The Founding: Cynthia Harrod Eagles - Morland Dynasty #1

The Founding

by Cynthia Harrod Eagles

If you like Philippa Gregory, you'll love this.  I read another writer's blog (Random Jottings - The End of a Dynasty?)  recently lamenting that Cynthia Harrod Eagles' publishers had 'dropped' her because sales of her cult historical novels weren't as high as they would have liked.  The blogger raved about the Morland Dynasty and the Kirov novels (the latter set in Russia) and I was intrigued.  Here was a writer with a long track record of rave-reviewed historical fiction and I'd never stumbled on her before.  Why?  Under-promotion, the blogger suggested - all the publisher's fault.  So I hopped over to Amazon and downloaded the first of the Morland Dynasty saga - The Founding - set in the 15th century world of Richard III, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret of Anjou and the Wars of the Roses - Lancaster and York.

I was immediately gripped by the central character - Eleanor Courtenay, impoverished ward of Lord Edmund Beaufort (grandson of John of Gaunt) - who is sold off in marriage to a wealthy Yorkshire sheep farmer and wool merchant who wants to trade his money for a bit of spit-and-polish and some aristocratic influence.  The gently born and educated Eleanor is transported to a filthy northern farmhouse and bears four children in three years.  Eleanor's courage and sheer bloody-mindedness win in the end, but the influential connection she brings with her also carries obligations that are not always comfortable.  She and her husband find themselves caught up in the civil war and torn between allegiance to the Lancastrian Beauforts or to Richard of York.  Eleanor's private loyalties prove costly.

It's been a very good read with accurate historical detail - a wonderful insight into the way women had to live - enduring superstition and prejudice and almost continual child-bearing.  I also liked the way that Eleanor's character developed through the book as she aged and was changed by circumstance. I'm off now to down-load the next book, The Dark Rose, to follow the fortunes of Eleanor's grandchildren.  There are 35 books altogether, bringing the family's fortunes up to the present day, so I expect to have to pick and choose a bit, but there are some readers who have read every one and are totally addicted!

I might also follow Random Jottings' suggestion and write to the the publishers to protest about their actions - it's time Readers started to make publishers aware of what they want.

You can get The Founding in paperback second hand for 1p or on Kindle for £4.72.

Orkney: Amy Sackville

Literary Fiction

After reading Peter May's dark thrillers set in the Hebrides, I was definitely in the mood for more about remote Scottish islands.  I bought Amy Sackville's Orkney a while ago, but (after one or two false starts) I hadn't got round to reading it.  The night of the Great Storm over Britain definitely provided the right atmosphere - the TV screens, even in Italy, were filled with images of surging tides and wild winds.

I loved Amy's first book, The Still Point, and really rate her writing - poetic, atmospheric prose of the kind that isn't fashionable in main-stream publishing these days.  Fortunately Amy's published by Granta who like the experimental and unashamedly 'literary'.

Orkney has no plot, only 2 main characters (a few walk-on parts) and feels as though it's written in real time.  But the prose compels and draws you in the further and further you go - rather like the sea around the island.

Richard, an elderly academic, has married one of his students after a very short acquaintance.  She has no family he is aware of and no friends.  But we only have Richard's word for that - he is obsessed with her and can't see anything very clearly outside what his young wife calls 'the frame' he has drawn around her.  In Richard's first person journal, her name is never mentioned.  She has no identity other than the one he creates for her.

Richard has brought her for a honeymoon on the Isle of Orkney - to a remote cottage where he is going to make endless love to his wife and work on his book about mythologies.  They are his speciality - particularly where they relate to women:

'Transformations, obsessions, seductions;  succubi and incubi;  entrapments and escapes . . . Curses and cures.  Folk tales and fairy tales retold.  And all the attendant uncertainties, anxieties and aporia. Do I wake or sleep? Fantasy and phantasm.  Beautiful terrible women. Vulnerable lonely cursed women.  Strange and powerful women.  It's an old obsession.'

And it's one that should worry his wife.  Everyday she goes to sit on the beach to watch the sea.  And Richard watches her from inside the window.

