Category: Books

Agatha Christie’s Birthday – A Celebratory Post

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

So much has been written about Agatha Christie’s life, her books, her houses, and so on and so forth, that I wasn’t sure what to write about for this post to celebrate the 121st anniversary of her birth.  Last year I wrote an A – Z of facts about her taken from her autobiography and the year before I visited her grave and wrote a bit about that and Winterbrook House, her house at Wallingford.

Looking for inspiration I came across the Agatha Christie: Official Centenary Celebration 1890- 1990, which is a mine of information with articles about Agatha Christie to celebrate her life and work. Along with lists of her books, plays, films and TV adaptations (up to 1990) there are articles about her poetry, life before the First World War, her family life, the actors and actresses playing the roles of Poirot and Miss Marple, including many fascinating facts and photographs.

For example there is this “Confession” reproduced in Michael Parkinson’s Confession Album, 1973 in which famous people filled in a questionnaire about their likes and dislikes. The reproduction in the book is indistinct and I can’t make out some of the words but here are some of Agatha’s favourite things and her greatest misery:

  • My ideal value: Courage
  • My idea of beauty in nature: A Bank of Primroses in Spring
  • My favourite qualities in men: Integrity and Good Manners
  • My favourite qualities in women: Loving and Merry
  • My greatest happiness: Listening to Music
  • My greatest misery: Noise and Long Vehicles on Roads
  • My  favourite authors: Elizabeth Bowen Graham Greene
  • My favourite actors and plays: Alec Guinness  Murder in the Cathedral
  • My favourite quotation: Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us – Sir Thomas Browne
  • My favourite state of mind: Peaceful

There is also an article by Mathew Pritchard – Agatha Christie – a Legend for a Grandmother, which reveals that

She was an intensely private kind of person, who listened more than she talked, who saw more that she was seen, and whose perception, humour and enjoyment of living was in many ways the opposite of what you might expect from the nature of her stories. Her family was what she prized most – I think she regarded our summers together as a reward in part for the completion of another Christie for Christmas which had usually taken place by May or June each year and partly as relaxation from the strenuous archaeological tours she undertook with her husband Max Mallowan most springs during the 1950s. We all looked forward to them, I as a schoolboy more than most.

Amongst other memories he  wrote about her plays in the West End, and her house in Wallingford where he took school friends, who were all impressed by her modesty, friendliness and the interest she took in what they were doing. He revealed that her greatest passion apart from reading and writing was music (see her greatest happiness, above) and remembered her singing  and their visits to the opera, visiting Bayreuth together to see a production of Wagner’s Parsifal.

One strand of Agatha Christie’s work that I’m not familiar with is the books she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her daughter Rosalind Hicks explained how she had chosen the name – Mary was Agatha’s second name and Westmacott the name of some distant relatives. She managed to keep her identity as Mary Westmacott unknown for fifteen years. She wrote six books under this name:

  1. Giant’s Bread, published in 1930, a novel about Vernon Deyre and his obsession with music, in line with her love of the musical world. She had been trained as a singer and a concert pianist.
  2. Unfinished Portrait (1934), based on her own experiences and early life.
  3. Absent in the Spring (1944), which was for Agatha the most satisfying book she wrote, about a woman alone in the desert finally coming to recognise what she was really like.
  4. The Rose and the Yew Tree (1947), which Rosalind described as a favourite of both Agatha and herself.
  5. A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952) about the battle between a widowed woman and her grown-up daughter.
  6. The Burden (1956), the story of the weight of one person’s love on another.

Rosalind didn’t think it was fair to describe them as ‘romantic novels’, nor yet ‘love stories’, but books about ‘love in some of its most powerful and destructive forms.’ Definitely books I’m going to seek out.

See more celebratory birthday posts at the Agatha Christie Blog Challenge Celebration.

