Cornflower Books

And one more thing

    Before we leave the subject of The Bloomsbury Group for now, I must mention the second of the six titles as it's due out this week. About eighteen months ago I snapped up a charity shop copy of The Brontes went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson having heard much about it including how hard it was to find. It proved a good buy, and here's what I thought of it:

This book is quite mad, and yet it sparkles - and I don't mean with a sort of deranged glint in the eye!
It's the story of an eccentric family - the three Carne girls, their widowed mother and their governess live in 1920s London. Deirdre, the eldest daughter, is a journalist and would-be novelist, Katrine is beginning a career on the stage, while Sheil is still in the schoolroom, but their lives are peopled by all sorts of imaginary friends and characters around whom they create bizarre flights of fancy, pretence and running jokes.
When reality overlaps with their elaborate fantasy and they actually encounter their unlikely 'pin-up', the very real Mr. Justice Toddington, and his wife, both of whom have been part of their imaginings for some time, the story takes an engaging turn as the made-up "saga" must now be lived out.
"The main trouble lay in the fact that I came to Lady Toddington aware: primed with a thousand delicate, secret, knowledges and intuitions, whereas to her I was ... merely so much cubic girl, so to speak." And "Toddy, from a negative, had developed into a print." But the Toddingtons, once they - like the reader - get the hang of the Carne girls, play along with true spirit and add much substance to the girls' lives. Whimsical and fey it may be, but there's also a deeper, darker side to the book (which is where the Brontes come in) to balance the froth and fancy.
It's quick, sharp, more than a touch batty, but ultimately rather endearing.

So, two very different books to launch what looks like being an excellent list, but no prizes for guessing which is my personal favourite!
    

Letters from home

  

    When Bloomsbury got in touch a few months ago to tell me of their plans for a series of reprints and to ask for suggestions of much-loved titles to go on the list, among the books I mentioned to them was Joyce Dennys' Henrietta's War. Originally a series of articles for The Sketch magazine, the wartime letters from Henrietta, the wife of a doctor in a Devon coastal town, to her 'Childhood's Friend', Robert, who is serving abroad with the Forces, are about "the trivial doings of protected people in what is called a safe area". But for all their self-deprecating humour and their 'making the best of it' light-heartedness, they are also a perceptive study of people's attitudes to the war, of the way they thought and how that affected daily life.

  Evacuees from London are prone to 'bombing oneupmanship', the locals find themselves becoming compassion-weary, and Henrietta admits, "I have been rather bad about the war lately. This time the feelings of waste and desolation have taken the form of extreme irritability with Mrs. Savernack whom I suspect of enjoying the war because she can sit on committees and boss everybody about...."
The plumply comfortable, always good-natured Lady B. says, "I am a great believer in the Power of Thought...I take a big breath and shut my eyes and send great waves of hope and courage and confidence across the Channel. And what's more, they get there!" (Lady B. also memorably describes the enemy as "mentally and spiritually pot-bound").
     As Henrietta wistfully recalls "more spacious days", and she and her friends and neighbours try to carry on as normally as possible, the letters - with their sharp and funny illustrations by Joyce Dennys herself - amuse and reassure as they chronicle the seemingly unimportant daily doings of those whose job it was 'to carry on'. As I've said before, they are a delight and they deserve a wide readership, and I hope that Bloomsbury will publish the second volume, Henrietta Sees it Through, in due course.
But don't wait for that, buy this book in quantities!

Match point

  

Have not Bloomsbury done a wonderful job of matching the colour for the cover of Henrietta's War to my study walls?!!

And here's the original, longer version of my back cover quote:

 
    

"Joyce Dennys' account of the war fought on the home front is warm and funny, but candid and telling too. While the self-effacing Henrietta observes her friends and neighbours with much affection, her letters chronicle the spirited response of small-town Britain to difficult and dangerous times.
A real delight!"

More on the book proper later!

