Back and forth on the Mississippi

I was intrigued to read reviews of James, the new novel by Percival Everett. Then I decided to remind myself of the novel upon which James is based: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I haven’t read Mark Twain‘s two novels (Tom Sawyer being the other) since I was about twelve, maybe a year or two older but not much, so it was at least sixty years ago. Reading it again, with a twenty first century sensibility, and that of an adult is rather uncomfortable. The attitudes, the language and even the story is horribly racist.

Although Huckleberry considers Jim, the runaway slave, as his friend it does not stop him also regarding him, as all white people did, as stupid, ignorant and servile. This is further compounded in the tale by the arrival of two out and out con artists, who to the detriment of both characters, lead them into dangerous territory.

It was therefore a joy and relief to pick up James and read the corrected version of the coloured man’s story. The novel follows quite rigidly to the early part of the Mark Twain narrative, but with a boot on the other foot – so when Huckleberry and his friend Tom Sawyer play mean tricks on Jim, the house negro, it is often he who is laughing at them, playing up to the white man’s perception when in fact he is at least as intelligent, clever and learned as either of the two boys.

At some point though, James gets separated from Huck and his adventures are all his own. Everett creates a living, breathing world about this runaway slave – the two con men sell him to a blacksmith, he is then exchanged for two hundred dollars to sing with a black and white minstrel show – in which he must be blacked up! As with other books that touch on this situation, the coloured man’s life in America, Everett uses humour to emphasise the enormity of the situation. There is a terrible lesson involving a pencil – too awful and too real to think about, with fatal consequences. James is well aware of the tightrope upon which he balances.

I am not sure that I recommend revisiting The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you will get just as much out of Everett’s novel without it. It was just that I had my copy on the shelf – after all these years, though somewhere along the line, I have lost Tom Sawyer.

Three Country Wives

Using a narrow focus can sometimes reveal more than a longer, wider view; thus it is with Rural Hours. Taking a look at a short period in the lives of three well-known authors, each of whom has already been exhaustively examined by others, Harriet Baker has brought out a moment in each life, that transformed the person.

In every case, it was a move to the country. Virginia Woolf was a decade older than the other two women in this book: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamund Lehmann, but she knew, if not intimately, both of them.

In 1914, after a protracted illness during which time she wrote nothing, Virginia and Leonard moved to a house in Sussex, and after a short temporary stay, bought Asheham. Leonard still spent most of the time in London, but Virginia was convalescent and he monitored her daily life, by the constant exchange of notes and letters (mostly still extant). Ms Baker concentrates on a single volume of writing, neither a diary nor a notebook – a small bound book of plain pages upon which, on a more or less daily basis, Virginia has written an observation. There is no “I, me, mine” in this writing, merely “walked the Downs” and lists of flowers, butterflies and occasionally people seen on her wanderings, she was especially interested in the German prisoners of war that were working in the fields, and some of the notes show “the harvest brought in”, or exchanges with the farmer’s wife and the scarcity of eggs, flour and on the obverse of some of the pages are lists of the prices of some staple foods – eggs, bread and milk.

This was the first writing that Virginia had done for two years. The Asheham notebook does not feature in the collected works, not is it treated like her diaries, and it is quite different from any of them. Observational, accurate but impersonal.

The next section deals with Sylvia, her move from an awkward situation in London to Dorset, and her sudden exhilarating love affair with another woman. In the spirit of socialism that she endorsed, Sylvia bought a modest workman’s cottage, without running water or electricity and lived in a frugal, self sustaining life, not using her wealth to improve the cottage, but enjoying its eccentricities and the exigencies of living in such a basic manner.

The final section is Rosamund Lehmann’s move to Berkshire. She was also avoiding a difficult marriage, and moved with her son to a small cottage. Her brother, John, worked at the Hogarth Press with the Woolfs, hence the connection with Virginia. It covers the years and heartache of her affair with Cecil Day Lewis, her hopeless anticipation that it would be resolved in his leaving his family to marry her, and her despair when he did just that, but married another woman.

In an epilogue, Harriet Baker brings everything together with the Woolfs’ life at Rodmell and the other two writers’ reaction to Virginia’s sudden death.

This is not about their writings, though all three were, indeed, published writers. It is more about how the countryside changed their perceptions, of themselves and of their surroundings – as if time had slowed down and a new awakening made them notice the patterns and renewal of nature, and thereby renewed in them the spirit to live again.

