Bingo, Bingo, Bingo!

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2015 Challenge, Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Book Bingo, Book Review, Other Stuff, The Reading Bingo Challenge

Now how can I resist the lure of this, particularly as I can use it to add in all those great books which got squeezed out of my top 10-but-as-I-can’t-count-became-11. I have studiously avoided, with one exception any books which made my ‘best of’ .

Curiously/fortuitously pretty well all the categories had appeared in the PopSugar challenge, so, by nearly completing that, I could mark a full card on this

  

Over 500 pages for Norman Collins – London Belongs To Me. This 700 pager, London on The Home Front in the Second World War is a good old fashioned book, and nods to Dickens

A forgotten classic gives Austrian writer Stefan Zweig his place with Beware of Pity, published in 1939. Unsurprisingly events at home meant Zweig had wisely left his homeland some years earlier

Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne du Maurier seem a happy match though the Master’s film of Rebecca is substantially less dark than the writer’s book

It took an ex-pat Brit, long resident in America, to bring Tessa Hadley to my attention. Published this year The Past may be my first Hadley, but it won’t be my last. She is definitely an ‘understated’ writer – that is, trusts the reader’s intelligence

   

Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky is for sure a book with a number in the title – actually, it is a trilogy. Not to mention a TV adaptation. He could have happily filled over 500 pages and forgotten classic slots too! He made my best reads of 2015 with another title.

Colette’s extraordinarily racy book, given its 1900 publication date, was published when the author was 27. Claudine at School, my entry for a book written by someone under 30 could equally well have gained the movie and the funny and the forgotten classic slot!

I had never read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and only did so as part of my ‘Reading The Twentieth’ long term challenge (published 1900) Although the central character is a little girl, a lion, a scarecrow, a tin man, several munchkins and the like give it status as my book with non-human characters. To be honest, it wasn’t my favourite in this category – that belongs to my re-read of Kenneth Grahame’s much more wonderful Wind In The Willows. But as I didn’t write a review, just basked in the book, Baum gets the slot

Another re-read, and what a delightful one, gets my ‘a funny book’ slot – though it also qualifies in my mind as perhaps a forgotten classic. Dodie Smith, she of 101 Dalmatians wrote the delicious I Capture The Castle. Judging by my ‘comments’ on the post, a lot of us have fond memories of this, reading it in our teens. I suspect the humour gets better and better as the reader disgracefully ages

   

So many brilliant books by so many brilliant authors. I’m delighted to get Marianne Wheelaghan’s The Blue Suitcase in as my book by a female author. Though I rather resent the category which seems to suggest books by females might be rare! The Blue Suitcase, loosely based around Wheelaghan’s mother,growing up in Germany in the 30s, was one which gave me much heartache not to include in my ‘top 10’ of the year. Had I done a top ten fiction, it would have been there. It occupied my thoughts for quite a long time after I finished reading. Always something which I value.

I got a lot out of Claire North’s assured time-jumping, body-jumping SF-ish, Triller and Suspense-ish, Lit-Ficcyish invention. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August had me reading through the night feverishly wanting to solve the many mysteries.

I’m a huge fan of (well-written) books about espionage, fact and fiction. The idea of leading a double life would fill me with impossible to handle anxiety. The fact that some people do, for various reasons, interests me. Simon Mawer’s sequel to The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, which I read a couple of years ago, is Tightrope my highly recommended one word title book

Short stories are often something I have some reservations about. Rose Tremain is an author I much admire. And The American Lover had me delighted with nearly every story in this collection

   

Rebecca Mascull’s second novel was another book which absolutely would have made my Top Ten if I had gone the ‘Top Ten Fiction’ route, instead of a mixed top ten. And leaving her wonderful Enlightenment set Song of the Sea Maid just out of the combo top-ten was a very hard thing to do. So she gets the central ‘free choice‘ slot here

Brian Payton’s The Wind Is Not A River was set during the Second World War, in the Aleutian Islands, part of America’s Alaskan territory, which was invaded and occupied by the Japanese army. Which most Americans  were unaware of at the time, a very secret war. And, as I live in the UK, Alaska definitely qualifies as a book set on a different continent

Peter Doggett’s 125 years of popular music Electric Shock was an utterly absorbing book. Not just music, but also social history. It gets the non-fiction slot, though non-fiction books have also been slotted in in other spaces!

Tana French. Oh, Tana French. Now, I first encountered her with her fourth book, recommended by a couple of bloggers. And pretty quickly went on to her fifth book, also recommended by those bloggers.  (Since you want, rightly, to know WHICH bloggers : Jane from her previous blog FleurInHerWorld for Broken Harbour and Cleopatralovesbooks for The Secret Place ) And, what do you know, Ms French hooked me and wouldn’t let go; within 6 weeks I had read everything she has written. Her Dublin crime series is magnificent. So Tana French is clearly an author I love and this book is therefore the first book by an author I love:  In The Woods What all her many fans are shouting, screaming, stamping their little feet crossly about is when will number 6 appear, when? WHEN, Tana???

  

To be honest, most of the books I now hear about are books heard about online. But I’m delighted to use the slot to further push another book it really hurt to exclude from my Top Ten of the year. Jasmine Donahaye’s Losing Israel explores the complexities of the conflict between Israel and Palestine in a very personal way

I enjoyed Sarah Water’s best-selling The Paying Guests with some reservations. I suppose I might have included any one of Tana French’s other books as an unreserved best-seller recommendation, but I’m trying to avoid author duplication here, or duplicating anything from my top ten list which was yesterday’s post!

Paula Milne’s well-written Circling the Sun, my entry for a book based on a true story slot, is another with reservations – mainly because she plays a little fast and loose with this account of the aviator and horse trainer Beryl Markham, as I discovered when I did a little more research into Markham. I have a slightly uncomfortable feeling around biographies as fiction when the impression given to the reader is that this is more biographical than it really is. It feels as if a life has been tampered with, and I would have preferred it if Milne had come clean and clear at the end about what had been invented.

