To start with I must apologise for being so late in posting this month’s blog. Two things have got in the way. The birth of a granddaughter. And the need to clear things out of the way before starting to write the 50,000 word novel for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo). I’ve tried to do this in the past, but have never managed to complete the requisite 50,000 words. I’m determined this year. I’ve sorted out the beginning and end and roughly what needs to take place between them. You are allowed to do that before November starts according to www.NaNoWriMo.org . But you may not write one word of the novel itself.
However, back to September. Having recovered from travelling round New Zealand in a campervan for three and a half weeks in August, I started reading again with a vengeance.
I’ll start with the Non-Fiction. Douglas Palmer’s Seven million years was all about the evolution of Homo sapiens from his ape forebears to the present form of the species. It’s a fascinating book with plenty of good illustrations. After that I read Vook’s rather simple How to Draw People. But then, I need that sort of guidebook. And followed it up with Life in Cape Town by various denizens of the city. This gave a lot less than it offered.
To make up for that, however, I read Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Alfroxden Journals edited by Pamela Woof. William Wordsworth the poet should have an acknowledgement to his sister Dorothy not only on the back of the Title page, but also at the top of just about every poem he wrote. Her eyes saw things first and he then wrote about them. Apologies to all Wordsworth fans out there. But just read the journals and you’ll see what I mean. I’ve always loved John Donne’s poetry and have even read some of his sermons when they’ve been included in collections of his works. David L Edwards’s biography of him, John Donne, man of flesh and spirit made me want to read every one of his sermons as well as re-read all his poetry. It’s a wonderful portrait of the man and his age. In the second half of the 19th century Mikhail Bulgakov, qualified as a doctor and spent the first year of his qualified life deep in the Russian countryside. He recorded this experience in A Country Doctor’s Notebook.
William Fiennes’ brilliant autobiographical The Music Room is a superb and entertaining read, giving the reader the chance to see what life was like for a child living in a castle that was visited by the public. A book that is not necessarily to everyone’s taste is St Cuthbert, History, Cult and his community to AD 1200. It explores through a series of detailed and highly academic papers near enough everything related to the late 7th century saint, from his death right up to the establishment of the monastic community in Durham. It’s well worth reading a chapter at a time.
The last of my non-fiction books is about forced marriage. In Sold Zana Muhsen tells the story of how her Yemeni father in Britain sold her and her sister to Yemeni families as brides and her desperate struggle to escape from there. It brings tears to your eyes and anger to your heart.
Now for Fiction. Ann H Gebhart’s The Outsider is about a shaker community in 18th century America and how it struggles to force a girl/young woman to stay in it rather than join with the local doctor who she has fallen in love with. In the end she gets her man, but not without adventures. Vicento Blasco Ibanez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the extraordinary story of a Brazilian family with connections to both Germany and France with the result that two brothers end up fighting on opposite sides during the First World War. JR Tomlin’s Freedom Sword is all about the 12th century history of Scotland when the Scots fought the English King Edward I was trying to occupy it as his own territory.
Freedom Sword
J R Tomlin
Smashwords, 2011; iii + 272
ISBN:
This is an historical novel set at a time of crisis in late 13th century Scotland. King Alexander has died without an heir and so the English king Edward has been asked to judge between two contenders for the throne. His choice is John Balliol.
The story starts in 1296 with Balliol’s Scottish army trying to stop an English advance. Andrew de Moray and his father are in a unit trapped by the English. They are wounded and taken captive. Balliol, in another action, is also taken captive but he is made to renounce the Scottish throne in favour of King Edward.
The Scottish prisoners are shackled and made to march south under heavy guard. When they reach Chester, King Edward orders Lord Lacey to keep Andrew de Moray prisoner on his behalf. He is locked in a dungeon where there is no light and is only given water and food in small quantities at irregular intervals. In the dark he manages to work a stone loose from the wall. When the guard next comes in, Andrew kills him with the stone, steals his clothes and manages to escape with a horse. He heads east rather than the north his captors expect him to go. In the end he reaches Elgin where his uncle is dean of the Cathedral. The monks treat a wound and help get him back to health. Then the English arrive and Andrew is smuggled out of the Cathedral to a leprosarium which the English soldiery will never dare to enter.
He makes his way back to his father’s lands which have been over run by the English. He hides in a cave with friends. With help from his uncle and some Elgin lay brothers they ambush an English supply train and capture an important English pennant which they can misuse to confound other English troops they come across. Then they take his father’s castle of Avoch from the English and use it as a base to recruit and train an army of peasants leavened with a few proper knights. They stockpile arms for this gathering army.
Over time, Andrew’s forces steadily re-conquer the principal castles of NE Scotland from the English. While all this has been going on in NE Scotland, William Wallace has been similarly active against the English in SW Scotland. Andrew and Wallace meet and coordinate their activities. At Stirling, on 11th September 1297, the Scottish army defeated the English. But the hero of this book, Andrew de Moray, is so badly wounded that he dies.
The Appendices to this novel are useful and very helpful. The map on page 294 shows the effectiveness of a well-designed and simple map. It is a model I wish more cartographers would follow.
Niccolo Ammaniti’s Me and You is the sad story of a brother and half-sister in Italy.
Me and You
Niccolo Ammaniti
Translated by Kylee Doust
Canongate, 2010; v + 156
ISBN: g978-0-85786-197-9
The main part of this novel is set in Rome in 2000. It is framed by two short sections set in Guidale del Friuli in 2010.
The narrative starts with Lorenzo in Guidale del Friuli holding a piece of paper his half-sister Olivia gave him on 24th February 2000 when he was 14 and she 23.
In 2000 Lorenzo is a troubled child who lives entirely in his own dream world. He is alienated from all the other pupils at school and has been from a very young age. His parents, very worried by this, have sent him to psychiatrists top unravel his problems. But it hasn’t worked. It’s just that, at secondary school, he can hide his alienation more effectively.
You can imagine his mother’s joy when he tells her he’s been invited by a school ‘friend’ (real) to go skiing with her family for a week. She can’t do enough for him. However, the skiing trip – while real – doesn’t involve him as he’s invented the invitation. Instead, he plans on spending the week in the family’s store room in their apartment block’s basement. He has a bed, TV, radio and food and drink supplies. His mother phones any number of times asking to speak to his friend’s mother. Only every time he says she’s otherwise occupied. After a couple of days his mother starts to get a bit suspicious.
In the middle of the night Lorenzo is woken by his sister Olivia breaking into the store room. She is high on drugs she has bought after having sex in a car park with a man for money. She lies on a couch and sleeps to start with. Lorenzo feeds her. The truth is that she is a drug addict who has decided to go cold turkey after the experience with the man in the car park. After two terrible days she tells Lorenzo to get some sleeping tablets so she can sleep through the withdrawal symptoms. He manages to get some from his grandmother’s bag. But he is unable to get back into the basement without being seen for ages. By then, Olivia has ransacked the furniture and clothes stored in the room and found something that will serve as a sleeping pill. When she has recovered from the withdrawal symptoms, Lorenzo persuades her to pretend to be his friend’s mother the next time his mother phones. That keeps her happy for the rest of the skiing week.
Lorenzo and Olivia talk at length about their families because they haven’t seen each other for years. She really hates their father which is the main reason he has seen her so rarely. Eventually they go to sleep. When Lorenzo wakes Olivia has gone. She leaves him a sheet of paper saying that she can’t cope with goodbyes. She also promises him that she will never take drugs again.
The novel ends in 2010 in Guidale del Friuli where he has an appointment. He is taken to the morgue to identify Olivia who has died in a bar from a drug overdose.
This is a well written (or should that be well translated?) novel that keeps you reading right to the end. I just wish I knew more about what happened to Lorenzo in the ten years between the two dates of the action. Will we ever learn more?
Vassily Grossman’s Forever Flowing is a strange soviet novel in which the bulk of the text is given over to criticising, if not damning, the whole of the soviet social and economic structure. It’s a fascinating book and a good follow up to Life and Fate, for those who’ve read it.
Donna McDonald’s Dating a Cougar is a good romance to read in the autumn evenings. Sylvia Day’s Catching Caroline is two short stories about vampire love. It’s very definitely a good and entertaining read. Myne Whitman’s A heart to mend is another good modern romance as is Lucy Kevin’s Sparks Fly. Justine Elyot’s Erotic Amusements is a good story mainly about corruption and human exploitation.
Erotic Amusements
Justine Elyot
Carina Press, 2011; vi + 192
ASIN: B005CRQ41S
The focus of this novel is corruption, how deeply embedded it can become in a small seaside town called Goldsands and how the innocent can be drawn in.
Flipp is a pretty girl without a family, background or references whop is employed by Charles Cordwainer to man the kiosk in an amusement arcade. He has numerous businesses in the town, knows everyone who is anyone, and has designs on developing a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Flipp meets Rocky when he comes to the arcade. He does all sorts of odd jobs for Cordwainer and warns Flipp about him and tells her to get another job. They enjoy each other’s company and end up falling in love.
