Harriet Devine's Blog

Bodnant

  To Wales yesterday where my daughter and family were staying with her mother-in-law who lives near Colwyn Bay. The weather wasn't great but we spent the morning at what must be one of the most beautiful gardens in Britain, Bodnant. I've been there in the spring (when the amazing Laburnam Arch is in flower and visitors come from all over the world to see it) and in the autumn, but never before at this time of year. The garden is huge, and sweeps down through a fabulously planted valley to a most lovely little river which plunges over a waterfall and dashes over rocks complete with stepping stones, ferns and moss. Gorgeous. The borders were full of late summer colour, reds and oranges and yellows, and many roses were still in flower. My two grandsons George (11) and Cai (5, and what a poser) were in heaven -- in this picture they are standing at the base of a huge sequoia, of which there are a number, all planted in the 1880s. We had lunch in the lovely town of Conwy, which has a massive medieval castle, a very pretty harbour, and lots of delightful shops. Amazingly the sun came out and we were able to sit on a wall by the sea eating our ice-creams.

Lunch with Adele

Yes, yesterday I went off to Manchester -- about a forty minute train-ride -- shopped a bit -- had a bit of a ramble round the wonderful Central Library, where I have spent many happy hours in the past making use of their amazingly good collection of nineteenth-century books and journals -- and then met Adele Geras for lunch. And here we are, in a great japanese noodle-bar restaurant by the name of Tampopo, in Albert Square. I don't think the photo does Adele justice and she kindly says it doesn't do me justice, but I don't think we look too bad for a couple of ladies not in the first flush of youth. The nice and pretty waitress who took the picture said she was going to get the "hunky chef" (her words) in as well, but alas he is only just visible and his hunkiness or lack of it not apparent. We did have fun. We have corresponded by email quite a bit of late, but never met before -- but of course by means of blogs and emails and reading each others' books we felt we knew each other already. There was lots to talk about, including some experiences in common -- boarding school in Sussex, Oxford, early acting careers, daughters called Sophie... Both of us also are vegetarian, so Tampopo was a good choice -- it's not vegetarian but has lots of non-meat on the menu. I had some delicious noodles with peppers and leeks and Adele had a rice dish whose name sounded very much like Cow Pie but clearly wasn't, especially as it began with a Q. And then of course we had pudding -- ginger creme brulee for her, passion-fruit syllabub for me. We drank fizzy water, and toasted dovegreyreader in celebration of her new book deal. Time flew, and we suddenly realised that we were the last ones in the restaurant, so scurried off, me to my train and Adele to her bus. She has kindly said she will let me come and do an interview with her, which I will of course post on here. On the train home I read most of her delightful book Voyage -- the story of a ship full of emigrants going to New York in 1904 -- about which I will write very soon. And finally, here is a  nice picture of Adele .

Andrew Wilson, The Lying Tongue

One day last week I was visiting one of my favourite blogs, Random Jottings, and found Elaine giving a rave review to this book. It sounded so great that I was desperate to read it, and Elaine was kind enough to send me her copy, which arrived on Saturday. I've been fighting off an irritating virus all week, which has been chasing itself round and round my respiratory system, so I had a good excuse to curl up with this book and read it all in no time.

The Lying Tongue is Andrew Wilson's first novel, but he has written a biography of that great crime writer Patricia Highsmith, and if I say it shows, that is not meant in any way to diminish his achievement here. But certainly there is a touch of Highsmith's extraordinary creation Ripley in Adam, the central figure and narrator of The Lying Tongue, though this is something which only really dawns on the reader gradually. As the novel begins, Adam has just finished an art-history degree in London and, having broken up with his girl-friend, has accepted a job in Venice, teaching English to a sixteen-year-old Italian boy. When he arrives, he finds the job has fallen through, but the boy's parents suggest he might approach an aging English resident of Venice, the writer Gordon Crace, who, they think, may be in need of a secretary/companion. Anxious to stay in the city, where he hopes to write his first novel, Adam makes contact with the reclusive Crace and is soon living in the crumbling palazzo where the writer has lived in total seclusion for more than forty years. Crace's past is something of a mystery -- he has only ever published one, hugely successful, novel, in the 1960s -- and one which Adam is increasingly fascinated by. Indeed, he becomes more and more convinced that the real purpose of his own future will be not his non-starter of a novel but a biography of Crace himself. He returns briefly to England to pursue various researches into his employer's past, a journey which leads him down avenues he certainly could never have anticipated. The denouement, following his return to Venice, is shocking and surprising, as much for Adam as for the reader.

