Juxtabook

A Bookish Life

A nice end of the year meme pinched from Other Stories and Gaskella.

Using only books you have read this year (2010), cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title. It’s much, much harder than you think!

Describe Yourself: Borderlands (Brian McGilloway)

How do you feel: The Arsenic Labyrinth (Martin Edwards)

Describe where you currently live:  Harbour (John Ajvide Lindqvist)

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Homecoming (Bernhard Schlink) I hate travelling.

Your favorite form of transportation: The Blackpool Highflyer (Andrew Martin)

Your best friend is: Never the Bride (Paul Magrs)

You and your friends are: Excellent Women (Barbara Pym)

What’s the weather like: Fludd (Hilary Mantel)

Favourite time of day: Good Morning, Midnight (Reginald Hill)

If your life was a: Weird Stories (Charlotte Riddell)

What is life to you: Let the Right One in (John Ajvide Lindqvist)

Your fear: The Stranger House (Reginald Hill)

What is the best advice you have to give: There are No Ghosts in The Soviet Union  (Reginald Hill - again)

Thought for the Day: The Dead Secret (Wilkie Collins)

How I would like to die: The Visit of the Royal Physician (Per Olov Enquist)

My soul’s present condition: Out of the Shelter (David Lodge)

The Detective Branch by Andrew Pepper

Cross a Shardlake novel with The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher and what do you get? Pyke. Elegant, character driven, tightly-plotted historical crime. Marvellous.

If book tokens have come your way over Christmas and you enjoy detective fiction then you could do little better than this, the latest Pyke novel The Detective Branch. I've joined the series at book four and enjoyed it very much.

Pyke is the head of the embryonic Detective Branch in 1840s London. In this novel we get a brief flashback to his time in a London orphanage 40 years earlier before being immediately confronted in Pyke's present day with three bodies in a pawnbroker's shop, all shot dead. Pyke is a complex character, less easily likeable than Shardlake but just as three dimensional. And despite his flaws it is hard to lose sympathy with him. His home life, like many detectives, is less than smooth but the relationships between Pyke, his teenage son Felix, and his uncle Godfrey are never less than real. Pyke walks a difficult line between loving his job, loving his son and being a successful parent. Over and over he makes mistakes out of weakness or ineptitude but you can't help feeling sorry for him and nor do you stop wanting him to succeed with Felix.

Pyke's personal and emotional life is well integrated with the fast paced plot. Like in the Shardlake books you can almost smell the historical setting, it is so alive, and the crimes, and clues, and minor characters are all wonderfully Victorian. Its literariness is not at the expense of the reader's basic urge to turn the page and as Pyke gets closer to the truth and farther from safety the end remains a genuine mystery till it is upon you.

More than just a page turner though, there is much thought on the social consequences of policing and on the ethics of the law:

A man is killed and every effort is made to apprehend the murderer. But hundreds, thousands, die each year from starvation disease and poverty and we act as if it doesn't matter.

It is the many levels of Pyke that I found so engaging. I am not a fan of the modern "gritty" police procedural. I find they lack the charm of the golden age detective and yet don't really succeed in their grittiness either. With Pyke's London Andrew Pepper manages to create a place that combines real charm, in the characters of Pyke's family, and real villains; he uses Pyke as a force for good, but recognises that good actions have unintended consequences and that good consequences sometimes require immoral actions. Pyke is not really a philosopher and he is certainly not a hero; he is just a man reacting to circumstances, ploughing a furrow that is better than most but is not always good. The Detective Branch is modern Victoriana at its very best.

Belated Christmas Wishes

A belated merry Christmas from an alternately frozen and soggy Yorkshire. My plans for sending good wishes in the run up to the big day were stimed by the chaos caused here by frozen pipes in my new kitchen followed by a dreaded burst. The kitchen is single story with a solid floor that slopes down to the cellar steps. Our cellar is our bookroom for our business stock. It is warm, drylined and insulated and perfect for keeping books at the right temperature and humidity - unless there is water cascading from the kitchen...

Fortunately we noticed the leak (torrent) almost immediately and by one of the strange quirks of older houses the leak went first through the kitchen's foundations into next door's cellar. They don't keep books in their cellar and they have a pump down there so a neighbourly disaster was averted. Had we not seen the leak at once our cellar would have filled once next door's was awash, plus once the foundations were saturated the water would have travelled along the kitchen floor and cascaded prettily down the twelve stone steps. In the event we had just about 2 tablespoons of water actually get into our cellar, not enough to call a puddle. How lucky is that!

