I first discovered Carol Shields, like many people I suspect, through her novel The Stone Diaries, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. I have a clear memory of reading it on a train to London just after finishing my A-levels, which must date said discovery to 1996. My copy has my mother's name inscribed in it, which of course means that it's not my copy at all. A few years ago I went through my bookshelves extracting all the books which belonged to my parents, hauled them down to London on the train and deposited them in the parental sitting room; rather than expressing gratitude at this rendition of their rightful property, my parents looked horrified - their home is already over-crowded with books, and they had probably given up all hope of ever seeing any of these long-forgotten loans (OK, some of them were thefts) again. The Stone Diaries must have slipped through the net, and the thought of giving it up now is too painful to contemplate. Such is my love and veneration for Carol Shields, the American-born, Canadian-resident chronicler of the human heart who left a huge hole in the reading lives of millions when she died of breast cancer in 2003. I say the reading lives, but for me it goes beyond this - her books are a part of me, and I can't think of my life separately from them. Maybe all passionate readers feel this about a small selection of writers, and Shields is definitely one of them for me.
I don't think I really fell in love with Shields's work, though, until the summer of 2001, when I read The Republic of Love on holiday in Croatia. I'm bound to re-read this book at some point while writing this blog, so I won't dwell on it here, except to say that it's one of the very best love stories I've ever read, charting the tangled paths which bring two people together amid the mesh of family, friends, work - in other words amid the densely detailed tapestries of two fully-formed lives - and the joys and troubles that then follow in the attempt to merge those two paths together. However, on a snowy weekend that quickly turned to slush (this is Manchester, after all) a few weeks ago, on my own - Gregory was in London - and on my sofa, it was an earlier novel, Happenstance, to which I turned in search of the perfect re-read for a gloomy day.
Happenstance was originally published as two books: a novel of the same name came out in 1980, with A Fairly Conventional Woman following in 1982. Together they chart the events of five days in the lives of a married couple, Jack and Brenda Bowman. It was the UK publisher Fourth Estate who brought them together in 1991, with a reprint by Flamingo in 1994. This is the edition I have, and the reader chooses whether to begin at the front or the back, both of which are designed as covers, with Jack's story or Brenda's. I tend to start with Brenda, since it is her story which touches me the most.
When the novel opens the Bowmans have been married for twenty years. This is the first important point about Happenstance, and Shields in general: she has made a speciality of writing about long-married couples, and broadly happy ones at that, finding a particularly rich source of material in the measures and manoeuvres by which two people manage to hold a marriage together over many years. Even in The Republic of Love, which focuses on the early days of a couple's life, Tom and Fay are surrounded by the marriages of others and by their own previous relationships. Jack and Brenda, then, are bidding each other farewell as Brenda sets off from their hometown of Chicago for a craft convention in Philadelphia. After years as a wife and mother, Brenda has recently discovered a talent as a quilt-maker, which has grown from a hobby to something approaching a career. She has begun to sell her quilts, which has in turn justified her taking over a room in the family home as her own. There are more than a few echoes of Woolf here, and of Shields's description of her own writing: "what you're doing is you're going into a little room and you're shutting the door, and you're sitting there, and that's where you really live". When I think of Happenstance the image that immediately comes to my mind is of Brenda's workroom, which, we are told, is "the brightest room in the house", three walls painted white and one "a brilliant yellow", with quilts and plants and good places to sit and nurse a cup of coffee. "It seemed", reflects Brenda, "to have sprung of its own accord out of the cluster of duller rooms [...] to be the room of a much younger family, belonging to more cheerful, more energetic people, people who knew the kind of thing they liked". Shields writes wonderfully about interiors - this is another reason why I like her so much - and here Brenda's room is quite clearly a symbol of who she is becoming, a vision of the new person she wants to be. This is not a source of undiluted pleasure to her, however, and much of her stay in Philadelphia among the basket makers and the weavers, not to mention the predominantly male tribe of metallurgists whose conference is taking place in the same hotel, is spent feeling restless and unsatisfied, as if her transition into a person with her own work to do has left her questioning how well she has spent her time so far.
