Muriel Spark – Memento Mori

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#ReadingMuriel 2018, Book Review, Memento Mori, Muriel Spark

You answer the phone, an anonymous caller says “Remember You Must Die”….and then hangs up.

Muriel Spark’s third novel, Memento Mori, published in 1959 is a blackly comedic, sometimes savage, sometimes tender journey towards death, following a group of aged upper middle class intellectuals, their servants and companions, towards their final breaths.

To quote a definition of the title (Wiki) :

Memento mori (Latin: “remember that you have to die”) is the medieval Latin Christian theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Lisa Brooke died in her seventy-third year after her second stroke. She had taken nine months to die, and in fact it was only a year before her death that, feeling rather ill, she had decided to reform her life, and reminding herself how attractive she was, offered up the new idea, her celibacy to the Lord to whom no gift whatsoever is unacceptable

Spark had converted to Catholicism (from Presbyterianism) some 4 years earlier, and faith was clearly important – if not to say a potential conflict, in her life. Spark’s father was Jewish, her mother Presbyterian, and one of the central relationships in this novel, that of a successful writer, Charmian Colston and her wealthy businessman husband, Godfrey, features several spats around what Catholics do and do not believe. Charmian is a Catholic, and Godfrey seems to simultaneously envy and despise her beliefs.

Someone appears to be terrifying several members of the group of elderly and very elderly people as that someone – or perhaps even a group of someones – is making anonymous phone calls. All the caller says is “Remember you must die” Some of the elderly group bear this with equanimity, taking it as a philosophical statement. Others are outraged, terrified or in denial. Curiously, each person describes the caller’s voice very differently, and their attitude towards the phone call, as well as the description of the anonymous voice, seems to suggest more about the nature of the person receiving the call than anything else.

                Pieter Claesz:  Vanitas, Still Life 1630

A major concern for all the cast of wonderfully delineated characters is health – both their own, and that of their contemporaries. Everyone is watching everyone else, both for their physical decline and frailties, but, more importantly, for evidence of what is happening to compos mentis. And the observation of the others is not always done with kindly intent, but is as much to do with self-preening, schadenfreude or pure greed – what might be in the fading one’s will, and might steps be taken to ensure one’s own benefit?

There were twelve occupants of the Maud Long Medical Ward (aged people, female)…..These twelve old women were known variously as Granny Roberts, Granny Duncan, Granny Taylor, Grannies Barnacle, Trotsky, Green, Valvona, and so on.

Sometimes, on first being received into her bed, the patient would be shocked and feel rather let down by being called Granny….A year ago, when Miss Taylor had been admitted to the ward, she had suffered misery when addressed as Granny Taylor, and she thought she would rather die in a ditch than be kept alive under such conditions, But she was a woman practised in restraint;  she never displayed her resentment

Everyone’s lives have secrets, and the very elderly, by virtue of their longevity probably have more than the young. No matter that some of the most scandalous and shameful secrets are those from long long ago, keeping secrets of affairs, business malpractice and savage rivalries matter as much to the nonagenarians within these pages as they might to someone in the middle of active exposure.

Trying to discover who is responsible for the alarming ‘Memento Mori’ phone calls, a retired detective is engaged..but, in a nice little crime fiction twist, some of the recipients of the calls suspect the detective himself.

It might sound as if this could be a grim or a depressing book, think, rather, a kind of combination of a lids-off, Ortonesque lively exposure of sexual shenanigans – even though these are innocent by modern standards, with Dorothy Parker sharpened pen nib humour which is barbed and deliciously deadly. Spark is writing about serious matters, and the pathos and sadness blows land, in amidst her sparkling, inventive, sometimes savage account of the one-way journey we are all making

On the first occasion it had been necessary for him to indicate his requirements to her. But now she understood…..(he) placed on the low coffee table a pound note….Without shifting her posture she raised the hem of her skirt at one side until the top of her stocking and her suspender were visible. Then she went on knitting and watching the television screen….(he) gazed at the stocking-top and the glittering steel of the suspender-tip for the space of two minutes silence. Then he pulled back his shoulders as if recalling his propriety, and still in silence, walked out

(I have obviously removed character names as it is for the reader to discover identities!)

There are, for sure some horrible individuals within these pages, lying in wait for the vulnerable; there are also the mildly dotty, the seriously vanished who-knows-where, the kind of lifelong committee person who can be such a stalwart – and such a pain – in the doing-of-good

Spark creates brilliantly drawn characters, and the reader needs to pay attention to all of them; their lives are wonderfully entangled, and there are some complicated twists to discover. It is the economy and precision of her writing which makes this such a delight – and, of course, the fact that though this is a comedic book, in many ways, it is darkly serious at heart. A light touch on an inescapable subject

I read this as part of Ali’s through the year journey with Muriel Spark, ReadingMuriel 2018

Memento Mori UK
Memento Mori USA

BTW, UK readers wanting to buy this on Kindle – at the moment (26th Jan) gets you a translation of the book into Italian. Which may not be what you are hoping to buy.

