David Leavitt, Florence: A Delicate Case (Bloomsbury, 2002)

The non-fiction strain of this blog continues with the next book, a beautifully produced, enticingly slim number I bought I can’t even remember when, and have hauled around ever since intending to read.  David Leavitt, an American academic and writer of fiction who divides his time between Florence and Florida, contributed this book on the Tuscan city to a series which Bloomsbury published under the title “The Writer and the City”.  My own visits to Florence must have inspired me to buy it, and limited as my experience of the city is, Leavitt seems to me to have captured something essential when he writes about it as a place which plays host to thousands of visitors, drawn by its heavy freight of art and culture - fully a fifth of the world's stock, according to Leavitt - while concealing its real life behind closed doors.  The streets of Florence, as anyone who has been there will know, are strangely forbidding: tall, heavily rusticated walls keep the narrow alleys in perpetual shadow, hiding courtyards only glimpsed by chance as someone arrives or leaves through thick, iron-bolted doors.  Sparkling light, greenery, flowers, burbling fountains: all these are hidden away, not for the lowly tourist who spends hours queueing for his or her glimpse of the priceless works of art contained within the Uffizi or the Academia. 

Perhaps part of the attraction for Florence’s historically large ex-pat community was the challenge of penetrating this closed world, of becoming one of the elect observing the melee from the heights of Fiesole or Settignano, drinking tea at the invitation of a Countess.  This is the world on which Leavitt turns his gaze.  The book's title is taken from Henry James, who apparently described the city as "a delicate case", pointing to the strange fact that, as Leavitt notes, its most famous citizens, at least in the last 150 years, have all been foreigners who, in many cases, thought they knew better than the Florentines how to preserve their precious treasures.  Leavitt proceeds to regale us with a seamless flow of anecdotes about these various foreigners, each vignette the basis for a book in itself.  We move between well-known figures - E M Forster, staying with his mother at the Pensione which would become the model for the more famous one containing the room with the view; John Ruskin, bemoaning the erection of an omnibus stand by the bell tower in the Piazza della Signora - and more obscure ones.  Leavitt has a particular interest in Florence's appeal to gay men and women, recounting the exodus from London that took place at the end of the nineteenth century in the wake of the Labouchere Amendment and its dire consequences for Oscar Wilde.  Ironically, Labouchere himself ended up in Florence on his retirement, living "cheek by jowl" as neighbour to Lord Henry Somerset, who had fled London and his wife after she found him "in flagrante delicto with a teenage boy named Harry Smith".  The resulting scandal played out worse for the wife, Isabel, who made her discovery public and thus "flouted the Victorian code of 'reticence for women'", finding herself "persona non grata in English society".  In the more relaxed environment of Florence, Lord Henry, by contrast, set about enjoying his exile.

The art of Florence, of course, also features heavily.  There is a wonderful section on Michelangelo's David, which left me wondering once again how on earth Leavitt had uncovered all this stuff.  David's left arm, apparently, was broken off in 1527 when a riot broke out in front of the Palazzo Vecchio where he was on display.  The sculpture, having been moved shortly after its completion, was shifted once again in 1873, this time into its current home inside the Accademia.  Leavitt's descripton of David's progress through the streets of Florence in a cart running along specially constructed rails, is marvellous: "His famous posture - head turned, eyes glancing hesitantly over the left shoulder - takes on new pathos [...], as if what he is regarding with such worry is actually the gradual disappearance of the only home he has ever known".  The David now outside in the Piazza Signora is a replica, but even this has not been immune to mistreatment: a vandal broke off one of its toes in 1991.

