Eliza Carthy – Anglicana

Tags

Anglicana, Eliza Carthy, English folk music, Folk Music

Glee to set toes a-tapping!

This a wonderful album of traditional music from these sceptred isles.

I love the combination of what almost sounds like a scratch band who just happened to pick up some instruments which were lying around, and then launched into playing and revealed how skillful they are. This feels spontaneous (I’m sure it isn’t, but the absence of a ‘produced’ tweaked in a studio feel is what gives rise to the immediate joyousness)

Carthy’s ebulliant and bouncy fiddle playing is hard to sit still with, demanding the listener jig and twirl.

Perhaps this is sacriligious, but I rather prefer daughter to mother, vocally. Norma Waterson is superb at dark strong tough smokiness (even if she doesn’t, for me, touch the parts which only June Tabor can reach in earthy ancestral soulfulness) but that is what she always does. Eliza Carthy has some of this, but there is also a spring and a lightness and flexibility to her voice. At times she sounds sweetly, sorrowfully mellow, (listen to the Bold Privateer without tears threatening, if you can!), but she can mix this all up and sing of joys and frivolities with equal ease.

I had some reservations about the instrumental piece, MCMBE, as I  was more enchanted by the combination of Carthy’s singing and playing, than I was by MCMBE (Martin Carthy MBE) the piece composed by Carthy Junior for dad, and found my attention dipping a bit here, particularly as it jarred for me a little with the English, particularly North Country English, traditional heritage of music, which is the concept of this album. MCMBE is like finding a chapter from a Virginia Woolf book inexplicably in the middle of one by Fielding!

Anglicana Amazon UK
Anglicana Amazon USA

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Hannah Kent – Burial Rites

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Book Review, Burial Rites, Hannah Kent, Icelandic setting

Hard hearts should break; frozen hearts should melt.

This book, even with its advance praise, somehow slips beneath the accolades it deserves.

This is Australian writer Hannah Kent’s first novel – and she joins the ranks of those who seem to be IMPOSSIBLE as first novelists, because the craft, the breadth of vision, the ability to create character, narration, sense of time and place, the language used, the structure employed, are all so effortlessly sure.

This is really a book to savour. It absolutely stands comparison with a book which looks at a similar metatheme – Margaret Atwood’s deservedly lauded Alias Grace The metatheme is how society, in other times, other places, has dealt with women who by character and intelligence were stronger, fiercer, more independently thinking than the restrictive norms of their time allowed. Other fine books with this theme include The Madness of A Seduced Woman and Mrs Lincoln

Kent’s book is based on real events, though she applies a writerly imagination. It is the story of the last person to be executed in Iceland, Agnes Magnusdottir, in 1830, for the murder of her lover. Kent acknowledges her own imagination, but also tells us her research is sure, implying, as she does so, that she would have us understand Agnes precisely as a woman dealt with unfairly by virtue of her sex, her class (impoverished, servant class) and the systems of the time.

                             Iceland Reindeer Wikimedia Commons

Kent’s book captivates and succeeds on so many levels – firstly, an astonishingly evocative account of an incredibly harsh subsistence existence in the Far North. Such details as the fact that these isolated farmsteads were for the most part turfed in their walls and ceilings – wooden walls meant a degree of wealth. Details such as the fact the bedroom – one, not many, would have been impossibly close and stinking. The difficulty of a very restricted diet, in a part of the world where what grew would not grow for very long, as daylight and warmth were minimal.

Mostly, what works so amazingly is her ability to inhabit these people, possessed of a certain harshness and wildness which seems precisely linked to their cold harsh landscape. All her characters, minor as well as major, are beautifully developed, and most of them change, grow, become more intensely real – none are ciphered.

And then there is her language, spare, direct, unfussy, clean, as needed, but also alive with startling imagery and rhythms. I did not find myself distracted by moments of ‘beautiful writing’ tacked on where they did not fit; the sustained moments of elegy were all of a piece.

The name is everything that went wrong. Illugastadir, the farm by the sea, where the soft air rings with the clang of the smithy, and gulls caw, and seals roll over in their fat. Illugastadir, where the night is lit by fire, where smoke turns in the early morning to engulf the stars, and in ruins, always Illugastadir, cradling dead bodies in its cage of burnt beams.

This is the language of ancient lays, stories handed down over generations, myths of a people – and in a sense – so this is.

I will, absolutely, be impatiently waiting for her second novel. Let it be soon!

