Harriet Devine's Blog

The Jump by Doug Johnstone: Blog Tour

I'm happy to tell you that I'll be participating in the blog tour for Doug Johnstone's new novel, which is coming out on 6 August. My review is scheduled for 24 August, but I can tell you now that it's an amazing novel. I reviewed Doug's previous book, The Dead Beat, on Shiny New Books last year and a review of this forthcoming novel will also be appearing on Shiny 7 in October.

Woman Reading with Cat

 

This is 'Sunday Afternoon' by Bruce Bingham. She is a female artist, American, lived in Malta for ten years, now back in the US. I suspect this is a self-portrait -- see the photo of her here. Lots more of her paintings on the same site. 

Two Golden Oldies

I've had a lot of fun this week with a couple of golden age crime novels. I ordered She Died a Lady online after reading about it on someone's blog, can't remember whose, but it sounded great. I'd been reading about Carter Dickson (whose real name was John Dickson Carr) in Martin Edwards' great recent book, The Golden Age of Murder -- he was an American, but set most of his crime novels in England, including this one. So when it popped through the door, sadly in a cover not quite as fine as this one, I lost no time before plunging in. 

This is an amazingly silly story, it must be said. I can't really better the blurb, so here it is:

Beautiful Rita Wainwright and young Barry Sullivan walked down the footpath to the edge of the seaside cliff -- and never came back. Suicide by drowning, the police decreed...until the bodies were washed ashore. Each had been killed by a bullet fired at close range, and the double suicide was suddenly a double murder.

The only footprints to be found at the top of the cliff belonged to the victims, but the famous detective Sir Henry Merrivale didn't believe in a gunman who could walk through the air. A very down-to-earth killer was on the loose, and it was up to Sir Henry to bring the footpad to heel and take him in tow before he had time to make tracks for his next victim!

Yes, you get the idea. Dixon Carr/Dickson evidently specialised in apparently insoluble mysteries and this one certainly fits the bill. Needless to say there is an ingenious solution to those pesky footprints, involving among other things a garden roller. I must say I found the 'famous detective' rather hard to take. He recurs in a number of novels, but in this one he has hurt his toe, and spends most of the book in a wheelchair, which tends to run away with him and bump into things and people. At times he is also dressed as a Roman senator (still in the chair). He is obviously supposed to be funny as well as brilliant, but I'm afraid he didn't raise a smile with me. As for the identity of the murderer, I didn't guess it, which is a great plus. So despite all the quibbles, this was an enjoyable read, full of great, if clichéd characters -- I particularly liked Belle Sullivan, wife to the murdered Barry, a lively good-time girl who narrowly escapes being sunk in quicksand after deliberately shutting herself in the boot of a car. 

I went straight on after this to a delightful British Library Crime Classic. This got an excellent review from Simon in the latest ed. of Shiny, which spurred me on, though I'd have read it anyway as I'm a huge fan of this ongoing series. Alan Melville was involved in the theatre world, which he has a great time making fun of here. The novel starts at the opening night of a performance of a 'musical comedy operetta', in which a crucial scene involves the shooting of the leading man, Brandon Baker, in the midst of a duet with the beautiful Coletta. 

He heard Mr Baker's spirited rejoiner to the Rebel Leader: "You say she is your woman, yet you treat her like a dog!" He saw the bold, bad Phillipo draw his revolver slowly from his belt. He heard Coletta's feverish, "No, no, not that!" and saw her nobly attempt to put herself in the way of the bullet, and Mr Baker equally nobly pushing her aside, and behind his manly protective chest...And he saw Mr Baker fall efficiently on the stage with two spotlights marking the spot.

I expect you've guessed that the bullet turns out to be real. Baker is very dead, and the actor playing the Rebel Leader is found soon afterwards having hanged himself in his dressing room. Seems to the police like an open and shut case, but when Mr Wilson of Scotland Yard, accompanied by his journalist son Derek, comes on the scene, he believes that a very different construction must be put on the incident. Most of the rest of the novel involves Wilsons senior and junior pursuing various clues and putting together a most ingenious solution to the case -- which, in a wonderful twist at the end, proves to be entirely mistaken. 

