Fathers and Sons

I've just finished Fathers and Sons, Alexander Waugh's book about his male ancestors. He begins with his great-great grandfather, also called Alexander, but known to the family as the the Brute, and then moves on to his great-grandfather, Arthur, then to his illustrious grandfather, Evelyn. I haven't got any further than that yet, but I assume that he moves on to his father, Auberon, Evelyn's eldest son.

It's a delightful read and I enjoyed it very much - he's not the greatest of writers, but his style is easy, and comfortable to read, especially last thing at night when one's feeling a bit dozy and doesn't want anything too demanding.
But why I am I reading such a book, one which has absolutely no relevance to my life, past or present? Well, it's the Waugh magic, of course,and it's fascinating to see how it was born, grew and matured. I've always loved Evelyn's books, and have grown up with them. I first started reading them in my early 20s and have never stopped. They bear repeated reading as Waugh's prose style is perfect - the book reveals that he was a stickler for correct grammar, and being a bit of a grammar fanatic myself, it's not surprising that his writing is so satisfying, like most grammatically-correct writing. Alexander's writing is OK, but unlike Evelyn's, his writing is sometimes clunky, with rather infelicitous descritopns - but, no matter - his book is highly enjoyable and readable.

Its centrepiece, surprisingly, is Arthur, Evelyn's father who turns out to be a complex and fascinating character, and possibly the source, unwittingly, of Evelyn's talent. He openly favoured his older son, Alec and Evelyn was ignored and neglected throughout his childhood. Arthur's worship of Alec was bizarre and pathological, while Evelyn was left to make his own way in life, turning out, of course to be a literary genius. Arthur was, however, a benign and benevolent character, and after his death, Evelyn wrote a wonderfully forgiving piece about him, remembering his exuberance, and love of home-grown family entertainments. Arthur was certainly the source of many of Evelyn's fictional fathers, and few of them are monsters. Charles Ryder's father's benign neglect in Brideshead Revisited is clearly based on Arthur's.
Alexander's father, Auberon, Evelyn's eldest son, had another neglected childhood and it's fascinating to see how the near delinquent became a lovely, if deeply flawed man, who somehow manged to break the cycle of bad parenting, which went all the way back to Arthur's father, also Alexander, who was known, accurately, as the Brute. Auberon inspired enormous love and affection in his children and clearly worshipped them, but not in Arthur's dysfunctional manner. So, a fascinating family memoir, and a wonderfully vivid picture of Victorian and Edwardian parenthood. Is ours an improvement? Time will tell....

Brideshead Revisited

I saw the new film of this book last week; it wasn't at the top of my 'to-see' list, but my daughter wanted to go, so, as we knew nobody else in our mostly male family wouldn't want to go, off we went to the local multiplex.
We thought we were going to be the only people in the audience (we were, once before, when we saw the Hamlet set in a present-day New York loft apartment, starring Ethan Hawke. It was quite good actually, but a rather weird experience, watching Hamlet in a deserted multiplex auditorium). But 2 more people turned up, so the 4 of us settled down, rattling around in a huge cinema.

Brideshead is something I feel very attached to; I read the book back in the 1970s, so I was very much the age my daughter is now when I first encountered it. I read it several times, luxuriating in Waugh's perfect prose and inimitable storytelling. I went on to read most of Waugh's other novels, and then his diaries and letters. His l;ife was fascinating - although far removed from my own world, I was seduced, and still am, by the whole Waugh milieu.
Anyway, along came the ITV serial in about 1981, starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, which of course became a benchmark for so-called 'heritage' drama serials. In the days when there were only 3 channels, it became compulsive viewing for millions, and the nation was riveted. I remember looking forward with high excitement to the final episode, which was screened just before Christmas. The nation was frozen under a blanket of snow and ice; the Solidarity protests were underway in Poland, and people over there were starving; the Tory spending cuts were taking hold and the country was still only beginning to recover from the late 70s recession, yet we were all held in thrall to this elegy for British country house aristocratic life before WWII.
Jeremy Irons essentially read the book as a voiceover, and his elegaic, understated style set the tone for the whole dramatisation. John Mortimer wrote the script and I can't see any deviation from Waugh. Mortimer is a socialist atheist, about as far removed from Waugh as is possible, yet he captured the spirit of the book perfectly. The casting was perfect - I've said this before, but it's one of my bugbears, so I'll say it again - they could all speak Waugh's dialogue, and, try as they might, none of the actors in the new film could. Emme Thompson as Lady Marchmain did her best, but even she couldn't manage it. Claire Bloom played her in the TV series, and portrayed her icy elegance perfectly. Thompson was good, but somehow too robust, and coul;dn't quite manage to excise the estuary from her voice. Patrick Malahide as Charles's father did better, as did Michael Gambon as Lord Marchmain, but when you know they were following in the footsteps of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier then even these fine actors are going to seem somewhat diminished. Gielgud caught Mr Ryder's unworldly yet lethal self-absorption so perfectly, it's hard to imagine it being done any better.
I must also mention Phoebe Nicholls as Cordelia. She captured her heartfelt goodness perfectly. She only made the most perfunctory appearance in the new film - a merely token presence only, but in the book, and the TV series, she's central. She's a living embodiment of how Catholic lfe should be lived, and example to all the other characters, and she could have been insufferable, but Nicholls made her enchanting. I suppose the filmmakers either couldn't find anyone who could play the part convincingly, or they just couldn't be bothered with her, seeing her as just a priggish goody-goody.

