Tag: Emily Maguire

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Correspondent to A Little Trickerie

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 have had a lot of trouble with this chain: It’s stumbled together, rather than gracefully evolved. And it begins with a book I haven’t read. The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans is a debut epistolary novel exploring the life of Sybil Van Antwerp, a prickly, 73-year-old retired Maryland lawyer navigating deteriorating eyesight and past grief.

I decided to go with a woman who writes – not letters, but a notebook. Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes and translated by Ann Goldstein, is set in 1950s Rome, about Valeria Cossati, a 43-year-old wife and mother who starts a secret diary. Her dreams are humble: to have space in the house for herself, and just a little time. Writing in this forbidden journal causes her to question her restricted domestic life, her husband’s patriarchal authority, and her own identity, leading to a profound personal awakening. 

What about a woman – and a man too, in fact – who hadn’t even known they were dissatisfied, until …. ? This story is told in André Aciman’s Room on the Sea.  Paul and Catherine are two married professionals in their 60s who meet during a sultry New York City jury selection. Over a week, their initial connection deepens into a secret, intense, and philosophical romance, exploring themes of yearning, regret, and the temptation to act on missed opportunities. This novella charmed me as much as this man, this woman charmed each other. Their easy teasing relationship, their way with words, their openness with one another had me rooting for them.

Maybe Paul and Catherine have an affair.  Maybe they don’t.  My next book, Phil Harrison’s The First Day begins with an affair and its consequences.  It’s a book of two halves. exploring a destructive affair between Samuel Orr, a married Belfast preacher with a twelve year old son Philip, and Anna, a young Beckett scholar. Anna falls pregnant, they keep the baby … and everything falls apart.  Fast forward thirty years to New York  where that baby, Sam is now living. He’s our narrator – actually it turns out he always has been. Why is he there? Why is he choosing to stay under the radar? Eventually, horrified, we find out. This is a very readable book about faith, about power-imbalance, about desire, about long shadows cast by single events. 

In The First Day, Samuel Orr is never referred to as anything but ‘Orr’.  In James Meek’s Your Life Without Me, the main protagonist, an English teacher, is only ever known as Mr. Burnham.  The story centres on him as he navigates the death of his wife Ada, and his strained relationship with his truculent teenage daughter Leila.  And there’s Raf, ex-pupil with whom he maintains close contact.  Is Mr. Burnham going to be implicated when Raf is discovered in a major act of terrorim?  Despite the perhaps over-neat ending, this is a well-delivered book about four flawed and compromised people, building into a compassionate and involving story.

Leila is an awkward and motherless teenager.  Let’s go back twelve centuries and find another:  Agnes, in Emily Maguire’s Rapture. Brought up and educated by her father in a world of men, Agnes renders herself unsuitable marriage material in 9th century Mainz. When her father unexpectedly dies, she disguises herself as a man and enters a monastery. The book catalogues her life as a respected scholar and scribe in an austere Benedictine monastery, and her subsequent adventures which see her travel to Athens, to Rome, where her scholarship, her piety ensure she’s always noticed by those who matter. She lives always with the fear of being found out for who she is, with the discomfort of her tightly bound breasts, with her tussles with herself over her austere faith. We come to know Agnes/John as a child, a scholar, a woman, a lover, a teacher… and finally a pope. An absorbing, well researched, imagined and audacious story, transporting me to the reality of religious life in 9th century Europe.

We’ll stay in the past, but in early Tudor England, and meet a young vagrant, Tibb Ingleby, in Rosanna Pike’s A Little Trickerie.  Her mother dies, and Tibb has to make her way alone in a world where vagrancy is a crime.  Meeting a young lad, Ivo, makes a big difference and the two team up.  One day he disappears, and her next adventure sees her falling in with a band of strolling players.  And on the story goes, vivaciously told by uneducated Tibb, who nevertheless has a way with words. Who knew that being naked was ‘wearing a no-clothes outfit’? Through her we meet the often horrifying prejudices and superstitions of early 16th century England, The last section of the book  is inspired by the story of a real woman known as the Holy Maid of Leominster who, like Tibb herself, engaged in fraud and ‘trickeries’ . Fraudster or not, Tibb is an engaging character, doing what she can to get through life as best she can, never hurting those she holds dear. The ending disappointed, but till then, I found it an involving story.

So there we have it. Six books, six or more characters with tales to tell about their ordinary – or not so ordinary – lives. Next month, we’re to begin with Charlotte McConaghy‘s Wild Dark Shore, set on a remote small island housing the world’s largest seed bank. That should give scope for next month’s Six Degrees to scatter in many different directions. If you don’t already … why not join in?

Six Degrees of Separation: from Rapture to The Island Of Sea Women

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

Set within a religious community in 9th century Germany, Emily Maguire‘s Rapture, which I have yet to read, reimagines the life of the first and only female pope.

