Harriet Devine's Blog

Gilead

People sometimes ask me why I enjoy blogging. There are two reasons. One is that I am a compulsive writer and after many years in which I wrote lectures, articles, books, I find this is a wonderful way of feeding my craving to get words onto the page, electronically speaking. The other, equally important, is the fantastic network of friends I have made, most of whom I have never met face to face. My regular readers and commentators mean a huge amount to me, and so does the relatively small but extremely choice circle of other bloggers who I visit regularly. One such is Ruth of Crafty People, who describes herself as a lapsed reader. Lapsed she may be, but when she does read she reads with a great deal of perceptiveness and I always enjoy her reviews. I was intrigued recently by what she had to say about Gilead and lo and behold she was kind enough to send it to me. I am so glad she did. This is without doubt one of the most remarkable novels I have read in many a long year. Set in a small town in 1950s Iowa, it is in the form of a long letter, or memoir, written by the aging minister John Ames for his young son. Ames is in his seventies and in poor health. Knowing he will not see his little boy grow up, his great desire is to leave for the child something that will give him some sense of who his father was, where he came from, and what he thought and believed. So he begins, in part at least, with what he calls the "begats" -- the story of his own father, a minister and a pacifist, and of his grandfather, a minister and a radical fighter in the Civil War. We also learn that this very late marriage, to a much younger and adored wife, was Ames' second, his first wife and childhood sweetheart having died after giving birth to a daughter who lived for only three days. Still living and in equally poor health is his other childhood friend Boughton, another minister, who has been the closest thing Ames had had to family for many years. Boughton's children have all dispersed, leaving only their sister Glory to care for the ailing father. But soon after the novel begins, his son Jack unexpectedly returns to Gilead. The black sheep of the family, Jack has been long gone, who knows where, and Ames is extremely uncomfortable when he reappears, especially as he soon wins the hearts of Ames' wife and son. Slowly slowly the reasons for his disappearance are revealed, and finally, in a heart-wrenching last section of the novel, he tells to Ames the story of his recent and tragic years. I not ashamed to tell you that cried at the pain of it, and because nothing can ever solve this impossible situation.

These stories emerge slowly because Ames is much concerned with his own inner life and how his faith in God is affected by his intensely human reactions to events. A deeply religious man, widely read in theology, he is trying, as part of his legacy, to make his son understand the grounds of his faith, which has been maintained in the face of sometimes great odds. This, really, structures the novel, which moves back and forth in time and in and out of Ames' thoughts and feelings interspersed with outward events and memories. It's a novel about the history of America's mid-West, about race prejudice, about spirituality, about fathers and sons, about love. Exquisitely written, deeply moving, greatly thought-provoking, this may not be the novel for everyone. But believe me, it is a masterpiece. Thanks, Ruth!

My Antonia

"During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood ...His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her".

These words, from the Introduction to this fine novel, are spoken by the (un-named) narrator, who then disappears from the scene, leaving the rest of the story to be told by his friend, the lawyer Jim Burden. Jim, orphaned at ten years old, is sent by train from his home in Virginia to live with his grandparents on a farm in the wilds of Nebraska. Also on the train is an immigrant Bohemian (i.e. Czech) family, the Shimerdas, who are about to start a new life in the same locality. Jim soon makes friends with their beautiful, wild, strong-willed fourteen year old daughter Antonia, and the two become inseparable. A few years later Jim's grandparents move to town, and Jim, whose feelings for Antonia are powerful, is happy when she too moves, to work as a "hired girl" for a local family. Jim is growing up and is greatly attracted to Antonia and her friends, going to local dances and engaging in mild flirtations. He loses sight of her during his university years, though sometimes hears news of her from her friend Lena Lingard, now a successful dressmaker, with whom he has an affair. Later he learns that Antonia has left home to get married but been jilted and has returned home pregnant. He visits her and finds her strong as ever, loving her new baby. Many years pass until he meets her again, now married to a farmer and the mother of eleven children. It is clear that she is happy -- Jim sees her as “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” --  but also that the bond between her and Jim is undiminished.
    This bald account of the story of the novel will not really give you any idea of how great it is. Because it is structured as Jim's reminiscences, it is not a particularly well-shaped story -- no twists or major surprises here. But it is absolutely enthralling for so many reasons. It is a wonderful picture of life as it was lived by those brave late-nineteenth-century immigrants, arriving with little money and struggling to survive the harsh conditions on the prairie; a fine bildungsroman, showing Jim maturing from a young, uncertain boy, through adolescence and into adulthood; and an extraordinarily strong characterisation of Antonia herself, who seems to stand for that enduring spirit of the early pioneers, rising from poverty and privation to become the founders of the best of the American spirit. Cather writes beautifully and I enjoyed this so much that I was really sorry to get to the end of the novel. If I had the strength and energy to put together a list of 100 must-be-read books, this would definitely be on it.

