Harriet Devine's Blog

A minor triumph

 Even if you've never been to Oxford you're probably familiar with the famous front of Blackwell's bookshop -- it appears in numerous episodes of Inspector Morse, often with the red Jaguar parked (illegally) outside, and probably shows up in Lewis as well. 

Well, yesterday evening, Blackwell's was the scene of a minor triumph when five of us -- Simon of Stuck in a Book, Simon's friend Mel, plus Ruth and Sheenagh from our book group and me -- made up a team for the Blackwell's quiz night. We were all rather nervous and I for one thought we might be ignominiously defeated. There were eight rounds on different subjects, and amazingly, when they announced the halfway marks, we were in second place out of a total of eleven. We were pretty sure we'd plummeted after that -- we really needed a scientist as the science round was a killer (pity Dark Puss wasn't there) -- but after a nail-biting finish with a tie breaker for second place ("What's the population of Chicago's Hyde Park district?" -- some serious guesswork going on here), we did end up second and each got a £5 book token. Really good fun (and free crisps and soft drinks into the bargain). 

Good news for Gaskell lovers

A nice piece of news for anyone who loves Elizabeth Gaskell. And I'm sure lots of people do, especially since Cranford hit our small screens.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/elizabeth-gaskell-joins-the-greats-in-poets-corner-2089911.html

The Garden of Last Days

This is the second book I have read on commission, as it were, and another one I would not have otherwise thought to read. So this writing job is proving to be very good for me as it takes me out of my comfort zone, I suppose, whatever that is. 

I had just about heard of Andre Dubus III's previous novel,  House of Sand and Fog, mainly because it was made into a film (which I have not actually seen). But of the author himself I knew nothing, and I doubt if, of my own accord, I'd have picked up a book about an Islamic terrorist visiting a strip club in Florida just before 9/11. But it turned out to be a lot better than I was expecting. 

The Garden of Last Days is a tense psychological thriller. The novel begins on an early September evening in 2001. April, a stripper, is on her way to work at the Puma Club for men. April’s landlady Jean, who usually baby-sits three-year-old Franny, is in hospital, so April has decided to bring her daughter to the club, and to leave her watching children's videos in the office while her mother works. But April quickly gets caught up with an unusual, foreign, client, whose name is Bassam. He has a great deal of money, all in cash, and he is extremely free with it, demanding private time with April. But while she is in the Champagne Room with Bassam, Franny gets scared and wanders out of the office looking for her mother. Meanwhile, another client, AJ, drunk and angry, is in the car park, having been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper.  He’s been denied access to his own beloved small son, and when he spots Franny alone and crying he decides to take action, with disastrous results.  

The novel is based partly on known facts. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, several of the hijackers spent time in Jacksonville, Florida, where they stayed at the Ramada Inn. While they were there they are known to have visited strip clubs and to have purchased pornographic videos and used the services of prostitutes. Doing so was breaking strict Islamic law, and a sin for these Muslim fundamentalists who were about to die for their faith. So major theme of the novel is extremist Islamic fundamentalism and its results. Bassam is shown to be a naïve young man, who, despite the warnings of his father, a good-hearted moderate Muslim, has been recruited by an extreme terrorist organization. The incentive that has persuaded him to die for his faith is the promise of heavenly rewards after death in the shape of willing and beautiful young virgins. But during the waiting period before the attacks, Bassam and his fellow hijackers are drawn into supposedly sinful encounters with alcohol and sex. Another strength of the novel is the way it shows the underlying humanity of characters who may initially appear morally culpable. AJ, drunk and confused, abducts a child in the belief that he is rescuing her from a worse fate.  April could easily be judged as a bad parent for taking her child to the club, but she is a loving mother who only wants the best for Franny. And Bassam, despite the terrible commitment he has made to his faith, is shown to be a confused young man, torn between his religious beliefs and his more human urges.

I'm not sure I will be seeking out more novels by Andre Dubus III (so-called because his father and grandfather were also novelists) but he is certainly a talented writer and a thought-provoking one. I'm glad I read this, anyway, and I certainly learned a lot. 

The Reluctant Bride

Are you familiar with that great website Art Inconnu? I've discovered some wonderful painters on there who I'd never heard of before. And here's another one -- Auguste Toulemouche (1829-1890). Apparently he was a member of a school of art known as Costume painting and you can probably see why. But look past the dresses and you can see that there's a lot more going on. How cross and miserable the poor girl looks! There's a novel lurking around in here somewhere, for sure.

