Harriet Devine's Blog

The Lady and the Unicorn by Rumer Godden

I'm a great admirer of Rumer Godden, but I've read only a handful of what wikipedia tells me are her 60 books. Only about 25 of this are novels, some of them are non-fiction and a large proportion were written for children. This was only her second novel, published in 1937, and it contains an element that I haven't encountered in any of the others I've read - a sort of breath of the supernatural.

Godden was born in England but raised in India where her father worked for a shipping company, and she continued to live there for many years as an adult. Unsurprisingly a number of her novels are set there, including this one. The Lady and the Unicorn  takes place in Calcutta, where the Lemarchant family live in one wing of a an ancient crumbling mansion. They are what was known at the time as Eurasians - today I think we'd say Anglo-Indians. Descended from unions between Indians and white settlers, they are looked down on as half-castes by both the pure bred Indians and by the whites. The family consists of Father, who seems to spend most of his time lying on the sofa, and Auntie, who holds the family together, shopping, cooking, washing, and generally trying to control the children. There are three of them, all girls. The oldest is Belle, aged about eighteen. Glamorous and confident, Belle is determined to have a better life, and in pursuit of that is prepared to become the mistress of a much older man who treats her badly. However her determination is undimmed, and the last we see of her she has found a new protector who has promised to take her to America and get her into the movies. We're led to believe that it's not impossible that this may succeed, as indeed it is - think Merle Oberon or indeed Cliff Richard, both Anglo Indians by birth.

The second daughter, a year younger, is Rosa, whose story this really is. She's not as flashy as her older sister but has a quiet beauty - pale skin, black hair and dark eyes. She's shy and retiring, has an innocent but close relationship with Robert DeSouza, a handsome boy whose family live in the same building. Then there's the youngest girl, Blanche, who is thirteen and the only family member to have dark skin, of which some family members are ashamed.  Rosa herself is ashamed of Belle's flaunting of her sexuality and anxious about her ambitions and the way she seems to let nothing stand in the way of her achieving them. Belle thinks Rosa could do better for herself and persuades her to borrow a dress and go to a party. Here she meets Stephen Bright, a young Englishman newly arrived in Calcutta. It's been described to him as a 'B party'

What's a B Party?

A and B. B girls.

Oh I see. What happens?

Usual thing. They behave well and we behave very badly, and then they behave worse.

Stephen falls head over heels for Rosa - he's fascinated by her beauty and also by the ancient house where she lives - together they explore the garden and find a crumbling old sundial, obviously imported from England, and learn something about the family who once owned the house, seemingly Rosa's ancestors. Rosa actually sometimes seems to glimpse these long gone people - a weeping girl, a little dog, a grand carriage of party goers, though Stephen can't see them. He raises with her the question of her identity:

You insist on being inferior Britons.

That's not fair....We're as much British subjects as you are.

It's all so false. You're no more like a British girl than a poinsettia is like a daisy. You talk of going home to England, when the only home you have is here in India. It's such a sham. Why can't you be more content, more dignified?

This really highlights what Godden was aiming at in this story - to show the great unfairness she perceived in the treatment of these families, living in between two civilisations but shut out of both. Although Stephen adores Rosa and starts by promising her marriage, in the end their cultural differences get in the way and she is left devastated. Whatever Bella's future may be, it's clear that Rosa is going to live out her life in the same kind of environment as she was brought up in. 

This is quite a dark novel, apparently suggested to Godden by an Anglo Indian family who lived nearby when she was growing up - the Godden children were forbidden to play with them for fear of contracting their 'chi-chi' accents. It's tremendously evocative of India in general -

Through the door in the front gate the people could be seen passing by on the pavement; a man carrying bassinets on a pole, and two Sikh women who hold their veils across their noses, and one of them had a birdcage with a cover of magenta gauze with tassels; a chinaman in grey cotton selling embroidered linen, a widow in dirty white on her way to the street tap, and three coolies carrying baskets of marigold garlands on their heads.

and Calcutta in particular - I was there about ten years ago and was fascinated by the many crumbling mansions and by the Park Street Cemetery, which Rosa and Stephen visit, marvelling at the 19th century tombs of long dead, mostly painfully young English colonists. My Virago edition has an interesting introduction to Godden and to the novel. Well worth reading.