I believe the lovely Virago Modern Classics version which I got on a used, market place seller, is reprinting and will be out in May

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Sylvia Townsend Warner – The Cats’ Cradle Book

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Book Review, Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Cat's Cradle Book

“If you speak Cat at all there is no reason why you should not speak it fluently. It is simply a matter of application”

The sparky, weird (sometimes a little Shirley Jackson-ish) Sylvia Townsend Warner has here written a rather wonderful book of ‘fairy tales’ from a particular perspective

The narrator, or perhaps we should say, the editor, comes by chance on an intriguing house in the English Countryside, It is

a seventeenth century house with a long façade and a reed-thatch roof. It gave an impression of slenderness, of being worn smooth and thin like an old spoon

The house and gardens contain perhaps 19, perhaps 27 cats and kittens. And the tenant of the house, and perhaps amanuensis and companion of the cats, is an unusually handsome young man (in the eyes of the narrator)

We cut a great deal of asparagus, and carried it into the kitchen. While I trimmed it and tied it in bunches he prepared nineteen fish dinners, and stood in the yard calling:

“The cats, the cats! The little cats!”

Besides the asparagus there was some cold pigeon pie and a plateful of sugar biscuits. And there was a bottle of vin d’Anjou, Several cats sat in the dining room, some on chairs, some on the window-sill, some on the large rosewood table. When, with the sugar biscuits, coffee and brandy were served, one of these, a massive marmalade cat, rose up and began to sip delicately from the wide glass

And perhaps we should draw a discreet veil over the swiftly erotic connection between this handsome young man and the narrator or editor of The Cat’s Cradle Book. What is really important is the speaking, and understanding of Cat.

The young man is fluent both in speaking and understanding – and, in fact, the love of his life was a remarkable Siamese cat he met whilst employed in Turkey, in the diplomatic service. Haru, the cat was a consummate storyteller, and like Sheherezade, beguiled with her stories. William, the young man, quickly began to study these, and other stories and which he realised were savage and instructive variants of the various myth and fairy stories which are so commonly told to children across the globe. It quickly becomes clear the original of ‘our’ fairy stories were tales told by generations of mother cats to their kittens.

And the stories are a little odd – for example, The Fox-Pope :

A fox who had been reading the Lives of the Saints was so delighted with the style of the book that he decided to become a saint himself. It seemed to him that he would be happiest as a hermit; so he retired to the Transylvanian Alps, taking with him a great bundle of lettuces and a cold chicken to eat on Sundays and saints’ days

These are not just whimsical and fey though. Townsend as a writer is far closer to Grimm (or Jackson) than she is to pretty Perrault. So we have crows feasting on the eyes of corpses, and our almost Fox-Pope resisting the nymph like temptation of a female rabbit whilst eating her litter ‘as solitude is essential to hermits’

                          Aoshima, Japan’s Cat Island

What we have here, then, is a collection of some of these cat’s cradle stories. But, before we can begin to enjoy them, it is only fair to warn the ailurophiles who are the ones most likely to enjoy these strange and literary tales, that though the narrator clearly loves cats, since she has learned to understand the language, though she only speaks it tolerably well, there is quite a lot of heartache to go through, as there is a high count of loved cats who are passed into cat afterlife. This is not due to human savagery, merely time, and the length of a life

This is a delightful collection – however, I feel both mean and heartless in championing it. The book is out of print, no digital version exists, and I may have snaffled the last inexpensive second hand copy, advertised on Abebooks, after a fellow blogger praised this collection, following a chance find in a second hand shop. The Cat’s Cradle Book was originally published in 1960 by Chatto and Windus.

We can only all hope that someone decides to reissue more of Townsend Warner’s books, or, perhaps, a wonderful epublisher of ‘forgotten’ minor (but wonderful) uniquely resonating voices from earlier in the twentieth (like Open Road Media) brings these back.

I note that Townsend Warner seems to be appearing and re-appearing on a lot of literary blogs whose authors are particularly active in championing unjustly vanished out of consciousness and print, writers, particularly those who were at one point so well served by Virago

And I must of course make obeisance to Jane from Beyond Eden Rock. She is one of the bloggers buzzing about Sylvia Townsend Warner and is indeed that blogger who found a copy of this, in a second hand shop. I did not trust time, and chance, and went screamingly in search on the Internet. You can read Jane’s alluring (or should I say ailuring) (!) review here

Anthony Horowitz – Magpie Murders

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Anthony Horowitz, Book Review, Classic Crime Fiction, Crime Fiction, Golden-Age Crime Fiction, Magpie Murders

5 stars for Atticus Pünd and another 5 stars for his careful editor Susan Ryeland

Susan Ryeland is a literary editor for Cloverleaf Books, a small, independent publisher whose success is primarily dependent on one man, ‘Golden-Age’ crime writer Alan Conway. Well, to be properly precise, Golden-Age-Crime-Genre writer, as Conway, like the rest of us, lives in modern times. Conway, of course, is the author of the hugely successful Atticus Pünd series of detective novels, and the series is an homage to Agatha Christie, amongst others, in many ways. A BBC TV series is pending, and the latest book in the series, Magpie Murders, is enticingly waiting for Ryeland’s editing work to start.

