Books and reading – Page 2 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: From Dangerous Liaisons to Cloistered

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t yet read this month’s choice: Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons. I ordered it from the library and have only just collected it.

So … I’ll go with the fact that it’s a novel written in epistolary form, and choose another written in this way: Ann Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum. A book of considerable charm. An English 60 year old farmer’s wife writes a letter to a museum curator & professor in Denmark about Tollund Man, a perfectly preserved man from about 300 BCE who is exhibited there. A correspondence begins. Initially formal, the letters become more intimate. This busy outdoorsy farmer’s wife with her chintzy house couldn’t be more different from austere Scandinavian Anders. But both are lonely and have gaping holes in their lives. With every letter they disclose more of their joys, disappointments and difficulties and draw inexorably closer. At the end is a revelation. What effect will this have on them, on their burgeoning relationship? We can only speculate. A touching and intimate book.

Archaeology and paleontology are not the same, but perhaps it’s not too big a leap to go to southern England in the early 19th century for Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures.This book is a fictional account, almost certainly not too far from the truth, about the geological work of middle-class-but-in-reduced-circumstances Elizabeth Philpott, and definitely working class Mary Anning. Both live in one of the fossil capitals of England, Lyme Regis. Both spend hours on the beach fossil hunting – Elizabeth for her own interest and as a pastime, Mary for an income, selling them. It’s inevitable that they should meet, less inevitable that Elizabeth should become Mary’s friend and champion, encouraging her to learn to read and write.This is their story. And it takes a very long time for it to end well for Mary. An enjoyable, and – yes – an informative read, if not Tracy Chevalier at her best.

Reading this may whet your appetite for a spot of non-fiction: Helen Gordon’s Notes from Deep Time: an engaging and thought-provoking account of geological time. As a non-scientist, I often find such accounts dry or inaccessible, but this is a highly readable book attempting with some success to engage our brains in comprehending the vastness of time, and the difference between the various eons that constitute the time that the earth has been in being. Who knew for instance that triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex not only didn’t appear on earth at the same time, but in fact were separated from each other by an infinitely longer time span than humankind from tyrannosaurus? From discussions about the physical appearance of the earth in previous periods, to ongoing research about dinosaurs (what colour were they?) to urban geology, and laying up problems for the future, this is a wide ranging book to which I shall return.

I’m making a great job of mixing archaeology and paleontology, because my next book, The Crossing Places involves a professional archaeologist, Dr. Ruth Galloway, in the first of the popular series about her by Ellie Griffiths. An involving story, with well-developed, believable characters and a sense of place: the flat Norfolk landscape is well described. I bought into the plot, with Ruth Galloway, young academic archeologist brought into a police investigation to uncover a mystery about a disappeared child whose bones might, just might, be buried on her ‘patch’. The series is some 15 books long and I’ve by no means read them all. But they’re good for those moments when you haven’t got much bandwidth for anything too demanding.

Let’s stay in Norfolk, but delve once more into the past. Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain. Two female medieval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe tell their stories in alternating short chapters. Julian is the better known figure, for her ‘Revelations of Divine Love‘, written when she was an anchoress, enclosed in a tiny windowed cell abutting a Norwich church. Both she and the other figure in the book, Marjorie Kent, had visions. Whereas Julian chooses to see little, but see it intensely, Marjorie is very different. Illiterate and rambunctious, with little time for her husband and children, she loudly proclaims her visions of Christ to anyone who will listen, and indeed these who do not wish to listen. Both took risks. To go against current Christian orthodoxy, especially as a woman, risked excommunication and a painful death. In the book, and we cannot know if this happened, the two meet, and this unlikely pair make a genuine connection. Beautifully written, and quickly read, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

Finally, a book I haven’t read, but intend to because I heard snatches of it being read as BBC’s Book of the Week. Catherine Coldstream’s Cloistered tells the story of her years as a nun in the 1990s, and her eventual flight from the convent – I didn’t hear that bit. And how did I get from a story about two amoral lovers-turned-rivals to the story of women who’ve taken vows of chastity? Ah well. That’s Six Degrees for you!

Next month’s starter is Paul Lynch‘s Prophet Song: a book I very much ejoyed reading last year.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Orbital to Walking the Bones of Britain

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is the 2024 Booker Prize winner: Samantha Harvey‘s Orbital. I loved it. This book moves through space with six astronauts, viewing the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.

My first link is by book title as much as subject matter. Constellation by Adrien Bosc has pilots rather than astronauts at the heart of his story. Based on an actual plane crash that took place in 1947 in the Azores, on a flight from Paris to New York. Bosc was fascinated by the mysterious history of this tragedy, for which there was little explanation. The flight was carrying a number of well-known people, as well as a group of Basque shepherds. The book tells the story of many of these people, and gives them a voice, as well as piecing together what he can about the story of the crash itself. An interesting blend of actual facts and a degree of surmise. Here’s a story about the inter-connectedness of collective tragedy, engagingly told.

My next book begins with dealing with the elemental natural world in a different way: the sea this time. Mallachy Tallack‘s That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz is a quiet book, telling a story with its roots in the 1950s, when the main protagonists’s father Sonny was working in brutal conditions on a whaling ship before returning to the Shetlands to ask Kathleen to marry him. Jack is their son, and grows up unable to find his place in life, except through the medium of the country and western music he loves. The story of Sonny, Kathleen and especially Jack interweave to tell a story with no great dramas, but which lyrically evoke their simple Shetland lives.

