A Book Blog 2023 by Books do Furnish a Room

[Books do furnish a room]

First review of the year

The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock

“Part of me was a sceptic – even a cynic, but part of me was also romantic and gullible.”

This is an odd one and a little of pre-knowledge about Moorcock and his work does help. It’s the first in a trilogy, although the other two have yet to appear. This is what we would call today a mashup, two strands in the same story and Moorcock becomes his own unreliable narrator. It is part autobiography and part fantasy.

The autobiographical part is an account of Moorcock’s early life in London in the 1950s and 1960s. This includes his musical career in various rock and roll bands and of course the development of his writing career. In the 1960s Moorcock wrote a great deal or fantasy and science fiction. Many short stories and the Elric of Melnibone sagas. This is one part of the whole and describes Moorcock’s adolescence and young adulthood including his marriage, children and divorce. All very worthy and it makes up a straightforward piece of autobiography.

However there is another strand woven into this which is pure fantasy. Moorcock meets a monk called Father Isidore. He recognises something in Moorcock and takes him to a place in London he has never been before. It is called Alsacia and is near the Inns of Court and the river. It is a part of London which seems to exist out of time and space. It is full of characters from different times, but especially from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Characters out of fiction mingle with real life characters (the four musketeers for example). Other authors have done this: Rowling with Diagon Alley and Doctor Who to name two. It’s all pretty far-fetched and Moorcock has some fun trying to make his young rational self get his head around the metaphysics of it all. The whispering swarm of the title is a form of tinnitus, the voices Moorcock hears when he isn’t in Alsacia.

This is all very unusual, there is a plot to rescue Charles II, fights between Roundheads and Cavaliers, Dick Turpin, Buffalo Bill and Moorcock falls in love with a Highwaywoman. Then there’s the monastery and some very old monks and rabbis (very old). There’s also a fair amount of navel gazing and philosophising.

I am sure Moorcock fans will love this, but although there is a lot to interest it is rather muddled.

6 out of 10

Starting O Pioneers by Willa Cather

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. by Helen Southworth

 

This is a collection of essays about the work and influence of the Hogarth Press, set up by the Woolfs. There are nine essays all told, all worth reading, some obviously better than others and very wide ranging. There are essays on the following.

The poet Joan Adeney Easdale was only seventeen when she was first published by the Hogarth Press. Woolf championed her and published more than one collection/individual lengthy poems by her. The author outlines the tensions between the male poetry establishment and a young female poet drawing references from Woolf’s own writing.

The second essay looks at the so called middlebrow authors published by the press; examples being Rose Macauley, Margaret Cole and E M Delafield. It illustrates how the press covered more than just highbrow modernist literature.

The third essay covers the Press’s attitude to religious works and their publication. There were few examples of religion being covered but they did publish Freud’s The Future of an Illusion and Braithwaite’s The State of Religious Belief.

One of the best essays in the book is on the Hogarth Press and anti-colonialism. Mulk Raj Anand and CLR James both came in contact with the Woolfs and the Press. The Press published works by both authors, including James’s The Case for West Indian Self Government. There were extensive anti-imperialist publications, especially in the pamphlets series.

There is an essay on William Plomer who published nine of his early works with the Hogarth Press. He wrote about his experiences in South Africa and Japan. He was gay and there are queer undertones to his work. He is a writer I am not familiar with, so another one for the tbr list.

The sixth essay covers Jan Harrison’s translation from the Russian of The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by himself. It also covers D S Mirsky’s involvement too and looks generally at the different approaches to Russia and the 1917 Revolution which initially was greeted by a great deal of hope and optimism.

There is an essay on the marketing of the Press and in particular on the work of E McKnight Kauffer who designed for the press from 1928 to 1939.

There is an interesting essay on working class voices. Orcadian poet and socialist Edwin Muir. His wife Willa Muir also produced some interesting writing on women. Two other writers stand out, R M Fox and John Hampson. Hampson, in particular, was another gay author. His first novel was so explicit that even the Woolfs felt unable to publish it so close to the Well of Loneliness trial. I believe it has never been published, but they published his second and third works.

8 out of 10

Starting Bloomsbury's Outsider by Sarah Knights

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A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

“A passer-by hesitated, stared. “Excuse me–” he said. “Good citizen–are you Robespierre?
Robespierre didn’t look at the man. “Do you understand what I say about heroes? There is no place for them. Resistance to tyrants means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.”
“Good citizen, forgive me,” the patriot said doggedly.
Eyes rested on him briefly. “Yes, I’m Robespierre,” he said. He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulins’s arm, “Camille, history is fiction.””