Good lines: seaside decor

     "A bathing-hut, to my mind, is a small wooden sentry box crammed with damp towels, sand-shoes, black spectacles, melting chocolate, and fishing-tackle, and with so many wet bathing-dresses on the floor it is difficult to find anywhere to stand. But Faith has procured for herself a sort of mansion in off-white, with pale green china on hooks, and a kettle, and chintz curtains with lilies of the valley all over them, and six green deck-chairs with canopies and salmon-pink cushions."
From Henrietta's War by Joyce Dennys.

Feast your eyes....

... on this!
Which is your favourite?
Have you visited/used any?
If not, you can go there 'through the page' by means of this book or this one.

Pictures of war

      26th. April, 1937, the terror bombing by the Luftwaffe, in support of Nationalist forces, of the Basque town of Guernica. The most infamous event of the Spanish Civil War, rendered and remembered starkly in Picasso's painting of that name.
     Dave Boling's Guernica is a fictional look at events before and after the atrocity, concentrating on the lives of 'ordinary' people, and - to make its point all the more forcefully - nice, brave, good people. It stresses the fierce cultural pride of the Basques, but leaves politics aside to concentrate on the human story, and it's an engrossing one: very well-researched, well modulated, ultimately uplifting - it held me. It's been compared to Captain Corelli's Mandolin, but that's not really a recommendation that would get me excited! I did enjoy it very much, but there's something about its 'pitch' which gives me pause: it's a good read but a predictable one, and I found the Civil War scenes in Victoria Hislop's The Return, for example, more forceful and illuminating as to the conflict than the single terrible incident of this book (though The Return is as a whole lot more ponderous). Guernica is a very human saga, though, and without meaning to belittle the book or the events it portrays, if you're looking for something like a Saturday afternoon main feature "weepie", this will fill the bill nicely.  

Good lines: books, reading and men

     "Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true."

     "That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you on to another book, and another bit there will lead you on to a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."

     "Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books."

     "Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life." !

From The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

(I'm reading this delightful book for the second time, taking notes again and deliberately not referring to those I made the first time round, just to see how they'll compare in the end - one thing I know is that I'm enjoying it every bit as much as I did before.)

Iridology

   After that wonderful response to what was a very off the cuff post about Ian McEwan, I thought I'd canvass your opinions on Iris Murdoch today.
   I haven't read her for many years, but I know I loved The Sea, The Sea and The Philosopher's Pupil, (and I want to read them again) and I have An Unofficial Rose and Nuns and Soldiers, though I don't recall reading either (we're going back a bit here).
  So, any opinions on the works of Dame Iris? I've had her down as a Book Group possible, but perhaps not - what do you think?

Wolf silent

     "All in all, I have a crazy ma'am who owns a hundred dusty Bibles, a leggy boy with a too-soft heart, and no man to bed down with. And an Alaskan silver dying on my kitchen floor."
     Thus does Olivia Harker, heroine of Carolyn Wall's fine novel Sweeping up Glass, sum up her life in rural Kentucky during the Depression. She's struggling to keep running her ramshackle general store with the help of her young grandson Will'm, and the hindrance of her elderly, volatile and vindictive mother Ida. Her adored father died forty years earlier, and that sent the young Olivia down roads she'd have done better to have avoided. But now, wolves are being shot and mutilated on her land, and she wants to know what's behind the apparently senseless killing. As she and Will'm take in some tiny motherless cubs and try to rear them, her investigations lead her to discover things about long ago events that she had never suspected.
     In a book about hard times and racial prejudice, this is storytelling at its best. Olivia's voice is strong and distinctive and that's what powers the narrative. In the parts about her early life I was reminded of Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird or Jody Baxter in The Yearling, for there's an ingenuous humour and unselfconscious charm to her. The older Olivia is battered but tough, loyal and loving, though she fancies no-one will ever love her again. But it's her easy, mutually respectful relationship with her black neighbours which is at the heart of the book, this at a time of segregation, hostility and violence. There are many dark scenes in it, but overall it's a strong, hopeful and uplifting book and I loved it.

Atoning

    At the school summer fair yesterday, a cursory glance at the bookstall revealed three copies of Ian McEwan's Atonement for sale. I haven't read this - nor any McEwan at all, in fact - but I wondered why it was obviously not "a keeper" for those who'd donated them. I did see a woman comparing the two paperbacks for relative scruffiness, and it looked as though - for 10p. - she was going to give it a go, but it made me wonder about the book. Any McEwan fans here, and if so, how does Atonement rank in the canon?

