The Best of 2011

So what has stayed in my head after a year of reading?

Of the fiction I read, I'm still thinking about Sue Gee's 'The Mysteries of Glass'  and Maggie O'Farrell's 'The Hand that First Held Mine' - both fabulous novels.    'Sex and Stravinsky' by Barbara Trapido is up there too with Michael Ondaatje's 'Divisadero' (though I'm still mulling that one over).

The most memorable of the light romantic reads is Linda Gillard's 'House of Silence', though it's certainly more than romantic fiction and Avril Joy's 'The Orchid House' runs it a close second. My favourite short stories were the Raymond Carver collection 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'.

I've read a lot of poetry this year and the ones that have 'stuck' are Selected Poems by Carol Ann Duffy and the collected poems of Tomas Transtromer.  Of the new collections that have come my way this year I've loved Isobel Dixon's 'The Tempest Prognosticator' and Tim Jones' 'Men Briefly Explained'.  Both would have to be up for the 'Title of the Year' prize!

Top of the list for crime fiction has to be 'Snowdrops' by A.D. Miller, the Montalbano novels of Andrea Camilleri, the latest Anne Zouroudi and, of course, Kate Atkinson.  It's been a good year for crime novels.

Best non-fiction has to be Matthew Hollis's biography of Edward Thomas (though it never went deep enough for me), and the wonderful biography of Raymond Carver, A Writer's Life, by Carol Sklenicka.

The most disappointing book of the year, for me, had to be John le Carre's 'Our Kind of Traitor', which was so structurally flawed I was consciously re-arranging it in my head as I was reading.  He's a wonderful writer, but this was way below par.  

Unfinished Reads:    I haven't managed to finish The Crimson Petal and the White, so that's my main aim for 2012.  This year has been so busy, long books have been at a disadvantage. 

Looking forward to seeing what's on my Christmas Kindle (I have a wish-list 3 pages long on Amazon!)  -  and hoping for a hardcopy of Julia Blackburn's Thin Paths in Italy.  She lives just over the border from me in Liguria, but in the same mountains and I can't wait to see what she has to say about this area.

Tanti Auguri for Christmas and New Year to everyone!   And happy reading!

The Orchid House: Avril Joy

I made a resolution quite a while ago to read (and hopefully review) one self-published e-book a month.  This month my chosen read is Avril Joy's 'The Orchid House', with its luscious cover -  positively inviting you to pick it up.  Sadly on Kindle it comes up as black and white - but maybe soon Kindle will get its act together and discover full colour!

If you love romantic fiction with a darker undertow, gardening and garden history then the Orchid House will please you.   There's a lot of (very good) sex in the book too - and it takes real talent to write about sex well.  Gardening, when you think about it, is all about sex - breeding plants, fertilising seeds, earth, nurturing fruit and flower.  I have to say that this is one of the most erotic novels I've read for a while.  From the steamy tropical ambience of Sri Lanka to the hot-houses of Trescombe in England, the reader is treated to sensual prose unfolding a plot that is both tragic and compelling.

The heroine, 27 year old Roma, has just lost her lover, who drowned  while body-surfing in rough seas off the coast of Sri Lanka.  She returns to England, unable to move on with her life, until she takes up a project, illustrating the 19th century diary of the head gardener at Trescombe - a stately home in Cornwall.  She begins to make a relationship with Will, the current head gardener, though neither of them seem able to commit to each other.  He is curiously withdrawn, and his real passion is for rare orchids, the most beautiful and mysterious of plants, and he spends a great deal of his time in the hot-houses where they grow.  But the orchid house conceals a terrible secret, and there has been another death by drowning ......

Into Roma's emotional twilight comes the sadistic Max, owner of Trescombe, and sexually irresistible to both men and women.  The whole situation becomes explosive and the lives of Roma, Will and Trescombe itself are all put in jeopardy.  But, of course, as a romance, all is healed in the end, the heroine gets the right hero and all is well.   I really didn't know how it was all going to work out and was very happy with the way the story was  concluded.

This is Avril Joy's second published book - the first was The Sweet Track, published by Flambard Press and very well received.   The story of  how it got into print and the reasons why she decided to publish her second novel herself are told on Avril's blog here.   The Orchid House nearly made it to Headline and Bloomsbury.  You have to ask yourself why they didn't take the plunge, since this is a very good read that's pleasing many people at the moment (8 four or five star reviews on amazon).   Are publishers going mad at the moment?  Or just lost in the new landscape of BookWorld?  They do seem to be turning down some very good reads. 

