A Book Blog 2023 by Books do Furnish a Room

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Hope you enjoy it Luna

The House at Sea's End by Elly Griffiths

“Never trust a man who flies the Union Jack.”

This is the third in a series of detective novels. I sometimes don’t get too far in thos sort of series, but the setting and landscape helps. North Norfolk and the fens, often bleak and austere.

“She loves the house, loves the view that stretches over the marshes into nothingness, loves the expanse of sky and the sound of the sea, loves the birds that darken the evening sky, their wings turned to pink by the setting sun.

…It is a grey morning. The mist still lingers inland, but at the edge of the sea the air is cold and clear. It’s hard going, walking over pebbles and rocks encrusted with tiny, sharp mussel shells.”

 

The archaeology is always interesting and Griffiths has produced a developing cast of characters with some interesting interplay.

The plot in this one relates to World War Two and the threat of invasion: the north Norfolk coast being one of the places earmarked for a German invasion. Six skeletons are found on an eroding beach and are identified as being from Germany. The investigation has surprising resonances in the present and inevitably there are more suspicious deaths. There is more than a touch of the baroque here and although in this genre there is no shortage of female forensic experts, Griffiths seems to be producing one of the better ones. The landscape does help when building a sense of menace. There are lots of vignettes in this and the ongoing character of Cathbad (a druid) is one of the better ones. There is a wry humour which helps it along and which Griffiths uses to reflect on the characters. Ruth Galloway, the main protagonist is a new mother:

“…she found that, increasingly, when she spoke, people tended not to hear. This was a shock for Ruth, who has been a university lecturer for all her working life. People used to pay to listen to her. Now, unless she was talking specifically about the baby, her mouth simply opened and shut like one of those nodding dogs in cars.”

All in all this was ok, apart perhaps from a rather lame revel at the end.

7 out of 10

Starting House of Glass by Susan Fletcher

[Madeleine]

I like this series although it does get a bit far-fetched at times, with too many coincidences, but I agree about the sense of humour and Ruth is a great character.  I think this was one of the books I wasn't too keen on, one of the weaker ones in the series.

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A Hero for Our Time by Lermontov

“I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.”

A Russian classic at less than two hundred pages. Lermontov was born in 1814 and was dead by the age of twenty-six following a duel. The main character in this, Pechorin is certainly based on Lermontov himself. Pechorin is meant to be a Byronic hero (there are several references to Byron and Scott: Lermontov loved both of their works).

There are three narrators. The first two parts of the novel are others talking about Pechorin. The third part is extracts from Pechorin’s diary. Lermontov makes life interesting for his creation, who is also not particularly likeable. There are abductions, smugglers, duels, fights over women, murder, drunkenness, seduction, romance, unrequited love, all the usual ingredients. Pechorin’s attitude to death and the duels he fought was symbolic of the way he lived life:

"So? If I die, then I die! The loss to the world won't be great. Yes, and I'm fairly bored with myself already. I am like a man who is yawning at a ball, whose reason for not going to bed is only that his carriage hasn't arrived yet. But the carriage is ready ... farewell!"

A nineteenth century army is a good place for a frustrated Byronic hero. Lermontov’s creation certainly played around with literary conventions. Lermontov has created something of a literary monster who uses people for his own ends, or sometimes just because he can. Lermontov had already angrily criticised and denounced Russian society in The Death of a Poet, a response to Pushkin’s death. This novel is influenced by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Lermontov, like Pushkin influenced later Russian writers. He showed the complexity of the human personality, following Pushkin in writing a “psychological novel”. Pechorin becomes bitter, cynical and bored by life. Lermontov is shedding light on the nature of the contemporary hero. Holding a mirror to society and its mores.

Lermontov also writes well about place:

 “What a glorious place that valley is!  Inaccessible mountains on all sides, red-hued cliffs hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane-trees, yellow precipices streaked with rivulets; high up above lies the golden fringe of the snow, while below the silver thread of the Aragva – linked with some nameless torrent that roams out of a black, mist-filled gorge – stretches glistening like a scaly snake.”