Good lines: handmade

    "I made a half dozen quilt tops, each a more complicated pattern than the last - overlapping circles, diamonds, and one-inch squares. When they were finished, they looked like something I'd wanted to say but hadn't found words for."
From Sweeping up Glass by Carolyn Wall.

OK? OK!

   The cover first: as Barbara and Samantha said in the comments the other day, this picture has nothing to do with the book at all, and why something so unrepresentative and potentially off-putting was chosen is beyond me, but let's ignore it and move on.
   The contents: a series of linked stories, written/published here and there, but now brought together to form a portrait of a woman and a small coastal town in Maine.

   The eponymous Olive Kitteridge is a maths teacher in the local school. Along with her affable, gentle husband Henry and 'difficult' son Christopher, she features in some stories and appears in the margins of others, all of them depicting or referring to life in the town over a period of thirty or so years. What makes the book so compelling  - for despite its episodic nature it is - is the clinical precision with which Elizabeth Strout dissects her characters, exposing their flaws, their hidden, inner lives, their hopes and disappointments. As such, this is not a comfortable read because it's all too real and human, but it's a fine book, and one which shows a keen and perceptive understanding of what motivates and moves us, particularly as we age. It's the older Olive who figures most often, a person (to paraphrase Miss Brodie) of insight and instinct, but also of penetrating glance and caustic tongue. She's not an Everywoman, but she's an effective lens through which to examine relationships and singularity, expectations and disconnections. We may not like Olive, but we feel for her at times as if for ourselves.

Five from fifty - part 3

The final five 'stars' from the first fifty books of this year are, without further ado,
D.J. Taylor, Ask Alice - (not to be missed).
Tim Gautreaux, The Missing - ("what you do will say who you are").
Iain Pears, Stone's Fall - (pure entertainment).
Michael and Ellen Kaplan, Bozo Sapiens - (some first class non-fiction).
A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book  - (imperfect but impressive).

As I said before, it remains to be seen which of these first fifteen books will make my final 'books of the year' list. Book number 51 is already a contender for a place on that list. Will it depose one of these? We shall see.

Five from fifty - part 2

     My second batch of five (from the fifteen best of the fifty so far...) is as varied as the first, comprising a romantic, historical novel with a Scottish setting, a strange and fable-like post-war drama, a rural idyll of unspoken love, a rattling good yarn and the tale of a man who plays second lead in his own life story.

Susanna Kearsley, Sophia's Secret - (great fun book, ignore that dreadful cover!).
Philippe Claudel, Brodeck's Report - (highly recommended).
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country - (ink long dry on a put-down pen).
Margery Allingham, Sweet Danger - (pure escapism!).
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business - (first class).

Five from fifty

  

      

      Fifty books read so far this year (I know, I'm a real slacker compared with some of you, and it doesn't sound that many, though it adds up to a lot of hours), and I've been keeping a list of the ones which are in the running for my 'books of the year' post in about six months' time.

     Of course, there may be huge competition in what's to be read over the coming weeks, but of the fifteen to have made the cut thus far, here are the first five. What are the criteria for inclusion on the master list? Some are there because they are impressive feats of writing, others because of the enjoyment they've given me, and some score on both counts.

Another ten to come in later posts, but let's begin with these from the start of the year:
Gil Adamson, The Outlander  - (more here).
Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Botom of the Pie  - (my impressions here).
Francesca Kay, An Equal Stillness - (thoughts on it here).
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies - (initial post).
Joyce Dennys, Henrietta's War - (no post proper as yet, just a quick mention).

More to be read

  

    There are several additions to the TBR pile to talk about, so I'll do the first three today and begin with Guernica by Dave Boling.
If the name means most to you as the title of Picasso's painting then here is the story behind it: the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Luftwaffe in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The book is a family drama, plotting the lives of the people caught up in that dreadful event, and it comes very highly praised.

