Harriet Devine's Blog

Women Reading

This is Three Women in Church by the German Realist painter Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900). He was best known for his portrayals of peasant life.

Hospital reading

Yes the reason for an even longer silence than usual is that I had an accident nearly 2 weeks ago and ended up in hospital with a suspected fractured pelvis - luckily after my being confined to bed for days they decided it was not a fracture just a badly bruised bone. So I am home now and hobbling about with a stick. Also suffering from a UTI which has not responded to antibiotics. So I'm not feeling all that cheerful. Reading has been a great solace and I've got through quite a few books over the past couple of weeks.

I've discovered Barbara Kingsolver! If you have not done so I can't recommend her enough. The first one I read was Flight Behaviour, the absorbing story of Dellarobia, a young married woman, clever but uneducated due to an unexpected pregnancy. She and her farming in-laws live in a remote mountain area and life is hard. But one day she makes an amazing discovery. Climbing up to the top of the mountain for an illicit tryst which never happens, she encounters a whole colony of gloriously beautiful Monarch butterflies, which have migrated here owing to climate change. Charismatic entomologist Ovid Byron turns up with a small team to study the butterflies and Dellarobia's life is completely transformed. Magic.

I read that on Kindle for my iPad, on which I also read a book for an upcoming book group. This was The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton. I know everyone was reading this years ago and there's also been a TV adaptation but it had passed me by. I'm not sure what I thought it was going to be about but it took me by surprise. Set in Amsterdam in the late 1600s this is the story of newly married Nella Oortman, whose attractive much older husband is mystifyingly not interested in her sexually. Why not? because he's gay. It all became rather violently visceral and while I much admired the quality of historical research that had gone into it, I can't say I actually enjoyed it very much. Sorry about that as I had read and enjoyed Jessie Burton's The Muse a few years ago.

I was missing physical books so was pleased when a friend brought me a couple. One of them was an early Barbara Vine, The House of Stairs. I was fairly convinced that I had read this before but it didn't come back to me as I was reading it. I was completely blown away by the skill with which the novel was constructed. It's told in the first person by a woman novelist called Elizabeth, and swings seamlessly between past and present. We know from early on that there's been a murder, for which Elizabeth's erstwhile lover Bell has spent many years in prison, but the why and the how are concealed from the reader until almost the end. Mystery piles on mystery here and much of the fascination of the plot revolves around Elizabeth's total misinterpretation of the facts. Wonderful stuff.

My friend's second offering was something I didn't think I would enjoy particularly - Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani. A romantic novel? No thanks. But in desperation I started it anyway and to my surprise got totally caught up in it. Big Stone Gap is a remote village in Virginia, where most people marry and start families straight out of high school. The exception is Italian American Ave Maria Mulligan. The town pharmacist, she is thirty-five years old and a self-proclaimed spinster. She's never left the village and has no intention of doing so, but a long concealed family secret reveals a whole unexpected aspect to her life and soon she is planning a trip to Italy. In the meantime however she receives two proposals, pretty much out of the blue, both of which she turns down. But Ave Maria knows herself less well than she thought and by the end of the novel she is happier than she ever dreamed she could be. Trigiani has written many other Big Stone Gap novels but I'm not seeking them out, though happy to have read this one.

I have another Kindle book on the go at the moment - Orley Farm by Trollope. I saw this recommended on somebody's blog recently and got myself a copy because I'm a huge fan of Trollope and having read all the Barchester and Palliser novels am always delighted to find a standalone  I haven't yet read. It's a bit of a doorstopper and I'm only a fairly short way in to what promises to be an exciting and intriguing story of legal shennanigans. It all centres round beautiful Lady Mason, who is suspected of having forged a codicil to her late husband's will so that their son has inherited the property, much to the fury of her much older stepson who expected to be the sole heir. Is Lady Mason guilty? I haven't found out yet and don't expect to do so for some time, but there's plenty of fun and romance to be enjoyed along the way. However I've put it aside for the time being because I'm finishing another physical book which I have been loving to bits.

Pigs in Heaven is my second Barbara Kingsolver. I'd ordered myself a copy some months ago after reading a review by Simon which made me think it would be right up my street. And oh yes indeed it is. I'm still a few pages off finishing it but have been enjoying every minute. This is a drama of adoption and identity. Four years ago a young woman named Taylor has found an abandoned two-year-old girl in her car in a parking lot. She takes the child into her care and names her Turtle because of her habit of clinging onto her mother's hand. Turtle can't say much about her early years but there has obviously been abuse and trauma. In addition she is obviously of Indian descent, and here's where the trouble begins. Mother and child are invited to appear on Oprah, where they are spotted by a young Cherokee lawyer, who believes the little girl should be returned to her tribe for a proper understanding of her culture and heritage. Terrified of losing her beloved daughter, Taylor goes on the run and has a very difficult time surviving. Meanwhile her own mother Alice makes contact with the Cherokee Nation and intense discussions get underway to establish how to fulfil the child's cultural needs with her powerful dependence on her adopted mother. Heart wrenching stuff, highly readable.

