Cornflower Books

The gift of being interesting

 

    There is an excellent article in the New Yorker about Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring up the Bodies (due out here in just a few days' time). James Wood puts his finger on where the author's gifts lie, and any novelist would do well to take note of the points he makes, I think.

   "She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case."

    "... when a historical fact is central to a novelistic detail, Mantel uses it in a way so novelistically intelligent that the historical fact seems to have been secretly transposed into a fictional one ..."

    "[she] has made a third category of the reality, the plausibly hypothetical. It’s what Aristotle claimed was the difference between the historian and the poet: the former describes what happened, and the latter what might happen."

    "If you want to know what novelistic intelligence is, you might compare a page or two of Hilary Mantel’s work with worthy historical fiction by contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd or Susan Sontag. They are intelligent, but they are not novelistically intelligent. They copy the motions but rarely inhabit the movement of vitality. Mantel knows what to select, how to make her scenes vivid, how to kindle her characters. She seems almost incapable of abstraction or fraudulence; she instinctively grabs for the reachably real. Her two most recent novels concern famous historical events—Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, her execution at the King’s orders, the English split from the Roman Church and the authority of the Pope—but they make the stories fragile again, with everything at suspenseful risk."

Healing reading

    Following on from Friday's post, you'll see in her second comment there that Linda is looking for suggestions of suitable reading for her hospital stay and while convalescing at home.

    I know that laughter is good medicine, and P.G. Wodehouse is hard to beat for funny writing; similarly, Alexander McCall Smith's humour and humanity and his delightfully whimsical way of looking at the world can give a gentle boost to the spirits at any time. For the same reasons, I'd offer Gwen Raverat's memoir Period Piece - A Cambridge Childhood and Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure (BBC Radio Collection) - who better than the lady herself to read that one?

    Understandably, Linda doesn't want any books with grim subject-matter, so something uplifting and restorative is what we're after here. What would you prescribe?

First impressions - John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk

 

he village of Buckland. A boy and his mother run for their lives. Behind them a mob chants of witchcraft. Taking refuge among the trees of Buccla’s Wood, the mother opens her book and tells her son of an ancient Feast kept in secret down the generations. But as exquisite dishes rise from the page, the ground beneath them freezes. That winter, the boy’s mother dies.

     Taken to Buckland Manor, John Sandall is put to work in the house’s vast subterranean kitchens where his talent raises him from the scullery to the great house above. A complex dish served to King Charles brings him before Lady Lucretia Fremantle, the headstrong daughter of the house. He must tempt her from her fast. But both encounters will imperil him. As the Civil War begins and the New Order’s fanatical soldiers march, John and Lucretia are thrown together into a passionate struggle for survival. To keep all he holds most dear, John must realise his mother’s vision. He must serve the Saturnall Feast.

    

    An astounding work of historical fiction, John Saturnall's Feast  charts the course of one man's life from steaming kitchens to illicit bedchambers, through battlefields and ancient magical woods. Expertly weaving fact with myth, Lawrence Norfolk creates a rich, complex and mesmerising story of seventeenth-century life, love and war.

    "Imagine Patrick Suskind's Perfume, the turbulent England of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and magnificent, ancient dished created by Heston Blumenthal."

    I've known about this book - the first from Lawrence Norfolk in some twelve years - for a couple of months and have been greatly looking forward to reading it because of that very rich and potent subject matter outlined above. 

 

    My proof arrived wrapped in black tissue paper and most imaginatively accompanied by a bundle of cinnamon sticks, another one forming the package's seal (see top picture), a reference to the culinary elements of the novel as each part of the book is prefaced by a recipe from The Book of John Saturnall (1681).

    If you go the book's website, Let the Feast begin, you can find out about pre-publication events and more, but as to the text itself, after only a page or two I am enthralled; here's a short extract about the young John and his gift:

    "He looked up at the dark line of trees and breathed in slowly, smelling wild garlic, mulched leaves, a fox den somewhere and a sweeter scent. Fruit blossom, he thought. Then that small mystery was eclipsed by a larger one. A stranger scent hid among the blossom, sweet and resinous at once. Lilies, John thought, drawing the scent deeper. Lilies mixed with pitch.

    'What're you sniffing at now?' his mother asked with a smile.

    He smiled back. He had a demon in his throat, she said. A demon who knew every smell in Creation. Breathing in the sharp saps and sweet blossoms, he felt them anchor themselves within him, their invisible trails fanning out around him. But here was a smell his demon had never met before. He looked up at the trees of Buccla's Wood ...."

Edited to add: I have now read this quite marvellous book; my post on it is here.

