Cornflower Books

The way we were

    "Part of the reason to own books is that they create a record of our past: passions, missteps, aspirations and intentions. They are the physical manifestations of what we were thinking at the different times in our lives. People can look at our bookshelves and know something about us, who we are and who we hoped we would be. "

    Ann Patchett - from this post.

Waiting for the Albino Dunnock

 
  

    For me to even pick up a book subtitled How Birds Can Change Your Life is noteworthy, never having had any interest whatsoever in birds, and in fact having a fear of them, but references on the jacket flap of Waiting for the Albino Dunnock to mythology, philosophy, history, literature, and folklore caused me to open it and I was captivated from the first page.

    Rosamond Richardson writes with flair and sensitivity and with such knowledge of topics far beyond matters avian that her book is an engagingly multi-textured one and an example of nature writing at its best. She describes how a chance encounter led her to discover a fascination with birds which helped her at a difficult period in her life, but this is no confessional account of personal sadness - rather she is discreet and allusive -  it is far more about seeing, observing, appreciating, understanding, and making connections, and about the enriching effect of a year of watching birds in East Anglia and far beyond.

    When I was in Suffolk last autumn we went for a walk on Dunwich Heath, right next to the bird reserve at Minsmere. It was a very wet day and the keen birders in our party knew there would be little to see so they contented themselves with a ramble instead of a session with the binoculars, but even if conditions had been ideal nothing would have induced me to go and sit in a hide and try to spot birds (I did it once, years ago, and found it dull to say the least). But, having now read this book I would certainly join my bird-watching friends if an expedition were proposed, and I tell you this to illustrate the fact that Rosamond Richardson has opened my eyes and my mind, for which I thank her.

    Let me sketch the map of the book for you in the hope that there will be territory here which draws you to it as it did me: the author writes of John Clare, Montaigne, Thomas Merton; she quotes Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, and G.K. Chesterton; her chapters are subtitled "stillness", "silence", "music", "joy", "the consolation of beauty", and "the uncommonness of the commonplace". She is discursive but always to the point; she brings to her discoveries "the beginner's mind" but retains a clear sense of perspective; her "personal crossroads" led her to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, but she doesn't rhapsodize, she speaks with quiet containment.

    As to the book's title, it's inspired by R.S. Thomas, poet and priest, "who spent hours in wild landscapes in west Wales, watching for birds, never knowing whether he would see any or not". Alerted to the possible presence of an albino dunnock on the Lleyn Peninsula, "he muttered Waiting for birds is like waiting for God but I don't think I'd wait three hours for God." Rosamond Richardson closes thus: "the waiting is more about the search than the result [...] as much an inner journey as a field trip. Likewise 'waiting for the albino dunnock' is not about the achievement of spotting a rare bird and recording it on a list [...] but an intuition about what is mysterious and just beyond our reach".

    I commend this book to you.

Calling Henry Marsh fans

   

    Mr. Marsh has a new book out next week: Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery.

    Here's the gist -

     "Henry Marsh has spent a lifetime operating on the surgical frontline. There have been exhilarating highs and devastating lows, but his love for the practice of neurosurgery has never wavered. Prompted by his retirement from his full-time job in the NHS, and through his continuing work in Nepal and Ukraine, Henry has been forced to reflect more deeply about what forty years spent handling the human brain has taught him.

    Moving between encounters with patients in his London hospital, to those he treats in the more extreme circumstances of his work abroad, Henry faces up to the burden of responsibility that can come with trying to reduce human suffering. Unearthing memories of his early days as a medical student, and the experiences that shaped him as a young surgeon, he explores the difficulties of a profession that deals in probabilities rather than certainties, and where the overwhelming urge to prolong life can come at a tragic cost for both patients and for those who love them.

    In this searing, provocative and deeply personal memoir, the bestselling author of Do No Harm finds new purpose in his own life as he approaches the end of his professional career, and a fresh understanding of what matters to us all in the end."

    For anyone who hasn't read Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery, there's a post on it here.

