Harriet Devine's Blog

Missing You by Harlan Coben

Harlen Coban is not a writer I would necessarily make a beeline for, and I would almost certainly not have read this if I hadn't been offered a review copy by, of all things, Sainsbury's e-books. Yes, not content with selling paperbacks, the supermarkets are now breaking into the e-book market. And -- which I suppose is their USP -- they are selling many of them at very low prices.  Now I'm not a great lover of ebooks, and I haven't got a Kindle, but I do sometimes read them on my iPad or my phone, and that's how I read this one. Having a Kindle wouldn't be any good anyway, as you can't use it for these -- I downloaded a Sainsbury's e-reader onto my iPhone (you can get them on Android too, I believe), and passed some surprisingly happy hours.

But what about the book, I hear you say. It was good. I picked it because I had a vague memory of reading and enjoying one of Coban's books in the distant pre-blogging past -- no idea which one -- and was quite taken with the blurb: 

It's a profile, like all the others on the online dating site. But as NYPD Detective Kat Donovan focuses on the accompanying picture, she feels her whole world explode, as emotions she's ignored for decades come crashing down on her. Staring back at her is her ex-fiancé Jeff, the man who shattered her heart 18 years ago. Kat feels a spark, wondering if this might be the moment when past tragedies recede and a new world opens up to her. But when she reaches out to the man in the profile, her reawakened hope quickly darkens into suspicion and then terror as an unspeakable conspiracy comes to light, in which monsters prey upon the most vulnerable. As Kat's hope for a second chance with Jeff grows more and more elusive, she is consumed by an investigation that challenges her feelings about everyone she ever loved - her former fiance  her mother, and even her father, whose cruel murder so long ago has never been fully explained. With lives on the line, including her own, Kat must venture deeper into the darkness than she ever has before, and discover if she has the strength to survive what she finds there.

Clearly, online dating sites provide wonderful food for the crime novelist -- by chance, they feature very prominently in the book I reviewed here a few days ago, SJ Watson's Second Life. Like all online social media, they offer the possibility of assuming a false identity, and have the added bonus of appealing to the lonely and desperate, who are only too ready to be duped. Kat Donovan is not desperate, or even all that lonely, but she is alone and wouldn't mind a relationship. Her problem seems to be that she has never managed to forget Jeff, even after eighteen years. She thinks, briefly, that she's actually found him again, but his online responses don't measure up, and she soon realises that something very dodgy is going on. Meanwhile she has been contacted by a teenage boy who is desperately worried because he hasn't heard from his mother for some days. All he knows is that she met a man online and has gone off somewhere to spend some time with him. Alarm bells all round, then, especially when the site in question turns out to be the very same one where the possibly fake Jeff was hanging out. Luckily this lad is a skilled computer hacker, and he and Kat start getting very worried indeed by what he discovers, though they don't know the full magnitude of what is going on. We, the readers, do know it, however, and very horrid and scary it is. I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say everything turns out OK in the end for most people, though not for the bad guys -- well, this is a crime novel, so that's what you'd expect.

So this is good, entertaining, sort of middle of the road crime. Harlan Coban doesn't need any help from me as he's already a 6-year New York Times bestseller. But even though I won't be immediately seeking out any more of his books, I'd certainly pick one up if it came my way and I was in the mood. And if you like the sound of it, you can buy it at Sainsbury's ebooks for only £2.99. If you don't, why not check out the site anyway -- there are some great titles on there for as little as £1.99. And apparently you can also use your Nectar points if you have them.  

Google Fight

I just discovered Google Fight, on which you could waste a lot of time. I suppose it could be a serious research tool but I suspect most people just play on it. Basically I guess it works out how many searches per word and compares them. You can enter your own terms or read some popular ones -- I tried God vs Satan (God wins by a large margin) and happiness vs misery -- misery won comfortably. Perhaps one day I'll find a bona fide use for it, as did the person who wrote this.

