Cornflower Books

The Lark and the Laurel

   

    There's just the right amount of jeopardy in this book; in fact, it's its balance that makes it, I think. It's a good-hearted story, a quiet, steady, unshowy sort of novel, and it's informative and intelligent without being obvious or forced. It has the weighting of historical detail, setting, and plot just right.

    As I've mentioned before, The Lark and the Laurel is the first of the Mantlemass series by Barbara Willard, set on a Sussex manor farm from 1485 over two centuries.

    With the defeat and death of Richard III at Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor now on the throne, noblemen who supported the late king are deemed traitors. One such, Sir Thomas Jolland, flees to France leaving his young daughter Cecily in the care of his sister, the redoubtable Dame Elizabeth FitzEdmund, a woman more plain of dress and direct of speech than any Cecily had encountered in her sheltered, sophisticated London existence.

    Here at Mantlemass, schooled by her aunt, Cecily must learn country ways and adopt country habits. She exchanges rich gowns for homespun, fine sewing for coarser work, but she has a freedom denied her in the capital, and makes a friend from a neighbouring farm, the skilled horseman and gallant swain, Lewis Mallory.

    However, her increasing delight in her new home and her fresh understanding of the world arising from her open and practical way of life are threatened by the prospect of her father's return from exile, for Cecily's worth to him stems from more than blood ties and paternal love. How can she possibly have the future she so desires?

    Excellent stuff all round, and I'm looking forward to reading the next in the series, The Sprig of Broom.

    (In the same vein, see this post and this one.)

Update: 2

    I am loving this book!

    Also, in the light of this listing and this one, I got a great bargain when I bought the set from Catherine!

 

    (Update: 1 - wool-related - is here, by the way.)

Friday reads: to Mantlemass

 

   Sidebar lists are still not functioning so 'Current Reading' is now quite out of date. I've long since left 1913 Devon (The Wanderers), passed through the Himalayas in 1935 (Thin Air), and the Chilterns in 1937 (Country Matters), and now I'm in the Sussex Weald in Tudor times with the first of Barbara Willard's Mantlemass books, The Lark and the Laurel, which is off to a very good start.

    If you've a moment, do tell us what you're reading this weekend.

Country Matters

   

    I've been reading Clare Leighton's Country Matters, illustrated - of course - by the author. It's as handsome an edition as her Four Hedges (snippets here and here), and imbued with the same connection to the land, the seasons, the timeless links between past and present, even in an era of fast change and 'progress' (the 1930s). Her wood engravings have great strength, movement, charm, and are the perfect counterpoint to the keen observation of her text.

 
   "At first sight the Ploughing Match resembles an ocean upon which ships cross and recross. The teams as they keep to their separate furrows can hold no intercourse. So at sea do ships pass, but never meet. But no, it is not a sea. Rather is it an enormous loom. The strips of pale stubble are the warp stretched tight across it. The furrows are the woof. Their lines of chocolate-coloured silk cross the stubble at right angles. The teams are the shuttles, ten in number. Slowly they move over the field, drawing the deep-brown silk behind them. But it is not only on the earth that this design is woven. Above, in the blue sky, it is repeated. Long white clouds pass across the firmament, parallel with the stubble, and at right angles to horse and plough. So, in two elements weaving proceeds."

    Her portraits are of primrose-picking, tree-felling, the village flower show, the cricket match, the fair ... each a glimpse of rural culture, character, and custom. But this is no eulogy to a disappearing age, rather - in her words - "a record of an enduring world [...] Romance need not live only under thatched eaves, drawing its water from moss-covered wells. It can survive the invasion of the tractor and the radio. It feeds upon an attitude of mind [...]"

Acclaimed but never entirely content

    

    

    "Mrs. Uttley's best selling status as an author was based on a few, relatively simple formulae - the vivid recollection of a vanished rural England for the pleasure of the nostalgic and curious reader; the creation of several closely-knit and wonderfully described communities of animals, in which the real world was mixed with magic, and in which some danger and suffering was contained by the security and goodwill of the wider community, and the writing of many precise and thoughtful essays that sparkle even more brightly with the passing of time.

