Writers Review
Fortnightly book reviews by one of us or a guest, all writers or independent booksellers, with occasional special features such as Q&As with authors. We choose our own recommendations: fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poetry, nature writing; in fact anything other than children's books, and not necessarily newly-published. We hope you'll enjoy our selections and keep coming back for more. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter - @writersreview1.
Monday 14 October 2024
MODERN NATURE by Derek Jarman, reviewed by Linda Newbery
Monday 30 September 2024
Guest review by Pippa Goodhart: FIERCE BAD RABBITS by Clare Pollard
Pippa Goodhart has written over a hundred and fifty books for children. Best known is her picture book You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Her most recent children’s novel, The Great Sea Dragon Discovery, set in her home village of Grantchester, won the Young Quills Award for best historical children’s novel for 10-13 year olds. More on Pippa's website.
Clare Pollard is a poet who became a mother. Sharing books with her two young children and remembering her own childhood experiences of story, she adds academic study and a perceptive mind to considering the books many of us know and love. She writes so lucidly, with humour, moving fast through her rich material, carrying the reader onwards.
We get something of a cultural history of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, reflected in what we present to children. It’s gob-smacking to learn that both Franco and Hitler were scared enough of the potential influence of The Story of Ferdinand that they banned and burned it. What was the scary power of that little story for children written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson? Simply that Ferdinand, the bull, is a character who would rather sit and sniff the flowers than fight. The book was published in 1936. In the US it became a best-seller, knocking Gone With The Wind off the top of the sales chart.
We learn of Eric Carle digging trenches for Nazis aged only fifteen, really understanding what extreme hunger is like, before idly playing with the hole punch on his desk and coming up with his classic Hungry Caterpillar. So many classic children’s picture books have links to the Second World War. Eric Hill, ex-RAF, realised that he’d given Spot the dog aircraft markings with the placement of spots on his coat! There are many more stories behind the stories to discover when you read this book.
I loved getting something of the personalities and lives of children’s book creators. The enterprise of Beatrix Potter, not just self-publishing when publishers turned down her Peter Rabbit story, but also creating and selling merchandise based on her artwork. We hear that Alison Uttley, creator of saintly Little Grey Rabbit, was herself of a bitchy tendency, calling Little Grey Rabbit’s illustrator, Margaret Tempest, ‘a humourless bore’, and neighbour Enid Blyton, ‘a vulgar, curled woman'. In contrast, we have charming Jan Pienkowski regularly meeting-up with Helen Nicoll, the author of his Meg and Mog books, at Membury Service Station, always taking with him a small bunch of flowers for the table they sat at to discuss the next book!
But there are sadder things. It’s so poignant to learn that the Babar stories which open with Babar weeping over his dead mother, was written and illustrated by young father, Jean de Brunhoff, when he knew himself to have TB, and that his own children would soon face the death of a beloved parent. Other examples of stories behind stories had me in actual tears.
And there’s just the quirky interest to be found. Did you know that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) had a stammer, so referred to himself as ‘the dodo’ as in Do-Do-Dodgson? Hence the dodo in Alice in Wonderland? Do you know what name Winnie the Pooh really had, if only AA Milne had listened more carefully to his son? Did you know that John Ruskin urged Kate Greenaway to undress the ‘girlies’ in her pictures? Urgh! I leave you to read and discover these things out for yourselves.
We also touch on picture book history through the development of different printing techniques, the start of children’s sections in libraries, the introduction of novelty elements of flaps and shaped pages, and more.
As Clare Pollard says, picture book stories are perhaps an area of culture shared more generally than almost any other. And they are important. Picture books, she says, ‘are teaching our children how they should be’. We know that the ones which strike a chord with children are loved and remembered for a lifetime.
I re-read this book over a couple of days, relishing reminders of favourite books and favourite book creators, some of whom I’ve been lucky enough to meet in my Heffers Children’s Bookshop days in the early ‘80s up to now being a picture book writer myself. Just about anyone will meet old book friends in this book, and find things out about those old friends they never knew before. A treat!