This was written when Mantel was in her 20s and written up for publication in the 1990s. It certainly foreshadows her work on Thomas Cromwell. I have some familiarity with academic writing about the French Revolution from my degree. What Mantel does here is to focus on three of the leading figures of the Revolution, their spouses and families. They are Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Mantel makes a point of using the words of her main actors from their speeches and writings where she is able. This is a lot of book for your money, over 800 pages, but I certainly found myself gripped by it and it certainly wasn’t boring. I had some basic knowledge of the historical events and certainly knew who survived and who lost their heads. It did help to have some background to the political comings and goings. Mantel manages to create fair and balanced portraits of the three main characters, from the pragmatist Danton, to Desmoulins the rabble-rouser to the Sea-green incorruptible himself, Robespierre. You can tell that Mantel actually quite liked Robespierre and over time felt less positive about Danton.  (As she says “ I see Robespierre as a revolutionary and Danton as a chancer”) They are all human. But the whole cast is huge.  

Mantel explains her work thus:

“I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could.”

The historical novel is not as respectable as it used to be. The Marxist literary critic Lukacs argued that early historical novels like those by Scott, Balzac and Tolstoy showed that human nature was not fixed, but changed over time, therefore showing that Revolution was possible and so making it more likely. This is a good historical novel with complex characters and terse one-liners; this one by Mirabeau:

“Liberty is a bitch that likes to be f^++ed on a mattress of corpses.”

Or as Robespierre says:

“History is fiction”

Setting the three main figures within the context of their own families’ works well and the work is a telling account of the complexities of the French Revolution. The place of greater safety referred to in the title is the grave.

9 out of 10

Starting The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy

Edited January 7, 2023 by Books do furnish a room

[France]

I have to admit to rather running out of steam when I read this. The writing is terrific and much of it has stayed with me but getting to the end was a slog (a teacher friend who is far more more intellectual than me admitted he felt the same).

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Hi France. These days I seem to enjoy the long hefty books more than I used to!!

O Pioneers by Willa Cather

“One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.”

The first of a trilogy, the Great Plains trilogy. This is a fairly early novel and the real main character is the land itself, Nebraska. The title is from a Whitman poem. This is pretty much a novella and farming is central. The descriptions of the land are impressive and work well, the characters are bit wooden. Not a great deal happens until close to the end, but that isn’t necessarily a problem.

It revolves around the Bergson family, who have emigrated from Sweden, and their neighbours, who have also moved from various parts of Europe. There are characters from France, Bohemia and other parts of Scandinavia. Each group has their own Church and graveyard. The main character is Alexandra Bergson who on the death of her father manages the farm, looking after her brothers. Many have found this dull and rather boring, but this wasn’t the problem for me. Here is a typical description in relation to the land and the pioneers:

“When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since the land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

There is a problem here of course. This isn’t untouched land. It has been lived in for centuries by generations of Native Americans who have now been driven out of it. There is no sense of this and only the merest suggestion with a derogatory reference to a “squaw”.

There is a strong female lead and a sympathetic account of a woman running a farm (which wasn’t unusual), but there is also a spot of victim blaming at the end as well. Two of Alexandra’s brothers represent the traditional male point of view:

“The property of a family really belongs to the men of the family, no matter about the title. If anything goes wrong, it’s the men that are held responsible… We worked in the fields to pay for the first land you bought, and whatever’s come out of it has got to be kept in the family.”

It is well written and provides an account of life on the plains at the end of the nineteenth century and the land itself is a striking and compelling character. For me there were other issues though.

5 and a half out of 10

Starting The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

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Woodbrook by David Thomson

This is a non-fiction account of David Thomson’s time in Ireland. In 1932 at the age of eighteen he went to County Roscommon to Woodbrook, a somewhat run down big house owned by the Kirkwood family. He was to be tutor to their eleven year old daughter Phoebe. He effectively stayed for over ten years as tutor and later farm hand. This was written in 1974 and seems to be much loved.

Thomson writes beautifully and the descriptions of the landscape are poetic. He also goes off on lots of tangents, mainly historical, and I learnt a good deal of detail about Irish history. One positive about the book is that Thomson does outline the full infamy of English oppression over the centuries: famines, evictions, clearances and general cruelty. The accounts of rural life are fascinating, especially the accounts of wakes which were clearly semi-pagan in origin.