Jack, meanwhile, at home in Chicago, is coping with a string of unforeseen events, mourning his children's metamorphosis into adolescents and coming to terms with the fact that his long-gestated book project, a treatise on Indian trading practices, may never see the light of day. Jack is a historian, who works at the Great Lakes Institute, mildly baffled by but nonetheless very grateful for the fact that he is paid to spend his days in such a comfortable and undemanding setting. Trouble has come, however, in the form of a rival publication by his ex-girlfriend Harriet Post which he has seen advertised as forthcoming: Harriet, it would seem, is also planning to bring out a book on Indian trading practices, while his own is still far from finished. Lacking all spirit for the task, he continues work on chapter six anyway, as his boss has insisted on seeing it on Monday morning. Just as he is contemplating the pointlessness of the whole project, and sinking into the particular brand of despair known only to academics who cannot bear to read another word of their own prose, his friend Bernie Koltz turns up on his doorstep, slightly drunk and bearing the news that his wife has left him.
By the time that Brenda returns home, nothing has changed, and yet their marriage is subtly altered by their separate experiences. The brilliance of this novel is in the way that the accounts of husband and wife reflect and inflect each other, reminding us that making a good marriage is a creative act, but one which always carries within it a certain fragility, no matter how happy or well-matched the participants. Shields, herself happily married for forty-six years, shows us the mystery at the heart of the union between two people, which has something to do with luck and something to do with faith, and something which lies beyond description. Brenda remembers a period in her marriage about four years previously, just after the death of her mother, when her love for Jack seemed to have evaporated overnight. Horrified, she surveys the wreckage of her life, trying to find a way to stagger through it and carry on. For four months Jack accepts her grief for her mother as an explanation, until one day on holiday in France, as if by some kind of divine grace, she sees again the man she loves. The marriage is healed, its surface betraying no sign of the cataclysm that has taken place beneath it, and the arc of Jack and Brenda's life as a couple continues. No unit is invulnerable to the ebb and flow of love over time, Shields suggests, and it is foolish to think otherwise.
Shields's greatest genius, however, is in her ability to render the ordinary extraordinary, to make the matter of everyday life shine with transcendent beauty. Her writing simply makes us notice more, be more awake, see things more clearly. After reading one of her novels the world appears fresher, more dazzling, more remarkable, and I feel a renewed sense of gladness to be in it, and of its infinite possibility. What more can one ask of a book than that?
Monday 27 February 2012
Tuesday 21 February 2012
Clare Dudman, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees (Seren, 2010)
Unlike the re-reads of the first two books reviewed on this blog, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees was entirely new to me. Firstly, I should say that its author, Clare Dudman, is a friend of ours: she and Gregory used to share a publisher. She kindly gave us a copy of this, her latest book, when we saw her in the summer of 2010 and I had been meaning to read it since then, especially after Gregory, who got to it first, said how much he had enjoyed it.
A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees takes as its subject the Welsh colony which was founded in Patagonia in the mid-nineteenth century. No, I didn't know it existed either - and the great strength of this book is the life it gives to an almost-forgotten piece of history. In 1865, when the novel opens, a group of about one hundred men, women and children are straining to catch sight of their new home from the deck of the badly battered ship that has brought them across the Atlantic from Wales. All in flight from English oppression and hoping for a better life as colonisers themselves, they have been lured to Patagonia by promises of "a place of meadows and tall trees", where farming the land will be easy and where they will be masters of their own destinies. They soon discover that the reality is very different. The story of the colonisers' attempts to wrestle life from the parched soil while holding their community together and negotiating a form of co-existence with the indigenous people is fascinating, and kept me reading through disaster after disaster. The couple at the centre of the novel, Silas and Megan James, have an unremittingly grim time, only gaining the possibility of a future in Patagonia after sacrificing a great deal, perhaps too much. This is the story of a group of people who thought they had nothing to lose, and who end up securing their own survival through sheer endurance and determination alone.
Clare has done extensive research for this novel, not just reading widely but travelling to Patagonia and interviewing descendants of the original settlers. In a note at the back of the book she explains the historical figures on which she based her central characters, and what became of them in real life. She also outlines the subsequent history of the colony, explaining that, astonishingly, parts of Patagonia still feel distinctly Welsh, with the language still spoken and the inhabitants thinking of themselves as "Welsh-Argentines". It is this painstaking research and personal experience that give A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees its depth, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, and even to those who usually don't.
