Cornflower Books

Where's your reading taking you?

     

    This week I've 'been' on the Matterhorn with a group of adventurous Edwardian ladies in Susanna Jones' excellent and chilling When Nights Were Cold (of which more soon), and then I went to Cornwall in the 1990s via a re-read of Tim Smit's The Lost Gardens Of Heligan, his beautifully enthusiastic and succinct account of the discovery and restoration of the gardens of this now world famous Cornish estate. Now I'm off to 1660s Oxford to make a start on our February book group book, Iain Pears' An Instance Of The Fingerpost.

    Where's your reading taking you?

People of the Book

    I have very much enjoyed Geraldine Brooks' novel People of the Book, but (yes, there is a but) it struck me as a less successful book than the two others of hers I've read, the excellent Year of Wonders and March. Admittedly, it's been a while since I looked at them and I may be mis-remembering, but my recollection is of works which have a greater level of consistency and integrity to them than People of the Book has.

    This is the story of a highly important, hugely valuable book - the Sarajevo Haggadah, "a lavishly illustrated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was against illustrations of any kind" - and of how its conservation reveals its history and origins. It is told by way of a modern-day narrative interspersed with episodes from the book's past, so we move back in time from Sarajevo in 1996 when conservator Hanna Heath is called in to work on the book, to the city during the Second World War, then to Vienna in 1894, Venice in the 1600s and so on, each period supplying the answers to the clues to the book's past found by Hanna in her meticulous examination of the precious, mysterious work.

    Hanna's own story is very much in the foreground, too; daughter of a top Australian neurosurgeon with whom she doesn't get on, she has never known her father's identity, and has grown up determined to make her own way in the world despite her mother's condescending attitude and evident disappointment that she chose not to follow her into medicine.Without conventional family ties but with an enviable reputation at the top of her field, hers is a life of travel, scholarship and casual relationships, but nothing beats the thrill and interest inherent in her primary work, the conservation of medieval manuscripts: "By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book. I can figure out who they were, or how they worked. That's how I add my few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge".

    That passage might describe the novel itself as it's based on a real book and real events but around fictional characters and a great deal of plausible invention. The author's extensive research shows, but there are sections where it has been incorporated with less finesse than I'd have expected, and to raise one tiny point of irregularity, would a fin-de-siècle Viennese liken an acquisitive person to a bowerbird? Surely that's too Australian a term for that time and place.

    Overall I felt there was an uneven tension between the historical strands and the present day one with its suspense and spy thriller-like action, but the drama of the book reflects well the turbulent passage of the Haggadah itself and those who made it or were connected to it in times of extremism, religious intolerance, persecution and war. It's a terrfic story whose technical aspects are fascinating, and in which the protagonist's surprisingly high-powered life engages the reader, but Geraldine Brooks says in an interview that working with a plot ranging over centuries was intimidating and at one point she put the book aside for two years as she felt herself overwhelmed, and I think that sense of the material's being unwieldy does show in the finished piece - it isn't quite as polished as I remember her earlier books being. In the grand scheme of things my criticisms are small ones, and I remain a firm Brooks fan, keen to read her latest, Caleb's Crossing.

Just arrived ...

   

   

    Things That are: Encounters with Plants, Stars and Animals by Amy Leach is "a highly original and irresistible debut ... celebrating the universe in all its wondrous glory. With the imagination of Lewis Carroll, the poetry of John Donne and the lyrical beauty of Gerard Manley Hopkins, this is an utterly undefinable work of non-fiction."

    Ten Things I've Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler is "a heart-wrenching and life-affirming novel": Alice returns to London from travelling abroad, and unaware that her father is dying, she gets home only just in time to say goodbye. Daniel spends his days searching for the daughter he has never met - until now... "A unique story of love lost and found, of rootlessness and homecoming and the power of the ties that bind."

    Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop has garnered this lovely comment from Margaret Drabble: "It's funny and it's cheering, with a beautiful warmth to it, achieved without a moment of sentimentality. Frank, courageous and entertaining, I felt better for reading it." A chance meeting in a doctor's waiting room sparks a friendship based on shared interest. As events unfold, Cecilia and Helen "are united by their experiences not only of illness but of love, honesty and motherhood."

