Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

It can't have been much fun to be Queen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For that matter I doubt it was much fun being a woman (or being anything) in those days - at least, not by comparison to the ease, comfort and variety of our lives today.

I've been reading a whole range of books about Queens in the middle ages and early modern period, including Alison Weir's book on Eleanor of Aquitaine (fascinating content, I found it a bit dry) and Lucy Worsley's history of the Georgian Court. And I've got into Philippa Gregory's books - in particular The Other Boleyn Girl, and her books about the Wars of the Roses (The Red Queen and The White Queen). All credit due to Yvann at ReadingWithTea for the blog posts that prompted me to head to the 'G' section in the local library.

I know that we're meant to look down on historical fiction as being somehow 'less' than other fiction, but I don't think received wisdom can possibly be right. Firstly - because good historical fiction is a good read, and fundamentally, that's what I'm after in a book. Who would say that Wolf Hall was a less good book because it concerns historical characters? What about Shakespeare's history plays? A good read is a good read is a good read - and a great book must be a good read, as well as doing something more.

Secondly, because history is about what happened and why. And good historical fiction contributes to understanding the why - if we trust the author to have done a respectable amount of research, it's a lot easier to understand (and to empathise) with social mores and manners if they're illustrated within a plot rather than described with academic caveats. And fictionalised conversations are a far more 'real' way to explain how and why individuals might have made the decisions they did - and to give and gain a tangible understanding of the motivations and constraints that shaped people's decisions and actions.

To be honest, though I feel I ought probably to blush as I type, I even think that the fantasy 'Song of Ice and Fire' adds something to my sense of how feudal loyalties, authority and politics worked and felt. Obviously you need a bit of nous to realise that there are often different interpretations of what happened and/or why, and to remember conversations and plot are not the same as actual history. I think you need a bit less nous to grasp that no-one was hatching dragon eggs in the Middle Ages.

I've also just finished The Song of Achilles by Madeline Millen - retelling the Iliad but focussed on Achilles' relationship with Patroclus, and a great read (made me think of giving the 'real' book a go at some stage). Coming up some time soon, I'm going to continue this historical thread of reading with She-Wolves, and The Winter King. Any other suggestions? Who else writes good historical fiction?

She was a woman in a crowd, surrounded but alone

The Report by Jessica Francis Kane is a superb, heartbreaking, human read. It's a fiction-based-on-fact retelling of the 1943 disaster at the Bethnal Green tube station/bomb shelter. 173 people died on the stairs into the shelter, crushed to death in the crowd on a night when no bombs were dropped on London.





Although we know from the blurb (or general historical knowledge) about what happened that night, the structure of the book allows the story of the alert, the rush, the crush and the aftermath to develop in parallel with our growing understanding about how it happened and the cumulative stories of individuals and their individual actions which contributed for good or ill. The author presents each of them as rounded individuals, and the magistrate appointed to investigate and write the report takes a similar approach. 

We hear from the warden who put a brighter light bulb onto the stairs, the various council bureaucrats who hadn't approved funding for a handrail, the police man who chose to stop a group of small boys for playing with torches rather than hurrying to his post at the shelter entrance, the clerk transfixed by the green soles of a girl's shoes, a harassed mother hurrying to the shelter with her daughters.  The result was a human report, put together with ceremony and sympathy, and written to explain, understand and heal. 


 


There's a whole separate strand about telling the truth. The magistrate did not apportion blame - and chose to omit a crucial detail about how the crush started because he was worried about tensions in the community. The Government also refused to provide information about whether new guns had been fired that night (which might have sounded like bombs landing and exacerbated the crush), and sought to suppress the report, because it was worried about morale in the community. In the individual case of the magistrate and told through a sympathetic point of view the decision to suppress information seems sensitive, decent and constructive - but a similarly motivated approach by the Government seems patriarchal, patronising and obstructive. Interesting.

I read this book because two reviews - by Rachel at booksnob and Darlene at roses over a cottage door - both posts are well worth a read, as is this article. I loved this book, and am about to start to press it on everyone I know.

Commuters ahoy!

When did you last miss your stop because of reading, and what was the book? It is years since I've missed a stop, but this morning I did that terrible thing of realising we'd arrived, leaping from my seat, stumbling through everyone else to arrive at the doors just as they closed. No chance of pretending anything other than the truth, and I'd lost my rare-as-something-very-rare seat! Had to smile, chuckle, do body language to symbolise 'what a fool I am' and then poke my nose back into the kindle which was the root cause of it all. Gah. 

And the book? I'm reading the Crimson Petal and the White, was expecting a bit of light historical fiction, and in fact its the most porn-esque book I think I've ever read but with a blindingly brilliant narrative voice. I just love the way the narrator addresses the reader directly, switches to narrate a character's thoughts, surmises what the reader should be thinking and then switches back to ticking us off, telling us to pay attention, telling us it's about to get good...

Other reads over the weekend - Chris Mullin 'A very British coup' had me chortling at the descriptions of how the civil service works (especially Private Offices, Permanent Secretaries and No.10) but the plot seemed thin and dated, compared to Yes Minister and/or Thick of It. And I whipped my way through Love Virtually by Daniel Glattauer, an epistolary novel via email, which really made the most of the anonymity of email, and the way that we construct personalities from the tone and language of the emails we receive from people...

