Category: Books

Red Queen-itis

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

I feel I’m suffering from Red Queen-itis: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” (Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll).

It’s all my own fault, I know, but I’m struggling to read all the blogs I like to visit, read all the books I want to read and write about them, enter all my books into LibraryThing (still not finished) and do all the other things I want to do. When I was working full-time I thought that when I left work I ‘d have lots of time for everything, but it just isn’t like that at all. I can’t think why but I popped into my local library this morning and borrowed two more books. I’d only intended to return some, but at least I returned four and came away with only two.

I’ve spent most of this afternoon just trying to catch up with reading blogs and I’ve so many books I want to read and posts to write and I still haven’t written about Astrid and Veronika. That will have to wait until another day, now.

I didn’t really believe other people when they said that after they left work they didn’t know where the time went or how they ever had time to go to work. I do now!

Chipping Norton Bookshop and The Uncommon Reader

Published on by Margaret5 Comments


Whilst we were in the Cotswolds last week we drove through Chipping Norton and decided to stop for a coffee. There is a small parking area on Middle Row, just off the main road through the town and there was just one space available. When we got out of the car, we saw behind us some tables and chairs outside a bookshop and thought great that’s just what we wanted – a bookshop and a cafe too!

This is Jaffe & Neale, a bright, welcoming bookshop with a good variety of books on offer. There wasn’t much space left inside to sit and have a drink, but in the car park there was just one table left. It was our day for sure! We had coffee and I was very tempted by the cakes, but resisted.

It was just too much to expect me to resist buying a book and I had a wander round the shelves. They had some books that have been signed by the authors and I was really pleased to find a pile of books signed by Alan Bennett. I had seen on the BBC website a while ago that Alan Bennett had been reading his new book The Uncommon Reader on Radio 4, but I hadn’t managed to listen. So I was delighted to find it here.

It’s a lovely little hardback book and it only took me a couple of hours to read it. It tells the story of Her Majesty, not named, but she has dogs, takes her summer holiday at Balmoral and is married to a duke. She comes across the travelling library, thanks to the dogs, parked next to the bins outside one of the kitchen doors at the palace and ends up borrowing a book to save the driver/librarian’s embarrassment. There are some wonderfully amusing touches, such as the Queen asking:

‘Is one allowed to borrow a book? One doesn’t have a ticket?’ No problem’, said Mr Hutchings.
‘One is a pensioner’, said the Queen, not that she was sure that made any difference. ‘Ma’am can borrow up to six books’. ‘Six? Heavens!’

Helped by Norman, who works in the kitchen, she borrows books regularly and this changes her life. This little book is full of interesting ideas about books and the nature of reading and society. As the Queen expands her range she realises that ‘Books did not care who was reading them, or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth: letters a republic.’

I love the way Bennett describes how the Queen becomes a bookaholic (my word, not his) and wants to discuss her books and what she is reading. The French President had mentioned Proust to her, when she had asked him what he thought about Jean Genet, which led to her taking Proust’s novel, all thirteen volumes of it, and George Painter’s biography of Proust, as her holiday reading at Balmoral. What an image!

This book is only 124 pages, but what a lot is packed into those pages, not a word is wasted. It’s amusing and thought provoking as well. I wondered where it was leading and how Bennett was going to end the story, but all I’ll say is that the Queen realises that books have enriched her life ‘in a way that one could never have expected.’ Her next venture follows inevitably. Do read this book. I wonder if the Queen has.

Books read in September

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

1. Letters to Malcolm by C S Lewis
2. Speaking of Love by Angela Young
3. Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
4. Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott
5. Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olsson
6. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
7. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
8. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat from Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe

I finished reading a good mixture of books in September. First in the month was Letters to Malcolm by C S Lewis, which was our book group meeting’s choice. For this group we usually read religious non-fiction, both older and more recent books. Letters to Malcolm was published in 1963, not long before Lewis’s death. It takes the form of letters on prayer written to an fictitious correspondent called Malcolm in a similar vein to The Screwtape Letters, but nowhere nearly as amusing or as confrontational. He has some interesting comments on different aspects of prayer: petitionary prayer, prayers of praise, corporate prayer, and whether it is right to pray for the dead.