The Mom Song

Every mother and everyone who has had a mother will recognise this extremely funny song. It's on You Tube but I don't know how to make it appear properly on my blog so you will have to click the link. Do try it -- it is quite brilliant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESe-AysF9mw

Sunday Salon: The Wyndham Case

This is not the book I'm really reading -- that is Willa Cather's wonderful novel My Antonia, which I will tell you about soon. But I was enjoying that so much that I really didn't want to get to the end of it, so when the library rang to say they had got me another two Imogen Quy novels I decided to take a  break from Cather and plunge into Jill Paton Walsh. As you may know, I stumbled across these a couple of weeks ago and have read two of them with great enjoyment. The Wyndham Case is the first of the series (four in all -- hope there will be more!), and a cracker it is indeed. Imogen, the college nurse at the fictitious, but very believable, St Agatha's College in Cambridge, is called in to the precious, heavily guarded, Wyndham Library, where a student has been found dead among the valuable seventeenth-century books. Philip Skellow, she soon learns, was not popular with his fellow students, who generally despised him for his grammar-school origins, and investigations are made more difficult as they all close ranks and refuse to disclose information about Philip's final evening in college. His death looks like murder but may have been accidental, though there are some very strange indications on the post-mortem report. But when a second student is found drowned in the college fountain, there is no doubt that a murderer is at loose somewhere in the college. At home, meanwhile, Imogen's eccentric lodger, an aged professor who lives and breathes for his collection of ancient and valuable books, becomes distraught when he discovers one of them is missing. He then disappears for several days and reappears having lost his memory and muttering about having been kept in a dungeon. To cap it all, the police decide Philip was in the Wyndham Library for the purpose of stealing books, something Imogen has reason to think is probably not true. Of course in the end all these disparate strands are wonderfully and ingeniously interwoven and solved to everyone's satisfaction. What a delightful book -- intelligent, witty, well written and altogether hugely satisfying.

A Saturday Poem

Over on Books Do Furnish A Room today, Lindsay has some Scottish poems. For some reason they started me thinking about Jackie Kay, that excellent living poet. Born in 1961, to a white Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, she was adopted by a white Scottish couple and brought up in Glasgow. Her powerful poem sequence, The Adoption Papers, gives an account of a search for the birth mother and the development of a relationship with her as well as with the adoptive parents. This poem, 'My Grandmother', is one of my favorites. See how the picture of the grandmother is subtly transmuted at the end of the poem, even though the same images are repeated from the beginning?

My Grandmother

My grandmother is like a Scottish pine,
tall, straight-backed, proud and plentiful,
a fine head of hair, greying now
tied up in a loose bun.
Her face is ploughed land.
Her eyes shine rough as amethysts.
She wears a plaid shawl 
of our clan with the zeal of an Amazon. 
She is one of those women 
burnt in her croft rather than moved off the land.
She comes from them, her snake’s skin. 
She speaks Gaelic mostly, English only 
when she has to, then it’s blasphemy.

