Senior Common Room

An Interesting Week

2011-08-14T10:24:00.000+01:00

First an apology. I did mean to get round and visit this past week, but as I expect most of you are aware, we are living in interesting times in the UK at the moment and let me tell you it is truly the curse that Confucius said it was. After what might be called 'a close encounter of the Hoodie kind' on Tuesday, I'm afraid my mind has been on things other than blogging. In fact for most of the week there have been three bags by my front door, one full of necessary paperwork, one with a change of clothes and the third ready to throw The Bears into so that we could be out with the essentials at a moment's notice. (Some of you don't know about The Bears, but those that do will understand - I am going nowhere without them!) For the moment, things seem to have become more peaceful and I'm hoping that I will be able to unpack, but we all know about chickens and hatching and counting, so maybe I should wait awhile longer.

In the meantime, life has had to go on. We had a very successful Music Summer School and I now know a lot more about the concerto than I did before. Donna, I hope you're reading this and very glad that you chose to 'crawl out of the woodwork'. I don't know of a book, but there is an excellent set of lectures published by The Teaching Company on the concerto. I can't recommend them too highly. In fact all their music series are superb. They can be a bit pricey, but if you wait until they come round on sale you can often get a real bargain.

What has suffered this week has been the reading for the Literature Summer School. I have managed to read The House on the Strand and do the background work on the historical novel in general (although I still have that to write up) but the other two books remain untouched and I absolutely must get down to them. I did watch a really fascinating interview with Daphne du Maurier made for the BBC in the very early seventies, just after The House on the Strand had been published. Television has definitely changed! She chain smoked throughout. That wouldn't stand a chance of getting on screen these days. What I found most interesting was that the only moment her eyes really sparkled was when she was asked how she felt about being the main breadwinner once her novels started selling. "I loved it," she said. "It gave one the power." Very telling, especially in the light of the particular book we've been reading, which in many respects is about power and the way in which it is abused. If any of you want to see the programme just put Daphne du Maurier BBC interview into google and it should be the first item that comes up.

Other than that it's been a relatively quiet week. This afternoon I'm going to a garden party one of my goddaughters is organising to say goodbye to us all before she goes off on her gap year next week. She's off to a remote area of Guyana to teach science and maths in a newly established school for girls of eleven to fourteen. I am inordinately proud of her. The Bears have a special invite and will be going in their Sunday best. They say you should see a picture of them, so here they are looking as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. Don't you believe it.

Have a good week.

Here I Am

2011-08-06T18:15:00.000+01:00

Well, here I am again! Still a bit wobbly, but definitely better than I was. My current plan is to try and write just at weekends until I'm through rather a busy teaching period and perhaps stronger health wise. Fingers crossed.

Next week is the first of our Summer Schools and so I shall be spending most of the forthcoming seven days listening to and discussing the development of the piano concerto. I love music but am no musician, so I've had to do a lot of research to be able to organise this one. We're focussing particularly on Beethoven, Schumann and Shostakovich, but of course we have to fill in round the edges as well and so the house has been resounding to the music of Corelli, Vivaldi and Mozart as preparation for Monday's opening session. Not that Corelli and Vivaldi wrote for the piano, but you do need to know where the concerto started to be able to follow the later developments

Once that's underway then I really must get down to the reading for the Literature Summer School, two weeks later. I have read the three books (Du Maurier's The House on the Strand, Emma Darwin's A Secret Alchemy and Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk) before, but I do need to refresh my memory and organise the line through the discussions. What I'm really interested in is why the historical novel has suddenly become fashionable again and I hope we can explore that as well as the books themselves.

And then, of course, there is the 1485 programme to begin to pull together. A number of people have asked if there is any way that this could be opened up as an internet discussion. I'll have to think how this might be possible and also ask the other people in the group what they think, but the very basic website that I'm slowly building is open to all, so if you're interested you can see what we're planning at

Integrated Studies ~ 1485

I'll try and come visiting this week. I hope you're all well.

I Am Still Here

2011-07-18T08:48:00.000+01:00

This is just to say that I am still here. As some of you know, I have various health problems and life is a bit on the difficult side at the moment, but when this bout is over, I will be back.

Take care of yourselves.

1485

2011-07-03T13:14:00.000+01:00

So, I have this problem. I have a basic understanding of the timelines of each of the individual arts. I know how Shakespeare relates to John Donne, I can place Mozart in relation to Bizet, at a pinch I can even put most of the major artists in some sort of accurate order. But, when it comes to integrating those timelines, or, even worse, tying them up with what was going on historically or in the worlds of philosophy and religion, forget it, I'm hopeless.

When I first came back home after training to be a teacher there was an extra mural course at the local university that took a period in history and, drawing from all of the relevant departments, explored the social and political events along with the prevalent religious and philosophical movements and scientific discoveries. It then placed the arts within that framework and asked how they had been influenced by the cultural climate in which they were created. I really wanted to do that course but it ran during the day and of course I was working and couldn't get there. So, I promised myself that when I retired I would beg the extra mural department to put on something similar, if necessary, just for me. What I hadn't anticipated was that by the time I retired there would be no extra mural department. In fact, no community education programme of any sort. (I could wax lyrical about this abdication of civic responsibility, but that's for another day.) Thwarted again!

Well, some of you will remember that this time last year I was getting extremely het-up about another education problem, namely the cost of Summer Schools. My answer then was to stop grumbling and organise one of my own and not only did it go extremely well, this Summer we have expanded and have two Summer Schools running. (Bromsgrove U3A Summer School) Perhaps I could do the same thing again? So, starting after the summer break I am going to bring together a group of like-minded people to see if we can't do something about this. The idea at the moment is that we will take a pivotal year in British history and explore what was going on in as many areas of academic interest as we can, not only in Britain but across the world as it was known and understood at the time. We aren't going to confine ourselves just to that year; if something vital happened a couple of years earlier, or a dozen years later, then of course that will be covered as well. The one stipulation will be that we can't go beyond the date we have chosen for the next set of meetings, the ones that hopefully will begin in September 2012. (Ever the optimist!)

At the moment the putative schedule looks like this:

September ~ General Meeting

October ~ Historical Events

November ~ Philosophical Movements

January ~ Religious Thought

February ~ Scientific and Medical Discoveries

March ~ Art and Architecture

May ~ Music

June ~ Literature

July ~ Review and Forward Planning

The basic idea is that one or more members of the group will research each month's area and then come back and present a paper to the rest of us. Gradually, over the year, we will garner more and more understanding not only of the different topics but, more importantly, of how they interrelate one with another and this will then be the subject of discussion over the substantial pot of tea and gargantuan plate of biscuits that will be provided half way through the afternoon. (Gillian, if you're reading this and panicking, don't worry, I'll bring the biscuits!!!) What this means for those of us involved is that no one will have to research and present more than once a year, which I hope will make it easier for those members of the group who, unlike me, are not far too fond of the sound of their own voice and lack confidence to speak out loud. We shall see.

Of course, it may not work. It is going to depend on our having people who are interested in covering each of the areas. We are having a preliminary meeting a week tomorrow to see where we stand on this. But it certainly won't work if we don't try. As you will have seen the year we've chosen as a starting point is 1485, the year of the Battle of Bosworth and the beginning of the Tudor monarchy. Not the happiest of years in the life of a Yorkist like myself, but one that I think will provide everyone with interesting material to research. I'm thinking at the moment that we might set the upper limit at 1534, the year of the Act of Supremacy, when Henry VIII broke from Rome, but that will be up for discussion when we meet next week.

If we do get off the ground then two further ideas I'm playing with are building a website and possibly putting together a pamphlet at the end of the year containing all the contributions. If I do get those established and anyone is interested in having access then let me know.

What really worries is me, of course, is after the Summer Schools last year and now this, what bright idea am I going to come up with next year. If you see one beginning to burgeon, nip it in the bud straight away, will you? There are only so many hours in the day!

Making Connections ~ The Time Line

2011-07-01T15:47:00.000+01:00

Having managed to get as far as London once there is now absolutely no holding me. The National Gallery last month and now, this month, the Courtauld Gallery, tucked away amongst the buildings of Somerset House, just off the Strand.

The Courtauld is one of those small galleries, of which there are several dotted around the capital, where you turn a corner and suddenly come across one of the world's great paintings, like this one by Manet. If you'd asked me where I thought this was I would have hazarded the National or the Louvre or the Prada. I wouldn't have expected to find it tucked away down a London side alley.

I had actually gone to see the Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril exhibition. Jane Avril was one of the dancers at the Folies-Bergeres who Toulouse-Lautrec used as models for the posters and pictures he created for the theatre. We normally see her dressed in bright colours, legs flying, as she entertains the punters in the can-can. This was the picture that took my attention, though, showing the dancer in a much more somber mood as she leaves the theatre in the early hours of the morning almost unnoticed in her classic blue suit. There is something so contained about her in comparison with the abandon she displays in the more well known paintings. She looks separate, lonely. This is the canvas I could live with.

I had as much pleasure though from looking around the rest of the gallery. As well as the Manet they have some wonderful Van Gogh and Degas as well as an interesting collection of paintings by Rubens and it was the Rubens which brought home to me gaps in my knowledge that I know I have to do something about.

Where each of the individual creative arts is concerned I have a reasonably good understanding of the time line through from the medieval to the modern day. I know where Rubens comes in relation to Degas or when Mozart was composing in relation to Brahms. What I don't know is how they relate across the artistic boundaries. So, I find it amazing that Rubens was painting this picture of Moses and the Brazen Serpent at the same time and in the same place as Shakespeare was writing The Tempest. It isn't that I thought they were from different time periods, I just have no real understanding of how they relate at all.

Well, there is no point in simply bewailing my lack of understanding, is there? I need to do something about it and I'm going to, but that is for another post.

Oh, and before any of you ask, yes, of course I went to Fortnum and Mason for afternoon tea. This time I replaced the scones with a slice of Raspberry Yoghurt Cake but unfortunately I can't find a picture of this magnificent confection. I should have taken one before I demolished it. Anyway, I can definitely recommend you treat yourself, just be prepared to explain the bill to your bank manager next time you see him!

The Torso ~ Helene Tursten

2011-06-29T15:51:00.000+01:00

Thank goodness! I really enjoyed Helene Tursten's first crime novel, Detective Inspector Huss, but you know what it's like, you get a first novel that is absolutely wonderful and then the second disappoints and the author just never seems to manage to push those same successful buttons again. Not Helene Tursten, who is without a doubt the best of the Scandinavian crime writers I've discovered over the past couple of years. Her second book, The Torso, is every bit as good as her debut and my frustration at discovering that the library only has one copy of her third novel and that there is a long queue is immense, although not entirely unexpected.

Irene Huss and the other members of her investigative team are called in when the torso of a body is discovered on the Swedish coast line wrapped in a black plastic bag. Not only has the body been dismembered, but it is clear from the obscenities inflicted on the remains that the victim has been horrendously tortured and mutilated. Searching across Europe to try and identify the corpse, Huss discovers a similar crime in Denmark and so is sent by her Superintendent to Copenhagen to see if there is any evidence there as to who the body parts may have belonged to. The information that Irene is able to pull together suggests that a necrosadist is operating in both countries, killing in order to get sexual satisfaction from the desecration of the bodies.

Very quickly, it becomes apparent that the killer is aware of the police's interest in him and that he appears to have some level of access to the investigation. A succession of people identified as having likely connections with the murderer turn up dead or are viciously attacked and the fear grows that he will target members of the team themselves. There is also the possibility to be faced that it may be one of their own who is the perpetrator.

One of the things that I find admirable in Tursten's work is that she doesn't glory in the horrors that she has to describe. She doesn't hold back, but there is no sense of her using the terrible scenes that are involved to draw the reader in. And believe me, in this book she could well have fallen prey to that temptation. The point is made on several occasions that necrosadism is extremely unusual and for that we should all be extremely thankful. Nevertheless, while she leaves us in no doubt that the actual murderer is a monster, Tursten is also careful to explore the manner in which more 'normal' humans can find themselves drawn into the environs of such appalling practices and, for the most part, these people she depicts with a welcome level of sympathy and understanding. It would be all too easy to judge.

As before, there are certain things about Tursten's work that don't necessarily translate well in either the literal or figurative sense of the word. I'm fairly sure that only one translation has been commissioned and it is definitely an American one. Even so, I think something audacious takes 'the biscuit' rather than 'the cake' in both versions of the English language and there are several other incidents of such infelicitous renditions. And then there is the detective set up. Do the Scandinavian police really not ring each other up after five o'clock because everyone would have gone home? I find that rather scary. And do they really turn a blind eye to some of the excessive drinking on duty that goes on and the behaviour towards colleagues that results. There are a couple of Tursten's detectives who, if Quintin Jardine's Bob Skinner was to ever to have them under him, would find themselves back pounding the beat before they could blink. That is if he didn't throw them out of the force altogether.

However, these are relatively minor points and I wouldn't want anyone to be put off this series, which I think is one of the best to come out of Scandinavia in recent years and certainly one I hope continues through many more volumes.

Summer Time

2011-06-26T15:17:00.000+01:00

There are certain sure signs that Summer is here. For each of us they are probably very different. It used to be the sound of the first ice cream van jingle, but round here they were still trying to ply their trade when I couldn't get the car out of the garage because of mounds and mounds of snow, so I've had to ditch that as one my sure fire indications. Sadly, these days I complete the statement

I know that has Summer has come when.....

with the words

I can drive onto campus at 11.00am and find a parking space.

Usually you have to be there well before nine. The pleasure of not having to fight for a place is immense.

One universal signal, however, is the appearance in the Sunday papers of the lists of Summer Reading and this morning, the first really warm day we've had this year, The Sunday Times has provided fifty fiction and fifty non-fiction choices along with a handful of audio and children's suggestions.

I always pour over these lists with real interest. The New Year equivalent, when people are asked for their 'books of the year', are terribly 'worthy' and I don't believe for a moment that half of them have ever really been read. They have just been chosen to make the people recommending them sound good. These Summer recommendations are different. Oh, very few people actually come out with the real 'beach reads', but what you do get are suggestions of good, solid readable fiction; the sort that will see you through the next six months or so whatever the weather.

Amongst this morning's list there are several books that I have earmarked for any free days that I might discover hidden in my diary, including Ann Patchett's new novel, State of Wonder and Jane Harris's story of an English spinster who attaches herself to the family of a painter in the Glasgow of 1888, Gillespie and I. There are also a couple that I seem to have missed when they came out, but which look very interesting. I've enjoyed Justin Cartwright's earlier books, so I shall definitely see if I can find a copy of Other People's Money and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies set in post-war Paris sounds fascinating as well.

Reading through the list made me think, however, about all the plans I have made for Summer Reading over the years and about how rarely I have been able to stick to them. When I was studying or teaching there was always a reading list for the following term that needed attention and each year I promised myself that I would get started early and make sure that I didn't end up having to rush. After all, how many people had the privilege of a working life where reading fiction was a central activity? How many would have killed for such a life? But it never worked out like that. There was always something on the library shelf, or something I'd been storing up all year that found its way into my hands instead. And I don't suppose this year will be any different. I might state my intention of reading certain books, but I strongly suspect that the same thing will happen as in the past. I have eight books that have to be read for one reason or another before the second weekend in September, all excellent novels in their own right, but I don't mind betting that I shall be desperately trying to finish them at the last moment just as in previous years.

Am I alone in this? Or are you all far better at meeting your objectives than me. If so, what is your secret? Please, do share it.

Back Again!

2011-06-24T14:07:00.000+01:00

Look, if I ever commit myself up to that level again, will you all please take me out and shoot me! How stupid can you get? All I feel like doing now is precisely what is going on in the picture on the left. In fact, I'm not even certain I've got the strength to read. It might have to be a decent audiobook and someone else reading to me.

However, I do have one thing to be grateful for in as much as I had a request earlier in the week from a local university to see if I would do a year's cover work for them from September and I said no. At any other time I might have been tempted to help them out only to have regretted it later when all the preparation and marking started to mount up. But, coming as it did, just as I was really experiencing the consequences of saying yes too often, I turned them down without a second thought. Come cold winter mornings, when I would have been dragging myself out to catch an early train, I shall be so glad about that.

Anyway, now I'm taking a breather before turning my mind towards the two Summer Schools I'm organising this year. The first is the second week in August and is based round three piano concertos, one each by Beethoven, Schumann and Shostakovich. We're going to place each one in the context of other music being written at the same time, by both those composers and others and I'm really looking forward to it because, although I've done all the organisation, I'm not leading any of the sessions so I can just sit back and enjoy the music.

The other, two weeks later, is our annual literature Summer School and this year the people coming have chosen to read three books each of which is set in two different time periods: Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand, Emma Darwin's A Secret Alchemy and Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott. I have to do rather more where that week is concerned, because as well as leading the final discussion I also have to pull the whole week together and I want to get people thinking about why historical fiction seems to be making a comeback at the moment. I happened to catch a radio discussion some weeks back suggesting that more recent historical research, which has concentrated on the everyday life of ordinary people, as opposed to the political events, was responsible and I shall be interested to see what the others think about that idea. If any of you have any thoughts that would add to the discussion then please do let me know.

Now I'm off to put my feet up and listen to Wimbledon. I might even pick up a book and read. But then again, I might not. Have a good weekend.

Call Me Stupid!

2011-06-10T17:14:00.001+01:00

I don't know what's wrong with me. I do it every single time. I resolve solemnly that never again will I say that fatal little word, "Yes" without checking every diary I possess and then promptly start saying "Yes" as if my life depended on it. Consequently, sitting quietly reading in the garden is precisely not what I am doing at the moment. A picture of a dog chasing its own tail would be infinitely more appropriate.

I am thoroughly over committed for the next ten days or so and as a result my presence round the blogging sphere is going to be very limited. Apologies to all those whose blogs I don't get to read and comment on, I will be back when I have a spare moment.

Be good while I'm not there to keep an eye on you!

Room ~ Emma Donoghue

2011-06-08T16:28:00.000+01:00

I have to say that if I'm honest I've been avoiding Emma Donoghue's book Room ever since it first came out and there was so much publicity about its links with real life cases of abduction and imprisonment. I thought it was one of those books that I would simply be unable to read because its subject matter would hurt so much. That may be cowardly of me. Perhaps it would be better for me to read books that cause me empathetic pain and force me into accepting the very real evil that does exist and which I have been so lucky as to avoid. However, the truth is that I don't find such books easy reading and am therefore likely to put them to one side and they remain unfinished.

So, when Room turned up on one of my book group lists I wasn't quite certain how I was going to approach it. I decided in the end that I would set myself a goal of fifty pages a day in the hope that I would never have to spend so much time in the world of abuse that I would be unable to continue with the reading.

The first day didn't go too badly at all. There is no way that an adult can ignore the fact that what is being described is a situation so horrific as to be most women's worst nightmare but, because the narrator is five year old Jack, we are cushioned from that. The one room in which he and his mother are confined is the only world that he knows and for him it is security. His days are filled with creativity and love and he is content. Oh, he'd like a bit more in the way of Sunday treats, but for the most part he is a happy child. It's almost the extreme possible argument for a child being better off if they have clear cut boundaries. Jack certainly has boundaries and they define his life in a way which at five make him feel safe. How's that for irony?

So, the first day didn't go too badly. I did have an argument with Donoghue on the very first page because I wasn't convinced and I'm still not convinced that a child of five would be able to handle the concept of minus numbers. I've come across a good number of undergraduates who still have a problem with the idea. But, I was willing to let that go if only because so far the book hadn't been the painful read I'd been anticipating. I was beginning to think that this was going to be one of those books that I would be glad that I'd read even though I would never be able to read again.

Then came day two - remember, fifty pages! It was a Sunday, so I thought I'd knock them off first thing in the morning and have the remainder of the day for more pleasant reading. Four hours later I climbed out of the mental wringer that the rest of the book had put me through not having been able to put it down until I'd finished it and I knew that this was a book to which I would return time and time again.

I am not going to go into the story because I'm sure most people will already know what this novel is about and neither am I going to wax lyrical about the way in which Donoghue controls the narrative voice because I know that my obsession with the way in which the narrative voice is used is not universally shared. (I once heard Philip Pullman say that the most important decision a writer had to make about a book was the nature of the narrative voice and I had to be forcibly stopped from standing up and cheering!) But I do just want to mention the, to me at least, very interesting comments the author seems to be making about what are and what are not universal truths and philosophical dilemmas that are actually native to our human way of thinking.

I almost passed the first of these by without noting it. Jack has just learnt that the world he sees on the television is a representation of something that is real and he is forced to reflect on what this means for his own reality.

Outside has everything. When ever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they're real, they're actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired. And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they're all really in Outside. I'm not there, though, me and Ma, we're the only ones not there. Are we still real?

But, I had to go back to it when I hit the Schrodinger's Cat problem. During the moments of his escape from Room, wrapped in a rug that threatens to smother him, Jack realises that for the first time ever he has left the security of the only home he has ever known and in a panic asks himself.

I'm not in Room. Am I still me?

Only later, when he and his mother are safe to turn that around to

Is Room still there when we're not in it?

How do we know who we are? How do we understand our own reality in relation to that of those around us?

There are echoes of towering truths from literature as well; understandings that our greatest writers have come to and passed down, but which Jack discovers for himself. As he considers the implication of growing older he comments

Before I didn't even know to be mad that we can't open Door, my head was too small to have Outside in it. When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything.

And later, as he begins to comprehend the enormity of Outside and the people it contains he echoes Shylock's great speech on the universality of humanity.

I think about all the kids in the world, how they're not TV they're real, they eat and sleep and pee and poo like me. If I had something sharp and pricked them they'd bleed, if I tickled them they'd laugh.

There are several other examples of Jack trying to come to terms with the nature of of the world he eventually finds himself in and especially of the vexing question as to what is real and what is not, what is a valid response to any situation and what is either not acceptable or simply false. I will simply finish with what I think is most telling. Jack is indulging in a new game at the home of his grandparents, namely channel surfing, and he hears his own name not in real but in TV.

"...need to listen to Jack."

"We're all Jack, in a sense," says another man sitting at the big table.

"Obviously," says another one.

Are they called Jack too, are they some of the million?

"The inner child, trapped in our personal Room one oh one," says another of the men, nodding.

I don't think I was ever in that room.

"But then perversely, on release, finding ourselves alone in a crowd..."

"Reeling from the sensory overload of modernity,"says the first one.

"Post-modernity."

There's a woman too. "But surely, at a symbolic level, Jack's the child sacrifice," she says, "cemented into the foundations to placate the spirits."

Huh?

Huh, indeed. This is just so much psychobabble -and that is being polite. Jack knows what is real in this world, what matters, far better than any of these so-called experts. When he asks why he can't see Ma, now sick in hospital she tells him

"They're still fiddling with my dosage, trying to figure out what I need."

To which Jack's response is

Ma, she needs me. Can't she figure that out.

All you need is love.

Please read this book.

I am not a Passive Reader.

2011-06-05T12:29:00.000+01:00

As Erica Wagner said in yesterday's Times, I don't like disagreeing with Kate Atkinson, who is one of my favourite authors and a writer whose intelligence I respect, but when she says as she did in that selfsame publication that reading is a passive activity I simply have to take issue. The actual quote, taken from a piece marking the move of Jackson Brodie to the television screen this evening was this,

People like to think that there’s some synergy between reading and writing but there isn’t. Writing is a very active act and reading is passive and that’s seen as a negative thing: people don’t want to be seen to be passive. They want to feel engaged and involved in the process but they’re not. They’re reading something that would exist even if the reader didn’t.

Don't worry, I'm not going to get into the whole reader-response question here. I know that the book sitting by my side at the moment would still exist even if I didn't. But, even without wandering into the realms of literary theory, I'm afraid I think she is just plain wrong. Whatever else reading is it isn't passive. Or if it is then it has stopped being a worthwhile occupation because all you are doing is letting the words pass through your mind without engaging with them in any way and you might just as well fill the space up with so much cotton wool.

Any child in the process of learning how to read will tell you that reading is damned hard work. The fact that so many of us manage to master the art to the point where we no longer notice that fact is a tribute to a lot more hard work put in by teachers of one sort or another all over the world. But once you've reached that point and you don't notice the work you're putting in any more what you're doing is still not passive; what is more it is perfectly possible for it to be active in a different way every single time you pick a book up.

This past week I've read four books each of which has asked me to engage actively with it in an entirely different way. One has an extremely complex plot located in a slightly off kilter world which demands that I follow every twist and turn in an unfamiliar setting without letting a single ball drop if I want to have a hope of understanding how the final denouement fits logically with what has gone before.

A second has engaged me in an emotional manner that has demanded that I empathise with characters I might not normally respond to and come to some understanding of why they have behaved as they have and why I might possibly be able to follow their reasoning if not ever applaud their choices.

The third and fourth are both books where I have been struck immediately by the fact that the writers are women of tremendous intelligence and I have struggled, as I read their novels, to keep up with the ideas that their minds have woven into extremely readable books. But even here what I have been working at has been different. In one of these it has been the ideas themselves that have kept me on my toes, the writers that this author has assumed I would know and the way in which their concepts have fed into the story she is telling. In the other is has been the style that has had me thinking, deceptively simply and yet expressed in language so distilled that unpacking all the layers of meaning has been a tremendous challenge. Working out how she has managed it would be another task in itself.

So, I'm afraid I have to disagree with Kate Atkinson. For me the very essence of the pleasure that is reading is the fact that it isn't passive, that I have to work at it if I want to get anything out of it. And the day it becomes a passive, time filling activity is the day I will burn my library cards and go out and shot myself.

Don't Rain on my Parade!

2011-06-03T15:27:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I went down to London for the day. Now, unless you know me very well, you won't realise the enormity of that sentence. Due to a chronic condition that forced me into early retirement I haven't been able to travel any great distance for the last five or six years without disastrous consequences that laid me low for days. For the first three years I had a fifteen mile limit and could only be glad that there was so much that I could do locally within such a small area. Gradually, I've been able to push my boundaries further afield, getting to Stratford two years ago and Oxford last summer. Now I've managed the two hundred mile round trip to London and although I'm not going to be able to do it very often, I feel as if I've been given the world. As I walked down Baker Street on my way from Marylebone Station to Trafalgar Square I looked up at the first storm clouds the capital had seen in weeks and bellowed out the Streisand song defying the weather to rain on my parade. It's a good job people are used to eccentrics in London. No one paid a blind bit of notice!

