Harriet Devine's Blog

Abandoned Books

Everyone is always going on about how many books they have on their TBR pile -- but I'm becoming more and more aware of how many I have on my CNF pile -- that's Could Not Finish. In my last post I was saying how picky I was, and it seems to me that I have got a lot pickier in the last few months, though I can't fully account for it. It might possibly has something to do with lack of easy availability of books -- being in France I can't go to the library or the charity shop and browse for something I like the look of. I do bring books back from my quite frequent visits to the UK, though, and of course there's always Amazon, and friends' bookshelves.  

And in fact when you look at what's on the pile, it's certainly not all rubbish. There's a couple of Viragos on there -- and in fact I found another, May Sinclair's The Three Sisters -- after I'd taken the photo. The biggest disappointment there was The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West, who is one of my best-loved novelists. This is an early novel, and all I can say is that she doesn't seem to have found her voice yet. I lasted about half a chapter of this one, and the same with the Holtby and the Sinclair. 

And what about Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety? It's an extraordinary tour-de-force, set at the beginning of the French Revolution, and I read about half of its enormous length with great pleasure and then ground to a halt. Perhaps I'll get back to it. As for Parade's End, I loved this on the TV recently, and as a fully paid up adorer of Ford Madox Ford's somewhat contentious The Good Soldier I couldn't wait to get my hands on the novel. But no, it just confused me and I gave up really quickly. Another one for later, perhaps.

I won't be coming back to the AS Byatt or the Deborah Moggach. Though I've liked some of their other books quite a lot, these ones ended up by boring me. Kathy Reichs was a disappointment as I didn't realise that this was not a Tempe Brennan novel, which series I have gobbled up in the past and hoped to go on with the gobbling. An Equal Stillness was a Christmas present -- I read about a third of it, put it down, and never picked it up again. The Weight of Silence I found in a charity shop and didn't warm to at all though it had sounded intriguing. And the Attica Locke was kindly left for me by a visitor who knows how much I love crime novels, but somehow I just couldn't get into it.

All this is really rather disappointing and worrying. I know sometimes it's possible to change your mind and start to love things you thought you never would like at all -- notably this happened to me with Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which was given to me for my birthday many years ago. I twice picked it up, read the first page, and thought, no, not for me -- and it ended up, when I finally did read it, being one of my absolute favourite novels. And of course there are still things I do enjoy -- I'm just finishing my second William Boyd this month, Ordinary Thunderstorms, and loving every minute, and I'm amazed to find myself enjoying Ivy Compton-Burnett -- I'm about halfway through A Family and a Fortune and I think I've finally got ICB. More on these soon.

How about you? Any notable rejects?

Time for a change

Yes I have a new banner -- I've had so much trouble getting it right and I think it's still a bit off but I can't go on fiddling for ever. Not sure even why I needed it as I really liked the old one, but perhaps it's spring in the air that makes me think of new beginnings.

And while I'm at it I must apologise for not posting any reviews for a while -- I have been all over the place, back and forth to the UK from France, going to funerals, trying to keep up with the demands of my life. I haven't even done all that much reading in the past couple of weeks but I will be back, I promise. One problem is that the book I'm reading at the moment, which I bought on impulse on Brittany Ferries, is more than 500 pages long and I'm finding it so entertaining and informative that I can't give it up till I get to the end. I'm also reading Muriel Spark, which I shouldn't be as Muriel Spark Week is still almost a month away. But I'm deep in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (reading it on my iphone) and am absolutely swept away by what a wonderful novel it is. So you will be hearing more about these before too long.

Now I have to read Elizabeth Taylor's A View of the Harbour because I'd forgotten about this.

Disappointed Expectations

This is a still from the recent BBC adaptation of Great Expectations. Looks wonderful, doesn't it. I'd certainly been looking forward to it very much. And indeed it was beautiful to look at, atmospherically filmed and, on the whole, well cast -- this little boy, Oscar Kennedy, was excellent as young Pip. But despite all that, I was disappointed. I've been grousing about it for days so I thought I'd try to explain what it was I didn't like. I've had to think quite hard about this, and I've been re-reading the novel to help me understand what was, as far as I can tell, very much a minority reaction.