The Woodbrook estate is in decline and this is very much an account of the disappearance of a way of life. The Kirkwood family had arrived in Ireland in the late seventeenth century and so were still newcomers and part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

It’s all very interesting, however there are a couple of things that made me take a step back. The primary one is Thomson’s relationship with his pupil Phoebe. She was eleven at the start of the book. Thomson describes how he fell in love with Phoebe and seems to have been effectively grooming her (he was eighteen when he first arrived there). At one point he talks about her “budding breasts”. She obviously also responds to his attentions and it’s all rather exploitative. It’s not Lolita, and it seems like her parents gently cooled it off at one point (when she was about fourteen). It was clearly a totally inappropriate relationship. There’s also a bit of adolescent angst which didn’t go down well either.

So, despite the poetic writing, the interesting historical information and the description of a disappearing way of life, I didn’t enjoy the whole for the reason described. I have read many reviews which don’t mention this at all, which I find incomprehensible.

3 out of 10

Starting The Persian Boy by Mary Renault

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Hare House by Sally Hinchcliffe

“We walked through a landscape bleached with frost, the earth standing hard and frozen. Ice crept everywhere. Even the streams had begun to freeze, ice fingering out from their edges, tombing them over. Yet the cold left me feeling alive, as if we were indeed the only things out there that were still living, the only things moving in the whole landscape.’’

I like hares, just as I like owls. There is a wildness and otherness about them. Consequently there is lots of folklore about them and links with witchcraft and shapeshifting. This gathers together quite a few gothic and witchcraft tropes. It is set in Scotland, in Dumfries and Galloway. There are also a few dour Scots tropes and plenty of weather: rain, wind, snow and the like. Hinchcliffe does capture the landscape quite well. The themes are typical of this genre; mental illness, symbols of witchcraft, hares (inevitably), clay dolls, sprigs of Rowan, ancestral curses and the like. Someone also seems to be wandering about the place writing Exodus 22:18 (Thou shalt not permit a witch to live).

“If I hadn’t laughed before, I might have then, except that we had reached the churchyard gates and were standing staring at them. The wind here was wild and gusting, the tops of the trees tossing violently, and for the first time it struck me that walking through forests in a gale wasn’t that sensible an idea. But it wasn’t that which had brought me to a halt, brought both of us to a halt. On the gateposts ahead of us, fresh paint stood stark red against the rain-blackened stone. It was crudely done, the letters crammed in towards the end, the paint running, but it was still clear. Exod 22:18.’’

There is also an unreliable narrator, a single woman, approaching middle age, who has left teaching following an “incident”, some “mass hysteria” in the classroom. The reader learns more about this as the novel develops. She now does online work, writing essays and papers for people.

This is very easy to read and can certainly be described as atmospheric. The ending is certainly odd and leads the reader to ask questions about the narrator. Nothing wrong with that but the implications here play on certain negative tropes about women, especially single childless women. I didn’t find the whole convincing (what am I saying!!). And obviously there weren’t nearly enough hares.

5 out of 10

Starting Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra

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A Storm of Swords 1: Steel and Snow

“The greatest fools are ofttimes more clever than the men who laugh at them.”

Martin continues to manage multiple plot lines and lots of plates spinning at once. I am reading a historical book about the women around the Norman Conquest and to be honest there is a certain similarity and it’s just as bloody and treacherous.

Gradually there seem to be fewer surprises and some characters have become a bit predictable, but I’m sure Martin is just lulling into a false sense of security. It’s as much a chess game as anything and the dragons are growing.

It’s all escapist nonsense, but sometimes it’s what I need.

7 and a half out of 10

On to part two

[Madeleine]

Wait til you get to Part 2.....

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Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

"Suddenly sober, he says, 'Perhaps there are already many thinking as we do. Thousands of men must have fallen. Maybe there are already writers like us. But that doesn't matter, Anna! What do we care? It's we who must do it!'"

This novel, written in 1946, just before Fallada’s death is based on a true story. Elise and Otto Hampel were a working class couple in Berlin. Early in the war Elise’s brother was killed in action. They began a silent protest against the Nazis and the war: by writing postcards. For over two years they secretly distributed hundreds of postcards, on which they wrote criticisms of the regime. They put them in all sorts of places and for two years they baffled the Berlin Police. The case was eventually handed over to the Gestapo, who assumed they were dealing with a group of people. They were eventually caught and executed (by beheading) in March 1943.

Fallada takes this story and turns it into this novel. He adds a number of secondary characters. The main characters are Anna and Otto Quangel. They live in an apartment block and we follow the lives of the residents as well. Fallada also follows the police/Gestapo investigation as well. It is the Quangel’s son Otto who dies in action in the novel and triggers the postcard writing. It’s a long novel, almost 600 pages, and despite what Penguin say, it’s not a thriller.

