Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading

Here's a little known (to me at least) painting by a very well-known artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). Painted in about 1880, it's called 'Young Woman Reading an Illustrated Journal'. 

According to Facebook, this was sent to me by a friend four years ago (thanks Dark Puss), but I don't seem to have posted it here at the time. I love it when people send me suggestions, even though sometimes it takes a while for me to act on them. 

The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes (Audible)

Earlier this month I was telling you about an enjoyable Audible book, From London Far by Michael Innes. I said then that I couldn't abandon Innes after that one novel, and I went straight on to listen to another of his standalone novels, The Journeying Boy. Written in 1949, this is, I must admit, a better book in many ways, being less absurd and bizarre, without losing any of Innes's exuberance or wit.

The journeying boy of the title is fifteen-year-old Humphrey Paxton. The son of Sir Bernard, Britain's top nuclear scientist, Humphrey is a highly intelligent boy, extremely imaginative and sensitive, and poised at that point in his adolescence where he still enjoys adventure stories like the famous Biggles series but also has acquired a rather unsuitable girlfriend. His father, his sole parent, is worried about him, as he's given to fits of temper (he recently threw a cream jug at a celebrated scientist over dinner). So, he has accepted an invitation from some distant relatives in Ireland for Humphrey to spend the summer holidays over there. He obviously can't go unaccompanied, so a tutor has to be engaged to go along with him. 

The first man he interviews is the middle-aged Mr Thewlis, whose academic credentials are irreproachable. As far as Humphrey's important studies are concerned, he seems to be the perfect man for the job. But then, following a second interview with the far less academic but much more sportsmanlike Captain Cox, Paxton decided to offer him the post instead. The train tickets are booked, Humphrey is packed, but then Sir Bernard receives a brief note to say that Cox has been prevented from coming as a result of death in the family, so Thewlis is on again. 

What we know fairly soon but the Paxtons do not is that the death that prevents Cox's journey to Ireland is his own. He has been shot in a West End cinema during the showing of a film called Plutonium Blonde. While this puzzling event is being investigated in London by Inspector Cadover, Humphrey and Thewlis are on the train to the north west, where they will get a ferry and a small local railway to their destination. The journey is far from uneventful, and the account of it is made entertaining as well as exciting by the fact that Humphrey is in a very nervous state and believes someone is trying to kidnap him, but Thewlis has convinced himself that all his suspicions are a result of his over-active imagination. As the whole account is from the point of view of the charming but blinkered tutor, this makes great reading - the reader has to make up their own mind about the adventures Humphrey and Thewlis encounter along the way, and the people who share their carriage - the sinister bearded man, and the nice old lady who seems very friendly with Humphrey.

They make it eventually to Killyboffin Hall, home to their Bolderwood cousins. They are received with open arms and appear to be going to have an enjoyable holiday. But the Bolderwoods are not what they seem, and when Ivor offers to take Humphrey on an early morning exploration of a local beach with an exciting network of caves, things get very dangerous indeed. 

There's so much to enjoy in this novel. Innes, as you may know, was an academic (real name J.I.M. Stewart) and he excels at portraying middle-aged academics who are thrown into fantastic action which is as far from their comfort zones as its possible to imagine, but who of course find hidden resources of strength and courage. Thewlis here fits that bill perfectly; he's a silly old dodderer in many ways, though of course extremely learned in his own field, but though we are invited to laugh at him it is all done with great affection. As for Humphrey, he is an amazingly well-observed portrait of an adolescent boy - charming and infuriating in about equal measure. I see from Wikipedia that Innes/Stewart had five children, so he doubtless had one or more models for this character. The Bolderwood villains, father and son, are wonderfully conceived, a couple of down and out crooks who have assumed the guise of old Anglo-Irish gentry to a somewhat exaggerated extent. And on top of the excellent characterisation, there's a lot of very exciting action here. Really I can't fault Innes in this novel, which I listened to on Audble and which provided more than 12 hours of great listening pleasure. 

