Harriet Devine's Blog

Sunday Salon: Vintage Murder

Vintage murder indeed! Dame Ngaio Marsh, one of the four great 'Queens of Crime' of the mid-twentieth-century (the other three are Christie, Allingham and Sayers), wrote this book in 1936 and I have to say it I thought it one of her best. Dame Ngaio was born and raised in New Zealand and spent a number of years as an actress -- and this novel is about a theatre company touring New Zealand! So she is really coming home with a vengeance. Indeed it is the authentic detail that I found so attractive in this book. The story begins with her great detective, Roderick Alleyn, on a train journey in New Zealand, a country he is visiting for the first time, on a holiday to recuperate from an operation. With him on the train -- as they have also been on the boat from England (no long-haul flights here) -- is a touring theatre company. Thrown together with them for so long, Alleyn has struck up a friendship with the leading players, the beautiful Carolyn Dacre and her leading man Hailey Hambledon. Hailey has loved Carolyn for many years, but she is married to the company manager, the rather dull and plain Alfred Meyer. An adoring husband, Meyer has thought up a tremendous surprise for Carolyn -- for her birthday party, to be held on the stage at their first venue, he has fixed up a contraption in the theatre flies which, when Carolyn cuts a red ribbon, will enable a jeroboam of vintage champagne to slowly descend into a flowery basket in the centre of the table. I'm sure you can see where this is going! Despite at least twelve successful try-outs during the day, when the ribbon is cut on the night the huge champagne bottle drops with terrifying speed and lands on Meyer's head, with obvious and horrid results. Alleyn, who has been trying to remain incognito, is drawn into the resulting murder investigation which, needless to say, he finally solves with his usual intelligence and aplomb.
This novel has a lot going for it. Being a one-time theatre person myself, I loved the period theatre detail and the wonderful types who make up the touring company. But above all it was wonderful to find Dame N writing about New Zealand, which she does with the most obviously deep love. In fact she conveyed to me the magic and mystery of the landscapes more successfully than the Lord of the Rings film did, and that made them look pretty attractive. I loved the way she showed Alleyn getting drawn in to deeper and deeper admiration and awe as he started to explore the countryside -- and, as this is an early book (so he has not yet encountered Troy, his wife to be in later novels), also starting to fall in love with the beautiful Carolyn. There is even a great Maori character, Dr Rangi te Pohika, whose disquisitions on his nation's heritage are fascinating both the Alleyn and to the reader. And a small religious object, a tiki, plays a vital part in the unravelling of the plot.
For my money, though Dame N writes rather better than Dame Agatha, I don't find her plots quite measure up to Christie's -- the denouement was OK but not as startling as any of AC's. But that was not the point. It was an enthralling read, and I gobbled it up in a day.

Run

I've no idea what made me want to read this book though it was almost certainly somebody else's blog. I finally got hold of it on Read It Swap It, a site I'm starting to use more often now as I find it  has books I actually want to read, unlike Bookmooch which doesn't. I knew nothing of Ann Patchett, although I now know she won the Orange Prize for Bel Canto in 2002. I think if I'd picked this up in a bookstore and read the gushing review extracts on the back I probably wouldn't have bought it:
"Her books are so warm, so overflowing with love and affection, that when you've finished reading one your first inclination is to embrace it" (Guardian). Hmmmm....
However, having read it, I have to say I can see what they mean, though I don't think I'd have expressed it in quite those terms. But, in fact, this really is a novel about love. Not love between men and women, which hardly figures at all, but love within families. The family at the centre of the book is that of Doyle, a widower and an ex-mayor, who has been bringing up his three boys in a university town somewhere in America. The eldest, Sullivan, twelve years old when his mother died, has made a mess of his life and, at the beginning of the book, has returned home under a cloud from many years living abroad. The two younger boys, Tip and Teddy, are African-American brothers who were adopted as babies when Doyle's wife found she could not have any more children. At the start of the book they are young adults, Tip a serious-minded university student deeply absorbed in the study of marine life and Teddy, sweet natured and spiritually inclined, thinking of entering the priesthood. But one snowy night, their lives are turned upside down when Tip is rescued from a potentially fatal car accident by a woman who pushes him out of the way at the last minute and is badly injured herself as a result. The Doyles get her into hospital and then find themselves responsible for Kenya, her eleven year old daughter. Taking Kenya home, they gradually discover that the child knows all about them and their lives -- that she and her mother, in fact, have been watching them from a distance for as long as Kenya can remember. Unwillingly, she at last reveals the secret she has been told never to tell -- her mother is in fact Tip and Teddy's birth mother. The reactions of the family members are various, and confused, and the novel tells the story of how they each, in their different ways, come to accept, to understand, and to love. To some extent this is a novel of secrets, and several more are revealed as the book unfolds. Patchett writes with tremendous understanding of the way people relate to each other, the way they deal with grief and loss, and, finally, the way love can draw people together. Despite some great sadness along to way, the ending is entirely uplifting. Read it!