Murder on Brittany Shores by Jean-Luc Bannalec

Back in 2014 I reviewed Jean-Luc Bannalec's first novel, Death in Pont Aven, for Shiny New Books (here). I'd enjoyed it quite a lot, though as I said in the review my pleasure was augmented by the fact that I'd recently visited the beautiful area of Western Brittany where the novel was set, and which is not a million miles from where I live. I then proceeded to forget all about Bannalec and his detective Commissaire Dupin until a few weeks ago when I spotted this, his second novel, on Amazon. Set on the Îles de Glénan, an archipelago off the south Brittany coast, this sounded intriguing, and was crying out to be read. I've just finished it. 

Although I've visited that part of Brittany a number of times, I'd never heard of Glénan. The islands are about 20 kilometres from the mainland, and are often compared to the Caribbean - miles of unspoiled white sand beaches, extraordinarily clear seas constantly changing between varying shades of turquoise, virtually empty of inhabitants, though much visited by tourists in the summer months. The people who do live there, or at least pass much of their time there, are naturally enough connected in some way with the sea - there's a successful diving school, for one thing, and everyone, visitors and inhabitants alike, tends to congregate in an attractive café restaurant on one of the main islands. 

But Commissaire Dupin is not there for the wine and the lobster, though he manages to enjoy both of these during his necessarily frequent visits. Necessary because three people have been found dead in the nearby seas. Initially this was thought to be an unfortunate boating accident, but when it turns out that the men had been drugged before they set out to sea in bad weather, this turns into a murder investigation. We are now plunged into the Breton equivalent of a manor house mystery(i.e. with a small number of possible suspects) - the men had dinner and drinks in the restaurant before setting out, and it's clear that the drug must have been administered during their meal. Who could be responsible? The sister of one of the dead men stands to inherit huge sums of money and valuable property, but every one of the small group of permanent residents turns out to have had some kind of relationship with one or more of the dead men. There are various leads to pursue - it appears that treasure hunting is a massive, but secret, enterprise on the islands, as a great many important and wealthy ships lie still undiscovered under the waters, and this seems a likely motive for the murders.

Dupin is confused by too many leads and too many suspects. He's forced to make numerous journeys across from Concarneau, his home base on the mainland, some by helicopter and others in boats, a form of transport he hates. He's a grouchy and irritable sort of chap, and seems to rather despise the police officers who work with him. He's a total caffeine addict and can't function without several strong espressos downed at intervals throughout the day. He finally works out who he decides is responsible, but there's a bit of a twist at the end which takes him, and hopefully us, by surprise.

I quite enjoyed meeting Dupin again, but most of all I enjoyed exploring this beautiful location. The author is actually German - Bannalec is the pseudonym of a German publisher Jorg Bong. He's obviously madly in love with Brittany and wallows rather not just in natural descriptions but also in little tidbits of Breton lore. I thought he piled it on a bit thick at times, and found the plot to be sometimes rather too packed with incidents and a confusing number of suspects. But it passed some enjoyable hours, and I look forward to the third novel in the series, which I gather exists but which has not yet been translated into English. 

Home

You may not have noticed, but I've been more or less absent on here for about three weeks. I was in Kerala, South India, and just got back last night. So normal service will be resumed soon. Meanwhile here are some Keralan Christmas decorations. Happy Christmas to you all. 

The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

If you've noticed that I've been a bit quiet on here lately, it's because a) I've been travelling and b) all my recent reading has been of books that will soon be reviewed in the Extra Shiny, due out on 3 December. However, though this book is one such, I couldn't wait to tell you about it. I've always been a huge fan of Bill Bryson -- he's so intelligent and well-informed but, as they say, he wears his learning lightly, and is capable of making me laugh out loud, a quality I prize highly though have to watch out for on buses and trains. 