Anyway, what was good about the new film was Ben Whishaw as Sebastian. I love Whishaw as an actor, and I think he's something very special. He had some bad reviews and I couldn't find anyone who was prepared to say a good word about his performance. But I though he captured Sebastian's damaged fragility perfectly. Anthony Andrews was of course superb, and managed to convey Sebastian's self-knowledge and deliberate self-destruction beautifully, but he was physically wrong - too tall and too robust. He towered over Irons which somehow seemed wrong, while Whishaw seemed as is he might break at any moment, which is how I always imagined Sebastian.
Mortimer, in spite of his atheism, never shied away from the religion, which is central to the book. Waugh says in the preface that it's the subject, but the film pushed it aside as a kind of annoying extra that they had to somehow fit in, but wasn't really interested. Mortimer was interested, and in the book Charles comes to recognise the operation of grace - something which the film ignores. Film Charles remains a doubter, which is wrong. Which makes Julia's refusal to continue their relationship meaningless. And that's another thing - Julia. Diana Quick in the TV series was perfect, brittle, but vulnerable. Again Hayley Atwell did her best but was too solid. You just couldn't imagine her giving up Charles for God.

So, a missed opportunity perhaps, but I don't think the book is filmable nowadays on any level. You have to be able to call on people who are prepared to take Waugh seriously, and I don't think any one is these days. Oh well....I suppose we'll never see another good Waugh adaptaion, though there are plenty out there already. Kristin Scott Thomas in A Handful of Dust - another actress who can speak properly And does anyone remember the marvellous Sword of Honour BBC serial in the 1960s, with Edward Woodward? A creditable version was done a few years ago with Daniel Craig which I remember as being rather good, but, in the end, the books are so good that they spring to life in one's head.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy's book has been dramatised before, notably by Roman Polanski nearly 30 years ago. I saw it at the time, but I need to revisit it -Nastassia Kinski was Tess and that's about all I can remember.
I first read the book as a young teenager; I'd never heard of Hardy until I read an article in the teen magazine Petticoat when I was about 12 or 13. Petticoat was a new publication which sought to capture the burgeoning early-60s ethos and attempted to be different from longer-established mags such as Jackie. It contained the usual cartoon-strips and articles on fashion, makeup and relationships, but it also touched on cultural topics, and its earliest issues had celebrities talking about their favourite books. Jean Shrimpton, the Kate Moss of the 60s, talked about Tess of the D'Urbervilles and what it meant to her, and I was captivated. Something I've never forgotted was her description of the passage where the dairymaids cross a stream on their way to church dressed in their best clothes. Shrimpton talked about the skirts of their white muslin dresses flying up and butterflies being trapped in them, and what a miraculous image that was. I was captivated and resolved to read Hardy as soon as I could.
Of course I wasn't aware that the 60s saw a renaissance of interest in Hardy's novels. He'd fallen out of favour since his death, but his books had begun to appear on the 'O' and 'A' Level syllabuses. We did The Woodlanders for 'O'Level and The Return of the Native for 'A' Level, and we all loved them, but Tess, and Jude the Obscure were not surprisingly kept off the syllabus. Of course these two, both emotional rollercoasters are strong meat, and were my favourites. Tess is the perfect book for romantically-inclined adolescents, but I think it really must have beed a sixties thing, as ny children, when asked to read Hardy at school, were unmoved. I don't know it was because they were boys, but I have a feeling that Hardy's books caught the temperature of the times, and the 80s were less sympathetic to his work.

Anyway, the TV series. This production was a typical 2000s BBC costume drama; high production values, great care lavished on sets and costunes, a lush musical score and easy-on-the-eye actors. This can have mixed results - for example, Gemma Arterton as Tess looked perfect, very much as I'd always imagined Tess; tall, beautiful and with a slightly other-worldly appearance, a bit apart from everyone else, with a faraway look in her eyes. The actor who played Angel though, was wrong, wrong, wrong. He looked far too young, and had a petulant look on his face, as if he was always about to stick his lower lip out. He was also too small. I'd always seen Angel as a big man; fair-haired, yes and a chilly character, but he was a man of weight and substance. This version was a callow adolescent. But maybe it's my vision that's wrong.
Anyway I enjoyed the first 3 episodes, but the final one dragged, and although I dutifully watched it through to the end, I'd lost interest long before. Tess's fate left me unmoved, and I'm not sure why. I suppose I just didn't believe a word of it. The thing with Hardy is that you do believe it when you're reading it, however preposterous the story.