What really sold this novel to me was not so much the plot, though this is undoubtedly exciting and engaging, but more the way in which Adam's character, and elements of his own past, are gradually  revealed as he proceeds with his account of his investigations. An apparently attractive, intelligent and rational young man, he proves to have a darker and more disturbing side which increasingly overturns the reader's initial impressions of him. All very skillfully done.

PS As this was a freebie, I'd be happy to pass it on to any fellow blogger who'd like to review it!

Adele Geras, Facing the Light

                                I was halfway through this book before I set off for my hols and managed to forget to take it with me. Then it had to wait until I had finished the Roth trilogy. I picked it up again yesterday and read the whole thing in one go as I had to know what happened.

This is the third of Adele's novels that I have read, and my favourite so far. Like the other two (A Hidden Life and Made in Heaven) it is the story of a large, multi-generational family. Like the others also, it deals with secrets -- in this case, two very momentous ones. What I liked particularly here was the way in which the novel showed, clearly but subtly, the effect of keeping, or suppressing, those secrets. Also impressive was the structure of the narrative, which moved backwards and forwards through time, as the characters recalled, or contemplated, or faced up to, events which had structured their own present experience.

Central to the novel's plot is the matriarch of the family, Leonora. As the story begins, her large family -- two daughters, numerous grandchildren -- are converging on Willow Court, her lovely country house, to celebrate her 75th birthday. At the best of times such an event, involving large numbers of guests, caterers, marquees and flower arrangements, would bring its share of tensions and anxieties. But this is all exacerbated by a number of stress-inducing extra pressures. For one thing, a television company is arriving to make a documentary -- for Leonora's house holds a precious collection of paintings by her celebrated father, Ethan Walsh. Indeed, this is another cause of tension, as Leonora's grandson, the attractive but increasingly untrustworthy-seeming Efe, is attempting to persuade his grandmother to allow an American millionaire to open a gallery where the paintings will be more accessible to the public. Leonora is deeply opposed to this idea, largely because she promised her adored father that the paintings would never leave Willow Court.

Although everyone in the family loves the house, with its glorious gardens and lake, Leonora's younger daughter Rilla, a flamboyant and warm-hearted actress, has decidedly mixed feelings about spending time there. Many years earlier her adored five-year-old son Mark drowned in the lake while Rilla was out shopping in the village, and she has never ceased to blame herself for not being there, even though he was left in the care of his aunt and grandmother and various cousins. Though she has been separated for many years from Mark's father, and never been short of admirers and lovers, Rilla has never felt able to commit herself to anyone, though she has been a wonderful mother and friend to her step-daughter Beth, who she has brought up on her own. Beth, meanwhile, has been secretly in love with Efe for as long as she can remember, notwithstanding the fact that he is now married to the beautiful, rather empty-headed Fiona, and has a small son of his own. But Efe's marriage turns out to have secrets too, and not very attractive ones at that. As for Leonora's memories of her own childhood, and Rilla's of the events surrounding Mark's death, both of these prove to have hidden dimensions which, when they are brought to the surface, completely transform the lives not only of these two women but of everyone connected with them.

I think what I admire most about these novels, apart from the fact that they tell a cracking story, is the way Adele Geras manages to touch on some really profound and difficult issues without ever being heavy-handed or depressing. The effect of keeping memories suppressed and finally of facing up to them and their implications is obviously a primary theme, but the book also looks at male violence against women, and the way it seems to descend through families. In other hands, this could make for a very different kind of novel, but here, despite the fact that a few characters are probably not going to have ideally happy futures, the overall effect at the end is warm, comforting and positive. Quite an achievement, and a really enjoyable read.

