Month: November 2010

Teaser Tuesday – The Beacon by Susan Hill

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I’ve just finished reading The Beacon by Susan Hill. It’s a short book that can be read in one sitting and it’s beautifully easy to read, written in a straight forward style, moving between the past and the present. It’s compelling, drawing a picture of a family, four children and their parents living in the Beacon, an old North Country farmhouse. It’s also full of tension, of unspoken feelings and emotions as each child, Colin, May, Frank and Berenice grow up and leave home. Except that May came back after a year at university in London, unable to cope with ‘the terrors’ that began to assail her.  As the years pass, May is left at home caring for her widowed mother, after she suffered a stroke.

I have two teasers today. The first is a description of one of May’s terrors:

When she lay down again she saw strange shapes before her eyes, trees with branches that curled upwards and inwards and turned to ash and blood-covered beaches dotted with mounds of sand-coloured snakes which stirred and coiled and uncoiled. Her own heart was beating extremely slowly and as it beat she felt it enlarging, swelling and filling out like a balloon inside her chest and stomach and finally growing up into her brain. (page 53)

And the second is about Frank. Frank is the mysterious one, the loner; the others felt they didn’t know him and said that no one knew what went on inside his head – it was one of life’s mysteries. There are hints throughout that Frank is different and it is only in the latter part of the book that it becomes clear why none of his siblings have any contact with him and don’t want him to know of his mother’s illness and death.

He did little speaking but a great deal of staring out of large green-grey, slightly bulbous eyes. He followed people too, his father and the men about the farm, his mother in the house, the other children at school almost anywhere. Turn round and Frank would be there, silent, watching, following. (page 32)

It’s a short, powerful book about truth and memory, about the ordinary everyday outer lives we  live and the inner turmoil and tensions within us. It’s also about what we make of our lives, how we express ourselves and about how other people see us. It’s amazing.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB where you share ‘teasers’. I’ve adapted it a bit in this post, to include more information about the book and longer teasers.

Microfiction Monday – The Man with No Horse

Published on by Margaret18 Comments

His horse stolen, poor Pedro had to walk and his feet were killing him. Those new thigh-length boots were definitely not made for walking.

Microfiction means the shortest of short stories. Think Aesop’s fables, comic strips, or even jokes: complete stories that can be told in under a minute. For this game, the limit is a tweetable 140 characters or fewer. Microfiction Monday is hosted by Susan at Stony River.

Weekly Geeks – Time for Reading?

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This week’s Weekly Geeks question is about how to find time to read:

Do you read for a few minutes here and there?

Do you put aside certain nights or times of the day to read?

How do you minimize family interruptions?

If I don’t have some time for reading each day I feel deprived – I have to read even if it’s only for a few minutes. Reading is essential.

I’ll read whenever there are a few minutes here and there. At work I used to read whilst waiting for the lift, at breaks and at lunch time. I’ll read whenever I have to wait – at the doctor’s, dentist’s and hospital waiting rooms (it is more difficult to concentrate in those places, I admit). I also like to read whilst eating breakfast (but not other meal times), and each night I read before I fall asleep.

Family interruptions aren’t a problem. I can read whilst the TV is on, provided I don’t want to watch what’s on, of course. Sport is ideal for both reading and writing – the background noise seems to help me to read. This may be because growing up I had to do my homework in front of the TV in a warm room, or upstairs in a freezing cold bedroom (we didn’t have central heating).

Gone To Earth by Mary Webb

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Gone to Earth by Mary Webb was a favourite book when I was a young teenager.  I was reminded of it when I was reading Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before It Falls recently and I wondered whether I would still enjoy it. My memory was that it was a beautiful book about a young woman and her seduction by an older man.

Reading it now I was struck by the lyrical, poetic quality of Mary Webb’s writing.  I’m pleased that I still enjoyed this book despite its melodrama and occasional moralising and philosophical  comments. I particularly liked the descriptions of the Shropshire countryside and its recreation of a rural community in the early years of the 20th century.

As John Buchan wrote in the introduction:

The book is partly allegory; that is to say, there is a story of mortal passion, and a second story behind it of an immortal conflict, in which human misdeeds have no place. Hazel Woodus suffers because she is involved in the clash of common lusts and petty jealousies, but she is predestined to suffer because she can never adjust herself to the strait orbit of human life. (page 7)

It’s the story of Hazel Woodus, torn between two men, Edward Marston, the gentle country minister she marries and John Reddin, the hard-living, fox-hunting squire of Undern. She is drawn to Edward, attracted by his gentleness and the security she finds with him and attracted to Reddin by his passion and sensuality. ‘Edward appealed to her emotions, while Reddin stirred her instincts.’ (page 187)

But, despite her fascination with these two men she wanted neither:

Her passion, no less intense, was for freedom, for the wood-track, for green places where soft feet scudded and eager eyes peered out and adventurous lives were lived up in the tree-tops, down in the moss.

