Cornflower Books

Looking forward to reading: Weatherland

   

    I loved the excellent Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (there's a post on it here, and a bit more here), so I am delighted to hear that Alexandra has another book coming out soon.

    Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies is "the story of English culture over a thousand years told through the creative responses to the weather. Writers and artists across the centuries, from Chaucer to Ian McEwan, and from the creator of the Luttrell Psalter in the 14th. century to John Piper in the 20th., looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk air, have felt very different things and woven them into their novels, poems and paintings.

    The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, which is why Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a 12th. century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1864, and the 'Sunspan' house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. 'Bloody cold', says Jonathan Swift in the 'slobbery' January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud, and John Ruskin wants to bottle one.

    Weatherland is both a sweeping panorama of cultural climates on the move and an intimate account rich with evocative details - for although weather, like culture, is vast, it is experienced physically, emotionally and spiritually; as Harris so cleverly reveals, it is at the very core of what it means to be English."

    Out in September.

Friday reads - Pottering about

    I am only a few pages from the end of Linda Lear's excellent Beatrix Potter: The extraordinary life of a Victorian genius, and I've been spinning it out, reluctant to leave not only a meticulously researched, beautifully written biography, but also the Lakeland world of the last century, and the book's very detailed picture of Beatrix and her abiding interests and passions. If you're at all interested in the subject, I recommend it most highly.

    Happily, I have Marta McDowall's lovely-looking Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children's Tales to go on to, and it begins, intriguingly, "Every garden tells a story, if you know how to read it." I think this will be the perfect complement to the full biography.

    As for fiction, I'm not sure what to pick up next, and I'm not short of choice, but while I make up my mind, please tell us - if you will - what you're reading just now.

Book of the day - The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

      Book jacket design trend: the hole in the cover; (here, the watch face is actually on the endpaper, as you'll see from the picture below).

    I like the sound of this book; The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley "blends historical events with dazzling flights of fancy to plunge readers into a strange and magical past, where time, destiny, genius - and a clockwork octopus[!] - collide."

    "In 1883, Thaniel Steepleton returns to his tiny flat to find a gold pocketwatch on his pillow. But he has worse fears than generous burglars; he is a telegraphist at the Home Office, which has just received a threat for what could be the largest-scale Fenian bombing in history.

    When the watch saves Thaniel's life from a blast that destroys Scotland Yard, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori - a kind, lonely immigrant who sweeps him into a new world of clockwork and music. Although Mori seems harmless at first, a chain of unexpected slips proves that he must be hiding something.

    Meanwhile, Grace Carrow is sneaking into an Oxford library dressed as a man. A theoretical physicist, she is desperate to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether before her mother can force her to marry.

    As the lives of these three characters become entwined, events spiral out of control until Thaniel is torn between loyalties, futures and opposing geniuses."

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the winner

    We've had the longlist, the shortlist, and now this evening, the winner of The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: John Spurling for Ten Thousand Things.

    "Set in 14th-century China, during the final years of the Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty, it is the story of Wang Meng, one of the era’s four great masters of painting. It is John Spurling’s fourth novel [...], took him 15 years to write and was rejected 44 times before being published by Duckworth last year."

    The judges said of the book, “The Ten Thousand Things is subtle and rewarding. Through John Spurling’s writing you feel as though you are reading Wang Meng’s paintings as he created them.  It is a mesmerising, elegantly drawn picture of old imperial China, which feels remarkably modern."

Looking good ...

    ... Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase, out on 2nd. July.

    "... beautiful, utterly escapist world", "a sheer delight", "a deliciously intriguing novel whose rich sense of time and place bear more than a few echoes of du Maurier's best".

    The author says, "...I'm terribly nosy, especially when it comes to houses. I have always loved the 'At Home' features in newspapers and magazines: opportunities to poke around other people's homes and unearth juicy revelations beneath the chalky layers of Farrow and Ball. In general, the more cash-rich the owner, the less interesting the house - it is easy to spot the dead hand of an interior designer. The houses that have stuck in my mind are the chaotic ones in the country with their boot rooms [...] and secrets, impossible to maintain, sprawling spaces for families to go wrong, but also for magic to happen. Powderham Castle in Devon, Hilles in Gloucestershire, Pencarrow House and Port Eliot in Cornwall were in the back of my mind when I wrote this book."