Portobello by Ruth Rendell: A Book Review

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Portobello is one of Ruth Rendell’s psychological studies of obsessional and eccentric characters, with a touch of insanity and crime mixed in. I can’t say I ‘enjoyed’ it as in parts it really irritated me, but I did wonder how it was going to end and so read on. The setting is good; the description of the Portobello Road in London brings the area to life, making it a character in its own right:

The street is very long, like a centipede snaking up from Pembridge Road in the south to Kensal Town in the north, its legs splaying out all the way and almost reaching the Great Western Street main line and the Grand Union Canal.

… The Portobello has a rich personality, vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy with graffiti that approach art, bizarre and splendid. an indefinable edge to it adds a spice of danger. There is nothing safe about the Portobello, nothing suburban. It is as far from an average shopping street as can be imagined. those who love and those who barely know it have called it the world’s finest street. (page 2)

The plot promised to be good, with Eugene Wren finding an envelope filled with money and sets in motion a chain of disastrous events. But it failed to live up to that promise. The money belonged to Joel, a very strange young man who after being attacked in the Portobello Road and losing the envelope, suffered a heart attack and a near-death experience in which he went through a tunnel and was then brought back.  Joel is accompanied by Mithras who came back with him through the tunnel. He descends rapidly into an unreal world shunning the light and doing nothing at all.

Eugene is a secretive man who owns a Fine Art Gallery and is engaged to Ella Cotswold, a doctor. Ella takes on Joel as a private patient even though it’s clear his problems are psychological rather than physical and even when she refers him to a psychotherapist he continues to consult her.

Eugene in an attempt to lose weight and give up smoking tries eating low-calorie sweets and becomes addicted to Chocorange, a sugar-free pastille containing just 4 calories. This is one of the parts of the book that irritated me – it is repeated ad nauseam  how he wants to give up, tries to and fails, how he hides packets everywhere.

A third set of characters are Lance Platt, a petty burglar (who told Eugene the money belonged to him) and his Uncle Gib. Lance Uncle Gib is a reformed burglar, now an Elder in the Church of the Children of Zebulon, who only puts up with Lance living in his house for the rent money. Uncle Gib is another unpleasant character:

… a tall, emaciated old man with his Voltairean face and his fluffy white hair singing hymns as he bounded along. Eccentricity is the norm in the Portobello Road. (page 134)

It’s descriptions like that, that kept me reading this book, for Rendell is expert in depicting sad and seedy individuals, the mentally ill, and obsessed and strangely addicted characters. I wasn’t impressed with the way she tied up all the loose ends; it seemed too sentimental and not in keeping with the rest of the book. Overall and having thought about since finishing it I think that the prose drags the book up beyond the two stars (meaning it was ok) I gave it on Goodreads, so if I could I’d upgrade that to two and half  – I nearly liked it! :)

I’d identified this as a book to read for Carl’s RIP IV Challenge but I’m not sure it fits, although there is some suspense in it and a touch of dark fantasy.

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Arrow (13 Aug 2009)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0099538636
ISBN-13: 978-0099538639
Source: I bought it (in a 3 for 2 in Waterstones)

Awakening by Sharon Bolton: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

I read Awakening  very quickly because once I started reading I didn’t want to stop.

If you don’t like snakes this book won’t help you get over your phobia! Clare Benning is a wildlife vet who’d rather be with animals than with people. She was facially disfigured in a traumatic childhood accident, which isn’t explained until nearly the end of the book. She has recently moved to a quiet country village in Dorset, where she is soon drawn into more contact with other people than she had bargained for, when a man dies following a supposed snake bite.

To make matters worse this snake is not a native British snake but a  highly poisonous snake from Australia, a taipan:

Taipans can be very aggressive snakes. They’re fast and strong. Each one of them has enough venom to kill a whole battalion of policemen. People die within hours of being bitten. (page 62, Location 998)

Then more, and more snakes surface and it gets really scary. There is an awful lot of information in Awakening about snakes and yet none of it is out of place, nor does it slow down this fast-paced novel – it adds to the tension. And it’s not just because of the snakes – there are some very strange people and unexplained events that scare Clare, but she is relentless in her search for the truth. I really liked Clare; Bolton has depicted her so well drawing out how her physical scarring has caused her emotional fragility and how she deals with it. The relationships between the characters is also believable and the setting is very dark and atmospheric.