For me, there's only one little niggle - as with most Kindle books (even - alas - the top publishers) there are a few typos and formatting errors,  but these are easy to overlook when the story is so good.  What all e-published authors need is a good editing service at an affordable price - it's quite a different art to the usual kind of copy-editing.  Having fallen foul of the conversion process myself, I'd be first in the queue to sign up!


Avril talks about her life as a writer in prison 'Twenty Five Years Behind Bars',  and her writing, over on the Authors Electric Blogspot. 

Helen Rappaport: Magnificent Obsession

The Death that Changed the Monarchy

I'm not a Royalist, in fact I'm a rabid Republican (you can always get rid of a President, royalty's a bit more tricky)  and in 1792 I would probably have been out on the streets of Paris cheering the tumbrils - though I like to think I might have been a bit more humanitarian!  So, my reading of Helen Rappaport's beautifully written book on Victoria and Albert, 'Magnificent Obsession', has been a little biased.  


Victoria is revealed as a spoilt and self-obsessed young woman who retreated into hysterical grief on the death of her husband at the age of 42, completely neglecting her children and her role as head of state.  This, to me, is not magnificent - it's appalling that she was allowed to get away with it.  But, under the protocols of the time, only Albert had been in a position to put limits on her behaviour.  

He wrote Victoria a letter shortly before he died, when she was grieving hysterically for her mother (an ominous precursor of what was to follow),  exhorting her  to 'try to be less occupied with yourself and your own feelings'..... Pain was 'chiefly felt by dwelling on it and can thereby be heightened to an unbearable extent....   this is not hard philosophy, but common sense supported by common and general experience. If you will take increased interest in things unconnected with personal feelings, you will find the task much lightened of governing those feelings in general which you state to be your great difficulty in life.'

Her children, the youngest only 3, had their lives plunged into gloom by Victoria's obsessive mourning, forbidden to play with friends or go to parties or other social occasions.  Her eldest son, Bertie, was rejected for being the cause - in her eyes - of Albert's demise.   Victoria's children gave her no comfort.   She told a visitor that 'she had never taken pleasure in the society of her children as most mothers did.'  Albert had been her entire world.

The book focuses on what Victoria's retreat from public life did to the politics and economy of the country -  it is a fascinating study of how the private behaviour of a head of state can have far-reaching effects on the public health of the country.   Her obstinate refusal to 'do her job' did not make her, or her family, popular, especially when she expected Parliament to dig deep into its pockets to fund her growing brood.


I shared the country's outrage when Parliament was asked to vote £100,000 a year out of tax revenue to fund Bertie and his Danish wife Alex, in a life of luxury and idleness, at a time when a skilled labourer might earn 30s a week, a housemaid £12 a year, and even a bank clerk only around £90 per annum.  There were people starving in Lancashire at the time due to a shortage of cotton caused by war in America, but Victoria, locked into her grief, was oblivious to anything happening outside her darkened room.

She was, at the time, paying £200,000 for the mausoleum at Frogmore and complaining that English, instead of German, was being spoken too often at court.  Her insistence on finding all her children German wives and husbands, was to have lasting consequences for Britain.  Kaiser Fritz, her favourite, in particular, though Victoria never lived to see the result of her dynastic manouevres.

Helen Rappaport writes lucidly and impartially on Victoria's  great obsession, and brings the woman vividly alive, as well as making very clear just how much Albert did for Britain and how much we lost when he died.  It's a book I'm enjoying very much.

Stanley Plumly: Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me

Stanley Plumley sounds more like a Yorkshire shop-keeper than an American poet, but names are deceptive. He’s one of their best. Plumley is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and published by CCC - an imprint of HarperCollins publishing. Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me is a collection of new and selected dating from 1970 to 2000. It’s arranged in reverse chronological order because the publishers want you to read from the new poems back to the ones he started out with. I tried to read it like that, but found myself giving up and going to the back of the book, reading through his life from young man to old man (he was born in 1939). My favourite poems are from the early period - his first collection ‘In the Outer Dark’.

