Interview with a new blogger (and happy birthday me)

On 10th April 2007, Stuck-in-a-Book was launched... I don't know whether or not I thought I'd still be blogging six years later, I hadn't really thought about it, but I certainly hadn't imagined that I'd meet so many wonderful people (online and offline) or have such fun.  Thank you for making my first six years so lovely!

I've done a few retrospectives, or thanking posts, at various anniversaries - so I'll do something a bit different today.  It seems appropriate, on a blog birthday of a longstanding blog (six years feels very longstanding in the blogosphere!) to welcome the recent arrival of another beautiful baby blog.  Also, although this is far from a unique-to-me quality, I hope that one of the dominant characteristics of Stuck-in-a-Book is an encouragement of community, and a celebration of other bloggers.  With that in mind, I have interviewed a new blogger - Washington Wife.

Washington Wife is one of my very dearest friends, and I'm thrilled that she has entered the blogging world.   Hers is not a book blog, but she loves books about as much as I do, so I'd be surprised if they don't make an appearance now and then.  Her reasons for starting blogging are below, so I shan't explain them for her.  (And, because she is a journalist, she is keeping herself anonymous on her blog - I will have to work hard to remember not to include her real name, and shall refer to her as Washington Wife, or WW.  In the interview below, I am ST - you can decide for yourself whether it's short for Stuck-in-a-Book or Simon Thomas.)  Oh, and do, of course, check out her blog and say hello - it's really brilliant so far, and I'm not just saying that as a close friend!

ST: So, what made you decide to start blogging, huh? HUH?


WW: Well, at the beginning of February, my husband got a job in Washington D.C, and we've just (at the end of March) moved there from Paris, where we've both spent three years as journalists. I'm sure there are innumerable 'new to the US' and even 'new to Washington' blogs (there were certainly lots of 'Brits abroad' ones in France) but I thought mine would be an interesting viewpoint given I'm comparing the US not only to my native land, the UK, but also my adopted homeland for the last three years, France.

I think it was also a combination of my wanting to record how I felt about living in such a talked-about country, about which everyone has an opinion, and the fact that it was a lot easier than sending dozens of separate emails to all the people who would want to know said thoughts. I was a bit scared to start though because I'm not always very good at seeing projects through... but I'm really enjoying it so far!

ST: What are your first impressions of living in America?

WW: Well - you'll have to look at my blog ;) Mainly though, everyone really is helpful and friendly (compared to Paris, where I was living before!) and everything is bigger. The roads are wider, the buildings are taller, the portions are larger, the billboards are higher, the packets in the supermarket are heavier... Paris, and even London, will feel miniature in comparison!

ST: Anything super-amazing-exciting happened to you yet?  Just a question out of the BLUE, not something I know about already, obvs.

WW: Well it's funny you should mention... but (again, see my blog for full account!) on Easter Sunday, my husband and I decided to try a little church not too far from our new flat in downtown D.C. The church is opposite the White House and the website said it has a pew reserved for the President. We thought that was rather sweet...but we arrived to find the whole building sealed off, secret service everywhere and the First Family on the way there! Amazingly, we managed to get in for the service, and, sitting in the gallery, had a wonderful view of Barack Obama, Michelle and the two girls. We even got within a foot of them when we went up to communion. Not bad for our first week in D.C!

ST: Do you have any thoughts about the direction in which you'd like your blog to go?

WW: Well, as I said, I was a bit nervous about beginning as I'm rather feeling the pressure to continue, but I keep finding, as I wend my merry and very uncertain way around Washington, that new ideas and thoughts for blogging keep occurring to me. I think it's made me a slightly better observer, so that's a positive thing I'd like to continue. I think eventually it may have to stop being about my perspective as a 'newcomer' (I don't know when you stop being one of those though - in English country villages, I think it takes about half a century) and be more about the city itself and - hopefully - the more unusual, off the beaten track things I'm discovering (if I do!) One thing I don't want it to be about is work - it's nice to do something separate from journalism!

ST: Could you pick one thing you miss about England, one thing you miss about France, and one thing you're loving about America?

WW: Hmmm... one thing in each category is difficult! I think I most miss English understatement and sarcasm (I missed it in France too!), because here everyone is very sincere and a bit earnest and sometimes I just long for a little putdown or self-mockery.

I rather miss the Paris metro - it smelt of wee, but it was very efficient and there was a train every 3 minutes most of the time. The other day here I had to wait 10 minutes for a metro train, and it took a bus I was on over an HOUR to get from downtown to the National Cathedral, a distance of about four miles, because of the ridiculous amount of traffic and lack of public transport options.

But one thing I am really enjoying about America is how convenient everything is (apart from public transport!) Everything's open all the time, the customer service people really do attempt to help you, the roads are easy to cross... everything is designed to make your life a little bit better. And that is refreshing.

ST: And, since Stuck-in-a-Book is a book blog, cards on the table: what are the best English novel, French novel, and American novel?

WW: Ooooh. Toughie. Best French and American novels are hard because I'm woefully under-read in those categories, and English because there are too many to choose from. I'd say that the novel that had me most gripped at a young age, and I always love re-reading, is Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. Stylistically, it might not be Middlemarch, but the plot is superb and the narrator compelling.

Regarding French novels, can I cheat? It's not really a novel, but when I was a child, my Godmother gave me one copy of Antoine de Saint Exupéry's book Le Petit Prince in French, and another in English. I loved the English version at the time, but, later on, was doubly delighted by its whimsy in French. But it's definitely not just for children!

As for American novels, although I loved The Great Gatsby and Lolita, and Little Women will always remain one of my favourite children's books (I especially remember my childish British puzzlement at some of the quaint American words and traditions!) I might have to pick one I know Simon hates... The Catcher in the Rye. It had a real effect on my writing style for a while after I read it - not necessarily for the better! - and Holden Caulfield continued to intrigue me long after I put the book down. But I also loved The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

ST: Now choose one English author, one French author, and one American author that you're looking forward to trying out.

WW: Now this is easier! My 'to be read' list is huge.

In French, I always meant to try out Michel Houllebecq, in translation OR in the original... I just never got round to it. So I'd probably start with Les Particules Elémentaires (or Atomized, in English), which won several international awards.

As for American authors, there are so many! I have joined the local library here and browsing the shelves made me realise just how much I have to catch up on... For starters, I borrowed one Anne Tyler (Digging to America) and one Gore Vidal (appropriately enough, Washington, D.C  - I didn't realise he'd written a series of historical novels.) But also keen to start reading more Philip Roth (only ever read Portnoy's Complaint!) and Jonathan Franzen.

And an English author I don't yet know... Well, my policy when trying to cut down the number of books for shipping over here was mainly to bring ones I hadn't yet read. So there are plenty to choose from! Including A House and Its Head by Ivy Compton Burnett, an author much recommended by a certain friend who's always StuckInABook. So I'm hoping to start enjoying that one soon. Another book I'm really excited about - and this is cheating a bit - is by an author I already know and deeply love, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Apparently, the fifth volume in her series The Cazalets is coming out in the autumn; I can't wait!

