Harriet Devine's Blog

Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Not long ago I was telling you about my re-reading of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles. I've now, just this morning, finished the third book in the series and had to quickly tell you (as I'm off on holiday today) how very much I'm continuing to enjoy it. I have the fourth and final book on order, which will arrive sometime while I'm away - because tomorrow I'm going to Sicily for a week!

Anyway, yes, this is a family saga, and this volume has just taken us through the final stages of WW2. The children who featured in the first book are growing up and it's their lives in particular we get to hear about. Beautiful Louise has had to abandon her thoughts of a career in the theatre after her marriage to ghastly mother's boy Michael, who she loves less and less, and the birth of her baby who she finds it impossible to love. Polly and Clary have moved to London and are finding out what it means to be grown up. Polly falls in love with an older man who is deeply fond of her but not in 'the right way'. Clary still holds on to the impossible idea that her father Rupert, missing for most of the war, will finally return. 

All this is told with such great understanding of how human beings function, with some wit but mostly great compassion. Howard wonderfully recaptures all the misery of adolescence and the privations of wartime, and shows how marriages come under terrible strain and sometimes don't survive. 

This is hardly a review but never mind - I'll be back to tell you more soon. Meanwhile, if you haven't read these great novels, time to make a start now!

Hot

Are you having a heatwave where you are? We certainly are here in France. It makes me feel a bit like this. It's one of a number of cats painted by the British artist Ruskin Spear (1911-1990). There's a whole Pinterest page devoted to them. The man obviously loved cats!

Woman Reading

 Zdzislaw Cyankiewicz (1912-1981) was a Polish artist. That's all I can tell you about him, though Google Images reveals that he painted a good many abstracts and also liked to paint nude women, often ones who were reading. 

The Dead House by Harry Bingham

I'd never heard of Harry Bingham or his detective Fiona Griffiths ('the most startling protagonist in modern crime fiction' according to the Sunday Times) but a review I saw about this, the fifth in a series, gave me a strong desire to read it. It's taken me a while, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because it got relegated to being a beach and garden read, and I had other fish to fry on other occasions.  So, did I enjoy it? That would have to be a moderate yes. It took me a while to get the hang of Fiona, and perhaps I'd have got gripped a bit sooner if I'd read the earlier books in the series. It's clear from the start that she's a bit of a maverick - more than a bit, actually, as it's hard to believe her bosses put up with her habit of taking matters into her own hands, disobeying orders, setting off for places she has been told not to go to and more besides. She drinks a lot of peppermint tea, rarely eats or sleeps, and smokes a great many joints. And she seems to have some kind of love affair with corpses. I guess that this would have been more fully explained in the earlier novels, but here, though it manifests clearly when she encounters the first dead body in the book, we just find her rhapsodising over the pretty, dead young woman who she finds nicely laid out in a so-called dead house in a remote Welsh village ('I spend a moment taking in the scene, its loveliness, its sweet perfection'). 

This particular corpse turns out not to have been a murder victim, having died of natural causes, but the place where she is discovered, and the beauty and care with which she has been laid out, lead Fiona to believe that something extremely unusual lies behind her death. Soon they are able to identify her, and in doing so discover the existence of a gang of crooks who specialise in kidnapping the children of wealthy international industrialists and demanding huge ransoms. If paid, the children are returned, if not, they disappear and are presumed to have been killed.

So much is clear from very early on, but even after they have discovered the identity of the young woman, Fiona is determined to discover where she was kept in the days that led up to her death. She's also curious about another, presumably unrelated incident, which took place a few years ago in that same isolated rural area - a young woman walked out of her family home one day and disappeared without trace. Suspicion fell on a rough local man, known to be her friend, but no body has ever turned up and no evidence exists to show he had anything to do with her disappearance.

Fiona's investigations take her frequently away from her Cardiff base and up into the wilds of mid-Wales, where she visits a monastery and gets drawn in against her will to the intense daily services held there, and also send her at one point, with a colleague, to explore an underground cave network where they get trapped and almost die. In fact Fiona has some pretty terrifying experiences and only manages to escape through great courage and ingenuity. Needless to say she solves both the crimes to her own and everyone else's satisfaction.

Despite my somewhat lukewarm verdict at the start of this post, I have been sufficiently intrigued by Fiona to go back to the first book in the series, which I'm now listening to on Audible. This is caused me to abandon the novel I had started, Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, a Booker long-lister, which just wasn't grabbing me. Lots of things I should be reading for Shiny but hopefully I will get onto those soon.