Woman Reading with Roses

This painting, by the Danish artist Peder Severin [P.S.] Krøyer (1851-1909), is actually called 'Roses: Marie Krøyer seated in the deckchair by Mrs Bendsen's house'. Marie was his wife, and an artist herself, though she painted little during this marriage, which broke down, probably because Krøyer had recurring mental problems. In their early days together, though, he painted her many times.

My Shiny Reviews

I've been a bit remiss lately about pointing you to my recent reviews in Shiny. Here are a couple that have appeared in the last few weeks.

Min Kym's Gone is subtitled A Girl, a Violin, A Life Unstrung. Maybe you have heard of Min Kym, a supremely talented violinist of Korean extraction, recognised as a child prodigy by the time she was seven. Maybe you even read about the great tragedy of her life, the loss of her precious Stradivarius violin when it was stolen from her in a café at Euston Station. Or maybe she, and her story, are new to you. Either way, you really should read this book, in which Min tells her amazing story in her own beautifully chosen words.

Read the whole review here.

 

 
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

 

This is a very short novel – only just over two hundred pages. 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. I loved every single second of it. 

That's what I said about it in my review. Certainly this was one of the best novels I read in 2016, and it's now out in paperback. 

Read the whole review here.

Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

The rather tacky cover of this book, taken from the very tacky film adaptation of this fine novel, should not put you off reading it. Jean Hanff Korelitz is an excellent writer, as I've said before here and will be saying again soon on Shiny New Books. Having read her two most recent novels, I'm now chasing up her backlist. This one was published in 2009, and 'adapted' (chopped about, essential plot details completely changed) in 2013.  But let's forget the instantly forgettable film and concentrate on the intelligent, thought-provoking and heart-warming novel.

Portia Nathan is an admissions officer at Princeton University. She's had the job for sixteen years, and for most of that time has been living with her partner Mark, an Eng Lit professor from the UK. As the novel begins, Portia is embarking on an important part of her job, visiting schools in the local area to drum up applications to the university. There's something deeply ironic about this as Princeton will only accept a tiny percentage of the kids who apply, but they need to keep applications high in order to score at or near the top of a widely read university grading system. So most of the young people who Portia excites at the thought of coming to Princeton will be disappointed.

Most of the schools Portia visits are well known to her, but this year she has been invited to a newly formed experimental school called Quest. It's a school that combines high academic standards with many extracurricular activities like building, gardening, care for animals and more. She's greeted there by a teacher, John, who apparently had a crush on her when (though she doesn't remember this) they were at university together. He introduces her to a student, Jeremiah Balakian, who he says is the most brilliant and well-read person he has ever encountered. Portia is suitably impressed, and convinces Jeremiah to apply to Princeton. She knows he would do stupendously well there, but his chances of acceptance are slim, since he did very badly at the school he attended before Quest, having been pursuing his own extraordinarily ambitious programme of reading rather than attempting the far too simple tests. At Quest, however, he has achieved top scores on every exam he has taken, without any preparatory courses, and Portia hopes this may be enough to swing it.

While all this is going on, Portia's personal life is in tatters. Mark leaves her for a deeply unpleasant new professor from England ('the world expert on Virginia Woolf') and she slides into a decline, forgetting to eat, wash, change her clothes or answer her phone or mail. Her feelings are rather complicated by the fact that while visiting Quest she had ended up having a startlingly passionate night with John - but Portia is very good at ignoring complicated feelings. We gather from quite early on that she has a secret in her past which she refuses to confront, but which we may be able to guess at from the fact that she is startled and somewhat upset to realise that all this year's applicants were born in the same year and are now 17 years old. The reveal doesn't come until a good three-quarters of the way through the novel, but when it does it explains a lot about Portia and the way she has always dealt with emotions. It also complicates her determination to get Jeremiah into Princeton. In the end, all these factors are going to bring about some highly uncharacteristic behaviour and lead to a complete change in Portia's life, but one which we are confident is going to result in great happiness. 

