Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading

This is Saint Catherine, painted by the wonderfully named anonymous Master of the Female Half-Lengths (a Dutch painter or possibly a whole studio of painters) in about 1530.

Rainy Day

It is a rainy day today, in London at least, so here is another picture by FW Benson of somebody enjoying a quiet day reading, which is what I'd like to be doing, though I won't. And the painting is called -- Rainy Day.

Portrait of a Lady

No, not the novel by Henry James, which I don't think I've read though probably I should and perhaps I will, but a painting by Frank W Benson which just happened to catch my eye this morning. As you will see if you follow the link, he was a celebrated American painter and described by Wikipedia as an Impressionist. This is not what I'd call an impressionist painting, though, but perhaps shows the influence of Vermeer or Velasquez, both of whom he apparently admired very much. 

She's not reading or writing or doing anything else, and it's not Saturday, my usual day for art, but because  I'm on the move this week, dashing hither and thither, and won't have time for reviewing, I thought I'd just show you something nice instead. If you want to see more of FWB's paintings there are many of them here.

Woman Reading

I saw this on Gaskella's blog and could not resist sharing it with you. A rapid image search has not revealed anything beyond the fact that it's popped up all over the place recently. I wonder if anyone can find out any more about it (PH I am thinking of you).

Harriet (by Elizabeth Jenkins)

Last October I tried to read this book, and if you were reading my blog then you might have spotted it in a post called 'What I Haven't Read This Week'. Yes, I tried it and gave it up, thinking that it was too depressing. But when Persephone kindly offered me a copy, I thought I really should give it another try -- the title, after all, seemed to demand it, and also the fact that part of it is set in Penge, in South East London, where my daughter and family live. I've just finished it, and I am so glad I did, as it is a remarkable novel.

The thing about this book is that there are, in one sense, no surprises. Jenkins based the story on a true crime that took place in the 1870s, and most people who pick up the novel will be aware before they start of the bare bones of the plot. Harriet, in her early 30s, is a woman with learning difficulties, or as Jenkins puts it

what the villagers in Mrs Ogilvy's old home would have called a natural. Her intellect was not so clouded that intercourse with ordinary people was out of the question; the deficiency showed itself rather in a horrid uncouthness, the more noticeable in that she had a vigorous and powerful zest for such aspects of life as were intelligible to her.

 She has been well brought up by a loving mother, takes care of herself and pride in her appearance, likes nice clothes and pleasant things around her. She is also an heiress, having three thousand pounds to her name and another two thousand on the way - according to my edition that's about a million in today's money. This is her downfall. She encounters a young man, Lewis Oman, who quite ruthlessly decides to marry her for her fortune, and he succeeds in doing so despite her mother's best efforts to prevent him. At first he looks after her fairly well, and even makes her pregnant. But after the child is born his treatment of her deteroriates, and eventually he moves her into his brother's house in the country and takes his young mistress to live with him nearby. Some months later, Harriet is dead, having been terribly mistreated and seemingly starved to death. This dreadful affair, and the trial that followed, came to be known as the Penge Murder, as this was the area of London where Harriet finally died.

You can see why I thought this novel was going to be depressing, and the subject matter is, indeed, very disturbing. But Jenkins handles the material so tactfully that the real fascination is not with Harriet's sufferings -- these are not glossed over, but they are implied rather than dwelt on -- but with the extraordinary psychology of the people who have her in their care. Harriet is sent to live with Lewis's painter brother Patrick and his devoted wife Elizabeth, whose younger sister Alice is Lewis's mistress. There is never point at which these four people make a decision to starve or otherwise mistreat Harriet, and in fact the matter is never discussed. Instead, it comes to pass slowly, over time, and everyone somehow manages to convince themselves that they are in the right. There's a telling moment quite early on when Elizabeth visits Alice at her home and finds her in the kitchen, ironing. Sitting down at the table, she sees that her sister is ironing some beautiful pieces of silk and realises they have been unpicked from a dress of Harriet's of a beautiful jay's wing blue, which Alice had earlier seen and admired, thinking to herself at the time how much better it would suit her than Harriet. Elizabeth says nothing -- she just looks away silently. A weak woman, she is so besotted with her husband Patrick that she will never question anything he does or says, while Patrick in turn is completely devoted to handsome, flashy, common Lewis. The unusually close relationship between the two brothers is never more evident than after their arrest when they are put together into a cell:

the brothers did not lie down. Seated side by side, their arms round each other, they whispered into each other's ears all night long. It was the conslusion of all the midnight conversations they had held as children, when, side by side in the double bed, they had whispered under the clothes so as not to be heard next door. The darkness was the same; it was the same surrounding silence. Patrick had pulled the blankets round their shoulders, and their breath was warm and damp on each other's cheeks just as it had ever been; and the confidence was the same -- the unreserve they had never achieved with women, or with anyone except each other.