'She's staring at the sea now.  My young wife.  There she stands on the barren beach, all wrapped up in her long green coat, among the scuttle and clatter of pebbles and crabs.'

Gradually more information about her past emerges - her father had disappeared when she was a young child - perhaps lost at sea.  She is fascinated by tales of Selkies and Finfolk - men and women who come from the sea to land, but must always go back again.  She can't swim and dreams of drowning, night after night.  The novel creates a real intensity and claustrophobia as the relationship between the two is exposed within the four walls of their tiny cottage buffeted by wild Atlantic gales.

'I lay awake for hours, on my back, listening, eyes open or closed, I could not tell, an equal darkness within and without.  Our bed a berth in a boat, below deck, the sea pressing up at the window and rolling and moiling below us;  the fish swimming by the glass indifferent;  tiny shrimp coiling and stretching in meaningless Morse code;  all the sightless, glowing life of the ocean floating past. A Leviathan's eye, filling the portholes, peering in.'

I won't spoil it by writing about the ending, but I'm still speculating about just how reliable Richard is as a narrator - he has a tendency to see everything one way and can't be contradicted.  The clues to what is happening are in the fairy tales, re-told by firelight, the myths and superstitions that inhabit the abandoned hearths of the island.

Orkney
by Amy Sackville
Published by Granta

River of Shadows and Blood Sisters - Two Italian Thrillers

River of Shadows

by Valerio Varesi

This novel is set on the foggy plain of the Po, and the river is rising after intense rain - the wide, placid summer river becoming a winter monster of churning currents and relentless spread. In the darkness, a barge casts off from its mooring mysteriously on the flood tide and no one knows if the owner, Tonna, is on board.  At the same time there's an apparent suicide leap from the window of a local hospital.

Commissario Soneri is called in to investigate.  He finds himself unraveling a nightmare that involves conflicts between Communist and Fascist that date back to the atrocities of World War 2, but which still divide parts of Italy today.  How can the Commissario know who is telling the truth, while avoiding the distractions of local food and wine and his barrister girlfriend, Angela, who likes high-risk sexual encounters in public places?  There's a slightly comic undertow to the darkness of the main plot.

The book is beautifully written, the characters and the location vivid and real, and the dialogue pitch-perfect.  I'm not sure that I completely understand the fine details of the plot yet, but the complex political nature of Italian daily life is one hundred per cent true to what I see around me.  

Top quality crime fiction - and I've just downloaded the next in the series.  At £2.57 for the Kindle edition it's cheap as chips!

Blood Sisters

by Alessandro Perissinotto

I'm a great fan of the Montalbano novels, also Donna Leon, and always on the lookout for a new Italian thriller writer to match my favourite locations with some good suspense.

This book was recommended by a friend and it's an enjoyable read with a good protagonist. Anna Pavesi is a psychologist by profession, newly separated from her husband and rather short of money. Having successfully tracked down the missing son of a rich Milanese, Anna finds herself being persuaded to look for a missing body. It's set in Bergamo and Milan, on the foggy plain of the river Po - an area I know well, having driven across it through fog and freezing fog many times! It adds considerable atmosphere to the book. 

There are some interesting characters in this novel and a couple of nice twists at the end. It didn't have quite enough edge for me and either the writing, or the translation, seemed to lack sparkle. But I would definitely read another of his novels, though at over £5.00 for a Kindle edition it's not a cheap read.

The Blackhouse, by Peter May

The Blackhouse,

by Peter May

Published by Quercus


This is the first part of the Lewis Trilogy and the only one I've read so far, though I have down-loaded the others.  The Blackhouse is Tartan Noir - very, very Noir, so be prepared for some gruesome twists and turns.  A man is discovered hanged and mutilated in a boat shed at a small village on the Isle of Lewis.  Fin Macleod is sent to investigate, partly because it's a copy-killing of a murder he's been investigating in Edinburgh, and partly because Crobost is his home village.  The timing is bad - Fin is grieving for his young son, killed in an accident, and for the marriage that couldn't survive the loss.

Fin has rarely been back to his roots, for reasons that gradually become very clear in the novel.  But, as he investigates the brutal murder, he has to confront the fall-out from things that happened in his childhood - a youthful obsession with Marsaili, now married to his old friend Artair - and the strange events that happened on a coming-of-age trip to cull the 'guga' on a remote rocky island - events that have had long-reaching consequences.