This, although also quite silly (in the nicest possible way), is actually an excellent novel. Written when Melville was in his early twenties, it is incredibly lively and entertaining. The two Wilsons are a wonderful pair, whose loving father-son relationship allows them to tease each other endlessly in the most affectionate way. Melville's Death of Anton is coming out next month, and I'm looking forward to it tremendously. 

The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann

She makes a mood, an atmosphere, which is only hers, and is never forgotten... the inner voice of women talking to themselves about their love affairs, knowing that its hopeless, having to go ahead anyway, expecting the end as soon as it begins. That of course is what Rosamund Lehmann does best. (Sunday Times)

Some time back Open Road Media offered me the chance to read and review this new reprint, which I was glad to do because I am a great fan of Rosamond Lehmann and always surprised that her writing seems somehow to be less appreciated today than that of many of her contemporaries. Published in 1953, when Lehmann was 52, this was her penultimate novel, followed only by The Sea Grape Tree more than twenty years later.

The Echoing Grove is a darker work than her earlier novels, and this is explicable when you find out that it was written in the wake of the break-up, after more than nine years, of her affair with the poet Cecil Day Lewis, who refused to leave his wife for her. Clearly the pain of all this fed directly into the novel, which has a rather fascinating plot. Two sisters, the beautiful, rather naive Madeleine, and the less beautiful but more sensual, strange and attractive Diana, are in love with the same man, Rickie. The trouble is, he is Madeleine's husband. The story swings around through time, back and forth between the present of the novel, in which Diana is visiting Madeleine for the first time in fifteen years and Rickie has long ago died from a duodenal ulcer, and various times in the past when he is with one or other of the two women.

I thought the passages of the novel in which Rickie and Madeleine were together, trying to work out whether their marriage was still viable, were painfully well observed -- Rickie rather shifty, confused, uncertain, unable to conceal the fact that he still loves and longs for Diana, and Madeleine angry, hurt, unable to trust him or to restrain herself from making sharp, smart comments -- and yet both of them still capable of enjoying days out as a family, in the country, with the children. My goodness, Lehmann does know about human beings and how they behave in relationship to each other.

I must admit that this isn't going to be my favourite Lehmann -- I really love the earlier novels best. Dusty Answer, An Invitation to the Waltz, and The Weather in the Streets are amazing and everyone should read them. But that doesn't make The Echoing Grove any less readable -- far from it. It's a complex, sad novel, immensely truthful about love in all its forms, and loss, and betrayal -- and of course about two women trying to mend bridges that were seemingly burned for ever fifteen years earlier. 

This edition is newly available on Amazon and elsewhere, so why not pop over there and grab a copy -- you won't regret it. 

 

Go Set a Watchman

Yes, I read it. Or actually listened to it, courtesy of a review copy from Audible, beautifully read by Reese Witherspoon. Rarely can the publication of a novel have been surrounded by such an uproar and so many misconceptions. Let's put one of them straight right away -- this is not a 'first draft' of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's an earlier novel, which Harper Lee described as the parent of that book, though of course it actually acts as a sequel, as it deals with later events. I've been trying not to read reviews, but I caught one which said it was 'a mess'. No, it is not -- it is a well-crafted novel. Perhaps the thing that has saddened me the most is the many people I have read who have said they will not read it because it will spoil their feelings about TKAM, by which they generally mean about Atticus Finch. I suppose we have to say that they are entitled to take this view if they must, but it seems to me to be akin to the growing trend in some universities for students to avoid certain modules because they will have to encounter opinions and statements which challenge their own beliefs. Perhaps those people should take note of what Harper Lee apparently said (though I haven't found the source of this):

The book to read is not the one that thinks for you, but the one that makes you think.

