Category: Fiction

Sunday Salon – Sunday Selection

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Recently the weekend is the time when I’ve just finished a book and am deciding what to read next. This weekend is no exception. Yesterday I finished Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, a book I first read as a young teenager. This is a dramatic romantic tragedy, first written in 1917. It tells the story of Hazel Woodus and her marriage to Edward Marston, the gentle, local church minister. Hazel is an innocent, a child of nature, wild and shy and a protector of all wounded and persecuted things. She becomes the prey of John Reddin, the squire of Undern who is obsessed by her. I’ll write more about it in a later post.

Because I enjoyed Gone to Earth so much it’s hard to find a suitable book to read next.  I have started All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine, which is the choice for my local book club. But so far I’m not sure if I want to finish it. It’s about Colin and his mother, who could complain for Britain. He has a twin sister who is estranged from her mother, making up a unhappy family who don’t get on. It’s about old age and the problems of carers and  up to now I’m not finding it at all uplifting. It paints a sad picture of the frustrations of old age and the problems of everyday life. I’ll give it a few more pages before deciding whether to finish it or not.

Other than that book, I have several library books I could read next.

  • The Beacon by Susan Hill – a short book (154 pages), examining truth, mental health and memory. Maybe that’s not right for me today as it sounds like another family with problems.
  • Missing Link by Joyce Holms – a new author for me, this book is a murder mystery a case for the detective duo Fizz and Buchanan. This one looks promising.
  • The Missing by Andrew O’Hagan – about people who disappear from society, a merging of social history and memoir. Described on the back cover as ‘elegantly written, affecting and intelligent.’

I’ll also look at some of my own books, to reduce the growing pile of to-be-read books. I started A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book a while ago. I think I’ll start that one again, or maybe look at Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, or a shorter book such as The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch.

Although writing posts like this does help a bit to clarify my thoughts, sometimes I just can’t decide what to read next and today is one of those days.

Teaser Tuesday – Solar by Ian McEwan

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

I started to read Solar by Ian McEwan on Saturday. I’ve borrowed it from the library and on Saturday I discovered I couldn’t renew it because someone had reserved it. It’s due back tomorrow and I really wanted to read it.  So I stopped reading Gone to Earth and Agatha Christie’s Autobiography (my current books) to concentrate solely on Solar.

I think it’s a strange juxtaposition of the story of a scientist, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winning physicist whose fifth marriage has failed, set against a scientific background. I love it when McEwan writes sentences such as this on page 8:

Then her absence hung in the summer dusk like garden bonfire smoke, an erotic charge of invisible particulates that caused him to remain in position for many pointless minutes. He was not actually mad, he kept telling himself, but he thought he was getting a taste, a bitter sip.

And I also am full of admiration for his detailed description of Beard sitting opposite a stranger in a train, both eating salt and vinegar crisps from the same packet:

Inevitably the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once. (page 123)

But he loses me somewhat with sentences like this:

Without the ‘entexting’ tools the scientists used – the single-photon luminometer, the flow cytometer, immunofluorescence, and so on – the gene could not be said to exist. (page 131)

As I haven’t finished this book yet it’s too soon to decide what I think of it, but so far I’m liking it, despite those words I have only a vague idea about their meanings. Parts of it actually made me laugh out loud, at the morbid humour, but I wonder if it could have done without the science and stood just as well as a story about an ageing, womanising, narcissistic, overweight and food-obsessed man.

Weekly Geeks – The books you’ve waited too long to read

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This weekend, Weekly Geeks host EH asks about books we have waited too long to read.

Is there a book that has been hanging around your reading pile for far too long before you got to it. A book that probably got packed away until you accidentally got to it or a book that you read a few pages in and never got back to.

There are quite a few books over the last few years that I have started to read and not finished. I don’t mean the ones that I don’t intend to finish. Rather these are books I would like to read all the way through but have not so far got round to it. They are mainly non-fiction and the reason I’ve not finished them is usually that they take more time to read than fiction and so I slot other books in between reading sessions and sometimes just don’t get back to the non-fiction.

These are some of them – all books I do intend to finish:

  1. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin – I stopped reading this partway in as I decided I needed to read more of Hardy’s own books before going further. I’ve read a few more of his books, but have never got back to this biography.
  2. A Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela – I must have read about half of this book before I stopped. It was so long ago that I can’t remember why I didn’t finish it.
  3. A Dead Language by Peter Rushforth – this one is fiction. I loved Pinkerton’s Sister by Rushforth. I found A Dead Language hard-going, but I will get back to it one day. The downside is that I’ll have to start it again as I’ve forgotten who all the characters are.
  4. 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro – I can’t remember any specific reason I haven’t finished this book.
  5. Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing by Hermione Lee. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each essay that I’ve read so far. As the essays are self-contained there is no problem in reading it in instalments.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

In Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery, published in 1964  Miss Marple is on holiday, arranged for her by her nephew Raymond West after her doctor had prescribed sunshine. Whilst staying at the Golden Palm Hotel on the fictitious island of  St Honoré, she is listening to Major Palgrave droning on about his life, reliving days when he’d been happy. He was about to show her a photo of a murderer when he stares over her shoulder and sees someone, stops his story and hastily returns the photo to his wallet. Then hours later he is found dead. Miss Marple suspects he didn’t just die in his sleep and investigates his death, involving old Mr Rafiel, a man who looked on the point of death himself, and who delighted in contradicting anything anyone else said.