    The Specimen by Martha Lea is set in a Victorian world "battling between the forces of spiritualism and Darwinism, polite society and the call of clandestine love," and the story shifts between country house drawing rooms and the rainforests of Brazil. "A gripping melodrama, a romance and a murder mystery for fans of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and The Observations by Jane Harris.

    Worthless Men by Andrew Cowan. "It's market day in an English town two years into the Great War. The farmers are coming in from the country, the cattle are being driven through the streets and a trainload of soldiers is due to arrive. At a nearby mansion, its hospital tents at the ready, waits Montague Beckwith, a psychological casualty of the war. Across town, Winnie Barley prays that her missing son Walter will be on the train ... A panoramic, vivid portrait of a place as individual as it is archetypal."

    The Night Rainbow by Claire King. Maggie O'Farrell says of this, "At once moving and gripping, elegant and spare, a daring novel about a child faced with the baffling world of adult grief". Five-year-old Pea and her sister Margot play alone in the meadow behind their house on the edge of a village in the South of France. Their mother is isolated by her Englishness and burdened by a double grief, and Pea cannot reach her. Then Pea meets Claude who loves the meadow and has time to play - the children have found a friend and maybe even a new papa. But why do the villagers view Claude with suspicion, and what secret is he keeping in his strange, empty house?

Edited to add: there is a video trailer for the book here.

Bargain of the day - Island of Wings

    Today's Kindle Daily Deal is Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg, a creative re-imagining of life on the remote island of St. Kilda in the 1830s and early '40s. My full post on the book - which is based on real people and events - is here, and it concludes as follows:

    "I found this a very elegant novel, one that's assured and convincing and which uses a wealth of research as the basis for a work of sensibility and imagination, taking the trials of faith and love and loss and making something sadly lovely and memorable of them."

Books for Christmas?

 

    I doubt I shall get any books for Christmas as my family know just how many I already have, but recent acquisitions notwithstanding, there are still more than a few on which I have my eye, Kilvert's Diary (with that seasonable cover) for instance, and Rose Tremain's Restoration and its 'sequel' Merivel: A Man of His Time to name another couple.

    What about you? Have you put certain books on your Christmas list or do you leave the choice to those who know you well enough to select something you'll love? Perhaps you prefer to give yourself a present of a book or two. Whichever way you've come by it, is there anything you'd particularly like to be reading over the Christmas holiday?

Cornflower Blues 2012 - the best of the best

  

    John Saturnall's Feast and The End of Your Life Book Club: one novel, one memoir, two books which are 'the best of the best' I've read this year.

    Take a bow, then, Lawrence Norfolk and Will Schwalbe; your work has engaged the brain and touched the heart, provided a stimulating literary delight on the one hand, and on the other, a very moving personal story which will resonate with anyone to whom books matter. Thankyou, gentlemen!

A banquet for the thinking reader

   

    It's tremendously gratifying when someone takes up one of my recommendations and gets in touch later to tell me that they loved the book as much as I did. LizF did just that and she kindly left a comment today re. John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk (which I wrote about here); this is what she had to say:

"It is very rare that I get to the end of a book and want to go back to the beginning and start again but that was exactly how I felt when I finished this - just a shame that the library had to have it back! John Saturnall's Feast is one of those books that you inhabit and to think that I would have missed it if not for your review because I had struggled with one of Lawrence Norfolk's earlier books - thank you SO much for a real reading treat!! It is now on my Christmas list and if that fails I will just have to wait until it comes out in paperback and buy it myself (just hope they keep that gorgeous cover!)."

    Thankyou, Liz!

    It won't be long before I choose the 'Cornflower Blues' (my books of the year) - no prizes for guessing which title will be at the top of the fiction list.

Arrivals: Elijah's Mermaid

   

     "Deep waters. Dark secrets." That's the strapline on the cover of Essie Fox's new novel Elijah's Mermaid, "a tale of obsessive love and betrayal moving from the respectable worlds of Victorian art and literature, into the shadowy demi-monde of brothels, asylums and freak show tents - a world in which nothing and no one is quite what they seem to be."

   

    The web-toed baby Pearl was found floating in the Thames one foggy night, and was brought up in a brothel known as the House of Mermaids. Now near her fourteenth birthday she discovers she is to be sold to the highest bidder.