Ms Ryeland introduces herself, and then the first half of the book which you might be considering reading is Conway’s manuscript, as submitted to Cloverleaf Books. It’s helpful to keep that in mind, as you peruse, as the book entitled Magpie Murders, by the author Anthony Horowitz, also has much involvement from Susan!

Sometimes, authors play tricks games and deceptions on their readers, and we resent untoward, unsubtle manipulations, and sometimes – as here – the more we are tricked, distracted, deceived and toyed with, the more we love it, gasping at authorial audacity, crowing with delight as rug after rug is whipped from under us, and as every clue we cry ‘AHA!!! ‘about turns out to be a herring of reddish hue, we want to applaud the author for his cleverness and our own naïveté

This is a most delicious romp. I can’t really say more, because I think the less the reader knows about the journey Horowitz will take them on, the more they may enjoy it. He is a consummate craftsman of the genre, and it was a complete delight to surrender to his writerly skills

All I would say, is that the decision to allow to Susan introduce herself first is an extremely good one, stylistically. It prevents the sort of sudden tricksy surprises an author might spring which leave the reader feeling cheated – information which should have been revealed, withheld by authorial contrivance, only. And what it also does is create an interesting double perspective right at the start, and reads one way, with another reading possibility lurking whisperingly in the mind.

I enjoyed this so much that I could hardly bear to put the book down, and was also MAKING myself only read in short bursts, as I really wanted to prolong the pleasure for as long as possible.

If you are an aficionado of Golden-Age Crime writing, particularly Christie, I expect you will enjoy it even more, due to the little synchronicities which you will recognise. But, fear not, because if these pass you by, because you aren’t familiar enough, (they did me!) Ms Ryeland is remarkably helpful so that the innocent can still appreciate the jokes!

There is also some no doubt helpful advice, for those plotting their own detective novels, from Ryeland’s years of appreciation of the genre, and the editorial skills she brings to bear on her work, when reading submissions from prospective authors:

If there is one thing that unites all the detectives I’ve ever read about, it’s their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks necessary questions but he doesn’t actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn’t trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It’s a relationship based entirely on deception and it’s one that ultimately, goes nowhere.

I received this, as an ARC, from the publisher via NetGalley. And have to say, to my huge joy, given the subject matter, there were quite a lot of formatting and typo mistakes. Not having seen the ‘out on the shelves’ version, I can’t say whether these are deliberate or not, but they did add to the fun for me, rather than irritate!

Let me leave the last word to the erudite, literary Ryeland:

I’m not sure it actually matters what we read. Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we enjoy it

And the designer of that delectable cover should be commended, something Kindlers miss

The final word will be mine, after all: those amongst us who are a little squeamish about dripping-with-gore-crime-fiction, rest assured that though there are a couple of quick arresting images which might cause those who are easy visualisers to become a bit squeamy for a moment, this is not lovingly dwelled on – we are, after all, in Golden-Age territory before serial slashers and their ilk began predictably stalking the pages of crime fiction, casually dismembering women (particularly beautiful ones)

Magpie Murders Amazon UK
Magpie Murders Amazon USA

It’s Publication Day! Margery Sharp has landed!

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Book Review, Cluny Brown, Fiction, Humour, Humour and Wit, Lighter-hearted fiction, Margery Sharp, The Nutmeg Tree

It’s re-issue day at last for Margery Sharp, thanks to Open Road Media and some dedicated bloggers who have been raising flags for her for at least a couple of years.

Followers of this blog and most of us new Margery readers know that Jane who blogs from beyondedenrock has done sterling work in helping Margery to reach a new generation of readers. You will find, if you explore that there are reviews to more Margerys, not to mention reviews of various Margery books, from readers around the blogosphere who engaged, this year and last, in Jane’s hosted Margery Sharp day

Go explore Margery – she is a light-touch, light-hearted writer, who writes books which are hugely entertaining, witty, and well-turned in writing craft. Margery can indeed write sharply and incisively; you get the sense she feels warmly towards humanity, but is not at all saccharine.

Cluny Brown and The Nutmeg Tree have both been reviewed on here, so you can follow the links.

They feature two delightfully individual and quirky central characters, and I’m delighted to have met and made friends with Cluny and Julia

When Jane started her championship of Margery on her blog, she was only available, if you were very lucky, as a charity shop find, rumpled and elderly, but at reasonable cost. And, as time went by, and more of us were introduced to the wonderful Margery Sharp, the dwindling copies of Margeriana began to reach eye-watering prices via market-place sellers. I could only find a battered Cluny and a battered Julia-Nutmeg, at reasonable outlay. 

Until now – so have a look at the other titles Open Road Media have released. I trust some of them will make their way on here in due course!

Cluny Brown Amazon UK
Cluny Brown Amazon USA

The Nutmeg Tree Amazon UK
The Nutmeg Tree Amazon USA

Margery Sharp – The Nutmeg Tree

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Book Review, Humour, Humour and Wit, Margery Sharp, The Nutmeg Tree

A woman of impeccably loose morals.