ST: And the question I ask everyone - what are you reading at the moment?

WW: Well, slightly naughtily, given everything I wrote above, I'm reading an author who's neither French, nor English, nor yet American, but Israeli. It's a book I borrowed from the library near our new flat, called The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, by Shani Boianjiu, and it's about three Israeli girls who are conscripted into the army, and how they get on. Given that for much of the time, they are very bored, the book itself is quite a page turner, and very strangely and beautifully written. It certainly gives you an insight into the lives of Israeli teenagers.

The photo, by the way, shows the ONLY books we currently have on our new living room bookshelf (The People of Forever Are Not Afraid being upstairs!) This state of affairs won't last, once all our worldly goods arrive by ship from Paris via Bristol via New York City... I thought Simon would be pleased to note the stack of OUP Very Short Introductions as well... on offer in W.H Smith on the rue de Rivoli...

Innocent cat grabbed in garden

Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook will have seen these already, but I thought I'd share some pictures of me playing with Sherpa when I went home for Easter...  My hair, incidentally, is much shorter now.  I think Sherpy's is the same length.  (Photos taken by my brother Colin.  I deleted the ones he took of his feet.)

Sherpa 'runs into my arms'.

HUGS!

Revenge of the cat...

 

"I claim this land for cats!"

  

She's looking a wee bit drunken in this pic...
but I reckon it's just happiness :)
That's certainly what's lighting up my silly face!

I was going to write a film review tonight.  You got cat photos instead.  Who's to say which is better?  (Spoiler alert: you'll probably get the film review soon, too.)

Some recent books...

I thought I'd do a little round-up of various books that I've bought and been given, because... well, why not?  You usually have something fun to say about them.

That Sweet City: Visions of Oxford - John Elinger and Katherine Shock
Kathy Shock is Our Vicar's Wife's dear friend from school days, and also lives in Oxford (my experience of Oxford for the first 18 years of my life was chiefly visiting Kathy and her family) - she is also a brilliant artist, and sent me a copy of That Sweet City.  It has poems by John Elinger and illustrations by Kathy (one of which you see in the photo above) - I'll write more about it in due course.

Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm
Continuing the Oxford them - so many people have told me that I must read this (and been rather outraged when they discover that I haven't) that I'd better snap up this Penguin edition when I saw it.

The Teleportation Accident - Ned Beauman
I loved his first novel Boxer, Beetle (even though I didn't expect to at all), so I was excited to receive the paperback edition of this Booker-longlisted second novel.  And isn't it a fantastic cover? Thanks, Sceptre!

The Secrets of Bredon Hill - Fred Archer
I had to bring this home, when I saw it in a Headington charity shop, since it's about the year 1900 in Aston-under-Hill - which is the village in Worcestershire where I went to Bredon Hill Middle School for three years.  Quite a curious coincidence to find this in Oxford...

The Crack in the Teacup - Joan Bodger
When I wrote about Bodger's brilliant account of touring literary sites in England, How The Heather Looks, the blogger at Leaves and Pages (sorry, can't find your real name, I feel bad about that) recommended that I try Bodger's autobiography - and I immediately ordered a copy.

C.S. Lewis: A Life - Alister McGrath
When Sophie at Hodder offered me a copy of a new C.S. Lewis and mentioned that she'd found my review of Lewis's beautiful book A Grief Observed, then I couldn't say no, could I?  I've seen Shadowlands, but I've never actually read a biography or autobiography of Lewis, some I'm excited to get my teeth into this one.

Any comments on any of these very welcome!  What is the latest book you've bought?

Song for a Sunday

A band I'm fond of, Texas, have come back with a new song I can't stop listening to - The Conversation:

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy weekend, everyone.  It's finally starting to look a bit sunnier and - dare I say it - a touch less freezing here, so I'll be spending my Saturday... at work.  Oh well, it'll be nice to say hello to Bodleian people, and then I'm off to spend Saturday evening at my friend's house, watching The Voice.  Very classy, me.  You can treat yourself better, by reading a weekend miscellany.

1.) The blog post - check out Hayley's response to my recent On Not Knowing Art post, entitled On Knowing Art.

2.) The book - came courtesy of lovely Folio books, and is a beautiful copy of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque - which I've been intending to read for ages.  Has anyone read it? (Follow that link to see the details of the Folio edition I was kindly sent.)

3.) The link - is silly. It just is silly. But I love it. Click here to ask one of nature's great questions.

Alberto Manguel on.... Reading Aloud

The Library of the Palais Lanckoronski, Vienna (1881) - Rudolph von Alt

"The humanist teacher Battista Guarino, son of the celebrated humanist Guarino Veronese, insisted that readers should not peruse the page silently "or mumble under their breath, for it so often happens that someone who can't hear himself will skip over numerous verses as though he were something else.  Reading out loud is of no small benefit to the understanding, since of course what sounds like a voice from outside makes our ears spur the mind sharply to attention."  According to Guarino, uttering the words even helps the reader's digestion, because it "increases heat and thins the blood, clean out all the veins and opens the arteries, and allows no unnecessary moisture to stand motionless in those vessels which take in and digest food."  Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine."

--- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p.179

Leaves in the Wind - 'Alpha of the Plough'

Leticia gave me the very best kind of recommendation earlier in 2013, on this post - a recommendation for a book which I already owned, and was keen to read.  Perfect!  The book was Leaves in the Wind (1918), the author was 'Alpha of the Plough'.  Not, as you may imagine, the author's real name.  Alpha is, in fact, A.G. Gardiner (not E.V. Knox, as I thought at one point) - who chose the name when writing for The Star, as several contributors were named after stars. What a serendipitous recommendation, seeing as I'd bought the book out of (a) curiosity and (b) frustration at the lack of decent books in Dorchester's charity shops.  And I ended up doing rather well.

It's that variety of gem which doesn't really exist any more (and how many times have I lamented its demise in my posts here!) - the personal essay.  All sorts of wonderful people wrote them, from Rose Macaulay to J.B. Priestley, and there seemed to be no lack of audience for them in the first half of the 20th century - even (maybe especially) during the First World War.

Gardiner covers a great number of jovial topics - from his companions of a bus to giving up tobacco, from smiling in the mirror to famous conversationalists - but there is also a hefty portion of the book given over to soldiers and war.  Difficult to avoid during wartime, and perhaps it is only to the 21st-century reader that the combination of the frivolous and fatal seems incongruous.  Gardiner was nearly 50 when the First World War began, and did not see active service in it - but he is a kind, insightful observer of soldiers, blinded neither by patriotism nor cynicism:

A dozen youths march, two by two, on to the "up" platform.  They are in civilian dress, but behind them walks a sergeant who ejaculates "left - left - left" like the flick of a whip.  They are the latest trickle from this countryside to the great whirlpool, most of them mere boys.  They have the self-consciousness of obscure country youths who have suddenly been thrust into the public eye and are aware that all glances are turned critically upon their awkward movements.  They shamble along with a grotesque caricature of a dare-devil swagger, and laugh loud and vacantly to show how much they are at ease with themselves and the world.  It is hollow gaiety and suggests the animation of a trout with a hook in its throat.

