Cornflower Books

Advice please, if you'd be so kind

   

    I've had Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series on my wish list for ages, and it's about time I got to it, especially as this seems an appropriate season of the year to start reading it. My question for all you Cooper fans is which book to start with?

    Would you advise beginning with Over Sea Under Stone (which I understand was written several years before the others and is less complex, being more for younger readers), or can I just dive in with The Dark Is Rising itself and go on from there?

Dulce domum

 
   I'm reading Humphrey Carpenter's most interesting Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature, and I've reached the chapter on Kenneth Grahame. Carpenter identifies two poles of personality in Grahame, the Wanderer and the Home-lover, and says that all his writing was a product of the tension between those two, The Wind in the Willows being "the outstanding result of it".

    Tracing the home-lover aspect, Carpenter refers to the many moves Grahame had to make during childhood and remarks,

    "[they] must have played a part in his obsession with creating a snug, little home for himself, which runs through The Wind in the Willows (Mole End, Rat's bachelor home, Badger's splendid underground quarters) and may also be discerned in his early essays and letters. To a friend, he confessed that he had a recurrent dream of

    'a gradual awakening to consciousness in a certain little room, very dear and familiar ... always the same feeling of a home-coming, of the world shut out, of the ideal encasement. On the shelves were a few books - a very few - but just the editions I had sighed for, the editions which refuse to turn up, or which poverty glowers at on alien shelves. On the walls were a print or two, a woodcut, an etching - not many ... All was modest - Oh, so very modest! But all was my very own, and, what was more, everything in the room was exactly right.' "

    The picture is from a recent edition of the book illustrated by Inga Moore.

    Also on the subject of Home-lovers and Wanderers, see this post.

Every English novel ever

    This is good!

Re-jacketed

 

    I mentioned in passing in this post that I wasn't keen on the current covers for my favourite Nancy Mitford novels. Happily for those sharing my opinion and looking to buy them now, the books have been re-jacketed to mark the 70th. anniversary of publication of The Pursuit of Love, so that novel along with Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred (among others) will be available from tomorrow in much smarter livery*.

    This page gives a flavour of NM's jackets through the ages.

    *Edited to add: designed by Luli Sanchez.

Have you met Hermes?

   

    Another Kindle bargain for you, this time The Messenger of Athens, the first book in Anne Zouroudi's Greek Detective series:

    

    Hermes Diaktoros is no ordinary investigator.

    For a fat man - that's how he's referred to throughout - he's surprisingly fleet of foot, though it's tennis shoes he favours rather than wingèd sandals, and although he's been sent from Athens to look into the death of a young woman on the island of Thiminos, he's not a policeman but works, as he puts it, "for a higher authority". If I tell you also that he is something of an avenging angel, a man who sees deep into the hearts of others, who has a knack for knowing what ails a person and what might cure their ills, then you'll perhaps appreciate that this 'messenger', this 'intermediary' is not as other men; that said, it's an all too real world in which he finds himself when he steps off the ferry with his capacious holdall on a chilly Spring day.

    Hermes is such an original character and one whose particular gifts will afford his creator great possibilities, but in case you think this book is some kind of myth or fable, let me correct that impression. It's a gritty tale of passion and lust, of jealousy, vengeance and corruption, and of the harsh treatment of women; it's like the picture postcard image of a Greek island but taken in the off-season, with the dilapidation and decay - both physical and moral - which would normally be kept strictly 'out of shot', very much in the frame. So the book works both as morality tale and detective story and makes compelling reading.

    As to the plot, Irini Asimakopoulos has been found dead on an island hillside, and while the local police are content to sign off her death as suicide, Hermes takes a different view. In his questioning of the locals, of the victim's husband and others who were close to her - and his methods here are certainly unorthodox - he builds a picture of betrayal and brutality in a society where love and marriage seem rarely to go together. Behind the white-washed façades of the simple village houses, secrets are kept, shame and dishonour are hidden, and piety cohabits with cruelty. But Hermes is in Thiminos to see justice done and this deus ex machina is nothing if not effective, so that by the time he leaves the island many wrongs have been righted in stylish fashion, and the reader will close the book with a sigh of satisfaction.