 So, let's set aside the controversies and take a look at the novel itself. It is set in the mid-1950s, not long after the US Supreme Court passed a bill outlawing racial segregation, something which will resonate throughout the novel. A young woman, once known as Scout but now called Jean Louise, returns on holiday to her Alabama hometown from New York, where she lives and works. Her lawyer father Atticus is now 72 and suffering badly from arthritis, and her aunt Alexandra has moved into the house to take care of him. He still goes to work, aided by his assistant Henry, who is also Jean Louise's long-term boyfriend. Henry very much wants them to marry, but Jean Louise isn't sure -- she knows she loves him but she also suspects that he is not the right husband for her, and in any case she values her independence. 

How all this would pan out in the end under normal circumstances, who knows. But Jean Louise happens on a meeting at the local courthouse, attended by every white male in town (including Henry) and presided over by Atticus himself, at which racist sentiments are being exchanged freely and enthusiastically. To say she is shocked hardly encompasses it. Her entire world, everything she has ever thought and believed, is thrown into complete and devastating disarray. Her first reaction, after the vomiting and weeping have retreated a bit, is to pack her bags and leave, never to return. But the story doesn't end there. She talks to Henry, and she talks to Atticus, she hears their points of view. None of this changes the way she feels, but the ending offers a resolution of sorts, albeit a sad one. 

For me this was an immensely powerful and thought-provoking novel. No wonder people have been upset by it -- anyone (and goodness knows there are plenty of them) who has idolised Atticus Finch will find it disturbing. But in some ways it almost makes him a more admirable man, or perhaps we should say admirable in a different way. His extraordinary and unprecedented act in TKAM, the defence of Tom Robinson, has to be seen in a different light. We undoubtedly assumed that he did it because he was not prejudiced against black people, but no -- he did it because he believed in justice, even for a race of people who, as we now discover, he viewed as little more than ignorant children. So, a man of strong principles, a believer in right and morality, but a man whose attitudes have the power to shock and revolt as much today as at the time the novel was written. Jean Louise's cry is tragic -- 'Why did I have to be born colourblind?'. Of course we admire and love her for her colourblindness, but it's easy to understand why she feels she'd rather have been as blinkered and ignorant as everyone else in her hometown evidently is -- it would have saved her the pain and devastation she'll probably go on suffering for the rest of her life.

Probably most people will read this rather than listening to it, as I did, but if you are a lover of audiobooks I highly recommend this recording. I was particularly impressed with the way Reese Witherspoon conveyed Atticus's tone of voice in the long and intensely painful confrontation with Jean Louise in the penultimate section. She is angry and grief-stricken to the point of hysteria, and he is quietly and sweetly reasonable even while expressing sentiments you will not enjoy hearing, which of course makes them all the more chilling.

So -- this is a novel about growing up, with a vengeance. Although the circumstances here are extreme, I think the basic premise will resonate with many people -- it's all too easy to put someone on a pedestal, to make them a god, as Jean Louise says. The great challenge is to find a way of continuing to love them when you discover they are not the person you believed them to be. Does it make Atticus less of a good and loving father that he was a racist bigot? A book that makes you think. Do read it.

 

Woman and Cat Reading

 

Well, of course the cat isn't actually reading but it does play a prominent part in the composition. This is by the Spanish painter Josep de Togores (1893-1970) and I think it's called René et le Chat. More than that I do not know. 

In love with Shardlake

Well, not in love with Shardlake himself, though he's certainly very nice, but in love with Shardlake as in the series of novels by CJ Sansom. Back in May I read Revelation, the fourth novel in the series, and wrote a slightly lukewarm review of it.  I'd been told it didn't matter where you started in the series but now I've gone back to the beginning and read the first three books (yes, you see what I mean about being in love) I don't think this was good advice. 

