Harriet Devine's Blog

Rabbit Reading

Seeing as its Easter, here's a bunny reading. I had no idea why rabbits were associated with Easter, but thanks to Wikipedia I now have rather more information than I can easily process.

Thanks to them too for this nice 1907 card, wishing everyone a very happy Easter.

A Treacherous Likeness

I do like a good historical thriller (with the emphasis on good) and especially so if they have real historical figures appearing in them. Tricky to do, but fun if it works. So I was more than delighted when I was offered Lynn Shepherd's latest novel to review, since the historical figures in it are people about whom I already knew rather a lot. But as it turned out, that was a bit of a mixed blessing.

The people concerned here are the poet Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her step sister Claire Clairmont. In fact when the novel begins, in 1850, Percy is long dead, and Mary is a sick elderly lady living with her son, the 'controversially ordinary' Sir Percy and his manipulative wife Jane, whose sole purpose in life is to sanitise the poet's posthumous reputation, a far from easy task. This is, indeed, the starting point for the novel. Jane Shelley is deeply anxious because Claire, for many years an exile from England, has reappeared in London. Jane fears that she holds documents that will show that the poet, far from the ineffectual angel she wishes him to appear, was actually immoral, untrustworthy, and verging on the unbalanced. To help her to retrieve the documents Jane calls in the detective Charles Maddox, who soon works out that there are other secrets to be uncovered which are at least equally damaging, and which involve his own family. Soon we are back in the years 1814 to 1816, as Charles looks hard at the existing evidence of the shenannigans of the Shelley entourage, uncovering disturbing indications of unexplained infant deaths and promptings to suicide. 

Lynn Shepherd was well qualified to write this novel, as she has a PhD in English Literature and has clearly used all her research skills here. Not only that, but she has brilliantly interwoven the real words of her characters -- Mary, Shelley and Claire -- with her own imagined dialogue, so that the people appear totally convincing. Also, all the mysteries that Charles sets out to solve are genuine and have puzzled Shelley scholars for generations. What was the true nature of Shelley's relationship with Claire? Whose was the baby Elena, adopted and then inexplicably dropped by the Shelleys in Italy? What happened in Wales in 1814 to terrify Shelley so much? and much more besides. I could not possibly fault all this, or indeed wholly disagree with her conclusions about Shelley's peculiar mental state. I've always had a very soft spot for Claire and thought she came out well here. But, though I've never really warmed to Mary, I can't say I've ever gone down the road that Shepherd takes us on -- enough said.

Many years ago I wrote a book about Mary Shelley's mother, the great feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and did my fair share of puzzling over discrepancies in the historical accounts, one of which resulted in an article with the rather charming name 'A Meritorious Wife; or, Mrs Godwin and the Donkey'. You might think that this foreknowledge would have put me off the novel, and I see that Daisy Hay, author of the recent Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, showed her displeasure with it in her Guardian review. But you know what? I took it all with a pinch of salt and thought it was really good fun. In fact my only real quibble was that by the end my head was rather spinning with all the revelations and complications that Charles uncovered. But maybe that's just me. 

I have not read Shepherd's other novels, but I am now keen to read Tom All Alone's, which uses the characters and seetings of one of my favorite novels of all time, Bleak House, as well as featuring the attractive detective who reappears here. Anyone else read either of these?

 

Dr Thorne

How Did He Do It?  is not the title of a novel by Anthony Trollope, though it could be (cf. Can You Forgive Her? Is He Popenjoy?, Did He Steal It?). No, it reflects my amazement at the astonishingly prolific output of a man who managed to hold down a highly responsible job while producing 47 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 18 works of non-fiction and two plays. And not just any old novels, mind you -- although his reputation was a bit up and down at first, there's no doubt -- in my mind at least -- that he was one of the most important novelists of the nineteenth century. And in fact, one reason why he was looked at with a rather beady eye by some of his contemporaries was the very fact that he wrote so much and in such an organised way -- he paid his servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up with a cup of coffee at 5am so that he could write for three hours before he went to work. What's wrong with that, you may ask? Well, there was a view at the time that you had to wait for the Muse to strike you before you picked up your pen, so Trollope's method seemed a good deal too mundane. Also, he was not much liked for his most delightful way of suddenly addressing the reader, or, in more contemporary parlance, drawing attention to the act of writing:

But it will be too much, perhaps, to tell the reader what she wore as Beatrice's bridesmaid, seeing that a couple of pages, at least, must be devoted to her marriage dress, and seeing, also, that we have only a few pages left to finish everything...

