Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Painting

Here's something I found for you today. Rather charming, but you can't help thinking she is more concerned with smiling sweetly at the painter than with whatever is on the canvas. But maybe she is painting the painter? Here's what it said about him on the site I found him on:

Max Nonnenbruch (1857-1922)
A painter of striking seductiveness of style is Max Nonnenbruch, of Munich. After winning recognition by his earlier works of domestic genre, he devoted himself almost entirely to idyllic and semi-classical subjects, akin in feeling to "The Favorite," in which he found the true direction of his talent, and by which he is represented in the greatest private collections of Germany.

The Serpent Pool

I've been a bit under the weather this week -- just a sort of cold-type virus with a mild fever, not enough to lay me out but enough to make me feel tired and lacking in energy. I spent one day in bed but the rest of the time I have been soldiering on though not enjoying it particularly. So I was particularly delighted when this popped through the door. Crime fiction might not be everybody's idea of comfort reading but it certainly is mine, and this is an excellent example of the sort of thing I enjoy. It's the fourth in Martin Edwards' Lake District novels, the first three of which I have already read with great pleasure.

You probably know, even if you don't live in the UK, that the Lake District is a particularly beautiful, magical, slightly mysterious part of north-west England. We don't do really high mountains here in Britain, but there are some pretty impressive ones (known as fells) up there, as well, of course, as the eponymous lakes. There are also woods, streams, waterfalls, windy hillsides, winding roads, stone cottages and plenty of small pools, usually known as tarns. The area is probably best known, apart from its natural beauty, as the home of the poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and  his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A little less well-remembered is their younger contemporary Thomas de Quincey, who, if you have heard of him at all, you may know as "The English Opium Eater". Eat opium he certainly did (it was quite legal and could be bought at any chemist) but he also married a local girl and took over Dove Cottage in Grasmere when the Wordsworths moved to a larger house.

Why is she telling us all this, you are probably asking. Well, apart from the fact that I like rambling on about all this sort of thing, de Quincey features in the plot of Martin Edwards' latest novel. Indeed a de Quincey Festival is being planned, and the historian Daniel Kind, newly returned to his Lake District cottage after a spell in America, is to be a keynote speaker. His talk -- also the subject of a book he is starting to write -- is de Quincey's remarkable essay, "On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts". Meanwhile Daniel's friend DCI Hannah Scarlett is investigating a murder that took place several years ago, when the body of a young woman was found in the Serpent Pool, by coincidence just up the hill behind the house Hannah and her partner Marc have recently bought. This is a "cold case", but there seem to be connections with a recent murder, in which a rare-book collector has been burned to death amidst his precious library -- and soon a second and equally disturbing killing appears to link up with both.

Quite apart from the ingenious solution of the cases (in which de Quincey features in an unexpected way), the interest of the novel lies in the details of police procedure and also, of course, in the relationship between Hannah and Daniel, which has inched forward unbearably slowly through all four novels. Daniel is now free, as his neurotic girlfriend is back in London, but Hannah is still living with Marc though she is having grave doubts about the relationship and is, more than ever, drawn to Daniel (who I cannot help visualising as looking exactly like Daniel Craig, which makes everything even more delightful). 

If you like good, solid, intelligent detective fiction, you will not be disappointed in this. Go get it!

Boy Reading

You either love him or you hate him -- that's Norman Rockwell, the great American painter and illustrator. I love him, myself. Here's one his magazine covers, called Boy Reading Pirate Stories. If you do like his work you can see lots more of it here.

Pontoon

Once upon a time, many years ago, in what now almost seems like another life, I spent a year in the American mid-West. Not in Minnesota, where this novel is set, but in Iowa, which is the next southernmost state. It was a happy time in my life and I have always had a warm feeling about that rather empty, often bleak part of the world, with its extreme temperatures (freezing winters, humid summers, no spring or autumn to speak of). It's surprising, then, perhaps, that I have never before read any of Garrison Keillor's novels. Of course I have heard him occasionally on the radio -- only the other day he was interviewed on BBC Radio Four -- but somehow I never got around to the books. I might never have done if I hadn't entered a draw on dovegreyreader and won this book. I  must be on a roll, I think, as it's only mid-January and already I have made two great new discoveries, Muriel Spark and now Garrison Keillor.

Pontoon is set in a small town, Lake Wobegon. The novel starts with a death and ends, more or less, with a funeral of sorts. Does this sound depressing? It is about as far from that as it could possibly be. The person who dies is 82 year old Evelyn, a woman of the most enormous appetite for life. A great traveller, an enthusiastic walker and exerciser, warm, generous, outspoken, she dies in her sleep, as she had hoped to do.