It’s not too much of a stretch to travel to 7th century Ireland in Emma Donoghue’s Haven. Holy man Artt, recently returned from his travels, fetches up at a monastery with a plan to set forth with two of the monks there to set up a tiny community on a totally uninhabited island, to live prayerfully in total isolation. Imperfectly equipped, they soon embark on their journey into the unknown: and Artt insists on choosing not one of the nearby islands, but a distant one that is rocky, bleak, inhospitable. The tough character of this island, with its panoply of resident birds is brought vividly to life, as are monks Cormac and Trian. Artt remains as distant to us in many ways as he is to the two monks. This is a story that cannot end well, as a bad situation becomes worse. But it vividly brings to life the increasingly unbearable conditions made more difficult by a completely unapproachable and inflexible man-in-charge. It’s a quietly engrossing story.

A different remote island, at a different time – the 19th century.  Carys Davies’ Clear is an engrossing book about a vanished way of life. One which disappeared 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 appears to evict him, but instead falls into a concussed coma from which Ivar nurses him back to health, he too falls under the island’s spell, and haltingly Ferguson begins to learn the vocabulary, then the language itself which Ivar speaks. The book celebrates that language and the fragility 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.

Yet another remote island – off Norway this time – present day Norway.  Author and farmer James Rebanks was going through a tough time mentally.  He needed to get away, and got the chance to stay in a remote and tiny island just below the Arctic Circle, where a woman was continuing the tradition, practised since Viking times of encouraging eider ducks to breed there, so that their valuable down could be harvested for warm clothing and quilts. This book is an account of the island’s astonishingly rich (but always diminishing) range of birdlife; its weather and relationship with the often unforgiving sea. Of how the woman and her friend, and that year Rebanks too, persuaded eider ducks back by building nests for them – yes, really! The protective down could be harvested from the nests when finally deserted, then cleaned and prepared for sale. It’s an immersive tale of a life that’s simple, often monotonous, always hard and often bleak, but with simple satisfaction too.  The tale is told in The Place of Tides.

Let’s stay by the sea but lighten the mood, and read Jess Kidd’s Murder at Gull’s Nest.  It’s Cosy Crime, and I don’t like this genre at all.  But Jess came to speak recently at our local independent bookshop. She was a hit. She spoke wittily and enthusiastically about her career as a writer, and about this book, which is only the first of a planned series, following its heroine, a woman of middle years, plain and practical, Nora Breen. Nora links back to where we started from, because she was until recently a nun.  But when her fellow nun and friend Frieda leaves the order, and then goes missing, Nora chooses this event as her reason to abandon her vocation behind and search for Frieda. She begins her search in a seaside town in the south, Gore-on-Sea(!) at a pretty dreadful boarding house (this is the 1950s) called The Gulls Nest, where Frieda herself had stayed till she disappeared, a victim in Nora’s opinion, but not that of the police, of Murder Most Foul. At first I was rooting for Nora, and enjoyed getting to know the half dozen or so other varied characters who populated this book . But improbable incident follows improbable incident. The book’s well written, but it isn’t enough to keep me invested in the events it described.

It’s too late now.  I’ll have to stay with the sea for the whole chain, and this time, with gulls too.  But let’s change the mood, and go with non fiction.  Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry.  I unreservedly loved this book. Nicolson has long been fascinated by seabirds – not just gulls – and explains how these birds differ so much in habit and lifestyle from the garden birds with whom many of us are more familiar. Then he takes ten different species to examine in turn. He refers to his personal observations, to scientific research, to history and to literature to build a rounded and fascinating portrait of each species he’s chosen. My husband got used to having a daily bulletin of ‘today’s most fascinating seabird facts’ at breakfast each morning. Beautifully written, meticulously researched. readable and involving, this was a book I was sorry to finish.
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I’ll end in entirely another part of the world – South Korea, and take you to the island of Jeju, in Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women. I had an immediate interest in this book, having travelled in South Korea – though we didn’t visit Jeju – and having already learnt to be fascinated by the lives of the haenyeo diving women.  These are divers who harvest seafood (sea cucumber, urchins, abalone, octopus) all year round from the sea floor; they can stay underwater for sustained periods of time without breathing apparatus.  This book combines a strong story following the story of two women Young-Sook and her mother, whose lives develop through their membership of the haenyeo culture, as they live through a twentieth century defined in Korea by occupation, internal conflict, deprivation and rapid change. Learning more about this history was in itself illuminating and interesting. It was a backdrop to a story of friendships, broken relationships and family struggle which drew me in to the last page. I was sorry to finish this book too.

It’s not clear to me how I got from a religious life in long-ago Germany to six books involving the sea. But Six Degrees takes us all to unexpected places. Where will next month’s starter book, All Fours, by Miranda July take us?