I received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine UK programme. I’m also grateful to fellow blogger FictionFan for recommending it – see her review

Burial Rites Amazon UK
Burial Rites Amazon USA

Muriel Spark – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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Book Review, Modern Classic Fiction, Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Dark subtext delivered with light touch – Spark sparkles!

I’ve recently read a few books which have been compared to this only because the subject matter is similar: the effect on the young and impressionable made by a charismatic, rather shady teacher. And rather found myself thinking `comparisons are odious’ as the later books seemed variously overwritten or self-indulgent, or desperately trying to shock for shock’s sake, heavy-handed or crude.

it was an absolute delight to return for a re-read to the book those others were compared to – Muriel Spark‘s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

This of course was turned into a film with Dame Maggie Smith as Miss Brodie, but I remember little about the film which I’m pretty sure pops up on TV from time to time, other than Dame Maggie, yet re-reading the book my memories were strong.

What I particularly appreciate is Spark’s economy. Books often seem to be getting longer and longer, often for no good reason, and I find myself longing for someone to have slashed and cut writing which can seem indulgent.

This is almost novella, rather than novel, length, yet jam packed with telling image and incident. Spark’s mind is glittering and incisive, her love of, and mastery of, language evident in each clean sentence: nothing fussy, nothing fudgy, a sense of an author who can weigh and balance her sentences almost as if they had a precise poetical form which needed to be adhered to. A sense of discipline and craft to counterpoint fine imagination and dark wit.

Her style is interesting, certain telling phrases get repeated and repeated in the text, almost like a mantra, as we move back and forwards in time between the little girls, meeting Miss Brodie as 10 and 11 year olds, jumping forwards and backwards to various incidents in the rest of their schooldays, sandwiched between future snapshots of what they will become as adults, and back again, moving also between Miss Brodie in her Prime, to a failing and elderly Miss Brodie, not in any linear progression, more as if all times and all becomings are always present, child and adult all together.

Princes St, Edinburgh, 1930

There are psychologically disturbing visions – the book is set in Edinburgh in the early 30’s, and Brodie’s feverish, strange world view not only encompasses artistic passion and sensibilities but is also more darkly attracted towards a fascination with the Fascists in Italy and Germany, as well as some rather shocking attempts to manipulate the budding sexual identities of her girls.

Somehow, Spark’s ability to be witty and light touch about all this, rather than heavy handedly telling the reader what to feel, is a brilliant balancing act

The Wiki article is interesting, revealing (unsurprisingly) that she was a poet before she was a novelist, and also had taken a course in precis writing. Her complex relationship with religion (the child of Presbyterian/Jewish parents, she converted to Catholicism) and also questions about her sexual orientation act as central themes or subtexts in her writing. It is possible to see the central ‘Brodie girl’ as standing in part for Spark herself.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Amazon UK
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Amazon USA

Louise Doughty – Apple-Tree Yard

Tags

Apple-Tree Yard, Book Review, Crime Fiction, Louise Doughty, Psychological Thriller

Fish-hook, line and sinker!

This was a superb piece of writing; an edge of the seat courtroom drama with twists and turns of back-story, believable and necessary blind alleys and secrecy, and lots of dark undercurrents about relationships between the sexes, the casual violence and patronisation even other women can offer to each other. Sexual politics and the still double-standards on morality, differently held for men and women, act like fish-hooks do – no hope of easily removing without further hurt.

There is little which can be usefully laid out in a review without spoiling the reader’s journey. All I will say is that it took quite a long time for me to really realise why the central character was in that court as a defendant in a murder trial. None of Doughty’s journey red-herrings were at all spurious, and the various shocks she offers are absolutely tight, believable and coherent.

DNA Double Helix Wiki Commons

Several reviewers have compared her grasp of believable psychological twisting of the reader, unfurling of character and plot, to Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell in darker, more disturbing psychological mode). For once, such an admiring comparison is accurate.

I’ve been disappointed recently in several sub-psychological crime/thrillers, but recommend this highly. Doughty does not manipulate any of her characters in an unbelievable way.

As long as you accept the premise that the madness of love and lust can strike any of us and make us go places which are surprising, all the rest follows

I like the elegant structure of the book which in the major sections, connects to the work of the central character, a geneticist, and how what is hidden, twisted, subterranean in the journey of the novel echoes that double helix.

This is a perfect summer (or winter holiday) read, but also leaves you thinking.