Descriptions of the Caucasus.

Lermontov is also rather knowing in his relationship with the reader:

“Perhaps, however, you would like to know the conclusion of the story of Bela? In the first place, this is not a novel, but a collection of travelling-notes, and, consequently, I cannot make the staff-captain tell the story sooner than he actually proceeded to tell it. Therefore, you must wait a bit, or, if you like, turn over a few pages. Though I do not advise you to do the latter, because the crossing of Mount Krestov (or, as the erudite Gamba calls it, le mont St. Christophe) is worthy of your curiosity.”

There are also lots of literary references throughout:

“The history of a man’s soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau’s Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends.”

It has been some time since I read any nineteenth century Russian literature, too long. I appreciated this and it won’t be too long before I read more.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting The Monk by Matthew Lewis

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Stalingrad by Vassily Grossman

“I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too—above all, when things are as bad as they are today—there is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us. If the Germans enter Stalingrad, you’ll learn that if you chase after two truths, you won’t catch either. It’ll be the end of you.”

This is effectively the first part of Life and Fate, Grossman’s magnum opus. Unlike Life and Fate, this was published in Grossman’s lifetime. This translation has restored many parts that were censored in the Soviet edition. Stalingrad in summation presents the moral cause and reasoning for opposing Nazism. In Life and Fate Grossman draws comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism. There is progression though. Stalingrad hints at what is revealed in Life and Fate. The two books complement each other. There is a sharp criticism of the political regime, especially in Life and Fate, but also praise for the social and economic system. Krymov reflects on the soldiers he fights alongside:

“Before the war they had worked in Soviet factories and kholkozes [collective farms]; they had read Soviet books and spent their holidays in Soviet houses of recreation. They had never seen a private landowner or factory-owner; they could not even conceive of buying bread in a private bakery, being treated in a private hospital, or working on some landowner’s estate or in factories that belonged to some businessman. Krymov could see that the pre-revolutionary order was simply incomprehensible to these young men. And now they found themselves on land occupied by German invaders, and these invaders were preparing to bring back those strange ways, to reintroduce the old order on Soviet soil.”

Comparisons will be drawn to Tolstoy inevitably. One major difference of course is that Tolstoy was looking back, but Grossman was there. Tolstoy was also more directly preachy, Grossman is more subtle, but is still able to make his point:

“Among a million Russian huts you will never find even two that are exactly the same. Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar roses, should be identical… If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate.”

Many of the characters in Life and Fate are here and the reader sees the beginning of their journey. At the very start of the novel the Shaposhnikov’s and their friends gather for a party. At the close of Life and Fate look back with sadness. The circles of the novel is complete. At its best there is a vividness to this, especially when it focuses on particular individuals and circumstances: for example Vavilov, who is a farm worker and his preparations for going to war. The whole is panoramic and manages to focus on the collective and the individual. It is not only the soldiers who are heroic, so are those further down the line: factory workers, childcare workers and the like.

This is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. I did wonder whether it would bear any comparison to Life and Fate, but it does.

“The strength and good sense of the people, their morality, their true wealth—all this will live forever, no matter how hard fascism tries to destroy it.”

I only hope that is true, but I have my doubts.

9 and a half out of 10

Starting Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

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The Horned God: Weird tales of the Great God Pan

