Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading

In fact called 'Afternoon Reading', this is by the Belgian artist Fernand Toussaint (1973-1956). You can find more of his paintings, mostly portraits of women, on a website devoted to him here. As I've said before, I have a special fondness for pictures of women viewed from the back, goodness knows why.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (Audible)

'If her mother had not been so pretty, none of this would have happened'. So muses Franny, at the end of this lovely novel. And at the beginning, it is indeed the irresistible beauty of Beverley Keating that causes the married, but restless, Bert Cousins to kiss her in the nursery at Franny's christening party, and before we know where we are, two marriages have broken up and Bert and Beverley are married. Or at least we gather that is what happened, as the narrative of this book proceeds obliquely, moving back and forth through time, hinting at events or laying trails which will probably be elucidated later. What we do know is that two homes are exploded, as Bert takes Beverley and her two daughters, Franny and Caroline, back to his home state of Virginia, and his ex-wife Teresa remains in Los Angeles with her four children, the youngest of whom, Albie, was born after the break-up.  

The chief result of the two divorces and the remarriage is that all six children are forced into  what certainly becomes an uneasy alliance. Every summer the four Cousins children are flown across the US to spend the long vacation with their father and stepmother, neither of whom is particularly interested in entertaining them or keeping an eye on what they get up to. This gives then a considerable amount of freedom, which they enjoy to a great extent, but which will ultimately have tragic consequences. Even before this happens (and it happens so quietly that it takes a while to realise exactly what has happened) we watch with a mixture of pleasure and horror as the kids run wild on a lake holiday, leaving their tired parents in bed while they make their way across the fields, armed with chocolate, crisps, gin and a gun that happened to be in the glove compartment. I don't want to tell you too much, but the gun is actually a red herring. Soon, bored with looking after baby Albie, they dose him up with Cal's anti-histamine tablets and leave him peacefully sleeping in a field - not the first, or the last, time they have done this.

Interspersed with the history of the children's childhood is an account of what takes place once they grow up. Franny, the main focus of the novel, has dropped out of law school and is working as a cocktail waitress in a posh hotel. Here she meets Leo Posen, a famous novelist who is suffering from writer's block. As their relationship progresses, she tells him the story of her childhood, and this he transforms into a best-selling novel, which is also called Commonwealth. The book is read by Albie, now an adult, estranged from his family,  and a recovering heroin addict, who is initially appalled to discover what his siblings did to him when he was tiny, and what the ultimate effect of this was to be. However this causes him to track down Franny, leading to a new friendship and also ending Franny's five-year affair with Leo. 

Another strand of the narrative moves forward more than fifty years from that fateful christening party, and we find Franny and her sister Caroline  visiting their father, who is in the grip of terminal cancer. The two sisters pretty much hated each other as children but are now reconciled, and the same is true of the rest of this disparate bunch of people, who have come to look back at the extraordinary and often painful events of their past with an eye of maturity and forgiveness. Abbie, who has been horrified initially by Leo's novel, comes to view it with greater understanding:

It was about the inestimable burden of their lives: the work, the houses, the friendships, the marriages, the children, as if all the things they’d wanted and worked for had cemented the impossibility of any sort of happiness.

Amazingly, though, happiness does come to the survivors of what seems for a long time to be a tragic mess. There's nothing sentimental about this, but yes, it is an optimistic novel, one that believes in the possibility of love and forgiveness. And why not? The novel is wonderfully perceptive about human beings and the way they interact, beautifully constructed and immensely thought-provoking and memorable. I listened to it on Audible and enjoyed every minute.

 

Girl with Book

 

This is by the Victorian painter Arthur Elsley (1860-1952). He was apparently 'famous for his idyllic genre scenes of playful children and their pets', but here's a girl looking a bit sad. Or maybe the books just made her dreamy?