206 Bones

I went to the library last week in search of some Tess Gerritson, having been persuaded to read her by some very positive reviews on Random Jottings. I did pick up a couple but I haven't started them yet because I also spotted this, which I think is the most recent of Kathy Reichs' Tempe Brennan novels. I've been a huge fan of these terrific, funny, intelligent thrillers right from the start, but the last one I read, Devil Bones, was a great disappointment, I felt, and I was not alone in this, that the novel was really rushed and a bit skimpy and altogether not up to her usual high standard. So I was a little apprehensive about starting on this one.

I needn't have worried - Reichs seems to be back on form. Yes, of course any series in which the same characters reappear again and again is bound to have some common elements, but the story here is a complex one. As a forensic anthropologist, Tempe is often working on several cases at the same time, and generally they are quite separate. But here she finds some curious connections which lead her to believe that there is a serial killer responsible. However, things in the lab are not going at all smoothly, and she begins to feel she may be losing her grip -- she misplaces important items of evidence, overlooks obvious clues, misses a vital diagnosis. Her boss is increasingly worried and she is unsure how to proceed. She does have the friendship and support of her friend and ex-lover Ryan, but most of her colleagues seem unhappy and mistrustful. Yes of course it all works out fine in the end, but only after Tempe has gone through some pretty gruelling experiences. 

What I like so much about this series is way Kathy Reichs manages to combine the knowledge and experience derived from her own extremely distinguished forensic and anthropological training with the ability to tell a fast-paced, exciting story with wit and sensitivity. Tempe is far from perfect -- she is often bad-tempered and grouchy, she's very confused about her continued feelings for Ryan -- but when it comes to the job in hand, she is absolutely focused and trustworthy. And it does help that Ryan is so totally gorgeous -- I'm sure I'm not alone, at least among female readers, in longing for them to get back together again. And do they? You'll have to read the novel to find out.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Let me say straight away that I was paid to read this book. More on this below -- but the big question is, would I have read it otherwise? Probably not. I didn't know anything about it, had never read any of David Mitchell's other novels, and to be honest there is so much on the TBR pile already that something has to reach out and grab me by the throat before I will drop everything and pick it up. But money is a great motivator, and I managed to gulp down all its 469 large-size pages in just three days. 

And am I glad I did? Well, yes -- it was quite enjoyable and I learned a lot, and a lot of images and impressions have stayed with me since.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is set in Japan, during the country’s Edo period (1603-1837). In the 1630s, the reigning Shogun had forbidden overseas travel, banned all foreign books, and closed off all trade with the outside world apart from very limited contact through the trading post of Dejima, a small artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki. This was controlled by the Dutch East India Company, who were permitted to bring in two ships per year to trade items such as sugar in exchange for Japan’s rich copper holdings. The novel begins in the summer of 1799, as Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk from the Netherlands, arrives on Dejima. His task is to help uncover evidence of the former Chief Resident’s corruption, which he does with some success though it earns him the distrust of many of his compatriots. He befriends Ogawa Uzaemon, a local interpreter, and falls in love with Orito, a Japanese midwife who has permission to study under the company physician on Dejima. But Orito is kidnapped and imprisoned in a monastery run by the corrupt Abbot Enomoto, and Ogawa’s attempt to rescue her ends disastrously. Jacob struggles on, attempting to deal with the duplicity and vice that surround him on every side, until his successful foiling of an attempted English takeover of the island earns him the position and respect he deserves.

So much for the story, which is packed with incident and adventure with a bit of romance thrown in. But what is the novel actually about? Well the clash of cultures and civilisations is obviously an important theme -- East vs West, imperialism vs democracy, superstition vs science and so on. Language plays a part in this and the interpreters are central to communication between the Dutch and Japanese, sometimes with quite entertaining results. And of course there is an interesting consideration of women's lives here, with Orito's role central to this -- at the start she is something almost unheard of in Japan at the period, an educated woman getting a medial training, but she is captured and imprisoned in a terrifying "House of Sisters", where women are forced to submit to unwanted sexual intercourse and childbirth (shades of Margaret Atwood here). 

But I think it was the style and atmosphere of this novel that made the most impression on me. Told in the present tense and the third person, with multiple points of view, the novel's prose is often breathtakingly lively and impressive, whether it's the short, haiku-like sentences of description ( “Steam rises from a bowl of water; light is sliced on the bright razor. On the floor a toucan pecks beans from a pewter saucer. Plums are piled in a terracotta dish, blue-dusted indigo”), the compressed sensuality, as when Jacob bites into a persimmon and “the pulp disintegrates into fermented jasmine, oily cinnamon, perfumed melon, melted damson”, or the many dialects, idioms and habits of speech of the multifarious characters. 

