Congrats to The Servant

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18th century, London, squalor

The Servant – the book we hope to be reading soon!  Many congratulations to ninevoice Maggie Richell Davies, who has won the Sharpe Books/Historical Writers’ Association Unpublished Award 2020.

The other eight ninevoices have heard this book progress (and change form) for some time now and we know how good it is.  We’re in 1765: and, to quote the HWA website, “Fourteen-year-old Hannah must go where she’s sent, despite her instincts screaming danger. Why does disgraced aristocrat William Chalke have a locked room in his house? What’s sold at the auctions taking place behind closed doors?”   The story evokes 18^th century London and its squalor and brutality and also its redeeming features. 

It’s clear from the descriptions of the short- and longlisted novels how strong a field the judges had to choose from.  Our congratulations to all those authors in those lists!  See http://www.historiamag.com/hwa-sharpe-books-unpublished-novel-award-winner/

Troy

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Achilles, Brad Pitt, British Museum, Byron, Cassandra, Chaucer, Clytemnestra, Euripedes, Euripides, Homer, Keats, Lady Hamilton, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Penguin Puffin, Pompeii, Priam, Roger Lancelyn Green, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stephen Fry, Troy, Virgil

The Trojan War has for centuries (millennia, even) inspired writers and artists.  We can think of so many writers – Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sophocles and Euripedes, as well of course as Homer and Virgil.  In our own time we can think of Margaret Atwood’s amazing Penelopiad (I wish I knew who it was I lent my copy to) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.You can see how artists have mined this great seam at the splendid Troy – Myth and Reality exhibition at the British Museum.  But hurry – it ends on 8 March.

From a jar of 530 BC showing Achilles killing the Amazon queen to a poster of Brad Pitt as the same great warrior in Troy (2004), you can see in how many different ways art has portrayed the tale of Troy.   This picture of Helen boarding Paris’ ship for Troy was once on someone’s wall in Pompeii: what does that expression on her face mean?

This wonderful bowl shows Priam begging Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body – it may well have been made in the time of Christ. We know that soldiers’ lives aren’t all danger and excitement, but there are long periods of boredom while the troops wait for something to happen. Here are Ajax and Achilles whiling away some time playing a board game.

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Hamilton’s life was lively enough without needing to call on the classics, but here she is as Cassandra (painted by George Romney).

And you shouldn’t mess with Clytemnestra – as her husband has just found out.  Look at her face and the step by her feet.  John Collier painted that.

The exhibition website is at https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/troy-myth-and-reality.

Like many others I first was taken with it as a child reading the Puffin books The Tale of Troy and Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green.  I’m now much enjoying Stephen Fry’s so readable and entertaining retelling of the Greek myths – Mythos and, my current reading, Heroes.  This doesn’t get to the Trojan War – I hope there’ll be a third volume for that.

Where do good ideas come from?

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Cheltenham Literary Festival, Franz Kafka, Ian McEwan, Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, Metamorphosis, Pulp fiction, Ros Schwartz, The Cockroach, The Reader on the 6.27

Where do good ideas come from?

Sometimes you read a book with a strikingly original and simple idea; you then think, “Well, of course, I could have thought of that if I I’d tried,” but the point is YOU DIDN’T.

Two examples from books I’ve just read:

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan. We know Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which opens with a man waking up to find he’s a giant insect. Why not reverse that? Have an insect who wakes up to find he’s turned into a man? Brilliant. And when we learn that that man is the British Prime Minister, who is leading the country into a whole new economic system that merely a few years back was advocated only by people who were thought crackpots …. Well, you can finish the sentence. A topical satire and, as I’ve said, a great and simple idea. (Unfortunately I’ll have to return the book to my sister who lent it to me, as she got it signed by the author at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.)

The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent is the other (translated from the French by Ros Schwartz). Here the simple idea is to have a central character who loves books but is compelled to work in a factory that destroys them. This is an appalling place where books are pulped. They are devoured and converted into a disgusting slush by a dreadful and dangerous machine into which our hero has to climb each day as part of its maintenance. And each day he rescues a page from whatever book is going into its maw, and reads it to his fellow-commuters on the train to work the next morning. They love it. The other characters are grotesques, all with some often bizarre link to books and writing. (Fortunately I was given this by a friend so can keep it. Thanks, friend.)