A central thread of Leaves in the Wind is humanity in the midst of war - the minutiae amongst the vast and awful.  The collection would be worth hunting down for that alone.  But I don't want to give the wrong impression of Gardiner's tone - because Leaves in the Wind is very often an amusing book too, and wanders onto the sorts of topics in which A.A. Milne would have delighted in his pre-war sketch writing days.  Such as gentlemen's fashion:

I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not mean the over-dressed man:  he is an offence).  I would be well-dressed myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way.  Like Squire Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion.  I find that with rare exceptions I dislike new fashions.  They disturb my tranquillity.  They give me a nasty jolt.  I suspect that the explanation is that beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old grass-grown turnpikes of habit.

Quite frankly, I adore the idea of calling someone 'an offence', and will be putting it into practice asap.

This has been a speedy overview of a book which, though slim, is very varied - and, like almost all collections of personal essays, covers so many topics that an exhaustive review would be impossible, unless it was almost as long as the book.  Gardiner proves himself, in Leaves in the Wind, to have an impressive range of tone - from funny to solemn, and (more impressive still) sometimes both at once.

Thanks, Leticia, for pushing this to the top of my tbr pile - I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for any more furrows ploughed by this particular author.

Penguin Bloggers' Night

I love an event for bloggers - always wonderful to see friends old and new - and was delighted when Lija emailed to invite me to the third annual Penguin Bloggers' Night.  I am a veteran of all three, as were several of the other bloggers there, and hopefully I'll be able to attend more in the future.

Candid snap of Polly, Simon, and Kim... :)

This wasn't just put on for us to hobnob with other bloggers - although it was fantastic to see friends like Simon S (Savidge Reads, Hayley (Desperate Reader), Annabel (Gaskella), Sakura (Chasing Bawa), Kim (Reading Matters), Polly (the erstwhile Novel Insights), David (Follow The Thread) and doubtless others whom I've forgotten right now.  It was lovely to meet Rachael aka @FlossieTeacake. Also in attendance, the primary purpose of the extravaganza, were various authors with forthcoming books.  Indeed, with my crib sheet to hand, I can tell you that we saw Catherine O'Flynn, Joanna Rossiter, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Rhidian Brook, Bernadine Evaristo, Alicia Foster, and Jonathan Coe.

All the authors read excerpts from their books, and were introduced by pieces of music (of their choosing) played energetically by the real-live-pianist.  Very classy, Penguin, very classy.  There are too many to talk about all of them, so I'll just pick out a few.

The one which really grabbed me was Alicia Foster's reading from Warpaint - a novel set in 1942, telling the war from the perspective of various women artists.  It sounds like a new and interesting angle on a much-described period, and I went home clutching a copy.

The excerpt from Joanna Rossiter's The Sea Change made it very obvious that she's a product of a creative writing MA, but that's no bad thing if one is in the mood for that sort of thing - very poetic, very imagery-driven, and possibly very brilliant.  Difficult to tell from a short excerpt.

Jonathan Coe, mid-reading

I'd only come across two of the authors in attendance, and one of those was Jonathan Coe.  I have to admit that I haven't read anything by him, but have The Rain Before It Falls on my bookshelf. Well, I did have his new one, Expo 58, in my hands until I heard his excerpt... it was basically all about toilets.  I have a big sense of humour deficiency when it comes to toilet humour (in the literal and figurative senses), so passed my copy on to Polly immediately.  Sorry, Jonathan.  I'll still read The Rain Before It Falls, especially since it's apparently inspired by Rosamond Lehmann.

Whilst catching-up with various bloggers of long-standing, I was intrigued to see the emergence of the vlogger.  Someone at Penguin whispered to me "We don't really know what they are!" when she mentioned that quite a few vloggers were dotted around the room.  They weren't difficult to spot; they were the young women with striking hair or make-up, making those of us who keep determinedly hidden by pages of text and pictures (rather than video) look rather... bookish, shall we say?  I felt like a member of a family folk band might feel, when encountering Chuck Berry.

"I don't know much about book vloggers," said I to the Penguin lady, "but there is one I watch - Sanne at booksandquills."  And, while walking to my seat, I happened to walk straight past her.  I felt - believe it or not - a little starstruck.  I've made friends with at least 50 people from blogs and online book discussion, and feel like book bloggers are my kindred souls, rather than deities (and I think my readers feel the same about me) - but Sanne felt a little bit like a celebrity to me.  Maybe it's that whole thing about seeing the person on the screen?

Sanne is filming on the left; Lija from Penguin is on stage.

I went and said hello to Sanne, and she gamely pretended to know who I was, while I probably babbled away too much.  She asked me to take a couple of photos with her very fancy camera, which I completely messed up, and we parted ways.  It was fun to chat about bookish gatherings in general, and it was nice to meet someone from the new generation of bibliophiles - I watch quite a few vloggers and Youtube comedians, but she is the only book blogger I watch.  (Our taste in books isn't at all similar, although she did talk about Three Men in a Boat a while ago, which I recommend watching if you'd like to try out a vlogger - here.)  The audience is different, and the style is different, but the love of books is the same.

This has turned from a post about Penguin's event into musings on vloggers!  Maybe that will come another day - maybe a book blogger will turn their hand to vlogging? - but for now, thank you Penguin for inviting me and putting on a fun and interesting night, thank you Foyles for hosting so well, and thank you authors for writing and not being unnerved by speaking to those internet types.

Q's Legacy - Helene Hanff

Amongst those of us who write or read book blogs, there are two varieties: those who love Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, and those who have yet to read it.  In case you have yet to have that pleasure, it's the (true) letters between Hanff in America and Frank Doel, who worked in a London bookshop.  It's charming and bookish, and a slightly can't-believe-how-stereotypical-they're-being encounter between brash American and restrained Brit.  I've bought a few Hanff books since I read 84, Charing Cross Road (and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, published together) eight or so years ago, but the first I've read was Q's Legacy (1985) on the train home to Somerset.  And it was fab.

For some reason, I had believed that Q's Legacy was Hanff's first book, and settled down to it for that reason.  I was, at it turns out, wrong - most of this book is about the writing, success, and aftermath of 84, Charing Cross Road - but before I get to that, I'll address the title.  You might, or might not, know that 'Q' is the author, essayist, poet, and anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch (which rhymes with pooch).  I believe 'Q' dates from the time when writers in periodicals, particularly Punch, appeared under initials (hence A.A. Milne being known as AAM for some of his publications) - but Arthur Quiller-Couch could get by with just 'Q'.  Although he pops up quite a lot in biographies I've read about other people, the only work I've read by Q is his poem 'Upon Eckington Bridge, River Avon' - because I grew up in the small Worcestershire village which boasts this bridge.  Barbara recently visited in on her travels, so you can see it here.