The road goes ever on

    From National Book Tokens.

Bargain of the day - State of Wonder

   

    One of today's Kindle deals is Ann Patchett's novel State of Wonder. I recommend it strongly, as you'll see from my original post:

    

    If, when discovering an author for the first time, you're drawn to read more of their work - not straightaway perhaps, but later - then they've passed a test of sorts. With Ann Patchett's State of Wonder that test was passed for me after only three or so pages, and reaching the end of the novel, the question isn't 'whether' I'll read more but 'when': how soon can I get hold of the rest of her books? Never before have I looked up all an author's published work with a view to buying everything in one go, but so taken am I with this book that I do want all the others, and as soon as is practicable.

    While I've read a number of excellent novels recently, State of Wonder is unsurpassed. It's a book 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.

Here and there, this and that

    Everyone's talking about the Sainsbury's Christmas advert (and the 'making of' video) just now, Mog toys are flying off the shelves and the book is topping the bestseller list - great news for Save the Children to whom the profits go.

    Judith Kerr, still going strong at 92, is surely a role-model for us all; in case you didn't see it, here's my report of her appearance at last year's Edinburgh International Book Festival where she took the stage with her son Matthew Kneale to explore creative heritage.

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    Not book-related but still on the subject of ageing well, this excellent gentleman has become Mr. C's hero, while this video neatly links cats and skiing!

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    Back to books now, and in other news, the Costa Book Awards shortlists have been announced, and I'm pleased to see Melissa Harrison's At Hawthorn Time in the novel category. It's a story of contemporary rural life set over a spring month, but it's an original and unsettling piece, beautifully done, and it deserves its place on the list.

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    A Clerk of Oxford has posted a typically thoughtful and thought-provoking piece, stemming from St. Hilda, abbess of Whitby. I've had the novel Hild by Nicola Griffith on my wish list for some time, and I was wondering if anyone had read it. Here's an interview with the author.

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    Lastly today, as a PLR Twitter advocate I'm reminding UK writers to ensure that ALL your books are registered at www.plr.uk.com. Paperbacks and audiobooks - anything with a different ISBN - should be listed along with hardbacks so that they qualify for payment under the PLR scheme. Illustrators and translators should check, too. If you have writer friends, please nudge them to make sure their registration is up to date.

Civilised Saturday

    This is good: for those to whom Black Friday is anathema, bookshops across the country will be offering 'Civilised Saturday' shopping on November 28th.

    The theme will be taken up in various ways including providing afternoon tea, cocktails, poetry reading and storytelling, "as well as gift advice from experienced booksellers for Christmas presents".
 
    Among the shops taking part are Book-ish of Crickhowell in Powys who are going Downton-esque; "customers will be greeted at the door by our butler and offered a glass of prosecco and canapés. A ‘book walking’ competition will be held with the winner being the person who walks furthest down the High Street using correct posture with a book on their head.”

    Here in Edinburgh, The Edinburgh Bookshop staff will be wearing cocktail outfits, evening gloves, and offering customers "genteel snacks and drinks".

    In Oxford, Blackwell's have the very civilised David Mitchell in attendance, while in The Bookshop, Kibworth, Leicestershire, "in the spirit of The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies* by Susan Elderkin and Ella Bertoud, Kibworth is bringing in a green velvet armchair so customers can sit, relax and talk about what sort of books they think they might like, while being served with tea and cakes and being offered a complimentary hand massage."

    

*see this post.

On characters

   

     "If there is one thing I have learned, it is that you must have at least some emotional connection with every soul who figures in a story. You may like them, love them, find them disgusting or hate them, but you must react to them in some way. You must see them as real and treat them with the same respect you would accord someone you meet in the street. Only then can they take on any life of their own. And they do. I always love it when people I have invented start behaving unexpectedly, as real people do - being themselves, in fact."