The elements and the natural world come to the fore in my next book, written for children: Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. A lovely book for older children, this story is told as much by the glorious blue and black illustrations that illuminate the action described. This is a story of migration. Of Leila, a Syrian asylum seeker who lives in London with her aunt and cousin. Of her mother, who is now an academic in northern Norway, studying climate change as it affects the animal population of the Arctic. And of Miso, the Arctic fox whom she and her fellow research scientists are tracking as she completes her 2000 mile migration from the eastern Arctic to Canada. Leila comes to spend her summer with her mother as the research project evolves by going to follow the little fox ‘in person’. It’s an opportunity to discover the raw beauty of the Arctic, the courage and steadfastness of one little fox, and most importantly, a chance or Leila and her mother to discover and rediscover their bond. A story that invites thought and reflection on the whole issue of migration, and the issues which face those obliged to migrate, whether human or animal.

From Elements to Weather, British style. 188 Words for Rain, by Alan Connor. When I noticed this title at the library, I knew immediately I wanted to read it. A tour of the British Isles looking at all the different words that have evolved over the years to describe this most British of weather phenomena in all its manifestations? I was in! And it WAS interesting, reminding me of many terms I know, and many more that I don’t. Together with engaging weather-related factoids. But it was held together by pointess little anecdotes of imaginary people and their experience of these phenomena, intended to drive the narrative along, but which only succeeded in irritating me. A good idea spoilt.

Now why should a book about rain lead me to a book about walking, eh? Must be because I’m English, and a woman who walks. Annabel Abbs‘ Windswept: Why Women Walk is, according to the publisher ‘The story of extraordinary women who lost their way – their sense of self, their identity, their freedom – and found it again through walking in the wild.‘ And this applies to Abbs herself, who interweaves episodes from her own walking life with the stories of famous women, not noted as walkers, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Gwen John, to whom walking was a fundamental need and source of renewal and refreshment.

Which brings me to my last book: Walking the Bones of Britain by Christopher Somerville. What a rich and immersive book this is. For a small island, our geological story is particularly rich. Somerville undertakes to walk it, from the north of Scotland down as far, slightly oddly I thought, only to the River Thames. And this is what he does. He’s curious to examine the geology of every path he takes, and to understand what effect the geological story has had on the development of the landscape and how it has been exploited by the people who live in it. He’s investigative, humorous, personable in his enquiries, which makes what could be a difficult book approachable. This book has opened my eyes to the landscape, both locally and more widely throughout Britain.Which brings us full circle. In Orbital, our astronauts see the whole earth spread beneath them as they orbit the planet, whereas Somerville examines just a small portion of the planet in forensic detail.

Next month’s starter book is one I don’t know, by an author I don’t know either. Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.

My Year in Books: 2024

I was just thinking about writing a post about the books I’ve enjoyed this year. I was feeling not a little daunted. But then an email from Goodreads dropped into my inbox . It’s done the hard yards so I don’t have to. Here are a few highlights: although the examples in the featured photo seem to include representatives of both my most enjoyed and least remembered books.

They’ve missed a few of my ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews here. What about Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat by Jo Shute? Or Bee Sting, mentioned below? There was Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry. Clear, by Carys Davies. And Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Tomb with a View, by Peter Ross. I might have missed one or two others as well. I really HAVE had a really good reading year. For which I must thank two book bloggers in particular. Susan, who blogs at A Life in Books. And Kim, of Reading Matters fame. Both read a wide range of My Kind of Fiction, and write thoughtful and enticing reviews for the books they enjoy, whilst warning me off just a few of the ones they come across.

I’m reminded of the very first book I read this year: the Norwegian Hanne Ørstavik‘s Love. That got ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

And the very last (up to press – there are still 13 days left of 2024): also a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐read – Malachy Tallack’s That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz.

This is information overload really. I hope that clicking here will lead you to thumbnails of the books I’ve read this year, and by clicking on individual titles, to their reviews. But in January, I’m migrating to The StoryGraph, because it’s independent from Amazon. The StoryGraph might be a bit stats heavy for me, but I’d like to give it a go. Might you join me?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Sandwich to My Coney Island Baby

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month begins with Catherine Newman‘s Sandwich. It’s a book I enjoyed – with reservations – but let’s concentrate on the basics. This is a smartly delivered story told through the voice of menopausal Rocky as she goes with her husband; her two grown up children; and for part of their week there, her elderly parents to the same -faintly decrepid – house in Cape Cod that they’ve rented every summer for years and years. This gives me my premise for my Six Degrees this month. All my choices will have a marriage embedded in the story – to a greater or lesser degree.

Here’s another American marriage, in Ron Rash‘s The Caretaker. Jacob is called up to fight in the Korean war, and has to leave his pregnant wife Naomi behind. He is from a privileged background, and Naomi most definitely is not. His parents disapprove of the match so much that they set up a subterfuge to ensure that the couple will never see one another again once Jacob returns. Only one person, Jacob’s childhood friend has an idea that something very wrong is taking place. The book quietly presents a story that slowly unfolds when Jacob comes home, invalided out of the war, and believing himself a widower, with a child who never saw life. A cleverly devised plot, which for all its lack of high drama, is suspenseful to the end. My first Ron Rash. But definitely not my last.