So it was lucky I was curious enough to want to explore some more, and I'm really glad I did. Of course the characters have really grown on me, as they always do in a series like this. I feel now that I really know Matthew Shardlake and admire him for his intelligence and his perceptivity, and also sympathise with him for his flaws and his insecurities, mostly no doubt a result of being born as what was known as a crookback and getting teased and abused for it throughout his life. But then there's his assistant (both in his legal business and in his crime-solving activities), the attractive rough diamond Jack Barak. Love the relationship between the two of them, which is as close to being a friendship as is possible given the fact of their difference in status -- Barak rarely hesitates to tell Shardlake when he's going wrong, and vice versa of course, and their association is incredibly fruitful in every way. In Sovereign, Jack meets beautiful Tamasin and falls heavily in love for the first time -- having read the next novel in the series I know that things are not going to go well for them, but can only hope for better developments in the future. And of course there's Shardlake's friend Guy, the Spanish/Moorish ex-monk turned apothecary, on whose skill and wisdom Shardlake comes to depend.

So yes, these are crime novels, and that's a genre I always enjoy. But the real strength of Sansom's books is the extraordinary historical detail. Although I'm not an avid fan of the Tudor period, I would have said I knew a fair amount about it, but my goodness has it been brought to life to me. This is true in a broad sense -- I was aware of the dissolution of the monasteries, of the religious turmoil that resulted, and of Henry VIII's marital history, but had never fully taken on board what this would have meant if you were actually living through it -- the desperation of the monks made homeless and rootless, the terrible destruction of the beautiful old monastic buildings, the fear in which people lived if they chose to follow the old religion they had been brought up in, the terrible torture suffered by people suspected of treason (a word given a very wide definition at the time). But as well as the wider picture, these novels bring home forcibly what everyday life must have been like. Just to give one example, I had never thought of how important horses were. Everybody has one, or everybody of a certain class, anyway. And they have to be stabled, fed, generally looked after. If you lived in the country, that was fine -- but in the city, hay would have to be brought in every day in huge quantities, and horse dung removed too, altogether a huge and time consuming business.  And that's before you start thinking about human waste, something that rears its head rather forcibly in Sovereign, in which the king and queen are on a 'progress' to the north of England, accompanied by many hundreds of people, leaving a trail of devastation behind them as a result of using farmers' fields to dispose of their...well, you get the picture. 

Though I've very much enjoyed all three, I would say that Sovereign is the best so far. But others will no doubt have other favourites. I'm going to try to take a break now, but I can see it won't be long before I'm drawn back and find myself once more plunging in -- there are two more to go, numbers five and six, so watch this space. 

 

Shirley Jackson Reading Week: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Actually I completely missed the announcement that it was going to be Shirley Jackson Reading Week this week. I rather enjoy these sort of events so I might well have provided myself with an unread novel of hers, but I didn't. However, in the spirit of the thing, here's a review I wrote three years ago. 

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.  I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance.  I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.  I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise.  I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom.  Everyone else in my family is dead.

A couple or so years ago it seemed that everyone was reading this novel, which for me is often a good reason not to, and I didn't. But when it fell into my hands in a charity shop recently it seemed that its time had come. I remembered it having been generally praised to the skies, and that makes one wary, but apart from that I didn't have much of an idea what was in store.

So -- did I like it? Yes I did -- it was a fascinating and absorbing read. People seem to describe Jackson as a writer of gothic fiction, though I'm not entirely sure what exactly that means, and it's not a term that draws me in. I would describe it as a powerful portrait of a disturbed psychology. Mary Katherine Blackwood --Merricat -- tells the story here, and so everything that happens, and has happened, is told through her obviously skewed perspective. She's not exactly an unreliable narrator, as she is rather frighteningly honest about her views of the people and the world which surround her, but she does not disclose everything she knows and indeed there are crucial facts which we are left to guess at even when one important fact has been revealed (or rather, I would say, confirmed).

Merricat is eighteen. She lives in a large and beautiful mansion in a small New England town with her older sister Constance and her aged and disabled Uncle Julius. Six years ago the rest of her family died, all on the same day, all poisoned by arsenic, an event for which Constance was tried but eventually acquitted. Since then the three survivors have shut themselves away, though Merricat goes to town once a week to shop. This is a terrible ordeal for her, as the townspeople mock her and abuse her as she goes through the town, and she harbours a tremendous hatred for them as a result. Much of her life is lived in a fantasy world and she tries to control events by rituals of her own invention, burying objects or hanging them in trees, investing certain words and actions with tremendous power, creating safe spaces where she and her cat can take refuge. By this means she manages to control her world, but everything is thrown into disarray with the arrival of Cousin Charles, an impoverished relative with designs on Constance and on the large sums of money hidden in the family safe. Merricat's attempts to dispel his malign influence eventually bring disaster, though ironically the breach between the sisters and the rest of the town is partially healed as a result.