    Diana Wynne Jones,  Reflections on the Magic of Writing

Out now in paperback - Wolf Winter

   

    I very much enjoyed Cecilia Ekbäck's debut novel Wolf Winter a few months ago, and as it has just come out in paperback I wanted to mention it again.

    It's an accomplished, atmospheric piece set in Swedish Lapland in 1717, and it's multi-faceted, being a murder mystery, an exploration of a remote place and distant time, and a fable-like piece of literary fiction.

    As I said of it on publication:   

    Joining a small group of settlers on forbidding Blackåsen Mountain is a family of Finnish incomers. When young Frederika discovers a neighbour’s mutilated body on the mountainside one day, the death is at first put down to a wolf attack, but Frederika’s mother Maija – an ‘earth-woman’ or healer – is sure it was a man’s hand at work.

            As harsh winter approaches, Maija tries to uncover the truth about the killing, her search for answers to the many questions raised by it revealing the secrets each Blackåsen family has brought with them and tried to hide, and putting the lives of both her daughters at risk as she unwittingly exposes them to dangers both natural and unnatural.

    "Like a silent fall of snow; suddenly, the reader is enveloped ... visually acute, skilfully written; it won't easily erase its tracks in the reader's mind." So says Hilary Mantel, and she's right.

For Remembrance Sunday

   

    I must recommend Glory: A Story of Gallipoli by Rachel Billington which I mentioned in passing when I read it earlier in the year. It's a novel based on the author's own family history, and is a compelling story about that ill-fated campaign.

    Bingo Fitzpaine is a Dorset landowner who as Brigadier-General now commands a regiment of yeomanry sent to Egypt. His daughter Sylvia is engaged to Arthur Lamb, a scholar who enlisted to make Sylvia proud. He’s aboard the SS River Clyde, moored off V Beach, about to begin the assault on the Gallipoli peninsula.

     What follows charts the terrible events which took place over nine months from April 1915. Meticulously researched, and written with elegance and sensitivity, the novel describes ‘the suicidal mission’ in which so many fought and died in vain.

    As I wrote elsewhere, "The words ‘Their glory shall not be blotted out’ are inscribed on the headstones in the military cemeteries of Gallipoli. This book makes those words flesh."

Literary links

    -    The bookshop we've all been waiting for .... (or maybe not!).

    -    What to read when you're poorly.

    -    Lottery living.

    -    Pretty things.

    -    "ideas do not come from nowhere..."

Even Dogs in the Wild

    Mr. C. writes:

    Rebus and Cafferty, the Holmes and Moriarty of modern crime fiction, are forced into a wary and volatile alliance in Ian Rankin's latest sharp and unsettling work, Even Dogs in the Wild. Both now officially retired, but both unable to escape the past and its demons, the detective and the gangster are thrown together when the violent death of a respected judge is linked with an attack on Cafferty's home. Rankin unravels the thread which connects the two with his usual wry insight, guiding us along the way to some dark and unexpected places in Edinburgh's history.

Good lines: A good book

    "A good book should be another place, beyond ordinary life and quite different from it - though by no means unconnected with it -  made with care and containing marvels."

    Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections.

What I was reading ...

    I've looked back at my reading journal to early Novembers past, and here are some of the better books from previous years:

    The Quickening Ground by Hayden Gabriel

    Caught in the Web of Words by K.M. Elisabeth Murray

    The Mist In The Mirror by Susan Hill

    The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill 1952-73

    The Return Of The Soldier (there's a post on it here).

    Myself and Michael Innes by J.I.M. Stewart (post here; and a P.S. to that - I still haven't read any of the novels!).

    A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness (once again, post here).

    18 Bookshops by Anne Scott (post here).

    A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks (short extract here).

    My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster (post here).