Cornflower Books

Penelope Lively on the novel as 'satisfactory whole'

 

    "In a novel, the narrative moves from start to finish, from beginning to end. But within that framework time can be juggled, treated with careless disregard - the story can progress, can dip backwards, fold up, expand. What matters is the satisfactory whole defined by Frank Kermode: 'All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning.' For a novel to work, you want to come away from reading it with the sense that everything has gathered towards a convincing conclusion - not one that necessarily ties up every loose end, but one that feels an integral part of what has gone before. It must make sense of the space between the beginning and the end. You start reading a novel with no idea where this thing is going to go; you should finish it feeling that it could have gone no other way.

    The novelist would like the writing process to be thus; it is not - or at least not for me. I do need to have a good idea where the thing is going - I won't have started at all until a notebook is full of ideas and instructions to myself. And I will have achieved the finishing line only after pursuing various options, wondering if this would work better than that. The reader should have an easy ride at the expense of the writer's accumulated hours of inspiration and rejection and certainty and doubt."

   From Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively.

   See also Robertson Davies on this subject.

Past Perfect: Penelope Fitzgerald

   

    Ahead of publication of Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, do listen if you can to Radio 4's Past Perfect in which literary historian Michael Alexander assesses the much-admired novelist whose works are perhaps not as widely read as they should be. He highlights the modesty and economy of her style, and alongside her biographer, her daughter, and Julian Barnes, considers what makes Penelope Fitzgerald's books so distinctive and distinguished.

Cornflower Book Group - The Shooting Party

 

    Exactly one hundred years on from the events of the novel, we look back to the period in which Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party is set - the Edwardian era immediately before the First World War - with an even greater sense of perspective than that summed up so eloquently in the book's opening passage.

 

    In the light of what we know was to come, the book is a sharply delineated commentary on its time. Its focus is narrow - a small group of guests gathered at Sir Randolph Nettleby's Oxfordshire estate for the most important shooting party of the season, on the last weekend in October 1913 - and yet through that prism it shows much. Historic and impending social and societal change, attitudes, beliefs and mores, all are there in the background, almost as allegorical tapestries adorning a wall, in front of which is played out the central drama, that of a sporting rivalry which leads to a death.

    Precise, evocative, economical and controlled, it places vivid pen-portraits of its major characters within the narrative and then balances them in the final few pages with equally brief but nonetheless full and fitting accounts of what was to become of them in the years ahead. There's more to that than just a simple tying up of loose ends, for an important subtext is that of legacy - in the widest sense, what will be left and to whom. Sir Randolph is preoccupied with the decline of the rural way of life and of estates such as his own on which so many people rely for their livelihood; Lionel Stephens, barrister and romantic idealist, looks to war or some other "great trial" as a cleansing force, one that would rid society of its baser habits and make for a better world. Bob Lilburn and Gilbert Hartlip, men of lesser conscience, are more concerned with form and self and reputation; and then there's Tom Harker, poacher turned if not gamekeeper then beater, a fulcrum of sorts for the plot, Cornelius Cardew, the outsider, and his proselytising, Dan Glass and his scholarly ambitions, even young Osbert and his concern for his duck; all, in their way, are spokes in a wheel, even though some question their purpose.

    There were some lovely lines such as the Downton-esque, "He is the eldest son, and there is coal beneath the Park," and "... he was a good gardener and good gardeners were known to be on the despotic side", also the references to Olivia's reading, including "frivolous novels" such as the works of E.F. Benson; but one of the most telling, I think, was again to do with Olivia when she and Cicely and Aline are following the guns and she feels an unexpected and unexplained sense of excitement and in noticing every detail of her companions and of their progress "to the front line" wonders, "are we really all so beautiful and brave, or do we just think we are?".

    How did you find the book - too slow and studied, or a perfect portrait of a time and place?

    Did you feel its prefiguring of the slaughter to come was too obvious, or was that point well-stated?

    What of the mix of characters - were any too stereotypical, did you think?

    Have you read anything else by Isabel Colegate, and on the basis of The Shooting Party, would you seek out her other novels now?

    Any more impressions, thoughts, likes and dislikes?