In another part of the town, Michelle and her husband once owned a B & B which Cordwainer has now bought. She runs it during the day for him but is required to do other services for him at night. He calls her Miss Object when she is tied down to a table and caned in front of town worthies meeting in a room above the amusement arcade. They all also have sex with her afterwards. Cordwainer then gives Michelle to Councillor Trewin for him to treat her as he wishes.
Michelle meets a journalist on the local paper and, after discovering that he has already discovered a lot about the corruption in Goldsands gives him some detailed information about Charles Cordwainer. His editor refuses to touch it without concrete evidence to back up what he says. Michelle eventually provides this and the story is published, much to the discomfort of Cordwainer.
Rocky and Flipp, warned about the article, go into hiding in a campsite. Michelle also goes there to hide. However, the man Rocky has asked to provide a boat for them to go to France with, has told Cordwainer. So when they go to escape in the boat, Cordwainer’s men as well as the police are there to catch them. Cordwainer is shot but not killed. Rocky is wounded. And Flipp finds herself taken by a metropolitan policeman who had her in his abusive care for three years before she managed to escape.
Finally, all comes good. Rocky and Flipp get together for good. Laura disowns her father when the truth about his involvement with Cordwainer’s sex group emerges as well as his ownership of Michelle. And the Met officer gets his just deserts.
I really enjoyed this well-written book. It is no ordinary romance. With all its twists and turns, the story you hooked from page one and never lets go until the last page.
Joely Sue Burkhart’s Golden is a short novel inspired by a Chinese original that keeps your attention from beginning to end.
Golden
Joely Sue Burkhart
Carina Press, 2011; iv + 68
ISBN: 978-14268-9214-1
Two ideas lie at the centre of this novella set in China: friendship and loyalty. It starts with a woman with amber eyes who, from the age of about 8, had been trained to please the Emperor in whatever way he chose. When she first came to court he had gifted her to his oldest son as a wife. Her husband preferred other women to her right from the start of their marriage and so there were no children.
The woman at the centre of this story had a mentor called General Wan. Before she came to court he had trained her to the highest level in sword and bow and in court etiquette. He had also provided her with some secret knowledge about the emperor. Before the emperor reached the throne, he and his close friend, General Wan, had been fighting a war. On one occasion they won a battle but lost many of their own men. The Emperor was grief stricken by this. In the end he took out his rage on a woman by beating her severely with a leather strap and then having violent sex with her. His conscience made him reward her generously. At the same time, he sent General Wan to govern at the edges of the empire.
The woman, who ended up as wife of the oldest son, had also been trained to withstand considerable pain. After a time she learned to gain pleasure from it.
She came to his attention in the court because of her kindness to her servants. He asked her to come and talk to him once a week because she was clever and this entertained him. Their relationship slowly develops and they start to have sex. She then suggests he beat her. And things go on from there. Meanwhile, her husband has become incandescently jealous of her. He believes she is being unfaithful to him and that she won’t reveal who her partner is. He takes her down to the punishment courtyard and orders his men to savagely whip her until she reveals her partner. The Emperor intervenes, but not before she has been badly injured.
The empress and her son, the current heir, as well as her husband plot to kill the woman. Luckily for her, she is able to use the weapon training she received as a girl and ends up alive while her enemies are all dead. The Emperor ends up marrying her.
This lovely story is based on a Tang Dynasty (AD 618 – 907) tale. The Tang period is the Golden Age of Chinese poetry and a high point for short story fiction. If this story is anything to go by, let’s have lots more of them rewritten in English.
I really enjoyed Janet Mullany’s Tell me more about the trouble a radio presenter gets into as a result of phone conversations when she is on air.
Tell me more
Janet Mullany
Spice, 2011; vi + 339
ISBN: 978-0-373-60558-3
This is the story of Jo Hutchinson who presents a late night programme of classical music on the local radio station. The story starts with her parting from her ex-boyfriend and meeting Patrick who is to become the tenant of part of her house.
At the radio station she has regular quiet phone conversations with a Mr D while the music is playing. These start out innocently enough, discussing the music. But over time they become more intimate and, ultimately, end up with mutual masturbation over the phone lines. She agrees to meet Mr D and is drawn into a complicated love life involving orgies, mutual stimulation and voyeurism. She sort of enjoys all this and signs a contract with an innocent sounding Association which is the cover name for a sophisticated sex club.
Then she and Patrick spend a weekend skiing and fall in love. She tells Mr D that she wants to leave the Association. He reminds her that to do so is problematic as she will have to pay £10,000.
She and Patrick attend a formal dinner organised by the Association. Everyone wears a mask. What Jo and Patrick don’t know is that they are the entertainment for the evening. They retire to bed in the room they have been given and have uninhibited sex. The others watch through two-way mirrors. Patrick discovers this and storms out. Jo thinks she has lost him forever and is extremely upset not only about this but also because she thinks Mr D and the Association have lied to her.
After a misunderstanding, Patrick storms up to the radio station while Jo is on air. They have a furious row which involves some explicit sexual content. This is accidentally broadcast.
At home, Jo gets a legalistic letter from the Association demanding £10,000 if she leaves. She manages to get Patrick to help her respond to it. He writes an appropriately worded response and demands a meeting to discuss the matter. As a result, the Association lets Jo leave without having to pay their penalty.
Jo’s friend Kimberley leaves the radio station to work raising money for a local shelter. She asks Jo to join them to deal with the media and marketing. Which she does. Jo doesn’t realise that Patrick helps them out with free legal advice. Then she goes home, strips naked, lies on her bed and phones Patrick, starting a new phone conversation like the one she had with Mr D …….
The story is told in good, literate English. Descriptions of buildings and the landscape are excellent, as it the scene setting. The multitude of twists and turns lead you all over the place. And, best of all, it is only at the end that you realise that the nice Mr D of the beginning is actually pretty evil. Patrick, on the other hand, …..
Claude Lambert’s On Pets and Men is a very entertaining collection of very short stories which focus on animals. H G ‘Buzz’ Bernard’s Eyewall is very definitely a different kettle of fish. It’s a real adventure story/thriller with a bit of romance on the side.
Eyewall
H W ‘Buzz’ Bernard
Bell Bridge Books, 2011; vi + 232
ISBN: 978-1611940015
If you didn’t know the detailed mechanics of a hurricane before opening this book, you certainly will by the time you close it. The story tracks the crew of a Hercules C-130 that is sent to fly through a Category 1 Hurricane in order to collect meteorological data. The pilot – a reservist who loves nothing more than flying - is on his last flight because his wife has forced him into resigning. The flight should be completely routine and he should be home in time for his daughter’s birthday. However, a meteorologist at a local TV station has noticed some anomalies on satellite photos and realises that the hurricane is going to be much more powerful than currently predicted and that its landfall will be on the Georgia coast rather than where originally suggested. He goes on air to warn about the coming threat and suggests evacuation in areas not currently under compulsory evacuation orders. The station owner is furious at this and sacks him on the spot. He and a female colleague leave the station and talk about what he’s seen.
Data fed to the hurricane centre from the Hercules show that the TV prediction of a Category 5 Hurricane and its revised landfall are correct. The plane gets trapped inside the eye of the hurricane after it loses the tip of a wing and then two out of its four engines fail. The meteorologists are recalled to the TV station after having been promised reinstatement and increased salaries.
As a result of the earlier broadcast people along the Georgia coast and the very low lying island of St Simon have already started evacuating inland. One family on the island is waiting for the oldest daughter to return from a date, only she has got trapped. They set off in their car, rescue her and then discover that the sea has surged and cut off all causeways to the mainland. Trapped themselves, they go to the highest point on the island, the airfield. In the howling wind and rain they are very surprised to see a Hercules landing on the runway. It’s the only chance the pilot has to save his crew. They rescue the family. Then they see a man and woman holding a baby. The pilot and co-pilot go out into the hurricane to rescue them. In the end the co-pilot is killed and the pilot injured, though the baby is saved.
There are happy endings for the co-pilot and the on-board meteorologist and the two weather forecasters on the TV station who also force the owner to formally reinstate them and increase their salaries.
The way this book is organised in time sections helps make the whole story gallop along. It is, in any case, an excellent thriller with romance thrown in for good measure.
I only read a few murder-mysteries and thrillers this month. I can’t think what is coming over me! To start with, Sheila Quigley’s Living on a prayer is a captivating police-procedural in which a fake religious group is investigated and found seriously wanting. It involves grooming young teenagers, sex and murder. All the fears of a parent. Philip Kerr’s A Quiet Flame follows the further career of Bernie Gunther’s career solving crimes and murders in the Third Reich. I am, I’m afraid addicted to this series of books, largely because I love Gunther’s way of thinking and doing things. And last of all, Martha Perry’s Hide in Plain Sight a clever suspense combined with romance.
Friday 4 November 2011
Friday 23 September 2011
August 2011 books
OK. So I'm late with August's books. I'm sorry about this, but I was in NZ touring that wonderful country in a campervan. It's the only way. Luxury it ain't, but the freedom to stop and look at things makes up for it.
