Harriet Devine's Blog

The Invisible Ones

One of the earliest reviews I wrote on this blog was of Stef Penney's Costa winning novel The Tenderness of Wolves. Like pretty much everyone who read it I was bowled over by it, and when I read it a second time last year in order to write a short essay on it I liked it, if anything, even better. So naturally I was anxious to see how she could possibly follow it up. And I'm happy to say I was really fascinated and gripped by The Invisible Ones. No, it's not The Tenderness of Wolves, and why should it be? But, though that novel was set in nineteenth-century Canada and this one is set in 1980s Essex, both share a sense of the strangeness, and otherness, of lives and worlds very different from the ones most of us inhabit.

This is a novel of two narrators, The first is Ray Lovell, a private investigator. As the novel begins, Ray is approached by a man who wants him to find out what happened to his daughter Rose, who disappeared less than a year after her marriage seven years earlier. He has chosen Ray for this task because he knows, from his name, that Ray is a gypsy, as he is himself. Ray is in fact only half gypsy, his father having given up the travelling life, moved into a house, and married a gorgie, a non-gypsy. Good money is put on the table, and Ray plunges in. 

The second narrator is JJ Janko, a fourteen year old boy and a member of the old Romany family into which Rose married. JJ lives in a modern caravan with his single mother, surrounded by members of his extended family -- grandparents, great uncle, and cousins. One of his cousins is Ivo Janko, Rose's abandoned husband, who takes care of their six-year-old son Christo. This is no mean task as Christo suffers from what the Jankos call the family curse, a serious inherited blood condition which is apparently incurable, though Ivo seemingly made a full recovery after a journey to Lourdes.

The ins and outs of these two points of view, which soon start to overlap as Ray meets the Jankos and starts his investigations, are really fascinating. The Jankos have many secrets and Tena Janko, JJ's great uncle and the family patriarch, is a firm believer in 'the old black blood of the Romanies' and a holder of the old stories and the old traditions. Many mysteries need to be unravelled before Ray solves the case, and in the process uncovers information that threatens the whole Janko clan. There is an important denouement which casts a very different light on everything that has gone before, and unfortunately I guessed what it was well before it was revealed. You'd think this would have spoiled my enjoyment, but it didn't, or at least not to any appreciable degree.

So -- what I loved, apart from the twists and turns of the central mystery, was the portrait of a race about which I knew next to nothing. The desire of the old generation to hold on to the old ways, the distrust of those who choose to dilute the pure blood, the superstitions and the arcane knowledge of herbs and magic ceremonies, the strong sense of family ties -- but also the low status of women, and the toughness of the life, and the racial prejudice suffered by the tribes -- all  of this was more or less new to me and left me wanting to know more.

I read a review that suggested Ray might reappear in future novels, and I would welcome that -- he is an interesting and complex character who spends much of the book trying to come to terms with his imminent divorce. If he does, I hope JJ will also come along -- his narrative voice is terrific, and his intelligence and sensitivity combined with his typically fourteen-year-old thoughts and actions make him a character nobody will forget in a hurry.

Stef Penney is a fine writer, and I strongly recommend this novel -- and if you want to read an interesting take on gypsies, here's an article I found.

One Book, Two Book, Three Book, Four…and Five (again!)

Thanks to Simon and Claire I've been reminded of Simon's meme so here's the current state of play in my reading world.

1) The book I'm currently reading

Robert Barnard, A Stranger in the Family. 

 I discovered Robert Barnard a few months ago when I read his excellent Out of the Blackout. I'm only a short way into this but I'm enjoying it very much so far. It's about a young man who returns to the family he was abducted from at the age of two -- and discovers there are many secrets...

 

2) The last book I finished

Stef Penney, The Invisible Ones. 

 Having really loved The Tenderness of Wolves I was very curious to see what Stef Penney was going to follow it up with. Some people seem to have been diappointed but I wasn't. Review will be up soon.

 

 

3) The next book I want to read

Henry James, The Golden Bowl.

 Whether I actually will or not is another matter -- but I read an excellent review of this on Gallimaufry and was inspired to try it. I have read some Henry James but I've always been afraid to try this one as it does sound like a challenge. But challenge is good, isn't it?

 

 

 

4) The last book I bought

Henry Green, Concluding.

 I've read a couple of Henry Green's novels, Loving and Party Going, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this -- I'm hoping it will be waiting for me when I get back to the UK next week.

 

 

 5) The last book I was given

Val McDermid, A Trick of the Dark.

 Got this for my birthday last month and whizzed through it -- it passed a pleasant enough few hours but didn't set off any fireworks. I know people who are huge fans of V McD but I am not one of them.