Two of David Mitchell's earlier novels were shortlisted for the Booker, but this one, though it made the longlist, didn't make the shortlist, and I can see why -- really the plot is a little clunky in places and the pudding is perhaps rather over-egged -- one critic described it as "Pirates of the Caribbean on speed". But you might love it -- perhaps you have already read it and did -- or hated it?

Yes, the money -- I've got a nice little short-term job reading 21st century novels and writing about them for an American publication. I'd be happy to do this forever but alas I think it ends in November.

 

 

 

The Siege of Krishnapur

  

 "For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece". So wrote the New Statesman of this great novel, which won the Booker prize in 1973. I couldn't have said it better myself. Having read and loved JG Farrrell's Troubles (set in Ireland at the time of the 1916 rebellion) last June, I thought this one, which deals with the Indian mutiny of 1857, would be a good choice to take with me to India, and how right I was. 

These novels, together with The Singapore Grip (1978), have come to be known as Farrell's Empire Trilogy, and all three show the British colonisers at their horrifying, ludicrous worst. Based closely on historical accounts of two sieges, of Cawnpore and Lucknow, this book tells of a British garrison town which manages to hold out for four months against the attacks of native Sepoys. 

Led by the Collector, Mr Hopkins, a sensitive, intelligent lover of art and of progress whose main obsession is the Great Exhibition of 1851, the British inhabitants of Krishnapur gradually lose their stiff upper lips and their prejudices as cholera, starvation and gun shots diminish their numbers, food runs out, dead bodies putrefy and the carrion birds grow fat. Unhappily finding himself in the midst of all this is George Fleury, a young Oxford educated poet, who has come to India to accompany his widowed sister Miriam on a visit. Circumstances force Fleury to learn to load cannons and fire pistols, but his mind is constantly wandering off to pleasanter fields of Wordsworthian fancy, causing the increasingly deranged Padre to come to believe that the siege is God's punishment for Fleury's supposed atheism. Two doctors, Dunstable and McNab, argue incessantly over the cause of cholera -- is it carried in the air, as Dunstable believes, or in water, as McNab argues -- until Dunstable's attempt to prove McNab wrong by means of a personal demonstration has predictably disastrous results. The women suffer terribly at first, having to do their own washing and even cooking, but as the weeks go by several of them find surprising strength -- Lucy Hughes, a fallen woman rejected by the whole community, keeps everyone happy with little tea parties, often consisting of cups of hot water and little else, and shows a remarkable talent for manufacturing gun cartridges, while Dr Dunstable's beautiful daughter Louise, the belle of many balls before the siege, throws herself into nursing the sick. 

Serious and horrendous though many of these events are, this novel is at the same time almost painfully funny. A cloud of flying black insects lands on Lucy Hughes, who tears off her clothes and stands completely coated in them until Fleury and his friend Harry manage to scrape them off her with the cardboard covers torn off the Bible. They are amazed to find that though Lucy much resembles statues they have seen, she has pubic hair:

'Do you think this is supposed to be here?' asked Harry, who had spent a moment or two scraping at it ineffectually with his board. Because the hair, too, was black it was hard to be sure that it was not simply matted and dried insects.

'That's odd', said Fleury, peering at it with interest; he had never seen anything like it on a statue. 'Better leave it, anyway, for the time being. We can always come back to it later when we've done the rest'. 

Fleury's bumbling attempts to deal with the realities of war are a constant delight, as when he manages to kill one sepoy with a violin and another with a faulty pistol he has been fiddling ineffectually with minutes earlier. The gun-shot finally runs out and the inhabitants are reduced to loading the cannons with anything they can find that is remotely portable, so that the attacking sepoys are mowed down with silver sugar tongs, false teeth, teaspoons, fish knives, marbles and pieces of lightening conductor. And there is much much more.

Sadly this did not win The Best of the Booker, for which it was shortlisted in 2008. But it's one of the best novels I have read in a very long time.

Russia in Colour, 100 years ago

 

This is just one of a whole series of the most amazing photographs taken in Russia between 1900 and 1910. To see them all, just click here. The quality is astonishing -- hard to believe they are a hundred years old. 

Dear folks -- I have been getting so many nice comments on the blog lately and am concerned that you must all think me very churlish for not replying. I am still in India and my time online is very limited, but I really appreciate hearing from you all. I'm coming home on Thursday and will start posting properly again soon afterwards -- I've read some really enjoyable books -- EH Young's Chatterton Square, JG Farrell's Siege of Krishnapoor and also his unfinished The Hill Station, and have just last night finished (re-) reading Villette (which I hope I am right in thinking is the next book scheduled for one of my reading groups). So more on all those very soon.

Woman with Daffodils

 Actually called "Watering Daffoldils"and painted by William Henry Margetson (1861-1940). You can see some more of his paintings here.