To start with Non-fiction. David Miles's The Tribes of Britain is a superb book that is especially good on prehistory, Roman and Anglo-Saxon/Norman Britain. It makes you stop and think quite hard. I suppose I ought to include Lonely Planet's guide to New Zealand. Well-thumbed and dripping with scraps of paper collected as we went round the country. And an excellent book of road maps. Can't get anywhere without either of the latter.
So now for Historical Fiction. Philippa Gregory's The White Queen is yet another excellent exploration of the place of women in English society; how a woman from a non-noble background became Edward IV's queen. She has explored the place of women in Tudor England and is now focussing on the preceding century. CJ Samon's Heartstone continues the career of his hunchback lawyer with his side kick, Barak, and friend, moorish physician, Guy. Susanna Gregory wrote A Murder on London Bridge in which events take place in London during the Restoration. In Edward Marston's The King's Evil has two religious opponents solving yet more murders. To jump to the Twentieth Century, CJ Sansom's A Winter in Madrid is focussed on the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939)and makes the reader think about the intentions of some of the major participants on both sides.
I'm not quite sure where to place Lee Langley's Butterfly's Shadow. The author has continued the story of the opera Madame Butterfly. If you remember the heroine commits suicide at the end of the opera. In this book, a friend manages to rescue her before she dies. She continues to live in Nagasaki and becomes a successful business woman. The child that Pinkerton took away with him when he returned to America grows up not knowing about her until after his father's death when his stepmother tells him about Butterfly, with whom she has been in secret correspondence for all these years. The child is in the US Army during World War II and, because he is fluent in Japanese, is seconded as a translator to Tokyo. On a day off he goes to Nagasaki to see if he can find his mother. Her good friend takes him to his mother's house and shows him round. When he asks about her, the friend shows him a shadow on a wall and says that is all that survives of her from the A-Bomb blast. His stepmother is greatly distressed when he decides not to return to America because he has met a Chinese-American girl, also a translator, is now a property owner as his mother's heir and hates the Americans because of the way they treated the USA-resident Japanese during the war.
Another twentieth century historical fiction is Simon Montefiore's Sashenka which follows the fate of a family from the Russian Revolution into the modern post-communist era. While Sashenka and her husband were executed by the KGB, their two children survived and, at the end of the book, are finally put in contact with each other. It's a brilliant book which draws heavily on historical evidence.
I only read a couple of normal fiction - if there is such a thing. Emma Donogue's Room. Is a staggering book about how a mother and her five year old son create a world of their own while living in the cellar of a house. She was trapped by a man who keeps her in pretty dismal conditions. In the end she and her son are rescued, but the psychologists are completely flummoxed by the world the child describes. He has no knowledge of the world outside the basement and is confused by what exists outside it. Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me is the story of a Roman Catholic priest in a deprived area who tries to understand the problems of the young people in his parish. Unfortunately he gets rather too close to them and, in the end is accused of abusing them in his innocence. And he is an innocent. And then, last of all, comes Scarlett Thomas's Our Tragic Universe. And Lynne Andrew's romance From this day forth.
The last books are a murder-mystery and two medical sci-fi novels. The murder mystery Sandra Brennan's Lot's return to Salem centres on a series of murders that have taken place in an area used for a huge motorbike rally. But it's not the bikers who dominate the novel who are the killers. The ending is much more surprising than that. I read two Thomas Hoover novels this month: Syndrome and Life Blood. He does like his future extensions of current medical ideas. The novels are great fun to read.
And, while I read no poetry on my travels, I did read Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya.
To start with Non-fiction. David Miles's The Tribes of Britain is a superb book that is especially good on prehistory, Roman and Anglo-Saxon/Norman Britain. It makes you stop and think quite hard. I suppose I ought to include Lonely Planet's guide to New Zealand. Well-thumbed and dripping with scraps of paper collected as we went round the country. And an excellent book of road maps. Can't get anywhere without either of the latter.
So now for Historical Fiction. Philippa Gregory's The White Queen is yet another excellent exploration of the place of women in English society; how a woman from a non-noble background became Edward IV's queen. She has explored the place of women in Tudor England and is now focussing on the preceding century. CJ Samon's Heartstone continues the career of his hunchback lawyer with his side kick, Barak, and friend, moorish physician, Guy. Susanna Gregory wrote A Murder on London Bridge in which events take place in London during the Restoration. In Edward Marston's The King's Evil has two religious opponents solving yet more murders. To jump to the Twentieth Century, CJ Sansom's A Winter in Madrid is focussed on the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939)and makes the reader think about the intentions of some of the major participants on both sides.
I'm not quite sure where to place Lee Langley's Butterfly's Shadow. The author has continued the story of the opera Madame Butterfly. If you remember the heroine commits suicide at the end of the opera. In this book, a friend manages to rescue her before she dies. She continues to live in Nagasaki and becomes a successful business woman. The child that Pinkerton took away with him when he returned to America grows up not knowing about her until after his father's death when his stepmother tells him about Butterfly, with whom she has been in secret correspondence for all these years. The child is in the US Army during World War II and, because he is fluent in Japanese, is seconded as a translator to Tokyo. On a day off he goes to Nagasaki to see if he can find his mother. Her good friend takes him to his mother's house and shows him round. When he asks about her, the friend shows him a shadow on a wall and says that is all that survives of her from the A-Bomb blast. His stepmother is greatly distressed when he decides not to return to America because he has met a Chinese-American girl, also a translator, is now a property owner as his mother's heir and hates the Americans because of the way they treated the USA-resident Japanese during the war.
Another twentieth century historical fiction is Simon Montefiore's Sashenka which follows the fate of a family from the Russian Revolution into the modern post-communist era. While Sashenka and her husband were executed by the KGB, their two children survived and, at the end of the book, are finally put in contact with each other. It's a brilliant book which draws heavily on historical evidence.
I only read a couple of normal fiction - if there is such a thing. Emma Donogue's Room. Is a staggering book about how a mother and her five year old son create a world of their own while living in the cellar of a house. She was trapped by a man who keeps her in pretty dismal conditions. In the end she and her son are rescued, but the psychologists are completely flummoxed by the world the child describes. He has no knowledge of the world outside the basement and is confused by what exists outside it. Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me is the story of a Roman Catholic priest in a deprived area who tries to understand the problems of the young people in his parish. Unfortunately he gets rather too close to them and, in the end is accused of abusing them in his innocence. And he is an innocent. And then, last of all, comes Scarlett Thomas's Our Tragic Universe. And Lynne Andrew's romance From this day forth.
The last books are a murder-mystery and two medical sci-fi novels. The murder mystery Sandra Brennan's Lot's return to Salem centres on a series of murders that have taken place in an area used for a huge motorbike rally. But it's not the bikers who dominate the novel who are the killers. The ending is much more surprising than that. I read two Thomas Hoover novels this month: Syndrome and Life Blood. He does like his future extensions of current medical ideas. The novels are great fun to read.
And, while I read no poetry on my travels, I did read Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya.
Saturday 30 July 2011
July 2011 books
It's been a pretty good month for reading. Quite a lot of non-fiction. I started with Mary Kingsley's classic explorer's account of West Africa in 1893, Travels in West Africa. I followed this up with EAW Budge's edition of the ancient Egyptian The Book of the Dead. After that came Frederick Martin's rather old The Life of John Clare. But Julie Summer's Stranger in the House made up for that. It explores the problems families had at the end of World War II when soldiers returned following demob or, importantly, from German or Japanese POW camps. Some parts almost reduce you to tears when you find out what the families had to deal with, without any support. The last of this group of books was Michael Charry's biography of the master conductor George Szell:
As for fiction, if I start with historical novels, they span many years. The earliest was Susanna Gregory's A Masterly Murder which had Matthew Bartholomew solving the usual mayhem of late 14th century Cambridge. A great jump to the 18th century led to Christopher Waklin's The Devil's Mask set in Bristol:
The last historical novel I read this month was Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis which explored aspects of the brutal Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939).
I indulged the softer parts of myself by reading a few romances this month. I can say without a doubt that I enjoyed them all. First came Linda Goodnight's A very special delivery,then Michelle Reid's Mias Scandal and, finally, Liz Fielding's The Bride's Baby.
OK. Now for the grizzly end of the business: the murder-mysteries and thrillers. I do love a bit of blood and guts, to be honest. But not too often or too much. They are all set in the 20th century. I really enjoyed John F Dobbyn's Black Diamond not only because it is well-written, but because it draws attention to the link between American-Irish and the more extreme, underground, elements of the IRA in Ireland today. Philip Kerr's The One from the Other follows his German hero from post-war Germany to Argentina after his identity has been compromised by a war-criminal. Mark Terry's The Valley of Shadows is about extreme Islamist attacks on the USA on the eve of a Presidential election.
I have to admit to reading some sci-fi this month. I am still trying to come to terms with David Nickle's Eutopia.