I had, in fact, gone specifically to see the Jan Gossaert exhibition at the National Gallery. I love the Flemish artists of this period (early sixteenth century), especially the wonderful portraits that they painted of both their aristocratic patrons and some of the more mercantile burghers who employed them. This chap, keeping very careful note of all the financial comings and goings in his business, is a banker. I would love to know what his filing system was like. Could he just reach up and find the appropriate note that told you by how much you were overdrawn without even looking. I bet he could. Look at that face. You weren't going to put anything over that gentleman, were you?

But the whole expedition had clearly gone to my head because I kept seeing all sorts of things that I suspect a serious minded art critic would not have agreed with nor approved of. For example, there is a wonderful cartoon of Adam and Eve in which it is absolutely obvious from the way in which Eve is supporting him that Adam has taken all the apples from the Tree of Knowledge and turned them into high octane cider. What's more, he's drunk it all!

Then there is a canvas of St Luke painting his vision of the Virgin and Child and I am seriously worried about what one little cherub sitting at Mary's feet is up to. What need has he to have his hands up Mary's skirt, I ask myself. Actually, I probably don't want to know the answer.

Anyway, giggling is clearly not the done thing in the National Gallery, so eventually I took myself off down Piccadilly to Fortnum and Mason and indulged in that most decadent of English customs, afternoon tea.

If you ever have the chance to go to Fortnum and Mason for afternoon tea then do take out a mortgage and partake. (And you definitely do 'partake', any other verb simply wouldn't meet the circumstances.) Nothing else rivals one of their own individual blends served in a silver plated tea-pot and accompanied by homemade scones, jam and clotted cream. I was very good and stuck at that. But if you want to you can go the whole way and add sandwiches and a slice of one of their wonderful cakes. You won't want to face either your bank manager or the bathroom scales in the immediate future but believe me it will be worth it.

I hope this isn't going to be a one off visit to London. I just woke up that morning and knew that I could try and I suspect that for the moment that is going to have to be the way I do it. Planning in advance is likely to hype up my adrenaline levels and undermine me before I start. But it's a beginning and I intend to build on it.

Detective Inspector Huss ~ Helene Tursten

2011-06-01T17:52:00.001+01:00

Hard on the heels of the Martin Beck novels I've come across another Scandinavian Crime writer whose first book, at least, I've really enjoyed. Detective Inspector Huss is the initial novel by Swedish writer, Helene Tursten, in a growing series about her eponymous heroine, Irene Huss. The copy I have says on the jacket that she is Sweden's Prime Suspect. I can only say that whoever wrote that has either not read the book or not seen the British TV programme because Irene Huss, happy in her home life with husband and twin daughters, is about as far from Jane Tennison as it is possible to be. Neither does the book glory in violence in the way that the television series can seem to. Yes there is violence in this story, but for the most part it is kept at a distance. We see its after effects, but there are no long drawn out descriptions of the attacks to which various members of the force are subjected. In fact, if the book made me think of any English writer it was P D James. Tursten's insistence on the day to day routine that is behind most police work and the need to follow through with all the necessary legwork is reminiscent of Dalgliesh at his best.

Irene Huss is called in to help investigate when an apparent suicide turns out to have been something more sinister. The victim, Richard von Knecht, rather than jumping from his balcony appears to have been helped on his way and the case only becomes more complex when there is a bomb blast at von Knecht's office and an explosion in the car of one of the chief suspects. When it becomes apparent that there is also a link through drugs to roaming gangs of Hells Angels the police team have to ask whether there is some wider criminal conspiracy going on, especially as all the family members who might have had reason to want von Knecht out of the way have what appear to be cast iron alibis.

I suspect that the reason I enjoyed this book so much more than many of the other Scandinavian novels I've tried is because it concentrates on the police rather than the victims or suspects. I felt I really got to know the officers concerned in a way that has not been the case with several other writers. In that respect, this is much more like a British crime novel. However, one thing that it does have in common with many other swedish novelists is an exploration of some of the social and political problems that beset the country. In particular this book considers the rise of the Nazi Party among Swedish youth and their denial of the Holocaust. It doesn't impinge on the case - it is one of Irene's daughters who becomes involved - but nevertheless, Tursten makes it clear that any impression we may have in the UK of Sweden as a haven of political neutrality and liberal minded thinking is little more than a fantasy.

As far as I can see there are two more Irene Huss books available with a fourth due later this year. If you want to try Swedish crime fiction without straying too far in style from what you're used to then I very strongly recommend you start here.

To Prepare or Not To Prepare.......

2011-05-29T10:03:00.000+01:00

Well, I don't know what it was that hit me last weekend, but I'm very glad it seems to be on its way out, helped, I'm sure, by all your good wishes. I haven't even felt up to any decent convalescent reading, so I can't make myself feel better by making the rest of you jealous with the tales of all the good reading time I've had. Still, showing off would not be good for my soul, I'm sure, so maybe it's better that way. To be perfectly honest, I still feel as if I am a Bear of very little brain, so excuse me if what I write over the next few days makes very little sense indeed. And the first person who says, "So what's different?" gets knocked straight off my Christmas card list.

Something which caught my attention in last weekend"s papers, and which I had intended to raise then, was an article about the need to prepare, to do your homework, as it were, before you take yourself off to any sort of cultural event. I should have made a note of it at the time, but I was rushing out to go to Stratford and thought I would come back to it on the Sunday. Of course, I didn't, so I may not be quoting the opinions with any accuracy but it was quite simply because I was going over to Stratford that it caught my attention and I thought I would ask what you thought about it.

As far as I remember, the gist of the argument was that if you were going to a play or an art exhibition or a concert it was pretty much your duty to have done some preparation before you went so that you could fully appreciate the work being laid before you. So, if you were on your way to a concert you should have listened to the music beforehand so that you could judge the quality and interpretation of the specific performance you heard. If going to an exhibition you should have researched the artist's portfolio and the context in which s/he was painting. And, if you were going to the theatre you should have attempted to read the play before you went.

As I say, this struck a chord with me at the time, because I was just on my way to see the RSC's production of Philip Massinger's play of 1632, The City Madam and earlier in the week I had picked up a copy of the programme precisely so that I could read the scholarly articles which the Company always commissions over a pre-preformance lunch. These articles don't give away the story, but they do cast light on the particular aspects of the play and its original context that the director has seen as important. I find that they help to focus my mind on the world in which I am going to spend the next three hours before I ever take my seat and I do feel as if I enjoy the whole experience the more for having put some effort into it. However, a couple of weeks prior to that I had been at a discussion with the director of another of this season's offerings, the 're-imagined' Cardenio, where the director, Greg Doran, had specifically asked that we shouldn't read the play itself before we saw it. I probably respect Greg Doran more than any other theatre director around, so I hastily stuffed my newly purchased copy in my bag and haven't taken it out since. I don't see the production for another month or so.

I can't really comment on the concert aspect because I've been going to classical performances now on a regular basis for over fifty years and it is very rare indeed that I go to hear a piece of music I don't already know. If I do, it's likely to be something new that isn't available to listen to beforehand anyway. I have, however, recently been to see the Jan Gossaert exhibition at the National Gallery (post to follow) and for various reasons wasn't able to read up about the artist's work or life beforehand. I did pop into the Gallery prior to going to the exhibition itself with the intention of picking up the catalogue to read through over an early lunch but it was so vast that I couldn't even face the thought of lugging it round the exhibition with me and so ended up not buying it until I was ready to come home. And I'm sorry about that because I'm certain that if I had had more context into which I could have placed Gossaert's work I would have got a lot more out of the paintings themselves. Preparation would have helped.

So, where do you stand? Do you prefer to go to these things 'blind'? Do you feel the need, or the duty, to have done some preparatory homework? Or do you laugh at the very idea of having the time to research before you experience a great cultural event? I'm interested to know.

Poorly!

2011-05-22T10:37:00.000+01:00

Driving back from Stratford yesterday I realised that I was beginning to ache all over. This morning it's worse. It looks like summer flu. I don't want to infect anyone, so I will see you all next week.

Urggg!

The Merchant of Las Vegas

2011-05-20T18:33:00.000+01:00

Two or three weeks ago I went over to Stratford to hear Patrick Stewart talk about playing Shylock. In many respects the discussion was general, partly because he is coming to the role this year for the fifth time, but also because the current production, which had its press night earlier this week, has been shrouded in mystery and the director, Rupert Goold, was very keen that the overall concept of the production shouldn't get out too soon. As you can imagine that set all of us off trying to find out what we were going to be watching and it wasn't long before someone managed to discover that shock horror the central setting was a casino in Las Vegas. I'll pause while you all recoil in dismay.

Certainly, all the members of my two Shakespeare classes took several deep breaths before letting me know in no uncertain terms what they thought of the idea. I have to admit that I wasn't exactly cheering from the gallery myself, although I could see certain similarities between the financial situations explored in the play and the careless way in which money is won and lost in the world of the multimillion Las Vegas gambler. However, on Monday one of class went to see a preview and the following morning I got an e-mail quite simply raving about it, saying it was the best production of the play she had ever seen and that once she'd got used to the idea she thought the concept was sheer brilliance.

So, it was with a great deal of interest that I went over to Stratford on Wednesday to hear Rupert Goold talk about the play and explain why he'd taken the decision not only to set it in America, but also to play it in American accents. Of course, there is the argument that East Coast American vowels are closer to those of the Elizabethans than are current English ones and that such a decision makes the speech more authentic, but what was more interesting was what he had to say about the stress patterns involved and how the American speech rhythms emphasise the verse forms far more than the British rhythms do. I have to admit that I hadn't thought about that before, but once he demonstrated it was easy to see what he was talking about, especially where there is some form of antithesis being evoked. Try doing 'to be or not to be' in an American accent and you'll see what I mean. Goold also cited other highly successful productions of the play that have been set in very specific places. There was one situated in Weimar Germany and another located in the time and location of the early Rothschilds. In siting the play in the gambling capital of the world he has been able to emphasise the risks that both our own society and that of many of Shakespeare's contemporaries have been prepared to take with money - often, it should be said, with other people's money.

And of course, there is that other great financial parallel - rising inflation and its social consequences. In medieval England prices had remained pretty much stable for three hundred years, but in the sixteenth century inflation was rampant and by the time this play was written the cost of living had doubled in a matter of years. Lacking twenty-four hour news programmes to analyse the situation for them, the English were understandably annoyed (actually they would probably have been even more annoyed if they had had twenty-four hour analysis) and their answer was all too often to blame the problem on the foreigners coming into the country, who were, as they saw it, taking their jobs and their wages. If you think the cry of 'British jobs for British workers' is a twenty-first century slogan, think again. In the early 1590s the pamphleteers were doing great business raising feelings against Flemish workers in London in just the same way as voices are raised about EU immigration today. It's easy to see both where the impulse behind the Shylock situation came from and its modern day parallels.

By the time Goold had got this far, and with Val's ringing endorsements in my ear, I was beginning to be won over and the next point he made tipped the scales completely in his favour. He noted that this is a play that has no character in it that you can actually like and this is the first time that I have come across someone else who has the same problems that I do with Portia. Now, I know that Portia gets a raw deal from her father. In this production the whole business with the caskets is turned into a game show. Choose the right box and get the beautiful girl - and, of course, the money that goes with her! That's a production choice which seems to me to sum up the whole situation nicely. However, her bad luck in the matter of fathers can't hide the fact that Portia is as ardent a racist as any of them. Look at the trial scene closely some time. She knows Shylock's name and yet she refers to him all the time as 'Jew', you can hear the contempt not simply for the individual, but for his entire race, and it is Portia who, having 'deprived' Shylock of his pound of flesh, suddenly ratchets proceedings up a notch with her 'Tarry Jew, the law hath yet another hold on you'. She is enjoying this. There were whispers of discontent in the audience on Wednesday at this point, but I was silently cheering. I have always avoided directing The Merchant not because of Shylock and the antisemitic issues, but because I have never known what to do with Portia or, perhaps it would be truer to say, because I have never had the courage to play her as I have wanted to and has Goold clearly has taken the risk of doing.

So, all in all this looks set fair to be a very interesting theatrical experience indeed. Press night was Thursday and the only review I've seen was very positive. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing it until August, so it will be sometime before I can come back and report here on what I find. If anyone else is going sooner then I would be fascinated to hear what you think.

Trick of the Dark ~ Val McDermid

2011-05-17T17:56:00.000+01:00

For some reason I simply can't imagine I missed the publication of Val McDermid's latest stand alone novel, Trick of the Dark and consequently I've only just got round to reading it. Never mind, If I'd read it on publication I wouldn't have had the pleasure of curling up over it during the past few evenings although, as usual where McDermid is concerned, now that I've finished it I feel completely bereft. I don't know any other writer of crime fiction who is as good in her one off fiction as she is in her series work. Much as I look forward to a new Tony Hill novel this autumn, McDermid is the one writer who doesn't elicit a groan with the announcement of a non-series publication. Her last novel, A Darker Domain, which recalled memories all too vivid of the social devastation of the Miners' Strike, was brilliant and this latest is just as good.

Charlie Flint is a senior lecturer in Clinical Psychology and Psychological Profiling accredited by the Home Office to work with the police as a profiler. Or rather she was. All that is now in limbo as her suitability is called into question following a trial that has gone spectacularly wrong. Brought in to give her opinion as to whether or not the accused had committed the crime for which he was indicted, she (correctly as it turns out) states that she thinks he was not. However, despite her warning that while he may not have killed on this occasion he is likely to in future, the accused is set free and goes on to kill four times before he is brought up before the courts again. In as spectacular piece of unfairness as you could imagine, Charlie is publicly held to blame for this and while the General Medical Council considers her position she is banned from practising.

Going stir crazy, Charlie is almost relieved to receive a mysterious package in her morning post containing cuttings about the murder of a man on his wedding day and the subsequent trial and conviction of two of his business associates. The case is especially intriguing as it involves people she knew during her student days in Oxford and so, encouraged by her partner, Maria, she decides to follow up the case simply to give her something else to occupy her mind.

Gradually it becomes apparent that the package has been sent to her by the mother of the bride, her old Oxford tutor, Corinna, and when Charlie challenges her about this she confesses that she has indeed deliberately set out to involve Charlie because she is convinced that the wrong people have been convicted. Her daughter, Magda, far from being the traditional grieving widow, has taken up very rapidly with another ex-student, Jennifer (Jay) Stewart and is now living with her. Corinna, although uncomfortable with her daughter's apparently overnight conversion to lesbianism, is actually far more concerned because she claims she has reason to believe that Jay has committed murder in the past in order to get something she desperately desires and is certain that she has done so again in this instance. She challenges Charlie to find out the truth of the situation, throwing out the bait that by proving there has been a miscarriage of justice in this case, Charlie will be able to redeem herself in the eyes of the public, the police and her academic peers.

As much to get the persistent Corinna off her back, Charlie agrees to at least look at the evidence, the more so because it allows her to be in Oxford and near to the enigmatic Lisa Kirk, a woman she has recently met and who is exercising a hold over her that even she realises is too strong to be healthy. And from there everything else unfolds. But I am saying not a word more. You need to read this for yourself. But I strongly suggest you don't pick it up unless you have a couple of days when you don't have to meet any other commitments. While there were one or two plot points I was a bit sceptical about, the characters are fascinatingly drawn and I was throughly involved from the first page. This is vintage Mcdermid and I can't recommend it too strongly.

To Believe or not To Believe...........

2011-05-15T10:49:00.000+01:00

First an apology. There was some sort of blip in the Blogger world at the back end of last week and as a consequence a number of comments were wiped out. That really annoys me, as I would hate to think that anyone believed I had deleted their comment as unacceptable. I do do that from time to time, but not with any of these. I have no way of knowing just how many people were involved, but if one of them was YOU, then please accept my apologies.

Secondly, a blowing of my own trumpet. I did what I said I would do last Sunday and cancelled one of my library tickets. As a result my bookshelves are slightly less bowed in the middle and I am feeling a little less guilty about the number of library books that appeared to have taken up permanent residence here. I have also reduced the number of reservations I have on my other two tickets to the number of books I could actually take out at any one time. It is so embarrassing when ten books turn up at once and you only have space for eight of them on your ticket. Which do you leave behind? Quite how long I will be able to maintain this part of the resolution I don't know, but at the moment I am being really good. (And also, really smug, but we won't go there for the moment.)

There were a number of things that I wanted to write about this morning but if I try to rattle them all off I will end up saying very little about nothing. So, a relatively short post about one of them and then I'll pick up on the others later in the week. Over breakfast this morning I was reading a review of a new book by Harold Bloom, called The Anatomy of Influence. In it the reviewer, John Carey, a distinguish British scholar, writes:

He regards Shakespearian characters as real people, who exist outside the plays. Hamlet, for example, has a will of his own and “rebels against apprenticeship to Shakespeare”. Those who object that Hamlet is just a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination are quickly dismissed: “I brush aside all academic critics — dryasdusts and moldyfigs.” As real people, the characters are free to become quite different from anything Shakespeare wrote. Bloom’s Falstaff is “an incessant and powerful thinker” and his Hamlet “knows everything”.
Apparently Bloom once wrote a fantasy novel, and in these creative misreadings he becomes a fantasist rather than a critic. His imagination also gives him access to secrets of the characters’ sex lives omitted from the plays. He knows that the marriage of Othello and Desdemona was never consummated, and that Macbeth was prone to premature ejaculation (at least, that is what he seems to mean when he discloses that Macbeth is “sexually baffled in his enormous desire for his wife”).

I have read very little of Bloom's work; he is not as feted on this side of the Atlantic as I believe he is in the US, and if this is representative of his views, then I can't see me reading very much more. It is, of course, possible that there has been an editorial slip and that what he really intended to say was that Falstaff is “an incessant and powerful drinker” but given the other examples I suspect not. I'm not denying that Falstaff did a fair bit of thinking, but let's face it, it did him no good at all given the way that he completely misread the situation between himself and Prince Hal. And, if it is true that Hamlet knows everything, how come we have the perpetual question of to be or not to be hanging around in our heads? However, should it be the case that Macbeth was indeed prone to premature ejaculation, then I suppose that does at least give us an answer to the worrying dilemma of how many children had Lady Macbeth. We should be grateful for small mercies.

But, oh yes, there is a 'but' hidden away in here. There is an issue here. If we are going to believe in a character and the way in which they behave within the novel concerned, then they do have to have a reality to them that allows that belief. They have to be three dimensional enough for the reader to accept that they could do what they do within the confines of a human life. If a writer plies their craft well enough for us to laud a book with praise then surely one of the things they must have achieved is the creation of a set of characters that behave in a consistent and recognisably human way? So, if a writer does his or her job supremely well is there not a chance that caught up within the power of the reading experience we might not, just for a moment, forget that there is no such person as Elizabeth Bennett, or that annoying as he is in his worst excesses, I am not going to be able to take Dickens' Pip and bash his head against a wall to knock some sense into it?

It's a fine line. And it is the reader's line to draw. If John Carey's reading of Harold Bloom's work is correct then Mr Bloom seems to draw it a lot further over than I do. But you may feel differently and it would be interesting to hear your opinions. Is it acceptable to project a life beyond the page for a character or should we confine our discussions to those facts that the author gives us? And, I suppose, a second question could be should that be just the 'original' author, given how many characters find a second existence in the pages of writers' works.

As a postscript I should tell you the story of a discussion my Mom and I had before she died. We had both been reading the Harry Potter series and she was as big a fan as I am. However, I must have been waxing too lyrical on this particular occasion, because I distinctly remember her saying to me in a very concerned voice, "Annie, they're not actually real, you know." Perhaps she thought I was going to leave my car parked outside her house and try and fly home on her kitchen broom.

Every Breath You Take ~ Michelle Spring

2011-05-13T18:13:00.000+01:00

I've had a number of false starts this week with books by crime writers I hadn't encountered before. As an article in last weekend's Sunday Times pointed out, everyone and his dog is writing crime fiction these days and, in the case of some of the books I've tried over the past few days, the authors would have been best advised to leave their dogs to get on with it.

A good crime novel is not easy to write. It has to excel in terms of both plot and character. The former has to be believable while at the same time having enough suspense to keep the reader turning the pages and the latter have to have psychological reality despite the fact that some of them at least will, of necessity, eventually have to be shown to be distinctly flawed human beings. It isn't enough to excel in one area. To write even readable crime fiction you have to be good at both. To write outstanding crime fiction you have to be a master at both.

Well, Michelle Spring isn't exactly a master as yet, but at least her first novel featuring the private investigator, Laura Principal, Every Breath You Take, kept me reading until the end and was satisfying enough to send me back for a second helping. Running for Shelter is on the shelf waiting.

Laura Principal, once an academic herself, now shares a weekend cottage with her friend Helen, a librarian at Eastern University. When financial considerations force them into taking a third into their arrangement Monica Harcourt, the art lecturer who applies, leaves Laura feeling uneasy. However, as Helen does not seem concerned by Monica's jumpy behaviour, Laura decides to go ahead with the arrangement and calls in to Monica's Cambridge home to finalise the agreement. Glancing in through a lighted window she sees the artist tied up and brutally assaulted. It seems that whatever Monica had been so concerned about has finally caught up with her. In the days that follow Laura is forced to track down Monica's assailant not only in an attempt to bring about justice but also to protect herself, Helen and Helen's daughter, Ginny, as they receive threats that they may become targets of the attacker themselves. Tracing back Monica's time at the University, Laura discovers that there have been several lecturers who appear to have been targeted in ways that have left them at best uncomfortable and at worst, unable to continue in the profession they had loved. The misconduct that she eventually uncovers is unpalatable to say the least, but is it what lies at the heart of the mystery, or is there something else behind the attacks? As all the best summaries say - now read on.

In terms of plot and character Spring doesn't do too badly. I felt the plot was brought together very well. I thought I knew who the killer was and was wrong, but even so I didn't feel as if the plot that was eventually revealed was misleading or in anyway implausible. Indeed as an ex-acadmic myself, I'm afraid I knew that given the right characters it was all too credible. However, I did have some qualms not so much about who the assailant turned out to be, but about the depth of characterisation that that person had been given. (I'm having to be careful here, because I got the gender wrong, so I don't want to use singular pronouns.) They had been so lightly sketched in that they didn't seem to have anything other than a supernumerary role until the very end of the book. I don't think this is fair on the reader. To pull an unexpected rabbit out of the hat at the end of a story is all very well and good, but it does have to be a rabbit that has at least been hopping about in full view for a reasonable amount of time. I hope that that is a failing which will have been corrected in later books because otherwise I did enjoy this and it would be comforting to be able to think that some good had eventually come out of an otherwise rather substandard week's reading.

Sir Thomas More ~ By Just About Every Jacobethan Writer Going.

2011-05-11T15:59:00.019+01:00

I went over to Stratford last week to hear John Jowett, one of the Professors at the Shakespeare Institute, talk about his new edition of the Jacobethan play Sir Thomas More. Jacobethan because in this instance the most recent dating evidence suggests that while it was originally written around 1599 in Elizabeth's reign, it was then completely revised in 1604 after James had come to the throne.

For all sorts of technical reasons (such as there are large chunks of the original version missing!) it is the revised text that John has been working with. And anyway, it is the revised text that is the really interesting one. There is evidence in it of the hands (quite literally, the only existing copy is a hand-written manuscript) of at least four playwrights we can identify, plus A N Other whom we cannot, but who is probably not a recognised playwright, who is coyly know as Hand C. And of course, the truly remarkable fact is that one of those playwrights is William Shakespeare.

Have you worked out what that means? The manuscript is hand-written. Shakespeare's scenes are in his own hand. He touched those very pages. Which is more than you or I can do, because this treasure of English Literature is stored in the British Library never to be seen by the likes of you or me and even if you're the likes of John, you only get to see a bit of it at a time and you definitely don't get to touch it at all. John likened working with it to being in the presence of a holy relic. Oh yes!

As far as I can gather the story goes something like this. The play must have been commissioned by one of the Elizabethan theatre companies. We don't have any evidence as to which one it was, although there is no reference to it in Henslowe's diaries so it most likely wasn't The Admiral's Men. It was probably written in the first instance by Anthony Munday, one of those contemporaries of Shakespeare you don't come across very often. However, like all plays at this time, before it could be played or printed it had to be licensed by The Master of the Revels, the Sixteenth Century equivalent of the modern day censure.

From what evidence we have Sir Edmund Tilney was good at his job. He doesn't appear to have taken the red pencil to scripts willy-nilly. He would ask for a couple of lines to be altered rather than cutting whole scenes. So, there must have been real problems with this text for him to have demanded the wholesale re-write that appears to have taken place.

Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof, he writes at the beginning of the copy that was sent to him, and begin with Sir Thomas More at the Mayor's sessions, with a report afterwards of his good service done being Sheriff of London upon a mutiny against the Lombards - only a short report, and not otherwise, at your own perils.

Sections of the play were parcelled out to different writers, possibly by Hand C, whoever he may have been. Those people who are really good at this sort of thing can detect the work of Henry Chettle, Thomas Haywood, Thomas Dekker and, of course, William Shakespeare. They appear to have worked independently of each other, which causes problems when you try and put the whole thing together, problems that Hand C seems to have tried to eliminate by adding his own occasional links. The whole thing must have been a nightmare to edit and it would take someone of John's patience and scholarship to come anywhere near a satisfactory text.

His edition has just been published by Arden and I for one am going to put a weekend aside as soon as possible to get really into all the intricacies of the play and its history. I am also going to try and access the on-line facsimile of the manuscript, although at the moment I'm having difficulty locating it. I want to see Shakespeare's hand for myself.

Eureka! I found it, or at least part of it. You can access a 'pop-up' of one of the pages Shakespeare wrote here

and get access to a facsimile of parts of the manuscript in an edition prepared in 1911 by W W Greg here.

You can actually download the Greg edition onto your Kindle, but if you do be prepared for the fact that the images of the original manuscript give a whole new meaning to the word illegible!

Eyes Bigger Than......

2011-05-08T12:57:00.000+01:00

I have just come in from a long walk during which I have taken a momentous decision; I am going to give up one of my library tickets. I am going to go into my local library tomorrow morning, surrender my card and ask them to delete it from the system.

No, I haven't had a brainstorm, nor have I taken leave of my senses. What I am trying to do is curb the habit I have of ordering far more books through the library system than I could ever hope to read in the time I'm allowed to keep them. Actually, I shouldn't call it a habit, it's far worse than that; it's an addiction. Not only do said books weigh down my book shelves until they are at breaking point, but while those books are sitting on my shelves they're not on the library's shelves available for other people who do have the time and the desire to read them. It has to stop.

