Cornflower Books

Cornflower Blues, 2018

    My books of the year list is a shorter one this time (here is last year's for comparison).

    In non-fiction, Henry Marsh makes a reappearance, this time with Admissions his second volume of memoirs, while Laura Freeman - an outstanding newcomer - shares top spot for The Reading Cure.

    In fiction, Dear Mrs. Bird came along at a very difficult time, but A.J. Pearce's perfect pitch helped me through; Anne Youngson, showing that you're never too old to begin a new career, is a worthy Blue with her debut Meet Me at the Museum (which is getting the wider recognition it deserves), and joining them on the podium are two old hands, Kate Atkinson for Transcription, and William Boyd for Love is Blind.

    If you have a moment, perhaps you'd share your reading highlights of the year.

Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame

    I closed Matthew Dennison's biography of Kenneth Grahame with such a strong feeling of 'if only' and 'what might have been', for its subject's life was so sad, so limited in many ways - partly by circumstance, partly by misdirected choice. 

    Born here in Edinburgh in 1859 (delivered by Simpson, coincidentally), Kenneth lost his mother to scarlet fever when he was only five. His father proved unable to cope and eventually fled abroad leaving his children in the care of their grandmother in England. The surroundings of his later childhood in Berkshire may have seemed idyllic to Kenneth, but the emotional landscape was austere. A lack of funds "excluded him from the Oxford of his youthful fantasies"; instead of reading for a degree in the city he loved, he joined the Bank of England as a clerk and spent his entire career there, rising to Secretary. He made a disastrous marriage and lost his only child to suicide. His rich inner life was fully realised only in his writing.

    Those bare bones are given flesh in spare fashion in the book which shows a man forever an escapist, an inhabitant of "imaginary relationships and imaginary worlds", someone capable of achieving an "intense engagement with place", sustained by "a mysticism centred in nature."

    Would Grahame's masterpiece have existed at all or as is had his life been otherwise? Impossible to know, but in The Wind in the Willows his ideas of fellowship, his concepts of home* - and his 'twinning' of escape and homecoming - his conservative ideals of ruralism, all cast in a nostalgic light, were worked out on the page, shaped perhaps but also uncircumscribed by the failings of others and the disappointments of 'real' life.

*See also.

A postscript to ...

... this post:

    "for Nature's particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking ... is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted ... certainly creative and suprasensitive."

    Kenneth Grahame, quoted by Matthew Dennison in Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame.

Wishing you ...

 

    ... a very bookish Christmas!

The last book I ...

    I'm taking my lead from Simon today with a 'last books' list:

The last book I gave up on was

    this one.

The last book I re-read was

    Embers by Sandor Marai.

The last book I bought was

     James Lees-Milne's Diaries, 1942-1954 as recommended on episode 1 of the Slightly Foxed podcast.

The last book I said I read but actually didn't

    I have never done such a thing!

The last book I wrote in the margins of

    I don't do that either - all my notes are on slips of paper tucked into the title page.

The last book I had signed was

     this one

The last book I lost was

     Victoria Finlay's Colour: Travels through the Paintbox. I lent it to an artist friend a few years ago, and guess she has it still.

The last book I had to replace was

    in my case it's 'will have' to replace: my copy of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, currently on loan to a family member, has had its spine so badly cracked*, I noticed the other day, that I shall have to buy a fresh one for myself.

The last book I argued over was

    I know not what; arguing isn't really my style.

The last book I couldn't find was

    this. It's here somewhere, but vexingly I can't lay hands on it.

    

    *Cue fit of the vapours.

House of Glass

 
    Susan Fletcher's novel Corrag* is a book which for good reason - as that post on it shows - left a lasting impression. I've just read Susan's latest, House of Glass, drawn to it by its subject matter: a country house with a large and beautiful garden, a young woman invited there to establish a glasshouse full of plants from Kew, an absent owner, secrets, lies, loss ...

    It is a story which stands in the tradition of Jane Eyre or Rebecca, one which wrong-foots the reader - and chills them, builds a complex, intricate picture of lives based on false assumptions, lives constrained by others' misdeeds. It's a book of illusions, of faded colours, and broken dreams.

    Set in 1914, it's narrated by Clara Waterfield, a young woman who has just lost her mother, and whose life thus far has been circumscribed by osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. Having been sequestered for fear of fractures, Clara is unworldly; forthright, but remote, outspoken, unused to the society of anyone beyond her small family circle. Now seeking solace, she becomes a regular visitor to Kew Gardens and forms an acquaintance with Forbes, the foreman of the glasshouses, who slakes her sudden thirst for botanical knowledge and in time passes on not just knowledge but an invitation. A Mr. Fox wishes to buy plants from Kew to fill his Gloucestershire glasshouse, but he asks, too, for a person, someone to bed in his new collection and care for it in the first weeks of its establishment; Forbes encourages Clara to accept the position. So she travels to Shadowbrook, to the newly built glasshouse, set in a garden of many 'rooms'**, to a house whose owner is away but whose walls echo with the voices of the past.

    Reading what follows is like waiting in a room of hot, still air, thick with motes of dust drifting in a slowly shifting shaft of sunlight, for it has that almost stifling intensity to it, so atmospheric is it. Susan Fletcher achieves this through a deep connection to her material - there is nothing sketchy about her writing, nothing superficial or unconsidered, rather I sense her moulding every scene, every line, like working clay, feeling its form, shaping and re-shaping at fingertip level. Here and there it veers towards the precious and the mannered, and an editor might have pulled it back a little, but that's a small criticism of what is essentially fine work. On a broader level, though some might call elements of the plot overly involved or contrived, it is a beautifully crafted book, and like Corrag, will stay in the mind.

*Also known as Witch Light.

