Harriet Devine's Blog

Lace in a Frame

I bought this very pretty piece of old lace in a market in south west France last year. It cost one euro. Somebody's granny probably made it. I liked it so much that I put it in a frame, where it looks very good on a background of black paper. You can also see a ghostly image of me in this picture, reflected in the glass -- I couldn't find a way to take the photo without having to appear in it myself! and at the top you can also see a bit of my dining-room chandelier (Homebase, but very convincingly antique looking).

Happy Ever After

After I blogged recently about Adele Geras' Apricots at Midnight, she very kindly sent me another of her books, Happy Ever After. I'm so glad she did, as I've had a really enjoyable time reading it. While Apricots is aimed at younger readers, this one is intended for what we call these days 'young adults'.

One important pre-requisite for a writer is having really good ideas, and Adele seems to have this in abundance. Happy Ever After is a collection of three stories, each of which could be read separately, but they are linked in two ways, by characters and by theme. The three stories all concern the same three girls, Megan, Alice and Bella, but each story is narrated by a different girl, whose story it is. Not only this, but also each of the three stories, though set in the mid-20th-century, is based on a traditional fairy tale. So Megan's story is an update of Rapunzel, Alice's of Sleeping Beauty, and Bella's of Snow White. But this is so cleverly done that it never seems crude or intrusive. So, in Megan's story, the three girls are at boarding school and sharing a room at the top of a tower. The school is also Megan's home, as she is an orphan and has been adopted by the (slightly witch-like) schoolteacher Dorothy. A young man, Simon, comes to work at the school, falls in love with Megan, and climbs up to her room via scaffolding which has been put up against the wall. But Dorothy has also fallen for Simon, and when she discovers the relationship she drives him away in a fury. Megan runs away to join him, but ends up lonely in another tower-like room in London while Simon works every day. She cuts off her long golden hair and eventually, unhappily, returns to school while Simon, hurt, goes off to America, possibly forever. Beautiful, delicate Alice lives in a grand mansion surrounded by a glorious rose garden. She has a  number of eccentric aunts and great aunts, who have all given her very special presents at her christening. But her unpleasant great-aunt Violette arrives from Paris and, furious at not having been invited, wishes ill on her, to befall on her 18th birthday. And sure enough, at her birthday ball, she suffers a horrendous attack and takes to her bed, refusing to speak or move, much to the distress of her parents. Bella, whose mother has died when she was a baby, has a bad relationship with her stepmother. She leaves home during the summer holidays and moves into a house in London inhabited by the seven members of a band, whose singer she becomes.  Several curious and worrying incidents occur which endanger her life, and she suspects her stepmother may in some way be responsible though she can't prove it. Of course this book is called Happy Ever After, so you may guess that these girls' stories will turn out alright in the end. They are such fun to read! As they stand up perfectly well in their own right, but have a huge added charm in that you keep recognising elements which link up with the original fairy tales, often used with great ingenuity and wit.

Oscar and Lucinda -- the movie!

Having read and loved and blogged about the book, I had to get hold of the DVD of the film. I really thought I could not possibly enjoy it, but I was surprised to find I did. It's a somewhat curious experience when one is fresh from the extraordinary fullness and richness of the novel -- in the film, everything moves so fast and after just over an hour you suddenly realise you've almost reached the end of the story. But that being said, it is extremely true to the heart of the novel, and a very well-made film. It was directed by the distinguished Australian director Gillian Armstrong (who also made Charlotte Grey, Little Women, and My Brilliant Career among many others) and stars, as you can see from the picture, Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes. Blanchett is a fantastic actress, incredibly versatile, so it was no surprise to find her so good in this. But I have never been all that keen on Fiennes and was really pleasantly surprised at how brilliantly he captured the innocence and sweetness of Oscar. I have always thought him rather a cold actor, but in this he was not so at all.  The whole cast is excellent -- I particularly liked Clive Russell as Oscar's father, a wonderful, tragic figure in the novel and one who appears only very briefly in the film. The scene where he turns up on the ship just as Oscar is leaving for Australia and has the whole surrounding crowd down on their knees when he prays was really moving. The film is beautifully shot, and makes a good job of convincing you you are in 1840s Australia.  Definitely one to watch, if you haven't already.