    Her success was, however, achieved at the cost of much pain, for herself and for others, as she relentlessly pursued her objectives. Indeed, Penelope Fitzgerald was to describe her as 'a self-deluding romantic ... and a compulsive housekeeper, patching and jam-making in an heroically untidy kitchen ... it is impossible not to think of her as a sorceress, a story teller whose tales were produced only at mortal cost.'"    

    Denis Judd, The Private Diaries of Alison Uttley.

Thin Air

   

    If you're in the mood for a ghost story, I'd highly recommend Michelle Paver's Dark Matter (post on it here and report on the author's appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival here), and now her Thin Air. She is an excellent storyteller, getting on with the job in a brisk, economical manner, creating atmosphere, placing facts, playing out her plots in an instinctive but extremely well-informed manner with a sound grasp of pacing and detail, and an analyst's feel for what's important, when it's important, and why.

    In Thin Air we're with a 1935 expedition attempting to be the first to reach the summit of Kangchengjunga, the third highest mountain in the world and one of the most dangerous. The men are following the route taken by a 1906 team led by General Sir Edmund Lyell whose account of his expedition, Bloody but Unbowed, is required reading for the later group of which our narrator, Stephen Pearce, is team doctor. But it's to Captain Charles Tennant, now the only surviving member of that earlier attempt, albeit the one who has never spoken of his ordeal, to whom Stephen goes for advice on the route, only to be warned off in no uncertain terms - except it seems that there's more to Tennant's antipathy than a simple fear for Stephen's safety.

    Undaunted, Stephen and his companions, who include his elder brother Kits, set off from Darjeeling, trekking to the mountain with their native porters. The sherpas, however, are naturally superstitious and particularly uncomfortable about following in dead men's footsteps, for of the 1906 group, only Lyell and Tennant made it off Kangchengjunga alive, and adopting their route and camp sites is in the sherpas' view to court disaster.

    What follows is a perfectly judged study of sibling rivalry, of derring-do, and of psychological disorientation caused by altitude, conditions, and "the shark's fin of the past jutting into the present". It is, like Dark Matter, a genuinely unsettling page-turner, with a highly convincing account of the characters' back-story and future lives to book-end their present utterly chilling jeopardy.

Starting, finishing, acquiring

    For some technical reason I can't add books to the sidebars at the moment, so this post will do instead.

    I've just finished John Lewis-Stempel's excellent little book on the owl (there's a bit about it here), and I've moved on to Michelle Paver's ghost story Thin Air (a souvenir from Daunt's) which is off to a very promising start; meanwhile Will Schwalbe's Books for Living: A Reader's Guide to Life joins the TBR pile, but on the back of Will's The End of Your Life Book Club it goes pretty much to the top.

The Wanderers

   

    Tim Pears' The Wanderers is the second part of his West Country Trilogy and takes up young Leo Sercombe's story where The Horseman (one of my books of the year last year) left off.

     It's June, 1912, and Leo is on the move while his friend Lottie Prideaux faces changes at her family home. To say any more would be to say too much, both about this book and the first volume, if you've yet to read it, but the epigraph, from Genesis, 4: 12-14, " [...] I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth", is clue enough.

    Over a period of two years Leo's journey through the West Country takes him down the byways of being as he encounters people living on the edges of society, surviving on their wits or on their exploitation of others. This sense of displacement and of being 'beyond', captured in the following passage, marks the book:

    "The boy felt as if the calendar and the clock, the normal measurement of time, even time itself as he had been taught to understand it, had been left behind. It still existed, elsewhere, but [... he had moved] into a parallel time of no past or future but only an ever on-rolling now."

    In that present Leo is alert to all around him as before. He feels the shift of the seasons, observes the flora and fauna with an even closer, more urgent, engagement, and notices his own growth. But in essence he's adrift, and at times in danger of becoming becalmed, and if I've a quibble about the book (aside from a couple of anachronistic terms which should have caught an editor's eye) it's that here and there the same could be said of it.

    But Tim Pears has the measure of his material. He is good on dialogue, although he favours the characters' interior lives; he knows his topography, his period, and he stays surely within the register he's chosen for his narrative. There are some passages for which you'll need a strong stomach (one I skipped entirely when I saw where it was heading), but there's nothing gratuitous here - it speaks of its time.