Monday 16 September 2024
Guest review by Nick Manns: H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald
'Grief has no distance,’ wrote Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. ‘It comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.’ The ‘dailiness of life’ is that touching trust in stability; of everything in its place and all being right with the world.
With Didion that confidence crashed when her husband dropped dead one evening from a heart attack and she spent months trying to navigate a changed reality. With Helen Macdonald, her old world finished with a phone call: when her mother told her that her father, apparently recovering from a trivial injury to his arm, had suddenly died. His heart had stopped.
Whereas Didion struggled to believe John Gregory Dunne was really dead (she needed to be alone,' she wrote, ‘so that he could come back’), Macdonald describes her grief in Biblical terms: ‘the rain fell and the waters rose and I struggled to keep my head above them’. Worse still, this was a world that was indifferent to her suffering: ‘planes still landed, cars still drove, people still shopped’ and ‘nothing made any sense at all.’ She finds herself in Auden land, where the misery of the bereaved cannot be assuaged: clocks can’t be stopped; catastrophes are always someone else’s problem. Icarus drops into the water and no-one notices.
The likeness to Didion isn’t limited to a shared experience. As the American author believed (at some level) that her husband was still around (heading towards the front door), so Macdonald holds a similar fantasy about her father, except that she wasn’t hanging around for the doorbell to chime or for the phone to ring.
Although most readers (who aren’t writing book reviews) will probably pass by incidental details, a pleasure of this book is in the hints and clues that Macdonald builds into the narrative. Early on, whilst walking the blasted heath of the Brecklands – the broken lands – of Norfolk, in search of goshawks, she comments: ‘The goshawk is the birdwatcher’s dark grail.’ They’re rare and hard to see. And she adds, ‘Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often.’
Of course, the notion of the ‘grail’ is often the focus in stories of chivalry – of a search for something precious in the Christian tradition. The journey to attain the grail (or achieve some worthwhile end) may be uncertain and perilous. In Macdonald’s case, like Sir Gawain, she must find her own way and use her own resources. The ‘broken lands’ of East Anglia are as good a place to start as any.
Throughout – and running as a parallel narrative – she shares with us the tale of another traveller, who went before, and we realise that finding the grail or receiving grace isn’t a given. Although there are no maps to this terra incognita and no guarantees, in good medieval tradition, she takes guidance from those who had asked the important questions and knew the likely trail. For Freud and Klein, the grail for each of us is authenticity and this is earned through self-knowledge.
In the early days, after the fateful call from her mother, Macdonald had groped her way out of ‘madness’ by connecting with the certainties of her childhood. She says: ‘When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards’. She recalls that years before, when working in a falconry centre, an injured goshawk had been brought in for assessment. The bird was not seriously harmed and they took her outside and then, like a magic trick (or something out of Philip Pullman), ‘She opened her wings and in a second was gone. She disappeared over a hedge slant-wise into nothing. It was as if she’d found a rent in the damp Gloucestershire air and slipped through it.’
Years later, following her father’s death, and after a series of dreams about hawks, she drove to Scotland, to meet an Irishman, who would hand over a young female goshawk. Although she had been advised against this project (‘Hiding to nothing,’ comments her friend), she was by this time an experienced falconer and disregarded the note of caution. And yet. The travelling box is opened and the bird ‘came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack.’
Her training of the incongruously named ‘Mabel’ dominates the rest of the book. We’re educated in the process of feeding the young bird and how Macdonald painstakingly built trust. This is a creature that is given ‘roughly torn day-old chicks’ and bits of rabbit. She’s also a creature straight from the menagerie of Ted Hughes: ‘I see it all; I own all this world and more.’
The notion of ‘looking’ is a key term in this book, and a suitable one for someone on a quest. As a child Macdonald describes herself as a ‘watcher’ who would climb the hill behind her home, crawl under a rhododendron bush and ‘look down on the world below.’ This habit of quiet observation is reinforced by her companionship with her father, who worked as a press photographer and transmitted the need for patience.