"And when people heard about her death, they stopped what they were doing and stood, hands at their sides, and felt her absence. A tall tree had crashed to the ground".

That's the end of the first chapter. The rest of the novel tells about the effect of her life, and her death, on those around her. Mainly the book focuses on her daughter Barbara who has not been happy for many years. Divorced, a quiet alcoholic, she misses her two children, one at university and the other a girl, brain damaged at birth, being cared for by nuns. But it is not too much to say that Evelyn's death liberates her. Her first discovery, shortly after she has found her mother's body, is that Evelyn had a lover, Raoul, someone she had met again many years after a brief love affair when they were both in their early twenties. Barbara starts to look at her own life, and decides it is time to make some changes. The vodka goes down the sink and she starts to plan the send-off Evelyn requested -- which involves among other things putting her ashes inside a bowling ball and dropping them into Lake Wobegon. The end of the novel does indeed describe this, which is the most astonishingly glorious, funny, heart-warming event you could possibly imagine.

If you want to laugh, maybe cry a bit, and come away feeling that life can be good and that there is much to look forward to if you grab it and make the the best of it, this is the place to go.

They Found Him Dead

I was supposed to go to London today but I woke up early and found that several more inches of snow had fallen -- it's falling still -- so I rather regretfully cancelled the interview I was supposed to be doing and started to read this book instead. And, in fact, I have just finished it. I don't usually get through things so fast but it was easy reading and once I'd started I thought I might as well get to the end.

I must say at once that I am far from being a fan of Georgette Heyer's Regency novels. I read a few as a teenager but was not all that crazy about them even then, and the few I have tried in recent years have not grabbed me at all. I had no idea she wrote crime fiction until I saw a review not long ago on Random Jottings and discovered that she wrote lots of it. I'm always up for a bit of classic crime so I thought I give her a chance to raise herself in my estimation. Did she? Well, kind of. I certainly found the novel much more readable and less irritating than the Regency ones. This is a classic country house murder mystery, first published in 1937. The novel begins with a death, though whether or not it is a murder is questionable -- Silas Kane falls from a cliff on a foggy night and it may well have been an accident. But Kane was a wealthy man, and when his cousin, and heir, is shot through the head not long afterwards the police are called in and an investigation gets under way. There's a tremendous crowd of possible suspects, ranging from 80 year old Emily Kane through various relatives, servants and business partners. The police are assisted, or at times hampered, by the best character in the book, fourteen year old Timothy Harte, whose obsession with American films and pulp fiction has given him a suspicious mind. Several more murder attempts and many red herrings later the identity of the murderer is revealed. Sadly I had guessed who it was very early on and was in fact rather surprised that neither the family nor the police, who seemed pretty smart on the whole, had come to the same conclusion.

Guessing who did it does rather spoil the fun, of course. But the characters are likeable (or dislikeable where appropriate) and the novel is entertaining enough, and enjoyably full of period detail. So I might try one or two more of these when the mood takes me (or the snow traps me).

Little Girls Reading

I love it when I discover a new painter and then find more of their work to put on here. This is another by Henriette Browne, whose lovely Girl Writing was on the blog last week. This is called "The Reading Lesson" and it's in a rather different syle from last week's but equally charming. If you want to know more about the painter herself, check out one of the comments on last week's painting.

Oxford Snow

Well, we finally got snow in Oxford and these were taken out of my back bedroom window this morning. It's still bucketing down, very pretty, but everything seems to have ground to a halt. A chance to read some books?

To Bed With Grand Music

A good many of my fellow bloggers have written about this 1946 novel by Marghanita Laski, and made it sound so interesting that I was eager to read it. As the photo (taken from the Persephone catalogue) indicates, this is a novel about wartime. I don't know about you, but I have often wondered how I would have coped if my husband went off to war and I was left alone in England -- this actually happened to my mother, and she struggled on but I know she missed my father terribly. As the novel begins, Deborah and her husband Graham are in bed together on the night before he leaves for the war. Naturally the talk has turned to fidelity:

"Listen, darling", he said, "I'm not going to promise you I'll be physically faithful to you, because I don't want to make you any promise I may not be able to keep. God alone knows how long I may be stuck in Mid-East, and its no good saying I can do without a woman for three or four years, because I can't. But I'll promise you this, I'll never let myself fall in love with anyone else, and I'll never sleep with anyone who could possibly fill your place in my life."....This means I'll have to be pretty damn careful, he said to himself, but aloud he said, "Darling, will you promise me the same?"