Because of the way our library system works I have three different tickets which in total allow me to borrow forty books, most of them for up to three months at a time. Forty books, and that's not counting the ones that I can have on reserve. You can see the problem, can't you? The Booker long list comes out - I order the lot. One of the papers does a 'books of the year' or 'summer reading' article - another dozen or so join the list. And blogging! Oh don't get me onto the effects blogging has on this. Oh yes, you're the ones who are really to blame. None of this is my fault. It's you lot out there, leading me into bad habits, that are at the root of the problem. You're a bad influence, that's what you are. I should have known better than to keep company with any of you.

There is another side to this as well. I'm not really being discriminating enough in what I reserve. Instead of taking the time to browse through a book or really read the reviews thoroughly I'm ordering things on a whim and then finding that I've spent time trying to get into a book that was never going to appeal to me in the first place, time that could have been better spent with books I had taken the trouble to find out more about. Of course, some times there is a wonderful, serendipitous find, but not often enough to justify the continuation of my present approach.

So, I'm clearing the decks. The ticket and the books associated with it go back to the library tomorrow. I won't need more than one journey provided I pack the car boot carefully. And the new policy of keeping a wish list and only reserving book from it as I finish one in the pile begins. One book finished, one book ordered and no more than a dozen in the house at anyone time. I have the will power, I can do this. If I repeat that often enough I might even begin to believe it.

The Bell ~ Iris Murdoch

2011-05-06T17:21:00.002+01:00

For reasons it's far too complicated to go into, our Monday Reading Group this month discussed Iris Murdoch's 1958 novel The Bell. I went through a Murdoch phase a couple of decades ago and read her first three novels, but got distracted at that point and so never reached this, her fourth novel, described to me on Monday as 'the first one with real people in it'. Perhaps that is a clue as to why I gave up on her previously. I really can't remember. For most of the group, however, this was at least a second and in one case, a fourth read and having spent last weekend in Murdoch's enclosed lay community at Imber, I can see why.

After a couple of false starts last week with novels where the writing was either so ordinary or so sloppy that I simply couldn't go any further, to enter a world so precisely and so effective described as the one we are introduced to here was a sheer joy. I don't think you would ever call Murdoch a poetic writer, but there is an almost mathematical definitiveness in the way in which she lays out her setting and her characters before the reader. As someone remarked, you could walk the paths around the lake which is central to the novel without any fear of getting lost and if you ran into one of the characters in the course of your walk you would know exactly who it was you had met before you even spoke to them.

Imber is an enclosed lay community attached to an Abbey of Medieval foundation and it is towards this claustrophobic environment that Dora, one of the two protagonists, is travelling as the book opens. Dora, a young woman in her early twenties, is returning to her estranged husband, Paul, several years her senior, who is researching in the Abbey's archives. Dora is young not only in years but in maturity - witness the fact that she is returning to Paul rather than ditching him completely. Dora may be a blunderer who does wrong things even if for the right reasons, but she does not deserve Paul who is manipulative and in many ways an inadequate human being. The word that is used most often in relation to him is 'violent' and although he is never physically so, mentally and emotionally he is a bully.

If Dora is always acting before really thinking, then the other chief protagonist, Michael is the exact opposite. Many of the disasters that occur during the course of the novel might have been avoided if only Michael, the putative leader of this group, had acted rather than thought so protractedly about whether or not he ought to act. In a weekend spent considering the role of equivocation in Macbeth, Michael was yet another character who was persistently saying one thing while meaning something else, although in the main the person he was trying to fool was himself.

One of the questions we inevitably found ourselves posing on Monday was whether or not the book had dated and while I think that would be too harsh a criticism, it is true that Michael's dilemma must have been viewed in a very different way by the original 1958 readers to that which is likely to pertain today. At the time the book was written both the social and legal attitude towards homosexuals was different to today, even if we may not have progressed as far along the road in terms of rebuffing any prejudice as we might like. Michael's sexual orientation torments him, especially as his greatest desire is to enter the priesthood. As far as we are aware he has done nothing about fulfilling his sexuality until he is trapped by a fourteen year old boy in the school where he is teaching. There is no doubt that Nick is the one who does the seducing and who then, seemingly for the pure pleasure of destroying another human being, denounces Michael as his lover. Ten years on, Nick, who now seems bent on destroying himself through drink, is sent to the community in an attempt to save him from his inner demons and Michael is now forced to face again the reality of who he is in the midst of a world that will condemn what lies at the core of his identity out of hand.

During the few summer weeks that the novel's plot spans both Michael and Dora have to learn certain harsh truths about themselves and, like the bell which gives the book its title, they have to recognise that brilliantly projected new starts are rarely able in reality to live up to the promise of the dream. I can certainly see why some of the other members of the group had returned to this book more than once and I'm very glad that I have been reintroduced to Murdoch's work. I shall definitely be going back for more.

Macbeth ~ Royal Shakespeare Company

2011-05-04T15:41:00.003+01:00

The new RSC season has started and all is once again well with my world. I am never completely happy unless I have a parcel of theatre tickets sitting in my bureau waiting to be used and if they are tickets for the theatres in Stratford well then all the better. I started off this season's theatregoing last Saturday with a visit to the new Main House to see Macbeth.

Those of you who read my piece last week about Michael Boyd's current production of Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company will recall that I was concerned that this performance might not hold together as a coherent whole, given that Boyd had said he was only playing the Shakespearian elements of the text and cutting out the passages by Thomas Middleton. Well, I needn't have worried, the production is one of the best I've seen of this play and certainly hangs together as well as Macbeth ever can. This is in part because, despite what he said, Boyd has still left in certain lines from the Middleton scenes.

Thus, we still have the prophecies that set the whole play in motion. After all, if no one tells Macbeth that he is destined to be King then we might as well all head for the bar before curtain up and stay there. But, there are no witches. Instead Boyd gives us three ghostly children, a direct result of his production some years ago of a dramatised version of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Talking about this Boyd said that he had found those children more scary than any representation of the witches that he had ever seen and more appropriate as an image of terror for a modern audience. And I would have to say that I agree with him, especially as those children then become the MacDuff babes who are later brutally slaughtered. Believe me, no one was tempted to laugh.

And, we still have some of the Porter's lines, although they are assigned to Seyton and there is no indication of the Porter in the programme. At first glance it might appear that these lines are kept just as an opportunity to remind the audience that this play was initially performed only months after the failed gunpowder plot and indeed we all came away having had the lesson that you should never return to a firework once lit hammered forcefully home. However, there is a far more important reason why Boyd has to keep some of the Porter's speech and that is because he needs retain the reference to the equivocator.

There is a really interesting article in the programme by James Shapiro, one of our leading Shakespearian scholars, about the nature of equivocation and the way in which the use of the word changed as a result of the activities of Father Henry Garnet, the foremost Jesuit in England and a man who instructed Catholics how to mislead the authorities not by lying, but by evading the truth. Garnet was hanged, disembowelled and cut into pieces on May 2nd 1606, the year in which this play was written and so the concept of equivocation would have been very much in the minds of that first audience. As Shapiro says:

Before this time the word 'equivocation' had only been used by English writers to describe what happened when a word could be understood in more than one way, when its meaning was ambiguous or uncertain. There was no sense of equivocating as deliberately misleading others in sinister way or...of using a mixed proposition to express one part of a man's mind, and retain another.

That was not the case after Garnet's activities became well known.

Equivocation is at the heart of this production. Macbeth tells only part of what has occurred in his letter to Lady Macbeth and they both then equivocate with their guests. Macduff's wife tells her young son partial truths and Malcolm equivocates with the Thane of Fife himself. Who is telling the truth? Who dares to tell the truth? The other aspect of Jacobean England that is forceable brought home, especially through the set, is the fact that the country is still riven by the religious 'civil wars' of the Tudor period. For the past sixty years it has been unsafe for one faction or another to make known their religious allegiance and who knew who could be trusted and who could not. Neighbour could turn on neighbour, brother on brother. The need for equivocation was something Shakespeare's audience would have understood only too well.

As far as it is possible, I thought Jonathan Slinger and Aislin McGuckin handled the main roles well. I'm not certain that there is ever enough in the early part of the play to account for Macbeth's turn from loyal follower to traitorous renegade. Those first scenes are appallingly underwritten and my own belief is that we don't have the full Shakespeare text. I suspect that when the Middleton additions were tacked on it was to bring coherence to a version that had been cut down to fit the 'two hour traffic of our stage'. Remember that they had to be off stage by five (by-laws were by-laws even in Shakespeare's day) and all the great tragedies would have had to be cut substantially to fit in with this requirement. Luckily, we have managed to retain the complete Hamlet, Othello and (with certain caveats) Lear, but Macbeth, I think, is another matter. Slinger came through the early scenes as well as any actor I've seen other than Ian McKellen and McGurkin's descent into madness was well defined. I also liked the very bluff MacDuff of Aidan Kelly; I would have trusted him with my life any day of the week.

So, all in all, a success, which is more than you can say for most productions of Macbeth. It's had very good press reviews as well, so if you live within reach of Stratford and feel you might want to see it, I would book quickly. I think this may be one of those shows where tickets are hard to come by.

Making Connections ~ The Other

2011-05-01T12:28:00.000+01:00

A librarian friend of mine is convinced that books talk to each other because she so often finds that a subject she has been reading about in one will then find echoes in whatever volume she picks up next. Well, I certainly wouldn't want to disagree with her. In fact, one of the reasons that I first took up blogging was precisely because I wanted somewhere that I could explore those connections as and when they arose, although then, as now, I was interested in connections across all disciplines rather than just in books. My weekend decision to do a bit of weeding and try and get back to reading for more than just escapism prompted me to think about that early resolve again and so this is going to be the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about making connections and the 'added value' such thematic 'echoes' can bring to the enjoyment of a book, a play, a piece of music or a work of art.

Over the past few weeks I've gone back to some of my earliest dramatic roots and have been re-reading the Greek Tragedies. One of the issues that has come up time and again has been the problems that the 5th Century BCE Athenians so obviously had with anyone who was in some way 'other'. You might have thought that this would be predictably with someone who was foreign, but far more often it was with someone who was female. Pity then poor Medea, who being both foreign and female was on a hiding to nothing before she ever set foot in Greece. OK, so what she did, killing not only her rival for Jason's love but also the children she, herself, had borne him, was perhaps not the ideal way to endear herself to the populous, but nevertheless she just didn't stand a chance.

What happens to Medea, especially the way she is set aside by Jason when he wants to take another wife, and the attitude expressed towards her, epitomises the often expressed regret of the Greek male that women had to exist at all. In a strictly patriarchal society and one which saw women as inferior beings, it was a source of great concern to the men of Athens that it was unavoidable that they had to consort with women in order to perpetuate their family through the production of a male heir. You get the feeling that if it hadn't been blasphemy to say so they would have told Zeus he'd got it wrong somewhere. All babies should spring fully formed out of their father's heads as Zeus's own child, Athena did - except, of course, such children should always be male. They might be able to get rid of a foreigner, but the dreaded woman they had to keep about them.

Coincidently (or not, as the case of the whispering books may be) I've also been doing a lot of work on The Taming of the Shrew this past few weeks. It's proving quite a frustrating play to study, mainly because wherever you look for academic discussion you find only two subjects being given any great attention, the relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew and the question of how you interpret what happens to Kate in that final scene, where it seems she capitulates completely to Petruchio's mastery. I might come back to the first of those issues at some point because I think the answer to why there are two very different but clearly related plays probably accounts, to some extent at least, for the disappointment brought about by the second, however, the interesting aspect of my study in relation to this particular set of connections was the extract I came across from Jack Holland's A Brief History of Misogyny printed in the programme for an RSC production of the play.

For men, women are the original 'Other' - the 'not you'...woman presents a...complex problem for those who designated her as 'the Other'. She is 'the Other' that cannot be excluded. Racists can avoid interaction with the despised group. But intercourse with women is in the end unavoidable, even for misogynists...intimacy with her is as unavoidable as it is essential. The very maintenance of human life and society depend upon it.

And there we have it again, this idea that there are some instances of 'otherhood' that you can avoid, but the 'otherhood' of gender is inescapable. I'm not certain, by the way, that this is a particularly helpful approach towards understanding what is going on in either A Shrew or The Shrew as texts, but clearly there was one RSC director who thought that it might provide a way of approaching the play when it came to trying to make sense of it on the stage.

Then along came instance the third, Julia Spencer-Fleming's second book in her Clare Ferguson series, A Fountain Filled With Blood. Spencer-Fleming is one of those crime writers whose works I shall not be throwing into the compost bin. Not only is this second book definitely better than the first, but she is also a writer who offers you subjects that require some serious thinking on the part of the reader, demanding that they consider their own position in relation to whatever issue she has chosen to raise. I suspect the fact that Clare is an Episcopalian Priest is not purely coincidental.

In this book the people who have been assaulted, and in one instance killed, are all homosexual. Clare is convinced that this is not a coincidence and that the fact that they are hate crimes should be made public. Russ Van Alstyne, the local Police Chief, disagrees, arguing that to do so could cause unnecessary panic. However, eventually he admits to Clare that this may not have been his only reason for refusing to publicise the sexuality of the victims.

"I guess I'm afraid that, deep down, all my reasons for not issuing a general warning or going to the press with the gay-bashing idea are because of ... who the victims were. Because I don't, you know, feel comfortable around gay guys."

"Bur Dr. Dvorak was - is - a friend of yours. That doesn't make any sense."

"We were friends at work. I knew who he was and what he was, but it never impinged on our relationship. He never talked about Paul, just like I never talked about my wife. The fact that he was gay was like having a friend at work who's Jewish, or vegetarian. You know about it, but you don't have to think about it, because what you do together never intersects with that other part of the person's life."

Here then is the other side of 'otherness', the 'other' you can pretend doesn't worry you because you can avoid ever having to face what marks that person out as different. (Or for that matter, what marks you out as different. Difference works both ways, although we rarely manage to recognise the fact.)

It makes you think, doesn't it? How many prejudices do we deny simply because we've never been put into a position where we've had to intersect or interact with the people who embody them? If we found ourselves in Russ's position could we be that honest? Unless I hie me to a nunnery, I have to acknowledge the gender 'other', but other 'others'? I'm not so sure.

The Burning ~ Jane Casey

2011-04-29T16:29:00.000+01:00

To Whom It May Concern:

Thank You.

I had great difficulty with Jane Casey's first novel, The Missing, so much difficulty, in fact, that I didn't finish it. I'm not certain what it was about the book that I found so off putting. Perhaps it was the theme, but I've read books about missing children before. Perhaps the plot or the characters just didn't grab my attention. For whatever reason it didn't strike a chord with me and as a consequence I wouldn't have picked up her second novel, The Burning, if it hadn't been for the fact that I read several very complementary reviews out there in the blogging world.

And, I'm very glad that I did, because if this book is anything to go by, Casey is going to be one of those writers who improves with successive volumes and in DC Maeve Kerrigan, she has a character who will definitely be worth knowing over a long period of time.

Maeve is part of an elite murder squad investigating a series of murders, each of which has ended with the victim's body being set fire to following a brutal beating. When Rebecca Haworth's body is found in apparently similar circumstances the first thought is that she is victim number five. However, as evidence is gathered and forensic reports are studied an element of doubt begins to grow and the team has to face the possibility that they may have a copy cat killer at work. Already under extreme pressure from the press and public to make progress in identifying and catching the killer they have named 'The Burning Man', the police have to decide whether to go public with their fears or carry on the investigation as if there were only one killer while keeping an open mind on the question of Rebecca's attacker. It falls to Maeve to follow up the possibility that there may be something in Rebecca's past that has led to an old enemy taking advantage of the publicity surrounding the serial killings to rid themselves of her unwelcome presence. Key to Maeve's enquiry is Louise North, Rebecca's roommate when they were students and, for the most part, the story is told alternately from Maeve and Louise's point of view.

The picture that Maeve builds up of Rebecca is very different from that which the world in general saw and the further she delves into the young woman's past (and present) the more the DC questions the apparently close relationship that Louise claims the two had continued to share. Certainly something happened in their last shared term at Oxford that has cast a shadow over their friendship and as the investigation continues it begins to look as if finding out what that was might provide the key to identifying Rebecca's killer.

Casey's development of the characters of these two very different women is probably the best thing in the novel and it is Maeve who will take me back to her next book, which it seems will also feature the young policewoman. I'm less sure of her ability to handle plot. She sets herself up with a very complex premise, because the hunt for the serial killer has to continue and in many ways her narrative choices signal the resolution of that story as the climax of the book, which it is not. I'm also slightly concerned that she may feel that she has a good thing going in the two different first person narrative voices and it may become a pattern. And you all know my feeling about pattern. It gets its effect when you break it. Stick to it too rigidly and you become straitjacketed by it. Nevertheless, this seems to me to be a far better book than The Missing and I am very much looking forward to the appearance of The Reckoning later in the year.

Middleton's Macbeth.

2011-04-27T15:51:00.001+01:00

I spent an interesting evening on Monday listening to Michael Boyd, the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, talk about his new production of Macbeth. I haven't yet seen this on stage but what he had to say has certainly whetted my appetite for a play that I wouldn't say is normally one of my favourites. I have only ever seen it brought off successfully once and then in the very small and intimate space of 'The Other Place'. For me it's a play that doesn't work in the vast regions of a thousand seater theatre.

Aside: I should ask myself seriously at some point why that is. After all it was written for The Globe which probably took an audience of three thousand. But that's a discussion for another day.

To come back to Boyd's production. What has me particularly intrigued is that apparently he is only playing the Shakespeare text and that is a very bold move indeed.

You do realise, don't you, that Macbeth as we know it (I am trying very hard to avoid the Star Trek joke here, especially with Patrick Stewart in the company this season) is only partially by Shakespeare. What we have is almost certainly a version for the stage cut and embellished by Thomas Middleton. If you decide to play only the Shakespearian bits then you lose not only the Porter, but also the Witches and Hecate too. For some people I know that means the very bits that wake them up.

These passages are, however, parts of the Folio text that can be very hard to bring off. Antony Sher and Greg Doran in their book Woza Shakespeare make the point that in a society that has no real concept of witches in a way which has an immediate, daily impact, it is almost impossible to invest the characters with the terror that they would have inspired in an audience that believed implicitly in the potency of such figures. Too often, in the modern British theatre, they simply get the production off to a bad start by being laughed at. The Porter normally fares better because by that stage in the play you're desperate for anything that offers a bit of light relief. But, how do you give him the relevance that he had at the time? His speech is a bit like Koko's 'little list' in The Mikado. If you want it to have the effect it had when it was first produced, you have to update the references. Most productions would change the script at this point, although I've never before come across a director bold enough to cut the scene completely.

I have to say that this has me really itching to see this production. However, I do have a caveat. Will it hold together now? I suspect, and of course I have no way of knowing, that we have lost a good deal of what Shakespeare actually wrote when he first put quill to parchment over Macbeth. Think how short it is compared to the other tragedies. I've seen an almost uncut version played without an interval in little over two and a half hours. Try doing that with Othello or Hamlet. We only have the Folio version of Macbeth. There are no Quartos published before the 'official' 1623 First Folio. In other words, we don't have the original Shakespeare Macbeth, only the version 'prepared' by Middleton for a stage that expected a play to be around the two hour mark. Now, Middleton knew his job. He has given us a script that works. He was, after all, a damn good playwright himself. But if you start to adapt an adaptation are you going to be left with a text that has an inner coherence?

Well, time will tell. I'm seeing the production within the next couple of weeks and you can be sure I will have something to say about it. I hope it will be good.

Freedom, Not Escapism

2011-04-24T11:45:00.000+01:00

Long ago and far away, in another blogging life, I used to contribute a discussion piece to the Sunday Salon on a fairly regular basis and very often what I wrote about would be sparked by the topic the author, Jeanette Winterson had raised in her column in the previous day's Times.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who regrets the passing of the Times Saturday Book Supplement. It was full of interesting reviews and debates and, coupled with The Guardian's Review Section, it ensured that you could catch up, over each weekend, with whatever had been going on in the book world during the previous seven days. But it was Winterson's pieces I always looked forward to the most. As an author she is someone whose works I have never particularly enjoyed, but as a thinker about the literary world and about what it means to be a reader I thought she was second to none. So, it was with real pleasure that I picked up the collection of articles from Books and Company that I bought in Oxford a couple of weeks ago and found that the first of the pieces is one by Winterson, A roof of one's own.

In this essay Winterson talks about the way in which she 'made' books for herself as a child to replace those she could not buy. Her technique was not exactly orthodox, but then neither was her childhood. Whereas you or I would probably have bought ourselves a notebook and scribbled away in the privacy of our bedroom, the strictures laid down by Winterson's mother meant that was not an option open to her. Instead she would memorise passages from the books she was allowed to borrow from the library and then copy the lines down on roofing slates from the old Accrington Stanley football ground. Lacking any chalk with which to scribe, she used instead the stones that lay about the derelict buildings.

Of course the eighteenth and nineteenth century classics she was allowed to borrow were long and the slates not really adequate for the purpose and so inevitably major parts of the works would get paraphrased in Winterson's own words. But, what she was aiming for was not a boiled down Reader's Digest style abridgement.

It was not the story I wanted, I wanted those moments of intensity that change a narrative into a poem. I wanted to feel its heartbeat against my own.

Those couple of sentences brought me up short. Especially that clause it was not the story I wanted, because when I think about my own reading, of late it has only been the story I've wanted. My disquiet was only enhanced when I moved on to the next paragraph where Winterson talks about freeing herself from within the books as she copied them out.

Freedom, not escapism. Time with a book is not time away from the real world. A book is its own world, unique, entire. A place we choose to visit, and although we cannot stay there, something of the book stays with us, perhaps vividly, perhaps out of conscious memory altogether, until years later we find it again, forgotten in a pocket, like a shell from a beach.

Freedom, the chance to enlarge mind and spirit beyond the confines of everyday.

Yes, exactly! That is exactly what books used to do for me and yet of late, if I am honest, I know that I have been reading in a very different way; I have, for the most part, been reading simply to escape.

Now, I don't think there is anything wrong with a bit of escapism. Goodness knows, during the winter we've just been through there were days when a book that took you away from the feet deep drifts of snow covering the surrounding district was the only way you could get 'out' of the house. But, when I think back and try and remember the last time I read a book that gave me a feeling of having freed something of myself, of having expanded my mind and spirit, of having asked me to really engage with it, I'm hard pressed to recall anything.

Part of me would like to argue that there must have been a reason for this, that my mind must have needed a time of lying fallow and I think there is possibly some truth in that. But I also think that it is very possible to simply become lazy in our reading habits and ask for nothing that demands more than a cursory, glancing attention. A time of essential fallow can morph only too easily into a period where we simply allow the weeds to grow.

So, with Winterson at my side, I am going to go weeding. That doesn't mean that I am going to give up completely on my plot driven crime fiction but I am going to make sure that it isn't any more than fifty percent of what I read and I am only going to read the best, rather than whatever happens to come my way. If it becomes clear that I have something in my hands that has little more than plot to recommend it then back to the library it goes.

And, if anyone at the Times should be reading this (well, you can always hope!) I want my Saturday Book Supplement back please. More especially I want Jeanette Winterson's column back. I've clearly suffered without a regular kick in the behind to keep me up to the mark.

Anyone For Tennis

2011-04-21T16:08:00.000+01:00

I don't know if you remember, but earlier this year I blogged about an idea that had been mooted by the Institute of Fine Arts situated on Campus that they would run a book discussion group in conjunction with this summer's exhibition on tennis in art. They were running into difficulties because there aren't that many books that feature tennis to any great extent. Indeed, even when I put out a call for suggestions the blogging world found itself pushed for ideas.

Well, earlier this week I was contacted about the final selections and this is the list that the people organising the event have come up with.

Double Fault, Lionel Shriver
A Room with a View, E M Forster, (romance between Lucy and Cecil)
Period Piece, Gwen Raverat
Love Among the Chickens, P G Wodehouse, (Chapter XIII. Tea and Tennis)

As you can see, the connections between the game and the narrative in most of the books are as tentative as the texts I came up with, so there obviously really is a gap in the market out there just waiting to be filled by someone other than Lionel Shriver. Nevertheless, I've signed up to participate because I want to encourage the Institute's attempt to reach out to a wider audience. I think the basic idea of linking exhibitions with other art forms is a really good one and who knows what possibilities there may be in relation to future exhibitions.

So, I will try and whip some enthusiasm for Double Fault, difficult as I know I'll find it. I have real problems with Shriver's written style. It doesn't matter how good or otherwise her work may be, the surface structure just gets in between me and it. Forster, of course, is never any hardship and this particular book a wonderful summer read. And, I suspect that the same will be true of the Wodehouse. I don't know the chosen book, but doubtless it will be good for a wry smile at the very least and if it has to do with tea then it's bound to be a winner where I'm concerned. I think the Raverat is a memoir. I must check. If that's the case then I will be very interested in it because I know she and her husband were good friends of the Woolfs and I enjoy anything to do with Bloomsbury.

What with this and the Summer School June to September is going to be a busy reading period, but then how does that make it different from any other period in my life? What I will find interesting about this project is to see what the dynamics of the group will be like. I've never been involved in an ad-hoc coming together like this before. All the book groups I've belonged to have been made up of people who, for the most part, already knew each other. There is the potential here for a certain amount of fireworks as people jostle for position. It could work very well or it could be a recipe for disaster. I shall just have to wait and see.

Roseanna ~ Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo

2011-04-19T17:38:00.003+01:00

I haven't been particularly successful with Scandinavian Crime Fiction over the past few months. I certainly haven't come across any writer whose works I have wanted to explore past the first sampling. At first I was inclined to put this down to poor translation, but as the numbers mounted I began to think that there must be something in the Scandinavian approach to the genre which just didn't work for me. However, several friends had urged me not to give up until I had tried the Martin Beck series by the husband and wife team, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and last week I finally managed to get hold of the first novel in the sequence of ten, Roseanna. The preface to my copy stresses the importance of reading the books in order as they were, apparently, conceived of as one long narrative in ten chapters. I have, therefore, just completed chapter one and surprisingly, I think I shall be going back for chapter two. Surprisingly, because there are many of the same features in the Beck novel that made the other Scandinavian books so disappointing, however, there is also something else about it which takes it out of the ordinary and makes this a series worth coming back to.