Wondering what to do with that gift card you got for Christmas? You could see if you like as much as I did what these writers made of these original and simple ideas.

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan, published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape, ISBN 978-1-529-11292-4 RRP £7-99 (it’s only 100 pages)

The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, translated by Ros Schwartz, published in 2016 by Pan, ISBN 978-1-5098-3685-7 RRP £8-99

Anglican Women Novelists

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Agatha Christie, Alison Shell, Barbara Pym, Book of Common Prayer, Capital punishment, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte M Yonge, Charlotte Maria Tucker, Church of England, Dorothy L Sayers, East Anglia, Elizabeth Goudge, Evelyn Underhill, Gaudy Night, Iris Murdoch, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Judith Maltby, Lambeth Palace Library, Margaret Oliphant, Monica Furlong, Murder Must Advertise, Noel Streatfeild, P D James, Prayer Book Society, Rose Macaulay, Shirley, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death

There have been more Anglican women novelists than you might think. 13 of them feature in Anglican Women Novelists – from Charlotte Brontë to PD James, edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, and published only this year. Two of the ninevoices were at its launch in the magnificent setting of Lambeth Palace Library in July.

The editors explain that to keep the book of manageable size they restricted it to writers who were British and deceased. But questions of selection are inevitable. Iris Murdoch is here? Yes, because although she lost her faith in Christ’s divinity, and was drawn towards Buddhism, her world was still infused by Anglicanism and she still attended Anglican services. The author of the Iris Murdoch essay (Peter S Hawkins) entitles it “Anglican Atheist”.

And why no Jane Austen, in whose novels the C of E features so much, when Charlotte Brontë gets in? Because between the two lie Catholic Emancipation and the repeals of the Test and Corporation Acts, meaning that other denominations could now take their place freely on the national stage: Anglicanism had lost its ‘default’ position as the nation’s faith and was becoming more of a denomination that you made a positive choice to join.

The essay on Charlotte Brontë (by Sara L Pearson) argues how much her life was rooted in the C of E and how much of her work does too. Shirley, we read, shows her “longing for the Church of England’s preservation and reformation”. In Jane Eyre the male representatives of the Church, Mr Brocklehurst and St John Rivers, are hardly role models, and their failings are compared with (and perhaps compensated for by) the qualities of female characters around them. Also, “the Book of Common Prayer haunts the pages of Jane Eyre … not only for its contents but also as a physical object”: it will have formed such an ever-present part of her childhood.

‘Dorothy L Sayers – God and the Detective’ is the title of Jessica Martin’s piece. She speaks of the role justice and punishment play in her detective novels. She makes the important point that Golden Age detective novels were written in the time when the hangman awaited the unmasked murderer: in that sense the stakes were higher, the ultimate retribution is always in the background.   Sayers had trouble with this, we read: she had “increasing unease with narrative arcs which must privilege orderly acts of justice over the wilder power of mercy”. She sees the limitations of this, and justice must come from elsewhere: “her plots have an invisible protagonist, and his name is Jehovah”. The essay then analyses Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death and Gaudy Night in this light.

The final essay is ‘PD James – “Lighten our Darkness”’ by Alison Shell.   She compares PD James to other Golden Age detective writers, principally Agatha Christie, concluding, “For all her own homage to Christie, her novels are far more violent and desolate than her predecessor’s; if Christie is the quintessential Golden Age detective novelist, James’ fallen world locates her within an Iron Age of crime fiction.” Evil is a reality: and the essay speculates on the degree to which PD James saw evil as a force in its own right. Her novels are steeped in the Anglican Church and its tradition. Churches (in a bleak East Anglia) provide the settings for many key events. PD James herself was a lover of the beauty of its traditional language and was a great supporter of the Prayer Book Society, set up to keep alive the glorious heritage of the Book of Common Prayer. Quotations from it recur in her work.

The other authors covered in the book are Charlotte Maria Tucker, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte M Yonge, Evelyn Underhill, Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Goudge, Noel Streatfeild and Monica Furlong.

