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.

Tracy Chevalier - notes on process

    As promised, a few notes on Tracy Chevalier's writing process, as outlined in her recent Edinburgh Book Festival appearance:

    -    Tracy commented that her writing focuses on the senses, so if stuck on a scene she asks herself what her characters would see, smell or touch, and she goes on to imagine what that scene would look like if it were a film.

    -    When researching, she prefers to read books and take notes rather than resorting to Google for her facts (see the bibliography at the back of A Single Thread).

    -    She writes in notebooks then types up her draft every day or so, but the first pass is always done fully by hand and that relative slowness is a crucial part of the process; in addition, the crossings-out and movings-around on the page become the book's road map, she says. She edits on paper, too, printing a scene or chapter and working on the text by hand before correcting it digitally.

    -    As to stationery, she always tries to suit the notebook to the novel, but sometimes has to "make do" if her large collection can't furnish the perfect style. She can't work in cafes or other public places, preferring to sit on her sofa away from the distractions of the computer.

    -    On editing, "be ruthless" is Tracy's advice, for "editing is where most unpublished novelists fall down".

    -    How long does a book take her? She'll do six months' research before beginning to write, then she aims for around 1,000 words a day (her novels are typically about 90,000 words) but despite the initial work she often has to break off to check facts, and other writing commitments intervene, so 2 - 3 years in total is a fair estimation. Her next book is set in Venice in the 15th. and 21st. centuries and is about glass-making and beads; this is a big subject so will take longer, and no, she has not got any quicker over time and with practice. 

    -    Regarding subject matter for future books, while a place or situation may draw her, Tracy says she has to be patient "then something will click" and she sees "a flash" of what she could do with it. For example, Girl with a Pearl Earring grew from looking at Vermeer's painting and wondering "what did he do to her to make her look like that?", thus a portrait of a relationship took shape on the page.

A Single Thread

    Tracy Chevalier was in Edinburgh today to launch her new novel A Single Thread. Her Book Festival event was chaired by Clare Hunter, author of Threads of Life, and while the discussion naturally looped back often to embroidery - the book's main character Violet Speedwell is one of the 'broderers' of Winchester Cathedral - it covered much else besides, and the audience spent a happy hour learning about the writer's craft - in the widest sense.

    Asked about the novel's genesis, Tracy explained that she had always been fascinated by cathedrals and knew they would feature in a novel one day. On a visit to Winchester she discovered all the stories and associations for which its cathedral is best known, but then she came upon a display of ecclesiastical embroidery done by a group of volunteers between 1931 and 1936, and she realised she had her subject. Something about the seat cushions, kneelers and alms bags - made under the guiding hand of Louisa Pesel and all worked in wool on canvas - caught her imagination, and she decided to explore that world through her character Violet, one of the so-called surplus women, those from whom the terrible losses of the First World War had taken all prospect of marriage.

    Violet has left an overbearing mother in the family home in Southampton to try to make an independent life for herself. Working as a typist in an insurance office in Winchester, she lives in a boarding house, ekes out her meagre income, and is uncomfortably aware of the condescension and judgement - express or implied - to which the single woman is constantly subject. She comes upon the work of the broderers and on impulse she joins the group, learning the stitches from scratch, making friends, finding in her new interest an absorbing occupation and in the cathedral itself a place of refuge. 

    On the therapeutic aspects of needlework, Tracy spoke of her association with the charity Fine Cell Work and the ways in which stitching benefits the prisoners who take part in the scheme. As Miss Pesel says in the book, "When there is an upset, there is nothing like needlework to bring calm and focus," but in common with the fictional Violet, the inmates also find a sense of achievement, of having made their mark in the world through colour and texture and the creation of something beautiful and lasting: every good reason to pick up a needle. Asked whether anyone could learn how to stitch, while in the novel the skilful broderers prize evenness, Tracy spoke to the craft's inclusivity, making the point that it is often the very irregularity - the obvious handmade-ness - of handwork which gives it its character.

    I'll cover what Tracy had to say about her writing process in another post, but for now I'd urge you to get hold of a copy of A Single Thread (officially released on 5th. September) and hope you will enjoy the story of Violet, the embroiderers, and Winchester Cathedral as much as I did.

