Cornflower Books

Bargain of the day - The Home-Maker

   

    In case you're not on the Persephone Books mailing list, you may like to know that the new 'Classic' edition of the excellent novel The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher is available for the next two weeks for only £6 instead of £9.

    The link there to the book's page on the website tells you all you need to know about this, one of my top favourites from the Persephone list, and if you haven't already read it you're in for a treat.

Weekend reading

   

    Yesterday I quoted a passage from Esther Freud's new novel Mr Mac and Me, and Lucille kindly left a link to an interview with the author on Radio 4's Open Book. Do listen if you can as it gives an interesting insight into the background to the book which tells the story of the celebrated architect/designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh's time in the Suffolk village of Walberswick in 1914 and 1915, and his friendship with the young Thomas Maggs.

    I'm about half way through and loving the book, admiring Esther Freud's lightness of touch, and fascinated by the portrait of Mackintosh and his history, for despite his enormous standing now, this shows him at a time when his fortunes were on the ebb.

    That's my weekend reading - what's yours?

Always keep a notebook

    Writers and their notebooks pop up here from time to time; for instance, we've had

    Dorothy L. Sayers,

    Tracy Chevalier,

    Lawrence Norfolk,

    Mr. Norfolk again with A.S. Byatt and others,

    my guests 'at the writing desk',

    and now here's Joan Aiken on the subject - and by the way, the Joan Aiken blog, written by Joan's daughter Lizza, is very much worth visiting.

Bellman & Black - in paperback

   

    Out in paperback tomorrow (the 25th.) is Diane Setterfield's Bellman & Black, one of my top favourite novels of last year. No apologies for re-posting my review - as you can see, I thought the book was a superb piece of work:

 

    "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 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.

                     

Suspend your disbelief

    Here is a lovely talk about the power of fiction, and a book as "a doorway to wonder" - it should make you smile!

                                                ~~~~~

    The 'flipside' of this, you might say, is the real experience which inspires a fictitious one, and this article reveals the fairly mundane basis for the dream-like party scene in Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, which itself had a very famous literary successor.

Looking forward to reading ...

 

    ... Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Matthew Dennison, out on 9th. October.

    I greatly enjoyed Victoria Glendinning's biography of Vita which I read some time ago, and of Vita's own work I can very warmly recommend All Passion Spent (there's much comment on it here) and The Heir, which as I said last year, shows you how to paint with words on a small canvas, (and fill the picture with passion).

    While I wait for the new biography, I am reacquainting myself with Vita as gardening writer by way of Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden by her granddaughter-in-law, Sarah Raven, and I do love her style.

Have you read ... Robin Hobb?

   

    I confess I had not heard of Robin Hobb until recently, but a 5* review (by Jane Shilling) of her latest book, Fool's Assassin, caught my eye, and I was intrigued.

    Should you look at the sidebar on the left there you'll note that I don't have a 'fantasy' category in the archive, and that's because I happen to read so little of it - other books put themselves in my orbit more, but now this one has appeared, it "transcends the genre," apparently, and it sounds so good I want to know more.

    The new book is the first volume of a trilogy which features characters from the author's previous series: "Fitz ... is preparing to celebrate Winterfest with his wife, Molly, when a messenger arrives at their rural retreat of Withywoods. In Fitz's old occupation, the arrival of a messenger was invariably the preamble to a testing adventure. But either he has lost his edge, or he prefers not to recall the past, for he ignores his visitor, who vanishes, leaving nothing but a sense of disquiet. The vanished messenger had something of momentous importance to impart, but it takes Fitz almost the entire book to realise it. In the headlong final pages, when the slowness of the opening chapters comes together, the reader realises with a mixture of exhilaration and dread that the adventure is just beginning."

    "Hobb is always readable," Jane Shilling sums up, "but the elegant translucence of her prose is deceptive. What interests her is not fine writing per se, but writing that offers the least resistance between reader and story. Groping for comparisons, you find yourself in the company of the great compendious literary novelists. As the best writers do, Hobb shows us ourselves in her characters. Their longings and failings are our own, and we find our view of the world indelibly changed by their experiences. That is the ambition of high art. The novelists in any genre are rare who achieve it with Hobb’s combination of accessibility and moral authority."

    Is it necessary, I wonder, to have read The Farseer and The Tawny Man trilogies, to better appreciate this new book, or can one begin here?

    Have you read Robin Hobb, and what do you think of her work?

Bargain of the day

   

" ... a bizarre but lovely mixture of old books and typography, modern technology, a quest, a code, a secret society, a lot of Googling (i.e. an illuminating look inside Google HQ itself), the weirdest book club in the world and the search for something which I cannot reveal. Fun, sweet, warm-hearted, mad-in-a-good-way...",

    that's my summing-up of Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan which is one of today's Kindle deals.

Books on foot

    Since walking was the subject of yesterday's Cornflower post, how about some books on the subject? In no particular order:

    As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee

    Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found, Cheryl Strayed (appropriate name ...)

    A Walk In The Woods, Bill Bryson

    A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby

    A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

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

    The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane

    The Green Road Into The Trees,  Hugh Thomson

    Walking Home, Simon Armitage

    Footsteps, Richard Holmes

    If you can think of any more along similar lines, please leave a comment.

    The painting is Miss Jekyll's Gardening Boots (1920) by Sir William Nicholson, so nothing to do with walking as such, but the boots look as though they have tramped many a mile.

Quick links

    This is such an interesting post by Sophie Hannah on the challenges and, especially, the joys of writing The Monogram Murders, her Hercule Poirot novel which was published this week.