Anyway, time to have another look at the Polanski, I think.

Snow

I took ages to read this book, but persisted, and it was worth it. I found it on my shelf - I hadn't bought it myself so wondered where it had come from. Intrigued, I decided to give it a go. It turned out that it belonged to one of my sons, and he'd left it with me without telling me. A friend who'd read it also recommended it, so I felt I had to.
First of all, it gave me a window on Turkish politics, something I knew absolutely nothing about. I was vaguely aware of controversy over headscarves for women, but that was all. Headscarves are central to Snow but it's about much more. Orhan Pamuk, the author, who I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of, is one of Turkey's most celebrated writers, and of course, I now see his name everywhere.
I won't attempt to describe the events in the book, it's too dense and complex for a brief precis, but to cut a very long story short, it follows the progress of an emigre writer and sometime poet, Ka, who is commissioned to write an article on the seemingly large numbers of girls in the snow-bound town, Kars, where he grew up, who are committing suicide because, apparently, they have been forbidden by Turkish law to wear headscarves. A lot happens, which I won't pretend to describe, but the events in the book take place while the town is blanketed by thick snow, and this metaphor provides the central organising principle behind the book.
There are several themes running through the book - that of the impact of exile; Ka is viewed with suspicion, as tainted and polluted by Western values, yet there is enormous interest in him and he acquires something of an exalted status almost immediately.
Ka battle throughout with his atheism and the resurgent Islamism he finds all around him. Turkey is a country riven by conflict, but this makes it a vibrant, questioning country, in ferment. It's torn asunder by those who want it to becoome a fundamentalist state, and those who want it to be accepted into the EU, and become fully westernised. There's a much better review here which will relate the events in the book more effectively than I can, as it really is extremely complex, and I don't want to do the book a disservice.
I must say, though, that the translation isn't great. it's by the journalist Maureen Freely, who is British, but grew up in Istanbul. I suppose it's descriptive rather than literary, but I felt all the way though that I was missing a great deal - it seemed incomplete somehow. The prose didn't sing. Translation's tricky, but when it works, it's wonderful and there are some great examples. This isn't one of them, but the book still made me want to find out more. I now read news articles about Turkey in the paper with great interest, and it was Snow that gave me this. Not many books do that. A great achievement.

Sebastian Faulks

I've just finished a Sebastian Faulks marathon - I was lent a pile of his recent books and I read my way through them. I fancied reading them together to get a feel for his writing and style.