Friday reads

   

    "The sun was two fingers of the brink of the world when they rode out of Heytesbury, Laurence Haket, the lady Bernadine, Thomas, Will and Madlen. Drops of dew lay on every leaf and mist stood thick as milk in the hollows. Sheep's fleeces glew gold of the morning and the cattle stinted to graze and beheld the riders going by as if the days of Adam's kind were long gone and they hadn't never seen no man before. The riders went by hollow ways through dim woods where the birds sang loud as children achatter in the church, and by fields of ripening corn that hadn't been weeded a week, bright with red, yellow and blue blossoms. They came of their horses and led them on foot down the steep road into the dean of the Wylye, between still, sleeping towns without no smoke nor bells, and up a wild road on the far side onto high green downs, nearer to the sun, thick with bees and butterflies, where the grass grew so rich the horses trod without no sound. By mid-morning they came to the top of a hill that looked down on Mere, with its mighty castle, and beyond the town a great wold glimmered with the water of the Stour, and beyond that, blue and far, the downs of Dorset, so Thomas said."

    I'm reading To Calais, In Ordinary Time by James Meek, out soon and sure to get a lot of attention. It's set in England in 1348 and tells of a gentlewoman, a Scottish proctor (or representative of the clergy) and a young ploughman joining a company of archers on the road to Calais, while coming towards them is the qualm or plague, the Black Death to which half of the population of Northern Europe was to succumb. What is remarkable about the book is James Meek's use of language or idiom. I won't go into it here, but I will quote Hilary Mantel who says "fans of intelligent historical fiction will be enthralled by a story so original and so fully imagined. Meek show the era as alien, and doesn't falsify it by assimilating it to ours. But his characters are recognisably warm and human." It's an impressive piece.

    Anyone else reading something particularly good?

To be read - 1

 

    "London, 1321: In a small shop in Paternoster Row, three people are drawn together around the creation of a magnificent illuminated prayer book. Even though the commission seems to answer the aspirations of each one of them, their secrets, desires and ambitions threaten its completion. As each struggles to see the book come into being, it will change everything they have understood about their place in the world.

    Rich, deep, sensuous and full of life, Book of Colours is also, most movingly, a profoundly beautiful story about creativity and connection, and our instinctive need to understand our world and communicate with others through the pages of a book."

    Robyn Cadwallader is the author of The Anchoress (also on my TBR pile); you'll find her website here.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the winner

    News just in from the Borders Book Festival: this year's Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been awarded to Robin Robertson for The Long Take, written in both verse and prose and set in America after the Second World War.

    The judges said -

    “The Long Take recounts the inner journey of Canadian veteran Joe Walker as he travels from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco attempting to rebuild his life after living through the horrors of war in Europe. In poetry of the utmost beauty, Robin Robertson interweaves themes from the great age of black and white films, the destruction of communities as cities destroy the old to build the new, the horrors of McCarthyism and the terrible psychological wounds left by war.

    Robertson shows us things we’d rather not see and asks us to face things we’d rather not face. But with the pulsing narrative drive of classic film noir, the vision of a poet, and the craft of a novelist, The Long Take courageously and magnificently boosts the Walter Scott Prize into its next decade.”

    John Banville reviews the winning book here.

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).

Speaks volumes

    Away from the blog I recently recommended Tim Pears' West Country Trilogy to a discerning friend.

    He tells me that he found it so enthralling he read all three books back to back, something he has never before done with a series.

    I'm delighted to hear that but not at all surprised.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the shortlist

    

    The longlist for this the 10th year of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been reduced to a six-book shortlist:

 

A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey

After The Party by Cressida Connolly

The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

 

    Place your bets!

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction: the longlist

    Just announced, the longlist for this year's Walter Scott Prize, celebrating historical fiction published principally in the UK, Eire, and the Commonwealth in 2018:

Little by Edward Carey

A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey

After The Party by Cressida Connolly 

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan 

The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey 

Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry 

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller 

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje 

The Wanderers by Tim Pears 

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

All The Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

Tombland by C J Sansom 

    The shortlist will be released in April, and the prize will be awarded at the Borders Book Festival in June.