I've read a few of Trollope's novels over the years, though only reviewed one on here, the not very well known Lady Anna. Dr Thorne is much better known, being the fourth of the so-called Barchester Novels, of which I have read the first three, though in pre-blogging days. The eponymous doctor is a middle-aged gentleman of modest means, who lives in the village of Greshamsbury. Twenty or so years before the story begins, he adopted the illegitimate baby daughter of his ne-er do well brother, who had been murdered by the brother of the village girl he made pregnant. The child's mother has married and gone to America, the brother has served his sentence and subsequently become stupendously rich, but the doctor and his beloved adopted Mary have gone on quietly with their lives in domestic peace and comfort. Mary has become very close to the daughters of the neighbouring squire Mr Gresham, with whom she has shared lessons throughout her teenage years. Now, as the novel begins, the Gresham's only son Frank has reached twenty-one, and the whole neighbourhood is sharing in the celebrations. As we soon learn, Frank and Mary have fallen in love, but from this seemingly innocent fact springs the whole convoluted and often nail-biting plot.

Money, social class and "blood". To these and their often complex interactions are owed the trials and tribulations of poor Mary and Frank. For Frank's father has managed to get himself into deep financial trouble, and that part of his estate that he has not sold is heavily mortgaged. Thus it is that, certainly as far as his mother and her aristocratic relations are concerned, Frank has but one duty -- to marry money. Mary has neither money nor that second prerequisite, "blood" (of the blue variety), and indeed her illegitimacy puts her beyond the pale. Of course, the immensely wealthy heiress who the family would like Frank to marry is the daughter of a tradesman, but her riches overrule what would otherwise be an absolute barrier.

As anyone who is familiar with Trollope will know, these are his common concerns. But that does not make this novel any less appealing. Trollope manages to satirise the worst excesses of the appalling aristocrats and the dreadfulness of their lawyers in a way which is both funny and horrifically convincing. But he also manages to create characters who have undoubted faults and yet make them surprisingly sympathetic. And then of course there is Mary, the most admirable heroine, intelligent and feisty as well as pretty, who suffers dreadfully through a great part of the novel but bears it with great courage, and dear, good-hearted, loyal Frank, and the delightful doctor himself, very human and not always right but always having at heart the best interests of those he loves. 

I am so happy to have rediscovered Trollope. After a rather worrying reading block earlier this year, it is exciting to find that there are more than forty unread novels to look forward to! I've started one already, and another is on its way, so keep a watch on here for more reviews soon. Any fellow Trollope fans out there? What's your favorite?

 

Spring Landscape

Something for everyone who is suffering from an unseasonably late and cold spring. Here in France we have so far escaped the snow and bitter cold that has hit the UK for the second time this month, but the sky is grey, the temperature low, and there's no sign of the beautiful spring blossom that is shown in this lovely painting by the Danish American Emil Carlson (1853-1932). But it will come sooner or later.

People Reading

This attractive image is of a painting by one Knut Ekwall (1843-1912), a Swedish artist. It's called The Reading Lesson. But here's the question -- who is the teacher? I'm pretty sure of the answer, but would be interested to hear what you think.

All the Beggars Riding

Clever Lucy Caldwell, who writes both plays and novels and manages to win prizes for both, has just published this, her third novel. I've read the other two, and reviewed the second, The Meeting Point, a couple of years ago. Both were impressive and enjoyable, but this one I found absolutely unputdownable -- I started it as soon as it popped into the mailbox and finished it by the next day.

This is the story of Lara Moorhouse, who also narrates the novel. A woman in her late thirties, not happy with her life, she is looking back to her childhood with a good deal of grief and anger. Until she was twelve, she had accepted the absences of her plastic surgeon father Patrick, who only visited the family in London once every couple of weeks since his job kept him in Belfast. Then a sudden revelation on a disastrous holiday in Spain made her understand the truth. Lara, her brother Alfie, and their mother Jane were Patrick's second family, his first being his legal wife and two children in Belfast. Somehow Patrick has succeeded in keeping this secret double life going, but, after he is killed in a helicopter crash, the truth comes out, and Jane and the children are forced to leave their comfortable flat and move to grubby and unattractive lodgings in the back streets of Fulham. Lara is furious and incomprehending about how her parents made their choices, but her attempt to get her dying mother to talk about it has failed completely. 

The novel, then, is about coming to terms with all this, something Lara has never been able to do. And she does it, in the end, by writing about it. In the early chapters we learn that, as part of her job as a carer, she has been attending, though not participating in, a creative writing class, and eventually she decides to write the story of it all from her mother's point of view. In doing so, though she realises that Perhaps it didn't happen like any of that at all. It probably didn't, she also feels some kind of reconciliation: I understand how it could have, now that I've tried it.

