Cornflower Books

Books in brief: The Dig

   

    The Dig by John Preston is good - very much worth a read if you are interested in archaelogy or enjoy novels such as J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country.

    It's about the excavation at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939 which resulted in one of the most significant discoveries of Anglo-Saxon artefacts ever made, but told from the viewpoints of several of those involved in the dig, this multi-faceted account is a comprehensive and compelling treatment of its subject.

    Part of its strength is down to what it leaves unsaid or simply suggested, fittingly for a book about 'impressions'; what was found to be inside the barrow on Mrs. Edith Pretty's land was a ship-burial, but the ship itself had perished leaving only its imprint. This restraint in the writing contributes to a beautifully crafted and atmospheric novel about a remarkable event, and it's a book which I warmly recommend whether or not you've been to Sutton Hoo (as I have) or seen the treasure in The British Museum.

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Spells to call up glowing visions

 

        "Autumnal! I had never heard the word before. It had a good sound, a golden sound, a sound of colour, and ripeness, and the maturity of things. Autumnal! I said it over to myself a time or two, and wondered if there was anybody I dared try it on, and decided there was not. [...] I was in half a mind to risk it on Father, he liked coloured words, too, but if they were to take his fancy they had to sum up a definite experience, something he could thrill over and talk about afterwards. Somebody told him once that the railway lines at Crewe were like a spider's web. He was fascinated with the thought. He knew what a spider's web was like, he had seen them, many and many a time stretched between brambles, or tall grasses, on an October morning, heavy with dew and shining as if they had been dipped in glass. The thought of railway lines being like that quite entranced him. [...] But I never thought it was necessary to stick to any one particular picture for words. You just had to let them have their way with you. They were spells to call up glowing visions. They goaded the imagination. They could bring together shreds and remembered pieces of scattered pleasures, and make them into one delightful whole. Autumnal was everything rich and splendid, and aflame with colour, in the dying summer."

    From Country Boy by Richard Hillyer.

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This and that

    National Book Tokens have just launched their annual fun (but time-wasting) competition. Click here to play the game by guessing book titles from their corresponding cryptic road signs and you could win a year's supply of books.

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    If you're a fan of the late Miles Kington's you may like to pledge your support for a book of his letters via Unbound - watch the video there to hear from Michael Palin, Joanna Lumley, and Stephanie Cole (and go here for a bit of Instant Sunshine, the comedy cabaret group in which Miles Kington played double bass).

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    Combining several Edinburgh 'institutions', this forthcoming event will be great fun - pity it's sold out! (It might be worth contacting V&C in case they get any returned tickets.)

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    Southerners, meanwhile, could always go to the Slightly Foxed Open Afternoon. I can't find the relevant page on their website, but here are the details: "For anyone who happens to be in London on Monday 5 December between 3 and 7.30 p.m. there’s an opportunity to see all our books and merchandise, stock up on Christmas presents, and meet the team at our first Slightly Foxed office ‘Open Afternoon’ in Hoxton Square, only a couple of minutes’ walk from Old Street tube station. Do drop in to raise a glass (or a restoring cup), have a chat and enjoy a mince pie."

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Good words

    From Literary Interest on Twitter, "A ‘dreamery’ is a place where a person dreams or is likely to dream. The first recorded instance (Blackwood's Magazine, 1826) suggests a hot bath as an ideal dreamery."

    Again on Twitter, Claire King posted her ideal dreamery: "Under a blanket on a chaise longue, by a roaring fire, next to a large window, with the rain coming down outside on the wild green hills."

    That might be mine, too, or if not hills, then a wild sea (as in Stanley Cursiter's "Rain" above).

Well-seasoned

   

    It so happens that I was in Oxford over the weekend for a family celebration, staying at the always wonderful Old Parsonage Hotel (mentioned many times on the blog - e.g. here).

    Jeremy Mogford, owner of the hotel and its excellent sister establishments, The Old Bank, Quod, and Gee's*, sponsors an annual short story competition in association with the Oxford Literary Festival; its theme is always food and drink, and this year's judges are Philip Pullman and Mary Berry.

    You'll find full details here but to summarise, entries can be fiction or non-fiction, must be unpublished, and no longer than 2500 words. The closing date is 15th. January, 2017.

 

*I've stayed at or eaten in all these places often and recommend them most highly.

Rule 2: draw a map

    If you have watched the second episode of Andrew Marr's Paperback Heroes you'll know that rule 2 of his guide to fantasy is 'Draw a Map': he cites Game of Thrones as an example of a book in which a map drives the whole story.

    I don't know how central to the plot of Caraval is the map shown above, but this Venice-like plan at the front of the book is certainly a point of interest.

    Caraval is a debut young adult novel by Stephanie Garber to be published in both the UK and US in January with film rights having been sold to Twentieth Century Fox; here's the blurb:

    "Scarlett Dragna has never left the tiny isle of Trisda, pining afar for the wonder of Caraval, a once-a-year week-long performance where the audience participates in the show.