The body of a young woman is dredged up out of a lake and it is clear on closer inspection that she has been murdered. However, there have been no reports of missing persons who might fit her description and there is no evidence as to how her body came to be in the lake in the first place. Martin Beck thought by some to be the country's most capable examining officer, is called in to help his colleagues discover who the woman is, where she comes from, how she got into the lake and of course most importantly who put her there. There is no quick and easy solution to the mystery and one of the things which is most characteristic of the book is the way in which it stresses the daily grind of police work; the hours spent pouring over reports or shivering through surveillance duties are spelled out in meticulous detail. Even when the police feel certain that they have identified the culprit there is no immediate confrontation. Martin Beck and his fellow officers still have to spend weeks constructing a situation that they can only hope will lead to his giving himself away. And when the case reaches its resolution there is no sense of triumph, simply of a job completed.

It is this attention to the realistic detail which most clearly characterises the novel and which to some extent separates it from many of the other Scandinavian crime fiction I've read which, with the exception perhaps of Larsson, has been fairly short on detail. However, that isn't why I think I enjoyed this more than the works of other writers, in fact, coupled with the narrative voice evoked, it could have been fatal. Because, as in so many other instances I still found the narrative voice worked to keep me at a distance. As a reader you are never more than an observer of the reported events that comprise a narrative, but it is up to the author just how close an observer you are allowed to be. Scandinavian fiction always seems to want to keep me at arms length. I often feel as if I am reading an official police report rather than a narrative intended to involve and entertain me. When I add that to the way in which the attention to realism seems to flatten out the arc of the narrative structure, which would normally serve to add shape to the otherwise random events of everyday life, what I end up with is something that feels closer to fact than to fiction.

At least it would be if it wasn't for one thing and that is the rather wry sense of humour that permeates the writing and even makes its way through the translation. And it is this feeling that neither Martin Beck or the writers are taking themselves too seriously which eventually won me over to the book and which will take me back to the other novels. That and the fact that as someone who is particularly involved in the study of narrative organisation I am very interested to see how the writers manage to make good their claim that the series is one complete narrative, presumably with a narrative arc of its own, distinct and separate from those of the individual stories. That is an extremely difficult thing to bring off, for technical reasons I won't go into here. If they manage it I shall be very impressed indeed.

As a footnote, when I was in Blackwell's last weekend, I noted a relatively recent book about Scandinavian Crime Fiction, called simply, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, it is by Paula Arvas and Andrew and looked very interesting indeed. Perhaps at some point in the future I shall have to treat myself to a copy.

Summer School ~ 2011

2011-04-17T15:22:00.000+01:00

Every year I look longingly at the adverts for Summer Schools, especially those which involve a study of some aspect of the literary world. And, every year I force my gaze away from those same adverts for one simple reason - the cost. A week at a Summer School at one of the UK's universities can set you back anything between £400 and £800 and that's before you factor in accommodation, board and transport. Even if I didn't live on a very fixed income there is no way that I could even begin to think about splashing out that amount of money.

Well, last year, I decided to do something about it. It seemed to me that if I felt this way there must be others with the same desires and the same problems meeting them. I began by canvasing members of my U3A group to see what interest I could gather there and before I knew it I had a group of a dozen other avid readers who were all keen to see if we couldn't put something together for a little less in the way of financial layout.

What I eventually devised was a week in which we met on three afternoons, the Monday, Wednesday and Friday, to discuss three separate, but linked, books. We met in a different person's house on each occasion and someone different led each discussion. That way no one was asked to take on too much of the burden of hosting or of preparation. We all dropped 50p into a saucer on the way out every time we meet to cover the cost of tea and biscuits and as a consequence the week set us back by the grand sum of £1.50 a head. It was a roaring success. We started on the Monday with Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, moved on to Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and finished up the week with Andrew Taylor's The American Boy. By the Friday meeting we were so involved with the books and with our comparison of the treatment of crime in the nineteenth century that I had to force people to leave so that Jen could have her home back.

Needless to say, we are repeating the experience this year and running a music equivalent as well and the time has come for me to put together lists of possible literary trios so that this year's group can decide what they would like to read. I'm going to follow the same pattern as last summer when I offered five sets of three books and asked people to rank them one to five in order of preference. I then totalled the marks for each set and the one with the lowest score was chosen. In fact, it was a very close run thing last year and four of the trios pushed each other hard. That makes it easier this time round because I can retain the three losers on the list. There was one set that no one was interested in, so that will have to be replaced and I need a final group to fill in for those we actually read last year.

Choosing the books is more than half the fun. There are some criteria I have to abide by. Everything has to be easily and cheaply available and we don't want anything too heavyweight. This is supposed to be fun, after all. Other than that, the literary world is my oyster. This is where I've got to.

Groves of Academe

The Secret History ~ Donna Tart
Gaudy Night ~ Dorothy L Sayers
Nice Work ~ David Lodge

Then and Now

Ghostwalk ~ Rebecca Stott
A Secret Alchemy ~ Emma Darwin
The House on the Strand ~ Daphne du Maurier

The Regeneration Trilogy

Regeneration ~ Pat Barker
The Eye in the Door ~ Pat Barker
The Ghost Road ~ Pat Barker

221B Baker Street and Beyond

The Hound of the Baskervilles ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Final Solution ~ Michael Chabon
Arthur and George ~ Julian Barnes

Authoboigraphical Fiction

The Master ~ Colm Toibin
The Hours ~ Michael Cunningham
Girl in a Blue Dress ~ Gaynor Arnold

The first three are the runners up from last year. The first and third speak for themselves. The second comprises three books that all work in two different time periods. The first new group is one I've put together from books that have something to do with either Sherlock Holmes or his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the second (for which I desperately need to find a better title!) is made up of books that fictionalise aspects of a writer's life.

Now, here's where you come in. Are there any obvious contenders for those last two groups that I've missed? I don't want to put one of the Mary Russell books into the Sherlock Holmes set. I know the people who will be participating and I don't think it would work. But, are there other re-imaginings of Holmes' adventures? And what about other books that fictionalise authors? I would have loved to include the new David Lodge, A Man of Parts, which is about H G Wells, but it's still only in hardback. Any suggestions will be gratefully received before I have to finalise the list at the end of the week.

The Poison Tree ~ Erin Kelly

2011-04-15T14:37:00.000+01:00

Given how long I've had to wait to reach the top of the reservation list for Erin Kelly's debut novel, The Poison Tree, I was hoping that I was in for a good read at the very least and quietly praying that I wasn't in for a major disappointment. The reviews that I (and clearly all the other library borrowers) had read were excellent and the fact that no one seemed to be giving up on it after a day or so boded well too. But, you know what it's like. You get yourself all worked up about a book and then for some reason it just doesn't live up to all the hype.

Well, not in this case.

The Poison Tree is a psychological thriller more in the style of Barbara Vane than the crime fiction which makes up the bulk of my relaxation reading. So, perhaps I'm not the best person to judge its worth, not enough experience in the field. But I think this is probably the best crafted book I've read so far this year and certainly one that I would recommend without hesitation.

Karen is coming to the end of her degree course at Queen Charlotte's College in London where she is expected to take an outstanding first and move on to one of the many academic opportunities that are being offered to her. (It is 1997, exceptional students were still being fought over rather than having to fight to get themselves noticed!) During her time in London, working class Karen has shared a house and life style with three much more well-heeled and extremely orthodox colleagues and has definitely missed out on the rather more 'dissolute' activities you might expect a student to have indulged in. As their time at University draws to a close, however, the other members of the household and Karen's decidedly upperclass boyfriend all make it clear that relationships which may have been acceptable in the world of study are not going to continue beyond graduation and, at a loose end for companionship, Karen bumps into Biba, a drama student in the same College. Her life will never be the same again.

Biba lives in a derelict old Highgate house with her brother Rex and a stream of extremely unorthodox lodgers and, as a result, of this chance encounter, Karen's final summer as a student is spent experiencing many of the features of a more typical student existence that she has previously missed out on. While she becomes Rex's lover in a physical sense, it is the relationship between herself and Biba that is far more important to her and her feelings for the young actress grow until they border on the obsessive.

And then something happens. Something that results in Rex spending the next ten years in prison, while Karen, giving up any notion of an academic career is left to bring up baby Alice on her own.

I'm not giving anything away by saying this because one of the features of the book that I like the most is the integral manner in which Kelly interweaves the present with the past. We know from the beginning, as we wait for Rex's release, what he has been imprison for and we know too that there is a question as to the veracity of the verdict. What we are not certain about is the reason that verdict is being called into question and it is that which slowly Kelly reveals to us in a way which keeps you guessing without ever making you feel as if you have been fed false information or misdirected in any way whatsoever.

Kelly clearly has a remarkable gift for plotting, but she is also excellent at drawing character. There are some wonderful yet thoroughly believable creations amongst the lodgers who inhabit the house in Highgate, but she is also brilliant in her portrayal of the main characters. In particular the portrait of Biba, one of the most selfish and self-centred people I've ever encountered in literature, rings completely true. Her final appearance might have seemed unlikely at least in a less able writer's hands but here it was note perfect. I could happily have rung the woman's neck with my own hands.

Erin Kelly is going to join that short list of writers whose books I automatically read as soon as I can get hold of them. She has a second novel, The Sick Rose, coming out in June and I'm off right this minute to harass the library because they don't have it on pre-order. I may even have to talk to the bank manager and buy my own copy.

Yogabouthere

2011-04-13T15:45:00.002+01:00

My apologies for a very brief post today. As you will have gathered, I had a wonderful day in Oxford on Sunday, but as usual such delights have to be paid for and it will be a couple of days longer before I'm back functioning at anything like normal. This does, however, give me the opportunity to point those of you who practise yoga in the direction of the blog my own yoga teacher has recently established.

Yogabouthere

I've been working with this particular teacher for about five years now and she is really very good indeed. Her blog offers suggestions for sequences of poses as well as links to other sites where she has found ideas that she thinks her students will enjoy. I hope you enjoy them too.

The Great Book Buying Expedition

2011-04-11T15:11:00.000+01:00

So, yesterday morning I woke up feeling well enough to set out on a Great Book Buying Expedition because, as some of you know, I was recently the lucky recipient of an unexpected present of some book tokens. As real book buying for me always means travelling to one of two fairly distant places it can never be planned in advance, I have to take myself by surprise and just set out. If I know what I want and it's something that I think they are likely to have in, then I go to a small Shropshire town called Much Wenlock to my favourite independent shop, Wenlock Books. If you're ever in the area I can't recommend the shop too highly. Anna sells both new books and second hand volumes and is always only too glad to talk to you about her stock. If you're lucky she will also make you a cup of excellent tea as well. What more could anyone ask?

Yesterday, however, I needed to browse and I also felt well enough to get as far as Oxford and that is a combination which means just one thing - a day in Blackwells.

Some people, I know, find a bookshop that size intimidating and I can understand that. How can you hope to find something that is just right amongst all those books? How do you ever narrow down your choice? Panic ye not! I have the perfect answer - tea and buns. The tea and bun break is an essential part of any Great Book Buying Expedition. Actually, if you're going to be pedantic about things, several tea and bun breaks. Blackwells acknowledges this fact by having a cafe inside the shop, although normally there are so many people having tea and bun breaks that it is hard to find a seat. But don't let that worry you, there are plenty of other appropriate places where you can indulge within very easy walking distance.

So, your plan of campaign should go something like this. Arrive at your destination. First tea and bun break while you decide which sections of the bookshop you are going to prowl round and in what order. For me, yesterday, this was the literary criticism section, the fiction in translation and the history department.

Having made your initial selection you then go back to the shop and carry out a preliminary sweep, logging possible choices as you go. Note book and pencil is essential at this stage, although you will need to be prepared to defend yourself if challenged by concerned booksellers who think you are just noting down titles that you then intend to buy at half the price from the Internet. (You wouldn't do that, would you?) This reconnaissance can take anything from half an hour to half the day depended on the size of the bookshop and how many categories of book you are interested in. However long it takes, by the time you get to the end of it you will definitely need another tea and bun break. You might even need two buns if your exertions have left you really exhausted.

Over your second bun you then peruse and narrow down your lists and decide which books are going to be deemed to be serious contenders. Over your first bun you may have got the list down to a couple of dozen but it's over that second one that you do the really hard work and cull for all you are worth. They will want to close the bookshop at some point that evening.

Back to the book face then, this time for some serious browsing. I hope you haven't come in your best clothes, because this part of the proceedings inevitably means that you will end up sitting on the floor pouring over tables of contents, reading first chapters or chasing through indexes to see if your favourite writer is mentioned or if that essential piece of information is covered. This is hard work. When you have browsed your way through your short list you will justifiably be tired. You will need more tea and buns.

I recommend a real good strong Assam tea for this deliberation because this is where you have to make the final selection and your resolve will need fortifying. However much you want that book on Crime Fiction that's only available in hardback at £125 (I kid you not!) you can't have it, at least not if you have my bank manager, you can't. You have to be realistic and make decisions. You may even find you need a full cream tea to get you through this difficult and heartbreaking part of the operation.

Finally, at a point where the staff of both tea and book shops are ready to have you removed for loitering with intent, you pull out your purse (or in my case, book tokens) and you buy your books. These may or may not be the ones you decided on over your full cream tea. It's not unknown for all this hard work to be in vain and for me, at least, to completely change my mind the moment I get back inside the shop and buy something that just happens to cross my line of vision as I go through the door for that last momentous visit. But what does that matter? I've had the fun, I've had the tea and buns and I've finally got the books. What better way of spending a day?

What's that? I haven't said which books I actually bought? Sometimes I think that is the least important part of the whole expedition, but if you really want to know.

I rejected the fiction in translation because I've had so many bad experiences recently with poor transitions and I didn't have anyone with me who could vouch for the quality of what I was looking at. The history section was always little more than a preliminary scan for when I move on to study medieval literature next year and want some social and political context. The serious buying in that area won't happen until Autumn at the earliest. So, that left literary criticism and within that I found myself drawn back again and again to the essay section. I looked long and hard at the latest volume of Virginia Woolf's collected essays, but it was very expensive, and I also hankered after the new Zadie Smith collection, but that is coming out in paperback later this month and I am prepared to wait a little longer. So, what I finally came home with was a volume of Michael Chabon's essays in praise of reading and writing, Maps and Legends, and a collection edited by Susan Hill, The Best of Books and Company, which comprises a selection of the essays that originally appeared in the magazine of that name. I love nothing better than reading about other people's bookish loves. Both of them will give me hours of pleasure, accompanied, of course, by more tea and buns.

Annie

U3A Monday Reading Group

2011-04-09T17:34:00.000+01:00

You may have noticed that I've added a new tab at the top of the page for my Monday afternoon reading group and I thought you might like to know a bit about us and the type of book that we read.

As the tab says we meet under the auspices of the University of the Third Age, which you may know is a world wide organisation through which people who for the most part are either retired or semi-retired come together to self-educate. Branches vary in size. My local group is around the 200 mark, but there are others which are smaller and others that are as big as 1400 or 1500. The study groups available will depend on the interests of the individual branch members and the expertise within the group in terms of people who can lead the learning. In my case I belong to the history and music groups in addition to the reading group and I teach two Shakespeare classes as well as running a literature Summer School each year.

I belong to three different reading groups, but this is the one that most makes me think. Almost all of the members have been English teachers up to at least 'A' level standard and all of them are really really intelligent readers. I learn so much just from talking with them about the books we choose to read. I love our Monday afternoons and always come home with my mind buzzing with new ideas.

Our group was set up to read award winners and for the past three or four years that is what we have done, choosing from amongst the Booker, Pulitzer, Orange, Costa, Commonwealth and Dagger Lists. Given the amount of 'bashing' that goes on after any prize is awarded, it's interesting that in all that time there has only been one book that we have unanimously agreed should never have had a sniff at any award. I probably ought not to say what that was in case the author is reading. I've been caught out that way before.

Despite our having so few failures, at our last meeting we decided that we would like to spread our nets a little wider and acknowledge the fact that in many instances there have been other books on short lists that have been every bit as deserving of the award as the title that actually won. So, with that in mind, we have been studying the runners-up for the Booker and I suspect that this is a project that will keep us busy for the next couple of years, if not longer. May is a special meeting because we have specifically been asked to read Iris Murdoch's The Bell. As we take a break in August, for the moment we have just selected titles for June and July, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop and Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. But before we break up for the summer we will decide what were going to read through the winter and I will post our choices here.

If you have any favourites that you know have run the Booker winners close and which you would like to recommend then we are always open to suggestions. What do you think we should read over the coming months? Or, if you are brave enough, are there any you think we should definitely avoid?

Annie

How Much Bottom Space Do You Need?

2011-04-07T14:28:00.001+01:00

Ah well, the hay fever season is here again and this is clearly going to be a bad year. So, until my little blue miracle pills begin to kick in, my posts may be a bit on the short side, as too much working with a screen tends to start my eyes watering with a vengeance. I did, however want to share with you the beautiful architectural designs that you can see to your left. These are going to be used as the basis for the Globe Theatre Company's new indoor theatre intended to mirror Blackfriars, the winter home of Shakespeare's Company from 1608 onwards.

The designs were discovered in Worcester College Oxford and probably date from around 1660. I was privileged to be at a seminar last week where Professor Andrew Gurr, the leading scholar in the study of Shakespeare's theatres, company and audiences, presented these to us and talked about what we could learn from them about the theatres of the time. One of the most interesting points he made was that these theatres were clearly designed for listening rather than seeing. As a result, the best seats in the house were those over the stage, on the stage itself, and in the side boxes; exactly the opposite of what you would expect today. In exploring this in greater detail in order to work out what the audience capacity would be, they have come to the interesting conclusion that if you were a Lord you were allowed 2' 6'' bottom space, if you were a Lady you got 2', but if you were like me, a mere pleb, then you had to squeeze yourself into a paltry 18". As someone I was telling yesterday remarked, "Just like travelling by plane then". There are somethings about human nature that simply never change.

Annie

The Whisperer ~ Donato Carrisi

2011-04-05T16:22:00.001+01:00

Has anyone else read this? Because, if so, I would very much like a second opinion. I was asked to read it by a librarian friend who knows that I enjoy crime fiction. She herself was in two minds about it, and I think I can see why, but as I say, I would like to hear what others think.

The Whisperer is a first novel by an Italian writer, Donato Carrisi. Carrisi has written in the past for the cinema and you can certainly see a cinematic imagination at work in this book.

Basically, without giving too much away, the story centres around, Mila, a police woman who specialises in the rescue of abducted children. She is called in to help a dedicated and already established team following the disappearance of five young girls between the ages of eight and thirteen. A possible burial site has been identified and sure enough as the police begin to dig they also find remains. However, they are not the remains of complete corpses. All they find is a series of left arms. And they don't find five, they find six. Somewhere another girl has been abducted, but her disappearance has not been reported. Furthermore, forensic examination of the arms leads the team to believe that while the other five children are dead, the sixth may well be being kept alive. The race is on to identify that final child and to find her while there is still a chance of saving her life.

For a first novel there are many things about this book that mark Carrisi out as a writer to watch. The plotting is tight and the twists come at just the right moments and certainly surprise. But, while they are not signalled, they are still believable. This man knows a lot about human nature. Furthermore, the psychology on which the basic premise is founded is sound and this isn't surprising given that the author has a degree in law and has specialised in criminology and behavioural science. I don't want to talk about the direction his thinking actually takes because it would given too much away, but well known cases are quoted and unlikely as the underlying hypothesis might seem, when you start to think about it I'm afraid any disquiet as to its accuracy gives way to disquiet at the thought that there are humans out there who can behave like this.

I also thought that he managed his characters very well. I had clear pictures in my mind of each of them and of their relationships with each other. My only possible uncertainty was to do with the Police Chief, Roche. Accepting that he would have got as far as he has in the service asked me to be more cynical about the relationship between police and politics than I like to be. But then, I have to remember that this is Italy. It is a different system from the one I'm used to and therein lies the rub.

Because I do have some disquiet about this book and the further I read the more I began to wonder if it isn't down to the way in which it has been translated. To begin with, the actual lexical translation itself seems to me to be very uneven. One of the problems with English becoming such a universal language is that there are many different versions of English. We're probably all aware of the difference between British English and American English. Who was it said that we were two nations divided by a single language? There is the same degree of difference between other varieties as well and I think part of the problem here is that the translator hasn't decided which variety he is going to opt for. So, I will happily be reading along in British English only to suddenly come across a phrase that I have only ever heard from some of my Irish colleagues. All well and good if the character is Irish, but he isn't, he's Italian.

Or is he, because some of the names seem to have been 'translated' into English as well. Am I really supposed to think that there was a small Italian boy in a Catholic orphanage called Billy Moore? I don't think so, somehow.

But then, am I actually suppose to think that the book is set in Italy? I can't remember any direct references that would place the action that precisely. Is the translator going for a kind of universality, a one size fits all that would let any reader place the events in their own country? If so, it isn't going to work because there are aspects of the way in which the crime is solved that won't translate that neatly. And elements in the aftermath that not even I am cynical enough to think that the police would get away with in the UK.

I know I am always very wary of translations, so perhaps I am being unfair but the feeling I come away with from this book is that here is a writer of considerable potential who needs to have serious discussions with his publishers about the way any future books are prepared for the overseas market. I don't think this version does Carrisi justice. As it stands I found the story he had to tell really gripping. Next time it would be good if the narrative through which it found voice was gripping as well.

Annie

Book Tokens

2011-04-03T12:22:00.000+01:00

Totally unexpectedly, I was given some book tokens yesterday. They were a completely unnecessary thank you for a very minor service I'd done someone, but nevertheless very very welcome, because I love book tokens.

Not, every one does, you know? I have three sets of god children, all in varying stages of growing up, and while the youngest are still at the stage where I wouldn't think of giving them a token, because anything that doesn't have wrapping paper that can be torn to shreds is a major disappointment, the other two groups have diametrically opposed views on the subject. The eldest, a grouping of three, now all in their thirties, demand the real thing. So what if I choose a book they already have? It doesn't matter. They want something I have gone out and chosen especially for them. The youngest of these has a birthday just days away from my own and we think so alike about literature that on three occasions we have chosen exactly the same book for each other. It can get complicated.

The middle group are both teenagers and for the last twelve years or so, they have been equally adamant about wanting tokens. I don't think it's to do with them not trusting my judgement, they will often ask for advice about what to buy, they just like going round the bookshop for themselves and weighing up the options.

And I'm with them. The thrill of being able to browse the shelves, knowing that you don't have to leave all those books behind, that you're in a position to take one or maybe even two, home with you without having to calculate whether or not you can really afford them, is wonderful. Some of you will have heard this story before, so I apologise in advance, but I think it's worth the retelling. Some years ago an ex-partner (and believe me, that ex is important) asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said that I would love some book tokens so that I could go and browse round my favourite bookshop looking for books that I didn't even know existed but which I would want as soon as I saw them. Well, Christmas morning came and we exchanged presents. I gave him the individualised, custom-made barometer I'd commissioned after he had admired the maker's work at an exhibition we'd been to and he gave me.......

An Electric Toothbrush.

You see why the ex was important.

Well, no electric toothbrush this time. This time I get the joy of deciding which bookshop I'm going to go to, browsing for a couple of hours, going off and having tea and cake while I think over what I've seen and then finally coming home clutching my wonderful and unexpected purchases. Could life hold any greater pleasure? Not from where I'm standing.

Writing By Hand

2011-03-31T16:33:00.000+01:00

I don't know about you, but I would be completely lost without the BBC and consider it one of the major blessings of civilisation. In one manifestation or another it is on in this house most of the day and living in a time or place where that would not be possible is something I prefer not to contemplate. As I expect most of you know, the BBC publish a range of magazines to complement the superb programmes that they put out both on radio and television and we in the Senior Common Room take three of them, BBC Music, BBC History and BBC Focus.

As you can see, the Focus magazine concentrates on issues to do with all branches of the sciences and technology and those of you who live in the UK won't be surprised to hear that the current edition is packed with articles to do with Brian Cox's series on The Wonders of the Universe. However, it was a much smaller item that caught my eye over breakfast this morning. (I hope you're duly impressed - reading about science over the breakfast table - of course, you might not find that impressive at all, just terribly sad, but if that's the case I'm sure you'll be too polite to say so.) The article was a report on findings from Norway and France about the neurological impact of writing facts down as opposed to reading them on the computer screen. And I quote:

it's thought that writing is better, because when jotting down letters with a pen, the brain gets feedback from these 'motor' actions. This is turn helps fix what's been written in the memory.

Well, I would have to say to start with that I'm not sure that like is being compared with like here. Surely the comparison should be between writing notes with a pen on paper and typing those same notes onto a computer, however, I do have some sympathy with the view being expressed. I have always claimed that, unlike those people who don't know what they think until they hear what they say, I don't know what I think until I see what I write. Writing has always helped me clarify my thoughts and I find that that is the same whether I am writing by hand or typing onto a computer screen. In fact, thinking about it, because I can do the latter faster I think it is possibly more helpful here. When it comes to remembering things, however, having the experience of shaping the letters is, I find, extremely helpful and this has really been brought home to me lately by the arrival of my Kindle.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love my Kindle and I have no intention of being parted from it, but I am finding that when I make an electronic note while I'm reading I don't remember what that note was about in the same way as I would have done when I was jotting things in a notebook. Oh, yes, it's very convenient to have all those notes collected together for me in one place, especially as the passages I've highlighted are there as well, but somehow I don't seem to remember the points I was making as well when I do it in this form as if I had written them, rather more slowly but with that additional kinaesthetic element, by hand. Lately, I have found myself going back to the notebook even when I am reading electronically because the salient points of whatever I have been reading are proving to be less firmly fixed in my mind.

Clearly this isn't just my experience or the article wouldn't have been written, but I found myself wondering how other e-reader users felt about this. Are you using the annotating function to any large extent and, if so, do you find it as easy to fix points in your mind this way as you did when you were writing them down? I would be interested to know.

And, an additional note for those of you of a certain age who might feel that you are finding it difficult to remember anything. Yesterday morning that same wonderful BBC brought us Professor Lewis Wolpert, himself eighty-two, explaining that it isn't that we forget things but simply that the act of recall takes longer. I don't know about you, but I find that incredibly comforting.

In the Bleak Midwinter ~ Julia Spencer-Fleming

2011-03-29T15:07:00.000+01:00

I have never quite been able to decide whether the way in which one is constantly being introduced to new writers is one of the blessings of belonging to the blogging world, or one of its major curses. Practically every day, it seems, I go hurrying over to the library site to see if I can locate either a specific book or anything by a previously unknown author that I would never have thought about requesting had it not been for something one of you had recommended. (As you can see, I'm putting the blame fairly and squarely where it really lies.) Ultimately, this way lies madness. I walked out of the library this morning struggling under the weight of no fewer than seven volumes. It's a mile and a half walk home!