Sense and Sensibility

It's been Jane Austen all the way this week -- Emma with the 3rd years on Monday, Sense and Sensibility with the 2nd years yesterday. Different context, different group, but another lively discussion. This 2nd year group have been working their way forward chronologically since the beginning of the academic year -- last semester it was the 18th century, this semester it's the Romantic period, roughly 1789-1836. They've been doing mostly poetry and fiction, with a little drama and non-fiction thrown in. So they've read a few 18th century novels -- Robinson Crusoe, Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Fanny Burney's Evelina, to be exact. They struggled a bit with all of them -- the language and style seemed to them very archaic. Everyone agreed yesterday that Austen was so much easier to read, and seemed so modern in comparison. Interesting, and obviously true, even though S&S was probably written in the mid-1790s and so more or less contemporary with Fanny Burney's novel. It was the first novel Austen published, though it didn't appear till 1811.
It was interesting to hear everyone's responses to the two sisters in the novel. Nobody was all that keen on Elinor, who they thought was too cold and repressed. And indeed, though Austen does make it clear that Elinor has strong feelings -- she is privately in agony when Lucy Steele tells her that she is secretly engaged to Edward Ferrars, who Elinor is in love with and has supposed, or hoped, loves her in return -- she never shows them. My students thought that anyone who could keep their suffering so firmly under wraps probably wasn't suffering all that much anyway. I was quite surprised, though, to find that many of them did not really like Marianne all that much either! I have always been very fond of Marianne -- I know she has to learn to be a bit more self controlled, but she is so warm and sweet and responsive to the world around her. But quite a few of my students seemed rather shocked by her public displays of emotion.

I must admit that though I have trouble deciding what is my favourite Austen novel, I know for sure that it isn't this one. Though it has many great things in it, it doesn't quite work for me for some reason.

Oscar and Lucinda

I have just finished reading this book -- not before time, you might think, as it won the Booker Prize in 1988. I've always known of it, heard people raving about it, but for some reason never really fancied it myself. Goodness knows why not -- I never really troubled to find out all that much about it, so had no grounds for judging. I picked up a copy in December at our local school fair and it fell into my hands before Easter when I was looking for books to take to France. I'd been glutting myself on crime fiction and thought it was time for a change, so decided to give it a go. And my goodness, am I pleased I did. It is, I think, one of the most remarkable books I have ever read, and I have read a few. It's really hard to find things to say about it which even get close to giving an idea of why this should be. It's a huge book, for one thing -- huge in scope, huge in ideas -- an epic. It is bursting with life and vitality. It is totally unpredictable and totally convincing. Everything about it, from the plot to the characters to the language, seems fresh and new. It is funny and it is tragic, it's both painful and uplifting. It tells the story of two bizarre, eccentric, damaged people: Oscar Hopkins, born an Evangelical, converted to Anglicanism, educated at Oxford, a compulsive gambler, tall and thin as a scarecrow, a sort of holy innocent, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an orphaned heiress who buys a glass factory, gambles obsessively, and struggles to find her way as a woman in the harsh world of mid-19th-century Sydney. They meet. They hate each other. They fall in love and live together in chastity. They make a bet -- Lucinda's glass works will construct a church made entirely of glass, and Oscar will accompany it to a remote area in the outback. If it reaches its destination, she will give him her entire fortune. The last part of the book tells the story of Oscar's journey into the heart of darkness. More I must not say -- the ending took me by surprise and if you have not read it it will do the same for you. A film was made of it which I haven't seen though I have just ordered it -- I'm afraid it will be a disappointment. I've also just found a great review of the book, by Angela Carter, dating from 1998, which I enjoyed almost as much as the book itself. She was another great writer, and is much missed.

Emma

I'm teaching a 'Special Author' module this semester on Jane Austen. It's coming to an end now, and yesterday we were looking at Emma. It was an unusually lively seminar, everyone very engaged with the discussion. There was some division of opinion about Emma herself, and several students said they had never really warmed to her. This is not really a surprise -- Austen herself said, when she was starting the book, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like".  People find her  snobbish, for one thing --  and, by today's standards, perhaps she is.  But the main sources of  disquiet seemed to be the way she manipulates Harriet into refusing Robert Martin's proposal, and above all her rudeness to Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic. Of course these are here so she can learn from them, and certainly she does appear to do so. But a few students doubted if she would ever really stop being nosy and high-handed, and also wondered if she really was in love with Mr Knightly or just making sure she kept her high status in Highbury. This last bit is actually what some critics have said about the book. Other things they have said include the suggestion that Emma's interest in Harriet Smith has a lesbian element, and that Mr Woodhouse is suffering from syphilis. Yes, these are genuine arguments by respected academic critics. As the module includes an important element of reading recent critical approaches to Austen, we have to give them all due consideration. I have my own views, of course, which in the end are pretty traditional, but I do enjoy the to-ing and fro-ing which they elicit from the students. I don't really mind what kind of outrageous-seeming suggestions anyone -- student or critic -- makes about any novel, poem or play, but I do require them to be able to support their arguments by intelligent close reference to the actual text. In fact the bit about Mr Woodhouse is, for me, the most convincing, believe it or not! It's based partly on his symptoms and partly on the poem he keeps quoting, "Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid" which, as someone has pointed out, is actually a rather rude poem about a prostitute, which suggests that Mr W had a rather racy past before he became such a confirmed invalid. Next week we go on to Persuasion, not such a contentious novel, but one that I really love -- possibly, right now, my favourite JA, but that's probably because it's the last one I have (re-) read.