    I'm very pleased to see Tim Pears's The Wanderers there, the second part of his superb West Country Trilogy; if you're not already familiar with it, there are posts on the other two parts here and here.

    

                                                   ~~~~~

    Related to the above is a further set of books to recommend, and in this I've had a hand. A few months ago I was invited to be a member of the Prize Academy, and I was delighted to accept and in that capacity to put forward a list of titles meeting the prize criteria which I felt were worthy of association with it. From the Academy's submissions the following list has been compiled:

Love Is Blind by William Boyd 

The Prince Of Mirrors by Alan Robert Clark

The Making Of Martin Sparrow by Peter Cochrane 

So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernieres

All Among The Barley by Melissa Harrison 

The Hundred Wells Of Salaga by Ayesha Harruna Attah

Only Killers And Thieves by Paul Howarth 

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly

The Black Earth by Philip Kazan

The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson

Mad Blood Stirring by Simon Mayo 

As The Women Lay Dreaming by Donald S Murray 

Kintu by Jennifer Nansubaga Makumbi

The Angel’s Mark by S J Perry

A View Of The Empire At Sunset by Caryl Phillips

Painter To The King by Amy Sackville 

A Treachery Of Spies by Manda Scott

The Tristan Chord by Glenn Skwerer 

Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson

The Madonna Of The Mountains by Elise Valmorbida 

                                            ~~~~~

    By way of a small personal footnote, I've always known that my grandfather was a keen reader of and about Sir Walter Scott, and I have his very handsome copy of Lockhart's life of the author on my biography shelves. I learned recently, though, that Grandpa's enthusiasm extended to his reading the novels during the sermon at Brechin Cathedral where he was an elder and no doubt should have been engaging with the minister's words rather than Scott's, but such is the power of literature!

Once Upon A River

    I spoke yesterday about not wanting to break the spell cast by Diane Setterfield's Once Upon A River. We talk often about 'good books' and 'good reads', but there should perhaps be another category, one for those immersive reading experiences so pleasurable, so 'warm-inside-while-the-rain-pours-down', as to be enchanting. I have no snappy name for them, but I'm sure you'll know what I mean, and this book is one of them.

    As we happen to be in the midst of National Storytelling Week, what could be more fitting than a book about stories? Set on the River Thames between its source and Oxford, its centre is an inn, the Swan at Radcot, which offers in addition to the usual ale and cider a rich storytelling tradition perpetuated by both customers and staff. On the night of the winter solstice the Swan becomes the site of a strange story unique in the annals of the river on whose bank it sits: an injured stranger bursts in, holding in his arms the corpse of a drowned child, but hours later the dead girl returns to life. Who is she? Where has she come from? Is her revivification magic or miracle? "A body always tells a story," thinks Rita the wise local nurse, "but this child's corpse was a blank page."

    The book's story then flows on like the main stream of the river at its heart but its pull comes also in its tributaries, backwaters, eddies and undercurrents, for no matter its course there's not a word wasted here, not a scene that doesn't serve. The author is nimble on the page, supple and graceful in the paying out of the lines of her tale; her voice is even, her narrative smooth. Her telling encompasses characters to care about, a subtle sense of place and period, a clever melding of myth and folklore, science and fact, and her delivery is such that to hear this book read aloud  - in the manner of the worthies of the Swan themselves - would be an even richer pleasure, I think.

    Towards the end of the story the photographer Henry Daunt muses on the published collection of photographs of the Thames he has created: "inevitably the book fell short of its ambition." I don't know what ambition Diane Setterfield had for her novel but I can say there's no falling short here - she has written a book whose intricacies are to be savoured, one to revisit from time to time and live in for more of that 'warm-inside-while-the-rain-pours-down' enchantment. Don't miss it!

 

(And see also.)

The Redeemed

    

    Whatever the year has in store for me reading-wise, in terms of fiction it will be hard to find anything to match Tim Pears' The Redeemed. 