**Inspired by Hidcote.

Good books, good food, good conversation

    This looks very appealing, do you not think?

    And if you need accommodation locally you could always stay here.

The Way of All Flesh

    This is a cracking crime novel!

    The Way of All Flesh is by Ambrose Parry, the writing partnership of novelist Christopher Brookmyre and his wife, consultant anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman. Marisa's profession (and Master's degree in the History of Medicine) is key here as the book is a medical drama, set in Edinburgh in the winter of 1847, and featuring the obstetrician James Young Simpson who pioneered the use of chloroform as anaesthetic.

    We are introduced to the Simpson household at 52, Queen Street through medical student Will Raven, live-in apprentice to the great doctor, and a man who may not be all he seems, but Will is on a mission to redeem himself: "to heal, to save, to atone," and with the help of Professor Simpson's headstrong housemaid Sarah - a young woman of common sense, intelligence, perception, and no small knowledge of medical matters, acquired through bookish leanings and assisting at her employer's domestic clinics - he discovers the perpetrator of a string of crimes against women.

      Edinburgh itself plays a starring role in the book, with a vivid rendering of the contrast between the New Town and the Old, the one a place of fine broad streets, elegant houses, refinement and grandeur, the other one of cramped dwellings set hugger-mugger down the city's spine between the Castle and Holyrood, home to poverty, crime, and disease. Raven moves easily between the two, from the University and Infirmary on the south side, the taverns and the houses of ill repute, to the order of its newer northern counterpart, with its "rigidity and unbending rules". As he seeks to solve the murder of a prostitute of his acquaintance, so he is at the mercy of his past, both recent and more distant, and risks his personal and professional future. "I have one or two wee questions, laddie," says Professor Simpson quietly at a crucial point in the story, his understatement pointing up the extraordinary turn of events in which his staff are clearly more than peripherally involved, his presence in itself a bridge between two worlds.

    Although the book's central plot is fictitious, it weaves its way through real events, most notably the discovery of chloroform - not in a laboratory but famously around Simpson's Queen Street dinner table with friends and colleagues as guinea pigs - showing Edinburgh's foremost place in the world of medicine, and its immense cultural and scientific significance at that time. But where there is enlightenment so there is also darkness, and while we see the humanitarian side of this great innovator, other baser motives are at work elsewhere in the medical profession, and the contrast is as dramatic as it is fascinating.

    This novel is the first of a series with the second book, The Art of Dying, out next year and A Corruption of Blood to follow it in 2021. The writers have established a compelling scenario peopled by solid characters and driven by a finely worked plot, and I look forward to the forthcoming books with great interest.

Round the houses

   A few things in publishers' recent catalogues and newsletters have caught my eye:

    From Yale Books, The Classical Music Lover's Companion to Orchestral Music by Robert Philip - and see the accompanying playlist. Also, Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans.

    Oxford University Press are currently offering a 30% discount on books on their website; perhaps a title or two from their excellent Oxford World's Classics might fill a gap on your shelves? To delve a little deeper there are some audio guides, too.

    From Vintage Books, some titles with a Christmas theme; given the subject of yesterday's post, I might be asking Santa for The Robin: A Biography by Stephen Moss.

    From Penguin Classics, The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi; "have nothing in your houses ...".

    From the British Library, A History of Children's Books in 100 Books by Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad.

    From John Murray, A Shepherd at the Edge of the World by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir out in April, and Monty Don's Japanese Gardens - with photographs by Derry Moore - in March.

    And from Bloomsbury, A Black Fox Running by Brian Carter, a 'lost classic' of nature writing first published in 1981, and described here as "remarkable".

Library book

 

    A while ago I posted a few of Harry Cory Wright's photographs from The Library of Trinity College Dublin, his pocket-sized portrait of that breathtaking building. Since then Typepad seems to have changed their settings and pictures here are appearing far less sharp than they should be, so I won't attempt to add to that gallery today, but I shall commend the book for its evocative images of age and venerability, learning and scholarship, craftsmanship and  continuity.

    In her introduction, Librarian and College Archivist Helen Shenton recalls her first impressions of the place:

    "I first stepped onto the balcony of the Long Room - frequently described as 'the most beautiful room in Ireland', and often called 'the most magnificent library in the world' - early one summer morning as the soft, dust-speckled sunbeams radiated diagonally across the room. Cleric and historian Gerald of Wales (1146-1223) described the Book of Kildare (an early medieval Gospel manuscript - now lost - that is believed to have been similar to our Book of Kells) as 'the result of the work, not of men, but of angels'. On my first visit to the Long Room, it felt as if such ethereal beings might gently float down the early morning shafts of sunlight [...] Looking down at the 200,000 volumes in the handsome, dark, oak bookcases in the soft morning light, I was profoundly moved by the beauty, the stillness, the history, the accumulation of knowledge..."

    Helen goes on to talk about visitors' reactions, from the tear in the eye, the expressions of awe, the lowering of voices, and the many comments, especially from younger people, on the books' scent - "the sweet note is attributable to furfural," she says, "the smell from ageing cellulose in paper; it is similar to the smell of almonds, which contain the same chemical."

    A working, living library still, it has featured in films such as Educating Rita, and The Professor and the Madman, and was George Lucas's inspiration for the Jedi Archive in Star Wars: Episode 2, but its atmosphere - though magnificently conveyed by Harry Cory Wright's pictures - is best sensed in person:

    "At night, or in the depths of one of those dark, dour November afternoons in Dublin when all colour seems to have drained from the world, the Long Room is as moving as it is in the soft light of early morning. When all the people have gone and the doors are closed, the eye is drawn through the gloaming, along the lines of busts, to the 'darkness visible' and to the palpable sense of the infinite."