I feel very guilty about reading no poetry this month - unless you count The Book of the Dead, which I don't. So that is an omission I shall have to make good next month.
George Szell: a life of music
Michael Charry
University of Illinois Press, Urbana; 2011; xxii + 434
The focus of this book is the rise of the Cleveland Orchestra from a second rate one to a world-renowned orchestra between 1946 and 1970, the years George Szell was in charge. OK. We learn about how Szell, born in 1897, was a prodigy, how he studied composition, music theory and the piano in Vienna at the age of 6. He was 11 on his debut as pianist/composer. At the age of 15 he had a ten year composition contract with Universal Editions. He had his conducting debut a mere two years later and was an assistant conductor to Richard Strauss between 1915 and 1917. In fact, Strauss thought highly of him and unsuccessfully tried to get him appointed his assistant in Vienna when he was appointed chief conductor there. In 1920 Szell married Olga Band who he divorced six years later. He spent most of the years between 1920 and 1939 conducting orchestras in Berlin, Prague and Holland. In 1937 and 1938 he toured Australia, conducting Australian orchestras. He married his second wife, Helene Schultz Teltsch in 1939. In that year they went to New York. He taught composition and advanced theory at the Mannes School of Music (which is where the author of this biography teaches). He was a guest conductor for various orchestras between 1941 and 1946 as well as having a contract as principal conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1946 he was appointed Musical Director of the Cleveland Orchestra and remained with it until his death 24 years later in 1970.
We learn quite a lot about how Szell developed musically up to about 1939. It would have been interesting to learn more about the relationship between Szell and Richard Strauss because they seem to have admired one another and worked well together. His marriage to Olga Band is scarcely touched upon in the biography. We are not told why. Is it because there is a dearth of papers, letters or diaries for that period. Or was it done by Charry out of respect for Szell’s second wife, Helene? There is certainly a lot of documentary evidence for his tours of Australia which is used extensively in the book. And some of it – in particular, Szell’s opinion of Australian orchestras; and vice versa - makes quite amusing reading.
The real trouble with this biography starts once Szell and Helene get to New York in 1939. Behind a lot of the musical information lies the hint of a struggle to live in a new country. But we are left to guess at what their life was like. He taught at the Mannes School. But we don’t know what his colleagues or students thought of him, both as a man and as a teacher. What sort of social life did they have? What sort of communication did they have with friends and relatives left behind in Europe? In fact, we learn scarcely anything about George Szell’s own family. I can’t even remember there being a mention of brothers or sisters! And his two wives exist in the same limbo, except that Helene had had a previous marriage with two sons who were left behind in Europe. And only one of the sons survived to come to America in 1945. There is a whole story there. Only you won’t find it in this biography. To be honest, the reader really wants to know about the women the subject of the biography marries. Who were they? Their interests? Family? Background? And we get none of this. There are almost certainly letters and diaries hidden away in the Szell archive which would open our eyes. What about Szell’s relationship with his stepson? Nothing.
From 1946 right up to Szell’s death in 1970, the biography is truly a biography of the Cleveland Orchestra. The reader learns just about nothing about his private life, except for blunt statements about going on holiday after Charry has provided pages of detailed descriptions of most of the concerts Szell conducted during the preceding season. While I haven’t counted, there must be hundreds of concert programmes listed with selections from press reviews from time to time. Szell raised the Cleveland Orchestra from a second rate orchestra to a world-beater. And yet we learn relatively little about how he actually did it, except that in the first couple of years he encouraged certain players to leave and encouraged others to join. He taught the orchestra members to listen to what everyone else in the orchestra was doing at all times, which was one of the characteristics of the Cleveland under his baton. Where did he learn this? Or was it his own idea? There is quite a bit of Orchestra politics from time to time. I wondered whether this was all necessary.
If you are looking for a biography that tells you something about the social man, his friends and family with stories about episodes in his life, then this not the book for you, I’m afraid. I even wonder how much it tells you about him as a musician. Except that he was incredibly hard working all his life.
I suppose Joseph Frank’s 5-volume biography about Dostoevsky’s life and works has set an incredibly high standard for learning about the lives of prominent people. He gives the reader a chapter describing a period of Dostoevsky’s life; the following chapter discusses his work in the same period. By doing this he is able to link life and work intimately. This method keeps the reader engaged from start to finish. And I think a similar approach to George Szell’s life would have provided the reader with a rounded picture of the man.As for fiction, if I start with historical novels, they span many years. The earliest was Susanna Gregory's A Masterly Murder which had Matthew Bartholomew solving the usual mayhem of late 14th century Cambridge. A great jump to the 18th century led to Christopher Waklin's The Devil's Mask set in Bristol:
The Devil’s mask
Christopher Wakling
Faber and Faber, London; 2011; vi + 312
ISBN: 978-0-571-23922-1
This superb novel is about the lengths people will go to in order to conceal their wrongdoings. At its heart is the cargo of the ship Belsize which has just docked in Bristol port.
Inigo Bright qualified as an attorney to work in Bristol just six months before the story starts. He belongs to a merchant family; his three brothers work for his father’s company. His father definitely looks down on Inigo for abandoning the family business. Sometimes the company funds whole ships and sometimes only buys a share in a ship. This is the case in the most recent voyage of the Belsize. While the action is focussed on the Belsize and its investors, it takes place all over Bristol and, briefly, in Bath. The shareholders in the last voyage were only interested in making a profit and didn’t care how it was done.
Adam Carthy the lawyer who Inigo works for, has been asked to audit the Dock accounts to establish which ships and companies have failed to pay their customs dues over the past few years. Very quickly, Inigo becomes aware that there was something not right about the Belsize’s last voyage. At the same time mutilated bodies of three black people are found still with manacles attached to them. This is surprising as slavery was abolished some time ago in Britain. Then a black seaman – Blue – steps in to help Inigo. He was on the last voyage of the Belsize and tells him that some slaves were carried in a concealed deck. At this point Carthy is kidnapped and Inigo is warned off any further investigation. Soon after that, Inigo and Blue go to Bath to interview one of the ship’s officers. Only they are taken and kept in prison by a corrupt Bristol judge.
Eventually the truth emerges about the illegal slavery, but Inigo is stripped of hiss right to work as an attorney in Bristol. Carthy’s kidnapper turns out to have been his own father who also kept one of the illegally imported slaves in the same dungeon under his house.
This is a good story, well told. I keeps your attention right to the very end as the twists and turns are surprising. A humorous, and recurrent theme in the novel is the problem Inigo has in controlling his unruly hair.
At the opposite end of the country, in Northumberland, the problems of keeping secret the dangerous herb garden of an apothecary and his daughter leads to all sorts of problems in the household. That is from Maryrose Wood's The Poison Diaries. There is a link to the poison garden at Alnwick Castle which the present Duchess of Northumberland has developed. Rosalind Brackenbury's brilliant Becoming George Sand moves effortlessly between modern Edinburgh and 19th century France.
Becoming George Sand
Rosalind Brackenbury
Mariner Books, NY; 2009; xii + 296
ISBN: 978-0-547-37054-5
The first thing to say about this novel is that it is smoothly written. There are no spare words. Nor are there any inappropriate words to interrupt the flow of the story. In fact, the text is beautiful. The story flows effortlessly from beginning to end and carries the reader with it. The sheer quality of writing makes me want to find other books Rosalind Brackenbury has written.
This is the story of an academic couple who live in Edinburgh and teach at the university there. He is a scientist with a particular interest in the flora and fauna of the Mediterranean. She teaches French. They live in a large house with their two children. So far, so good. So normal.
Maria has always been interested in George Sand. On one visit to Paris she bought her diaries. Well, five of the six volumes. In an Edinburgh bookshop she buys another book and orders the letters between Sand and Flaubert. While her book is being wrapped, a handsome young man walks in. They chat briefly and decide to go for a coffee. He is a scientist researching the human immunity system. This meeting leads to an affair. Meeting and making love in her spare room in the afternoons before the children get back from school. She sort of wonders how the affair between George Sand and Chopin began. Was it as innocently as hers? Isn’t this how many affairs begin? A chance meeting?
Maria reads the account of the affair between Sand and Chopin and how they go to stay on Majorca for a time in the hope that Chopin’s TB will improve. In those days you caught the returning cattle boat from Barcelona to Majorca. There they rent a house that is completely unsuitable for any of them. They move up to live in rooms in an abandoned monastery. Chopin pines for a decent piano to help him compose. After some months they return to Sand’s country house. By then the affair was over sexually but they remained close friends and companions.
Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, Maria and her husband decide to go to Majorca for a fortnight. She wants to track George Sand and Chopin’s movements there. He wants to begin his part of a collaborative research project. At the end of the holiday, he tells Maria that he knows she is having an affair.
