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,

They seek him here, they seek him there…

Another Damian Seeker novel. Brilliant, tense, and full of surprises.

Time has moved on since we first met Damian Seeker. The Protectorate has gone and Charles II is now on the throne. One of the first Acts of Parliament has been the Act of Oblivion, remitting all crimes against the monarchy save for the thirty-odd men who signed the death warrant of King Charles I : they are to be hounded, found, tried and put to death. One or two other men (and a few women) were also not exempt from severe punishment, one of those being John Milton (poet and propagandist) whose books were burned, but who himself remained hidden. Shielded by Andrew Marvell according to The Winter List, another person of interest who had managed to slide seamlessly from one side to the other.

There was another spider though, who had his own web of intelligence who was privately expanding the list of people who should be hounded, found, exposed and brought to justice.

There are many characters in SG Maclean‘s new novel that we have met before, some less attractive than others but whose loyalty to their own cause cannot be doubted, we think. But a man can turn and turn again, so how can anyone be completely sure.

As usual, a masterful rendering of fiction and history fraught with danger, especially for Damian Seeker, to the last page.

There are now six Seeker novels, if that seems a bit daunting, I strongly recommend another novel dealing with this period. Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

And then there were three

I have been having a reading binge. Two novels that complete long awaited trilogies. Kate Mosse, who has now completed two historical (fictional) trilogies, one based in Carcassonne and this one which is described as The Joubert Family Chronicles, of which The Ghost Ship is the final part.

The Joubert family are Huguenots in France. We first meet them in The Burning Chambers just before the marriage of Catherine de Medici and Henri, the second son of King Francis 1. Shortly after the marriage was solemnised, on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, the Roman Catholics rose up and slaughtered Huguenots, mostly in Paris, but also making their lives impossible in the rest of France. Our family fled to the Netherlands, where we find them in the second volume of the trilogy, The City of Tears. At the beginning of The Ghost Ship, the grandmother and father, Minou and Piet are back in Paris, nervously awaiting the final part of Louise’s inheritance of her father’s Will, a large sum of money. They are nervous on two counts. Once the documents are signed, they all travel to Carcassonne.

These are not stand alone novels. Without reading all three, the levels of nuance are lost. For myself, my reaction to this final novel was one of mild disappointment. It is a crackingly good story, Kate Mosse delivers on that score, but the thrust of the previous two novels was much more about the religious divisions that split France and caused the Huguenot diaspora, a really fertile spreading of the seed. A dispersal that benefitted pretty much every continent upon which the refugees settled, The Netherlands, England and South Africa principally, and the Canary Islands more marginally.

In The Ghost Ship, we have switched from a concentration on the religious and turned to the maritime trading empire of The Netherlands, the VOC or The Dutch East India Company as it came to be called. Minou has two sisters, Alis Joubert and Bernarda Gerritsen and Louise ends up in Amsterdam after an incident in La Rochelle (France) which has compelled her to leave suddenly. Alis is a partner of Cornelia van Raay, the owner of a shipping fleet.

It is all good stuff, just not quite what I was expecting.

The second trilogy, the Amara series from Elodie Harper, delivered the perfect ending to a story set in Pompeii before and during AD79.

In The Wolf’s Den we met the characters in a brothel in Pompeii, the brutal pimp, Felix and his various women prostitutes: Amara, a Greek, Dido, Victoria and Britannica and the men who used the brothel as a source of female concubinage. By the second volume, The House with a Golden Door, Amara has been released from the brothel and has her own establishment, courtesy of Rufus, her protector. By the time we start The Temple of Fortuna, Amara is a freed woman, the companion of a much older man, Demetrious, they live in great luxury in Rome. Vespasian has just died and Titus is the new emperor, his brother, Domitian, is a dangerous threat. As a consequence, Demetrious sends Amara back to Pompeii.

This is a tremendous delve into the lives of women in the Roman Empire. A glimpse into the hierarchies and the lives of the slaves, for Amara has a secret which has trapped her into a vulnerable position, so even though she is now free and wealthy, there is a price to pay.

O Saints Alive!

Do you ever read a book and think (hubristically) this was written for me? A book about Saint Cuthbert and Durham Cathedral, so perfect in every way, it spoke to my heart.

My father’s family came from County Durham, he is buried in St Cuthbert’s graveyard and Durham Cathedral was the first English Cathedral that I ever visited. This book, it is neither quite a novel or a collection of poems, but it has a poetical licence to speak across the ages about the Northeastern saint who, more or less singlehandedly, brought Christianity to the northern parts of Britain, after the Romans had left.

Cuddy, Saint Cuthbert’s familiar name, covers the moments of his death right up to the present day, when his great cathedral is being restored. Benjamin Myers recorded the monks’ (the haliwerfolc) wanderings with the body of Cuthbert in his stone sarcophagus, seeking for the sign that will tell them: this is where he should be buried. Along with the monks, in this book are two characters that will be replicated throughout the narrative: an orphan girl, Ediva, and a young boy, Owl Eyes. At this point the date is roughly AD 955.

