Cornflower Books

First impressions - The Story Keeper

   

 

    "[...] they reached two stone gate piers topped with griffins, marking the entrance to a long gravel drive. As they walked along it, the dark shape of the mansion rose out of the gloom before them, a wide, imposing grey-stone building, two flights of steps running up to the door. This must be the house she had seen from the boat, but at this distance it seemed not so much a house as a fortress: the turret appearing to swell into the darkness. There was something oddly familiar about it too, like a picture in a storybook she had read as a child."

    1857, the Isle of Skye. Audrey Hart has come to Lanerly Hall in answer to a newspaper advertisement: "Lady folklorist seeks assistant."

    Anna Mazzola's The Story Keeper sounds promising, don't you think?

First impressions - John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk

 

he village of Buckland. A boy and his mother run for their lives. Behind them a mob chants of witchcraft. Taking refuge among the trees of Buccla’s Wood, the mother opens her book and tells her son of an ancient Feast kept in secret down the generations. But as exquisite dishes rise from the page, the ground beneath them freezes. That winter, the boy’s mother dies.

     Taken to Buckland Manor, John Sandall is put to work in the house’s vast subterranean kitchens where his talent raises him from the scullery to the great house above. A complex dish served to King Charles brings him before Lady Lucretia Fremantle, the headstrong daughter of the house. He must tempt her from her fast. But both encounters will imperil him. As the Civil War begins and the New Order’s fanatical soldiers march, John and Lucretia are thrown together into a passionate struggle for survival. To keep all he holds most dear, John must realise his mother’s vision. He must serve the Saturnall Feast.

    

    An astounding work of historical fiction, John Saturnall's Feast  charts the course of one man's life from steaming kitchens to illicit bedchambers, through battlefields and ancient magical woods. Expertly weaving fact with myth, Lawrence Norfolk creates a rich, complex and mesmerising story of seventeenth-century life, love and war.

    "Imagine Patrick Suskind's Perfume, the turbulent England of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and magnificent, ancient dished created by Heston Blumenthal."

    I've known about this book - the first from Lawrence Norfolk in some twelve years - for a couple of months and have been greatly looking forward to reading it because of that very rich and potent subject matter outlined above. 

 

    My proof arrived wrapped in black tissue paper and most imaginatively accompanied by a bundle of cinnamon sticks, another one forming the package's seal (see top picture), a reference to the culinary elements of the novel as each part of the book is prefaced by a recipe from The Book of John Saturnall (1681).

    If you go the book's website, Let the Feast begin, you can find out about pre-publication events and more, but as to the text itself, after only a page or two I am enthralled; here's a short extract about the young John and his gift:

    "He looked up at the dark line of trees and breathed in slowly, smelling wild garlic, mulched leaves, a fox den somewhere and a sweeter scent. Fruit blossom, he thought. Then that small mystery was eclipsed by a larger one. A stranger scent hid among the blossom, sweet and resinous at once. Lilies, John thought, drawing the scent deeper. Lilies mixed with pitch.

    'What're you sniffing at now?' his mother asked with a smile.

    He smiled back. He had a demon in his throat, she said. A demon who knew every smell in Creation. Breathing in the sharp saps and sweet blossoms, he felt them anchor themselves within him, their invisible trails fanning out around him. But here was a smell his demon had never met before. He looked up at the trees of Buccla's Wood ...."

Edited to add: I have now read this quite marvellous book; my post on it is here.

First impressions - Alys, Always by Harriet Lane

 

    "Frances is a thirty-something sub-editor, an invisible production drone on the books pages of the Questioner. Her routine and colourless existence is disrupted one winter evening when she happens upon the aftermath of a car crash and hears the last words of the driver, Alys Kyte.

    When Alys's family makes contact in an attempt to find closure, Frances is given a tantalising glimpse of a very different world: one of privilege and possibility. The relationships she builds with the Kytes will have an impact on her own life, both professionally and personally, as Frances dares to wonder whether she might now become a player in her own right ..."

    That's the starting point for Harriet Lane's novel Alys, Always which has been described as a Barbara Vine-esque thriller and which is getting rave reviews (it will be out later this week). Its setting is literary London where Laurence Kyte, husband of the dead woman, is an acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author; through her contact with him Frances gains access to a gilded world, and with her increasing status comes recognition and prestigious commissions from her boss, literary editor Mary Pym. 