The True History of the Kelly Gang: Sunday Salon

It has taken me a week to read this book, and that is pretty slow for me. Circumstances have slowed me down, but also it is a book which, while a most fascinating read, is not one you feel you have race through. Published in 2000, it won the Booker in 2001. The novel is presented as the autobiography of the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, divided into thirteen sections. Each one is prefaced with a page of description of the physical manuscript on which the text supposedly appeared. This, together with the remarkable style of writing, gives the text which I suppose you could call a spurious authenticity -- but this is a plus, of course, as it's almost impossible to believe that it is not the actual words of Kelly himself. Supposedly based on Kelly's only surviving letter, the writing is in a kind of vernacular style, with little punctuation (no commas!), some Irish dialect, and a good deal of edited profanity -- that is, the text is peppered with 'effing's and 'adjectival's. Through this you get such a powerful sense of how these people really talked. As for the story itself, it is an extraordinary and finally a tragic one. Kelly's parents, born in Ireland, were transported first to Van Dieman's Land and then to Australia where his father died. His mother, beautiful Ellen Kelly, supported her growing family by running a shebeen and taking various lovers, including the bushranger Harry Power, who takes young Ned as an apprentice. As a teenager and later a young adult, Ned's constant desire is to live an honest life, but circumstances are against him. The world in which he lives is fundamentally corrupt, and Ned's many run-ins with the police dig him further and further into a situation where he is forced to commit crimes, or falsely accused of them, and spends several periods in prison. At last he, his younger brother and two other young men are forced into the outback where they become the notorious 'Kelly gang', and the novel ends with Ned's death. But this summary does not do justice to the wonderful subtlety of this novel. Ned is such a fine, interesting character -- totally uneducated but sensitive, thoughtful, intelligent -- his relationship with Mary Hearn, the mother of his child, is beautifully depicted, and his powerful love for his mother, whose fallibility is something he is only too well aware of, is such that he puts his own life in jeopardy in order to stand by her.  Highly recommended.

Girl Reading

I'm sorry not to have written anything here for almost a week but things have been pretty hectic -- I've been getting my 19-year-old ready to go off to university. Anyway, here is a pretty picture to be going on with.
Mary Gow, 'Fairy Tales', 1880.
I've nearly finished reading Peter Carey's  The True History of the Kelly Gang, so more on that soon.

Sunday Salon: Are Books Like Food?

