Rose Tremain – Rosie

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Autobiography, Book Review, Rose Tremain, Rosie

Goodbye Rosie, Hello Rose

I am a huge fan of Rose Tremain. She is an author who always writes and observes beautifully, but does not have just one book within her, regurgitated in different ways. She constantly surprises.

So I was interested to read what looked like a remarkably slim autobiography, Rosie : Scenes From A Vanished Life

That ‘vanished life’ is Rosie herself, as she claimed her true identity as Rose

This is beautifully written, but curiously distanced, distancing.

Born into a rather privileged background, at least in terms of status and finance – her stepfather was after all a ‘Sir’ and her real father’s cousin, her childhood was nonetheless curiously lacking in parental attention, encouragement and warm regard. In fact, her mother, referred to as ‘Jane’ by Tremain, and not by any maternal appellation, had lacked love and affection herself as a child, and had also been called by a name she disliked, rechristening herself as Jane.

Rosie’s First Birthday

Children – and the adults they become, sustain damage from absent affection, they don’t have to be actively ill-treated to bear wounds.

I found myself wondering about the kind of distance with which Rose writes about herself. This isn’t a ‘misery memoir’ but it does have a kind of lack of warmth in it. I found this unsettling because she is a writer whose characters are warmly and fully regarded by her. The reader of a Tremain novel is drawn into feeling that they really know her complex and beautifully rounded characters. Yet, the sense here is that Tremain did not really want the reader to know Rosie. Somehow, the child and the young girl sent off to be ‘finished’ in Switzerland, rather than pursue the academic route she wanted are seen through a screen. Which is a curious place to be writing some kind of autobiography from

Rosie, her loving and beloved Nannie Nan, and her sister Jo

This is rather like picking up a collection of faded snapshots, which have intriguing titles, but they are incomplete, part of a larger collection, which probably were mounted in sequence in an album, and told a larger story, but this is missing.

This is probably one which will be most interesting to those who love and know her writing. As she is at pains to point out, she is not an ‘autobiographical’ novelist per se, but certainly small events make their way into the novels and stories, and she references these.

There was one recounted incident where Rose drew me close to Rosie, and I felt great grief for her. Her inspired music teacher at the boarding school she was sent away to, arranged for a concert to be given by her pupils. A prestigious one, at the Royal Festival Hall. Though open to the public, the majority of the most expensive seats would be bought by proud families. Who would then take their children out for a congratulatory tea. Except Rosie’s mother and stepfather did not come. She wrote to her real father (who had abandoned his family for a liaison with another woman) He was a writer, and also a keen pianist himself. Though he did come, he left at the interval, after Rosie had played, and did not come back to take his daughter for tea

In conclusion, I liked this very much indeed, but remain slightly confused as to the purpose of its writing. There is half the sense of a catharsis (perhaps) for the writer – except that the feeling I was left with was an unresolved, and even covert anger and resentment (completely understandable) still within the child inside the woman.

Here is a wonderful excerpt, a moment of epiphany, an ‘aha’ moment, where the idea of writing, as something profound and meaningful, hit the thirteen year old

The perfume of the day, the heat of my body after the tennis game, the sky the colour of coral, the silence surrounding me – all combined to fill me, suddenly, with a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which, in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience.

I told myself that if I continued standing still, this moment would last and might even change me in some way that I couldn’t quite foresee. But I stood there so long that the sun almost disappeared and the field became full of shadows. And with the dusk came a feeling of desolation. The desolation was simply a mundane recognition of the fleeting nature of everything, which even teenagers (or perhaps especially teenagers) understand. A moment of happiness as intense as this slips quickly away with the turning of the earth. So I asked myself, there in the hayfield, with the swear of the tennis game drying down my back and making me shiver: was there any way in which the experiences of my life, like this one, could be captured and locked away, not just in capricious, gradually fading memory, but in some more concrete form

Rosie UK
Rosie USA

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Rose Tremain – The Gustav Sonata

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Book Review, Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

As rich, beguiling and satisfying as the best of sonatas should be

Rose Tremain is always a tender, subtle, rewarding writer, and so she is here. The Gustav Sonata starts shortly after the Second World War, in Matzlingen, a small, unremarkable town in Switzerland. It is 1947. Gustav Perle is a stoical little 5 year old, only son of Emilie, a repressed, joyless, depressed widow, whose ability to love seems non-existent.