Woman Reading in a Hotel Lobby

This is actually a detail from a painting called The Hotel Lobby, by the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Here below is the whole painting.

Google Fight

I just discovered Google Fight, on which you could waste a lot of time. I suppose it could be a serious research tool but I suspect most people just play on it. Basically I guess it works out how many searches per word and compares them. You can enter your own terms or read some popular ones -- I tried God vs Satan (God wins by a large margin) and happiness vs misery -- misery won comfortably. Perhaps one day I'll find a bona fide use for it, as did the person who wrote this.

What I haven't read this week

Of course there's a lot I haven't read this week, but it's been one of those weeks when nothing I picked up seemed to be right. I'm in France at the moment and when I came over in September I made a big effort to bring books I'd been really looking forward to reading, and up to now it's worked really well. But this week, my goodness, I've been picking them up and putting them down and completely unable to settle to anything.

I actually ordered Elizabeth Jenkins Harriet from abebooks because when I read that Persephone was about to bring it out I thought I'd steal a march on them. Apart from the title, and the fact that it's set in Penge, in south east London, which is where my daughter lives, it's a Victorian thriller based on a true crime, so it sounded like a must-read. And I knew Jenkins was a good writer because I've read The Tortoise and the Hare. But I found it really depressing and abandoned it around chapter three.

As for Patrick Hamilton -- well, I'd been absolutely swept away by The Slaves of Solitude a few months ago, and also loved his early novel  Craven House. Hangover Square is possibly his most famous novel -- but the story of a mentally disturbed man who finally murders the girl he is in love with just didn't grab me at all and that one bit the dust at the end of chapter two.

When I wrote about Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows not long ago I asked for recommendations for more of her novels and In This House of Brede was one of them. I think I'll be getting back to this, as it is certainly unusual and fascinating, being the story of an attractive middle-aged woman who abandons a successful career to enter a nunnery. But it's serious, and slow moving, and quite long,  and I just wasn't in the mood.

I'd never heard of Ellen Feldman though apparently she's a popular writer. Next To Love, which has recently been published, came to me as a pre-publication copy a few months ago. Here's what the blurb says

Babe, Grace and Millie have been best friends since their first day at their small town’s only kindergarten. Despite their differences, they’ve played together, grown up together, shared each other’s secrets. And when World War Two becomes a reality for America too, the girls begin a new phase of their lives together – each quickly marries her first true love. With the men away, life is difficult for these newly married women, but when no fewer than sixteen telegrams arrive on a single morning in 1944, bearing news of the worst kind from the War Department, the girls know that nothing will ever be the same again . . 

I did actually get to the end of this, but only because I skimmed and skipped like mad. It's not awful, and lots of people will probably love it. I hoped I would, because I've been on such a WW2 binge lately, but it seemed, I'm afraid, terribly pedestrian and not at all engaging. Sorry, Ellen -- I hope I'm in a minority here.

Luckily I'm now onto something I'm really enjoying, Stef Penney's The Invisible Ones. More on that soon.

Child Reading

Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) was a celebrated American illustrator. This lovely picture is from A Child's Garden of Verses (1905) but you've almost certainly seen her work elsewhere. You can see stacks of it here.

The Old Wives Tale; or A Series of Gig Lamps?

If you're ever in the mood for immersing yourself in a great big and wholly absorbing Victorian novel, you should definitely consider The Old Wives Tale. But just remember one thing -- this one was published in 1907, six years after Victoria's death, so really it is a great big and wholly absorbing Edwardian novel, though it takes place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Are you with me so far?

Apparently Arnold Bennett got the idea for the novel from seeing a rather fat elderly woman in a restaurant and realising that she must once have been young and beautiful -- which led him to think about peoples' lives, and the changes they undergo both physically and psychologically. So he wrote this, which is the story of two sisters, Constance and Sophia. Teenagers when the novel begins, their lives are meticulously followed until their deaths in their sixties. 

If this doesn't sound wildly interesting, think again. The two girls are the daughters of a successful draper in the town of Bursley, one of the Five Towns that comprise the Potteries of middle England. Middle England, middle class, middle of the nineteenth century -- could this be significant? Their lives have always revolved around the shop, run by their mother since their father's stroke confined him to his bed, and it's always been assumed that they will follow their parents into the business. And so, indeed, will Constance do, becoming, as she ages, not a replica of her mother but as close as makes not difference. Sophia, though, is a rebel. Beautiful and passionate, she falls for the dubious charms of a visiting salesman, and before too long she has eloped with him and ended up living in Paris on his rapidly dwindling inheritance. 