Back to a book with not a whisker of reservation about its inclusion – except, with no apologies, to state this has already appeared as one of my firm top ten. Richard Yates’ extraordinary Revolutionary Road was indeed a book at the bottom of my TBR pile. I had bought the book 4 or 5 years ago following a strong recommendation by someone who had given me some other great reads, mainly non-fiction. But following one or two fictions which hadn’t worked for me, I thought this book might be another one such, and it rather slipped off the radar, till an impassioned review by FictionFan pulled this book out from its languishing place at the bottom of the pile to become possibly THE book of this year. 

   

Lissa Evans warm-hearted Crooked Heart was a book loved and recommended by a friend ‘in real’. And I loved and recommend it too!

Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney is a book that scared me. And it’s brilliant. And scary………….

J.D. Salinger’s FAR from forgotten classic, The Catcher In The Rye which I re-read this year is my book over 10 years old

Jane Smiley’s Early Warning is the second book in a trilogy of books looking at 100 years of American history. I enjoyed it enormously, but can’t quite work out why I’ve dilly dallied over getting the final volume

And finally, to finish my card, is a book with a blue cover. Where I’m Reading From is one of two thoroughly enjoyable books by Tim Parks which I’ve read this year, all about reading, writing, reviewing, publishing and, indeed the all the vexed philosophical ideas you may have about why on earth you, me and our species ever read at all, read in the past, currently read, and may (or may not) read in the future

Having completed my card its time to do wings avoiding work, building muscles for some hefty tomes on the agenda for 2016

Have a wonderful New Year, one and all, and see you, auld acquaintance, new acquaintance, on the far side of the year

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Drum roll for the top 10…11….10….11 of 15

Tags

Book Review, Books of The Year, Reading, Soapbox

Another terrific year of reading, and a hard choice to get it down to 10 + 1. In the end, the criteria for inclusion came down to the fact that all these books continued to make me think about them and talk about them and be not quite ready to let them go and start something else. Book nags, the lot of them!

In no particular order, but more or less the order I read the books in, though two of the books I found were in, out, in, out with each other, and by the time Ginger finished a final decision was not forthcoming, which would seem to make them joint 10, as none of the others budged a millimeter from inclusion. 4 of these books are non-fiction, the rest fiction. Books by dead Americans loomed large this year.

Links to original reviews within the text.

C.J Sansom’s Lamentation was the first of two books in my list this year which gave me certain nightmares about what it might have been like to live in the reign of that much-marrying man Henry VIIIth. A terrific book, a proper page-turner, and one which had me worrying intensely for the central character and his friends, as much as if I was back in the day, and Sansom’s characters were real. This was a book which made me cry, lots, and also terrified me, was instructive, and gave much exercise to the heart too

Helen MacDonald’s extraordinary book, H is for Hawk, winner of the Samuel Johnson prize was a clear and unforgettable inclusion in my list. Written in searingly powerful prose, MacDonald’s book encompasses grief at the loss of her father, a transcendental exploration of the natural world, an assessment of T.H. White, and, most of all a kind of intensity about what it means to be human through engaging as searchingly as possible in attempting to inhabit the being of a non-human living creature.

Patrick Hamilton was described by J.B Priestley as one of the best minor novelists writing in the interwar (and beyond) years. That sounds like being damned with faint praise, though I don’t believe it was meant in that way. I think, over time, his stock has risen, and that perhaps his difficult personal history may have prevented his peers from seeing quite how good his writing is. He is particularly fine in being able to give authentic voice to ‘little people’ – and, especially, to women. The Slaves of Solitude, set in 1943 is wonderfully funny, as well as making the reader wince with true empathy and recognition, often in the same moment. A light touch writer

American author Dorothy B. Hughes 1963 Golden Age Crime Thriller The Expendable Man makes my list for similar reasons to the three other American books. Not just a well-crafted book, and a strong narrative, but a book which lays bare much of how society, in specific times and places, is faring. Novels, creating the imaginary lives of imaginary individuals, can really bring home, powerfully, something which statistical analyses of information about attitudes from questionnaires and studies, fail to do. I can’t say too much about Hughes book. There’s a journey the reader needs to make for themselves with it, but I do recommend it highly. The fact that it was re-published by the excellent Persephone Press is also a recommendation!

Sean Michael’s Us Conductors was a delight. Canadian Michael’s between the two world wars and beyond, USA and Russian set novel, won Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s Man Booker equivalent. It is a kind of fictionalised biography of Leon Termen, a scientist and inventor who invented the teremin, an electronic musical instrument played by the performer’s hands between the circuits of two oscillators. The book, like the instrument, and like Termen’s life, is a weirdly wonderful thing. This was another book which was instructive, as well as being beautifully written, thoughtful and engaging. It was one of two books I had my in/out tussles with. I couldn’t bear to drop it, nor could I bear to drop the other which was as equally needing inclusion. Published 2015 in the UK

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , a flawed, raging, book about the exploitation of migrants, the disenfranchised, an impassioned polemic for the righteousness of socialist politics, and against the putting of profits above fair pay and working conditions, was always going to be high on my list. Published in 1939, as war began to provide a terrible solution to the stock market crash of the late 20s, this is another book which uncomfortably drags the reader to the mirror, making us examine ourselves, and the society we live in. Steinbeck pulls no punches, and his writing is sometimes sublime and sometimes punches the reader round the head to ensure he gets his point across. It’s a far from comfortable, far from easy read, but good heavens, it is an awakening one