I have to admit that there's a lot here about university politics and admissions procedures, which is certainly fascinating to anyone who, like me, has worked within the system - my experience has largely been in the UK but I did have a taste of the very different American procedures during a sadly rather brief period at a university in Pennsylvania. Essentially, students in the UK stand or fall by their A-level results, whereas in the US, results form only a part of the complex business of proving yourself to be a well-rounded person (and having family members who attended your university of choice makes a difference). Undoubtedly this is an over-simplification but there's enough truth in it to provide food for thought. But believe me you don't have to have any background in all this to enjoy the ironic wit with which Korelitz lays out the complexities of the whole procedure. And then of course there's the rest of the extremely enjoyable plot - I haven't mentioned Portia's relationship with her infuriating lifelong feminist mother, who conceived her via a brief encounter on a train with a man whose name she forgot to ask, or John's tender upbringing of the Ugandan boy he adopted during a Peace Corps visit to Africa. In fact all the secondary characters are full of vivid and credible life, and this applies most of all to Portia, who is a totally believable portrait of an intelligent and dedicated woman who has huge lessons to learn about her own emotional life.

Jean Hanff Korelitz is married to the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who is a Professor at Princeton, and she herself worked there in the admissions department for a couple of years. I've enjoyed everything of hers I've read so far - just a couple of early novels left to catch up with. She's also a published poet and has written non-fiction books and books for children. Do give her a whirl!

Girl Reading

This is Kizette in Pink (1926), by the Polish Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempika (1898-1980), 'the first woman artist to be a glamour star', or 'the baroness with a brush'.  Kizette was her daughter, who she painted many times but with whom she had a pretty neglectful and chequered relationship. 

 

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey: 1951 Club

I can't remember when I first read The Daughter of Time, but I know that I was very young and that it was given to me by my mother, who introduced me to much wonderful golden age crime. She loved Josephine Tey (actually knew her slightly) and so, of course, do I.

So yes, this was a re-read, probably even a re-re-read, but none the worse for that. I picked it up a couple of days ago, read three-quarters of it at one sitting, and polished it off yesterday. Of course I knew the plot - who doesn't- but that in no way diminished the fascination of watching the two protagonists making their astounding discoveries. 

I can't believe you don't already know this, but the novel concerns Tey's regular detective, Inspector Alan Grant, who is confined to bed in hospital following a serious accident. Bored with all the contemporary best sellers people keep bringing him (there's a great satirical passage describing some of their contents) he welcomes a gift from his actress friend Marta of a collection of prints of famous faces from history. One of them is of a face he doesn't at first identify - a sensitive, intelligent, rather troubled face of someone who turns out to be the great monster of English history, Richard III, notoriously a wicked hunchback who killed his nephews in order to claim the throne. Grant is fascinated by the discrepancy between the face and the reputation, borrows some old school history books from a nurse, sends out for library books, gets more and more puzzled. It soon becomes clear that the whole picture of Richard that has come to be accepted has its origin in a book by Thomas More, who was only 5 when the events he is describing took place. Hearsay, then, and clearly influenced by the Tudors, who claimed the throne on Richard's death. Grant acquires the help of a young American researcher, Brent Carradine, who is able to spend his days rummaging in the British Museum, and together the two uncover a disgraceful piece of political jiggery-pokery, designed to legitimise Henry VII's decidedly dodgy right to the English throne.

There's so much to love and admire about this book. It's consistently reached the top of 'Best 100 crime novels' lists which, considering that it is bursting with serious genuine historical research, is quite an achievement. But yes it is a crime novel, with Grant applying his traditional investigating methodology to discover who was actually responsible for the deaths of the two Princes in the Tower, Edward Prince of Wales and his brother. Essentially it all comes down to what Grant says is always the primary factor in such cases - motive. Grant's reasoning and Brent's research show conclusively that Richard had no motive at all. The mother of the two boys had been shown not to be legally married to Richard's brother, the previous king, making the boys illegitimate and Richard the right person to take the throne. There's a much more plausible suspect, though, in the person of Henry VII, who had many reasons to want to dispose of anyone who might challenge his claim.