Florence's artworks have suffered disaster several times, and Leavitt knows about them all.  The most moving account is of the great flood of November 1966, when the Arno burst its banks and muddy river water coursed through the city, reaching a height of six metres inside the Duomo.  The catalogue of what was lost is heartbreaking, but a light was shone into the horror by the generosity of hundreds of students and young people who came from all over the world to help repair the damage.  When Senator Edward Kennedy arrived in Florence to survey the scene, he found in the National Library "thousands of students up to their waists in water, working by candlelight", fishing the damaged books out of the water and passing them from hand to hand so they could have absorbent paper inserted between their leaves.   Who knows how much greater the loss would have been without the interventions of the volunteers, who became known as the "angeli del fango", or mud angels.  One young woman, of course, met her future husband in the line at the library, and never returned to the US.  In 1996 there was a 30th anniversary reunion in Florence for the mud angels, and another American woman, who had celebrated her twentieth birthday during the flood, returned for her fiftieth.

I'm sure that having visited Florence added a lot to my enjoyment of this book.  Nonetheless, I recommend it highly even if you haven't been to the city.  As an example of how to write this kind of book - an intelligent, lightly academic, amusing mixture of history and contemporary observation - it probably cannot be bettered. 

 

Karen Armstrong, Buddha (Phoenix, 2000) and A Short History of Myth (Canongate, 2005)

Sorry for the long-ish gap in posting.  Initial blogging enthusiasm has perhaps been tempered by poor blogging discipline as the months have gone by.  Nonetheless, since this blog has focused exclusively on fiction so far, and since this represents neither a true picture of my reading habits in general nor the selection of books that came to Manchester in particular, it seems appropriate to turn to some non-fiction.  I hope you'll forgive the gap when you see that this post combines reviews of two books by the same author: a biography of the Buddha and A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Karen Armstrong to me.  I first came across her when her memoir, The Spiral Staircase, was the book of the week on Radio 4 early in 2004.  Having caught a few episodes, I went out and bought the book.  Perhaps I mentioned earlier that I buy very few books: something, clearly, had persuaded me that this one was worth it, and, my goodness, my instinct was right.  Armstrong's account of life after seven years in a convent is compelling, moving and inspiring, but what also struck me was her suggestion that there were more ways of being religious than I had taken into account.  I had assumed, like most people, that religion was a matter of belief: for those of us brought up within the Christian tradition, either you accepted certain premises about the nature of God and the events around the crucifiction and resurrection of one Jesus Christ, or you didn't.  If you did, you could be a Christian, go to church and so on, and if you didn't, you couldn't.  I wanted to believe those things, but increasingly, as I wandered from church to church in an attempt to have some kind of religious practice in my life, I found that I just didn't.  I was going from time to time to the church across the road from my flat in Edinburgh, but growing more and more uncertain than I was in the right place.  I was getting tired of saying to myself, "but it's just a metaphor", as I repeated the words of the creed, and other ways of getting round the obvious (to me) untruth of what seemed to be the central tenets of the Christian faith.  Then I read Karen Armstrong, and began to understand that the emphasis on literal belief was a very modern element of religious observance, and that other religions weren't nearly so keen on it.  The stories of the Bible were, she explained, to be taken as myth, not literal, scientifically-provable truth.  If they inspired their followers to live deeper, richer, more outwardly-focused lives, then they were doing their job, regardless of whether the events described had actually happened or not.  Practice was the important thing, and, in particular, the practice of compassion, which has since become Armstrong's principal concern. 

Karen Armstrong never mentioned the Quakers, and it wasn't until October 2006 that I attended a meeting for the first time, but the seed of my life as a Quaker, as it would become, was laid with her book.  For that, I am profoundly grateful.  In the Quakers I found a group of people who seemed to be following the principles that Armstrong had identified: less concerned with belief than with practice, they never asked me to define what I understood by God or make any statements of faith, but they did expect me, like all Quakers, to make a serious attempt to live by the testimonies of peace, truth, simplicity and equality.  In the gathered silence of a Quaker meeting I found a depth of experience which no other religious ritual had previously offered me; that silence seemed the most eloquent response possible to an awareness of the sacred, and when Friends did speak, what they said often spoke to me much more profoundly than the traditional Christian liturgy.  Through the Quakers I came to understand what a religious community could be, and why anyone would want to be a part of one.  For the first time it seemed possible actually to be friends with the people with whom I was worshipping, rather than dashing away as soon as I could in case someone hijacked me and put me on the flower rota.

