl Meets Boy a couple of months ago. She is generous to them, fills them with feelings and quirks and emotions that just pour off the page. There is 'Kasia's Mother's Mother's Story' about a devout Catholic women, oppressed by too many children and too little food, scavanging for spiritual comfort. There is 'Small Deaths', which is about a flea infestation. Only Ali Smith could write a really great little story about a house with a flea infestation. There is 'The Hanging Girl', which is chillingly spooky, about a girl, hanged and haunting another girls many years on. Except, is it really a ghost, or is it really a psychological blip?

As ever, though, Ali Smith is at her best when writing about love. I have never read another writer who puts love and its exaltations and fears into words quite so perfectly. The last story in the collection - and such a fitting end to the book - is called, simply, 'A Story of Love':

"Goodnight, we said, like every night, and you longingly hopelessly happily fearfully selfishly loyally temptingly knowingly passionately lovingly wordlessly kissed me

and I kissed you all of it back
goodnight."

And now it is my turn to tag another blogger to tell us all about a forgotten book next Friday. Dovegrey Reader - I hand the baton on to you.

The Best of Bookers - Shortlist Announced

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, and as I noted some time ago in a post that I not can't find, three judges have put together a shortlist of what they consider to be the six best Booker winners since the prize's inception. Said shortlist was annuonced this week. The lucky nominees are:

• The Ghost Road Pat Barker (1995)
• Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie (1981)
• Oscar and Lucinda Peter Carey (1988)
• Disgrace JM Coetzee (1999)
• The Conservationist Nadime Gordimer (1974)
• The Siege of Krishnapur JG Farrell (1973)

Now, here's the kicker. I haven't read any of them. In fact, I only own one of them (Oscar and Lucinda). Therefore, the chances of me making giving an informed opinion on any of the above are, frankly, slim to none. I can, though, give my opinion on books that aren't on the list. Pointless? Possibly. Possibly not.

Firstly, I would like to express my relief and profound thanks to the judges for not selecting Life of Pi. Rarely has a fiction book made me actually angry, but this one did. I was also angry at the judges who chose it that year over Sarah Waters's Fingersmith. Now, I am not a person particularly confident in my writing abilities; as much as I harbour the novel-writing dream (along with God knows how many other readers), I do not think my writing is yet good enough to start showing to anyone other than my boyfriend and my cats. I am not that arrogant. However, reading Life of Pi, I found myself thinking "I could do better than this. I could definitely do better than this" all the way through. And don't get me started on the ending, OK? Just. Don't.

However, I am sad not to see AS Byatt's bloody fantastic Possession on the list, which remains pretty much my favourite Booker winner, like, ever.* In fact, I must reread it soon, when I have got over the reading block. Speaking of the reading block, I have taken all the novels away from the bedside table and have stacked them in a neat pile in the corner. In their stead lies a small pile of short story and poetry collections, thus: The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore, The Collected Novels and Stories of Kate Chopin, and The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. I must say that so far the plan is working rather well. Last night I managed to read one story from the Grace Paley, one by Lorrie Moore, and one by Kate Chopin, while this morning before I got up I read one from the Zadie Smith volume, and a few Edward Lear poems.  I think I might have cracked it.

*The "like" is ironic. I promise. 

Joshua Spassky - Gwendoline Riley

I had never heard of Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley before. In fact, if I am quite honest, I’d never heard of Gwendoline Riley before at all, despite the fact that according to the inside blurb she has written two books previous to this one. However, it made up a Buy One Get One Half Price promotion in Borders, and it sounded alright going by the back of the book and anyway, the shop was closing in ten minutes, and the table was near the till. I took a punt. I bought the book. And boy, I’m glad I did.

This is a short book that follows Natalie as she leaves a meandering existence in Manchester to meet Joshua in North Carolina. She is a novelist (though her success to this point seems to be questionable), he’s a playwright who is doing well enough to have had plays put on in both his native USA and in England, which is how he knows Natalie. They have history, largely involving whisky and unfulfilling random sex.