    The final part in his masterly West Country Trilogy builds on all the painstaking groundwork of the first two books. The Horseman set the scene, The Wanderers took young Leo away from the natural order and security of his Devon valley, now as the third part of the story begins it's wartime and he's at sea, his ship lying at anchor in the Firth of Forth; all hell is about to break loose. Back at home, Lottie Prideaux has grown up too, acquiring a degree of independence and humility as she begins her veterinary training and finds her place in a changing society. The two friends' paths have diverged and it is hard to see how they will ever cross again, but as the novel takes Leo and Lottie through the war and beyond, the lines of the epigraph (Isaiah, 43:1-2) point the way ahead.

    The brilliance of Tim Pears' writing is in the steadiness of its rhythm and the evenness of its tone; this gives the book an internal stillness - whether it's a battle or a pastoral scene that is being described - and an integrity which holds the reader throughout. His approach is always thoughtful, fastidious even, balanced; it looks effortless, so organic is the development of each scene, each episode, but it stems from a sure grasp of pace and pitch combined with an affinity for and a deft handling of the very considerable material covered.

    If you're looking for a masterclass in the novelist's art, read these books, but read them also for the deep pleasure of a solid story beautifully told, and a lyrical portrait of a lost age.

Just begun

 

    I've just begun The Binding by Bridget Collins, described by Tracy Chevalier as "a rich, gothic entertainment that explores what books have trapped in them and reminds us of the power of storytelling". It has started with great promise and such a clever premise: that books are bound to capture memories and contain things people wish to forget. In this short video, Bridget Collins talks about it and chooses some books which have inspired her, while this interview will tell you more.

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.

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.

Love is Blind

 

  A small observation before we get on, I bet William Boyd keeps a notebook in which he jots names he might use for characters because he's very strong in that department and there's a certain style to a Boyd name - it usually says a lot about the person who bears it.

    Anyway, Love is Blind, his new novel, is the story of Brodie Moncur, an expert piano tuner in the Edinburgh of the 1890s. Brodie is a pleasingly Boydian protagonist and a likely lad - bright, bold, keen to escape his domineering father and his featureless siblings who are under the paternal thumb, so when his boss at Channon & Co. piano manufacturers offers him a superior position at the Paris branch of the firm, Brodie is quick to accept.

    In Paris Brodie comes up with a grand scheme to raise the firm's profile: have a big name of the concert stage endorse the Channon piano. John Kilbarron, 'the Irish Liszt', is the man he secures, and it is Brodie's skill with the piano, adjusting the instrument to minute degrees in order to have it suit its player's touch, that makes this a winning combination.

    But then Brodie meets Lika, Kilbarron's Russian muse and mistress, and there's no saving him.

    What follows is an account of a curious love affair - I say 'curious', but really the clue is in the book's title, its subtitle ('The Rapture of Brodie Moncur'), and its two epigraphs, but while the reader is saying, "don't do it, Brodie, she's not worth ruining your life over!", the man is following his heart, and that's all there is to be said.

    What I particularly loved about the book is the musical content; the piano tuning aspect is fascinating (by the way, if you don't already know T.E. Carhart's marvellous The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, mentioned here and here, then do read it also); the running theme of the power of music to evoke an emotional and physical response - and Boyd dissects this, fascinatingly; the parallels between Brodie Moncur and both Frédéric Chopin and, on the literary front, Robert Louis Stevenson. Boyd is an exceptionally good storyteller and his extensive research furnishes the book in comprehensive and opulent manner (I'll let him off the couple of Edinburgh details he got wrong), and he's excellent at infusing the singular, personal, and particular with the essence of a period or a cultural ethos - his sense of the balance of 'flavours' is keen.

    In sum, this novel is a strong candidate for my books of the year list - on which general topic see this article by Alexander McCall Smith!

Transcription

   

    I needn't say much about Transcription because Kate Atkinson is a first class novelist and readers are safe in her hands. You won't find pedestrian, clunky, formulaic writing here, for all is precise and fitting; the narrative has pace and flows smoothly from 1981 to 1950, 1940 and back; the editing is tight, the tone is light - "Think of it as an adventure [...] A bit of a lark, something from Buchan or Erskine Childers [...] A Girls' Own adventure." - and the raw material is so professionally shaped and polished as to bring out the grain in all its beauty and complexity: therein lies the skill, hence the safe hands.

