Following the death of Tom Stoppard, everyone is telling Tom Stoppard stories and I don’t have one but I will tell you about the time I went to watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead starring Simon Russell Beale at the Barbican, many years ago. I don’t remember much about the performance except a vague memory that I enjoyed it and was thrilled to see SRB before my very eyes. But I went with a schoolfriend and her parents, and I’ve never travelled in a car before (or since) where the driver didn’t use the mirrors but relied on the front passenger to tell him when it was safe to change lanes. Their daughter, my schoolfriend, was the first of us to pass her driving test and taking us to the leisure centre one day, she parked by driving into a bin and blamed us, her passengers, for not telling her it was there in front of her. Some wonder why I have a huge distrust of anyone behind a wheel. These people drive among us.
Anyway, November, a month to get through and I resolved to read well, to stave off the gloom of this dreariest of months.
Falling Animals – Sheila Armstrong
This is a slim volume, highly praised. It opens with the discovery of two bodies on an Irish beach – one a seal that is easily removed, and the other a man. The man is unknown, unclaimed and, once his body is taken away and examined, buried in an unmarked grave. Each chapter is told – not shown, told (I mention this as there’s so much writing advice about showing not telling and yet, done well, telling is fine) – by a different person and together they build a picture of the small town and the ways it was connected with so many different people, across the world. It’s a novel that paints a picture of every day lives but unlike other writers, it feels like this is not just enough for Armstrong. She uses the small portraits to make larger points about the world, about modern ways of life and how things used to work and how they work now. This is not a wallow in nostalgia, it’s clear eyed and bleak at times and you do need to pay attention to who everyone is, esp when they recur later on. But it treats the reader as an intelligent adult and doesn’t talk down. Well worth a read.
Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling
This is another in the Daunt books essays series which I really enjoy, especially as the themes are always interpreted widely. So this isn’t just a book of essays about cycling, it’s about people and family and memories and freedom. Frankly it makes a change to read positive things about cycling, when so many people still tediously wang on about how much they hate people on two wheels. Anyway, these are an enjoyable set of essays, taking in everything from caring for an elderly relative to rediscovering cycling after a major life change and a surprise one about the hospitality of the Slovenian people under communism.
Mantel Pieces – Hilary Mantel
This excellently titled book is a selection of pieces that Hilary Mantel wrote for the London Review of Books and also contains some emails she sent to the editor, Mary Kay Wilmers. The essays have a lot of themes familiar to Mantel fans – several about Tudor figures we know from Wolf Hall, one about mediums, another about the French Revolution – and also contains the Royal Bodies essay that the tabloids got worked up about a few years ago. Mantel was not anti-royal in the piece, which still comes across well, but discusses female lack of agency in the royal family, something she then pursued as a core theme of the Wolf Hall trilogy. A strong collection.
The Covenant of Water – Abraham Verghese
This came highly acclaimed by members of my reading group and I seem to remember enjoying his previous book Cutting for Stone. This is incredibly long, 700 pages, and the first half is engaging, interesting and enjoyable. It’s set in India, and opens with the wedding of a young woman to an older man on his estate of Parambil, a highly advantageous marriage to her family. The book is a family saga and we follow the bride as she grows used to running a household, taking on the parenting of her husband’s young son from his first marriage, and deals kindly to the ghost of his first wife. As she grows up and comes to love and respect her husband, and have a family of her own, we learn more about The Condition, a curse that all his family seem to carry – a fear of water and how this affects them. There are also sub plots with other characters, including a British doctor who lives and works in the area. Despite a gripping first half, I did feel that it started to lose its way in the middle and on the whole was too long. It came back together at the end but the middle was definitely baggy or less interesting. I did mostly enjoy it but 700 pages is tough to pull off.