And I’m staying Stateside with Richard Yates Revolutionary Road. Originally published in 1961 Yates’ book is a portrait of a suburban marriage, and of corporate America, the American Dream and its underbelly. It is set in the mid-50s, in Connecticut. Though it was made into a fine film, directed by Sam Mendes, with Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio, which at some point I mean to positively review, what the film can’t do (outside using dialogue taken from the book) is to do justice to Yates’ stunning use of language, and the way something which is described in the book, like the building of a rockery path in a garden, encapsulates, in a very unforced way, metaphors as well as close description. In this, there is a kind of poetic sensibility in his writing, which is full of layers, whilst being absolutely accessible

Having spent quite a lot of time on fictions set earlier in the twentieth century this year, it became time for two non-fiction books about history to occupy my ‘best books’ slot. Alison Weir’s The Lady In The Tower connects back to my first read book of my top reads, the C.J. Sansom. Weir explores the last few month’s of Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. This is history, not historical fiction, and she uses the book to also explain what historians can and cannot do with their research. As well as piecing together documentary evidence she also explores how the thinking of the times in which a later historian is writing, will influence interpretations of meaning. So history has changed its view of the principal players, over time

And then there is the wonderful children’s history book, A Little History of the World, written by the art historian E.H. Gombrich in the 30s, which follows ‘history’ right from prehistoric times with a wide-angled view of the world. It has been updated to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in the recent translation into English. Less about a view of an individual country across the millenia, there’s a global view of ideas, dreams and nightmares of attempts at world domination. It’s like the historical version of the evolution of mankind. Gombrich may have written it for children, but it proves to be a book of immense interest and edification for adults

I returned to Stateside reading in the first book in my ‘Reading the Twentieth’ Challenge. And what a book Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie turned out to be. Dreiser was looking at concerns which would come to dominate again, later in the century – how women (and men) are exploited by capital, the hypocrisy of society towards women’s sexuality, how much we can be said to have free choice, given the power of the unconscious, and the need for peer acceptance, toeing the line, fitting in: the influence of the thinking of the times upon us. A great, rich, weighty tome of a book. I’m keen to engage with Dreiser further, if I can ever penetrate further into the century!

And my final book, one published this year, was also the other one of the in/out tussle. Sara Taylor’s assured debut novel The Shore is a collection of interweaving stories about a community within the geography of islands off the Virginia Coast. Told in distinct voices, and in a back and forth timespan between 1876 and 2143 this is a strange and powerful book. Violent at times, it is never gratuitous, though punches are not pulled. I found myself quite amazed at the strength and assurance of the writing. Taylor is certainly a writer to watch; this is a first novel of great finesse, brutal and beautiful all at once

It only remains to wish you all a very happy 2016, and may your TBR’s grow ever more unwieldy, as magnificent books demand to be added!

On the Challenges of Challenges

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2015 Challenge, Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Books, Other Stuff, PopSugar Challenge, Reading, Reading Challenges

Having embarked on the 2015 PopSugar challenge, I’m unlikely, I hope, ever again to try a challenge which is ‘random’, in terms of categories without a clear literary focus – for example, the randomness of ‘a book with a one word title’ ‘a book written by an author with your initials’ and the like. I must admit, although I started well, reading exactly what I would normally read, and then seeing if it fitted into categories, pretty quickly the bizarre/’fun’ nature of this challenge began, I’m afraid, to irritate this rather serious reader.

Those wanting to see the categories can re-route to the post where I said I was going to do it.

It meant 100 books – not a problem, I’m normally reading a couple of books a week, depending on length and intensity. But categories such as ‘a book with a colour in the title’ began to lose appeal, very quickly.

Paperback, hardback, eread, the books kept arriving and mysteriously downloading…..

However……………..I doubt if the long term challenge I’ve set myself would have materialised without the PopSugar, as doing it let me see that this year there have been some big gaps in my reading:

I was a little shocked to see, for example, that until the idea of MY challenge presented, I had read no books in 2015 which were more than 100 years old. My reading of books in translation and non-fiction were a bit under-represented.

Abandoned books hope…all ye who enter here. Dante’s Inferno illustration from Mapsinchoate, Pinterest

Regrettably, there were a lot of books in the category ‘books you didn’t finish’. Only ONE of these made the ‘books read in 2015’ total, as it was a book which originally I didn’t finish, only because I’d started it at the wrong time and headspace, and it was seriously a-lurking on the TBR for that better time. So it properly earned it’s place in that particular PopSugar niche as it turned out to be one of my Top Ten of this year. The 7 or 8 other ‘books you didn’t finish’ represent books so not to my taste that abandonment was achieved quite rapidly, and without qualms

There were a couple of unfilled categories – what a voracious reader I have always been – I must confess there was NO book which I ‘should have read in high school, but didn’t’ – I did think about stretching it to include the COMPLETE Canterbury Tales, Prologue and All Tales, which I SHOULD have read for my Chaucer Paper whilst at University, and, quite frankly, had a huge aversion to – the original Middle English, don’t you know. But, well, it wasn’t in the category of ‘high school’ and seemed to be too much of a dreadful punishment now.

I also ploughed ‘an author with my initials’ – curiously, there do not appear to be any who have books reasonably accessible, there is one with the same first initial and last name, but he inserts another middle name, so it isn’t quite a match anyway. He at least is an author who I might be interested in reading, and might be able to get hold of a book by, but it won’t be before the end of the challenge

So, failures for high school, and failures for initial

Anyway…………….pertinent to blog world, for the category ‘a book recommended by a friend’ it’s perhaps unsurprising that bloggers have been more responsible for reccs than ‘real’ friends – certainly, a couple of bloggers have pressed me numerically into more reccs than the one or two reads specific ‘reallies’ did

Top reccer of the year honours are shared, equally, by Fiction Fan and Jane, now blogging at Beyond Eden Rock. 6 a-piece. Well done both.