    Still on the subject of writing historical fiction, here are a few pointers from Philippa Gregory (including a guaranteed way of overcoming writer's block!).

    From the past to the future, and a highly novel library concept which will take shape over the next 100 years.

The Man Booker Prize 2014: the shortlist

        

    On the shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize are:

    To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

    The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

J by Howard Jacobson

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

How to be both by Ali Smith

    Having read only two of the longlisted titles, I'm not in much of a position to comment, but on the basis of those two I do think it's a poor show that Niall Williams' History of the Rain has missed the cut. See yesterday's post for more on that.

  The winner will be announced on Tuesday, 14th. October.

Enthusiasm

   

    In this recent article the novelist Nick Hornby talks about writing reviews for The Believer, an American magazine which concentrates on books its reviewers like "with a nod to the concept of the inherent Good". His column has enabled Hornby to "become an enthusiast, rather than a stern, difficult-to-please gatekeeper", he says, and so I thought I'd ask you all for recommendations of books about which you feel truly enthusiastic, not ones that you've 'just' enjoyed or admired, but those which you feel compelled to press on people (if you're so inclined), ones which have inspired you, perhaps, or simply entertained you to a very high degree.

    To compare and contrast, I've just read Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Margaret Atwood's Stone Mattress: Nine Tales and both are works of high quality, very slick, very sharp. While the former takes a certain situation and charts its repercussions and associated ethical questions to great (if not flawless) effect, the latter - a collection of short stories - shows off its author's talent and imagination and provides laughs and chills along the way. I genuinely admire the art and craft of both books, I can appreciate their finer points and I commend them to you, but in terms of enthusiasm, I don't feel it as I do for books such as Alan Bradley's sparkling Flavia de Luce series (see also), and - as you may guess - History of the Rain by Niall Williams which I adored and which has yet to be beaten in my reading this year.

    I could cite many more examples, but those are a couple of recent reads which stand out, one because it is clever and fun and original, the other because it has so much heart and soul in it, and both make you feel better for reading them.

    Do you have any books - recently discovered or old favourites - about which you are a true enthusiast, or evangelist, even?

If only I'd known

    I'm reading Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave just now and happened to look at the acknowledgements page last night. Among those thanked by the author is Robin Denniston, who through the 1960s and early '70s was editorial director and managing director of Lady Stewart's publisher Hodder & Stoughton.

    Robin, who died in 2012, was our next-door neighbour some years ago; he was a charming gentleman and an excellent pianist. Latterly he had been with Oxford University Press, and when we knew him he had given up publishing to become an Anglican priest, so I had no inkling then of his illustrious career at Hodder and it is only now that I have discovered his connection to Mary Stewart; had I known, I'd have asked him all about her, but this piece of his (which was published posthumously) does tell us a little.

Betjemania

    Sir John Betjeman was a founding member of The Victorian Society and campaigned to save and preserve many of the period's buildings, perhaps most notably St. Pancras Station and its attached Midland Grand Hotel (which in its new incarnation was my home last week).

    Sir John is commemorated in the station by a pub, The Betjeman Arms, and by this statue by Martin Jennings. Inscribed on its base are lines from the former Poet Laureate's work Cornish Cliffs:

    And in the shadowless unclouded glare

    Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where

    A misty sea-line meets the wash of air.

    Last Thursday, the 28th. of August, would have been Sir John's 108th. birthday, and someone who recognises his contribution to the country's architectural and cultural heritage left flowers and a birthday card beside his statue - a sweet gesture, I thought.

    I missed Monday night's A.N. Wilson documentary Return to Betjemanland, but thanks to iPlayer (and a timely comment from Kaggsy) I watched it last night and greatly enjoyed it. Just by the way, Wilson's last television film was on C.S. Lewis*, Betjeman's tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a man with whom he did not get on; Wilson has written biographies of both.

 

*If you haven't already seen it, this post may be of interest.

Good lines: good penmanship

    "Ségolène ... expressed herself in a more delicate, more graceful Italic hand than Bilodo had ever had the good fortune to admire. It was rich, imaginative handwriting, with deep downstrokes and celestial upstrokes embellished with opulent loops and precise drops - a clean, flowing script, admirably well-proportioned with its perfect thirty-degree slant and flawless inter-letter spacing. Ségolène's writing was a sweet scent for the eye, an elixir, an ode. It was a graphic symphony, an apotheosis. It was so beautiful it made you weep. Having read somewhere that handwriting was a reflection of a person's soul, Bilodo readily concluded that Ségolène's soul must be incomparably pure. If angels wrote, surely it was like this."

    From The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Thériault.

And the winner is ...

 
    A big 'thank you' to everyone who entered our recent draw for the Edinburgh International Book Festival/Guardian book bag, the postcards from Penguin, and a copy of Michael Morpurgo's Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Storymaker's Journey - all your comments were such fun to read. I have been away for a few days so have only now picked a winner (with the help of a random number generator), and that person is Di McDougall.

    Congratulations, Di, and I'll get your prize in the post to you just as soon as I can.

    Since the comments on the draw post were all about what you'd pack for a long journey, I should say that on my long journeys this last week - and I spent a lot of time on trains going to London and back with a day in Paris in the middle - my bag contained two small knitting projects, my camera, my Kindle (I've started Phil Rickman's The Wine of Angels on Sue's recommendation), and Alexander McCall Smith's forthcoming Mma Ramotswe book The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café
which had me helpless with laughter; fellow passengers must have wondered what on earth I was reading.