Category: Fiction

The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

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The Very Thought of You is a book that starts off so well, but didn’t quite live up to its early promise for me. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, because I did, but it’s told from so many different viewpoints that my attention wandered at times. Then I found it getting repetitive because so many of the characters were experiencing sad love, lost love, yearning for love, love never known and separation from the people they loved.

Eight year old Anna  is evacuated from London to Yorkshire at the start of the Second World War, leaving behind her mother. Along with other evacuees she goes to live at Ashton Park, the home of Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, who have set up a school in Thomas’s ancestral home. The Ashtons are a childless couple, in an unhappy marriage and Anna gets caught up in their relationship as it breaks down.

There is too much description, too many insights into what the characters are thinking and feeling, but very little dialogue. It all began to feel remote and distant. At one point the children are having a poetry lesson and Thomas reads them a poem by e e cummings, a love poem and Anna sums up the book so well when she says it is a sad poem

because it was about sad love. … it was all distant, as if they could never be together … it sounds as if he thinks he’ll never reach her’ (page 209)

The final section of the book is about the rest of Anna’s life and the effect that the evacuation had upon her. She still yearns for what was gone and reflects on her love for Thomas. She feels detached and ponders whether life was

one long story of separation, just as Wordsworth had said.  From people, from places, from the past you could never quite reach even as you lived it’ (page 300).

A sad and somewhat haunting book. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction for me it can’t stand up against Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – Final Thoughts

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

I began reading Wolf Hall last year and at first I found it hard to get interested in it. For one thing it’s written in the present tense and that usually jars with me and then it’s so physically big and heavy. So I put it to one side whilst we moved house, only going back to it recently.

I’ve referred to the book in a few posts including one on a small extract containing the word waffeting and one on my thoughts as I was reading it. Now I’ve finished it I can reflect on it as a whole. Overall, despite being written in the present tense and despite the over-frequent and confusing use of the pronoun ‘he’, I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, if not the best one. It is satisfying in depth and breadth, with a host of characters and detail.

It is, of course the story of Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith, and his political rise, set against the background of Henry VIII’s England and his struggle with the Pope over his desire to marry Anne Boleyn. It’s a brutal time. What I found most enjoyable was the way this book transported me back to that time, with Mantel’s descriptions of the pageantry, the people, the places and the beliefs and attitudes of the protagonists. My knowledge of the period has been built up over time, from history lessons at school, films, books and TV series and it all seemed secondhand. In this book you are there in the thick of it all. Here, Thomas More is not the saint I thought he was from watching ‘A Man for All Seasons’, Anne Boleyn is a coy, flat-chested, manipulator and schemer and Thomas Cromwell is not the hard hearted, cold and stern character I’d read about before, but is humane, kind and considerate, taking care of his family whilst weaving his way through the intricacies of court life. He is hardworking, generous and cultured. But he is tough and ruthless too. Here Chapuys, the French ambassador is talking to Cromwell after Anne’s coronation:

‘Well, you have succeeded where the cardinal failed, Henry has what he wants at last. I say to my master, who is capable of looking at these things impartially, it’s a pity from Henry’s point of view that he did not take up Cromwell years ago. His affairs would have gone on much better. … When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter – oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same.’ He pours himself some of the duke’s present. ‘But in the last resort, you just kick it in.’ (page 465)

The descriptions of Cromwell’s house, Austin Friars, and his family brings it all to life, the reality of the daily lives of ordinary people as well as of the court. I wondered about Austin Friars, whether it still exists and found an article by Mantel in the Timesonline where she writes:

Very near the Bank of England, at the foot of the glass cliff of Tower 42, there is a secret city garden that now belongs to Draper’s Hall. A plaque on the wall says: ‘On this site, once part of the Augustinian Priory, Thomas Cromwell built his palace and in 1536 plotted the downfall of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII.

“Palace’ is perhaps an inflation. The building at Austin Friars was an opulent merchant’s house, which from 1530 accreted new wings, storerooms, strongrooms, and tighter and tighter security. It was a powerhouse of Tudor politics, and over a decade, its master became one of the richest and most powerful men in England: councillor and secretary to the king, Master of the Rolls, Lord Privy Seal and eventually Earl of Essex. Austin Friars was not a quiet spot. Twice a day, 200 of London’s poor swarmed to the gate to be fed by the great man’s kitchen.