Moral support

   

    Many of us are big fans of Linda Gillard's novels, and usually when I start a post with those words it's to let everyone know that there is a new one just out, but today they preface a notice of a different kind because Linda has had bad news concerning her health and she could do with the support of all of us who so enjoy her books. If you haven't already seen it you can go onto Linda's Facebook page and read her major update from Wednesday.

    Our very best wishes to you, Linda.

A few things ...

    - To covet: for sale - houses with literary connections.

    - To be admired: the Penguin English Library (also to be found here).

    - To ban: words! Which would you outlaw?

    - To be judged: the shortlist for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

    - To watch: in case you missed it before, and specially for Freda, the short video Birth of a Book.

About Cornflower Books

    Judging by some of the emails I get it seems that quite a few people visiting this site for the first time come away with the mistaken impression that its sole function is as the home of a book group. I thought I'd better set the record straight.

    Cornflower Books is all about books and the wider world of books: writing, publishing, literary festivals and prizes, bookshops, libraries, our reading habits, and so on. It reflects my interests as a lifelong passionate reader whose aim is to spread the word about good writing and books worth reading. Happily, it has a large and loyal following of equally keen readers from many countries, and it functions as a source of recommendations, bookish news and comment, a place where good books of many types and vintages may be found and discussed. Yes, it is home to a book group, too, but that accounts for no more than two or three posts in a month; the rest of the time it's mostly concerned with what I happen to be reading.

    Although I went to university to study English (with the vague idea that I might eventually work in publishing), my first year course took all the joy out of the reading of literature and so I ditched it in favour of a degree in Law, a subject I took to wholeheartedly. But the time devoted to legal training and fully-fledged practice has turned out to be well-spent in terms of what I do today; that honing of the analytical faculties and seeing through to the heart of the matter means that when I write about books now - feeling as though I've come full circle in a way - it's always with the aim of being as succinct as possible and getting, if I can, to the essence of the thing. Communication is key, with regular posts saying what I rate and why so that others may discover and enjoy those books for themselves, but I claim no knowledge or experience other than that which my years of writing and talking about books here, in print and on the air have given me.

    I hope that all who stop by find this a warm and friendly place, and I do love to hear from readers whether it's by way of a comment or an email - the link to my address is over there on the right. If you're a publisher, publicist or writer wanting to send me a book, do by all means get in touch; a quick glance at a few posts or at the books I've read and written about (see the sidebars or look here for a pretty comprehensive list) should give you a fair idea of typical Cornflower material (there's the original site, too). You may have to wait a while for a reply as I am often inundated, but I do my best to respond, and I read as much of what I'm sent as I can, though these days that's only a small proportion of what comes in.

    In whatever capacity you have come to this site, I hope you'll feel welcome and find something here to interest and engage you.

Would you like a book?

 

    Thanks to a kind publisher I am giving away a beautiful, very Cornflower-y book over on the other site, but on this site off my own bat and as it's World Book Night I'd like to offer a copy of the Orange Prize shortlisted The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller to some lucky winner. I know I've gone on about that novel since I read it last year, but I thought it was breathtaking and I really do want to shout about it.

    To enter (and the draw is open to all, regardless of location), please leave a comment on this post naming a novel you've particularly enjoyed over the last year or so, and I'll pull a name out of the hat soon.

Interviews with remarkable authors

    Here in the BBC archive is a wonderful resource, a collection of interviews with writers. Following on from our conversation about The French Lieutenant's Woman, this evening I've been watching John Fowles talking to Melvyn Bragg about that book among others, about literary truths and the artificial nature of fiction, the relationship between reader and writer and the richness this brings to the experience of reading (and writing) fiction.

    If you watch the film I'd be interested to hear your impressions of Fowles - we talked a lot in yesterday's post and comments about his presence in his own novel, and not everyone took kindly to his intrusion, but in person he comes across very differently, I think.

Cornflower Book Group - The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

    This is the Cornflower Book Group's 50th. book, so there's extra helpings of cake to anyone who has read the lot!

    March 1867. Charles Smithson and his fiancée Ernestina Freeman come upon Sarah Woodruff, 'Tragedy', staring out to sea at the end of the Cobb in the Dorset town of Lyme. Companion to the bombazined Mrs. Poulteney (whose fondness for laudanum has Fowles refer to her as "an inhabitant of the Victorian valley of the dolls"), the story goes that this scarlet woman of the town has been jilted by a French lieutenant and disgraced. Is she indeed addicted to melancholia, as Dr. Grogan suspects, so that her sadness becomes her happiness? "I have fallen in love with being a victim of fate," she says, and as a series of enounters allows feelings to develop between her and Charles, is her underlying motive pure or one of "vindictive destruction"?