    Orphaned twins Lily and Elijah live in a secluded country house with their grandfather, but on a visit to London a chance meeting with Pearl will have repercussions for all of them, "binding their fates in a dark and dangerous way ..."

 

    Essie Fox - who blogs at The Virtual Victorian - is of course the author of the very popular The Somnambulist which was a Channel Four TV Book Club choice earlier this year (click on the link there to watch the programme). "A spellbinding tale of lost love, grief, murder and madness in Victorian England," it features young Phoebe Turner who one night spots an enigmatic stranger in the audience at Wilton's Music Hall. When this Mr. Samuels offers Phoebe the job of companion to his reclusive wife at their country home, Dinwood Court, little does she know that the grand house may be haunted and hold the darkest of secrets.

 

    A word about the very attractive covers Essie's novels have - they are designed by Bold & Noble whose work includes the inspired and memorable jacket for Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars (a book my son recommends).

The Knot

   
   

    Jane Borodale's second novel The Knot takes a man's life in the years from 1565 to 1578, with an epilogue in 1607, and examines it in terms of both its important events and its everyday occurrences. It's about a family, but also an academic undertaking - the translation of a Herbal - and the making of a garden, the Knot of the title, and just as a garden needs structure and 'bones' and features together with infilling or 'clothing' with plants, so the focus on Henry Lyte constantly and effortlessly alters from large life-changing episodes to small and beautifully rendered domestic details.

    In keeping with her theme, Jane Borodale's engrossing narrative moves with the shifting seasons and the cycles of growth and die-back, inflorescence and decay, to show the phases of Henry's life, its waxing and waning, periods of vigour and stasis. Subject matter and method of presenting it are perfectly matched.

    Henry Lyte lived at Lytes Cary Manor in Somerset. He was married three times (it's the period of his second marriage which is covered by the book) and had thirteen children, many not surviving to adulthood, but he is remembered as the author of A Niewe Herball (1578), a translation of the French edition of the Cruydeboeck of Rembert Dodoens (1564), made with the express purpose of setting down the properties and uses of medicinal plants so that "knowledge should run freely" and be there for all, and good health should be "a universal possibility".

    His book is a labour of love, taking him many years to complete, and involving careful study and collection of plants in the wild and in cultivation. In tandem with the book, Henry is making a garden, "a perfect Knot: green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of senses. [...] He hopes to coax from it an exquisite, flourishing entity; something wholly alive and changeable, a place where man and nature can meet and within which he and others will be able to study the riddles of botany". Helped and vexed in equal measure by his wilful gardener Mote who always seems to have the last word, Henry uses his garden - as he does his Herbal - as a means of escape from the harsh realities of an existence in which, despite his ample means, life is precarious and troubles forever beset him. His absorption in his work is both his salvation and ultimately his immortality.

    I loved the book for its meticulous research and its sense of the gentle sifting of historical fact, like dust motes in sunlight, over a story of substance which sets ambition and labour for the greater good of all against a background of travails and personal tragedy. It's a fine work, and one whose atmosphere lingers in the mind; I should very much like to read Jane's first novel The Book of Fires now, and I'll look forward with great interest to what she does next.

Companion piece 2 - fact and fiction

    More companion reading*, this time of the 'if you liked that then you'll like this' variety. Emma Donoghue's novel The Sealed Letter has much in common with Kate Summerscale's recent non-fiction book Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady. The latter (there's a post on it here) is an account of a scandalous divorce case; the former is a fictional version of a similarly sensational real-life action, one which has many similarities to Robinson v. Robinson and Lane, to the point where that case crops up in Emma Donoghue's narrative, cited as having set a useful precedent.

    The Sealed Letter is based on the daily newspaper reports of the 1864 Codrington v. Codrington and Anderson and it's a highly readable, detailed but brisk page-turner of a book which concentrates on the shocking allegations behind the case and the legal twists and turns, manipulation and intrigue which propelled it to its sorry conclusion.