The novel opens with Natalie packing her bags, and in the process unearthing old family documents and momentos that cast her mind back into her past: her violent father, his death, her mother’s death some years later, the realisation that we all are bodies and that bodies can fail and break and are messy things. She has been, ever since, obsessed with the physical.

He said, ‘There’s no use being squeamish, Natalie,’ and asked me to pass his toilet bag up. I found it in the dresser cupboard, a shabby brown cord case with a snap fastener. He opened it on his lap and pulled things out to show me, to rattle at me. I wasn’t feeling squeamish, exactly. I thought it was interesting. Steradent and Anusol. ‘That’s what bodies are,’ Dad said.

And this obsession with the physical permeates her life from that moment on. The emotion is too difficult for her to verbalise, coming out only through the existential novels that she writes, based “in her head” rather than any actual location. The physical characterizes her relationship with Joshua, and this latest trip to the States begins in just the same way. Joshua drinking neat whisky from a sticky bottle, cheap hotel rooms where they have sweaty sex, sheets sticking to them in the hot room. They talk about the intervening months since they last saw each other. Joshua talks about other girls he’s dated. Natalie tries to figure out what she’s doing there, what they’re both doing there, and why they have this pull to each other.

Finally, they decide just what they’re doing, and as the novel begins with endings – the deaths in Natalie’s family – the novel ends with a new beginning for both Joshua and Natalie.

Gwendoline Riley has a strong, vibrant narrative voice, and has a real knack for dialogue and characters. As a reader, I could feel the laden silences, the growing tension, the things not said, and that is a real skill for a writer to have. Someone once said to me that what makes a novel good is for there to be something to find in between the lines, for the author not to say everything and leave you to work out nothing. Riley manages that with panache, and I’ll be seeking out her first two novels post haste.

Hearts and Minds - Rosy Thornton

Much like Gifted by Nikita Lalwani, Hearts and Minds is a book which, if I had seen it in a bookshop, I wouldn’t have even picked up. The cover is all pinks and pastels, with florid script and, just for good measure, a dove soaring across the top with a heart in its mouth. In short, it screams “chick lit”, and that for me is a Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Another Commitment Phobic Sub-Mr Darcy. I wouldn’t have even have thought to glance at the blurb to see what it was about.

Thank God, then, for author Rosy Thornton, who emailed me a while ago and offered to send me a copy. She gave me a run down of the storyline, which peaked my interest, and so I accepted with glee. It arrived shortly thereafter and, I confess, my heart did fall when I set eyes on the dove with the heart in its mouth, but I by then knew enough of what it was about to remove the dust jacket and start from a lovely plain red (and very nicely produced) hardback. No flowers here, oh no. Also, Rosy T has a dog called W.G. Snuffy Walden (so it says on her website) and frankly any friend of The West Wing is a friend of mine.

Hearts and Minds is proof positive that you should never judge a book by its cover. Set in the academic world of St Radegund’s College, Cambridge, a new Master comes to take the reins after the retirement of the formidable Dame Emily. Transitions of this kind are always fraught with difficulties, but to make matters more complicated than usual, James Rycarte is taking over the helm of an all-female college, and some members of staff (and of the student body) are less than happy with a man being installed in the top job. Senior Tutor Martha Pearce, though, only wants what is best for her college, and while in an ideal world she would have wanted a woman in the post, if Rycarte is the best person for the job then so be it and let’s get down to business. After all, Martha’s domestic life is falling apart around her ears thanks to a lethargic poet-husband and a daughter who is spiralling into depression, has dropped out of school, and is rejecting the academic world of her mother so strongly that she won’t even ride her bicycle in Cambridge because it is too much of a signifier for the student world.

Add into the mix a restless student body, the initiation rituals of the St Radegund’s “Tigresses” – a collective of the very coolest girls that not just anyone can join, a subsiding library, and the offer of a sizable donation from a friend of Rycarte’s that will only stand if the college admits said friend’s daughter, and you have a very entertaining, very funny, but above all very intelligent novel that is part campus-novel, and part coming of age tale. It also offers rare insight into the politics and mechanics of academic life at Oxbridge made all the more realistic when you know that Rosy Thornton herself is a real life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. You can sense the frustration with bureaucracy, admin, and archaic University laws that seem to be designed absolutely to get in the way of the teaching and research that the academics came there to do in the first place.