    That is more or less the plot of The French Lieutenant's Woman though it is played out over several hundred detailed, discursive pages - an entire chapter is a digression on the novel and the novelist, for instance - but its style is distinctive, full of authorial comment and even intrusion (Fowles himself, as a fellow passenger, observes Charles on a train, and elsewhere with the writer's usual omnipresence and with frequent references to the modern day, puts himself firmly in or about the story). I enjoyed this dimension and liked, for example, the conceit that Fowles now owns Sarah's Toby jug; there's an aspect of arrogance to it, but it gives scope as well.

    Back to the plot itself, and Charles becomes obsessed with Sarah, or rather with the enigma she presents; something in her calls to "some hidden self he hardly knew existed". In true Darwinian style, he has thus far adopted "cryptic coloration, survival by learning to blend with one's surroundings", and while Ernestina virtually encouraged this camouflage, "the mask, the safe distance," Sarah "behind her façade of humility forbade it." This shadow-play, these emotional transactions based on feints and formality, are an intriguing part of the dissection of and commentary on all aspects of the Victorian age which Fowles goes in for here.

    As to the book's structure - and related to that last point - the author plays with his characters, ending the story after a fashion part way through, but then going on for a further 130 pages, deciding Charles's fate on the toss of a coin, and still teasing his readers, giving alternative versions. Again, I didn't mind this, feeling that it was consistent with Fowles's involvement, but perhaps you'd have preferred something less contrary?

    For anyone wanting to read on from this book, Fowles gives plenty of references to take you further, from fossil hunter Mary Anning (see Tracey Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, for example) to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the works of Thomas Hardy, Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and on to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his circle, so it's a rich book in more ways then one.

    It was a re-read for me, many years on from the first time, but I lapped it up, finding it thoroughly engrossing and fascinating. How about you?

The Sick Rose

 

    I spoke briefly the other day about Erin Kelly's novel The Sick Rose, and called it a psychological thriller in the Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine mould. I wonder, though, whether it might be fairer to say that Erin is not emulating anyone with this dark and suspenseful book but blazing a trail of her own.

    "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts" - that line from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep forms the epigraph to a story which features two characters for whom dead men, and the consequences of their deaths, loom large and threaten whatever uneasy peace they have found. Louisa is a gardener, the brains behind ambitious plans to restore a lost Tudor garden in Warwickshire. Paul comes to the site as one of the labouring team. He is running from a dangerous man who is out for revenge, she is hiding from herself, but the past is catching up with both of them.

    Tracing Louisa's life as a teenager in an affluent home in central London in the late 1980s and Paul's upbringing on a grim Essex estate much later, each strand of the story connects its protagonist to the winter of 2009/10 when the two first meet at Kelstice Lodge and begin to work together to bring its garden back to life. Erin Kelly has a real feel for time and place, and against these distinct physical and social settings she shows the bleak and needy sides of her very different characters. Where passion drives one to extreme behaviour, for the other it's loyalty and a friendship based on mutual protection, and for both she makes a compelling case for the force that drives them - why they are as they are, why they act as they do.

    Every scene twists and shapes the plot a little further, every incident and episode carefully weighted to establish motive, intention and opportunity, to subtly build pressure and pace until the highly dramatic conclusion is reached. It's a book that's very hard to put down, with each precisely timed turn of the narrative screw increasing the tension to a very assured climax. As a reader who is always drawn to books in which gardens feature, I'd have liked more on Kelstice, its history, its planned future and the work of the job, but that's a purely personal response. Gardening apart, the book delves deep into dark hearts and troubled minds and does so in deft and highly readable fashion.

A 1950s jacket

    I've just received a finished copy of James Runcie's lovely novel Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, and having previously read it in proof I'm seeing the jacket proper for the first time. I'm very taken with its design - it's by Greg Heinimann - and thought it deserved a post of its own. As you can see (and click on the picture to enlarge it) it's 1950s in feel, and suits the story's setting, subject matter and gentle romanticism perfectly.

    The book will be published early next month, and there's a post on it here.

Edited to add: you can read an extract here.

This week's reading

 

    I couldn't get a ticket to see Karin Altenberg at last summer's Edinburgh Book Festival and was vexed because I was keen to know more about her novel Island of Wings, set in remote St. Kilda in the 1830s (click there to hear the waves on the shore!), but months on I'm reading the book now. Longlisted for the Orange Prize, it reminds me to some extent of Sarah Moss's terrific Night Waking though Karin's book has no modern day strand and is altogether a more softly-voiced story. Half way through I'm loving it.