Nevertheless, sometimes there is no doubt that such recommendations are a blessing. So whoever it was pointed me in the direction of Julia Spencer-Fleming, thank you. You always know you are onto a good thing when you reach the end of a book and automatically look for the next in the series because you don't want to leave the main characters behind. This was definitely the case with In the Bleak Midwinter, the first of Spencer-Fleming's novels about Clare Fergusson, the newly ordained Episcopalian priest of a small upstate NewYork community and Russ Van Alystyne, the local chief of Police.

Being the first woman priest in this small town is going to be difficult enough for Clare, especially as it is clear that she is as different as can be from her predecessor; she doesn't need anything that is going to make life even more complicated than it already is. Cue disaster in the shape of a newborn baby abandoned on the steps of the church and the discovery, hard on the heels of this event, of the body of a young woman. These two incidents bring Clare and Russ into close contact and they find it easy to collaborate having both come from military backgrounds which have shaped their minds to work in pretty much the same sort of organised way.

Who is the baby? Who is the girl? Is she the baby's mother and if so who might want her dead? Why was whoever left the child on the church steps so insistent that he be adopted by a particular family from the congregation? Spencer-Fleming develops a convincing plot line that kept me guessing almost to the end.

However, good though her plotting is, I think her really strong points are her ability to create realistic settings and to draw extremely believable characters. Clare has come from much warmer climes and the New England winter is a real shock. It was to me as well. I really felt the cold and most particularly the difficultly of day to day life in a countryside that is almost impossible to penetrate once the snow comes down. I thought we'd had a difficult winter this year, but it was as nothing to what the people of Millers Kill have to face. If we have another bad spell next winter remind me not to complain before I've re-read this, will you.

Clare herself I found really attractive. As someone who was brought up in the Church, but no longer belongs, she struck me as the sort of priest the ministry could do with encouraging. She leads her congregation in the ways she feels are moral without actually judging them. When I am screaming at a character, "And you call yourself a Christian?" Clare is trying to find a way of helping that person see for themselves that what they are proposing is not acceptable. The best thing I can say about Clare is that I would like her for a very good friend.

Something that I will be interested to see is how Spencer-Fleming develops the community in which her novels are set. I'm seeing her here in relation to Louise Penny, who has created in Three Pines a group of individuals every bit as important and as central to her work as Inspector Gamache and his police team. So far I haven't felt that there is anyone among the inhabitants of Millers Kill who is going to become a recurring and important character but that may change further into the series.

All in all then, this is a mark in favour of being introduced to new writers and a book worth adding to the pile as I struggle home from the library. Thank you.

Annie

This Year 'Don Quixote'?

2011-03-27T17:25:00.000+01:00

I'm still working my way slowly though Susan Hill's book of reading delights, Howards End is on the Landing, and this morning, curled up in one of my favourite coffee shops, I came across her piece about the books with which we form a special relationship despite the fact that they have been standing unread on our shelves for decades at the very least.

They become known in a strange way, perhaps because we have read a lot about them, or they are books that are part of our overall heritage. I think I know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I do know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I have just never read it. I doubt if I ever will. But I know what people mean when they talk about tilting at windmills; I recognise a drawing of Quixote and Sancha Panza. I believe Cervantes to be a great European writer. Why do I believe that? What possible grounds do I have for believing it? Other people's opinions, the fact that it has an honourable and permanent place in the canon? So, 'Don Quixote' has an honourable, permanent place on my shelves. It would be wrong to get rid of it.

I feel exactly the same about Don Quixote. I too have a copy and, like Susan Hill, I have never read it. Nevertheless, this doesn't stop me from being convinced that I know what the novel is about. After all, I did once, long ago, see a stage version at the National starring Paul Scofield. That has to count for something, surely?

Well, two people who we know did read the book were William Shakespeare and the up and coming star of the King's Men, John Fletcher. I don't know about you, but I always find it astounding that Shakespeare and Cervantes lived at the same time, however, that is, in fact, the case. Indeed, they died on the very same day, April 23rd 1616.

Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605 and the first English translation, by Thomas Shelton, hit the book stalls outside St Pauls in the early Summer of 1612, just in time for Shakespeare to pick up a copy and decide that one of the stories it contained would be ideal fodder for his Christmas production for the company he had been part of since its foundation in 1594. By this time most of his work was being done in collaboration with the young Fletcher and this was no exception. The play, Cardenio, was written, the music composed by Robert Johnson, who also worked with them on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, and the whole entertainment presented at court over the Christmas period 1612.

What, you've never heard of a Shakespeare play called Cardenio? Ah, well there's the rub. We've lost it. Careless, I know, but nevertheless, a fact. What we do have is a bowdlerised version from the eighteenth century by one Lewis Theobald called Double Falsehood which he claimed was based on the Shakespeare and Fletcher original, but if he had the three copies he said he did they almost certainly went up in flames in the Drury Lane fire of 1809. Please, don't ask me to say any more, it's just too painful. If it's any sort of consolation, what does still exist is the music for that first production and you can see it, I believe, in the Bodleian Library.

Recently, however, there has been considerable interest in both the Theobald play and in attempts to use it as a basis from which to reconstruct the original Cardenio. There was an Arden edition of Double Falsehood published last year and there have been two university attempts, one here in the UK and one in New Zealand, to stage a version of what scholars have thought might be something like the original of 1612. Now, we have the first professional production opening at the Swan Theatre in Stratford next month. As you can imagine, this has caused considerable interest, not to say controversy, and I can't wait to see how Greg Doran (a director, for whom I have the greatest respect) has set about rebuilding a script from very little original material. Fortunately, there are going to be several opportunities during the coming months to talk with him about the process, including an afternoon workshop in June that I've managed to wangle myself a place on.

There is no way that what we are going to see on stage this summer can possibly be thought of as a reliable reconstruction of the performance King James and his court saw during those seventeenth century Christmas festivities. Theobald must have completely gutted the original. For instance, there is no subplot in Double Falsehood and I am reliably informed, by someone who definitely knows, that there is only one play from that period which doesn't have at least one subplot and often more. Shakespeare certainly always liked an extra line of plot development knocking around. Nevertheless, if even just a few lines are reliably by Shakespeare that has to be worth something.

And now, I have to decide whether I am going to celebrate this event by making this the year in which I change my relationship to the Don. Is this going to be the year when I finally take my copy down from the shelf and actually read it? Maybe, we'll see.

Annie

Lasting Damage ~ Sophie Hannah

2011-03-25T16:04:00.000Z

I have been a fan of Sophie Hannah ever since I picked up her first crime novel, Little Face, and made the acquaintance of Sergeant Charlie Zailer and DC Simon Waterhouse. As I suspect is true for many crime addicts, I am intrigued and gripped as much by the developing story within the police team as I am by the individual cases that are the subject of each of the books and I am definitely gripped by the cases. Sophie Hannah certainly knows how to write a thriller that keeps the reader on tenterhooks to the very last page. Lasting Damage is no exception.

Connie Bowskill is worried and, as we very soon discover, she's been worried for sometime. That worry forces her out of bed in the early hours of the morning to surf the net for details of a house she's seen that is up for sale. Bringing up the estate agent's website she finds that there is a virtual tour available and so she clicks on the button in the hope that she will find evidence that will settle those worries one way or another. Well, she finds evidence all right, but it isn't what she was expecting, because what she sees is a woman lying face down in a pool of blood. However, when she brings her husband downstairs and gets him to search the site, the woman has gone. What is more there is no sign of the blood either. The carpet is perfectly clean, the room perfectly normal.

And so the process of investigation begins and as usual it isn't until the very last pages of the novel that it becomes clear which of the many twists and turns in the plot will finally reveal the truth. Inevitably, it will take a mind that can see past the obvious and join dots that are so far apart as almost to belong to different puzzles to solve the mystery. Which is another way of saying that it will take Simon Waterhouse. And this is a problem because as the story begins he and Charlie are hundreds of miles away on their honeymoon. But then you surely didn't ever expect that to be the proverbial bed of roses, did you?

This is a very good book. They are all very good books. However, I am beginning to have a 'but'. While each of Hannah's books works extremely well as a single novel they all follow exactly the same pattern, not only in respect of the way in which they are structured but also in terms of the type of crime and the nature of the victim. Now, I am a great believer in pattern. To quote Kenneth Pike, man is a pattern-making, pattern-seeking animal. But, having shown that we know how the pattern works the trick to keeping an audience's attention is to break it without having the structure fall down around our heads, especially when the chosen pattern is as obviously signalled to the reader as it is in these books. Hannah is a good enough writer to do that and I am beginning to wish that she would find a way of making her work fresh. For me, she is starting to sound the same note rather too often.

Annie

Romeo and Juliet ~ Royal Shakespeare Company

2011-03-23T17:37:00.001Z

For one reason and another I spent most of last week in Stratford including, on Saturday, going to see the RSC's current production of Romeo and Juliet in the newly rebuilt main theatre. I am not going to go into what I think about the new theatre here, mainly because no one is going to want to read a rant. Surfice it to say that I think they made a mistake trying to put a new stage in the old theatre building. They should have pulled the whole lot down and started afresh. It's too late now to do anything about it, so I'm just going to have to learn to live with it.

The production of Romeo and Juliet, is however, worth revisiting. It started out last year in the Courtyard theatre, the Company's temporary home a hundred yards up the river bank and I very much enjoyed it then. During the intervening year it's consolidated its better points and dealt with some of the problems and is now a very polished theatrical experience indeed.

I always feel with this play that there are no half measures. You are either going to like the way the director decides to approach the production or you are going to hate it. I have seen more performances of Romeo and Juliet that have left me seething than any other play in the canon. In fact it is the only play I've ever walked out of and I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to stand up about twenty minutes in and say to the uncomfortable looking cast something along the lines of "Okay, you've got this wrong, haven't you? Shall we go back to the beginning and try again?"

But when a company get it right it can be so good and Rupert Goold has brought this production together very successfully, although I'm not sure it is for quite the reasons he intended. There are a couple of very erudite essays in the programme, one about the Counter Reformation and the other an exploration of suicide in the arts, but although they are both extremely interesting they don't signal what is, for me, most obviously successful about the interpretation. The production works for me because they have managed to find a way of exploring a universal aspect of human nature in a way that keeps it firmly rooted in Shakespeare's time and yet also ties it to our own. For what is the quarrel between the Montagues and the Capulets but a sixteenth century manifestation of gang culture and even more specifically, knife crime?

For the most part the play is presented in Elizabethan Verona, but it begins with a streetwise twenty-first century youth, complete with hoodie, listening to a recorded tourist guide. This is Romeo and the costume choice works as we slide into the sixteenth century setting partly because of the colour and the materials chosen and partly because of the Universal nature of the teenage uniform of tee-shirt and jeans. When Juliet appears in something very similar, she works in both time periods as well. And that is all it takes to bring home to you the disturbing fact that one tribe of teenagers, turned against another tribe by elders who ought to know better, are exactly the same now as they have ever been. Whether it is on the streets of Renaissance Verona, or amongst the tower blocks of modern day London, the murder and mayhem that is unleashed is terrible to behold.

A second feature of the production which helps to hammer home this disturbing fact is the attention that has been paid to ensuring that the lovers come over as very young teenagers. I don't know exactly how old Mariah Gale and Sam Troughton are, but I would have thought early thirties and yet they both manage to communicate that frantic, explosive switch from one extreme of emotion to the other, that is the hallmark of teenagers everywhere. Gale in particular does the sulky thirteen year old so well there are times when you want to slap her. And the fact that you know wouldn't be the sensible way to handle the situation is neither here nor there. Like all the 'best' teenagers, she just gets to you.

The production closes in Stratford very soon and I'm not certain if they are taking it anywhere else, but if you do get the chance to see it then it's worth looking out for. The new season gets underway next month with Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice. I know they have to fill the theatre, but it would be nice to break away from the obligatory exam texts once in a while. I wonder when someone is next going to be brave enough to give a season of Timon of Athens?

PS. Sam Troughton is a very good actor, but I find it hard to forgive him for making me feel very old indeed. I remember watching not only his father, but also his grandfather. Damn him!

Annie

Shared Fetish

2011-03-21T15:41:00.000Z

How do I manage to do it time, after time, after time? Here I am again running rings round myself in order to try and catch up with everything that needs to be prepared for this week. Actually, I know why it's happened this time. I was involved last week in the appointment of a very senior academic position (which I would love to gossip about, but to do so would definitely be unprofessional) and I underestimated just how much time and energy it was going to take. So, here I am battling away to finish a lecture on the relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew and read David Nicholls' novel, One Day, both of which I need for meetings on Wednesday.

Fortunately, the Nicholls is hardly the most demanding of works, in fact I'm not certain how we are going to sustain an hour and a half's discussion on it. It's taking time, but not much brain power. And, every now and again it makes me smile in recognition of something that strikes a chord in me, like this.

[Emma] drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

If there is such a thing as a fetish for stationery then I definitely share it. I love the feel of a clean sheet of paper that has still to be marked in anyway. I can get tingles up and down the back of my spine just remembering the thrill of having a new exercise book at school, a book that has, as yet, not even been sullied by so much as a ruled margin. Friends buy me notebooks as presents because they know I will go all gooey-eyed and drool my incoherent thanks as I imagine all the world shattering observations I will record in them. I don't, any longer, hanker after the 'best fountain pen' because I learned a long time ago that the surest way to defile a beautiful sheet of paper was to turn me loose anywhere near it with real ink. But it does have to be a very particular make of biro and always, always a fine nib and black ink.

And, do you know what? I reckon I'm not alone in the blogging world in sharing Emma's fetish. I suspect that there are a lot of closet stationery obsessives out there right now. Have the courage to come out and admit your addiction and we can form a blogging branch of stationery fetishers anonymous. Just as long as no one ever really tries to wean me away from my notebooks, pens and rulers that is. This is a fetish I'm actually happy to claim as my own.

Annie

Twisted Wing ~ Ruth Newman

2011-03-19T17:14:00.000Z

Browsing round the library the other day, a seriously dangerous occupation which should definitely carry a health warning, I came across a book by an author I hadn't heard of before but which had a recommendation on the front by Sophie Hannah.

Scary, tantalisingly unpredictable and very, very hard to put down.

As Sophie Hannah is one of those few writers whose works I automatically read, I thought it was worth a risk and took Ruth Newman's first novel, Twisted Wing, home with me. It was a good move.

Set in the fictitious Ariel College, Cambridge, the story begins with what appears to be yet another in a series of killings. A third student, June Okewano, is found horrifically butchered in as many years. However, this time two other students are found with the victim. One, Nick Hardcastle, becomes the immediate suspect given that he is discovered attempting to replace June's intestines back inside her body. The other, Olivia Corscadden, is in what appears to be a catatonic state, unable to respond to anything.

Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Weathers calls in his old University friend, forensic psychiatrist, Matthew Denison to try and unlock the evidence that he feels sure must be in Olivia's mind if only she can be reached and helped to communicate. Over a period of weeks and eventually months, Matthew pieces together not only all that has happened since Olivia and Nick arrived at Cambridge, but much about Olivia's early life that will prove relevant to the investigation as well.

The reader is encouraged to fit the pieces in the puzzle together at the same time as the investigative team and consequently makes as many false moves as they do. In fact, I pinned the culprit very early on, but was repeatedly made to think that I had got it wrong and that I was doing that individual a disservice. At least my mistakes didn't directly lead to an innocent individual being accused of murder. Matthew Denison is not so lucky.

Newman is a real find. I was completely gripped by the story from the very first pages and thoroughly convinced by the characters she has created. The atmosphere of menace is deftly evoked and the eventual denouement both realistic and terrifying in its implications. I thought at first she was looking to build up a series, and would have been happy to go on developing a relationship with Weathers and Denison. However, given the metaphorical coup de grace delivered in the final pages I don't see how that would be possible. Nevertheless, I have her new book, The Company of Shadows, on reservation from the library and hope it will live up to its predecessor. If you like Sophie Hannah, or even more, I think, if you enjoy S J Bolton then it would be worth your giving this a try.

Annie

Rivers of London ~ Ben Aaronovitch

2011-03-17T17:13:00.017Z

Peter Grant is just about to finish his time as a probationary police constable and is awaiting his first permanent assignment to a branch of the service that he hopes will be more exciting than the paper pushing job he is expecting. Well, fate smiles on him. He finds himself involved in a murder investigation and, as a result of an interview with a ghost, assigned as apprentice to Chief Inspector Nightingale, the Last Wizard in England.

And there you have it, I've mentioned the 'W' word. I think it's very unfortunate that the quote on the cover invokes the world of Harry Potter, because in fact Rivers of London is much more akin to Shaun of the Dead meets Hot Fuzz and like those two films, it is definitely not for children. You wouldn't want your ten year old reading some of the language that is used and no school child should be introduced to certain of the gods of London rivers that populate the world that Peter finds himself investigating. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a book that is in any real way offensive, it is just that it is a book that might reach the wrong audience if it isn't carefully marketed. By all means give it to your sixteen year old who is looking for a book that will amuse and speak to the inevitable cynicism of most teenagers, but don't give it to your ten or eleven year old who is searching for a Harry Potter replacement.

Having become involved with an investigation that clearly concerns the forces of magic and enchantment, Peter finds himself searching the archives for information about that other source of enchantment, the theatre. The murder, or rather murders, because our criminal does not stop at one, take place in the heart of London itself, in the precincts surrounding Covent Garden, and it soon becomes clear that the motivation for what is happening can be traced back to events that occurred in that quarter of the city centuries earlier. If Peter is to have any hope of understanding what lies behind the killings he must consult those who know the metropolis far better than he can hope to, which is where the Rivers of London come in. You've probably heard the expression 'Old Father Thames'. Well, here you actually get to meet him, and Mother Thames as well. Although not at the same time as they haven't been on speaking terms for decades.

I have to say that at first I was rather sceptical about the whole thing, it felt gimmicky rather than truly original. Within a couple of chapters, however, I was hooked. Aaronovitch brings just the right amount of cynicism about both the police service and the current social climate to his writing and as a result the book is not only very funny but also, despite the magic, recognisably about the world in which we live. It is also, if you happen to know the parts of London about which he is writing, very well researched. I suspect non-Londoners might appreciate a map, but if you are a London theatre-goer then you're going to feel very much at home in this world. I am a convert and pleased to find that this is the first of a trilogy, the second and third parts of which are due for publication later this year.

If you like crime, if you like humour, then I think you should give this a go. If you have older teenagers to buy for and can't think of what they might enjoy, I would say this is a must. I know I've already earmarked two copies for birthday presents later in the year.

Everyman ~ Philip Roth

2011-03-15T14:45:00.011Z

I promised last week that I would write about our book group discussion of Philip Roth's Everyman but I had to put it on the back burner for a while until I had time to think about what turned out to be an unexpectedly mixed reaction to the work. As a group our only other encounter with Roth was about eighteen months ago, when we read and thoroughly enjoyed, The Human Stain. There wasn't one of us who didn't want to go back and re-read it straight away because there was so obviously so much there to think about and learn from. Everyman, however, split the group in two, those of us who had not only 'enjoyed' it but thought that there was something extremely profound being explored in the text and those who had struggled to engage at any level and really couldn't see the point.

The book tells the story of an unnamed main character who I am going to call Everyman, beginning at the moment of his funeral and then building up his life through a patchwork of scenes until, in the final pages, we return to the moment of his death on the operating table. During a scant two hundred pages we learn about his childhood as the younger son of a Jewish Jeweller, his time working in a Design Business, his three unsuccessful marriages and his final years spent in a retirement complex on America's East Coast. And throughout the figure of Death walks with him. We are never for a moment allowed to forget this man's mortality, the fact that at any moment something may go wrong with the intricate and delicate instrument that is the human body. It is no coincidence that there is an image of the inner workings of a watch on the cover of my copy. In its concrete form it is a reminder of the clocks and watches with which Everyman's father worked; as an image it serves to reinforce the unpalatable truth that it only needs one element to go out of balance and the entire mechanism will fail.

So, we are with Everyman, when as a child of nine he makes his first visit to hospital for a hernia operation and witnesses the death of a fellow patient. In the Star Beach Retirement Village we experience vicariously the incredible pain of one of the women who lives there, pain that eventually drives her to the ultimate answer of suicide. And, we follow the progress of Everyman's own bodily weaknesses as one by one the valves in his heart fail and have to be shored up artificially. But perhaps the most damaging failures, weaknesses and deaths are not the physical ones, but those which occur in his relationships with his family. We learn little about his first wife, or why he found the marriage so unsatisfactory, but the break-up leaves him alienated not only from her but also from his two sons. While it seems that his second marriage, to Phoebe, is far more successful and their daughter, Nancy, does retain her feelings for her father, again he destroys the relationship almost on a whim and marries a woman with whom he has nothing in common and who soon goes the same way as her predecessors. Even the closeness he feels for his older brother, Howie, is destroyed by his jealousy of Howie's loving family life, business success and continuing good health. This is a man who walks with Death in one form or another all his life.

And yet, this is not, on the surface at least, a religious book. There is no suggestion that we should read this as a warning that Death might call at any moment and we should therefore look to the content of our lives in case we should be called to answer for our deeds and be found wanting. In fact, if anything I felt there was a measure of moral ambiguity here. Everyman may feel that he has lost all and that Howie has everything and we, as readers, may feel that we want to point out that Howie has lived a pretty much unblemished life, working hard, loving his family and hurting no one and thus perhaps deserves what he has, but in the final pages I think Roth raises a caveat to this easy response. Everyman is in the graveyard where his parents lie buried and this is what Roth writes:

His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them, "I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one." "Good. You lived," his mother replied, and his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left."

"You lived." It seems to me that there is implicit in that phrase the idea that we cannot spend our lives in the shade of Death, we have to live and that not to live is in itself a death. "Atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left." What is asked of Everyman in the Morality play is not only unrealistic, it is also in one sense a sin against the life we have been given, whoever or whatever you may believe we have been given it by. I don't end up much liking Roth's Everyman figure, I'm pretty sure I would have rather known Howie any day of the week, but I'm not certain that I can in anyway condemn him. Morality stands on far less resolute foundations now than in did in the early sixteenth century.

The Last Dragonslayer ~ Jasper Fforde

2011-03-13T16:22:00.001Z

Those of you who have read the Thursday Next books (and if you haven't, for goodness sake why not? Pick up a copy of The Eyre Affair immediately!) won't be surprised to hear that Jasper Fforde has branched out into writing for children. If ever there was an author who had the sort of imagination that children would immediately recognise and respond to, it is Fforde and The Last Dragonslayer is going to the top of my 'books to buy for birthday presents' list as of now.

Set in a country that is just about and absolutely immediately recognisable as the England we all know and occasionally love, Fforde tells the story of Jennifer Strange, one time foundling in the convent of The Blessed Ladies of the Lobster, currently Acting Manager of Kazam Mystical Arts Management and (I don't think I'm giving too much away) soon to be The Last Dragonslayer, responsible for riding the country of the Last Dragon, Maltcassion. Not, you understand, that Maltcassion has done anything to warrant his being got rid of, but he is sitting on thousand of acres of prime real estate and while he remains alive no one but the Dragonslayer can set foot there.

Lightly disguised as a walk through the realms of a fantasy world that you have to have a seriously clever mind to have thought up, Fforde, as usual, casts a searing eye on the greed and folly of the consumer society in which we live. If Jennifer has to kill Maltcassion, and she seriously hopes that that won't prove to be the case, then she feels that the least she can do is turn the land into a sanctuary for some those animals whose very survival is threatened by humankind, such as the buzonjis, the shridloos and of course, the quarkbeast. (I'm sorry, there are no dodos or mammoths in this book. Fans of Pickwick will need to pick up the latest adult novel, One of Our Thursdays is Missing. I'm hoping there will be a reappearance of the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat as well.) Everyone else simply wants a piece of the very expensive action. Hounded on every side by companies demanding she endorse their products, real estate developers who want to build theme parks and supermarkets and warring monarchs who want to create yet another bloody battlefield, Jennifer has until Sunday lunchtime to decide what to do. And you thought you had problems making you mind up what roast to cook.

You don't have to be mad to enjoy Fforde, but I find it does help if you have followed the White Queen's advice and practised believing six impossible things before breakfast every morning. Once you've got the general idea you will find an absolute and irrefutable logic in every thing he writes. For example here is Maltcassion on what he calls 'the more endearing features' of humankind.

'Well, counting in base ten is pretty wild, for a start,' he said after giving the subject a moment's thought. 'Base twelve is far superior. You also have extraordinary technical abilities, a terrific sense of humour, thumbs, being built inside out - '

'Wait! Being built inside out?

'Of course. As far as the average lobster is concerned, mammals - with the possible exception of the armadillo - are built inside out. Any crab worth his claws will tell you the soft stuff should definitely be on the inside. Bones in the middle? Whoever designed you was having a serious off day.'

Argue with that, I dare you.

Jasper Fforde is one of the most original voices writing today and I am so pleased that he has turned his attention towards children, who will recognise him as one of their own and enter into his world without a second thought. If you haven't already had your own passport stamped then I recommend you do so immediately.

PS I have just checked the Mammoth Migration Site and I think the Lammer Herd and the Grampian Herd are due to cross paths in my back garden tomorrow morning. We who are about to die, salute you. It is a very small back garden.

An Uncommon Writer

2011-03-11T17:01:00.000Z

Well, here we are, at the end of the week, and I've made it in one piece. I'm going to celebrate by spending this weekend with the latest book by one of my favourite authors, Sophie Hannah, whose sixth crime novel, Lasting Damage, has just arrived from the library. The phone is coming off the hook, I'm detaching the door bell from the batteries and I shall repel all borders. I will also find time to catch up with my posts here and my on-line visiting ready to get back to a more organised schedule on Monday.

Meanwhile, I want to share what I think is a lovely story. When it first came out my library reading group all read Alan Bennett's wonderful book An Uncommon Reader. I'm sure all of those readers who are in the UK know about this gem but if you are from overseas and it hasn't come to your notice it imagines the arrival of a mobile library in the precincts of Buckingham Palace and the gradual conversion of HM the Queen to books and to reading for pleasure. The writing is absolutely typical of Bennett's perceptive observation and wry humour. It's the sort of book you read at one sitting, not only because it's fairly short, but also because you can't put it down until you've finished it.