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 595 KB
  • Print Length: 544 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0312381875
  • Publisher: Transworld Digital (23 April 2009)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B0031RS22C
  • Source: I bought it

Book Notes

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I’ve been reading more than writing recently and there are four books that I have yet to write about on this blog. One of my reasons for writing is to remember more details of what I’ve read and to crystallise my thoughts about the books. But as it has been some time now since I read these I’m just going to write short notes on two of them.

This book follows on from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart being the third book about the family of Okonkwo in Nigeria from the time of European colonisation up to the 1950s. No Longer at Ease is set in the 1950s. Obi Okonkwo has been educated in England and returns to Lagos where he works as a civil servant. He has a fiancée, Clara and a lot of expectations to live up to from his family and tribe who paid for him to study in England. He soon falls victim to the corruption in the city and upsets his family, who disapprove of Clara. This is the story of pressure from a changing world that Obi doesn’t understand and struggles to adjust to.  It’s a downward spiral and a sense of foreboding pervades the whole book.  I preferred Things Fall Apart which I’d read quite a while ago now.

This is the first in the Isabel Dalhousie series. I’ve read a few of the later ones before getting to this one, which does fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of Isabel’s background. It is really better to read these books in order.

Isabel is a philosopher and the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics and as you would expect from this the book is packed with Isabel’s thoughts on the events that take place. I really like the gentle pace of these books and reflecting on the points made. It actually begins dramatically with the death of a young man who falls from the upper circle of the Usher Hall where Isabel had been at a concert. She saw him fall and becomes convinced that he had been pushed.

I like the mix of Isabel’s reflections and her concern over her actions and their consequences. I like the characters – Grace, Isabel’s down to earth housekeeper, Cat her niece who seems to go from one unsuitable boyfriend to the next, and particularly Jamie, Cat’s ex-boyfriend. I noted a few questions raised by Isabel’s reflections – questions about the nature of lying, whether there are good lies and bad lies, the blurring of truth and falsehood, what moral obligations do we have to other people, forgiveness, and hypocrisy.  Isabel finds it

… intellectually exciting to become involved. She wanted to know why things happened. She wanted to know why people did the things they did. She was curious. And what she wondered was wrong with that? (page 78)

And that’s why I like this book and the other Isabel Dalhousie books so much.

The other books I’ve read and not yet written about are both by S J Bolton – Awakening  and Blood Harvest. They are both great books, which I’ll write about soon.

The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I loved The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths, which is just as well as I’d been looking forward to reading it after I’d enjoyed her first book The Crossing Places. Sometimes, a second book does not live up to the promise of the first, but in this case I think her second book is even better than the first. I just wish Elly Griffiths hadn’t written them in the present tense. I always have to overcome my dislike of it, until I become engrossed in the story and forget the tense.

From the Back Cover

Forensics expert Ruth Galloway is called in to investigate when builders, demolishing a large old house in Norwich, uncover the skeleton of a child – minus the skull – beneath a doorway. Is it some ritual sacrifice of just plain straightforward murder?

The house was once a children’s home. DCI Harry Nelson meets the Catholic priest who used to run it. He tells him that two children did go missing forty years before – a boy and a girl. They were never found.

When carbon dating proves that the child’s bones predate the children’s home, Ruth is drawn more deeply into the case. But as spring turns to summer it becomes clear that someone is trying very hard to put her off the scent by frightening her half to death…

My view

Once I’d become engrossed in this book I read it very quickly, eager to find out what happens next. It does follow on from The Crossing Places in that it features the main characters in that book and continues their story. Ruth is now pregnant, but she’s not sure she wants the father to know, although it’s obvious she’s pregnant and Harry has his suspicions about the identity of the father.

Two archaeological digs are in progress, one in Norwich where the body of a child is found under a doorway, which is where the book’s title comes from. Janus is the two-faced god of doors and openings and also of times of transition and change  as he could backwards and forwards at the same time. The Celts and sometimes the Romans used to bury bodies under walls and doors as offerings to Janus and the god Terminus.  The other is on a hillside outside Swaffham, where bones have also been found under a wall.