A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees takes as its subject the Welsh colony which was founded in Patagonia in the mid-nineteenth century. No, I didn't know it existed either - and the great strength of this book is the life it gives to an almost-forgotten piece of history. In 1865, when the novel opens, a group of about one hundred men, women and children are straining to catch sight of their new home from the deck of the badly battered ship that has brought them across the Atlantic from Wales. All in flight from English oppression and hoping for a better life as colonisers themselves, they have been lured to Patagonia by promises of "a place of meadows and tall trees", where farming the land will be easy and where they will be masters of their own destinies. They soon discover that the reality is very different. The story of the colonisers' attempts to wrestle life from the parched soil while holding their community together and negotiating a form of co-existence with the indigenous people is fascinating, and kept me reading through disaster after disaster. The couple at the centre of the novel, Silas and Megan James, have an unremittingly grim time, only gaining the possibility of a future in Patagonia after sacrificing a great deal, perhaps too much. This is the story of a group of people who thought they had nothing to lose, and who end up securing their own survival through sheer endurance and determination alone.
Clare has done extensive research for this novel, not just reading widely but travelling to Patagonia and interviewing descendants of the original settlers. In a note at the back of the book she explains the historical figures on which she based her central characters, and what became of them in real life. She also outlines the subsequent history of the colony, explaining that, astonishingly, parts of Patagonia still feel distinctly Welsh, with the language still spoken and the inhabitants thinking of themselves as "Welsh-Argentines". It is this painstaking research and personal experience that give A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees its depth, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, and even to those who usually don't.
Wednesday 15 February 2012
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Egerton, 1814; Penguin 2003)
Over Christmas, Patricia Rozema's 1999 film of Mansfield Park was on TV, and Gregory and I watched it with my Dad. As it turned out, this was a doomed endeavour on many fronts. Firstly, my parents have recently acquired a new telly; after years of badgering from my film-loving brother, frustrated by the poor quality of the hardware available at for communal film-watching over Christmas, they gave in and invested in a large, wide-screen type affair. Unfortunately the model they chose seems to turn even good films into terrible ones - for some reason, immune to endless fiddling with light and contrast levels, everything looks dreadful on it, over-lit and stagey. Rozema's Mansfield Park was far from equal to the challenge. Secondly, my Dad is a frustrating companion for film-watching. While he has overcome a habit that lasted through my childhood of peering at the screen and asking whether any given actor is Donald Sutherland, he still makes his contempt for any sub-standard offering plain while remaining nonetheless determined to see it through to the end and distract other viewers with his commentary.
Thirdly, I had seen the film when it first came out, and had remembered it as much better than it is. At the time I found it desperately romantic, and must have overlooked the atrocious dialogue ("this is 1806, for God's sake"!) and cringe-inducing lesbian subtext. However, back in Manchester after the festivities, I decided to re-read the novel.
If this blog is beginning to give the impression that I do a lot of re-reading, that is entirely accurate. Readers divide into two camps: those who are so eager to sample as much as possible of all the wonderful literature on offer that they plunge eternally ahead, never revisiting former reads, and those who feel they haven't really read anything unless they've read it at least twice. I belong to the latter. Sometimes re-reading is pure indulgence - a safe voyage of familiarity rather than an exciting one of discovery. But a really good book will always give you more on each reading, and once you've read some books several times, you have the satisfying reward of finding that you really know them well. For me, this applies to all of Austen's novels (and most of those by E M Forster and Carol Shields, about which more in future posts). The last three in particular, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, never fade - their insights seem sharper over time and their vision bleaker. I didn't start loving Austen until after leaving school - we studied Persuasion for A level and I thought it would be daringly iconoclastic to announce how obvious it was that Austen was in failing health when she wrote it and that I wanted to throw it across the room. The restraint of Anne Elliott infuriated me; I wanted everything I read or heard to be full of the fire and passion lacking thus far in my own life. Now and for some time, as with Mozart, I feel differently.