A story, late on in the book, about a scientific study on how far altruism goes, haunts

Apple-Tree Yard Amazon UK
Apple-Tree Yard Amazon USA

Mark Forsyth – The Etymologicon

Tags

Book Review, English Language, Etymology, Mark Forsyth, The Etymologicon

Stanley Kubrick’s Debt To John Milton

It’s a very good job I have short-term recall of facts. Otherwise, no friend would be able to have a conversation with me without me pouncing all over their words and unravelling and re-connecting them. As it is, I will just be restricted to pouncing on the word and saying – you know that word GENERAL you just used well read that fabulous book The Etymologicon and see how it links to people making oaths hand-on-testicles.

I would love to invite this author to dinner, (though I might not get, or want, a word in edgeways!) such is the absorbed, inventive, eclectic, playful mind, weaving together such a fascinating circularity of linguistic musing. Derivations can be an interesting, but often rather dryly explained topic. Not here. Forsyth is erudite, witty, conversational, and enormously excited and passionate about his subject, sweeping the reader enthusiastically upwards and onwards in a great circle of linguistic connections. This is a smile-on-your-face-laugh-out-loud-gosh-that-is-FASCINATING-I-want-to-know-more sort of book.

Saint Panteleimon

I was delighted to find that my undergarments for my nether regions have compassionate origins (The much beleaguered patron saint of Venice, Saint Pantaleon, (means All-Compassionate); Venetians often then referred to as Pantaloni ; Commedia del Arte gives the character Pantalone wearing the typical style of breeches, Pantaloons, worn by those Venetians; Pants!

As for Stanley Kubrick? Well Milton was the inventor, like Shakespeare, of a huge number of words and phrases which are now common coinage in our language. One of these Miltonic words was the word ‘Space’ applied cosmologically.

So, without Milton, Kubrick’s seminal (!) film might have had to be called 2001-A Great Void Odyssey. Which could have been a disaster, as the subliminal linguistic message might have been interpreted as 2001 – one to A-Void. Particularly if someone was familiar with connections to matters lavatorial and colonic irrigation in the non-Miltonic ways of describing the cosmos (you’ll have to work it out)

Brilliant book!

The Etymologicon Amazon UK
The Etymologicon Amazon USA

Professor Jonathan Brostoff and Linda Gamlin – The Complete Guide to Food Allergy and Intolerance

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Book Review, Food Industry, Jonathan Brostoff, Linda Gamlin, The Complete Guide To Food Allergy and Intolerance

‘5 stars’ are not enough – this book is the gold standard!

Professor Jonathan Brostoff and Linda Gamlin have produced an amazing (and shocking) piece of work in this book, which appears and disappears – I suspect a further edition/update is in the pipeline, as this 4th edition was published in 2008.

Their work (in any edition) is the best and most comprehensive book I have read on this subject – and it works superbly for however you wish to use it!

If you are a sufferer, or suspect you may suffer from food allergies, and you are looking for a clear and comprehensive guide to self-treatment, this is the book for you.

If you are a practitioner, and are looking for a clear and detailed understanding of these issues, in order to best advise your clients (and my advice would be ‘buy this book’) this is the book for you

If you are a teacher, and looking for help for a clear way to present information on the subject, this is for you.

If you are fascinated by the politics of the food industry – this is for you – I can’t begin to express how horrified I was to discover the extent of the use of food colourings, linked with potentially highly dangerous effects, which have been banned all over Europe and the USA, but which are allowed in the UK. There are some very suspect actions taken by the food industry in this country.

If you admire clearly presented scientific writing, this is for you.

A great read, a great reference text, a survivors kit for many

Oh, and if anyone is really worried and appalled by the tie-up between the food industry and dodgy substances, and lives in the UK (where we really don’t seem to care that much about it) – the best place to live is Norway, who seem to ban EVERYTHING where studies have shown problems with additives.

Or you could just make sure you don’t buy any packaged food with ingredients that are  not obvious ‘foods’

A fantastic companion to this book would be Michael Pollan’s In Defence Of Food – his sensible advice, encapsulated, is:

Eat food. Not too much. Eat more plants.

Beg, borrow, or preferably BUY this book. (the Brostoff/Gamlin one). The information in the book goes way beyond artificial additives (which are LOT of problems are linked with) and does also look at ‘real’ foods which can be problematic, and how to identify allergies and intolerances for yourself

Flicr Commons terren in Virginia’s photostream

For some reason (poor Statesiders!) the version available there has an amended title and is an earlier version (2000) – I’m guessing it may be a little less ‘international’ than the UK version, where information is given about additives banned in many different countries.

