Cornflower Books

Derring-do

   

     I'm reading Rider Haggard's 1887 novel Allan Quatermain and greatly enjoying it! Quatermain is said to have been the basis for Indiana Jones, and here our hero and his companions are searching for a lost East African kingdom and facing all sorts of perils along the way. But there is plenty of stiff upper lip in evidence as they keep intact the English gentleman's fine reputation of honour and fearlessness. I've reached the point where the company must rescue a very plucky damsel in distress so I must go and read on!

Have you read any ripping yarns lately?

Good words

    We do 'Good lines' posts here periodically, so why not some 'Good words'? To start with how about the very good Scots word 'smeddum'. I think of it because yesterday a friend described one of my children as having smeddum, and if I explain that it means "spirit, energy, drive, vigorous commonsense and resourcefulness", you'll see that that was a compliment!

'Smeddum' is also the title of a book, a collection of work by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, coming from his acclaimed short story of the same name.

104

  

       All those of us who enjoyed Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare (the Book Group read it recently) may like to visit the Persephone Post today.

Eating books

    I've read a lot of very good books recently and have lengthened my wishlist considerably by adding to it other recommended titles by the authors I've been particularly enjoying. As so much of my reading time is already spoken for, I'm not often free to choose what I want to read, but even if I were I wouldn't necessarily gorge on an author after discovering a great book, I'd be more likely to opt for a mixed diet, trying other things and then coming back to the new favourite.

    How about you? Do you devour all the work of a new find (an author or series) in one go, or will you acquire it in more of a piecemeal fashion, and return to taste again over the coming weeks and months?

   

Good lines: digression

 

      "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;- they are the life, the soul of reading;--- take them out of this book, for instance,-- you might as well take the book along with them; - one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;--- he steps forth like a bridegroom, - bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail."

From The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne.

This week's reading

     Have you read Tristram Shandy - or to give it its full title, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne?

     First published in 1759, "extravagantly praised for its humour and roundly condemned for its indecency", I have to read it by the end of next week so I think I shall do it in fifty-page chunks rather than one big bite, and alongside it I'll be reading

Love in Winter by (the wonderfully named) Storm Jameson - another author I haven't read before. This 1935 novel begins in the early 20s and features Hervey Russell whose burgeoning literary career is not enough for her. Living with an unloving husband "makes her long for a new beginning" and then she meets ...

I'm looking forward to it!

Good lines: words

     "She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water."

From The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

Cornflower Book Group - A Shropshire Lad

  

     "This magical and poignant evocation of coming of age in the countryside describes lovers in secluded lanes, cricket and church bells, cherry trees hung with snow and woods full of bluebells. Yet in A Shropshire Lad the fields and hills are also places of loss and sorrow, where men die young or are sent far away to fight in foreign wars. Aching with longing for a vanished world, these exquisite verses are a meditation on the fleeting nature of love, youth and happiness."

That is the blurb on the back of my edition of Housman's collection, and it's accurate up to a point, but oh, what a melancholy book this is! Its themes are the shortness of life and the endless sleep of death, love's longings and heartbreaks, death again, comradeship and shared humanity, live while you may as you'll soon be dead, dying for your country, or just dead - full stop. Alright, I exaggerate, but the relentlessness of the message coupled with the very similar metre throughout meant that there was a monotony which rarely broke.

     That said, there are wonderful passages, so it might be better to cherry-pick than read the whole, but what I found interesting about this exercise was that the very act of reading poetry over (in my case) an hour or so did require of me a different type of attention, a stillness, a proper 'look', not just the fleeting glance which the narrative push of so many novels engenders. To that end this was a useful and very positive experience and I'm glad of it. 

    But what of the beauty of the piece? Perhaps you'll let us know your favourite lines, whether it's the poignancy of "the land of lost content", the storm-scene of  "On Wenlock Edge", or something less well known, and if you're not in the habit of reading poetry, has picking up this volume reminded you of its pleasures?

Edited to add: In his comment below, Thomas rightly mentions the Vaughan Williams settings of the poems. Here is an interesting clip of Ian Bostridge performing and talking about them.

Plum lines

     Fans of P.G. Wodehouse may like to vote for their favourite 'Plum line' in the Plum Idol competition on the Heywood Hill website. 

     I chose Deborah Devonshire's one, and I rather covet that voucher!

New arrivals

   Two new arrivals today, a biography and a novel on a topical subject.

   The first is The Madness of Queen Maria by Jenifer Roberts, the story of the remarkable life of Maria I of Portugal (1734-1816). This is something I know nothing about but as it is "... an intimate glimpse into the world of absolute monarchy, of court life in the old Europe, before the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon brought the Braganza dynasty to the brink of ruin", I shall be interested to read it.