I suspect next year that the challenge for ‘most tempting blogger of the year on Lady Fancifull’s TBR’ will be quite fiercely contested in 2016, as I started following three bloggers late this year who are rapidly looking like making inroads on 2016’s TBR, particularly as they read a lot of classics, often from other countries (it’s all going to serve my Reading the Twentieth) Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, Shoshi’s Book Blog and JacquiWine look like giving me RSI of the 1-Click finger

And, more thanks due to Jane. Looking at those endlessly fascinating (to the blog author, if to no-one else) stats I see that she has soared ahead of others in driving her readers to pop over to look at my site. Thanks, Jane, for the great books and the helpful posted diversion signs!

And thanks to PopSugar for pointing up where I want to be heading in my reading over the next several years, and into making me design a seriously exciting as well as alarming little project for myself.

I shall keep a weather eye out for people doing odd challenges like ‘1924’ ‘German reading month’ etc, as some of these sound interesting little ideas for a book or two, every now and again, but with my own Everest of a challenge, I take myself out of commission from anyone else’s!

As far as categories which I WAS interested in (as they had some literary point, for me)

I read 117* books Not all of which were reviewed, and some of this year’s reads will be reviewed next year, for various reasons

Of these:
38 books published this year
53 books written by women
2 books of short stories (fewer than normal, it illustrates that I’m not really drawn to short stories, which seems to be the preface to every book of short stories I DO read and review!)
62 books set in a different country – perhaps predictably, the bulk of these were American or European, and this is something I want to redress, and roam a little wider next year
18 non-fiction – pretty woeful!
4 books more than 100 years old (see what I mean, my challenge will improve that one, for sure)
55 books by an author I had never read before
9 books originally written in another language (woeful, again my challenge will include this)

Okay………time to refine the nominations for books of 2015 before all you bloggers mass your ranks and get serious on building my 2016 TBR pile

*Number might be a little more than that, as I may well finish another one or two between the posting of this and the end of the year

Rebecca -Alfred Hitchcock

Tags

Alfred Hitchcock, Film review, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson, Laurence Olivier, Movie, Noir Movie, Rebecca, Thriller and Suspense Movie

A Paler Shade of Noir

I watched Hitchcock’s 1940 film, which I had seen before, close on the heels of re-reading du Maurier’s wonderful 1938 novel, and whilst the film is in many ways a brilliant adaptation particularly served by excellent performances, a tautly written screenplay which sensibly uses du Maurier’s dialogue, where this is given in the book itself, stunning cinematography and of course is excellently suited to the master of suspense’s vision, I do have some reservations at choices which substantially weaken the film, in comparison to du Maurier’s edgier, unsoftened version.

Some of the choices made by Hitchcock (or possibly by Selznick, who produced the film), seem pragmatic and perhaps understandable, but there are two major changes – the rather soapy, surviving adversity as the music swells to soupy lushness, ending, for Mr and Mrs and, even more importantly, the changed revelation of how ‘the crime’ actually happened, absolutely undercuts the far more powerful, morally tainted and uncomfortable questions du Maurier leaves for her readers, and, of course, for her unnamed heroine. I can’t say more, in case someone reading this hasn’t read the book or seen the film. Did David O. Selznick demand this choice, or did Hitch himself pull his punches?  Some stars would not have wanted to be left with moral taints, but I don’t think Olivier was one of those.

The book itself creates the ambiguous ‘after the end scene’ ending, by having the second Mrs de Winter describe the Winter’s post Manderley life, at the start of the novel. We do not get this in the film, either in the beginning or at the end, which creates more upbeat than du Maurier gave us.

I suppose another contrast to the book is what happens to Mrs Danvers. Hitchcock goes for high opera, and a visual which in some ways underlines the similarity that the book has with Jane Eyre, though, again, du Maurier presents something less resolved, less black and white. Readers of course have time to think about what they are reading, and can put a book down. Viewers, at least back in 1940 could not pause and reflect; the dynamic of the movie, once started, must be clearer to follow and more direct in its journey

There were some more understandable changes, which are inevitable when adapting a book which is most careful and subtle at applying the build-up of tension quite slowly, particularly at the start, whereas the film must concentrate everything into 2 hours and 10 minutes.

I was impressed by how very quickly and deftly plot was advanced, and how much the wonderful cinematography immediately created the layered build-up du Maurier’s prose had been crafted to do. We lose of course the interior feelings, imaginings, the running-in-the-head commentary of the book’s narrator, but the way, for example, the pile-up effect of napkin after napkin, leaf of stationery after leaf of stationery, stamped with the assured R de W logo has on the second wife, is expertly rendered by shot choices and Joan Fontaine’s feelings and thoughts as they express in her body language and face.

Fontaine, Olivier, Anderson

The initial slow build of connection and suspense from Maxim and the gauche young woman’s meeting in the book is given a much more dramatic and quickly signalled ‘something is dreadfully wrong’ subtext in a film scene which is not in the book.

The DVD comes with a few extras, some interviews with Hitch and some of his film critic admirers, which were interesting, but there are quite a lot of rather hard to read text notes, biographies of the two central actors, etc.

Something I found most fascinating is that Olivier was insistent that his then lover, Vivien Leigh (they were not yet divorced from their respective first spouses) should be cast as the second Mrs de Winter. It was Selznick who, rightly, nixed this, saying Vivien Leigh did not have the right qualities to the part. Too right – if anything Vivien Leigh (and, particularly as her marriage with Olivier began to unwind) displayed behaviour and powerfully charged emotional states which put her on the Rebecca end of the spectrum – plus, of course, that fabulous erotic beauty and clear sexiness.

Vivien Leigh who became the second Mrs Olivier, rather than the second Mrs de Winter

By all accounts, Olivier was perfectly beastly to Fontaine, and rather undermined her. Hitch, we are told, as he so often did, manipulated the insecurities the young and at that stage, fairly inexperienced Fontaine must have felt, to create ‘in real’ the not good enough, can’t match up, extreme fragility and low self-esteem of the character. Fontaine was of course an American, so there was plenty of potential on-set feeling against a Yankee playing a quintessential Brit, particularly in such an iconic role, as du Maurier’s book had been a runaway best-seller from the off.