 

The 'Books and Cakes' post for The Shooting Party is here.

Age-old stories

    "A faun carrying an umbrella; a hobbit who lives in a hole; a mysterious name - Lyra; an ill-treated schoolboy with a scar and a secret. Children's fantasies may be said in some sense to begin with resonant images - certainly they often do so in the authors' myths of origins. However, they also begin in an author's reading practices, in his or her own experiences, in the influences which, acknowledged or not, shape and articulate their own vision and help define what it is and, sometimes more importantly, what it is not."

    That's the opening of the chapter 'The magical Middle Ages in children's fantasy literature' by David Clark, from Magical Tales: Myth, Legend and Enchantment in Children's Books, a book which I am finding quite fascinating and which is leading me off down all sorts of highways and byeways, remembering books and stories I read as a child, discovering others I haven't read yet and very much want to; it's a many-branched signpost, and it provides a clear illustration - if one were needed - of the cross-pollination of ideas, of how an 'old story' can by re-interpretation become something new, and of how the chain of influence and inspiration stretches from folklore, myth and legend, through the earliest written literature to that of the present day.

Books in brief: Black Sheep

    'The novella is harder to write [than a novel] because there's no hiding place."

    That's Susan Hill talking about the form which "demands discipline", and you can hear what else she had to say about it on Monday's edition of Front Row.

    She talks about every idea "which comes whole into [the writer's] head" having its own shape and size, and she is adept at handling her material, whether it's a long or a short form that it dictates; in her latest book, Black Sheep, she shows that skill once again, producing a masterpiece of economy and control.

    In only 130 or so pages, she presents a community with its social hierarchy, its customs, mores, and history, and a family - a focus for external events and internal struggles. There isn't a superfluous word, an unnecessary scene, and as in the superb A Kind Man (brief post on it here), Susan Hill tells an affecting story made all the sharper and more memorable by that very spareness.

Book of the day - This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

    "This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a wide-ranging and deeply personal combination of essay and memoir. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone National Park, her joyous discovery of opera, scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, the gradual loss of her beloved grandmother, starting her own bookshop in Nashville, her love for her very special dog and, of course, her eventual happy marriage.

    The book overflows with close observation and emotional wisdom and [its stories] are told with wit, honesty and irresistible warmth."

    I said on Friday that I was reading too many books just now, but when this one arrived next morning I almost plunged in right away, so keen am I to read it, but in the end I exercised some restraint. I'm a fan of Ann Patchett's, of her fiction (see these posts on State of Wonder and Bel Canto), of her book posts on her own bookshop blog, and of the essays of hers I've read here and there, including The Getaway Car, her "practical memoir about writing and life", and The Bookshop Strikes Back, both of which have been included in this collection. She's so eloquent, warm, witty, far-sighted, I find her a joy to read, and I'm sure this book will be just that.

Bargains

     

    One of today's Kindle Daily Deals is James Runcie's Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death, the first in his Grantchester Mysteries series. "I am completely smitten," I said when I read the book last year - you can find the full post here, something of the background to the novel here, and a post on the second in the series here.

    William Nicholson is a writer I admire greatly, and his The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life hooked me from the off, so I've just snapped up the two 'loose sequels', All the Hopeful Lovers and The Golden Hour, at a mere 56p each in the Quercus e-book sale.

    Lastly today, another Quercus bargain, Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg. This elegant novel is based on real events and real people, and is set on the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda in the 1830s - there's a post on it here.

Friday reads (x 4)

   

    I have too many books on the go at the moment, but my justification is that they are all good ones and they all fulfil a different reading function.

    Elizabeth Gilbert's lush 500-pager The Signature of All Things is balanced by the quiet observation of Sue Gee's new novel Coming Home, while for non-fiction I've got the visual pleasures of Virginia Woolf's Garden by Caroline Zoob (just out this week), and some mental stimulation from Magical Tales: Myth, Legend and Enchantment in Children's Books edited by Carolyne Larrington and Diane Purkiss, which accompanies the Magical Books exhibition I saw in Oxford last month.

    How about you? What are you reading this weekend? Multiple books, or strictly one at a time?