His legacy to Hanff came about by writing On The Art of Writing, which she stumbles across while trying to educate herself in literature.  In his five-volume collection of lectures, he covers the grand scope of literature, and inspires Hanff to go off hunting:

In the first chapter of On The Art of Writing he threw so many marvellous quotes at me - from Walton's Angler, Newman's Idea of a University, and Milton's Paradise Lost - that I rushed back to the library and brought home all three, determined to read them all before going on to Q's second lecture.  Which would have been perfectly possible if I hadn't included Paradise Lost.  In Paradise Lost I ran into Satan, Lucifer, the Infernal Serpent, and a Fiend, all of whom seemed to be lurking around the Garden of Eden and none of whom my teachers at Rodeph Shalom Sunday School had ever mentioned to me.  I consulted my Confirmation Bible, but I couldn't find Milton's fearsome personages in Genesis.  I concluded that Lucifer and the Fiend weren't Jewish and I would have to look in the New Testament for them, and since this was an entirely new book to me, Q had to wait while I read that one, too.

When she wants to source some out of print books mentioned by Q, can you guess where she goes for help?  Yes, that's right - Marks & Co. Bookshop, at 84, Charing Cross Road - that's how their acquaintance starts.

Alongside this autodidacticism, Hanff is trying to make it by writing.  She manages to eke out a non-lucrative career, slowly writing poorly paid history books for children.  She tries her hand at various other types of writing, with very little success - a lovely publisher called Genevieve encourages her along the way, with a mixture of blunt honesty and unrealistic optimism.

And eventually, while going through old boxes of letters, Hanff stumbles across the letters she received from Frank Doel, some twenty years later.  She thinks that they might, if edited, make a fun magazine article - and sends them to Genevieve.  She loves them, and passes them onto a niche publisher - and, without ever having intended to make a book out of them, Hanff finds that she will be published.  (She entirely glosses over how she got her half of the correspondence - perhaps she kept carbon copies, or perhaps Frank Doel's then-widow sent them to her.)  Either way - a book was made.

For those of us who love 84, Charing Cross Road, this book is the equivalent of a Behind The Scenes clip on a DVD.  We get to see the creation, but we also get to see the aftermath.  Hanff writes self-deprecatingly and amusingly about being catapulted to fame (albeit the sort of fame a literary author gets; she's no Lady Gaga) and having fans.  As she points out, including her current address in a book probably wasn't the wisest move for anybody who wants any privacy - and, sure enough, many strangers phone or write, although none seem to turn up in the middle of the night with a horse's head, so... that's something.

But things do not finish there!  Hanff continues to document her experiences as 84, Charing Cross Road is turned into a 1975 TV programme and a 1981 stage play.  Had Hanff waited a couple of years to publish Q's Legacy, she might have been able to include the film adaptation (which is very good, and even has a small role for Judi Dench, back when she didn't really do films.)  Seeing the TV and stage adaptations behind the scenes, from someone tangentially involved but still wowed by the whole process, was a real treat.  I much enjoyed a lot of it very, very much - although when Q's Legacy turned into diary entries, for Hanff's trip to London, it lost some of its charm and momentum, in my eyes.)

Hanff admits that she struggles to create memorable or apt titles, and I can't imagine there are many souls who leapt at the title Q's Legacy (although some certainly do - like me), but I am glad that she chose it.  It's fun to trace one's literary tastes and career successes to a single decision - and generous of her to dedicate her writing, as it were, to a man who could never know anything about it.  Although Hanff is really only known for 84, Charing Cross Road, Q's Legacy suggests that she should be known for rather more - and anybody who wishes that 84, Charing Cross Road were much longer will be happy to discover, in Q's Legacy, that, if the correspondence cannot be extended, at least the tale of Hanff and Doel is.

Alberto Manguel on...shelving issues

Still Life (The Grey Fan) - Francis Cadell

"Yet one fearful characteristic of the physical world tempers any optimism that a reader may feel in any ordered library: the constraints of space.  It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement.  In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.  Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.  This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself."

--- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p.66

Happy Easter!

He is risen indeed, hallelujah!

Have a lovely Easter, wherever you are - and, those of you who can, could you spare a prayer for Our Vicar's Wife? (For those who are new to Stuck-in-a-Book, that's my Mum.)  She's ill at the moment - not life-threatening or anything, but still, health would be much appreciated all round :)

Little Poems About Authors

I spent this evening at the Penguin Bloggers' Night, which I'll write about properly next week - lovely to see the old guard (as Kim described us on Twitter!) and to meet some new faces - and, of course, to hear the authors read extracts from their forthcoming books.  More on't that soon.

The writers mural at Barter Books, Alnwick

What I'm writing today, instead, is somewhat fanciful... on the train home, I started to craft little poems about authors.  Some sincere, but mostly frivolous.  I thought you might enjoy reading them - and that, hopefully, they'll inspire you to follow suit (either in the comments here, or on your own blogs.)  Here are the four I made up on the train journey!  Do have a go; it's fun, and makes you feel a bit like you might be Dorothy Parker's new best friend.

George Eliot; or, Asking for Eliot in a Bookshop
Who'd have guessed, dear Mary Anne,
Your efforts to be thought a man
Would lead, in the next century,
To: "Sorry, sir, T.S. or G.?"

Virginia Woolf
The Angels of the House you slew,
And buried in decorous graves,
Leaving (with arched eyebrow) you:
The common reader who made waves.

Philip Larkin's Legacy
Oh Larkin, yes, you swore; that's fine.
But no-one knows the second line.

What's troublin' ya?
I am glum; something's marred me.
Life is hard; I am Hardy.

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

I don't read many living authors, certainly not as a percentage of my overall reading, but I think there is only one whom I consider to be a 'great' - and that is Marilynne Robinson.  This opinion was formed on the basis of her novel Gilead, and has been strengthened by reading her first novel, Housekeeping (1980).  I don't think it is as good as Gilead, but it is still a strikingly beautiful example of how astonishingly an author can use prose.  The opening lines are surprisingly stark, given the writing that follows:

My name is Ruth.  I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Forster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.

This opening, hovering between comedy and tragedy without any indication which side the balance might fall, is an indication of the absence of men in Housekeeping.  Indeed, the only man who has stuck around makes a dramatic exit in the first pages of the novel - in a manner which reminded me of the opening to Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, although Robinson's came first.  The man is Ruth's grandfather; the exit is on a train in the town where they live; the train derails from a bridge, and sinks through the ice to the depths of an enormous lake, drowning everyone on board and hiding their bodies from rescue.

Even this dramatic event, which reverberates slowly through the whole novel - (The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town's history, and as such was prized.  Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered.) - is depicted almost quietly.  There were no proper witnesses, and Robinson does not take on the mantle of omniscience - instead, this tragic and would-be grandiose event is presented through veils of supposition and uncertainty.  I don't think Robinson could be over-the-top if she tried.  See how calmly she depicts the aftermath, when describing the widow with her daughters (later to be Ruth's mother and aunts):

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace.  She knew a thousand songs.  Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce.  In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she putt hem in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon.  Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.  Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence.  Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her.