She also wants to find out about the murderer the Major had mentioned. The question she needs answered was who was it the Major saw that disturbed him so much. Once again it is her knowledge of human nature, gleaned from living in peaceful St Mary Mead that leads her to uncover the truth. She considers the other guests at the hotel in turn, and not sure whether the murderer was a man or a woman everyone is a suspect, from the elderly Canon Prescott and his sister, a thin severe-looking woman to the hotel owners, a young couple, Molly and Tim Kendal. There are plenty of misleading false trails and hidden relationships to discover before the murderer is revealed.

This is not my favourite Agatha Christie but it’s still an entertaining book, which I enjoyed. I didn’t guess who the murderer was until quite near the end, but that is not a bad point. I liked the descriptions of the island and Miss Marple’s thoughts and observations on human nature. At the beginning Raymond mistakenly thinks his Aunt Jane has her head buried in the sand, living in an idyllic rural life when it is real life that matters. Jane silently disagrees:

People like Raymond were so ignorant. In the course of her duties in a country parish, Jane Marple had acquired quite a comprehensive knowledge of the facts of rural life. She had no urge to talk about them, far less to write about them – but she knew them. Plenty of sex, natural and unnatural. Rape, incest, perversion of all kinds. (Some kinds, indeed, that even the clever young men from Oxford who wrote books didn’t seem to have heard about. (page 9)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I wasn’t sure that I’d like Salmon Fishing in the Yemen as its title put me off. In fact I only read it because it was my face-to-face Book Club choice. It sounded far too quirky and I’ve never had much interest in going fishing – but I did like it. I even liked all the details about salmon and the conditions necessary for them to thrive. Of course, the conditions in the Yemen are completely wrong and that is the conundrum that Dr Alfred Jones has to solve when Sheikh Muhammad wants scientific advice on how best to introduce salmon fishing into the Yemen. The sheikh has an estate in Scotland where he pursues his great love of fly fishing.

I didn’t get on at first with the format of the book. The story unfolds through a series of diary entries, letters, emails, extracts from Hansard and reports, but after a few entries I found myself enjoying it and being entertained by the satire of bureaucracy and politics. The project is completely barmy, but once I thought of it as nonsensical tale I began to enjoy the book for what it is.

Dr Jones is dead against the idea at the start but is forced into considering it by his bosses and eventually by the prime minister who sees it as the ideal photo opportunity – one of him not only fishing in a wadi, but catching the first salmon in the Yemen. Alfred is not a happy man at home either. He and his wife Mary have been married for over 20 years. Their relationship is distant at the beginning and becomes increasingly estranged the more he gets involved in the project. They both come across as dull, boring and pompous.

His life begins to change when he meets Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, who works for the Land Agents acting for the Sheikh. Harriet is the opposite of Mary, young and attractive and Alfred noticed immediately that she dressed

… as if she was about to go out to lunch at a smart restaurant rather than for a hard day’s work in the office. Mary always says it is demeaning for working women to dress themselves up like that. She herself is a strong believer in sensible, practical working clothes which do not accentuate the wearer’s femininity. (pages 21 -2)

Indeed, as Alfred begins to warm to the project under the sheikh’s influence his life is changed completely. He becomes more human, and not so totally absorbed in his small world as a fisheries scientist where his main preoccupation was with the cadis fly larva. It is through his diaries that we see his world opening up and he moves from being an atheist to someone who believes in belief. He also begins to fall for Harriet, whose fiancé is a soldier missing somewhere in Iraq.

There is also much in this book contrasting the secular western world with the faith-based societies of the Middle East. The sheikh contrasts the UK class system with the tribal system prevalent in the Yemen. He considers that there is a lot of snobbery in the UK  and people don’t seem to know what class they belong to with the result that the country is ridden with class prejudices, whereas in the Yemen there are many different ranks that are accepted without question – each person knows their own place and there is no fear of ridicule or restraint (paraphrased from pages 52-3).

However, he knows that the Yemeni are sometimes violent and quick to pick up a gun to finish an argument and this is one reason he wishes to introduce them to fly fishing. He has noticed that fishermen have patience and tolerance and fishing would change his countrymen’s nature.

This a light comic novel, much of it complete but enjoyable nonsense. Some of it such Prime Minister’s Question time and the interviews didn’t seem credible. Parts of it made me laugh – the ridiculous way politics and companies conduct their business for example. As it draws to it’s inevitable dramatic conclusion I was actually hoping the project would be successful and that salmon would run up the waters of the Wadi Aleyn in the heart of the mountains of Heraz.

Teaser Tuesdays – Gone To Earth

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

I’m currently reading Gone To Earth by Mary Webb. It’s an old book, originally published in 1917. My copy, a sturdy hardback, belonged to my mother and was published in 1935 and has an introduction by John Buchan (who was Lord Tweedsmuir, politician and author – his most famous book being The Thirty Nine Steps, a spy thriller). His introduction is masterly. He describes what he likes about the book, sets the scene, and discusses Mary Webb’s style of writing:

The style as in all Mary Webb’s books, is impregnated with poetry, rising sometimes to the tenuous delicacy of music, but never sinking to ‘poetic prose’. There are moments when it seems to me superheated, when her passion for metaphor makes the writing too high-pitched and strained. But no one of our day has a greater power of evoking natural magic. (page 9)

And here is a passage from the opening chapter of the book:

Between the larch boles and under the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb, a brilliance of tint, that few women could have worn without self-conciousness. Clear-eyed, lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight – a year-old fox, round headed and velvet-footed. Then it slid into the shadows. (page 11)

Gone To Earth is still in print, in a paperback edition published by Virago Press Ltd in 1992, with a longer introduction by Erika Duncan, including biographical details of Mary Webb’s tragic life.