As I'm sure you know, Bryson wrote Notes from a Small Island in 1995, and now, twenty years later, has is taking another look at the country he has adopted as his home. He's recently become a UK citizen, which involved taking a knowledge test -- one which no true born British person I know could possibly hope to pass:

You can be denied citizenship if you  don't know the number of states in the Commonwealth, who Britain's enemies in the Crimean war were, the percentage of people who describe themselves as Sikh, Muslim, Hindu or Christian, and the actual name of the Big Ben tower. (It's the Elizabeth Tower). You even have to know a few things that aren't in fact true.

So, partly as a result of passing this test, the idea of this book came about. In fact it was owing in part to Bryson's discovery that, though the test asserts that the two farthest apart points in the British Isles are Lands End and John O'Groats, this is not in fact the case. From this was born the concept of the Bryson Line, which runs directly between the actual farthest points, which happen to be Bognor Regis in the south and Cape Wrath in the north. Both of these places are visited, and a great many more in between, with often hilarious results.

But The Road to Little Dribbling is not just a comic ramble through the UK. Bryson is seriously concerned about the many changes he finds as he visits the beautiful villages and countryside of Britain -- not surprising when you know that he has acted as President of the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England. 'There isn’t a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in than the countryside of Great Britain', he writes -- 'Let's keep it that way'. And even the British themselves seem to him to be deteriorating -- he tells a story of seeing an obviously wealthy woman slipping a 10p coin into a container intended for tips, and remarks that

The Britain I came to was predicated on the idea of doing the right thing most of the time whether anyone knew you were doing it or not… You might not leave a tip... but you wouldn’t pretend to leave a decent tip and then stick in a small coin… It wouldn’t occur to you to be a dick.

Being Bill Bryson, he surprises us endlessly with a wonderful range of facts: for example, that there are 600,000 people on the London Underground at any one time, 'making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo', that 'cows kill a lot more people than bulls', that there are about 50% fewer people in London than in either New York or Paris, and much much more. 

Bill Bryson obviously doesn't need my recommendation -- this will head the best seller lists for a long time to come. But I'm absolutely delighted to have had a chance to read it, which I did courtesy of Sainsbury's e-books, so many thanks to them. I've actually written another (different) review which will appear in Shiny in a couple of weeks, so I'll link to that in case you're interested. 

Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie

From time to time, Audible, or rather their publicists, send me a list of new releases in case I want to review any of them. This is often a great blessing, as it enables me get hold of new books I've been dying to read. However, though I was curious, this was not one of them -- I'd never heard of it, even though I am fond of Agatha Christie's novels. Of course, though it is a new release as an audiobook, it was first published in 1946, and turns out to be a real gem.

I suppose I knew about as much about Christie's life as the next person. I knew her first marriage had ended in divorce, that she'd married for a second time to an archaeologist, and that she used to go with him on digs. But I'd never given much thought to what that must have been like. Well, this is the book that answered that question, in the most delightful way possible. For this is a book absolutely stuffed with humour and charm, and one thing I felt sure of was that Agatha's marriage to Max Mallowan must have been a happy one. 

Come, Tell Me How You Live, though not published till 1946, was written during the war, and describes events that took place during the 1930s. Max had got funding to excavate some important sites in Syria, and Agatha decided to go along. Several expeditions are described, as Mallowan and his team found an enormous amount of valuable material at several sites in the area. At the start of the book, though, Christie describes the journey to Syria in some detail, and quite a trek it was, involving a number of changes of train over several days. Then there was the settling in -- eventually the Mallowans had a house built for them by a local Sheik, but before that there was a good deal of roughing it, and life was never as comfortable or easy as Agatha was accustomed to. But she took it all in her stride with the greatest good humour (though not without the some episodes of intense irritation -- with the Arab servants and workmen, and even with Max himself, who seems to have responded with admirable kindness and understanding). 

It's wonderful to see Agatha participating so enthusiastically in the everyday life of the dig. It was her job to clean and label the pots, and also to act as the official photographer, a task which made it necessary for her to have a darkroom built wherever they happened to be staying at the time, with extremely variable results. When you realise that she also managed to keep writing her novels during the several months' periods of absence from her English home you can't help admiring her tremendously.