When they return to Edinburgh he leaves the house for an apartment he has found. He also goes to see a clinical psychologist. The children are stunned by the separation, but soon get used to having separate lives with each of their parents. Maria’s affair stumbles to an end. She now concentrates on reading and researching her book on George Sand. The children resume their normal lives. Who said that children are soft, sensitive beings? Some say all they need for a full life is food, TV and a computer. Oh, and a mobile phone. Over time the children bring increasing numbers of their friends to the house. Maria never knows who is in or out. Just that there is a heap of coats and shoes at the front door. When she cooks, she feeds everyone who is in the house at that time. It is the picture of a relaxed, happy household.
In the summer a friend in France who is a novelist and her translator, invites her to stay for a couple of weeks at her cottage in the country. The advantage of it is that George Sand’s own country house is not far away and so she will have known the countryside there. The attraction is obvious. She gets her husband to stay in the house with the children while she is away. She has a wonderful time exploring the area and being with her friends. She is, however, aware that something is wrong with her friend. A few months later, she is called to Paris to see her friend who is in hospital, terminally ill. She visits her briefly because that is all her friend can cope with. She and her friend’s husband start to sort through her papers because they have been named her literary executors. They find papers and books either completed or almost completed and plan how to arrange publication.
When she returns from Paris her husband has cooked a special meal for her. They eat and talk and realise that they still belong together. Once the children have gone to bed, they, too, go to bed. He leaves in the early hours before the children wake. They have to plan their recombination carefully. I loved this book and wished it had been twice as long.
I indulged the softer parts of myself by reading a few romances this month. I can say without a doubt that I enjoyed them all. First came Linda Goodnight's A very special delivery,then Michelle Reid's Mias Scandal and, finally, Liz Fielding's The Bride's Baby.
OK. Now for the grizzly end of the business: the murder-mysteries and thrillers. I do love a bit of blood and guts, to be honest. But not too often or too much. They are all set in the 20th century. I really enjoyed John F Dobbyn's Black Diamond not only because it is well-written, but because it draws attention to the link between American-Irish and the more extreme, underground, elements of the IRA in Ireland today. Philip Kerr's The One from the Other follows his German hero from post-war Germany to Argentina after his identity has been compromised by a war-criminal. Mark Terry's The Valley of Shadows is about extreme Islamist attacks on the USA on the eve of a Presidential election.
The Valley of Shadows
Mark Terry
Oceanview Publishing, Florida; 2011; viii + 296
ISBN: 978-1-933515-94-6
This is a novel in which the development of the characters is sacrificed to the incredibly fast-paced action. At times it almost seems to read as a screen play rather than a novel. The subject is an Al-Qaeda attack on the USA on or immediately before the day of a Presidential election.
The story starts in Islamabad in Pakistan when a joint FBI/Pakistan team surround and take an apartment. In the fire-fight four Islamic martyrs are killed and fifth wounded. The sixth man – Kalakar –who was supposed to be there, escaped after receiving a warning text message. Laptops in the apartment contain deliberately misleading information, apart from the booby-trapped one which explodes and kills an FBI agent when he picks it up. The question of who gave the warning to Kalakar is posed in this opening chapter but is not answered until the very end of the novel. Somehow this is central to the story, and it would have been helpful in tying the story more firmly to Pakistan if there had been intermittent references to it.
In the USA a team from FBI/Home Security and other security forces has just completed a dummy exercise dealing with threatened terrorist attacks. Suddenly they get a report of a bomb going off in Dallas and are mobilised to work in small teams. Early the next morning a suicide bomber walks in to Chicago Airport when there are very few people about and detonates his vest. He is the only casualty. By this time the security teams are reaching their locations around the country. The one the novel follows has been assigned to California, in particular, Los Angeles.
The team traces through the LA underworld and picks up clues about various individuals who might be dealing in bombs and small nuclear devices. They leave a trail of bodies behind them. They realise, however, that the imam of a particular mosque is communicating with radical elements in the Muslim community. These include the Vice Consul of Pakistan whose offices are on the floor above that of an Entertainment Lawyers’ office. The lawyers are predominantly Pakistani.
To cut to the final chase, Kalakar has been armed through the imam including a Stinger ground-to-air missile. He stays with an acquaintance who is an air traffic controller at LA airport. He has persuaded him to tell him the flight path and best place for visual contact with the ice-Presidential jet that will fly in on the day before elections. John Seddiqi fails to do as he was told. Kalakar kidnaps his child and tells him to repeat the exercise the day following when the Governor’s plane is due. If he fails again, his daughter will be killed.
FBI have managed to identify Kalakar and are chasing him as hard as possible but are never quite close enough. In the end, on election day, Kalakar meets John’s wife, who he kills; the daughter escapes while he struggles to arm and launch the missile. As he is aiming it, two agents arrive and open fire. Seriously wounded as he is, Kalakar does manage to launch the missile before expiring. The airplane pilot is warned and, having been a fighter pilot knows what to do, takes successful evasive action.
Meanwhile, in Washington four suicide bombs have gone off in the airport with devastating effects. I can’t quite see thee point of this episode. There is nothing leading up to it. Nor is there any aftermath. It just happens out of the bl;ue and then it’s back to the real story.
The true conclusion is that two prominent generals in Pakistan, one with the President’s ear, are identified as the overall organisers of the attacks on the USA. Justice is meted out without recourse to the law courts.
OK. It’s an Al-Qaeda novel. The link with Pakistan is good. The shenanigans in LA are a bit over the top. But at least the slowly building romance between the two key FBNI players is conventional. As in a James Bond 007 movie.
I loved L J Sellers's The sex club not just because it is well plotted, but because it addresses up-to-date ethical questions.
The Sex Club
LJ Sellers
Spellbinder Press, USA; 2007 – 2010; vi + 304 pp
eISBN: 978-0-9795182-0-1
This is a delightfully complex novel. At its heart is extremism and terrorism. By a Christian group. There are three inter-connected strands that run through it. The first is the conflict between a group of people who work for Planned Parenthood and who give advice to teenagers on sex, STDs and abortion. They are strongly opposed in everything they do by a powerful Christian group, mainly drawn from the First Baptist Church. A second strand involves Ruth, a member of the protest group, who is so radical that she is prepared to bomb for her beliefs. The third strand is teenage rebellion which belongs to a group of teenagers who belong to TeenTalk a youth group attached to the First Baptist Church. And a fourth strand, that runs intermittently through the novel is the slow-growing love/attraction between Kera, a worker at Planned Parenthood and Detective Wade Jackson, a detective leading the team investigating deaths that are linked back to the other three strands.
Kera from Planned Parenthood treats Jessie for genital warts and suggests she think about forms of contraception. Next day, after Planned Parenthood has been bombed and a client has lost her life, Jessie is found murdered in a dumpster. Her parents are shocked to discover that she has been having sex with more than one man and that she is pregnant. They thought she was a pure Christian girl. Before the police investigation is really fully under way, Planned Parenthood workers receive anonymous letters denouncing what they do.
Kera decides to visit the local school that Jessie went to and to see if she can talk to the most sexually vulnerable group. The headteacher says they don’t do sex education, leaving all that stuff to parents. As Kera leaves the school, one of Jessie’s friends asks to talk to her. They briefly chat in Kera’s car and swap numbers. Next day that girl is found dead.
Detective Wade Jackson decides that the two murders are connected because both girls have been smothered and have relatively recently had sex.
Running in parallel with all this is the normal First Baptist Church activities involving adults. Long meetings with other groups some distance away. Bible Study groups, etc. Ruth is caught up in the middle of all this. She was the person who made and planted the first pipe bomb at Planned Parenthood. Having heard from her daughter about Kera and her interests in the dead girls she plants a car bomb on her car. While she is a church meeting, she goes outside and, by phone, detonates the bomb. Little does she know that her daughter and a friend have gone round to Kera’s to kill her because they believe she knows all about their sexual activities. Kera has just managed to escape their clutches and run out of the house when the car bomb goes off and one of the teenagers is killed.
The solutions to the three murders are pretty neat and very definitely surprising. So I can’t spoil them for the reader. Suffice it to say, this is a good read. The text is well-written and fast moving. And, in an action book, the characters are really well drawn. Go read it. And then read the following three Jackson murder-mysteries. Does he really get to marry Kera in the fourth novel? I hope so.
Maxie Mezcal's Concrete Underground is a pretty weird murder-mystery, but Leslie DuBois's Ain't no sunshine draws you in. Raymond Benson's The Black Stiletto draws you in, entangles you in its threads and spits you out at the end slightly confused but very satisfied.
The Black Stiletto: the first diary - 1958
Raymond Benson
Oceanview Publishing, Florida; 2011; xii + 268
ISBN: 978-1-60809-020-4
This novel starts in a fairly unpromising way. A son wonders what point there is in visiting his nursing-home-bound, Alzheimered mother. She’s a complete mystery to him, even though he is successful in his own life. Then he has a meeting with his uncle who hands him some keys and confirmation about where to look in his mother’s house that has been up for sale for the past two years. He has held this on his sister’s instructions until he decided it was time to hand it on to her son. He has no idea what lies behind the instructions or what the keys will lead to. He is just a dumb lawyer.