Well, as I say, everyone in the group loved it and Mary, the librarian who runs the sessions, decided that because it had given us such pleasure she would contact Bennett's agent and just say thank you on our behalf. So, she sent him an e-mail and asked him to pass on our best wishes to the author. That would have been the back end of 2007 and none of us had given it another thought until last week - when a postcard arrived.

The postcard, of the Yorkshire Dales, had been sent in September 2009 but had been rather vaguely addressed and it had taken the Post Office sometime to work out where to deliver it. To be honest, the sender's handwriting didn't help either. However, when we deciphered it, we discovered that it had come from Alan Bennett himself. He thanked us not only for our kind thoughts but also for taking the trouble to contact him and spoke about the process of writing the book and how it had been easier than most because he didn't know HMQ and could therefore let his imagination do the work. He wrote as if we were the ones doing him the favour instead of our being the people who had benefited immeasurably by the pleasure given by his wonderful writing. We would have been thrilled by a response from his agent, but this was so personal, and so typical of a man who is known here (much to his chagrin) as a National Treasure. He is, indeed, a most uncommon writer.

Annie

Warning!

2011-03-09T08:50:00.000Z

This is shaping up to be the Week From Hell. In part it is my own fault. I promised myself (and enough specialists to staff my own hospital) that I wouldn't over commit myself again and I genuinely didn't think I had done, but what I forgot to do was look in my diary when I said 'yes' to various requests and so didn't see that they were all scheduled to happen in the same fortnight. This is the second week of that fortnight and if I make it to the end I promise I am never going to say 'yes' to anything on the spot ever again. It is always going to be 'let me get back to you', so that I have time to look at the implications not only of the time given over to the actual event but also to the time that is going to be necessary to prepare for it.

So, this is likely to be the only post I put up before the weekend and I apologise for lack of visiting and commenting this week.

However, I thought I ought to tell you why my week from hell just got worse. I've just been contacted by my credit card company who informed me that as a result of a charitable donation I'd made to the New Zealand Red Cross my details had been compromised and I was now being targeted by fraudsters. They've stopped my card and I'm now going to have to make an emergency dash to the bank in order to have enough cash to buy food for the ten days before the new one will arrive. As I know a number of bloggers have given to the same charity I wanted to be sure you were aware that there might be a problem and that it might be an idea to check your own card security.

As my mother would have said, "If it isn't one thing, it's another."

I hope you all have a better week than I'm having.

Everyman ~ The Original

2011-03-06T15:09:00.000Z

This month our Monday book group is reading Philip Roth's 2006 novel, Everyman, and as it must be all of thirty-five years since I read the original morality play, I thought I ought to go back and revisit it if I was going to be able to make sensible comparisons between what I assume are texts that are meant to be considered together.

The earliest print fragment of Everyman dates to somewhere between 1510 and 1525 and although it has been suggested that it is actually several decades older than that if, as is often posited, the English play is based on the Antwerp text of Elckerlijc (c 1518-1525) then this fragment is probably very close to the time of composition. This isn't the place to go into theatre history and its developments, but if Everyman is as late as 1525 then the changes that were to take place in the intervening seventy-four years between this and the opening of The Globe on Bankside in 1599 with that ringing cry of Oh for a muse of fire are just unbelievable. Even the thought makes my head spin. (Look, we can argue another day about whether the choruses were in that first performance - stop trying to distract me and take me off subject!)

What strikes me most immediately about Everyman is how modern it is and yet how much it is of its own time. There can't be a single person who reads this who doesn't identify with the main character, facing his own death and realising that the life he has lived has not been as he might have wished. It doesn't matter whether you define a well-lived life in terms of religious belief or not, surely everyone of us has to have some regrets. And everyone of us has to share Everyman's fear as well. I know that there are some people who live in such pain, physical or mental, that death is a relief, but even in such instances there must be, I would have thought, a certain amount of trepidation. And, the 'associates' who desert Everyman, his friends, his kin and most especially his goods - well I bet there are a few people around now who are reckoning the cost of the financial turn around in more than just monetary terms.

But, at the same time, this is so much part of the medieval society, especially in its insistence that however much Everyman repents he has to get it all sanctioned by a priest. No question of finding your own way to salvation, you go the way the church lays down or you don't go at all. If this is as late as 1525, then Martin Luther has been making waves on the Continent and the Catholic Church in England, not aware of the home grown challenge just around the corner, would be keen to emphasise and reinforce its power over the people who would have made up the audience for this drama.

Something that I do find interesting is that unlike a lot of other plays of this type there is no depiction of the 'fun' that Everyman has had up to the point that death comes along and says "Oy". We just jump straight in there on the fateful day itself. Maybe the church wasn't taking any chances. Don't give the plebs any ideas, they can be creative enough in the ways of evil as it is without putting notions in their heads for them. It does make for a pretty dark play from the first line onwards.

But, the original version of Everyman has one speech in it that surely lifts the heart of every reader who meets it. Having been forsaken by those he thought would always stand by his side, Everyman thinks he is alone until he discovers his ailing Good Deeds and that virtue's sister, Knowledge and it is Knowledge who says to him

Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide,
In thy most need, to go by thy side.

This, of course, is the preface to the books published in the Everyman series. Words that still thrill me every time I hear them.

So, how is this going to relate to Philip Roth's book? That remains to be seen. Not only, of course, a modern retelling, but also one by a notably non-Christian writer. Our discussion this week is going to be very interesting.

Annie

Horror on the Rue Morgue

2011-03-04T17:23:00.000Z

Actually, the horror starts before we ever get to the Rue Morgue, because I have to admit that crime fiction addict that I am and despite working for decades in a University English Department, last night I read Poe's classic story for the first time.

Somehow, I have missed out on any in-depth study of the literature of the nineteenth century and consequently many texts that others take for granted I have only encountered if the whim has so taken me. My whim has never extended to Poe. I've read some of his poems and we used to use a short story, The Oval Portrait, as a means of introducing our first year undergrads to the novel thought that we might be interested in hearing their views about a text rather than simply having our own thoughts parroted back to us, but other than that my whim had never been wafted in Poe's direction. Thus, horror the first.

Horror the second comes with the murders themselves. You seriously don't want to be reading this book if you have any sort of squeamish stomach. Whatever anyone might say about the violence in present day crime fiction (and I was watching a seriously graphic televised version of one of Val McDermid's books the other evening that was enough to turn anyone's insides with the exception of the victim, whose insides were already thoroughly 'turned') it has nothing on what Poe describes here. You will have second and third thoughts about your safety, even behind locked doors, after you've shivered your way through this story, I can tell you.

But, horror the third comes when you find out whodunit. Don't worry, I'm not going to give the game away, but what a ..........! If you tried that in a modern novel you'd never get it past the publisher - at least I hope you wouldn't.

Having said that, in many ways this isn't typical of how crime fiction has developed over the intervening years. You can see how it leads to Sherlock Holmes, with the emphasis on close analysis of the detail of the crime and its surroundings and I suppose that does relate to some extent to those books that rely to a large extent on the use of the forensic sciences, but in truth this is a justification of a particular mode of thought, a specific cast of mind, that just happens to play itself out through the medium of a crime. Catching the perpetrator is secondary really.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I've read it and can now move on to other material from the period that is new to me. Next up is M E Brandon's Lady Audley's Secret, which is another book I should have read years ago. Fortunately a friend whose judgement I trust implicitly read this last year and loved it, so with luck I should fare better. No more horrors, I hope.

Annie

How Do You Like Your Shakespeare?

2011-03-02T16:36:00.000Z

Yesterday evening I went to hear a colleague give his inaugural lecture as Professor in Shakespeare Studies. John actually received his chair almost two years ago but it's taken the powers that be this long to get round to organising the event and we're all still trying to work out just why it was scheduled for a lecture theatre in the School of Sport and Exercise rather than the School of English, but as John is also a mountaineer it wasn't, perhaps, that inappropriate. John is one of the great textual scholars and has worked on many of the best known editions of plays not only by Shakespeare but also by his contemporaries. His most recent work is the just published Sir Thomas More for the Arden Early Modern Drama series and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy to see what he has to say about those scenes which are now thought to be by Shakespeare and which it appears we have in the Bard's own hand.

Last night, John chose to talk to the title Sit Down For Shakespeare and if that seems a somewhat unusual choice then you have to see it in the light of the Royal Shakespeare Company's recent educational thrust that aims to engage children through the performance aspects of the works and which is called Stand Up For Shakespeare.

Now, you can't teach Shakespeare in Stratford and not acknowledge that what the man was doing was writing plays and writing them to be performed. Not only would none of us even think of taking an opposing stance but much of the work in the department is specifically performance based and, what is more, aimed at exploring what the performance practice of Shakespeare's time would have been. However, John is a man who has given his working life to a close examination of the text and what he was exploring last night was the dynamic that comes about when you remember that, to quote him, 'Shakespeare is a book' and as such can repay the sort of close attention to detail which it is sometimes difficult to pick up in the hurly burly of live performance. This isn't an example he gave but think of the number of times that Richard III is likened to specifically nasty animals throughout the play that bears his name. In performance you are unlikely to pick this up, but when you realise what is going on you can see that one of the things Shakespeare wants us to know about the man is his bestial nature. I could ask is he a man or is he an animal, but that would be unfair on some very nice animals I've known.

Citing that example allows me to take the point about the essential dynamic between textual study and performance a stage further because no serious actor would ever approach a part like Richard III without exploring the text in exactly the sort of detail John would prescribe and then utilising what they find to inform their interpretation. In my memory we've had the bottled spider of Anthony Sher and the toad-like Richard of Simon Russell Beale, both direct reflections of elements of the text.

Taking the issue of dynamics a step further something that John did look at was Juliet's speech in Act II Scene iii of Measure for Measure. Juliet, you will remember, is imprisoned along with her lover, Claudio, for having anticipated their marriage. She, for the moment, is 'safe' because she is pregnant, but the disguised Duke has just come to tell her that Claudio is to die the following day. Her response in just about every edition you will find is:

Must die to-morrow! O, injurious law,

That respites me a life whose very comfort

Is still a dying horror.

I love this. The Duke, disguised as a friar, has been trying to reconcile Juliet with her position and she tells him exactly what she thinks of the so called mercy she is being offered. BUT, that word law is an emendation, substituted by generations of editors who thought that the word used in the First Folio of 1623 had to be an error, because what the First folio reads is

Must die to-morrow! O, injurious love,

That respites me a life whose very comfort

Is still a dying horror.

Now, we could argue forever as to which is the more likely word for Shakespeare to have written. Law, clearly fits, but so too does love and in more ways than one because it is the loving mercy of the church that the friar is offering (whatever you might think of the form it takes) and it is also the love between Juliet and Claudio that has resulted in her pregnancy which has saved her life. But, why do we have to select one or the other? Yes, of course, in a text or a performance you are going to have to make a decision, but if as a member of the audience (for which ever medium) you can hold the two in your mind together then think of the dynamic which that creates. It is the very dynamic between the rule of love and the rule of law that is the central concern of the play as a whole.

No one is ever going to persuade me that Shakespeare was not first and foremost a man of the theatre, but equally I know from personal experience that close reading of the text can illuminate a performance for me in ways that would not have been possible if I had not taken the time to explore the detail of the words on the page. So, I like my Shakespeare both ways, thank you, and I'm just so grateful that I have the opportunity to experience the performance and the textual aspects at the hands of such erudite practitioners in both disciplines.

Bad Intentions ~ Karin Fossum

2011-02-28T15:49:00.000Z

Alex, (Philip) Reilly and Jon are camping out on the banks of Dead Water Lake. They all have something on their conscience, something in which they were involved together nine months earlier, something that has affected each in a very different way. Alex has become more determined than ever to keep the situation and those concerned completely under his control; Reilly has retreated further into a world dulled by the use of narcotics; Jon - Jon has found no way of coping and as a consequence has been admitted to Ladegarden Psychiatric Hospital following a nervous breakdown. The trip to the lake is Jon's first venture back into the world and it quickly becomes apparent that his reluctance to go away with his friends is well founded. When the three of them go out on the Lake that night only two return.

This is the first of Fossum's Insepctor Sejer novels that I've read and was kindly sent to me by NetGalley. Normally, I prefer to read a crime series in order and I'm feeling the lack of any pre-knowledge of how Fossum works acutely in writing this review. In many respects this novel is very different from the books in this genre that I would normally read and I don't know to what extent that is true of all the author's work, or whether this book stands out as an exception in her own work. There is also the further complication that I am, of course, reading it in translation and some of the features that stand out may be as a result of that further physical distancing from the writer's intentions.

And distancing is one of the first things that I was aware of with this novel, my distance as a reader from most of the characters and most especially from the two detectives Sejer and Skarre. This is certainly not what I would expect from a British or American crime writer, who for the most part will centre the narrative around the thoughts and the actions of their investigators and make each novel the opportunity to develop their on-going characters. Here, the only character to whom I became anywhere near attached was Reilly. The detectives remained almost anonymous, although this could, of course, be a feature of this book alone; it may be that I ought to know them well enough by now from earlier novels in the series.

The other aspect of the book which I found different was how sparse it seemed. There are no sub-plots, no red herrings, it concentrates on telling the story of the crime these three have committed and its disastrous consequences to the exclusion of anything else. As crime novels in English get thicker and thicker, with two or sometimes three investigations running parallel to each other, it seemed strange to sit down and read this book in a single sitting.

However, these differences do not make this in any way a less satisfying read. The main effect of the unexpected point of view is that there is a tendency to sympathise, or at least to understand, the perspective of the accused and in this case, at least, that is no bad thing. By the end of the book, one person will bear the responsibility for a series of preventable deaths, but nevertheless it is difficult to feel that what you are looking at is a harden criminal. Coming hot on a succession of Val McDermid's serial killers this is something of a relief. Perhaps not all baddies are psychopaths after all. It is also a lot easier to keep up with the twists and turns of the plot. In fact, I'm tempted to ask what twists and turns? If you've tried to get your mind round something like the latest C J Sansom, for example, this is also a comfort. Drawing up plot analyses was something I thought I'd put behind me when I finished my PhD, but with some crime fiction it's really the only way to keep track of what's going on.

All in all then this is a well-written book, with a clear, well organised plot and some interesting, if perhaps underdeveloped, characters. Certainly, I enjoyed it enough to go back in the series in order to discover to what extent it is typical of Fossum's work and I would be more than happy to pick up her next novel to see where her writing takes her.

The Essay

2011-02-26T14:56:00.000Z

First, an apology to those of you I haven't got round to visiting this week. As some of you know, I don't always have the best of health and there are times when I just have to sit back and let life go on around me. In the past I have let this put a stop to my blogging, but this time round I don't want that to happen. I may occasionally have to go silent for a time, but I will eventually come back.

Down time does give me the opportunity to do some thinking about how I want to spend my up time, especially my reading hours and one of the forms I know I want to revisit is the essay. Perhaps thirty years ago I read a great many collections of essays, especially those put together from the work of arts journalists. I read everything published by Bernard Levin, for example, a journalist who had such a following that when he wrote in praise of a show or an exhibition it would turn its fortunes over night, as the RSC discovered when he waxed lyrical about their superb adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Somehow, however, I've let the habit slip and until the last couple of weeks there have been almost no essays on my shelves at all.

The essay is a difficult genre both to compose and to appreciate, I think. By its very nature it has to be thought in a concentrated form, a distillation of many hours of deliberation. Whatever argument the writer is putting forth, it has to be set out clearly and in a concise manner, it has to make its point at the first attempt. There is no option of setting out your thesis in an opening introduction and then returning to expand on your meaning a couple of chapters down the line; you have to get it right the first time.

Likewise, as a reader you have to hit the ground running. You don't have the luxury of easing your way into a writer's style, of gradually coming to understand their point of view. Although you do, at least, have the option of returning to a difficult passage, an essay generally demands a level of concentration greater than the average novel, a commitment to follow absolutely every turn of the author's mind.

And this, I think, is the reason I have let my essay reading fall by the wayside. Concentrated thinking hasn't been my strong point over the past few years and it is a habit, which once you let it fall into disuse, takes some retrieving. Now, however, I would like to do something about this, even if it only a promise to myself to read at least one essay a week, and so, as a way of breaking myself in slowly, I've been gathering a number of books which are primarily essays about reading. If I can't read about books, what can I do?

Anne Fadiman has been on my shelves all along. I love her work and return to it often. However, someone mentioned Michael Dirda on a blog and his work looks ideal. Classics for Pleasure and Book by Book, I found easily enough and yesterday Bound to Please finally arrived. Carolyn Heilbrun was also recommended and I've managed to pick up good cheap copies of The Last Gift of Time and Hamlet's Mother and other Women on line. I was lucky enough to be given a copy of Sarah Bakewell's essays about Montaigne, How to Live. And finally, and quite by chance, last weekend I picked up second hand collections by Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, although the latter seem to be political rather than literary.

So, I can't say that I don't have enough to go at, can I, and the next thing I need to decide is how I'm going to structure my reading. And so, two questions: have any of you tackled an essay reading project and, if so, how did you go about it and are there any other collections of literary essays I might look out for? All suggestions most gratefully received.

Annie

A Hal By Any Other Name

2011-02-24T17:51:00.000Z

Much to my surprise, I found myself having a good old grump this morning at my dear friend, Thomas C Foster. However, you won't be surprised to hear that it was his chapter When in Doubt, It's from Shakespeare, that was causing the grumping. There are a couple of factual inaccuracies in there and that really annoys me. I'm sure none of us is perfect when it comes to making sure that our blogs are 100 percent accurate and completely free from typos. But then we aren't asking someone to pay for the pleasure of reading our words of wisdom, nor have we set ourselves up as some sort of authority. In a published work of non-fiction such inaccuracies worry me because they automatically call into question all those facts I didn't know before I started reading and have happily been assuming to be true. For the record, it was Prokofiev who composed the ballet Romeo and Juliet and not even a newly pious Prince Hal is hard-hearted enough to hang Sir John Falstaff (nor foolish enough, I would imagine the audience would have lynched him). Rather the old knight made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child. It is Bardolph who is condemned to death for robbing a church while the army is in France.

Having said that, the main point that Foster is making in this section remains valid, namely that it is not unusual to find a more recent text reworking or in some way referencing a Shakespeare play and that recognising the relationship will often lead to a greater appreciation of the referencing work.

One of the examples he gives is Athol Fugard's play Master Harold... and the Boys, making the point that the young man, Master Harold, is a modern day equivalent of Prince Hal, loafing around with the black workers when he ought to be readying himself to take over his father's business. Eventually 'Hally', like Hal, is forced to take not only a position of responsibility but also a political disregard for those whose company he has previously enjoyed.

I have to admit that when I saw this play at The National Theatre in London, I didn't make the connection. However, in my defence, the performance I saw was so memorable in other ways that I think I can be forgiven. I must have seen it in the early eighties and the play (which was initially banned in South Africa) had caused a stir among right wing groups because it questioned apartheid. About half an hour in two members of the audience (I'm doing my best to be polite here!) stood up and made their objections to black actors appearing on an English stage, in a play which had the audacity to suggest that black people might have the same rights as white, very clearly heard. Everyone else, actors, audience, staff, froze......for a moment, just a moment, and then the audience members closest to the protestors stood up and without a word formed a ring around them and made it impossible for them to do anything other than walk out of the theatre. The 'guard of honour' then came back, sat down and the play continued as if nothing untoward had happened. It was English sang-froid (if that isn't some sort of linguistic disjunct) at its very best, but you will understand that it did mean that I had things on my mind that afternoon other than looking for Shakespearian parallels.

I've always enjoyed Fugard's work, The Road to Mecca is my favourite, and so I'm sorry if I haven't done Master Harold full justice. I shall have to go back and re-read it, although, of course, that won't be as potent as actually seeing it on stage. One thing I will be looking out for is any way in which it makes me re-assess the Henry IV plays because I think these Shakespearian referencings can often prompt new insights into the original works as well, but that is the subject of another post altogether.

My Life in Books

2011-02-22T17:26:00.000Z

Well, not exactly mine, but the lives of the twenty guests who will be interviewed by Anne Robinson over the next fortnight as part of the BBC's run up to World Book Night on March 5th. This is not a television household. The radio wakes me up in the morning and goes off when I finally put the light out at night. I do, however, make an exception for programmes that discuss books and the prospect of this every weekday evening for a fortnight, is tempting indeed.

If there's one thing I love as much as I do reading it is discussing what I've been reading with other likeminded people. Hence the three book groups to which I belong, not to mention being part of the blogging world. So, a programme where two guests each brings along five of their favourite books to talk about has to be my idea of heaven. In fact you can tell how much I'm willing to put up with to listen to a book discussion if I say that two of the three people involved in the first of these programmes are among the broadcasters I would normally go furthest to avoid and yet I still watched it and still enjoyed it.

The format is very simple. Anne Robinson invites two readers to choose books that mark particular points in their lives and explain why they have been important to them. It could become extremely formulaic and lifeless and indeed after the first five minutes, especially when Robinson kept jumping in to try and move the proceedings along, I was worried that it wasn't going to work. However, the two guests, writer P D James and radio presenter, Richard Bacon, suddenly started to interact with each other, ignoring whatever time constraints there may have been, and the programme immediately took off. I hope by the time the second in the series airs this evening Robinson will have relaxed a little and learned to let the discussion flow more easily. I'm not certain, though, that she does relaxed and it might be necessary for the guests to take over every evening.

Whatever the faults it is just so nice to have a programme that takes reading as a lifelong obsession seriously and I hope that it will be such a success that the BBC will have to think about giving it a regular spot in the schedules rather than just a short term project. Maybe we should all write and demand a second series.

Some Things Just Never Change

2011-02-20T15:55:00.000Z

Having discovered during my research on Andrew Marvell that corrupt politicians are not the prerogative of the twenty-first century (OK, so that wasn't really that much of a surprise) I came across this passage, last night, while reading Daniel Deronda, which shows that the publishing world hasn't changed that much either.

One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel.

Airport novels eat your hearts out. There is clearly nothing new under the sun.

Andrew Marvell ~ Poet or Politician

2011-02-19T18:10:00.000Z

You might be forgiven for thinking that there is precious little reading going on in the SCR at the moment, I certainly feel as if that is the case. I don't seem to be writing much about books and the tbr pile is simply growing by the day. However, in my defence I do have three quite substantial projects on the go. My Wednesday evening book group is reading Daniel Deronda for the first week in March and I have to lead the discussion. Not only is this a substantial read in its own right, but I'm also having to do quite a lot of background reading both on Eliot's own religious position and on the general reception of Jews in England in the period when the novel is set. I'm thoroughly enjoying the work, but it is taking time.

Then, my Wednesday Shakespeare Group is just about to move on to The Taming of the Shrew and the first of the three sessions is always the most difficult to prepare for as I like to look not only at the major sources for the play but also at the various editions that are available. In the case of The Shrew, of course, this means reading and comparing the Folio text with the three Quartos of The Taming of A Shrew which were published before the First Folio in 1623 and then taking on board all the arguments as to which, if either, is the original play. Again, this is fascinating, but it takes time.

Finally, I was suddenly asked to give a talk to our History Group about the seventeenth century poet, Andrew Marvell, on the somewhat shaky grounds that we have now reached that period in our study of English History and I am the literary one.

Now if push comes to shove, I can talk about any Shakespeare play for an hour or so off the top of my head, and this isn't the first time that I've read Daniel Deronda, but the sum total of my knowledge about Andrew Marvell prior to this request was the first line of the poem To His Coy Mistress. So, believe me, there has been a great deal of reading going on in the SCR but it's mostly been aimed at finding out more about this remarkable man, who was far better know in his own time as a politician and a writer of tracts designed specifically to get up the noses of the great and the good than he was as a poet.

Marvell was born in Yorkshire in 1621 and the family very soon moved to Hull, a city with which he was associated for the rest of his life. His father was an Anglican Minister and from what I can discover Marvell himself was solid in that faith throughout his life. Certainly, he was voluble orally and in writing against both the Catholics and the Episcopalians, and towards the end of his life this would set him at odds with all the major players in the political arena as Charles II moved further and further towards the Catholic church and those who wished to see the power in the hands of the Bishops fought the monarch in the House of Commons.

He was a very well-educated man, attending Cambridge University from before his thirteenth birthday, and using the chance to travel as governor to a young nobleman to learn Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian. His knowledge of languages was to become well known and he was employed as tutor to a number of well connected teenagers including, for a time, the nephew of a friend of Oliver Cromwell who was intended as husband for Cromwell's youngest daughter. When he moved into politics as MP for Hull, he was often given secretarial roles that required him to interpret and translate documents for visiting dignitaries and was part of a delegation to Russia when Parliament was trying to renegotiate trading deals that had been cancelled when Charles I was beheaded. Obviously Tzar Alexis didn't want his own subjects getting any regicidal ideas.

Looking at his time in Parliament you do tend to get the feeling that things were pretty much the same then as they are now. The Borough of Hull paid Marvell 6s 8d for every day that the House sat as well as expenses and the occasional barrel of ale. Oh that word expenses. We all know what that can mean after the scandals of the last year about the monies claimed by our current crop of MPs. And what about those barrels of ale? I suppose we can only be glad they weren't Duck Houses! (With apologies to my non UK readers who may not quite understand that last comment.) However, Marvell did speak out in the Commons against a bill designed to allow MPs to accept public office, a means of bribing politicians to vote in ways favourable to those who held the real power. In fact, my overall impression of Marvell is that he was his own man. He had his own ideas of what was right and wrong and he supported whichever grouping he thought was most likely to bring about the effects he thought desirable. This has led to people looking at him as something of a turncoat, but I think you could rely on him if you relied on him to be true to himself.

And all this time he was writing, but not primarily the poems for which we now remember him. The works that brought him most notice were the poems and the tracts which either feted or poured scorn on the major players in English government. His final great piece was An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government which opens:

There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyrrany, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery

and goes on to trace the conspiracy back to Charles II himself. A real example of how to win friends and influence people!

Marvell died of the tertian ague (which probably means some form of malarial type illness) in 1678, but even then was hardly able to avoid controversy when his housekeeper claimed to have been secretly married to him and consequently to have rights over his estate. His poems were published after his death, but for a long time the more political writings were overlooked. It was really the essay written by T S Eliot for the tercentennial volume of his works, published in 1921, that brought Marvell back to general notice and led to a reassessment of his writings, both poetical and political.

So, you see there has been some reading going on in the SCR and now I just have to hope that I can satisfy my colleagues when I give the longer version of this paper on Monday. Fingers crossed.