The other fascinating character is Alice. Very young, very beautiful, entirely selfish, she plays a less active part in the final mistreatment of Harriet, though she is perfectly well aware of what is going on. She acquires Harriet's clothes and jewellery and is happy to use Lewis's, or rather Harriet's, money to live a life of luxury and ease which she would never have expected from her rather humble beginnings. There's a wonderful moment when she has had the most glorious dress made, entirely of crepe, the dim mauve of lilac or heliotrope flowers; the bodice and sleeves were tight to Alice's beautiful slenderness --  and she is almost overwhelmed:

when she put it on, she was amazed, vain as she was, at the mysterious beauty of her own appearance. It seemed as if all the resource and intelligence and taste and determination which had been developing all her life had reached their zenith in creating this; her charm had reached its full perfection; and she was awed by the spectacle of herself. As she stood with the light of the chandelier revealing her, gazing at Lewis, her smile had in it something rapt and solemn, as if she were the vestal guardian of her own loveliness.

As I'm sure you can see, Jenkins writes beautifully, and her perecption and understanding of the inner lives of these people is wonderfully done. True crime is a genre I usually avoid like the plague, but this is something else -- moving, thought-provoking, it will stay with me for a long time. And next time I go to Penge I will try to find Harriet's grave, which still exists in St George's Church in Beckenham.

Shakespeare's Sonnets Set to Music

When I was about ten, my father gave me a book of Shakespeare's sonnets, and for some reason I took to them in a big way. I can't imagine that I understood everything in them -- in fact I'm not sure I understand everything in them even now. But I read them a lot, and I can still recite several of them from memory.

Anyway, the other day I got an email about a new project to set some of the sonnets to music. I'm not actually sure whether, on the whole, I'm a particular fan of setting poetry to music, but I listened to some of these and I liked them, and thought some of you out there might like to hear them too. The music is played on traditional Elizabethan instruments and does, I must say, sound lovely. There's also a non-Shakespearean setting of a piece called 'Love is a Babe', which sounds like a very 21st-century title but isn't.

So -- here is a picture of the instruments being played, and I'm going to copy the information, and links, that I was sent so you can follow it all up if you want to.

 

Here's a link to I Fagiolini's "Love Is A Babe", an acapella piece that could very well have been performed in Shakespeare's time. And a five track sampler of more contempoary material, featuring the afformentioned Elizabethan instruments, including album highlights "Like As The Waves Make Towards The Pebbled Stone" and Cara Dillon's "Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day".

 SHAKESPEARE: THE SONNETS

Shakespeare’s poetry. Shakespeare’s instruments. Modern songs. Out on April 23rd (Shakespeare’s birthday) Written during the time of Elizabeth I and re-imagined for the Diamond Jubilee year of Elizabeth II, these are the most precious words ever written about love.

Performed on instruments from the early 17th century, played by the cream of the world’s period instrument specialists, conceived with immense passion, commitment and integrity, Shakespeare: The Sonnets was recorded in London over the last 6 months.

Fresh from his success of recording an outsize Renaissance mass for a massive 40 parts that had not been heard for 400 years (and winning a Gramophone Album of the Year Award in the process), Robert Hollingworth, director of vocal ensemble I Fagiolini (also a judge on the UK’s Choir of the Year and involved in a number of films) was looking for a new challenge.

To a specialist of the Renaissance period, Shakespeare’s sonnets are an intriguing challenge: the most romantic and personal poems ever written but rarely set to music. All the lyrics are Shakespeare’s own and no additions made, although occasionally lines have been moved around to fit the contemporary song structures. Within this, the meaning is never altered and the emotional content of the sonnets is always sustained.

What is amazing is how modern some of Shakespeare’s language is: ‘Blind Fool Love’, or the ‘blues’ sonnet ‘No Longer Mourn’ - or the final track, ‘Love is a Babe’. Singers from all over the UK perform on the album, but finding players of these rare and ancient instruments ought to have been incredibly difficult. In actual fact, the UK is the world leader in modern performers on these recreated ‘period’ instruments, and experts in playing in period style. For example, Erin Headley plays the lirone - a 13 string cello-type which is so difficult to play that it has not been heard for hundreds of years. In fact Erin is one of only a handful of professional lirone players in the whole world. Also Lynda Sayce, who played lutes, Renaissance guitars and theorbo is the lead lutenist and a world authority on the instrument. Her theorbo (a type of giant Lute with a very long neck) is a copy of one originally made in Venice in 1608 and now housed in the Royal College of Music, London. It has strings lengths of over 170cm and a massive 2 metre neck!