Mansfield Park is my favourite of Austen's novels. I know it's an odd choice. Fanny Price is, as a heroine, no match for Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, nor can Edmund Bertram hold his own with the Messrs Darcy and Knightley. It is everything else around this central pair that is so enthralling. Mansfield Park has the broadest reach of all Austen's novels: it is the only one in which we have more than a glimpse of real poverty, the only one in which London is not the farthest-flung destination to which the characters travel, though it features heavily as an off-stage location, and the only one with such a rich intertextual life: what the characters read and act becomes of crucial symbolic importance. All Austen's novels hinge on the centrality of marriage for women - it defines their destiny almost single-handed - but in Mansfield Park this is more starkly exposed than anywhere else. The novel opens by recounting the fates of three sisters, one of whom has made a brilliant match with a baronet (to which "her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim"), another has chosen respectably but unremarkably and the third has married "to disoblige her family", falling in love with an impoverished naval officer and committing the ultimate foolishness of assuming that their infatuation will be sufficient foundation for married life. Austen always defends those who marry for love, stating that it is wicked to do otherwise, but she makes sure that her heroines marry money, as well. As more and more children are born to Mr and Mrs Price life becomes harder and harder, and their romantic dream is short-lived. In an age before birth control, men and women cannot afford to be carried away by their feelings. When the Prices' eldest girl, Fanny, is nine, she is transplanted to her aunt and uncle's home at Mansfield Park, an act of charity on the part of the Bertrams which nonetheless divides her entirely from her own family. Her status there is very much one of the poor relation, and what comfort and friendliness she finds is owing to her cousin Edmund. By the time Fanny is grown up, she is, inevitably, in love with him. A fly in the ointment arrives, however, in the form of Mary and Henry Crawford, visitors from London, who play havoc with the affections of almost every member of the family.
More than in any other of Austen's novels, the knives are out: the satire aimed at the cruel, the vapid and the mercenary is mercilessly sharp. The background in slave-driven sugar plantations in Antigua - the source of Thomas Bertram's wealth - is intruiguing, though not perhaps able to stand up to the volumes of critical ink that have been spilled over it. And most of all, despite Fanny's meekness and infirmity, we do root for her: we long for her search for a home amid a family torn apart by crisis to be rewarded, as of course it ultimately is.
The paperback copy of this novel which we own has sentimental value for me. When I first visited Gregory in his then home of north Hampshire, I insisted that we visit the Jane Austen House Museum in nearby Chawton, and he bought a copy of the novel in the gift shop, along with Carol Shields's excellent (and short) biography of Austen. Beyond this most recent life, there is some wonderful secondary writing on Mansfield Park. My favourites are Virginia Woolf's essay on Austen in The Common Reader, where she writes of the moment in which Edmund and Fanny meet then pass on the stairs with a visionary transcendence which almost transforms it into a scene from one of her own novels, and Lionel Trilling's essay on the novel in The Opposing Self. Mansfield Park is not as delightfully witty as its predecessor, Pride and Prejudice, which Austen came to decry as "too light, bright and sparkling", but reading it gives a particular pleasure which is hard to pin down.
Thirdly, I had seen the film when it first came out, and had remembered it as much better than it is. At the time I found it desperately romantic, and must have overlooked the atrocious dialogue ("this is 1806, for God's sake"!) and cringe-inducing lesbian subtext. However, back in Manchester after the festivities, I decided to re-read the novel.
If this blog is beginning to give the impression that I do a lot of re-reading, that is entirely accurate. Readers divide into two camps: those who are so eager to sample as much as possible of all the wonderful literature on offer that they plunge eternally ahead, never revisiting former reads, and those who feel they haven't really read anything unless they've read it at least twice. I belong to the latter. Sometimes re-reading is pure indulgence - a safe voyage of familiarity rather than an exciting one of discovery. But a really good book will always give you more on each reading, and once you've read some books several times, you have the satisfying reward of finding that you really know them well. For me, this applies to all of Austen's novels (and most of those by E M Forster and Carol Shields, about which more in future posts). The last three in particular, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, never fade - their insights seem sharper over time and their vision bleaker. I didn't start loving Austen until after leaving school - we studied Persuasion for A level and I thought it would be daringly iconoclastic to announce how obvious it was that Austen was in failing health when she wrote it and that I wanted to throw it across the room. The restraint of Anne Elliott infuriated me; I wanted everything I read or heard to be full of the fire and passion lacking thus far in my own life. Now and for some time, as with Mozart, I feel differently.