Book II, nearly three hundred years later, is the building of the cathedral to house Saint Cuthbert’s body. The site has had many much smaller Saxon buildings, all built to house the sacred sarcophagus, but now on a promontory high above the River Wear, the great cathedral is rising out of the ground. Ediva becomes Eda, a brewer-wife bringing ale to the masons, Ancel Paine is Owl Eyes;

Moving swiftly on through the centuries, there is an Interlude. We have arrived at the aftermath of the Battle of Dunbar, it is 1650 and the cathedral is now a prison. Oliver Cromwell is the Protector of the Realm and hundreds of Scottish soldiers, prisoners of war, are being starved to death. At this point, the book becomes a play and gives the stones of the cathedral a voice, among the whispered despair of four dying men. [Their graves will be found some three hundred years later when excavating a site for another building]

Book III starts in 1827, historically one of the first and most egregious excavations of Cuthbert’s tomb in the cathedral. Here the two characters reappear, as Edith, the housekeeper and a strange boy with large eyes and a haunting message. This section is a diary of an Oxford antiquarian called upon to be a witness of the exhumation.

Book IV and we are right up to date, it is 2019 and a restoration process is being carried out. Mike Cuthbert, a nineteen year old, is working as a general dogsbody in the cathedral, he carries tea and coffee to the masons, generally tidies up and makes himself useful. He has grown up within miles of the cathedral, but has only ever visited it once. In this section, Eda, Ediva, Edith has moved one more step and is a university student working at the Undercroft Cafe, her name is Evelyn. Mike is the new incarnation of Owl Eyes and his surname has its own resonances.

Threaded throughout there are passages of quotations from old sources (Bede et al) and new (Pevsner and Simon Jenkins and others) either about Cuthbert or about the cathedral. These illuminate the reader without in any way detracting from the book we are reading. In every way, this book, which is not a novel neither is it non-fiction, is a rewarding and enthralling engagement. How wonderful are the creations of man? The endpapers are of all the masons’ marks found in Durham Cathedral. Thank you BM.

If you dare

This is some novel! Whether or not you were ever bullied at school; whether or not you belong in some sense to an ethnic/religious minority; whether or not you are a mother who finds she doesn’t really know what is going on for her teenage son – then if you read The Wolf Hunt, you may end up with an inkling of what it feels like to be any one or combination of these emotions.

Ayelat Gundar-Goshen writes in Hebrew, this is a translation. The novel is set in Silicon Valley: the greenest, quietist, safest place in America, until it isn’t. The trigger words, massacre in a synagogue, Nation of Islam, Mossad all will tell you that something is going to happen. But the parents of Adam are both blissfully unaware of the great wave that is about to crash over them.

This amazing novel brilliantly evokes all the uncertainties and paranoia that can result is the smallest jar in an apparently uncomplicated life, but once the crack opens it can widen until it is an abyss of incomprehension, doubt and fear. But what, or who, is behind it all? Sometimes you can never be entirely sure.

The See-Saw of State

It is quite unusual to find two books with the exact same title, The Winding Stair. The title is taken from Francis Bacon’s own letters in which he describes the climb to power as the winding stair. Jesse Norman also ascribes to Bacon the more modern aphorism of the greasy pole, which in case you are not familiar with it, describes what you see of the person above you. In this, I think Jesse is taking a liberty for fictional purposes.

Daphne du Maurier is writing a serious non-fiction study of Francis Bacon and as a consequence, his nemesis, Edward Coke (pronounced Cook) comes off rather worse for wear. Jesse Norman fleshes out the whole conflict in terms of the two men, equal in quality and rivals for power, the other characters in the drama are presented rather as walk-on parts as the two men struggle to gain ascendancy and power, but that is the nature of fiction, the author can chose what to add and what to emphasise.

The last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and the early years of James I were turbulent, risky and volatile. With his hands on the reins of power Lord Burghley was steering the country towards a succession without strife, Elizabeth would not name her successor, but the obvious choice was James IV of Scotland, secret negotiations were being held behind closed doors.

Various offices of state were gateways to the leverage of power and two men, both lawyers, were angling for them and both had marital relationships with Burghley. Edward Coke through his marriage and Francis Bacon was his cousin. Which one, petitioning Burghley and the sovereign would harvest the plums?

Both books demonstrate the ways in which the rise of one man prevented the career of the other from flourishing; Bacon spent his youth burdened by debt and only came into his own through marriage and then finally through the machinations that led to Coke’s downfall, but by the end of their lives the tables had turned again.

Booker Longlist 2023/5

This is a decidedly strange novel. Quite short, only 189 pages.

The narrator, female and unnamed, after being exploited by her siblings as the youngest child of an extensive family, in adulthood is summoned by her eldest brother to come to another country to look after him; in a spirit of obedience she leaves her natal country and moves in with him.

We are never told where that country is, there are clues but no certainty. What does become clear though is that she and her brother come from Jewish stock and they are now living in a country where their ancestors (not too distant) were punished, if not annihilated.

The woman arrives and is immediately rendered servile. She washes, cleans, feeds and succours her brother in every way, even bathing him and dressing him as if he is a child. He then goes away for several months.