So the son goes to his mother’s house. There he finds a cleverly concealed small room in the basement. It contains some black leather suits, masks, capes, a whole collection of diaries that start in 1958, comic books, newspaper cuttings and books. And they are all about a murderous woman who called herself The Black Stiletto.
He starts to read the 1958 diary, hence the sub-title of the book. He learns that his mother’s father died when she was young, that her mother re-married and that, when Judy Cooper was 13, her stepfather raped her. She left home and made it to New York, having stolen her stepfather’s wages. She finds a boxing gym run by a man called Freddie, an ex-boxer. She asks him to teach her to box, but he refuses. In the end they come to a deal. She cleans the gym while the men are using it; he will teach her boxing in the evenings. And she can have a room in his apartment above the gym. He will never allow her to box his male clientele. She is a quick learner and becomes proficient in this sport. He then introduces her to a Japanese martial arts master who teaches her karate. She progresses from utter novice to black belt. She is still uncertain that she can deal with everything she might faced in the street and asks Freddie to introduce her to a man who can teach her how to fight with a knife. Freddie disapproves, but does find her an Italian named individual. Unfortunately, he is a member of a mafia mob. He insists on Judy living with him while he teaches her. They fall in love. One New Year’s Eve they attend his mafia boss’s party as guests. Then, during the following year he goes missing. Killed by the boss. The next New Year’s Eve party she gatecrashes the party and kills the boss and one of the pair of twins who are his close body guards. The other chases Judy and nearly catches her. But he is caught by the police who want him for a series of crimes that result in a 52-year sentence. Judy has begun to make a name for herself as The Black Stiletto who protects innocent members of the public from street robbers and thugs. She continues acting in this vein. And leaves messages with the papers every now and again. But we never learn why she gives up being The Black Stiletto.
The novel takes place 52 years after she first became The Black Stiletto. The twin who was sentenced to 52 years in prison is released from Sing Sing. He immediately sets out to find and kill Judy. But the old mafia network is no longer there. He has to track down separate members of the mob who lead him to her house. But there is no one there. And the house has obviously been standing empty for some time. And then tracks her down to the nursing home. She surprises everyone there, even though she has not spoken a word for two years nor sshown any signs of appreciating anything in the world about her for the same length of time.
I enjoyed this book. It is well plotted and has many surprising turns in it. It is set to be the first in a series of adventures by The Black Stiletto, I hope.
I feel very guilty about reading no poetry this month - unless you count The Book of the Dead, which I don't. So that is an omission I shall have to make good next month.
Wednesday 29 June 2011
June 2011 Books
Lets start with non-fiction. Umberto Eco wrote a brilliant book when he wrote Kant and the Platypus. It's all about how do we know we are seeing the same thing. Do the words we use to describe it mean the same to each of us? And a lot else besides. It really is quite fascinating. Then there was Ryan and Amy Hockney's 101 things you didn't know about Irish history. And they are absolutely correct in their title. How many English people really know anything about Ireland and it's incredible history? Xinran's China Witness is a collection of interviews with people who have lived in China since at least 1949 when it became a communist state under Chairman Mao. It really does show how different things were in China compared to the propaganda that we received. This book fits in with all her earlier books about China and the people who bear witness to its reality. And then I read E H Carr's Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881), an old (1931) biography of the writer which still has a lot to say both about the man and his writing. It was interesting to read a book that still regarded the Bolshevik revolution as something potentially positive! But Joseph Frank's 5-volume biography is still the last word in Dostoevsky matters. Cybill Sheperd and Aimee Lee Ball's autobiography Cybill Disobedience, about her life on stage and in film was OK, but nothing to write home about. And then came my treat of the month, a book I cannot praise highly enough. Anne Stewart O'Donnell's C S A Voysey.
CFA Voysey: Architect, Designer, Individualist
CFA Voysey: Architect, Designer, Individualist
Anne Stewart O’Donnell
Pomegranate Communications Inc., San Francisco; 2011; v + 104
ISBN: 978-0-7649-5884-7
This is not so much a book as a work of art between boards. More than that, the gorgeous illustration of a clock case on the front cover seduces you into opening the book. And you are hooked!
CFA Voysey was born in 1857. His father was an Anglican clergymen whose unorthodox views led to him being defrocked. Voysey’s grandfather – Anneiley – however, was an engineer-architect who built bridges, lighthouses and churches.
When he left school he trained in the office of Pollard Seddon between 1874 and 1879 and worked as an assistant for a further year. Seddon had close links with the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and Burne-Jones. Voysey then spent a year working with George Devey who used his deep knowledge of the vernacular in his designs.
In 1881 Voysey set up his own practice in 1881 by which time he had established two key principles for his designs. The first was that there should be no features about a building that are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety. The second was that all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building. In 1885 he married Mary Maria Evens and designed a house for them to live in. Only he couldn’t afford to build it. Nevertheless, he published the plans in 1888. Shortly after, Michael Lakin, a cement manufacturer, asked him to modify the design to fit his requirements for small houses for his workers.
Designing 14 South Parade led Voysey to believe that the architect must abandon any attempt at a preconceived style and design. Each house should be designed afresh based on the client’s fundamental needs. Voysey rose in importance in the early 1890s partly through his vigorous use of the press where he published photographs and drawings of his work.
By 1897 The Studio described him as not only a dreamer but as a practical and experienced architect ‘who will give you first a sanitary, substantial and comfortable house and in doing so …. [will] manage to make it a really artistic building at the same time.’ He looked to the house as being ‘the most peaceful, restful, simple servant we possess.’ Within the house he wanted to banish all small ornaments and to design furniture that used simple decoration to enhance the appearance of the whole item. He also looked to nature for colour combinations. Nevertheless, he used many visual puns in his designs. In houses these could include unexpected features such as grotesque masks or wickedly cheerful demonic profiles.
His last house commission was in 1911. The fashion had changed to the Georgian Revival. At the outbreak of the First World War he had three houses in an early stage of design that were never built.
In 1909 he turned down the offer of the Directorship of the Decorative Art Department in the Glasgow School of Art. This did not come out of the blue because he had joined the Art Workers Guild in 1884. In turn this led to the foundation of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. In turn, this movement developed into Art Nouveau.
From then on, things did not go well for Voysey. His father died in 1912. His marriage broke up in 1917 and by April 1918 he described himself as being ‘within measurable distance of the workhouse’. From then on he intermittently continued his design work for wallpapers and textiles. In the 1930s he designed some Alice in Wonderland wallpapers.
His prestige as architect and designer was, nevertheless, clear. In 1924 he was elected Head of the Art Workers Guild. In 1927 The Architect and Building News devoted a five-part series to his lifetime and accomplishments. Architecture Review sponsored an exhibition of his work in 1931. His last honour was the award of the prestigious Gold Medal by the RIBA in 1940.
The dense text of this book is most informative while still being eminently readable. Nearly all the illustrations have an extensive caption that expands on the main text. (Wendy Hitchbrough published a longer and more detailed account of his life in CFA Voysey in 1997.)
It is the illustrations that make this book come alive. 65 of the 89 are of his work. They are presented at such a scale in such vivid colour that they tell the reader a great deal about Voysey’s designs. Nearly all of them are drawn from the RIBA Library. The beautiful studio portrait facing the first page of Chapter One sets the incredibly high standard of the book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Historical fiction I've read this month includes J M Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg. It's the story of how Dosteovsky came to St Petersburg to deal with his stepson's affairs after the latter had committed suicide. He lives with his son's landlady and her daughter and beds the landlady. Once things have been settled, he leaves. You feel as though Coetzee is sort of exploring aspects of Dosteovsky's Crime and Punishment. I really enjoyed Gretchen Craig's Crimson Sky, historical fiction set in the late 16th century in Texas. It's a novel about contact between the Spanish and the native tribes and shows very clearly how each side not only viewed the other but also how they treated each other.
Historical fiction I've read this month includes J M Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg. It's the story of how Dosteovsky came to St Petersburg to deal with his stepson's affairs after the latter had committed suicide. He lives with his son's landlady and her daughter and beds the landlady. Once things have been settled, he leaves. You feel as though Coetzee is sort of exploring aspects of Dosteovsky's Crime and Punishment. I really enjoyed Gretchen Craig's Crimson Sky, historical fiction set in the late 16th century in Texas. It's a novel about contact between the Spanish and the native tribes and shows very clearly how each side not only viewed the other but also how they treated each other.
Crimson Sky
Gretchen Craig
G Craig, pub. 2010; iv + 247
ASIN: B00475AUEK
The novel is set in an adobe pueblo village in Texas during the 1590s. The village is placed on top of a mesa with its fields down below. The men are away hunting for meat to store for the winter. The Querechos, a tribe who do not farm, raid the village in the dead of the night. No one is hurt, but all the stored food is stolen. And Mitsa, a woman, is taken. One of the sentries – ShoHona – is found just alive, but scalped.
