Cornflower Books

Writers' portraits - Hilary Mantel

    I'm glad to read that Hilary Mantel is pleased with this portrait by the young artist Nick Lord. It is to go on show at the British Library later this month and will be the first image of a living writer to be hung there.

    Its subject said, "I didn't want to look as if I was just sitting, contemplating the daffodils, but as though I might have an impact in the world". I think she's got her wish.

Cornflower Book Group - April 2014

   

    Having just read a biography of Rumer Godden I thought a novel of hers might be a good choice for the Book Group. The one with which she made her name was Black Narcissus, but it's a later book I've chosen, also a huge popular success, and a critical one, too.

    First published in1969, In this House of Brede was the product of five years of painstaking research and writing, and is its author's longest and most complex book. Here's the blurb:

    "Bruised by tragedy, Philippa Talbot leaves a successful career in the Civil Service for a new calling. She joins an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns. In this small community of fewer than one hundred women, she soon discovers all the human frailties: jealousy, love, despair. But each crisis of heart and conscience is guided by the compassion and intelligence of the Abbess and by the Sisters' shared bond of faith and ritual. Away from the world, and yet at one with it, Philippa must learn to forgive and forget her past."

    Here's a passage from Anne Chisholm's biography:

    "Brede did seem to be blessed: everyone who read it before publication was impressed by it. A hint of amazement is sometimes discernible behind the compliments... [Rumer's] agent told her it was a triumph; Macmillan were delighted, and [the editorial director of her American publisher] wrote from New York to tell Rumer he found the book 'absolutely extraordinary ... I would have been incredulous had anyone told me how terribly involved with and concerned for a community of Benedictine nuns I could become ...' "

    Rumer's US advance was $150,000, the equivalent, apparently, of just under $1,000,000 today, and her publishers' faith in the book was justified by its sales. Structurally, it is her most ambitious work - Anne Chisholm tells us - spanning nearly twenty years and dealing with two dozen major characters (it's satisfyingly chunky at around 500 pages in the Virago paperback edition). Although it was made into a film starring Diana Rigg, that "has not worn well" (AC again), and Rumer did not care for it. I hope our reaction to the book will be a positive one, and I've slotted it into the calendar for discussion from Saturday, 26th. April.

    Details of our February and March books are given here, and I hope you'll join us to read some or all of our next three titles; you'd be very welcome.

Comin' thro' the Rye

    Lamb House, Rye, East Sussex, has been home to at least three writers: Henry James, E.F. Benson, and Rumer Godden who leased the house from the National Trust for five years from1968.

    "[It] was a house with a considerable writing tradition. Although few traces of Henry James were left, Rumer used his writing room and rather enjoyed showing visitors round. She was asked one day if she knew Rumer Godden; 'All too well,' was her reply."

From Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life by Anne Chisholm.

    There's more on literary Rye here and here.

Books of the day - 2

   

     "A heart-breaking first novel about family secrets, soul-mates and missed opportunities," that's Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase by Louise Walters, out soon.

    "Roberta likes to collect letters and postcards she finds in second-hand books. When her father gives her some of her grandmother's belongings, she finds a baffling letter from the grandfather she never knew - dated after he supposedly died in the war.

    Dorothy is unhappily married to Albert, who is away at war. When an aeroplane crashes in the field behind her house she meets Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski, and as their bond deepens she dares to hope she might find happiness. But fate has other plans for them both, and soon she is hiding a secret so momentous that its shockwaves will touch her granddaughter many years later ..."

    I've just read the beginning - a description of the bookshop in which Roberta works - and would love to go on with it right now, but it will have to wait a bit. US readers may like to know that it is to be published in the States, too, and by Amy Einhorn, publisher of Kathryn Stockett's phenomenally successful The Help. Finally, who could resist that cover?

Books of the day - 1

   

    Rosie Thomas's The Kashmir Shawl was a big hit with many of us, and it was one of my books of the year in 2011, so I'm glad to say that Rosie is back with a new novel, The Illusionists, out later this month.

    Billed as "her most ambitious and atmospheric novel to date", the book sees "love, seduction, magic and illusion collide as she takes us on a spellbinding journey through the shadowy world of Victorian London. Set in and around "The Palmyra", a new theatre of varieties, The Illusionists perfectly captures the spirit of Victorian England..."

    Beginning in 1870, it's the story of Eliza, an artist's model who meets a showman by the name of Devil Wix, a man whose dream is to run his own theatre company. Wix's right-hand man is Carlo Boldoni, an ill-tempered dwarf with whom he is usually at odds, and then there's Jasper Button, "mild-mannered, a family man at heart, his gift as an artist makes him an unlikely member of the motley crew.

