Cornflower Books

A little more on The Song of Achilles

 

    I didn't want to leave last night's wonderful news that The Song of Achilles has won The Orange Prize for Fiction without another word or two on the subject as I couldn't be more pleased and am as excited as if I'd won it myself!

    I feel very protective of Madeline's book having seen it as something special from the outset (I read it before publication last year), and so when I read reviews or newspaper reports which despite being admiring contain fatuous, wrong-headed remarks which show that the writer hasn't 'got' the book at all, I want to leap to its defence and say again that it is a most finely-wrought, beautifully crafted piece of writing, stunning in its pairing of style with subject matter. I ended my original post on it thus:

"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."

    I hope that this prize helps the book reach an even wider, ever more appreciative readership, and that its strength and unique identity will continue to be recognised and lauded.

    If you'd like to know a bit more about the book's gestation, what influenced it and how Madeline approached the writing, please click here. Madeline is currently in the UK and has a number of events coming up over the next few days; do try to see her if you can - she is delightful.

Later: click here to see Joanna Trollope, chair of the judges, awarding the prize and being interviewed alongside Madeline by Nick Higham of the BBC, and click here for a podcast interview.

The 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction

 

    The winner is ...

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller!

    I am absolutely thrilled by this decision; Madeline's book is quite outstanding (I've raved about it often here), and she is a lovely person. Wonderful news!

Good lines: in life as in art

 

    "In this country she had every now and then the sense that she had strolled into some picture that she had seen, that she did not know was real. She had taken a train across all of Europe to get here. In Paris and Venice she had stopped for a day or two and seen the sights. She had seen the Corots and Millets in the Louvre, the Renaissance paintings in the Accademia. Then there was the Danube and Bucharest, and another long train journey of a day and a night. She looked out of the window of the train and saw living scenes from the paintings, and when she arrived at the station Constantin Văleanu was there to meet her, and there had been a dusty drive past pale oxen pulling carts and men walking with scythes on their shoulders, and they came to the village and stopped, and a man with a face from a Duccio came to kiss their hands. There was the ploughman from Brueghel's Icarus. There was this boy, standing aside like Brueghel's shepherd. And now there were these men mowing, all dressed in white, the sweeps of their scythes moving in slow waves across the grass. [...]

    Constantin stopped before the mowing men. They did not look up but went on working. Their rhythm held, passed down the line: a stroke, a step forward, a geometric passage across the lawn; a pause every now and then to whet a blade. Such a slow, medieval process. He watched and shook his head and idly put out a hand to stroke a restless dog."

From Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding.

More good reading

    Here are a few more books from the arrivals pile for your delectation:

    Mesmerized by Alissa Walser, translated by Jamie Bulloch, is "a luminous, sensual tale of an episode in the lives of Franz Anton Mesmer and a blind musical prodigy". Set in Vienna and beginning in 1777 in a world of scientific experimentation and courtly intrigue, its focus is on Mesmer's controversial, alternative cures for body and mind and what happens when he is asked to help restore the sight of a blind musician favoured by the Empress. Fame is within his grasp, but at what cost?

    The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber is a novel written in blank verse, "an enthralling, innovative and exceptionally accomplished debut which combines the grip of a thriller with the emotional force of a sonnet". It concerns the death in a tavern brawl of playwright Christopher Marlowe on the 30th. of May, 1593, but here his demise is revealed as an elaborate ruse to avoid being convicted of heresy, and spirited off to lonely exile, he continues to write, "hiding behind the name of a colourless man from Stratford - one William Shakespeare".

    Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark is set in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, a time of economic uncertainty, riots and tabloid scandal-mongering. Its central character is Maribel Campbell Lowe, the wife of a radical MP, but she's very much a person in her own right, outspoken, opinionated, passionate and intent on making her mark in the world. However, Maribel has a secret, and when a notorious newspaper editor takes an interest in her .... well, we shall see what happens. (I'm about a quarter of the way through this book and enjoying it hugely.)

    John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved offers an intriguing analysis of the world of Jane Austen's novels to show that her brilliance can best be appreciated by looking at "the quirks and intricacies of her fiction". Do we ever see the lower classes? What do characters read? Why is it risky to go to the seaside, and how experimental a novelist is Jane Austen? The answers to these questions and many more are to be found in this new book by the Professor of English at UCL.