   Next, a long-lost final novella by Stefan Zweig. Journey into the Past is "a poignant examination of the angst of nostalgia and the fragility of love". Ludwig returns home after the First World War to meet the woman he loved passionately and who had promised to wait for him. "But circumstances have changed...."
I've seen many recommendations recently for Zweig's The Post Office Girl, so I shall be very interested to read this short work by "an incomparable storyteller".

   Lastly, a book which has been on my wishlist for a while and which has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year. Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is about an "indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable ... retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, struggling to make sense of the changes in her life as she grows older". It's "a penetrating, vibrant exploration of the human soul in need, and will make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain and shed a tear or two".
More on it soon.

Good lines: food for thought

   

    "Women could not use minds which had been fed on nothing but sugar flowers and cream soup and hatpins."
From The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt.

Girls and boys come out to play

     Beginning at Midsummer, 1895, and spanning the years until May 1919, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book is a majestic novel whose astonishing scope demands time and concentration on the reader's part. It is as much a portrait of an age as of the families who people its pages, but alongside its charting of political and social shifts is a compelling account of creative energy and movements in art, craft, literature and drama which made its period one of organically sprawling growth and change, mirrored by the novel itself.
    At the start of the book the children's writer Olive Wellwood - she is based on E. Nesbit - is visiting the South Kensington Museum (later to be re-named the V&A). She is there as a guest of Prosper Cain, Keeper of Precious Metals, and it is from his exhibits she is seeking inspiration for her tales which mix folklore and myth and speak to the child in every adult. The museum has a presence in the story, a backdrop almost permanently under construction and extension, a place of dust and treasure, and later the scene of a beautiful set-piece supper dance. Cain's house within the museum's precincts displays a Morris tapestry, a de Morgan lustre bowl and cushions of flame and peacock silk, and this powerful visual sensibility underpins every scene and exerts a narrative pull where the characters themselves sometimes lack magnetism.

     The story moves to Todefright, the Wellwoods' family house in the Kentish Weald where they are neighbours of Benedict Fludd, potter of genius but man of impulsive, unpredictable temperament. And so the three families, Cains, Wellwoods, Fludds, with sundry relations, friends and Fludd's apprentice Philip Warren, co-exist, grow up, form attachments and try to find their paths in life. As they do so, it is against recurring themes of 'second selves', self-expression or restraint, anarchy, misrule and licence, the pastoral compared with the industrial, youth and age and the denial of adult responsibility.
Again and again, A.S. Byatt uses the earth as her leitmotif, from the clay with which Fludd and Philip fashion their pots, to the land itself, its topography and past, to the underground - the cellars of the museum, the bowels of a school, the mines which claim lives, then the trenches of the Somme and the soil which swallows those who don't live out the book.

     From family story to thematic exposition to documentary-style statement of historical fact, all are here, but so - for this is Byatt - are discursive cultural examinations of such topics as women's suffrage and higher education, the premiere of Peter Pan, the Paris Exposition, the intricacies of the potter's art. It's a book which has the reader dithering on the intellectual crossroads, wondering which path to follow next, and for that it must be praised.
It's not a flawless book, but it is a mightily impressive one.

Aromatic

Have you seen this?
(It was launched back in April!).

Botanical specimens

   Hardly in the category of subtle, understated covers (click to enlarge the picture), Margot Berwin's book Hot House Flower, which has just arrived, nevertheless intrigues me as it's a novel about plants!
    Lila is thirty-two, divorced, disillusioned and lacking direction. When she stops at the flower market to buy a Bird-of-Paradise to brighten up her Manhattan apartment, it's the start of an adventure which will take her to places - real and metaphorical - of which she'd only dreamed.
    So, a book involving shamans, herbalists and orchid obsessives, but also "a man who just might be able to dent Lila's emotional armour", I shall be very interested to see what the author makes of her raw material!

     Very different in subject matter and style, but two novels about plants and plant hunters which I enjoyed enormously are Philippa Gregory's Earthly Joys and its sequel Virgin Earth. It's a while since I read them but the story of the Tradescants (father and son), their collecting expeditions, life in seventeenth century England and the origins of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum are fascinating, and I recommend them.