Josephine Tey - actually Elizabeth Mackintosh - had a lifetime's fascination with history. Under a different pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, she wrote several hugely successful historical dramas, including the celebrated Richard of Bordeaux. Although she wrote a number of crime novels, she never abandoned her other interest, and there's no doubt that the research undertaken here by Grant and Brent is entirely bona fide. For me she makes an absolutely unarguable case for Richard's innocence, and also provides a demonstration of a broader point, the fact that it's only too easy for false historical myths to become accepted truths. 

A Game of Hide and Seek (1951)

I hardly ever join in read-alongs these days - I used to find them fun but sometimes stressful. trying to fulfil the requirements when perhaps I'd rather be reading something else. But I do like Simon and Kaggsy's year clubs and have managed to join in each time, even if it means recycling old reviews. This time, for 1951, I provided myself with a copy of The Daughter of Time, but then I went away for a week and forgot to take it with me. I'm going home today so maybe I'll get it read by the end of the week. Meanwhile here's an old review rehashed for the occasion.

 

As soon as I first read a review of this novel  I really wanted to read it, and now I have. And it wasn't just because the leading character is called Harriet. I have read a few of Elizabeth Taylor's novels -- the usual suspects, Angel and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, and her last novel, Blaming -- and quite recently I read Nicola Beauman's biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Having read that fine book, which revealed among many other things that Taylor had a long-standing love affair while she was married, I was interested that to find that this novel is a sort of variation on that same theme. Only a sort of variation, though, as Harriet and Vesey's relationship is much more tentative and frustrating than Elizabeth and Ray Russell's seems to have been. In fact, though the workings out of the plot here are quite different, I was reminded at times of that wonderful film Brief Encounter, which had come out a few years before and is actually referred to in this novel. But the encounter described here is far from brief.

Harriet falls in love with Vesey when they are both eighteen, and a significant part of the process is indeed a game of hide and seek in which they both end up hiding from the younger children in a hayloft. But their extreme shyness and inexperience prevents anything happening, though both clearly yearn for some development which never actually takes place. But it's not just this game that gives the book its title -- the game is also a metaphor for the nature of the relationship between these two people for many years to come. Vesey disappears to Oxford -- Harriet marries kindly but unexciting Charles -- Vesey, now an unsuccessful actor, comes back into Harriet's life when her daughter Betsy is a teenager herself. Life comes to consist of snatched meetings, lies, hidden, unspoken feelings. You can probably see now why Brief Encounter sprang to mind, and indeed the film does spring to the mind of Vesey's cynical ex-actress mother Julia, whose careless, selfish upbringing of her son clearly is at the root of his problems as an adult. Because Vesey, for my money, was a bit of a mess. It was hard for me to see what Harriet saw in him, but perhaps that was the point -- her feelings were a legacy of that childhood passion, exacerbated by the passionlessness of her marriage. The progress of their affair is so unfulfilling, so largely unconsummated, that it seems only explicable on the basis of an obsession left over from her teenage years. 

Elizabeth Taylor writes beautifully. There are many passages I could quote to prove this, but perhaps you should find out for yourself. I actually found the most enjoyable part of the novel to be the account of the early years -- the teenage angst, the paralysing shyness, the inability to act on one's feelings -- all very well done and entirely recognisable. But Taylor brilliantly conveys subtle shades of feeling all the way through -- I think she is justly being recognised now as a really important novelist.

From London Far by Michael Innes (Audible)

I've always had a soft spot for the rather (sometimes very) quirky crime novels of Michael Innes - he wrote nearly fifty of them between 1936 and 1986. I have no idea how many I've read - there are a whole lot featuring his detective John, later Sir John, Appleby, a suave and well educated sort of chap, and mostly very enjoyable they are. But then there are the stand-alones, and these tend to be even more 'exuberantly fanciful', as a critic called them, as well as even more stuffed with learned literary allusions. I can well imagine that this kind of thing is not up everybody's street, but it's definitely up mine. And, though I haven't read all the ones in this group, I suspect that From London Far goes about as far down that road as any.