So, this is also a story about writing, its difficulties and its rewards. We see Lara's early struggles with how to structure her story:

I'm getting ahead of myself, I know, jumbling things up again. I do intend to come to things properly, in their own time, in at least approximately the right order. It's harder to tell a story, though, than you'd think. As I said earlier, lives aren't orderly, and nor is memory: the mind doesn't work like that. We make it so, when we narrate things -- setting them in straight lines and in context -- whereas in reality things are all mixed up, and you feel several things, even things that contradict each other, or that happened at separate times, or that aren't on the surface even related, all at once.

and it is only when she steps outside her attempts to make sense of her own life and puts herself into her fictional mother's fictional shoes that she's able to get a clear perspective. 

The whole premise of this story is one that I found particularly fascinating. We are quite used to reading of the pains and pleasures of being a mistress -- the jealousy, the loneliness, the self-deception, but also the excitement and the knowledge or at least the hope that you have something that the wife does not have. But when children enter the equation you are in a whole other ballgame. In fact this is a surprisingly common state of affairs, and pops up in the press fairly frequently. Lucy Caldwell was apparently inspired by a documentary about the architect Louis Khan, who actually had three families -- the film, My Architect: A Son's Journey, was made by one of his 'secret' children. All very interesting.

I interviewed Lucy Caldwell in 2011, so if you'd like to know more about her and her writing, you can find that here. But better yet, get yourself a copy of this novel and prepare for a really enjoyable read. 

Naked Woman Reading

Leon Kroll (1884-1974) painted this. Life Magazine described him as "the dean of US nude painters" and somebody else said he had " the eye of a hawk and the heart of a dove". 

Seeing as the weather here is grey and windy and the moment, and I am in bed with a nasty cold, this painting makes me feel decidedly chilly. Let's hope he painted it on a nice warm day.

My Mother

Not actually my mother, who, God bless her, departed this life many many years ago, but the mother of the great Swedish painter Carl Larsson. In my family nobody takes any notice of Mothers Day, though this year my darling youngest gave me a pretty necklace, which was a really nice surprise. I'm perfectly happy about this, so don't feel sorry for me. But as mothers seem to have been so much in the air in the last few days I thought I'd share this very lovely picture with you. 

"perfect for fans of..."

If there's one thing that really riles me when I find it on the cover of a book, it's a comment such as 'perfect for fans of [insert random name here]'. There are variations such as 'the next Steig Larsson' which appears in the publicity of just about any crime novel published anywhere north of Germany, but 'perfect for fans of...' suggests to me that there will be some kind of similarity between the present work and that of the named celebrity. So I was a little disquieted when I saw the formula on the cover of this one, kindly sent by the publisher, especially as it was attributed to a writer I admire a lot, Sam Mills, who seemingly thinks the novel would be perfect for fans of Sophie Hannah. Now I am a huge fan of Sophie Hannah, and have in fact just received a copy of her latest novel, so you'll be hearing more about her soon. But the thing for which I would say she is most celebrated is her ability to kick off her novels with the most extraordinary and apparently inexplicable scenario, which is then slowly unravelled throughout the rest of the book. And such is not the case with The Woman Before Me.

Now this is not to say there is anything wrong with this novel, which has won the CWA Debut Dagger Award and the Luke Bitmead Novel Award (of which I'd never heard, but never mind that), and has a great many five-star reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. I'm just riding a probably rather pathetic hobby horse here --  it's just that I think it doesn't do a writer any favours if you compare her to someone who she doesn't really resemble. But Ruth Dugdall clearly has done fine anyway, and this, her first novel, has been followed by two more, equally successful.

On her website Ruth says "my books explore the darker areas of himan behaviour and how long-held secrets can affect the present". Certainly that is a good description of what happens here. Rose Wilks, an unhappy and rather unattractive woman in her thirties, has served four years of a sentence for murdering a baby who died in a fire when she had been babysitting him. Ruth is up for parole, and being assessed by a young probabtion officer, Cate Austin, who is new to the job. The narrative shifts between Cate's story, present day, and Ruth's 'Black Book' in which she recounts her own past history and the events which have led up to her arrest and imprisonment. A sad story it is indeed, and of course, being the sort of novel this is, there's a twist on the last page which I  wasn't expecting (though I was expecting something). 

So, if this sounds like your sort of book, go for it! 

Girl with Flowers

This painting, 'Girl with Flowers', is by Francis Coates Jones (1857-1932),  found on a website I often visit called Old Paint. I thought some flowers would be nice, to signal the coming Spring (though I see snow is forecast for Monday -- oh well). 

You can see a lot more of his paintings here, including several of people reading, which may well pop up on here before long.