    It begins with a chance meeting in a London street: Helen Codrington, recently returned to England after some years abroad, bumps into her old friend Emily 'Fido' Faithfull. Although the two women had once been close, the friendship had foundered and they had lost touch. Emily had gone on to lead an independent life as the proprietor of a printing press and a pioneer of the Women's Movement, while Helen had become increasingly unhappy in her marriage to a vice-admiral, but having met again after so long, cordial relations are restored and all appears well. However, things are not quite as they seem, and 'Fido' soon becomes the unwitting accomplice to Helen's obsessive affair with an army officer. As events take their inevitable course, no party will emerge unscathed.

    There are accusations and counter-accusations, secrets, lies, betrayals and shaming facts. "This isn't a sensation novel," Helen reminds herself as she listens to her husband's barrister in court, but of course it's the stuff of one, and Emma Donoghue has used her material very skilfully in this historical recreation.

                                                    ~~~~~

    *Companion piece 1 is here.

Cornflower Book Group - November 2012

    The Cornflower Book Group's October book, Touch Not The Cat, is set at the charming old English manor house Ashley Court. The book I've chosen as our November read also features a house, but one of a very different period and kind; it is a gleaming modern building which is at the heart of Simon Mawer's The Glass Room.

    "On honeymoon in Venice in 1928, Viktor and Liesel Landauer face a new world when they meet brilliant architect Rainer von Abt. Soon, on a hillside near a provincial Czech town, the Landauer house with its celebrated Glass Room will become a modernist masterpiece of travertine floors and onyx walls, filled with light and optimism. But as Viktor is Jewish, when Nazi troops arrive the family must flee.

    The house slips from hand to hand, Nazi to Soviet and finally to the Czechoslovak state. It becomes a laboratory, a shelter from the storm of war, and a place where the broken and the ruined find some kind of comfort until, with the collapse of Communism, the Landauers can finally return to where their story began."

    I was going to quote from some of the reviews of the book, but if I begin I'll be here all day - they are starry indeed. The novel was shortlisted for (among others) the 2009 Man Booker Prize and the 2010 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and as Wolf Hall won both of those, we know the competition was stiff and it was in exalted company. But considering the book now from the point of view of 'the casual reader' rather than that of the critics or a panel of judges, it is heartening to know that the members of the Mainstreet Trading Company book group voted it a favourite! I hope we shall all enjoy it as much as they did.

    If we set our discussion date as from Saturday, 24th. November, we should have plenty of time to read it, and as to availability, it seems to be easy enough to get hold of both from libraries and retailers here and abroad, though The Book Depository will supply it with free worldwide delivery if local sources don't have it. Everyone is very welcome to join in, sharing their thoughts and impressions of the book, come the day, in as succinct or discursive a manner as you choose!

    By the way, if you'd like to see the real modernist house which was the inspiration for the Landauers' home, click here - others may prefer to let a mental image develop as they read (though there are line drawings in the book).

Book of the day - The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

 

    Jude Morgan is a writer whose books have been on my wish list for some time, put there because I've read laudatory reviews by people whose opinions I trust and whose tastes I share. I was thus particularly pleased when I found that the book parcel in this morning's post contained Jude's The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, billed as "for fans of David Mitchell and The Children's Book, or of the blockbusting biographies of great writers, or just anyone who loves books and wants an intelligent, utterly compelling, brilliant read," - I fall in all those categories.

    I've already read two novels featuring Shakespeare, the bold, brilliant and bawdy Will by Christopher Rush (post here), and the altogether quieter, more reflective The Sonnets by Warwick Collins (thoughts here), so I shall be interested to see what manner of man he becomes in this latest incarnation; I suspect he is in safe hands.

    The author has some very high profile followers, for example, Hilary Mantel writes, "As soon as I saw a Jude Morgan book I tossed aside the twenty other review copies I should have got to, and sat down to read it .... completely involving, absorbing. Full of insight and very accomplished ....", and Tracy Chevalier: "Wonderful - rich, authentic, beautifully written. He has written about Byron, Keats and Shelley in Passion and the Brontë sisters in The Taste of Sorrow, and now here he puts Shakespeare's relationship with his wife Anne at the heart of things, in what's been called a "wholly believable" fiction. I am so looking forward to reading it.

Have you read ... Bernard Cornwell?

    If you were to take a look at the books in my son Will's room - though I wouldn't venture in there if I were you as it's not exactly what you'd call spick and span - you'd find a very masculine mixture of military history, things like the Flashman series and John Le Carré, general history, and biography with a military leaning (this is a young man who plans to join the army). You wouldn't therefore be surprised to find that the collection includes a large number of novels by Bernard Cornwell - all of them read and greatly enjoyed.