Many of the poems are autobiographical - which is probably why it makes more sense to start at the beginning. His relationship with his mother is told in personal, affectionate detail as in ‘My Mother’s Feet’

                 ‘How no shoe fit them,
and how she used to prop them,
having dressed for bed,
letting the fire in the coal stove blue

and blink out, falling asleep in her chair.
How she bathed and dried them, night after night,
and rubbed their soreness like an intimacy.
How she let the fire pull her soft body through them.’


his alcoholic father,

‘I watched you humble a man in a fight once -
he went down like an animal whose spirit
world has suddenly collapsed and all that’s left
in the wounded moment after is not quite
animal nor man. He was big, which made
his humility that much larger, and there
was blood but so little that it seemed less like
a fight than a conversion. You had his right
arm at the wrist in your right hand and simply
turned him down onto the floor, which stank of wear
and sawdust. I’d seen you break the back of wood
like that. The man wept, he was drunk, you were drunk
and at the same time sober. He was my size
now. And in his eyes I could see his children .......’

Many of the poems are personal observations of the relationships around him - trying to make sense of them.

‘People are standing, as if out of the rain,
holding on. For the last two blocks
the woman across the aisle has wept
quietly into her hands, the whole
of her upper body nodding, keeping time.
The bus is slow enough you can hear,
inside your head, the traffic within
traffic, like another talk.’

There are prose poems, and beautiful exercises in observation, such as ‘In Answer to Amy’s Question What’s a Pickerel’

‘Pickerel have infinite, small bones, and skins
of glass and black ground glass, and though small for pike
are no less wall-eyed and their eyes like bone.
Are fierce for their size, and when they flare
at the surface resemble drowning birds, .......

But through all of it, the poet’s voice, with a quiet tone of enquiry and exploration, is steady and consistent and extraordinarily likeable. My favourite poem, even after I’d read the whole collection, remains the title poem ‘Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me’.

We lie in that other darkness, ourselves.
There is less than the width of my left hand
between us. I can barely breathe,
but the light breathes easily,
wind on water across our two still bodies.

I cannot even turn to see him.
I would not touch him. Nor would I lift
my arm into the crescent of a moon.
(There is no star in the sky of this room,
only the light fashioning fish along the walls.
They swim and swallow one another.)

I dream we lie under water,
caught in our own sure drift.
A window, white shadow, trembles over us.
Light breaks into a moving circle.
He would not speak and I would not touch him.

It is an ocean under here.
Whatever two we were, we become
our falling body one breath. Night lies down
at the sleeping center - no fish, no shadow,
no single, turning light. And I would not touch him
who lies deeper in the drifting dark than life.

E-Book - Wendy Robertson; Paulie's Web

I’m pledged to read one E-published book a month and this time it’s Wendy Robertson’s novel ‘Paulie’s Web’.  Wendy is a much-published author with more than 25 titles on the bookshelves.  Paulie’s Web is the novel her publishers didn’t want because they thought it too ‘difficult’ for her readership because it’s about women in prison and the challenges they face when released.  It came from several years spent working as a writer in prisons, an experience Wendy describes as ‘challenging and life-changing.’  

‘It has taken me ten years to digest the extremities of my experience in prison,’ Wendy says, ‘and write my novel as true fiction in a way that pays tribute to the many  women I met while working there. If, by the by, it goes some way to cracking the absurd stereotypes of women in prison it will be an extra delight.  While there are dark passages here I make no apologies for the ultimately optimistic tone of this story which is a true reflection of the humour, stoicism and kindness that I was witness to in my prison experience.’

The novel tells the story of 5 women locked in the same white van to be taken off to the remand centre.  One of them, Paulie, has been wrongly convicted and when she’s released, 6 years later, she’s determined to track down the other women and find out what’s happened to them. 

Paulie is a great character.  Wendy says that ‘If you are interested in the experiences of people on the margins of our comfortable lives, you will like Paulie! She is great – clever, resourceful and capable of surviving the hardest challenges that life throws up at her.’  In the prison, Paulie has become a writer and the women’s stories are interspersed with extracts from Paulie’s notebook. 

This is an honest novel - neither a misery memoir - which so many prison books are - or a romanticised version of unimaginably hard lives.  It offers a picture of a sector of society most of us know nothing of - except what we read in the papers.  I grew to love some of the characters - particularly Queenie, the elderly schizophrenic given to wandering and having visions, locked up in prison (like so many people with mental health issues) because there’s nowhere else to go.

There’s an underlying message in the book - Paulie finds redemption through the prison education system - through literature.  Wendy intended the novel to confront the issues of  ‘justice and injustice in ordinary people’s lives’, but it does more than that.

Wendy is an expert story-teller and wordsmith and Paulie’s Web is a delight to read, even though the subject matter is dark.  Hanging and flogging members of the House of Commons should be made to read it.