    Transcription is the story of Juliet Armstrong, recruited by the Security Service during the war, her job to transcribe recordings of incriminating conversations of Nazi sympathisers: "filaments in an evangelistic web of treachery." Asked to leave her typewriter and infiltrate that web, Juliet - whether spider or fly - puts herself at risk, but retribution is long in coming.

    I loved the book's humour, for besides the black comedy, Kate Atkinson has the Alan Bennett/Victoria Wood gift of colouring a character with a telling domestic detail or a wry observation. In addition, Juliet's very self-possession, her self-awareness, gives a certain detachment to her perception of and involvement in events, and it's that little 'distance' that makes room for comedic comment and lends a spaciousness to her story. There are some set-piece scenes or longer sections which I imagine the author had particular fun with, not least the post-war BBC Schools department which is a rich seam to mine (not surprisingly she lists Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices as a source). There's a wool shop cameo which reminded me of Wallace and Gromit's Wendolene's Wools, and her use of a flamingo (see the cover, above) is surely a nod to the surrealism of Alice's game of croquet.

    The first of the book's three epigraphs is Winston Churchill's 'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Bear that in mind as you read this superb novel.

The Poison Bed

    It is the early 1600s; James I is on the throne. At court, the king's favourite Robert Carr sees Frances Howard, ambitious wife of the Earl of Essex, and is smitten.

    "Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust."

    Those lines from Webster's The Duchess of Malfi are the epigraph to The Poison Bed by E.C. Fremantle, an intricately plotted, brilliantly realised novel, cleverly imagined but rooted in fact. It's the tale of a trial for murder, and with its dual narrators - Frances and Robert - its shifting focus makes for an intriguingly multi-angled look at a world of ruthless power play, strategic manoeuvring, and shameless manipulation.

    Frances's early betrothal to Essex had been arranged in order to mend an old rift between the two families, but as ''the Essex crowd" lose their influence at court having favoured Prince Henry over the king, the Howards plan to extricate her from the marriage so that she can be of more use to them through a new alliance. The orphaned son of minor Scottish gentry, Robert Carr is on the rise; favoured by the monarch, he is accruing enemies to match his growing status, but his passion for Frances is real, and their match is likely to raise him to even greater things, except that deep-rooted jealousies and spurned loyalties find Robert out of his depth, and when a man dies, the Howards discover they are no longer the unassailable force they believed themselves to be.

    There's an astute brain behind this chess game of a novel which sets a psychological thriller in conventional historical fiction territory. "There has long been speculation," says the author, "about what really happened when an insignificant man died at the tail end of summer, 1613, in a gloomy cell in the Tower of London [...] It was a scandal that rocked the Jacobean court and was one of the initial cracks that would eventually lead to the devastation of the Stuart monarchy [...] My novel has been a way to explore the depths of an intriguing event, blurred by time and made murky by corruption, through the prism of an era in which the truth has become equally elusive."

    Through that prism we are shown guile and charisma, self-possession and the lack of it, the vigorous tendrils of politics, at once supporting and suffocating, and the human puppets always at the mercy of their masters. It's a compelling combination and makes for an excellent read.

Books in brief: The Story Keeper

   

    I gave you a snippet of Anna Mazzola's The Story Keeper recently. It is a very enjoyable, well-researched book; its sense of place - Skye - is strong, its folkloric theme adds a pleasing plangent tone, its gothic/sensation leanings give it suitably muted colour, but I sensed a modern story struggling at times to sit comfortably within the corset of its historical (1857) setting. A good read, but set next to its obvious shelf-companions Sarah Moss's Night Waking and Karin Altenberg's Island of Wings, I'd say those two have the edge.

Quote of the day (2)

   

    "[...] English Passengers is a masterpiece, an achievement of such complexity, ingenuity and sheer narrative power that each time I reread it I am newly surprised: how can a writer have thus conjured up the wildly conflicting attitudes of another time, another place, with such persuasive force?"

    Penelope Lively on Matthew Kneale's superb English Passengers in Slightly Foxed issue 57, Spring 2018.