For some reason most of my reviews in the latest issue of Shiny New Books were of reprints. Here's a taster of one I really enjoyed. You can read the full review here.
I live in rural France, and visit Paris from time to time, generally rather briefly. I’m beginning to get the hang of the city and to appreciate the character of its various arrondissements, but I want very much to get to know it better – the place fascinates me as it has fascinated people for centuries. So when I spotted this volume, just published by OUP, I thought it looked as if it would be just the thing to increase my knowledge and appreciation. And I was right.
And here's a bonus, as it's National Poetry Day - a poem by TE Hulme (1883-1917), who is much less well-known than he deserves to be. This is probably his most celebrated poem:
The Embankment (The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night)
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy, In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement. Now see I That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy. Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.
The Shiny editors have decided to give all you budding poets a chance -- we are extending the deadline for the Shiny Poetry Competition to 19 December (was 3 December).
We are looking for original poems of no more than 25 lines on the subject of ‘Reading’, and you can interpret that as widely as you like, feel free to be innovative.
So get writing -- we are looking forward to reading your entries.
While we Shiny editors are all slaving over hot computers to get next week's edition off the ground, we thought we should remind you that you need to write and submit your entry to the Shiny Poetry Competition. With a nice broad subject (Reading -- so you could even write about the Berkshire town and get away with it), a 25-line limit and some tasty prizes, what's not to lose?
It's a fact that many people write poetry secretly, perhaps never thinking of publication. But it's also an obvious fact that some of those poems are probably really good. So if you have even a faint hope that yours might be, just bite the bullet and send it in. Full details here.
This is The Love Letter (1863) by Auguste Toulmouche. Well, it is Valentine's Day, not that I've ever paid all that much attention to it, or not since I was at boarding school, when it mattered terribly whether you got any cards -- I never did, apart from one memorable year when a friend of my parents sent me three, all purporting to come from different people, one of whom was the coal man (yes, we had coal delivered in those days) -- it had a black thumbprint on it. Of course I knew who had done this, but it was a nice thought. Anyway, if you care about such things, I hope you get a lovely card from your loved one today.
And if you love poetry, how about some love poetry? Audible has a special offer for today, a recording of fifteen classic love poems, read by Richard Armitage. Classic Love Poems can be downloaded free from: www.audible.co.uk/mt/valentines_day. And if you want to see Richard talking about, and reading some snippets, here's a video.
I have to admit that when I got this for my birthday last month, I was a bit unsure how much I would get out of it. Having spent more than a decade studying the works and lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I thought I knew quite a lot about the respective daughters who feature here -- beautiful, brilliant Sara Coleridge, whose picture you see here, and troubled, anorexic Dora Wordsworth, whose father for many years denied her the marriage she most ardently desired.
Well, in one sense that was true -- there were no great surprises here. But all credit to Katie Waldegrave for a hugely impressive piece of research which I would hope would not offend the most ardent admirer of those two great, if rather peculiar, poets and their decidedly peculiar family lives. What it did for me was to fill in what was, after all, a relatively sketchy picture, and make many illuminating connections.
Sara and Dora were born a few years apart at the very beginning of the 1800s. Both grew up in the beautiful Lake District of England and both were the daughters of ground-breaking poets who, in the early days, were the closest possible friends. But by the time of Sara's birth the friendship was beginning to sour, and she was still a young child when her father left the family home, theoretically to deal with his opium addiction though in practice he never conquered it. The marriage of her parents broke down irretrievably, and she was raised by her strong-minded mother in the busy household of her uncle, the poet Robert Southey. Sara was a young adut before she re-established a connection with her father, by this time living in London. Dora, meanwhile, grew up in the equally full house, or various houses, where the Wordsworths lived in marital and familial harmony -- of a sort, anyway. The household was dominated by the poet, hugely talented but extremely demanding -- all the females of his family spent many hours copying his poems and watching his agonise over his revisions.
It was a long time before Dora was able to break free, as her father disapproved deeply of her choice of a potential husband, but Sara married happily and had children, though she also suffered from miscarriages and still births. Throughout all this, and the rather early death of her husband, she carried out with incredible tenacity the task of editing and commenting on her father's works. In fact modern scholarship now acknowledges that Sara was one of the best, most brilliant and most sensitive editors Coleridge has ever had. Sadly she also became addicted to opium, but managed to control it to the extent of being able to live a relatively normal life. Dora too had massive health problems, though hers took the form of an absolute inability to eat, which now we have to assume was a form of anorexia.