    Thrown together by a twist of fate, their lives are inextricably linked: the fortune of one depends on the fortune of the other. As Eliza gets sucked into the seductive and dangerous world her strange companions inhabit, she risks not only her heart, but also her life ..."

    There is a video trailer for the book - filmed at Wilton's Music Hall, and you can find Rosie's blog here.

Monday miscellany

   

    - Elaine has a very interesting post on the Morland Dynasty novels of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, or to be more exact, on their publishing history/future. I haven't read any of the books (yet), but Elaine's proposed marketing strategy to get the series to a new and wider audience sounds eminently sensible to me, and let's hope the publisher takes note.

 

   - Following on from the CBG's recent reading of Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, do read - if you can lay hands on it - Maggie Fergusson's article on the book in the Winter 2013 edition (No. 40) of Slightly Foxed. She says the novel has "the most moving ending to any children's book" she knows, a great deal to offer grown-ups, and that the memorable skating scene is based on the author's father's account of the great frost of 1895, when he and his friends skated down the Cam. She goes on, "Philippa Pearce stops time in its tracks by trapping her memories between the pages of a book, like pressed flowers. But she does more than this. Time, in Tom's Midnight Garden, does not stand still, but bends and twists so that past and present embrace and comfort one another ... time itself curls about, accommodates, suspends its own iron laws for a while, to help us on our way."

   

     - Speaking of time bending and twisting, Kate Atkinson's Costa Novel Award-winning Life After Life plays around with time in no small measure. Here is an interview with Kate in which she talks about her fascination with the Second World War, "embedding reality within fiction", the importance of character, the problem of being categorized, and God in Ruins, the companion novel to Life After Life. "What is a 'good' writing day for you?", she is asked. "A sentence. A good one", she replies.

Life itself is a story

    "To me and my kind, life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories; that is the way it falls."

    Rumer Godden, quoted by Anne Chisholm in Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life.

Friday reads

    I have just this minute finished Peter May's Entry Island and I'm pleased to report that, as you'd expect, it's a great read. Mr. C. will be glad to hear that he can now have it - he's been hovering eloquently, silently urging me to get to the end and hand it over. More on the book soon.

    Now, what to read next?

    While I browse the shelves, do please tell us what you will be reading this weekend.

Books of the day

    Here are two excellent-looking books to look out for in due course, the first being The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin, published in the UK next month.

    "A mystery unsolved to this day. A mystic who confounds the cynics. A writer looking for the story that will make his name.

    A ghost ship appears in the mist. To the struggling author Arthur Conan Doyle, it is an inspiration. To Violet Petra, the gifted American psychic, it is a cruel reminder. To the death-obsessed Victorian public, it is a fascinating distraction. And to one family, tied to the sea for generations, it is a tragedy.

    In salons and on rough seas, at séances and in the imagination of a genius, these stories converge in unexpected ways as the mystery of the ghost ship deepens. But will the sea yield its secrets, and to whom?

    Intricate, atmospheric, and endlessly intriguing, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste is a spellbinding exploration of love, loss and the fictions that pass as truth."

    I can't wait to read this one from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Property and Mary Reilly (which, by the way, is relevant to our CBG book for February), but meanwhile let me draw your attention to the cover design which appears as you see on the picture above left, but achieves that misty, ghostly effect by means of a semi-opaque jacket over the image in the picture on the right.

    

     I've mentioned Harriet Lane's eagerly anticipated second novel before, but details were scanty then. Her new book, Her, won't be out until June, but that gives plenty of time for library requests and pre-orders, so here's the gist:

    "Two women; two different worlds. Emma is a struggling mother who has put everything on hold. Nina is sophisticated and independent - entirely in control.

    When the pair meet, Nina generously draws Emma into her life. But this isn't the first time the women's paths have crossed. Nina remembers Emma and she remembers what Emma did.

    But what exactly does Nina want from her?

    And how far will she go in pursuit of it?"

    You will remember Harriet Lane as the author of the superb Alys, Always, a brilliant debut and one of my books of the year in 2012 - if you haven't read it you'll find a post on it here, and you'll see why I'm so looking forward to reading her new book.

Bargain of the day

   

    Among the Kindle daily deal books today is Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine, one of my 'books of the year' in 2010, a novel marked by the deftness of the writing. Here's my post on it.

                        ~~~~~

    Today's deals include former Costa award-winners, and along with the O'Farrell Matthew Hollis's biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, is among them. I've added it to my TBR mountain.

The Costa Book of the Year is ...

    ...The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer (the winner of the First Novel category).