Mansfield Park is my favourite of Austen's novels. I know it's an odd choice. Fanny Price is, as a heroine, no match for Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, nor can Edmund Bertram hold his own with the Messrs Darcy and Knightley. It is everything else around this central pair that is so enthralling. Mansfield Park has the broadest reach of all Austen's novels: it is the only one in which we have more than a glimpse of real poverty, the only one in which London is not the farthest-flung destination to which the characters travel, though it features heavily as an off-stage location, and the only one with such a rich intertextual life: what the characters read and act becomes of crucial symbolic importance. All Austen's novels hinge on the centrality of marriage for women - it defines their destiny almost single-handed - but in Mansfield Park this is more starkly exposed than anywhere else. The novel opens by recounting the fates of three sisters, one of whom has made a brilliant match with a baronet (to which "her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim"), another has chosen respectably but unremarkably and the third has married "to disoblige her family", falling in love with an impoverished naval officer and committing the ultimate foolishness of assuming that their infatuation will be sufficient foundation for married life. Austen always defends those who marry for love, stating that it is wicked to do otherwise, but she makes sure that her heroines marry money, as well. As more and more children are born to Mr and Mrs Price life becomes harder and harder, and their romantic dream is short-lived. In an age before birth control, men and women cannot afford to be carried away by their feelings. When the Prices' eldest girl, Fanny, is nine, she is transplanted to her aunt and uncle's home at Mansfield Park, an act of charity on the part of the Bertrams which nonetheless divides her entirely from her own family. Her status there is very much one of the poor relation, and what comfort and friendliness she finds is owing to her cousin Edmund. By the time Fanny is grown up, she is, inevitably, in love with him. A fly in the ointment arrives, however, in the form of Mary and Henry Crawford, visitors from London, who play havoc with the affections of almost every member of the family.
More than in any other of Austen's novels, the knives are out: the satire aimed at the cruel, the vapid and the mercenary is mercilessly sharp. The background in slave-driven sugar plantations in Antigua - the source of Thomas Bertram's wealth - is intruiguing, though not perhaps able to stand up to the volumes of critical ink that have been spilled over it. And most of all, despite Fanny's meekness and infirmity, we do root for her: we long for her search for a home amid a family torn apart by crisis to be rewarded, as of course it ultimately is.
The paperback copy of this novel which we own has sentimental value for me. When I first visited Gregory in his then home of north Hampshire, I insisted that we visit the Jane Austen House Museum in nearby Chawton, and he bought a copy of the novel in the gift shop, along with Carol Shields's excellent (and short) biography of Austen. Beyond this most recent life, there is some wonderful secondary writing on Mansfield Park. My favourites are Virginia Woolf's essay on Austen in The Common Reader, where she writes of the moment in which Edmund and Fanny meet then pass on the stairs with a visionary transcendence which almost transforms it into a scene from one of her own novels, and Lionel Trilling's essay on the novel in The Opposing Self. Mansfield Park is not as delightfully witty as its predecessor, Pride and Prejudice, which Austen came to decry as "too light, bright and sparkling", but reading it gives a particular pleasure which is hard to pin down.
Tuesday 14 February 2012
First book: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Picador, 2004)
Many thanks to everyone who read the introduction to this blog which I posted on Sunday. Now for the first book. I already have a bit of a backlog going back to November, when the move to Manchester took place, but have decided to try and clear it so as to have as complete a record as possible.
I first read Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty in July 2005 (as the inscription on the first page of my paperback copy usefully informs me). It had won the Booker Prize the previous year, a fact which makes Hollinghurst's most recent novel's non-appearance on even the long list for the same prize in 2011 even more extraordinary. I had always meant to re-read it, and brought it to Manchester for that purpose. The publication of The Stranger's Child last year brought Hollingshurst back to my attention, along with the fact that we are once more under a Tory government (okay, it's a coalition, but with the Tories more dominant than the frantic negotiations of May 2010 might have led some of us, naively perhaps, to hope would be the case). The Line of Beauty documents the Thatcher years, unfolding in successive episodes from 1983, 1986 and 1987. The main character is Nick Guest, a young gay man just out of university who becomes a lodger in the home of Gerald Fedden, a Tory MP riding the tide of his relentlessly reforming government and in particular his own thrilling rise through its ranks. Nick basks in the reflected glory which his unlikely niche in the Fedden household has given him, dreaming of one day meeting the PM herself, while toying with his PhD on Hogarth, cherishing his unrequited passion for Gerald's son Toby and trying to prevent his daughter Catherine from killing herself. Catherine's depression is, as the novel opens, the only dark note: all is gilded and sunny in Nick's world as he re-crafts himself into a skilled negotiator of a social world that had seemed beyond his reach. As the London summer of 1983 wears on, Nick finds a boyfriend in the person of Leo, a young, black guy of a distinctly lower social class than the one in which Nick is now moving, with whom he becomes infatuated. This affair is, however, only a prelude to a much more serious relationship to follow, whose consequences explode the safe, self-congratulatory world of the early 80s.