Julia ,’by marriage Mrs Packett, by courtesy Mrs Macdermot’ is the central character of three strongly delineated women, in Margery Sharp’s delightful The Nutmeg Tree.

Sharp, a deliciously witty writer of rather eccentric English romances and childrens’ books, from the 1930s to the 1970s, had sadly gone out of print, and was only available as lucky finds in second hand shops or sometimes on line at some eye-watering prices.

Fortunately, Open Road Integrated Media who have a wonderful reputation for reissuing ‘minor’ classics in good, digital format, have now reissued a generous couple of handfuls of her titles.

And this is one of them, and I was delighted to be offered The Nutmeg Tree by Open Road, as a copy for review

Julia is a middle-aged actress, member of the chorus, and any kind of vaguely theatre related work she can get. She is a woman of impeccably loose morals. Promiscuous in part because she has a generous heart (and even more generous bosoms), she cannot bear to disappoint or embarrass a suitor. Not to mention the fact that she is hopeless with money, will squander what she has on a good time and good friends, and, when treading the boards work is slender, a man might take her out for a meal. She is not averse to undertaking the odd swindle, to part a fool from his money, either

It is Sharp’s particular genius, her wit and her warmth, to take this seemingly unprincipled woman, and make us root for her, delight in her, and understand exactly why so many who meet her, both men and women, happily fall under the spell of her charms. Despite her dishonesty, she is remarkably honest with herself about her failings, and really dislikes hurting or offending those whom she fleeces.

The opening paragraph of the book immediately showed me this was going to be a sparkling and good humoured read:

Julia, by marriage Mrs, Packett, by courtesy Mrs Macdermot, lay in her bath singing the Marseillaise. Her fine robust contralto, however, was less resonant than usual, for on this particular summer morning the bathroom, in addition to the ordinary fittings, contained a lacquer coffee table, seven hatboxes, half a dinner service, a small grandfather clock, all Julia’s clothes, a single bed mattress, thirty-five novelettes, three suitcases, and a copy of a Landseer stag

I was already laughing so hard by this point, with the tune of ‘On the twelfth day of Christmas’, rather than the Marseillaise, playing in my mind, that I half expected the sentence to end with the proverbial partridge, pear tree and all.

Julia, on her uppers again is the mother of a grown-up and extremely intelligent daughter, presently at Girton. She was never the most motherly of women, and Susanne, or Susan as she is now called, has been brought up by Julia’s mother-in-law, a well-to-do woman whom Julia admires, and who has always treated Julia kindly. Even if she does nurture a rather peculiar fantasy that her daughter–in-law would make a great success if she would only open a cake-shop in Knightsbridge.

Julia hasn’t seen her daughter for years, but Sue wants to get married to a man, whilst her grandmother wants her to wait till she is twenty one. Susan sends a letter to her mother asking her to come to France (where she and her grandmother are holidaying) to help persuade Mrs Packett senior to accept Sue’s beau, Bryan, and a speedy marriage.

Dormant mother love is wakened, and the story follows Julia’s eventful journey to France, and the amusing encounters which await her there

In a neat twist, it is Julia, and even the older Mrs Packett, who are the flexible and adventurous ones, whilst Susan, bar a desire to marry a little young is implacably rigid and insufferably worthy

Susan was a prig. Not an objectionable prig, not a proselytising prig, but a prig from very excess of good qualities.. Like all the right-minded young, she wanted perfection; the difficulty was that her standards of perfection were unusually high. Exquisite in her own integrity, she demanded an equal delicacy and uprightness from her fellows

Susan – unlike Julia – is not a lot of fun, Take, for example, this typical throwaway Margery Sharp gem, about Julia’s pecuniary embarrassment and the detail of her underwear :

Julia decided to take single instead of return tickets, and to buy a new dinner dress with the money saved. She also purchased a linen suit, a Matron’s model hat, and three pairs of cami-knickers. She had indeed plenty of these already, but all with policemen embroidered on the legs

I shan’t (of course) reveal spoilers, but do just need to say that I thought the ending was utterly brilliant, and done with panache.

A film version, or should I say an extreme ‘based on’ was made, starring Greer Garson. Whatever the merits of the film, most of the elements of Sharp’s novel have been bent into unrecognisable shape. The title of the film was Julia Misbehaves

I enjoyed this book enormously; though Sharp is writing light, witty romance, it is in a unique and wonderfully executed manner. Her characterisations are brilliant, her humour never laboured and, knowing more Margery’s are waiting for me, accessible, and reasonably priced is enchanting.

Thank you Open Road! And thank you to Jane at beyondedenrock, who probably woke us all up to Margery

The Nutmeg Tree, and other Margery titles are being published on April 12th. Not long to wait!

The Nutmeg Tree Amazon UK
The Nutmeg Tree Amazon USA

Margery Sharp – Cluny Brown

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Book Review, Cluny Brown, Margery Sharp, Margery Sharp Day

Frivolous, charming, frothy perfection, but, nonetheless, with crunch and bite.