She was fascinated by Reddin; she was drawn to confide in Edward; but she wanted neither of them. Whether or not in years to come she would find room in her heart for human passion, she had no room for it now. She had only room for the little creatures she befriended and for her eager, quickly growing self. (page 88)

She’s superstitious, her world is that of ancient legends, of the Black Huntsman and the death-pack hunting over Hunter’s Spinney, a world of magic and beauty too, of the woods, birds and animals. She’s naive  identifying with her pet foxcub, Foxy, predestined to be hunted and the victim of man’s cruel nature.

The landscape of the remote Shropshire countryside is brought to life, its beauty and tranquility contrasting with the old, musty dark haunted corridors and rooms of Undern. Undern was the place where the magic was not good, a place of deep sadness, that drew Hazel in within its walls.  The weather and the seasons too reflect the growing tension and suspense as the winter storm raged around Undern and across the countryside:

A tortured dawn crept up the sky. Vast black clouds, shaped like anvils for some terrific smithy-work, were ranged around the horizon, and, later, the east glowed like a forge. The gale had not abated, but was rising in a series of gusts, each one a blizzard. … From every field and covert, from garden and orchard, came the wail of the vanquished. (page 258)

One of the main themes throughout the book is the cruelty of humans, the savagery of civilised man and the sacrifice of the innocent. Hazel is horrified by the domination of the strong over the weak:

… the everlasting tyranny of the material over the abstract; of bluster over nerves; strength over beauty; States over individuals; churches over souls; and fox-hunting squires over the creatures they honour with their attention. (page 99)

Civilisation,  Mary Webb maintained was based on vicarious suffering, all built up on the sacrifice of other creatures. It reminds me a little of Thomas Hardy’s novels with its romantic melodrama and poetic intensity. There is the same sense of impending and inevitable tragedy, without hope of relief and like Hardy there is that love of nature and pity for the weak that pervades the story.

(Note: page references are to my 1935 hardback copy of the book.)

Agatha Christie on Poirot

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

These are some of Agatha Christie’s thoughts on creating Hercule Poirot, taken from her Autobiography.

She had decided to write a detective story whilst working in a hospital dispensary during World War 1. Surrounded by poisons it seemed natural that death by poisoning would be the method. She then decided who should be poisoned, who would be the poisoner, when, where and how. And then who should be the detective? She was steeped in the Sherlock Holmes tradition but decided she had to invent a detective of her own and he had to have a friend as a ‘kind of butt or stooge’. He had to be unique, a character that hadn’t been used before. She considered a schoolboy, or a scientist, but when she remembered the Belgian refugees who were living in a colony in Tor that is who she settled on.

She decided her detective should be a Belgian – a refugee and a retired police officer and only later realised what a mistake she had made:

What a mistake I made there. The result is that my fictional detective must be well over a hundred by now.

Anyway, I settled on a Belgian detective. I allowed him to grow slowly into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy, I thought to myself, as I cleared away a good many untidy odds and ends in my own bedroom. A tidy little man, I could see him as a tidy little man, always arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round. And he should be very brainy – he should have little grey cells of the mind – that was a good phrase: I must remember that – yes he would have the little grey cells. (page 263 -4)

And then he had to have a name, rather a grand name. She wondered about calling her little man Hercules but his last name was more difficult. She didn’t know how the name Poirot came to her – whether it just came into her head or whether she saw it in a newspaper or written down somewhere, but it didn’t go with Hercules; eventually she decided that it should be Hercule – Hercule Poirot. So, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was conceived and eventually published. She was jubilant – her book was going to appear in print. She didn’t know that this was the start of her long  writing career and that

Hercule Poirot, my Belgian invention, was hanging round my neck, firmly attached there like the old man of the sea. (page 285)

Because  Poirot had been quite a success in The Mysterious Affair at Styles she was encouraged to use him again and then she realised that she was tied to both Poirot and his Watson: Captain Hastings.

I quite enjoyed Captain Hastings. He was a stereotyped creation, but he and Poirot represented my idea of  a detective team. I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp – and now I added a ‘human foxhound’, Inspector Giraud, of the French police. Giraud despises Poirot as being old and passé.

Now I saw what a terrible mistake I had made in starting with Hercule Poirot so old – I ought to have abandoned him after the first three or four books, and begun with someone much younger. (page 290)

Poirot, whatever Agatha Christie thought of him is one of her most famous characters, vying in popularity with Miss Marple. Each time I read on of the 33 novels he appears in or see him portrayed by David Suchet (who is Poirot for me) I think he is my favourite. But then I’m equally as fond of Miss Marple (Joan Hickson fitted the part to perfection) and she too is my favourite. I can’t pick one over the other – they are both outstanding creations.