Harriet Devine's Blog

Girl Reading

Here's one by the Hungarian painter Robert Berény - or Berény Robert, as his name would have been in his native country (1887-1953). It reminds me so much of what I was like as a teenager - I basically spent my life just lying on the sofa with a book. 

An interesting bit of trivia from Wikipedia:

A Berény painting titled Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, whose whereabouts had been unknown since 1928, was re-discovered by chance in 2009 by art historian Gergely Barki upon watching the 1999 American film Stuart Little with his daughter, where the piece was used as a prop. An assistant set designer had bought the painting cheaply from a California antique store for use in the film, and had kept it in her home after production ended. The painting was sold at auction in Budapest on 13 December 2014 for €229,500.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns (Shiny)

I've just reviewed this excellent novel on Shiny New Books. It's actually the second Comyns novel I've read and reviewed in the past few months - see my review of Mr Fox back in November here.

I've loved Barbara Comyns since I was first introduced to her wonderfully quirky and entertaining novels about ten years ago, so this was a re-read, but none the worse for that. Published in 1954 but set 'about 70 years ago' in a small Cotswold village by a river, it has one of literature's most memorable opening lines - 'The ducks swam through the drawing room windows' - and tells the story of a family who live under the thumb of the terrifying and malicious Grandmother Willoweed: will they ever escape her iron grip?

But there's so much more - a tremendous flood that swamps the village and sends many dead animals swirling down the river - a huge thunderstorm, sending the family to hide under the dining-room table - and a terrifying outbreak of madness and death in the village, culminating in the butcher's public suicide with one of his own knives.

Here's what I said in the final paragraph of the review:

it’s partly her ability to mix the everyday with the gothic and grotesque that makes her novels stand out, but most of all it’s her unique style and perspective. Her narrators, whether first or third person, observe and describe the world around them with a curiously objective naivety, even when what they are seeing is potentially upsetting or frightening. If you’ve read her before, you’ll know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a treat.

Check out my full review here.

Sacred Country by Rose Tremain

This beautiful, engrossing novel begins on 15 February 1952. A Suffolk farming family stands in a muddy field, attempting a two-minutes silence to mark the death of King George VI. Attempting, because the minute hand has fallen off Sonny Ward's watch, his wife Estelle can't help whispering her thoughts aloud, and the little children start bickering. Six-year-old Mary wonders if the time will ever pass:  

and then the idea of them waiting there in the field, the snow little by little settling on them and whitening them over gave Mary a strange feeling of exultation, as if something were about to happen to her that had never happened to anybody in the whole history of Suffolk or the world....'I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy'. 

Sacred Country was published in 1993, early days for such an issue to be central to a novel. Central because Mary's journey, covering twenty-five years in all, is an important part of the story. But it's not the whole story. There are a number of other characters with stories of their own. In Mary's family there's Estelle, her beautiful, sad mother, who never quite knows what she's supposed to be doing in the world and who feels safer on the several occasions when she ends up in the local mental asylum; Sonny, her violent, alcoholic father, missing an ear after a shooting accident, whose enthusiasm for farming, never great, diminishes over time; and Tim, her delicate little brother, who will defeat his father's hope that he will man-up and start running the farm, instead choosing to train for the priesthood. And there's Mary's grandfather, Estelle's father, Cord, who lives in a place called Gresham Tears, and is the only person who really accepts Mary/Martin, even if he doesn't fully understand her/his decision.

Then there are the neighbours: 60-year-old Edward Harker, who makes much sought after cricket bats in his basement, believes in reincarnation, and lusts after his cleaning lady Irene, who visits the house with her exquisite little illegitimate daughter Pearl; and the Loomis family - Pete, who lives in a converted trolley bus behind his brother's butcher's shop and once spent some time in the American Deep South, and his nephew Walter, 16 when the novel begins, dreamy and slow at school, who suddenly realises 'that his singing voice was rather fine - so peculiarly fine he felt that it couldn't possibly belong to him'.

When I was reviewing Rose Tremain's Islands of Mercy for Shiny New Books last year, I read an interview with the author in which she said that the book was about 'the quest to find a meaning in life'. I think this is a recurring theme for Tremain, and it could just as well be applied to Sacred Country. Most of the people in the novel are at the start rather lost souls, not knowing what to do with their lives, and the story takes the reader through each of their journeys, with all their false directions and, in many cases, their final and satisfying resolutions. Mary's journey, of course ends as Martin: it's a hard and physically painful process, and one in which it's hard to keep from getting depressed and disheartened, but the outcome, though it brings one major and rather tragic event in the process, ends with a quiet and pleasing development. So too does Walter's, and even Estelle's looks set to do so.

I was already a huge fan of Tremain, and this book only confirmed my admiration of her writing and her seemingly endless invention. This is a book about ordinary people, living seemingly ordinary lives - people you'd pass by in the street without a second glance - who all prove to have fascinating, often strange, inner lives.

Woman Not Reading

That should really be Woman with a Book but Not Reading It. I do love a picture that tells a story, and this one certainly does, to me at least. She's sitting there in her pretty dress, next to her rather older husband, who's engrossed the newspaper. She's got a book, but it's just a blind - all she really wants to do is think about her lover. You can tell she has fun with him by the naughty look in her eye. Or not. What do you think?

It's by the French painter Félix Armand Heullant (1834-1909.

O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

Up there, in the pure, clean moorland air, the pattern of life showed more clearly, on a larger scale. I lifted my eyes to the hills; and I perceived how minute, how unimportant, a portion of that pattern we made, all of us; and we no longer seemed to matter greatly.