It’s a great book, and I’m going to be lending it to Academic Friend straight away. After all, she is taking up a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge later this year, and I wouldn’t want her to rock up at her college in September ill-prepared! :o)

I recommend Hearts and Minds to all. But I still don’t know why there’s a dove with a heart in its mouth on the cover.

The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West

I don't know if you saw it, but on Saturday there was an excellent piece in the Guardian by Carmen Callil, who started Virago back in the 70s. It explained the motivation behind setting up this publishing company that championed women ('How often I remember sitting at dinner tables in the 1960s, the men talking to each other about serious matters, the women sitting quietly like decorated lumps of sugar. I remember one such occasion when I raised my fist, banged the table and shouted: "I have views on Bangladesh too!"'), and it was a wonderful article that made me feel really quite inspired.

And so today, I return to my First Ever Virago Modern Classic, The Return of the Soldier by  Rebecca West. For such a short book, it really does pack quite a punch, and I find myself thinking of it surprisingly often. It sort of slots into my head with Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf because two of the main themes are more or less the same: the passage of time (public and private), and The Great War.

Chris Ellis returns from fighting in the war a shell-shocked man. Via hospital, he eventually returns to the marital home (or mansion, rather) and his beautiful wife Kitty. However, the shell-shock has destroyed his memory, and because of that we discover that Kitty wasn't his first love. Five years previously he had been in love with - and planned to marry - the considerably more humble Margaret Allingham. He had had a huge argument with her, which was what put paid to their marriage plans. In his amnesia, though, he believes himself to be still in love with Margaret, and has no idea who Kitty is. Narrated by Kitty's sister Jenny - who lives with them - we watch as Kitty allows Chris to meet with Margaret, but only deep in the grounds of the marital estate - never in the house.

Kitty's disgust with the situation is not just about jealousy. Kitty is a wealthy, beautiful woman, who thinks constantly about social position, while Margaret is of a more meagre income and ordinary looking. Thus, the house becomes representative of the public: public (i.e. linear) time, the show we put on for the neighbours, social position, outward gestures, while the garden becomes a forest of the past, of the private time scale in Chris's head, of the breakdown of Edwardian social structure that the war caused. As the novel moves forward (and West is different to Woolf in that she tells the story simply in a straightforward fashion) and Chris begins to regain his memory, we watch the struggle between very different feelings for two very different women, and therefore two very different lives.

I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't read the book, but I do beg and implore you to go and read it. It's only short (less than 200 pages), and its simplicity of language makes the story incredibly moving.   

I got tagged! Again!

The lovely Sara at A Salted got me right back for tagging her with the 'Six Random Things' meme by tagging me for a more bookish meme. This time the rules are:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

So, given that I spent a large part of this weekend getting myself right back into the Vanity Fair zone, and that I am now carrying it around in my bag, that's the book which is closest to hand at the moment.

Page 123 sees us right in the middle of one of the devilish Rebecca Sharp's letters to Amelia Sedley, and the three sentences after the fifth find Becky at her most scheming and spiky:

"Your India muslin and your pink silk, dearest Amelia, are said to become me very well. They are a good deal worn now; but, you know, we poor girls can't afford des fraiches toilettes. Happy Happy you! who have but to drive to St James's Street, and a dear mother who will give you anything you ask."

Ooooh, she's a sly one, that Becky Sharp.

Now, who am I tagging this time? Well, I don't want to tag the same people again, but that doesn't leave me with many options. So, I tag anyone who wants to have a go. Hurrah!

I Am Mary Dunne - Brian Moore

I Am Mary Dunne, the 1968 novel by Brian Moore, is easily straight up there in the list of best books I've read so far this year. I came to him through the enthusiasm about him that permeates Palimpsest, picking up second-copies of this and his first (and possibly more famous, thanks to the film) novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. I read it more or less in one sitting at the weekend, breaking only for a trip to Tesco, and was rivetted to the point of Boyfriend having to say my name several times to get my attention.