I really enjoyed The Line of Beauty when I first read it, but I had forgotten quite how well written it is - the prose is a joy in itself, each sentence crafted with the care of a writer who publishes rarely and discards, I suspect, much. It's also extremely funny in a subtle, wry kind of a way: the episode in which Gerald participates in a "welly-wanging" contest at his local constituency fete had stayed in my memory as a perfect example of the humour to be drawn from the kind of man for whom anything, however trivial, becomes a matter for fierce competition. Hollinghurst can also write a better party than anyone else: there are a few wonderful set-pieces in this novel. It also seemed to me a more serious novel than it did in 2005, perhaps because of the financial crisis and change of government which have occurred in the meantime; a portrait of a set of people who claim the status of masters of the universe as a kind of divine right, for whom money simply "turns itself" into more money, and who, of course, are hiding all kinds of dark secrets.
By chance, while I was re-reading the novel, Alan Hollinghurst came to give a reading in Manchester which clashed for me with a pre-existing commitment. I didn't know whether to be encouraged or dismayed that this represented the first events clash of my new life. Gregory went for both of us, and returned with a signed copy of The Stranger's Child which he gave me for Christmas. This obviously posed a dilemma for the purposes of this blog; nonetheless I read it immediately, but won't review it in detail here since it was not among the books that I already owned when we moved. Suffice it to say that I hugely enjoyed it and devoured it in about a week: the Forsterian atmosphere of the opening section is intoxicating and the first two-thirds of it are wonderful. The returns are diminishing towards the end - how often is that true? - but I highly recommend it.
PS: I should perhaps clarify a point in the previous post about the French wine merchant. We did not buy job lots of wine from her, but took advantage of her back room full of empty boxes when we moved. The neighbours must have thought that we were alcoholics with an insatiable appetite for co-operatively produced chick peas: the remaining boxes were sourced from the health food shop over the road.
I first read Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty in July 2005 (as the inscription on the first page of my paperback copy usefully informs me). It had won the Booker Prize the previous year, a fact which makes Hollinghurst's most recent novel's non-appearance on even the long list for the same prize in 2011 even more extraordinary. I had always meant to re-read it, and brought it to Manchester for that purpose. The publication of The Stranger's Child last year brought Hollingshurst back to my attention, along with the fact that we are once more under a Tory government (okay, it's a coalition, but with the Tories more dominant than the frantic negotiations of May 2010 might have led some of us, naively perhaps, to hope would be the case). The Line of Beauty documents the Thatcher years, unfolding in successive episodes from 1983, 1986 and 1987. The main character is Nick Guest, a young gay man just out of university who becomes a lodger in the home of Gerald Fedden, a Tory MP riding the tide of his relentlessly reforming government and in particular his own thrilling rise through its ranks. Nick basks in the reflected glory which his unlikely niche in the Fedden household has given him, dreaming of one day meeting the PM herself, while toying with his PhD on Hogarth, cherishing his unrequited passion for Gerald's son Toby and trying to prevent his daughter Catherine from killing herself. Catherine's depression is, as the novel opens, the only dark note: all is gilded and sunny in Nick's world as he re-crafts himself into a skilled negotiator of a social world that had seemed beyond his reach. As the London summer of 1983 wears on, Nick finds a boyfriend in the person of Leo, a young, black guy of a distinctly lower social class than the one in which Nick is now moving, with whom he becomes infatuated. This affair is, however, only a prelude to a much more serious relationship to follow, whose consequences explode the safe, self-congratulatory world of the early 80s.