Well, the rotas came along later, but by that time I was hooked, and being asked to make coffee or welcome people at the door seemed more like an opportunity than a burden.  Since that first meeting I've re-read The Spiral Staircase several times, and acquired copies of Buddha and A Short History of Myth.  I started Buddha some time ago, got half-way through and got distracted, so, having brought both books to Manchester, it seemed a good moment to finish one and read the other, and review them together here.

Armstrong had written a number of books on religion before Buddha, including a biography of Mohammed and the magisterial A History of God.  She seems in very comfortable territory with Buddhism - a non-theistic religion whose focus is on right action rather than right belief, and whose founder always insisted on the central importance of experience over second-hand knowledge.  The Buddha's story is an inspiring one, of a young man compelled to leave his home, go out into the world as a mendicant monk and devise a new religious system for a people restless and dissatisfied with what was currently on offer.  At the same time, I can't help feeling for the Buddha's wife and infant son who found themselves abandoned in the cause of the new faith; several years later, when the Buddha came back to his home town and converted many there, including his father, his wife refused to forgive him, and who can blame her?  As Armstrong recounts the principal events of the Buddha's life - his birth, departure from home, search for a new approach to life, formation of a group of adherents or Sangha, travels around ancient India and finally his death - we of course learn a lot about Buddhism, and what an appealing religion she makes it appear.  The original monks, she tells us, were a cheerful bunch, whose apparent happiness with their lot drew comment wherever they went  Fundamentally, the Buddha was "trying to forge a new way of being human":

The evident contentment of his bhikkhus [monks] showed that the experiment was working.  The monks had not been infused with supernatural grace or reformed at the behest of a god.  The method devised by the Buddha was a purely human initiative.  His monks were learning to work on their natural powers as skillfully as a goldsmith might fashion a piece of dull metal and make it shining and beautiful, helping it to become more fully itself and to achieve its potential.  It seemed that it was possible to train people to live without selfishness and to be happy. [...] 'Unskillful' states, such as anger, guilt, unkindness, envy and greed, were avoided not because they had been forbidden by a god or were 'sinful' but because the indulgence of such emotions was found to be damaging to human nature. (pg. 129-30)

The "method" devised by the Buddha used well-established practices of concentration and meditation, chiefly from yoga, to transcend the temporal, illusory and impermanent and to break free of attachments to possessions, status and, ultimately, life itself.  The idea of status, together with the wealth which it brought, was an illusion, since these things could never endure but must give way to the more powerful forces of change which govern human life.  Aligning oneself with reality, then, meant submitting to this knowledge, and, in doing so, to achieve a kind of liberation: clinging on to possessions, people and comfortable ways of living could never bring an individual into a deeper spiritual life.  This is a familiar message to anyone conversant with even the rudiments of religious teaching: all faiths exhort their followers to break free of convention and question their most dearly-held assumptions about what matters in life.  Buddhism does this, however, without reference to an omnipotent, omniscient God - human beings can achieve enlightenment all on their own.  The yogic disciplines mentioned above are pretty intense, though, and Armstrong leaves us in no doubt that enlightenment, while theoretically attainable by anyone, is the result of a lifetime of hard spiritual work and not of a week's course in an ashram.  I was nevertheless interested to find concepts emerging which were already familiar to me from my study of yoga - many readers will know that I am training to be a teacher of the Iyengar method.  It's widely thought that yoga is a form of exercise, good for stretching the body and maybe feeling a bit calmer, but this is not in fact the case - physical postures, or asana, are only one of the eight limbs of yoga.  The first two, discussed by Armstrong, are yama and niyama - ethical disciplines which provide the basis for the adherent's practice and which include non-violence, truthfulness, self-control, non-covetousness, cleanliness, contentment, enthusiasm, self-knowledge and surrender to something greater than oneself.  The remaining limbs, after asana and pranayama (breathing exercises), are forms of meditation increasing in intensity from withdrawal of the senses from external stimuli (pratyahara) to complete absorption in the oneness of the universe (samadhi).  Most of us who practice yoga only get a short way along this path.  The Buddha and other "enlightened ones" went all the way along it, and yet remained in the world to teach others: the compassion essential to Buddhists demands that they share their knowledge and not vanish into a private spiritual realm of their own, however tempting that may be.

