Tag: Victoria Mackenzie

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 Hydra to Purple Hibiscus

Goodness!  I completely forgot that today is Six Degrees of Separation day.  I’ll have to play catch-up.

This month’s chain-starter isn’t yet published in the UK, so I haven’t read it: Hydra by Adriane Howell. 

I gather something bad has happened to the heroine as the book begins, so I’ll start with Dolores by Laureen Aimee Curtis. Dolores is a somewhat enigmatic character who fetches up at the gate of a convent – pregnant. The nuns take the young woman in, and she adjusts to their life while her mind slips back to the years before: to the assignations in love motels, sometimes to life back at home, to a boy called Angelo. Life happens to her, almost without her input. The nuns hadn’t known she was already pregnant when she came to their door. She gives birth, and they name her son. What will happen to this confused young woman? We don’t find out. Perhaps this convent, full of mainly elderly and unworldly women will remain her home. Or not. Dolores’ life has been pretty grim so far and seems likely to remain so. Somehow, we as readers remain detached from her, as the author herself does. A strange, visceral book which kept me thinking beyond the time I turned the last page.

Let’s stay with – well, not nuns – but those who have chosen the religious life:  Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain. Two female mediaeval 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 those 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.

So to another woman, isolated from her professional peers simply by virtue of being a woman:  Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. While Elizabeth Zott, hero of this book, was fighting her battles for acceptance as an academic and chemist in the ’60s, I was a schoolgirl at an all-girls’ grammar school where achievement was expected, and the norm. All the same, our academic prowess when, post graduation, we entered the world of work was not always remunerated as favourably as that of our male colleagues. So this story of a woman who was disregarded while her research was nicked by her male colleagues was bound to interest me, as was her determination not to patronise her female audience when she was hired to do a TV cookery show. But … the characterisation was thin (EZ herself), or frankly unbelievable (her small daughter), and the males disappointingly stereotypical – especially the villains of the piece. As a page-turner it wasn’t wholly successful for me.I’m out of step.  Most readers seem to love it.

I’ve just finished Go as a River by Shelley Read (Whom I’ve met!  She came to an event organised this week by our local independent bookshop and spoke engagingly and with warm enthusiasm). Victoria lives in a small inward-looking town in Colorado – one that will have been covered by a new reservoir by the end of the book. Hers is a family of men, the women in her life having died in tragic circumstances when she was only 12. They’re either hardworking and grim (father), brutal (brother) or bitter and disabled (uncle). She is their housekeeper. One day, she meets an itinerant young man, a Native American, despised and reviled by the local community: racism is rampant . Falling in love with him changes the trajectory of her life, and is the story which makes up this book. In this account, we have the wild and rugged forest landscape which surrounds her town vividly brought to life, as well as the emotional life of Read’s characters. This is an immersive tale of love, loss and resilience. As a debut novel, it’s a triumph.

Victoria is only 17 when her story begins. Ana, in Dominicana by Angie Cruz, is 15 and living in the Dominican Republic with her family. Since the age of 11 she has been promised in marriage to a man more than twice her age. Love doesn’t come into it. This wheeler dealer, a Dominican now based in New York is her family’s best chance of emigrating there with Ana as the sponsor. New York as Ana finds it is not a city paved in gold, but a shabby flat in which she is more or less a prisoner with a sometimes violent and unpredictable husband. This is her story of her feisty struggles to make a life for herself, and gain some independence, while maintaining contact with her family in troubled political times ( the late 1960s). A good read, up-beat and engaging even when times are very hard, and a real insight into the struggles and compromises of being an immigrant with responsibilities to those who have been left behind.

Lastly, another 15 year old, whom we meet in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. Kambili is a Nigerian teenager who lives a privileged life with her brother Jaja and her parents. Her father is a successful businessman who is proud of the way he is able to support his community with his generosity. His devotion to his Catholic religion is however fanatical and more than a little warped, his expectations of his children controlling and cruel. Their home life is set against the turbulent politics of the time, and the contrast with their father’s sister’s family. They are in much more straitened circumstances, but surround each other with easy-going love. It’s the play between these two sets of attitudes that brings this story into being, and allows Kambili gradually to find her voice. A compelling and often uncomfortable page-turner.

Each of these books is linked by having as their protagonists women, isolated either by choice or circumstance.  Perhaps they could have done with reading next month’s starter book: Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, by Elizabeth Day.