This is certainly a brilliantly achieved novel. OK, the revelation towards the end must surely have been guessed by most readers long before, but the focus is rather on what it reveals about Constance and Merricat's relationship than anything world-shaking in terms of the plot. If as I suspect Shirley Jackson's other novels are rather along the same lines I can't say I'm impelled to rush out and get another one -- she seems to me to be a writer best taken in small doses. But if you haven't read this one, please do so before too long -- it's well worth it.

For more on Shirley Jackson Reading Week, see the hosts' blogs: Simon's, Jenny's and Ana's.  

My Shiny 6 Reviews

This time round, I wrote fewer reviews for Shiny 6 than usual. I didn't plan it that way at all, but a variety of things conspired to make it happen. For a start, I'd been going to review Martin Edwards' fantastic Golden Age of Murder, which I read with huge enjoyment, but then one of our regular reviewers, Lyn Baines, posted such an excellent review on her own blog that I thought I couldn't better it, and asked if we could republish it, which she kindly agreed to. Then the same thing happened with Nicola Upson's London Rain -- I'd enjoyed it tremendously, but very much liked the review by another of our regulars, Rob Spence, so he ended up rejigging it for Shiny. In fact I did interview both these writers, and the Q&As appear in the BookBuzz section. Martin's is here, and Nicola's is here. I also got a review copy of A.N. Wilson's The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible, which I thought sounded fascinating. But oh dear, it wasn't -- not to me, anyway. So that one bit the dust. 

However, I did review some excellent books. One was Kate Atkinson's wonderful A God in Ruins -- I'd already talked about it on here with relation to the audiobook, but my Shiny review goes into more depth. Then there was a late addition, All the Light We Cannot See, the Pulitzer prizewinner from Anthony Doerr, newly out in paperback. I normally review several contemporary crime novels, but this time round the only one was Laura Wilson's intriguing The Wrong Girl, set partly in the 1970s. My only contribution to non-fiction was a review of Stanley Wells' Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction, and I also reviewed two brilliant golden age crime novels in the reprints section: a British Library Crime Classic, Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries, and Ianthe Jerrold's The Studio Crime, published by Dean Street Press.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, just six reviews in total. I feel vaguely guilty about not doing more, but I also know that's really silly. One of the great things about Shiny New Books is the way we are recruiting such a superb bunch of reviewers. I do most of the proofreading before we go live, and I am constantly bowled over by the quality of the writing that comes in. So, though I'll never end up taking a back seat (or I hope not, anyway), this is actually a really healthy sign, and I can only say long may it continue. 

Have you explored Shiny 6 yet?

Woman with Book

 

This atmospheric painting is actually called 'Twenty Minutes Past Three', by the artist Tom Roberts (1856-1931). Born in England, he lived in Australia for most of his life.

The book, of course, is only a small part of the story of the painting, but it adds something important. The title tells us the time -- it's the middle of the night, or perhaps we should say the small hours of the morning. The lamp is lit, the woman is fully dressed. There's what I take to be a pile of mending or sewing on the table, a discarded book, and a small clock. A blanket is thrown carelessly over the back of the chair, as if she has just stood up. Long hours of waiting, that's what's been going on. Inability to concentrate on anything. And now, I think, she's heard a noise -- the front door, probably, being, no doubt, opened quietly on the assumption that she's fast asleep in bed. 

Hands up if you can relate to this! I certainly can. Waiting anxiously for a man, or a teenager, or indeed anyone who should have been home and isn't. An intensely painful experience at the best of times. I may be wrong in imposing a scenario of an unfaithful husband onto this, but it certainly fits the bill.