Finally I mustn't forget to mention Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novel Big Sky, which I have just finished reviewing for Shiny New Books. It's nine years since the last of the Brodie novels was published and it's great to renew acquaintance with the rather melancholy retired policeman turned private eye. Jackson is older (we don't know exactly how old) and has joint custody of Nathan, his teenage son with his on-off girlfriend Julia. His life has become rather routine and not very exciting, but soon he has got himself involved with some very dodgy dealings which lead to the discovery of a current human trafficking ring which proves to have connections with a decades old case of historical paedophile abuse. The story is a good one but the great joy is Atkinson's wry wit and the excellent characters who abound along the way.

And if all that wasn't enough, I've recently joined Netflix and have had some happy hours though some rather less than highbrow. So life goes on.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

I have known about this novel for a very long time - I think I may have heard of it first through Simon, who wrote about it in his D.Phil and has mentioned it many times on his blog. But somehow I never got around to reading it. So what better novel to read for Helen's Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week? And yes, I can see why it is so highly regarded, though it surprised me very much because I was anticipating one kind of novel - lady becomes a witch - and though this does happen, it happens very late on in what until then has been the story of an ordinary single woman who has been forced the make her home with her family. And it happens in a most unusual way, not at how I'd imagined.

Laura Willowes is twenty-eight when her father dies. She has no choice but to accept the offer of a roof over her head from her brother and sister-in-law, who, though not exactly rich, live in considerable comfort. Laura is 'absorbed into the family like a piece of family property forgotten in the will'.  She is given the use of the second best spare room, and treated with kindness, though she never feels she belongs. The family is an unremarkable one:

Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behaviour imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors. Observing those canons no member of the Willowes family had risen to much eminence.

In this dull household Laura becomes indispensable, though her duties are few. She is much loved by the children, who call her Aunt Lolly. The years go by and she fades into middle age, vaguely dissatisfied but lacking any direction for change. Her only small rebellion is her habit of filling her small room with beautiful hothouse flowers, something regarded with amused acceptance by her family. Laura is filled with cravings, though for what she can't say:

Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at in the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness - these were the things that called her away from the comfortable fireside.

One day, in a flower shop, she is overwhelmed by the beauty of some red chrysanthemums, and an idea comes into her head. What she really craves for is to be on her own in the countryside - to be 'standing alone in a darkening orchard'. As she reflects to herself, 'It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of one's possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies'. And so it is that, much to the shock and disapproval of her relatives, she ends up in a small village called Great Mop. Her brother has invested her small capital badly, so she can't afford to buy a cottage, but she finds a congenial landlady who rents her a pleasant room in her comfortable house. And so begins her new life, with solitary walk in the fields and woods, and a much greater sense of contentment than she ever had in London. 

She was changed and she knew it. She was humbler and more simple. She ceased to triumph over her tyrants, and rallied herself no longer with the consciousness that she had outraged them by coming to live at Great Mop. The amusement she had drawn from their disapproval was a slavish remnant, a derisive dance on the north bank of the Ohio. There was no question of forgiving them, She had not, in any case a forgiving nature; and the injury they had done her was not done by them. If she were to start forgiving she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great aunt Salome and her prayer book, the Bank of England, Prostitution, the architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilisation.

And then one night she finds herself at an event which she soon realises is a witches' sabbath. Practically all the women from the village are there and Laura finds herself caught up in the general rejoicing and frenzied dancing. And it's there that she encounters the only male present, who she soon recognises as Satan. But this is not Satan as we have been taught to imagine him - she calls him a 'loving huntsman' who, as Sarah Waters puts it in her excellent introduction to the Virago edition, 'pays [women] the compliment of pursuing them and then, having bagged them, performs the even more valuable service of leaving them alone'. Towards the end of the novel Laura has a long conversation with Satan, in a field by a wood, and then, abruptly, he gets up and leaves. The sun is going down and Laura realises it is too late to get home - she will sleep out for the first time in her life, under the stars. She's happy at the disappearing day and the parting of her new friend, 'pleased to be left by herself, left to enter this new independence acknowledged by their departure'.

This is a truly wonderful book and Warner is an exceptional writer. The novel, her first, was a critical success, though Warner was saddened that people viewed it as simply charming whimsy:

they told me that it was charming, that it was distinguished, and my mother said it was almost as good as Galsworthy. And my heart sank lower and lower; I felt as though I had tried to make a sword, only to be told what a pretty pattern there was on the blade.

For more reviews and links, head over the A Gallimaufry where new reviews will be popping up all week.