Cornflower Books

Good lines: on being precipitate - or not

"She wore a 'terra-cotta' dress, And we stayed, because of the pelting storm, Within the hansom's dry recess, Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp, sad pain, And the glass that had screened our forms before Flew up and out she sprang to her door: I should have kissed her if the rain had lasted a minute more."

A Thunderstorm in Town by Thomas Hardy.

Book ends

    Seen at the National Museum of Scotland shop, wooden book ends. I should have bought them!

On Gwyneth

    Alis Hawkins' promised piece on medieval women as master craftsmen is now up on her blog, and readers of Testament will find that extra background to the book very interesting.

Have you read ... Elizabeth Peters

   

    Harriet has been reading Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries. She loved it and had to have volume two, The Curse of the Pharaohs, ready to go as soon as she reached the last page of volume one.

    These books about a Victorian Egyptologist were originally recommended to me by a very well-read friend who said they were tremendous fun. Harriet agrees and is very glad to know that there are many more in the series for her to enjoy. I rather fancy them, too.

    Have you read them?

Edited to add: Reading all your comments, it looks as though these books are a real treat in store!

Once upon a time

    If all writers were as good at telling a story as this young lady is, think how much better entertained we readers would be. What imagination, what vocabulary, what narrative skill! I love the expression, the dramatic force, the free-ranging story, and all of it no doubt ad lib. Did A. A. Milne ever envisage such an adventure for "Winnie l'ourson", do you think?

A portrait of the artist

   

     Aeronwy Thomas' My Father's Places, her memoir of her childhood in Wales, is a very readable, unselfconsciously natural account of an unusual upbringing. She, her baby brother Colm, her famous father Dylan, and volatile mother, Caitlin, came to live at The Boat House in Laugharne under the patronage of Margaret Taylor (wife of A.J.P.). Money was always short, though there seemed to be plenty for drink, the children were left to their own devices to an alarming degree, but amidst extended family, friends and neighbours, life seemed largely happy if not exactly settled.

   Of course, what we want to know about is Dylan Thomas himself, and he's presented more in a series of sketches cropping up in the general scheme of things rather than by means of a deliberate study, so for instance his daughter describes him at Colm's christening party "looking round like a benevolent teddy bear, talking to Augustus [John] and drinking beer from one of Granny's best porcelain cups", or reading to her from The Wind in the Willows, "Dad modulating his voice differently for each character", and meeting the Queen who passes on warm regards from her mother.

    His work methods are interesting, locked into his writing shed by Caitlin - her contribution to his literary output and thus to twentieth century poetry - he had the view to inspire him, but 'forbidden' detective novels were confiscated so that he wouldn't be distracted. If the family could hear Dylan's voice they knew he was working, testing his lines by speaking them; if there was silence, they could tell he had succumbed to the charms of a Raymond Chandler or an Agatha Christie, and there would be nothing to show for the hours of his forced seclusion.

   I'd have liked more about Dylan - as Aeronwy would have liked more time with him - but he was often absent, away on tours or broadcasting, and then he died suddenly in America when his daughter was still very young. No happy ending, then, and the reader's left to think what might have been ...

A little snooze

    Another Dark Puss 'find' for us, this time library users 'resting their eyes'; (my favourite is the toddler quite near the bottom of the page!). I wonder what they were reading that caused them to doze off? The Big Sleep, Twilight Sleep or Sleep, Pale Sister?

    Here's a genuine question, though, are e-readers less snooze-inducing than paper books? I mean, does the pressing of the buttons and what have you perhaps use areas of the brain not employed by a normal book and does this keep the reader more alert? I see the new iPad includes "a virtual bookshelf complete with cover art", which sounds interesting - more on the device here, if you're still awake.

Happy days

    

     I'm jumping the gun a bit with this book as it won't be out here for a while and I hadn't intended to read it now, but I picked up Hector and the Search for Happiness by François Lelord after a particularly stressful and exhausting day when no other book would do, and it was just the thing for some light relief but with enough depth to it to make for a soothing and very engaging read.

    I found it delightful, and was taken by its central character (who reminded me a bit of Louis Theroux) from the very first page. Hector is a psychiatrist and he's very good at his job. He talks to his patients, listens to them and is genuinely interested in them and in what causes them to seek treatment, but he's aware that many of them are not so much ill as just deeply dissatisfied with their lives, and he finds this puzzling and wearing.

    Hector decides to take a break, a busman's holiday, travelling around the world to try to find out what makes us happy - or not - and searching for the elusive key to that state which can be as hard to recognise as it is to define. Along the way, Hector meets people and encounters certain situations, both mundane and extreme, experiences which his perceptive, logical mind distills down to form 'lessons' about happiness, ones he can apply to his own life as well as offering his patients.

   I could use words such as 'quirky' and 'idiosyncratic' to describe this book, and its distinctive, simplistic style is perhaps deceptive, but it is a fable and commentary on modern life, full of a kind of wise but innocent charm and amusing authorial asides. Many a self-help book or even an academic study would tell you no more about 'cultivating your serenity' or 'subjective well-being' than this novel, but its psychiatrist author has cleverly got to the nub of things here and has chosen to present these findings in a beautifully naive manner.