Recalling Shakespeare

2011-02-17T18:02:00.000Z

On Monday I went to see a dear friend who is in the process of moving house. It's a difficult situation because she has lived in the same rather isolated cottage for the past sixty-three years and she is a hoarder. As you might imagine, given the length of time she's been in her home, she is having to move because of health problems and she is going into much smaller accommodation. It isn't easy for her, either emotionally or physically.

I went over on Monday specifically because she wanted me to have her collection of programmes from the theatre visits she'd made to Stratford over the years to use with the Shakespeare groups I teach. While I'd seen many of the same productions myself, I don't have the space to be a hoarder and so I haven't kept any but the more recent programmes myself. I've often regretted this, but a small house is a small house and that's all there is to it.

As you might imagine, I've had the most wonderful time over the past few days going through these programmes and recalling some of the marvellous productions I've had the privilege of seeing since I first started going to Stratford in the early 1960s. They include, for example, the programme for the very first professional Shakespeare I saw, Peter Hall's 1962 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Judi Dench as Titania, Diana Rigg as Helena and, I notice, the novelist, Margaret Drabble, tucked away among the fairies. I knew she had wanted to be an actress, but I hadn't realised I'd been there to see her early attempts.

It is, though, the even earlier programmes that really make you catch your breath and turn green with envy. Here, for example, is the 1959 production of Othello with Sam Wanamaker as Iago and Paul Robeson as The Moor. What wouldn't I have given to see that. Or the Cymbeline from two years earlier with Peggy Ashcroft as Imogen and, hidden deep among the Lords, Ladies, Servants and Guards, an as yet unheard of, Eileen Atkins. And what about a production of Dr Faustus just after the war, in 1947, with Robert Harris as the eponymous scholar and Paul Scofield as the evil Mephistophilis?

The piece de resistance, however, has to be the 1951 programme for Henry IV Pt I. The cast list reads like a theatrical who's who of the period; Harry Andrews as King Henry, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Michael Redgrave as Hotspur, Hugh Griffiths as Owen Glendower and, of course, Richard Burton as Prince Hal. I am not old enough to remember Burton as anything other than a film actor. How I wish I could have seen that production. The Henry IVs are among my favourite plays anyway, but with a cast like that.......

I'm so sorry for my friend that she has had to give away programmes that are reminders of so many happy memories, but I know she is pleased that they are going to be put to good use and when I talk to her about the memories they have recalled for me as well, we are at least going to have food for hours and hours of theatrical discussion.

The House at Sea's End - Elly Griffiths

2011-02-15T18:01:00.000Z

The House at Sea's End is the third of Elly Griffiths' crime novels about forensic archeologist, Ruth Galloway. I love Ruth, she is everything a female crime hero 'shouldn't' be, forty, single, overweight and, in this book, the mother of newly born Kate, who promises to be every bit as much of a character as Ruth is.

This time Ruth is called in to examine a burial uncovered by her team beneath a rockfall on an isolated Norfolk beach. As she excavates the bones it becomes apparent that she has not one, but six victims of what appears to be a war-time execution. Inevitably, the police are called in and DCI Nelson is forced to consider the possibility that not only were there war crimes committed in this very small and now rapidly vanishing village seventy years ago, but that there might also still be someone alive who is prepared to kill to make sure that the truth is never revealed.

The theme of war crimes is explored further through the visit of Ruth's old friend of Bosnian extraction, Tatjana. Tatjana is still trying to come to terms with the loss of her own child and his grandparents and in exploring that story Ruth learns more about her own feelings on having become a mother and what Kate's presence is going to mean in her life. The two narrative are woven together very well and complement each other rather than feeling contrived as might so easily be the case.

But then that wouldn't happen with a writer of Griffiths talent, would it? With every novel she becomes more and more adept. Her plots stand up, her characters are wonderful creations and completely real, and above all she has the most original narrative voice I've encountered in years. Writing in third person present tense Griffiths' narrator stands slightly back from the action and offers a wry commentary on everything that is going on. The temptation is to think that it is in some way Ruth's voice, but the narrator is there when she isn't. Whoever it is, I'm rather glad they aren't always around to observe some of my follies. Here is Ruth coming home to Kate and to her friend, Shona, who has been looking after her.

Ruth looks at Shona, who is still holding Kate and looking pleased with herself.

'We've been up for ages,' she says. 'I got Kate dressed and gave her a bottle. We've been playing.'

Of the two, Kate looks the better for the experience. She is bright-eyed and bursting with energy. Shona has, in fact, dressed her in pyjamas and a jumper that is two sizes too big but she is overcoming these sartorial disadvantages with aplomb. She takes Ruth's phone and bites it, experimentally. Shona on the other hand, looks pale and bleary-eyed, her hair is unbrushed and her skirt is on inside out. But she is obviously pleased with herself for having survived the night. Pg 192

And she turns the English language superbly.

'Can I get you a drink?' asks Hastings, shrugging off his coat. 'Tea? Coffee? Something stronger? Keep out the cold?'

'I'm driving.' says Nelson. 'Coffee would be grand.'

Ruth would love 'something stronger' but she feels sure that Nelson would disapprove. Not only will she be driving later but she is also going to be operating a heavy baby. 'Coffee would be lovely,' she says. Pg 69

It is wonderful to watch a writer grow, as Griffiths is doing, book by book in the mastery of her craft. I can't recommend her books too highly, but, as I so often find myself saying, if you haven't read the first two you really ought to go back to the beginning. Once you've read one you're going to want to read the others anyway so save yourself the trouble and begin at the beginning.

Annie

Is There a Comic in the House?

2011-02-13T22:04:00.000Z

"My problem," I declared to the friend with whom I was lunching yesterday, "is that I was born without the laughter gene."

We were reflecting on the David Lodge lecture to which we had both been on Wednesday and discussing the next speaker in the series, whose name I genuinely can't remember because it is someone of whom I have never heard. The main reason I haven't heard of him is because he is a stand up comedian and I'm afraid I have yet to find a stand up comic who makes me laugh. Everyone around me can be rolling in the aisles but I will just sit there looking bemused. Television sit-com is just as bad. There will be gales of laughter coming from the studio audience (OK, no real indication, I know but someone must find them funny or surely they wouldn't go on making them) while I sit shaking my head in amazement.

Perhaps it is to do with the fact that laughter these days seems so often to revolve around making fun of someone else's misfortune in a way which is frequently, or so it appears to me, to be needlessly cruel. We condemn then playground bully who makes fun of the lonely child who somehow fails to fit in, but it's acceptable if the bully is being paid vast sums of money to humiliate others in a wider public forum.

Anyway, I had decided that I didn't do laughter and that I must be the worst sort of social misfit - and then I read the next segment of Susan Hill's Howards End is on the Landing; the chapter in which she discusses what makes her laugh. Back they came flooding, all those occasions when I've laughed so hard that I cried. Wodehouse never fails whether it be Jeeves or Lord Emsworth, and she also mentions someone who in my mind is one of the great comic writers of all times, Gerald Durrell.

Hill talks of probably Durrell's most famous book, My Family and Other Animals, and I would rank that high up amongst my favourites as well, but for me the really funny books are those which detail his travels in search of rare animals for his conservation programme: Beasts in the Belfry, Catch Me a Colubus and above all The Bafut Beagles. For some reason I read the last of those in a hotel room in Paris and much to the distress of the other guests I was still chuckling as I went down to breakfast. Ah, these mad English!

As Hill says, what distinguishes authors such as Wodehouse and Durrell is their style. These are not writers out for a quick laugh, they are people who have something to say and say it with panache. You would want to read them whatever they were writing about simply because they know how to turn a beautiful sentence. I've spent this afternoon finding cheap copies of the volumes I remember best and in future when I worry about the state of my laughter gene I shall have somewhere to turn for reassurance.

Annie

Reading Experience Database 1450 - 1945

2011-02-12T17:56:00.000Z

As I'm sure most of you know, The Open University maintains a site which they call The Learning Space where you can access short on-line courses available to the general public without cost. They can be in any subject, range across the various undergraduate levels and for the most part they are expected to take between one and twenty hours of study. Whenever they add to these courses they publish the fact on their Open Learn page and I regularly check in on a Saturday morning to see if there's anything new that might appeal. Well, this morning I hit pay dirt. There had been not one, but four attractive courses posted during the week, all to do with the history of the reader.

The courses are all related to a database the OU maintains about which I previously knew nothing, the Reading Experience Database 1450 - 1945. The site explains better than I could what its purpose is:

UK RED is an open-access database housed at The Open University containing over 30,000 easily searchable records documenting the history of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945. Evidence of reading presented in RED is drawn from published and unpublished sources as diverse as diaries, commonplace books, memoirs, sociological surveys, and criminal court and prison records. In January 2010 the RED project received generous AHRC funding to develop an international digital network for researching the history of reading across borders, in collaboration with partners in Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.

Each of the four new courses is designed to help the student understand the nature of the material stored on the databased and the potential for its use.

The first course, History of Reading: An introduction to reading in the past, consists of a series of essays, drawn from material referenced in the database, designed to illustrate aspects of reading in the UK during the period from 1450 to 1945. It contains essays relating to, amongst others, Dickens, Austen, Pepys and Stevenson.

The second, History of Reading Tutorial 1: Finding evidence of reading in the past, is designed to help researchers search, browse and use the resource, exploring the types of evidence historians have uncovered about the history of reading. It has in it, for example, a unit about the way in which material has been drawn from diaries, letters and journals - some of my favourite type of reading.

The third and fourth courses are each illustrative of ways in which researchers might use the database to compile a substantial body of evidence either about the way in which a specific book has been received by readers over the ages or the reading habits of a particular individual. History of Reading Tutorial 2: The reading and reception of literary texts - a case study of Robinson Crusoe, does just what it says on the tin, it looks at the history of the readers response to Defoe's novel,while History of Reading Tutorial 3: Famous Writers and their Reading: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Vernon Lee explores the way in which the reading habits of a writer can then be seen to feed into their own writing.

I've only just begun to look at the first of these and have done little more than scratch the surface of what is actually available in RED itself. I put in Ben Jonson and discovered that when Virginia Woolf was reading plays from this period she commented:

Tomorrow I go onto Ben Jonson, but I shan't like him as much as Marlowe.

Not exactly groundbreaking information, but it does show the potential.

I hope you enjoy playing with this as much as I know I'm going to. The trouble is it's something else to take up my time when I ought to be doing the reading myself rather than exploring other people's reading habits. Oh well!

The Hanging Wood ~ Martin Edwards

2011-02-11T16:36:00.000Z

The Hanging Wood, Martin Edwards' fifth novel set in the Lake District featuring DCI Hannah Scarlett and historian Daniel Kind, was sent to me via NetGalley for pre-publication review. And as I'm an avid follower of the series, I was more than grateful to have the opportunity to read it before anyone else in my equally enthusiastic library group can get their hands on it. This probably makes me a very nasty person, but at least I am an honest one. Which is more than can be said for most of the characters in this book - the honest bit, that is - a fair few of them come under the heading of very nasty indeed!

Hannah's cold case unit is brought in to examine the disappearance twenty years earlier of fourteen year old Callum Hinds, when his sister, Orla, apparently commits suicide in the grain silo on their father's farm. At the time it was assumed that Callum had been killed by their uncle, who was found hanging shortly afterwards. However, no body has ever been found and conversations between Orla and Daniel shortly before her death raise the possibility that not only may Callum still be alive but also that there may be something suspicious about her own death.

But, (there is always a but in the best crime fiction) Orla and Callum are linked to a family grouping that is involved in bringing a great deal of wealth and business into the area. Even better, the family is offering to sponsor a local police project. Hannah is under strict instructions not to rock the boat with her investigation and to make sure that it is all wrapped up within the week. Fortunately (well, maybe not fortunately, but you get the picture) there is another death, after which no one can hide from the fact that there was something very wrong with the conclusions reached two decades earlier and that there is a very live investigation needed now.

As usual, it is through the careful deliberations of Daniel, the son of Hannah's ex-boss, who brings his academic historians mind to bear on the evidence, that Hannah is handed the key that solves the mystery. Working on a new book in the idyllic surroundings afforded by a residential library, Daniel has to hand the details of the family needed to shed light on what it was that Callum discovered twenty years earlier which meant he had to disappear. When the past is clear, the present falls into place.

I really enjoy Edwards Lake District books. While they may not have the same grittiness as those set in Liverpool, neither do they ever pretend that the Lake District is simply a chocolate box location. The farm that provides much of the setting for this book is clearly a place where those who live struggle for survival; it is also a place where there is constant potential for danger, either accidental or premeditated. In The Hanging Wood, this is set against the beauty of a residential library and yes, you read that correctly, a residential library. Given that anyone reading this is likely to be a book fanatic can you imagine anything more idyllic: a library where you can go and stay and not have to go home in the evening. I am still reeling with the joy of discovering that although the institution in Edwards' novel does not exist, it is based on a real place. I promise you, I am going to stay there at some point, just as long, that is, as there are no cold cases that need solving in the vicinity.

If you enjoy a good crime thriller along the lines of those written by Peter Robinson and Reginald Hill then I'm pretty sure you will enjoy Edwards. As usual, I'm going to say that I think you should go back to the beginning and read the series in order, but if you are already acquainted with these books then this one will not disappoint.

David Lodge ~ Author, Critic and Teacher

2011-02-09T18:50:00.000Z

I've just come in from listening to David Lodge talk to our creative writing undergrads. Unless you're an English graduate yourself, you're most likely to know of David as a novelist. His campus trilogy, Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work led to frantic attempts on the part of local academics to try and pin just which of them had contributed to the works as models for particular characters and I know of at least one individual in a very senior role who read all three of them in preparation for her interview in the department so that she would have a flavour of what the university was like and the type of people she might possibly be working with. David, of course, strenuously denies that Rummidge University is based in any way on the institution in which he taught for almost three decades or that there is any link at all between his characters and the people with whom he worked. No one believes him for an instance!

Latterly, his novels have had a less academic background, although the most recent, Deaf Sentence, did return to the topic if somewhat indirectly. Today, however, he came to talk to the students about his forthcoming book, A Man of Parts, which is published at the beginning of April. Like his novel Author, Author, A Man of Parts is biographical fiction, in this instance concerning the novelist H G Wells, and I want to return in a later post to what he had to say about writing in this particular genre when I've had more time to think about it because, as those of you who are English graduates will appreciate, what he said was theoretically very sound but also very complex.

Because, David Lodge's other writing reflects his career as one of our major literary critics. His work ranges from that very accessible set of essays, The Art of Fiction, to seminal texts such as Modern Criticism and Theory: a Reader and Consciousness and the Novel. When David talks about fiction you are always aware that what he has to to say is underpinned by a depth of knowledge and understanding that leaves most other people gasping. Our creative writing students may have been drinking in every word concerning the shaping of a mass of research into a novel, but those in the audience who study literature from a more theoretical standpoint were also busy taking notes and rapidly making links between what he was saying about the way the novel is now moving and the development of other strands of modern culture.

However, what wasn't mentioned by the person who introduced him, but which must by the end of the session have been apparent to everyone in the room, was the fact that David Lodge is simply the most brilliant teacher I have ever known. As I said earlier, he taught at the University for a very long time and is still Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and even though I was a language student I used to sneak into the postgraduate seminars he held each week in his rather cramped office. (Well, it was actually rather spacious for an office, but definitely cramped when all the students who wanted to attend piled in.) Every week one of the postgrads would introduce a topic focussed on a particular text and then we would have a free-for-all discussion. At the time I was already a teacher of some years standing, but had never worked at that level and I would watch him spellbound. Everything I now know about running seminars be they for undergrads or more experienced students, I learned from observing David. He has the most remarkable gift of making every one who contributes feel as if they have just made the very point that will elucidate the topic under discussion for the entire group. He did exactly the same thing this afternoon in the question and answer session. "What a good question....." "Now that is a really interesting point...." The students came out glowing.

So, perhaps the final thing that should be said about David Lodge is that as well as being an extremely gifted writer, critic and teacher he is also a very kind human being.

Felicia's Journey ~ William Trevor

2011-02-07T18:09:00.000Z

It is to my great shame that I have to admit that I have never before read anything by William Trevor. What is more, had this not been on the list for my Monday Book Group, I wouldn't have read Felicia's Journey, his 1994 Whitbread winning novel. The loss has been mine.

It is hard to say anything about the book without spoiling it for those of you who have yet to read it, but I will try and give you a flavour of what it is about. Eighteen year old Felicia has left her native Ireland to search in the English Midlands for her boyfriend, Johnny Lysaght. No one in her home town approves of the relationship and she has travelled without any real knowledge of where she is going or how she is going to find Johnny once she arrives. In the course of her search she encounters Mr Hilditch, a strange and lonely older man who befriends her for reasons of his own which, inevitably, the reader suspects from the first. As we learn more about Hilditch's background and the reasons for his peculiar life style, so we become more and more concerned for what the outcome of their chance meeting might be. At the end, despite the fact that Felicia appears to be in a very difficult situation indeed, it is possibly to argue that had events turned out as we anticipated, everything could have been so much worse. What would in any other circumstances be a downbeat, if not tragic, ending has almost the feeling of victory, certainly of relief.

The greatness of this novel, however, lies not so much in the story that is told, but in the manner of the telling. Trevor, is celebrated for his short story writing and there is much about this book that is reminiscent of the art of the short story writer. Paramount is the emotional attachment that the author creates between the reader and the characters. It is impossible not to react to each of them as if you actually had to have dealings with them yourself. For example, at one point Felicia finds shelter with a group of religious fanatics who harass those they consider likely to hear their message with a vigour that is so real I wanted to pick the phone up as I read and demand that the police remove them from my doorstep NOW. (You will be relieved to know that I restrained myself.)

In terms of the written style Trevor wastes not a single word and in half a sentence he can paint an entire picture.

Wouldn't you go up on the deck?

asks an anonymous women in the first couple of lines and immediately you know you're on the ferry coming from Ireland to England. He doesn't need to tell you anything more.

Or you might get a more extended passage that conjures up an entire way of living. The whole is too long to quote, but there is what amounts to an elegy on the homeless which begins:

Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs. They lie with their begging notices still beside them, with enough left of a bottle to ease the waking moment, with pavement cigarette butts to hand.

The power of the writing is in the placement of a single word, 'pavement cigarette butts'. That word pavement tells an entire story with nothing else needing to be added.

Inevitably, Felicia's journey turns out to be more than a journey from one side of the Irish Sea to the other, but neither is it simply a journey from innocence to experience. It could be argued that in some ways Felicia is as naive at the end of the book as she is at the beginning, or conversely you could argue that she had lost innocence before the book begins. If pushed I would have to say that I think what she finds is a level of independence, a voice and a will of her own. If you read her story you may feel that by the end she has lost just about everything except her life and yet I can't help feeling that she has found something that if not exactly what you would want for her is in someways at least a life of her own.

The power of the experience of reading this book has been such that it will be some time before I read another Trevor novel. You cannot live a reading life at that level of intensity for very long. But I most certainly will read other works of his and am only glad that because of my own previous folly I have his entire back list to work through.

Sunday Armchair Travelling

2011-02-06T17:15:00.000Z

It is Sunday afternoon and as is fast becoming a habit I have been enjoying tea and scones while reading another chapter of Susan Hill's book, Howards End is on the Landing. Despite the fact that she claims to neither be a traveller nor to be particularly interested in travel writing Hill has all the recent greats in her collection, Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Like Hill, I am no traveller. I not only like my own routine, I actually need it for my medical well-being and travelling not only exhausts me it also separates me from the secret of my much needed sleep, my own bed. So, if I want to know anything of foreign parts I am reliant on the work of others, be that though the auspices of the BBC or through writers of the calibre that Hill describes.

I know Chatwin better through his novels than through his travel books. On the Black Hill, is the story of twin brothers who, like me, are not travellers. They are Welsh farmers whose existence revolves round the land on which they were born and through charting their lives Chatwin also manages to evoke the life of the country itself.

Colin Thubron I once had the privilege of hearing speak and have never forgotten that calm and gentle man talking of the hazards of journeying through China at a time when the regime in power still made it difficult for a foreigner to spend even a couple of days there let alone any extended visit. I bought a copy of his book, Behind the Wall, and took it back to share with the children I was teaching who were as fascinated as only children can be by the man who kept a collection of noses in jars. Speculation as to what you might do with a nose collection kept the classroom buzzing for weeks.

But, Leigh Fermor, just the mention of his name brought back a feeling of shame. Hill speaks of his book, A Time to Keep Silence, as:

hardly a travel book at all - or if it is, the travel is inwards, a spiritual journey. Some books are balm to the soul and solace to the weary mind, a cooling stream at the end of long and tiring days and 'A Time to Keep Silence' is assuredly one of them.

Some years ago now, a dear friend offered me Leigh Fermor's books at a period when balm to the soul was much needed and I failed to take him up on his suggestion. I could walk upstairs now and put my hand straight onto the copy he gave me of A Time of Gifts, but I have never so much as opened it. Hill says that Leigh Fermor is the doyen of the travel world and I can neither contest or confirm that view - as yet. Has anyone else read his works? And, if so, what do you think? Should I start with the volume I already have or are there better ways in?

And are there other travel writers to explore? Not, please Bill Bryson, who always seems to be laughing at someone. But any other writers of the calibre of Chatwin, Thubron and Leigh Fermor would be welcome suggestions.

Annie

Faulks on Fiction: Yes, but what sort?

2011-02-05T18:00:00.000Z

The BBC are celebrating 2011 as their Year of Books. Quite why 2011 should be an important year for books I'm not sure. In this house, every year is book year and we hadn't noticed that 2011 was more bookish than any other, but what ho, if the BBC wants to celebrate books we are more than happy to join them.

Rather ironically, given that there are demonstrations going on all over the country even as I write against the 400+ library closures coming about thanks to the government's funding cuts, the celebrations kick off this evening with the first in a series of programmes introduced by the author, Sebastian Faulks. Faulks on Fiction will focus on four different character types in the English novel, starting with the hero and moving through discussions of the lover, the snob and the villain.

As is the BBC's wont, they have published an accompanying book and this morning I had an e-mail from one of our major book chains informing me that not only could I download the book itself for just slightly more than half price, but I could also claim four classics of English Literature free to go along with it. Well, my kindle doesn't accept downloads from this particular company, but I thought if they were making this offer there was a fair chance Amazon was as well, so I nipped over to their site to see what was what.

Amazon had the same offer, although it was rather more expensive. They did, however, also claim to have a very much cheaper download of the Faulks without the accompanying novels and as I already have the other books concerned I eagerly clicked on the link,

only to find this: yes, I was rather surprised too. So, I went back to the original book + novel download and scrolled down the page. The first part of the description was definitely about the Faulks but then I hit this:

Leanne inherits a halfshare in a former boarding school set in a remote part of Scotland. She gives up all that she knows to start her new life in the staff quarters of the school - then finds that the other owner, Adam, is a dominant male. His insistence on disciplining the erring female staff is at odds with Leanne's feminism and she's even more perturbed to find that she's aroused by watching the frequent punishments.

Setting this novel in a vast former boarding school gave me lots of scope for unusual castigatory settings. Miscreants are corrected in the staff rooms, classrooms and even the stables. The remoteness of the institute ensures that attractions build amongst the staff. The tension heightens when Adam, a first class advertising copywriter, starts to write copy for adult erotic toys - toys that, solely for the purposes of research, I forced myself to experiment with. These devilishly effective devices similarly take Adam's personal assistant, housekeeper, cook and other employees to their submissive depths and orgasmic heights.
Leanne initially tells herself that she'll have nothing to do with Adam's authoritative boundary-challenging sexuality, but her psyche and her libido have other plans.

(Amazon website description (apparently) of Faulks on Fiction)

Well! If that's what the BBC are intending to broadcast tonight all I can say is that there are going to be some very shocked viewers, either because of what they've seen or because of what they've missed!

I e-mailed Amazon and asked them what was going on. In fact, feeling rather indignant, I asked them if someone wasn't playing a particularly childish joke. They assured me that this was not the case, that it was a genuine error and that the matter would be corrected, but I've just been over there now and the site is still as it was this morning.

So, what are we in for this evening? I was actually going to record the programme and watch it tomorrow, but I'm not sure I can stand the suspense. I may have to watch it as it is transmitted. On the other hand if I have an hour of Lingering Lessons before I go to bed who knows what damage it will do to my beauty sleep. The story will continue.......

Devouring Notions

2011-02-04T17:52:00.002Z

I'm still busy picking up tips on how to read better, or perhaps more precisely, how to give more thought to what is going on in the mind of the author with whose work I'm trying to engage. Today I have been learning that extremely useful life skill that not all vampires actually have pointed teeth and painful looking brow ridges. Oh no! Sometimes they are as normal looking as you and me. (Well me, anyway, my not being able to speak definitively for who might be reading this blog.)

Foster makes the point that there are ways of devouring an individual's life spirit other than draining them of their blood. What is more, the non-vampiric predator is often far more lethal precisely because their intentions are not immediately apparent. He calls on a number of texts I have to admit to not having read to support his claim but what came to mind immediately was the passage in Margaret Forster's Keeping the World Away that I quoted a couple of weeks ago where one of the characters says of Gwen John that she drained whoever she was with by the emotional demands she made on them without giving anything back in return. That surely is a sort of vampirism and one that makes me realise that I've actually come across a few blood suckers in disguise myself over the years.

Then there are those characters who assume that everyone is at their beck and call and that the whole world exists simply to do their bidding. My favourite would have to be Jane Austen's Lady Catherine de Burgh who would still be happily draining the life out of all and sundry had she not had the misfortune to run into Miss Elizabeth Bennett.

And there in lies an important distinction. When characters like these meet their Waterloo the outcome is comedy or at least a feeling on the part of the reader of a kind of triumph. When they have their way and we have to watch helplessly while a good person is destroyed as a result of their devilment, when an Iago brings an Othello to his untimely doom, then what we have is tragedy.

Give me a vampire I can recognise every time.

Annie

A Lesson in Secrets ~ Jacqueline Winspear

2011-02-02T15:12:00.001Z

Every now and then you come across a new author whose future works you know you are going to want to read the moment they become available. That was the case in 2003 when I read the first of Jacqueline Winspear's novels about the eponymous Maisie Dobbs. Maisie, having survived the hospitals of the First World War where she was nursing, has returned to England, completed her Cambridge degree and set herself up as a private detective. Her methods of detection are unusual in the extent to which they rely on an understanding of human nature as much as on other more tangible evidence. And, as a result, she and the police with whom she comes into contact don't always see eye to eye. Nevertheless, Maisie has a clear up rate that would be the envy of any police force and what is more, she also manages to help her friends find their way though the most difficult of circumstances. In fact one of the major attractions of this series for me is watching the way that Maisie grows in confidence in dealing with the social world into which she has moved, having started life as a maid of all work in the home of one of the English aristocracy.