A Short History of Myth appeared in 2005 as the introduction to a series published by Canongate of ancient myths retold by contemporary authors.  They couldn't have asked a more appropriate person to provide a framework for the stories which followed.  Armstrong is clearly drawn to the mythic mode, finding in it a way of interpreting the world far more fruitful than literal belief.  She defines a myth as a story which, while not being literally true, contains a deeper truth about human experience.  Hence, she argues, the central importance of myth in religion, which, as we know, she sees as held back in modern times by an obsession with belief as an acceptance of factual propositions.  Myth, furthermore, goes hand in hand with ritual - and so it is that all religions link their central rituals to specific events in their mythology.  The Christian Eucharist is a re-enactment of Christ's death and resurrection, and has meaning whether you think that the man in question actually rose from the dead or not.  Similarly with the Jewish festival of Passover:

We do not know what actually happened when the people of Israel escaped from Egypt and crossed the Sea of Reeds [or Red Sea, when, according to the Bible, the waters parted to let them through], because the story has been written as a myth.  The rituals of Passover have for centuries made this tale central to the spiritual lives of Jews, who are told that each one of them must consider himself to be of the generation that escaped from Egypt.  A myth cannot be correctly understood without a transformative ritual, which brings it into the lives and hearts of generations of worshippers.  A myth demands action: the myth of the Exodus demands that Jews cultivate an appreciation of freedom as a sacred value, and refuse either to be enslaved themselves or to oppress others.  By ritual practice and ethical response, the story has ceased to be an event in the distant past, and has become a living reality. (pg. 106-07)

There is much food for thought here, as in all Armstrong's writing.  For anyone interested in religion, there is no better guide to this famously bumpy terrain.  If more contemporary commentators on religion had even half her intelligence, open-mindedness and concern for compassion, we wouldn't be in the mess of wilful misunderstanding and intolerance of each other's faith, or absence of it, that we currently are.

   

    

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Fourth Estate, 2011)

In including Jonathan Franzen's new novel in this blog I must put my hands up and declare openly that this represents something of a bending of the rules.  Strictly speaking, Freedom was not in the original five wine boxes that travelled from Edinburgh to Manchester.  Knowing how highly I rated The Corrections, Gregory bought Freedom for me for Valentine's Day (much better than a bunch of flowers) before I had started this blog.  The temptation proved too much for me, especially when I realised that I could take it away with me as a holiday read.  Last week we were in rural Shropshire, trying in vain to understand the workings (or non-workings) of a wind turbine in an "eco-cottage" we had rented in hopes of a relaxing Easter break.  It turns out that constant worry about whether the lights are going to stay on and whether the woodburner will stay lit is no friend to relaxation.  The need for back-up in the form of a diesel generator also compromised the eco-credentials somewhat: ironically, the generator had to run for four hours continuously to jump-start the turbine into action.  Still, the landscape was beautiful, and we managed to get some good walks in.  In a way, though, we spent our most enjoyable day snowed in.  A blizzard had raged overnight, and when we woke up the ground was several inches deep in snow, with more blowing horizontally, building up deep drifts.  There was nothing to do but remake the fire in the woodburner and settle in for a long day of reading. 