At one point Macdonald recounts a dream in which she looks down on a Second World War bombsite and sees a boy amidst the rubble. He turns and she sees it is a figure of her father as a child, who points to an approaching aircraft. She later reflects: ‘I’ve come to realise that we were watching the same things: or at least the things that history conspires to make the same. Since the dawn of military aviation, birds of prey had been thought of as warplanes made flesh…Hawks fly and hunt and kill: aircraft do the same.’ She concludes: ‘I must have inherited being a birdwatcher from Dad.’
There’s also something of the photographer in the exactness of her metaphors: long-tailed tits in a willow were like ‘animated cotton buds’; the feathers down the front of the young goshawk are the colour of ‘sunned newsprint.’ She describes fieldfares as ‘netting the sky …like a 16th century sleeve sewn with pearls.’
To understand Mabel, to train her so that they can become a hunting partnership, she reads widely and returns to the work of T. H. White. She had read The Goshawk as a child, and as then, so now, she is disturbed by the cruelty meted out by White in his attempt to make his wild bird biddable. This cruelty contrasts with her own sensitivity and kindness to the young bird in her care.
For Macdonald, ‘running towards’ the source of her feelings, enabled her to get in touch with important elements of her childhood: she was able to make sense of her life by inspecting her past. White’s past included neglect at home and physical abuse at boarding school: a history in which the school sanctioned the punishment of younger children by older pupils. As a gay adult he tried to ‘pass’ as a straight man (with upper class pretensions.) His repeated attempts to form relationships with women were predictable failures. Macdonald sees his efforts to train ‘Gos’ as an (unconscious) desire to tame the ‘wild’ parts of himself. She writes: ‘White found himself in a strange, locked battle with a bird that was all the things he longed for but had always fought against.’
Whereas White’s training methods would today elicit a call to the RSPCA, Macdonald is able to empathise with Mabel: she’s a ‘baby’ who could be ‘happy’ or ‘contented’. She doesn’t have to control this creature but to collaborate with it: she isn’t conflicted in her role. White was both stern schoolmaster and wild child: both roles which would be depicted in his children’s novel of Arthurian adventure, The Sword in the Stone.
White never resolved the different parts of himself: the relationship with Gos (spoiler alert) ends tragically: the hawk escaped. Macdonald notes that he remained alone all his life. At the end of her book, Macdonald can symbolically ‘let go’ of Mabel (the hawk spends several months in an aviary so that she can moult) and Macdonald emerges from crushing grief: she ‘lets go’ of her father.
This ending takes us back to the start of the book: she notes that Melanie Klein had commented that children deal with states of mind akin to mourning and that adults return to this emotional world whenever grief is experienced. Macdonald tells us that as a child she comforted herself that White’s Gos wasn’t really dead, he was ‘out there’ in the woods and she had wanted to go and ‘bring him back’. As an adult, she had wanted to ‘slip through that rent in the air’ and fly her hawk to find her lost father.
In the early days of training Mabel, Macdonald had riffed on lines by John Keats: ‘My arm aches and a damp tiredness grips my heart’. The poet had been meditating on the beguiling charms of a nearby nightingale, a ‘deceiving elf’, who might help him escape ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ of life. At the very end of her book, Macdonald fully returns to the human world: she recognises that goshawks are ‘things of death and blood and gore’. The world we inhabit is shared – but separate. She concludes, ‘Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks.’
H is for Hawk is published by Vintage.
See Nick's previous reviews:
The Antidote: Happiness for People who can't stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkmann
Monday 2 September 2024
Guest review by Graeme Fife: THEBES - THE FORGOTTEN CITY OF ANCIENT GREECE, by Paul Cartledge
In what we know as Greece, their Hellas, the prominent power bases are celebrated: Sparta in the south, the formidable militaristic people, ruled by two kings; Athens, the fledgling democracy and agitator-in-chief in the centre and to the north, athwart the main invasion route, in Boiotia we find Cartledge’s aptly named ‘forgotten city’, Thebes.
It may be that his more scholarly descriptions of how so much knowledge passes to us via archaeology, archaic inscription and tablet do not detain the average reader. Doesn’t matter: the core is here, vital to how Greece, its states and peoples, came to be and what made them tick.