I came to Margery Sharp, a writer who was deservedly popular as a fine writer of children’s books and books for adults, from the interwar years, through Jane, of Beyond Eden Rock, a blogger who has been championing her writing, most of which is now out of print. A couple of her books had made her more widely known when they were filmed, The Nutmeg Tree, (by all accounts a disastrous adaptation) and this one, Cluny Brown. Having had a quick look at clips on YouTube, I was not minded to include them. The film is very much ‘based on’ which means, of course, liberties. taken

Back to the book: As Jane runs an annual ‘celebrate Margery Sharp day’ (the author’s birthday), I thought I would try and see what all the fuss is about, track down a Sharp book, and roll up with my Happy Birthday, Margery, review

And I am so very glad I tracked down a modestly priced old copy of Cluny Brown. Some of Sharp’s books are now so rare that they are offered for four figure sums! I can only say that I hope Sharp’s dedicated champions can persuade a publishing house to re-issue her books, so more of us have a chance to read more of them. She is a delightful, nicely sharp, well-crafted, light-touch writer of wit. I have seen her described as a kind of ‘early chick-lit’ All I can say is there is an irony, a kind of delicate and barbed mockery of the class system, that is a million miles away from the (admittedly few) chick-lit books I have read.

Published in 1944, but set a good 6 years earlier, when the idea of war was beginning to rumble away in people’s minds, but war had not been declared, this must have been some kind of much-needed temporary escape from the darkness of the world at war.

Clover (Cluny) Brown is a young, working class woman, only just out of her teens. She is an orphan, presently living with her Uncle, Mr Porritt, a plumber. Cluny is Porritt’s secretary/clerk/message taker. She is, everyone around her insists, remarkably plain. ‘Plain As A Boot’ And very tall. Except, she is really what the French call ‘Jolie Laide’ and certainly her vitality, intelligence and forthrightness are much more alluring and attractive than might be imagined at first glance. One of the major problems with Cluny, at least from the perspective of the more conventionally minded in her world, is that she just doesn’t seem to ‘know her place’. She acts unconventionally, out of class and out of gender – taking herself for tea at the Ritz, having far too much confidence and lack of becoming deference, so that those far above her in class occasionally think she is one of them, making friends with a colonel who doesn’t realise she is only ‘a tall parlourmaid’ The despairing cry from all around is ‘Cluny Brown – Who Does She Think She Is?’ The answer is, alive, enchanting, exhilarating. Following an event where she decides to pick up one of her Uncle’s plumbing jobs, and discovers the attractions of a dry martini, her Uncle decides the safest thing is to make sure she fits in to her proper and expected station in life. And goes into service. She becomes The Tall Parlourmaid for an Aristocratic Devonshire Family.

  A Golden Retriever (Wiki, Commons) happily advances the plot. NOTE for readers of a sensitive disposition the author does not cause any harm to come to her fictional animals in the course of this book

Margery Sharp assembles a cast of strong and quirky characters, all of whom might seem to be examples of ‘types’ – the stunningly beautiful vamp, the scion of the aristocratic house who espouses radical socialist ideas, a louche Polish literary hero, the lady of the manor, all gardening and good works – but Sharp renders them all much more interesting, much more contradictory, and, all of them, much more likeable. Her pen is sharp, but it is also fizzy, joyous, expansive. There is no spitefulness, no meanness of spirit in her writing.

What I most appreciated is that Cluny gets the journey the reader wants her to have – the journey she deserves. There is, I’m sure, a destination which we might discover we are fearing. Perhaps another author would have given her a different outcome. I’m so pleased that Sharp is not a punitive author. Neither is she saccharine, but she views humanity with warmth, I feel.

I definitely want to read more of the wise, warm, witty Ms Sharp. Lacking the funds for four figure sums of stray existing copies, I shall be hoping for treasures in charity shops. Or, perhaps some kind and techy savvy soul could get the oeuvre a Kindled

If you want to know more about Margery Sharp, visit Jane’s blog or this blog, which is 100% Margery

Cluny Brown Amazon UK MarketPlace Sellers
Cluny Brown Amazon UK MarketPlace Sellers

Michael Cunningham – A Wild Swan: and other tales

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A Wild Swan, Adult Faerie Tale, Book Review, Michael Cunningham, Yuko Shimizu (Illustrator)

Subversive Once Upon a Time, They All Lived Mainly Unhappily after……………..

Michael Cunningham’s A Wild Swan is a darkly, slyly, sour and witty adaptation of some particularly potent faerie tales.

There’s more than a whiff of Angela Carteresque sumptuousness and sexual meaning out in the open, though Cunningham pulls many of these tales into the here and now.