Published by t&tclark, ISBN 978-0-567-68676-3 RRP £27-99

 

 

 

Things I heard Simon Mawer say

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'The Glass Room', 1968, Arthropods, Czech Centre, Czechoslovakia, HG Wells, Hitchhiking, Man Booker Prize, Mendel's Dwarf, Moody Blues, Oxford, Prague Spring, RAF, Simon Mawer, Warsaw Pact, Zoology

This week I heard the author Simon Mawer speak about writing: specifically about his novel Prague Spring, but also his other Czech-based books The Glass Room and Mendel’s Dwarf. Prague Spring is set against the events in Czechoslovakia in the fateful summer of 1968, leading to the invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact.

Four things of writerly interest in my mind from that talk:

He was asked what effect having The Glass Room shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 had for his career. It benefited hugely, he said, sales went right up, though not as much as if he’d won! He was easy about not actually winning that year, he assured us, though he was just a bit galled when Hilary won it again two years later …

One good thing about being a novelist, he told us, is that you can reinvent your own life. The example he gave was how in the summer of 1968 he had hitchhiked around Europe with a male friend. When in Bavaria they had discussed whether to cross into Czechoslovakia, then enjoying the best days of the Prague Spring, but had decided to go to Greece instead: a decision he had ever since regretted. In Prague Spring two of his main characters set out from England to hitchhike across Europe – a male student (as he had been) James, but this time with an attractive female companion, Ellie; and this time events lead them to cross the Iron Curtain (and thus into the story) rather than go to the Italian sun as planned.

He used more of his own direct experience in James and Ellie’s story. When he and his friend had been hitching they were given a lift by a German lady harpsichordist who interrogated him where he was studying, and when he gave the name of his Oxford college she asked if he knew a particular law professor there, whose friend she was. In Prague Spring he retells this story, with James and Ellie meeting a lady cellist who, likewise, is a friend of a don at his Oxford college.

Perhaps less commonly for novelists, Simon Mawer has a scientific background: his degree was in zoology and for many years he worked as a biology teacher. This shows in a remarkable simile in one of the extracts he read to us on Tuesday: a Russian tank lost in the streets of Prague is likened first to a Martian in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds but then, more uniquely, to a reptile or arthropod, the muzzle of its gun being a proboscis, which “shifts back and forth, as though sniffing the air, perhaps even trying to work out where the humans have gone.” Not an image that would have occurred to those of us with English literature or history backgrounds, perhaps.

In thrillers, he reminded us (and in whodunits, come to think of it), everything that happens must be related to the plot. But life, of course, isn’t like that. Lots of things happen that don’t link up with anything else. But in a novel you can explore these, and tell them for their own sake. One bizarre episode that features in Prague Spring but is not essential to the plot is the appearance of the Moody Blues. They actually were in Prague at this time, and the day before the Russian invasion they were filmed performing on the city’s famous Charles Bridge. Their appearance in the novel adds colour and interest and tells a true story, and you’re glad it’s there, but in a thriller you’d be wondering what its significance was.

(You can see this surreal performance on YouTube – go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4_xCA4IO7U , to see these Brummies miming Nights in White Satin to adoring fans on an otherwise empty Charles Bridge for a Franco-Belgian TV programme. It’s strange to think that 24 hours later that area was busy with invading soldiers.)

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Dept: In his interview Simon Mawer asked us to reflect on the fact that once the invasion happened, the British Embassy somehow arranged for the Moody Blues to be flown out of the country, apparently in an RAF transport plane. How was it, he asked, that in all the chaos and busyness of those events, someone managed to persuade the new Warsaw Pact controllers of the country to allow an RAF plane into Czechoslovak air space to evacuate a group of British pop singers? Would you dare put such an unlikely happening in a novel?

The interview was organised by the Czech Centre at the Czech Embassy in London. Simon was interviewed by Prague-based journalist David Vaughan, followed by a lively Q&A session with the audience.  Thanks, Czech Centre!

Prague Spring was featured on this blog at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2018/12/10/prague-spring/ and The Glass Room at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/the-glass-room-revisited/ . You can listen to all of Simon Mawer’s talk at https://soundcloud.com/czech-centre-london/simon-mawer-prague-spring .