Occasionally there are moments of plot in Housekeeping, and they can be quite significant moments, but nobody could call this a plot-driven novel.  No, it is certainly character-driven - and the central character is Ruth.  Robinson doesn't capture her voice in quite the mesmeric way she captures John Ames's in Gilead - but that is a feat I consider unmatched by any recent novelist, so she shouldn't be judged too harshly on that.  We see the bleak, plain experience of young life through Ruth's eyes - as her sister Lucille grows apart from her, as she looks back on their mother's abandonment of them, as she tries to understand her increasingly eccentric aunt.  But mostly as she watches the world pass, and attempts to find her place in it.  There are certainly humorous elements to her observations, but perhaps the dominant note is poignancy: 'That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.'

I am usually left unaffected by depictions of place and landscape in literature (it's probably the reason that I loathed Return of the Native, for instance) but even I found Robinson's depiction of Fingerbone - the atmospherically named small town - entirely consuming and impressive.  Whoever designed the cover for this edition did an exceptional job.  Maybe it's cold, vast places which affect me, since I felt the same about Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.

At book group, someone mentioned that Housekeeping couldn't have been set in the UK - we just don't have that sort of isolated vastness anywhere.  Having the enormous lake, holding unfindable bodies and untraceable secrets, and the equally enormous railway bridge running over it - it is such a clever way to create a dramatic, memorable landscape, and define the town in an unsettling manner.  A trainline should signify connection and communication, but here it just seems to connote distance and almost terrifying grandeur. And the bridge comes back into play at the end of the novel, encircling the narrative with the same all-encompassing dominance that the bridge and lake have over Fingerbone.

I've not mentioned much of the plot, because (as I said) it is pretty immaterial to the chief pleasure of reading Housekeeping.  The novel is really like a very long poem.  It meanders, in the best possible way; it is impossible to speed-read, or at least it would be an exercise in wasted time to do so.  Instead, one ought to wallow and wander through Robinson's prose.  Traditional storytelling has no place in Housekeeping - instead, a patchwork of moments is sewn together, creating a fabric which is unusual but beautifully captivating.

Maguel on... the printed page

Last July I mentioned that I was starting an ongoing series on excerpts from Alberto Manguel's The Library At Night. Well, better late than never, here is the second instalment!  And it's a cheeky riposte to the rise of e-readers, which have (to my mind, rather inexplicably) exploded in popularity since this book was published in 2006.

Restaurant Car (c.1935) by Leonard Campbell Taylor

"Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication.  As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the page, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.  (Columbia University's librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books, disagreed with this notion.  "The value," she wrote, "in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established."  There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading."*

--- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, pp.74f

*[I would point out that, reading Patricia Battin's Wikipedia page, she is far from a dolt - and has even done a lot for the preservation of physical books, but I still agree with Manguel that what she says here is, to my mind, unsatisfactory.]

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Hopefully I'm going to see some crocodiles this weekend... I'll keep you posted, either on here or, more likely, on Twitter - where I'm @stuck_inabook, donchaknow.  I'm afraid I'm just as likely to talk about Neighbours or cats as I am books, but...

1.) The books - you know me, I love reprints - so it's always exciting to unwrap an unsolicited publisher package and discover that it's got reprints.  Even better, they're by an author I like, and they're books I don't own - soon I'll be trying The Boat and A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley (best known for the very good The Go-Between), courtesy of John Murray.  Click on the images for more info.

2.) The links - time for an update about OxfordWords blog posts, sneakily put in the 'links' section!  I've been calling in favours from the blogosphere, and a couple of posts appeared over the past weeks from names you'll recognise... here are some of my favourite recent articles:

Harriet wrote about Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rachel wrote about Vita Sackville-West
Andrew Motion wrote about poetry and memory
My lovely boss Malie wrote about My Fair Lady
I wrote about pronunciations of 'scone'.
Our 'baby names generator' proved very popular!

3.) The blog post - do check out Karyn's posts about her travels - especially if piles of Penguins get you all tingly.

Going Underground

Look what arrived in the post the other day!

That was a very pleasant surprise - Penguin kindly sent me the Penguin Lines collection - a series of stories celebrating 150 years of the London Underground, each (as you see) the colour of a tube line.  The British Transport Museum, incidentally, offers milkshakes in every colour of the tube map - which sounds like a lovely idea until you realise that one of them will have to be grey.

It's no secret here that I don't much like London, and I certainly don't any fondness for the Underground - but I *do* have a huge fondness for any Penguin series, and have their Great Loves and English Journeys boxsets.  My collecting instinct and love of sets, not to mention my love of colour, makes me already fall in love with this set, even though I've only actually heard of one of these authors (John Lanchester).

All the book and author info is here - perhaps you can advise me where to start?

Old and young writers

photo source

After reading The Easter Party by Vita Sackville-West (see previous post), which included a little section where Lady Quarles propounds her thoughts on philosophy and theology - a little overdramatic, and seemingly Vita's own views put into a character who, for a page or two, became a puppet - it got me thinking.

It is a truism that the very young proclaim their beliefs most assertively, and that the old have been humbled by their experience of life into an unprovocative wisdom.  That isn't my experience of reading novels.  Yes, young writers often throw forth their theories with earnest abandon- but also, it seems to me, with a sly awareness of their own audacity.  Novelists at the end of their careers (and, at 61, Vita Sackville-West was not exactly old when writing The Easter Party, but she was nearer old than young) seem to dismiss all other theories as the babblings of youth, and put forward their own (however subjective) theories as some sort of obvious truth.

Does this tally with your reading?  Any thoughts?

The Easter Party - Vita Sackville-West

Hayley has a good track record of giving me books that she hasn't hugely enjoyed, which I end up loving. First off was Marghanita Laski's Love on the Supertax (which remains my favourite of her novels, although I've only read three); now is Vita Sackville-West's The Easter Party (1953). I couldn't get a good photograph in the light, so I played around with the image instead.

It certainly isn't an unflawed novel.  It is melodramatic and improbable.  But, with the odd reservation or two, I loved it.

The Easter party in question is a gathering at Anstey, the beautiful country home of Walter and Rose Mortibois.  In the party is Rose's dowdy, contented sister Lucy, with her husband Dick and 22 year old son Robin; eccentric, flirtatious Lady Quarles, and Walter's witty, intelligent brother Gilbert.  It is a curious group of people, all a little wary of the situation, each with their own private or public anxieties.  Which sounds a very trite way to describe the scenario - and, truth be told, Vita Sackville-West doesn't wander too far from the trite, at times.