The Necessary Aptitude

If you live in the UK, you'd have to have been hiding under a stone all your life not to have heard of Pam Ayres. If you don't -- well,  she presents radio and TV programmes, appears on quiz shows and even in a sitcom, but above all she is a poet of a most original kind --  simple in form, very funny, and very perceptive, her poems are hugely loved by millions of people and she was awarded an MBE a few years ago. Mostly she performs them herself, in her distinctive Oxfordshire accent, and you can see her doing that on youtube if you want to -- here's one called They Should Have Asked My Husband, for example. 

You might, I suppose, find her silly or irritating, but I've always loved her, which is why I agreed to review a copy of her "eagerly awaited" memoir (not eagerly awaited by me, as I didn't know anything about it, but there you are). It's not the sort of book I usually read -- as you probably know, my present preference is for modern classics of the Virago/Persephone/old Penguin school with the occasional foray into crime -- reading it, rather than committing it. Anyway, be that as it may, the book arrived a week or so ago and I have just finished it, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

I knew very little about Pam's life beyond the fact that she came from somewhere in Oxfordshire and had won a TV contest called Opportunity Knocks in the 1970s. That victory, which  launched her on the spectacularly successful career she has pursued ever since, is more or less where this book ends. So, as she was born in 1947, here we have the first twenty five or so years of her life. 

Pam grew up in Stanford in the Vale, a pretty village in the Vale of the White Horse. While not destitute, her parents lived dangerously close to the poverty line, and bringing up their six children, of whom Pam was the youngest, was a constant struggle. Their home was a council house, unattractively situated on the edge of the village. I was actually astonished to read that not only did it not have a bathroom but that the lavatory consisted of a bucket with a seat over it, poorly concealed behind a door in the kitchen, which had to be emptied periodlically into a hole dug at the end of the garden. In my middle-class ignorance, I thought that kind of thing had disappeared before the second world war. But despite this and other privations (not, of course, perceived as such as they just seemed normal), the young  Ayres led a generally peaceful existence, cared for by  an obviously loving and intelligent mother, even though the greatest treats available were the occasional poached pheasant or a wobbly bicycle ride around the local countryside. 

That Pam turned out as she did is something of a miracle, really, given the disadvantages of her childhood and her schooling. Having done well at primary school, she somehow failed the eleven-plus exam and thus ended up not at the grammar school, but at the secondary modern. This distinction was massively important in the 1950s -- while a grammar-school child might well go on to university or at least to a good job, anyone attending a secondary modern would probably leave school with no qualifications and be doomed to a live of drudgery. Pam, who is clearly extraordinarily bright, slid even further down the scale at first, ending up in the C (lowest) stream, and though she soon got herself back up to the A stream, she left school with little to look forward to in the way of a working life. Several more or less dead-end jobs followed, in which Pam did not exactly excel. In fact she frequently encountered rejections on the grounds of lacking 'the necessary aptitude'. Even when she managed, with the help of a boyfriend, to qualify as a draughtswoman for the RAF, she found the work a huge struggle as she really had never got the hang of it. This pattern could have continued for the rest of her life, but Pam loved both writing and performing, and slowly this became increasingly important in her life, starting in small folk clubs and local venues and ending, of course, with the appearance on Opportunity Knocks, since when she has taken off like a rocket. 

All this is extraordinarily encouraging and inspiring, and makes the most enjoyable reading, narrated as it is with great honesty, charm and quiet wit. You'd have to be a terrific curmudgeon not to warm to Pam and to rejoice in her success, her apparently happy marriage, and her continued optmism and enthusiasm. She really appreciates what life has brought her, and good luck to her, I say. 

Hooray for Slightly Foxed

I have long been an admirer of Slightly Foxed, the most readable and intelligent literary magazine you could ever hope to find. And now I am very happy to say that they are offering a new service, called A Taste of Slightly Foxed which basically does what it says -- gives you a piece from the magazine to read at your leisure. What's more they have been kind enough to send me a link and here is the most recent one, which is about Iris Murdoch. Now my last attempt at Iris Murdoch was a dismal failure -- I tried to read The Unicorn and gave up halfway through. But now, having read this excellent essay, I am determined to have another go and The Sea The Sea is the one I'm going to attempt. So watch this space. Meanwhile here's the Taste.

