Juxtabook

Two for Sorrow by Nicola Upson

Two for Sorrow by Nicola Upson is the third in her historical mystery series that features Josephine Tey, the crime ficiton writer, as a protagonist. It was a fascinating read from start to finish and one that I repeatedly made time for ("I'll just have a cup of tea and another chapter") but it is oddly unsuccessful in some points.

Upson's version of the theatreland of the thirties was superb in An Expert in Murder so I was delighted to discover that we were returning there and here lies both the strength and weakness of the book. The behind the scenes look at the Motley establishment, costume and clothes designers to theatre's stars and its rich and influential patrons, is detailed in that pacey, organised-chaos kind of way that one expects from such a place. Here is the heart of theatre's "look" and so a vile and visual murder at its centre is a huge shock for Josephine and her friends. The murder is horrific but the reactions are delicately handled and I particularly liked Ronnie's forthright anger and determination to face things down that seemed to fit so well with her lively tough love.

The plot as it plays out is a brilliant period piece focusing on a crime routed in the post-industrial pre-feminist age of the world of baby-farming. This was something about which I had only sketchy knowledge (mainly based on reading the wonderful Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith) and though it is a horrible mire of loss and violence and fear it is still something I was glad to know about. Again, as with the world of theatre, Upson is a brilliant guide. The plot is complex but worth the wait and reminded me of Barbara Vine at her best and captured something of the atmosphere of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

So what are my caveats that I hinted at at the start of this review? Well, Upson has always had her work cut out in utilising the real life Josephine Tey. Although Tey is just a persona, a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh which Mackintosh used for her crime fiction, as an authorial hand she is as brilliant as she is shadowy. Mackintosh's works as Tey are some of the most literary of the Golden Era and though not the best known of those popular "Queens of Crime" her work is adored by those who stumble on it. This makes using Tey successfully a really hard trick to pull off. I went along with it for the first novels, and I think Upson made a good start. Using both Richard of Bordeaux and The Man in the Queue was successful and alongside Upson's brilliant sense of place and time made for a very successful start. The second book Angel with Two Faces wavered a little maybe but Josephine's relationship with Archie became more intriguing and the use of the open air theatre and Cornwall's rugged coastline was imaginatively done. So what went wrong in book three?

The trouble with real life characters is that they have a real life which you might feel makes a good twist in the plot. Here Josephine's personal life takes on a strange twist which comes out of the blue and makes no emotional or psychological sense. An endnote tells us that the character with whom she becomes involved is based on a real person who knew Elizabeth Mackintosh and that almost everything that character says to Tey in the book is taken from diary entries made by that person. What happens may have been emotionally true for Elizabeth but it does not fit with the Tey as written in the first two books. I thought it didn't work and it made me stop believing in Upson's Tey: a great disappointment as I had grown fond of her over the three books.

So do we give up? No, I don't think so. Upson is a skilled plotter, and a wonderful historical novelist. Tey's emotional life does remain up in the air at the end and maybe Upson can pull it back on track in book four should there be one. I really hope there will be, not least because I am fascinated by Upson's project here. Tey is in many ways only ever a character moving from Makintosh's head to Upson's. She was not the real persona of the writer. Mackintosh's work in theatre and habit of using pseudonyms does make her ripe for this kind of narrative resurrection, and in Tey she has created the perfect player for someone else's stage. But this kind of balancing act between a Tey who was only ever an authorial construction or convenience for Mackintosh, and Upson's Tey portrayed as real and onto whom aspects of Elizabeth Mackintosh's real personal life are sometimes put, is one where it is very easy to drop off the tightrope one side or the other thereby breaking your reader's suspension of disbelief. Upson's Tey lives when Upson's  main inspiration is Tey's novels; when Upson takes too much from the real players' biographies then there are too many competing threads and somehow it doesn't quite work.

I must say again that I could not put this book down and I can't stop thinking about the ramifications of this kind of work. So despite my reservations this is thoroughly enjoyable and comes with one of Juxtabook's highest recommendations. For either the baby farming or the crime plot this is a worth while read, we'll just have to cut Upson a bit of slack on the characterisation side with this one.