And another wordsmith

Also widely reviewed, Burma Sahib is a novel about the early and formative life of the man who became George Orwell. Eric Blair is sent, through parental pressure, to Burma to learn to be a policeman. As a rookie, he is everything that he should not be, and is passed in his probationary period from one outpost to another. Even once he has moved up a notch, to full service as a police officer, his life is not without it failures. Eventually, invalided home. he finds his true metier – thank goodness!

Paul Theroux has fleshed out this novel from Orwell’s own account and other contemporary references, many of them uncomplimentary. It is a marvellous insight into a misfitted life. Funny, painful and blisteringly frank about Blair’s contempt for his superiors, for colonialism and the Raj in particular.

Books, books, books

These three books, read in this order have enlightened, intrigued and deepened my understanding of why I read and why I read books in a material format rather than online. I, sadly, have lots of friends who have stopped buying books as they don’t know what to do with them and no longer have space to keep them. And it is also, depressingly true, that it has become quite difficult to unload unwanted books anywhere – schools will not take them, Oxfam shops are full to the brim – so I am eternally grateful to the Annual Booksale at St John’s Wood Church, NW8 7NE which is about to take place – Saturday and Sunday 18th & 19th May – as they accept boxes of books gratefully, and apparently they are snapped up eagerly, so if you can go – get there early!

The Book Makers has been widely and positively reviewed. Each chapter concentrates upon one aspect and mainly one or two remarkable people involved in book making. Printing, typesetting, papermaking, binding and everything in between the pages. It is a most fascinating and lively delve into the materiality of the book. Adam Smyth has used the more shadowy people in the trade, so not William Caxton but William de Worde, not John Baskerville but his wife, Sarah Eaves. And I thought I knew a lot about Little Gidding, until I read this.

The Book Forger is another kettle of fish all together. A detective story of the most acute and interesting sort. Two young men go in search of fake documents, one only to start with, but horrifyingly more and more come to light. Joseph Hone has deliberately written this as a detective novel, and one of the two men, Henry Graham Pollard, has a keen interest in detective fiction – we meet several luminaries of the early detective novelists, Dorothy L Sayers for one. But this is not a novel. A great connoisseur, biliophile and member of the Roxburghe Club, highly respected and revered in such august establishments as The British Museum, the Browning Society, the Swinburne Society and other bookselling and buying establishments is, it turns out, not simply a massive forger, but also a thief.

On the other hand, Reading Lessons is about teaching English Literature to secondary school students. Carol Atherton has taught for three decades in Lincolnshire. Her book talks about aspects of the curriculum, all seen through some classic novels, poems and plays and the things that we can learn from reading and teaching at a time when the creative arts are under considerable stress. She looks beyond the text to what the books can teach us and our children about life and living – move aside all those Williams (Blake, Wordsworth and Shakespeare) and let the light in for Maya Angelou, Malorie Blackman, Barry Hines et al. I think every parent should read this, not just a few teachers.

End Game?

I fear that this maybe the final volume of the Marwood and Lovett series. Six novels covering the city of London from about 1666. The opening volume introduces the characters during the shock and awe of the Great Fire. By this time, in The Shadows of London, much has changed but the rebuilding of the damaged city continues. Cat Hakesby and her partner Brennan, are engaged to build a series of almshouses and a street of private houses for a wealthy client (engaged in the triangular trade it transpires) but a body is found and work has to stop. The novel is full of details: characters, costumes and Court intrigue in the intimate circle around Charles II; danger and threats from characters that we have met before. This is not the book to read if you haven’t followed the narrative, there is too much back story. This is a series that needs to be read from the beginning, Andrew Taylor tells a great story with just enough genuine history behind it to intrigue the most perceptive of readers, and plenty of excitement to engage the reader who cares more for the detection and adventure.

Readings since Easter

Quite a mixed selection, most of them sent from Primrose Hill Bookshop, where they have been waiting for the Lenten abstinence from fiction to abate. Between Silk & Cyanide bridged the gap. I mentioned it in another blog and then re-read it. If you (or your children) are interested in coding, in the old sense of the word, secret writing, then this is the book for you. Leo Marks was rejected by Bletchley and ended up working in SOE creating the coding patterns that would be used in Europe by the wireless operators working under stressful conditions in occupied Europe between 1940 to 1944.

The novels were read in a random order, just as they came to hand from the box of joy. They are all very different. The Imperfectionists is a collection of stories about a disparate group of writers working for a failing newspaper, and the history of the family that founded the paper and why, why it began and why it began to fail. Tom Rachman keeps the balls in the air and one’s interest is piqued.