The claustrophobic nature of the Hebridean island is perfectly evoked in the novel - you can smell the peat and feel the constant Atlantic wind tugging at your hair.  The roots of the crime lie in the nature of the island community, with its gossiping tongues and bleak Calvinist values, as well as strong codes of honour that protect both the innocent and the guilty.

Peter May is a Scottish author, born in Glasgow, who has written literally hundreds of television plays and episodes for series and also has a dozen best-selling thrillers on the shelves as well.  That kind of experience shows in the taut dialogue and the spare writing - not a wasted word. Definitely a must-read!

The Blackhouse, Peter May, Quercus

Brian Moore by Patricia Craig

Brian Moore
by Patricia Craig
Published by Bloomsbury

The first adult book I ever read, (apart from classics), was Brian Moore's Feast of Lupercal when I was 12 years old.  It was my mother's library book and I read it secretly, the explicit sexual content giving me hot flushes.  But apart from the thrill of the illicit, I was aware even then of the quality of the prose.  It was set in a school and schools and school-masters were familiar territories.  The novel laid bare their secret lives. Even to an innocent 12 year old (and I was) the atmosphere of claustrophobia, thwarted lust and the humiliation of sexual inadequacy, was vividly conveyed.

After that I read quite a few of his novels, though they were all so different from one another that I didn't always like them.  The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Black Robe, The Temptation of Eileen Hughes were the ones I favoured, but my absolute favourite by a  mile was I am Mary Dunne, which I still think is a masterpiece.  A day in the life of a pre-menstrual, unstable woman who isn't sure who she is - at the time I read it, the psychological profile fitted me like a glove. I couldn't believe it had been written by a man.

So I pounced on this biography of Brian Moore in a second hand shop, wondering why I hadn't noticed its publication.  Published by Bloomsbury, written by a respected journalist and editor, it held out high hopes which were quickly dashed.   How could a respectable publisher like Bloomsbury allow such a badly edited book?  The prose inclines to the academic, serious in tone, but contains phrases such as 'After the exhibitions  and gold-medals and what-not obtained during his schooldays ....'  'Socially, her background seems a bit of a hotch-potch . . .' etc etc.    

The first couple of chapters are an impenetrable maze of three (or was it four?) generations of Brian's family tree before he was born.  The families are large and many of the names are the same or very similar. Confusion had set in before the end of chapter one, but I pressed on.  The justification for this seemed to be that Brian drew heavily on his family for the characters in his novels, so I would need this information later on when the novels came up for discussion.  That didn't seem to happen.

I did learn more about Brian Moore's life and his complicated family politics, but never felt that Patricia Craig got close to his essential character, even though she knew him and he had given her hours of interviews before he died. He had a triple identity - Northern Irish Catholic, Canadian citizen, but living in America. Mind-boggling! She never gets to the heart of his novels quite, and this is a pity - I wanted to know and that's why I carried on reading. Most of the biography is concerned with Brian up to middle age - the last half of his life seems to be crammed into the final chapters of the book in something of a hurry, yet some of his later books are his most important. It was also the period when he was living shoulder to shoulder with members of the 'jet-set' - there's a brief glimpse of Bianca Jagger and David Hockney dropping in for an impromptu party, and a dinner with Hitchcock, but I'd have liked more.

She also skipped lightly over the period when he wrote about a dozen best-selling thrillers (under a pseudonym) in order to pay the bills and buy time to write the serious novels.  This was something I didn't know about and it must surely have been very important in the process of learning his craft.

The biography also infuriated me by referring to events before they'd actually occurred, giving vital information which, when the event did happen I had to skip backwards to re-read. Sometimes events weren't referred to at all until they were long-gone.  I only discovered that Brian had been a creative writing fellow at UCLA for 17 years, when his letter of resignation was referred to.  Time-hopping, I believe, is something the biographer should try to avoid for the sake of clarity.

This book is such a lost opportunity - a fascinating subject and one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century.  The author had all the material -  it just needed a good editor!