   What does Hector eventually discover? You'll have to read it yourself to find out!

Poetry posting

     Poetry Live for Haiti  (full details there) will take place in London on Saturday 30th. January.

                                                ~~~~~

    A poet, only the fourth ever, has won this year's Costa Book Award. The overall prize goes to Christopher Reid for A Scattering.

    (Pipped at the post is Cólm Toibín, tipped to win for Brooklyn, and memorably described in this article as having "an extraordinary head. It looks as if it was sculpted by someone with enormous powers of expression but fairly rudimentary chisel skills."!).

Have you read ... Terry Pratchett?

     Terry Pratchett's name cropped up several times in the comfort reading post. I haven't read him at all but I wondered if his fans would tell us what makes him so special (he's hugely popular) and which of his books we should begin with if we want to give him a try?

Testamentary writings

 

      Just in case you haven't seen it, Alis Hawkins, author of Testament, has left a comment for us on Saturday's post (click there and scroll down to read it).

    You can find out more about the historical background to her book by visiting Alis' website, and keep an eye on her blog for information about the status of women as 'master craftsmen' in medieval times, an interesting point which came up in our discussion.

Recent acquisitions

    Monty Mouse has been inspecting some new arrivals on the Cornflower desk of power (which is where he lives) and I see he's put his paw on The Monday Night Cooking School as he lives in hope there will be a tasty morsel or two in that one. Erica Bauermeister's novel is already out in the States under another title and with a very attractive cover, but her British publishers have gone for a different look - which do you prefer?

    Erica's novel is sandwiched (yes, I know) between David Vann's Legend of a Suicide, much talked about here and there, and my copy a prize from Simon S., and The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, she was a long-suffering woman by anyone's standards.

    Almost in its rightful spot there in the pile is Kelly Corrigan's The Middle Place, a memoir about growing up when you are already an adult, and a book "both unbelievably moving and hilarious."

   Beneath it are Secret Son by Laila Lalami and Nigel Farndale's The Blasphemer. Both books sound very strong indeed, the former a modern fable set in contemporary Casablanca, a rags to riches story with a difference, while the latter poses the impossible question, would you save yourself or the one you love?

   Lastly for now, and a slim little volume up by Monty's shoulder, Hector and the Search for Happiness by François Lelord is another 'modern fable', this one written by a psychiatrist. Is there such as thing as the secret of true happiness? We shall see what Hector discovers. (Monty thinks it's an ample supply of cheese and an absence of cats.) 

Good lines: written on a postcard

     "The pooled ponded rosed goldfished arboured lizarded swinghung towelled winetabled Aeronshrill garden leads into our own (dear God) olives and vines climbing to a mutes' conventicle, Niobe's eisteddfod, of cypresses."

Dylan Thomas writing to a friend from an Italian villa.

Quoted by Aeronwy Thomas in My Father's Places.

Cornflower Book Group - Testament

    

   "In one miraculous year he had been given both a commission to match his ambition and a son. But now Simon was learning that things longed for, once held in the hand, do not always match the picture nurtured in the mind."

     Alis Hawkins' novel Testament is about a college - part of the medieval city of Salster - both at the time of its foundation in the fourteenth century, and as it faces a financial crisis and a threat to its autonomy in the present day. The master mason who built it, Simon of Kineton, his family and his patron, bring to life the early period, while the modern story is centred on the college's marketing manager Damia Miller. The two plots unfold in parallel, their junction being the discovery of a strange mural which will be the key to understanding events of the past and will help secure the venerable institution's future. The mural's subject is Simon's crippled son, Toby, "...the bag of twitching bones and wandering wits" as his father describes him and from whom the college takes its present day nickname. But why? What was so significant about Toby's life that he should have been remembered in this way?

    That's a brief outline of what is an ambitious and complex story, one whose intricacy and wealth of detail could have been its downfall but happily was not! It's a long book, and yet I read it in no time at all, so gripping were both its strands. Alis Hawkins has done a terrific job of producing a coherent whole, beautifully balanced and made real. I found the historical side fascinating, while the twenty first century college, its political wranglings, its staff and students, were equally well-realised. If I have a quibble it's with over-emphasis on matching the two halves of the story, and reliance on coincidence such as the discovery of all-important archival papers, while Toby's fate pushed credibility, I felt, (nor did I fully understand the Fairings/Obit scenes!), but none of that was enough to detract from what for me was a very enjoyable read indeed.

     What did you think of the book?

(PS. In case you missed it, Testament's 'books and cakes' post is here).

Are you reading comfortably?

    Following on from yesterday's post, a little piece on comfort reading in this morning's paper puts it rather well, I think. The writer, talking about the death of Robert B. Parker says she has often turned to his books "because they represent a world where I absolutely know what to expect ... a world where good can triumph." She goes on, "Reliability, grace and moral certainty are, I think, the secret of all comfort reading. You need to know, before you turn a page, that the book you have chosen will distract you from whatever is worrying you - and that everything will turn out all right in the end."