Naomi doesn’t feature directly in Rash’s story. The wife in my next choice doesn’t either: Bernhard Schlink‘s The Granddaughter. 1964. A young West Berliner spending time in East Berlin meets a young woman and falls in love. He contrives her escape, marries her. But they do not live happily ever after. She only half heartedly returns his love, is constantly searching for she knows not quite what, and eventually dies in a drunken stupor. Only then does her husband, a bookseller, discover that she’d had a baby whom she’d abandoned before marrying him. The book describes his search for this woman, who must now be well into her 40s, and it results in his taking the woman’s own daughter under his wing and having her visit him for weeks at a time. A tale of complex feelings: getting to understand that the East was not in fact necessarly grateful to be ‘liberated’: that anger, bitterness, political feelings that resulted in the rise of the Far Right in Germany is one of the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall. His granddaughter’s father has passed all this anger onto his child, and this plays out in the latter part of this book. A moving and illuminating account of the feelings informing modern German politics.

The division of Germany into East and West was a consequence of World War II, so let’s go to wartime France. Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon. A real fast-moving page-turner, detailing the war time adventures of the real-life Nancy Wake. An Australian, Nancy lived and worked in Europe as a reporter in the years before the war. By 1939, she was in Marseille, and it’s here that her story begins – as far as the book is concerned. The plot however, weaves between her four incarnations as, initially an ambulance driver and people-smuggler for the French resistance: and increasingly, under different guises, as a fully fledged member – and commander even – of the guerilla military arm, in her case in the Auvergne. We are also witness, in Marseille, to the slow-burning yet passionate love affair between herself and Henri which results in their marriage. Her war work drives them physically apart, but does not diminish their love for one another. This work cannot be described as a biography. Lawhon has admitted to some characters being composite, some incidents elided or transposed for the sake of the story. And certainly there are scenes here whose veracity could never be proved: though I am sure the general ‘flavour’ remains accurate. Nancy was unusual in being a female commander in a male world, which brought its own difficulties, and also meant she probably had to be larger-than-life. Henri has his own role in the story. But not until towards the end. Because I already am familiar with much of the history of the French resistance, I found this a fascinating and involving story, and I fairly raced through its (almost) 450 pages.

Let’s stay in France and look at Boxes by Pascal Garnier. I simply don’t know what to make of this. Brice’s wife Emma has disappeared, leaving him to manage alone the move into the countryside which she had wished for. In this book, we witness Brice’s descent into depression and madness. We see his developing odd friendship with his neighbour Blanche. Various intriguing hints are dropped, but never ultimately satisfied. For instance, why does Brice so strongly resemble Blanche’s father? The house, the surrounding countryside are described in unsettling ways. Everything is alien. Brice’s past life. His present life. His career, which he abandons, apparently on a whim. Everything’s on a whim: from his shopping choices to the hole he stoves into the kitchen/dining room wall. It was all a bit like watching a certain kind of French film, and I was bemused, rather than enthusiastic about this book.

Now for another book where it’s a woman who’s centre stage: Water, by John Boyne. We meet a woman in middle years who has just fled to live in a fairly remote Irish island, changed her name and as far as possible her appearance. Why? Only slowly do we find out. Her husband’s crimes reflect on her: the world assumes she had enabled them – and, she believes, one even greater tragedy. She has done her best to vanish. She meets a few characters who are also uncomfortable with their lives, making relationships with some. Slowly she regains the strength of character necessary to reject her husband and to renew her relationship with her daughter. This book deftly charts her slow, but steady steps to recovery.

And for our last book, we’ll return to America, though to (like Boyne) an Irish writer, in Billy O’Callaghan‘s My Coney Island Baby. Michael and Caitlin have been meeting as lovers for one day a month, for a quarter of a century. They are married, but unhappily, to other people. The book explores their time together, on a single day. The day when Michael reveals that his wife has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. And Caitlin will reveal that her husband is likely to be promoted, and will require them both to move to Illinois, almost 1000 miles away. Yet despite their marriages’ fading passion, duty and the constraints of middle age will probably keep them tied to their respective spouses. The book swings between the hotel bedroom where the couple meet, and their past lives which have brought them to where they are now, disappointed by the choices they have made. An achingly poignant exploration of an intense and long-held love, drowned out as darkness falls and duty calls.

So that’s it for this month. A selection of marriages and stories, and ending where we began, in America. Next month we leave earth all together, and read Booker Prize-winning Orbital, by Samantha Harvey.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Intermezzo to The Patient

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book, Intermezzo, is by Sally Rooney and I have no immediate plans to read it. It’s -apparently – a moving story about grief, love and family. Which seems to leave the field wide open.

Maybe Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood hovers round the edges of all these themes. I was somewhat unsettled by this book, which reads somewhat as auto-fiction. It presents as a sort of diary of a woman who has abandoned both her marriage and her job, and thrown her lot with a community of nuns, despite having no religious belief. She takes comfort in the daily rhythms of the convent, and its hard physical work. Events arrive, in the form of the bones of a former member of the convent, murdered in Thailand and transported there by Helen Parry, assured climate activist whom the writer had, with others, bullied dreadfully at school. Even worse is the cataclysmic arrival in the convent of an infestation in their thousands of mice, of over a long period. The writer muses on her past, on her relationships, paying great attention to detail. I’ve a feeling this book may stay with me, though I can’t say I enjoyed the experience of reading it.