    For Scarlett and her beloved and wild younger sister Tella it represents freedom, an escape from her ruthless, abusive father and from her own dark past.

    When the sisters' long-awaited invitations to Caraval finally arrive, it seems their dreams have come true. But Scarlett is too scared of her father to leave Trisda and so she is kidnapped by Tella and a dangerous yet oh-so-seductive sailor named Julian and taken to the mystical Isla de los Suenos, the site of Caraval.

    Legend has it that everything that happens during Caraval is only an elaborate performance. Nonetheless, on arrival Scarlett quickly becomes enmeshed in a dangerous game of love, magic and heartbreak. And real or not, she must find Tella before the game is over, and her sister disappears forever ... with the evil Master of Caraval, Legend."

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Meet the Writers

   

    If you have half an hour to spare, listen to this charming and very moving interview with writer and illustrator Judith Kerr*.

    Further episodes are listed here - I'm off to listen to Tracy Chevalier next.

 

*This post may be of interest, if you haven't already seen it.

Ink

   

    "For many cultures, the practicalities of ink - legibility, permanency and consistency - have gone hand-in-glove with rather more diffuse, emotional, even reverential considerations. The ancient Chinese used inks perfumed with cloves, honey and musk. The scents, it is true, helped cover the odour of the binders used - yak skin and fish intestines were common - but these inks sometimes also contained powdered rhinoceros horn, pearls or jasper. In medieval Christian monasteries, the act of copying and illuminating manuscripts, of putting wisdom and prayer to paper, was seen as a spiritual process in itself.

    Black ink also had a devotional relationship with Islam: the Arabic word for ink, midãd, is closely related to that for divine substance or matter. An early seventeenth-century recipe in a treatise on painters and calligraphers contained 14 ingredients; some, like soot and gallnuts, are obvious enough, but others - saffron, Tibetan musk and hemp oil - are far less so. The author, Qadi Ahmad, was under little doubt of ink's numinous power. 'The ink of the scholar,' he wrote, 'is more holy than the blood of the martyr.' "

    From the chapter 'Ink' in The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair.

Looking forward to reading ...

   

    ... The Horseman by Tim Pears.

    "1911. In a forgotten valley on the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, with eyes as dark as sloes, Leo dreams of a job on the Master's stud farm.

    As ploughs furrow the hard January fields, the Master's daughter, young Miss Charlotte, shocks the estate's tenants by wielding a gun at the annual shoot. Spring comes, Leo watches swallows build their nests, hedgerows thrum with life and days lengthen into summer. Leo is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger's hat, he discovers Charlotte. And so a friendship begins, bound by a deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries - boundaries that become increasingly difficult to navigate as they approach adolescence.

    Hallucinatory, beautiful and suffused with the magic of nature, this tale of an unlikely friendship and the loss of innocence builds with a hypnotic power. Evoking the realities of agricultural life with precise, poetic brushstrokes, Tim Pears has created a masterful pastoral novel, the first in a dazzling new trilogy."

    I've read and enjoyed Tim Pears' Disputed Land (I refer to it here), and have high hopes for this book which will be out in early January.

Rather Be The Devil

   

    Mr. Cornflower writes:

    John Rebus, the detective hero of Ian Rankin’s seamy Edinburgh, had to retire one day; Rankin has been writing about him in real time for nearly thirty years. But like his alter ego, the gangster Big Ger Cafferty, he won’t give up and let go. Brought back by his old colleagues to help with a case involving Cafferty and with deep, dark roots in the city’s past, Rebus steers his usual driven course to the truth, along a line set not by rules and procedures but by his instinct for trouble and his view of justice.

    Like every first rate writer of detective fiction, Rankin has not only compelling protagonists in Rebus and Cafferty but a rich gallery of supporting characters: Rebus’s ex-colleagues Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox; the up and coming prince of the Edinburgh underworld, Darryl Christie, a chillingly composed young man who approaches crime with the zeal of a Scottish accountant tackling a complicated audit; and the long dead Maria Turquand, promiscuous wife of one of the city’s leading financiers. And he also has that other marker of quality, a wonderfully evocative sense of place and setting, exploiting to the full the theatrical contrasts which Edinburgh offers, between the complacent bourgeois mansions of Inverleith and Merchiston where Christie and Cafferty have installed themselves, and the low dives of the Cowgate and the grim warrens of Craigmillar. Best of all, Rankin has mischievously deprived Rebus of drink and tobacco - “doctor’s orders” - so let’s hope he still has more stories to tell.

    Rather Be The Devil is the 21st. Rebus book and is well up with the best of them.

    Here's the author himself to tell you more.

A writer's notes

    The first draft of Kate Forsyth's latest novel Beauty in Thorns took two years to write; here Kate condenses the process into four minutes.

    The video shows something of the amount of work which goes into a book - from idea to research, from sketchy notes to detailed ones, writing, rewriting, re-ordering material, adjusting balance and weighting, and so on and on through the hundreds of pages required to construct and tell a story. Good to know that after all that, Kate's editor is happy!