There are some questions he poses that he doesn’t answer directly, which made me ponder further. Such an example is how can we account for the embarrassing promises made in the Bible that what we pray for with faith we shall receive. I’ve always found this statement puzzling. So did Lewis:’Every war, every famine or plague, almost every death-bed, is the monument to a petition that was not granted.‘ The difficulty is not why prayer isn’t answered, but why it is promised and Lewis can only offer guesses. He asks, as I do too: ‘Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?‘

I’ve already written about Speaking of Love (see here), Crow Lake (here), Ghostwalk (here) and Ivanhoe (here) all of which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories are very short and I’ve discovered that I don’t really like such short stories. These are most grizzly and so horrific that they turn my stomach, particularly The Black Cat, in which the narrator kills his wife with an axe and then bricks her up in the cellar. When the police arrive and search the premises they hear the cat howling and wailing and lo and behold when the wall is opened there is the corpse, ‘greatly decayed and clotted with gore‘ and standing on its head is the cat ‘with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire.‘

I had built up in my mind this picture of Poe’s tales as being really spooky and scary, but reading them proved to be disappointing. The Fall of the House of Usher is a bit better, but it still didn’t live up to my expectations. It’s a story of the decay of a family into madness and this time the lady of the House of Usher is buried alive.

I’ve written about The Murders in the Rue Morgue here. This story too has gory details and is interesting as the forerunner of the modern detective story. I’m not sure I’m going to read all of Poe’s tales, but I am going to see if reading The Pit and The Pendulum is as terrifying as watching Vincent Price in the movie.

Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olsson is a beautiful book and Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader is a little masterpiece. I’ll write about both of these in another post, as this is enough for now.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

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I was surprised to find that Ivanhoe was easier to read than I had imagined, although Scott does use some archaic language and there were a few words that I had to look up. It took me some time to read as it’s nearly 500 pages of quite a small font in my copy, but I’m glad I’ve read it. It’s a mixture of romance and historical fiction, although I can’t vouch for its historical accuracy and Scott admits that ‘it is extremely probable that I may have confused the manner of two or three centuries, and introduced, during the reign of Richard the First, circumstances appropriated to a period either considerably earlier or a good deal later than that era’.

Set in England in the 12th century, ruled by the Normans it is the story of the continuing conflict, approximately a century after the Battle of Hastings, between the Normans, and the Saxons. There are many characters, including Saxon nobles and peasants; Norman knights and Knights Templar; Jews; and outlaws – Robin Hood and his merry men. Ivanhoe is the son of a Saxon noble, Cedric who has plans to marry his ward, the Lady Rowena to Athelstane, a descendant of the last Saxon monarchs, in an attempt to regain the throne. However, Ivanhoe and Rowena are in love and so his father has banished him.

As the story begins Ivanhoe has returned from the Crusades, in disguise, to his home hoping somehow to win Rowena as his bride and he challenges the Knight Templar, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert at a tournament held by Prince John. As a result he is severely wounded and cared for by the Rebecca, the beautiful daughter of the Jew, Isaac. With the reported escape of King Richard the Lionheart from imprisonment by the Duke of Austria, Prince John fears that the unidentified Black Knight who is victorious at the tournament is his brother returned from the Crusades.

A series of events then rapidly follows including the capture of Rowena, Cedric, Athelstane, Rebecca, Isaac and Ivanhoe by the supporters of Prince John. They are held in the ancient castle of Torquilstone, now belonging to the Norman, Reginald Front-de-Boeuf. The Black Knight is of course Richard and he enlists the help of the outlaws Locksley (also known as Robin Hood), Friar Tuck and Alan-a Dale to rescue them.

Scott gives a blow-by-blow account of the siege of the castle and rescue of the captives. I normally gloss over battle scenes as I find descriptions confusing and I admit boring, but Scott won me over completely. Rebecca gives such a vivid description of the battle to Ivanhoe, as he lies wounded on his sick bed, that it seemed as though I was there seeing it for myself. Rebecca of course falls in love with Ivanhoe, who at first seems to be enchanted by her, until she reveals that she is a Jewess.

The racial tension between the Christians, the Jews and the Muslims is one of the themes running through the novel, and is paralleled by the tension between the Normans and the Saxon ‘porkers’. Rebecca’s position as one of the despised Jews is contrasted with Rowena’s, with her proud disdain of the Normans. However, lust overcomes prejudice as Bois-Guilbert is infatuated with Rebecca and attempts to seduce her.