Zia, the wife of one of the absent hunters, sees a fire belonging to the raiders in the distance. She and other women and some of the older boys creep up on them. The men are taking turns to rape Mitsa. Zia manages to give her a drug to supply the men with. At dawn all the men are killed, Mitsa rescued and the stolen food recovered.
On return to the village they discover a troop of Spanish soldiers demanding supplies aggressively. Fortunately their captain, Diego, arrives and calls them off when Zia says they have no stores because of drought.
Meanwhile TapanAshke, Zia’s husband, kills an elk but is attacked by strangers and then falls down a short cliff. Injured, he makes his way back to the hunting campo to discover that all but six of the group have been killed and all the meat stolen. He is rescued by hunters from Acoma, a neighbouring village,. In time his wounds heal and he can go home.
At his home village the hunters return without some of their number. Zia believes that TapanAshke has been killed and is badly affected by her grief. ShoHona slowly recovers from being scalped and helps the boys in the village make bows aand arrows and how to shoot them He also teaches them hunting. But he starts to have absence spells which Zia and Mitsa worry about.
In Acoma, TapanAshka is still not quite strong enough to walk all the way home. He constantly thinks about Zia. Then thee Spaniards arrived. Following the village’s refusal to supply 200 men, there was a skirmish. The Spanish captain was so angered by the way the villagers threw the dead Spanish soldiers over a cliff that he ordered all surviving men to be kept as slaves for 220 years. He made examples of some of them, including TapanAshka, by chopping off one of their feet. The whole village, including the maimed, is marched off. TapanAshka and the village medicine woman manage to escape and she more or less heals his stump.
Back home, Zia’s brother-in-law Soshue, has been paying her unwanted attentions. He accuses her of witchcraft but she successfully defends herself. He is executed.
Later in the year the village suffers severely from a food shortage. They reluctantly decide to go to the Spanish mission at Oke in the hope of help. Diego Ortiz, the Spanish captain who had earlier helped them, meets them and helps them reach the mission. He takes Zia, her baby son TyoPe and her grandmother to live in his house. The rest of the village is given an area to live in away from the village. Zia’s sister HaNa spurns her for living with the Spaniard.
Diego insists on Zia going to church and converting to Christianity. They don’t make love for a long time. And then, after he has been away for several days, they do make love.
Measles strikes the villagers camp and kills many of them. Zia and TyoPe also catch it, but survive thanks to a special medicine her grandmother makes.
Meanwhile TapanAshka has managed to get back to the village. He is surprised to find it empty and showing signs of a planned departure. He sustains himself and then stores supplies in a secret cave in case of trouble.
Zia, talking to the people in the village, learns how brutally the people of Acoma were treated by her Diego. The next time he is away, she and TyoPe together with her sister HaNa and ShoHona escape. They find a cave near their home village to live in and hide from the Spaniards. Diego and two soldiers as well as his hunting dogs appear.
To find out how the story ends most satisfactorily you will need to read this book. It is easy to nread and well-written. I enjoyed it and think you will.
And then I read three good novels: Philip Kerr's If the dead rise not, Rose Tremain's excellent Sacred Country and MaryLu Tyndall's Surrender the Heart. Lorelei James's Slow Ride simply made me angry because it is so obviously a means of raising extra cash from faithful followers.
Slow Ride
Lorelei James
Samhain Publishing Ltd, Macon, USA; Nov 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60928-301-8
For the life of me I cannot see the point of this novella. It forms part of a series of novels and should either have been at the end of the preceding novel or set at the beginning of the next. If this is being sold as a self-contained work, I can only see this as a cynical money-making move by the publisher. If I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to apologise.
The story follows on from the marriage of Jack Donoghue and Keely, his former fiancée. During the Reception she desperately tries to get him to make love to her. But he refuses. She continues to have sex with him on the way to the airport, on the plane during their flight to their honeymoon location. He insists that they can only make love to each other once they have arrived at their destination. In the end they melt into each other’s love-fevered bodies on the beach in front of their villa in Tahiti.
This very short work is well-written and easily read. As I said before, I can’t see why it isn’t included in the novels either side of this scene.
M H Stromm's Arousing Love, aimed at the teen market, will annoy some people (like me) by the Christian propaganda in the second half when the 16-year-old heroine is heavily controlled by her father at an age when she should have been given some leeway.
Arousing Love
M H Strom
Marstro Press, USA; Nov 28, 2009; 246 pp
ISBN: 978-0615323305
This is a love story between Zacch, who is 18, and Joanna, who is almost 16. Zacch is the local boy who likes nothing better than surfing and painting but has to serve in his parents’ store every day it is open. He is, though, pretty free to do what he wants and has a shack at the back of his parent’s house. Joanna and her parents are on a fortnight’s holiday from Colorado and are staying in the camp site near the beach.
Zacch and Joanna fall deeply in love and start to kiss, cuddle and explore one another’s bodies as teenagers do. But Joanna’s Christian conscience steps in before they go too far. Nevertheless, she allows Zacch to paint a nude portrait of her lying on his bed. He also paints a self-portrait for her to remember him by. Even though they have rather taken to Zacch, her parents start to rein them in, controlling what they do and how far they go from the camp site. It is really her mother who mis worried about Joanna becoming pregnant.
The second week of Joanna’s holiday is spent with them having to stay in sight of her parents most of the time except for one occasion when they bare allowed to go out for a meal and a movie. Otherwise they have to stay as a family.
The back of the novel then breaks. It becomes a Christian diatribe with a bit of a story interwoven. Inside a week Zacch is converted to intense religious belief and Joanna baptises him in the sea. The pair want to get married as soon as they can, hey have fallen so deeply in love with each other. Her parents, however, don’t even want to talk about this. In fact, they rather hope everything will die down after they return to Colorado.
In the end Zaacch and Joanna’s father have a heart-to-heart conversation. They agree that if Zacch can find a way to come and live in Colorado, then her father, using Old Testament precedent, will formally betroth her to him and not allow her to see any other man for a year. At the end of that time, when she is 17, they can marry.
Zacch applies to art colleges in Colorado but gets turned down by them all. However, the best college has a scholarship programme and are so impressed with him and his work that he wins one for the four years of the course. On the day of the interview, when he gets the news, he is in Colorado. He goes to Joanna’s house to tell her and her family the good news. It is also her birthday. Her father formally betroths them for a year. The condition attached to the betrothal is that there must be no sexual contact of any kind. Kissing and cuddling only are allowed.
The more I read of the second half of this novel, the angrier I became. Writers are told again and again that the golden rule of successful writing is to ‘show not tell’. The second half of this novel tells the reader how to run their life. It is a piece of what can only be described as Purity Movement Propaganda. Not only are abortion and gay marriage justified as totally wrong and immoral using quotes from Old Testament sources from a society at least 2,500 years old. (And societies that old are not our normal moral models.) In any case, in a free society, both topics are surely matters for individual consciences. Joanna’s father has taken complete control of her life. He dictates what and when she can do things, almost as though she is his slave. And surely at her age it is time that parents should start to withdraw control and be prepared to act as safety nets catching and comforting teenagers when things go wrong.
I breathed a sigh of relief for the couple when Joanna moved into Zacch’s apartment on the day before her 17th birthday and their wedding. I felt as though her life as an independent person could finally begin within the intense love she and Zacch had for each other.
Susana Fortes's Waiting for Robert Capa is an absorbing, fictionalised account of his and Gerda Taro's life as photographers in Paris and during the Spanish Civil War up to her death.
Waiting for Robert Capa
Susana Forbes
Translated by Adriana V Lopez
Harper Collins, 2011; iv + 188
ISBN: 978-0-06-200038-5
The spur this novel was the discovery of an archive of 4,500 photographic negatives of the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour (Chim) in Mexico in 2008.
The novel starts in early Nazi Germany. Gerta Pohorylte, a Jewess with a Polish passport, is interviewed by the SA who want to know where her brothers Oscar and Karl are. She doesn’t tell them that they are making their way to the Swiss border, hoping to cross it to safety. Nor does she tell them that her boyfriend, Georg, is in Italy. She is released after a fortnight, possibly due to the efforts of the Polish Consul who is one of her father’s good friends. She immediately fled to Paris where she shared an apartment with an old friend called Ruth. Shortly after arriving she hears through the Refugee Help Centre that her brothers have safely arrived in Switzerland.
She and Ruth both have jobs but, one evening they meet a Hungarian photographer called Andre Friedman and his friend Chim. They start going round as a group, with both Andre and him taking photos wherever they are. The two men begin to get commissions irregularly. Gerta decides to become Andre’s manager and makes him dress elegantly. In return he taught her how to use a Leica camera and to develop film. It was while she was learning to use the camera that she realised that it could be used as a political weapon. She began to keep a diary because she was afraid she would forget who she was and where she came from.
All four of them begin to get involved in the leftist militants in Paris. They are concerned with the way Hitler is remilitarising the Rhineland and at Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. While Andre is in Spain on a newspaper commission Gerta types our the manifesto of an international writers group. Shortly afterwards their apartment is attacked and ‘Filthy Jews’ scrawled on the walls. She, Chim and Ruth repair the flat. Chim arranges for Fred Stein, a German refugee and another photographer, to stay in the spare room.