    Love that cover!

Writers' houses (and a dog)

    If you've visited here for a while you may know that there is an occasional post on the subject of writers' houses. Today's is all thanks to Miranda's lovely blog which pointed me in the direction of artist Amanda White and her Writers' Houses series of collages, many of which are available as cards or inexpensive prints.

    Being immersed in Beatrix Potter just now (and being a lover of rain) I couldn't resist this card of Beatrix at Near Sawrey, 'Passing Showers, Hill Top 1905', but there are many other lovely ones, and a calendar, too.

    Thanks again, Miranda!

    Before we go, here's an addition to the as yet sparsely populated Writers' Dogs archive: Beatrix in 1913 with her favourite collie Kep, who of course appears in The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck and does sterling work regarding the fox.

Snippets - 3

 

    "I pulled from under my pillow [...] a small square book covered in thick shiny cellophane. Across the cover pranced an empty-headed-looking rabbit. Inside, there he was again. He and other rabbits of his acquaintance seemed to be living full and interesting lives. I can remember exactly where we sat in my bedroom, my mother and I, reading the Beatrix Potter books, how I smugly explained to her the famous word 'soporific', dazzling the world with my brilliant instant reading. All over the country, hundreds of children were doing the same. A couple of times after having Beatrix Potter read to us, we were off. The few words on each page were beautifully printed and yet not in the least childish - like a missal. Those who call Beatrix Potter sickly don't know what they are talking about. They are books written by a woman who had never messed about with 'children's books'. They are full of harnessed passion, the powers of darkness, malice and terror - all the things children love - as well as the sweet comforts of ordered lives, the miraculous English landscape and the enigma of the human and animal condition. They are also very funny and this makes up for the stories being rather feeble."

    Jane Gardam, from The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books that Inspired Them, edited by Antonia Fraser, and sold in aid of Give a Book.

Snippets - 2

   

    "[Andrew Lang's Fairy Books] were the first books I read which others had not either read or recommended to me, and they left me with a permanent fondness for fairy stories and with something else, something that has been of practical use to me as well as perennial fascination. Andrew Lang began the process of teaching me how to frighten my readers."

    The late Ruth Rendell, from The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books that Inspired Them edited by Antonia Fraser.

Snippets - 1

    "Once you have taken possession of a book, you can inspect a writer's mind, in all its shades and dimensions. You can establish a relationship, which would be intolerable to a living individual: you can wake the writer at three in the morning, switch her off in mid-sentence, insist she continues for six hours unbroken, skip, go back, repeat the same paragraph again and again, impertinently second-guessing her vocabulary, and metaphors, scrutinizing her structure and tricks.

    But a book is not a genie bottle, and the writer is not a slave-mind under your command. The writer remains always autonomous, never quite obedient to your expectation or understanding. At first, you might flatter yourself that you have developed an indecorous intimacy. I have even fancied I had caught a reference which no one else had caught - as though George Eliot had shared a private joke, with me and only me, over a distance of a century. But when I tried to keep up with her, follow her into her most inaccessible passages, press my mind into hers, burrow into the ions and synapses of her sub-cervical cortex, I could never quite possess her."

    Rory Stewart, from The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books that Inspired Them edited by Antonia Fraser.

Printing masterclass

   

    Here's something I'd love to go to if I could, a printing masterclass offered by Faber & Faber:

    "This Masterclass is perfect for people with no prior experience to learn how to prepare work, and print on a press from start to finish. You will learn hand typesetting in both lead and wooden type, how to lock up your work into a forme, selecting paper stock, choosing and mixing inks and how to set up the presses. At the end of the day, you’ll take home your own unique poetry print."

    That sounds tremendous fun!

    Details here.

Bargain of the day - The Song of Achilles

   

     One of today's bargains for Kindle is The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. It's a book which was a top favourite of mine in 2011, when it came out, and it went on to win the (then) Orange Prize for Fiction the following year. Below is my original piece on the novel, and here you'll find a post about my get-together with Madeline herself.

    If every first novel I read were 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.