We were all day without water but were lucky to get a plumber within about 5 hours. They had to smash a large hole in one wall but it was behind the washing machine and the new kitchen remained undamaged. Considering there were apparently over 10,000 households in Yorkshire in a similar position we've a lot to be grateful for, but it did rather throw us behind with all things Christmassy.

So, a very belated happy Christmas from Juxtabook and an early Happy New Year in case anything else happens. I hope you all kept warm and had running water over the holiday!

Booktrust and Bookstart and the cut in government funding.

You might have heard that funding for Bookstart, a programme to give books to young children, is being axed. According to The Guardian:

Booktrust, the independent charity set up to encourage reading, is to lose all government funding for its children's gifting programmes Bookstart, Booktime and Booked Up, in England, it was announced today.

Whilst the aims of Bookstart are undoubtably laudable, having experienced the bookgifting side as a parent I would suggest that the books probably largely go to families who are already highly literate and are therefore a questionable use of resources. I'd rather the money was spent on smaller classes in early years provision in catchment areas with poor literacy track records, in the current economic crisis.

You can read here about how in my town the first book gift worked well, the second was an accident, and the third (aimed at three year olds and at a cruicial point in reading development) was entirely down to my child attending the right play group and my using the library. Reaching stay-at-home parents with poor literacy it was not.

Digital Nativity

I picked this up via twitter. I think it is a rather charming version of the nativity story showing how events might have unfolded had the participants had social networking. Thanks to Theodora Wayte who tweeted the link.

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink is an exploration of presences and absences and homecomings of all kinds. Engaging on every page it is a complex ethical, philosophical and literary mystery.

Based loosely on the Odyssey the tale begins with Peter Debauer's reminiscences of his post-war childhood visits to his late father's parents in Switzerland. The absence of his father shapes Peter's thoughts as a boy but he is relatively happy in his childhood. His grandparents are editors of pulp fiction. As paper is rationed back in Germany, when Peter returns home for the summer he is given the galleys of some of the books to use as scrap paper with the injunction that he should not read the books as they are not good or suitable literature. He obeys this injunction for many years but then finds himself reading part of one by accident. He does not have the start or the finish but the passage he has describes a soldier's homecoming: the waiting outside the front door, the thinking of the wife as she has been during his absence, the walking up the path, the hand on the door ...

Years later he finds the same galley wrapping something he had put in storage. He reads it again:

Too Bad. I would have liked to read again about what happened when he rang the bell, the door opened, and his wife stood before him. And I would have loved to know what happened after that. But even though I didn't expect to learn more than I had when I had read it the first time, I found it exciting, as if this time I could read on to the end.

Ulysses of course opened the door to the tapestry-making Penelope, her suitors and the unfortunate maids. Peter becomes obsessed with the homecomings in the galley he has read whilst experiencing various homecomings in his own life, and like Ulysses does not always treat the other participants fairly. Peter's researches into the mysterious book and its author cannot help but have dramatic consequence for his life. The plot is lively, tight and unexpected despite the parallels with other literary works. The ethical and philosophical conundrums thrown up are fascinating but do not make the book feel like a heavy, weighted text.

Like The Reader, Schlink's most famous work, Homecoming is not always an easy read. Schlink has a knack for making one's humanity an uncomfortable and inescapable thing. It is, however, also a book of journeys and quests and beautifully layered characters with something of the capital "I " of the best Romantic Bildungsroman. Cross Great Expectations by Charles Dickens with Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and you'd get a novel very like Homecoming, and with such parentage it cannot help but be good. It is one I borrowed from the library but I will have to buy it; it will be one to re-read often.

Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper

Spoiler Alert!!

 

If you have read Operation Heartbreak (a lovely Persephone reprint) already then you might like to read this article on the BBC about Operation Mincemeat  the real event that inspired it. If you haven't then don't as it gives the plot away!

Books as Christmas Presents

As last year here are a few last minute suggestions for those challenged on the pressie buying front.