My grandmother sits by the fire and swears
There’ll be no darkie baby in this house 

My grandmother is a Scottish pine,
tall, straight-backed proud and plentiful, 
her hair tied with pins in a ball of steel wool. 
Her face is tight as ice
and her eyes are amethysts. 

The Story of Forgetting

  I was lucky enough to win this in a draw over at dovegreyreader's recently. Written by a new young author (I believe he is only 24), it is a novel whose theme, early-onset Alzheimer's, may not appear to be a particularly promising one. But Stefan Merrill Block -- whose own family seems to be subject to something like this -- has woven this seemingly terrible disease into a story which is, in the end, uplifting and strangely comforting. The young protagonist, Seth, a rather troubled teenager, has recently seen his own mother, still in her fifties, hospitalised and deteriorating fast. Aware of the fact that her rare form of the disease is passed down through families, he starts to research the background and to seek other sufferers to whom he knows he must be related. Most of all, he wants to discover more about his mother's immediate family background, which she has always kept quiet about. Parallel to this story is that of Abel, an aging hermit living in considerable squalor in his ancient family house in Texas. His links to Seth and Seth's mother are not immediately clear but become so as the novel progresses. Woven through these two stories is a fable, the tale of a lost land called Isadora, in which memory does not exist and in which everyone lives in great peace and happiness. This is a fascinating and moving novel, and one which becomes even more interesting when you discover the background to the story in Stefan Merrill Block's own life -- you can read his own account of it here.

What Type is Your Blog?

Alerted to this by Litlove's blog Tales from the Reading Room I was unable to resist finding out what mine is. And this is what it turned out to be:

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Hmmmm.....

You can check yours out here.

Engleby

I have pretty mixed feelings about Sebastian Faulks. I really liked Birdsong and Green Dolphin Street, quite liked Charlotte Gray, was not wildly impressed with The Girl at the Lion d'Or, and was so bored with Human Traces that I gave up reading it. This one sounded intriguing -- the inside story of a troubled mind, secrets, a murder, Oxford in the 1970s -- a complete departure for Faulks, said the critics. Well, yes. I was impressed with the way he had caught the voice of Mike Engleby, a man is certainly suffering from a form of mental illness -- I was thinking Aspergers, but probably a more serious kind of psychosis. Certainly he is unable to form friendships, is deeply uncomfortable in social situations, indeed has no feelings to speak of apart from some fondness for his young sister. He is also highly intelligent and often very witty in his peculiar, skewed view of the world. But, though he tells us the story of his life -- his miserable, deprived childhood, his father's physical abuse, his dreadful years as a scholarship boy at a public school -- there are definitely things he does not reveal. Yes, Mike is an unreliable narrator. It's not, however, at all difficult to read between the lines, and there will be few if any readers who have not guessed the truth about the disappearance of Jennifer, the young girl student with whom he becomes obsessed, long before the final denouement. The story of his life -- it's in diary form, so we follow him through university, and through his career as an ultimately quite successful journalist in London and so on -- is a fascinating one, and, as I say, Mike as a character is extraordinarily and powerfully believable, and Faulks definitely gets an A for that. So what's not to like? It's hard to put my finger on, but it was something to do with the construction of the plot, the way the secrets are concealed and revealed -- somehow I was not terribly impressed with how that had been done, and might just give him a B/B+ for plotting. Quibble quibble. But overall it kept me interested and I'm glad I read it, though I must say the Guardian's "digested read" of the novel made me laugh a lot, and did put its finger rather well on the weaknesses of the novel.