I was, then, extremely pleased to be given the opportunity by NetGalley to read the eighth Maisie Dobbs novel, A Lesson in Secrets, prior to publication and spent last weekend immersed in the Cambridge of 1932 where Maisie finds herself at the behest of the Secret Service conducting covert surveillance into the activities of the staff and students in an independent college dedicated to encouraging peace amongst the citizens of various European countries. While the Government is concerned that there may be problems with people entering the country under false pretences, it is not long before Maisie becomes far more concerned with the extreme political allegiances of some of her colleagues and their influence upon the students with whom they are associated. As usual, it is Maisie who has the more accurate grasp of the situation.

Inevitably, matters are complicated when the College Principal, a man whose writings are said to have caused a mutiny in the ranks of both the British and German armies during the First World War, is murdered and Maisie becomes embroiled in the investigation even though specifically warned off it by the powers that be. One of the things I really like about Maisie is that she is always prepared to tell said powers that be when she thinks they are wrong, even if she does know that she is still going to have to play along with them in the end.

Eventually, of course, the murderer is found and the real danger at the heart of the College revealed. Revealed, but still not acknowledged by the leaders of the Secret Service. There is clearly scope for taking the matter further in future episodes.

As well as putting together a tidily thought out plot, Winspear also explores a number of issues that were pertinent at that period. She brings to the fore the failure of the British Establishment to recognise the threat posed by Hitler at a time when it might still have been possible to do something to stop him and hints at the possibility that it is a fear of the rise of the lower classes that fuels this failure. Too many people in power in the UK, I believe, thought that Hitler had the right idea when it came to keeping certain types of individuals in their places. She also explores the post war growth of racketeering and of extortion that was the plague of those trying to set up their own businesses in a world that had seen a tremendous slump in trade and a dramatic rise in unemployment. And, perhaps most interesting of all to me, she has her characters look back on the treaty signed at the end of the Great War and foretell the disaster that was to come as a result of the demands made upon Germany. There were moments when I noted as I read "this could be Winifred Holtby", thinking of that writer's journalism on this subject rather than her fiction. She too was aware of the catastrophe that awaited Europe as a result of the short-sightedness of the Treaty of Versailles, a catastrophe it would have been possible to avoid but which by this stage was already inevitable. As one of Winspear's characters says:

we do not pay enough attention to the past...in 1914 we had become a reflection of history when we embarked upon what could be considered another European Thirty Years War.

Now there's an interesting thought, one conflict stretching from 1914 right through to 1945. It is, I think, a perspective that has some merit.

This is the excellent novel that I've come to expect from Jacqueline Winspear and I recommend it heartily. My only caveat, if you are a new Maisie Dobbs reader, is that you shouldn't think about starting here. I do think you need to read this series in order. However, if that is the case, then how lucky can you get. You still have all eight to read and delight in. I envy you.

The Hand that First Held Mine ~ Maggie O'Farrell

2011-01-31T12:58:00.001Z

Maggie O'Farrell's latest novel, The Hand that First Held Mine, has a dual setting in time if not in place. In the first part of the book we follow the stories of two women and the men who are fascinated by them. In the 1950s we watch as Alexandra Sinclair leaves home after a row with her mother and transforms herself into Lexie, a young woman capable of looking after herself and soon deeply engrossed in a relationship with the man she met briefly in her home locale, Innes Kent. Switching to the present time we then encounter Elina, just swimming back into consciousness after a three day labour and an emergency caesarian during which she almost died. Initially Elina has great gaps in her memory of both the birth and of her life with her partner, Ted and we watch her struggle as she tries to make sense of what has happened to her as well as cope with the pressures of a young child.

Switching between the two stories O'Farrell gradually builds a picture for the reader of how Lexie's life in London develops and of how her relationship with Innes, fifteen years her senior and separated from his wife and daughter, grows into an all consuming love on both sides. All the time, however, she makes us aware that, looking back from the time of Elina and Ted, Lexie's relationship will not last. We don't know how these two stories are going to interrelate but having the later perspective allows the writer to take on an omnipotent role and drop hints about the earlier section of the narrative.

The way in which the novel is structured is a direct reflection of one of its major concerns, how the mind plays tricks in respect of memory, blocking out those episodes that we are better off not being able to recall until such time as we are able to cope with them. It isn't only Elina who has gaps in her recollections, Ted is subject to momentary black outs where the world seems to shatter in front of his eyes before slowly reassembling itself and when asked about his childhood he is unable to bring to mind any details before his school years.

Gradually, as the story progresses and we start to understand how the two strands intertwine, the characters also discover what has happened to them and in different ways begin to explore how they might integrate what they have learnt, dreadful though it may be, into a new way forward. Their knowledge is hard bought, but ultimately the future looks hopeful.

The other major exploration in the novel is the nature of motherhood and in particular the pull of the baby and the instinctive bond that comes into being between mother and child from the moment of birth. I am not a mother and therefore perhaps not the best person to comment on this, but even I can see that O'Farrrell captures this magnificently. Some of the passages where Elina is caring for her son are among the best pieces of fiction I have read for a long time and she also deals with the desperate need for a child that can be felt by those unable to conceive or carry their own children and the overcompensation that can result.

This novel won the most recent Costa Novel award and was, I understand, a close runner up for the overall prize. It deserves both distinctions and I now have all O'Farrell's back list lined up in the hope that I shall enjoy her previous books as much as this.

Annie

Food, Glorious Food.

2011-01-30T14:40:00.000Z

I am still busy learning how to read like a Professor and today I have discovered that when the characters in a novel sit down for a meal what they are actually doing is celebrating a kind of communion. I am given the warning that I need to understand 'communion' in its widest sense, but nevertheless meals are about bringing people together to further understanding and celebrate the 'union' of their relationship.

Except, of course, when they aren't.

Well, yes, definitely!

Last term, I was teaching Titus Andronicus, which, if you've ever had a strong enough stomach to watch it, you will recall has a pretty powerful banquet scene towards the end that is calculated to do anything except unite the participants in friendship. By this stage in the play half the cast are wandering about minus at least a hand and the other half are gloating about the fact that they have been responsible for this state of affairs. When the first half invite the second half to a feast you can be fairly sure that friendship is not top of the bill of fare.

And yet!

Oh yes, and yet, because when you think about it this scene is, if nothing else, the very communion service itself distorted for the purposes of revenge. We can argue another day about whether or not it is a righteous revenge, but nevertheless, the feast that Titus prepares for Tamora and Saturninus is in actual what the communion service is symbolically. The dish that Titus concocts for the Queen of the Goths and her depraved Roman lover is assembled from the blood, bones and flesh of her sons, Chiron and Demetrius. There is no need for a service of transformation here. Titus offers up the real thing. Mind you, I am right about one thing. It isn't friendship Titus has in mind.

Apologies if that has completely put you off your Sunday lunch. Let me try to make amends because there are some wonderful instances of food in novels and instances where I would have to argue with Thomas Foster when he contends that meals in novels would be boring if they were just about the food. I suspect he must be a man who has never been on a diet and dined vicariously on a fictional character's fictional six course banquet, the only sort that doesn't add inches to your waistline.

The first books that came to mind when I was reading this section of Foster's text were Enid Blyton's Famous Five series. How come those children never burst? How come they never made it into the government's stats on obesity in the under twelves? They never stopped eating. Everywhere they went the picnic basket went with them and it was always stuffed to the gills with enough carbohydrates and cholesterol to induce heart failure by their early twenties. Perhaps this is why there have been no more of these books in later years. It has nothing to do with the demise of the author and everything to do with the demise of the characters - early death from calorific overload. But the food was magnificent and all you wanted to do was find a space on the picnic rug and help yourself.

There was even, some twenty years or so ago, a Dragon and Dungeons version of the Five. And did the points that you earned buy you extra powers in the shape of magic swords and skills? Of course not, you earned points that bought you support in the shape of a picnic basket and the goodies to go in it. What more could a first class hero ask?

The other series that I thought of almost immediately was Frank Tallis's books about Max Liebermann and Oskar Rheinhardt set in turn of the (19th) century Vienna. Like all the best crime novels the police and their sidekicks spend as much time eating and drinking as they do detecting, but there is nothing so sordid as grimy Glasgow pub or downtown New York bar for these two. Oh no, they spend their time in up market Viennese coffee houses and Tallis describes every last flake of pastry, every single mouthful of whipped cream. I know people who read these books solely for the second hand delights of gourmandising on forbidden fruits or, more accurately, forbidden cream cakes. Don't get me wrong. The books are absolutely fine, but the pastries.....well!

So, while I'm perfectly happy to look with Foster for the symbolic significance of any banquet or afternoon tea that I might stumble across in my reading, I am certainly never going to look on the food as boring. Stomach turning occasionally if Shakespeare's had a hand in the menu, but boring, never.

For An Ex Far East Prisoner of War

2011-01-28T15:56:00.000Z

I have been allowing myself just small portions of Susan Hill's wonderful Howards End is on the Landing as a daily treat, one section at a time, and yesterday I read the piece in which she talks about her long friendship with the poet Charles Causley.

Causley was too often dismissed by people who should have known better as a children's poet, in part, I suspect, because he spent his working life time as a primary teacher and some of the poems by which he first became known drew on the experiences he had in that Cornish schoolroom. Indeed, I first encountered his work through the renegade Timothy Winter when I was studying for 'O' Level. However, if read with care and thought about deeply there is very little in Causley's work that doesn't speak of emotions far more intense than children would necessarily appreciate and as a primary teacher myself there were few that I felt comfortable offering to the classes I taught. 'O' Level (15-16) was about the right age to read him for the first time.

I love many of his poems and know a lot of them my heart bit if I have a favourite then it is probably the Sonnet For an Ex Far East Prisoner of War. Causley himself was in the navy during the Second World War and so I'm not certain for whom he actually wrote this. However, my father was a Far East Prisoner of War and there is much here that I recognise from his own struggle to come to terms with what had happened to him and his determination to put those depravations behind him and not let them destroy the rest of his life. It is not an easy poem to read, but I hope you think it as good a work as I do.

For an Ex Far East Prisoner of War

I am that man with helmet made of thorn
Who wandered naked in the desert place,
Wept, with the sweating sky, that I was born
And wore disaster in my winter face.

I am that man who asked no hate, no pity,
I am that man, five wounded, on the tree.
I am that man, walking in native city,
Hears his dead comrade cry, Remember me!

I am that man whose brow with blood was wet,
Returned, as Lazarus from the dead to live.
I am that man, long counselled to forget,
Facing a fearful victory to forgive:

And seizing the two words, with the sharp sun
Beat them, like sword and ploughshare, into one.

Charles Causley

The Betrayal of Maggie Blair ~ Elizabeth Laird

2011-01-26T17:03:00.000Z

Although she had already had a long career writing picture books, I first came across Elizabeth Laird when her novel for older children, Red Sky in the Morning, was published in 1989. The book, which is about a girl taking care of her hydrocephalic baby brother, marked her as something very special, a writer whose voice rings with truth and integrity in every word she writes. With each subsequent book Laird has only reinforced that first impression. Her 2007 book, Crusade, was one of the best and most balanced accounts of the Holy Wars for children that I have ever read and was deservedly short listed for both the Costa and the Carnegie Children's Literature Awards. Now we have her latest book, The Betrayal of Maggie Blair, which I have had the privilege of reading pre-publication via NetGalley, and I have to say that I think it is well nigh perfect.

Based on events from Laird's own family history, the book tells the story of sixteen year old Maggie Blair, who lives on the Island of Bute with her maternal Grandmother. We are sometime in the 1680s and the peace of the country and of the folk who live there is ravaged by two manifestations of prejudice, intolerance and self-seeking; the pursuit of those deemed to be witches and the persecution by royal forces of the Covenanters. Disliked by the islanders for her sharp tongue, it takes very little for a grasping landowner to turn the local people against Maggie's Grandmother and have her condemned as a witch. Barely escaping with her own life, Maggie is forced to flee the island and seek shelter with the family of her father's brother, a family she has never met before.

Rather than finding herself in any form of haven, Maggie discovers that her uncle is a staunch Covenanter and, as such, likely to be arrested by the Red Coats and forced to take the test of loyalty to the Crown; to declare that the King is the Head of the Church and stands between his people and God. There will be no peaceful life for her on the mainland either, it seems. Matters become even worse, when the girl who betrayed Maggie on Bute turns up at her uncle's farm and looks set fair to continue to act in whatever way is most likely to line her own pockets regardless of who is harmed in the process.

One of Laird's great strengths is that she knows just how far to take a young reader into the horror of some of the situations in which her characters find themselves. She shirks nothing of what happened to witches in the seventeenth century, nor of the tortures and depravations that were inflicted on those who opposed the Crown. Nevertheless, she still leaves the reader with enough grounds for hope to make the reading experience a positive one.

Neither does she shirk the questions raised by the religious and political disputes that the characters find themselves engulfed by. Just as in Crusade the reader was asked to see the conflict from both sides and to recognise the cruelty of belief carried to its extremes whatever the faction involved, so here, Maggie questions the faith that asks a man to sacrifice himself for his beliefs at the expense not only of his own life but also that of his family.

And it is here that the ambiguity of Laird's title comes to the fore. Who is being betrayed? Is it Maggie, or is it that Maggie herself is the one who is guilty of betrayal. Certainly, Maggie is betrayed by people in whom she should have been able to place her faith, but there is also a question in her own mind as to whether or not in trying to persuade her uncle to take the test and return to his family she is betraying him. There are no simple answers in this book. Laird never lets you take the easy way out.

I suspect that The Betrayal of Maggie Blair is too late to be considered for this year's Carnegie, but whenever the opportunity does arise it should certainly be on the short list and I have to say that it will be a book worth reading that beats it into second place. I don't think Laird puts a foot wrong in this novel and I can't recommend it too highly.

Political Fictions

2011-01-24T17:58:00.000Z

One of the reasons I first took up blogging was a need to celebrate and clarify the serendipitous connections that seem to turn up in my life on an almost daily basis, so you'll have to excuse me if I let the latest in the series take me off on a ramble round my always rather chaotic mind.

Last week, quite by chance, I happened upon the writings of Michael Dirda, a book critic who really thinks about what he has to say and who, as far as I can discover (you have to remember he is a new discovery) writes mainly for The Washington Post. Having ordered every collection of his that I could find, I then decided to see if there was any of his work to be had by mining the paper's archives and what was he writing about last week? He was writing about the very book on Andrew Marvell that I posted about two or three days ago, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, by Nigel Smith.

Dirda has obviously got further through the book than I have. He writes:

While most of us think of Marvell as the author of the best seduction poem in the English language, he was known to his contemporaries as private tutor, a hardworking civil servant and an occasional diplomatic emissary (to Holland and Russia). He was also quite probably a secret agent.

Serendipity Number One.

Yesterday evening I settled down with a pot of good tea (someday I'll tell you about me and tea, but not today) to listen to the Sunday Evening drama slot on Radio 3. It turned out to be a play by Stephen Wakelam entitled Living with Princes and was about the essayist Michel de Montaigne. Last week I was fortunate enough to win a copy of Sarah Bakewell's new book on Montaigne from Dorothy at Of Books and Bicycles.

Serendipity Number Two and Number Three.

Serendipity Number Three because the play was not about Montaigne's writing career but about his role as a diplomat, specifically about the part he played in the struggle for the succession to the throne of France.

This set me thinking about the number of writers who have had their fingers in diplomatic pies, whether overtly, like Marvell, or, as Wakelam's play suggested, rather more covertly like Montaigne. It is pretty much accepted now that Christopher Marlowe was recruited to Walsingham's spy network while he was at Cambridge and that it was this, rather than a tavern brawl over who was to pay the bill, that led to his death. Pepys, of course, seventy odd years later, was Secretary for the Affairs of the Admiralty, which is simply a fancy way of saying he was an important bod in navy matters.

Of course, it wasn't just writers who were engaged in affairs of state. It was common practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to recruit composers and musicians to act as couriers between various monarchs and their men of state because such people had easy access to the courts of Europe and could carry messages without their activities being remarked upon. There is some evidence, for example, that the composer and lutenist, John Dowland was involved in this way.

Then there are those people who we think of first and foremost as statesmen, but who have also had careers as writers of fiction. Benjamin Disraeli comes to mind straight away, his best known novel probably being Sybil, but more recently there has been the Conservative Peer, Lord Archer, whose books I can't abide, but who nevertheless fits the pattern.

I'm sure there must be others that haven't yet crawled out of the darker recesses of my mind, but you will rectify that for me, I know. And this, of course, is before we even start on the current crop of memoir writers from every conceivable corner of the political spectrum. To what extent their writing might be classed as fiction I wouldn't even dream of speculating.

Questing

2011-01-23T17:36:00.000Z

I was in our local Oxfam Bookshop yesterday morning and picked up a book with the title How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C Foster. I'm a complete sucker for any book like this. In theory, given the career I've had, I ought to know how to read literature like a Professor, or at least like a Senior Lecturer, but I can never resist finding out how someone else thinks it should be done and so the book found its way off the shelf and came home with me.

Foster's style is very engaging and I can see that whether I always agree with him or not I am going to get a lot of pleasure simply from spending time in his company. If he lectures as well as he writes then his students are fortunate indeed. I set out this morning to read just the introduction and before I knew it I was half way through the first chapter as well.

In that first chapter Foster discusses the concept of the quest, the driving force behind literature from Beowulf through The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter. What I found most interesting about this discussion was the text that Foster chooses to illustrate his thesis, Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. I have to admit that it isn't a book I know well, but those of you who are familiar with it will recall that the protagonist, the person who is on the quest, is Oedipa Maas, who, just in case you weren't sure, is a woman.

This set me thinking about the idea of the woman as quester, because I wouldn't mind betting that they are about as rare as the dragon's eggs your average quester might be searching for. It's noticeable that when Forster is talking in more general terms the novels he mentions all feature male protagonists and he always uses he as pronominal reference.

I toyed for a time with the notion of Jane Austen's heroines as going on quests. Certainly, they meet Foster's requirement of attaining a greater level of self-knowledge by the end of their respective novels and I suppose you could argue that they are on a quest for marriage, but if you're going to accuse Lizzie Bennett of setting out to look for a husband can I please get out of the line of fire before you do so. So perhaps not.

I thought then about some of the children's literature I know. I'm in the middle of reading an ARC of Elizabeth Laird's forthcoming book, The Betrayal of Maggie Blair, and although I have yet to finish it that does seem to be moving towards meeting the criteria. Set in Scotland in the time of the Covenanters, it is about a young woman who is forced to go questing by the superstitious minds of the people amongst whom she has been brought up. She is certainly meeting with perils on the way and although it asks for role reversal there is the equivalent of the evil knight and the beautiful princess who is going to need rescuing. Whether or not it will finally resolve itself with Maggie growing to greater self-awareness I shall be better placed to tell you towards the end of the week, but it looks as though it might.

So, perhaps there is greater scope for the female quester in literature being written for children growing up in an age where woman have more expectation of being allowed to follow paths traditionally prescribed for men? Can I think of any others?

Well, there's Philip Pullman's Lyra, of course, who is certainly the protagonist in Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) and without a doubt ends up with greater self-knowledge. That, after all, is what the sequence is about. Even there, however, the main role is taken over in the second book by Will and Lyra never completely regains the ascendancy she had in the first novel.

And perhaps I don't have to stay with modern children's literature. What about Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden? Her quest, it could be argued, appears to be to rescue the garden, but she definitely finds out more about herself in general and comes specifically to a greater self awareness as a result of the journey she undertakes. I'm not sure how Colin would feel about the role of princess in distress, but as far as I'm concerned he fits the bill nicely.

But where are the adult female questers? Who am I missing? Who are the obvious contenders? What do you think?

Annie

Public Private Libraries

2011-01-22T17:53:00.000Z

The History Group to which I belong has reached the time of the English Civil Wars and at the moment we are all busy researching the period around 1650. Because I know almost nothing about him other than that he wrote the poem To His Coy Mistress, I offered to explore the life of Andrew Marvell, who was not only a poet but also a man active in many different aspects of public life; indeed, if the rumours that he was a spy are well-founded, also active in less public aspects of government enterprise as well.

I have to admit that there was a second reason why I offered to carry out this research, namely, that I wanted an excuse to read the new and highly praised biography, Andrew Marvell: the chameleon, written by Nigel Smith. This book came last Autumn to stunning reviews and I've had it on my radar ever since.

This week I've been reading about Marvell's early years with his family in Yorkshire where his cleric father served as Master of Charterhouse in Hull. Andrew Marvell senior seems to have been a man of some vision and certainly very aware of being a public servant. He also clearly understood the value of books. As Smith tells us,

Marvell senior wanted to build a ceiling in the [Charterhouse] hall and above a new room that would function as a library, no doubt warmed by the large fireplace below in the hall. The library would be open to any in Hull who could make use of it.

Marvell left a very large part of his own collection of books as a foundation for this library.

If you live in the UK you cannot have escaped over the past few months the phrase, 'The Big Society', the current government's idea that the public at large should step in to replace the services that are being forced to cut back as a result of their (the government's) financial stringency. No doubt they would have heartily approved of the Rev. Marvell's actions. As, it should be said, (as long as you don't therefore draw the inference that I approve of the government) do I. But in the 1620s and 30s, which is when this was being discussed, there were far fewer books and far fewer readers. I can't think that there are many private libraries now that could seriously be made available to the public in this way. Despite the fact that many book bloggers probably feel they have more books than they can ever hope to read, maybe even more books than they can ever hope to count, if we were to open our doors we'd soon be forced to recognise that not only could we never satisfy the sheer volume of the demand we'd also be lacking the necessary variety required.

Certainly, there are still some wonderful private libraries around in various stately homes. I remember my father gazing longingly at shelves full of racing form books going back centuries in one such establishment. He would have given anything to have taken them down and buried himself in their pages for the rest of the day, if not the rest of the entire year. But, of course, he wasn't even allowed within breathing distance of them for fear his working class breath might damage a collection that didn't look as if it had been disturbed by the gentry in decades.

Realistically though, opening private collections to the public, whether they are yours, mine or those of the British aristocracy, isn't going to solve the dilemma that our library services face today. However, it is heartening to know that in the past there have been people like Andrew Marvell's father who have been far-sighted enough to recognise the importance of books to the public at large and who have done something practical to advance a vision of a wider reading community. I only hope that we can find the equivalent answer for our own times before our smaller, local public libraries have been allowed to vanish undoubtedly never to return.

Annie

Gifted ~ Nikita Lalwani

2011-01-21T17:34:00.000Z

This month's Bookworms' read was the first novel by Nikita Lalwani, Gifted. The book is the story of Rumi Vasi, a young Hindu girl growing up in Wales in the 1980s. Rumi's parents have come to Britain, immediately after their marriage so that her father, Mahesh, could complete his studies and gain his PhD. Mahesh has promised his wife, Shreene, that as soon as he has completed his thesis they will return to India, but this hasn't happened and so the opening of the book sees the family settled in Cardiff with Mahesh travelling each day to his post as a lecturer in Physics at Swansea.

Rumi has always been fascinated by numbers and one day her teacher accompanies her back to the family home to explain that the school think that she is 'gifted'. Despite the antagonism he feels towards the teacher, who he sees as interfering in his family life, this prompts Mahesh to take an even greater control over his daughter's development than he has done previously as she is groomed to become the youngest child ever to gain a place at Oxford to study Maths. Initially compliant, as she reaches puberty, Rumi finds more and more ways of subverting her father's strictures. And, though she does make it to Oxford, the results are not what anyone in the family was expecting.

Unusually for Bookworms, we found ourselves discussing the issues raised by the book in greater depth than the book itself. In part, this was because we are mostly educators in one field or another and so the question of what is meant by a gifted child and what the implications are for the child so labelled was pertinent to us all. However, I think we also followed this line because we all felt that the book itself was typical of a first novel and flawed in many ways. To give just one example, while the ending is certainly not unexpected to the reader and is, in fact, based not only on an actual case but also reflective of Lalwani's own life (she dropped out of a medical degree at the end of the first year) it is unconvincing in the writing mainly because of problems with pace and the sudden switch of character focus.

We could, I think, have completely deconstructed the book had we focused just on the text itself and as a group we don't like doing that, so instead we found ourselves debating the difference between the concepts of gifted and talented and asking if it is ever to the child's ultimate advantage to be labelled as being gifted. It is clear in Rumi's case that while she may have a facility for numbers and for recognising patterns, she doesn't have the capacity for original thought that goes with real genius. We all felt, I think, that she would have been far better left to move through the education pathway at the same pace as her peers, broadening her understanding of the world outside Maths and then moving on to Oxford at a time when she had greater emotional maturity and could have handled the expectations that surround her more successfully. Too many of us had horror stories to tell of children who had been pushed by their parents, beyond their physical, mental and emotional capabilities to the point where their health and in one cases their mind, had broken down completely.

We also spent time discussing the question of whether or not the first generation immigrant (whatever race or culture) isn't inclined to cling to traditions and social expectations long after the families they have left behind have moved on. Certainly, when Rumi and her mother return to India it is clear that their relatives there have a far less rigid approach to western influence than do Mahesh and Shreene and ultimately Rumi is damaged as much by the difference in cultural expectations as she is by the rigid regime of study. Whatever we thought of the book, the reader can't help being sorry for this teenager who is caught in the double bind of having to meet the expectations of both a culture she doesn't understand and a label she doesn't want.

If Lalwani writes an second novel then I will read it, because I think she has some promise, but when, as a group we look back over our reading year, this book is one that we will remember for its subject matter rather than for the quality of the writing.

Annie

Power to the Reader

2011-01-20T18:11:00.000Z

I'm simply passing through today, having just got in following an extremely hair-raising and foggy drive through the Warwickshire countryside. However, I thought I would share this with you. We discovered last night at Bookworms that if you order Nikita Lalwani's book 'Gifted' (last night's read) from the UK branch of Amazon they automatically ask you if you want to order a copy of 'Daniel Deronda', which is next month's book.

Now how is that for the power of one small reading group to change the thinking of a multi-national company? More power to the little reader's elbow, that's what I say!