    Kate Atkinson was heavily tipped to win for Life After Life, but she has been beaten by the debut novelist whose book "tells the story of Matthew and Simon, two brothers who are separated yet united by a tragic accident. Exploring themes of loss, grief and mental illness, this extraordinary novel transports the reader directly into the mind of Matthew and his slow descent into madness as he confronts his role in the boyhood death of his older brother ten years earlier."

    "Hilarious and heartbreaking", "a stunning debut", "engaging, funny and inventive".

    Congratulations to Nathan Filer.

If you flee fate ... fate will find you

   

    "It is evident from the way the stones are set into the slope of the hill that industrious hands once toiled to make this pathway. It is overgrown now, the shallow impression of a ditch on one side. He makes his way carefully down towards the remains of the village, pursued by the oddest sense of treading in his own footsteps. And yet he has never been here.

    The silhouette of a broken-down drystone wall runs along the contour of the treeless hill above him. Beyond it, he knows, a crescent of silver sand curls away towards the cemetery and the standing stones on the rise. Below him, the footings of the blackhouses are barely visible among the peaty soil and the spikes of tall grasses that bend and bow in the wind. The last evidence of walls that once sheltered the families who lived and died here.

    He follows the path between them, down towards the shingle shore where a ragged line of roughly hewn stones vanishes into waves that cast their spume upon the pebbles, frothing and spitting. They are all that remain of some long-forgotten attempt to build a jetty...."

    I know a lot of us were big fans of Peter May's Lewis Trilogy, The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man, and The Chessmen (which I don't think I wrote about here), so it's good news that he has recently published a new novel. Entry Island begins with the passage I've quoted above, and I've just started reading it today so can't say much yet other than that it links Canada and the Hebrides and features Detective Sime Mackenzie on what appears to be a routine investigation, but one which seems to have another dimension ...

   More on it soon, I hope, but while we're talking about Peter May, I must recommend his pictorial accompaniment to The Lewis Trilogy, the very beautiful Hebrides with photographs by David Wilson, and if you've ever marvelled at his output, in this short video he explains his writing methods and how he 'hits the ground running' with every book.

Cornflower Book Group - Tom's Midnight Garden

   

    Reading my notes on Philippa Pearce's much-loved children's book Tom's Midnight Garden, I'm struck by how straightforward it seems but how complex is the thinking behind it.

    It was first published in 1958, and the contemporary part of the story is indeed of its time - urgent communication was by telegram! This has a certain nostalgic charm. But beyond the simple device of a lonely boy's finding his way into a garden which no longer exists, of making a friend there, and of his growing attachment to both place and person coming to dominate his thoughts and actions - strong and appealing in itself - is the concept of time, and the intricacy of the author's use and examination of it.

    A clock striking thirteen, and seeming thus to mark an extra hour in the day; the clock that is always there, even when its surroundings change, "time in, time out"; the time past that is not a fixed or linear time for Tom in that he can visit the garden at all seasons and hours of the day, and can go and back and forward within the garden's time, unlike in his own, where "Time was marching steadily onwards in the way it is supposed to go: from minute to minute, from hour to hour, from day to day". The ticking of the clock sounds to Tom like a human heart, "alive and beating", and by extension his life in the garden and his friendship with Hatty is so much more real and vivid and absorbing for him than the contained, mundane hours spent in his aunt and uncle's flat. But time itself is both friend and enemy, each second taking him closer to his next longed-for visit to the garden, but also to his eventual return to his own home, the loss of his nocturnal adventures and the companionship of Hatty.

    "Tom thought again: Time no longer - the angel on the grandfather clock had sworn it. But if Time is ever to end, that means that, here and now, Time itself is only a temporary thing. It can be dispensed with, perhaps; or, rather, it can be dodged. Tom himself might be able to dodge behind Time's back and have the Past - that is, Hatty's Present and the garden - here, now and for ever. To manage that, of course, he must understand the workings of Time."

    In the end, Tom comes to understand that as Hatty - now Mrs. Bartholomew - tells him, "... nothing stands still, except in our memory." He cannot live in the past, but has a secret he can hug to him, memories to sustain him, and will return home content.

    I found it a very touching book, a satisfying one, clever and thought-provoking. I can see why it has become a children's classic and has earned a place on many people's 'favourites' shelves, and also how it could be re-read and enjoyed - and perhaps appreciated differently - at any age or stage in life.

    What did you think of it?

    While you're gathering your thoughts, do go and have a virtual slice of cake.

Book of the day - Reckless

   

    Just arrived, a novel I've been looking forward to for some months, Reckless by William Nicholson, out on 6th. February.