    An Absolute Deception by Lesley Lokko is "a spellbinding tale of secrets, love and friendship", a blockbuster of a novel set in the world of fashion. Anneliese Zander de St. Phalle is one of the world's most celebrated designers with a global empire to match, but she's also a reclusive perfectionist who rarely gives interviews and never talks about her past. Then at a party at her island hideaway, a woman whom Anneliese has done her best to forget appears and brings with her a story that demands to be told; the past is now part and parcel of the present.

    Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award last year and was a great hit with readers including book groups. At under a hundred pages, it's "an exquisite little fable about Mexico's narcoculture", a  darkly comic chronicle of "a delirious journey to grant a child's wish" when young Tochtli, son of a drug baron, wants more than anything else to have a pygmy hippo from Liberia for his private zoo!

Even a single half hour

    Suzy Joinson, whose A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar is very high on my tbr pile, has a lovely piece on Barbara Hepworth's work ethic on her blog today; it's very much worth a read (it's short) as Dame Barbara's approach is applicable to anyone involved in the creative life.

The picture is of her Three Forms, 1935.

And the winner is ...

 

    Many thanks to everyone who entered the draw to win a copy of Kate Summerscale's new book Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady. I enjoyed reading all about your diaries (many different varieties and functions there), and using a random number generator I've now pulled a winner from the hat, so the book will shortly be on its way to Ruth M. - I hope you will enjoy it greatly, Ruth!

A books and gardens meme for Chelsea week

    

    As this is the week of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show (and I am glued to the television coverage), how about one of those daft bookish memes but with a gardening theme: using the titles of books you've read this year, complete the sentences as best you can, though of course you can tweak them a bit for a better fit. If you have a go at this, please leave a link to your post in the comments here so that we can all enjoy your efforts.

    Early this morning as I was Waiting for Sunrise, I stepped out of The Music Room into the garden and bent down to touch The Good Earth.

    As dawn broke and I took in my surroundings I noticed several things: The Sick Rose was struggling due to Secondhand Daylight, Little Bones had been dug up in The Corner That Held Them under the Lolly Willowes, but with help from A Kind Man and knowledge gleaned from A Year in the Village of Eternity, I was able to bury them with Lady Audley's Secret.

    Later, The Messenger of Athens popped in to take a cutting or two; You do not need another self-help book, he told me, but he pointed out that The Fountain Overflows.

    Taking a well-earned rest from the weeding and chatting over the wall with The Lewis Man from next door, I mentioned The French Lieutenant's Woman and remarked on The Company She Keeps, but then Falling Sideways, we said The Beginner's Goodbye and I went back to do a little light pruning.

    My garden was once The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall, but tending it is a joy and part of The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life.

Not reading today

   

 

    Celebrating!

Good reading ahead

    There's some very good reading ahead by the look of these recent arrivals:

Toby's Room sees Pat Barker return to the First World War with this "provocative, dark novel about the complexities of human desire, wartime horror and the power of friendship" in which Toby and Elinor, brother and sister, friends and confidants, are the sharers of a secret carried from 1912 to the battlefields of France and London in 1917.

An Inventory of Heaven by Jane Feaver takes the evacuation of young Mavis Grant to Devon during the Second World War as its starting point, but as it goes on to trace Mavis' story to many years later when she can finally lay the ghosts of the past to rest, so it is "a meditation on the things we hold onto in life and how ... we can try to let them go".

A Humble Companion by Laurie Graham follows Nellie Welche, friend to Princess Sophia, one of George III's brood of children. "From the first rumblings of revolution in France to the exciting, modern times of gas light and steam trains, Nellie is the sharp-penned narrator of a changing world ... and her memoir lifts the lid on the House of Hanover's secrets and lies."

Abdication by Juliet Nicolson looks at the turbulent years of the 1930s with a love story featuring May Thomas, secretary and chauffeuse to Sir Philip Blunt, a member of the Baldwin government. "Secrets, undeclared loves, unspoken sympathies and covert complicities are everywhere, the most dangerous among them the new King's developing relationship with a married woman, and the increasing inevitability of another war."

Canada by Richard Ford is "a haunting and visionary novel of vast landscapes, complex identities and fragile humanity. It questions the fine line between the normal and the extraordinary, and the moments in our lives that take us into new worlds", and it begins in Montana in 1956 with Dell, a solitary child obsessed with bee-keeping and chess, running away when a bad mistake takes his parents from him.

A Trick I Learned from Dead Men by Kitty Aldridge is "sad, hilarious, tragic and deeply moving." Lee and his deaf brother Ned think all is lost when their father disappears and their mother dies suddenly, but then Lee gets a traineeship at the local funeral home and discovers "there is life after death. Here, in the company of a crooning ex-publican, a closet pole vaulter, a terminally ill hearse driver and the dead of the town, old wounds begin to heal and love arrives aboard a 'Fleurtations' delivery van."