While Andre was in Spain he interviewed a Basque boxer, witnessed a protest against the fourth anniversary of the Republican proclamation and then visited Seville during Santa Semana, photographing the Holy Week processions.
Until Andre returned from Spain, Gerta had not realised how much she loved him. The whole group went on holiday to Cannes. Gerta and Andre separated from the others and spent their time on a small island getting to know each other better. Back in Paris, Andre gave her much more intense training in photography and in a short time she became an accredited journalist like him and Chim. There simply wasn’t enough work. They decided to change their names and nationalities. He became Robert Capa, a rich, famous and talented photographer. She became Gerda Taro, also an American photographer.
As soon as news came through of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a group of journalists chartered a flight to Barcelona. They were particularly interested in the Republican army made up of huge numbers of ordinary men and women, volunteers from Spain and all over the world.
Capa wanted to be nearest the fighting and so he and Gerda moved to Cordoba. At a deserted village Capa joined a dug-in position on a hill. There he took his most famous photograph of all: a militiaman at the moment he was shot. It was published around the world. Gerda joined forward moving troops. Later in the war, when she was in Valencia she was able to photograph refugees streaming north from Andalucia. Because the hospital was overwhelmed with wounded, she put down her camera and began to prepare bandages. Capa arrived with the flood of refugees.
Travelling back to Madrid they came across Paul Robeson entertaining Republican troops in the open. Capa asked her to marry him, but she wouldn’t answer. Once in Madrid they went to the main office of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. There were serious problems with provisions and distributing rations. They often used to stay up late listening to poets and music in cafes and streets. Sometimes until dawn.
When Guernica was bombed, Capa went to Bilbao armed with a small movie camera. He filmed the evacuation of children onto ships off Bilbao. Joining Gerda they filmed and photographed the unsuccessful Republican Segovia offensive.
Gerda was desperate to photograph a Republican victory. In June 1937 there was a huge battle for Madrid. She constantly in the open getting her pictures. At one point a plane was diving on their position and all she could think of was catching the dust trails of bullets. She knew she had to get out of there if she as to remain alive. She and a friend, Ted Allan, were on their way back to safety when a tank drove over her. Even though she survived to be operated on in the hospital at El Escorial in Madrid, she died. In her mind she sees Capa found Magnum Photos and his death in Hanoi.
This is an extremely well written novel that leads the reader along several interlinked trails. It makes you want to go to a reference library to hunt out biographies and catalogues of the lives and photographs of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour. And also to find out more about the Spanish Civil War.
Now for the murder-mysteries. I really enjoyed all three of them: Sheri Leigh's Graveyard Games, David W Huffstetler's amazing attack on capital punishment in Dead in Utah. And, lastly, Sharon Potts's In their blood.
Dead in Utah
David W Huffstetler
Typescript; N.D.; 271 pp
If you believe that execution is the just punishment for murder, then this novel might sew a few doubts in your mind. It explores how prejudice and nepotism can come together to result in the execution by firing squad of an innocent man.
The facts are these: John Morrison and his two sons are closing up their store late one night in 1911. The younger son is in the back room and sees what happens in the shop. Two masked men burst in and shoot the two older Morrisons, but not before the older son has loosed off one shot at them.
Merlin, the younger son, can only say that there were two men, one taller than the other. Because they were wearing kerchief masks, he could not identify them. When the police arrive, they see a blood trail down the side of the store. They make much of it, but fail to follow it properly. It later turns out that it leads to a dog with a wounded paw.
A woman living opposite saw two men leaving the store after the shooting, one taller than the other. She cannot identify them because they were wearing masks. Another woman, near the town’s theatre, was pushed off the pavement by two men in a hurry. She assumes it was the killers.
Dr McHugh, later in the evening, treats a man (Joe Hill or Hillstrom) for a bullet wound that went right through his body. He also notes that Joe had a gun. Joe says he was wounded in an argument over a woman. Dr Bird drops by to see Dr McHugh. He, too, sees the gun. He gives Joe a lift to Murray where his lodging is.
It turns out that Joe and his brother left Sweden for the USA after their mother died. They changed their names once they landed in New York; and then parted. Joe became involved in the union movement and rose within it to become a strike organiser for the IWW. Unions were not at all popular among the owners and moneyed classes at that time. Nor did the people with power like them. This applied from local to national level.
To cut a long story short, Joe attends a preliminary hearing and then the trial itself, both under the same judge who knows many of the jurors as well as the police. The end result is that Joe is found guilty of murder and sentenced to be executed, by firing squad at his choice. He applies through his attorneys for a re-trial to the same judge but this is denied. He appeals to the State Supreme Court using two very good attorneys. They point out that all the evidence against Joe is circumstantial and that there is nothing whatsoever that puts him at the scene of the murder. They are all aware that prejudice against union men has been a major factor in his conviction, which is confirmed. They apply to the Pardon Board. Again the same judge is a member of the tribunal. Yet again, his conviction is confirmed. Throughout this whole process, there has been an international protest against his conviction. The local people say it is orchestrated by the unions and so should be ignored.
Eventually, Joe gives up hope and submits to his fate eight years after the original crime. All along Joe has not named the woman who the fight was over because he says it would cause her embarrassment. This is his only alibi.
This story left me seething at a legal system that could condemn a man to death on such flimsy evidence. And I remembered how, even now, quite a large number of people on Death Row in the USA, are found to be innocent when the evidence is properly investigated.
In their blood
Sharon Potts
Oceanview Publishing, 2010; 386pp
ISBN: 978-19335156265
This novel begins with a bang when Rachel and Daniel Stroeb are shot dead in their bed on the evening of their return from a flight to Europe. Their 16-year-old daughter Elise comes home shortly afterwards and finds them dead. Her brother Jeremy who has been wandering in Europe for much of the last year, arrives back in time for the wake. And is greeted by considerable animosity by his Uncle Dwight who tells him he is Elise’s guardian according to their father’s will. Dwight and his wife are making plans about moving into their luxurious house and putting on airs and graces. They also challenge every decision Jeremy or Elise make.
Their grandfather reveals that Dwight is only the back-up guardian if Jeremy is unable to act. So Jeremy and Elise are free of them. She returns to school a bit at a time. Jeremy decides that he wants to complete his degree studies at the local university where their father was a professor. In order to fund his studies he is employed by the prominent accountancy firm where his mother had worked for years, rising to a very senior position.
At the university he finds his father’s assistant, Marina, sorting out his papers. He helps her and, predictably, they have an affair which means that he leaves Elise alone for too long, much to Dwight’s malicious delight. He can find out nothing about any enemies his father might have had at University. Eventually he ends the affair with Marina when he learns that she had had one with his father before him. She turns out to be a good friend to him in the end. And he begins to spend much more time with Elise. Dwight had taken him to court saying he was an incompetent guardian, but he and Marina had found some information about Dwight which discounted him as a guardian.
At the accountancy firm, the partner he is working for sets him the demeaning task of cataloguing old paper files kept on stacks of shelves and cabinets in a large store room. They are to be destroyed once he has done it. In the process he discovers some files where his mother had carried out detailed audits. One, in particular, belonged to a company owned by Enrique Castillo, where she noted considerable discrepancies. And a huge luxury hotel complex on a Caribbean Island is prominent in her doubts. Since Castillo is a well-known and very wealthy local businessman and Elise is going out with his son Carlos, Jeremy decides to read the files. Meanwhile he has tried to access his mother’s files on the firm’s computer, but finds nothing. All files wiped clean. He makes friends with another assistant in the firm, a girl called Robbie. She works with him in extracting information from the paper files, even though on one occasion a heavy cabinet falls on her. Jeremy is certain it has been deliberately weighted to fall when the drawers were opened. They know someone is watching them.
Elise and Carlos spend a happy afternoon watching DVDs on his father’s yacht in the bay. And they uncover, by accident, a series of accounting files which bear no relation to what Jeremy and Robbie have seen in the paper files. They are certain Enrique Castillo is up to no good. The problem is how and where?
Eventually they decide that they need to visit the island where the hotel is situated. Eighteen years previously it had been destroyed by a hurricane, but there is no clear evidence for rebuilding. But the income from the island keeps on increasing and is now the major source of Castillo’s wealth.
Robbie is still recovering from her injuries, so Jeremy goes home to prepare to fly out to the island. He gets home to find Marina dead in his father’s old car. Fortunately the killer failed to inspect her pockets. There Jeremy finds a note she was going to leave for him before going home to Chile to look after her grandmother. It turns out that his mother had an affair with Enrique Castillo when he was first building the hotel.
Everything comes to a brilliant climax on the island where all the baddies die, two business empires collapse as a result and Jeremy emerges the hero. He also gets Robbie.
This is a compelling read. The story is well-written. New questions keep on cropping up when you least expect them. Until the very end.
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