The Island Swimmer is of a different magnitude altogether. The principal character, Evie is hiding in London having left The Orkneys twenty years before. She has kept in touch with only one person, Freya. But her father is dying and she is returning in trepidation. All is slowly revealed and discovery is uncomfortable, devastatingly sad. As an evocation of the sublime healing qualities of the wild, especially the Scottish islands this would be hard to beat. Lorraine Kelly has returned to Orkney time and time again and it is clear from the novel what it means to her.

Sigrid Nunez also writes about a group, this time mostly women. New York is in pandemic lockdown and so communication is via smartphone. Some families have left and the city streets are blissfully uncrowded. The narrator of The Vulnerables is loving the solitude, but circumstances lead her to flat-sit a friend’s apartment with a parrot who needs company; she is suddenly joined by a stranger, the previous parrot sitter but cannot move back into her own apartment as it is lent out to a doctor who is working in the pandemic hospital and does not want to bring infection to her own family. This is one of a number of pandemic novels which looks at the way we coped through an examination of the lives of a close knit group of friends now held apart by circumstances, who have to adjust.

What can I say about Wellness? Is was both hugely enjoyable, frustrating and sometimes plainly irritating. One chapter in particular has a bad example of mansplaining! This is Nathan Hill‘s second novel. He is exploring, through fiction, the nature of coupledom: falling in love, falling out of love, marriage and monogamy though the eyes and experience of two “city orphans”, Elizabeth and Jack. They come from extremely different backgrounds which they have voluntarily left behind, and end up in apartments in Chicago facing each other across a narrow alley. Like Evie, in The Island Swimmer, Jack has left behind a family tragedy; Elizabeth has left behind wealth and privilege and is working in a science laboratory called Wellness. The novel is both a page turner and a study in the social world of the internet. Fascinating and intriguing, but some chapters drove me to distraction!

Last but not least, What Will Survive Of Us. Although I have read a great many Howard Jacobson novels, generally I am not entirely on his wavelength. But this novel I found entrancing. Another “couple” story. A relationship that begins with a kerpow moment, becomes an affair of longstanding and then a marriage. As a study of affection, love and friendship it has everything. I cannot recommend it too highly.

On unofficial business

This was passed on to me on its way to the charity shop and I will admit to being somewhat undetermined about its content. Partly because, I think, I knew people who really had been part of the SOE, whose work I respected and whose writings I have read, and indeed, re-read frequently.

Pam Jenoff makes no secret of the fact that this is fiction, that she has taken liberties with the stories of the undercover agents who were sent out to France in advance of the invasion of Europe towards the end of the Second World War. In The Lost Girls of Paris we are arrested in the first instance by a discovery of a suitcase and a bundle of photographs that end up in the hands of a stranger. Grace Healey, the one with the photos, is intrigued and does her level best to find the owner and return the photos and this leads to a long and involved quest.

Between the chapters covering her searches, we meet the young women in the photos who were recruited into the SOE and sent to France. As the title suggests, some of them never returned.

All this is true, not these stories, but ones very like this. My difficulty with this novel is that is contains a treachery so vile, so depraved and so violent that is becomes a travesty which besmirches the reputation of the SOE, and other branches of the War Department.

I have the privilege of knowing several people in the SOE, some of them on active service and some in the secret offices in Baker Street. This novel does them no favours. If you really want to know about the SOE and the various people involved you would be much better reading their books.

Which is not to say that there are not many novels by other authors whose characters are part of the SOE clandestine operation, just I would suggest, not The Lost Girls of Paris.

Lent is spent

These are the books that I read during Lent. The book by Rowan Williams, quondam Archbishop of Canterbury, is a meditation and explanation of the ways in which the Eastern Christian philosophy differs from what one might loosely call, the Roman Catholic. Going right back to the Desert Fathers, The Very Reverend Williams looks at the reasons why the monastic discipline got going in the early Christian life; and it was about the things that stand in the way of our relationship with God, our passions. In shorthand – The Seven Deadly Sins (of which there are actually eight but seven is a more significant number). The book was the chosen Lent book for Southwark Cathedral, London and is as relevant to a Christian today, as it was to those men and women who retreated to the desert to find God. Though the book does not recommend the retreat from the world, but for us to embrace it fortified, with the self-knowledge that this short series of expositions offer.