This month’s taste of Slightly Foxed is A.F. Harrold on the novels of Iris Murdoch, chosen to celebrate the 92nd anniversary of Iris’s birth. Here’s to you, Iris, and happy reading to you all. 

Some years ago a couple of friends were running a speed-dating event at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature and, being short of male participants and knowing I was performing at the festival that weekend, they asked if I could help out. And so it was that I found myself meeting twenty women, sequentially, for very short periods of time, wearing nothing (as it were) but a name tag. It was, naturally, almost as bad as it sounds.

Because it was a literature festival, however, our name tags didn’t sport our own names. Instead they carried the title of a favourite book or author or character, and that evening I wore ‘Iris Murdoch’ on my lapel – the consequence of which was that every time I changed tables I was greeted by one of two opening gambits. On the one hand, the words ‘The Sea, The Sea’ might be said (an acknowledgement of her Booker-winning novel of 1978), usually followed by the phrase, ‘I’ve not read it’; or, on the other, I would be encouraged to agree that Jim Broadbent is a really superb actor, especially (and relevantly) in the film Iris. It’s not wholly unusual for an author to be remembered for such things but it seems a bit of a shame, as does a third response, voiced by many of my speed-daters: ‘I’ve always found her rather impenetrable.’

Perhaps Iris Murdoch is often seen as off-putting because she began her career as a philosopher (as a student she arrived at Cambridge just after Wittgenstein had left but fell under his spell nevertheless – the first line of her novel Nuns and Soldiers is simply his name, spoken by a dying man) and she both lectured in and published books on the subject (hers was the first English monograph about Sartre, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist). Her books, even the thinnest of them, inhabit a world alive with philosophical thinking – her characters are people in search of meaning and understanding, on the deepest levels. In short, they worry a lot.

But what sometimes isn’t mentioned is that all her books are rollicking love stories. Her characters fall in and out of love violently, passionately, desperately and despairingly, often with the wrong people, often when they’re already involved elsewhere, often inopportunely. If they wore bodices they would be ripped. And it’s these two poles that make her books entirely their own creatures – stories of intellectuals having affairs with one another and worrying about the nature of The Good. And they’re funny, too. And heartbreaking. They’re like grandiose Shakespearean tragedies and comedies with added vigour and philosophy. Take the plot of The Sea, The Sea. It’s told in the first person by a retired theatre director, Charles Arrowby, who moves to a remote cottage on an unnamed stretch of coast. He’s busy living a life of solitude and simplicity – a break from his London life, an escape from his friends – when he meets a woman in the local small town. She turns out to have been the love of his life, whom he last saw forty years ago. They have both grown old, but in his deluded loins the fires are relit. She is married; he stalks her, abducts her. All sorts of complicated, embarrassing and frankly frightening (and occasionally supernatural) things happen and eventually she is lost to him again.

So much for the plot. We only have the report by Arrowby himself however, and as a storyteller he is astonishingly self-centred, self-important and clearly somewhat deluded. One wonders exactly how far the unreliability of his unreliable narration extends. What would this story of obsessive, destructive, unrequited love of one pensioner for another look like from the outside? 

The Black Prince, an earlier first-person novel, actually has four additional postscripts written by characters other than the narrator – each of whom shares their view of the narrator, each of whom puts themselves at the centre, as the real undeclared love interest of the story. Maybe that’s an accurate and natural way of seeing things, to assume such a central importance (it’s certainly very funny to read), but in The Sea, The Sea, Arrowby goes wonderfully above and beyond, entirely unable to imagine any other point of view.