 Published in 1946, the novel takes it's title from a line in a poem by Samuel Johnson, called 'London: A Poem'. The protagonist of the novel, Robert Meredith, is a fifty-year-old academic and expert on classical Roman literature. Walking in London one day, musing on Johnson's poem, he wanders into a tobacconist, and, while his order is being wrapped, murmurs the poem's title to himself. To his astonishment, the shopkeeper responds 'and Chicago's gone'. Clearly a case of mishearing - the man thought he'd said 'London's going', the first half of a secret password exchange. The result of this is that the mild, scholarly Meredith finds himself in a hidden basement room in which priceless stolen works of art are stored before being transported to billionaire collectors of illicit treasures. Before much time has passed, Meredith has found himself assuming the identity of a powerful international criminal named Vogelsang, shooting the real Vogelsang when he inconveniently appears, rescuing Jean Halliwell, an attractive and intelligent young lady, and making a daring escape in which the two of them are lucky to escape with their lives. And that's just the first chapter. 

Now the action moves to Scotland, where the centre of this massive and illicit art theft organisation is located, using an enterprise of harvesting guano as a front. Here, on the remote island of Moila, Meredith and Jean find themselves staying in an ancient castle inhabited by two almost equally ancient ladies, one of whom is obsessed with plumbing and drainage (which she has managed to install thanks to the payments from the supposed guano trade) and her sister, who more or less lives in the fourteenth century. Huge metal contraptions called Flying Foxes pass overhead at all hours of the day, transporting the guano in one direction and the works of art in the other. Eventually Jean and Meredith get a lift in a seaplane to an Irish island where is located the astonishing mansion of the prime collector of the stolen artworks. Here, in a house topped with an enormous double sided swimming pool, in which bathers swim surrounded by a false wall behind which whizz sharks and giant octopuses, and in which the occupants are transported around on huge conveyor belts, they finally find the resting place of hundreds of precious paintings and sculptures. But will they ever get themselves and the stolen artefacts out?

This is all, on one level, patently absurd. There's a suggestion that Innes may have been parodying John Buchan, in whose popular thrillers a fairly ordinary sort of chap is catapulted into terrifying adventures with a series of wicked villains. I think this is probably true - while Buchan's heroes are generally rather fit and well-rounded, with some skills in handling guns and so on, Meredith is about the unlikeliest of action heroes you could hope to imagine. But indeed this is one of the great joys of this novel - despite being thrown so violently out of his fifty-year comfort zone, he shows remarkable ingenuity and courage, and acquits himself wonderfully well.

There's a tremendous array of secondary characters, all decidedly comic but all with some touchingly sweet quirks of their own, making them both likeable and believable. I was particularly taken with the billionaire collector - a man with unlimited financial resources, zero morals, and absolutely no education or cultural background, who has by some extraordinary fluke developed a genuine understanding of, and feeling for, great visual art. 

There's more, so much more. The novel must be taken with a huge pinch of salt, but it's full of action, energy, exuberance, and I loved every minute. I listened to it on Audible, very well narrated by Jonathan Keeble, who dealt superbly with a very wide range of accents and voices. Great stuff - I've moved straight on to another Innes, The Journeying Boy (a  re-read, though so long since the first time I've forgotten most of it). Very grateful for the Audible credits in exchange for an honest review.

 

 

 

 

Woman Reading Secretly

This is 'Secretly', painted in 1878 by Eva Gonzales (1849-1883), a French Impressionist of Spanish descent. She was a pupil of Manet, and enjoyed some success before her death in childbirth at the age of 34. What a great image this is!

Thanks to my one-time colleague and present Shiny reviewer Rob Spence for sending me this today via twitter!