Someone At A Distance

I bought Someone At A Distance as the third of my latest Persephone '3 for a bit cheaper' deal. I was already committed to Round About A Pound and Few Eggs, and I'd really enjoyed They Were Sisters. 

I started the book a couple of weeks ago and finished it on my first day in Hay - and it didn't disappoint. A quick plot summary from Amazon: "Apparently a 'fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage,' Nina Bawden wrote in her Preface, yet 'it makes compulsive reading' in its description of an 'ordinary' family, husband commuting up to town, wife at home ('Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife'). Disaster strikes when a young French woman visits (the scenes back in France are most beautifully described, with touches of Balzac or Maupassant) and calculatingly seduces the husband. He abandons everything for her; then there is no going back."

I loved the characterisation of the North family, and the way that Dorothy Whipple captures their happiness and relationships while also showing us their tics and flaws. And I found Louise loathsome but captivating - from the first moment we see her we know she's not a nice piece of work. Her seduction of Avery - and the end of his marriage to Ellen - is slow and specific, with key moments described in detail through one or both character's views. Although we know through the omniscient narration that Louise is playing a careful game and shifting her aims as she works out her options, as a reader I felt that there was no escape as each incident seemed to lead inexorably to the next. And maybe that is how Avery explained it to himself at first, because none of the individual actions/situations on their own were inexcusable - and many were inappropriate only because of the cumulative impact.

The book left me thinking about three quite different things.
1) Early on, the narrator compares Louise to Madame Bovary in her social ambitions and as I went on reading the book I found that echoes and parallels kept coming to mind. I've not been able to find any reviews on line which explore this properly with quotes and more sharp comparisons - but it sounds like an essay question just waiting to be set!

2) The book ends 'right' with Ellen back on her feet with a new home, kids happy and secure, and Avery and Louise miserable in each others' company. I found myself wondering about Ellen's final reaction - her sense of pleasure and pride that Avery misses her and is so evidently upset. I wondered about whether they would ever find a way to be together again, and whether I would think that a good or bad thing...

3) Nina Bawden's preface to the Persephone edition suggests that although the book was written and set after the Second World War, the overall tone has a sense of nostalgia which might better place the book in the prewar period. I've been wondering about whether that's true - or whether it's just that the big changes of post-war England had much less impact on wealthy country-dwellers. And I was very struck by how much has changed since the 50s in terms of women's lives - we don't have maids any more and we do expect to work - and often to have a career, with all the associated increases in independence and in hard work because we're still expected to keep house and home together.

There are some great reviews around, including on the Persephone Forum and from the Persephone Reading Weekend (Tuulenhaiven and BookGirl). I also thought that Carol Wallace's review picked on something important about how we feel about unpleasant characters when an author/narrator lets us see inside their worlds too. 

Irma Voth by Miriam Toews

Irma Voth is a nineteen year old Mennonite woman in Mexico. She's estranged from her family and her narco husband has left her. Then a film crew arrives and shakes things up even more. There are good summaries of the story here and here.

I thought this was going to be a plot-driven book about a reclusive community and the disruption and attraction of outsiders with a different way of life. It's not - it's character and language that makes the book special.

April's reading round-up

I've not reviewed any of my reading this month - and I'm not motivated to write properly considered posts for any of the books. But here's a quick round-up:

8) Round about a Pound a Week - I first added it to my TBR list during Persephone Reading Weekend, then moved it up the list to make sure I've read it before Hay so that I can discuss with the lovely Sally. I'm about 150 pages in, finding the writing a bit dry but the content and argument shocking and provocative. Makes me think of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, and also of Polly Toynbee's Hard Work which I read when I first moved to London. 

7) Annabel - I thought this was superb. Again, it wasn't the first Orange longlister to leap out of the list and entice me, but after picking up and putting down a copy on several different bookshop trips (in part captivated by the astounding cover photo and a serendipitous link to something I'd read on Jezebel about androgynous models), I decided to give it a go. The story is of a child born in 1970s Labrador, his childhood and adolescence as a boy and young man (Wayne) living on the edge of the wilderness, and his move to the big city and attempt to live as his true self - both Wayne and Annabel.

This is really a book about human relationships - Treadway and Jacinta (Wayne's parents) have an unusually good relationship that turns over time; Thomasina (Jacinta's friend/neighbour) projects her longing for her dead husband and daughter; Wayne's relationship with Wally - and the awful echo that both of their dreams are damaged/delayed by shards of glass wielded by judgemental bullies. I was struck at the end of the book by the depth of characters and the focus on understanding who, how and why they are as they are - and the range of characterisation which accepts multiple identities and/or ambiguity.

Long Time, No See

So I just completed my first 'Early Reviewers' book - Long Time, No See by Dermot Healy. The blurb on the back describes him as 'the finest prose writer at work in Ireland today' and describes the book as 'A novel about community, family, love and bonds across generations, Long Time, No See is an epic in miniature, peopled by a cast of innocents and broken misfits, its still lyrical power casts a miraculous literary spell.'