Oxbridge Literary Festivals this week

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Boat Race, Cambridge, David Owen, Francesca Simon, George Monbiot, Hilary Benn, Iris Murdoch, Jo Brand, Joanne Harris, K-Tel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Heseltine, Michael Morpurgo, Mortlake, Oxford, Philip Collins, Putney, Ranulph Fiennes, Robert Harris, Roger McGough, Simon Mayo, Tracey Thorn, Val McDermid

This weekend sees the annual University Boat Race – Oxford squaring off against Cambridge on the Thames between Putney and Mortlake. But this time of year also sees a more cerebral rivalry – their Literary Festivals.

The dark blue Festival is already under way (https://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/) . Oxford events started on Saturday 30 March and continue till Sunday 7 April. “350 speakers from 25 countries”. Performers or interviewees still to come include Ranulph Fiennes, Robert Harris, Jo Brand, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Owen, Michael Heseltine, Val McDermid, Joanne Harris and Michael Morpurgo. And many more, as they used to say on the compilation LPs they used to sell in the 1970s. (Were they on the K-Tel label?)

Turning a paler blue, the Cambridge Spring Festival (http://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/) runs from Friday 5 April to Sunday 5 April. Like Oxford’s, the schedule is too full to list here, but it includes George Monbiot on A Plea For The Planet, Tracey Thorn on A Teenager in Suburbia, Forever Iris (“celebrating the centenary of a magnificent novelist”), Philip Collins on How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics, Francesca Simon on Horrid Henry, Simon Mayo on The Power of Storytelling, Hilary Benn MP on Finding A Way Forward, and Roger McGough with A Night of Poetry and Performance. And many more.

Two real feasts! So if you have the time this week, get along to one of these two ancient seats of learning. You’ll come back with inspiration for your own writing, and rather a lot of books …

Should a writer spend time doing nothing? Byron did

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Allegra Biron, Byron, churchyards, doing nothing, Harrow School, John Peachey Esq, St Mary's church Harrow, Windsor

If you’re a writer, budding or established, do you spend enough time doing nothing, do you take time to stop and stare? Do you ever just sit or lie there, and look at the view?

No less a giant than Byron did just that. On this tomb in the churchyard of St Mary’s church in Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was presumably in better repair then, and without the railings subsequently put on because of the very fame he had brought it. Its occupant was “John Peachey Esq, of the island of St Christopher’s”, who has thus gained prolonged and unintended fame because of his grave’s location and the identity of its famous lounger.

According to a picture in the guide to the church, Byron lay on it propped up on his elbows. This looks uncomfortable, but it seems he lay there for hours, looking at the view, for when addressing the elm that was then above the grave he wrote,

“Thou drooping Elm! Beneath whose boughs I lay,
And frequent mused the twilight hours away …”

A plaque at the spot says, “In school he was known for his witty epigrams and satires, but it was here, surrounded by reminders of mortality, that he invoked a more melancholy and reflective muse.”

He was a pupil at Harrow School at the time (from 1801 to 1805), so either he just played hooky when he should have been inside doing his homework, or noble scholars like him didn’t have homework to bother with. The plaque says that he came here “to escape the restraints of school life”. The guide to the church does say that “he was rather an erratic student” at Harrow, and that he “was a ringleader in a lot to blow up George Butler who the boys did not want as Head Master”, so perhaps the teachers were quite happy to let him lie for hours in the churchyard …

His poem “Lines Written Beneath An Elm In The Churchyard Of Harrow” can be found at http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/lord_byron%20/poems/5989. The first verse is reproduced on the stone at the front of the tomb, put there in 1905 by the son of one of his school friends.