Gregory had David Mitchell's latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (much recommended), through which he proceded at a phenomenal rate.  I, in between obsessing about the fire and constantly rearranging its logs to no good purpose, made good progress with Freedom.  It's not always the case that a novel hooks you from the very first paragraph - most take a bit more getting into than that, I find - but when one does it is a particular pleasure.  Within a few chapters I found myself being drawn into the same territory as The Corrections - disfunctional family life in modern America - and revisiting the somewhat choppy emotional sea of dismay and fascination in which I had read it, on a trip to Edinburgh in 2003.  The uncertainty I felt at the time about whether I wanted to leave London for the Athens of the North is now inseparable in my mind from the heavily ironic, tragi-comedy of manners which made Franzen's name when it first came out in 2001.  Freedom has been a long time coming - Franzen has been occupied with essays and journalism in the meantime - but it's a weighty successor, both in terms of its content and its length: it's a big ole' 600-pager.

At the centre of the novel is, as you might expect, a family - Patty and Walter Berglund and their children, Jessica and Joey.  Walter's college roomate, Richard Katz, also plays a pivotal role.  Franzen begins by approaching his subjects obliquely, from the perspective of their erstwhile neighbours in Ramsey Hill, a now fully gentrified neighbourhood of St Paul, Minnesota.  We learn that Patty and Walter moved into the area as a young married couple, a symptom of as well as a vital force in its transformation, and have spent twenty or so years there, bringing up their children and enduring a complex feud with their neighbours, the Monaghans.  During the course of this long, inexhaustible war of attrition, Patty morphes from a cheerful neighbour with never a bad word to say about anyone into an embittered and disappointed woman, given to absenting herself to the family's lake house up-country for extended and unexplained stays.  When the novel opens, the Berglunds have relocated to Washington DC, where Walter has become embroiled in some similarly obscure scandal involving the US coal industry and its enthusiasm for blowing the tops of mountains; their former neighbours are at a loss to understand how this could have happened, given Walter's impeccable green credentials.

So much for the bare bones of the story.  For the rest of the novel, Franzen fills in the gaps, taking us deep into the heart not only of the Berglund family but also of the forebears responsible for its existence.  In the first substantial section, Patty, in the guise of a third-person narrative, tells the story of her East Coast upbringing, her considerable talent for basketball and her ill-treatment at the hands of her parents, who persuade her not to press charges against a boy who rapes her at a party because it will cause tension between themselves and his parents.  Patty then goes on to recount the events of her college years, marriage to Walter and years of motherhood, which reveal among much else that she has failed to learn certain key lessons from her own parents about the importance of giving all one's children equal attention.  Patty loves her daughter, Jessica, but it's her son whom she really adores.  Feelings which should be focused on Walter have been misdirected somewhere, with the result that the real emotional intimacy in the Berglund household is between mother and son, and not between husband and wife.  Hence Patty's distress when Joey breaks ranks in the dispute with the Monaghans, the next-door neighbours whose daughter, Connie, has become his girlfriend, and moves in with them.  The Berglunds are disintegrating, and all it takes is the reappearance of Richard Katz, Walter's closest friend and the long-ago object of Patty's lust, to complete the slide into chaos.

There are so many strands to this novel that it is difficult to give a full picture of its richness in a brief plot summary.  Each member of the family has his or her time in the spotlight: we move from Patty to Joey, Jessica and Walter, meeting also Patty and Walter's parents, grandparents and siblings.  The generational mine-shaft is deep and full of undigested events, unhealed wounds and unresolved conflicts.  The tragedy of Freedom is in the damage we inflict on our children without meaning to, within the infinitely wide field that opens up once we've covered the basics of feeding them, clothing them and providing them with somewhere safe and warm to live.  When Patty asks her mother towards the end of the novel why she never came to any of her basketball games, Mrs Emerson is at a loss for an answer: clearly distressed, she can nonetheless come up with nothing better than vague speculations about how it wasn't really her thing.  Finally, heartbreakingly, she admits, "I guess my life hasn't always been easy, or happy, or exactly what I wanted.  At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they'll break my heart".  The narrator continues, "and this was all Patty got from her, then or later.  It wasn't a lot, it didn't solve any mysteries, but it would have to do".  There are very few neat or easy answers in Freedom about why people behave as they do: we are left contemplating the dispiriting fact that sometimes we just can't help but hurt the people we love.  Our better selves are not always operational, and that's just how it is.  Yet despite all this, there is still a gentleness and hopefulness in the novel.  As it draws to a conclusion, and the narrative voice opens out once more to view the Berglunds from a greater distance, we see that Franzen has taken pity on his readers and allowed something to be salvaged from the wreckage.  I found Freedom a hard read as well as a compulsive and very enjoyable one, and was grateful for some solace after 600 pages.