    Here's the opening passage:

    "It's shortly after six o'clock on a Sunday evening. I'm sure of the time because I've just listened to the headlines on the radio.

    Sleet spatters the windscreen. I'm driving through low countryside, following the occasional fingerpost toward the A road and London. My headlights rake the drizzle, passing their silver glow over gates and barns and hedgerows, the 'closed' signs hung in village shop windows, the blank muffled look of houses cloistered against the winter evening. Very few cars are out. Everyone is at  home, watching TV, making supper, doing the last bits of homework before school tomorrow.

    I've taken the right fork out of Imberly, past the white rectory with the stile. The road opens up briefly between wide exposed fields before it enters the forest. In summer, I always like this part of the drive: the sudden, almost aquatic chill of the green tunnel, the sense of shade and stillness. It makes me think of Milton's water nymph, combing her hair beneath the glassy cool translucent wave. But at this time of year, at this time of day, it's just another sort of darkness. Tree trunks flash by monotonously."

 

    I've read on - forty or so pages - and I'm hooked. Frances has now met Alys's family and seen what contact with them might lead to for her. The story is about to broaden out, I think, but this is very taut writing, and I get the sense that Harriet Lane has complete control of her material so that in the telling it's going to be very direct, no meandering, no digression, though the reader might be played like a fish! I'm impressed and intrigued and I wouldn't dream of putting the book down.

 

Edited to add: jacket design is by Carrie May.

First impressions - The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott

 

    Described as "Little Women meets Water for Elephants" and as "a novel about art and women, and personal fulfilment and the thrill of performing", Marina Endicott's The Little Shadows is a nicely chunky 500 pager which tells the story of "three sisters making their way in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. Setting off to make their fortune as a singing act after the untimely death of their father, the girls, Aurora, Clover and Belle, are overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama.

    "The girls begin with little besides youth and hope but evolve into artists as they navigate their way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary characters - charming charlatans, unpredictable eccentrics, and some who seem ordinary but have magical gifts.

"Marina Endicott lures us onto the brightly lit stage and into the little shadows that lurk behind the curtain, and reveals how the art of vaudeville - in all its variety, madness, melodrama, hilarity and sorrow - echoes the art of life itself."

    I haven't read Marina Endicott's earlier novel Good to a Fault which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, but I've certainly read very good things about it, so I was keen to see her new book which will be out in the UK early next month; here's how it  begins:

    " 'Keep moving,' Mama told them. 'You will only be cold if you are slow, and we must get on. He won't wait.'

    So they went quickly over the half-frozen field, in gritty snow that crunched underfoot but stung on their cheeks, and rubbed like sand between their hats and collars. Three girls in a row behind one round-bundled woman, who bent to the wind and made good headway on short, flicking legs. Aurora slid between snowbursts, smooth-sailing as a swan over a white lake. Bella was the smallest, hurrying to warm her hand by tucking it into Mama's pocket; Clover behind them, slowest and least desirous of their destination.

    Everything in the little town was whirling and bright, late-afternoon whiteness unusual here where it did not snow deeply, being too far west into desert. But they could see through the squall the brick building of the Empress Theatre, and the black frame around its door, and the white placard tacked up on the door:

    Cleveland's Star Union Vaudeville

    And now they could hear a plink-plink-plink timpani of notes with depth removed by distance, and a soaring, scooping voice doing arpeggios. Aurora felt her own voicebox contracting in time, one octave up, tenor to soprano, reaching and then cascading down..."

    So the girls audition for Mr. Cleveland, and Marina Endicott introduces her characters in a vivid scene of backstage nerves, hopes and superstitions as they take their turn amidst a motley bunch of performers. There are the has-beens, the troupers, those on the up, the ones still doggedly touring the circuit just to make ends meet, and into this world of greasepaint and variety acts, silver-shelled footlights and dingy dressing-rooms come the three young girls. It's a promising beginning - a rich, warm, busy scene - and I look forward to reading on.

First impressions - Diving Belles by Lucy Wood

 

    Our second book in the 'First impressions' series of posts is a collection of short stories: Diving Belles by Lucy Wood, a "luminous, startling and utterly spellbinding debut".

    "Along Cornwall's ancient coast, the flotsam and jetsam of the past becomes caught in the cross-currents of the present and, from time to time, a certain kind of magic can float to the surface ...