All cities look to their mythic foundation – ours, formulated by a mediaeval monk, was long since overlaid by ecclesiastical fictions, but ancient Greeks leaned much to myth, their word for story. Myth…in our parlance so often misused as meaning fairy tale. Not so to them: their myth is the very foundation of human understanding, it underpins all feeling and human response. Thebes claimed origin from no fewer than three mythic beings whose significance still resonates: Heracles, the strongman demigod, symbolic of human links with the divine, an important thread of our relationship with the universal pulse of nature and its manifestations, he whose celebrated Labours mirror our own travails and fortitude in coping with them; Dionysus, god of wine, ecstatic pleasure and passions, a good time, and Apollo whose cultural importance is wide-ranging within the influence of our arts. This may come across as a nonsensical construct, but in the ancient world mythic stories - Helen, addressing the lords of the Greek Trojan expedition, bids them sit and feast and ‘take joy in telling stories’. (Iliad IV 238ff) those stories are their life’s inspiration. For myth was central to the Greek examination and analysis of human sentience and behaviour, exploring and addressing the darker currents of the psyche and unconscious. They questioned things and fastened on the difficult, often frightening shifts of human nature; an admirable candour. What Cartledge terms our imaginary thought-world, echoed in myth.
Central to the Theban myth are the personages illustrated on the cover of this excellent study: Oedipus and the Sphinx, most potent elements in our own comprehension of the human psyche. Their myth/story drives three plays written by the outstanding Athenian tragedian, Sophocles. Other Athenian tragedians also looked to the myths of Thebes in their work, plays which thrill in their writing and action, and this alone gives some idea of the importance of a place so often overlooked in more general accounts of the basic ‘why Greece?’
Consider: a multiplicity of divine beings as representative of the great and teeming foison of Nature in this eco-age? Homer talks of ‘the earth that feeds us all’. It makes a lot of sense to me and Cartledge is an excellent guide to the evolution of such a forceful idea. The gods are capricious, argumentative, partial and problematic in their loyalties…why so? Because the people who conceived of their existence and behaviour exactly resemble them.
Greece, as the Romans named it, was eventually swallowed in the Imperium Romanum and we owe much of what survives of their literature etc to that subjugation. As the Latin poet, Horace, puts it: captive Greece took its untutored conqueror captive and introduced an uncultivated people to the arts and culture (Epistles II i 156ff).
This book is no homily but a fair-minded account of how embedded matters Greek are in our own culture - and best we acknowledge that, surely? Cartledge states that he aims to point out and to emphasise that ‘Apollo and Dionysus are both still vigorously at work deep within our collective and independent pysches.’
Monday 19 August 2024
SPECIAL FEATURE Q & A: Jane Rogers interviews Lesley Glaister about her new novel, A PARTICULAR MAN
Lesley Glaister has written numerous novels, as well as short stories, drama and poetry. Alongside her writing she has worked as a tutor and mentor in Creative Writing in settings ranging from Crete to The University of St Andrews. Her most recent novel, A Particular Man, is set in the 1940s, and looks at love, marriage and sexuality in the post-war period. Find out more on her website.
Jane Rogers: Congratulations on your 14th (??) novel, Lesley! It’s a completely engrossing read, and your characters continue to haunt me, especially Starling and Aida, that unlikely couple who almost certainly will not live happily ever after.
My first question is probably foolish, but I found myself puzzling over
whether the ‘particular man’ of the title was Starling, or the absent Edgar?
Lesley Glaister: Thank you, Jane. It’s my 16th
or 17th novel, depending on whether you count my YA novel, Aphra’s
Child. The title: A Particular Man, came late. I had several other
working titles including A Hole in the Corner Affair – but no-one else
seemed to like that! A Particular Man
jumped into my mind while I was washing up one evening and it immediately felt
right. It has both the meanings that you suggest. Starling is a particular man,
of course, and he’s the particular man Aida falls in love with. But in a larger
sense, the particular man who drives the whole dynamic of the novel is the
absent Edgar.
