The Hand that First Held Mine ~ Maggie O'Farrell

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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