 

The Office of the Dead

I've said so much already in praise of this trilogy that all I can really add, having now finished the third book, is PLEASE do read these three books! This one, designed to be read last, goes back in time to the 1950s, so about 20 years before the middle volume. David Byfield, the narrator of that book, is here a young priest and teaching at a theological college in a cathedral town. Married to the beautiful Janet and the father of four-year-old Rosie, he is viewed in this novel through the eyes of the narrator, Wendy Appleyard, who finds him cold but very sexy, and describes him as looking like the young Laurence Olivier. Wendy is a most wonderfully drawn character -- anybody who thinks male authors can't create female narrative voices should read this book. Separated from her charming, feckless husband Henry after surprising him in flagrante on a beach with someone she describes as the Hairy Widow (and possessing a snapshot of the event in case her resolve weakens), Wendy has come to stay with her schoolfriend Janet while she tries to decide what to do with her new single life. Witty, cynical, somewhat jaded by the rackety life she lived during her marriage, given to numerous nips of gin in the privacy of her bedroom, she nevertheless has a soft heart and feels for Janet who is coping not only with her intelligent, uncommunicative husband and her rather strange and difficult small daughter but with her ageing father who is descending fast into what today we would know as Alzheimer's. Bored with doing nothing much, she allows herself to be talked into taking a job cataloguing the Cathedral library, and becomes fascinated by the life and poetry of the mysterious Canon Francis Youlgreave, who, she soon discovers, was dismissed from his post at the Cathedral in the early 1900s for some unspecified but clearly very worrying and disturbing misdemeanours. There are still people alive fifty years later who remember Youlgreave and the events of the time, though everyone seems surprisingly unwilling to talk about them. Increasingly drawn to delving into this mysterious and threatening past, which appears to be reaching out and affecting the present day, she is also disturbed by the reappearance in her life of Henry, apparently reformed and wanting to give their marriage another chance. Both what she finally uncovers about the past and a series of grim events which take place in the present seem to raise unanswerable questions about the nature and origin of evil. They also, of course, finally make complete sense of many of the developments in the later two books.

There is an extremely good and perceptive review of this trilogy by Adele Geras on Andrew Taylor's website. Here's a quotation from her final paragraph:

There is murder, and worse than murder. What makes these books different from many others is that the moral dimension of the crimes is examined, and discussed and emphasized. The physicality of what happens is not glossed over, but it isn't gruesomely and unnecessarily dwelt on in hideous detail. The effect of not knowing is sometimes much worse than the unvarnished facts. Monsters are only scary when we have to guess at them. When they are revealed, we flinch and hide our eyes, but eventually we can grow used to anything, and we do.

bloggers -- get a free book!

The very nice people at the Book Depository are giving away free books to any blogger who agrees to read and blog about them. Take a look at the offer here -- Book Depository giveaway -- and jump on this very attractive bandwagon. Next time around they promise books to non-bloggers, too.

book meme

Saw this on litlove's blog and couldn't resist having a go.

What are you reading right now?

Well, I've JUST read the final volume of the Roth trilogy. But I also have two books waiting to be finished -- ones I started before I went on holiday and will now pick up. They are Kate Mosse's Labyrinth and Adele Geras' Facing the Light. I can't wait to finish Adele's book as I am meeting her for lunch on Tuesday!!!!

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that?

By my bed I have a book by C P Snow and one by Michael Innes, Hamlet Revenge. And yesterday a friend bought me The Memory Keeper's Daughter. So I shall read one of those next I think unless something else turns up or grabs me. It's often hard to say what I will feel like till the time comes.

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now?

Actually none. But if I did, it would be Marie Claire Maison or Marie Claire Idees, both of which I buy when I go to France. Very stylish and attractive.