 

First up is a double suggestion about the Victorian naturalist Margaret Fountaine. There are two wonderful books based on her diaries called Love Among the Butterflies: Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady and Butterflies and Late Loves: The Further Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady both edited superbly by W. F. Cater. Of the two I prefer the later and it is very readable on its own. Cater has done the kind of wonderful job of editing that Charlotte Mosley did on the Mitford letters. The material is presented so that brief editorial asides fill all the gaps. The second book even has a first chapter titled New Readers Start Here which means you do not need to have read the first book to enjoy the second. Both are highly readable as we follow Margaret's life as a young, passionate Victorian girl who thwarted in her first love leaves England for the most remarkable adventures, geographic, scientific and amorous. The are out of print but are available from the usual place secondhand as you can also try the indie used book sites ukbookworld, Biblio and Antiqbook.

In a similar vein to the Margaret Fountaine you can also try Spinsters Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorersby Dea Birkett and In Nature's Name: An Anthology of Women's Writing and Illustration, 1780-1930 by Barbara Gates are also good choices.

 

In fiction, apart from recommending my top ten books of the last ten years, may I suggest something from the small independent presses. I recommended The Blue Handbag by Fiona Robyn last year and I have no hesitation in recommending it again with the proviso that you should ignore the cover as it bears no resemblance to the contents. You can read my review of The Blue Handbag here.

 

No press is smaller than the self-published writer and when you find a good self-published book you can probably be sure that your gift recipient has not got it. It will not have been heaped on any 3 for 2 table or the like. My self-published find of the year is The Yellow Room by Christopher Bowden. A historical mystery centred on a country house in the 1950s and Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising it is a sort of cross between Josphephine Tey's The Franchise Affair and White Mischief by James Fox. You can read my review of The Yellow Room by Christopher Bowden here.

 

Highly recommended for the lover of historical fiction are two books discovered during this years Scandinavian lit fest at Juxtabook: The Tsar's Dwarf by and Tales Of Protection by Erik Fosnes Hansen. Both are top candidates for my read of the year. You can read my review of The Tsar's Dwarf (published by Hawthorne Books) here and Tales of Protection (published by Vintage) here.

 And for children, look at this ...

 

Another Night Before Christmas by Carol Ann Duffy as seen advertised in the windows of Foyles, above,  recently - have a peak inside... It is a small thing of beauty and that's before we come to the fact that the words are written by the poet laureate. A lovely little poetry adventure after the Clement C. Moore original. If it is the original you're after ("Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. /") then the The Night Before Christmas illustrated by Christian Birmingham is charming. With my English teacher's hat on too many children, even in bookish homes, have lots of fiction and little poetry and non-fiction. Good kids' poetry makes an excellent present.

 

On which note the poet laureate also has a New and Collected Poems for Children .

I don't have shares in Carol Ann Duffy but a final recommendation from her prose works is The Lost Happy Endings. This is a wonderful book but a little scary so it is not for teeny tinies but rather is better for older primary school children. You can probably chance it with a strong nerved 7 year old and there on up. It tells a tale of a witch who steals the ending from stories. Surprisingly inspiring.

 

Last up a few non fiction books for grown-ups. Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History by Mark Girouard is readable, accessible and informative. It details the evolution of the country house and by extension all houses. The reasons behind the medieval hall layout related to how we arrange our homes today, though we no longer have the pantler and butler. Fascinating and certainly not light weight it is still a book you can pick up and dip into whilst you're having a coffee.

 

Edward Thomas is a poet you (and your recipient) might know from whatever ever standard poetry anthology is on your shelves as it almost certainly contains "Adlestrop", his best known work. Who, however, has a collected or even a selected Edward Thomas? Like small presses minor poets are a good vein to mine for presents-your-recipient-has-not-got but you do need to know what you are looking for. There are reasons why minor poets are minor and their extended verse often shows what these are! However, there is a truly excellent collection of Edward Thomas works The Annotated Collected Poems of Edward Thomas edited by Edna Longley. Longley's introductory essay is the best of its kind and nearly worth the price of the book alone. A good companion purchase is Branch-lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetryedited by Lucy Newlyn where contemporary poets respond to Thomas' work in poetry or prose contributing existing poems that show Edward Thomas' influence, writing new poems dedicated to Thomas, or writing prose appreciations. Both as wonderful books and together would make a cracking present.

I hope that helps any present buying conundrums you might have. The links above are largely to Amazon UK. Readers from abroad might like to use the Book Depository with its free world wide shipping.