Another in the Tales of the Weird series from the British Library. These stories (and a few poems) relate to Pan, who was a Greek god of the fields and woods. He was also musical, playing a form of pipes. There was a fascination with Pan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was often as a counterpoint to formal, dry, established religion and a looking back to pre-Christian beliefs and rites. The music, often at the edge of hearing, the links to a more wild sexuality, a sense of the forbidden all have links to Blake’s “doors of perception”. Pan is also a challenge to modern rationality and science. He represents liberties relating to gender, sexuality and faith. The editor, Michael Wheatley, notes that Pan is much less visible in modern fiction.
There are stories from Arthur Machen, George Egerton, Barry Pain, E M Forster, Saki, Kenneth Grahame, Margery Lawrence, Algernon Blackwood, Signe Toksvig (Sandi Toksvig’s great aunt), David Keller and Dorothy Quick. There are also poems from Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Quick, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Hurley, Willard Marsh and A. Lloyd Bane.
There are some interesting stories in this collection. One of the most fascinating is inclusion of a chapter from The Wind in the Willows. The chapter at the centre of the book “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. It is also the title of Pink Floyd’s debut album; the only one with Syd Barrett taking the lead. The chapter involves mole and rat searching at night for Portly, a missing otter cub. The chapter has been described as one of the most heathen moments in modern literature. They search for much of the night and eventually hear music and find Pan:
“and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, [Mole] looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.”
The story by Forster involves a group of tourists in Italy who stumble across Pan. They experience fear and run, apart from one, a young man who is slightly apart from the group because of his idleness and “failures of masculinity”. The experience with Pan changes him. This is clearly a queer awakening narrative and the young man finds liberation.
These stories have more of an edge than some of the usual ghost stories and this is one of the better volumes in the series.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Haunters at the Hearth; Eerie tales for Christmas Nights

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Captain Swing by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude

“Oh Captain Swing, he'll come in the night
To set all your buildings and crops alight
And smash your machines with all his might
That dastardly Captain Swing!”

“You are to notice that if you doant put away your thrashing machine against Monday next you shall have a "SWING".”

“Sir, This is to acquaint you that if your threshing machines are not destroyed by you directly we shall commence our labours. Signed on behalf of the whole... Swing.”

Published in 1969 this is an analysis and examination of the Captain Swing riots in 1830. It’s written by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude; eminent Marxist historians. This is heavily based on detailed evidence with a detailed appendix. They explain their purpose:

“we are now able to ask new questions about [the riots]: about their causes and motives, about their mode of social and political behaviour, the social composition of those who took part in them, their significance and their consequences […]. The task of this book is therefore the difficult one, which nowadays – and rightly – tempts many social historians, of reconstructing the mental world of an anonymous and undocumented body of people in order to understand their movements, themselves only sketchily documented”

They detailed who the rioters were in each area and details of convictions and punishments. The riots took place primarily in the south and east of England, as far north as Lincolnshire and west to Wiltshire. The riots focussed on the breaking of threshing machines (which were perceived as causing unemployment) and the low level of wages Hobsbawm and Rude consider the origins of the riots including food shortages, low wages, enclosure (in some areas) and the ongoing recession following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. They also explain the role of the Speenhamland system, which was a method of poor relief introduced in 1795, which turned into a poverty trap.

This is a detailed piece of work and although historiography has developed since then, it still stands the test of time. The research is meticulous. There is also an illuminating section on what happened to those of the rioters who were transported to Australia.

There are lots of quotes. Some of them quite revealing. This one from the Duke of Wellington, the then Prime Minister sums up some of the attitudes of the aristocracy:

“I induced the magistrates to put themselves on horseback, each at the head of his own servants and retainers, grooms, huntsmen, game keepers, armed with horsewhips, pistols, fowling pieces and what they could get and to attack, in concert, if necessary, or singly, those mobs, disperse them, and take and put in confinement those who could not escape. This was done in a spirited manner, in many instances, and it is astonishing how soon the country was tranquillised, and that in the best way, by the activity and spirit of gentlemen"

This is dense and detailed but does highlight agricultural uprisings that are largely forgotten.

8 out of 10

Starting October by China Mieville

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Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby

“Anderby was hers. The mortgage was paid. That was worth anything; worth unlovely dresses made in the village, worth the constant strain of economy, worth the ten years’ intimacy with a man whose presence roused in her alternate irritation and disappointment.”

One of the good things about Virago is that they publish lesser known novels. Anderby Wold is one of Holtby’s lesser known novels, indeed, her debut novel. The setting is her beloved Yorkshire and this does feel a little like a rehearsal for South Riding. Anderby Wold is a village in the Wolds, a series of hills running through Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire.