However much their lives diverge, and diverge they very much do, with Constance staying in the house she was born in while Sophia lives through the Siege of Paris and other shocking and disastrous events, what is interesting is how their basic principles remain remarkably similar. Sophia's strict upbringing, once thrown overboard when she runs away with the dreadfully untrustworthy Gerald, sees her in good stead when she ends up alone and sets up what becomes one of Paris's most successful small hotels. I found Sophia's life more interesting, and it's certainly more dramatic -- the scene when Gerald forces her to go with him to witness a public execution is stunning, and her struggles to survive after his departure are wonderfully gripping. But Constance in her small and circumscribed world also has many domestic tragedies to deal with, including the fact that her adored only child Cyril, a rather mediocre painter living in London, neglects her shamefully. And though so much more restrained that Sophia, she suffers at least as deeply.

Virginia Woolf famously did not approve of Bennett's novels, finding them too fixated on the minutiae of everyday life -- she wrote: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” But I'd argue that Bennett's gig lamps actually enable us to see what's going on in the consciousness of the protagonists to an amazing degree. And I like being told what everyone was wearing, what the furniture looked like, where the house was in relation to the village square, what was for lunch, and all the rest of the realist baggage. It's a terrific novel and highly recommended. 

The Children Who Lived in a Barn

This is one peculiar book. Despite the nice picture here of the 1950s Puffin edition, I actually read Persephone's recent re-issue, which I have had lying around for ages and can't now remember why I ordered it. I must have read something very positive on someone's blog, I suppose, and as I do enjoy reading classic children's literature from time to time, I probably thought I'd enjoy it.

Well -- I can't say that I didn't, though I was rather troubled by the flaws in the plot. The central premise is great -- five children, aged between thirteen and seven, find themselves parent-less and homeless, and end up living in a very primitive barn and fending for themselves. This is, of course, what makes the novel so powerful and memorable, for much the same reasons as Robinson Crusoe has continued to attract readers for two hundred years -- you wonder how they will cope, and you wonder how you would cope in the same situation. 

These kids, of course, cope remarkably well, mainly because the two oldest, thirteen year old Susan and eleven year old Bob, immediately take on the parental roles. And, since this was written in 1938 and republished in the 50s, those roles are extremely well defined along gender boundaries. Sue is an extraordinarily capable and cheerful girl, who barely complains about the fact that she has to get up earlier than anyone else and light the fire, make the breakfast, get everyone washed and ready for school -- not to mention the fact that she goes to the local farm once at week to do the weekly wash, which means she has to get up at 4am, or that she also has a part-time job doing the accounts for the village baker, who pays her in stale bread. As for Bob, he's extremely handy and can mend things and carry things, and even carve the joint should there be one, which in fact there never is. Because these kids are living well below the poverty line and unless someone gives them a handout their staple food seems to be bread and dripping. Luckily they meet a tramp who teaches them to cook rabbits in clay (their fur and skin come off when you pull the cooked clay off) and the nice schoolteacher shows them how to make a haybox (a sort of primitive slow cooker) into which they can put a stew or some porridge. They fix up the barn very nicely, cleaning it and whitewashing it themselves and installing some basic furniture, but all they have is a cold tap and a cooker but no oven. As for the lavatory -- well, Graham draws a veil over that so goodness knows what they do -- a bucket? a hole in the ground outside? Maybe there's a primitive outside one that Graham is too polite to mention -- I do hope so, anyway.

All this is really fascinating and quite unforgettable, but the whole plot depends on some really shaky foundations. First and foremost, all this happens because of the absence of the parents. Initially this is got over rather perfunctorily quite early on by the illness in some foreign part or other of Mother's mother -- Mother and Daddy immediately decide to fly over there to sort it out, apparently untroubled by leaving the kids despite the fact that they have no idea when they will get back. Then they simply disappear -- their plane is believed to have crashed but nobody has any idea where or why, and nobody takes any trouble to investigate. The children don't know this at first and in fact it's not clear how and when they find out, but they take it so well that it doesn't appear in any way to change the even tenor of their lives. And when they do reappear at the end (sorry, that's a spoiler) their explanation is so extremely dodgy that it strains credibility beyond breaking point, involving a remote mountain village, a mad old man, and double loss of memory. Then there's the move to the barn, engineered because the owner of their rented house wants to sell it (just about credible) and the astonishing fact that nobody in the village seems to be in the least bit inclined to help or even sympathise with these apparent orphans, apart from the nasty District Visitor who wants to split them all up and send them to orphanages or foster homes. 