No doubt a similar ‘in reverse’ happened when the Brit, Leigh, won the coveted role in Gone With The Wind, which her American counterparts had failed to carry off, though I don’t think either George Cukor, who initially was on board as director, or Victor Fleming, who did direct, had reputations for mis-treating their actresses in order to get specific performances, in the way Hitch did, particularly with the women who were not yet established stars

My other ‘I can’t quite love this film, though I do admire it a lot’ criticism is of Franz Waxman’s score, which, to my taste is a little too ‘this is a love story’ – which is certainly where the Hollywood choice moral, rather than du Maurier’s darker, more bitter and difficult book, and the soupy almost happy ever after ending, at least for Mr and Mrs – are leading. I would have preferred a little more salt, a little more sourness, a little more bitterness in that music.

A stunning example of George Barnes’ craft (photo from Pinterest)

Most curiously, though the film was nominated for a whole cluster of awards, it won just two: Best Cinematography for George Barnes, and Best Picture – despite the best picture award (which thus went to Selznick) it did not win the Best Director for Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock by Jack Mitchell

Olivier, Fontaine and Judith Anderson, as a magnificent, intensely still and unhistrionic villain were all nominated, along with Robert Sherwood and Joan Harrison for best adapted screenplay, Waxman for the score, and also nominations for editing, art direction and special effects.

I found it a fascinating and rewarding experience to revisit book and film so closely together

Rebecca, Movie – Hitchcock Amazon UK
Rebecca, Movie – Hitchcock Amazon USA

Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca

Tags

Book Review, Daphne du Maurier, Gothic Novel, Gothic Romance, Psychological Thriller, Rebecca

“The salt wind from the sea”

I must have read Rebecca at least twice, over the years, the first time in my teens, and have seen the film also at least once, but reading it again after many years is a bit of a revelation.

I’m amazed that the very obvious homage to Jane Eyre did not strike me when I read it previously, because this time, that came into clear focus – no doubt helped by the rather excellent forward by Sally Beauman, in the Virago Modern Classics version I recently found in a charity shop, and snapped up, thinking a re-read would be a very good thing.

Now I always knew that du Maurier was a good writer, as well as a popular one, but, again, my re-read this time absolutely underlined how good she was. Freed from any ‘what happens next’ I soaked up structure, atmosphere, and could not help but compare this book to the sometimes relentless ‘psychological thrillers’ subgenre which burgeons on the bestsellers. Rebecca is a literary fiction book, surely, and it’s easy to see how Hitchcock was enamoured by her wonderfully structured, tellingly visual, darkly sub-textural visions

From that wonderfully brilliant, evocative opening line and paragraph, to the masterly ending where she trusts her readers, so that there is no need to spell out, as though to a child, exactly what has happened, but expects that the reader will connect the little clues, the phrases, and complete the picture themselves, she kept me close and spellbound on a disturbing, unsettling, dreamlike journey, almost skating over all sorts of myths lying beneath. Not only were there the clear nods to Jane Eyre, the scary archetypes of female madness, the charismatic, domineering older man – but I thought also of Bluebeard.

Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine

I won’t spell plot, in case, despite this book’s perennial popularity, a lucky person who has never met it happens on this review, but something which struck me forcibly on this reading is the rightness of never naming our narrator, despite the fact that Max de Winter informs her that she has a lovely name. The second ‘Mrs de Winter’ is remarkably unformed. Here is where the young, innocent, exploited ‘companion’ to a spoilt, rich, emotionally unintelligent woman, differs from the innocent and also sometimes exploited Jane Eyre. Jane may be gauche at times, but she has such a clear sense of herself, such discernment. Mrs de Winter has no boundaries, she has incredibly fine empathy and ‘feels the feelings’ of others, but she lacks a healthy and resilient sense of self-worth. She is almost like a mirror-image, or extreme opposite of Rebecca. In this book, we have not one, but I think two (and of course three, if you count the fearsome Mrs Danvers) women with some kind of psychological flaw. Rebecca, the charismatic, is deeply narcissistic, and has boundaries of steel and rock. She is invulnerable to the needs of others. The second ‘Mrs de Winter’ deeply imagines and inhabits what others are feeling; so much so that she loses herself. The other archetype which is played out, is that of Svengali/Trilby – almost anyone can be the second Mrs de Winter’s Svengali – Rebecca’s pervading presence, Mrs Danvers, Maxim, Mrs Van Hopper, and she is manipulated with ease.

Judith Anderson, Joan Fontaine

And of course Trilby was a work of fiction written by du Maurier’s grandfather, George.

Although I can’t read this as part of my ‘Reading the Twentieth’ challenge, as I am still firmly stuck in 1900, I am finding that my reading or re-reading of books from the first half of the twentieth is being influenced by ‘Reading the Twentieth’ Given that the book was published in 1938, it is surprising that there is absolutely no reference to the events brewing in the wider world, although of course the implacable, sociopathic Rebecca, might be a domestic version of tyranny and dictatorship. Du Maurier is I think creating a dark and mythic world here. It is assuredly realistic, not magical realism, yet the at times highly charged language, the implied, destructive eroticism, take the book into a kind of free-floating world of myth, metaphor and sub-consciousness. The only glancing intrusion of politics happens when Max’s sister, Beatrice, imagines that the central crime which the book leads towards might have been carried out by:

a Communist perhaps. There are heaps of them about. Just the sort of thing a Communist would do

I was intrigued to discover, that when the book came out it was pretty well dismissed by the ‘literaries’ – who only saw its populist appeal, and little more. The Times dismissively said “the material is of the humblest…nothing in this is beyond the novelette.” . The novelist V.S. Pritchett predicted the book “would be here today, gone tomorrow”. Inevitably, one can’t help but wonder how the book would have been viewed if the author had been male. Post-feminism, it has been re-assessed by readers and writers precisely with a feminist perspective, in its examination of the power differential between powerful, worldly men, and young inexperienced women.