Gustav’s father died during the war, and his death left his widow and child financially struggling. In the first ‘movement’ of the sonata, the outwardly phlegmatic little boy befriends a smaller, excitable, vulnerable little boy on his first day at kindergarten. Anton Zwiebel, it turns out, is everything which ordinary seeming Gustav is not.

‘I don’t want my heart stilled’ he said ‘ I want my heart to overflow with joy.’

Anton is an exceptional, privileged little boy, the son of doting, loving, wealthy parents. He is a musical prodigy, and great things are expected of him. The two boys become great friends, though Emilie has a kind of distaste for Anton, because he is Jewish. The Zwiebel family, particularly Anton’s warm-hearted mother take Gustav to their hearts, because of the initial kindness he showed to their son. The first section is the story of the two boys in childhood

He sipped the wine, which tasted sweetly of apples and of elderflowers, and he thought that this was how he was going to live life from now on, savouring small pleasures and not looking beyond them for happiness that was more complete

The second movement unpicks the story of Emilie and Erich, Gustav’s dead father, revealing how they met, how Erich made a clearly disastrous marriage to a small-minded woman, and how his own warm, compassionate, just nature led to him suffering disgrace. Erich had been in a position to behave nobly, in a time and place where society had made pragmatic, meaner choices.

Skating, and its joyousness, figures beautifully : Hence, Andre Rieu live at the Royal Albert Hall with Emile Waldteufel’s Skaters’ Waltz : Les Patineurs

In the third movement, Gustav is a quiet man, unambitious, in his 50s. He is a little man, an ordinary man, a moral man, doing the good he can, running a small hotel, endeavouring to make this a ‘home from home’. Anton has long since left the small town where Gustav still lives, though that childhood friendship keeps Gustav close to Anton’s ageing parents, disappointed in some ways by their brilliant, selfish son.

When he asked himself if he was unhappy, he discovered that he could find no deeper unhappiness in his own soul than he perceived in other people’s

On the surface, Tremain is not telling a huge, operatic story, merely the story of an ordinary person, one of the ‘little people, the ordinary, decent people’ . Unlike the trumpetings of divisive populist politicians, who seek to normalise small-mindedness, suspicion, fear and hatred in their appeals to the ordinary and decent, Tremain shows something very different in the ordinary. Gustav’s is indeed a story of the small and modestly heroic, the loving, the forgiving and the kind within ‘ordinary’ .

Friendship in all its complexities and contradictions, and love, with all its obligations and joys, surprising in the forms it may take are beautifully laid out here for the reader. Readers of Tremain’s earlier novels where music and flamboyant characters are beautifully woven, will not be surprised by the author’s ability to still weave what is rare, strange, and lovely, in more modest, contained, less obviously expressive characters.

Like a musical piece, Tremain has themes which appear again, as variations, reminding us of their earlier manifestations, in subtly transposed fashion, in later ‘movements’

As ever, this being Tremain, the writing is beautiful, truthful, the characters are rich and layered, and the plot is masterly. I was delighted to be ‘gifted’ this by the publishers, via NetGalley.

The Gustav Sonata Amazon UK
The Gustav Sonata Amazon USA

Rose Tremain – The American Lover

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Book Review, Rose Tremain, The American Lover

If Tremain can’t write an excellent collection of short stories, then I don’t know who can.

And of course, she does. One of the many qualities I admire in Tremain’s writing is that she is not someone with just one book, endlessly regurgitated, in her. Other than the excellence of her writing, always present, she is capable of inhabiting many times, places, themes, characters and plots. This facility sets her up well for the short story.