Anderby Wold is a village and farm. The farm is owned by twenty-eight year old Mary Robson. She inherited it when her father died at the age of eighteen, she also inherited the debt he had left. She married John at the age of eighteen: he was much older (over twenty years) and very solid and reliable and most importantly willing to follow her lead. He was also a little boring. The novel starts just as the debt has been paid off and Mary and John have been married for ten years.

The minor characters in this are all strong: Mary and John’s relations, the farmhands, the local schoolmaster who dislikes Mary for her appearance of being “Lady Bountiful”. The seasonal agricultural round has gone on time immemorial:

“Thus they had harvested at Anderby since those far off years when the Danes broke in across the headland and dyed with blood the trampled barley. Thus and thus had the workers passed, and the children waved their garlands following the last load home. Thus had Mary and other Mary Robsons before her welcomed the master of the harvest.”

However modern times and philosophies are at the door. A young socialist called David Rossitur is added to the equation and he talks about change, about unions, about wage increases and better working conditions. In one of those novelist quirks David is out in bad weather and is picked up by Mary in her horse and trap. He comes down with a fever and has to stay at the farm for a few days.

The work out of the differing views and the personal tensions take up the rest of the novel:

‘You stand for an ideal that is, thank Heaven, outworn. The new generation knocks at your door – a generation of men, independent, not patronized, enjoying their own rights, not the philanthropy of their exploiters, respecting themselves, not their so-called superiors. You can’t stop them, but they may stop you. You can’t shut them out, but they may shut you in.’

This is a good novel. It portrays a period of change and Holtby manages to enable the reader to have a level of sympathy for most of the characters. It does feel like a rehearsal for South Riding but it is also a strong novel in its own right.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting The Brontes went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson

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House of Glass by Susan Fletcher

Another Virago; a modern one. This is the first novel I have read by Susan Fletcher. It is another gothic tale with a ghost story at the heart of it. It has some of the usual tropes. A taciturn retainer who fetches from the station, garrulous housekeeper, gardener who knows more than he lets on, mysterious and interested locals who gossip a lot, a house that creaks at night, mysterious footsteps, on the floor above, the lord of the manor who when he is at home is a recluse on the first floor (there are strong shades of Jane Eyre as a touch of Secret Garden), a house with history (a previous family with violent brothers and an enigmatic sister who may be haunting the house), flowers in vases that die overnight, an odd psychic investigator: many of the usual suspects. It is set in The Cotswolds in the summer of 1914, just before the First World War.

Into all this comes the main character Clara who is twenty years old and works at Kew Gardens. The owner of a house in The Cotswolds has asked for someone at Kew to go to the house and set up a glass house with exotic plants. Clara has also been asked for as well. Clara though has what is known as “brittle bones”:

“Osteogenesis imperfecta. Twenty-two letters which click in the mouth and which, at first, we tried slowly. My mother would whisper the name like a prayer or incantation. I, too, mouthed it privately. But this name was soon discarded and, in its place, it became Clara’s bones. I heard it in hospital rooms and corridors, and this more accessible, intimate name implied that it was my complaint alone. That there was no other person in London or elsewhere whose ribs fractured on sneezing.”

This starts as a fairly routine ghost story with things going bump in the night. The minor characters are well developed and there are the usual plot twists. Just over halfway and the novel develops into something more nuanced, although still atmospheric and gothic. The theme throughout is the strength of women and linking it to women’s rights and the women’s movement.

The baddie in this is a bit random and the joins between the two parts of the book are not really seamless. This is well written and I enjoyed all of the aspects, even though they didn’t hang together that well. The reveals towards the end are weighed down with a great deal of information, in contrast with the rather slow meandering start. I didn’t mind the slow start at all and did like the vulnerability of the protagonist.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch

[Hayley]

7 hours ago, Books do furnish a room said:

there are strong shades of Jane Eyre as a touch of Secret Garden

This plus plenty of gothic tropes sounds good to me - adding to wish list 😄