Here’s another woman who’s just made big changes in her life, in The Arsonist, by Sue Miller. It’s an engaging book, whose central character is Frankie, home on extended leave – or is it forever? – from her post as an Aid Worker in Africa. She goes to her parents’ summer house, which on retirement is where they plan to live permanently. And then her father shows increasing signs of Alzheimer’s disease … Frankie’s adjusting to life back in America when a series of arson attacks sweeps the town – just the homes of those who come here only for the summer months. This book is a slow burn in a thoroughly satisfactory way as Frankie starts to find her feet in the community and falls in love. I particularly liked the ending as it (sort of) slowly resolved the mystery surrounding the arson attacks, the changed situation of her parents, her own career plans – and the love affair.

It’s every character who undergoes change in my third book, Catherine Chidgey‘s Remote Sympathy. This is a cleverly constructed narrative, set mainly in and around Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and the nearest town, Weimar. The voices are those of Dr. Weber, a doctor with Jewish ancestors, who is a camp inmate. He has previously invented a cancer-curing machine, only recently found to be ineffective: Frau Hahn, who has reluctantly move to the area with her son, following her husband’s appointment as camp administrator: SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hann himself: and a 1000 voces from Weimar – the collective voice of the town’s citizens. The narrative cleverly contrasts the opulence and ease of the Hahn’s lifestyle with that of the camp inmates’. The terrible lies believed by the town’s citizens, and by everyone outside the camp itself are exposed as the plot develops to allow Frau Hahn and Dr. Weber to meet in uncomfortable and deeply painful circumstances. This exhaustively researched novel depicts the holocaust anew. It’s sensitive yet powerful in its exploration of human feelings and emotions, and is both moving and involving.

Family relationships as seen through the prism of politics and power is the theme of Annie Garthwaite‘s The King’s Mother. A fine sequel to Garthwaite’s first book, Cecily. This narrative about the troubled reigns of her sons Edward (IV) and Richard (III) is brought to life in the story told from the perspective of their redoubtable mother. It offers a rounded perspective of life as it must have been at that time. Being rich, powerful and influential was no passport to an easy life, with allies becoming sworn enemies , and enemies friends, for a whole variety of reasons both good and bad. Richard in particular is sensitively portrayed, and is a different one from his image in popular mythology. I paid attention to the genealogical tables and the notes, because the strong list of characters is not always easy to get a handle on. Not Garthwaite’s fault. That’s the way it was. An involving and powerful story from a troubled period of history.

Dani Shapiro‘s Signal Fires also explores relationships. Here is a book about two families living in the same comfortable urban neighbourhood. Their situation – well off, cultured families, one with 2 almost-adult children, the other with one – can’t take away the fact that all is not well. In the doctor’s family, one child was driving the car when an accident they caused resulted in the death of a passenger. The other family’s highly intelligent son disappoints the father, because he’s not following the track his father had mapped for him. The narrative slips back and forth between various decades, allowing each of the principal characters a voice each time. This tender and moving novel with several sub-plots looks at different family dynamics, exploring guilt, penitence and loneliness.

Just to add something completely different to the mix, let’s go off piste and meet someone who’s rubbish at relationships, in Tim Sullivan‘s The Patient. George Cross is an unusual detective, in that he is neuro-diverse. His autism however, is what gives him focus, and an unusually fine attention to detail that others miss. His logical brain stands him in good stead. But he’s often awkward, rude and therefore misunderstood. His single-mindedness means that he determines to follow a case involving a woman who’s died, even though it’s already been decided by the Crime Unit that it’s a suicide. His obstinacy pays dividends, and what had appeared a fairly simply if tragic circumstance is revealed to be something much more complex and wide-ranging. My first George Cross read, but definitely not my last. An absorbing read.

One way or another, this month’s books have all been about relationships. As is next month’s starter book, Catherine Newman‘s Sandwich, which I’ve already read – and enjoyed: perhaps best described as a beach read with a difference.

Photo no. 1 is by Vladimir Šoić on Unsplash. Photo no. 3 is my own, but is an accommodation block from Auschwitz, not Buchenwald. Photo no 4 is also my own, of Alnwick Castle: the next nearest castle to Raby where Cecily Neville was born. Photo no 6 is by Gerda on Unsplash. Photos 2 & 5 are also my own.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Long Island to A Girl’s Guide to Winning the War

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t managed to read this month’s choice yet: Long Island by Colm Tóibín. I want to, because I loved its precursor, Brooklyn.