    When I heard that that most successful and prolific writer of historical fiction had a new book coming out (it's published today), I asked Will whether he thought I'd enjoy it, "or is it all battles and of interest only to men?" He assured me that I'd admire the solid research which informs the books and saw no reason why I wouldn't be thoroughly gripped by the story, too; Bernard Cornwell has, I learn, a large female following!

    1356 features the Battle of Poitiers in which England won her second great victory of the Hundred Years War, but the novel centres on Thomas of Hookton, "leader of a mercenary company of bowmen and men-at-arms who ravage the countryside east of Gascony. Edward, Prince of Wales (the Black Prince) is assembling an army to fight the French once more, but before Thomas can join, he must fulfil an urgent task. La Malice, a sword of mythical power guaranteeing victory to its owner, is thought to be concealed somewhere near Poitiers. With signs that a battle is looming, others are seeking the treasure too, and some are pursuing their private agendas against Thomas, but all concerned - and the fate of La Malice - become swept up in the extraordinary confrontation that follows, as the large French army faces the heavily outnumbered English."

    I have been reading the opening of 1356, the Prologue in which the sword is snatched from a tomb during the sack of Carcassonne, and the first chapter which sees a young English monk on his way to the Cistercian house at Montpellier caught up in violent scenes, and it's much as I expected: taut, vivid, dramatic, very 'cinematographic', so to speak. Am I inclined to read on? Yes, I am.

    Best known for his Sharpe series, Bernard Cornwell is the author of over 50 novels and he is a hugely popular writer. Have you read him?

Words and music

    To a concert of a different kind last night, and Master and Commander with Robert Hardy, part of the Lammermuir Festival, held at St. Michael's Church, Inveresk.

    This combined readings from several of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels with chamber music of the early nineteenth century (when the books are set) performed by the Raeburn Quartet on period instruments - a perfect demonstration of the significance of music in the books, and a powerful rendering of O'Brien's elegantly muscular prose.

    In my post on Hilary Mantel in Edinburgh I referred to the fact that it's comparatively rare to find a writer who can read well, and this observation is shared by Will Schwalbe in The End of Your Life Book Club who says, "Because of my decades in publishing, I've been to a lot of readings. I loathe most of them. I loathe the phony, singsong reading voice that most writers adopt, a kind of spooky incantatory tone that implies they are reading a holy text in a language you don't understand ... And what's worst about most literary events - almost no author knows when to stop reading and sit down."

    Last night, of course, it wasn't an author reading but an actor, and one who knows what he's doing. Robert Hardy was utterly magnetic. It is he who reads the Aubrey-Maturin audiobooks, so he knows the material through and through and understands its shape and heft. His passages were carefully chosen for their intrinsic style and value and their importance to the overall plot, and they were complemented by the musical programme, but the readings had their own musicality, and their narrative power and Robert Hardy's deft characterisation held the audience in rapt attention. It was a great pleasure to witness the symbiosis but above all to see a master at work - I'm sure the author himself could not have envisaged better.

    Any O'Brian fans here? Mr. C. is a great enthusiast - hence the collection you see above - but so far I've read only volume I (much enjoyed, though).

Companion piece

 

    I like the idea of books which complement one another, which although different in scale and supposed readership yet have much in common in terms of their periods or settings, their themes and their respective quality.

    In this spirit it occurs to me that I know the perfect companion piece for John Saturnall's Feast (see Thursday's post), one which though published for children is a book to be enjoyed by readers of any age, and that is Sally Gardner's I, Coriander.

    I wrote about it five years ago, and here's what I said then:

 

    "I have learnt that there is great power in words, no matter how long or short they be."

     Proving the power of words is an utterly magical book which Harriet loved and told me I must read, and now that I've done so I'm very glad I took her recommendation. Sally Gardner's novel for older children is the story of young Coriander Hobie who grows up in a loving and prosperous family beside the Thames in seventeenth century London. Her mother is a herbalist and maker of remedies whose gifts, it seems, go beyond the purely scientific. But forces from outwith Coriander's settled world destroy her happiness until she is able to discover her own power and win it back. Then, torn between love and duty, she faces an impossible choice.