The Dead Shall be Raised and Murder of a Quack

Here we have two really interesting and enjoyable 1940s crime novels by George Bellairs. I'd certainly never heard of him and you may not have either - his real name was Harold Lundell and he was a bank manager who wrote crime novels as a hobby for nearly four decades. He lived in what was then called the West Riding of Yorkshire, and that's where the first of these two novels is set. The title refers to the event that starts the story off - a body is discovered buried on the moor, and turns out to have been there for more than twenty years - but it's also a line from Handel's Messiah, which is being sung in the local church on this cold winter evening. Indeed, the local police superintendent Haworth is actually singing the tenor solos, the professional singer having failed to turn up. Listening to the magnificent singing are Inspector Littlejohn, recently arrived from London, and his wife, who's been convalescing in the village. When Haworth has a fall and injures his ankle, Littlejohn gets permission from Scotland Yard to take over investigating the case. 

I have to say that this is not the most exciting of plots - Littlejohn plods on, works out quite soon who did it and then spends a good deal of time finding a way to prove it - which also happens in the second novel in this volume. But don't let that put you off. Littlejohn is an attractive character, but it's the wonderful period detail that really makes this such fun to read. From the inspector's train journey to Yorkshire in the blackout to the packed church listening to the Messiah to a wonderful set piece where two retired police inspectors, father-and son-in-law conduct an interview with Littlejohn surrounded by their beloved prize hens, the novel really conjures up those far off days where, despite the war, which doesn't really impinge in this remote country area, everything seems to have been a lot simpler.

There's also a great deal of interest in the second novel in the volume, Murder of a Quack. The quack in question, Nathaniel Wall, is actually what is referred to in the novel as a bone setter, but seems to have been what today we would call an osteopath. He also practices homeopathy, and is highly respected in the West Country village where he lives. He comes from a long line of healers, and patients come to consult him from all over the country, many turning to his practice when their conventional doctors have failed to cure them. He's much liked as well as respected, and nobody can understand why anyone would wish to murder him. Could it be something to do with the dangerous criminal who he successfully treated some years ago? The man was on the run from the police, and was easy to identify owing to his broken nose and damaged right arm, both of which Wall has managed to cure. But why would the man have wanted to kill his benefactor? And what hold did he have over Wall to persuade him to do the long and arduous work that brought about the cure? The local police are baffled, and so they send for someone from Scotland Yard to help with the enquiry - none other than Inspector Littlejohn, who arrives on the train and gets himself lodgings in the local pub, The Mortal Man. Using what his creator described as his 'sheer patience and tenacity of purpose', he needless to say works his way through the various suspects - the drunken local doctor, who hated Wall, is high on the list - and reaches the right answer.

I have another Bellairs by my bed, The Death of a Busybody, so you may be hearing about that soon. Meanwhile, thanks to the British Library Crime Classics for more enjoyable reading!

Woman Reading Poetry

Last week we had a poet reading, this week it's a 'Lady Reading Poetry', which is indeed the title of this painting by the Japanese artist Ishibashi Kazunori (1876-1928) - the first Japanese artist I've shown on here, I believe. Born in Japan, he studied and painted in London and Europe for many years. It's said to be a portrait of an actress, but nobody seems to know which one. I like it a lot and am grateful to Rob for the link!

What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin (Audible)

I've not idea what made me want this novel but I suspect it had something to do with a film I'd recently seen, The Bling Ring, which is a fictionalised account of a real series of events a few years years ago, when a group of Hollywood teenagers broke into a number of celebrity homes and stole millions of dollars worth of jewellery and clothes. Brilliant film, which deserves a post all to itself. But what, you may be thinking, has this to do with What Remains of Me. Well, in the 1980s sections of this two-time-frame novel, the main characters are also Hollywood teenagers, who behave at least equally badly.

In this 1980s segment, Kelly Lund is seventeen. Her parents are not rich - her mother a make-up artist, her father a partly disable stuntman - but Kelly goes to school at Hollywood High, where she is befriended by the glamorous, wealthy Bellamy Marshall, the daughter of a famous film actor, and through her meets Vee, a boy whose father is a well-known director. Unhappy at home and missing her twin sister, who died a few years earlier, Kelly gets swept into a world of celebrity parties and drug taking. 