Fallada wrote this over a period of two months, he was dying at the time. He had been addicted to alcohol and morphine and spent a significant amount of time in psychiatric institutions. His relationship to the authorities was always ambivalent.

“Then he [Otto] picked up the pen, and said softly but clearly, ‘The first sentence of our first card will read: ‘Mother! The Führer has murdered my son.’’

Once again, she [Anna] shivered. There was something so bleak, so gloomy, so determined in the words Otto had just spoken. At that instant she grasped that this very first sentence was Otto’s absolute and irrevocable declaration of war, and also what that meant: war between, on the one side, the two of them, poor, small, insignificant workers who could be extinguished for just a word or two, and on the other, the Führer, the Party, the whole apparatus in all its power and glory, with three-fourths or even four-fifths of the German people behind it. And the two of them in this little room in Jablonski Strasse!”

This is bleak, with a few shafts of light and portrays a futile, yet principled resistance against a totalitarian regime. It’s a story still relevant. It’s probably a bit too long, but it’s a great study of human reaction to an oppressive regime.

“Well, it will have helped us to feel that we behaved decently till the end. […] Of course, Quangel, it would have been a hundred times better if we’d had someone who could have told us, such and such is what you have to do; our plan is this and this. But if there had been such a man in Germany, then Hitler would never have come to power in 1933. As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we ARE alone, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.”

9 out of 10

Starting The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

[Brian.]

19 hours ago, Books do furnish a room said:

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

 

9 out of 10

 

 

One of my all time favourite books.

[Books do furnish a room]

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra

This is a brief novella, well, more a short story dressed up as a novella. It is a romance, but it is also quite clever:

“Tending a bonsai is like writing, thinks Julio. Writing is like tending a bonsai, Julio thinks.”

There’s plenty more like that.

It is the story of a romance between Julio and Emilia, initially two college students. They read classics together, turning the reading into a game and looking for what might be vaguely sexual or a double entendre before they can have sex!

It’s a bit flimsy and I found it irritating and pretentious, but it is loved by some.

“In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia’s death.  Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio.  Julio and Emilia.  In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die.  The rest is literature.”

The rest is boring.

4 out of 10

Starting The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

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The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

“I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted of course. There was no initiation ceremony,”

“…in order to be free, which is our most precious desire, we are all slaves before the law.”

Finally, I get round to one of Bolano’s major works. Published in 1998, this is a toude force about an imaginary poetic movement called the Visceral Realists (Bolano did co-found his own poetic movement in 1975, Infrarealism). It focuses on two visceral realist poets; Arturo Belano (based on Bolano himself) and Ulises Lima (based on Mario Santiago, a friend of Bolano’s). Many of the characters in the book are based on friends, acquaintances and poets.

The novel follows the visceral realists around Mexico City in part one. It is set in 1975 and entitled “Mexicans Lost in Mexico”. It is narrated by a young poet Jaun Garcia Madero.

The second section is entitled “The Savage Detectives” and covers the period 1976 to 1996. There are a multiplicity of voices (over forty). They record encounters with Lima and/or Bolano over the years and all over the world. The narrators record their impressions of the two.

The final section is back to 1975/6 following on from the first part with the same narrator.

There are a variety of escapades, lots of dead end jobs, travelling, sexual encounters (with some variety), pot smoking, writing (of course) and it’s all very bohemian. It is written with elegance and the prose is sharp and poetic:

“If we didn’t have to read, too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.”

As well as being sought by others Belano and Lima are searching for another poet Cesarea Tinajero. There is humour, but that is undercut with sadness and isolation.

“Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren’t laughing anymore.”

It’s also a very political novel, with strands of many revolutions, oppressions and uprisings. There is a lightness of touch to it though which means it does avoid pretentiousness. But I did enjoy it and it really is a great ride.

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”

9 out of 10

Starting Terror by Dan Simmons

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Silk and the Sword: The Women of the Norman Conquest by Sharon Bennett Connolly

Connolly sums up her intention thus:

“From Emma of Normandy, wife of both King Cnut and Aethelred II, to Saint Margaret, a descendant of Alfred the Great himself, we will trace the fortunes of the women who had a role to play before, during and after the momentous year of 1066. Throughout these tumultuous times, women played a prominent part, in support of their husbands, their sons and of their people, be they English, Norman, Danish or Norwegian. Their contributions were so much more than a supporting role, and it is time that their stories were told, and the influence they had on events, was examined in detail. …My intention is to tell the story of the Norman Conquest, while providing the women with a platform for their stories, from the dawn of the eleventh century to its close.”