 

Women Reading

This is a detail from 'Album' by Édouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)

Here's what I read on the site I found it on:

In 1895, Thadée and Misia Natanson commissioned from Vuillard a series of five decorative panels. Collectively known as Album, they took the title of the largest of the paintings, in which a portfolio or album is the center of attention. Languid women suspended in sumptuous, flower-filled interiors are the subject of all five paintings, which are of various sizes. Figures and objects blend in a profusion of patterns, and their closely ranged tonalities of earthy browns, burgundies, and yellows evoke tapestries. The panels’ unusual character matched that of the Natansons’ apartment on rue Saint-Florentin, just off the place de la Concorde, which consisted of a large open space adjoined by several small alcove areas. Its unconventional décor reflected Misia’s taste, which was inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement. Also called the “Annex,” the apartment often served as an alternative office for the artists and writers who contributed to Thadée’s lively avant-garde journal, La Revue Blanche; among them were Claude Debussy, Léon Blum, Stéphane Mallarmé, and André Gide. The evocative Symbolist qualities of Mallarmé’s poetry and Debussy’s music also find echoes in Vuillard’s five panels.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Fiction with the condensed power of poetry: Strout deepens her mastery with each new work, and her psychological acuity has never required improvement. (Kirkus review)

I've never been a great reader of contemporary fiction, preferring the tried and tested reprints road. That's changed a bit since I started co-editing Shiny New Books, but even now I tend to read and review books by familiar names, such as, in the latest issue, Maggie O'Farrell's This Must be the Place and Rose Tremain's Gustav Sonata. However, when I read the recently announced Booker Longlist and realised I'd barely heard of any of the writers on it I decided it was time to venture out into unknown waters. I was happily enabled to start this project by the kind donation of some Audible credits. Many of the books on the list are not yet available in audio, but this one was so this is where I started. And oh my goodness what a place to start. If this doesn't make the shortlist I'm giving up reading (well, not really, but you see what I mean). 

My Name is Lucy Barton  was published earlier this year, and I had read a couple of reviews of it, but remembered little of what I'd gathered from them, so really I came to it with little knowledge of what sort of book it is. And what is that, you may ask? Well it's a book partly about writing, partly about families and motherhood, partly (perhaps chiefly) about the nature of love. 

Lucy Barton is a young married woman, mother of two small girls, who has ended up spending many weeks in hospital with a mystery infection. She doesn't have many visitors - even her husband (with whom her relationship is clearly troubled, though this is something she is not going to discuss) rarely comes to see her - and she is desperately lonely...

Had anyone known the extent of my loneliness, I would have been embarrassed. Whenever a nurse came to took my temperature, I tried to get her to stay for a few minutes. But the nurses were busy. They could not just hang around talking. About three weeks after I was admitted, I turned my eyes from the window late one afternoon and found my mother sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed.“Hi, Lucy,” she said. Her voice sounded shy but urgent. She leaned forward and squeezed my foot through the sheet. “Hi, Wizzle,” she said. I had not seen my mother for years, and I kept staring at her; I could not figure out why she looked so different.
“Mom, how did you get here?” I asked.
“Oh, I got on an airplane.” She wiggled her fingers, and I knew that there was too much emotion, for us. So I waved back, and lay flat. “I think you’ll be alright,” she added, in the same shy-sounding but urgent voice. “I haven’t had any dreams.”

Her mother stays for several days, refusing offers of a bed and just sitting in the chair, taking catnaps. They talk a bit, but truly what goes on between them is never expressed. There's tremendous love here, something that they can never vocalise, but also many memories, some of which the mother seems to have completely blocked out. Lucy is taken back to memories of her childhood, one of great poverty, deprivation, and probably abuse -- though this last is never foregrounded, it's hinted at and certainly suggested when Lucy's mentor gives her a positive critique of her writing and tells her to ignore negative criticism: 'People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. Such a stupid word, abuse'. 

Whatever the hidden truths about those far off days, the wonderful thing here is that Lucy has no anger or bitterness about her past, harsh though it clearly was. Indeed she is capable of great love, not only for her husband and children and her difficult, uncommunicative birth family but also for her wonderful, kind-hearted doctor, for her neighbour Julian, for Sarah Payne, the woman who encourages her to write. Even the deprivation she suffered has contributed to the work she now pursues with intensity:

My teacher saw that I loved reading, and she gave me books, even grown-up books, and I read them. And then later in high school I still read books, when my homework was done, in the warm school. But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone. This is my point. And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone! (But it was my secret. Even when I met my husband I didn’t tell him right away. I couldn’t take myself seriously. Except that I did. I took myself – secretly, secretly – very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn’t know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)

This is a very short novel - only two hundred pages, or in my case four hours of listening. But it's a little jewel of a book, not only for the wonderfully compressed truths about the way people communicate with others but also for the great beauty of Strout's simple, spare, immensely telling prose. The Audible version was beautifully read by Kimberley Farr, and I loved every single second of it. I'll be looking out for more from this wonderful author. If you haven't read this one I suggest you do so very soon.