Menabilly House, Fowey, du Maurier’s Manderley

Du Maurier interestingly wrote this not in her beloved Cornwall, but in Alexandria, Egypt, where her husband, ‘Boy’ Browning, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, was posted with his battalion. She longed for home, and that longing is most powerfully expressed in this book. There was also, by all accounts, a close to home exploration for du Maurier herself, of the powerful drive of female jealousy ‘Boy’ Browning had been engaged before, to a brilliantly dark haired beauty.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited

I will, in fairly short due course, before the wonderful atmosphere of the book begins to let me go, be watching the film on DVD. It will be interesting to compare. I believe (though I can’t quite remember) that Hitchcock went for a less dark ending.

Certainly, du Maurier, in the ‘present’ of the book – most of it involved the second Mrs de Winter looking back at the events of her new married life – gives us a sense of a terrible sterility. The polite forms are observed, and they are used to paper over the chasms of what must remain unsaid.

This is, of course, a properly fabulous book. Perfectly inhabiting genre, and much, much more

Rebecca Amazon UK
Rebecca Amazon USA

Sarah Hall – The Wolf Border

Tags

Book Review, Cumbria, Rewilding, Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border, Wolves

Both wolves, and borders, are rich in metaphor as well as in tangible reality

Sarah Hall’s book The Wolf Border is a deep and absorbing one – thoughtful, intensely visceral, exploring ideas and feelings the reader will be left thinking about, as well as luring that reader in with story, not to mention a wonderful sense of place in natural environments

Rachel Caine is a biologist, an animal behaviourist and environmentalist. She specialises in wolves. At the start of the novel she is one of a team of equally dedicated people working in a reservation in Nez Perce county, Idaho.The wolves are tracked, living free, and are also of course at risk from wolf haters (so deep does the wolf lie in our collective unconscious as a metaphor for many things) and from hunters whose relationship with the wild is to need to conquer, master and kill it.

Rachel is an English woman, a middle aged English woman, with a complicated family history back in the Lake District. Daughter of a rackety, wilful, independent woman who loved sex but was not a natural mother, though she did set her daughter free into independence, Rachel has put an ocean between herself and her mother, and between herself and her far less resilient younger brother. Drawn back to visit her mother, now elderly, and in a nursing home, heading towards the end days, she is also in ‘Annerdale’ – a vast, composite part of the protected National Park of Cumbria, which Hall is careful not to pin to too much specificity – for other reasons.

A wealthy, powerful aristocrat, close to the seat of government, Thomas Pennington, Earl of Annerdale, has a project to reintroduce wild wolves to wild Cumbria, in a large and boundaried area of his land. Bringing wild wolves back, safely though, to this country, where many centuries ago they once lived. Bringing back a top indigenous predator as a way to control rising native deer populations. A more natural method of control than the culls of hunting for sport. Pennington wishes to head-hunt Rachel.

Rachel has no reason to want to join Pennington’s project, there are class divides, and an innate suspicion of those who are so invested with power, property, prestige – a privileged mainly boys club. The setting is 2014, moving towards the Scottish referendum.

However, despite her distrust of Pennington, and her commitment to Idaho, events in her personal life bring her to accept the offer. The wolf, and the borders which must be created and maintained in the landscape to keep civilisation safe, and more, importantly, to keep the civilised world thinking it is safe and able to ignore ‘wild’, and the call of ‘wild’ within itself. There are a dizzying multiplicity of borders within this book – most powerfully between what we believe is ‘human, conscious, rational’ and what lies beneath, in darkness, instinct, viscera, the limbic system. The humans wear masks, clothes, surround themselves with pretences of rationality and, well, being human, not animal – but older, deeper calls lie hidden in the blood. Sex, procreation, territory, visceral embodiment are shown at work.

The wolf, in reality as well as in symbol represents something free, unconfined, authentic – and also dangerous. Rachel will be confronted by her own struggles to accommodate the intellectual and emotional freedom, the absence of relationship tethers, with another side to her nature, another side to instinct, which in the end confines as much as it expands and extends her – motherhood.

There are other people in her world who will also be engaged in that kind of struggle within their nature.

Although Hall sets her story in a particular region, and against the background of particular political concerns (the Scottish Independence referendum) she makes the decision to not have any ‘real’ individuals have an active place in her story. So, for example, though reference is made to Gordon Brown’s campaigning and influence on the ‘Better Together’ campaign, Brown does not physically make an appearance, or engage with any of the characters in The Wolf Border. However the Prime Minister, and the leader of the SNP at that time, are both characters who engage with Thomas Pennington, and in the case of the PM, visit Pennington Hall. Except that the PM is not called David Cameron, though he clearly stands for him, nor is the leader of the SNP and Scotland’s then first minister called Alex Salmond. This gives Hall the possibility to explore further both the mythic and the actual impact of what such an idea – the re-introduction of a wild predator, at the top of a food chain, might be, in terms of symbol and on the ground management of wildness.

I felt this decision added some interesting dimensions to her story.

There was one strand which I wasn’t quite sure about, which was the story, and eventual revelations connected with her brother, Lawrence. I felt they were possibly a device so that Lawrence was on hand for childcare, which otherwise might have proved problematic practically, given Rachel’s own nature, and the fierce pulls made by, one the one hand, her maternal instincts, and, on the other, the power of her connection to the wolves, symbolically and actually

Now I don’t know about you, but the howling of wolves is one of most beautiful, most unearthly sounds I can imagine. Foolish, I’m sure, but I’d want to go run with them…..

