Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman by the Window

I was saying the other day that I have a sort of running theme on Saturdays, which started as Women Reading and Women Writing though it has a tendency to go off in all sorts of other directions. But there's another occasional sub-theme which could be called Women Seen from the Back. A number of 19th century Danish artists were particularly fond of this one, but here's a painting by the Russian impressionist Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939). It's called By the Window and he painted it in 1893. 

The Bellini Madonna

By a strange coincidence, the two novels I've had on the go in the past couple of weeks have both been about the disappearance of paintings by great artists of the Renaissance. One was of course Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which you'll be hearing about soon if I can muster up the necessary courage to try to do it justice -- in that novel the painting is Carel Fabritius' The Goldfinch (1654). In Elizabeth Lowry's novel, the lost work is by Giovanni Bellini, a Madonna, presumably painted in about 1515. I say presumably because, as far as I know, the painting for which the protagonist is desperately searching throughout the book does not actually exist. Or maybe it does, but if so, it is as thoroughly lost as the picture that Thomas Lynch is so obsessively seeking.

But if you think that a novel about somebody looking for a lost painting doesn't sound very interesting, think again. Although of course you may be curious about the whereabouts of the picture (and I certainly guessed exactly where it was a good long time before Thomas did), this is certainly not what will keep you reading this clever, dark, ultimately tragic comedy.

Thomas Lynch is a middle-aged art historian. Born in rather humble circumstances in Ireland, he has recently been dismissed, under a large but undefined (though clearly sexual) cloud, from the university in Vermont where he has spent most of his working life. For many years he has been aware of the probable existence of Bellini's final Madonna, which shows the mother of Christ in middle age, grieving the loss of her son. Now, through various circuitous means, he has arrived at Mawle, a decaying country mansion in England, where he has reason to believe the painting may be hidden. As he arrives, he gazes at the house:

Above me the papery sky was brushed by the tall rear windows of Mawle, rough but rosy in its green petticoat. It overlooked the long runner of velvet grass that stretched from the raised terrace with its curved flight of descending steps, past parallel beds of foxgloves, lips sleepily incensing the warm air, down to a high beech hedge screening a decayed tennis court. The hypnotic hum of insects rubbing their glassy wings together rose from a nearby azalea bush. The upholstered afternoon rounded out its silences, each hour a plump cushion of peace.

But the outward beauty of the building hides a crumbling, dirty, ill-cared for interior, presided over by its owner, Anna Roper, a woman of indeterminate age -- Thomas at first takes her for a teenager -- together with a nine-year-old girl of indeterminate parentage and a large, muscular, uncommunicative gardener. Thomas feels sure at first that he can hoodwink Anna and her absent Italian mother, but it soon becomes clear that he is the one being hoodwinked, as he is fed with endless supplies of grappa and a strange herbal tea after which he invariably falls asleep. 

Thomas is a brilliant creation. On the surface, he's a pretty unattractive character. His past is littered with sexual misdemenours, he's frequently drunk, he has no morals to speak of, he's arrogant and pretentious. But he's also deeply pitiable, lonely and frightened. As for Anna, seemingly naive and confused but actually far more complex than she at first appears, her complicated feelings for Thomas have him, and the reader, reeling and uncertain. 

Elizabeth Lowry is an art historian, and this, published in 2008, was her first and apparently so far her only novel. As you can see from the passage above, she writes like an angel, and the book is full of the most wonderful observations of seemingly random objects -- a pair of sunglasses folded 'in the lotus position' on a table, a pair of soiled pyjamas 'suckling a litter of socks' in a washing basket. But she also has the ability to see into the human heart, and in the end this is a deeply compassionate - though frequently also very funny -- study of lonely people who manage to miss what in the end they most desire.  Highly recommended.

Saturday painting on Monday

If you visit here at all regularly, you may know that I try to put up a painting every Saturday. It started with Women Reading, soon spread into Women Writing, and those are still the sort of foundation of it all. But there's a lot of lovely things out there and sometimes anything goes. I totally missed last Saturday but here's a nice one, two days late. This is by the great impressionist painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917), and it's called Actress Before the Mirror in her Dressing Room. He was most famous for painting ballet dancers, and many of those will be familiar to everyone. But I'd never seen this before and I really like it, so here it is. 

Unexpected Night

It was a post by Litlove that alerted me to the existence of Elizabeth Daly, a golden-age crime writer from the United States. She seems to have fallen so thoroughly off the radar that she doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, almost unheard of these days. But her books, or at least eleven of the sixteen or seventeen she wrote,  have recently been republished by Felony and Mahem Press, in these rather stylish monochrome covers. So I was tempted, and splashed out on this one.