This is where the sumptuous pleasure of Iris Murdoch’s prose comes into its own. It’s the sort of prose that delights in its own fecundity, that believes in richness rather than sparseness, that was learned from Proust rather than Hemingway. She piles detail upon detail, without ever losing, for one second, her grip on the story. Granted, pages may go by as she details a dinner party and the involved irrelevant thoughts of the diners, but it all ties in (sometimes only on a second reading, but these books are jigsaws without any missing pieces). 

Her writing is sometimes criticized for its superfluity of adjectives, an over-richness on the lectorial palate. Indeed, when the paperback rights reverted from Penguin to Random House at the turn of the century, and the novels were reissued with introductions, Candia McWilliammentioned this while discussing The Black Prince: ‘As quite a young child . . . I heard an adult say that she wished “Iris Murdoch would not write her adjectives in threes”. So I watched for this habit . . . and it is true, she favours a triplet. Occasionally there are bravura groups of four or five adjectives . . . “She was looking at me in the cool north indigo duskiness of her room with such a humble pleading diffident rueful tender look on her face”.’ She goes on to suggest that these idiosyncrasies aren’t there to impress, but rather to soothe the reader – as if to suggest her art has the truthfulness and virtue of not being ‘over-mediated’.

Another common feature of Iris’s writing that might annoy is the habit of her characters to eat. Of course, characters in other writers’ books also eat, but not often in such combinations and detail. This reaches, perhaps, its apogee in the The Sea, The Sea, in Charles Arrowby’s meticulous and didactic diary entries:

For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil. (Really good olive oil is essential, the kind with taste, I have brought a supply from London.) . . . Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses. Our cheeses are the best in the world. With this feast I drank most of a bottle of Muscadet out of my modest ‘cellar’. I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading.

This passage ends: ‘How fortunate we are to be food consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.’ You get the sense that Iris herself is speaking in this last pair of sentences, and who am I to argue?

Other objections? It is said that her characters live their lives in closed circles outside the real world. No one ever seems to own a television, go to the cinema or read a paper – in fact news events never seem to intrude, there is no topicality; if they have jobs then they’re usually civil servants who never appear to go to the office. There is a lot of truth in these comments (a lot of untruth too, of course). Her characters aren’t always connected to the real world, aren’t always anchored in a recognizable time (although they’re ‘contemporary’, precise years are generally unpindownable), but they’re Shakespearean in that way. The real world, the one outside the closed walls of these circles, or these strange closed-away communities (in The Sea, The Sea it’s an isolated cottage outside an unnamed village, in The Bell it’s actually a nunnery), has nothing to do with the story and so is unnecessary. This is what love does – it drives away all other concerns. Her novels often dwell in that middle section of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where all is magic and bewildering and love.

But when they do touch the earth, there’s one character that recurs time and again, and that is the city of London. Murdoch really is a London novelist. Her first novel, Under the Net, was a philosophico-picaresque romp around post-war London, through bomb sites, pubs and a midnight swim in the Thames. Her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, includes a detailed, breathless, desperate chase scene (following Anax, a runaway dog) in which streets and parks and details whizz past like the A–Z.

And dogs! That dog, Anax, gets a lot of attention and is a major driver of the plot. In Nuns and Soldiers, Barkiss, the pub dog, is missing for the whole novel, only to return on the final page. InThe Philosopher’s Pupil the dog is called Zed, and there is a scene in that book in which some piece of information is revealed to an assembled crowd: ‘The silence continued, ringing now with echoes of what William had said, and each person present promised himself some amendment of life. Brian thought, what a skunk I am . . . Gabriel thought, dear, dear William . . .’, and so on for ten more characters, until, ‘What Zed thought is not known, but as his nature was composed almost entirely of love, he may be imagined to have felt an increase of being.’ To anyone who has known or owned a dog, that description must be ideal.

That passage is also one of the funniest – a hugely tangled web of concerns, intrigues and blind alleys all tied up together, with people worrying too much: Murdoch-esque and knowingly so. She’s funny in the same way as Leonard Cohen – they’re both aware of the dark corners of being human, and of their own reputations, and they know the only rational response is to explore the depths and smile while you do it.