The story has many twists and turns. Athelstane is declared dead and then later is found to be alive; Ulrica, the dispossessed Saxon heiress of the castle of Torquilstone dramatically takes revenge on Front-de-Boeuf; and Rebecca is accused of practising witchcraft on Bois-Guilbert. She is condemned to death but pleads for a champion to fight her cause against Bois- Guilbert. Ivanhoe still suffering from his wounds races to the combat and declares himself as Rebecca’™s champion. He is victorious but spares Bois- Guilbert’s life.

Ivanhoe almost takes backstage being injured and out of action for most of the novel, with the spotlight mainly on the heroic actions of Richard and also on the story of Rebecca. I think Rebecca is actually the star of the book and the scenes of her conflict with Bois-Guilbert reflect the misogyny and racial oppression of the times.

R.I.P.Challenge II The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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The Murders in the Rue Morgue from Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I’m finding these short stories interesting, if not spine chilling, although some of the descriptions (as in this story) turn my stomach.

 

This short story is the forerunner of the detective story, in which an amateur discovers who committed the crime through using his superior skill and logic when the police are baffled.

The key to this story is analysis. It opens with an account of analysis using the games of draughts, chess and whist as comparison. Poe writes:

As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.

Monsieur C Auguste Dupin is the amateur, the analyst, who discovers the identity of the murderer of an old lady and her daughter. About 3 o’clock in the morning the neighbours in the Rue Morgue, Paris are awakened by a succession of terrific shrieks. The daughter is found on the fourth floor of the house behind a locked door (locked on the inside). The room is in the ‘wildest disorder’, there is a razor smeared with blood and tresses of long, grey, bloody hair, apparently pulled out by the roots. There was no sign of a body, but one was eventually found in the chimney:

and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downward, was dragged therefrom: it having been thus forced up the narrow aperture for a considerable distance.

The body of the mother is found in the yard at the rear of the building ‘with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off.’

Both bodies showed signs of brutal mutilation, vividly described by Poe. There are several people who gave evidence all differing about the nationality of the voices that they heard coming from the building. There is seemingly no way that the murderer could have either entered or left the room, or indeed the building. Dupin with his superior analytical skill manages to uncover the fantastical sequence of events that resulted in the murders and establishes the identity of the killer.

Poe’s style is detailed and to match the character of Dupin is detached and dispassionate. Apart from the horrific details of the state of the bodies there is nothing macabre in this tale. I could guess the identity of the murderer, but I think that’s because I’ve seen films and read books with a similar storyline – lifted from Poe, I now suspect. Dupin is not a particular likeable detective, but he uses his little grey cells in a manner much like Agatha Christie’s Poirot and, of course, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Lewis Carroll … Again

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Whilst in Stratford last week I browsed the bookshops, one of my favourite pastimes, and couldn’t resist buying The Complete Stories and Poems of Lewis Carroll. I have my old and well-worn copy of Through The Looking Glass but I don’t have the copy of Alice in Wonderland that I read as a child. So I was delighted to see this book with the Tenniel illustrations and other stories and poems by Carroll that I haven’t read before.

Included in the book are Sylvie and Bruno, The Hunting of the Snark, as well as early verses and college rhymes, and acrostic and other poems.

The Tenniel woodcut illustrations are brilliant. Here is the Mad Hatter, singing:

“Twinkle, Twinkle little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.”
Tenniel sounds like a stickler for perfection and the first edition of Alice had to be re-printed because he was not satisfied with the printing of his pictures. Most of the copies of the original edition were recalled but some survived and are now worth a fortune.

When Through the Looking Glass was being produced Tenniel sent Carroll his drawing of the Jabberwock for the frontispiece. Carroll was concerned that children would be frightened by the monster and sent copies of the drawing to thirty mothers asking their opinion. They agreed that it was too frightening and so the drawing of the White Knight was used at the front of the book and the Jabberwock was relegated to the text. I like the White Knight, but actually when I was a child I was fascinated by the Jabberwock and didn’t find the drawing the slightest bit frightening.

Looking at it now it does look terrifying and I can understand how a parent would find it alarming – strange how one’s perception changes.

My love of words probably stems from Through The Looking Glass. I remember learning and reciting the Jabberwocky as I enjoyed the sounds, without understanding exactly what it means:

“‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jujub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch.”

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'”

Brilliant!