Less reassurance is on offer to mitigate the novel's other important undertow, the environmental chaos which results from America's insatiable quest for non-renewable energy resources.  Motivated by a deep desire to make a difference, Walter leaves his job with the Nature Conservancy to work with oil baron Vin Haven, who combines his friendship with senior members of the Bush administration and intimacy with the big energy companies with a passion for the cerulean warbler, a near-endangered bird that migrates between North and South America.  Convinced that only a pragmatic approach can win the day, Walter hands over the rights to mountain-top removal in an area of West Virginia in exchange for the space to create a protected reserve for the warbler.  Unsurprisingly, all does not end well.  In the end, Walter is forced to confront the impossibility of imposing limits on our freedom to mess things up in whatever way we choose. The family mess and the environmental mess intersect in subtle and complex ways in this novel, with the title finding a range of resonances as the story progresses.  I was reminded at times of Ian McEwan's Solar, but found Freedom a vaster and more profound work.  For anyone who is a parent or has one, it makes for very thought-provoking and challenging reading.

Adam Thorpe, Ulverton (Minerva, 1993)

The paperback copy of Adam Thorpe's Ulverton which I've just finished reading is inscribed with Gregory's name and a date of purchase of 2006.  This means he almost certainly bought it in one of Edinburgh's wonderful second-hand bookshops, perhaps Armchair Books: the nearest thing you'll get to Shakespeare and Company outside Paris.  For the last few years there's even been a book festival based around a group of these shops, which brings readers and writers together in their wonderful, musty-smelling spaces for a few days in June (see www.westportbookfestival.org).  Those bookshops are much missed in our new Manchester life: this fine city doesn't seem to have nearly so many.  There's a good Oxfam bookshop on the Wilbraham Road in Chorlton, and an excellent second-hand emporium at the back of The Art of Tea in Didsbury, but that's it for our discoveries so far.  If any Manchester readers know of others, please alert me to them in the comments section.

Anyway.  Nostalgia trip over.  I've been meaning to read Ulverton for some time; on every occasion since, I imagine, 2006, that I've roamed round our bookshelves saying, "I don't know what to read next", Gregory has replied, "Ulverton?".  Finally I've got round to it, and it's the greatest justification so far for this project of actually reading the books I own.  A word of caution, though: taking on Ulverton is a commitment.  Thorpe asks a lot of his readers - you'll be decoding dialects, following an intricate network composed of many threads, and rummaging your brain for all the history you can remember since the English Civil War.  This is not undemanding reading for the few minutes before you fall asleep each night.  Happily, Thorpe amply rewards the effort.

Thorpe had published a couple of collections of poetry before this, his first novel, appeared in 1992.  It was greeted with what I believe it's traditional to call "a chorus of praise".  Ulverton is such an ambitious novel that Thorpe would have been lauded just for the scope of what he had tried to do; to have pulled it off is a yet more remarkable achievement.  The novel takes place in the fictional village of Ulverton in Somerset at twelve different historical moments: it begins in 1650, as one of Cromwell's soldiers returns to the village after five years' absence to find that his wife has taken a new husband, and ends in 1988, with the attempts of a property developer to cover the ancient fields around Ulverton in new-build housing.  Each episode moves us about thirty years forward in time, so that the Civil War opening is followed by a sermon given by the parish priest in 1689 against the rise of non-conformism in the village and its pernicious influence over previously loyal Anglicans, which is succeeded in its turn by the the ruminations in 1712 of a farmer bent on improving his land in line with the most up-to-date innovations in agriculture, and then by the letters from 1743 of the lady of the manor to her lover.  Other chapters detail the dire punishment meted out to a villager accused of stealing a hat in 1775, the machine-breaking which swept through southern England in the riots of 1830 and the coming of the First World War.  To add to this huge variety of context and incident, each episode uses a different narrative device: there is everything here from letters to first-person testimony to screenplay.  As Hilary Mantel observed in her review, Ulverton "draws the reader into its task of reconstructing the unrecorded history of England.  And sometimes you forget that it is a novel, and believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voices of the dead."