The originals of these instruments are in museums and often unplayable, so modern replicas are now handmade to order by makers who have rediscovered this ancient art. A harpsichord and virginals can be worth £20,000 each: lutes, harps and theorbos £10,000 each. All the instruments benefit from stable temperatures with no air conditioning, often problematic in modern life. However the important feature of this project is its blend of early instruments and playing styles with modern recording techniques and the very modern groove. Percussion is played by famed drummer Geoff Dugmore who can usually be found playing with Robbie Williams, Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, as well as helping out modern day X Factor winners like Matt Cardle.

The Music:

1) Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore. Sonnet 60

2) Against that time - If ever that time come. Sonnet 49

3) Who will believe my verse in time to come. Sonnet 17

4) How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st. Sonnet 128

5) O, never say that I was false of heart. Sonnet 109

6) Love is too young to know what conscience is. Sonnet 151

7) No longer mourn for me when I am dead. Sonnet 71

8) Thou blind fool love. Sonnet 137

9) Those lines that I before have writ do lie. Sonnet 115

10) When I do count the clock that tells the time. Sonnet 12

11) Shall I compare thee to summers day? Sonnet 18

Woman Reading

Mary Cassatt, 'The Reader', 1877.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Nordic crime is immensely popular at the moment, and there are many terrific examples out there -- Wallander, of course, and Steig Larsson, and many others. But how many people have read the originators of the genre, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö? 

I had, actually, read one of their ten-book Martin Beck series many years ago, though I can't now remember which one. But it was on a trawl through Audible, to whom I pay a subscription for a monthly audio book, that my attention was caught by The Laughing Policeman, which is in fact number 4 in a series which really ought to be read in order. And I am completely hooked, so I am now going to go back to the beginning and read the whole lot. In fact I am absolutely in agreement with Louise France, who wrote in an excellent Guardian article a couple of years ago that you want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints. 

You can click those links to delve into the background of all this, but suffice it to say here that the writers were a couple, and decided from the start to write ten books, one a year, the whole series to be titled The Story of a Crime. They wrote an alternate chapter each, and edited each other's chapters. And the series title was making a political point -- both were committed Marxists, and their intention was to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare-state of the bourgeois type'. If you think that makes the novels sound as if they may be heavy going, think again. Yes, there is social comment in there, but it doesn't detract from the interest of the plot. 

I started this post two months ago! and have now read three of the series -- The Locked Room was the second, and I have just finished Roseanna, the first of the series. Although enjoyed the other two, I must say I thought Roseanna was absolutely superb. Of course it's helpful to start at the beginning of a series, and it was great to be introduced for the first time to Martin Beck, the rather surly, dyspeptic, unhappily married detective who will be central to all the novels. Beck smokes, has digestive problems, and suffers from chronic insomnia. He dislikes his wife who he feels he has nothing in common with (I must say I find this the least attractive thing about these novels -- it seems to me that the reader is invited to dislike her too, which I find a bit offensive). He works with a number of colleagues to solve various crimes, but if you think this is going to be exciting and fast-paced, think again. In Roseanna, months go by in which nothing at all happens. For this is a police procedural, and undoubtedly extremely true to life.

Briefly, what happens is this. A young woman's body is discovered in a lake, and nobody is able to identify her. Photos appear in the newspapers, Interpol is contacted, missing persons are followed up, but the whole thing remains a mystery for a very long time. Eventually a call from America clears it up -- this is Roseanna McGraw, from Lincoln Nebraska, who set off in the summer for a holiday in Scandinavia. It becomes clear that she died on a cruise ship that has passed through the area at the time, and now begins the painstaking process of contacting all the passengers to see if anyone can shed any light on what may have happened. But nobody can, until someone at the police station has the bright idea of asking for photos taken on the cruise. This is again a painstakingly slow and frustrating process, but at last a series of cine-films turns up which show Roseanna with an unidentified man. Yes, but who on earth is he? He's not one of the listed passengers, though he is clearly participating in the acitivities of the cruise...

This novel was published in 1965, and of course it's impossible not to be aware of the massive changes in communication that have taken place since. When Martin is contacted by the American detective Kafka (yes, really), their exchanges of information take place with infinite slowness -- crackly phone calls, long waits for photographs to come through the post, and so on. The detectives have to squint at tiny photos, often through a magnifying glass. And everything has to be printed and sent out by post. But it's not really all this, or not entirely all this, that slows everything up. This is real life -- well, not really, of course, it's fiction, but I'm sure it is a very good representation of what real life must be like for the police. Martin does have quite good intuition, and he is right when he finally decides on the identity of the murderer. But the last section of the novel, when the man seems to have been identified, is absolutely brilliant -- they must set a trap for him, and a young policewoman is recruited for the purpose -- for weeks and weeks it seems that nothing will happen -- an apparently fail-safe plan is conceived which in the end is almost foiled by a heavy traffic jam -- the tension is brilliantly done. 