I Am Mary Dunne opens with a memory, which is fitting because memory and identity are what this book is all about. The memory is of being at school, with Mary thinking that Cogito Ergo Sum would be more fitting as Momento Ergo Sum: I am what I remember. There have been questions here and there about whether the Latin is actually right, but you know, it's moot. The book's been published for years, I don't think he's going back to change it now. But anyway, the scene cuts to New York in the present day. Mary is leaving the beauty salon, and when booking her next appointment suddenly has a complete mind-block about her name. She eventually gives it as "Mrs Phelan" before realising just after she steps out of the shop that she hasn't been "Mrs Phelan" for years, that was her first husband's surname, and now she's on her third marriage. Her name is now Mary Lavery. But who is she really?

The book follows Mary as she spirals into a crisis of identity, following her as she looks back at how she was around her previous husbands, and realising that they had both wanted her to be a certain type of person, as does her current husband Terence:

I play an ingenue role, with special shadings demanded by each suitor. For Jimmy I had to be a tomboy; for Hat, I must look like a model: he admired elegance. Terence wants to see me as Irish: sulky, laughing, wild. And me, how do I see me, who is that me I create in mirrors, the dressing-table me, the self I cannot put a name to in the Golden Door Beauty Salon?

So, when a woman changes her name, does she become someone new? Who is Mary Dunne, as she was back in school when she realised that we are what we remember? Cue lots of skillful flashback sequences as lunch, and then dinner, with old acquaintances stir up memories which only had to her confusion and distress. Ultimately, no one is really who they seem; everyone has their dark secrets, and their life-altering moments.

It is astonishing that it was a man who wrote this book. His insight and voice as a female first-person-narrative character is absolutely spot on, and there were countless times where I found myself nodding in agreement with Mary as she admitting various failings she perceived in herself; as she came to believe that everything is her fault. If I hadn't known it was a male writer, I wouldn't have even pondered the idea it might have been, it was that good.

He must be a hell of a husband.

Silent in the Grave - Deanna Raybourn

I have been shamefully lax is reading this review copy that was kindly sent to me by Mira Books at the end of last year, but I'm pleased to say that it was very much worth the wait.

Silent in the Grave is the first in the Lady Julia Grey series of whodunnit novels set in Victorian London. No one here needs reminding that "Victorian" and "London" are two words guarenteed to make me rub my hands in booky glee, and this novel was no exception. The story starts with the immortal lines:

To say that I met Nichola Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.

And that really sets the tone for the whole shebang. Lady Julia Grey - feisty, independent, though still with a touch of endearing vulnerability - finds evidence that her husband's death was quite probably not natural, and with the help of the brooding, mysterious, and decidedly Heathcliff-esque Nicholas Brisbane sets about trying to unravel the mystery.

Now, I'm going to be straight with you here. This isn't a literary masterpiece, and I doubt it'll be troubling the Nobel Prize for Literature jury, but that is not to say that this isn't a great book. It really is just bloody great fun; a page-turner in the great tradition of page-turners. The word "rollicking" could have been conjured up expressly for this book. It's obvious too that Deanna Raybourn, the American author of this novel, absolutely delights in all things London-esque: she plainly had as much fun writing Silent in the Grave as I did reading it. Joy just drips from the page, which is a difficult feat in a murder mystery.

Just, er, one small point, and the Victorian Studies geek in me really apologises for bringing this up, but it was the only thing that annoyed me about the book: the word "gotten". No one says that over here. We just don't use that word in Britain, and certainly not in 1886. So, Ms Raybourn, if you happen upon my blog, please, delete "gotten". It stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise delightful book. Thanks. :)

There isn't much more I can say about this novel. It's got a brilliantly worked out plot, it elicited a couple of audible gasps from me towards the end as the demise of Edward was revealed in all its glory, and it'll hold your attention right to the end. It's great fun. And now I'm off to find volume two in the series.