JR: Speaking of Edgar - one of the things I love in the book is that everyone has their own story and secrets; Clem’s affair with famous artist Corin; Starling’s forbidden homosexual love for Edgar; Aida’s attraction to Starling which she tries to blot out by getting engaged to Neville. But the link between all the characters is Edgar, as son, as brother, as beloved comrade. And he is dead, and remains a total mystery. We have no idea if he returned Starling’s love, and even Starling doesn’t know. What made you decide to keep such a key character blank?
LG: Ha, good question! It wasn’t a decision. When I set out to write this novel, which has connections with Blasted Things, set twenty-five years earlier, I intended that Edgar, who was an infant in that novel, should be a central character. I kept trying to write scenes for him but he remained stubbornly inanimate. I couldn’t breathe life into him, or see him or hear him, and eventually I realised he was dead. For me writing is full of discoveries like this, rather than decisions. But I did decide to leave ambiguous the question of whether Starling’s love might have been requited if Edgar had lived. I think it would or might have been, but Edgar died so, like Starling, we will never know.
JR: Your writing is wonderfully vivid, transporting the reader instantly into the scenes and characters’ feelings you describe. Here’s an example taken at random:
Aida hurries out of the hammering rain into the puddled shelter of St
Pancras. As arranged, he’s waiting outside W H Smith, and her heart jerks like
a bad dog on a lead.
How much revision does it take to achieve this kind of economy and joyous
precision?
LG: Thank you! That is a huge compliment coming from a writer of your calibre. The honest answer is that those kind of similes and metaphors just seem to come naturally. Like many writers (and, of course, many people who aren’t writers) I tend to think in metaphor most of the time. Sometimes I drive myself mad with my habit of always thinking things are like this or that other thing. I have to work much harder at revising other elements of the narrative though: scenes where people have to move and act, dialogue, shifts through time etc. I always cut huge swathes in the editing process, and hone and sharpen scenes to try and rid them of any flab. I always like to be utterly certain of each character’s motivation at any one time – even if they aren’t sure of it themselves.
JR: The novel is set in 1946 and also refers back to the war years and to the experiences of prisoners of war in Singapore. You don’t acknowledge any sources, but I’m guessing you did a huge amount of research, because the post-war world you conjure feels totally authentic. The menus are a particular delight (lobster mayonnaise and chocolate meringue!) and there are lots of details which are new to me, e.g. the choice of demob suits offered to ex-servicemen. Can you tell us a bit about researching the background?
LG: One of my main sources was
a box of family memorabilia. This includes photographs, letters, and artefacts
relating to my father and his family. My dad was a Far East Prisoner of War in
World War 2, a fact that was never spoken about in our family while he was
alive. It was only after his death that I became fascinated both by his
experience and the silence that surrounded it. In 1994 I wrote a novel called Easy
Peasy, which is about that silence within a family. At the time I did a fair amount of research,
met a friend of my father from his time in Burma, read letters and newsletters written
at the time. The tobacco tin of sketches in A Particular Man, was a real
thing, though in real life it was a secret diary written on minute scraps of
paper, also wrecked by a trapped ant. I find this idea very resonant. A letter
from Edgar that Aida reads out loud to her mother is, in part, a letter that my
father sent his mother when he was on his voyage to Singapore. There were also
letters from my dad’s sister Kitty, who was killed during the Blitz and I was
keeping her in mind for the character of Aida – though of course I never knew
her.
As well as this family research, I also read reams of fiction set (and preferably written) during or shortly after the war as well as social histories. I watched films and TV documentaries and visited the Imperial War Museum. From all of these sources, I magpied away details of everyday life, such as those you mentioned, and the vocabulary of the times too. And of course I spent a lot of time Googling!
JR: I very much enjoyed the unsent letters from Aida to Starling. It’s a clever way of letting the reader into her thoughts. You also have Starling’s diary entries to reveal his inner feelings. But the larger part of the novel is written in the third person, from the restricted points of view of Aida, Starling and Clementine. How did you arrive at that writerly choice?