Norman Geras

    Very sad news this morning of the death of Norman Geras, academic, writer, author of the widely read and much admired Normblog. My thoughts are with Adèle and their daughters Sophie and Jenny.

The long and winding road

 

    Much has been made of the length of Eleanor Catton's Man Booker Prize-winning Victorian sensation novel The Luminaries, and at 832 pages it is by any standards long, but why - for that reason alone - would anyone baulk at reading it?

    I ask because I've seen various comments on this and other long books along the lines of "I couldn't read a book that long". Granted, if a book is boring, poorly written, distasteful, of no intrinsic interest, and so on, the reader is not going to stick with it beyond 50 or 100 pages, never mind 800, but if it is none of the above but instead is gripping, beautifully crafted, mysterious ... why wouldn't you wish to continue and stay the course?

    Clearly, if you had to read a long book for a deadline of some sort, to discuss at a book group, say, the limited reading time at your disposal might make it impossible, but under no such pressure, why would you not just settle down and enjoy the ride?

    If you are someone who instinctively passes over long books in favour of short ones, please do tell us why. Is it that you crave variety such as a constantly changing literary landscape, a wide range of voices, difference in pace and rhythm, and a fuller colour palate than that which one book read over what is necessarily a long period might offer? And conversely, if you're drawn to long books over shorter ones, can you explain their essential charm?

                                                   ~~~~~

    For those who are interested in such things, here is an article by one of this year's Man Booker judges on the judging process, and regarding another long book, Donna Tartt's third novel The Goldfinch (784 pages) is out soon, and here she is talking about it with Kirsty Wark on The Review Show.

The Man Booker Prize 2013

    The winner of this year's Man Booker Prize is The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, praised by Robert Macfarlane, chair of the judges, as "a novel of the New Zealand gold rush which slowly but deeply staked a claim upon us ... as intricately structured as an orrery. It requires a huge investment of time from the reader, but the dividends it offers are astronomical."

    Congratulations to Eleanor Catton. I went to her event at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival (she was speaking along with Hannah Kent, author of the acclaimed Burial Rites), and I've written it up here; as you'll see there, I was enormously impressed by her novel, which I summed up in a review for The Good Book Guide: "highly original, meticulously constructed, thematically convincing, a richly evocative mystery".

    The other shortlisted books were

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Harvest by Jim Crace

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

To the writing lodge

    "[Tomorrow I] shall smell a red rose; shall gently surge across the lawn (I move as if I carried a basket of eggs on my head), light a cigarette, take my writing board on my knee; and let myself down, like a diver, very cautiously into the last sentence I wrote yesterday."

    Virginia Woolf, as quoted by Caroline Zoob in Virginia Woolf's Garden: The Story of the Garden at Monk's House.

    Of her desk, above, Virginia said, "It is not an ordinary desk, not such a desk as you might buy in London or Edinburgh you see in anybodies [sic] house when you go to lunch; this desk is a sympathetic one, full of character; trusty, discreet, very reserved."

Miscellaneous literary links

    I'd rather like to sample Jardins d'Écrivains range of 'literary fragrances', from Edith Wharton bath salts to Brontë candles or Woolfian eau de parfum ... Londoners can find them at Bloom Perfumery.

 

Here is a book club with a difference - it's a lucky dip: The Bookshop in Wigtown have a Random Book Club through which you'll get a hand-picked book a month but you won't know what it is until it arrives. Leave your literary comfort zone, "discover treasures you never even knew existed and bring the thrill of browsing dusty shelves right to your doorstep." The link above will give you full details.

 

 

    Tuesday's edition of Radio 4's A Good Read featured two novels the Cornflower Book Group has read and enjoyed greatly: J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country (post on it here) and Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle (post here). Harriett Gilbert's guests were hotelier Alex Polizzi and writer Peter Robinson, and the programme is available as a podcast and on iPlayer.

Bellman & Black

    
    "You will have seen rooks [...]. Don't be put off by any sense of familiarity. Rooks are enveloped in a glorious sky-cloak of mystery. They're not what you think they are."