    Straying husbands lured into the sea can be fetched back, for a fee. Magpies whisper to lonely drivers late at night. Trees can make wishes come true - provided you know how to wish properly first. Houses creak, fill with water and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A teenager's growing pains are sometimes even bigger than him. And, on a windy beach, a small boy and his grandmother keep despair at bay with an old white door.

    In these stories, Cornish folklore slips into everyday life. Hopes, regrets and memories are entangled with catfish, wreckers' lamps, standing stones and baying hounds, and relationships wax and wane in the glow of a moonlit sea."

    I've read several stories to get a feel for the book, firstly Diving Belles itself, in which a woman goes to great lengths - or rather, depths - to be re-united with her husband; then Notes from the House Spirits, which shows that a home is far more than just four walls; and then Of Mothers and Little People which includes the great line "You have always believed in fate, picturing it as a fairy godmother labouring over a huge timetable".

    These and others transpose traditional myth and legend to a contemporary setting, giving an effect as of curiously beguiling dislocation, a type of cultural mis-step or syncopation, original and intriguing. Here is a voice which catches your attention; it's one of subtle detachment but distinctive emphasis, and though I'd intended to read only a story or two and leave the rest for later, I'm minded now to carry on and finish the book today - it's matter-of-fact other-worldliness has quite drawn me in.

       

 

One last thing, I must mention the lovely jacket, designed by Holly Macdonald. 

 

 

Edited to add: you can read one of the stories from the collection here.

First impressions - The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall

 

    Although I often write briefly here about books which have just arrived to join the Himalayan tbr piles, those are usually very short introductions to flag up what's new, and rarely will I have actually begun to read them. While that's fine as far as it goes, I'm conscious that it might be preferable to set down not only the bare bones of the story and a line or two from a review or a puff from the cover, but also some idea of what the book is like.

    I thought I'd start that today with the most recent arrival, giving you some impressions gleaned from the first chapter.

    The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall*:

    The gist - "He doesn't look like a tramp, yet he lives on a roundabout in a caravan and survives on the leftovers from a nearby motorway service station. He calls himself Quinn, the name of a boy in a world-famous series of children's books, but he's nearer retirement than childhood. What he hopes no one will discover is that he's the real Quinn, immortalised as a child by his mother in her entrancing tales about a little boy's adventures with his triplet sisters. It is this inheritance he has successfully run away from - until now. When Quinn's reclusive existence is invaded, he is forced to face his past, and the uncomfortable truths and secrets it contains about himself, his sisters and, most of all, his mother."

    That's a strong-sounding background; shades of House of Silence?

    The opening passage - "I exist in the eye of the storm, the calm in the centre of a perpetual hurricane of cars and lorries heading for the M6, the north and Scotland, or south to Penzance and Land's End. I sometimes wonder if they don't go on the motorway at all, that I hear the same vehicles circling endlessly, a kind of multiple Flying Dutchman, doomed to travel for ever. I don't regret for one minute that I am no longer one of them.

    "I call my caravan Dunromin, in the solid tradition of all those semi-detached streets that form the vertebrae of the country, because that's exatcly what I've done. Stopped roaming. I've anchored myself in the middle of one of the few patches of land where no one goes, among well-established birches, ashes, sycamores, surrounded myself with nettles and claimed sanctuary...."

    The first chapter is an intriguing beginning in which Quinn Smith is surprised early one morning by the arrival on his roundabout of Lorna Steadman, a junior reporter for a local newspaper. She's there to write an article for a series on unususal people and has heard about this man who apparently used to be a pilot and now lives an unconventional existence, without money, close to a motorway service station, but no one knows Quinn's true identity, and when Lorna finds in his caravan a very familiar picture, one which almost every child in the land would recognise from the bestselling children's book The Triplets and Quinn, her subject claims it's a print he found in a bin and took because he liked it - in fact it's the original ... "It's delicately drawn, washed with watercolour, a nostalgic image of childhood. There's a signature in the bottom right corner: Larissa Smith."

    With references and flashbacks to Quinn's former life with his mother and sisters in contrast to his solitary, scavenging present and now this intrusion from a well-meaning stranger, and all of it making for a promising beginning, am I inclined to read on? Yes, I am! 

 

*I haven't read any of Clare's books, though she is very well known for the Booker-shortlisted Astonishing Splashes Of Colour in particular.

By the way, cover illustration is by Tom Berry.