I’m still a bit puzzled about the title – why Wolf Hall, when Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymour family hardly figures at all in the book. It could be that it is symbolic of the times, when ‘man is wolf to man’ (page 572).  The Seymour family is a seemingly of little significance, sneered at by Anne as ‘those sinners at Wolf Hall.’  But there are tantalising glimpses of Jane Seymour at the court, ‘ a little pale girl … the sickly milk-faced creeper’ who Anne calls ‘Milksop‘ and thinks no one will ever want, let alone Henry! The future is signalled as the book ends, with Cromwell’s intention to visit Wolf Hall.

As well as being shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, Wolf Hall is also shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

I hope it’s not too long before her second book on Cromwell is published, taking his story up to his execution in 1540 .

The Breaking Point: Short Stories by Daphne Du Maurier

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

The Breaking Point, first published in 1959, is my first book for the Daphne du Maurier Challenge. It’s a collection of eight short stories written after The Scapegoat and before The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte. Sally Beauman sums up the stories well in her introduction:

The stories here reflect the concerns of those adjacent books: they are dark, difficult, perturbing – and sometimes shocking. Du Maurier grouped them together under the title The Breaking Point – and they were written during a period when she herself came close to a severe nervous breakdown. They reflect and echo that psychological stress; it runs through them like a fault line. Here, we are a stylistic world away from the smooth technical assurance of her bestselling novels of the 1930s and 1940s: these stories are jagged and unstable; they constantly threaten and alarm; they tip towards the unpredictability of fairy tale, then abruptly veer towards nightmare. They are elliptic, awkward – and they are fascinating. (page ix)

I don’t really need to add much more, other than to indicate the stories themselves.

  1. The Alibi – about a man wanting to escape his ordinary life who takes on a new identity. He lives a double life, which ends as he becomes involved in two deaths.
  2. The Blue Lenses – a truly strange tale of a woman undergoing an eye operation who then sees everyone around her having an animal’s head appropriate to their character. She discovers that she is a victim, subject to betrayal and exploitation, fooled by those close to her.
  3. Ganymede – set in Venice, where a man on holiday is seduced by the beauty of a boy who is killed in a water-skiing accident. He returns home but inevitably he cannot escape his own nature.
  4. The Pool – a supernatural story with a mystical quality about a young girl reaching puberty and her overwhelming sadness at the loss of the hidden secret world she inhabited.
  5. The Archduchess – has a fairy tale atmosphere, about an imaginary principality in southern Europe, where the Archduke’s benign reign is overthrown by the insidious influence of two greedy and jealous men.
  6. The Menace – a silent movie star, a heart-throb until the advent of the ‘feelies’ when it is discovered that his magnetism is almost non-existant. Despite the efforts to raise it by the usual means,such as pretty girls, nothing can be done, until he meets an old friend. This one is much more optimistic than the other stories.
  7. The Chamois – about a married couple hunting for chamois in the Pindus; a chilling story of fear and fanaticism.
  8. The Lordly Ones – about a boy who cannot speak and is thought to be backward. Terrorised by his parents and unable to communicate he finds refuge for a while with the ‘lordly ones’.

The stories tell of double lives, split personalities, paranoia and conflict, each one with a ‘breaking point’. My favourite is The Pool.

Library Loot

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I hadn’t intended to borrow any more library books for a while, at least until I’ve read at least half of the ones I’ve got out at present. But on Thursday I was watering the hanging basket at the front door and glancing down the road saw a mobile library van. We moved here in December and this was the first time I’d seen it. Needless to say I went across the road to have a look and came away with four books. It comes here every three weeks! So now I have three libraries locally that I can use – I’m spoilt for choice.

One of the books I borrowed is a great source of writers: Myers’ Literary Guide The North East. This includes not just writers born in the North East, which includes the counties of Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, Durham, and Cleveland, but also writers with important links to the area. These include such people as Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Auden and Larkin. This area of Britain boasts the first known writer of English prose – Bede (673 – 735) who was also known as ‘The Father of English History’ – and the first Christian English poet, Caedmon (fl. 670 – 680), a servant at the monastery in Whitby. The only drawback is that it concentrates on historical rather than modern writers.