One of the major problems (to my mind) with the genre, is that the time taken to read a short story may (or may not) fit well with a reader’s own time for reading. Finish a short story when you still perhaps have another 10 or 15 minutes that you had wanted to spend reading, and you may need to start another story. This can mean you rather lose the sense of completion and reflection on the one just finished, and, possibly even worse, if you read too many shorts at a sitting you quickly discover the author’s ‘tricks’. Because Tremain is not formulaic, I didn’t get repetitive read syndrome from her collection!

The subject matter of many of the stories is love and its loss – and this is explored not only in romantic love, but also in the love between parents and children, both ways, and the loss which may happen through bereavement and also the passage of time and shifting of relationship between children and their parents, over a lifetime. Lest this sound always dark, Tremain has inherent, rather than HERE IS A JOKE ABOUT TO HAPPEN, humour within her writing. Her humour is often wry, and in spite of, or even perhaps, because of, the dark.

There is also a strong literary flavour to several of the stories. The title story concerns a young woman who had a damaging relationship with an older man, and, partly in an attempt to heal, turns the relationship into a highly successful novel. Life seeps into art, with interesting consequences for the woman.

One day she takes the bus to Harrods, suddenly interested to visit the place where se’d worked long ago, cutting wrapping paper with mathematical care, fashioning bows and rosettes out of ribbon, making the most insignificant of gifts look expensive and substantial. It had seemed to her a futile thing to be doing, but now it doesn’t strike her as futile. She can see that a person’s sanity might sometimes reside in the appreciation of small but aesthetically pleasing things

I also particularly liked The Housekeeper, an imagined story of the inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s iconic Rebecca, and, specifically, the character of Mrs Danvers. This story was a little like looking in distorting mirrors, as Tremain plays with fact and fiction

Everybody believes that i am an invented person: Mrs Danvers. They say I am a creation: ‘Miss du Maurier’s finest creation’, in the opinion of many. But I have my own story. I have a history and a soul. I’m a breathing woman

The Jester of Astapovo takes the reality of the death of Leon Tolstoy, but from the point of view of the station master of the little isolated place where Tolstoy, on the run from his wife, came by chance to die

Ivan Ozolin laboriously wrote out a notice, which he pinned above Dmitri’s amll counter. It read: Your Telegraph Operator has not read the works of L.N. Tolstoy, so please do not waste time by asking him any questions about them. Signed: I.A. Ozolin, Stationmaster

Tolstoy. Wiki Commons

I preferred these longer stories, 30 pages or so, to the shorter ones, probably because of the possibility of clearer development of character, as events unfold.

The only story which I was not so enamoured with was the final one, ‘21st century Juliet’ a modern reworking of Romeo and Juliet set across class divides, and incorporating immigrants from Moldavia. This was the only story which seemed a little contrived

The American Lover Amazon UK
The American Lover Amazon USA

Rose Tremain – The Cupboard

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Book Review, Rose Tremain, The Cupboard

Rose Tremain – a mountain goat of a writer

Like a mountain goat, Tremain amazes by her agility and sure footedness, negotiating high peaks, impervious to the sheer and deadly drops beneath! In this book, the ‘drops’ or ‘traps’ which a lesser writer would have fallen into, she effortlessly avoids.

Her central character, whose life and writing we explore through conversations with an male American journalist, is a very elderly English woman, who has lived through most of the 20th century. Erica is a wonderful, fierce, tender, fragile, passionate and engaged woman. She has breathed in, engaged with, inspired, and been inspired by life. She, as Ralph, the journalist, discovers, lives with and through love – not only sexual love, but an ability to live from the heart and to really live a life in the moment. This means her life is large, joyous, terrifying, fraught with periods of madness, despair, doubt, pleasure etc etc.