The balloonist

    I had Lee Scoresby in mind when I was up in the balloon yesterday, but it was territory quite other than Svalbard we were flying over. You'll remember that in the beginning of Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows Rose and her family are living on a farm in the Pentland Hills just outside Edinburgh - that's the area you see above.

    But speaking of Lee Scoresby, in creating him Philip Pullman was inspired by The Balloonist by Macdonald Harris, now back in print; while I haven't read it, after my trip aloft I'm very inclined to re-read the utterly marvellous His Dark Materials.

Bargain of the day - The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

 

    Today's Kindle Daily Deal is William Nicholson's The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, on offer at the bargain price of £0.99. Here's my post on it from a few months ago:

  "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

    Those lines from Middlemarch form the epigraph to William Nicholson's brilliant novel which is set over six days in May, 2000 in a village in Sussex. On the face of it it's 'an everyday story of country folk', or to be more exact the generally well-heeled, upper-middle class members of a small rural community, those whose lives coincide at the school gates, on the commuter train to London or while picking up the Sunday papers at the village shop.

    Laura is happily married to Henry, a documentary maker, and divides her time between looking after their two children and occasional work as a specialist in antiquarian books, but a letter arrives out of the blue from Nick, the lover who let her down so badly twenty years earlier when they were students. Nick - a successful art dealer now living in the US - is back in England and wants to see Laura again, but he was everything to her and he walked away from their relationship, so what should she do?

    Then there's Liz, a journalist, whose daughter Alice is taught at the local prep school by Alan, a would-be playwright, and Liz's mother Mrs. Dickinson whose path crosses with that of a tenant farmer who is a subject of fascination to Laura and Henry's son Jack, the consequences of which involve the vicar who has lost his faith and who becomes the subject of a news item in which Liz played an instigating role ....

    So you see that that inter-connectedness forms the background mesh through which the various protagonists' stories are woven. It is there and in the very telling of their tales - those shifts, some minor but significant, some of major consequence, which can occur in any life on any day - that this book is so successful. There's an honesty to it, a lot of humour, a great deal of sharply accurate, sensitively perceptive dissection of the human condition and the workings of the minds of ordinary people - their thoughts, hopes and fears, their lusts and longings, their feelings of dislocation, of being somehow not on the path they were meant to tread; on another level, there's even a marvellous account of Laura's expedition to the better London shops to buy an outfit to wear at Glyndebourne, a scene with which many women will nod in sympathy! But it's that 'secret intensity', that 'roar ... on the other side of silence', which makes the book unusual and provides its major dimension, so beautifully balanced and intelligently played out, so marvellously entertaining and sparklingly done, and which holds the reader so effortlessly; I was genuinely sorry to reach the end.

    Happily, though, there is more where that came from in the shape of All the Hopeful Lovers which sees some of the characters return, eight years on, and then the third in the loose series, The Golden Hour. As you see, I am hooked.

Cornflower Book Group - The Good Earth

 

    Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth is a book which plots the course of a life in exemplary manner, its style formal, appropriate and utterly consistent throughout, the arc of the story well-proportioned, its themes universal. It's about the ebb and flow of one man's fortunes, of times of plenty and scarcity of all kinds - not just in the material sense - and of impermanence, of how all things, good and bad, will pass, but within the cycle of life, and in the passage from earth to earth which shows that for everything there is a season, there is so much more about Chinese culture and society, the position of women, religion, superstition and the propitiation of the gods, of the 'false summits' of achieving one's desires, and of how a legacy is in the hands of those to whom it is left - the giver has given over and given up the gift in the fullest sense.

    It needs no more introduction than that, I think, but I will say that it made a huge impression on me, its style, simplicity and profundity, its distinctive voice, its fable-like nature and the wisdom it offers; I'd call it a special book.

    What did you think of it?

The Chocolate Library

    Just the thing for those who like a little toothsome something to go with their reading, The Chocolate Library from Montezuma's. There are several collections here, though ours isn't shown, but we're nibbling the very good Spice It Up: Dark Chocolate with Dragon Ginger as we finish off The Good Earth ready for tomorrow, and how about Sea Dog: Dark Chocolate with Lime and Sea Salt for Master and Commander, or Jungle Fever: Milk Chocolate with Fruit and Nut for State of Wonder. A bar for every book!