The elm he addressed went long ago but here are its successors. In 1822 Byron was planning where to bury his 5-year-old daughter Allegra, and he wrote:

“There is a spot in [St Mary’s] churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the hill looking towards Windsor, and a tomb under a large tree (bearing the name of Peachie, or Peachey), where I used to sit for hours and hours when a boy. This was my favourite spot …” He wanted Allegra to be buried in the church, with a stone memorial bearing his own composition, but his reputation was so bad that the Rector and churchwardens refused his request and buried her in an unmarked grave. Today there’s a memorial to her near the south porch. (An account of this little girl’s sad life can be found at https://darkestlondon.com/tag/harrow-on-the-hill/.  Warning: Byron does not come out of this well.)  Here’s the view towards Windsor:

So, o writers ye, you are allowed to take time off just to gaze and muse. You don’t have to always be checking your e-mails or honing your synopsis. But where do you do this? In a churchyard like Byron? In your local park (will there one day be a plaque on a bench saying “This was Lavinia’s favourite spot”?)? On a country ramble?     Do tell …

 

 

 

 

Albert Finney and Rosamunde Pilcher

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Alan Sillitoe, Albert Finney, Christopher Marlowe, Cornwall, German TV, Henry Fielding, Room at the Top, Rosamunde Pilcher, Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, Tamburlaine, Tom Jones

Albert Finney RIP – I think I read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning before I saw the film (it will have had an A or an X certificate and I wouldn’t have been old enough to get into the cinema) but remember realising that the novel was something different.  And Albert Finney on film as Arthur Seaton was, well, definitive.  (I don’t know where my own copy now is, but seeing that old Pan paperback pictured this week I noticed that it really did say on the front “Makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea party”: I’d thought that that was just a cliché, but no, it was really used.)

An aunt took me to see Tom Jones at the cinema – another amazing Finney performance – and my copy of the book has my name and ‘1966’ written in it in her best calligraphy.  I see that the book cost a massive 8/6 – a lot for a schoolboy, so maybe she gave it to me.  I don’t know which I did first – see the film or read the book.  I’m sure I missed a lot of Henry Fielding’s jokes but I do remember the excitement of seeing as an A Level English student what a skilled writer could do with irony and description and character.  And why not go on for 800 pages?  Why stick at the 180 or 200 my usual reading matter then had?

My third Finney/literature moment was seeing him on stage at the National Theatre as Tamburlaine in 1976.  I’d read Tamburlaine and had wondered how this prolonged bombast-fest could possibly be staged (and what constitution the actor in the lead role must have!).  Well, Albert Finney was magnificent.  He made it work.  Christopher Marlowe would, I’m sure, have been delighted to see this massive anti-hero brought so compellingly to life.

Rather a different writer was Rosamunde Pilcher, who has also left us this week.  She sold 60 million books!  60 million.  Think of the sheer quantity of the pleasure she brought to her readers.  And that pleasure spread far and wide: a happy part of my Czech mother-in-law’s week would be watching Rosamunde Pilcher’s stories made by a German film company, in the most glorious Cornish settings, with Czech subtitles.  I don’t remember seeing those programmes in England but they have gone down well in Central Europe. Lots of red phone boxes and letter-boxes to remind the viewers where they are.

Must read The Shell Seekers one day.

So thanks, Albert Finney, and thanks, Rosamunde Pilcher.

 

Tsundoku – we’ve all got it (haven’t we?) …

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Arthur Conan Doyle, Bookshops, Church fairs, George Eliot, Japanese, Robert Browning, Royalties, To Be Read piles, Tsundoku

Tsundoku is the Japanese word for books you’ve bought but have not yet read. How brilliant to have such a word – why isn’t there an English one, we must have been piling them up just as much over here for just as long! Here’s some of my own tsundoku. Some was bought on impulse in a bookshop, some ordered after careful thought, some bought at a church fair because I was a friend of the person manning the bookstall and felt I had to buy something.

Authors, how do you feel about your work being tsundoku? Is it enough that your book caught a purchaser’s eye so much that he or she bought it? Or that you’ve had the royalty on that sale? Or are you somewhat put out that you’re still in the To Be Read One Day list?

If the latter, my apologies to the authors in my photo. I suspect that Robert Browning, George Eliot and Arthur Conan Doyle wouldn’t have minded that much.

 

Books make great presents

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Brexit, British Library Crime Classics, C J Sansom, John Bude, Pitt the Younger, Richard Askwith, Sophie Hannah, Stephen Fry, T H White, William Hague, Zatopek

A great gift haul this birthday and Christmas, my thanks to all the givers and authors!  All encouragement to those of us who like to put the odd word in front of another.

Thanks, guys.