Could we say that it was the pressure of being the daughters of two such famous, and difficult, fathers that caused the problems of these young women? I'm really not sure. Certainly difficult fathers cause problems, whether they are famous or not, and in Sara's case, her life was immensely enriched by the long years of study of Coleridge's writings. I've always admired her tremendously and was delighted to be able to get to know her better through her letters and other writings.
So in the end I read this with a great deal of pleasure, and all credit to Katie Waldegrave for uncovering so much fascinating material and making what must have been an almost unmanageably large quantity of research into a book which is immensely readable.
The Outlander was published in 2009 -- 2007, even, in Canada -- how on earth did it pass me by? I suppose in those days I was reading mostly older fiction, and not paying enough attention to newly published stuff? Anyway, I finally caught up with it only because someone who is moving house passed it on to me. And oh how glad I am.
Gil Adamson, whose first and so far only novel this is, is primarily a poet, and if I say this novel is pure poetry, don't get me wrong. Yes, the writing -- the texture of the prose -- is very beautiful, but more than that, there's an imaginative sweep through the plot which is constantly breathtaking, page-turning, endlessly surprising.
It was night, and dogs came through the trees, unleashed and howling. They burst from the cover of the woods, and their shadows swam across a moonlit field. For a moment, it was as if her scent had torn like a cobweb and blown on the wind, shreds of it here and there, useless. The dogs faltered and broke apart, yearning. Walking now, stiff-legged, they ploughed the grass with their heavy snouts.
The first paragraph really encapsulates what it is over-riding theme of the novel -- pursuit and escape. We don't yet know who is being pursued ('her scent') and won't find out till the third paragraph ('the girl') and finally the fourth:
Nineteen years old and already a widow: Mary Boulton. Widowed by her own hand.
This is Mary's story -- 'the widow', as she is most often called. But, like those opening paragraphs, it slowly unwinds through the course of the novel. She's on the run, yes, pursued by two men, red-headed brothers, Large men, identical in every way, standing close by each other, not speaking. These are her husband's brothers, obsessively fixated on revenge. She's lost her baby and shot her husband, though the details of all this will emerge only gradually. Mentally, she is more or less unhinged by what she has gone through, has lapses of memory, see things and people that are not there. But somehow as the days go by, days in which it is surprising she has not died from exhaustion and hunger, she survives long enough to be rescued by a man as isolated and almost as strange as herself -- William Moreland, the Ridgerunner. William rescues her, feeds her, loves her, deserts her. Then again, by some extraordinary chance, she finds herself in a small mining community, living under the roof of the kind, odd, Reverend Bonnycastle, who is building a church for the miners with his own highly unskilled hands and who takes her in and shelters her until the next disaster strikes...
"Winner of the International Association of Crime Writers' Dasheill Hammett Prize", proclaims the cover blurb. Well yes, I suppose in a way this can be described as a crime novel -- a crime of sorts has certainly been committed. But I would never classify it in that way. Yes, again, it's a novel of pursuit, but more than anything I'd call it a novel of survival. Robinson Crusoe comes to mind -- there can be few readers of that novel who don't ask themselves how they would survive on a desert island. Here too you can't help measuring yourself against Mary and wondering how you would fare in the trackless wastes, with no food, no rest, and no idea where you are going.
Physical survival, then, certainly, but mental and emotional survival too. Mary survives through the kindness of strangers, most of them social outcasts, people from whom, in her previous life, she would have run a mile rather than speak to. But she discovers that love is to be found everywhere, even in the most unlikely places. And so yes, this is also a love story, of a heart-rending kind. And on top of all this, it is a real page-turner -- I kept wanting to skip forward, as it was almost unbearable not knowing how things were going to work out. I can't tell you that, of course, but if you haven't read it, I suggest you put it high on the list.
I have numerous family connections with Canada, and am particularly fascinated by stories of how it was in the olden days -- The Tenderness of Wolves, which I also loved, could be a companion piece to this one. People forging lives in the great empty landscapes, the terrors of loneliness and the constant threats of the weather -- and the courage it took to survive all these. All of this is supremely shown in what I can only describe as a truly beautiful novel.
