I've given a bit of an introduction to Molly Peacock's The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
over on Cornflower today, but I wanted to say a little more about it here because it's a wonderful story. Described as "an inspirational tour de force that proves it's never too late to be who you might have been", it's not just about Mary Delany's life and work but also about Molly Peacock's discovery of her subject and "a blueprint for late-life flexibility, creativity and change". Here's Victoria Glendinning on it: "Peacock has structured the whole book as metaphor, a collage about collage, and a meditation on sexuality, friendship and creativity. It both analyses and exemplifies that obsessional, mesmerised state induced in artists and crafts people through concentration and close observation. The volume itself is a craft object, sumptuously presented and designed".
"Sumptuous and lively", I can't wait to read it.
Next, a new novel by Marika Cobbold, whose Guppies for Tea
and A Rival Creation
I enjoyed some time ago. Drowning Rose
, which will be released shortly, features Eliza Cummings, a ceramics restorer at the V&A, who receives a phone call which takes her back to a night twenty-five years earlier when Rose died. Why does Rose's father - Eliza's godfather - want her to visit him, and why is he being overly kind to her when both know he blames her for what happened to his daughter?
The story moves from London to the Swedish countryside and back in time to Eliza's schooldays, and it shows that "generosity, humour and friendship can smooth over and restore even the most broken lives, and that some secrets just can't be kept hidden".
Lastly today, to mark the centenary of Mervyn Peake's birth,The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy
, and here is the beginning of China Miéville's introduction: " 'Gormenghast'. With its first word the work declares itself. Establishes its setting and has us abruptly there, in the castle and the stone. There is no slow entry, no rabbit-hole down which to fall, no backless wardrobe, no door in the wall. To open the first book is not to enter but to be already in Peake's astonishing creation".
It's been quite some years since I was last in among Gormenghast's "roof-scapes, ivy-shaggy walls, its muddy environs and hellish kitchens", but I look forward to returning to the world of these marvellous books.