A bit of a bookish blether

 

    Today has been one of those days of frustration where the posts I was trying to write weren't coming together properly at all, so I've abandoned them and thought we might just have a bit of a blether instead. This suggestion may be met with silence broken only by the sound of readers clicking over to other more interesting blogs, but I hope someone will feel like hanging around for a bit of chat, or raising some bookish (or other) subject we can all talk about. Meanwhile, I'll put the virtual kettle on and offer one or two casual questions to start us off:

  - Has studying a book for an exam ever made you sick of it that years later you still shudder to think of it and would never re-read it or try anything else by that author?

  - Has a novelist ever written of a place or person so convincingly that you've believed them to be real? (I ask that because still people come here searching for the paintings of the fictitious artist Jennet Mallow from Francesca Kay's An Equal Stillness - I'm not surprised, as they are so convincingly 'realised' in the novel).

  - If you had the collective ear of all the big publishers, what - as a reader or consumer of books - would you say to them? Would you request more of this and less of that? More attention paid to editing and higher production values? Support for the so-called midlist authors who are often abandoned in favour of debut novelists? If you had power and influence to shape things in publishing, what might you do?

  - Would you prefer tea or coffee, and who's for a slice of the best banana bread ever? (Recipe in Leon: Baking & Puddings, made by Harriet to help fuel her revision of The Go-Between for today's Higher English exam - see above).

Cornflower Book Group - June 2012

 

    "Welty remains for me the model of how all authors ought to be." So says Anne Tyler of Eudora Welty, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Optimist's Daughter will be the Cornflower Book Group's June book.

    First pubished in The New Yorker in 1969, then revised and extended to its current form in 1972, it is "a reflective, poignant novel of independence and love", "a gentle, tender work, bright with Welty's sharp humour and pioneer sense of place".

    "The people of Mount Salus, Mississippi always felt good about Judge McKelva. He was a quiet, solid, reassuring figure, just as a judge should be. Then, ten years after his first wife's death, he marries the frivolous young Wanda Fay. No one can understand his action, not least his beloved daughter, Laurel, who finds it hard to accept the new bride. It is only some years later, when circumstance brings her back to her childhood home, that Laurel stirs old memories and comes to understand the peculiarities of her upbringing, and the true relationship between her parents and herself."

    At under 200 pages this is a short novel which everyone should easily be able to acquire and read in time for a late-ish June discussion - let's say Saturday the 23rd. I've not read Eudora Welty before and I'm looking forward to this book, especially as what was meant to be just a glance at the opening passage had me reading on and keen to go further right now when I already have three other books on the go. This is said to be her finest novel, and I hope it will prove to be an excellent read for us; do please join in.

A letter from the author

 

    Last year the post A letter to the author gave rise to some lovely comments on your experiences of getting in touch with writers. I was reminded of the subject today when I read this utterly charming letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to a fan, one Miss Honeybourne. Do pop over there to Letters of Note and read it, or the transcript, and if you have about half an hour to spare you may care to watch this slightly curious 'interview' with Tolkien, first broadcast in 1967; he's engaging, and the views of the Oxford students on his work are a mixture of the quaint and quirky and the predictably perverse.

    But back to the present day, and as the use of social media increases and authors become ever more public people, have you been in touch with any (more) and have you had a response to rival the letter above?

Mrs. Robinson in Edinburgh

    "The true story of an intimate diary and a scandalous trial that rocked Victorian England," Kate Summerscale's Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady has just been published to rave reviews. "Captivating ... instantly gripping," it tells the story of Isabella Robinson's infatuation for the married Edward Lane, and how her diary - discovered by her husband and used in evidence in the divorce court - was her downfall.

    It was in Edinburgh that Mrs. Robinson met Lane, and as both lived just a stone's throw from my house, I did a bit of 'location shooting' this morning to give you a flavour of part of the book's setting. In the picture* top left and right is Moray Place, a very fine twelve-sided circus in the New Town, and the house with the blue door (middle right) is No. 11 where the Robinsons lived. Middle left and bottom is Royal Circus, a short distance away from Moray Place, and it was here on a November evening in 1850 that Mrs. Robinson met Lane, her feelings for him eventually causing her to be the object of the scandal of the day.

    In that house with the white door just beyond the lamp-post (middle left), Mrs. Robinson attended a soireé given by Lady Drysdale who was Lane's mother-in-law and a renowned hostess. Dickens was a guest at a party there, and Edinburgh luminaries such as James Young Simpson, obstetrician and pioneer anaesthetist, and Robert Chambers the publisher were to be found at the gatherings in that elegant crescent, but that evening it was Lane Mrs. Robinson wrote of in her diary: he was "handsome, lively and good-humoured ... fascinating." She would chastise herself for being susceptible to a man's charms, 'but a wish had taken hold of her, and she was to find it hard to shake'.