    The book is set in the time of the Commonwealth and the Restoration and displays a real feel for the period in its social historical detail and its treatment of the wider issues which prevailed, but at heart it's a fairy story about good and evil, beautifully and richly written and quite delightful. Sally Gardner could have come a cropper with her combination of fact and spell-binding fantasy, but there isn't a false step in the book, to my mind. She depicts puritanical zeal, an extreme religious sect, witch-hunts, a Frost Fair on the Thames, London life and much more besides, but all so beautifully and grippingly that it has to be one of my reading highlights of the year.

John Saturnall's Feast

 

    It's rare, in my experience, that a book has a visceral pull over you in the way that a place or a person does; a hold which means that when you turn the final page and leave the world you've inhabited for so many hours and days, you feel that parting keenly.

    John Saturnall's Feast is such a book, and approaching the end this morning I found myself slowing down, trying to make its conclusion last a little longer, wishing that somehow I could linger within the story. Lawrence Norfolk's literary historical novel is a triumph of technique but it's also a very affecting work, a magical one, a banquet for the thinking reader, a sensuous delight. Lay hands on a copy and read it as soon as you may and you'll find something truly worth savouring - every image, every detail, inspired, its full and fascinating depths inviting exploration and providing pleasure of the most satisfying kind.

   

    It is set in seventeenth century England and is the story of one man, the eponymous John Saturnall, from his boyhood as the son of a woman hounded as a witch, to his life in the kitchens of a great house - Buckland Manor - and his relationship with the headstrong daughter of the house, Lady Lucretia Fremantle. It is a complex tale of its time, when the Civil War shattered the old order and in place of comfort and plenty came stricture and hardship, but it's in the rendering of life below stairs in the regimented and hierarchical world of the vast kitchens - scenes of almighty labour and the highest expertise - that the book's world truly lives.

 

    And yet there is so much more to it than the tale of a boy's rise from the squalor of the scullery to the lofty position of Master Cook. It encompasses myth and legend, allegory and arcane knowledge, love, war and entrancing storytelling, combining these ingredients to make no mere culinary conceit or kickshaw but a readers' feast of the highest order.

    I confess I am now at a loss as to what to read next - the book has spoiled me for anything less; if ever I meet Lawrence Norfolk I shall kiss his ring.

"The chimneys of Buckland Manor ..."

    "... tunnelled up from the depths of the kitchens, through the dark tonnage of stone and brick above. Sliding between walls and driving through floors, the hot channels funnelled heat, smoke and smells as they twisted past receiving rooms and jinked around chambers, wriggled past corridors and galleries, leaving enigmatic traces in the fabric of the house. Purposeless buttresses bulged from walls. Smoke percolated through cracks in the plaster. Certain corners of the house were inexplicably hot and chambers adjoining both the East and West Wings were infiltrated by the smells of roasting meat, or baking bread, or soup ...

    The whiffs and stinks came and went. Hotspots drifted, as if the flues of whirling fire and fumes writhed within the massive stonework, splitting and rejoining, rearing and rising until the thick brick fingers broke into the root stores and apple lofts under the eaves, driving through the attics where the maids huddled in the depths of winter, pressing themselves to the hot walls and waking to the morning tocsin of ladle on cauldron which resounded up from the kitchens below."

From John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk.

The Bruce

    My final event of this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival was last night's session with historical novelist Robyn Young. Author of the million-selling Brethren series, Robyn is currently writing about Robert the Bruce and the 13th and 14th. century Wars of Scottish Independence, her books Insurrection and Renegade (and there's a third to come) opening up that era to a large and loyal readership.

    As with Hilary Mantel, much of the discussion centred on the gaps in received knowledge and how the historical novelist fills them. Fact is not always as 'hard', as sure, as it seems, details are debated and disputed, events are subject to varying interpretation, and so the novelist must "pick a path and follow it" - decide on a plausible way of filling those gaps, make sure a character's motivation is consistent with what is known or believed, and then working within those constraints, tell a convincing story. Asked whether she found it helpful or restrictive to have to work within fixed plot points, Robyn said it was both: comforting, in so far as the structure of the story already exists, but testing in terms of the responsibility to be fully credible and serve the genre well. She referred to a recent conversation she'd had with historian turned historical novelist Alison Weir in which Alison talked of writing about a particular event firstly as a historian and then as a novelist; in the first instance she said the facts "didn't feel right", but her imagination was able to make them right when she wrote of them in fictional terms with the relative creative freedom that allows.