The fact that I'm not going to be able to write a rave review of the novel is not at all a reflection of its quality. It's clearly a fine book, well written, with a clever twist at the end which I certainly did not see coming. It was Daly's first, and in it she introduces Henry Gamage, an expert in antiquarian books and in handwriting, who will continue to feature throughout the whole series. A quiet, well-educated man, Gamage clearly moves comfortably through relatively high class society, bringing his considerable intelligence to bear on whatever crime or mystery he happens to find himself involved in. Here it is the sudden death of an extremely wealthy young invalid, followed shortly by a couple more, this time of members of a rather seedy theatrical company. Questions of inheritance raise their heads, and many strange and puzzling things take place, all finally sorted out through the keen mind (and handwriting expertise) of Gamage.

So -- I appreciated all the novel's good qualities, and would certainly be willing to read more of Daly. But I was reading it at the wrong time -- my attention was never fully on it because I was too involved with The Luminaries. Normally I can, and do, have an audio book and a printed book on the go at the same time and happily switch between the two, but this time it just didn't work, and Daly was the one to take a back seat. But nevertheless I am quite willing to say that, if you like well written and intelligent golden age crime, you really must give Daly a go. And so must I, again, when the time is more propitious. 

 

 

Cats

 

Nobody reading or writing or painting or anything else. Just cats (or rather the same cat in different poses) beautifully sketched in chalk by the incomparable British artist Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), who normally painted people and (or in) landscapes. Said to have been done as a gift to his hostess while staying at her home. Nice present. 

The Luminaries

Let me say at once that I absolutely loved this novel, all 832 pages of it. Except that there were no pages because I was listening to it as an audio book, so all 29 hours and 14 minutes of it. I listened in bed, in the car, cooking the lunch, waiting for my appointment with the osteopath, in the bath, and more besides. 

So much has been said about The Luminaries, and it is so extremely full and complex, that it's hard to know where to begin. It was, without doubt, the perfect novel for me to be reading, because not only did it satisfy the craving for great baggy monsters that I'd developed after several months of Trollope, but it also provided the exact kind of plot that I really love -- lots and lots and lots of mysteries, the unravelling of which didn't even begin until about half way through the novel. 

Of course the comparison with Trollope doesn't end with the length, for this is what is sometimes, rather disparagingly, referred to as a cod Victorian novel. There are summaries at the start of each chapter - In which a stranger arrives...,  In which Quee Long makes a complaint before the law...and so on. There are characters with Dickensian names -- Moody, Clinch, Frost, Carver. The novel's narrative voice could be Dickens, or Trollope, or Wilkie Collins. But you're not going to read it for that, although it adds to the pleasure.  

The novel begins with the arrival of a young Scotsman, Walter Moody, in the small New Zealand town of Hokitika. It's the 1860s, and the gold rush is in full swing, with huge fortunes to be made by the assiduous and lucky. The town has attracted people from all over the world -- mostly Europeans, but also a fair smattering of Chinese. The Maoris are still there too, of course, though they are not interested in gold, just in the rare jade that can be found on their own land. Indeed, a fair cross section of these people is stumbled upon by Moody when, just off the ship, he takes shelter in a nearby hotel and finds a conference of twelve men discussing some pressing issues, including the disappearance of a wealthly young man, the suicide attempt of an opium-addicted whore, a missing fortune in gold, and the sudden death of a drunken recluse. Each man knows the answer to a part of the puzzle, but no one knows the whole of it. So for at least half the novel, we get to hear everyone's side of the story -- but even then, we are none the wiser. In fact it is not really until the final few (tiny) chapters that the whole story finally emerges.

Fascinatingly, though the twelve men plus Moody all have their part to play, none of them is central to the story. Truly, at the centre of everything, is the whore Anna Wetherall, though she herself is a mystery for a long time. Associated with her and her story are Emery Staines, a beautiful, naive, romantic young man, whose disappearance has caused great consternation; the clever, ruthless madam Lydia Wells; Lydia's lover the vicious desperado sea captain Francis Carver; and the sad, good-hearted drunk Crosbie Wells, father of the child Anna so tragically miscarries. 

Where did the gold that was sewn into Anna's dress come from? Where has Emery gone, was he really shot, and if so, who by? Will Crosbie's legitimate half-brother ever respond to his letters? What is the powerful psychic link between Anna and Emery? And will the lovers ever be reunited?

The richness of all this, the wonderfully evoked historical background, the complexity of the puzzles and of the relations betwen the characters, all make this a truly remarkable read. And I hope I'm not giving too much away when I say that it is an essentially optimistic book -- the bad get punished and the good get rewarded, family breaches get mended, and we are given hope that those we have come to love are going to live happily ever after.

As for listening to this rather than reading it -- well, I was amazed by the skill of the reader, Mark Meadows, and the way he was able to differentiate so completely between all the many and disparate characters. I'm addicted to audiobooks and so was delighted to have such a great one to listen to. But now I want a paper copy -- in fact if I had one here today I think I'd start reading it immediately. I want to flip back and forth, follow up leads, puzzle over the astrological stuff at the start of each chapter, and just hold the thing in my hands. So I expect I'll get hold of one before too long.

