Wednesday, June 22, 2016

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This is an old young adults book by the woman who later wrote 101 Dalmations. I remember reading it as youngster but re-reading it as a (very) mature woman brings a bitter sweetness to this coming of age story that was almost unexpected. I say almost because I picked it up again following a review or some mention of it in my wider reading as somebody or other’s favourite. Vague, I know, but enough to pique my interest. There are times when I want sweet and old fashioned, something dating from before that cynical hard edged chick-lit sort of novel, full of pseudo feminists, was invented. It is beautifully written. It is poetic. It is charming. And the characters are marvellous, especially Cassandra who is a semi-autobiographical creation. It’s the kind of can’t put down book you read under the covers by torchlight as a kid. And you really don’t know what’s going to happen. Cassandra lives with her ridiculously eccentric father and step mother and her beautiful sister Rose, who unaccountably reminded me of Ophelia for no other reason than for her looks, in a derelict castle that they’ve rented for forty years. The father is a genius one-book wonder of a writer, who has plunged the family into penury through his inactivity. Along comes a rather brash American family who have inherited the local ‘hall’, a Mrs Cotton and her two eligible sons Neil and Simon. They interfere completely in the lives of the English family. You know from the outset it’s going to be a romance and of course you’re not disappointed. However it’s not the sort of romance story a teenager would expect and raises all sorts of ethical questions about people’s relationships that are quite unexpected. It’s a lovely old fashioned but eminently readable book and much, much better than a lot of the trashy fraught stuff that has superseded it.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner

Yum. Another book by Helen Garner. I have been a fan of hers since she first published Monkey Grip. There are times when I think it’s me talking, not her. She and I view the world through the same eyes. I love her to pieces. This is a fabulous collection of bits: articles, observations, snippets, journal entries. I doled them out, one, perhaps two, definitely no more than three at a time, so I wouldn’t swallow them all up in one gulp without properly appreciating them. I loved the piece about the ballet rehearsals, something she wrote as a magazine article I think because she’s accompanied by a publicist. It’s observant and poetic. And I loved her observations on getting old and invisible and the sudden, irresistible need to sort people out. I’ve been trying to think what it is about her that is so wonderful and I think it comes down to one word: honesty. She says it like it is. And that applies both to the story concept and to her words. I love the colloquialisms that pepper her writing too, her use of words that remind me of my childhood like ‘chewy’ – how long since I asked my brother for a piece of chewy? Do people today even know what that means? Mmmm, she’s my hero.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

I disliked the main character of this book so much that I finished it thinking that I’d disliked the book. But wait – no, in retrospect it was indeed a wonderful book! It’s the story of the rise and fall of an Edwardian woman writer, somebody who, as Hilary Mantel said in her introduction to my copy, never underestimated the taste of the general reading public. Her books are trash, utter trash, and while the critics have a heyday the public cannot get enough of her. She is driven, producing a book a year and pouring all her earnings into tasteless extravagances (while at the same time denouncing the nouveau riche.) Her greatest extravagance is the purchase and restoration of Paradise House, the place where her aunt worked as a ladies maid and which has been held up to her as the pinnacle of cultivated life. Even her own name, Angel, has been given to her after the daughter of Paradise House. Angel herself is a loner, completely unable to relate to other people and selfish in the extreme. Her only interest in people is in what they can do for her and she never, ever holds back. The book charts her rise, her marriage to Esme, and her decline in the ruins of Paradise House surrounded by her animals and her small group of strangely devoted followers. The secondary characters are a joy: the charmless waster Esme, whom she marries; her ladies maid aunt Dottie with the all-seeing eye and acerbic tongue; her benevolent publisher Theo; her devoted companion Nora and the surprising chauffeur Marvell, who sticks with her through thick and thin. Elizabeth Taylor’s humour is subtle and black, at times leaping out of nowhere and socking you in he jaw. Read carefully and think about it, or you’ll miss the sly innuendo or the carefully pitched little bit of wasp.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Sometimes you come across a piece of writing that is so subtle and understated that you almost absorb what’s going on by osmosis. This marvelous novel is like that. I loved Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women and Quartet offers more of the same quiet observation of ordinary human lives. It’s the story of four ordinary single people, two men, Norman and Edwin, and two women, Letty and Marcia, who work together in unspecified clerical jobs, live alone and struggle with a deep loneliness. They are all nearing retirement age and when the two women retire they must adjust to this new landscape. Letty has to find a new home when her plans to join an old friend in the country fall through; Marcia has to find a new way of living when her normal workday routine has disappeared. Despite the bleakness of the setting and the drabness of these people’s lives, Quartet is frequently full of black comedy. I’ve read this described as ‘tender’ comedy, and yes, Pym is both understanding and forgiving; at the same time however she is a keen and humorous observer of the ludicrousies of these mundane lives. It’s a book for reading very, very carefully, watching for the wry smile on Pym’s face as she makes some small and easily overlooked observation.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

The Shepherds Life: A Tale of the Lakes District by James Rebanks

What a lovely book. It’s not what I’d call literary and it’s not a rollicking good yarn, but it is an authentic, humanly written account of the lives of farmers in England’s Lakes district who have been farming sheep on the mountains there for 600 years or more. One of the things I liked best was the connection Rebanks feels with pre-historic peoples. He talks particularly about the showing and selling of sheep, regular calendar events, and draws a comparison with the gatherings that ancient people had to trade, socialize and even find wives and husbands. We visit these places of standing stones and ancient post holes, and it’s truly satisfying to think that a remnant of social behaviour still carries through to the present. I loved his sense of connection with the seasons, also. The book is divided into the four seasons with bits of story interwoven with descriptions of the work that is done in those times. He’s a keen observer of the plant and wildlife of each season. Of course he is a farmer through and through - despite his Oxford firsts in history! – and I loved the practical farmer’s approach to difficulties, to life and death, to foxes and crows, to his relationships with other farmers and his family, with little sentiment. Having lived and worked in rural Australia I recognized it immediately and found it true. Rebanks talks about the sheep hefting to the land, getting connected to a particular place on the mountain so that they can return to it year after year and know they are home. I think he’s talking about himself as much as his sheep.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Utopia by Thomas More

So, having bailed out of a day-long meditation session that smelled remarkably like a cult brainwashing session, I came home and spent the wet and wind-blasted afternoon finishing Utopia. This is a book erudite people refer to all the time. Not being particularly erudite, I hadn’t read it but I’m about to begin an on-line literature course based on the English country house and Utopia is the first book we’re studying. It’s short, just 128 pages, and detailed and I’ve been reading it in bursts. ‘I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of managing the public only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please. And if they can but prevail to get these considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws.’ ‘Now if in such a court, made up of persons who envy all others, and only admire themselves, a person should but propose anything that he had either read in history or observed in his travels, the rest would think that the reputation of their wisdom would sink, and that their interest would be much depressed, if they could not run it down…’ if better things are proposed they cover themselves obstinately with this excuse of reverence to past times.’ My father used to say that the one thing humankind had never done was to learn from history. So here is someone in the 16th century describing the malaise of modern life. This book is frightening because nothing has changed.