Inevitably, some of the chapters involved me more than others.  Those that have stayed most vividly in my memory are those from 1743, 1830 and 1914.  In the first, the mistress of Ulverton Hall has just given birth to a son by her lover, a young classics tutor now in London, to whom she writes a series of increasingly desperate letters begging his return.  She believes that their relationship has escaped detection, but as the months wear on and she remains confined to her room, on the pretext that she has not yet recovered from her delivery, it is clear that her imprisonment amid the gloom - she is not allowed to open the shutters - and coal fumes is a punishment for her transgressions.  Almost a century later, another series of documents gives us an insight into the events of summer and autumn 1830, when farmers ran riot, breaking the agricultural machinery which threatened their livelihood and extorting money from those who were keeping them in penury.  By December many of the offenders were on trial, facing death or deportation, and a young lawyer is summoned from London to take their depositions, which are interleaved in this chapter with his letters to his fiancee.  The writing in these two sections is a virtuosic performance, an exquisite act of ventriloquism: we can almost believe, with Hilary Mantel, that these are documents dating from the periods themselves.   Here is the lawyer decribing the village in 1830:

We are set up in a room of the Manor in the settlement (for so I grace it) named Ulverton - or Ulvers - or Ulverdon - makes no difference - the most dismal place one can imagine - the seat of the Riots in this part of the country - with ditch-mud in the place of road and not a head of thatch without its sprout of moss and weeds.  The main Square hardly merits justification of its nomination: but it is more a Circle of despondency about a dripping well, whose handle creaks the rope up so loud it forces me to ask for repetition from the Examinants at least ten times of a morning.

By 1914 the prose is plainer, but no less evocative, as a retired colonial administrator tells us how the able-bodied men of Ulverton responded to the rousing calls of the Squire to volunteer themselves for the great fight.  As a line of men forms across the village square, one farmer hangs back, calmly explaining when challenged that he would rather "bide at home".  The Squire heaps shame upon him, but surreptitiously keeps at home a handful of men who are excavating a barrow mound on his land.  Eventually they too elect to fight, and only the older and more infirm remain on the mound to hear the church bells tolling each time news reaches the village of another death on the far-away battlefields.

Percy Cullurne, the refusnik farmer, is given the nickname "Bidatome", and endures its chants until it has become worn into "Bid'm" by use.  In the next section, from 1953, this nickname is still in use: the narrator refers in passing to Cullurne as "Bidem", remarking that she has no idea why he is always called by this name.  This is only one example of a technique that Thorpe uses throughout the novel: the sections are bound together by countless details of place - we recognise the same fields and farmhouses over and over again - and of people - the surnames endure from generation to generation.  The result is an extraordinarily rich palimpsest, not unlike a section through an archaeological dig: layer piles on layer, as the events we saw taking place in 1650 become ever more deeply buried and yet their traces still visible, even when the passage of time has made them indiscipherable.  This is the most profound impression which I took away from Ulverton, of the extreme fragility and yet equal durability of the past.  By the end of the novel Ulverton Hall has undergone dereliction and restoration by the National Trust, but the crimson damask wall coverings installed by the unfortunate Lady of 1743 are still there, buried beneath later accretions.  The pub is refitted by a developer in 1988, to the disgust of the locals who bear the names of their ancestors whom we first met in 1650, but his plans for new housing are about to be derailed by the discovery of bones pointing to a crime committed as long ago as the very beginning of the novel.  The sections are knitted together so intricately and so convincingly that I wished I had read Ulverton more quickly, to immerse myself in its world more completely.  As it was, I found myself continually flicking back, trying to remember what had happened two hundred years ago at Five Elms Farm, and why it was significant that a particular orchard now no longer existed.  Thorpe's achievement is to have created an entirely holistic picture of English rural life and history and to have taken his readers on a richly detailed journey through time and space, all without leaving this one tiny and unremarkable patch of ground.                    
 