He's very much the popular writer of his age, but I detect in his more recent books, a desire to complicate and challenge. The actual content and themes of Human Traces and Engleby, his most recent books, although not at all difficult in terms of their style, were testing. Human Traces is concerned with the pre-history and germination of psychoanalysis, and it asks, implicitly, what if a different path had been taken? Freud isn't mentioned at all, yet his shadow hangs heavily over the book. The two protagonists, Thomas and Jacques, are striking out a path through the undergrowth of psychiatry in the late 19th century, but have no-one to guide them. It's an ambitious book, but not wholly successful, I thought. Faulks struggles with period settings and has trouble getting his characters to speak and behave as if they're actually living in the age into which they've been born. For example, Sonia, the main female character, can't help living speaking and breathing as a 21st century woman. Characters frequently employ modern vernacular and behaviour, and this made it difficult for me to be convinced by the book. Also Faulks has a rather literal, plodding style and sometimes you long for a poetic passage, but that's not his forte at all, so he sensibly steers clear.
Engleby was better, I thought, as it was set in the 1970s and 80s, a period though which Faulks has actually lived himself, so the book was much more convincing, though it still didn't stay with me after I'd finished it. He's not much good at narrative, and I felt both books meandered, and lacked a real focus. His books don't really satisfy, and don't linger long in the memory. I feel as if I've just munched on a Kit-Kat rather than a few squares of Green and Black's.
The Fatal Englishman was better. It's non-fiction for a start, the stories of three young men who lived in the 20th century and died prematurely for various reasons after living lives of great promise. I enjoyed the last one most, the story of Jeremy Wolfenden, the young gay man who died just before homosexuality became legal. Yet again, though, the books didn't stay with me for long, and failed to be truly memorable.
I don't know, perhaps it's just me getting old. Maybe my brain is less receptive. I'm going to go back to reading Jane Austen and the Brontes soon to test myself against the classics.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I went to see this a couple of days ago. I'd read the book last year, so knew what to expect in terms of content, but it brought the book to life in a way that I wasn't really prepared for. I'd heard great things about the film - Mark Kermode (on Radio5Live), thought it should have received the Oscar for best foreign language film, but apparently the French didn't submit it for some bureaucratic reason. Was it becuase it was directed by an American, even thought the subject-matter, and its cast were resolutely French? Ridiculous.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because a) Oscars don't matter inthe grand scheme of things, and b) its haunting, lingering quality will resonate for a long time in the hearts and minds of everyone who sees it.
The cinema was about three-quarters full - pretty good for a teatime showing and, as usual at the Watershed, everyone was rapt throughout and sat silently. People usually know how to behave here, but this film wouldn't probably have attracted the casual customer anyway.
The film begins inside Jean-Dominique Bauby's head as he awakes from a coma after a major stroke - his brain, vision and hearing functioning perfectly but realising that he cannot move or speak, or commuicate on any level. We see what he sees; a fragmente, blurred, view of what is directly on front of him, and we share his feelings of isolation. Gradually, with the help of a dedicated speech therapist, he learns to communicate - 1 blink for 'yes', 2 blinks for 'no', and eventually 'writes' a book. I suppose if something like this had to happen to anyone, at least it happened to someone with the gift of irony. He was the editor of Elle magazine; someone in the prime of life; wealthy, successful, celebrated, handsome, with the world at his feet when he was struck down with a stroke that left him with 'locked-in syndrome', when the only muscle that moved was one eyelid.
Jean-Do (as everyone called him) was played, superbly, by Mathieu Amalric, who captured his previous incarnation perfectly. I have a friend who had trouble with the book, as he felt so little sympathy for Bauby and didn't feel particularly impelled to see the film. Well, Amalric brought him to l;ife, and yes, I can't think of anyone who would have ever wanted to be his friend, but the film offered a different angle, a rather more oblique point of view, using music, memory and stunning photography to enable its audience to get inside his head.
Its unsentimental, and unself-pitying, and we leave the cinema thinking about what it is to be human - what is the minimum we need to keep us going.
Another bonus was Max Von Sydow, one of the greatest of film presences, playing Jean-Do's father, who is elderly, crippled and alone. There are 2 wonderful sequences - one when Jean-Do remebers giving him a shave, and the scene encapsulates perfectly what it means to age and become dependent on your children, yet at the same time always feeling responsible for them.
As Philip French notes, 'Jean-Do's experience is what we'll all come to in the end - spectators in our personal galleries of memories'. It's film which touches on the universals of life, and I've rarely found anything as rewarding and fulfilling for a long time.

The Road

My son lent me The Road by Cormac McCarthy recently, and I've just finished it. I'd never read any of McCarthy's books before - he'd always been one of those writers I'd put on the back burner, thinking, 'I'll get around to reading his stuff some day'.
The prospect of the imminent release of the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of another McCarthy book, encouraged me, so I started it straight away.
I read it in record time, for me, as I usually read much more slowly than I used to, these days, and I found myself staying up until 1am to finish it. On one level it's an easy read - the chapters are divided up into short paragraphs with a line break in between, so you can put it down, pick it up and find your place; these things matter as you get older and the brain becomes less nimble. The paperback edition I read has a few pages at the beginning of comments and testimonials from various reviews, Iand wasn't the only one who blasted through the book in record time; some read the book at a single sitting.
McCarthy writes of a post-holocaust America, at an unspecified time, though one assumes it's the near future. Life on earth has been re-imagined; the world as we know it has vanished; only a rapidly-decaying detritus remains. Names have vanished - the characters are simply 'the boy' and 'the man'. Life has been extinguished, and the fragments that remain are rapidly disintegrating and dying, as those that remain cling to life as best they can. The landscape is littered with bodies, and there is no life, only ash.
Language is mutating - unfamiliar words appear; they're vaguely recognisable, but somehow different. There's a Beckettian flavour to McCarthy's language - invented words that sound familiar, yet are strange. The man talks of things from his previous life, but the boy, born after the holocaust, doesn't know what he's talking about. It gets unbearably tense at times, as you're constantly aware of the precariousness of their hold on life
It sounds bleak in the extreme, but it isn't. It's a fearful, terrifying world, deeply strange, but utterly convincing. In spite of the horrors, love remains, and at the end, hope, of a kind, appears. It's whetted my appetite for more McCarthy, and I'm looking forward enormously to No Country For Old Men.