This history inevitably spans the whole of the eleventh century as well as straying before and after the allotted span. It covers much of Europe, especially Scandinavia, and as far as Kiev (“Harold II Godwinson’s own daughter, Gytha, would make her life in Kiev as the wife of Vladimir II Monomakh and was the mother of Mstislav the Great, the last ruler of a united Kievan Rus. Vladimir was the nephew of Harald Hardrada’s first wife, the Russian princess, Elisiv”)., there was an awful lot of travel! The connections and interrelationships are complex, just as complex as anything in Game of Thrones and there are murders at feasts/weddings.

There are examinations of the lives of many of the women on both sides of the Norman Conquest. These include the wonderfully named Edith Swanneck and the more well-known Lady Godiva, real name Godgifu. The myths about her stem from over a century after her death and are just that, myths. There is also a chapter on the unknown woman on the Bayeux tapestry.

This is a good counterpoint to the usually all male historiography of the era and fills a gap full of men. There are still lots of gaps and more research to be done. The women here play a variety of roles and there is even a saint among them! There are lots of perils and marriage is inevitably a lottery. All the women are interesting and this is a window on a complex world. The bibliography is excellent.

8 out of 10

Starting Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison

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The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy

“The cold was bracing instead of numbing, the darkness promised long hours of warmth and reading.”

The quote is there because I liked it, not because it’s relevant!

A novel of pottery, passion and prejudice (not forgetting the dog Chinna, who is the real star). That’s enough of the naff straplines.

The novel follows Sarayu from about eleven when she is living with her family in India, until she is about twenty at university in Cambridge.

The focus of the novel is her relationship with Elango. He drives an autorickshaw, taking Sara and her sister to school. He is also a potter (hence the title) and he teaches Sara how to be a potter, something that stays with her. Elango falls in love with Zohra: he is Hindu, she is Muslim and some members of the community are very unhappy as a result. Elango has a dream, to make a large pot horse and the central part of the story is the making of the horse. It is told partly in the present (early 1980s I think) and partly by flashback. The character of the dog (Chinna) is well drawn and symbolically important:

“..more than my first pot, or anything else that took place in the world, what changed the configuration of earth-sun-sky in that year of unimaginable wonders and bloodcurdling horrors was the young dog that Elango found in a forest.”

There is a focus on myth, memory, family and history, but the prejudices of the political situation intrude. There is a rather effective build-up of detail and some interesting reflections on the creative process. Pottery is obviously a metaphor for change, growth and regeneration. Creation and destruction are linked. However it is the dog that crosses easily the social and religious barriers and the one who loves unconditionally.

Roy has also reflected on the role of the artist in an interview:

“I didn’t think about the “role of the artist” when I was writing my first book, but over the years it has become clearer to me how tangled the process of making anything is. Not only must the writer or artist mine the force of her imagination – her personal seam of ideas and images – and then do what it takes to turn them into books or pictures or films; the outer world intrudes and alters the shape of things, too. This doesn’t have only to do with time and space and family. In The Earthspinner, the potter finds that he has to overcome not just his self-doubt and his lack of material supplies; his dream of making a clay horse runs full tilt into the hostility of his community. The threat of the mob is something every artist now faces, anywhere in the world, and all of this together is fascinating to me: how people continue to create despite everything, including their own senses of themselves.”

I enjoyed this and felt Roy made her points with a fairly light touch.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana.

[France]

On 1/24/2023 at 2:01 PM, Books do furnish a room said:

Silk and the Sword: The Women of the Norman Conquest by Sharon Bennett Connolly

Connolly sums up her intention thus:

“From Emma of Normandy, wife of both King Cnut and Aethelred II, to Saint Margaret, a descendant of Alfred the Great himself, we will trace the fortunes of the women who had a role to play before, during and after the momentous year of 1066. Throughout these tumultuous times, women played a prominent part, in support of their husbands, their sons and of their people, be they English, Norman, Danish or Norwegian. Their contributions were so much more than a supporting role, and it is time that their stories were told, and the influence they had on events, was examined in detail. …My intention is to tell the story of the Norman Conquest, while providing the women with a platform for their stories, from the dawn of the eleventh century to its close.”

This history inevitably spans the whole of the eleventh century as well as straying before and after the allotted span. It covers much of Europe, especially Scandinavia, and as far as Kiev (“Harold II Godwinson’s own daughter, Gytha, would make her life in Kiev as the wife of Vladimir II Monomakh and was the mother of Mstislav the Great, the last ruler of a united Kievan Rus. Vladimir was the nephew of Harald Hardrada’s first wife, the Russian princess, Elisiv”)., there was an awful lot of travel! The connections and interrelationships are complex, just as complex as anything in Game of Thrones and there are murders at feasts/weddings.