Naturally, a good deal of the book is devoted to the differences she finds between the way of life she's used to and the habits and customs of the Syrian people. She's often struck by the differences between the Arabs -- gloomy, quiet, dressed in black -- and the Kurds, joyful, outgoing, colourfully dressed. But it's their attitudes to life, and to death, that she finds a constant mystery. The term 'inshallah' -- 'if God wills it' -- seems to be useable in a variety of situations, often functioning as an excuse not to commit oneself to any course of action, and of course also enables one to accept that death is unavoidable and not to be feared. And it often makes people careless about treating illnesses and ailments, much to Agatha's occasional irritation, as she gets put in charge of handing out medicines and realises that her patients will frequently not get the treatment they need. This is what happens when the Sheik sends his wives round for a medical visit:

I offer the conventional greeting and lead the way into the little storehouse. Not one woman, but five follow me in. They are all very excited, laughing and talking. The door is shut upon us. Max and the Sheik remain outside the door, to  do what interpretation shall be necessary. I'm a little dazed by seeing so many women. Are they all wives? All need medical attention? Off come the veils. One woman is young, and tall, and very handsome. I imagine that she is the new Yazidi [Kurdish] wife, just acquired with the advance rent from the land. The principle wife is much older - she looks about 45 and is probably 30. All the women are wearing jewellery, and all are the gay, handsome, Kurdish type.  

The principle wife turns out to have a serious case of blood poisoning, affecting her eyes, but it becomes clear that despite the fact that Max tells the Sheik she needs urgent hospital attention, he is unlikely ever to take her.'Inshallah'.

I suppose if this book had been written in 2015, we might have been talking about racial prejudice here, but in fact Agatha and Max are extremely broadminded, for their day, in accepting the local ways even when they find them hard to understand. Above all, though, this is a really entertaining and often very funny book. I was left feeling I not only knew a lot more about Agatha but also warmed to her tremendously, and  was happy for her obviously happy second marriage to a man who clearly adored her.

Wondering about the title? It's a pastiche of a poem by Lewis Carroll, and describes her meeting with Max and her decision to go to Syria with him.

I met an erudite young man/A-sitting on a 'tell'./'Who are you sir', to him I said, /'For what is it you look?' /His answer trickled through my head/Like bloodstains in a book. He said 'I look for aged pots/Of prehistoric days/And then I measure them in lots/And lots of different ways./And then, like you, I start to write./My words are twice as long/As yours, and far more erudite./They prove my colleagues wrong'./But I was thinking of a plan/To kill a millionaire/ and hide the body in a van/Or some large frigidaire. 

This audiobook was extremely well narrated by Judith Boyd, who seemed to me to have got totally into the spirit of Agatha herself. I enjoyed it so much I'm going to look out for a printed copy. Great stuff.

PS: When I sat down to write this I discovered the book had just been reviewed on the entertaining blog Clothes in Books. Here's the link.

Belonging by Umi Sinha

It's strange how a whole life can be changed in an instant. A dozen years later, I'm still haunted by that moment when I might have reached down and touched Father's head as he passed before me. If he'd known I was there, or if I'd jumped down instead of staying to see the tablecloth, I believe he would not have done what he did.

We Shiny eds are always pleased when people tell us that they've been inspired to buy the books we review. But of course sometimes we are similarly inspired ourselves. And when I saw Victoria's review of Belonging in the latest Shiny, I was immediately sure I wanted to read it. And the lovely publisher, Myriad Editions, kindly sent me a copy so I was able to read what Victoria called 'one of the most gripping, engrossing, heart-in-mouth novels I’ve read in 2015'. 

Covering three generations of a family, and spanning a period between 1855 and 1920, this is a big, serious, absorbing historical novel with a mystery at its heart. It deals with important questions about the relations between Britain and India, and between the British and the Indians (not always quite the same thing). 

Central to the novel is Lila, whose story begins with her childhood memory of being removed from India, where she was born and grew up, to be sent to England to live with her great-aunt Mina. Her father, as we soon discover, has shot himself, and her mother, always strange and troubled, has been removed to who knows where. The trauma of the events that led to this, and the shock of being uprooted to a cold, colourless, unfamiliar environment far away from everything and everyone she loves, renders Lila unable to speak for a long time. But what exactly the events were is something we have to wait for until practically the end of the novel. And by this time we have discovered the whole trajectory that led up to them, by means of dips into the past in which we learn about Lila's ancestors.