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read?

Shamefully (for a teacher of literature) that would have to be something on French literary theory -- Derrida et al. I tried so hard with all this when it was the flavour of the month in universities and found it strangely repellent. This is an embarrassing confession.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone?

This year I have been pressing everyone to read Sarah Waters' The Night Watch.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they?

Although I use the university library for research related books, I rarely visit out local library which is pretty limited. Most of my books come from charity shops, attic sales, abebooks.com and amazon.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all?

I'm sure there must be but I've drawn a blank here.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving?

While I eat, if I'm alone, I do. In the bath, yes, often. Not when I'm watching movies or TV or even listening to music as I find it divides the mind too much. Certainly not during those other activities.

When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits?

Luckily my two best friends were also avid readers. But I certainly spent a great deal of time lying on the sofa with my nose in a book rather than frolicking with my peers.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

I was reading The Four Last Things until VERY late last night! and will be blogging about it very soon.

want a laugh?

Here are some extracts from examination papers -- tragic really but I laughed a lot:
They Didn't Study

The Four Last Things

This is the second book I have read of the Roth trilogy -- actually it is the first in the series, though set in the 1990s, about 25 years after the one I blogged about a few days ago. Reverse chronology, you see -- though the books can be read in any order, this is how Andrew Taylor planned them. This is how he puts it on his website:

Like an archaeological dig, these three novels are designed to strip away the layers of a psychopath's history.                      
The structure of the Roth Trilogy is probably unique in crime fiction - and perhaps in any sort of fiction. It is composed of interlocking stories; each novel is self-contained and may be read independently of the others. 

Each book discreetly modifies the others, and each of them is written in a different style.

I am now halfway through the third, and earliest book, and am regretting somewhat that I read the first two out of order. Having read the second one first, I knew things about some of the characters' earlier lives which definitely modified my experience of the first novel, and guessed the identity of a central character on that basis. Working backwards as I am doing now is certainly a more fascinating experience and constantly makes you think, Oh -- I see.

One wonderful feature, among many, of this trilogy, is the way each novel is narrated in a different style. The Four Last Things, set in the 1990s, is quite a fast-paced thriller. At the start of the book, Lucy Appleyard, a four-year-old child, is kidnapped by the terrifying psychopathic Angel, a beautiful, plausible woman who, as we soon discover, has already kidnapped and somehow disposed of three other small girls. The novel switches, in alternate chapters, between the perspective of Lucy's mother Sally, a woman priest, and that of the sad, disfunctional Eddie, whose house Angel has appropriated for her horrific activities. Taylor's handling of this aspect of the narration is brilliant -- Eddie is, initially at least, completely in thrall to Angel, who is able to keep her power over him because she understands his own psychological peculiarity -- he loves small girls, though seemingly in a rather touchingly non-sexual way. He is really an innocent, and the reader is frequently one step ahead of him, guessing what some of Angel's puzzling behaviour implies while he is still telling himself it is all quite rational and above board. Like The Judgment of Strangers, this book also deals, in Sally's sections of the novel, with the agonies associated with an attempt to maintain religious belief in the face of horrendous odds.

Because these three books are linked, characters reappear in all three, though obviously at different stages in their lives. Sally's husband Michael, in this book a detective inspector in his mid-thirties, was a small boy fascinated by detective work in The Judgement of Strangers. And David Byfield, who was the narrator and central figure of that book as a man in his forties, here reappears, now an old man, in his role as Michael's godfather and mentor, mistrusted and disliked by Sally, who knows nothing of his, and her husband's, troubled past.

Which Book Are You?

I just did a quiz called Which Book Are You? and this was the result:

You're One Hundred Years of Solitude!
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lonely and struggling, you've been around for a very long time. Conflict has filled most of your life and torn apart nearly everyone you know. Yet there is something majestic and even epic about your presence in the world. You love life all the more for having seen its decimation. After all, it takes a village.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

A bit of fun, anyway, even if most of it is quite untrue!