Ballet Shoes

I watched BBC's Ballet Shoes on Boxing Day. I had to - Ballet Shoes was a major part of my childhood, as I suspect it was for many girls growing up in the 50s and early 60s. The cast looked good, with reliable performers such as Victoria Wood, Emilia Fox, Harriet Walter, the peerless Eileen Atkins, and the impressive and highly promising Marc Warren.
None of them disappointed, and the young actresses who played the Fossil girls were well-directed. The costumes and scenery were meticulously realised, and the accents were better than usual. The older generation, of course, were fine, but Fox and Warren did very well indeed, and the girls who played the Fossil sisters did as well as could have been expected.
My main gripe, though was the changes to the story. I realise that some had to be made, but these were tiresome. Warren played Mr Smith, a single gentlemen lodger who runs a garage - in the book, Mr and Mrs Smith are a couple. This allowed the creation of a spurious love interest for Sylvia, the girls' guardian, and we had to have a ridiculous wedding scene at the end. In the book Sylvia remains single, accompanying Pauline to Hollywood, but this was clearly unacceptable for TV controllers. Sigh......
I got my Puffin edition of the book out from my shelf of children's books (I never throw anything away!) and had a look. It's an incredibly matter-of-fact book, with few flights of fancy. It's based firmly on everyday life with enough wish-fulfilment to satisfy. For me, it was as fantastical as Harry Potter is to today's generation, bearing no relation to my life whatsoever. yet it was the descriptions of everyday life that I relished most. I do think reality is unnecessary for a great children's book and I devoured Streatfield's stories of girls (they were all girls) achieving stardom against the odds, reading them over and over again.
The production truncated a great deal, as I suppose it had to, but it was an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes, though it's 9.00 start was clearly aimed at 50-somethings who knew the book. I can't imagine it would grab any of today's 12-year-olds - but who knows?

The Line of Beauty

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker prize in 2004 - I've just finished it, and found it very readable indeed. However, it seems to have had mixed reviews; as well as the Booker, an article in the Guardian described it as Little Britain meets Evelyn Waugh. I think that's unfair - it was much better than that, but I can see where it came from.
Hollinghurst makes no secret of his love for, knowledge of, and debt to Henry James, who is referenced throughout. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is a James scholar, engaged in writing up a PhD on James. I've never read any James, except The Turn of the Screw years ago - he's one of those writers whose work I've always kept at the back of my mind, unread, waiting for the space I hope I'll have in old age. I do know that his work is dense, with long, ornate sentences, and Hollinghurst has produced what I imagine must be a deliberate pastiche of James's style.

I found much of the writing thrilling, and gloried and luxuriated in the prose style. Some of Hollinghurst's sentences made me breathless with admiration at times, and left me smiling at their audacity and sheer style. The Guardian review describes the prose as 'restrained' - I couldn't agree less; it's anything but.

The novel is set in the early-to-mid 1980s, and follows Nick's fortunes, after he leaves Oxford. Just down from Oxford, he lodges in Kensington, at the home of the Fedden's, whose son Toby, is a friend from Oxford, and Gerald Fedden, Toby's father, is a Tory MP married to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist. Nick comes from a relatively humble, provincial background, so the book therefore offers an outsider's view of the comfortable middle-to-upper classes in London during the early-to-mid-1980s, as they became rich under the Thatcher government, becoming almost drunk on success and money. Nick is attempting to complete his PhD, and remains an aesthete, while all around him are philistines,building lucrative careers in politics or finance.
Few of the characters are likeable - the only one I warmed to was Catherine, Toby's emotionally and psychologically fragile sister, another outsider, who periodically supplies a caustic commentary on the excesses of her surroundings. There are several set pieces throughout the book - one of most delicious being the appearance of Thatcher herself at a party at the Feddens She's dressed in a lavishly-spangled jacket, prompting Catherine to comment that 'she looks like a country-and-western singer'.
Cocaine-snorting and gay sex sometimes dominate the narrative, becoming increasingly tedious, and this, I think, ultimately damages the book. It sagged horribly in the middle, I thought, but rallied at the end; I wouldn't have given it the Booker, but there is much to enjoy.