In Nuns and Soldiers the character Anne Cavidge, a defrocked nun, has started reading novels: ‘Anne read with continued amazement. What an extraordinary art form it was, it told you about everything! How informative, how exciting, how funny, how terribly sentimental, how full of moral judgements!’ How true, I’d add! Even at their most fantastical, most unlikely and bizarre – when characters are being obtuse and irrational – Murdoch’s novels are desperately true and beautiful.

But I couldn’t say all this in the four minutes I had to share with each of those women in Cheltenham and so I left empty-handed, except for my name-badge which had declared me to be Iris Murdoch, for just one night.

 

© A. F. Harrold, 2010

This article first appeared in Slightly Foxed Issue 25, Spring 2010
www.foxedquarterly.com

A. F. Harrold is an English poet who follows wherever the work leads him.
He has had a number of collections published to little acclaim.
www.afharrold.co.uk

Kingston University London runs the Iris Murdoch Research Centre. Please visit their website for news, events, and all things Iris-related.
 Iris Murdoch Research Centre

Case Histories

Hands up who'd like to see Jackson Brodie on TV! If you have enjoyed Kate Atkinson's wonderful series of literary crime novels, I imagine you will be glued to the small screen on Sunday week when the BBC starts a six part adaptation of some, though not all, of these. Meanwhile here is a picture of Jason Isaacs, who I must say does not disappoint as far as his physical appearance is concerned. If you'd like to hear what he says about the series you can read an interview ith him here on the BBC website. I can't wait.

Save Your Library Posters

 

Thanks to Vulpes Libris for a link to this wonderful set of edited posters -- if you click the picture it should take you to the full set.

 

Ten Best Neglected Classics

Rather late in the day to be drawing your attention to this, but if you didn't see it, The Guardian had a feature at the weekend called The Ten Best Neglected Literary Classics. I'm ashamed to say I've only read two of them -- Barbara Comyns and George Gissing -- though I've read other novels by Laski, Wells and Manning. As for Elisabeth Sanxay Holding -- I've never even heard of her (though I should have done as this is now published by Persephone), but what a cover!  I'm now longing to read them all.

Do take a look -- there are some great photos on there too, especially the one of Marghanita Laski. 

 

Good news for Gaskell lovers

A nice piece of news for anyone who loves Elizabeth Gaskell. And I'm sure lots of people do, especially since Cranford hit our small screens.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/elizabeth-gaskell-joins-the-greats-in-poets-corner-2089911.html

"Historian Pays Damages For Fake Amazon Reviews"

A pretty sorry story, this one, which you can read about here in The Independent. What was he thinking of?

Bad News from India

I'm a great lover of India and visit there almost every year -- in fact I'm going in less than a month's time to beautiful Kerala in the south west. But, sadly, bad stuff goes on there from time to time, and I was really saddened this morning to read this report in today's online Guardian. Delhi is being prepared for the Commonwealth Games in October, and in their determination to clean up the city and make it "world class", government officials have forcibly ejected people from their homes and ploughed down a free school, without giving the staff and pupils any warning at all:

The government bulldozers came to the school at 11am, after yoga and before English and Hindi lessons. The children and their teachers had three hours to clear the classrooms. By mid-afternoon, the Yamuna Riverbank school was rubble.

"They told us we were a security risk, so we had to go," headteacher Parminder Khaur Somal said. "All my children were crying. I don't know how we can be a threat to anyone."

Somal founded the school five years ago for 180 local slum children living on the banks of the Yamuna river on the outskirts of Delhi. In recent months, she and her pupils have watched a vast new complex of luxury apartments rise 500 metres away: the athletes' village for the forthcoming Commonwealth Games. "We never thought it could be a problem," Somal said.

You can read the rest of the article here. I got the picture from the Guardian website -- hope they won't mind.