I really enjoyed The Line of Beauty when I first read it, but I had forgotten quite how well written it is - the prose is a joy in itself, each sentence crafted with the care of a writer who publishes rarely and discards, I suspect, much. It's also extremely funny in a subtle, wry kind of a way: the episode in which Gerald participates in a "welly-wanging" contest at his local constituency fete had stayed in my memory as a perfect example of the humour to be drawn from the kind of man for whom anything, however trivial, becomes a matter for fierce competition. Hollinghurst can also write a better party than anyone else: there are a few wonderful set-pieces in this novel. It also seemed to me a more serious novel than it did in 2005, perhaps because of the financial crisis and change of government which have occurred in the meantime; a portrait of a set of people who claim the status of masters of the universe as a kind of divine right, for whom money simply "turns itself" into more money, and who, of course, are hiding all kinds of dark secrets.
By chance, while I was re-reading the novel, Alan Hollinghurst came to give a reading in Manchester which clashed for me with a pre-existing commitment. I didn't know whether to be encouraged or dismayed that this represented the first events clash of my new life. Gregory went for both of us, and returned with a signed copy of The Stranger's Child which he gave me for Christmas. This obviously posed a dilemma for the purposes of this blog; nonetheless I read it immediately, but won't review it in detail here since it was not among the books that I already owned when we moved. Suffice it to say that I hugely enjoyed it and devoured it in about a week: the Forsterian atmosphere of the opening section is intoxicating and the first two-thirds of it are wonderful. The returns are diminishing towards the end - how often is that true? - but I highly recommend it.
PS: I should perhaps clarify a point in the previous post about the French wine merchant. We did not buy job lots of wine from her, but took advantage of her back room full of empty boxes when we moved. The neighbours must have thought that we were alcoholics with an insatiable appetite for co-operatively produced chick peas: the remaining boxes were sourced from the health food shop over the road.
Sunday 12 February 2012
Why five wine boxes?
In September last year my husband, Gregory, a novelist, was offered a teaching job in Manchester and we decided to leave our beloved Edinburgh and move there so that he could take up the post. A couple of months later we had found a friend who wanted to rent our flat and some people who were willing to rent theirs to us, and preparations for the move began in earnest. The flat we had chosen to rent was a lot smaller than the one we were leaving; I say we, but the decision was mainly mine: faced with the choice between a fairly large, two-bedroom flat with hideous carpets, wallpaper and furniture, and a small, one-bedroom flat, bright, clean and nicely furnished, I convinced Gregory that the second was the better option. "But what will we do with the books?", he hissed, as the estate agent politely pretended not to hear our deliberations. "We'll just have to downsize", I hissed back. We took it the same day.
Back in Edinburgh we contemplated the bookshelves. Gregory had reminded me many times since moving in with me that all the books he had brought with him by no means represented the whole of his collection. With great self-sacrifice and restraint, he implied, he had left a fair number in storage at his parents' house. Nonetheless, I still had memories of the horror I felt the day he moved in, as box after box was carried up the stairs and deposited unceremoniously in the sitting room. My flat had always been a minimalist haven; despite being an avid reader since childhood and engaged at the time on a PhD, I had acquired very few books. Nonetheless, over time I grew to enjoy having more stuff - especially books - around. It was wonderful to discover more about this man I was now living with through the books he had chosen to have around him. By the time of our move south, despite the "one in one out" policy which had been in operation for a while, we had a fairly sizeable collection of about 1500 books. The flat we were moving into had one small-ish bookshelf and we had decided we could take one of our own - this meant making a selection of about 150 books. Gregory was saved from complete trauma by the knowledge that his newly-acquired office at work had a large bookcase in which books could be double - or even, he comforted himself, triple - banked. The selection of the 150 became therefore mine to make. These were the books that would surround us at home, the select few that could be drawn upon at any time of day or night, the most precious, the most essential, those that could on no account by parted with. As I set about the task, I found my choice falling into two categories - those books I had already read, some several times, and which I knew I could not be without, there being a strong chance that I would read at least some of them again in the course of our stay in our rented flat, and those which I had always meant to read and had not done so yet. Some of these in the latter camp belonged to me - presents appreciated at the time but thus far unread, purchases lighted on in the wave of some enthusiasm, tomes I felt I really should have read - and some were books of Gregory's that he had particularly recommended to me, or which had always intruigued me.