    I'm looking forward very much to reading volume 3.

Looking forward to reading ...

 

    ... Once Upon A River, Diane Setterfield's "enthralling, richly-textured" new novel, coming in July.

    Here's the blurb:

    "A dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the Thames. The regulars are entertaining themselves by telling stories when the door bursts open on an injured stranger. In his arms is the drowned corpse of a little child.

    Hours later the dead girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life.

    Is it a miracle? Is it magic? Or can it be explained by science?

    Replete with folklore, suspense and romance, as well as with the urgent scientific curiosity of the Darwinian age, Once Upon a River is as richly atmospheric as Setterfield’s bestseller The Thirteenth Tale."

    It's a very long time since I read The Thirteenth Tale, but Bellman & Black, Diane's second novel, was one of my books of the year in 2013 - there's a post on it here.

From Here to Eternity

    

    Mr. Cornflower writes:

    You will have to overcome two kinds of squeamishness to enjoy Caitlin Doughty's From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death*. The first, and less important, is dealing with what actually happens to dead bodies when they are burned, buried or otherwise disposed of. The second and much tougher one is to reflect on how we feel about the fact of death itself; the fact that everyone we know and love will one day cease to exist, and, toughest of all, one day so will we ourselves. Death is a subject most of us prefer to avoid talking about, but this book, by a self-described “alternative undertaker” from California, makes a powerful argument that this reticence itself leaves us less resilient than many other cultures in the face of death. Birth and death are the two points which we share with absolutely every other being; and just as Yeats said of birth - “how but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” - we need the framework of ritual and observance to help us deal with death.

    Precisely which ritual doesn’t seem to matter; and Doughty makes a highly entertaining travelogue out of visits to countries with very different ways of commemorating the dead in ways that seem to help the living. In parts of Indonesia, the mummified remains of dead relatives are kept in the house and brought out and adorned for special ceremonies; one Indonesian contact tells of sleeping in the same bed as his dead grandfather for nine years. In high-tech Japan, where 99.9% of bodies are cremated and the families pick through the bones with special chopsticks, a mourner paying respects afterwards is confronted with a wall of several hundred miniature Buddha statues, each glowing blue in its own little niche; when the mourner identifies himself with a smart card, the Buddha representing his relative turns white. The Bolivians treat skulls as lucky charms, and adorn them with  snazzy beanie hats and, occasionally, a smoking cigarette.

    As part of Doughty’s own rebellion against what she sees as the excessively corporate (and expensive) American death industry, she also explores more creative approaches in her own back yard, from open air cremations - very successful - to the composting of bodies - more work needed. My own second hand experience (having had business connections with funeral directors in this country) is that families are indeed becoming more creative and unusual in their efforts to give the departed a proper send-off, with options ranging from the release of doves to a mini Viking funeral, in which a model longboat bearing the deceased’s ashes is sent out under radio control to the middle of a lake and set on fire. Although we both hope the day is a long way off, thoughts at Cornflower Towers tend towards natural burial in some woodland glade (though I am told that wicker coffins can make a loud creaking noise).

    The waning of religious belief and practice has left us uncomfortably placed, like a hermit crab between shells; the comforts of the old church rituals are less effective, but the feelings which those rituals assuaged have not gone away. The proper commemoration of the dead tells us that when living they were loved and that their lives had meaning and purpose. That noble and gracious instinct is the heart of Doughty’s admirable book.

 

*To be published here in the UK on 25th. January.

Biographical details

    The shortlist for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize has been announced today (judges' comments follow each book):

    David Jones, Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth

       This comprehensive life of the great Modernist poet-artist David Jones is the fruit of a lifetime’s research and understanding, and brings new light to shine on Jones’s rare originality and genius.

    The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon

        In this finely judged and elegantly written biography, Gordon teases out the truth behind Angela Carter’s fictions about her own life, while recounting the brilliant and volatile career of this born writer, critic and fabulist.         

    This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay

        A best-selling, no-holds-barred account of life at the coalface of the NHS by a comedian and former doctor, hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking by turns.