So we meet beautiful Cecily, initially as she's on her way by ship to India, to marry a man she hardly knows who is more than twenty years her senior. Then there's her son Henry, Lila's father, who knows his mother died around the time of his birth but doesn't know how or why and is afraid to ask his silent, remote father. These two have their own stories to tell, alternating with Lila's own as she grows up and struggles to come to terms with her sense of difference from everyone around her. In fact the only person she feels really close to is the Sikh boy Jagjit, who spends his summer holidays with the unusually open-minded mother of a friend from public school. As the years go by, Lila and Jagjit fall in love, but convention and the pressures of the past make it seem unlikely they can ever be together.

In the early years of the twentieth-century, even to befriend an Indian was an unconventional act, and throughout the novel we learn more and more about the tragic and unforgivable way that the British conquerors treated their Indian subjects. When Henry's father is finally able to talk to his son about the mysterious, beautiful Indian woman who lived in a small house in their grounds known as the bibighar, he explains that she was his lover (his bibi) when he first arrived in India. In those days, the first half of the 19th century, the British settlers were encouraged to befriend and start relationships with Indian women. But after the terrible mid-century Mutiny, all this changed, Western women started to travel over to India, and those relationships went underground. This central fact lies at the heart of much of the tragedy that underlies the novel. Also primary are the appalling facts about the Siege of Cawnpore, in which 120 British women and children were massacred -- all part of the Indian Mutiny (1857), a violent uprising by the subjected race against their oppressors. 

There's so much food for thought here, and certainly no easy answers. But though I called it a serious book, don't get hold of the idea that it must be boring. Umi Sinha doesn't preach, nor does she allow the important issues the novel raises to overwhelm the excitement and interest of the story. I was completely carried along by the need to know how Lila's story would end, and indeed how and why it began. I already knew quite a lot about India, and about the history of its occupation by the British, but to see it all in the context of the lives of people you come to care about makes it extremely vivid. I think this book should be required reading for anyone interested in India, or in colonialism in general. But it's also a brilliant and absorbing read for anyone who loves good novels. Could that be you?

 

 

A Perfect Woman by LP Hartley

Does anyone read LP Hartley any more? If not, they really really should. I picked up a 1956 edition of this 1955 novel at a vide grenier (aka jumble sale) in a friend's garden on Sunday, where books were three for a euro. I read it fast, and with huge enjoyment, and couldn't wait to tell you about it.

I suppose Hartley is most famous for The Go-Between (1953), which was made into an excellent film, though he published about eighteen other novels and several collections of short stories. I've also read his Eustace and Hilda trilogy and am certain I reviewed it on here but I can't find the post. But I'd never heard of this one, though it really deserves to be better known.

Essentially, this is the story of the marriage of Harold and Isabel Eastwood.  Harold is an accountant, conventional and unimaginative, and Isabel is clever and has literary leanings. Despite this discrepency, the marriage jogs along comfortably enough, largely because Isabel 

knew what was likely to happen when a woman of slightly superior social standing, decidedly superior brains and greatly superior imaginative capacity married a dullish man and lived in the provinces, and was on her guard against it. 

Are we hearing alarm bells? We certainly should be. For, as the novel begins, Harold has met Alexander Goodrich, a well-known novelist, on a train, and somehow found himself agreeing to take on his tax affairs. When Alec comes to visit some weeks later, two things happen -- he is immediately smitten by Irma, a lovely Austrian girl who is working behind the bar in a local pub, and Isabel is immediately smitten by him. Her smitten-ness, though, is initially highly altrusitic. Thus it is that she believes it is her duty to procure Irma for Alec -- Isabel has lived in London, where she was initially teased by her more sophisticated friends for being a prig, so this is something she has worked on diligently. Harold finds the idea initially rather shocking, but Isabel manages to persuade him that it will benefit both parties, providing a better life for Irma and improving Alec's novels, which have been criticised for being too full of unpleasant, bitter women.