The Complete Guide To Food Allergy and Intolerance Amazon UK
The Complete Guide To Food Allergy and Intolerance Amazon USA

Philip Glass – Glassworks

Tags

Classical music, Glassworks, Music review, Philip Glass, Philip Glass Ensemble

Romantic tone poems, lush and lyrical

Glassworks is a beautiful thing, gentler and more reflective than the vibrant, glittering repetitions which are typically associated with Philip Glass.

In Glassworks, only 2 of the pieces, Floe – like a first sudden moment at the start of a tropical dawn chorus – and the brass section sax rich shining Rubric, have the fierce edges. The other 4 pieces are more simple, flowing, watery.

There’s a typically Glass like circling quality to the whole CD – the opening track ‘Opening’ simply keyboards, for all the world a whisper away from the slow movement of one of the great Romantic piano composers, is echoed again in ‘Closing’, where the piece has become more textured by a chamber orchestra taking it up.

Glass’s typical repetitions, small builds and diminishings don’t feel meaningless in any way, there’s something really satisfying about being held in a structure which changes slowly. ‘Opening’ has the lovely muted grey violet quality of dusk.

Floe starts plangently, softly, and then explodes into edgy texture, rushing piccolo, sax, horns, its like a thousand cicadas wiring up for the day, and there’s something very thrilling about it. Just as you think your nerve endings can take no more of the texture and vibrancy, the track settles back into a breathing space for itself and then whirls off again to its resolved climax

Islands moves back into something more flowing and haunting, slightly melancholic, even a little menacing, with strings in a minor key, odd snatches of melody which feel as if they belong to ‘Psycho’ or ‘North by Northwest’!

Rubric, is the most jazzy, riffy of all the pieces. I found myself responding to it in that head nodding way of marking the rhythm that often seems to happen when people listen to jazz!

Facades is simply beautiful. It probably has the most shifting melody going more quickly to new places, melancholy and soulful, strings and sax, played sweetly and sadly.

An expanded version of this 1990 album has been re-issued with several additional tracks, which does exist as an mp3 – I only have this, shorter album as CD, so am used to its more contained musical shape. The expanded version does have a much more appealing cover pic though (illustrated here)  Unless you were a Glass Fan you really might be offput by the unappealing brown cover replete with Glass a scowling. It says ‘Don’t Buy Me!’

The tracks on this version reviewed here are:
1. Opening 2. Floe 3. Islands 4. Rubric 5. Facades 6. Closing

Glassworks Amazon UK
Glassworks Amazon UK

Susan Hill – Howards End Is On The Landing

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Book Review, Books about Books, Howards End Is On The Landing, Reading about Reading, Susan Hill

The pleasure of curling up with a good book about the pleasures of curling up with a good book

Susan Hill’s book about her books and the profound nature of the reading experience is unalloyed JOY. The premise is simple, she searches for a book from her shelves which she can’t find, gets lured by the contents of those shelves, and decides to explore her bookshelves more deeply; this sparks her to write a book about the experience.

This is much, much more than one of those dreary ‘list’ books – books you should read before you die, top classics etc etc. She spins off into a relationship with reading itself, and also some of her favourite books take her into accounts of writers she has met.

She did attract some reviews which commented negatively that the book is just ‘name dropping’ It doesn’t come across like that to THIS reader. Hill is a writer who had her first book published aged 18. She’s been fortunate to have mingled with literary life, and, personally, accounts of her brief meetings with, for example, such a wide range of ‘different greats’ as Edith Sitwell, Ian Fleming and even Benjamin Britten are utterly fascinating.

She’s an eclectic, unsnobby quirky reader – and I guess that’s why I find her appealing – someone who is as at home with Ian Fleming as they are with the book of Common Prayer, Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll and Trollope (Anthony) as well as Victorian diarists but NOT Jane Austen is an interesting mind.

Though I don’t share her discomfort with Jane I found her Austen immunity interesting.

There are also chapters extolling favourite reading places, the physical experience of reading, the pleasure of fonts, dustjackets and bindings, and, constantly poking through, a sense of books as mysterious, totemic objects with perhaps a secret life of their own…….she muses about which books might be happy or unhappy to be sitting next to its booky neighbour. Magic realism!

A charm (literally!) and an utter delight.