LG: Point of View is one of my obsessions and that close third person viewpoint is my favourite position from which to write. It means there is as little of the narrator showing as possible and all the narrative is filtered through the consciousness of the character in question. Sometimes, because of this restriction, it can be frustrating. For instance, I might think up just the right word, or image, but know that it wouldn’t be in the character’s vocabulary, or experience. With each novel I write I tend to wait for the first inklings of a voice to arrive. If it arrives in first person, I’ll go with that. The novel I’m writing at the moment, which spins off in an unusual direction from this one, is in the first person. One point of view I haven’t attempted yet is an omniscient third person – it simply looks too hard to control. I enjoyed using the first person for the letters and diaries and found it gave me extra insight into the characters of Starling and Aida. It was also a way of getting through a great deal of story in a reasonably economical way.
JR: How difficult was it to write using the point of view of a gay man in 1946?
LG: Oddly, I didn’t find it hard at all. I did a fair amount of reading including from a book called Curing Queers: Mental Nurses and Their Patients 1935-74 by Tommy Dickinson, which was excellent. I also did a lot of Googling and I was careful to run it past a gay male reader to ensure I hadn’t made any real howlers.
JR: And, leading on from that question, where do you stand on the whole vexed issue of appropriation? Do you think it’s OK for writers to write about people from different cultural/racial/social backgrounds to their own?
LG: Yes I do! Of course, if a writer pretends to be something they’re not in order to write from a particular viewpoint, that’s wrong. If a writer writes cruelly or inaccurately or causes any hurt from their writing, that’s wrong too. But I can’t see why any human being can’t sensitively and intuitively try to enter into the experience of any other. Surely that’s part of what creative writing is about?
JR: I know this novel was originally slated to be published by Sandstone, and that Sandstone then went into receivership. Can you tell us about the bumpy road to publication?
LG: A miserable tale! It’s so hard to get a novel published these days unless one is already a best-seller or a new writer on the brink of being discovered. For those of us that have published several (or many) novels, none of which have won a major prize, or been turned into a major movie (or maybe even if they have) publishers just aren’t interested. We are quite simply, out of fashion. This is true in my experience of the major traditional publishers, at least. Fortunately, there are smaller independent publishers – Sandstone was one – which work on a similar model but have more regard for quality rather than simply profitability. Sandstone published Blasted Things and I’d signed a contract with them for A Particular Man before they went into liquidation. I was left rather in the wilderness until Bloodhound came to my rescue. They differ from traditional publishers in being more focused on selling digital and audio copies than hard copies of books, though they do produce these too. I am very grateful that they have not only published A Particular Man but will also be reissuing Blasted Things later this year.
JR: Finally – the limericks! They are great fun. Are they all your own work? I knew you were a poet, but I didn’t know you had a talent for limericks!
LG: They were fun to do. I sometimes
think of limericks when I’m out walking my dog – it seems to suit the rhythm of
my walking. Sometimes that rhythm drives me nuts. Most of the ones in the novel
are my own, though one is adapted from someone else’s and the one that Peter
quotes to Starling towards the end is, as he says, ‘an old chestnut’.
Thanks for these lovely questions. You have really made me think!
JR: Thank you for your generous answers, and for a fascinating novel! I think I like it even more now I know how closely it is based on your own family’s experiences.
A Particular Man is published by Bloodhound Books.
Jane Rogers' review choices for Writers Review:
How the One Armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie Jones
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
On dramatising No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
Jane's dramatisation of Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai, about one family's troubles during the partition of India in 1946, is currently on Radio 4. Listen here to the first of two parts.
Monday 5 August 2024
Guest review by Penny Dolan: THE PLOT by Madeleine Bunting
A bookish friend had praised The Plot by Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting, so when the paperback lay there, face up on the Waterstones counter, what could I do?
I was already interested in the topic: an acre of land on the edge of the Hambleton Hills in North Yorkshire, where the sculptor John Bunting lived and worked from the Fifties. His ‘plot’ was up a rough track, some distance from the cold cottage where his artist wife looked after their six young children. John had, aged sixteen, seen the view from the ridge, and in his twenties, came back to make his live his life in that spot. Once I had come across a similar breathtaking view, from the top of Sutton Bank, a winding hill with a 1:4 incline. I stared, from the car park at the top, out over the Vale of York and right across to the hazy summit of Pen y Ghent, and saw why this was called ‘God’s own county.’