How could I not start snickering, in a kind of wry, sophisticated fashion, at an opening like this:

Most of us are safe. If you’re not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn’t trouble the constellations, nobody’s going to cast a spell on you. No one wants to transform you into a beast or put you to sleep for a hundred years…
The middling maidens – the ones best seen by candlelight, corseted and rouged – have nothing to worry about. The pudgy, pockmarked heirs apparent, who torment their underlings and need to win at every game, are immune to curse and hex. B-list virgins do not excite the forces of ruination; callow swains don’t infuriate demons and sprites.

Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings

I was immediately captivated by the authorial voice which opens out ‘what’s really going on’ displaying the often difficult world of love and marriage, and mismatch between expectation and reality, to belie the traditional ‘they all lived happily ever after’ .

These morality tales (what faerie tales often were) updated, are often beautifully upended. So, for example, the beginning of Cunningham’s version of Jack and The Beanstalk, Jacked :

This is not a smart boy we’re talking about. This is not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains.

Never mind asking him to sell the cow, when he and his mother are out of cash, and the cow is their last resort.

We’re talking about a boy who doesn’t get halfway to town with his mother’s sole remaining possession before he’s sold the cow to some stranger for a handful of beans….Jack isn’t doubtful. Jack isn’t big on questions. Jack is the boy who says, Wow, dude, magic beans, really?

I was absolutely thrilled to be offered this as a review copy by the publishers, Fourth Estate, in digital version………however, I would urge you to get the wood book, as there are stunning illustrations to each story, by the artist Yuko Shimizu, and I did long to see them on paper.

Yuko Shimizu’s illustration for the story “Beasts”

The stories are pretty well all magnificent, and it will be the readers’ pleasure to work out which fairy tales they are based on. The Hansel and Gretel tale is probably my own particular favourite. Most do not end anywhere near happiness, and one must feel grateful, therefore, for the absence of that ‘ever after’

Though, to be fair, kind, a little bit magical and hopeful , the final story, Ever/After does give us one redemptive sweet tale to take away, albeit one which starts more realistically and less under the illusion of the romantic happy ever after. In the last story, the couple have fewer stars in their eyes and are not bewitched by sprinklings of too much magic.

HIGHLY recommended; in fact magical

These are, by the way, very definitely faerie stories for ADULTS and not for children

A Wild Swan: and other tales Amazon UK
A Wild Swan: and other tales Amazon USA

Mick Jackson – Yuki Chan in Brontë Country

Tags

Book Review, Mick Jackson, Yuki Chan in Brontë Country

Why aren’t Brontë biscuits sister shaped? : The questions of Yuki Chan

Back in 2010 I had been captivated by Mick Jackson’s The Widow’s Tale, so I was delighted to have the chance to read Yuki Chan in Brontë Country, kindly offered as an ARC from the publisher, Faber and Faber, via NetGalley.

In some ways there are similarities in the territory of both books. The subject is bereavement, and how we can ever come to terms with it, and accommodate the huge gap that losing someone close leaves behind.

In the Widow’s Tale, Jackson wonderfully gave voice to a particular middle aged woman, and impressed me enormously, managing to be wonderfully funny about how grief can manifest, whilst at the very same time, being heart-breaking. I believe there is a kind of derangement which takes place in our normal way of perceiving the world, in loss, and finding ourselves in that place, being prepared to inhabit it, however odd it is to the outside eye, is the way in which in the end we might be able to move to a healed place.

In Yuki Chan, Jackson is jumping across several divides – not only, as a male writer, getting inside the head, heart, body of a female – but, in this case a young female, student aged. And moreover one from a very different culture – Japan. It’s a tribute to Jackson that all this is managed, and the reader both experiences the specific oddness of Yuki Chan at this difficult time in her life, following her mother’s death, and the oddness of her culture, to a Westerner, whilst at the same time enabling us to see the oddness of our own culture, through Japanese experience. Like The Widow’s Tale, this is a very very funny book indeed, and also a lacerating one. The humour prevents over-indulgent sentimentality but the willingness to enter into laceration acknowledges the real pain of loss.

Statue of Brontë sisters, Haworth Parsonage

There is some mystery which Yuki needs to understand, connected with her mother, which has led her to make an unlikely visit to Haworth, and Brontë country, as part of an eager coach trip of voluble elderly Japanese ladies, all big Brontë fans. Yuki has come to the UK on a short trip to see her bossy older sister, but really, to follow in her mother’s footsteps. She wants to understand why, for example, some years ago her mother came to Haworth and did the Brontë tour.

Yuki is a fashion student, but she just might be interested in designing underground airport terminals. Or she might just become an astronaut, or at least someone who designs clothing for astronauts.