 

    Another name from the "I've never read" list is that of Sylvia Townsend Warner, but as I'm about to read two of her books I can cross her off forthwith.

    Lolly Willowes was first published in 1926 but is "as fresh and powerful today as it was [then]". It is "magical and subversive, anticipating the fiction of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson," apparently, and I'm looking forward to discovering its author through this, her first novel, as well as

The Corner That Held Them (1948), the author's own favourite and one of her most popular. Set in a Benedictine community in the fourteenth century, this book is "dense with physical detail and imagined lives".

 

 

    I'm a fan of D.J. Taylor's books and have had the pleasure of talking to him and getting to know a bit more about the art and craft behind them. Having read and enjoyed At the Chime of a City Clock, set in the seedier parts of 1930s London, I'm glad to have the sequel, Secondhand Daylight, which sees us back with struggling writer James Ross. With a job front-of-house in a Soho nightclub, it's not long before an unfortunate incident puts James in a police cell, but coerced into undercover work by the mysterious Inspector Haversham he then finds himself infiltrating the Chelsea HQ of Mosley's Blackshirts...

 

    Last of this bunch which should take me through the next fortnight is When Hoopoes Go to Heaven by Gaile Parkin, and by the sound of it this should appeal to all of us who are fans of Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe books. It features ten-year-old Benedict who lives in Swaziland and who "likes to find ways to make things better" - a worthy occupation indeed, and "in Benedict's wonder-filled world, even the ugliest situation has a certain magic". A warm and funny book which will "restore your faith in humanity". That appeals.

Orange segments

 

The shortlisted books for the Orange Prize for Fiction are:

 

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright

Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

    Any thoughts? I adored both The Song of Achilles (see yesterday's post) and State of Wonder (post on it here) - I haven't read any of the others yet - but I'd be delighted to see either of those two take the prize on 30th. May as they'd be very worthy winners.

Out now in paperback: The Song of Achilles

    

 

    One of the books which impressed me most last year - and I hasten to add that it's one which I enjoyed to the utmost, too - was Madeline Miller's debut novel The Song of Achilles. It's been longlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction, and I've got my fingers tightly crossed that it will be on tomorrow's shortlist because it is a very fine piece indeed. As the paperback edition has just been released, here's my post on it which explains, I hope, what makes this book so special:

    If every first novel I read was as accomplished as this one is, it would say much for the future of publishing. The Song of Achilles is by Madeline Miller, a classicist who is also trained in drama, particularly in the adaptation of classical tales for a modern audience, and her background shows in her writing. Here is someone with a complete grasp of her material, but crucially that's teamed with the ability to present it in such a way that the reader is held in awe and admiration. It's a book of clean lines, spaciousness, an airy quality which forms a compelling contrast to the strong characters and dramatic events it portrays. This deft pairing of subject and craftsmanship is enormously impressive, and makes the book stand out as something original and fresh and beautiful (you won't be surprised to hear it's on my 'best of the year' list).

    It's the story of Patroclus, exiled to Phthia and the court of King Peleus and his son Achilles. This awkward boy is befriended by Achilles and they become steadfast, constant companions, sent to the mountain home of the centaur Chiron to be tutored in the arts of war and medicine. When Helen of Sparta is abducted by Paris, son of Priam of Troy, the warriors of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy, and the two young men leave their peaceful life to take up arms. While Achilles has been trained for the battlefield, it's as a healer that Patroclus comes into his own, the long years of war set to test them both and reveal their fates.

    A tender love story, a book not without humour, a moving re-telling of an archetypal tale, there is a scene in which Achilles' mother, the cruel, possessive sea goddess Thetis, appears to Patroclus in the early morning on the mountain Pelion: "The strangeness began as a prickling of my skin. First the quail went silent, then the dove. The leaves stilled, and the breeze died, and no animals moved in the brush. There was a quality to the silence like a held breath. Like the rabbit beneath the hawk's shadow ..."; the book itself has that feeling of stillness, imminence, foreboding. If this were a painting it would be an expanse of calm white grounding areas of intense, vivid colour, its simplicity drawing the eye, the skill of its making a magnetic charge; as a book, it's one that cannot be put down, its imaginative power lingering long.

Anne Tyler

 

    Fans of Anne Tyler's books will no doubt enjoy this rare interview with her, given on her recent visit to the UK; many thanks to Scrapiana without whose link I might have missed the piece.

    There's a post on The Beginner's Goodbye, Anne Tyler's new book, here.

Friday reads

 

    What's everyone reading as the weekend is in sight?