You know when you've eaten a lot of sweet stuff you crave for something salty, and vice versa? Well, I do, anyway. And I do the same with books. Lately I seem to have been reading a few rather lightweight novels -- Adele Geras' delightful teen novel Happy Endings, a historical novel, My Lady of Cleves, the Austen spin-off, The Darcys and the Bingleys, and a couple of Agatha Christies, only one of which I blogged about.  Admittedly I also managed an enthrallingly serious novel, Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, which I am delighted to say has made its way from the Booker long list to the short list since I wrote. But I was feeling in need of something rather weightier, and have now just embarked on a past Booker winner, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which I will write about soon. This is my second Carey book, and my first, Oscar and Lucinda, also won the Booker. I loved that one and am getting drawn into this one too. Meanwhile I have also just finished a non-fiction book which I am willing to bet not many of you will have heard of. Betty Bennett's Mary Diana Dods, A Gentleman and a Scholar, was published in 1991. Bennett, who died in 2006, was a most distinguished American scholar, whose most famous work was undoubtedly her  three volume edition of the Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the editing of which occupied her for about fifteen years. It was while she was preparing the first volume that she encountered the extraordinary figure who is the subject of this book. Initially Bennett thought she would easily trace the two men, David Lyndsay and Walter Sholto Douglas, whose names cropped up in Mary Shelley's letters -- she anticipated them appearing a a couple of one-line footnotes. To her astonishment, after a prolonged period of preliminary research, she discovered that neither of them actually existed. Both were pseudonyms used by a woman, Mary Diana Dods, whose own life proved to be so fascinating that Bennett ended up on an extraordinary trail of literary detective work which took her to Harvard, to London, to Paris, to Scotland and else where and occupied her, on and off, for about ten years. Doddy, as her friends knew her, turned out to have been one of the two illegitimate daughters of a wealthy Scottish earl, who raised and educated them and then seems to have failed to support them properly thereafter. One sister, married and then widowed, with two small boys, seems to have depended on her cleverer sister for financial support, so Doddy turned to writing and had a small measure of success, at least at first. In itself this is not particularly surprising, nor is her use of male pseudonyms at that period (we are talking about the 1820s here). What is much more amazing is the fact that she began, soon afterwards, to dress as a man, and formed a partnership with a young woman whose baby was generally taken to be hers. The two of them, aided and abetted by Mary Shelley (who obtained fake passports for them), went to live in Paris, where, astonishingly, they managed to carry off this deception for a number of years despite mixing in lively French society. Evidently the "marriage" deteriorated rather rapidly and Doddy's "wife" had affairs with several Frenchmen. As for poor Doddy, she ended up in a debtor's prison, where she sent out for false whiskers to deceive her jailers. Where and when she died is not recorded. Well! What a story. But what fascinated me as much as the facts that were uncovered was the story of how Bennett so singlemindedly pursued this research over years and over continents. What fun, and what dedication! Having done a bit of this sort of thing myself, I was envious and sympathetic at the same time. Of course, not being a novel, this book leaves a number of loose ends, not least of which is the question of Doddy's sexuality. Was she a lesbian? We do not know. Wonderful stuff.

Swamped in Austen

What a week it's been! Wherever I turned, Pride and Prejudice spin-offs have been coming at me thick and fast. I've been reading one of the most recent sequels, The Darcys & The Bingleys, which is best described as a romp, and a highly irreverant one at that. Marsha Altman has imagined the few years immediately after the marriage of the two eldest Bennet girls, and in doing so has introduced some elements which JA herself might have found somewhat shocking. The main preoccupation of Darcy and Bingley just before the wedding turns out to be how to please their wives in bed. Darcy solves this by rushing off to London to buy a copy of the Kama Sutra. Later in the novel the plot turns on the proposed marriage of Caroline Bingley to a Scottish earl who may not be what he seems. It takes a lot of chasing around the country -- Darcy Bingley and Georgiana to London, Lizzie and Mr Bennet to Scotland -- and even two attempted murders before this is all finally sorted out and Caroline ends up with the man she has secretly loved all along. Not one for the purists, then. If you can suspend your disbelief and go along with the raciness, the humour, the unexpected revelations about Darcy's and Bingley's early years at Cambridge (Darcy far too susceptible to alcohol), the frequent, and presumably deliberate, lapses into modern English, you will find this entertaining. If not -- read something else.

Or.. try Lost In Austen. As everyone probably knows by now, this is a four-part series in which Amanda Price, delightfully played by Jemima Rooper, a long-time devotee of P&P, finds herself catapulted back into the world of the novel, having changed places with Lizzie Bennett. I wasn't totally taken with the first episode last week, but still curious to see how things were going to develop. And I found myself rather enjoying this week's episode. Poor Amanda is making a terrible mess of things, though far from deliberately. Her 21st century openness and freedom of speech combined with her good looks are playing havoc with the susceptibilities of the Austen men. Having foolishly kissed the smitten Bingley in the first episode, this week she sets herself the task of encouraging him to fall in love with Jane instead. Meanwhile Mr Collins has turned up and has immediately proposed to her, much to her horror and disgust. Things go from bad to worse at the Netherfield ball, when Amanda ends up inflicting an extremely painful and extremely personal injury on Mr Collins. Darcy meanwhile has developed the most intense dislike of her, and she is appalled to realise that he falls far short of the man she has dreamed of all these years. By now she has alienated the whole Bennet family and is soon asked to leave Longbourn. The episode ends with Jane marrying Mr Collins and Charlotte Lucas deciding to go to Africa as a missionary. How will she extract herself from this mess?

Finally, if you live in the US, you can go and see a  musical version of P&P on Broadway. If you don't, never mind -- you can still listen to Darcy singing 'Fine Eyes'.

My Lady of Cleves

Generally speaking I am rather ambivalent about historical novels -- the ones, I mean, that construct a fictional story around the lives and known facts about real people. Mainly I think this is because I can't prevent my academic hat from planting itself on my head, and forcing me to wonder all the way through how much of this is actually factual and how much invented. The I have to rush off and look it all up. This happened to me last week when I saw the film The Duchess, and luckily I had Amanda Forman's biog of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire to hand. Then it happened again in the last couple of days during which I was reading Margaret Campbell Barnes novel about Anne of Cleves. But I have to say that, though I am forced to conclude that an awful lot of this story is pure invention, it is such a charming novel and such a delightful story that one can only wish and hope that perhaps it might have happened this way. Poor Anne of Cleves has had such a bad press -- Henry VIII's unkind remark about the Flanders mare has come down through the centuries, leaving most of us with the impression of a rather unattractive woman, so unattractive that Henry claimed he had been unable to consummate the marriage. But, as anyone who has ever troubled to look at her portraits will know, Anne was neither ugly nor fat, and indeed did have a quiet beauty, though clearly not the kind that appealed, in the flesh, to the aging king. Of course the portraits were the source of much of the trouble. Henry had sent that wonderful painter Hans Holbein to capture her likeness in order that he could see if he wanted to marry her, and the portraits convinced him that he did. Taking those bare facts, this novel posits a love affair -- never consummated -- between the painter and the young woman he was sent to portray. Clearly there is no evidence at all for this, but what a nice idea it is. What is true, though, and really very heartwarming, is the way Anne and Henry's relationship matured after the divorce into a warm and loving friendship.
This novel was first published in 1945, but it really does not show its age at all. Obviously impeccably researched, it manages to be totally convincing, and even uses many of the real words of the people involved. Henry himself is sensitively captured, so that the proud and bullying king slowly becomes a much more sympathetic character, and his next bride, little Katherine Howard, someone who evokes our pity. Anne's relationship with the royal children -- again, known to have been close -- is beautifully imagined, and even Mary, the eldest daughter, usually seen as a harsh and unattractive woman, appears here as a gentle, thoughtful young girl. I'm gushing a bit here, I know, but as you can tell I surprised myself by liking this so much. I have another by the same author waiting at the starting gate, so more on that soon.

Amazing Promotion -- Get Rich!

I've never done this before -- put a youtube video into a post -- but someone just sent it to me in a comment and I though those of you in the US might like to have a go!

The Secret Scripture

I was ranting on about Sebastian Barry a few weeks ago, before I had even read this novel, when its inclusion on the Booker longlist was first announced. It's another two days until the shortlist appears, and whether the book will be on it or not is anybody's guess. As I have not read any of the other contenders I can't, obviously, offer any opinion on this. All I can say, having stayed late in bed this morning finishing it, is that it is a most wonderful, and most terrible, read. Wonderful not only because Barry writes the most beautiful, heart-rending prose, but also because it manages to be a story both intensely personal and sharply political -- in fact the two are inextricably intertwined. And it is terrible for the same reasons -- that is to say, the story that it tells is one of such individual pain, such injustice, so much suffering, and all these in the name of religion. If this makes it sound too dark and too depressing a read -- well, believe me, it is not. Darkness is there, sorrow is there, but through it all there is an extraordinary vision of the persistence of the human spirit, and I think you will end this book feeling stirred, disturbed, but finally uplifted.

The novel tells the story of Roseanne McNulty, once "the most beautiful woman in Sligo", now a woman of somewhere in the region of a hundred years old, who has spent more than half her life incarcerated in a mental institution. Her story is narrated both in her own words -- she is secretly writing what she hopes is a true account of her life -- and through the 'Commonplace Book' entries of the institution's psychiatrist, Dr William Grene.The institution is about to be closed, and Grene has the task of deciding the fate of its inmates, some of whom, including Roseanne, he suspects were placed there for "social" rather than mental health reasons. Grene is a troubled, fallible man, whose unhappy marriage ends part way through the novel with the sudden death of his partially estranged wife. He starts his investigation of Roseanne's life simply with the desire to do her justice, but he gets increasingly involved as the facts he uncovers become more and more disturbing, and conflict with the little she is prepared to disclose to him herself. Meanwhile the reader is discovering the truth, or as much of it as Roseanne is able to confront herself, through her own writings. It is, indeed, a tragic story, one in which religious conflicts, political unrest, and repressive morality conspire to ruin the life of this lovely, and once happy, young woman.The most frightening figure in the novel is the priest, Fr Gaunt, who reappears at intervals throughout Roseanne's life and who quite deliberately falsifies her story, finally arranging for her to be sectioned on the trumped up grounds of nymphomania.

As we know, this kind of thing was, alas, only too common in Ireland until far too recently, and as Sebastian Barry says in this interview, the novel originated in a story he heard about the first wife of one of his own great-uncles. Like Roseanne, she was forcibly separated from her husband and sent to live in a tin hut on the edge of the village, her marriage was annulled, and she was finally incarcerated in an asylum. As anyone familiar with Barry's writing will know, he frequently uses his own family history as the basis for his work, and in fact some of his earlier characters reappear here: Eneas McNulty (from The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty), Lizzie Finn from the play The Only True History of Lizzie Finn, and possibly others I didn't spot. Of course you don't need to know this to appreciate the writing, but it does add yet another layer to what is already a multi-layered work. I know some readers have found the ending a bit contrived, but I think it has dramatic truth and I'm certainly not about to carp about it.

Here's an little extract, just to give you a taste:

We blew out, a crowd of young girls from the town, to Tom McNulty's dancehall by the sea, like a torrent of roses along the bleak roads, sometimes spilling in tremendous gaiety and simplicity out onto the strand itself, where the road came down from the village of upper Sandhill, and the bollards one after the other on the very sand itself showed the lowtide way to Coney. Maybe you would rather rather call us gulls, elegant white birds dipping and calling, we were always inland as it were -- as if there was always a storm at sea. Oh, it is girls of seventeen and eighteen know how to live life, and love the living of it, if we are let.

Women Playing Music

We've had painters, writers and readers -- now here are some musicians. This is:

Gerrit van Honthorst (1590-1656),

The Concert
1624

Musee du Louvre, Paris

I've just finished reading Sebastian Barry's Booker longlisted The Secret Scripture. I am so overwhelmed that I need to take a bit more time before I can write about it.