The House by the Thames was given to me because a friend, the new Dean of Southwark Cathedral, now lives in one of the houses that this book is about. If you have ever travelled down the Thames from Westminster Bridge in a guided tourist boat – and it is a journey that I strongly recommend – you will be fed a number of urban myths as you pass various sites. One of them is that Sir Christopher Wren lived in one of the houses is this little terrace. He may, quite possibly, have lived on this site, in just the same way as Charles Dickens may have once lived in Tavistock Square, the actually building now long demolished, but which does not stop there being a Blue Plaque on the said building. The opposite is true of this little row of houses: the Council have put up a notice saying “this is not where Christopher Wren lived”, but it doesn’t stop the gawpers. Disconcerting if you look up from writing your sermon to see a number of tourists peering in at you.

The Antony Beevor book, Paris after the Liberation is an eye-opener. Obviously, a great deal of it is about General de Gaulle. Written in collaboration with Artemis Cooper, they had access to the notebooks and diaries of Duff Cooper who was the British Ambassador in Paris at the time, and someone who stayed for pretty much the whole of the Second World War, and saw first hand the machinations of the un-elected government after the fall of the Vichy regime; there are acres of archives on various aspects of the post war period, but this book concentrates simply on the city and its environs; the factions and people who manipulated the story for their own ends and those that manipulated the situation for the good of France. People and historians alike differ strongly in their views of this protracted post-war period. It is well known that many collaborators slipped through the net and took positions in the de Gaulle government, expediency meant that this was a necessary compromise and was not restricted to France.

Edgelands in one of those books, which I frequently pick up simply because it follows a path that has memories for me, now that I am not wandering around myself. Sasha Squire is the wife of the Member of Parliament for part of that area, and also grew up on that coast; she walks the west coast path, writing lucidly and poetically about the places, features, colours and scents that the path, sometimes vertiginously, follows around Devon and Cornwall. There are lots of books likes this, I recommend Robert MacFarlane and Raynor Winn (authors that I have written about in this blog). As an aide memoire of earlier times, they are a wonderful resource; and as an encouragement to get out there and experience the British coast in all its variety for yourself, they are hard to beat,

Between the unethical and the legal

I was given this as a birthday present. My goodness, it is some read! I was rather amused to discover that David Barclay has in some fanciful way (though the family might not agree) managed to persuade himself that his family belonged to the Scottish family, the ones who founded the famous bank – in your dreams?

This is the story of the Barclay twins, David and Freddie, who rose from poverty to extreme wealth in a matter of four decades. How they did it, and why they did it has had to be deduced by the author, because none of the family would cooperate, and nor would many of their closest associates and friends. Nevertheless, Jane Martinson ploughed on through whatever opaque documentation exists in the public domain – and it is not the whole story by any means.

The stress throughout is that the twins did nothing illegal, but they managed to accrue enormous wealth with a combination of guile, sharp practice and asset stripping which made them a fortune, balanced against unrestricted loans, and the money that they made then vanished into offshore accounts the complexity of which made accounting for each penny impossible, with shell companies, trusts and transfers adding to the financial fog.

At the height of their success they owned The Ritz Hotel Piccadilly, The Telegraph, a Channel Island so small that it is invisible on a map, and a huge portfolio of property in Central London. Yet, when it all crashed to the ground – family feuding and divorce contributing largely to the failure, but made worse by the background of the global banking crash, Frederick could maintain that he had not got the wherewithal to pay his divorce settlement, his wife found herself, homeless and with a bank overdraft.

From a place on The Times Rich List to penury, David died before the true extent of their indebtedness was revealed and Frederick, owing to an earlier settlement when they were in their fifties, found himself at the mercy of his nephews.

Quite a saga – a tax free lifestyle that ended up costing the ordinary taxpayer millions.

A call out to grandmothers

How often have you heard someone say in an interview “I wish I had asked my mother/father/grandparents more about their lives, and now it is too late”. This image above is an example of a grandmother pre-empting that wail of lost opportunity.

The author, through a series of introspective and candid stories or essays, has given thought to who her parents were, what their lives were like, both in respect to their relationship with her, but also with each other. Lavishly illustrated with family photographs, she has offered her sons and their children, a glimpse into their relations, and into her life in a way that she might not have found possible in conversation.

Obviously, some aspects of the exercise were painful, and make hard reading. But as an exercise in sharing knowledge of who your parent is, what influenced them and how they became the person that you know, it is an exemplar of the best practice.

The narrative branches out from parents to cousins, and how it all fits together. There are photographs of houses that were lived it, places visited and relationships that came and went. The author does not gloss over anything, but acknowledges the good and the bad with an open and frank assessment of what happened – no recrimination or blame, just this happened and is resolved, or not as the case may be.

Everyone should consider a similar endeavour – before it is too late!