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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