There are examinations of the lives of many of the women on both sides of the Norman Conquest. These include the wonderfully named Edith Swanneck and the more well-known Lady Godiva, real name Godgifu. The myths about her stem from over a century after her death and are just that, myths. There is also a chapter on the unknown woman on the Bayeux tapestry.

This is a good counterpoint to the usually all male historiography of the era and fills a gap full of men. There are still lots of gaps and more research to be done. The women here play a variety of roles and there is even a saint among them! There are lots of perils and marriage is inevitably a lottery. All the women are interesting and this is a window on a complex world. The bibliography is excellent.

8 out of 10

Starting Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison

This sounds fascinating. Thanks.

 

[Books do furnish a room]

It is fascinating France!

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

“The human desire is to live, to cheat death, to live forever.  It is the same over all the ages.  It is why we build monuments to death so that they live on after we die.”

The first in a detective series, I’m ever hopeful! This one had a few advantages. It’s set in the fens/marshes of Norfolk/Lincolnshire and more specifically a tidal saltmarsh. There are two main protagonists. Dr Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist who lectures at North Norfolk University (fictional) and is in her late 30s, single with two cats and lives in a remote location on the edge of the saltmarsh. The other is a policeman, Harry Nelson. Lots of tropes, some quite predictable. The case involves the disappearance of two children, ten years apart. There is plenty of archaeology, mainly Iron Age with henges and causeways. As you expect there are twists, turns and red herrings, but the murderer is pretty obvious. As this is the first in a series Griffiths sets up her characters:

“books covering every available surface. Archaeology books mostly but also murder mysteries, cookery books, travel guides, doctor-nurse romances. Ruth is nothing but eclectic in her tastes. She has a particular fondness for children’s books about ballet or horse-riding, neither of which she has ever tried.”

I have certainly read worse in this genre.

7 out of 10

Starting Wychwood by George Mann

[Madeleine]

I enjoy this series, although I think the last couple have gone slightly off the boil and in fact the next one will be the last apparently.  But I like Ruth, she's an unconventional heroine with a good dry sense of humour, and overall the books are easy comfort reads, even if some of them are a bit far-fetched!

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Bloomsbury's Outsider by Sarah Knights

A very detailed and competent biography of David (Bunny) Garnett, who was at the centre of Bloomsbury. He led a bohemian life and fell in love notoriously easily with both men and women, usually with several at the same time. He was incapable of being faithful to one person, but inevitably felt less comfortable when his wives (two) had affairs of their own. He made it clear that it was the person he fell in love with rather than the gender and memorably had a long relationship with Duncan Grant whilst Grant himself was having an affair with Vanessa Bell.

He worked in journalism and publishing, but also wrote novels. Many are no longer in print, but Lady into Fox has aged well enough and most have heard of Aspects of Love since it got the Lloyd-Webber treatment. He also wrote a few volumes of rather candid biography. Much of his life was spent farming and growing food. This was a skill learnt in the First World War when he was a Conscientious Objector. He spent time with the Quakers in France and doing farm work in the UK. He knew and mixed with all of the luminaries of Bloomsbury and was a member of the Neo-Pagans before the War, Knowing Rupert Brooke well. His mother was the well-respected translator Constance Garnett, she translated all the main nineteenth century Russian authors into English (Tolstoy et al) and his father was in publishing Giving young David access to people like Conrad and Lawrence. Knights covers his life in detail including his second marriage to Angelica Bell (daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant), twenty-six years his junior. He was there when she was born and notoriously said he would marry her one day.

Garnett was a hypocrite, but he knew it as this reaction to his first wife Ray having an affair illustrates:

“For you to be jealous of my loves is as if you were jealous of my reading books & bursting into tears over their pages. For me to [be] jealous of you is selfish but the wisdom of preservation.”

Quite.

The biography is comprehensive and Knights was given access to Garnett’s papers by his son: two walk in cupboards stuffed with filing cabinets and boxes full of papers.

There are lots of vignettes of other people. T E Lawrence is one and Garnett posthumously edited his letters. Another is T H White who memorably fell out with most of his friends over the years. Not with Bunny, one thing that did impress me about Garnett was his loyalty and tolerance towards those he cared about. He was good to have as a friend, lousy as a lover!

This is a good even-handed biography. It is long (almost six hundred pages) and probably could have been shorter, but I enjoyed reading it.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Mouth full of Blood by Toni Morrison

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A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold by George R R Martin

Well the field is thinning out a bit. Martin has killed off a few of the main characters, even POV characters. He is also adding new POV characters on different sides and giving the “baddies” a platform too. All sides have a perspective and there is nuance in many of the characters that was less obvious at the beginning. The advantage of using thousands of pages to tell the story. 