It’s about a young Irish woman who leaves Ireland to have a fresh start in America. I’ll begin my chain with a young Irish woman who leaves Ireland to have a fresh start in London. As told in Christine Dwyer Hickey‘s Our London Lives. This could easily turn out to be my Book of the Year. It features three main characters: Millie, who’s run away from Ireland; Pip, an aspiring boxer who drinks at the pub where Millie finds work; and London itself, seen at its best and its worst – its vibrancy, its diversity, but also its expense, its violence and its diminution as a community in the face of capitalist redevelopment.The chapters pass between Millie and Pip. Millie’s story begins in 1979; Pip’s not until 2017 when, a recovering alcoholic, he’s just been released from prison. We don’t read a continuous narrative. Rather it’s a series of vignettes, from which we are able to work out the un-narrated years for ourselves. Real events pepper the narrative: the release of the Guildford Four; the Grenfell Tower disaster, and this contrubutes to the novel’s very real sense of place. Here is a story of flawed individuals who make, and fail to make choices; who miss opportunities and fall through the cracks, but about whom we come to care. I was involved for every one of the book’s 500 pages.

My next book starts with a young girl born in London, Frida -in Flatlands, by Sue Hubbard. A quietly powerful piece of storytelling, set in the flatlands of Lincolnshire near the Wash during WWII. The narrative is divided between 12 year old Frida, evacuated to an impoverished and unfriendly farming couple whose house is also remote: and the more privileged young adult Philip, who as a consciencious objector is working as a farm labourer while developing his painting skills in his spare time. Despite their differences, the two have much in common – their loneliness, their apparent abandonment by those who should love them, their poverty. The wetlands which are their temporary home is also a character: their savage beauty, their harshness. A moving tale, well told.

My next book is also deeply rooted in the landscape, whose main character, the author, has barely moved at all. This is an intensely personal and lyrical memoir from poet Wendy Pratt. The Ghost Lake is embedded in two things: her deep connection to the part of East Yorkshire where she has lived her entire life; and the death, at the moment of her birth, of her much-wanted daughter. She focuses each chapter on a different community surrounding the Paleolake Flixton. This now-vanished lake provides an epicentre to her story. Throughout the book she dwells on its own history; and her own – though not in order. Her father’s decision not to continue the family tradition of farming; her own ‘oddity’ and inability to mix, to shine – despite her intelligence – at school; her chequered job and personal life; her conversion from working class girl to educated and successful – though always working class – career as a facilitator and poet. And always, threaded through the narrative, the much mourned dead baby daughter. A haunting, powerful and poetic memoir, bringing to life the natural world and landscape of her home patch, as well as exploring belonging, and loss.

Death is central to The World After Alice, by Lauren Aliza Green. On page one of this book, teenage Alice stands on a bridge … jumps … and dies. Then the story proper starts, 12 years later. Morgan, once Alice’s best friend is to marry Benji, Alice’s brother, after a courtship long kept secret. In a series of visits to the present day and flashbacks to the period both before and after Alice’s death, we gradually build up a picture of the turmoil her death effects in two increasingly disfunctional families and those who are closest to them – that of Alice, and that of Morgan. This is a story of family dynamics, of love, of loss, of secrets, of individuals who have lost their ability to trust, to communicate. A deftly written and immersive book, and not at all as irredeemably depressing as I have undoubtedly made it sound.

Another story about how life is complicated, and about how past events can cast a long shadow. John Boyne‘s Earth. ‘I became a different boy than the one I was supposed to be. I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be good. I wanted to love someone, and to be loved in return. But none of those ambitions came to be.’
This is Evan, a young Irish would-be abstract painter – only he wasn’t good enough; impossibly handsome; gay. He’s a top-class football player, against his inclinations – but it brings him money and lots of it. One of his (sort of) friends in the team is Robbie, an arrogant young man whom Evan can’t take his eyes from, as heterosexual Robie is well aware of. After a party in Robbie’s flat, Evan is accused of filming his friend’s rape of a young woman. This is far from a simple narrative. It explores several themes: the long shadow of upbringing; class; homophobia; moral corruption; the way the legal system treats alleged sexual offences. In doing so, it drops several bombshells into the narrative, none more shocking than the one revealed in the last pages of the book. A thought-provoking and well-turned out read.

I’m choosing my final book, because perhaps we need to lighten up a bit. Life doesn’t always turn out as expected, but it doesn’t have to be awful. A Girl’s Guide to Winning the War, by Annie Lyons. This was an entertaining read, and the pages turned themselves easily enough. It’s about how clever, bookish but working class Peggy, and her titled side-kick Marigold become the darlings of the Ministry of Information with their writing and photographic skills, producing heart-warming books about aspects of the war as experienced by ordinary peple, whether serving in the forces or on the home front. Although I enjoyed it, I found the characterisation a bit stereotypical. Warm, loving working class family. Formal, buttoned up, emotionless public school types. Everyone however, if you look hard enough, has a Heart of Gold. A book to curl up with and race through on a foggy winter evening. And to bring us back to London, where I began my chain.

We’ve had a bit of a gallop through a series of books that in different ways touch the heart strings. Next month the chosen book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.

A Bonus and Unexpected Seven

I volunteer at our local library most Monday mornings. First job of the day is the Pick List. A list of books reserved by readers in other parts of the county and held in our branch is circulated for types like me to find, then despatch in the next delivery van to the branches where they’re wanted.

And look what the first book on the list was yesterday. The Square of Sevens. Really? I knew nothing about it, but courtesy of Google, I can tell you that it’s a crowd-pleaser for lovers of historical novels, of crime novels and of thrillers. You can read all about it here.

Will Becky, Queen of Squares,put it on her reading list?

