Cornflower Books

Now, where were we?

    Bit of an unplanned absence there - I was away for a few days (including a second literary pilgrimage here), and recent reads haven't felt terribly post-worthy, so the blog has been becalmed, but let's see if we can get some wind back in the sails.

    I popped into Topping & Co. yesterday to buy Andrew Whitley's book on sourdough (having made a loaf, following instructions in a general cookbook, which would not have looked out of place in the Ashmolean's Last Supper in Pompeii exhibit), and I picked up a copy of 4th Estate's free booklet The World of Wolf Hall: a reading guide to Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, to prime us for The Mirror and the Light (out in March and a wrist-breaking 864 pages, apparently). 

    A browse round Blackwell's Broad Street shop when I was in the south resulted in a couple of additions to my Christmas wish list: DJ Taylor's Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 and Christina Hardyment's Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings, meanwhile the Persephone Biannually arrived and caused the placing of an order: a DE Stevenson, Stella Martin Currey's One Woman's Year (which I shall keep for January), and Milton Place by Elisabeth de Waal which has started very promisingly. 

    Elsewhere in the family, daughters have been reading Oscar Wilde and Donna Tartt, and Mr. C. is deep in the Mick Herron canon and promises a post "soon". It was Adèle who put him on to MH, and the baton has been duly passed to the Hussar who sped through the Jackson Lamb series in no time. Incidentally, I sent him this picture of the George Macdonald Fraser novels taken in Toppings, 

saying these shelves ought to have a warning affixed: "reads these books at your peril - a career in the military awaits". He replied, "excellent preparation for a life of adventure!"; he read them as a teenager and has ended up in the modern incarnation of Flashman's regiment, which says something, does it not, about the power of literature!

    Anyway, I'm glad to be back and I hope you are all well and thriving and finding good things to read.

This is Happiness

    " 'Noe,' he said, and took a theatrical breath, 'this is happiness.'

    I gave him back the look you give those a few shillings short of a pound [...] but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

    I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.

    'This is happiness,' he affirmed once more, pushing off and gasp-pedalling the uphill away from further enquiry.' "

    Niall Williams' History of the Rain was my novel of the year in 2014, so I greeted the news of his next book anticipating fresh delights. That faith was well-founded.

    This is Happiness takes us back to the Irish village of Faha, County Clare - with a nod in passing to the Swains of History of the Rain - and tells a bittersweet tale of love and loss, of hope and expectation, of growing up, and looking back. "Once standing," we are told, "any decent story has a life of its own," so settle in with this one and let it take you where it will, for such is the author's mastery of his medium that his narrative is like free-wheeling down a country lane - who knows where that gateway goes or that track on the left leads, but come along for the ride and explore anyway and it's a grand time you'll have, the road taking you round and back eventually, advancing as it digresses or diverges, and all the while there's magic in the moment and the movement, rhythm carrying the reader, joy in the lilt, the poetry, the sheer 'rightness' of the words. 

    That's the manner of the telling; its matter is Noe (Noel) Crowe looking back over sixty years to the time when as a young man and a lapsed seminarian he came to live with his grandparents in Faha. With electricity not yet in the village, the Fahaens were "not only behind the times [...] but outside the times altogether," and so the eventual arrival of power would be transformative in many ways. But ahead of cabling and connectivity comes Christy McMahon, to lodge with Noe and his grandparents, bringing an agenda of his own far beyond the practical matter of establishing electrical infrastructure, and it's in the hoped-for resolution of a story from Christy's past that the impressionable Noe, while seeking his own path, becomes involved with Christy's destiny.

    As the older, wiser Noe reflects, "[Christy] was a chronic optimist and a pathologic romantic. That he added to this an old man's affliction of sentiment, I can't blame him. We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I'm guarding no more," and it's in this open-hearted fashion that Noe (and Niall) - tells his tale. Nostalgic, philosophical, generous of spirit, This is Happiness speaks to our own stories and how we tell them, reminding us in its gentle way that "you can turn a corner and find your life waiting there for you, and if you walked past it, it would come after and keep tapping you on the shoulder."

    Warm and wise, winding and wistful, this book - like its predecessor - will win your heart.

I popped back ...

    ... to Topping & Company this morning, and with fewer customers than on Sunday there was more space to browse (and have coffee by the window in 'Fiction', should you choose). 

    The range of the stock is astonishingly large and good so choosing is hard, but I came away with these two.