    Young, Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard by Gareth Russell

        A stunning reappraisal of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, as scholarly as it is readable, that uses extensive research into her household to bring her chequered story vividly to life.

    The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett by Helen Smith

        An exemplary life of the writer and editor with a gift for spotting genius, champion of Conrad, Galsworthy, D.H. and T.E. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham, literary godfather to the Edwardian age.

    Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation by James Stourton

        As a new version of Civilisation comes to our screens, the complex figure of Kenneth Clark, aesthete, broadcaster, writer and cultural panjandrum, is dissected in this perceptive and entertaining biography. 

    The winner will be announced on 6th. March.

A very short introduction to ...

 

    ... a good offer.

    Call me a nerd if you like but at my 'suggestion', Santa Claus put a Very Short Introduction (carefully chosen to reflect the recipient's interests or current studies) in my family's Christmas stockings this year, (and they were all well-received - honest, guv!).

    OUP, who publish the books, have a sale on their website until midnight tomorrow (12th.) with most items discounted by 50%: click here and scroll down for the code and details. You can find the useful Very Short Introduction series here.

    As the picture shows, prompted by Santa's offering Mr. C. has already taken advantage and added to his collection; my order has just gone in.

P.S. You might also find one or two Oxford World's Classics to tempt you.

Blue Remembered Hills

   

    Rosemary Sutcliff's Blue Remembered Hills, her account of her childhood and early adulthood first published in 1983, is a gentle, wistful memoir of acceptance.

    Physically disabled and subjected to painful treatment over many years, she is uncomplaining and seems to have borne the limitations her condition imposed on her with grace. An only child with few friends her own age, her relative isolation and resulting reserve seem to have afforded her a degree of maturity and a self-reliant focus which must have influenced and informed her writer's sensibilities. A love affair which never could have had a satisfactory future, far from being a source of regret, is recalled with joy for the treasured memories which remained when it was over. "I was happy with rather pathetically little," she says of another romantic attachment, but she could be referring to many other aspects of her life.

    Born in 1920, the daughter of a naval man, Rosemary's early years were spent in dockyards in England and Malta before the family moved to North Devon, to an idyllic-sounding setting for a novelist to grow up in. But it was painting in which she first made her mark, attending art school, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, becoming known as a miniaturist, acknowledging, though, that that career path was taken on the advice of her "elders and betters", and "generally speaking, I do not think that one should ever take another person's advice in the things of life that really matter, but follow the dictates of the still small something in one's innermost self."

      "I suppose it must have been around the middle of the war that I began to get the itch to write." So she began in secret, "at first purely for the pleasure of scribbling," then as forbidden delight and means of escape. She admits to embarrassment at her early attempts at story-telling - derivative, whimsical products of inexperience - but went on to attempt a re-telling of Celtic and Saxon legends which she gave to an old friend, a gentleman with connections, who passed them to an acquaintance at the Oxford University Press. By and by, OUP wrote to say that they did not want her British legends, but would she try her hand at writing a Robin Hood for them? "That was how it all began."

    The book reveals Rosemary Sutcliff's humour, a gift for making the best of things, a person at peace with herself. I'd love to know about her later life, what the success of her books meant to her, whether she achieved personal satisfaction beyond the level of stoic acceptance; on the basis of this fine memoir I very much hope that she did.

Bargain of the day

   

    A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, £0.99 for Kindle today. If you haven't already read this small masterpiece, don't delay!

    Here are our book group's thoughts on it, and for good measure here's a post on Byron Rogers' biography of Carr - he describes the novel as "as close to perfection as anything written in my time."

Admissions

   

    Henry Marsh's memoir Do No Harm (reviewed here) was one of my books of the year for 2017, so I was very eager to read Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery, a further set of the eminent neurosurgeon's reflections on his career written now from the perspective of retirement. The second volume does not disappoint.

    Once more Mr. Marsh writes with great candour and self-awareness, whether he is revisiting his mistakes, discussing painful episodes in his personal life, or contemplating old age and death. He admits fallibility - and lectures other doctors on the subject, recognises that we learn from our failures while success can make us complacent, and describes how hard it is, as a surgeon, to ask for help "as bravery and self-reliance are seen as such an important part of the job".