This is especially true in the comparison of Rose and Lucy.  Rose is in a loveless marriage - or, rather, an unloved partner in a marriage, for she devotedly loves Walter.  He, however, never made any bones about what he was offering her.  He prefixes his proposal with "I will not pretend to be in love with you," which is, of course, what every little girl dreams of happening.  By contrast, Lucy and Dick have a delightful marriage.  It is very rare to come across a lovely, loving couple in fiction, and Vita S-W has to be congratulated for creating a pair who, in middle-age, still call each other 'Pudding', and are adorable rather than nauseating.

So, yes, we have the rich, unhappy woman and her poor, happy woman.  (By 'poor' I mean, naturally, 'only has one bathroom' - they're not on the streets.)  It's not the most original set-up, and I did wonder whether Vita was writing this in a rush - it was her penultimate novel, and I already knew that I hadn't been much of a fan of her final one.  But this turns out to be more than a collection of amusing, exaggerated characters and well-worn, inevitable moral lessons.  Vita Sackville-West weaves something rather wonderful from this material.  For starters, it is amusing - here is Gilbert's faux-horror at the idea of meeting Lady Quarles:

Are you trying to tell me that Lady Quarles is cosy?  If so, I don't believe it.  Nothing that I have ever heard of her indicates anything of the sort.  It is true that my cognizance of her is limited to the piles of illustrated papers, all out of date, which I contemplate only when I visit, in a state of the greatest apprehension, my dentist or my doctor.  I am perhaps then not in the best of moods to appreciate the charm of irresistible, lovable ladies propped on a shooting-stick in tweeds or entering a theatre by flashlight in an ermine cloak, but on the whole I think I had better not risk transferring my acquaintance with Lady Quarles from the printed page to the flesh.  I might be disillusioned.

She is a wonderful character when she arrives - garrulous, excitable, somehow loved by all despite being an almighty nuisance.  I found her a little less tolerable when she started bearing her soul - because she started declaiming things in a very third-act-Ibsen way.  Thinking of The Easter Party in dramatic terms was very helpful for these segments...

It is, however, with the host and hostess that The Easter Party gets more interesting and original - and stand above similar novels.  I don't know about you, but I find passion between humans in novels rather dull to read about - it's so apt, if not done perfectly, to smack of the third-rate melodrama.  Perhaps it's my diet of soap operas which has made me so intolerant of these unconvincing sounding conversations.  But what I will run towards, eagerly, are novels where a human is has a passionate love for something non-human.  I was going to say inanimate, but that's not true for the central passions in The Easter Party.

For Rose, it is (besides her cold husband) Anstey and its gardens.  In Vita Sackville-West's exceptionally brilliant novella The Heir, a man develops a loving obsession with the house he inherited.  Thirty years later, Vita Sackville-West is still exploring the relationship between person and property.  She, of course, had this deep bond with her family home Knole (and was justifiably pained and outraged that the laws of primogeniture meant her gender precluded her inheriting it.)  This affection, along with her expertise as a gardener, enables her to write beautifully and movingly about Anstey and its grounds:

The beauty of the renowned Anstey gardens!  Rose stood amazed.  Svend [the dog] brought one of his little sticks and dropped it at her feet and stood looking up, waiting for her to throw it, but she could take no notice.  She was gazing across the lake, with the great amphitheatre of trees piling up behind it, and the classical temples standing at intervals along its shores.  It was one of the most famous landscape gardens in England, laid out in the eighteenth century, far too big for the house it belonged to.  The house, however, was not visible from here, and, but for the temples, the garden might not have been a thing of artifice at all, but part of the natural scenery of woods and water, stretching away indefinitely into the countryside, untended by the hand of man.  Already the legions of wild daffodils were yellowing the grassy slopes, and a flight of duck rose from the lake which they frequented of their own accord.  The air was soft with the first warmth of spring, which is so different from the last warmth of autumn; the difference between the beginning and the end, between arrival and departure.

But this is familiar Vita territory; I was not surprised to encounter it.  A more unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, passion was the relationship Walter has with his Alsatian Svend.  (And in case you're worrying, based on my previous reading of Lady into Fox and His Monkey Wife, fear not - their relationship is entirely unsuspect.)  Walter, who cannot express affection for any human, including his wife, is devoted to his dog.  The scenes describing their companionship and mutual trust could have felt like a mawkishly over-sentimental Marley and Me intrusion, but are done so cleverly and touchingly, that I doubt anybody could censor them.  And that's coming from a cat person.  Svend even becomes an important plot pivot...

There are enough lingering secrets and unlikely speeches to make The Easter Party feel like a throwback to theatrical melodrama, but Vita Sackville-West combines these with gorgeous description, genuine pathos, and a web of delicate writing which bewitches the reader.  It's a heady mixture, and one I doubt many authors could pull off - but I loved it.  Vita Sackville-West will never be in the same stable as Virginia Woolf, the author with whom she is still most often mentioned.  She wasn't trying to be.  She was a talented writer, crafting something unusual - somehow both willfully derivative and original, and (for me, at least) an absorbing, delightful, occasionally tragic, read.  Thank you, Hayley!

A lovely Penguiny find

Despite having a whole weekend doing basically nothing, I have still failed to put together a review - or even read very much, actually - so instead I shall show off a recent find!  I don't think it's especially rare or anything, but I think it's a fantastic example of Penguin cover design in its heyday.  And it cost 30p.  I didn't know there were still places where you could get books for 30p! Turns out the charity shops of Headington are rather cheaper than the charity shops of Oxford.

Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn (a blog post with a twist)

About 15 months ago, I got a gift from a lady at my book group: Ella Minnow Pea (2001) by Mark Dunn. Fast forward a bit, and I finally got around to it, and found it a surprisingly brilliant small book.

I did know Ella Minnow Pea's main, and most original, 'gimmick', if you will - that Mark Dunn gradually lost a, b, c, so on and so forth, throughout his book - and had thought that it was simply a witty structuring and a prolonging of a trick. It had a possibility of growing a touch dull or awkward (thought I) but was still worth trying out.

And, it turns out, my worry was wholly without basis.  Ella Minnow Pea is a fairly brilliant out-working of a good trick - but it is also dark and disturbing, on occasion, and not at all a throwaway, whimsical sort of book. I hadn't thought it would turn out so dark...

Dunn's story all occurs on an island known as Nollop, in honour of Mr. Nollop, famous for composing an important pangram - which you might know (follow this link.)  I don't know if Nollop is fictitious or not - Wiki is willfully ignoring him, if not - but Nollop is akin to a god for folk on his island.  So much so, that Town Councillors await his laws from on high - although Nollop is, sadly, long lost to this mortal world.  His command is, (so Councillors say), shown by Nollop Island's local bust of his body - or, particularly, wording put by a sculptor on it, of Mr. Nollop's pangram.  As parts of its wording fall off, Councillors claim that it is a dictat from Mr. Nollop, that island inhabitants must drop that part of vocabulary - by mouth or by writing.  If inhabitants do not comply: a warning for a first infraction, whipping for an additional slip, and banishing from Nollop for a third.