Note to self - must read The Emperor of Ice Cream.......

Opened Ground: Seamus Heaney

Opened Ground:  Poems 1966-1996

Seamus Heaney

Faber and Faber

I love Seamus Heaney's poetry and I have a few scattered collections - Stations, Death of a Naturalist - but I've recently treated myself to this because it covers most of Seamus' collections, from the first in 1966  right up to The Spirit Level in 1996.  This gives a wonderful overview of the development of his work and it also includes his Nobel lecture 'Crediting Poetry'.

Seamus chose the poems to be included himself, weeding out ones he was no longer happy with and some of the poems were re-written, though the alterations are so minor it's difficult to find any differences.

All my favourites are there - The Forge, Digging, The Barn, Churning Day, and his prose poem The Stations of the West, which describes how he was sent to the Gaeltacht to learn Gaelic and hoped, perhaps, to learn something of the Celtic mysteries.  These visions are denied the child, but there are other kinds of revelation. It ends:

'Neither did any gift of tongues descend in my days in that upper room when all around me seemed to prophesy.  But still I would recall the stations of the west, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its definition over Ranna-fast and Errigal, Annaghry and Kincasslagh;  names portable as altar stones, unleavened elements.'

Other favourites are the poems about his childhood home, Mossbawn, political poems such as The Ministry of Fear, Oysters, The Skunk - his erotic poem to his wife, peeling potatoes with Mary Heaney in 'Clearances', then the beautiful Postscript, and finally Song -

'There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.'

Yes, that's it exactly - that's what the poetry does. Words like 'big, soft buffetings' that come at you sideways 'And catch the heart off guard and blow it open'.

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996
Seamus Heaney
Faber and Faber

The Dream, by Sophie Nicholls

The Dream

by Sophie Nicholls
Everyday Magic #2

Romantic Fiction
My E-book of the Month

I read Sophie Nicholls first novel, The Dress, and loved it (see review here).  So I pounced on the sequel, but with a little apprehension – I’ve read so many sequels that were a let-down.  But The Dream didn’t disappoint. Iranian Fabbia and her half-Italian daughter Ella still had a lot of story to tell, and I finally got to meet the mysterious Maadar-Bozorg.

The Dress told the story of Fabbia and Ella’s arrival in northern city of York and Fabbia’s struggle to open a vintage dress shop and make a living for herself and her daughter.  It also described the teenage Ella’s quest to find an identity for herself – and the difficulties of fitting in to the close-knit northern community – with an Iranian mother and an Italian father who died before Ella was born, it was never going to be easy.  There are also family secrets that Ella hasn’t been told and she has never met Maadar-Bozorg, the woman who brought her mother up in Tehran.

As the sequel opens, Ella has achieved her dream of running a bookshop and becoming an author; she’s married to Billy and has a lovely 2 year old daughter Grace.  Everything should be perfect, shouldn’t it?  But life running a business, looking after a child, and trying to write a book, isn’t easy.

Ella is still troubled by ‘The Signals’ – her strange flashes of what used to be called ‘second sight’ –  and they sometimes frighten her. But then a confused young woman called Bryony walks into the bookshop, picks up a book called Miss Mary’s Book of Dreams and things begin to change.

Fabbia is living in California with David, the doctor she met at the end of the first novel, and though her relationship is going well and her vintage clothing business is thriving, there’s something missing.  She senses that Ella is in trouble and doesn’t know what to do.

Sophie Nicholls is a published poet as well as a novelist and the writing is beautiful.  It reads as effortlessly as any romance should, but it skates lightly over deeper water – so much wisdom and knowledge was thrown out as superstition and paganism – women were burned alive for knowing how to cure people with herbs – we have been taught not to listen to our ‘intuition’ but to put our trust solely in science – as a result we have lost many of the skills we need to survive.  In this novel, Ella and Fabbia learn to trust their intuitions in order to make sense of their lives.

This is a lovely ‘feel-good’ read, which will probably be a best-seller like it's predecessor.  Perfect for an afternoon when you're feeling a bit depressed and need cheering up.  Now I’m waiting for number three in the trilogy!

The Dream by Sophie Nicholls