Hilary Mantel, Fludd (Viking, 1989)

I only discovered Hilary Mantel fairly recently, though I had long known of her: she was one of those writers floating dimly somewhere near the back of my mind, an awareness, almost an intention, that never seemed to transform itself into any actual reading.  And then, when I finally got round to it, a real regret that I deprived myself of the pleasure for so long.

The first book of Mantel's that I read was her wonderful memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003), followed swiftly by Beyond Black (2005), an equally wonderful and very dark tale which brilliantly combined the otherworldly with the prosaic - the central character is a medium who plies her trade in the theatres and conference centres of the M4 corridor.  Sharing some territory with both books is Fludd, an earlier and shorter novel.  The setting, a Derbyshire village in the mid-50s, is that of Mantel's childhood, while the Catholic congregation around which the drama unfolds is steeped in a mysticism so innate that its details become commonplaces.  This is a portrait of a community for which religion is simply the stuff of life, its lexicon and its iconography known by heart - a place where the extraordinary is ordinary, but where, by the end of the novel, the ordinary will have recovered its ability to become extraordinary.  

Father Angwin has lost his faith, but finds this little hindrance to ministering to the needs of his flock, who, whether nuns, schoolgirls, members of the Children of Mary or the Men's Fellowship, go unquestioningly about their devotions in the permanently damp Derbyshire countryside.  A visit from the Bishop, however, presages the arrival of Fludd, a new curate sent to assist Father Angwin.  But who exactly is he?  And why has he come to this otherwise neglected backwater? Slowly, as Fludd works his way into the affections of the Fetherhoughtonians, the answers to these questions begin to unfold.  Life in the village, particularly for a certain young nun, will never be the same again.

The great joy of Mantel's writing is in its poetic accuracy and wry humour.  Each sentence brings the idiosyncracies of Fetherhougton and its inhabitants before us in a curiously slanted light, not unlike that of the Derbyshire summer itself, which, "a thick grey blanket, had pinned itself to the windows".  Mantel's prose avoids calling attention to itself, continuing pointing beyond the words to the precise and often strange reality beyond.  Lesser writers get stuck in their own cleverness, or poetic-ness, or whatever they think their own particular talent is, and forget that the words on the page are merely a veil, as permeable as they can make it, through which the stuff of the fiction shines through, more rather than less vivid for the language which presents it to the reader.   

For me, the pleasure of reading Fludd was also in recognising a place I know.  The setting sounds very like the Hope Valley, where a group of Quakers live in a residential community in the village of Bamford (www.quakercommunity.org.uk), to which we are regular visitors:

"Tiny distant figures swarmed over the hummocks and hills; they were Water Board men, Forestry Commission.  In the folds of the hills there were pewter-coloured reservoirs, hidden from sight.  The first event of the autumn was the snowfall that blocked the pass that led through the moors to Yorkshire; this was generally accounted a good thing."

The Quaker community is housed in the converted Water Board headquarters, built around the turn of the century; about forty-five minutes' walk away, up a track fashioned out of a disused railway line, lies the Ladybower Reservoir.  Other reservoirs do indeed reveal themselves to view around sudden bends in the high paths over the moors; the pass referred to is surely Snake Pass, whose closure by snow is still taken by the Met Office to mark the beginning of the cold weather.  It is an area of outstanding beauty - it is in Mantel's fictional interests to make it sound rather grimmer than it is, at least in my experience - and I urge everyone to visit it, Fludd in hand.  Both will reward the effort.






 

Carol Shields, Happenstance (Flamingo, 1994)

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?

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.