I do realise that one of my problems is my great admiration for the David Lean film version. Made in 1946, and winning two Oscars (art direction and cinematography), it has stood up remarkably well -- I watched it a month or so ago for the umpteenth time with huge pleasure. It's less than two hours long, as compared to the three hours of the BBC version, but somehow manages not only to include more characters (notably Biddy and the Aged Parent) but, crucially, to stay closer to the spirit of the novel. For Dickens pulls off a brilliant feat in GE -- by having the story narrated by the older and wiser Pip, he allows the reader both to see how badly Pip behaves towards his foster father Joe Gargery after coming into his inheritance and to appreciate that he later comes to understand what a ghastly prig and snob he had become. Actually I'm not sure how Lean conveys this in the film, but nothing of this came across in the BBC version and Pip really did seem like a horrid person in his newly aquired wealth -- much nastier to Joe on his visit to London, and much nastier to Magwitch when he reappeared. 

I think what I missed most on the TV were the finer gradations of the novel. Pip's relationship with Joe is so wonderfully conveyed by Dickens, and Joe such a truly delightful character -- so good-hearted and so simple-minded, so unswervingly fond of Pip even when Pip behaves appallingly to him -- so funny and so sad, sometimes simultaneously -- whereas the BBC's Joe was so very much less interesting and not remotely funny. As for the elimination of Biddy and the Aged P -- well, both of them seem to me to be crucial to what Dickens wants to convey here. Biddy really represents everything that Pip could have had if he had been able truly to appreciate her and not been carried away by his expectations -- and there is a wonderful chapter just before he leaves the forge for London in which we see him half realising all this but firmly suppressing it. As for the Aged P -- he is there to show the very best of Wemmick when he is at home, free from the pressures of Jaggers and the corruption and seediness of London life in general. For London, in Dickens, really is horribly seedy and corrupt, and the BBC's London was much smarter and more glamorous. 

Yes, there were changes to the plot, too, and yes they bothered me but you can put that down to boring pedantry if you like. In fact you can put all this down to boring pedantry. I'm tempted to say that this is what you get if you employ a writer from Eastenders to adapt Dickens, but that would be very elitist and snobby of me, wouldn't it.

Sorry for the rant. It's supposed to be my first contribution to Dickens Month -- let's hope my next one is a bit more positive.

 

 

South Riding -- a small but interesting fact

I haven't read South Riding, though I wish I had, but last night I watched the first episode of the new BBC adaptation on iplayer. No idea how it compares to the book, which I'll obviously have to get around to soon.  I enjoyed it a lot -- Anna Maxwell Martin is brilliant and it's great to see her playing such a different character from her superb Esther in Bleak House a few years ago.

Anyway -- there was a moment last night when a chap was blackmailed by a girl he'd been having an illicit affair with. The amount she asked him for was £500, and he was pretty shocked. Doesn't sound like a lot, really, does it? But this was 1934, remember. So this morning I looked it up on a website called Measuring Worth and it turns out that £500 in 1934 is equal to £99,100 using average earnings. No wonder the poor chap looked upset.

 

 

Tragic Wallander

If you live in the UK you may have been watching the Swedish Wallander series, which has been going from strength to strength. Dark, disturbing, powerful, it has been unafraid to tackle some really difficult issues. I watched the most recent episode, the last of the present series, last night. The series  has featured Wallander's daughter Linda, who has put her troubled past behind her and joined the police. Her relationship with her father is an important part of the series, as also has been her friendship with Stefan Lindman, her partner in the police and her lover at the beginning of the series. Played with tremendous nervous intensity by Ola Rapace, Stefan has been a great character -- angry, disturbed and lonely, unable to commit to Linda but unable to let her go, he has become increasingly out of control as the weeks went by. And this week we found out why, in a terrible and moving episode in which the uncovering of a paedophile ring proved to be intimately connected with Stefan's own deeply troubled childhood. The outcome of all this was shocking, both for the characters and for viewers everywhere, I imagine. There is some really excellent acting in this series, with Krister Henriksson knocking our Ken into a cocked hat as Wallander and the wonderful Johanna Sällström as Linda.  Sadly, we will not see any more of Linda, as Sällström committed suicide after the last series was filmed. So, tragedies both on and off the screen.  

The Secret of Annexe 3

It might surprise those who know me, and who know how much I enjoy crime fiction, to learn that I have never read any of Colin Dexter's Morse novels. Never until yesterday, that is, when I picked this up from the bookshelf and read it from cover to cover in the space of a few hours. 

I was a huge fan of Morse on TV, and I can still spend a happy afternoon watching re-runs even if I've seen the episode before. Spotting which bits of Oxford Morse is in (and having a bit of a laugh when he turns a corner and ends up on the opposite side of town) is part of the fun, but the biggest draw must be wonderful John Thaw, almost equally wonderful Kevin Whatley, and the niceties of their relationship. But, though the stories are sometimes fascinating, many's the time when I don't really understand the denouement. Colin Dexter has a very complex and devious way with plots -- it's easy to see why he enjoys solving cryptic crosswords -- and sometimes the twists and turns of the final solutions are frankly confusing, to me at least. So I thought it would be interesting to see how one of them held up in book form.