These segments of the story alternate with a narrative set in 2010. Kelly, now 47, is living with her husband Shane Marshall, the younger brother of her girlhood friend Bellamy. We learn that Kelly has served 25 years of a prison sentence for the murder of John McFadden, the father of her friend Vee. Shane and Kelly had married following a long correspondence while she was in prison, but the marriage is not happy and Kelly has a lover, a tattooed sculptor who lives nearby. But at the start of this part of the narrative, Kelly is under suspicion for the shooting of her father-in-law, though all the reader knows at this point is that Kelly did visit the Marshall's house on the night of his death.

Secrets abound, then - Kelly has plenty, but so do Bellamy, and Kelly's mother, who rejected her as a teenager and is now living in a curious, remote commune far from civilisation. Mystery surround the death of Katherine, Kelly's twin, and Kelly's dear friend Vee has vanished - in fact he has not been seen since the night of the 1980s party when his father was shot.

I found all this very fascinating and intriguing. There are lots of revelations and twists towards the end, and the Hollywood teenage world is well captured, as are the various celebrity shenanigans. I listened to it on Audible, enjoyed every minute, and was sorry to reach the end.

 

Poet Reading

This is of course John Keats, painted by his friend Joseph Severn (1792-1879 in about 1821. Keats had become ill in London and his friend Severn agreed to go with him to Rome in search of a warmer climate. He nursed Keats assiduously for several months, but all to no avail - the poet died there in February 1821. During their stay Severn wrote a series of journal letters home, now greatly valued for being the only surviving information about the poet's final months.

Days Without End - Costa Novel Prize 2017

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life.

So writes Tom McNulty, the narrator of Sebastian Barry's brilliant Days Without End, which has just won the Costa Novel Prize ( he also won it nine years ago with The Secret Scripture). Set in mid-nineteenth-century America, it's a story of survival, of war, of love and of gender. I read this last year and reviewed it for Shiny New Books - you can read the full review here. 

Beautifully written, moving, thought-provoking, this is a tremendous novel and the prize is well deserved. Read the review, but more important, read the novel - you won't regret it.

Her Every Fear by Peter Swanson

In 2015 I was bowled over by Peter Swanson's second novel, The Kind Worth Killing, and went on to read his first, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, with almost as much pleasure. So I was excited to get a copy of this, his most recent. Would it measure up?

The novel takes place in Boston, but the central character is a young English artist, Kate Priddy. Kate is recovering from a serious trauma - some months before the novel begins, her jealous and controlling boyfriend terrorised her, locked her in a cupboard, and shot himself, and it was several days before she was discovered. She's been slowly recovering, first at her parents' house and then back in her own flat in Belsize Park, London, still very nervous and prone to panic attacks. So, when she receives a surprise request for a temporary flat-swap from an American cousin she's never met, Corbin Dell, she thinks a change of scene might be a way of throwing off the last effects of her traumatic experience Soon she's on a flight, heading for Boston, and her cousin's extremely flash apartment in a large and grand apartment block. But though the apartment is lovely (she worries that her Hampstead flat won't measure up), and she's beginning to find her feet and explore the neighbourhood, she soon makes a disturbing discovery - Audrey Marshall, a girl who lived in the flat next door, was recently, and brutally, murdered. 

Living next door to a crime scene would probably disturb most people somewhat, but Kate, sensitive at the best of times and carrying the leftover demons of her own terrifying experience, finds it all very hard to take. She's befriended by a nice young man who lives in a flat more or less opposite, but it turns out he has been spying on the dead girl through their facing windows and soon becomes a suspect. The police also wonder if Kate's cousin Corbin could be responsible. And if that were not enough, Kate keeps hearing unexplained noises in her apartment, and makes some disturbing discoveries, among them the fact that Audrey's murder was evidently the most recent in a series stretching back serial years. Is Kate going to be the next victim?

Peter Swanson is an excellent writer, and very adept at getting inside the heads of his protagonists. In this novel we actually know a great deal more than either Kate or the police about who is responsible for this and other similar murders, so the final denouement is not so much whodunnit as willtheydoitagain? As you can imagine, this is quite a page turner. I enjoyed it a lot, though I didn't think it quite a good as The Kind Worth Killing. 

Her Every Fear is actually published next week, but of course you can pre-order it straight away.