Bill Bryson

I've just started The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's first book. I've read it before, a long time ago, but had it to hand. I needed to read something light and frothy after the marathon that was The Tenderness of Wolves, and Bryson's books are perfect for filling in those gaps when you're not in the mood for anything demanding. The last one I read was Neither Here Nor There, but the previous two were A Walk in the Woods and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, his most recent book. Some of them are mine, but others are borrowed - my children and my brother have several, so I never need to buy them.
I have to confess to a very slight ambivalence about him - he's my generation, and I always feel a bit funny about people my age. I wonder what their experiences of for example, the fifties and the sixties, were, and compare their subsequent lives to mine. I suppose there's a special intimacy which is absent from people from a different generation. I expect it's like this for everyone - people from the war generation will feel that particularly intensely. I suppose what reading Bryson means, for me, is that his experiences of school, college, growing up, etc all took place at roughly the same time as mine, even though his life in Des Moines was very different to mine. But not that different. Because growing up in the West in the Sixties and Seventies took place in the thick of a cultural revolution - the impact of which we are still experiencing. And our parents grew up in World War II, something which had a profound effect on our lives. We rejected their experiences, and we had to rediscover them.
Bryson's books are permeated with his childhood, and the lives of his parents and grandparents, and this has made them fascinating and compulsive for my generation, and I have to say, for succeeding generations. My children have his books, and enjoy them. I think it's their irreverence, their cynicism, yet open-hearted, wide-eyed innocence that appeals - who knows? Whatever it is, he's made a fortune, and good luck to him. He's made a pretty a decent career out of his travels and observation - it's not everyone who can construct a genial personality and make a living out of it. If that sounds a bit snarky, it's because reading his earlier books, I've come across stuff he's recycled in later books. Other writers have committed worse crimes, and Bryson only plagiarises himself - in that sense, he's a true original.
Anyway, I enjoy his freeform, improvisatory style - there's a school essay feel about them, especially the earlier books, a kind of school essay, 'what I did on my holidays' feel. He goes into places with a blank canvas and takes them as they come, but he's quite open about his prejudices. If he doesn't like a place at first sight, it's difficult for him to change his mind, but he often finds something to enjoy, even if it's only sitting in a motel room with a six-pack and a TV.
One of his main characteristics, which occurs in all his books, is his habit of making things up - I can see why he does it, it's a bit of exaggeration, a way of adding colour. Sometimes I find it a bit tiresome, but not always - sometimes it's funny. It's another thing he just does, and I suppose his books wouldn't be the same without it. He's everyman, really, but of course, he isn't any more - he's a best-selling writer, and famous.
He's a youngest child of three, and that's very obvious. There's something a bit attention-seeking about him. He wants to be heard, and noticed and feels a bit hard-dome-by if he's ignored. Often youngest children are good at playing the fool, as they often have trouble making themselves heard, or getting people to notice them. So you always get the feeling he's basking in his celebrity, and loves the attention - and who can blame him.
When he recently became President, I think it was, of the CPRE, he was all over the radio airwaves, thoroughly enjoying himself, so I hope he's hard at work. He's now an adopted Englishmen, with an English wife and children, and as is often case, more English than the English, a strange journey for someone from Des Moines, but that's the 20th century for you.

The Tenderness of Wolves

I've just finished The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney. I take much longer to read books nowadays - I used to blast through books incredibly quickly but don't seem to have the ability to do so nowadays, but even by my current standards it I seem to have been reading this for ages. It wasn't a difficult read by any means, but it is a long book, and towards the end I got the feeling that Penney had become so immersed in her characters, and the atmosphere of the bleak snowbound Canadian wilderness in which the narrative takes place, that she wasn't too sure how she was going to finish it. There are a great many characters in the book, not all of them as well developed as they might be, and a map would have been useful, as I found it difficult at times to work out where everyone actually was.
However, I found much to admire and enjoy, and liked very much the fact that not all the questions were answered. The Macguffin of the bone tablet was a particularly pleasing little feature, and the central relationship between Mrs Ross and Parker was well portrayed and, ultimately very moving.
One thing that kept nagging away at me all the way through was the question of historical authenticity. I'd read that Penney had undertaken meticulous researcc in the British Library, and it shows - everything about conditions in 19th century Canada; the landscape, weather, living conditions, seems immaculately realised. But I couldn't help feeling throughout that we were seeing 21st-century people plonked down in the 19th century. The characters spoke, thought and felt with modern voices and attitudes. I didn't however, feel this was necessarily a problem - sometimes attempts at period authenticity get in the way and overpower narratives. Somehow it didn't seem to matter that a married woman would take off into the wilderness with another man to look for her son. We'd been given a picture of a woman with a complicated background who obviously had enough independance of thought to do something like this, but it didn't really ring true for me. This, surely, would never, could never have happened in the mid-19th century, even in the wilds of Canada? But who am I to question this? Penney had exhaustively researched her book, and it's possible she may have found a similar story. I'm coming round to the idea that authenticity really is an over-valued concept. What does it actually mean? We can only go by whether we think and feel something is authentic, and why.
Anyway, I stuck with the book, and, although it's by no means perfect, it ultimately convinced me. Several critics found the ending unsatisfactory - endings are difficult, and more celebrated writers have come to grief over them. I hope she writes more as I think there's plenty there to suggest she has enormous talent - I've read that she suffers from agoraphobia, so I hope that doesn't prove too great an obstacle. She produced this without leaving Britain, so obviously has a fine imagination. I look forward to more from her.