Wendy has an excellent blog on www.lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com

If you're interested in E-books and authors doing it for themselves, check out www.authorselectric.blogspot.com
           

Now All Roads Lead to France: Matthew Hollis

I'm always happy when I see a biography of a poet written by a poet.   Matthew Hollis is one of the 'poetry whizz-kids' in Britain - someone who has won all the prizes going and has now ventured into biography with this study of Edward Thomas.

It's one of the new breed of biography - that tackles one aspect or one period of a life rather than ploughing through the whole thing.  This one is very cleverly done.  Edward Thomas's whole life is reflected and discussed in consideration of the most important five years of his life - the years just before his death, when he began to write poetry rather than prose.

Central to the story is Thomas's meeting with Robert Frost who had sold up all his possessions and come to England in a gamble to launch his own career as a poet, feeling overlooked in America.  For 5 years the two men talked, corresponded, shared their work and encouraged each other.  There are echoes of their conversations in each other's poetry - compare Thomas's 'The Signpost' with Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'.  The book is very good on their relationship.  But I don't always agree with Matthew Hollis's analysis of the poems.

In the background is the (one can't help but feel) tragic relationship between Edward Thomas and his wife Helen.  The youthful marriage he came to regret so much that he sometimes treated his wife with considerable emotional cruelty, and which seems to have precipitated  long episodes of depression.   Thomas had love affairs with 3 other women (one a very young girl) which may or may not have been platonic, but all deeply troubling to his wife.  One feels pity on both sides.

There is always a narrative hook at the end of a life abruptly terminated.  The question mark -  what would he have written/done/said if he had lived beyond the war?  We can't know.   The question mark hovers in the concluding lines of his own poems and is one reason we are so drawn to them - the other reason is the poignancy of the foreshadowing - the poet's own haunting uncertainty - matched with our own reading of the poems with the knowledge of how the story really ended.

Edward Thomas's poetry is better, much better, than I remembered from reading it years ago.  Let's pass over the much quoted Adlestrop, and his poem 'To Helen' (the meaning of which changes once you know the background).    Thomas's collected poems are available to download in a number of formats, free, at the Gutenburg Project.   Read Bright Clouds, The Long Small Room, Liberty, It Rains, In Memoriam,  Lights Out (written after he went to France, believing he would die), There's Nothing Like the Sun, and the poem that he wrote last to finish the collection 'Words'.  Then read the biography.

Lights Out (excerpt)

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book,
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

Under Storm's Wing: Edward Thomas

A Memoir of a life with Edward Thomas
By
Helen and Myfanwy Thomas

I’ve been reading this as an introduction and another perspective to Now All Roads Lead to France - Matthew Hollis’s account of the last 5 years of Edward Thomas’s life, when he began to write poetry seriously and enlisted in the war that was to kill him with such casual cruelty.

Helen Thomas’s memoir is a personal and passionate account of her relationship with the poet - how they met as teenagers, and became lovers in spite of their parents’ disapproval.  Her frank accounts of their youthful, innocent love making in the open air are quite beautiful, marking her out as a writer of talent in her own right.

They married (secretly) while Edward was still at Oxford, because she was pregnant and, although she was happy to live in a free relationship, Edward wanted to protect her reputation.  It was hard for the two young people.  Edward Thomas found it difficult to get enough free-lance writing work as an essayist, reviewer and hack biographer.  He suffered from depression and often had to go away and live by himself, leaving Helen to cope with the children alone.

 He fell in love with other women, or they fell in love with him - Eleanor Farjeon was one - and, although Helen skims over this - it must have been hard for her to cope with.  Behind her careful sentences there lurks the suspicion that there were times when ET wished that he was free and single and not burdened with the task of supporting a wife and three children. But Helen’s account asserts that they loved each other profoundly and this held them together, like trees strongly rooted in the ground, whatever storms were blowing in the branches. 

Helen writes of ET’s friendship with Robert Frost, who encouraged him to write poetry seriously - though it was never commercially published while he was alive.  The good thing about this edition (bought second hand)  is that some of the letters between ET and Robert Frost are included in a separate section.

The poem ‘To Helen’ was, apparently, written for her and given to her the night Edward Thomas left for France.  He died, not in action, but quietly smoking his pipe outside the observation post, when a shell whistled past him so closely, the blast stopped his heart.

Now to read Matthew Hollis’s biography which, I suspect, since both Helen and her children are long dead, may tell a slightly different story.