Jill Paton Walsh

How good it is to discover a new author. Having so much enjoyed Jill Paton Walsh's The Bad Quarto, which I wrote about a few days ago, I have managed to get hold of two more of her books from the library. Debts of Dishonour is the third Imogen Quy novel, and finds Imogen rather out of her comfort zone, the Cambridge college where she works as the college nurse. A combination of circumstances plunges her into the world of big business where, together with her friend and ex-lover Andrew Duncombe, she finds herself investigating the death of the wealthy businessman Sir Julius Farran. Her college, St Agatha's, had hoped for an endowment from Farran, but instead finds itself dangerously on the brink of financial ruin when the new bursar's rather dodgy dealings with Farran's company prove to have sucked millions out of the college accounts. As she and Andrew delve further and further into the backgrounds of those involved in the company, more and more disturbing secrets come to light. The final ingenious denouement leaves Imogen with a difficult moral dilemma, though with her usual thoughtful intelligence she manages to solve it to her own satisfaction. This is all so well done --I really like Imogen and felt for her here as she is forced to work with Andrew, and at the same time resist his attempts to get her into bed "for old times sake". His unreliability in the relationship department is only too obvious, but she has to struggle with feelings she realises are not as dormant as she had hoped. Great stuff.

Greedy for more of this excellent author, I forced the librarians down into the basement and they came up with Lapsing. This turns out to be JPW's first adult novel (she has written many books for children) and is, I am guessing, to some extent autobiographical. The protagonist here is Tessa, an attractive girl from a good Catholic background, who is studying English at Oxford in the 1950s. Intelligent, innocent and devout, she joins a "cell" of young Catholic students who meet each week to discuss theology under the leadership of a young priest, Father Theodore. Soon, to Tessa's shocked amazement, Theodore is confessing his passionate love for her. As she learns of his unhappy childhood and his problems with his vocation she becomes increasingly attached -- and attracted -- to him but, believing their relationship can only ever be platonic, she agrees to marry the serious research student Ben. The three of them set up home together for a while, an arrangement which causes both great joy and great pain to both Tessa and Theodore. Finally the young priest breaks free of the church and soon afterwards tells Tessa he has met someone he wants to marry. Desperately unhappy at this betrayal, Tessa herself abandons the church, though she will never lose her spiritual vision.

As I write this I'm thinking, goodness, it all sounds really cheesy. But I can assure you it is not. It is in fact a most remarkable combination of humour and seriousness, written with great compassion and intelligence. Oxford in the 1950s is brilliantly evoked, and Tessa is the most delightful of protagonists, whose thoughtfulness and deep religious convictions are constantly threatened, but never overturned, by her growing awareness of sexuality. I suppose all this is very old fashioned, and perhaps that's why the novel is out of print, though you can get it for a penny or so on Amazon. I liked it very much indeed.

Sunday Salon: Check out this nice new blog

Well, check it out if you  like poetry, or think you might grow to like poetry! I do like it, which is why I shall be adding Writ on Water  -- a new blog dedicated to poetry -- to my blogroll, and also to my list of regular reads accessed via Google Reader. When I was teaching Eng Lit, I was so often saddened by how few students these days really enjoy reading poems -- I think probably because they are scared that they won't understand them. Bad, or no, teaching in schools is at the root of this, I'm sure. When I was young we had to read poetry on a regular basis and to learn it by heart, too -- and in fact I can still remember some of the poems I learned then. But this just doesn't happen any more.

Here is part of a poem by a poet I admire tremendously, Denise Levertov:

A Tree Telling of Orpheus
     
      White dawn. Stillness.When the rippling began
          I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
          of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving. Yet the rippling drew nearer – and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
                              Yet I was not afraid, only
                              deeply alert.
I was the first to see him, for I grew
                    out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
                                        twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or golden grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
                    more like a flower's.
                              He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
                                        came the ripple.   
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
                    as if rain
                              rose from below and around me
                    instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
                    I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
                    what the lark knows; all my sap
                              was mounting towards the sun that by now
                              had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.

                    He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:
                    the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! There was no twig of me not
                              trembling with joy and fear.

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
                    came into my roots
                              out of the earth,
                    into my bark
                              out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
          gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told me of journeys,
          of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
          of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots ...
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
          and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
                              grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.

                                        Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
          As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
          were both frost and fire, its chords flamed
up to the crown of me.
          I was seed again.
                    I was fern in the swamp.
                                        I was coal.

Hope you like it. You can read the whole poem here.