So Harold agrees to ask Irma out to dinner, and is amazed when she says she will come. But soon he finds himself involved in a most enjoyable affair with her. Isabel, meanwhile, is drawn into a passionate relationship with Alec, and spends increasing amounts of time with him in London, at theatres and restaurants and of course in luxurious hotel bedrooms. Initially the marriage rather benefits fron this. Harold becomes a great deal more cheerful, even uncharacteristically playful, and Isabel is grateful for this. In addition, each partner is so involved in their own secret affair that they don't have time or energy to notice what the other is up to. But this apparently happy state of things cannot continue forever, and when Isabel gets hold of the manuscript of Alec's latest novel, things take a dramatic and alarming turn...

This summary cannot do justice to the many great things about this novel, which manages to be both serious and witty at the same time -- there were many moments when I laughed aloud at some particularly apt observation, such as the description of a group of young men in the pub whose dark hair "set off the Brylcreem perfectly". There are some wonderful characters, including Alec's long-term mistress Elspeth, a tragic harpy whose intervention brings about the shocking events towards the end. Then of course there are the children, desperately serious Jeremy and frighteningly emotional and talkative Janice, who at the age of six is obsessed with love and marriage. These two are wonderfully well observed, as their own interactions innocently mirror that of their parents.  But above all, the novel focuses on the inner lives of Harold and Isabel, and does so in an astonishingly perceptive and ultimately very moving way. You could justifiably say that Hartley sees into the human heart, and forgives its frailties. There are so many examples of this in the novel, but here's one more or less at random. This is Isabel, back from an illicit week in London with Alec, and surprised by Harold, who she feels she hardly recognises, and his  gentle, teasing welcome:

She had braced herself to meet the alien atmosphere of home, the sunlessness, the smilelessness, the necessity to feel, think and act from the dry, dusty centre of her being, without the energizing power of love. Love was not here, how could this pleasant stranger be in love with her?  And yet there was a simulacrum of it, to which her heart responded. 

Well, I can only say that if you get a chance to read this novel, please do so forthwith. You will not be disappointed. You know you'd have seized upon it if it had been published by Persephone, which it easily could have been. And it is, in fact, available on Amazon for not very much money. So what are you waiting for?

 

 

Death in Pont-Aven

I'm lucky enough to live in rural France, which is lovely in itself, but also great if you want to pop off for a little jaunt to some other glorious places. One such is Finistere, the most western part of Brittany and less than three hours' drive from my home. Close though it is, I hadn't visited the area until a month or so ago, when I took a trip which included a visit to the beautiful little village of Pont-Aven, once home to the painter Gauguin. When I got home I remembered I had a book called Death in Pont-Aven waiting to be reviewed for Shiny New Books, so I read it with great delight and here's my review of it.

In fact the novel whetted my appetite so much that last week I went there again, and visited some of the places Jean Luc Bannalec (who is really a German publisher called Jorg Bong) mentioned in the novel. One such was supposedly Gauguin's favourite beach, which he christened Plage Tahiti. Happy days!

 

Under a Croatian Sun

 'From grey Britain to a sunny isle: one couple's dream comes true', says the subtitle, and that says it all, really. There have been quite a few books about living, or attempting to live, the good life in France and Italy, but this is the first I have encountered that is set in Croatia. Anthony Stancomb tells the story of how he and his wife Ivana left Fulham, in London, for the island of Vis, the remotest island off the Croatian coast. Ivana's family had once fled from this part of the world, so her visit was quite loaded with emotional baggage. But the house they had found was delightful (or promised to be so once they had persuaded the builders to finish it), and even in April, when they arrived to take up residence, the weather was glorious. So all they had to do now was find their way around and make friends with the locals. 

Needless to say this brought many surprises.

At the end of our first week, a terrifying-looking woman dressed as if she was going to a Queen Victoria impersonation competition, appeared on our doorstep. In her sixties and with a face like a weathered block of granite, it looked as if someone had givn her bad news in 1958 and she was still chewing on it. She announced that she had come to be our housekeeper. 

This proved to be a mixed blessing, as Kermela was a whizz at cleaning, but brought all her friends round to tut over the ancient furniture and floorboards that had been uncovered when the old linoleum was taken up. 