And maybe the subtitle  ‘A Year Of Reading From Home’, just MIGHT be a piece of useful advice for myself (and compatriot bookiephiles) as i gaze in horror on the huge and mounting wobbly piles of unread books (often added to following squints to see what others are reading) which exist on chairs, bookcases and of course, almost invisibly and therefore more dangerously, on the Kindle. With the unread Kindles at 86, and the piles on the chairs (never mind elsewhere) at 40 plus I reckon that if I DID manage Hill’s  ‘only read what you have at home’ that could comfortably see me through the year, and if it didn’t, well the pleasure of re-reads would be there. Will I do this? Unlikely, dear reader, unlikely. Maybe if no bookie bloggers read or blog about their reading, if Amazon reviews all vanish, if I wear a sign saying DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT BOOKS around my neck, if I never pick up a newspaper or magazine which has book reviews, hear or watch any programme about writing, writers etc. I probably need casting away on a desert island with only the unread books, no internet access, and helicopter drops of food parcels. Ah well. I’ll happily re-read Hill again!

Howards End Is On The Landing Amazon UK
Howards End Is On The Landing Amazon USA

Neil Gaiman – The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

Tags

Adult Faerie Tale, Book Review, Myths and Legends, Neil Gaiman, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

Deep, Deeper, Deepest – oh why did this have to end!

Neil Gaiman has written a marvellous book here, poised beautifully between literary fiction, fantasy and horror, and adult (or child) fairy story

The central character, a man in middle age, with the disappointments of adult life upon him, turns down memory lane, when the death of a parent and the funeral gathering will unite him with the years passed. A failed marriage, work, creativity and the dreams of youth not having quite turned out in the way the younger man or boy might have wished he physically revisits where he once lived, as a seven year old boy, and recounts and remembers what the adult man has forgotten.

What makes this different from other ‘revisit childhood’ books is that the revisited land is large with powerful myths, and presided over by 3 potent female figures who live by ‘the ocean at the end of the lane’ The 3 powerful women a grandmother, a mother and an 11 year old (crone, mother, maiden)are constantly reminding this reader of other pagan and indeed religious threes – a matriachy of power and goodness to rival patriarchal religion, – including a willing sacrifice – the three Fates of Greek mythology, even as they appear to be initially easily dismissed perhaps as the three witches.

Goya : The Fates

Gaiman narrates a brilliant story – more than a battle between good and ill (is it really good to have all desires met – even the desire to be happy?) but under the tight and page turning narrative drive, the fine writing, the believable characters and relationships, philosophical and psychological insights are placed for the reader to chew on.

Its certainly a book which might be enjoyed by a child, even read to a child, especially as the central character is a child, but it reaches, I think, to the wisdom within a child, and to the child within an adult:

As Gaiman has his central character say:

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

I also liked the absolute truth (so it seems to me) of this:

Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

And, if you don’t like that sort of psychology, what about the plunges into transcendental experience – perhaps the experience much fine poetry and music takes us towards:

In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and i had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real,, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. it is the most basic building block of everything.

As adults, we have (in the main) forgotten the power of words, of the naming of things, of how potent the dominion of naming and language must have been to our species. And why (some of us) venerate poets, who give us back that place

Ailurophiles will appreciate the central part cats play in this book!

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane Amazon UK
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane Amazon USA

Janis Cooke Newman – Mrs Lincoln

Tags

Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Feminist viewpoint, Janis Cooke Newman, Mary Todd Lincoln, Mrs Lincoln

The Unfortunate Insanity of Being Female

This is an absorbing read, based on the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, who was judged insane and incarcerated in a lunatic asylum by her eldest son.

Whilst Mary was clearly a person strongly ruled by her emotions, and someone who held passionate beliefs, inevitably the ‘under story’ has to be – ‘If this intensely emotional, passionately committed person had been male, at this time, would he have been judged insane and incarcerated by his son and the court system’. The answer would seem to be ‘unlikely’

Mrs Lincoln would I suspect not have been judged as insane today. The book’s sympathetic account of the central character reinforces a sense that it was the patriarchal straitjacket women were laced into that was insane, and that those women who were unable to be confined and laced within its cruel strictures were often victims of a rigid, blinkered and unemancipated society, terrified of its own ‘shadow’

2 other books which cover the territory of ‘woman confined by cruel patriarchy’ in a similar historical period are Margaret Attwood’s wonderful Alias Grace and also The Madness of a Seduced Woman , which was also based on a real life case. Marge Piercy’s fictional Woman on the Edge of Time (A Women’s Press classic) is yet another passionately written, deeply wise and compassionate account of how female desire and conviction has been (and still is) seen as threatening and dangerous.

If you enjoyed this book, these 3 should be worth a read, and if you haven’t yet read Mrs Lincoln, a treat awaits. Janis Cooke Newman has written a rich and moving account. It is also very much a love story – between Mr and Mrs Lincoln, and the love of parents and children for each other, and of the alienation within families.

Mrs Lincoln Amazon UK
Mrs Lincoln Amazon USA