Of mice and men

    From 10th. May to 3rd. June, The Illustration Cupboard in London is showing an exhibition of Jill Barklem's original artwork for the much-loved Brambly Hedge books. You can find the illustrations here, and note, the sketches may be purchased - prices are to be released soon.

    Also on show at the gallery will be this Storyteller Children's Chair made by RhubarbLondon:

    Two-thirds the size of an adult's wing chair, its front legs have been carved from oak to recreate the Toadflax family's home, and there are speakers in the backrest powered by a self-contained battery system which 'broadcast' the Brambly Hedge stories to the occupier of the chair. Chequebooks at the ready, it costs £3,500.

                            ~~~~~

    On the subject of Brambly Hedge, you may not have seen this post.

Meet the Writers

    

    Aged just 21, Samantha Shannon made publishing headlines when she sold the first three books in a planned seven-book series for a six-figure sum. Now 25, and working on book four of the series, Samantha is in conversation with Georgina Godwin in the latest edition of Meet the Writers*.

    If you're not already acquainted with her work, here's my post on Samantha's first book, The Bone Season, and there's a little more on her here. Although it's quite off the beaten track for me, I am particularly looking forward to reading her forthcoming high fantasy The Priory of The Orange Tree which she mentions on the programme.

*See also, this post, this one, and this.

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The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the shortlist

 

A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

The Good People by Hannah Kent

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

    Read more about the prize here.

Adding to the already groaning shelves

    We paid another visit to Topping & Company's St. Andrews branch today, and a few minutes' browsing yielded this fine lot. The top three are mine, the others Mr. C's.

    Note the spelling mistake on the spine of Evelyn Waugh's biography of Ronald Knox!

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A rain of notes

     

    "An early full moon rose low in the sky, gauze-white. A skylark was perched on the telegraph wire beyond the yew hedge, crest outlined against the washed-out sky, streaked breast feathers discernible as he flew off weaving and fluttering, all graceful lines and dipping flight. Dusk was gathering. I walked over the crest of the hill to where a tall hedgerow, remnant of old woodland, shields the top field from the north wind. The barley, ripening over the weeks from soft golden-green to bronze, was now bleached to blond and brittle whiskered. [...]

    I stopped and listened. Skylarks were singing midsummer evensong as William Blake's 'mighty angels' filled the sky with liquid sound. An exultation of larks was spiralling upwards, hovering high over the field, filling the air with polyphony, pouring out a rain of notes (thirty-six notes to the second when slowed down) for several relentless minutes before dropping like winged pebbles into the barley. I walked slowly back down the sloping field. Two skylarks perched in profile on the fence-posts. The barley rippled behind them in the evening breeze, silver in the late light.

    The lark and the light are one, wrote Richard Jefferies of the minstrel of our fields that carries its song to the heavens. There is sunshine in the song. [...]

    From Waiting for the Albino Dunnock by Rosamond Richardson.

A marvellous magic

    "I have often wondered in four decades of writing how it is that time and again my stories seem to gather themselves, write themselves almost (the best ones really seem to), cover the empty pages almost effortlessly - once I get going, that is. Each one is, I believe, the result of forces of a creative fusion, a fusion that simply can't happen unless certain elements are in place [...]

    The last and most important element in the alchemy that produces this creative fusion is the sheer love of doing it, of seeing if you can make magic from an empty page and a pen. The truth is that it is not a trick. It is an art and a craft and a marvellous magic, and I long with every story to understand it better and to do it better too."

    Michael Morpurgo, Singing for Mrs. Pettigrew: A Storymaker's Journey.

Do No Harm

   

    I think this is a first for Cornflower Books: a book reviewed here twice. Eighteen months ago Mr. C. gave his thoughts on neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's memoir Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery; I read it over the weekend and must now add mine.

    I haven't been as gripped by a book of any kind for a long time. It's not that the cases Mr. Marsh describes have a grim or ghoulish compulsion to them (though it's true that many make harrowing reading), it's the honesty with which he writes, admitting to his own and others' mistakes - some of them avoidable errors - with a candour which makes human these 'god-like' men*, and when you contrast the surgeon's fallibility with the trust and faith put in them by patients and their families, and the fact that they so often operate on a knife-edge between success and failure, life and death, "wrecked" life or good life, you cannot help but read on. Add to that the writer's natural eloquence and the facility with which he tells his stories, his "wary sympathy" for those in his care, his clear self-knowledge, and what you have is an enthralling account of a very difficult job.