I feel very fortunate that there are publishers who send me books on request, and even more so if they send them without being asked. Top of that list must be the British Library, who have kept me happily supplied with their Crime Classics series since it began, and more recently with the wonderful Women Writers books, which have given me more pleasure than I can say. Despite the fact that I live in rural France, their books have turned up regularly, with no problems at all. No problems, that is, until last October, when a copy of this one failed to arrive. Despite a flurry of emails with the BL and with the warehouse where the books are sent from, neither the first copy they sent nor the second one they sent as a replacement has ever reached me. Who knows where they may be now - in a ditch somewhere? On the bookshelves of an anglophone courier? A great mystery. 

Of course I had to read it anyway so I bought a copy - why not, after all! It's time I put some money in the coffers of the BL. Was it worth waiting for? Oh yes. This is a truly magical book. Though written in the 1940s, it takes place some time at the beginning of the twentieth century. The story is told by Ryan Ashley, now an ageing woman, who is looking back to her own childhood. She is seven when the story begins, living in the Manse of her father, a strict non-conformist Minister. She has an older sister, the beautiful Sylvia, and a toddler brother Clem, who suffers from an unspecified disability. Then there's her beautiful, aristocratic mother, who sacrificed her comfortable life for the love of a man who hasn't fulfilled her expectations. Her restless unhappiness hangs over the house like a pall, and the children can feel it even while they don't comprehend it. Ruan is a tomboy, and not in the least jealous of her sister's beauty, though she does wonder if her own rather ordinary appearance might be the reason her mother doesn't seem to love her so much.

I've seen this described as a coming of age story, and I suppose it is in one sense, even though it covers only about six years of Ruan's life, making her thirteen when the novel ends. However, she's amazingly mature even as a young child, and the many and varied experiences she goes through during those six years simply develop her further and better. Heartbreaking things happen to her - little Clem dies, her mother leaves and then dies, her father goes off to Africa as a missionary and dies there. But the net result of all this is that she and Sylvia end up living with their mother's brother, Uncle Alaric, in his large and beautiful country house. He is a wise, kind and clever man who, seeing how unhappy Ruan is at the school she's been sent to, undertakes to educate her himself at home. As this consists mainly of letting her loose in his huge library, she devours everything she can lay her hands on, perhaps the best possible education she could have had.

Then there's another side to Ruan's life, something that takes her through the worst ups and downs she has to suffer. She's befriended by Rosie Day, a young woman who lives with her newly rich father in a soulless modern house on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. Also in the house lives a boy called David, who was adopted by Rosie's parents when he was orphaned. David is six years older than Ruan, but they quickly become inseparable. She spends long holidays there, and the two of them ride or walk for endlessly enjoyable days on the moors, talking about everything under the sun or just lying side by side on the heather breathing in the freedom and peace. The years pass, and David is no longer so readily available - school and a long year abroad take him away, and Ruan sometimes wonders if she will ever see him again. But - yes, sorry, spoiler - she does, and we are left with the hope that he will always be a part of her life.

So - this is a love story. But should we be disturbed by the fact that at the end Ruan is thirteen and David is nineteen? I wasn't, at all, and I think it would be a mistake to be troubled by it. This is not a sexual relationship - there's absolutely no suggestion of that. It's a very deep and loving friendship, a meeting of minds, and there's no earthly reason why that should not happen at any age, or why it should not endure or even develop over time. 

Dorothy Evelyn Smith was fifty when she wrote this, her first ever novel. How autobiographical it is nobody seems to know - certainly she was the daughter of a non-conformist minister and loved the Yorkshire moors. Her love of that gloriously wide open countryside is woven through the whole novel - I'll leave you with the very end, where Ruan, full of happiness, runs up to the moor alone.

It was calm that evening; calm and clear and very beautiful. The moor was settling down for her winter sleep. The heather had faded and the gold was dimmed, but the bracken was high and tawny and the great hills held the sun in their arms. Far down the valley I could hear the blacksmith's hammer. Cows were moving slowly homeward, lowing contentedly. The clock on Staving Church struck six.
I stood very still. So still that I could feel the heart of the moor beating beneath my feet: everlastingly patient with my foolishness: eternally kind...

 

 

Two Girls with Books

These little girls are Laurense and Anna Alma-Tadema, painted in 1873 by their father, the Dutch/British artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912). The title of the painting is 'This is our corner'. Nice.

Fun fact from Wikipedia: Alma-Tadema was a perfectionist. He worked assiduously to make the most of his paintings, often repeatedly reworking parts of paintings before he found them satisfactory to his own high standards. One humorous story relates that one of his paintings was rejected and instead of keeping it, he gave the canvas to a maid who used it as her table cover. He was sensitive to every detail and architectural line of his paintings, as well as the settings he was depicting. For many of the objects in his paintings, he would depict what was in front of him, using fresh flowers imported from across the continent and even from Africa, rushing to finish the paintings before the flowers died. It was this commitment to veracity that earned him recognition but also caused many of his adversaries to take up arms against his almost encyclopaedic works.

Rhododendron Pie by Margery Sharp on Shiny

It's taken me far too long to start reading Margery Sharp. But I finally got round to it last month, owing to the wonderful new editions just published by Dean Street Press. I actually got all five of them but I decided to start with her first novel, published in 1930 when she was 25. It's a totally charming sort of coming-of-age story - we first meet Ann Lavantie when she's 10, but in the main part of the book she's a young adult, trying to find her place in the world. This is not easy, owing to the nature of her upbringing. Her parents and older siblings pride themselves on their intelligence, culture and sophistication, and look down on their rural neighbours. The nearby Gayford family, who she has been brought up to despise ('They were rough. They had practically no brain. They were frequently dirty’) invite her round and she is surprised to find she rather likes their warmth and easy-going lifestyle, but it will take a while before she learns to see though her family's pretentious friends and find true love.

I loved this book. You can read my full review on Shiny here.

I've reviewed another of Sharp's novels on there - link coming soon.