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
This is William Rothenstein, 'The Browning Readers', painted in 1900. I take the title to mean that these ladies are reading Browning -- perhaps they are members of the Browning Society, which was up and running at that time. Their room is restrained but all the pictures and objects carefully chosen and thoughtfully arranged. Nice.
Many years ago I went to Florence, my first and last visit there, and in one of the great art galleries I saw this painting, which was labelled 'Andrea del Sarto: Self Portrait'. I stood in front of it for ages, totally transfixed. What a beautiful man. Of course I knew about this painter because of Browning's poem, which tells the sad story of his unhappy marriage and his dissatisfaction with his own work. I was reminded of all this by dovegreyreader's post on Browning, whose 200th birthday it is today, and thought I'd have a look at the painting. But oh dear -- since I was in Florence, it's turned out that this is not a self portrait at all -- it is someone else entirely. This is what he really looked like and though I'm sure he was a perfectly nice chap. I'm rather disappointed.
Here is another reprise -- I read this one in January 2010 but thought I'd give it another airing to celebrate MSRW.
Have you ever read an amazing poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called The Wreck of the Deutschland? Written in the 1870s, it is dedicated to five nuns who died in a terrible shipwreck, one of them chanting the Psalms as the ship went down. You can read the whole poem here, but this is just a part of it:
17
They fought with God's cold -- And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check -- Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.
18
Ah, touched in your bower of bone Are you! turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! make words break from me here all alone, Do you! -- mother of being in me, heart. O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth, Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start! Never-eldering revel and river of youth, What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?
19
Sister, a sister calling A master, her master and mine! -- And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling; The rash smart sloggering brine Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one; Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine Ears, and the call of the tall nun
To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling.
You are probably asking yourself why on earth I am quoting this poem in a review of Muriel Spark's celebrated novel, The Girls of Slender Means. If you have read the novel you will of course remember that it is one of the poems used by Joanna, an elocution teacher and one of the girls who lives in the May Teck Hostel where the story is set. But there's a bit more too it than that, though it will be hard to explain without giving too much away to anyone who has not yet read it.
Set in 1945, at the end of WW2, this great novel tells the story of a group of young women who live on very low incomes in this large Victorian house overlooking Kensington Gardens in London. They work in menial office jobs, scrounge for food and clothing coupons, gossip about boyfriends, and share one glorious Schiaparelli evening dress. There's beautiful Selina, who is sleeping with three men but keeping other, richer, ones dangling in the hope of marriage; Pauline, who seems normal but disappears out in the evening from time to time pretending she is going for dinner with the actor Jack Buchanan; Joanna, a clergyman's daughter, who has come to London to escape her tendency to fall in love with curates and is channelling all her passion into the poetry she uses in her elocution classes; and Jane, really the central character, who works for a seedy small-time publisher but is highly respected by the other girls for her work in what she refers to as "the world of books". Jane is fat -- not a politically correct term in this day and age but this is how she, and the other girls, think of her. As the novel begins Jane is falling in love with a moody intellectual author, Nicholas Farringdon, who strings her along but soon starts an affair with Selena. On his many visits to the hostel, however, it is Joanna who most fascinates Nicholas -- she can often be heard declaiming her favourite poems to her pupils, and the novel is studded with short extracts from poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and of course Hopkins.
The setting, in a London devastated by the war, is wonderfully evoked. All over the city are bombed out buildings, some still standing but with their sides torn away so that you can see each room, its wallpaper still intact, exposed to the elements. An unexploded bomb is indeed rumoured to be buried in the hostel garden but no one has ever succeeded in finding it. However this does have a bearing on the dramatic events at the end of the novel, during which Joanna is heard proclaiming from the Psalms in her wonderful, powerful voice. If you have read it you will see what I mean about the Hopkins poem and if you haven't read it you really should. During the course of the book we learn that after these events Nicholas has converted to Catholicism -- something Spark herself did -- and this too seems connected in some way with Joanna and with Hopkins. I'm sure someone has written a learned article or ten about all this. But don't let that put you off. This is an absolutely delightful, witty, perceptive, thought-provoking book and you will be glad you have read it.