libraries

I always feel completely at home in any public library - I suppose it's because I've spent so much time in them over the years. My parents didn't have much money, but they were took me to the children's library in Oxford as soon as I was old enough. I can't remember not being able to read, and have always been a pretty voracious reader, so the library was a treasure chest and I spent hours in there. My parents used to drop me off while they went shopping from a pretty early age - you could do that in those days - and I made the most of it. The holy grail was finding an Enid Blyton book on the shelves - she was so popular that her books were always out, but I discovered other children's authors, Ruby Ferguson was one, I remember - I loved her books, which were all about girls with ponies on Romney Marsh, and I adored school stories. It amuses me to read that children's books should be 'relevant' - why? Nothing could be further away from my life than the pre-war girl's boarding school, but I was addicted to them. I suppose stories about friendships, bullying etc. are universal wherever you are, and the Harry Potter phenomenon is testament to the fact that the boarding school still has a hold on the childish imagination. I suppose it's the fact it's a self-contained world where adults are entirely peripheral and their world is merely incidental, so it can provide a convincingly child-centred universe.
Oxford built a new, modern, much larger library and that's where I first took my children. I don't remember too much about it - the old library remains a much more vivid memory. As soon as we moved to Bristol in 1983 I discovered the Central Library on College Green, a magnificent building which retains the original Edwardian grandeur. It's surroundings have improved enormously in recent years - traffic is banned from outside and attractive fountains and flower beds are nearby, and it's recently been expensively refurbished and reorganised. I'm sorry that so much space is now given up to DVDs but I suppose libraries have to find ways in which to survive. I still love going there, mooching around the shelves, and I can see myself spending more and more time there as I get older.
Now, the reference library upstairs - it's magnificent! It has lovely big old desks and capacious, comfortable chairs. It's not what it was and has had to make room for the music library which was expelled from the ground floor and is now a shadow of its former self. But you can still spend hours in there reading ancient bound copies of magazines and newspapers and probably much else. There's always plenty of retired people doing family history research and much else I expect. The whole place a comfortable, well-used public service and I always feel as if I've come home whenever I go there. Public libraries are a repository of ecverything good about our society and I feel sure they wouild probably fail every one of the government-inspired financial 'public use' audits. It's hugely important that we keep them, use them, preserve them ,develop them - do whatever has to be done for them - they're a necessity, a public service in the most fundamental sense. Maybe not quite as important as water and sewerage, as demonstrated by the recent floods but still a vitally important part of public life.

reading aloud

I was wondering if people still read aloud to their children? I only ask because I've just bought a couple of Young James Bond DVDs for my nephew - it's his 12th birthday soon, and I don't think his parents have read to him much, yet he still loves to listen to stories in bed and has lots of audiobooks. He doesn't have a TV or computer in his bedroom and I know his parents have absolutely and firmly resolved to hold out as long as possible on this, a stance with which I totally agree. My sons had a TV in their bedroom when they were about 15-16 and my daughter never had one at all and there's something pitiful, I think, about children holed up in their bedrooms, away from adult life, with their TV's, DVD players and computers.
Anyway, back to reading aloud. I derived enormous pleasure from reading to my children, and discovered and rediscovered many, many books. They were incredibly lucky, as the 1970s were in many ways the golden age of children's literature. TV didn't compete in the way it does now, with multi-channel, 24-hour programmes on tap, there were no computer games or videos/DVDs. We read to them every night, either individually or to all of them at once, which meant that my youngest son got to hear Lord of the Rings at the impressionable, and possibly inappropriate age of about 7 and developed a deep and abiding love of the books, and, many years later, the films. I still have many of the books and am sad that bedtime stories now seems to be a dying practice. I've seen articles in the paper about reading to children but I imagine that parents who've been at work all day are simply too tired. I feel immensely privileged to have been a mother when most mothers of young children didn't need to work - nowadays it's a necessity in order to have even a half-decent income and pay the mortgage and bills.
My life would have been immeasurably the poorer for not having had that time every evening with them. And of course there were the books. I know the Frog and Toad books, Bread and Jam for Frances and Each Peach Pear Plum, off by heart, having read them in turn 4 times over. I feel sorry, not only for the children, but for today's parents today who haven't had such richness in their lives; still, I always promised myself that I wouldn't bang on about 'the good old days' when I became old and grey, and the 1970s had its disadvantages. It certainly wasn't all bad, though - great TV, great children's books, great films and some great music.

holiday reading - The Historian

I've just come back from 2 weeks in Ireland on holiday, and, as usual when on holiday, I've spent most of my time reading. I always find that it's a time when I can catch up, finish books that have been hanging around started but not finished, read ones that have been sitting there waiting for too long, and maybe discover some unexpected treats. I did all three, so feel very satisfied. The first thing I did was finally finish The Historian by Elisabeth Kostova. I'd started this on the recommendation of my daughter and it felt as if I'd been reading it for ever. It's certainly long, if nothing else - a kind of an amalgam of The Name of the Rose and Possession though nothing like as good as either. I've heard it mentioned as being a kind of Da Vinci Code for grownups but can't comment as I've never read the Dan Brown pageturner and don't intend to.
I have to say that I found it, not dull, as I managed to finish it, but unsatisfying and stodgy. The characters never sprang to life or leapt off the page - they were plot devices and that's all. The plot was labrynthine and, I suspect, deliberately complicated. I just about kept it together, and was determined to finish it, but I found it ultimately a dull, wearisome read.