So much for the books. As for the boxes, we discovered that a certain kind of flat-ish wine box, liberally dispensed to us by the French wine merchant around the corner, was ideal for packing books, inserted spinewise in rows much as they had been on a shelf. About five of these did the job. And the rest? Several went to second-hand bookshops and charity shops, some were left on the shelves, our very accommodating tenant assuring us that he would be happy to have them there, and the rest packed into boxes and left in a large storage cupboard in the flat that had always been a godsend and was excelling itself now. And so on 7 November we packed all our condensed belongings into a Europcar transit van and drove them down the M6, Gregory at the wheel and me clutching a peace lily whose life would have been endangered by the free-for-all in the back.
Having settled in and arranged the books in their new home, I decided to commit myself to reading all of them. After all, I had chosen each one, elevating it above its many competitors, with the full intention of reading it at some point. Why not now? I would work my way through the books I already actually owned. I would not be distracted by the temptations of new books coming out, by sudden memories of books I had been meaning to find in the library, by enticing reviews and recommendations. This blog will be a record of that project. I hope you enjoy it and are inspired to go back to your own bookshelves and read what's been patiently sitting there. Unless, of course, you already have - but how many people have actually read all the books they own? Certainly not me - until now.
Back in Edinburgh we contemplated the bookshelves. Gregory had reminded me many times since moving in with me that all the books he had brought with him by no means represented the whole of his collection. With great self-sacrifice and restraint, he implied, he had left a fair number in storage at his parents' house. Nonetheless, I still had memories of the horror I felt the day he moved in, as box after box was carried up the stairs and deposited unceremoniously in the sitting room. My flat had always been a minimalist haven; despite being an avid reader since childhood and engaged at the time on a PhD, I had acquired very few books. Nonetheless, over time I grew to enjoy having more stuff - especially books - around. It was wonderful to discover more about this man I was now living with through the books he had chosen to have around him. By the time of our move south, despite the "one in one out" policy which had been in operation for a while, we had a fairly sizeable collection of about 1500 books. The flat we were moving into had one small-ish bookshelf and we had decided we could take one of our own - this meant making a selection of about 150 books. Gregory was saved from complete trauma by the knowledge that his newly-acquired office at work had a large bookcase in which books could be double - or even, he comforted himself, triple - banked. The selection of the 150 became therefore mine to make. These were the books that would surround us at home, the select few that could be drawn upon at any time of day or night, the most precious, the most essential, those that could on no account by parted with. As I set about the task, I found my choice falling into two categories - those books I had already read, some several times, and which I knew I could not be without, there being a strong chance that I would read at least some of them again in the course of our stay in our rented flat, and those which I had always meant to read and had not done so yet. Some of these in the latter camp belonged to me - presents appreciated at the time but thus far unread, purchases lighted on in the wave of some enthusiasm, tomes I felt I really should have read - and some were books of Gregory's that he had particularly recommended to me, or which had always intruigued me.
So much for the books. As for the boxes, we discovered that a certain kind of flat-ish wine box, liberally dispensed to us by the French wine merchant around the corner, was ideal for packing books, inserted spinewise in rows much as they had been on a shelf. About five of these did the job. And the rest? Several went to second-hand bookshops and charity shops, some were left on the shelves, our very accommodating tenant assuring us that he would be happy to have them there, and the rest packed into boxes and left in a large storage cupboard in the flat that had always been a godsend and was excelling itself now. And so on 7 November we packed all our condensed belongings into a Europcar transit van and drove them down the M6, Gregory at the wheel and me clutching a peace lily whose life would have been endangered by the free-for-all in the back.
Having settled in and arranged the books in their new home, I decided to commit myself to reading all of them. After all, I had chosen each one, elevating it above its many competitors, with the full intention of reading it at some point. Why not now? I would work my way through the books I already actually owned. I would not be distracted by the temptations of new books coming out, by sudden memories of books I had been meaning to find in the library, by enticing reviews and recommendations. This blog will be a record of that project. I hope you enjoy it and are inspired to go back to your own bookshelves and read what's been patiently sitting there. Unless, of course, you already have - but how many people have actually read all the books they own? Certainly not me - until now.
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