There is plenty of treachery and deception and plenty of very good reasons for avoiding weddings. The morality is cruel and brutal, particularly in relation to sex and sexual relations. There is religion, more than one, although they are not quite as well developed as some other aspects of the culture.

There’s been a bit of grumpiness about well-loved characters being killed off, particularly in relation to the Starks, but Martin seems to have no favourites. Winter is still coming!

7 out of 10

Starting the next one: A Feast for Crows

[Madeleine]

My favourite book in the series, yes there is a lot more character development too which shows that not everyone is either good or bad (though some are!).

 

Enjoy "Feast".

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Madeleine

The Persian Boy by Mary Renault

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”

"Alexander is the richest man in the world and there is only one gift suited for such a man." "What is that, my lord?" "You, boy." 

This is the second in Renault’s Alexander trilogy. It is narrated by Bagoas a Persian eunuch from an aristocratic family who becomes Alexander’s lover and companion for the last six years of Alexander’s life. There is the basis of historical fact which Renault builds on and weaves her story around. Bagoas is castrated at the age of ten when his father falls from grace and is taught the arts of love and becomes a favourite of the Persian king Darius. Alexander sort of inherits him. The book covers the significant occurrences of Alexander’s later career, including his foray into India. It also covers Alexander’s relations with the peoples he came into contact with and the interrelationships within the often moving camp. Obviously the interplay with Hephaistion is also important. Historical sources include the Greek historian Plutarch and the Roman historian Curtius.

Bagoas is Persian and in this way Renault is able to make much of the interaction between the cultures: between three cultures, Greek, Macedonian and Persian. There are plenty of examples of culture shock.

The sex scenes are not graphic and generally between men, there are a limited number of female characters in the book. It was published in 1972 and has become a gay classic,

“The room smelled of sex and sandalwood, with a tang of salt from the sea.”

The scenes are sensual rather than explicit and in some ways this is a historical romance. The characters are believable and all have feet of clay.

Renault’s writing makes the whole vivid and her descriptive powers are good:

“The dead lay everywhere, like some strange fruit of the land, darkened with ripeness against the pale withered grass and scrub. A faint sweet stench was starting. It was hot.”

We see all the action from Bagoas’s point of view, so it’s from a distance. This is an absorbing novel. It can be read as a stand-alone, although it does help to have read The Fire from Heaven because the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion.

“I doubt he’d ever in his life lain down with anyone for whom he had not felt some kind of fondness. He needed love as a palm tree needs water, all his life long: from armies, from cities, from conquered enemies, nothing was enough. It laid him open to false friends, as anyone will tell you. Well, for all that, no man is made a god when he is dead and can do no harm, without love. He needed love and never forgave its betrayal, which he had no understanding of. For he himself, if it was given him with a whole heart, never misused it, nor despised the giver. He took it gratefully, and felt bound by it.”

9 out of 10

Starting the third in the trilogy The Funeral Games

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Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana

“The sun blistered intensely in the morning hours, and in the afternoons, a lazy breeze would come, followed by rain clouds rolling in from the east, drawing a canopy high up in the sky.”

From the wonderful Tilted Axis Press, a set of thirteen short stories from one of Thailand’s preeminent female writers. The stories are generally set in predominantly working class areas and we are not concerned with the lives of the richer elite, but with everyday people. The translation is, I think, excellent.

It’s not a perfect collection and has been criticised as well for being anti-male. I don’t agree with that but Pimwana’s men do run the gamut from predatory to patriarchal and many of the women in the stories feel unsafe. The double standards of entitled men is a dominant theme as well as their total lack of understanding of the women in their lives:

“I find it unnerving how fast women’s looks change. This is something I’ve been preoccupied with since I was young. I have noted, as I observed more women, that there are some exceptions to the rule. These female outliers were what I’d always dreamed of finding. For most women, family life seems to weigh them down with obligations that men often can’t imagine.”

Other themes include poverty, prostitution, unfulfilled dreams and obsession. There is also a sense of dislocation between town and country:

“My legs are strong; my body is strong, a farmer’s body built for physical labor.  The world has farmers, and I’m a good farmer.  But right now I’m an elevator attendant even though such a job shouldn’t exist in this world.  Is it so troublesome to lift your hand up and press a button that they have to pass this task off to someone else, someone who could do so many other things?  If I had been born with one hand and an index finger this job would be suitable for me.”

Pimwana is good small moments on which much turns and she can do this in comic an tragic moments. These are well worth reading and work on many levels.  