So -- if you are an admirer of Nordic crime, you really should try these remarkable novels, which, it's clear, have been profoundly influential on the writers who have followed. My edition of Roseanna had an introduction by Henning Mankell in which he admits as much. I shall be reading more of them, though I may or may not bore you with more of my ravings. Highly recommended.

Orange Longlisters

If you know me at all you may be surprised to see that I have just read two novels which have been long-listed for the Orange Prize. I rarely read newly published books, with the exception of crime novels, because I'm so often disappointed by them and because there are so many wonderful classics out there that I haven't got to yet. At the moment this is exacerbated by the fact that I am trying to do A Century of Books challenge, which confines me to the twentieth century. So what am I doing with these two? Well, I had a nice email from Quercus Books,  who published both of them, and thought they sounded intriguing. And certainly I got something from both of them, but to be honest I am glad I can run back to the old stuff now. 

Island of Wings is a first novel by Karin Altenberg, a Swedish archaeologist. Swedish, yes, but writing in English, her 'second language'. Before we pooh-pooh that, let's remember Joseph Conrad who, though I have never got on with his novels, pulled the language bit off pretty well (he was of course Polish). But I have to say that though I had not taken Karin's nationality on board at first, I was finding myself rather bothered at times by what seemed to me slightly clumsy writing style. I am terribly fussy about the way people express themselves, and have had several rants here in the past about reading books in translation, especially from the French, which often really offends my rather over-sensitive ear. So when I found out that she was writing in a language not her first, it did explain things a bit. 

Now of course the language issue may not trouble others at all, so what about the plot and the characters? Well, what drew me to the novel in the first place was that it was set on St Kilda, an amazingly remote island in the Outer Hebrides, about which I didn't know much at all. Taking place in 1830, the story concerns a Calvinist minister, Neil MacKenzie, who comes to the island as a missionary, accompanied by his young wife Lizzie. He is determined to bring the islanders to God and to drag them into the 19th century. They live in extraordinary squalour,  their lives are primitive in the extreme, but their morality is wonderfully admirable, though Neil can't see that. Lizzie on the other hand develops great sympathy for them, despite being unable to speak Gaelic. The whole background to this is absolutely fascinating, and Altenberg's archeaological training has served her really well here. Unfortunately I can't really say the same for the characters, or perhaps rather for their relationship, which of course has been imagined by Altenberg even though the people themselves really existed. Bascially I didn't find myself totally convinced, and this was not helped at all by the dialogue which was frankly terribly anachronistic in places.  But of course what kept me reading was the fascination of these people's lives in this unbelievably harsh environment, Neil's struggles with his religious beliefs, Lizzie's pain at the loss of several of her babies, the inevitable deterioration of their relationship. I will be amazed if this makes the shortlist and even more so if it wins, but I learned a lot from it and I'm glad I read it.

Lord of Misrule is a very different kettle of fish. Set in 1970s West Virginia, this novel concerns small-track horse racing, not a subject with which I had even the faintest familiarity. The main protagonist is attractive, charismatic Tommy Hansel, who turns up with a scam in mind -- he will buy four unknown horses, race them at long odds, make loads of money, and disappear fast. You can imagine of course that things don't go according to plan.

Well - I was complaining about style, or the lack of it, in Altenberg's novel and here we have the opposite problem -- a bit too much of it, perhaps. The narrative swings between several characters, but the whole thing is conveyed in dialect which I found very very difficult to read. It was actually pretty hard at times  to tell who was who or indeed what was going on, though there are some great characters -- I particularly liked Maggie Koderer, Tommy's girlfriend, who comes from a good home but has fallen completely in love with horses and the rough life she has to lead to stay with them and with Tommy. Here's how she thinks about him one day when he has lost a lot of money on a bet gone wrong:

She had a sense that his kingly pride would suffer no abridgement. It was a complete world but it was a flat world too -- one pure unmitigated plain of being, all the way to the edge, where you fell off. Then it was all void, all menace. He had a beautiful, feline walk, spare, athletic, no cowboy loose-jointedness about it, but there was something odd about his hands. They curled backwards behind his wrists, hiding themselves, as if they knew they were not to be trusted. They knew how to do many things, or rather they knew how to do one thing, how to tame animals, but they did this from a whole forest of angles, and always on sufferance, for under their gentleness was threat.

Clearly this is a novel that repays very careful reading, and if you are prepared to do that you will find some wonderfully crafted prose -- poetic, really, though I dislike using that term to talk about novels because it threatens to sound too elitist and unattractive. Will it make the shortlist? I think it's possible -- it's already a National Book Award winner and has obvious class.

So -- bye bye 21st century. I'm off to Virago and Persephone and Muriel Spark.