Luckily my withdrawal symptoms were immediately eased by the fact that I've now started listening to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and am already blown away by that as well. All very exciting. 

 

 

Armistice Day

I'm shockingly ignorant about a lot of things, and as today is a bank holiday in France for Armistice Day, I looked that day up on Wikipedia and found this fine picture, taken in Toronto on 11 November 1918. Not sure if France is having a two minute silence, as they are in the UK, but I know some of the local villages are commemorating it in one way or another. 

Woman Reading

 

This lovely painting is by the incomparable Gwen John (1876-1939). Sister of Augustus John, who in their lifetimes was the better known artist, she has gradually come to be seen as arguably at least his equal. This is called Precious Moment with Book, and though I'm not sure when it was painted, it was almost certainly done in Paris, where she lived for most of her adult life.

The Two Mrs Abbots

I have to confess that before I got this novel, kindly sent by Persephone Books, I knew next to nothing about D.E. Stevenson. Wikipedia tells me that she was the author of 'more than 40 light romantic novels' but does not go on to say that she sold a total of 4 million books in the UK and 3 million in the US. Despite this huge success, until recently she was one of those many talented mid-20th-century writers who had pretty much sunk without trace. I did know that Persephone had published two of them, Miss Buncle's Book and Miss Buncle Married, but though I had read plenty of rave reviews of these titles I'd never got around to reading them.

For anyone as ignorant as I was, these two books follow Barbara Buncle from her life in a small English village which she is forced to leave when she publishes a book featuring recognisable characters, to her marriage to a publisher, her move to Hampstead, and eventually to another small village, Wandlebury, where her husband hopes she won't start writing about the neighbours again. These two books were published in the mid 1930s, and in 1943 Stevenson returned to Barbara's life in Wandlebury. It is of course wartime, but Arthur Abbot is still living at home with Barbara and the children. Not so for his nephew Sam, who is fighting in the desert, a source of some anxiety for his wife Jerry, the second Mrs Abbot.

 I'm always a sucker for books written or set in the war, and this one provides yet another perspective on what life was like at that time for the British middle classes.  Barbara is certainly unrepresentative for having her husband at home, but Jerry has given over part of her house for the use of local soldiers, causing rather a lot of quite enjoyable chaos and inevitable crushes on Jerry herself. Barbara, meanwhile, has taken a family of evacuees into a cottage in her grounds, and is (rather disturbingly) appalled by their commonness and the dirt and disorder they create in the house. Barbara also takes in Jane, a young woman with a mysterious past, who turns out to be a famous romantic novelist on the run from her bullying sister, who wants her to keep on writing  trashy novels while Jane herself wants to do something more worthwhile. A couple of romances spring up, one ultimately more successful than the other.

Of course, it would be easy to quibble about some of the elements here. The most obvious of these is the attitude to the lower classes -- not only the Boles family from London, whose accents and attitudes horrify Barbara, but also Pearl Besserton, with whom a young neighbour has fallen in love, but who is frankly too common to be accepted by his family. Even when young Elmie Boles returns to Barbara's house and asks for asylum from her horrid family, though she is cleaned up and taught to speak properly, her final destination is to be life as a housemaid. No mixing of classes here, then.

But to tell you the story like this hardly encompasses what is so delightful about this novel. There are some great characters here -- Markie, Jerry's old governess, now her housekeeper, who is a great intellectual and a classical scholar, young RAF officer Lancreste Marvell, who keeps confiding in an unwilling Barbara about his passionate attachment to the dreadful Pearl, and my particular favourites Barbara's small children Simon and Fay, both of them wonderfully conceived and delightfully real. And then of course there are the two Mrs Abbots -- Jerry, who misses her husband but soldiers on splendidly without him, and who flys at her remaining gardener when he says he isn't going to sign up:

Suddenly Jerry saw red. The others had all gone -- all the good ones -- Fred and Edgar...and Sam, too. Edgar was dead. Fred was starving in a German war prison. Sam was lost in the wilds of an African desert, and here was Rudge, sitting in the warm, comfortable harness room eating an enormous supper and laughing at them...

-- and of course there is Barbara herself, seemingly quite vague and whimsical, but with an almost complete inability to speak anything but the truth, however inconvenient that may be. I look forward very much to meeting her again, in an earlier incarnation.

So -- a light read, yes, but none the worse for that. Thanks, Persephone.

Woman Reading to Child

I had a lot of trouble finding the source of this lovely image (well, spent a bit of time googling, anyway) but no trouble is too much for those of you who enjoy these weekly pictures. This one turns out to be by a Russian artist named Demakov Yevgeniy, who interestingly enough was born in 1968. I say interestingly enough because I would have placed this painting earlier in the twentieth century, for what reason I cannot now say. It's actually called Fairy Tale Tonight, and I really love it.