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree

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The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

Set on a small island in the Caribbean this is a modern day fairy tale with inevitable magic realist elements. The timeline is split between 1976 and 2016. It revolves around a local fisherman David Baptiste. When out fishing he sometimes sees a creature in the water, which he eventually realises is a mermaid. The mermaid is caught by American tourists and put on display in the harbour. David sees her and at night cuts her down and takes her home where she gradually recovers and becomes more human again. Then things start to become difficult and complicated. This is a fairy tale, but Disney it most definitely is not. No well-groomed Ariel:

“She looking like a woman from long ago, like old-time Taino people I saw in a history book at school. She face was young and not pretty at all, and I recognise something ancient there too. I saw the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past, shining at me. I saw she breasts, under the fine scaly suit. I saw webbed fingers and how they dripped with sargassum seaweed. Her hair was full of seaweed too, black black and long and alive with stinging creatures — like she carry a crown on her head of electricity wires. […] Then there was her tail […] Yards and yards of musty silver. It gave she a look of power, like she grow out of the tail itself. I think, then, that this fish-woman must be heavy as a mule.

Sea moss trailed from her shoulders like slithers of beard. Barnacles speckled the swell of her hips. Her torso was sturdy and muscular, finely scaled over, as if she wore a tunic of sharkskin. She was crawling with sea-lice. They saw that when her diaphragm heaved, it revealed wide slits which were gills and they looked sharp enough to slice a finger off. All the men backed away. Her spine spikes were flat, like the spokes of a folded umbrella, but when they flared and spread, they revealed a mighty dorsal.”

The transformations in the novel are messy and difficult and often general mermaid lore is turned on its head. There is a curse, but it is not one that is easily broken. Instead of the necessity of keeping something belonging to the mermaid, David gives the mermaid (named Aycayia) a pair of sneakers to help her walk. She is taught language by a good friend of David (Arcadia) and befriends Arcadia’s ten year old son Reggie who uses sigh language as he is without hearing.

The catching of the mermaid is pure Hemingway with the father and son US tourists fishing for marlin and the struggle to land her is long and messy and brutal. The older man is angry when his catch disappears:

“He wanted the mermaid back. If not millions, and an auction to a museum, he wanted the bloody thing stuffed and mounted on his wall. He had caught her fair and square. He had papers, a licence to keep what he’d caught.”

She is seen as property not as a person. Aycayia turns out to have thoughts and opinions of her own. Arcadia, the only white woman in the book tells her of local history and Aycayia responds:

“I ask why everybody in Black Conch is black skinned
She told me how black people came
I ask her where are the red people like me
She told me they were mostly all dead and gone, murdered
I learn from Miss Rain
how the Castilian Admiral
MURDER all my people in a very short time
My people long dead
I sobbed
She told me many black people were murdered too
I ask if the Spanish Christians own everything now
She said not any more and turn red in her face
Like the whole thing happen in a short time
Only five hundred years when the world is very old
This all happen quickly
My family own all of this part of the island she say
Land is not to be owned I tell her.”

The prose is literary and poetic and there are layers of meaning. I had some questions. The main black female character is one of the antagonists with no redeeming features. There are lots of threads: toxic masculinity, land ownership following slavery, folklore and myth, jealousy, community tensions, patriarchy, the nature of romance, the unfinished history of colonialism and so on. Here no one can escape the past and its legacies and the novel draws on demands of the marginalised for dignity and respect.

David writes in his journal:

“That mermaid be a revolutionary.” 

And that would be no bad thing.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting How the one-armed sister sweeps the House by Cherie Jones

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Wychwood by George Mann

A cross between a detective/crime novel and a supernatural thriller which manages to miss significant parts of both genres. There does not seem to be any twists and the antagonist is fairly easy to spot. There is a significant folklore element (hence the attraction) which focuses on a Saxon myth, the Carrion King. It is set in rural Oxfordshire.

The plot is standard. Young female journalist gets fed up of life in the big city and following a relationship break up returns to rural Oxfordshire to her mum for a period of reflection. She lives very close to the Wychwood and as she arrives there is a murder in the wood. The victim is set out in a ritualised fashion and there follows a series of related murders. Add to the mix meeting a childhood friend who is now a policeman on the investigation. And yes, there is a will they, won’t they vibe going on. Inevitably she gets involved in the investigation. There are the usual tropes and it’s all pretty predictable. There is also plenty of tea drinking:

“And what did you do after you had sex?”

“I made some tea.”

Lots of tea drinking.

It’s pretty standard stuff and predictable, with some interesting folklore elements.

6 out of 10

Starting The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews