Cornflower Books

The Man Booker 2012 shortlist

    From 145 entries to 12 longlisted and now 6 on the shortlist, here are the remaining contenders for this year's Man Booker Prize:

 

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twang Eng

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

Umbrella by Will Self

Men and the Fields

 

    Mr. Cornflower has been reading Adrian Bell's Men and the Fields, and he has kindly obliged me with a guest post on the book which was first published in 1939 and which, in its current Little Toller edition, has an introduction by Ronald Blythe and a foreword by the author's son, Martin Bell.

    Over to Mr. C.:

    If you go to many rural parts of Britain and find a good vantage point, it is easy to persuade yourself that what you are looking at hasn't changed for centuries. Squint a bit to blur out the pylons, look away from the grain silos and towards the village church, and you instinctively connect this stable landscape with a stability of lives and customs. This is a comfortable illusion, but it is an illusion.

 

    Adrian Bell's wonderfully written account of travels through England in the 1930s captures a particular moment when the fields were still busy with the labour of men, women, children and horses, and the villages still had their blacksmiths and their millers, but all were aware of how the world around them was being altered. The underlying causes - technology, changes in the law, new sources of supply in other parts of the world - have been picked over by historians in minute  detail, but what Bell is interested in, and what he makes his readers take an interest in, is how it felt to lead out a team of horses early in the morning or to shepherd a flock of sheep along an ancient track on the South Downs, feeling the sense of connectedness and satisfaction from an ancient and still vital activity, but knowing that you might be the last man to do this on this piece of land.

 

    The young people Bell spoke to would have been the older generation of farmworkers I first encountered when my family moved to a very rural part of East Devon in the 1970s; the roadmender who wore a sprig of honeysuckle in his cap and cooked on an old iron pot over the fire, the farmer who left a loaded shotgun outside his back door the better to deal promptly with vermin in the fields, the old man who'd been to Taunton once and didn't care for it. But the world they knew from before the war had gone; that is the world which Bell's words, with John Nash's illustrations, beautifully evokes.

A seed for a story?

    Tiny door at Pressmennan by Robin Wood.

Companion piece

 

    I like the idea of books which complement one another, which although different in scale and supposed readership yet have much in common in terms of their periods or settings, their themes and their respective quality.

    In this spirit it occurs to me that I know the perfect companion piece for John Saturnall's Feast (see Thursday's post), one which though published for children is a book to be enjoyed by readers of any age, and that is Sally Gardner's I, Coriander.

    I wrote about it five years ago, and here's what I said then:

 

    "I have learnt that there is great power in words, no matter how long or short they be."

     Proving the power of words is an utterly magical book which Harriet loved and told me I must read, and now that I've done so I'm very glad I took her recommendation. Sally Gardner's novel for older children is the story of young Coriander Hobie who grows up in a loving and prosperous family beside the Thames in seventeenth century London. Her mother is a herbalist and maker of remedies whose gifts, it seems, go beyond the purely scientific. But forces from outwith Coriander's settled world destroy her happiness until she is able to discover her own power and win it back. Then, torn between love and duty, she faces an impossible choice.

    The book is set in the time of the Commonwealth and the Restoration and displays a real feel for the period in its social historical detail and its treatment of the wider issues which prevailed, but at heart it's a fairy story about good and evil, beautifully and richly written and quite delightful. Sally Gardner could have come a cropper with her combination of fact and spell-binding fantasy, but there isn't a false step in the book, to my mind. She depicts puritanical zeal, an extreme religious sect, witch-hunts, a Frost Fair on the Thames, London life and much more besides, but all so beautifully and grippingly that it has to be one of my reading highlights of the year.

Friday reads

 
    How to follow a first class book? Read one that gives every indication of being as good.

    I've picked up Ann Patchett's Bel Canto which is, of course, the CBG's September title, and although I'm only forty pages in, I know I'm in safe hands and it's off to an excellent start.

    What are you reading this Friday? Whether it's good, bad or indifferent, do tell us.

John Saturnall's Feast

 

    It's rare, in my experience, that a book has a visceral pull over you in the way that a place or a person does; a hold which means that when you turn the final page and leave the world you've inhabited for so many hours and days, you feel that parting keenly.

    John Saturnall's Feast is such a book, and approaching the end this morning I found myself slowing down, trying to make its conclusion last a little longer, wishing that somehow I could linger within the story. Lawrence Norfolk's literary historical novel is a triumph of technique but it's also a very affecting work, a magical one, a banquet for the thinking reader, a sensuous delight. Lay hands on a copy and read it as soon as you may and you'll find something truly worth savouring - every image, every detail, inspired, its full and fascinating depths inviting exploration and providing pleasure of the most satisfying kind.

   

    It is set in seventeenth century England and is the story of one man, the eponymous John Saturnall, from his boyhood as the son of a woman hounded as a witch, to his life in the kitchens of a great house - Buckland Manor - and his relationship with the headstrong daughter of the house, Lady Lucretia Fremantle. It is a complex tale of its time, when the Civil War shattered the old order and in place of comfort and plenty came stricture and hardship, but it's in the rendering of life below stairs in the regimented and hierarchical world of the vast kitchens - scenes of almighty labour and the highest expertise - that the book's world truly lives.

 

    And yet there is so much more to it than the tale of a boy's rise from the squalor of the scullery to the lofty position of Master Cook. It encompasses myth and legend, allegory and arcane knowledge, love, war and entrancing storytelling, combining these ingredients to make no mere culinary conceit or kickshaw but a readers' feast of the highest order.

    I confess I am now at a loss as to what to read next - the book has spoiled me for anything less; if ever I meet Lawrence Norfolk I shall kiss his ring.

Treats in store

  

    A few recent additions to the 'must read' pile:
   
   

    I have never read any of Marian Keyes's books but of course I know her as an enormously popular writer with a huge, loyal following. Her latest - much-anticipated - novel The Mystery of Mercy Close comes out next week, and I'm greatly looking forward to reading it because in preparation, as it were, I've been looking at clips of Marian on YouTube and she is just the funniest person - so warm and friendly and mad in the nicest way, and with a sense of humour which makes me laugh out loud.
    The book revolves around Helen Walsh, the youngest sister in the Walsh family who feature in a number of Marian's earlier novels (Watermelon and Angels, for example), and this one finds her in a bad patch, her work as a private investigator having dried up, her flat being repossessed and herself in the grip of some old demons. It is billed as "hilarious, heart-breaking and life-affirming and as epic as it is entertaining"; you could hardly ask for more.

   

    England's Lane by Joseph Connolly begins in Winter 1959 and concerns three married couples living in England's Lane. "Each with an only child, and each attending to family, and their livelihoods - the ironmonger, the sweetshop and the butcher. Each of them living a lie, disguising sin, and coping in the only way they know how." Joseph Connolly has been described as "like a weird mix of Dickens and Martin Amis - quite impossible to put down", and that and the vague and tangential association with Eric Ravilious's High Street draws me to the book. Intriguing, don't you think?

    

    Lots of us have read and greatly enjoyed The Blackhouse and The Lewis Man, the first two books in Peter May's gripping Lewis Trilogy, and you'll be glad to hear that the third novel in the series will be out before long. In The Chessmen, our hero Fin Macleod is now head of security on a privately owned Lewis estate, investigating a spate of illegal game-hunting on the island. "This mission reunites him with Whistler Macaskill, a local poacher, Fin's teenage intimate and possessor of a long-buried secret. But when this reunion takes a violent, sinister turn and Fin puts together the fractured pieces of the past, he realises that revealing the truth could destroy the future."

   

    The Year After by Martin Davies sounds like a book in which to immerse yourself: "Home of the Stansbury family, Hannesford Court was always Tom's sanctuary. But in the hot summer of 1914, in the last weeks before the war, its famous tranquillity was shattered. Now, five years later, having finally returned from fighting in France, Tom finds himself alone in London at Christmas, and a last-minute invitation from Margot Stansbury proves irresistible. Soon he is caught up in a web of secrets and deceptions that he could never have imagined. The more he uncovers the truth ... the more he realises that he never really knew Hannesford and its people at all."

  

    Horse Stories is another in the lovely Everyman's Pocket Classics series (we had a quick look at their Dog Stories recently), and this covers "racehorses, ponies and cowboys' steeds" with tales from Kipling, Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Ted Hughes, Jane Smiley and John Steinbeck among others. As someone who was utterly horse-mad as a youngster and a devourer of pony books, I'm looking forward to reading this grown-ups' equivalent!

What kind of reader are you?

    Here's a fun post from The Atlantic Wire on reading 'styles'.

    Are you a 'hate reader', a 'chronological reader, a 'book buster', or even an 'anti-reader'? Or perhaps you come into one of the categories listed in the supplementary post?