   The brain is an organ of mystery, the surgeon's instruments "moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason [...]", and with a poetry of its own - the Sylvian fissure, the basal veins of Rosenthal, the Great Vein of Galen. Certain neurosurgical procedures are likened to bomb disposal work, and the surgeon learns to accept intense anxiety as a normal part of his day, and yet he would gladly spend all his working hours operating, practising his "craft", as medicine is described here.

    Henry Marsh was a hospital porter before he became a doctor, and his unconventional career path - via a degree in PPE and without any science 'O' or 'A' levels - is traced in the book, as is his own engagement with various branches of medicine including neurosurgery as a patient himself or close relative of one. He is deeply frustrated by the apparently ludicrous rules and self-serving bureaucracy of our health service, and yet he has gone regularly to work in the desperately ill-equipped, primitive but byzantine world of Ukrainian neurosurgery in the hope of helping people who have no access otherwise to the standard of care that this country offers. He is skilled in the "Olympian detachment" necessary to assess cases and make the inevitable difficult decisions, but he brings to his patients a genuine empathy, and a willingness to go far out of his way for them. He writes of real people and events with a novelist's eye for telling detail and a playwright's sense of timing, and he describes the "heaven and hell" of the neurosurgeon's lot without sentiment or sensationalism.

    The book is first rate and I can't recommend it too highly; it more than deserves its second outing here.

   

*They are mostly men.

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The Lark

 

 

    The other day I quoted from Charlotte Moore's introduction to E. Nesbit's The Lark, and she's spot-on there about the book's energy, humour, and the power of the happy ending. The novel is a joy: a spirit-raising soufflé of a book, lovely and lively, full of farce and fun.

    I won't go into much of the plot here other than to say that it's about Jane and Lucilla, cousins who are suddenly removed from their boarding school by their guardian and set up in a cottage on the edge of London where on a very small income they have to get by by their ingenuity and hard work. Fortune favours the brave, however, and events unfold in entirely fitting and satisfying ways!

    I loved many things about it: the authorial comment, the humour, the domestic details as mentioned here, and lines such as "you cannot be moderate with lilac". It has something of The Importance of Being Earnest about it, but really it's its own book, light and bright, cheerful, funny and warm.

    The Lark is published by Dean Street Press in association with Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow, and both are to be congratulated for bringing this delightful confection to a wider readership.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the longlist

   

    The longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017 was released earlier today, and here it is:

 

A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Crane Pond by Richard Francis

The Dark Circle by Linda Grant

The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

The Good People by Hannah Kent

Minds of Winter by Ed O'Loughlin

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

    The shortlist will follow in April and the winner will be announced in June, but in the meantime to broaden the reach of the prize the Walter Scott Prize Academy have published a list of a further 20 novels from this year's entries which they recommend; you can find it here.

Thought for the day

    "I have a theory. If you lead a very repetitious life, your imagination works very well. It's very active. So I get up early in the morning every day, and I sit down at my desk, and I am ready to write."

    Creature-of-habit Haruki Murakami talking to John Freeman in How to Read a Novelist: Conversations with Writers.

    See also this post.

To be read: The White Hare

 

    "A lost boy. A dead girl, and one who is left behind.

    Robbie doesn't want anything more to do with death, but life in a village full of whispers and secrets can't make things the way they were.

    When the white hare appears, magical and fleet in the silvery moonlight, she leads them all into a legend, a chase, a hunt.

    But who is the hunter and who the hunted?

    In The White Hare, Michael Fishwick deftly mingles a coming-of-age story with mystery, myth and summer hauntings."

    I like the sound of this novel for children of 12 and up, described as "a mix of tense thriller, magical legend and real life," which is out early next month.

    The jacket design is by Emma Ewbank, by the way.