Six Degrees of Separation: from After Story to Beastings

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read this month’s starting book, After Story, by Larissa Behrendt. I understand it’s about a mother and daughter struggling to come to terms with the death of a sibling. They embark on a journey, visiting the sites important to their literary idols. Idols who include the Brontës. So …

Robert Edric‘s Sanctuary. You can’t be familiar with the brooding moorlands near Howarth and not feel as though you understand something of the Brontë family and their lives. Most of us think we know about them: the mother and sisters who died; the sisters who remained hewing their path towards immortality in slow, painful steps. And then there’s the brother, Bramwell, the black sheep, fighting his failures, his addictions, his inability to find a way to make something of his life. He is the subject, in fact the ‘author’ of this book. He paints a sorry picture of his stumbling path, in the final year of his young life, towards illness, addiction and death. I found the picture he painted of himself – hopelessly depressed, fault-finding, increasingly estranged from his family, increasingly self-deluded a fascinating one. In this book, Bramwell does not dig deep in his moments of introspection, but then you wouldn’t expect him to. He doesn’t favour us with pen portraits of his father, his sisters. Just tantalising glimpses of what they’re like. But nobody is more self-centred, less self-aware than Bramwell Brontë. Edric has carefully constructed this book in a series of vignettes that barely constitute a narrative, but which leave us feeling bewildered sympathy for an intelligent young man who has utterly lost his way. A beautifully imagined reconstruction of a life ill-lived.

Here’s another book re-imagining history. Carys Davies‘ Clear. This is a story about a vanished way of life. One which vanished during the devastating Highland Clearances in Scotland during the 19th century. A man Ivar, the sole inhabitant – with his few animals – of a remote island, is alive to the natural rhythms of the island – the many seasons, winds, mists, rains and tides that govern it. And when John Ferguson turns up to evict him, but instead falls into a concussioned coma from which Ivar nurses him back to health, he too falls under the island’s spell. Haltingly Ferguson begins to learn the vocabulary, then the language itself which Ivar speaks. The books celebrates that language and the fragity of life in such a spot, as well as asking questions about the future of Ivar, John, and John’s wife Mary, all of whom are in different ways implicated in the consequences of the Highland Clearance.

A forbidding terrain and climate are central too to Daniel Mason‘s The Winter Soldier. We’re in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the First World War early on in this book – well, Vienna rather than Easter Europe. Privileged Lucius Krzelewski, medical student, finds himself put in the role of fully-fledged doctor, with only a nurse who’s also a nun, and a few other men – a cook and general hand, in a woefully underequipped and isolated field hospital on the Eastern Front. He does his best to learn his craft, largely from nun Margarete, and has to make decisions about the onward fate of soldiers who leave his care. One such decision has lasting consequences for the soldier concerned, for Margarete and for him. And he falls in love, just before the war sweeps him up once more and makes decisions for him…. A heartfelt and involving story, bringing to life the appalling conditions which so many had to contend with on the Eastern Front.

Another book, another unforgiving landscape in Michael Crummey‘s The Innocents. Set in 19th century Newfoundland, this is the story of a brother and sister, aged about 12 and 10 at the beginning of the book, whose baby sister, then their mother, then their father die after a long period of illness. They are isolated. The nearest town is not near at all, and they get supplies only twice a year, when the ship Hope arrives to buy what they have produced and sell them what they need for the coming year. Evered and Ada cope. They have no choice. The landscape is harsh and unforgiving. Fish and seals are their natural resources. There are occasional adventures – to a shipwerecked vessel, where what they find at first delights, then horrifies them. There are occasional visitors from distant ships: well-drawn characters who add leaven to their lives. It’s the depiction of the landscape, then the story of the maturing of these two lonely, isolated yet self-sufficient children as they become adolescents that gives this book its unusual power. A gripping tale.

We’ll stick with contending with demanding circumstances and landscapes, and with not-so-recent history too by looking at The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore. In 1855, Sarah leaves her abusive husband and her child, to flee from Rhode Island to the American West, Minnesota: Sioux country. Resourceful, she quickly finds a husband, a doctor, who decides his calling is in a community where Native Americans live too. This is the story of a woman who becomes friendly with the indigenous population, and who finds her husband, herself and her children in danger when this population rises in revolt at the unfair treatment routinely meted out to them. In the ensuing uprising, she’s not entirely trusted by some native Americans, but thoroughly despised by her fellow whites. What should have been a gripping rendering of a rather terrifying and unedifying history based on known facts is rather prosaically yet choppily told. A slightly disappointing read, from which I nevertheless learnt a lot about this piece of pre-Civil War American history.

Uncompromising stories set in testing landscapes seem to be this months’s choices. Why change the formula? Beastings is by my current pin-up author, Benjamin Myers. A priest who’s no better than he ought to be enlists the aid of a poacher to pursue a mute young girl, the product of a brutal orphanage, who has made off with a baby whose parents – specifically the father – she mistrusted. Their pursuit takes them across an unyielding and elemental Cumbrian countryside which is itself a character in this austere, bleak novel. It’s not entirely clear when this novel was set, but it doesn’t matter. The Girl (no character is named) meets one or two helpful souls: a woodsman, a farmer, but on the whole she and the baby are alone, trusting to the landscape and the elements as they undertake their increasingly desperate escape from a life with few prospects into an equally bleak and impossible future. A shocking, absorbing, involving story.