    She puts children's novels such as Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes in the comfort read category, and also cites Terry Pratchett, Trollope and Thackeray - "all are endlessly engrossing and strangely wise." That in itself is a comforting thought.

Sands of time

    It is said that there is no armour against Fate, and that is proved countless times over in Roma Tearne's novel Brixton Beach. The fragility of life, the hair's breadth which separates the safe path from the one that leads to danger, that is the unforgiving framework on which hangs this story of civil war, ethnic divisions and the search for a better life.

   The opening scenes describing a doctor looking for someone among the casualties of the London bombings in July 2005 are powerful, but then we move back from that urgent beginning to a very different time and place - Ceylon in the early 1970s. Here we meet Alice Fonseka, the child of a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father, her family fractured by racial divisions but her closeness to her grandfather, Bee, making up for much of what she lacks at home.

   The story follows Alice as she leaves Ceylon bound for England and an escape from the violence and discrimination, but this is not a happy tale, and almost every character will suffer - some terribly - before we are done with it. As such, I found it 'too much', and that's a pity because as well as being a writer, Roma Tearne is an artist, and her painter's eye puts on the page colours, textures, the sea in all its moods, as she would put pigment on canvas. There's a quality of light and lightness to some of those scenes and to the writing of them which is lacking elsewhere in what can be a mood of oppressive, unrelieved gloom and dull resignation. The reader wants some spark of brightness, some hope, some redemptive twist of fate, but no ....

   That said, it's a strong, well-written book, and its factual background should not be made light of in a fictional setting, but I felt there was too much mute acceptance by characters whose creator is quick to cut them off from what sustains them and who puts too intense a focus on their suffering.

Take a look

    I'm not sure what this site is or how it 'works', but if you're a book lover the pictures will appeal!

Thanks yet again to Dark Puss who prowls far and wide to put his paw on good things for us here.

PS. There's an appropriate line in The Cunning Man (see below):               "But a Library - well, a Library goes on as far as thought can reach."

Dr. Hullah's casebook

    

     Reading Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man is like listening to the scintillating conversation of an eloquent, intelligent raconteur; it's stimulating, engrossing, wide-ranging and it never flags.

    As with Davies' Fifth Business, which I so enjoyed last year and whose hero, Dunstan Ramsay, makes a cameo appearance here, it's a first person narrative and in effect a life story. This time the narrator is Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a Toronto diagnostician of some renown but one whose methods raise an eyebrow or two among more conventional practitioners. Dr. Hullah understands that "... the close stitching of mind to body meant that each communicated its fortunes to the other", and while he has an unimpeachable grasp of medical science, that is coupled with a highly developed instinct and intuition for what really ails his patients and why. He's a very sympathetic character, cerebral, self-contained, companionable but independent of spirit, and around him are collected all manner of types who enrich the book and augment the plot, but whose roles as periferals are to reflect light back onto Hullah himself.

    He's the fascinating one, the cunning man of the title, and as the book allows him discourses on subjects from Freud to high Anglicanism, the illnesses and afflictions of characters in literature, philosophy, art and music, it is rich apparel in which he is clothed. That apart, the essence of the man - what he believes and his holistic approach to his calling - is described and recounted with great skill and was of especial interest to me.

   We often talk about books' opening lines (and this book has a good one), but its closing passage - which must be just as hard to do well - is perfect. No use my quoting it here as it would make no sense, so you must just go and read the book for yourself; it's not to be missed!  

From page to screen or screen to page

     I rarely talk about films as I'm not a great watcher of them, and as such I'm hoping those who are will comment here! What I want to look at is the two-way street that takes 'consumers', for want of a better word,  from page to screen or from screen to page.

     So, have you come to a book through a film adaptation (and let's stretch a point and include television, too), or do you have a much-loved book which you have then seen successfully dramatised? The Janeites will no doubt have both favourites and those they deplore among the screen versions of the Austen novels, but there will be many who were inspired to pick up the books for the first time by Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle, and their ilk. 

    The two media must make for somewhat incompatible bedfellows, the one requiring from the consumer more imaginative engagement than the other - which is why many filmed interpretations can feel 'wrong' - but the measure is so subjective that it's not hard to see why that should be. The other side of the coin is the writer's reaction to their work in screen form; any liberties taken with the original material must be painful for them to witness! Going the other way, there are bound to be books which disappoint those who have first encountered them in a form far removed from black type on white paper.

    Being specific rather than general for a moment, the film version of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road has just been released; have you read the book and/or seen the film? And talking about going from page to screen and back again, here's The Road issue of the film magazine Little White Lies, which rather brings us full circle! 

Good lines: mothers

     

    "There is a whole large class of society - called children - to whom mothers are not women, but inescapable appendages, sometimes dear, sometimes not, and never full human beings but supporting players in their own intense drama."

From The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies.