Harriet Devine's Blog

Render Up the Body

AS I said yesterday I was reading crime all Christmas. This is the second Marianne Wesson I've read though the first in the series of three (so far) that she has written. Featuring Lucinda (Cinda) Hayes, an attorney, these are intelligent and enjoyable novels and deserve to be better known. Wesson is an attorney herself, so the legal detail is superb and always convincing. In this novel Cinda is working in a Rape Crisis Centre in Boulder, Colorado, having got disillusioned by her ten years as a DA. But then she gets a request, rather out of the blue, to handle an appeal on behalf of Jason Smiley, a convicted rapist and murderer. Although decidedly confused and unwilling she goes to meet Smiley and, despite being convinced of his guilt on the rape charge, comes to believe he is not guilty of murder. Clearly this puts her in a hideous position of divided loyalties. Add to this a great deal of corruption in the police and the judiciary, a new love affair which is gloriously enjoyable but brings its own problems, and a close friend in deep trouble, and Cinda's life is complicated and upsetting to say the least. Wesson writes with great intelligence and Cinda is a most attractive character. There is a twist at the end which I never saw coming. Very enjoyable read.

The Thirty-Nine Steps -- Not

If you live in the UK, you may well have seen last night's BBC adaptation of John Buchan's great adventure classic. Well. If the leading character had not been called Richard Hannay, I'd have been quite hard pressed to recognise the plot. OK, perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit, but they took such liberties! The chief of these was the introduction of a female character, a suffragette by the name of Victoria. Now I have read this book as well as seeing numerous films, including Hitchcock's celebrated version starring Robert Donat, and I really was astonished at what a difference this addition made to the story and indeed to the whole tone of the book. In fact Victoria really ran the show, more or less, and poor old Hannay often seemed to be tagging along in her powerful wake. This seemed so far from Buchan's original idea that it was confusing, to say the least. Yes, you can call me a purist and no doubt that is what I am, even if it is a term of abuse. But the great thing about the original novel is the way Hannay, a fairly ordinary chap, discovers abilities and strengths he never knew he had. Clearly that was too old-fashioned an idea for the BBC in 2008.  It is, though, rather curious to read in the blurb for this DVD that "This lavish version attempts to stay faithful to the 1915 book, whilst injecting a more contemporary energy into the dramatic action sequences". For "contemporary energy" read "a woman". If you want to see what Buchan really wrote you should read the book, which is great. Or you could just read a summary of it here on Wikipedia.

The Man in the Queue

"When in doubt, plant a geranium", wrote the great gardener and writer Margery Fish -- a piece of advice I have often followed (that's the hardy ones, not the house plants). Well, my policy seems to be, when in doubt read a crime novel. I've read three over Christmas. The first, and least interesting, was a Robert Goddard picked up in a charity shop. I might blog about this later -- it was OK, intelligent and well researched, but didn't set me alight. Then I read this one, rather fast as I had to wrap it up for my daughter who loves Josephine Tey, as indeed so do I. This one, which neither of us had read, is in fact Tey's first novel, published in 1929. The premise is intriguing. A large crowd of people is queuing for the last performance of a musical play which has taken London by storm. People are crammed together, but waiting cheerfully and patiently for the box office to start selling tickets. Finally the doors open and everyone starts to shuffle forwards. Suddenly, in the foyer, a gap opens up and a man falls forward onto the floor. He is dead, a knife in his back. Nobody appears to have seen anything happening. The police are called, and examine the body. He has a gun in his pocket, but no identification -- even his clothes are without labels. So the police have a double challenge -- not only must they identify the murderer, they also have to identify the murderee. Luckily, Inspector Grant is called in, and manages to discover the man's identity. Soon afterwards, he homes in on the obvious suspect and eventually, after an exciting pursuit which takes him to the wilds of Scotland, makes an arrest. But he is assailed by doubt. The man certainly fulfils all the criteria, but is he really guilty?

Grant is a truly excellent character. Intelligent and cultured, he is also blessed with extremely good intuition, which irritates his superiors no end but of course generally proves right in the end. I enjoyed this novel a great deal, and so would you if you read it. I'll tell you about the other crime novel I read tomorrow.

The Kiss

Nobody's reading, nobody's writing, but this caught my eye on a blog I visit every day -- Old Paint. It was painted in 1887 by one Theodore Jaques Ralli (Greek, 1852-1909) and is such a remarkable image that I hope they will forgive me for copying and pasting it here. Thought-provoking, isn't it.

Merry Christmas to all our Readers

Thanks to everyone who has visited this year -- have a wonderful Christmas!

Sunday Salon: Best of 2008

This kind of thing is a real challenge, but fun. I've decided to divide the list into categories, so here goes:

Best Non-Fiction

I've read relatively little non-fiction this year. But the winner definitely has to be Mrs Woolf and the Servants.  This fascinating book is not just for lovers of Virginia Woolf, but for anyone interested in relations between the classes, or between the sexes, or just between people in general (and that should cover pretty well everyone).

Best Contemporary Crime Fiction

This, on the other hand, I've read quite a lot of. I'm in no doubt here that Kate Atkinson has to win, for her wonderful trilogy -- Case Histories, One Good Turn, and When Will There be Good News? All three are stunning. Please, Kate, write another one soon.

Best Classic Crime Fiction

Lots of this, too, new reads and re-reads. I'm most delighted to have discovered the brilliant Francis Iles, and to nominate his superb 1931 novel Before the Fact.

Best Children's Book

I read some great classics in this category earlier in the year. Several of Noel Streatfeild's could have won, but I'd have to go for a pair of favorites since childhood, E. Nesbit's The House of Arden and its companion volume Harding's Luck.

Best Jane Austen Sequel

What a category to have! But this has been the year when I was introduced to this sub-genre, if such it is, by means of Diana Birchall's wonderful Mrs Darcy's Dilemma. I've read quite a few since then, some not so great and some pretty good, but the all out winner in this category must be Old Friends and New Fancies, first published in 1913 and an absolute joy from start to finish.

Best Classic

Well, I did love Little Dorrit, of course. But the joint winners are two American classics, neither as well-known as they deserve to be. They are Josephine Johnson's Now in November and William Maxwell's TIme Will Darken It.  Two wonderfully written novels, both highly recommended.

Best Contemporary Fiction

This is what I read most of, so I'm allowing myself a longer list.

Owen Shears, Resistance

Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet

Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Julia Gregson, East of the Sun

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto, which is practically a tie with the absolute top of the class:

Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way.

Dickensian Christmas, anyone?

This lovely pair came to me, and thence to you, from those delightful publishers of classy, intelligent books, Hesperus Press. We all have the idea that Dickens invented Christmas as we know it today, and perhaps in some ways that is true. Certainly he invented the Christmas story, his extraordinarily persistently successful Christmas Carol. So successful was this in his own lifetime that he hit upon the idea of producing special Christmas editions of the journal Household Words, and inviting his regular contributers to produce seasonal stories. These two beautifully produced little books reproduce the contents of two such specials. CD himself contributed, of course, but the collections also included work by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau and George Sala as well as many other talented contemporaries. As the titles suggest, the stories are supposed to be told by a group of people sitting around the fire at Christmas. So in the first volume we get, from CD himself, 'The Poor Relation's Story' and 'The Child's Story', from Gaskell 'The Old Nurse's Story', and from Martineau 'The Deaf Playmate's Story', among many others. These are not, though, the sort of relentlessly jolly tales you might expect for Christmas. If you've read (rather than seen on TV or in the movies) The Christmas Carol, you will get the idea -- there is a strong dose of moralism here. The Poor Relation, despised by the rest of the family as a failure, reveals not only a strong bond of love with one of the children, but also the ability to comfort himself, and perhaps to shame the others, by revealing his secret life in a Castle -- a Castle in the Air, of course. The Child tells an allegorical tale of a journey through life, one which culminates in a tribute to the good old Grandfather sitting by the fire. Martineau, herself afflicted by deafness, writes about a boy whose happy carefree life is damaged by his growing loss of hearing and the inability of his friends and family to understand his disability. Gaskell's tale, the longest in the first volume, is a wonderfully atmospheric ghost story, one which is no worse for ending -- by Dickens' instruction -- with a moral. So, though not all that jolly by modern taste, these are wonderfully evocative and thought-provoking stories,  and while some have been published elsewhere it is fascinating to read them in a group, as they originally appeared. Interesting and learned introductions by scholars of the period add the icing to the Christmas cake. Lovely.

What on a Wednesday

I'm delighted and honoured to have been given the chance to talk about myself and my reading and blogging on Mark Thwaite's Book Depository blog. If you want to see what I said, and enjoy Mark's other interesting articles, you can do so here. Mark also blogs at Ready Steady Book, as well as running the Book Depository, an excellent website which sends books post free.

Sunday Salon: A Long Long Way

It's pretty well unheard of for me to like a book so much that I can't find adequate words to describe it. But that is how I am feeling now. Regular visitors will know how much I enjoyed Barry's Secret Scripture, which failed, for some unaccountable reason, to win this year's Booker Prize. And here we have his earlier novel which unaccountably failed to win the 2005 Booker. Well, the Booker is a bit of a mystery to me and I certainly don't envy the judges, but I sure would like to have seen this one win. Why, you might wonder, when I am such a fan of Barry, did I wait so long before reading this one? The answer is simple -- because it was about war, a subject I usually avoid like the plague. I have even "read" War and Peace twice, but only the Peace bits. But I am so so glad I decided to take the plunge here.
This is the story of a young Dublin man, Willy Dunne. Aged just seventeen when the First World War breaks out, he joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, wanting to "play his part", and to protect girls like his beloved sweetheart Gretta from being killed by the Germans in Belgium. Of course you will not need to be told that his idealism is soon eroded by the terrible things he witnesses in the trenches of Belgium. The wholesale slaughter, the mustard gas, the deaths of his friends and comrades, the filthy conditions -- all these we all think we know about already. But I can tell you that with all my supposed wisdom and knowledge of these things, they have never been so fiercely alive to me as they became in reading this novel. That's not all, though. Remember that Willie, as a young Catholic Irishman, is fighting on behalf of a country that has oppressed him and his ancestors since time immemorial. And if that were not enough, on his precious leave at home in Dublin, he finds himself in the midst of the Easter Rising of 1916, where he sees his fellow Irishmen fighting against the British in the streets, and is flung, as a result, into a state of deep confusion and misery. Does this all sound upsetting and disturbing? Well, in one way it is. But it is also one of the most beautiful and uplifting novels I have read in a long time, perhaps ever. Because through it all persists Willie's spirit, still able occasionally to laugh, to feel love, and above all somehow to endure. Sebastian Barry writes the most poetic prose of any novelist living today, I suspect, and there are so many wonderful moments in this book that I would like to quote for you if I had time and space. Just for a taste, here is the response of the soldiers as they listen to a man singing at an impromptu concert:

Each man to his own inward thinking, glimpses of the beloved faces left behind, shadows of arguments unfinished and regretted, the sense of youth not vanishing but being submerged in a killing sea from which no one might emerge, bathed in the acid blood of bomb or bullet. Stretch of road loved and itemized, fold of field, loved turn of shoulder of a wife, her feet crossing the boards of a bedroom, her clothes thrown across a chair. The voice of a singing child, the sound of a child peeing in the pot, the tremendous affection of son or daughter, soft hair, big eyes, the struggle to find meat and cake. For single men the memories of their Grettas, foul words and good words, failed words of love and triumphant. How human nature fell ever short, but could be summoned to illumine the dark tracts of a life nonetheless. All the matter and difficulty of being alive in a place of peace and a place of war.

And here is a grand sweep of the effects of the war:

...great armies were massing everywhere, great divisions, so that a single man was only one flickering light in a wide sky of millions. There must be movement on the front, all were agreed. The French boys were drowning in the caverns of Verdun, drowning in their own blood. Millions must push millions. The Kaiser sent his myriad boys, the King of England his. Great troops of women followed, to bandage, bolster and bury. And all of England, and all old empires, British, Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, the empires of halfpenny lives and the hungry sad kings and commoners all party to the same haze, strained for news, and the mountains stood away, and a thousand widows wore their black ribbons in Ireland on their arms, and were treated kindly in the main, with whispered sympathy and whatever was left of wise words. Because the box of wise words was emptying.

My own experience of reading this novel was one of almost continuously feeling on the verge of tears, though sometimes laughing, too, at the great humour of those brave, simple, good-hearted Irish boys trying to keep their sanity among unthinkably appalling experiences. There is no one I can think of who would not benefit from reading it so I hope you will, if you haven't already.

Mrs Clenham's real secret (Spoiler!)

Confused? We certainly were! Three of us were watching that wonderful final episode and waiting with bated breath for the truth about that will, and what Rigaud had on Mrs Clenham. But oh dear, we were none the wiser, or not much the wiser, after it was all supposedly revealed. Two of us (including me) thought we had been told that Arthur was an orphan adopted by the Clenhams and that Amy was the child of Mr Clenham senior (he of the 'Do Not Forget'). That seemed a bit strange, to say the least. So as I was the one with the book, I got hold of it at once, and spent an hour or so reading the long long chapter in which these events were described. Of course we were quite wrong, but in a way that was understandable, as the BBC had mucked around with the plot, obviously in order to compress and simplify it. So in case you are as confused (or as thick) as we were, here are the facts according to Dickens. Arthur's father had been forced into a marriage with Mrs C, but he already had a girlfriend. She was a young musician, and lived in a house owned by Frederick Dorrit, Amy's uncle, who was her patron. When she became pregnant, Mrs C insisted on taking the child herself -- this was Arthur, of course -- and the poor young mother ended up in a madhouse run by Flintwinch's twin brother. When Mr C senior's uncle heard about this, he was horrified, and made a  will which left money not only to Arthur but also £1000 which he specified should go to Frederick's youngest daughter, or if he hadn't got one, then to his brother's youngest daughter -- which of course turned out to be Amy. It seems to me, having now read the whole book (I was waiting till it was over as I didn't want to get ahead of the BBC) that Andrew Davies tried to huddle too much in to the last hour. There were several puzzling loose ends for those who have not read the book -- I think many will have been puzzled by the box that Tattycoram found under Miss Wade's bed -- it contained, in fact, the hard evidence about Arthur's mother. All this being said, though, I really loved the whole thing and am sorry the audience figures fell off, as they are said to have done. People will have missed some stunning performances, far too many to mention, though I must say that Russell Tovey as John Chivery was astonishingly good throughout and perhaps especially so in the final episode. You can read more comments on it all on Random Jottings.