The dialogue is hard to penetrate - and whereas books like Clockwork Orange or The Inheritors suck you in - I felt like this book was aiming for something more Pinter-esque with apparently unrelated and banal dialogue meant to convey emotion, drama and depth. If it wasn't for Early Reviewers, this would have been a five-page-rant book. But I persevered - and so I got to know the characters and events. It passed the time and there were moments of lyricism, but I wasn't sucked into a sense of place or time, I didn't care that much about the characters, and the plot didn't really work for me. 

If I were to recommend it to anyone, I'd go for someone who knows and likes the countryside/life in a small community, and someone who's up for a slightly slower read and happy to sift through the dialogue to appreciate the drama and character sitting behind it.

Tiger Hills

I picked up Tiger Hills because it had an attractive cover, and bought it because it had an interesting blurb, was recommended by the TV Book Club and was only £4 from the bookpeople stall at work. Twenty pages in, I thought - ugh, is this trying to be a new Suitable Boy? 

100 pages in and I was well and truly hooked - and it kept me gripped to the end. It's an Indian story of a little girl and boy who grow up together, the terrible events of their teens which wrecks their relationship for decades, and the way it reverberates through the next generation(s). Above all its a story about favourites (and presumed favourites), and about mothers.

(Miserable) Consequences

Endpaper for the Persephone edition - 'Thistle' sold in Liberty's in 1896

I finished Consequences (EM Delafield) last night - or actually about 1am this morning. I picked it up in the Lambs Conduit St shop when my book group met there, and held on to read it as part of the Persephone Reading Weekend.

What a sad book - although the blurb and introductory essay had drawn out a sense of wryness or irony in the portrayal of a conventional and comfortable family at the end of the nineteenth century, I found it profoundly sad. 

I felt for Alex, so uncomfortable in her own skin, unable to 'read' other people - except for their disappointment in her - and so ill equipped to be happy in any of the circumstances and societies she lived in. I liked the complexity of the characters - for example the layers of Alex' relationship with her sister felt human and real, with the mixture of guilt, love, frustration, incomprehension, a desire to dominate and be the best mixed with awareness and envy of Barbara's greater social skills. I'm not sure that I agree with readers who draw out lesbian subtext, to me Alex' attachment to Queenie, Mother Gertrude et al was about idolising someone she wanted to imitate, and about her desperate loneliness and response to anyone who would accept her, take an interest in her and behave as if they cared about her.

I wondered how much to read into the title and the opening (vulgar???) game of consequences - it would be easy and maybe interesting to draw out a thread in which what happens to Alex is often the result of someone else (and different people each time) taking their turn to decide what happens next. And there is a refrain through the book about waiting for things to pass and for the next thing to happen...

In terms of how it's written, I'm obviously going through an anti-narrator phase. As with a couple of late-19th/early 20th century books I've read recently, I found the authorial voice irritating as it set the context or drew out inferences. My only other criticism is that I found the wrapping up of the book a bit too quick - it felt a bit bish-bash-bosh as one thing happened after another, and then slammed into the final scenes.

Sisters (not) doing it for themselves

Yesterday's book club saw one of the best discussions (and venues) we've had in a long time - well done Rachel. We met at Persephone Books on Lamb's Conduit Street - and talked about They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple.

'Pattern of Anemones', a 1935 printed cotton crepe dress fabric 

We all thought it a good book, though didn't all like it. Geoffrey is awful and destroys Charlotte; Vera is vapid and exploits Brian - and the cruelty to children (and dog) is shocking. Lucy is good, marries a good man, and does her best to help her sisters and nieces. Although the outcomes can be predicted from early in the book, this isn't a classical tragedy - all of the characters are culpable for failing to act when they have moments of insight and self-awareness. I think it would have been better with a bit more light and nuance, and a bit less authorial commentary, but it's eminently readable and very human - we follow the narration through each character's viewpoints and gain insight and empathy for their position. And the more I reflect on the book, the more internal echos and structural patterns I see. 

And we talked - about families, telling the truth to siblings and looking after children; about problems in relationships and whether we'd express concerns to friends, or see any echoes in our own lives; and about blame and responsibility.

***
And we made it to the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone, the Lion Hunt and the amazing table of pills in the Living and Dying room. Superb.

Fictional FLOTUSes...

So here's the real and long-mulled-over post on American Wife and Primary Colours. It's the first time I've written at any length about novels since I left university, and I'm definitely out of practice.

Primary Colors - I've wanted to see the film for ever, but never tracked it down. Finally saw the book in Waterstones and lashed out.

It's a roman a clef, about Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992 - but the similarity comes through characters and situations rather than through the specific features of the plot. It's told through the voice of an idealistic 'pol' (Henry) who joins the campaign at an early stage and follows his arc from his initial inspiration by an idealised candidate (Jack) with a real love for and commitment to 'real voters', through difficult debates as he confronts the candidate's constant cheating of his wife and low skulduggery to improve his chances, and on to exhaustion and exasperation as Henry plans to leave the campaign.