    With the help of an article in yesterday's Times, I now know what my handbag says about me (the assessment was uncannily accurate, and reassuringly, it's all good), but as to my book collection and my reading habits, none of the bookish personae are a perfect fit, so let's have another one - the book blogger: a person who delights in spreading the word about good books.

Catching my eye

   I've been looking at the programme for The Blenheim Palace Literary Festival at Woodstock (12th. - 16th. September, for those lucky people within easy reach) and plucking from the many author events some interesting-sounding non-fiction books I hadn't come across before, all of which have gone on my wish list:

 

      The Pinecone by Jenny Uglow, "The Story of Forgotten Romantic Sarah Losh". Sarah Losh built Wreay Church in Cumbria, "one of the most unusual and inspiring churches of the Victorian era ... She let her imagination flow in the church, which includes carvings of ammonites, scarabs and poppies; an arrow piercing a wall; a tortoise gargoyle launching itself into the air; and her signature pinecones everywhere." The book is also the story of the Losh family - wealthy industrialists who were friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge - and of village life at the time.

    Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling by David Crystal. Apparently 75% of English spelling is regular, 25% is not, and here one of the world's experts on the English language "unearths the stories behind the rogue words that confound us and explains why these peculiarities entered the mainstream, in an epic journey taking in sixth century monks, French and Latin upstarts, the Industrial Revolution and the internet. By learning the history and the principles, Crystal shows how the spellings that break all the rules become easier to get right."

 

  

    What Are Gardens For?: Visiting, Experiencing and Thinking About Gardens by Rory Stuart "questions what we ask of gardens when we make them or visit them, and it wonders how we can get more from our gardening and garden visits. Stuart approaches the experience of being in a garden from many different angles, exploring how we can more fully understand the physical, psychological and spiritual pleasures gardens give us" and appreciate them in a cultural context with reference to music, literature and painting.

"The chimneys of Buckland Manor ..."

    "... tunnelled up from the depths of the kitchens, through the dark tonnage of stone and brick above. Sliding between walls and driving through floors, the hot channels funnelled heat, smoke and smells as they twisted past receiving rooms and jinked around chambers, wriggled past corridors and galleries, leaving enigmatic traces in the fabric of the house. Purposeless buttresses bulged from walls. Smoke percolated through cracks in the plaster. Certain corners of the house were inexplicably hot and chambers adjoining both the East and West Wings were infiltrated by the smells of roasting meat, or baking bread, or soup ...

    The whiffs and stinks came and went. Hotspots drifted, as if the flues of whirling fire and fumes writhed within the massive stonework, splitting and rejoining, rearing and rising until the thick brick fingers broke into the root stores and apple lofts under the eaves, driving through the attics where the maids huddled in the depths of winter, pressing themselves to the hot walls and waking to the morning tocsin of ladle on cauldron which resounded up from the kitchens below."

From John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk.

For your delectation

   -    My thanks to Lindsay for the tip-off - a 'must see', surely, for all those of us who read that wretched book, is The Culture Show, tonight on BBC Two at 9.30: Who was Ford Madox Ford?  The Good Soldier apart, I am greatly enjoying FMF's Parade's End, but I put that down largely to Benedict Cumberbatch's performance and Tom Stoppard's script. (I see there is an accompanying documentary, too.)

    -    Still on the subject of Modernism but bringing it up to date, Will Self is curating a series of events "exploring the legacy and provocation of Modernism on writing today" at London's Southbank Centre in late September, details here, the series beginning with the launch of Will's Man Booker longlisted Umbrella, when the writer will be in conversation with the critic John Mullan.

    -    On a lighter note, how does a creative writing retreat in Ibiza sound? Here is a week-long course in October led by novelist Carol Birch, author of the Booker shortlisted Jamrach's Menagerie; also on hand will be Canongate Books' editorial director Francis Bickmore and publicity director Angela Robertson to talk about the submission of work and publishing options, and psychotherapist Lucy Beresford to give advice on getting started, keeping motivated and overcoming writers' block.

    -    One last thing - though it has nothing to do with books, and I quote it because I think it's hilarious and we were talking about music yesterday - is a story which I read in today's paper: "Mrs. Gladys Mills, during an abortive session [recording Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand] with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil used her free hand to dip into a box of Quality Street. 'In the middle of one of Ravel's torrential arpeggios she started to feel around for an Orange Creme,' recalls an onlooker. 'The rustling drowned out the strings. A furious von Karajan tried to stop her, but to no avail. Nothing came between Glad and her Quality Street.' " Can that be true?