The Wolf Border Amazon UK
The Wolf Border Amazon USA

Dan Rhodes – When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow

Tags

Book Review, Dan Rhodes, Humour, When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow

I first encountered Dan Rhodes with the wonderful, witty, intelligent, feel-good rom-com and more This Is Life. Rhodes on that showing, knew how to warm the cockles of the heart without spoonsful of saccharine, with a delicious, inventive sense of humour, sharp observations, and finely honed prose. I have to confess that the ‘humour’ genre generally raises nary a chuckle in this house, as you can spot the boom-boom punchlines coming in predictable fashion

Rhodes did not do that boom boom in This Is Life. However….he does it rather a lot in this book. If the story of a book will involve an earnest attempt to reach a place called Upper Bottom, it is absolutely obvious there will be much very unsubtle humour, geared at the reader’s inner four year old, and with more than a whiff of Ooh, Matron! Carry On about it.

And there was……but Rhodes had me groaning out loud with ‘no, no I can’t believe you are really going to go for potty humour in this way’ amusement. I whickered, snickered, sniggered, chortled, gasped, giggled, barked, roared, face-palmed in appalled disbelief, whinnied, screeched, howled, gibbered and made every attempt at working through an evolution of as many animal sounds possible as I proceeded through this possibly shockingly nasty book

One of the two central characters in this piece of fiction is a certain Professor Richard Dawkins who is a worldwide celebrity through the authorship of very well written books about evolution and genetics. He has also written books espousing a very militant atheism and achieved a guru like fame, loved and loathed in equal measure. This Professor Richard Dawkins has also become famous for using Social Media to scatter his pronouncements in peppery fashion on this that and the other. Curiously, the Professor Richard Dawkins who is one of the central characters in Mr Rhodes book bears more than a passing resemblance, albeit tweaked into a Spitting Image puppet kind of way, to a world famous evolutionary biologist and militant atheist whose name happens to be Richard Dawkins. And who is a professor. It’s possibly a coincidence.

“Dawkins at UT Austin” by Shane Pope from Austin, United States Wiki Commons

The Professor Dawkins of this book is a devoted public speaker, travelling here there and everywhere to carry the message of atheism to ignorant unbelievers who hold different views from those espoused by evolutionary biologists steeped in the scientific method. In this book, this Professor Dawkins is taking his message to the cosy Women’s Institute in a place called Upper Bottom. He is travelling with his assistant, a man called (by Professor Richard Dawkins), Smee. Though that isn’t his real name. Unfortunately an extreme wrong kind of snow weather event means his train can’t reach the Bottoms, (there are, of course, many Bottoms) and all roads to all Bottoms are blocked. The Professor is forced to seek shelter from the storm, with his trusty assistant carrying the bags, in the proverbial any port in the. Which just happens to be in Market Horton, whose claim to fame is being ‘The Gateway To The Bottoms’

The kindly hosts who will rescue the illustrious Professor and his devoted amanuensis are a retired vicar and his wife, Mr and Mrs Potter, who have a twin bedded bed and breakfast room in their house. Mrs Potter is a slightly simple soul, though enormously kind. She does make quite a few mistakes. For example, confusing this Professor with another gentleman of a reasonably similar sounding last name, who is a real-life mathematician. On being disabused of her error, and told that our professor is an expert on genomes, she makes another mistake, as anyone might, and tries to arrange the décor of the spare bedroom in a way which will make our rescued from the snow Professor feel right at home. Kindly Mrs Potter has installed a collection of objects from her garden, brought in for the winter, to gladden the heart of her chilly guest. And that was where I started making loud animal noises, which only got louder and more frequent

A gladsome wintery scene, commons, pixabay

I rather guiltily found this an enormously feel-good book. But then, I’m not called Professor Richard Dawkins, Martin Amis, Lynne Truss, Scarlett Johansson, A.C Grayling, Pippa Middleton, or any of the other names caught in the sights of Mr Rhodes pop-gun

For the record, this book (which I gratefully received as a Christmas gift digital review copy from the doughty publishers, Aardvark Bureau) was originally published a year ago in a limited run of 400 as a self-published book by Mr Rhodes, who is a successful author.

Surprisingly, this was a book seen as a little too hot to handle, as the legal teams of publishing houses were curiously worried that a certain Professor Dawkins might have a few choice objections, particularly as there is no disclaimer that none of the characters named in the book bear any resemblance to any real people who happen to have similar names.

I can quite understand that anyone called Professor Richard Dawkins might be very offended by this book. I would be, if that was my name. And so I’m very ashamed to say that even admitting that, I couldn’t stop laughing. Even though I no longer think that Dan Rhodes is such a warm-hearted person as I did after discovering that feel-good rom com ‘This Is Life’

Not a Professor

This is a kind of feel-bad because you feel so good book. I’m afraid I recommend it, and hope that Professor Richard Dawkins has some variant of a duck’s back gene, and handles this as if it were water.

When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow Amazon UK
When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow Amazon USA

Frank L. Baum – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Tags

1900, America 1900s, Book Review, Children's Book Review, Frank L. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Somewhere Over The Rainbow……………….

I have never read The Wizard of Oz. Not as far as I remember. My childhood books were very much the classics of English literature for children. I remember of course, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Wind In The Willows (very strongly), the marvels of the Andrew Lang coloured fairy story books, which I was forever borrowing from the library, Dodie Smith, the marvellous Moomins, a few Blytons – the Faraway Tree stood out. The famous five appealed less than Swallows and Amazons – I wanted to be Pirate Nancy Amazon, the Swallows were too tame! , Noel Streatfield, and, most of all, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett – a marvellous central character, a cross, imperious, bad-tempered girl who discovers a real love of the natural world (clearly, lots to identify with!) My guess is that what lay over the Atlantic did not really enter my mother’s mind. I don’t think I even saw the film till I was an adult, probably on one of the perennial TV showings.