    Robyn read a passage from Insurrection, an excerpt from early in the book when Robert the Bruce is in Ireland searching for the Staff of St. Malachy, a relic sought by Edward I in the belief - stemming from an Arthurian prophecy - that he who held it and other artefacts symbolising the constituent parts of the British Isles (the Stone of Destiny, for example) would rule a united kingdom. Robyn revealed that for that section of the book alone she travelled 2,000 miles round Ireland, visiting locations, getting a sense of the land in order to bring something of the actual place into her writing. But research takes different forms, and understanding one major aspect of medieval life involved Robyn in acquiring a skill: she learned to ride, and that has given her a new respect for the men who rode into battle in full armour, she says.

    Asked what initially attracted her to Robert the Bruce and what it was about him that convinced her he was a big enough subject to carry a trilogy, Robyn commented on the epic nature of Bruce's story; it was a quest, something on a truly grand scale which would require more than just one book to do it justice. He was not "an easy hero like the 'black and white' William Wallace", but was a complex man who switched loyalties not once but four times in all, a flawed character but one who was still sympathetic. As such, he is a challenge to write, but one senses that Robyn accepts that challenge with relish.

Good lines: the pen is mightier ...

 

 

    "When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semi-colon. Once paper and ink were to hand, it was useless to appeal to his better nature, to tell him he was wrecking reputations and ruining people's lives. A kind of sweet venom flowed through his veins, smoother than the finest cognac, quicker to make the head spin. And, just as some people crave opium, he craves the opportunity to exercise his fine art of mockery, vituperation and abuse; laudanum might quieten the senses, but a good editorial puts a catch in the throat and a skip in the heartbeat. Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to."

From A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

Deckchair at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (see other varieties here*); Hilary Mantel's Festival event reported here.

*Edited to add: designs by Frances Castle.

Telling tales

    As I mentioned in the last post, I was at the Book Festival yesterday to hear Lian Hearn talk about her latest book Blossoms and Shadows, set in 1860s Japan, and Susan Fletcher her fourth novel, the recently published The Silver Dark Sea. From the Meiji Restoration and the turbulent, male-dominated world of Japanese society, the end of the Shogunate and the re-establishment of imperial rule, to a fictitious Scottish island in which story-telling is at the heart of everything, and it's a strange kind of flotsam that is washed ashore one day, both books sound like immersive reading experiences crafted by authors with a very sure grasp of their real or imagined worlds.

    As a deliberate foil to its cast of feuding men, Lian's book has a woman as its central character - Tsuru, a doctor's daughter, herself medically trained, and based on the real person who inspired Orito in David Mitchell's excellent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. The narrative alternates between Tsuru's first person, past tense telling, and male characters' third person, present tense episodes, a good way of handling complex material and incorporating multiple points of view. Susan's new novel moves away from her previous books which each told just one person's story; here, in her island setting, she brings in the whole community she has created - "that's a lot of people to have in your head, and sometimes they were very noisy, " she says - but among them she found, as she puts it, "the centre of the flower, all the others being the petals", and she knew she had her focal point. Her book is about storytelling, myth and folklore, and she has given the novel itself an air of make-believe, "wrapped in mystery like a bedtime story." Having loved her last book (there's a post on it here), I was keen to read the new one, and hearing her talk about it doubles that sense of anticipation.

    But speaking of the last one, we learned why it had two titles (that is the UK editions) being published first as Corrag and then becoming Witch Light: a bookseller refused to stock it under the original title and so it had to be changed. The audience were quite amazed to hear this, and I'm mystified as to the perceived need for any alteration to the name (which is that of the main character). I asked Mr. C. for his opinion - would either title make him more or less likely to pick up the book in a shop? He said he would certainly pass over something called Witch Light because from that alone he would assume it was a "young adult paranormal romance type of thing", in which case he'd be missing out on what is a very fine novel indeed, and that would be a great pity.