Looking forward to reading ...

    

    ... Jacob's Room Has Too Many Books by Susan Hill, due out in October.

    "When we spend so much of our time immersed in books, who's to say where reading ends and living begins? The two are gloriously wedded, as Susan Hill shows.

    Considering everything from Edith Wharton's novels through Alan Bennett's diaries, Virginia Woolf and the writings of twelfth-century monk Aelred of Rievaulx, Susan Hill charts a year of her life through the books she has read, re-read or returned to the shelf. From beneath a shady tree, or the warmth of a kitchen, Hill reflects on what her reading throws up, from writing and writers to politics and religion, as well as the joy of dandies or the pleasure of watching geese cross a meadow.

    Full of wry observations and warm humour, as well as strong opinions freely aired, this is a rare and wonderful insight into the rich world of reading."

    For anyone who hasn't read Susan's earlier book Howards End is on the Landing, there's a post on it here.

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A novel for grown-up children

    "The Lark is a novel for grown-up children. It has many of the ingredients of E. Nesbit's children's fiction, starting with a magic spell, and moving on to secret doors, missing keys, dressing up, trespassing in shut-up houses, imprisonment, good-hearted burglars, small but dramatic injuries, mistaken identities, extraordinary coincidences, boats, trains, pet rabbits, cocoa, and small squabbles about nothing in particular. And it is bursting with the same energy, humour and sense of discovery that made Nesbit one of the best-selling children's authors of the early twentieth century. As in The Wouldbegoods, The House of Arden, Five Children and It, and The Railway Children, she revels in the power of fiction to make things turn out all right."

    Charlotte Moore, from her introduction to E. Nesbit's The Lark, my current reading.

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Lol

    "[...] Aunt calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps [...]"

    I've been reading The Inimitable Jeeves and laughing out loud. Trying to analyse PGW's brilliance, 'all' I can come up with is his perfect verbal timing and a gift for words which amounts to a personal thesaurus of beautifully expressive, inventive substitutes for the commonplace. As I said here, thank goodness for smiley people who write cheery books.

Done and dusted

   

    You may well have seen the news that the long-awaited first part of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials 'equel', as he terms it - The Book of Dust - is due for release in October. I heard the author talk at the Oxford Literary Festival a couple of years ago and appetites were whetted.

    I'm minded to re-read the first three books in preparation for the new one, and if I do I hope to be as spellbound as I was before.

In passing

   

    I mentioned The Thirteenth Tale in passing yesterday. Diane Setterfield's second novel, Bellman & Black, is currently available for Kindle at £1.99, and it's very much worth reading, as you'll see here.

What there is to say we have said

 

    A final few words on What there is to say we have said.

    I mentioned in that earlier post that I was reading this collection of letters "with great enjoyment, delighting in being in the company of two such lovely, eloquent, interesting people", and that stood throughout the book.

    Eudora Welty and William Maxwell corresponded for fifty years, their relationship initially a working one - besides being an acclaimed novelist in his own right, William Maxwell was Eudora Welty's editor at The New Yorker - developing into a close, sustaining, supportive friendship which lasted to the end of their lives. Miss Welty came to look upon Bill, his wife and daughters as almost a second family, and their shared joys, often in simple things, give their letters a warmth and gladness which make them such a pleasure to read.

    They discuss books, friends in the literary world, flowers - for both were keen gardeners and especially rose growers - their travels, and daily doings; early letters particularly include Bill's editorial advice which is very carefully considered (do editors these days typically go to such lengths, I wonder), while later ones applaud achievements, and discuss but do not dwell on age, ill health, and loss. Throughout the correspondence there is easy, genuine enthusiasm, keen observation and the writer's eye for telling detail, all coloured by a generous-hearted fellow feeling which means it's with reluctance that you turn the final page. I came away from the book feeling that both parties would have been very fine people to know, and that's saying a lot.

    If you love reading letters, if you enjoy literary memoirs, or if you simply like spending time in good company, keep an eye out for this book.

 

See also:-

    The Optimist's Daughter

    They Came Like Swallows