At first, as 'z' falls from Nollop's famous pangram, nobody thinks much about it.  It will not significantly adjust island inhabitants' communication - for how much do folk say 'z' anyway?

As 'q' follows 'z', and 'j' follows 'q', things start to grow in difficulty - and angst among inhabitants, many of whom unwittingly infract Nollop's laws, with postliminary warning, whipping - or having to sail away from Nollop for good.  Many Nollopians opt to abandon an unhappy island voluntarily...

Fourth to go is 'd', which brings with it appalling frustration.  Ella Minnow Pea all consists of writing from inhabitant to inhabitant, mum to child, aunt to young girl - scrawlings which Councillors scan for contraband words, but nothing apart from that, so this lady's inclusion of painful or incautious topics won't occasion Councillors burning or taking a communication:

My sweet Mittie, it is strange, so terribly strange how taxing it has become for me to speak, to write without these four illegal letters, but especially without the fourth.  I cannot see how, given the loss of one letter more, I will be able to remain among those I love, for surely I will misstep.  So I have chosen to stop talking, to stop writing altogether.

I found it a tiny bit difficult to work out who was who (or whom was whom, mayhap) always, but Ella Minnow Pea is primarily about a girl with that lmnop-sounding alias, maintaining a campaign against Nollop's Councillors - trying (with similarly stubborn island folk) to craft a rival to Nollop's pangram, which will (curiously) abolish Nollop Island's Town Council's dominant control of vocabulary.

It was surprisingly moving, actually. I think Dunn might aim for Ella Minnow Pea to imply an analogy with a Fascist nation, or any sort of dictatorship which bans individual autonomy. It was chilling, as inhabitants of Nollop lost rights, all books in Nollop's library - burnt, straight away, for invariably having 'z' - and, following from that, inhabitants lost all availability for articulation.

As I said at this post's start - Ella Minnow Pea is surprisingly dark - but not gratuitously so at all.

Mark Dunn isn't original in writing a book which avoids using a particular part of A-Z - in fact, a book using this cunning trick is known as a 'lipogram' (Dunn's book is, if you will, lipogrammatic) - but not many authors could discard so many words and still craft a story so brilliant, almost as though this linguistic loss had no ability to limit his writing or imagination.  Only Dunn could craft a book so moving and full of wisdom, with this handicap - thank you so much, Ruth, for giving it to Simon's Book Gift Mountain.

And now, that twist - did you spot that this blog post - I think! - was built (apart from citations and quoting 'Ella Minnow Pea' in full), without using any 'e's at all...?  Not with Dunn's brilliant cunning at doing so, although I must admit that it was oddly tiring!

Congratulations, if you did spot that!

Poorly Drawn Lines

I have finished a couple of really good books this week, very different from each other, and I'll be getting to those soon - but for today I wanted to share a fun cartoon website I discovered a few days ago.  The webpage makes it clear that it's ok to reproduce his cartoons, so long as you link back to the page - so I have handpicked a few that I love.  The page is called Poorly Drawn Lines, and the cartoons are often a tiny bit dark or subversive, but in a funny, colourful, non-scary way.  Here are some of my favourites, from a recent scroll-through (clicking on them takes you back to the relevant page of Poorly Drawn Lines):

Wonderland


New Moustache



Help



Go and have a browse!

Some photos from my week...

I don't take that many photos nowadays - in 2011 I took a photo everyday, and it was a really fun way to document the year, but I think maybe I reached saturation point. Still, I should take more... and in the spirit of that, here are a few I've taken on a couple of recent occasions:

Although I'm still working the odd Saturday at the Bodleian, my job at OUP means that I've now finished my regular evening shifts (and casual daytime hours) there - quite a moving goodbye to people I've worked with, on and off, for five and a half years.  Most Reader Services staff signed a very jolly card, and Lovely Verity got me a Radcliffe Camera Goodbye Cake - thanks Verity!

My friend Lucy and I were in London on Monday night for the launch of The Real Mrs. Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham at Slightly Foxed. It was good fun, and the book looks absolutely stunning - my favourite colour, for starters. (These photos were taken on my 'phone, hence their lack of high quality.)

I should explain... this photo of Lucy is something of an in-joke, since I've been encouraging her for years to write a review for SiaB (since she knows loads about modern literature) and she demurs - so I said she could just hold and book and give a thumbs up. And now she has!

I must take more photos... it's fun sharing recent events in my life this way!

Room at the Top (a pleasant surprise)

If you read my recent appearance on Danielle's blog, taking you on a tour around my bookshelves, you might have noticed this picture:

Being observant people, you will have spotted all sorts of things.  Half the Queen's head, on my breakfast tea mug, perhaps.  David's eye (David being the teddy bear), maybe?  A little bit of Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman, if you're very astute.  But what you won't have missed is that book slap-bang in the front of the photo - one which scarcely seems to accord with my reading tastes.  It was, in case you hadn't guessed, a choice for my book group.

Could there be a less promising cover?  A louche man in a trench coat; a cover design which combines the worst excesses of ClipArt with the block capitals of a child learning to write; worst of all, the tagline (which mercifully you wouldn't have been able to read on Dani's post): 'The famous novel of the drivingly ambitious, sexually ruthless Joe Lampton, hero of our time.'

It sounds absolutely ghastly, doesn't it?

It's fair to say, dear reader, that I approached Room at the Top with some trepidation.  Yes, it was given to me (so it's on the Reading Presently list) but by a man who, inexplicably, had about two dozen copies in his garage, and I don't think had read it.

But - but - as with A Confederacy of Dunces, another book group choice, I misjudged it.  Although Room at the Top isn't in the same league as John Kennedy Toole's superb novel, every moment of which I relished, it's certainly much, much better than I'd dreaded from the cover, tagline, blurb...

I think Room at the Top compares interestingly with Francoise Sagan's Sunlight on Cold Water, which I savaged recently.  Both novels are about men sleeping with various women, falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat, and trying to discover their futures - but somehow Braine's was engaging, while Sagan's was an overly-introspective bore.  If I were to describe the plot of Room at the Top in detail, I really don't think it would appeal to many of my readers.  A recently demobilised soldier works his way through fairly menial financial jobs, feeling bitter about the rich and lustful about their daughters.  He falls in love; he falls out of it.  He seeks parent-replacements.  And he has a fair bit of sex.

So why did I like it?

Basically because John Braine can write well.  He's in that school of writing which I always think of as the Orwell-school, simply because he was the first author I read from that stable.  The similarities aren't in topic or genre, but in the use of language.  Orwell has a prose style that is somehow both beautiful and plain.  Sentence by sentence, it seems serviceable, even a little utilitarian, but it builds up into a richness which is hard to pinpoint.  At its best, every word is just right - without the elaborate tapestry of a Woolf or even an Elizabeth Taylor, or the entrenched humour of a von Arnim or Austen.  Of course, the only excerpt I noted down is rather more ornamental than most of Room at the Top, but... well, here it is.  Lampton is visiting the bombed-out house where he and his parents had lived:

I stepped forward into the bareness which had been the living-room.  I was sure about the cream valance, the red velvet curtains, the big photograph of myself as a child which had hung over the mantelshelf; but I couldn't be quite certain about the location of the oak dining-table.  I closed my eyes for a moment and it came into focus by the far wall with three Windsor chairs round it. [...]