    I have just started The Sick Rose by Erin Kelly, a Ruth Rendell-type psychological suspense novel set around the restoration of the garden of a crumbling Elizabethan mansion where Louisa and Paul, whose backgrounds are very different, meet and find they are both escaping the past.

    One of the things which drew me to this was that garden setting, and the fact that in the reading guide at the back of the book, Erin Kelly lists among the books that helped inspire her The Lost Gardens Of Heligan by Tim Smit and The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden by Katherine Swift, both of which I've read and enjoyed enormously (there are posts on the latter here and here).

    I'm only twenty or so pages in so can't say much about it yet, but it has had very good reviews. Has anyone read it or Erin's first book, The Poison Tree? 

    Please tell us your Friday reads, good, bad or indifferent.

The Messenger of Athens

 

    Anne Zouroudi's The Messenger of Athens is the first of her series of books featuring the Greek detective, Hermes Diaktoros, and it's clear from the off that Hermes is no ordinary investigator.

    For a fat man - that's how he's referred to throughout - he's surprisingly fleet of foot, though it's tennis shoes he favours rather than wingèd sandals, and although he's been sent from Athens to look into the death of a young woman on the island of Thiminos, he's not a policeman but works, as he puts it, "for a higher authority". If I tell you also that he is something of an avenging angel, a man who sees deep into the hearts of others, who has a knack for knowing what ails a person and what might cure their ills, then you'll perhaps appreciate that this 'messenger', this 'intermediary' is not as other men; that said, it's an all too real world in which he finds himself when he steps off the ferry with his capacious holdall on a chilly Spring day.

    Hermes is such an original character and one whose particular gifts will afford his creator great possibilities, but in case you think this book is some kind of myth or fable, let me correct that impression. It's a gritty tale of passion and lust, of jealousy, vengeance and corruption, and of the harsh treatment of women; it's like the picture postcard image of a Greek island but taken in the off-season, with the dilapidation and decay - both physical and moral - which would normally be kept strictly 'out of shot', very much in the frame. So the book works both as morality tale and detective story and makes compelling reading.

    As to the plot, Irini Asimakopoulos has been found dead on an island hillside, and while the local police are content to sign off her death as suicide, Hermes takes a different view. In his questioning of the locals, of the victim's husband and others who were close to her - and his methods here are certainly unorthodox - he builds a picture of betrayal and brutality in a society where love and marriage seem rarely to go together. Behind the white-washed façades of the simple village houses, secrets are kept, shame and dishonour are hidden, and piety cohabits with cruelty. But Hermes is in Thiminos to see justice done and this deus ex machina is nothing if not effective, so that by the time he leaves the island many wrongs have been righted in stylish fashion, and the reader will close the book with a sigh of satisfaction.

The Casual Vacancy

    News of J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults; The Casual Vacancy will be out in September, and the author's new website is here.

Books in brief: Little Bones

 

    Janette Jenkins's Little Bones begins in London's Covent Garden in 1899, and features Jane Stretch, the daughter of a feckless family who take lodgings with a doctor and his wife. Pressed by creditors and the ne'er-do-wells with whom they associate, Jane's parents soon flit leaving their daughters to fend for themselves, and then when the pretty but dim Agnes follows suit, Jane, bright but crippled, is left on her own and the shadow of the workhouse looms large.

    Things take a brighter turn when Dr. Swift offers Jane work as his assistant, but it turns out he's a medical man with a particularly narrow specialism, and when the police take an interest in his cases, Jane is implicated too.

    I found this an interesting, unusual book with a rhythm of its own: on the face of it it's an atmospheric picture of the tawdry side of Victorian London, but it's also a story which implicitly asks a lot about duty and obedience, responsibility, culpability and matters of conscience. Stylistically there's a lightness and an originality to it, apparent in certain phrasing, in odd but distinctive moments, in the sum of its parts in fact, so that the overall effect seemed to me rather like that of a balloon tethered by a long string: the narrative well-grounded, the moral questions it poses floating aloft, tantalisingly just out of reach.

Email chaos

    Just a quick note to alert anyone who may have been trying to contact me that my email has gone haywire. I first noticed a problem with 'missing' messages a few weeks ago, that is a group of incoming ones vanished before I could read them, and then I heard that not all outgoing ones were reaching their destinations. Coupled with that I'm having frequent log-in problems, messages I've deleted or otherwise filed are being returned to the inbox, and much of the time the system is refusing to do what I ask it. Any attempts to solve these problems are frustratingly ineffective or short-lived.

    Apologies to anyone who is waiting to hear from me as I try to restore order to chaos.