My chain this month seems to consist of books which relate more to each other than to the starter book. Ah well. Next month, our book to begin the chain is Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, which has been on my Must Read list since the day it was published.

Photo credits: Me; Ed Philips; National Library of Scotland; Erin Minuskin; Jen Theodore.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Museum of Modern Love to On Gallows Down

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose, and I really enjoyed it. I’d like to thank Kate for drawing our attention to it. It’s an illuminating and satisfying examination of how we interact with art and what we get from it. It’s told from the perspective of Arky Levin, a composer whose terminally ill wife has forbidden him from visiting the hospital where she is dying, so he can get on with his career, and from a clutch of – very different – subsidiary characters. The real hero of the book is performance artist Marina Abramović, who in 2010 sat immobile in MoMa’s atrium while spectators queued up to take turns sitting opposite her while looking into her eyes.

Marina Abramović was an exhibit. So’s my next character. He’s an octopus in an aquarium, and his story is told in Shelley Van Pelt‘s Remarkably Bright Creatures. Seventy year old Tova Sullivan needs to keep busy since her husband died. She’s needed to keep busy for years in fact, since her son Eric was apparently drowned – his body was never found. So she works as a cleaner in the town’s aquarium. And it’s here she establishes a bond with an elderly octopus, who also gets to tell his story in short occasional chapters. Suspend your disbelief. This works. The other main character is Cameron, a man with a chip on his shoulder searching for the father he never knew. This book tells the story, the journey of each of them, with a light touch: with humour and with wit. A light, yet involving and engaging read.

From an unhappy octopus to an unhappy – and creative – man: Charles Rennie Mackintosh. He and his wife fetched up in a Suffolk coastal village at the beginning of WWI, to nurse his wounded ego, with commissions unforthcoming, and his Glasgow School of Art unrecognised. His story, and that of the community where he’s settled for a while is told through the voice of 11 year old Thomas Maggs whose own family life is difficult. This book – Mr. Mac and Me, by Esther Freud paints a picture of life in a working coastal village as well as that of the life of a poverty-stricken and disappointed artist. An absorbing story.

Two more disappointed people: in Ann Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum. This book of considerable charm is told entirely in an exchange of letters between an English 60 year old farmer’s wife and the curator of a Danish Museum which houses the Tollund Man. Initially formal, the letters become more intimate. This busy outdoorsy farmer’s wife with her chintzy house couldn’t be more different from austere Scandinavian Anders. But both are lonely and have gaping holes in their lives. With every letter they disclose more of their joys, disappointments and difficulties and draw inexorably closer. At the end is a revelation. What effect will this have on them, on their burgeoning relationship? We can only speculate. A touching and intimate book.

These two characters are in different ways rooted in their local surroundings. Anita Sethi in a British born woman of British Guianan heritage who suffered a racist incident while travelling by rail which resulted in a conviction for the abuser. It prompted her to plan and execute a journey along the backbone of England – the Pennine Way – which she records in I Belong Here. This was for her, an inexperienced walker, a journey of healing and a time for reflection. It also became an extended metaphor for her feelings about her status as British person from an ethnic minority; the Pennines as ‘backbone’; of ‘making your own path’; of ‘ruggedness and strength’; of laws which protect landscapes and humans .. and so on. She muses on community, on history, on legislation as she walks an area I know well, and gave me, a white person with roots in this part of the country, plenty to think about. I’ll be interested in how the rest of the proposed trilogy develops.

Here’s another book which begins with a journey through northern England. Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers. I know little about Saint Cuthbert beyond the fact that he was a simple man, much venerated in his own time. Which explains why a motley band of monks and devotees intermittently spent years moving his remains around to save him from the depredations of Viking raiders. And we meet some of them here, in the first section of the book set in 995CE, where orphaned Ediva, in her breathless disjointed but poetic prose recounts their journey, the landscape, and her vision for his final resting place. In Book Two, set in 1346, masons are enhancing and repairing the mighty hilltop cathedral (Durham). The wife of one meets and succumbs to another …. Then we leap to the 19th century to meet the opinionated and cocksure Forbes Fawcett-Black who has been invited to join the team exhuming the saint to see if the legend that his flesh is incorruptible is true. And finally we are in 2019, where a young under-educated man who cares for his dying mother is employed as a gopher to the current restoration team. His eyes are opened to a world and a heritage he had not known about. How different and yet how connected the sections are to each other. The language of each couldn’t be more different one from the other: free-flowing yet poetic; dense blocks of prose; a pastiche Victorian ghost story; a rich narrative in which sense of place and societal deprivation are juxtaposed The kinds of story told are utterly different. Yet links are there – there’s always an owl-eyed lad in the narrative, for instance. A richly complex feast of prose and poetry, provoking thought and discussion long after the last page has been turned. This is a book inviting – and deserving – several readings.