    The portrait which emerges from the internal scrutiny is a fascinating one. Over 30-odd years in a complex and dangerous field of medicine he appears to have achieved a balance between empathy and detachment, between confidence and self-importance; he has learned to observe without judging, grasped that all knowledge is provisional, and that in dealing in probabilities rather than certainties, decision-making is the hardest part of the job.

    Though retired from his London hospital consultancy he continues to work in Ukraine and Nepal, supervising surgery, teaching, and lecturing. Outwith the operating theatre and the classroom we see a man who is still obsessive, competitive, and ambitious, keeping bees, working with wood to a very high degree of proficiency, and renovating a derelict cottage single-handed. Though still acutely aware of his misjudgements and shortcomings, he seems to bring to all he does conviction, depth of thought, and great skill and knowledge, along with "the slightly fanatical determination and attention to detail that neurosurgery requires". This gives his book a profundity and an integrity which matches that of Do No Harm and makes them both thought-provoking, compulsive and deeply satisfying reading.

Thought for the day

    "... it is very easy to underestimate the importance of endless practice with practical skills. You learn them by doing, much more than by knowing. It becomes what psychologists call implicit memory. When we learn a new skill the brain has to work hard - it is a consciously directed process requiring frequent repetition and the expenditure of energy. But once it is learnt, the skill - the motor and sensory coordination of muscles by the brain - becomes unconscious, fast and efficient. Only a small area of the brain is activated when the skill is exercised, although at the same time it has been shown, for instance, that professional pianists' brains develop larger hand areas than the brains of amateur pianists. To learn is to restructure your brain."

    Henry Marsh, Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery.

Train to Nowhere

   

    My second wartime memoir in as many months, Anita Leslie's Train to Nowhere is very different in pitch and pace to John Hackett's I was a Stranger, but it's as moving and outstanding in its own way.

    Daughter of a baronet and second cousin to Winston Churchill, Anita joined the Mechanised Transport Corps in August 1940 and was posted to the Middle East, spending three years as a mechanic and driver and then working in the press, editing and distributing papers to the British troops. Her account of her life in Egypt, Palestine, the Lebanon and Syria is breezy and breathy and always colourful:

    "I spent two days travelling the flower-covered wilderness of the Jazira, trying to discover if and where the Taurus express ever stopped, if and where planes could drop anything and to whom. I waded knee-deep through a sea of wild larkspur and hollyhock and saw the snow-covered mountains of Persia, and explored great ruins that were the first cities of the world, but I never placed a single copy of the Eastern Times!"

    Moving back to Europe she joins the French army as an ambulance driver, and here her war begins in earnest. First in Italy, then in France, Anita and her fellow drivers - all of them young women - are in the thick of things, facing bombardment, morale-sapping living conditions, running risks almost as great as those of front-line troops:

    "Army lorries had to travel in convoy of at least twenty accompanied by two tanks. Only the ambulances rolled alone through enemy country." And the red crosses the ambulances bore were no guarantee of safe passage; but then as Anita says, "fear is comparative".

    Involved in the liberation of Alsace, the Battle of Colmar, and then as war in Europe ends, despatched to Germany to collect "sick French prisoners", Anita and her colleagues do not know that their destination is Nordhausen, a concentration camp, and the patients they must transport from there to hospital are inmates now barely alive. The horrors she describes in that chapter make the usually phlegmatic author sick with despair of mankind, and as a reader of those passages you will weep.

    Emotion apart, what gives the book its force, its vividness, is Anita's matter-of-fact reporting of all that she witnesses. Her understatement - for rarely does she labour a point - is telling, her spirit indomitable, her ability to get on with the job no matter what truly impressive. As an observer, no detail escapes her, but it's her wit and sense of the absurd, her good humour, essential humanity and clear-sightedness, which colour her words and which bring to life - real, harsh, painful life - the facts with which we think we are familiar.

    First published in 1948, the book and its author must both have been ahead of their time, but Train to Nowhere has as much to say today as it did then, and is perhaps even more compelling for all of us who have not lived through those terrible years.