The basic design would have to be clean and simple. No collars or cuffs which might get caught on important levers. Plus it would be good to avoid beige, which has long been a cliché in casual spacewear. You could have a different outfit for each day. That way, when you look around and see how everyone’s wearing blue with yellow trim you know it must be Wednesday. Or if everyone’s in a pink jumpsuit with a Fifties V-neck you know that it’s Friday and there’s only one more day to go

She is bemused by Britain – and why not ? Why, for example are the Brontë biscuits she buys in Haworth just, well, biscuits? What is Brontë about them – surely they should have been Brontë sister shaped, at least? Her fertile imagination can take her into all sorts of strange and interesting territory. Some of this gets written down in her notebooks, ideas for designs :

…platform boots with secret compartments….various unusual haircuts…a woman’s hair is swept up into a towering beehive, with a miniature camera hidden in it. Yuki explains that it’s for a project in which she secretly photographs people’s reactions to her own spectacular haircut

Jackson’s novel slowly gets darker, as we get deeper into Yuki’s journey

I had some reservations, not about Yuki herself, who was believable, weird, absorbing, or her journey. My reservations were with the friend she needs to encounter in order for her journey to be able to properly proceed and conclude. As a foreigner in a strange land whose English is a little challenging, she needs a local. Enter Denny, a strange young woman, resident in Haworth. Denny’s anarchic nature, not to mention a whole section on the moors connected with a dog felt a little too plot driven to satisfy me. Plots must of course happen, but it was Denny, feeling like a device for me, who pulled the book back from 5 star to 4.

Reading is always personal in taste; I note some other reviews felt the book became more enjoyable for Denny’s entrance.

The Kindle edition will be published in the UK on the 19th January, and on the 21st in wood book. It looks like Statesiders wanting wood will have to wait till April, or order from the UK, though it also will appear on Kindle on the 19th January

Yuki Chan in Brontë Country Amazon UK
Yuki Chan in Brontë Country 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

Colette – Claudine at School

Tags

1900, Antonia White, Book Review, Claudine at School, Colette, France 1900s, Gay and Lesbian Literature

Wicked, vicious and enchanting – girl power in France, circa 1900

A major effect of my sequential twentieth century challenge is that reading in this way will inevitably take me outside the book itself as an isolated reading experience, and focus some attention on the time, culture and geography of its arising – and, I suspect, I shall happily be drawn into ‘biographical fallacy’ as there is always a life being lived (the author’s) in that time, culture and geography. And sat within the twenty-first century, it will no doubt be interesting to see how much we consider to be modern and new is of course, merely a spiral: specific manifestations may change, but the form remains the same

So, turning to Colette’s first novel, Claudine at School, the story of a racy minx of a fifteen year old in a perhaps unusual school in Burgundy, which was published in 1900 purporting to be written by Monsieur Willy, the nom-de-plume of Colette’s husband, it’s necessary to take a look at the author, and also at the person whose name originally appeared as author.

Colette, born in 1873 as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, was by 1893 married to Henry Gauthier-Villars, a man some 14 years older than she was. His pen-name was amusingly apt, as far as Anglo Saxon speakers are concerned, because he was a libertine, with serial mistresses. Monsieur Willy was an ‘author’ – except he wasn’t exactly. He was a man of wealth whose family business was a publishing house. Although he was a music critic and writer who wrote under several nom-de-plumes, he also persuaded impoverished writers to write books which he then published under his own name, gaining some reputation as a man of letters. Although the authors did get some recompense, and had the satisfaction of getting published, they did not get the financial rewards, or the kudos, which might have accrued had they got published elsewhere, under their own names. This seems like a different version, perhaps, of our modern vanity publication – in reverse! Willy encouraged Colette, clearly a woman of generous sexual tastes, to have affairs with women whilst he continued his own affairs, which marriage did not interrupt. Curiously, it did not seem that he encouraged her to also have affairs with other men!

In the end Colette married three times, as well as having relationships with other women. It is not always clear how much of her writing is fictional, and how much merely an embroidery of fact.

Colette as a schoolgirl : Simplesue.tumblr.com

The story behind the Claudine series of four books puts it about that that this is a thinly disguised fiction, based on Colette’s own experiences at school. Colette recounted some amusing, not to mention salacious, tales of life at a school, where the headmistress and second mistress were lesbians, and the central character and narrator, Claudine, was more interested in girls and young women than she was in boys and young men, at that time. Willy suggested she wrote ‘her’ escapades into a story, and he would see if he could publish them. By all accounts, he didn’t initially think much of them and slung them, forgotten, into a drawer. A few years later, discovering them, he realised they were gold, and published them under his name. To be honest, the themes of hot-house gymslip pashes, crushes and overt lesbian sex, plus a fair smattering of dominatrix behaviour, perhaps become more alluring if they are presented as being more fact than fiction, as his wife’s stories, written by him. Certainly Colette had a rather unconstrained, definitely unconventional sexual history, and the reader might assume Claudine IS Colette, though the story certainly has major departures from her own known life – Claudine is the only child of a widower who is an academic specialising in the study of slugs – this latter the source of much humour. Colette was the daughter of a tax collector and her much loved mother, Sido did not die in the author’s childhood! Nonetheless, the way Colette describes the definitely vampy Claudine, down to that amazing hair and the shadowed, smudged eyes, does seem as if she has described herself!