    Those lines are from Mark Cocker's book Crow Country, and Diane Setterfield has used them as the epigraph to her new and long-awaited novel Bellman & Black, for rooks feature throughout, occasionally in the foreground, more often as a shadowy background figure, but always wearing that 'sky-cloak of mystery'.

    The story begins with a group of young boys playing in the Oxfordshire countryside. One of them, William Bellman, has a catapult, a good aim, and an unshakeable confidence in his ability to hit a target, and to his companions' surprise, his missile reaches its target - a rook on a far tree - and the bird is killed. Now rooks suddenly arrive from all directions and take their places on the branches where their fellow had sat. There is no noise, no chatter, just "intent and purposeful silence" as the birds stare at William who in turn is deeply unnerved.

    As William forgets the incident, so we follow him as he grows up, as he goes to work for his uncle at Bellman's Mill, as he quickly masters every aspect of the business and becomes an indispensible second-in-command. He is a man of drive and purpose, of great commercial sense and shrewdness and strategic ability, one who will apply himself to any problem and find a solution, and when competitors are failing, William's mill flourishes and he prospers. He seems blessed, both in his family life and his work, until tragedy strikes ...

    I loved this novel. I slid into it like a hand into a glove, and it held me comfortably from start to finish so that I was sorry to leave it. I loved its gentle pace and steady rhythm, its repeating images and motifs, the playing out of its central mystery - of which I'll say no more - the fugue-like development of its themes, and the inevitability of the story's trajectory. I found the details of the workings of the woollen mill, the 19th. century cloth industry, and William's subsequent business building and running an emporium on London's Regent Street all quite fascinating, and it struck me that Diane Setterfield has not only researched her subject with the utmost thoroughness but placed her facts and findings with care and skill to build a story of pleasing integrity.

    The book will not appeal to everyone. Some will not take to the rook lore with which chapters are interspersed; some will have no time for its central conceit; for others, the very seamlessness of the narrative - its steady pulse and its deliberate predictability - will not appeal. But for me, William Bellman and his ever-present calfskin notebook, his lists, his plans, his application to the task in hand and the one beyond it, the bargain he makes with a mysterious stranger ... all this made compelling reading.

A question for you

    B.R. Wombat has a question for us, and I hope that someone - perhaps the librarians amongst us - will know the answer: which firm bound library books in the manner of Wolf Solent, above, and why did the practice of rebinding books in this way stop?

    On the subject of the book itself, any Powys fans here? I haven't read him, but given what Margaret Drabble says about him (and especially about Wolf Solent) in this article, I'd certainly give him a try.

                                    ~~~~~

    To other matters, and I can't let today go by without mentioning Alice Munro and her Nobel Prize for Literature.

    I wrote about her collection Runaway a while ago, and as will be evident from that post and so many other reviews and commentaries, it's no wonder the Swedish Academy has dubbed her "master of the contemporary short story".

Book of the day - The Visitors

    No apologies for giving you a preview of a book that's still three months away from publication as I'm a great collector of titles that are yet to come and to which we can all look forward, so today here's advance notice of The Visitors, a debut by Rebecca Mascull:

    "Adeliza Golding is a deaf-blind girl, born in late Victorian England on her father's hop farm. Her only friends are the Visitors, mysterious acquaintances only she can sense. A teacher arrives to free her from the prison of her inability to communicate through the gift of finger spelling. Her friendship with her teacher and this woman's beloved brother lead them from the hop gardens and oyster beds of Kent to the dusty veldt of South Africa and the Boer War, and the truth about the Visitors."

    The Visitors is the tale of a unique friendship, a thrilling adventure, a heartbreaking love story, and a compelling ghost story."

    I've read the opening chapter and can tell you that this novel looks very promising indeed.

Leaving a trace - or not?

   

    Another short extract from The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies today, this time the authors' advice to those who 'revere books excessively':

    "Some people won't turn down the pages. Others won't place the book face down, pages splayed. Some won't dare make a mark in the margin.