Throughout Study in Obedience there is a sense of unease. The novel is subtly full of literary references, all of which are listed at the end of the book in case you missed them. I certainly did not spot them all. Sarah Bernstein has, in a very real sense, expanded on the idea of the scapegoat and this, it seems to me, is an extended essay on the nature of referred guilt. There are several instances of agricultural disasters, none of them unique in themselves: a dog’s phantom pregnancy, Avian flu, a sow smothering her piglets and such like which occur after the woman’s arrival but which logically cannot be attributed to her agency, even though her own behaviour cannot quite be conceived as normal. Who puts on their socks and boots before their trousers?

The mental processes, the growing unease and distance are well described. The writing is very dense, claustrophobic and sinister; the sense of alienation pours off the page, while at the same time there are beautifully evocative descriptions of the landscape and changing seasons. The narrator arrives in springtime, exults in the changes to the trees, the stream and the garden, and dreads the return of winter. So there is definitely a sense of reality in this novel, in spite of the somewhat extreme events which culminate in the town in a strange exorcism.

The Seeds of the Renaissance

This graphically detailed study tells the story of how a tattered, dusty manuscript was discovered and disseminated among the thinkers and writers of fifteenth century Italy, and slowly spread from there to France, Germany and England.

The dusty manuscript was Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things, his thoughts and observations became the seed bed of humanist thinking that shaped the Italian Renaissance. In Latin and in translation it would influence Galileo, Freud, Darwin and Thomas Jefferson and would shape the modern world.

Stephen Greenblatt follows the book hunter, Poggio Bracciolini of Florence, though his career in the Vatican, the disastrous fall and disgrace of his Pope which left Poggio without means or employment for a while, and led eventually to him fossicking around in German monastery libraries, where he found the ancient vellum manuscript, the poem which had been lost for over a thousand years, but was known of in fragments from other contemporary Roman authors, it was referred to many times, but the whole was lost until 1417.

Such is the power of its message that it changed the course of literature and art for all times. The Swerve is the story of how this happened.

Where there’s a Weir, there’s a way

My only trouble with this book is that the non-fiction book, Elizabeth of York, the First Tudor Queen, was so good! What the novel does, of course, is fill in those private and intimate moments, the conversations, the tensions and the secret dealings between Henry VII and Elizabeth, and before that her relationship with her mother and also Richard III. That relationship, between uncle and niece, is one that has been examined before, especially in fiction. The fact that Richard declared publicly, that he had no intention of marrying Elizabeth, suggests that it was in discussion. Elizabeth’s letter, a possible copy of which does exist, suggests that she is eager for it.

This novel delves into the difficulties that this liaison caused between Henry and Elizabeth, he must have been somewhat chagrined to discover that she had bound herself body and soul to Richard, until that is, his own offer was made good after the Battle of Bosworth.

These are the crucial differences between the scholarly works of Alison Weir and her fictions. She fleshes out what can only be imagined in a non-fiction historical study of a life. Bringing into play, her imagination and her great knowledge of the background, much of which may not be known to the reader. Very few people will not know the basics – sadly Ms Weir seems firmly in the monster camp where Richard is concerned, but otherwise this is a good start to a promising series.

Time traveller

Robert Harris is nothing if not a traveller in time. From Cicero’s Rome, Dreyfus’ Paris, Chamberlain’s Munich and many other people and places, the author has brought to the page the lives and times of the ages, through a well-researched historical lens, he has focussed on the drives, ambitions and purposes of the many and the few.

In Act of Oblivion, Robert Harris has turned his attention to a little known sequence of events. The Restoration brought Charles II to the throne of England, a well-known piece of history; what is not so widely known was the hunt throughout the following fourteen or more years for the men, all fifty nine of them, who signed the death warrant of Charles I.

All but one character in this novel existed in history, but some of the details must be imagined by the author in order to clothe the names in flesh and blood. So conversations and certain aspects of this book are clearly these accoutrements, the stuff of fiction.

There is one character only who is entirely fictional, the opaque and unforgiving hunter of regicides, Richard Naylor.

The regicides were picked off either by the natural enemies of the time: illness and malnutrition (probably the lucky ones), or through a series of betrayals, whereupon they were taken to the Tower of London, interrogated, possibly tortured and then dragged to Tyburn Hill, and finally and ghoulishly hung, drawn and quartered. This unenviable ending was meted out without mercy, even to those foolish enough to surrender themselves. The hanging was also meted out to the long-dead Protector himself, Oliver Cromwell. Who was disinterred from Westminster Abbey, along with Henry Ireton, a General in the Civil War and John Bradshaw, President of the High Court of Justice, each of them removed from their graves dragged to Tyburn and posthumously hanged, then beheaded.

Even though many of them fled to the Continent, they were still hunted down, nowhere was entirely safe. Two of the Puritans, the central characters in this novel: Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, made their way to fellow worshippers in America and it is searching for them there and how they evaded capture which fills most of the pages of this thrilling book.

Hope this makes it to the big screen!