Somehow or other, though, all this doesn't really matter in the end. Because despite all the quibbles and the implausibilities, this is a story of heroism in extreme circumstances and let's face it, that's always going to be a winner. And these kids, though wonderfully capable and admirable in so many ways, are essentially human and make mistakes, have bad moods (not many) and quarrel with each other (not often). Little Alice, the youngest, is interesting because she doesn't cope nearly as well as the rest of them -- too young to really contribute much, she gets bored and cross and miserable and is, in fact, not all that likeable but entirely believable. 

Could any kids today survive in similar circumstances? Could kids in the 1930s or the 1950s really have coped this well? These are the questions you'll be asking yourself if you read this book. And presumably it was somebody asking something along these lines that made me want to read it in the first place. And I'm glad I did.

Woman in Green

Thomas Mostyn, 1862-1930, was born in Liverpool and brought up in Manchester. Many of his paintings are a bit too sentimental and chocolate-boxy for my liking, but I do like this one, just called The Green Gown. 

And here he is in his studio.

The Necessary Aptitude

If you live in the UK, you'd have to have been hiding under a stone all your life not to have heard of Pam Ayres. If you don't -- well,  she presents radio and TV programmes, appears on quiz shows and even in a sitcom, but above all she is a poet of a most original kind --  simple in form, very funny, and very perceptive, her poems are hugely loved by millions of people and she was awarded an MBE a few years ago. Mostly she performs them herself, in her distinctive Oxfordshire accent, and you can see her doing that on youtube if you want to -- here's one called They Should Have Asked My Husband, for example. 

You might, I suppose, find her silly or irritating, but I've always loved her, which is why I agreed to review a copy of her "eagerly awaited" memoir (not eagerly awaited by me, as I didn't know anything about it, but there you are). It's not the sort of book I usually read -- as you probably know, my present preference is for modern classics of the Virago/Persephone/old Penguin school with the occasional foray into crime -- reading it, rather than committing it. Anyway, be that as it may, the book arrived a week or so ago and I have just finished it, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

I knew very little about Pam's life beyond the fact that she came from somewhere in Oxfordshire and had won a TV contest called Opportunity Knocks in the 1970s. That victory, which  launched her on the spectacularly successful career she has pursued ever since, is more or less where this book ends. So, as she was born in 1947, here we have the first twenty five or so years of her life. 

Pam grew up in Stanford in the Vale, a pretty village in the Vale of the White Horse. While not destitute, her parents lived dangerously close to the poverty line, and bringing up their six children, of whom Pam was the youngest, was a constant struggle. Their home was a council house, unattractively situated on the edge of the village. I was actually astonished to read that not only did it not have a bathroom but that the lavatory consisted of a bucket with a seat over it, poorly concealed behind a door in the kitchen, which had to be emptied periodlically into a hole dug at the end of the garden. In my middle-class ignorance, I thought that kind of thing had disappeared before the second world war. But despite this and other privations (not, of course, perceived as such as they just seemed normal), the young  Ayres led a generally peaceful existence, cared for by  an obviously loving and intelligent mother, even though the greatest treats available were the occasional poached pheasant or a wobbly bicycle ride around the local countryside. 

That Pam turned out as she did is something of a miracle, really, given the disadvantages of her childhood and her schooling. Having done well at primary school, she somehow failed the eleven-plus exam and thus ended up not at the grammar school, but at the secondary modern. This distinction was massively important in the 1950s -- while a grammar-school child might well go on to university or at least to a good job, anyone attending a secondary modern would probably leave school with no qualifications and be doomed to a live of drudgery. Pam, who is clearly extraordinarily bright, slid even further down the scale at first, ending up in the C (lowest) stream, and though she soon got herself back up to the A stream, she left school with little to look forward to in the way of a working life. Several more or less dead-end jobs followed, in which Pam did not exactly excel. In fact she frequently encountered rejections on the grounds of lacking 'the necessary aptitude'. Even when she managed, with the help of a boyfriend, to qualify as a draughtswoman for the RAF, she found the work a huge struggle as she really had never got the hang of it. This pattern could have continued for the rest of her life, but Pam loved both writing and performing, and slowly this became increasingly important in her life, starting in small folk clubs and local venues and ending, of course, with the appearance on Opportunity Knocks, since when she has taken off like a rocket. 

All this is extraordinarily encouraging and inspiring, and makes the most enjoyable reading, narrated as it is with great honesty, charm and quiet wit. You'd have to be a terrific curmudgeon not to warm to Pam and to rejoice in her success, her apparently happy marriage, and her continued optmism and enthusiasm. She really appreciates what life has brought her, and good luck to her, I say.