My last book is also rooted in the British landscape. But Berkshire this time. On Gallows Hill, by Nicola Chester. Nicola Chester has lived her whole life in Berkshire. This area has had a history of rebellion by the under-represented. John Clare wrote his poetry here. The Civil War had bitter battles here. Tenants throughout the centuries rebelled against their landowner masters. It’s where Greenham Common, site of the women’s peace camps, and Newbury Bypass, a much fought-over project which destroyed so much natural and rural history when it was sited near her homes. Chester has been a tenant all her life, and understands powerlessness. She also understands the natural world, and deepening her understanding of it, spending time in it with her family, particularly her children, is her salvation. Her battles change to doing her part to save the natural world. She has her nature writing accepted by the RSPB, the Guardian, her local paper, and this becomes part of her fight. She writes with lyricism and passion, describing the seasons, the creatures that form part of her day-to-day environment with incisive, poetic words and concludes ‘Anyone could make a place their home by engaging with its nature’. A book to read slowly, and to savour.

I think we can link Chester back to Abramović, since both share a passion for the things that matter to them, and go to often uncomfortable lengths as they invite the world to share their compulsive interest.

Next month? Our starter book will be After Story, by Larissa Behrendt.

Several illustrations are via Unsplash: (i) K Mitch Hodge (ii) Pete Williams and (vi) Frances Synge. (iii) Tollund Man is in the Public Domain: Sven Rosbum . (iv) Durham Cathedral and (v) Pennines landcape in North Yorkshire, are my own.

Wuthering Heights: Tourist Destination

This week, A Canadian blogging pal, Rebecca of Rebecca’s Reading Room reflected on re-reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It made me think of a post which I wrote six years ago, in which I described a walk in Emily’s footsteps. Now it’s not really playing fair to re-post something I published before for the Lens-Artists Challenge: Tourist Attractions Near and Far. But I’m going to do it anyway. How many walking routes does anyone know in the UK where the way-marking is in any language other than English? Here, they’re in Japanese. This wild and often unforgiving part if England has become an unlikely tourist Mecca for devotees of Brontë’s story of the passionate and tumultuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

Wuthering Heights

28th July 2018

Haworth: a charming village on the top of a high and steep hill, in an area of high, bleak and steep hills; home to the Brontë sisters and the surrounding moorland countryside of Wuthering Heights.

Cottages near Haworth. Cosy now: possibly less picturesque back in the Brontë’s time.

Everyone knows that you can expect ‘weather’ when you come here, whatever time of year you arrive. As you stumble along the church path to leave the village, slashing rain tumbling from sullen hostile skies needles your skin, slicks your hair to your face and saturates your clothes. As you set your face against the wild wind, your boots sink into the sodden peaty turf as you trudge onto the moor. If you dare to glance up, you see unending moorland before you: bleak, barren and bare, with sheep huddled against the dry stone walls which march across the landscape. This is Nature-in-the-Raw, and we expect no different.

I went there earlier this week. None of the above applied.

We are in Week Five of a heatwave. I doubt if either the Brontës or even Heathcliff himself had ever seen the like. Brittle coir matting now carpets the brooding moorland fells: and several weeks early, the heather is almost in flower, rich and purple. Yellowing grasses replace the dense green turf the sheep prefer, whispering and rustling in the light breeze.

Beyond Howarth, coir matting stands in for moorland turf.

There’s a little brook in the valley here. Angry peaty water jostling officiously along its path has been replaced by still, clear shallow pools.

The Brontë sisters would cheerfully have paused here to rest, reflect and write a little. Then, like me, they would have slogged on, up the peat-and-stone pathway that leads upwards, ever upwards, towards Top Withens.

There’s Top Withens, up there. Beside that solitary tree.

Top Withens may have been the isolated upland farmhouse that Emily Brontë pictured Cathy Earnshaw and family living in when she wrote Wuthering Heights. It’s a ruin now, the roof torn off in a violent thunderstorm in the 1890s. Just as you’d expect.

It was the perfect picnic spot for me. The moorland stretched before me, its hillsides rhythmically rising and falling. The world was silent: not that silence in which there is no sound, but that of the living countryside: the low susuration of the swaying grasses; the humming of the wind in my ears; the occasional complaint of a bird sweeping overhead. Beyond the moorland, greener fields lay, chopped centuries ago into rough rectangles by drystone walls. Some held sheep, some cattle, others recently cut hay. The sun warmed my rocky seat, and I was perfectly content.

Except for the sky. The day was sultry, sweaty, but freshened by a soft breeze. I knew the sun might be chased away by gusty rain. Ash-grey clouds swelled and receded, revealing granite tones behind: and beyond that, cornflower blue once more. It was a signal. Haworth takes weather seriously. Never be tempted to climb these uplands without a very capable waterproof in your kit.

The moorland I saw this week was not the Brontë’s moorland. It’s been a little sanitised. There are helpful finger posts pointing the way at every junction, in English and … Japanese.

Top Withens or Top Withins? Take your pick. I don’t know which the Japanese choose.

The pathways the sisters trod are no longer springy peat tracks, or sticky muddy gullies. Instead, heavy slabs line the way, to prevent footfall damage to this fragile area from the hundreds of people who tramp these paths looking for the Real Brontë Experience.

My day was far too comfortable for that. I was not returning to a draughty parsonage with self-destructive brother Branwell to worry about. If you want to see the Brontë’s life through his eyes, read Robert Edric’s ‘Sanctuary’. You’ll be glad to get back to bustling tourist-destination Haworth for a nice cup of tea.

This post should qualify for a mention in Jo’s Monday Walk, I hope.