 

    Next, Right to Die by Hazel McHaffie. After her journalist husband's death  from Motor Neurone Disease, Naomi reads the diary he kept of his illness; she has her own secret, and the diary will reveal whether Adam knew of it, but it also shows how he resolved "to mastermind his own exit at a time of his choice". "A startlingly clear-sighted and courageous story, this novel explores the collision between uncompromising laws, complex loyalties and human compassion."

I've read great praise for this fictional treatment of the question of assisted dying, and Hazel McHaffie's background in healthcare and as an academic in the field of medical ethics make her well qualified to write about such a difficult but important subject (you can find her website here).

Casualties of war

     I came to Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient with no prior knowledge; I hadn't read any of his books, nor had I seen the film version of this one, so by way of preconception I had only his reputation for fine writing.   

     What I found is that that renown is justified and due. Here is a wordsmith, here is a richly-furnished mind whose work is similarly well plenished, and in a narrative put together like a window of stained glass, every small scene or short passage is intensely coloured and deep with meaning. The lead that provides the episodic link is the crumbling Villa San Girolamo and the four people who inhabit it in the last days of the war. There is Hana, a nurse, who stayed behind when the hospital she was part of moved on, her sole charge now the English patient. This anonymous man was burned beyond recognition when his plane crashed in the desert. Who is he and what is the love affair of which he wrote in the palimpsest-like volume of Herodotus' Histories he keeps with him? Then enter Caravaggio, a thief, a spy, a family friend of Hana's. To complete the quartet, there is Kip a young Indian sapper or engineer, a bomb disposal expert, and in many ways the most complex and intriguing of the four.

    The story spans the characters' wartime experiences and pre-war histories as well their communion in the Villa, but it is the English patient's past in desert exploration and his affair in Cairo which is at the heart of the book, along with the questions of identity and the turns of fate to which that gives rise.

    Ondaatje's prose speaks of a muscular effort and a poet's sensitivity, so choose any passage and you'll find that tension producing writing of beauty and intelligence. Here is the English patient on economy of language:

"The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles."

In the spirit of that line, I'll close here as I've said quite enough!

Drifting off

     Mr. C. was reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness on the train back from London this evening and he found the story so gripping that despite the excitement he nodded off. But, the events and images of the book had clearly already seeped into his subconscious because as he snoozed through Yorkshire he was dreaming of them:

"Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high" and "...when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings", all this jungly stuff had an effect on him.

     Not content with reading in bed,  I am writing this in bed (ah, the thin end of the wedge!) but I'll stop in a moment and pick up The Ivington Diaries which has proved most satisfactory bedtime reading over the last few weeks, though I've yet to dream of Monty Don.

     But Mr. C. has just turned off his bedside light in a rather pointed manner so I'd better close here, and go to sleep, perchance to dream, but not before asking if you've read any book which has had a similar effect on you - pleasant dreams, not nightmares, I hope.

A place in the sun

    A sudden burst of sunshine in the study the other day lit up a small section of one of the biography shelves, so that's a fine excuse to mention a few of the 'illuminated' books.

 

    Of those with a place in the sun, my particular favourites include Candida Lycett Green's Over the Hills and Far Away, an account of her journey on horseback through Yorkshire and Northumberland, and a recollection of her earlier life (she is John Betjeman's daughter). Anne de Courcy is always good value and there are three of hers there: Society's Queen, 1939 - The Last Season, and The Viceroy's Daughters, so if you're interested in the upper echelons of society in early 20th century Britain, she shouldn't be overlooked.

Next is Selina Hastings on Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Jane Howard's Slipstream, Josceline Dimbleby's family memoir featuring Edward Burne-Jones, A Profound Secret, and just about to disappear into shadow is Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life.

(All Mr. C's worthy but most likely dull* political biographies were left in the dark!

*He says they are exciting).

Good lines: tryst

   

     "Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city."

From The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

Book no. 40

    

     Many thanks to Erika for the link to Susan Hill's new blog and specifically to her post on the fortieth book which was inadvertently omitted from the list in the first edition first printing of Howards End is on the landing (see below).

Stop press: Mr. C. says the 'mistake' edition of HEiotL could be subtitled The Thirty Nine Steps!

Halfway up the stairs

   I wanted more of this book. I wanted it to just keep on going because it was such a joy to read. I wanted to stop Susan Hill every now and then and say, "no, don't leave Benjamin Britten there, tell me more about him; explain how you came to know C.P. Snow and at whose house you met T.S. Eliot, and give us extra Iris Murdoch and Penelope Fitzgerald and Roy Strong", but on reflection, these brief glimpses of the people she has known and the associations they have had with her wonderfully rich reading and writing life are fitting and a wider view might have intruded on the story.

   Howards End is on the landing is Susan Hill's account of her journey through her own library, a year in which she read from what she already owned - some old favourites, some new discoveries, some books which she found she had outgrown, others (most notably Jane Austen) she is yet to grow into! It's a series of essays, digressions, personal views and observations, touching recollections, and its effect - on this reader, at least - is twofold: firstly, to open up new authors and new books (and the wishlist lengthened considerably as I read this), but secondly, to make me see my own books with fresh eyes, to re-appraise them and want to become reacquainted with many of them.