Getting a tattoo or two

I have two new books for the reading pile. The first needs little introduction The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson is, after a slightly slow start, so far proving rather violent but once now we've got onto the Vanger family it is getting hard to put down.

One I had not heard of but spotted in the library is The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban.

"Recently widowed and increasingly lonely, Roswell Clark’s life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed a tattoo. His ideal image was that of a bat featured on an eighteenth-century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah Varley, who was clearly compelled by the same bat."

Seriously, someone wants a tattoo and goes to the V&A? It is like buying a motorbike with stabilisers. Like the protagonists I rather like both bats and the eighteenth century so I couldn't resist picking this up.

And the winner is ...

Thank you to all my customers, Juxtabook readers, twitter followers and everyone else who entered the competition. Although there were quite a few entries there were only two correct answers, which were hardly enough to pull out of a hat so I allocated heads and tails and flipped!

The winner, with the correct answer of Patrick, was Karen at Cornflower. Well done Karen! Which was rather hard on the second placed Margaret of Books Please. Since the questions was harder than I thought with so many getting the answer wrong, I think that Margaret deserves a £5 voucher too. I will be in touch with you both about the vouchers.

For those of you who answered Branwell that was actually his middle name. The Rev Patrick and his wife did what many nineteenth century parents did and called their eldest (and only) son after his father and bestowed his mother's maiden name Branwell as a middle name. He was known as Branwell but it was not his first name!

Book voucher competition and book offer reminders

A quick reminder that there is still time to enter the competition for a £15 voucher for my book sales website. The closing date for the draw is midnight UK time on 17th July 2010 and international entries are welcome.

You also have the rest of July to take advantage of two discount codes currently available which used together could save you 20%.

The Tsar's Dwarf by Peter H. Fogtdal

My name is Sørine Bentsdatter. I was born in 1684 in the village of Brønshøj. My father was a pastor, my mother died in childbirth.

When I turned six my body did not grow anymore.

I don't care for the term "dwarf".

As a rule I don't care for dwarves at all.

I have read some lovely, lovely books this year. Top of the list so far is Conceitby Mary Novik but coming a very close second is this wonderful tale The Tsar's Dwarf by Peter H. Fogtdal. It's another historical novel that is funny, sad and delightful, all of which makes it sound elegant when in fact it's contemptuous, uproarious and potentially overwhelming.

The Dwarf (she seems to demand a capital D) in question is Sørine Bentsdatter. We join her life when she is miserably enduring a life of humiliations in Copenhagen living with Terje whom she calls the Scoundrel.

As her life with Terje comes to an end she gets sucked into life at the Palace. First as entertainment for Peter the Great's visit and then, without so much as a by your leave, as a gift for the unusual and charismatic Tsar.

Sørine is angry, very angry. She hates the world, the Danes, the Scoundrel, the Palace, her childhood and herself. She is also very strong and very funny. She's off the page and in your head and in your dreams - when she's not striding about the room you're reading in. She expects life to be rough, and it is, but often she is rougher still. Her time in Russia is full of adventures, some predictable given her size and role, but many not so. She is sometimes kind, which always surprises her. She lives in a bizarre world being both a dwarf and part of the Royal household which makes her twice removed from normality. She finds these perspectives during her adventures let her learn a bit more about herself. Her outer journey across Europe parallels her inner journey. By the end she does not hate herself quite as much as she did. She might be unruly and tempestuous but this reader was very sad to let her go and close the book.

Sørine is an original. I have never come across her like in a book before. Her personality bridges the episodic and sometimes surreal nature of her adventures making everything which is before us both real and relevant. I have no idea how accurate a portrayal of seventeenth and eighteenth century Denmark and Russia this book is, but the sheer forceful presence that is Sørine convinces us that this is how it was. There's no sense of an authorial hand, Sørine just IS and we can like it or lump it.

Fogtdal makes the difficulties of Sørine's situation abundantly clear without ever letting her wallow in victimhood. Her complex personality is handled with skill: whilst Sørine can be aggressive and unpleasant she is never repellent, when put-upon she never seems weak, when at a loss she never seems truly destitute. When she is controlled by the political forces around her she is never more commanding a presence in the book. She might make you rage but she'll rarely make you squirm. And just when you think you've never met a more unpalatable bossy little person in your life, she'll move you beyond words, surprise you with a gentleness, twist your thoughts with her unpredictability and show you that you never really understood her at all.