    Books exist to impart their worlds to you, not as beautiful objects to save for some other day. We implore you to fold, crack and scribble on your books whenever the desire takes you. Underline the good bits, exclaim 'YES!' and 'NO!' in the margins. Invite others to inscribe and date the frontispiece. Draw pictures, jot down phone numbers and web addresses, make journal entries, draft letters to friends or world leaders. Scribble down ideas for a novel of your own, sketch bridges you want to build, dresses you want to design. Stick postcards and pressed flowers between the pages.

    When next you open the book you'll be able to find the bits that made you think, laugh and cry the first time round [...] Favourite books should be naked, faded, torn, their pages spilling out. Love them like a friend, or at least a favourite toy. Let them wrinkle and age along with you."

    Well, that's all quite uncompromising! Where do you stand on this? Do you prefer your books pristine, as I do, or is condition unimportant? Do you doodle and scribble notes, so that the book becomes a record of your life and thoughts during the period you were reading it, or do you prefer to leave little or no trace?

 

Click to enlarge.

 

    On the subject of marginalia, here's a picture of the 1476 edition of John Duns Scotus' Questiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum which I saw at Innerpeffray, and although I can't read his notes, I do admire the beautiful penmanship of the man who took to the margins to express himself there.

In case you missed it ...

    

    ... Hilary Mantel was on yesterday's edition of Radio 4's Bookclub talking to James Naughtie and readers at the Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival about Bring Up the Bodies.

    Click on the programme link above to listen, and have a look at the accompanying illustrated post.

Reading the past

    I had never heard of The Library of Innerpeffray until recently, but it is the oldest free, public lending library in Scotland, having been founded (by David Drummond, 3rd. Lord Madertie) around 1680.

It is in the depths of the country, not far from Crieff in Perthshire, and is housed in a charming Georgian building adjoining an early 16th. century chapel, and overlooking the River Earn. Although the library ceased to lend its books in 1968, all are available for visitors to handle and read in situ, and among its many treasures are volumes dating back to 1476*.

    You can also see the Borrowers' Registers which provide a fascinating account of what the local people were reading at any time; click on the picture above to enlarge it and have a look. I hope James Hunter, a farmer, enjoyed The Love Letters of Prince Bismarck, and Ann Hunter got on well with Louis Pasteur - Life and Work.

    I bought a set of postcards of illustrations from some of the library's books to give away to anyone who loves old books and curiosities, and to enter the draw, all you have to do is leave a comment here telling us about your favourite library - real or fictional, personal, public or private.

    The draw is open to all (there's a cookery-themed one on Cornflower which you're welcome to enter, too), so please do throw your name into the hat, and if you're ever in the Crieff area, then make a beeline for Innerpeffray which, though very much off the beaten track, is well worth a special trip.

 

*Questiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum, part IV of Opus Oxoniense, John Duns Scotus, written 1298-9.

On culling & 'current reading': advice from The Novel Cure

    Today I give you a couple of short extracts from The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin (I wrote about it here) in the spirit of offering some food for thought. We'll begin with the uncompromising - and possibly terrifying - instruction:

    "Reader, cull your books.

    Do it every six months, and aim to cut your library by at least ten per cent each time. Give away any books you failed to finish or forced yourself to finish. Take to a charity shop those books that disappointed you. Keep only books that fit into the following categories: books you loved, books which are beautiful objects in themselves, books you consider to be important, edifying or otherwise necessary, books which you might return to one day, and books to keep for your children. Everything else is just bits of paper taking up space*. This way, you will keep your library fresh and make room for new additions.

*As Susan Hill says in her lovely Howards End is on the Landing: A year of reading from home [post on it here], 'You don't have to pay its rent just because it is a book'."

    On now to those 'new additions' to keep your library fresh, and one of the authors' prescriptions for this is,

    "Create a Current Reading shelf. This should ... contain the half-dozen books next up on your 'to read' list. Keep the turnover on this shelf brisk. Because rule number one is that you can only buy a new book when one of the other books on your Current Reading shelf has been read and returned to its place on your general shelves. Rule number two is that you must read the books on this shelf in the order in which they arrive, more or less. And rule number three is that if any of the books are leap-frogged more than once, or stay on the shelf for more than four months, they go to a friend or a charity shop."

    What do you think? Would that work for you?