Snow Falling on Cedars

I finished Snow Falling on Cedars last night, staying up until midnight to read the last few pages. It's a remarkable book that will stay with me for a long time. I found it very hard to get into it at first and had to make a real effort to stick with it, but was rewarded as it found its way under my skin as all the best books do.
Its subject is something I knew nothing about, the Japanese communities who arrived in America at the beginning of the 20th century, and their fate when war broke out. I had no idea that many Japanese fought in the US army during World War Two. So there was much to learn about in the book, something I always enjoy.
I made a list as I went along of the issues on which the narrative touched: love, loss, the passage of time, parenthood, belief, unbelief, grief, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, different cultures colliding, immigration, war and peace. The weather and its impact on our thoughts and actions is a constant thread running through the book, used throughout a a metaphor. As a snowstorm engulfs the community, it freezes, not only the pipes and road, but the souls of the three central characters, Ishmael, Kabuo and Hatsoe. Ishmael and Hatsuo had an secret relationship as children and teenagers, and it is the memory of this that haunts Ishmael after he returns from the war, in which he lost an arm. Memory, and the tricks it plays on us, is a major theme.
Their lives have been blighted by war, and it's as if their souls have been frozen over. At the end the reader becomes immersed in Ishmael's thought processes, almost becoming him as he ponders the choices he has to make. We will him to make the right one, but the possibility of him making the wrong one is left open right up to the end.
I did think the end was a little rushed and the book hurtled towards its conclusion in the last few pages. But, a fine book nevertheless, one that will live in the memory.

The Hours

I finished The Hours by Michael Cunningham last night, staying up until midnight. I haven't read a book that's touched me so deeply for a long time. It's the way he manages to convey exactly how life is really lived, which is simply getting through each day. Myself, I learned a long time ago not to look to far ahead as you can never predict what's coming up and Cunningham manages to capture the simple dailiness of everyday life.
It's also about the despairs and joys at the heart of life in such a truthful way, that, when a particular insight drove home with such force that long-buried memories began to resurface.
And there are other, simple observations that struck home with startling clarity, as, when Virginia rushes out of the house to travel up to London for the day, to escape, he muses on the particularity of railway stations, how they are both a 'portal and a destination', 'slightly desolate even when crowded'. The description encapsulated for me the reason why I love Temple Meads (in Bristol) so much, and why I'll grab any chance I can to go there. I picked my son up from there the other night - it was, in one respect, bleak and lonely, with travellers hurrying off their train, and others hanging around, rather hopelessly gazing at the departure screens, yet I loved it, felt comforted by being there and felt very much at home.
Laura Brown's deeply ambivalent feelings about her role as a housewife and mother, and her longing to escape, so that she can read her book, also hit home. I remember feeling exactly like that when I was at home with my children - one evening I got in the car and just drove around the city for a coiple of hours just to get away, and I'm sure I'm not the only young mother who's felt like that, and fantasised about just disappeariing. Laura got away for good, and part of me admires her for it, and understands her.
And as for Virginia, well, she did it as well, and Richard, Laura's son. There is, in Cunningham's book, an understanding of the realities of suicide, that sometimes, there can be no other way out, that there is a courage there. I've never been in that desperate situation, but have gained an understanding of what drives people to the limit through reading Cunningham's book.
Like all the best books and films, it leaves you thinking. I wondered if Laura understood Richard's suicide through her own abandonment of him and through reading Virginia Woolf. I thought of Laura, breaking away and reading all Woolf's books, bot just Mrs Dalloway, and perhaps her biograpghy, letters and diaries.
Clarissa is the one who is left behind, the one who has chosen to lead the ordinary life, like most of us. And Cunningham celebrates that equally, without privileging the suicides. In fact, I felt that Clarissa is the true heroine of the book, the one who has chosen to give.

I saw the film when it came out a couple of years ago, and have seen it three times. All three women, Moore, Streep and Kidman, were perfect, and now I've read the book, I can see how successfully they brought the characters to life, illuminating their inner life in a way that perhaps Cunningham couldn't quite manage.

I can't see The Hours as a single artefact any more - book and film are indivisible and form a whole in tandem with each other. I can see myself watching and reading again and again.