W.W.Denslow, Illustrator

So, having discovered that Baum wrote it – it never even occurred to me that it had had a literary beginning way before Judy Garland developed an obsession with rainbows – and that it first saw the light of day in 1900, it seemed time to see what a 1900 child was getting, particularly as the version I got on Kindle came with the original drawings (albeit in black and white). I gather that one very original feature of the book was that it had colour illustrations, which of course is something we absolutely expect in a children’s book these days. Thinking about those illustrations it was interesting to see that Dorothy is quite a stocky, solid, normal looking little girl, not stylised into extreme pulchritude in the Barbied or Disneyfied fashion of today

I was intrigued by Baum’s reasons for writing this . In the foreword, he states he wanted to write a book full of magic and wonders but without the moralising aspect of children’s books of the time – fair dos to that – but, curiously he was troubled by the nightmares and the horrors in children’s books – as in traditional fairy stories, for example, Brothers Grimm style. However, I was less impressed by that idea. Children do tend to rather love a degree of grisly, and I think it’s adults who then forget that as children there was a kind of terrified delight in the grimness of those dark tales. Things always came right in the end, despite the horridness.

I do have to say I rather missed the scary in this. There are of course baddies – the two Wicked Witches, though the first one is killed by Dorothy’s house landing on her before we even know she exists, and the second one, though not the nicest of lassies by any means, certainly is no where near as chilling as witches generally are in fairy tales. Besides, Dorothy is such a sensible and grown-up little body that though we are told she is frightened, homesick and the rest, Baum doesn’t really go in for the kind of description which really gets you into identifying with the feelings of the central character. And, perhaps this was an unusual aspect in the book. It is the little girl, Dorothy, not to mention the good and beautiful witch Glinda who are the most sensible and grounded, as well as psychologically balanced. Dorothy might almost be said to be too good to be true. I liked very much that the driver of resolutions (with a little help from her friends whom she, of course, had enormously helped in their own psychological development) was a female child. Dorothy is rescuer as much as she is ever rescued.

It was also interesting to see that her heart’s desire was always practical and pragmatic – to get back to Kansas. In large part because the kindly girl does not want to leave her aunt worrying about her. Her companions, the brainy scarecrow who believes he has no brains, the highly empathetic and feeling tin man who feels he lacks heart, and the cowardly lion who constantly behaves bravely but not does not realise that feeling fearful doesn’t mean cowardice, have problems in being unable to positively see themselves as they really are. Likewise, the wonderful wizard of Oz himself is a fake, who is afraid of being seen for himself. It’s only Dorothy who doesn’t really have time for all this neurosis which, in their different ways, the over-imaginative chaps of straw, tin, lion and wizardry are expressing.

Difficult to completely cast myself back into the mindset of the child I was, and try to see this through that child’s eye, but I suspect Dorothy would have been far too sensible and perfect for me to identify with, though I would have liked the fact that she’s the one who solves the problems rather than just waiting feebly for the prince to come and rescue her.

I also very much enjoyed the warm humour. Much of this may have resonated more for the adults reading the book to their children, though I’m not really convinced that those adults would have been thinking ‘here is an allegory about economic theory’ (see below):

Something I enjoyed almost more than the story was the inclusion, in the interesting after material of a fabulously, barkingly hot air academic analysis of this which tied itself in ever more ridiculous knots to find political, economic and sociological analysis of the text, indeed, going so far as to claim that Baum clearly wrote the book to engage with a major strand in economic theory thinking at the time – bimetallism. Oscar Wilde makes satiric reference to this theory in An Ideal Husband, as Mabel Chiltern deflects the often proposing Tommy from yet another proposal :

At luncheon I saw by the glare in his eye that he was going to propose again, and I just managed to check him in time by assuring him that I was a bimetallist. Fortunately I don’t know what bimetallism means. And I don’t believe anybody else does either. But the observation crushed Tommy for ten minutes. He looked quite shocked.

Bimetallism referred to a monetary standard which gave a fixed rate to both gold and silver – a fixed rate of exchange between them. Both gold and silver can then be exchanged into fixed rates of legal tender

Henry Littlefield, an historian, produced a highly complex analysis of the Wizard of Oz in the 60’s (irreverently I wondered under what influence!) claiming that the Yellow Brick Road which led to the Emerald City represented the Gold Standard. Which led to the fakery of The Emerald City with its fake wizard and the green glasses which deceived wearers into only seeing green: the fraudulence and fakery of ‘greenbacks’ – paper money. The silver slippers which finally will get Dorothy back to Kansas represent the stability which ‘Bimetallism’ would bring (according to its adherents) to the economy, compared to only using the Gold Standard.

Frank L. Baum

You’re quite right, I went cross-eyed trying to work out the theory of this, as reported in the afterword which reported on Littlefield’s theories, and others.

I think I’m with Mabel Chiltern.

I enjoyed my reading of Baum, and the inevitable inclusion of that iconic rainbow moment from the 1936 film.

I shall be looking forward to including some more books written for children, in due course, as I progress, increasingly slowly, through the century. It seems harder to move on from a year than I anticipated

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Amazon UK
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Amazon USA
This Kindle version has the original illustrations, but in black and white, and with the addition of a lot of extra background material

I have since found another version, also on Kindle, with those original illustrations by W.W. Denslow, but as colour illustrations. Heaven. I’m not sure whether it has all the interesting postscripts that the copy I had contains – I suspect not, from the big difference in numbers of pages. I suspect the first version is perhaps of more interest for adults, with all the background. Me, I’m greedy, one version with both please!
Original illustrations in colour Amazon UK
Original illustrations in colour Amazon USA

A READING THE TWENTIETH POST – 1900 : FICTION  (CHILDREN’S)– NON UK

Finally – I’m told by the Site Admin that this is my 500th post. It seems more than fitting that a blog called ‘Lady Fancifull’ should have a distinctly fantasy/fairy tale book review for such a momentous number