Over the coming months, among other things, Anthony establishes Croatia's first cricket team, starts to learn Croatian and buys a boat, Ivana gets involved with various kinds of herbal medicines, and the couple participate in musical evenings and dinner parties as the locals, very slowly, come to accept them as friends. By the autumn, they have truly become part of the community that viewed them with such suspicion and mistrust when they arrived. 'You make all Vis people so happy', says one neighbour. 'You proper Vis people now. Yes?'

So all in all quite a success story, which should inspire anyone who wants to get out of the rat race (though having a wife who speaks Croatian would be a definite advantage).

Eat Pray Love

Here's a bookI never thought I'd be reading. I have in fact done my fair share of all these things during the course of my life, which is why I went to see the film when it first came out a few years ago. But I didn't like it, and it completely put me off reading the book. I picked it up just a few days ago when a friend who'd been staying with me left it in the house. And I found I liked it very much indeed.

Before I get into reviewing it, a little preamble. I have always tended to compartmentalise my life, which has been rather long and very varied. As a result, I have numerous friends, but they fall into different groups. So I have my theatre friends, some of whom I've known since my childhood because my parents were in the theatre. Then there are my academic friends, met during my thirty or so years in various universities, my blogging friends, most of whom I've never met but feel I know anyway, and people I've just got to know because we lived close by or were friends of friends. And then there are my meditating friends, many of whom I first met forty years ago when I learned to meditate and fairly soon afterwards became a teacher. Though I wouldn't say these groups never overlap, I've learned over the years that many of the non-meditators are not in the least bit interested in what I can only call the spiritual side of my life. It's fine if you tell them about the practical effects of meditation -- relaxation, clarity of thought etc -- but mention God and they all look very sour and scornful. 

So for me, reading this memoir was a rare treat. There can be few people who don't know about Elizabeth Gilbert's decision, after a messy divorce and a failed love affair, to spend a year doing three things on her own and just for herself. That meant Rome, to learn Italian and eat delicious food, India to meditate in an Ashram, and Bali to meet up with an ancient healer and of course finally, though not part of the plan, to meet a gorgeous Brazilian who she would eventually marry.

Liz Gilbert is a professional writer and journalist, and she writes in a delightfully readable way. But what I liked most about the book was her honesty -- about her own failings, her moments of unrealistic fantasy, her self doubt, her struggles to understand herself and to overcome the grief and rage that was a legacy of the unhappy past few years. If this sounds as if it might be grim, I can assure you it's not. It's often very funny, but also often very wise. Liz never pretends she has any answers, but she recounts her struggles to find them and the solutions that have worked for her without any attempt to preach. 

Obviously with my own background I was particularly interested by the middle section in which she stays in the ashram of an Indian female guru. Having done the same thing myself quite a few times -- though in a different ashram of a different guru -- this was bound to grab me. And having practised meditation for so many years it was fascinating to read of Liz's downs and ups in her attempts to get a grip on it all, the miseries of feeling like a failure at it, the agonies of dealing with all the stuff that got stirred up, and the rare but astonishingly wonderful moments where suddenly everything worked and the experiences were -- well, beyond words, really, though she manages to find some pretty adequate ones. 

It was interesting to read, on wikipedia, extracts from some of the early reviews of the book. Most critics seems to have been bemused and turned off by the ashram section ( "narcissistic New Age reading", "this silliness") but that's par for the course -- if you don't relate to that sort of thing, you're bound to feel like that. And yes, of course, as other critics pointed out, Liz was able to make this journey because she had a considerable amount of financial backing  -- one reviewer felt that it offered "no real solutions for the astronomically high tariffs—both financial and social—that exclude all but the most fortunate among us from participating". Well yes, but I suppose you could say that about any travel book, and that's really what this is, though some of the journeys are being taken internally rather than externally. 

Anyway, I loved every minute of it, and it made me long to go to Rome, India and Bali, all of which I've been lucky enough to visit, though I'd hope not to gain 22 pounds from eating pasta, as Liz did,  and I doubt if I'd be coming back with a Brazilian husband. 

Anybody out there read it? What did you think?