Apricots at Midnight

After I put up the picture of Timmy on a Quilt a couple of weeks ago, dovegreyreader asked if I had read a book by Adele Geras in which all the stories were based on patches from a quilt. I had not! But now I have -- thanks to the great kindness of Adele herself, who posted me a signed copy. I started it as soon as I got home last night and have just now finished it. It's a childrens' book, of course, but they are often the best ones. First published in 1977 and still in print (well done, Adele) it is a sheer delight. The little girl who tells the story -- we never get to hear her name -- is visiting her Aunt Pinny, who was born in London in 1904. Her mother  was a private dressmaker whose house was full of wonderful snippets of beautiful fabrics with magical names, and Pinny, aged five, started to make her own quilt which grew as she grew. So all the snippets in the quilt have stories attached to them, and every night when her young niece comes to stay, Aunt Pinny tells her the story attached to one of the snippets. Through the various stories we come to know of Pinny's life, growing up in a rather impoverished but genteel household in London in the early years of the twentieth century. One scrap is from the skirt of a puppet she helped to make one rainy afternoon when her mother was delayed and did not pick her up from school, another from a wonderfully exotic patterned fabric designed by Mr Poffle, a temporary lodger. A very pretty patch with pink roses has a mysterious history -- the house where Pinny is given it, by a rather strange lady she meets one foggy day, proves to have been demolished some years earlier. A scrap from a beautiful lace dress, worn by Pinny to a picnic by the river, is there to remind her of how she almost drowned -- the lace dress has an odd and unhappy history, and its previous owner had also almost drowned. Impossible, really, to do justice to the richness and vitality of these stories. They reminded me of my own childhood -- when I was 5 my own mother was once delayed and couldn't pick me up from school, and I really felt for Pinny in this most awful of situations -- and of stories told to me by my mother and my own aunt, who was also born in 1904. Both of them were theatre designers, so I also grew up in a house full of scraps of beautiful fabrics. I wish I'd known of this book when my daughter was the right age -- she would have loved it. So, many thanks to Adele for such a lovely present.

French Banks

Not Credit Agricole, Banque Nationale de Paris etc, but grassy ones by the side of the road. They are simply smothered in flowers at this time of year. I've only just got home and my brain seems to have been turned to mush -- in a very nice way -- by so much sunshine and relaxation.  So here are some primroses while I gear myself up for some more intellectual remarks a bientot.

France

In case anyone wonders where I am -- I'm in France for Easter. I have a house here, on the border of Normandy and Brittany. It is very lovely here at the moment -- everything very fresh and green and springlike. All the grass verges are covered in primroses, violets, celandine -- all the trees budding like mad -- the sun shining briliantly. There are eight of us here, including children and grandchildren. I'm re-reading Persuasion and, for the first time, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda which I'm loving so far. No broadband here hence silence and lack of pictures!

Kathy Reichs, Break No Bones

More detective fiction! This has recently come out in paperback and I bought it to read on a longish train journey. I've read all Kathy Reichs' books and I always enjoy them. A member of the forensic anthropology school of crime writing made popular by Patricia Cornwell, she is now being described in reviews as 'better than Cornwell', and I have to agree. It's not so much her plots, though these are always lively and exciting, as the attractive feistiness (is there such a word? my spell-checker doesn't think so) of her central character Dr Temperance (Tempe) Brennan that keeps me, and presumably her other admirers, coming back for more. Tempe is a heroine with brains and impressive academic credentials coupled with a fondness for nice clothes and saucy underwear and saddled with an inability to sort out her personal life, an appealing and convincing combination. In this latest book the personal life becomes more complicated than ever, as Tempe's estranged lawyer husband Pete (nicknamed the Latvian Savant) takes up residence in the million-dollar beach house she has been loaned while she investigates a series of murders of homeless persons in Charleston, South Carolina. Tempe is disturbed to find how strongly she is still attracted to Pete, a fact which becomes extremely problematic when her current lover, Montreal detective Andrew Ryan, turns up unexpectedly for a visit. As the murder investigation progresses, both Pete and Ryan make useful contributions, all the while sniping at each other at mealtimes like a couple of irritable puppies. The ending solves the murders but leaves the future of Tempe's relationship with Ryan questionable -- will it survive her surprisingly intense reaction when Pete is seriously injured in a shooting incident probably aimed at Tempe herself?