Cornflower Books

Leather on willow

    An article in today's Times lists the 10 best novels about cricket (the cricket world cup has started, in case you weren't aware). I happen to have read two of the books and warmly recommend them - whether you're interested in cricket or not - as their scope goes well beyond the game:

    Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn has a post here, while my thoughts on A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks, originally published elsewhere, are below.

    "A novel in five stories, each one linked to its fellows in ways which are subtle and surprising, seemingly coincidental but always telling, this is a book of imagination, delicacy and sensitivity. Perfectly pitched, profound, and beautifully rendered, it explores the possible lives, the paths and opportunities taken or missed, which cross-hatch human existence.

    The stories are set in different countries and at different times, their points of connection – or divergence – serving to underscore the book’s theme: whether individuals are actually distinguished, one from another, or are in fact all part of the same vast and interconnected drama, ‘the same joined-up life’.

    From a World War Two labour camp to a Victorian workhouse, a 1960s American singer/songwriter whose work pins a life in a few lyrics, and an Italian neuroscientist researching the physical basis of human consciousness, each character and personal history offers much to admire and much to ponder."

    Not included in the Times list but very deserving of a mention is of course L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between.

The Herb of Grace

    One of the many things I like about Elizabeth Goudge's books is her way with people. Yes, she's generous of heart and tends to see the best in them, but she's wise, too, in her understanding of human nature, shrewd on what moves us forward or holds us back, and so there are facets to her characters and nuances to the way they relate one to another that add a richness to her stories. She may be clear and open in spirit - although not blinkered hers is a fundamentally optimistic view of life, after all - but her essential straightforwardness when it comes to the patterns her people move through is nevertheless elegant and pleasing in its rightness and its detail.

    In The Herb of Grace we pick up the story of the Eliots (first seen in the delight that is The Bird in the Tree) just after the war. The focus now is on George and Nadine and their children - the matriarch Lucilla taking a step back after some well-intentioned meddling in their affairs - and the old pilgrims' inn, The Herb of Grace, they take on. Also centre stage is Lucilla's grandson David, damaged by his wartime experiences and sick at heart. Into their lives come John Adair, renowned portrait painter of his day, and his daughter Sally. They are refreshing arrivals, Adair a blunt, brisk, bear-like man with a twinkle in his eye, Sally unselfconscious, good natured, "a curiously individual person", but both settle with ease among the Eliots and bring their particular gifts to the inn and to the family.

    While there is a sub-plot which leans towards the melodramatic, the main thrust of the book is much less sensational: redemption, making good, coming into one's own - all typical Goudge tropes - and all charmingly played out, supported by the author's gentle mysticism, her eye for beauty in the natural world and the man-made, and her capacity for finding joy and taking pleasure in small things.

    "Balm" was the word with which I began my notes on the book, and that's as good as any to describe the quiet power of Miss Goudge's writing. I'm glad I have many more of her novels yet to read.

Judith Kerr

    Sad news today of the death of Judith Kerr, such an inspiring lady.

    So glad I got the chance to hear her speak.

Clear your diaries

    The Mirror and the Light, the last part of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy*, will be with us in March!

    *If you've yet to read Wolf Hall, the first of the series, there's a post on it here,  (and here's one on Fludd, another favourite Mantel novel).

Looking forward

   

    Niall Williams' last book, History of the Rain, was my novel of the year* in 2014 and a true delight; great news, then, that his next one, This Is Happiness, will be out in early September. Judging by the first two or three pages I'd say we're in for another treat, so let me just give you the gist of it:

    "Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish unaltered in a thousand years.

    For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now - just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity - the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

    As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

    Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community - its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs - and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthly and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world."

 

*Margaret Forster's My Life in Houses came top in non-fiction.

Sunday reads

   

    I'm reading the perfect book for a slow Sunday, Elizabeth Goudge's The Herb of Grace (there's a snippet here).

    After the darkness of Small Days and Nights (which was preceded by Kate Atkinson's Case Histories - a lot more humorous than Tishani Doshi's book but quite grim, nonetheless) I wanted an uplifting novel, and I have it here in the shape of the second volume of The Eliot Chronicles (I wrote about The Bird in the Tree, the first book in the series, last year).

    There is much to be said for writing which celebrates good things and good people, and the restorative effect of a 'nice' book is not to be underestimated.

Small Days and Nights

   

    "It's in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights."

     Tishani Doshi uses that line of James Salter's as the epigraph to her novel Small Days and Nights, and it's an apt choice for a novel which takes a macro lens to some big subjects. This is not a pretty book, in places not an easy one to read, but it is compelling in its dissection of the dis-easedness of life, the ways in which we are unequal to our fate or unwilling to own it.

    Set in contemporary India, it's the story of Grace who has returned to Pondicherry on the death of her mother. She inherits a house on the coast, and a sister she didn't know she had, for Lucy has Down's Syndrome and has been cared for in an institution all her life. With a failed marriage behind her, Grace takes on the house - despite its remote and dangerous location - and makes a home for Lucy and herself, but she is restless, aimless, finds it hard to adjust to her new reality, and as tensions rise in the surrounding area and within the blue-shuttered house by the sea itself, Grace learns about sacrifice, choice, and the accommodations we make which really matter.

    What's skilful here is the way in which not only Grace's past but her parents' history too forms a background for her present story. Memories, moments, longer recollections or discoveries are layered into the narrative like pieces of fabric stitched one on top of another, but this is no prissy embellishment, rather it's workmanlike appliqué using concise offcuts: misshapen, raw-edged, and wearing the stains of past use. In that sense it's a perfect medium for a study of family, for families typically aren't neat but unfinished, made from disparate materials which under tension can pull apart at the seams. Tishani Doshi understands the forces which strengthen and weaken relationships, the 'small days and nights' in which ties bind or break; she presents them here with candour and without apology in a concise and melancholy story which although it travels far and wide in scope and location ultimately comes home.

This and that

    Carolyne Larrington's interesting talk on The Poetic Edda makes reference to William Morris, Wagner, and Game of Thrones (as yet unread and unwatched by me - anyone here a fan?).

                                                ~~~~~

    Here's an article to add to our occasional writers' notebooks series of posts - Robert Macfarlane on his 'underground' stationery.

                                               ~~~~~

    Sir Tim Waterstone was a recent guest of Georgina Godwin's on Meet the Writers; listen to his interview here.