I like the mix of archaeology, mystery and crime fiction in Elly Griffiths’s books. This one has a double dose, with mythology and Catholicism running through the narrative as well as the police procedures.  Ruth is an interesting character, not your usual detective, she’s overweight, self-reliant but also feisty and tough. She has to be with everything that’s thrown at her and as her investigations lead her into great danger. Another interesting character, also found in The Crossing Places, is Michael Malone, also known as Cathbad, a lab assistant and sometime Druid:

When he is in his full Druid outfit, complete with flowing purple cloak, Cathbad can look impressive. Now, with his greying hair drawn back in a ponytail, white coat, jeans and trainers, he looks like any other ageing hippy who has finally found a nine-to-five job. Ruth is pleased to see him though. Despite everything, she is fond of Cathbad. (page 87)

Cathbad plays an important part in the tense ending to this book as Ruth is abducted, resulting in a dramatic if slow chase through the fog-bound Norfolk rivers:

It is like voyaging into the afterlife. they have left behind the solid world and entered into a dream state, moving silently between billowing white clouds. There is nothing to anchor them to their surroundings: no landmarks, no sounds, no earth or sky. There is only this slow progress through the endless whiteness, the sound of their own breathing and the lap of the water against the sides of the boat. (page 309)

It’s the suffocating, unearthly nature, the grey nothingness and the uncertainty that makes this so frightening and tense. I have Elly Griffiths’s next book, The House at Seas End, lined up to read very soon.

H is for Hardy

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Thomas Hardy 001 (2018_05_20 15_18_26 UTC)

Thomas Hardy is one of my favourite authors. He was born in 1840 at Upper Bockhampton near Dorchester. What I love most about Hardy’s books are his lyrical descriptions of nature and the countryside and all his books show his great love and knowledge of the countryside in all its aspects. They also show his almost pagan sense of fate and the struggle between man and an omnipotent and indifferent fate. Hardy was a pessimist – man’s fate is inevitable, affected by chance and coincidence. It cannot be changed, only accepted with dignity. This is illustrated in his poem – Hap, written in 1866:

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: ‘œThou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!’

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,      

Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;

Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I

Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

‘”Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan’¦.

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain

The first book by Thomas Hardy that I read was The Trumpet Major – I think it was in the second year at secondary school. I remember very little about it, except that it was set during the Napoleonic Wars and I wasn’t too impressed. Then I read The Mayor of Casterbridge for A level GCE and thought it was wonderful.

Hardy Casterbridge

I still have my copy, with passages underlined and notes at the tops of pages – all in pencil.It’s full title is The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character. It tells the tragic tale of Michael Henchard, a man of violent passions, proud, impulsive with a great need for love. It opens dramatically as he sells his wife and child to a sailor at a fair. By his own hard work over the years he eventually became the rich and respected Mayor of Casterbridge. But then the re-appearance of his wife and her daughter sets off a train of events finally bringing Henchard to ruin and degradation.

Because I enjoyed The Mayor over the years I’ve read more of Hardy’s books, including Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, both dramatic tragedies. In Jude Hardy attacked the Church and the marriage state, which received a mixed reception at the time – the Bishop of Wakefield burned his copy of the book and W H Smith withdrew it from their circulating library, but the public bought 20,000 copies, whether or not due to the scandal it aroused.  These books were considered masterpieces by some and scandalous by others.

Of the two I prefer Jude to Tess and having re-read them both more recently I still feel the same, but now I’m less impatient with the way Hardy presents Tess as a helpless victim than I had been before.  She is an innocent, raped by Angel Clare, the man she loves and Hardy highlights the hypocrisy of the times in condemning the ‘fallen woman’.

In Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man Claire Tomalin writes not only about his life but also how he became a writer, poet and novelist. I began reading this book a few years ago and every now and then think I really must finish it. I stopped, as usual, overtaken by the desire to read other books- including more by Hardy himself.

The Thomas Hardy Society is an excellent source of information on the man and his works.

This is an ABC Wednesday post for the letter H.