Harriet Devine's Blog

Buy a Friend a Book

This is such a good idea! I saw the post about it on dovegreyreader, followed the link, and have just this minute ordered a book for my friend. The book is Love in Idleness, Charlotte Mendelson's first novel. I read her Daughters of Jerusalem a couple of years ago and loved it, and passed it to this same friend who loved it too. So hope she will like this one.

Philip Pullman on writing

My  car radio has been broken for ages and just got mended yesterday, so I had the great pleasure this morning of driving home tuned in to Radio  Four.  The programme that was playing was called Philip Pullman  and Miss Jones, though it took me a while to work this out as it had already started when I tuned in. Miss Jones (Enid) was Pullman's teacher when he was a small boy in Wales, and nearly fifty years later they are still in touch -- she is the first person he sends his books to when they are published. It was a very delightful programme, conducted by Terry Jones, who chipped in with commentary from time to time. One of the best things for me, as someone who teaches English, was to hear how much he felt he owed to her early teaching. It's always gratifying to hear people say this sort of thing. They had an interesting exchange about writing, too. Pullman was a teacher himself for many years, and talked about how much he disagreed with the methods of teaching writing that are used in schools these days. He described how, when he was in Miss Jones's class, she used to give them a subject for a story and he would just sit down and write it. Now pupils have to make a plan, do a draft which conforms to it, edit it, rewrite and so on. If he'd had to write like that, Pullman said, he would have got 2 out of 10 for his work. He spoke so well about the process of writing, which he said basically was finding things out as you go along -- writing into the dark was the phrase he used, I think. I have to say that, though the kind of writing I do is very different (academic writing, generally) this rang a bell with me. We also tend to tell students to start with a plan, but I have never been able to do that. I just start and see where it takes me. "How do I know what I think till I see what I say" was how EM Forster put it, and a very wise saying that has always seemed to me to be.  I've read and enjoyed most of Pullman's books -- His Dark Materials is astonishingly good, of course, but some of the ones for younger children are great too.  I was a Rat is a great hit with little ones.

Timmy on a quilt

 

Here is Timmy asleep this morning after heavy night out in the woods. He has rather a strange personality and may well think he is a dog, as he was born into a household where there were numbers of these. He can be quite affectionate at times, but has some peculiar habits, such as leaping out at you from behind bushes and grabbing you by the leg, and he can go from purring with pleasure at being stroked to suddenly lashing out for no apparent reason. Of course we still love him to death. He is sleeping on a rather nice old quilt, which I bought in Pennsylvania when I was teaching  briefly at a university there. We were very close to Lancaster County, where there is a thriving Amish Community and we often went over there to have a look at the place and to admire the beautiful quilts both new and old that were on sale. This one is not an Amish quilt, I don't think, as theirs are usually quite plain and geometrical (though with a wonderful use of colour). This is what's called a crazy quilt, a random set of shapes and fabrics, and from the look of the fabrics I would guess it dated from the 1920s or 30s. It is rather worn and bits of fabric are missing in places, but I keep it in my bed now as it seems a shame not to use it.

Burning Bright

I've just, for the first time in my life, joined a book club. A reading group, that is -- not one of those book clubs that seduce you into buying loads of books for a penny each and then force you to buy loads of very expensive books you don't want for ages afterwards -- I've joined plenty of those in my day but am sworn off forever now. No, this is a group of friends who meet once a month, and the book they have chosen for this month is Burning Bright. I have never read anything by Tracey Chevalier, though I did see the film of Girl with a Pearl Earring, which I'm afraid that I found rather dull despite being extremely prettily filmed and containing Colin Firth. I thought this new book sounded OK -- it's about, or partly about, William Blake and I am, after all, a Romanticist and find him interesting if somewhat incomprehensible at times. So I launched in last night and struggled through a few chapters, but so far struggled has been the operative word.  Having just finished The Tenderness of Wolves perhaps my standards have been raised unduly high. But the writing seems to me to be terribly pedestrian and I am not engaged with what I have read so far of the plot. I must try to finish it, though, so more on this once I get through to the end. Meanwhile I turned to another book, recommended by someone recently, which I thought much more promising from the little I've read so far -- Andrew Taylor's An Air That Kills . More on this later, too.

The Tenderness of Wolves

I stayed up late last night finishing this book and then could not sleep for thinking about it. I was really bowled over by it. I've read a description of it as a "literary thriller" but that hardly does justice to it. Yes, it does begin with the discovery of a murder, and yes, at the end we find out who did it. And yes, that adds to the enjoyment of the book. But what caught me and kept me enthralled was the astonishing range and depth of the characters and their complex, almost invariably unspoken, relations with each other.  Mrs Ross, who I suppose we must call the central character, narrates parts of the text, but her perspective is interwoven with those of a multiplicity of other characters including her 17 year old adopted son, who is found to have disappeared after the body is discovered and so is suspected of the murder. As we shift from character to character, each proves to have her or his hidden agenda -- feelings develop which can rarely be acted on -- discoveries are made which open new vistas -- people learn painful lessons about themselves and the world around them. But much remains concealed, even from the reader: we never learn, for example, the full story behind Mrs Ross's early life, though throughout the novel she reveals more and more about her incarceration, as a young girl, in an Edinburgh asylum. We never even learn her first name.  Nor do we (and nor does she) ever discover  anything much about the life, past and present, of the Indian guide William Parker, who leads her through the freezing wastes of the Canadian winter in search of her son and of the solution to the mystery that caused him to run away. The delicacy with which the growing relationship between these two is depicted one of the most impressive aspects of the book. Stef Penney, who has never visited Canada, evokes the place brilliantly and also the time, which is 1867. And she catches, with remarkable perceptiveness, the troubled and ambiguous relations between the Indians and the colonising whites. But what kept me awake, thinking, into the night was the admirable, though somewhat painful, way in which  she refuses to supply a happy, or even a conclusive, ending. People have certainly learned much about themselves and about those closest to them, but whether this knowledge will make much difference to their lives is a moot point. I was left suspecting that it will not, in any practical or visible sense. This sounds sad -- it is sad, in one way -- but also uplifting in some strange sense. If you have not read this book, do!