 

Reading on the Bus

This is The Bayswater Omnibus by the Irish painter George W. Joy (1844-1925). He was better known for religious and allegorical works, but this gives a great glimpse of middle-class life at the end of the 19th century.

Shiny New Books Issue 11 Out Today

Another great issue of Shiny is out today and there's so much for you to read! It's quite a Brexit-themed issue - Victoria has written a brilliant piece called Brexit Reading, and there's a lively discussion of European Culture between the Shiny ed.s, to which you are invited to contribute. Happy reading!

The Muse by Jessie Burton

I’ve seen what success does to people, Isaac, how it separates them from their creative impulse, how it paralyses them. They can’t make anything that isn’t a horrible replica of what came before, because everyone has opinions on who they are and how they should be.

So says the young painter Olive Schloss, whose work is central to this, Jessie Burton's second novel. Unlike a great number of other people, I have not read her hugely bestselling The Miniaturist, so I've got nothing to say about how this one compares to it, though I've read enough to know that Burton herself struggled with the effects of her unexpected success. Anyway, I spotted this one on a list of July releases from Audible and thought it looked interesting - art, and history, and some intriguing mysteries, all sounded like the sort of book I'd enjoy. And I did, though I'm afraid it's not going to be on my list of best books of 2016.

The Muse has one of those dual narratives that seem to be almost de rigeur these days. So we start in late 1960s London and jump back in alternate sections to late 1930s Spain. The two narratives are linked by a painting, created in 1936, which disappears from view and reappears in 1967. The circumstances of its appearance in London are quite strange, and partly owing to a meeting between Odelle Bastien, a young Trinidadian woman who, after five years working in a London shoe shop has got a job in an upmarket art gallery, and Lawrie Scott, who turns out to have inherited the painting from his recently dead mother. When the gallery's co-director Marjorie Quick sees the painting, she goes into a state of inexplicable shock. Although the painting's origins are revealed fairly soon, Quick's connection to it remains a mystery, both to Odelle and to the reader, until almost the end of the novel.

Back in 1936 Spain we meet the artist, who turns out to be a phenomenally talented eighteen-year-old girl called Olive Schloss. Olive, with her art-dealer father and her beautiful, brittle mother, are living in a big old house near the village of Arazuelo in southern Spain. In the village live a young brother and sister, the radical aspiring painter Isaac Robles and his sixteen-year-old sister Theresa, who becomes the family's maid. Olive has been offered a place at the Slade school in London, though her family don't know it - in fact they don't know she paints at all (this seems to stretch credulity a bit, but let's suspend our disbelief here). But one day, by means of a sort of joke played by Theresa, one of Olive's recent paintings is shown to the family as one painted by her brother Isaac. Harold Schloss is overwhelmed by the discovery of a new genius, and Isaac unwillingly allows the deception to go ahead. Soon his work is being sold to Peggy Guggenheim and he is fast becoming an international star. Olive is happy, because she knows her art would never be accepted in the same way if it was known to be the work of a teenage girl.

In many ways this is a story about creativity - Odelle is a writer, very much in secret, and is quite shocked when Quick successfully submits one of her stories for a prestigious literary magazine. She is upset when Quick points out that her work should be made more public - it's her duty, Quick says, a view that Odelle has never taken. Olive, similarly, is happy to keep her identity secret - she loves Isaac, wants him to be successful, doesn't feel the need to claim the  work as her own. Isaac, in fact, seems to be the muse of the title -when he ceases to make love to Olive, she is no longer able to paint. 

The Muse is a long, complex novel, and one that raises many thought-provoking issues. Both of its time periods are impressively researched and come vividly to life. I was thoroughly absorbed by it, and made extra time for listening, not something I always do with audiobooks. The central mystery - the true identity of Quick - remained unresolved until practically the end, when a useful epilogue finally tied up all the loose ends. I did have some reservations, certain things which I found a little hard to believe, but I was willing to overlook them in the light of the enjoyment of following the twists and turns of both narratives. Jessie Burton is obviously a writer of great imaginative gifts and the ability to create a wholly believable historical matrix to put her stories in. The audiobook was impressively read by Cathy Tyson, who was called upon to do a large variety of accents and managed it pretty well. So, many thanks to Audible for another enjoyable listen.