    This is what the author says about it on his blog today: "It’s my most ambitious to date. Still part of the sequence that began with THE SECRET INTENSITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE, but as with MOTHERLAND I’ve gone back into the past of my characters, this time to 1962. If you read MOTHERLAND you may remember Kitty and Ed’s little girl, Pamela. In the new novel Pamela is 18, and arrives in the London of Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. She’s beautiful, naive, and eager for adventure, with disastrous consequences. I’ve extended my technique of entering the minds of many different characters to the world stage, and re-create the mental processes of Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Mountbatten as the crisis unfolds. There’s a second plot too, about a girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary…"   

    Motherland was a favourite novel of mine last year, and William Nicholson is a gifted, multi-faceted storyteller, so I'm particularly eager to read his new book.

A winter jacket

    I love the jacket on Elizabeth Jane Howard's All Change, the fifth of her Cazalet Chronicles, which I've started today and am greatly enjoying.

    The design is by Alice Tait, and do click there to see more of her work including covers for Jane Gardam's The People on Privilege Hill and Elizabeth Jenkins's The Tortoise and the Hare*.

    Helpfully, All Change includes a family tree to remind us how the Cazalet characters are related to one another, and the endpapers are Merton, a William Morris wallpaper design, so this is a handsome book.

 

*a memorable CBG read.

Trollope on the radio

    Many thanks to everyone who has mentioned that The Warden - our CBG March book - is to be dramatised on BBC Radio 4 beginning this coming Sunday (the 26th.) at 3.00pm. The rest of the Barchester Chronicles are to follow.

    For those interested in Trollope himself, tomorrow - Thursday - at 11.30am. you can hear a programme about him made by Michael Symmons Roberts who has adapted the novels for this new series (and is the recent winner of the Costa Poetry Prize).

Bargain of the day

    My internet connection is likely to be very patchy today, so I'm nipping in while I can to flag up one of today's Kindle deals, Mary Stewart's Thornyhold, which I read last year and loved - pure escapism!

    "Thornyhold is a house deep in a wild wood like somewhere out of a fairy tale. To Gilly, it is an enchantment. Her very own enchantment, left to her by the cousin whose occasional magical visits had brightened her childhood. And as she explores, she discovers more about the woman who had come to seem like a fairy godmother for her: her herbalists's skills, her still room, her abilities to foresee and to heal. She discovers also that the local people believe that Gilly has inherited not just the house but the magical spell-weaving powers that live on in the house and garden. Slowly, quietly, she comes to realise that they are right."

    For those who haven't seen it, may I recommend again this video interview with Lady Stewart.

Findings

    A couple of quick links, firstly to this lovely post by Celia Rees on serendipity (and do read the comments, too), and secondly (in case you haven't already come across it) to BBC Radio 4's Books and Authors podcasts - lots of lovely listening!

Cornflower Book Group - February & March 2014

 

    As you know, the Cornflower Book Group is reading Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce as our January book (we'll talk about it from next Saturday), but today let's look ahead to our February and March titles as a bit of advance notice is helpful. I hope you'll approve of both novels I've chosen and will be as keen to read (or re-read) them as I am.

    In February, a short, dark book for what will still be quite short, dark days (at least up here in the northern hemisphere): Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, first published in 1886, a classic which really needs no introduction.

    For the lighter, brighter March days, I've taken Julie's prompt (see her comment here) and decided to offer Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855), the first of his Chronicles of Barsetshire, as a group read, and if that goes down well, we might even cover more of the series in future months.

    The chances are you'll have copies of both books already on your shelves, but if not they should be easy to come by. There are numerous paperback editions, audiobooks (for example here and here), Kindle versions are available free (and should you be so inclined you could go the whole hog and get the Complete Works of Anthony Trollope - all 47 novels, stories, notes, biographies, criticism and so on - for £1.39, and the slighter but nonetheless comprehensive Stevenson canon too), and if libraries don't have them to hand then sharp words are in order!

    Let's say we set our discussion dates as from Saturday, 22nd. February for Dr. Jekyll, and Saturday, 29th. March for The Warden.

    I'm looking forward to some good reading with these two, and I hope you'll join in and read them with me.

This year ...

   

    Blackwell's sent an email today recommending various books and headed "Make this the year you finally read ...".

    A timely reminder, I thought; perhaps this year I shall finally read Trollope.

   How about you? Do you have some long-postponed book, or an author you've never got round to picking up? If you're willing to 'make this the year you finally read ...', do leave a comment and tell us.

   

    For my part, I've taken The Warden off the shelf and shall begin it as soon as commitments allow - and not before time!