Inevitably, in describing such a character, there is the danger for the writer, either of overblown and fulsome prose, or of failing to fully describe, becuase of a fear of being overblown. Tremain avoids these pitfalls – Erica is seen through the distancing device of the youngish, male American – and it is through his perpective on her and her writing, that we discover her. It is also through her effect on him which causes him to look at his own more narrow, mundane and disengaged life, that Tremain makes us look at our own lives – do we live ‘Ralph’ or do we live ‘Erica’.

Not only does Tremain ‘tell stories’ and explore characters beautifully – she is also a fine, fine, poetic writer – without ever ramming the beauty of her writing down your throat – there is no self-indulgence in her writing, just every now and again, a phrase or an image will stop you in your tracks and remind you how crafted her writing style, her choice of words, her structure is.

She is at the same time an ‘easy’ read – and a read of depth.

I’ve never read a book of hers which has not delighted me – they are all VERY different in subject matter – she is a writer with many, many books inside her, not one book endlessly re-presented.

Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.

The Cupboard Amazon UK
The Cupboard Amazon USA

Rose Tremain – Merivel: A Man Of His Time

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Book Review, Charles II of England, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Merivel: A Man of His Time, Restoration, Rose Tremain

A Falstaffian hero – The Merry Wives of Restoration

Rose Tremain is an author I’ve long admired. She knows how to craft a story, she creates extremely interesting, well rounded, individual and realistic characters, her use of language is wonderful, fitting, often very rich, but not self-indulgent. She has a great sense of time and place. And she seems to have things to say. And, almost more than this, she writes many different books – not the same one, in a formulaic fashion, over and over.

So it was a surprise, on one level, to find her revisiting the past, producing a sequel to the richly satisfying, hugely successful, Restoration, which was published more than 20 years ago. Her central character (fictitious) a larger than life physician, Robert Merivel, later Sir Robert, and his relationship with Charles II (and some of the real cast of characters surrounding him) was a rich, inventive tragi-comic read.

Fast forward 17 years in the life of Merivel, and what we have is something slightly different. Age has intensified the nature of all the principal characters, both real and imagined. And Merivel has become Falstaffian in his ability to be deluded, often shallow, excessively driven by superficial desires, humorous, fun loving, clumsy, the butt of jokes – but loving, loyal, tender hearted. Like Falstaff, he is the jester who can break our hearts, and whose own heart is frequently broken, by his genuine love towards his king

This is a darker journey than Restoration. The subtext here is not the flowering and the crazy parties and the sweeping away of restriction of Restoration. Death is the constant character whose shadow grows larger. Merivel is now in his late 50s and we know this is set towards the end of Charles’ reign. Remembered characters from Restoration are now either dead, or inching towards death. Often raging against the dying of the light

The reader does not need to have read Restoration to appreciate this stand-alone work. Tremain, her artistry sure, finds plausible and meaningful ways to tell the back-story. She shows her craft again here – it’s a trap a lot of writers seem to stumble over – how do you give the reader information which THEY may need to know when the characters themselves will all already have that information, particularly if you are writing a first person narrative. All too often the lesser writer will have two luminaries in conversation with each other, and (for example) Albert Einstein turns to Neils Bohr and says `so let me remind you, Neils, of my Theory of Relativity’ Tremain does nothing crass. What the new reader needs to know (and the old, forgetful reader to know again) is effortlessly fed in little sippets. It felt like having memory reawakened, but through the filter of an older, darkening Merivel

If this doesn’t hit quite so many fizzy high spots as Restoration, and I had a few ‘hmm, could it really have been like this’ moments, that is in keeping with a Merivel who is more conscious of where journeys must end.

One small niggle – I was slightly surprised, given the extraordinary level of widescale rumpy pumpy encounters within these pages, that in an era before prophylactics, the characters all remained pox and baby free!

Paintings of Charles II by Peter Lely, 1670’s. Wikimedia Commons
Merivel: A Man of His Time Amazon UK
Merivel: A Man of His Time Amazon USA