Naturally Deborah solemnly swears she will always be faithful to Graham, "however long you're away", a promise she is to break many many times over in the course of the novel. Although she tries at first to make a life for herself and her small son Timmy in the country, she is soon bored and frustrated. Not a natural mother, she happily hands Timmy over to her housekeeper and starts work in London, returning only at weekends. Before long she has drifted into the first of what will be many affairs, though initially she and her lover manage to convince themselves they are just comforting each other for the absence of their spouses. But over time Deborah gets increasingly addicted to the thrill of the sexual chase and to the many perks associated with being a mistress -- the pretty hats, the elegant clothes, the jewellery, the parties, the expensive meals. The affairs get shorter, and any pretence of emotional involvement goes out of the window. As the novel draws to a close, the war has ended and Deborah is anticipating with some dread the return of boring Graham and her own enforced resumption of life as a country housewife and mother.

It's well known that To Bed With Grand Music was published by Laski under a pseudonym, apparently because she based Deborah on a woman friend who might have recognised herself in the leading character. In any case it was almost certainly not because the novel was shocking. In fact although government wartime propaganda was pleased to present women as keeping the home fires burning, and sitting beside them knitting socks and waiting for the return of the soldier, there's little doubt that many married women revelled in their newfound freedom and in the ready availability of spare men passing through London. And, though Deborah seems to be having a good time, the novel is actually something of a cautionary tale. It is quite hard to imagine what will happen to her after Graham's return, and pretty questionable whether she will be able to drag herself back from the slippery but intoxicating slope she has found herself on. But it is hard not feel some sympathy for her -- after all, her behaviour is only what Graham himself admitted he would be indulging in while he was away.

So the novel raises interesting questions about sexuality, about feminism, and about double standards. It's a most fascinating, lively and thought-provoking read, and highy recommended.

And here is the Persephone endpaper, taken from a Jacqmar silk scarf of the period.

Sarah Rayne x 2

I'm always in the market for a new (to me) crime writer, and, having heard good things about Sarah Rayne, I happily snapped up  Spider Light in the 50p bookstore in Notting Hill just before Christmas. Then a trip to the library a few days ago yielded up Ghost Song, so I took that home too. I've now read them both. Did I enjoy them? Well, they certainly kept me reading. But I think it was quite unfortunate that I read them so close together, as, though the plots were different, the formula, if that is the word, was rather startlingly similar. Both novels spanned three time periods, through which the mystery was interwoven. Both centred round an ancient and mysterious building, long disused -- in Spider Light an old mill, in Ghost Song a nineteenth- century theatre. In both novels, bodies were found to have been walled up in basement chambers, and both featured seemingly normal young women who turned out to be raging psychopaths. Of course there were many differences but I'm afraid I was rather put off by the similarities.

In Ghost Song as the title suggests the old theatre around which the novel centres is reputed to be haunted and indeed it does seem to be as the young couple -- surveyor and theatre historian -- who visit it do see what appears to be a ghost. The connections between the three time periods are well done here -- part of it takes place in 1914 and gives an interesting slant on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the subsequent start of the First World War --  and apparently inexplicable events and circumstances are satisfactorily resolved in the end. Spider Light is even more spookily gothic -- as well as the horrid old mill it also features an old madhouse and some extremely scary inmates, a rather nasty lesbian, and a very narrow escape for the plucky present-day heroine.

Sarah Rayne is clearly interested in madness, which springs up in several places in both novels. In fact these are not really crime novels, they are psychological thrillers with definite gothic undertones. I am not a huge fan of the gothic, and I really prefer a straight detective novel to a psychological thriller (always excepting the best of Barbara Vine) so I rather doubt if I will be reading any more of Sarah Rayne in the forseeable future. But she obviously has a great following and has been very successful in the past eight or so years since she started writing in this vein, so good luck to her. If you are keen on the gothic and on twisted psychology and terrifying murders, you will enjoy these a lot.

Girl Writing

This is a lovely image to start 2010. Painted by Henriette Browne (1829-1901), an artist about whom I know less than nothing  -- this is all I have discovered, from the National Gallery website:

Henriette Browne was the pseudonym for Mme Jules de Saux, née Sophie Boutellier. Born in Paris, she studied under Perin and Chaplin, and exhibited at the Salon from 1853. She specialised in genre scenes, especially Near-Eastern and religious subjects. She also worked as an engraver.

If you know any more about her, do let me know.