Becoming Jane

I went yesterday to see this film, which as everyone knows is a sort of fictionalised biog of Jane Austen. I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy it but I did. It's based on a book with the same title which I haven't read, though I've read several other biographies of Austen, so know enough to see more or less what is fact and what is fiction. The fact is that Austen did have some kind of flirtation with Thomas Lefroy, though no-one knows how far this went or how much her feelings were engaged by him. He was indeed penniless, he did indeed marry someone else and call his eldest daughter Jane and become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. I suppose I'll have to read the book to see if this author really did uncover some new facts. But even if he didn't, leaving aside the development of the romantic relationship, I thought the film did well in its depiction of JA -- you got a real sense of how difficult and challenging life must have been for a relatively impoverished girl with such a quick, brilliant mind and such an ironic take on the society she moved in. "A woman especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can", as JA herself wrote. Some of Austen's actual words, both from her letters and from the novels, were quite seamlessly woven into the dialogue, and the film seemed to be pretty true to many of the known facts of her family life. Whether there was really a Lady Gresham (wonderfully played by Maggie Smith) in the neighbourhood with a marriageable nephew or not I have no idea, but there certainly could have been, and the scriptwriters clearly used Lady Catherine de Bourg, Darcy's dreadful aunt in Pride and Prejudice, as a model for the character. A very pleasant way of passing a couple of hours -- recommended.

Pride and Prejudice

It is true, as I just wrote in answer to a comment on my previous post, that Jane Austen described Pride and Prejudice as "light and bright and sparkling". But that sounds rather as if she was blowing her own trumpet and in fact she was doing the opposite, in a way. What she actually said was that the novel was "rather too light and bright and sparkling", and it was after this that she started on Mansfield Park, which is a more serious work (though you might not guess this from last week's ITV version). The thing about Austen is that she was often extremely witty and her novels are delightfully funny at times, but there is always a serious agenda in there as well. In P&P it is something to do with not judging people on first impressions (in fact First Impressions was the original title). And after all I said so judgmentally about covers, here is Colin Firth smouldering away....

Repackaging Jane Austen

There's been a discussion, over on random jottings , of the recent attempt by ITV to 'make things easier for a 21st century audience' by messing around with the plots and characterisation of Jane Austen's novels. But there's also been what seems to be a similar marketing ploy -- packaging the novels with what I guess are meant to be chick-lit-type covers. Now I would be the first to encourage new readers to try Austen, but are these feeble and rather unattractive designs really going to do the trick? If you just compare them with, say, Penguin or Worlds Classics, surely the more traditional ones win every time in attractiveness and appeal? Or am I just an old fogey?

Detective Fiction

I have a real fondness for detective fiction. It is the only genre I consistently return to in the knowledge that I will almost certainly enjoy it, as long as I pick my authors wisely. I had a phase of avidly reading Patricia Cornwell but her most recent books have been disappointing and I am less keen these days on forensics and violence. I only discovered Robert Goddard about a year ago and have read several of his -- I've just finished this one, Borrowed Time, bought at Cancer Research for 25p. It's a remarkably ingenious story, with a number of astonishing twists, including one on the final page. Goddard writes very well -- intelligent, thoughtful prose -- which is important to me. He is a historian by training, so his books often, though not always, have a historical dimension. This one doesn't, in fact. It starts with a man on a walking tour who meets a beautiful woman on a remote hillside and has a brief, memorable conversation with her. A few days later, returning home, he discovers that she was brutally murdered just hours after their encounter. Unable to forget her and the powerful impression she made on him, he meets her family and becomes involved with them in various ways, all the time hoping to solve the several mysteries that surround her death. Even the arrest of a man for her murder does not satisfy his quest for understanding, and throughout the book different pieces of the puzzle emerge and apparently get solved, and each casts the dead woman in a different light, some of them very odd and disturbing. Often the whole truth seems finally to have emerged, only to be overthrown again a few pages later by some new information or revelations. Fundamentally what the book deals with is the impossibility of really knowing people, even those who seem to be closest to us.

Old Postcards

I go to France a lot, and am very fond of browsing street markets, especially ones with bric a brac and junk on sale. One thing I buy a lot is old postcards. Here are some very pretty ones -- the top left and the bottom right have delicate embroidered muslin flap which lift up to reveal a little message underneath. They are both birthday cards. The one with the fish is a card for April 1st -- on which for some mysterious reason people give each other 'poissons d'avril'. The battered looking one is an Easter card and it is made from some kind of early form of plastic, hence the damaged edges -- it is a pop-up with a pink flower revealed when you lift the flap on the front. The messages on them are often very touching -- the Easter one is dated from Toulouse, 1 April 1920. It says (and I translate!): "Dear Little Friend -- I am writing you this pretty card to prove to you that I love you -- only you -- and  as I promised before I left, I am only for you and not for the young ladies of Toulouse. Accept my darling a thousand kisses from him who thinks only of you".