There is much about The Tsar's Dwarf to recommend it, the plot, the historical details are very good, fascinating in fact, the narrative is always lively and the book is often funny, but it is Sørine who will stay with you and Sørine is why you really should read it.

Revolutionary Writing

Faber have just reissued a number of classics under their Revolutionary Writing series. I have to confess that I haven't read any of them though several have been on my wish list for a while. Faber's 3 for 2 offer seems to a good excuse to move them from the wish list to the TBR pile.

The series includes:

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi
The Children of Men by P. D. James
Leviathan by Paul Auster
GB84 by David Peace
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden

There's praise for the cover design on the Good Design // Bad Design blog.

New old books and Green Metropolis

I have had a look at Green Metropolis a few times but never used it. It is a book recycling site where anyone can list books very easily. From their site:

We are a company dedicated to encouraging our members to recycle their books, therefore whether it’s a latest release or last year’s bestseller, all paperbacks, hardbacks and audio books all cost just £3.75 to buy (and include free delivery on all standard sized paperbacks). Plus we donate 5p from the sale of each book to the UK’s leading woodland conservation charity the Woodland Trust, to support Woodland Creation. However heavier books such as hardbacks or large format paperbacks may incur a small delivery charge, in order to help cover the extra postage costs. Delivery charges are tailored to individual books but usual range from 50p to £4.50 depending upon the books size and weight.

Most books are £3.75 which includes postage for most paperbacks. Green Metropolis take 75p from each sale. Sellers can discount their books by a set amount of pence or by offering 3 for 2 and they can add extra postage for heavy books. Bearing in mind that even if the seller is offering books for a penny of Amazon (the bane of my life, penny books, as you can imagine) you're paying £2.76 including postage then Green Metropolis offers a good deal especially with the 3 for 2 offers.

Feeling the need for a few new paperbacks to refresh the TBR pile I took the plunge and made an order on  Monday. This was my choice:

Cross Channel by Julian Barnes, The Comfort of Strangers By Ian McEwan (one of the few of his I haven't read) and my next Brenda and Effie Something Borrowed by Paul Magrs.

I was impressed by the price and by the condition and by the speed of postage. The packaging was fine too - often not the case with amateur sellers or even professional ones. The seller I bought from has a very good selection on 3 for 2 and as good service deserves a recommendation I hope this link will take you to his/her pages but you might need to be logged in, if not you'll need to search for member 53717. Meanwhile, as Pooh says of honey, I think I might take Something Borrowed into a corner and make sure no-one disturbs it.

Competition Time

As part of the 10th birthday celebrations of C L Hawley Books I have a little prize draw for you. To win a £15 voucher to spend on my website just email me clh@clhawley.co.uk with the answer to the following question:

What was the first name of the brother of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë?

All right answers will go into a draw for the voucher. International entries are welcome and you don't have to be a customer or have commented on the blog before.

Please do NOT answer in the comments section!

The closing date for the draw is midnight UK time on 17th July 2010.

Good luck!

Happy Birthday C L Hawley Books!

Happy birthday to us - C L Hawley Books is 10 years old this month. We'd like to thank all our customers for their support over the last 10 years. To celebrate we are offering customers a 10% discount on our stock during July. Please use the discount code 10yearsold at the checkout and the discount will be applied. Extra offers will also be advertised here on Juxtabook during July so please keep looking in to see what's happening.

The first extra offer is an additional 10% discount which you can use as well as 10yearsold - the second code is juxtabook10 and is valid throughout July and is especially to thank readers here and followers on twitter. Please use both codes at the checkout or if you prefer use the contact us details on the site to request the total for your order.

We don't stock a lot of fiction but we do have some which you can view here. Most of our stock is literary criticism, history and the other academic arts and humanities.

Juxtabook readers might also like our early twentieth century novel catalogue, our contemporary novel catalogue and our literary biography section. We also have some literature in translation.

Thank you again to both my readers here and my customers at C L Hawley Books. I've had a wonderful 10 years. Here's to the next 10!