    It is thus a liberating book and a stimulating one, but as counter-balance to any tendency towards the greedy devouring of books, Susan Hill also mentions Slow Reading (like Slow Food), and even lectio divina, the savouring and digesting of passages, the pausing to understand their construction and effect, and that's a point well made. This book itself can be read quickly, but it is also one for the bedside table, for dipping into for a short chapter, a snatch of bookish chat with its author, and it has made me think hard about what I am going to read next, because every book, every minute of reading time is an opportunity not to be wasted.

    As she takes in the contents of her many bookshelves, Susan compiles a list of the forty books that would sustain her were she never to have any others, and this is printed at the end of the book. But, there are only thirty nine listed because one title appears twice, so what is the fortieth? I hope she will tell us!

    

Pastime with good company

    You could do worse than pass time in the company of this most excellent novel. I've spent the best part of a week within its pages, constantly in awe of Hilary Mantel's skill, and enjoying a thoroughly good read besides.

    Wolf Hall is the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son, lawyer, consummate man of business, who came under the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey and thence to the right hand of Henry VIII as his most powerful minister, 'fixer' of all things and eventually Earl of Essex. The Tudor court is its setting, but it's much more than a history lesson or a painted backdrop for the posturing of cardboard figures. It is a vigorous, vivid portrait which appears effortless because every word is right and the incorporation of detail, both decorative (but always with a point) and essential is done so skilfully. Its prose is like subtle, supple silk, many-hued, beautifully balanced and fluid, and despite its length it is an extraordinarily economical book, a whole scene often created in only a line or two.

    "There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of person." In that description and in the book as a whole, Hilary Mantel has captured the essential duality of the man, the public face - the strategist, the student of human nature, the shrewd politician - as well as the enigmatic, private one, generous and loving, learned, conscientious, and she has shown herself as astute as her subject in so doing. Her other characters are every bit as complex and fully fleshed, from Sir Thomas More (a very different figure from that of Bolt's A Man for All Seasons), King Henry himself and the scheming, manipulative Anne Boleyn - "... she looks small and tense, as if someone has knitted her and drawn the stitches too tight".

    We know the story - the multiple marriages, the religious wrangling, the political intrigue, we know what happens next, and there's a sequel in progress (thank goodness!), but read this bold and brilliant book and it all becomes less distant and more immediate. I'll finish here, though, with a completely gratuitous quotation from very near the end:

"Someone ... has put on his desk a shining silver pot of cornflowers. The dusky blueness at the base of the crinkled petals reminds him of this morning's light; a late dawn for July, a sullen sky."

Cornflower Book Group 2009: Volumes 11 & 12

    Looking at the calendar to plan ahead for our Book Group weekends, it occurred to me that in order not to get too close to Christmas we ought to have our December discussion slightly earlier in the month than usual, so to allow enough time to fit everything in I thought I'd choose two titles in one go today and give us all a bit of a head start.

 

   For November I've chosen Wallace Stegner, an American writer new to me, and his novel Crossing to Safety, which was first published in 1987 and which is so warmly recommended by Norm.

     It follows the increasingly complex and close friendship of two married couples from the 1930s to the 70s, and is, according to the Washington Post, "a magnificently crafted story ...brimming with wisdom". Sid Lang and Larry Morgan are both members of the English department of the University of Wisconsin when their wives meet and find they have much in common. The story is told from the perspective of the now ageing Larry, and is "an exploration of the struggle of four people to come to terms with the trials and tragedies of everyday life."

 

     For December, let's have a complete change of continent, period and mood with George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody, first published in serial form in Punch in the late 1880s. It "created a cultural icon, an English archetype. Anxious, accident-prone, occasionally waspish, Charles Pooter has come to epitomize English suburban life [which] is hilariously and painfully familiar in its small-mindedness and its essential decency. Both celebration and critique, The Diary of a Nobody has often been imitated, but never bettered."

I've done my usual spot checks and found that both books appear on library catalogues, while of course they are available through retailers. As to dates for your diary, let's talk about Crossing to Safety from Saturday, 21st. November, and The Diary of a Nobody from Saturday, 12th. December. If you haven't taken part before but you like the sound of these books, please join us!

Finished!

    The book  - not the knitting, which has hardly progressed at all because the book was so wonderfully engrossing!

Reading: a singular pleasure?

"Reading is an act of friendly isolation. When we are reading, we make ourselves unapproachable in a tactful way." Stefan Bollmann, Women who Read are Dangerous.

 

But:
"The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books." Katherine Mansfield.

On the other hand:
"Books and marriage go ill together." (!) Molière.

Perhaps because:

"She is too fond of books and it has turned her brain." Louisa M. Alcott.