    Do visit the book's website to learn more about Mrs. Robinson's story and to see videos of Kate talking about various aspects of it; there is also a podcast. If you're already eager to get your hands on a copy, it so happens that I have one to give away, so pop your name in the hat by way of the comments, please, and tell us if you would whether you have ever kept a diary, and if so, what kind it was - a childhood one, for example, a simple engagements book, a gardening diary, a record of guests and menus perhaps, a repository for miscellaneous notes and observations, or one for your innermost secrets. If you've never kept one or would rather not say, that's fine, just leave a comment anyway. The draw is open to all, regardless of location, and the book promises to be an excellent read, so please do have a go.

*Click to enlarge.

Spirit of place

    How refreshing that there is a literary prize awarded to "a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place". That's the Ondaatje Prize, and you can see a list of previous winners here, while the shortlist for this year's award has just been announced and comprises:

Thin Paths: Journeys in and around an Italian Mountain Village by Julia Blackburn

Edgelands by Michael Simmonds Roberts and Paul Farley

The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

Open City by Teju Cole

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing

Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom by Tim Robinson

    I can't say I've read any of the above, but Mr. C. speaks very highly of To the River, Olivia Laing's account of her walk following the Ouse from source to sea one week at midsummer, and it's a book which certainly attracts me. As to other books evoking the spirit of place, I'd offer Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain and The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett for starters. What would you put in that category?

Have you read ... Gladys Mitchell?

    Vintage Books' Clara mentioned the writer Gladys Mitchell on Twitter this morning, and the name rang a faint bell so I looked her up. She was certainly prolific - look at the list of her books here - and variable (see this 'best to worst' catalogue headed by When Last I Died), while this article brands her "a mad combination" of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, and goes on:

'The Spectator described her as a "tiresome old trout" whose mannerisms were the most trying in detective fiction, but many adored her work. Her murder cases have ambiguous solutions, and an air of the supernatural is never entirely banished from them. Her plots are on the farthest side of credulity, but to worry about realism is to miss the fun of her storytelling. In Merlin's Furlong, a necromantic don runs a coven of witches. In The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop, the victim is minced into sausages and hung from hooks.'

It concludes, 'a flawed gem can still sparkle'.

    Vintage are currently running a competition to win a selection of cosy crime classics with some of Gladys Mitchell's books included, so you may like to throw your name in the hat for that, but meanwhile, have you read her, and if so, what would you recommend?

Out now in paperback: State of Wonder

 

    Another of my 'books of 2011', Ann Patchett's State of Wonder is now available in paperback (and it's been shortlisted for the Orange Prize), so here's a reminder of why I thought it was so special: 

    This is a novel of integrity and clarity with compassionate intelligence behind it; it's a story which holds the reader long after the final page has been turned, and it poses questions of ethics to exercise the intellect. I suppose it has everything I unconsciously look for in a book.

    It is set largely in the Amazonian rainforest where the maverick scientist Dr. Annick Swenson is conducting revolutionary research into female fertility. Funding for the drug she is developing comes from the Minnesota-based pharmaceutical company Vogel, but as Dr. Swenson refuses to report on progress and remains frustratingly out of contact (even her precise whereabouts are unknown), the CEO has sent one of his own team to find out what's going on. Anders Eckman was despatched from Eden Prairie to deepest Brazil, but little was heard from or about him until a curt note arrived to say that he had contracted a fever and died.

    Anders's wife needs to understand exactly what happened to him, and Vogel still want a definitive indication of how soon the drug can move to clinical trials and thence to market, so Anders's colleague and friend Dr. Marina Singh undertakes the mission to the Rio Negro and the Swenson camp to try to bring back answers to their questions. She was once a student of Dr. Swenson's, and it was her tutelage that was to directly determine the course of Marina's career; her visit to the jungle is thus no small undertaking, either professionally or personally.

    The plot is, I think, brilliantly and beautifully devised, and set into it are very clearly drawn characters, not least the imperious Dr. Swenson, a woman of "brio [...], utter assuredness [...] indefatigably right". The work being carried out in the jungle is fascinating and raises many questions and matters of conscience, both at universal and individual levels, and some very careful, creative thought has gone into this aspect of the book. In this short clip you'll hear Ann Patchett say that in writing State of Wonder she wanted to make the reader think about different issues, not just to be entertained "but sort of stirred up by this book", and that would be her best case scenario, she says. She has certainly achieved her aim.