The Land in Winter – Andrew Miller
This was the favourite to win the Booker Prize but didn’t, which put me in a positive frame of mind towards it from the start. It’s winter 1962 and the inhabitants of two houses in the Devon countryside have to cope with terrible snowstorms. In one house, a doctor and his wife Irene, a tired marriage perhaps though Irene is pregnant, and it turns out the doctor is a bit of a shit. When Irene starts to make friends with Rita, the wife at the farm, also pregnant, the barriers break down a little but everyone has secrets which inevitably come out. This was a cold book, I could feel the draughts blowing through the farmhouse and see the animals in the snow. The writing is excellent, something I remember from a few of his earlier books. In all honesty, though a good book and an absorbing read, I’m not sure it was Booker winner worthy. It was good rather than distinctive. But since I often find Booker winners dreadfully hard work I’d rather have this.
Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon – Jane Austen
I’ve not read Austen’s short early work before and absolutely loved Lady Susan. It’s so rare someone with my name is painted as a conniving, disliked, manipulative whatnot that no one trusts. Susans are usually quite dull. This is a short epistolary novel, full of gossip and intrigue and playful wickedness. I loved it. (It was filmed as Love and Friendship a few years ago with Kate Beckinsale – also good.) The Watsons is another short piece about a country ball and a family of sisters. It too has some good observations and ideas that you can trace in her later work but finishes rather abruptly. Sanditon is her last work, unfinished by her death, and reads very much like a first draft, with only a little dialogue and everything bashed out in few paragraphs. It sets up a story of people staying in a seaside town and introduces characters who are black, which must set the traditionalists frothing at the mouth, so may well have been an interesting read, had she managed to finish it.
On the Calculation of Volume III – Solvej Balle
Published on 18 November (the day that our main character Tara is stuck reliving over and over) the third volume in this series gives us the first plot twist. Just as I wondered how she was going to pull off this story for seven books, the end of the second volume revealed that Tara has found someone else who is reliving the same day and this third book has them meet and talk about everything. But it turns out, not just one other person but more, and although Tara and the first man have accepted their situation, the others think there must be some kind of explanation for it and that they have the chance to save people, make a difference or change the world. As ever, the books give Balle the chance to really examine everything in detail, thoughts that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t have all the time in the world to relive over and over. So I’m still very much invested in this series and will be sitting here, waiting for the next installment…
The Book of Gothel – Mary McMyne
I’ve never read romantasy before and likely won’t bother again. I only picked this up because it was an alternative telling of the story of Rapunzel which was my favourite story as a child, which I made my mum read to me all the time. This is fun enough but utter tosh.
Villa Triste – Patrick Modiano
This was the reading group choice for next month. Modiano is a Nobel Prize winner though possibly not for this. It’s a fairly familiar story of a young boy who meets rich glamorous people who all act badly together before abandoning him. But here, not only is everyone both dull and predictable but it’s terribly written. I couldn’t work out if it was a bad translation, but it seemed unlikely. The tense changes from one paragraph to the next and despite the story being told in the first person, there is one chapter in the third person presumably because it contained facts about another character that he couldn’t think how to convey any other way. I skim read a lot simply to get through it. I mean, usually with Nobel winners you assume they can write basics, am I missing something?
Less – Patrick Grant
I’d been reading this on and off for a while. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it or finding it useful, but more because you get the point quite quickly and don’t feel the need to carry on too urgently. It’s about buying fewer things and when you do, only buying good quality things that last or can be repaired. Sometimes easier said than done. But Grant, to be fair, is living what he preaches, running British factories manufacturing quality goods.
Moments of Pleasure
I appreciate autumn being really quite full on this year. As much as I hate the dark, I do like proper seasonal change. Stomping around in new boots after the trip to Ghent broke my black boots and my DMs had already broken because DMs are no longer what they used to be. I’ve embraced Solovair boots and the blisters that come with breaking them in. And now I have dry feet while everyone else seems to wear trainers all the time. Fools.
I got a month’s Apple TV to catch up with the latest series of Slow Horses but since I watched that in a weekend, I’ve made my way through Shrinking, two series of a comedy with Jason Segal about a single dad psychiatrist trying to get his life together after his wife dies. It’s funny and if you didn’t already love Harrison Ford, here’s another reason – his character is my favourite. I finished both seasons and quite miss the characters, which is rare.
Susan E Barsby 