I also borrowed:

  • Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House by M C Beaton. This was quite opportune because I’d read an article about Agatha in newbooks Crime Fiction Supplement the other day. The victim of the haunting is an old lady nobody likes. Then she is murdered. This looks as if it sits in the Cozy Mystery genre.
  • Indiscretion by Jude Morgan, who was also mentioned in the Supplement, so maybe that’s why one of his books stood out for me. This one is historical fiction set in Regency England.
  • The Cruellest Month: an Inspector Gamache Crime Novel by Louise Perry. I keep seeing her books mentioned on book blogs but haven’t read any of them yet. This is a Canadian whodunit about a seance in an old abandoned house that has gone wrong. Another Cozy Mystery?

Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Passenger to Frankfurt 001

Passenger to Frankfurt is unlike any other Agatha Christie book I’ve read. It was first published in 1970, the year she was 80, as her “eightieth” title, although she had written more than that.

It rambles on a lot, has many characters, and at times I wondered what it was all about. I decided that it was best not to think of it as an Agatha Christie crime novel, but rather as a collection of her thoughts about life and the society she had lived through, with a bit of intrigue thrown into the mix.

It begins well, with Sir Stafford Nye, a diplomat on his way back to London, sitting in an airport lounge in Frankfurt. He was thinking that “life and journeys by air were really excessively boring” when he met a dark haired woman whose life was in danger and his own life changed for ever. The woman wanted his passport to get her safely to London, disguised by his dark purply-blue cloak with its scarlet lining and hood.  He agreed.

So far, so good. From then on Sir Stafford is dragged along, somewhat unwillingly at first into a world of espionage, and world-wide organisations dedicated to anarchy and violence, all mixed with strains from Wagner – with the Young Siegfried – and Nazism. It’s a bleak picture of the world with money and the power of money perverting young people world wide, following blindly like the children beguiled by the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

I never really got the impression that many of the characters were real, apart from Sir Stafford his Great-Aunt Matilda and the young lady known as either Daphne Theodofanous, or Mary Ann or Countess Zenata Zerkowski. Great-Aunt Matilda is a very verbose lady who tells him that things are in a very bad mess  and “once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.” Cynically she also comments that politicians are not to be trusted:

And one can’t help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies in a good cause. (page 80)

Sir Stafford doesn’t really know who he can trust, or who is playing a double game. It’s his sense of humour that is in the way of his career that makes him useful in discovering what is going on – he’s not a hero-worshipper and can see through humbug. The power some people wield through their personality is vital in enthusing people with their vision but it’s also dangerous:

It’s the magnetic power that a few men have of starting something, of producing and creating a vision. By their personal magnetism perhaps, a tone of voice, perhaps some emanation that comes forth straight from the flesh. …

Such people have power. The great religious teachers had this power, and so has an evil spirit power also. (pages 106 -7)

I find myself rambling as I think and write about this book. It does get rather repetitive with it’s pessimistic emphasis on a

growing organisation of youth everywhere against their mode of government; against their parental customs, against very often the religions in which they have been brought up. There is the insidious cult of permissiveness, there is the increasing cult of violence. Violence not as a means of gaining money but violence for the love of violence. (page 113)

It certainly is not representative of Agatha Christie’s books and not one I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t read any of her books. Although there is a degree of pessimism and cynicism running through it there is also a strain of humour, a sense that you shouldn’t take it all too seriously and I did enjoy it. Sir Stafford is the best portrayed character and as Agatha Christie has him say:

One cannot go entirely through life taking oneself and other people seriously. (page 43)

The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 shortlist

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

The shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction includes one book I have but haven’t read yet – Wolf Hall and one book I haven’t got but would very much like to read – Lacuna.

The full list is:

Some wonderful titles there.

The two books on the longlist that I have read – Little Stranger and Hearts and Minds haven’t made the shortlist. Let’s hope the shortlisted ones are better than these two, which I did enjoy to a certain degree. My posts on Little Stranger and Hearts and Minds are here and here.

The prize will be awarded on 9 June.

Must get reading Wolf Hall and find a copy of Lacuna. I’m going to the library this afternoon, maybe some of the others will be there?