Colette’s life did show her to be a highly sexy and alluring woman, with a remarkably, one would think, for the time, relaxed, light-hearted and playful attitude to sex. Certainly what might be thought of as ‘Victorian morality’ was not the case across the Channel, if Colette, and her book’s reception are anything to go by. Claudine at School (and the three later volumes in the series) became a runaway success, inspiring merchandising mayhem, and generating income for ‘Monsieur Willy’

Colette by Jacques Humbert 1896

By 1906 the marriage was over. Willy owned the copyright to the books and the merchandise, and Colette was unable to profit from her own works. To support herself, she went on the stage, had a scandalous relationship with another woman, married twice more, and in her late 40’s embarked on an affair with her 16 year old stepson, the child of her second husband. In a case of art imitating life, one of her most famous books, Chéri (and The Last of Chéri ) charts the relationship between a woman in her 50s and a much younger man/boy. Her third husband, with whom she lived happily until she died, was also a much younger man.

Probably her most famous book was Gigi, which became a stage musical and a film

Her writing was hugely appreciated and praised in her native country – as indeed it deserved to be – her life and her art explored female sexuality, marriage, and the struggles of women for independence. She had a great gift for describing the world of the senses and physicality. Even in this first book there is clear delight in her descriptions of the natural world, the colours, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of reality. She was at one time regarded as France’s greatest woman writer, was a recipient of several literary honours, in both France and Belgium, President of the Academie Goncourt, a recipient of the Legion of Honour, nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and was the first French female writer to receive a full State funeral.

Reading a brief account of her life and works, though I had read the Claudine books, and Cheri, many years ago, I had not at that time taken on board how extraordinary the subject matter was, given the time of publication. Never mind the sexual revolution of the sixties, certainly across the Channel from England this Frenchwoman was openly exploring her sexuality as the twentieth century dawned – and doing so in her writing with wit, verve, delicious openness and freedom. England and France were clearly worlds apart. It is impossible to think of an English writer at this time, at the tail end of Victoria’s reign, writing a book like this which is so frank and bold about young girls’ passions, and it also becoming a run-away best seller. What is remarkably different from, for example English writing on ‘inversion’ (as the term went in the UK) – such as Radclyffe Hall’s admittedly a generation later ‘Well of Loneliness’ or E.M. Forster’s 1913/14 written Maurice – which was in fact not published till after the author’s death – is that there is no sense of shame or guilt in ‘Claudine’ – there is gossip, there are whisperings and delight in scandal, but there is a kind of ‘so what?’ shrug being expressed about it all. A film of the book Claudine a L’École, directed by Serge de Poligny, and starring  Blanchette Brunoy, was released in 1937, here showing just some clips

What looks like a rather more knowing TV version followed later, with Marie-Hélène Breillat in the title role, directed by Édouard Molinaro and there is certainly a lot more ‘sass’ and a sense of in your face provocation in the clip from this.

Claudine herself is intelligent, witty, vicious, prone to sadism, rebellious, an utter minx, fearsome and sparklingly entertaining – and no relation at all to some of the troubled, angsty teens who become icons later in the century – Holden Caulfield, for example. Claudine runs rings around everyone, she oozes sexuality and female power and is no man’s – or woman’s – pushover. The book fizzes with vivacity, and the girls are remarkably odd – the intelligent ones are all wickedly ill-behaved, and the adults to a man and woman easily manipulated by the charming and scary Claudine and her close chum and nemesis ‘the lanky Anaïs’ This is young girl power, like a firework display.

Who would have thought that weird eating habits – a predilection for eating snow, pencils, crayons, cigarette papers and drinking vinegar could produce such an example of girls with not only attitude, but high intelligence and wit (you’ll have to read the book!)

We still had ten minutes to go before the end of class; how could we use them? I asked permission to leave the room so that I could surreptitiously gather up a handful of the still-falling snow. I made a snowball and bit into it: it was cold and delicious. It always smells a little of dust, this first fall. I hid it in my pocket and returned to the classroom. Everyone round me made signs to me and I passed the snowball round. Each of them, with the exception of the virtuous twins, bit into it with expressions of rapture. Then that ninny of a Marie Belhomme had to go and drop the last bit and Mademoiselle Sergent saw it.

“Claudine! Have you gone and brought in snow again? This is really getting beyond the limit!”

She rolled her eyes so furiously that I bit back the retort “It’s the first time since last year

Finally, during the hilarious examination scene, and in the lessons where the teachers vainly try to keep order, the standard of education, and particularly maths, is fearsomely high. No calculators either.

For me personally, the story dragged a little once the examination scene was over, and the final big set-piece and wrap up happened, with the visit of the Minister of Agriculture and a big ‘town celebration’ , though it did give the chance to open into the wider world.

     Colette with a couple of her soul-mates

The version I found was published in 1968, translated by Antonia White – she of Frost In May fame. You can rather tell that the translator is someone who is able to do much more than just ‘literal word for word’, and is someone who has the feel for the shape of a sentence, and the flavour of writing and different writers. I had no sense of ‘in translation’ just of immediate connection with what I was reading. The Kindle Version appears to be of the Vintage Classics republication of this, with White’s translation

Claudine at School Amazon UK
Claudine at School Amazon USA

A READING THE TWENTIETH POST – 1900 : FICTION – IN TRANSLATION