The walls had been decorated half in fawn and orange paper and half in imitation oak panelling.  The paper was reduced to a few shreds now, the imitation oak panelling was pulped with dust and smoke and weather.  There had been a pattern of raised beads; I struck a match and held it close to the wall and I could still see some of the little marks where as a child I'd picked the beads off with my fingernails.  I felt a sharp guilt at the memory; the house should have been inviolate from minor indignities.

My predominant impression is that John Braine was too good a writer to write this sort of book.  He was one of the Angry Young Men, but the anger in Room at the Top feels rather tepid - and as though it has been put on for show, trying to join in with the big boys.  Lampton rails against the corporate system for a bit, and talks about 'zombies' in all areas of life - people from his despondent hometown who hopelessly go through the motions of living.  But I never really felt that his heart was in it.  What Braine chiefly wants to do, it feels, is write a good novel - regardless of the topic or the didactic rage of Angry Young Men.  Well, this was his first - I have no idea how his other novels turned out.  Perhaps he took the unassuming beauty of his prose and turned it to topics I'd find more palatable.  Perhaps not.  Either way, Room at the Top was a very pleasant surprise.

Song for a Sunday

I've been discovering Joni Mitchell properly over the past couple of days - better late than never, eh? - and wondered which songs y'all might suggest...

This one is justifiably famous, and completely beautiful: Both Sides Now.

How The Heather Looks

This delightful book was part of my Reading Presently project, where I read books I've been given as presents, but... nobody knows who gave this to me!  I was sure it was my friend Clare, but she denies all knowledge... I know it was *somebody*, because it appears in my birthday present post here... so, if it was you, let me know!  Because I've read it now, and I love it.

The full title, which does the job of summarising the book for me, is How The Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books (1965) by Joan Bodger.  Even if the book had nothing else going for it, I was sold by the inclusion of 'joyous' in a subtitle.  Well done, Joan Bodger, you win my approval - and, when we look at the words surrounding it, thinks just keep improving. The title itself is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson:

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet I know how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart was given.

What Bodger (excellent name) means by this is that, although she and her family have not visited the sites of these children's books, they are already deeply familiar with them through reading and re-reading, and loving, books steeped in the British countryside. And the book documents how they do visit them, coming all the way from America to do so.

How The Heather Looks, really, rests on a false premise: that the settings, houses, and landscapes of children's books must be based on actual places.  I'm a big advocate of the fiction-is-fiction line of thought, and feel rather disappointed if I find that an author has not been as inventive as I'd hoped - particularly with characters-based-on-people.  I'm much more willing to allow a building or tree copied from life, but I don't expect it in the way that Bodger and her family do.

Luckily for them, they're satisfied without conclusive proof - or, indeed, much more than fanciful detail.  A stray cat is, they're sure, the model for a decades-old children's book; a certain patch of river cannot be other than Ratty's favourite place to mess around in boats (there is, actually, a lovely story attached to that expression in How The Heather Looks, which I will leave it for you to discover.)  I suppose, if one has not seen much of the British countryside, then any of it will provide an illuminating backdrop for British rural literature.  And it is almost entirely rural, from Beatrix Potter to C.S. Lewis - via (for Joan Bodger is not averse to the odd nostalgic moment for adult literature) Daphne du Maurier:

Hour after hour we drove through mist or rain under lowering skies.  The children were too tired even for crankiness.  I remember the green hills giving way to great brown sweeps of moor and long stretches of roadside, where we saw almost no evidence of human habitation and only a few sheep, as wild as mountain goats.  Once in a while, when the rain lifted, I would see a high crag or tor in the distance, and sometimes, in the hollows, the gray glint of a tarn.  We were pleased to discover how easily a lifetime of reading ables one to fit the right words to the landscape.  We had climbed to what must have been almost the highest point on the road when I saw an inn, a large, low, rambling building with beetling roof and a board that creaked in the wind.  Glancing back, my heart missed a beat when I read the sign: Jamaica Inn.  The day before we might have stopped, but now we flew past as though a pack of smugglers were at our heels.  At least, I thought, we could not be far from the sea.

Notice how she does not tell you that it's connected with Daphne du Maurier - she trusts you to know.  That's a theme of How The Heather Looks, actually; not a lot of background info is explained, because Bodger takes it for granted that we all love and cherish the same books.  This rather threw me in the first chapter, on the unknown-to-me Randolph Caldecott, but after that I think I was fine.  Even her son Ian, 8 years old, seems to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of British children's literature, and a photographic memory for it too.

I haven't mentioned the Bodger family properly, have I?  They're pretty fab - 'our family is incapable of passing even a shelf of books without pausing to take a look'.  (My family all enjoy reading, but wouldn't it be nice to have a whole family of unashamed biblioaddicts!)  There is Ian, who loves soldiers and adventure, and befriends children wherever they go; Lucy, aged 2, who seems (her mother suggests) to believe they have simply hopped into the landscape of one of her stories, and fully expects to meet Mrs. Tiggywinkle - and then there's husband John, a researcher, who is surprisingly absent from the page.  (This becomes less surprising when you realise that their marriage was ending while Joan Bodger wrote the book; only the tip of the ice-berg for a horrendous period of Bodger's life, with which I shan't colour this review.)

For there is nothing tragic about How The Heather Looks.  It truly is joyous.  The Thomas family once had a literary holiday, travelling along the South Coast to see various sites of literary importance (including Jane Austen's house and the area which inspired Winnie the Pooh) and it was, as I recall, an entirely splendid holiday.  We don't have the Americans' scorn of distance, willing to drive from Edinburgh to Cornwall to get a pint of milk, but we managed to cover a fair distance nonetheless - and see some wonderful sites, which stay with me.  I still have the photograph of A.A. Milne's house on my wall - it was taken illicitly, running down the driveway of a private residence... Not so, the Bodgers.  In (unsurprisingly) my favourite part of the book, they do for tea with Daphne Milne - A.A. Milne's widow - in his house.  So casually, she throws in that they wrote ahead and got the reply: "I am always happy to meet friends of dear Pooh."  Can you imagine that happening today?  In the same way, she finds out from affable locals where Arthur Ransome lives, and (although he foreswears interviews) charms him into submission!

How The Heather Looks feels a bit like a glorious dream.  Perhaps that is partly because Joan Bodger is looking with determinedly rose-tinted glasses at a halcyon summer from the vantage of a difficult period, but perhaps it is simply because she is a good writer, and the summer was halcyon.  I could call the book enchanted, I could call it a delight - but I think Joan Bodger picked the best description when she wrote her subtitle.  It really is, above all, joyous.

Now, if only I could remember who gave it to me...