In actual fact it turns out that this novel is one of the few -- maybe even the only -- Morse novel not to have been adapted for TV. As I reached the end, I began to understand why. Set in a fictional Oxford hotel on the Banbury Road, this novel takes place during and in the aftermath of a New Year's Special -- a weekend, in other words, where extravagant meals and entertainments are laid on for the guests. The highpoint of the two days is a fancy dress party complete with prize-giving. The theme is 'The Mystery of the East', which elicits lots of sheiks, yashmaked ladies, belly dancers -- and a Rastafarian, who in the end wins the prize even though there are some doubts as to whether his costume really fits the theme. Next day, the hotel staff discover a dead man in one of the rooms, still wearing a Rastafarian costume and make-up. 

When Morse and Lewis start to investigate, they discover that a great many of the guests have booked in under assumed names, and much of the investigation is devoted to discovering who they really were and why they disguised their identities. Of course the final working out of the plot depends heavily on mistaken identity but I can't say more than that. However I will say that the Rastafarian theme is handled rather clumsily here and probably would not get past an editor in today's climate, and no doubt this is why ITV never adapted it. 

So -- although I thought it was likely that this was far from Colin Dexter's best, I did enjoy it and found it almost impossible to put down. It was slightly odd reading the description of Lewis, who is rather different in the books -- older and stodgier, basically -- but I still needless to say couldn't help visualising the two of them as they appear on TV. The twists and turns of the plot, the red herrings, Morse's complex and sometimes incorrect convictions that he has worked out the solution, are all very satisfying to read, and though I'm unlikely to race out to get another of these, I'd certainly pick one up if it happened to be on another bookshelf somewhere.

The Snow Geese

There are many ways of acquiring books, from the sublime (finding them in jumble sales for 10p) to the ridiculous (paying full price in a bookshop?). Very high on the sublimity scale is winning them in a draw -- after all, you not only get the book but also a warm sense that someone or something in the universe is on your side for a change. Anyway, leaving the metaphysics aside, I did win not one but two books in a draw on the blog of the wonderful dovegreyreader, and this was one of them. I knew almost nothing about either the book or its author but I was willing to give it a go. I'm so pleased I did. This is a very special book. It is, I suppose, a travel book, but if you are like me and think that sounds a little boring -- it's certainly not my genre of choice, anyway -- please think again. It is certainly a book about a journey, which William Fiennes made in about 2002. He'd just recovered from a serious illness and decided he wanted to go on a quest. Having developed an interest in birds, he had the rather amazing idea of following flocks of snow geese from their winter quarters in Texas to their summer breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, a journey of over four thousand miles. And so, indeed, he does. The geese have several regular stopping places on the way and he stops there too, sometimes ahead of the geese so that he is actually there to see them arrive. He travels by bus and by train, the entire length of north America, extraordinarily long and exhausting journeys. On the way he meets people, gets invited to stay in houses and cabins, hears a number of often bizarre but equally often touching life stories. And he gets terribly lonely and homesick. His thoughts, or perhaps that should be meditations, on this subject are fascinating. He researches it, as indeed he researches birds and their habits, and anything else that catches his attention, sitting in tacky hotel bedrooms. (I was forced to wonder how many books he actually carried around with him). Of course the birds are going home, and he is increasingly longing, too, to go home. But towards the end of his journey he concludes that he must fight against the sense that he can only achieve a sense of belonging by returning to his childhood home.

Somehow I had to turn my sense of nostalgia inside out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging , that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.

My lucky draw included another William Fiennes book, The Music Room, but I haven't started this yet. I'm saving it up because I know I'm going to love it so much. Does that make sense?

Repackaging Jane Austen

There's been a discussion, over on random jottings , of the recent attempt by ITV to 'make things easier for a 21st century audience' by messing around with the plots and characterisation of Jane Austen's novels. But there's also been what seems to be a similar marketing ploy -- packaging the novels with what I guess are meant to be chick-lit-type covers. Now I would be the first to encourage new readers to try Austen, but are these feeble and rather unattractive designs really going to do the trick? If you just compare them with, say, Penguin or Worlds Classics, surely the more traditional ones win every time in attractiveness and appeal? Or am I just an old fogey?