Madeleine Bunting, John’s daughter, wrote her memoir as a way of coming to terms with her father. To me, this was not a book like Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, wrung out of deep grief. Instead, Bunting’s book felt brisker, written in anger, puzzlement and sadness, as she tries to understand her father and his love for his remote acre. Named Scotch Corner, the plot is marked on OS Navigator 100.
John Bunting’s passion, even at Ampleforth, his prestigious Catholic school, was carving in wood and stone. He visited the workshop of the Robert Thompson, the ‘Mouseman of Kilburn’ just as, later, he sought out sculptors like Henry Moore, Eric Gill and Brancusi. Returning to the seclusion of the Hambleton Hills and North Yorks Moors, John made a thin living through various commissions and part-time teaching at Ampleforth, where Anthony Gormley was among his students.
What marked Bunting out was that he was one of the young men who ‘escaped’ WWII, but not from its shadow nor its fallen heroes. Returning to Scotch Corner, he built a small ‘memorial’ chapel, as well as an everyday stone hut. Madeleine recalls his carved angel heads atop the doorway, and two crucifix and images of the Virgin and Child inside.
In particular, she describes sitting on the cold floor during mass, squashed between her siblings, because the chapel’s aisle was filled by her father’s life-size sculpture of a fallen soldier. Who was the soldier and why did this lost hero matter so much to John Bunting? And the other admired names she found in his notes? How did they and their reputations, over time, fare?
Gradually, Madeleine Bunting examines her father’s life, and the selfishness of his ’man among men’ attitude. After a day working in the hut, he spent evenings in the village pub, leaving his artist wife with six children in a cold, primitive cottage in the village. ‘It seemed that his belief in the dignity of physical labour meant that my mother’s should never end,’ adds the author. A not unfamiliar situation.
However, The Plot is far more than a single story, and stronger for it. In and among the author’s pursuit of her family story, she writes about the geography and history of that whole area, describing it as ‘a landscape known in reality and in imagination and in memory.’
She sets this personal acre within the wider movements affecting the British countryside over the centuries, bringing in topography, myths, history and custom, and expanding the vision out beyond the Hambleton Hills.
She writes about early flint-workers travelling the ridge; the people who marked the land with barrows; the foreign king who ‘wasted’ the North and made it uninhabitable for three generations; the incoming monks who gave order, wool and beautiful buildings to the area, and of the Scots drovers, bringing flocks of cattle to the markets of the south. She writes of the rise of Romanticism and the individualistic ‘view’ of the landscape; the arrival of sightseers, the railways bringing hunting parties, and the ugly sitka spruce plantations across the North Yorkshire moors. Separately, these histories might seem familiar but her overview is both thoughtful and interesting.
In her last chapters, Bunting considers the area of Hambleton in recent decades. She not only writes about the economic importance of grouse-shooting but also the tinder-box monoculture of the moors. She speaks of machines and pesticides, of the crisis in modern farming and in wider agricultural planning;. In particular, she draws attention to the nostalgia for rural life that has created holiday cottages, second homes and emptied out farms and village communities. Even, she says, her father who came here, in search of old, orderly society, might have seen the idyll disappearing as he carved.
A small but interesting point for food enthusiasts. While she was researching her book, Madeleine Bunting made friends with and relied on Fred Banks, a local farmer and self-taught historian. In the last chapters, Fred and his son Tom decide they cannot make a living from their farm and are thinking about buying a pub instead.
Now, in 2024, The Black Swan at Oldstead is a Michelin starred restaurant, and the main chef is better known as Tommy Banks, of Roots cookbook fame.
The Plot is published by Granta.
Monday 29 July 2024
EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: our best reads of 2024 so far, by Adèle Geras, Linda Newbery and Celia Rees
Adèle:
Lionel Shriver's new novel Mania is about the near future where cleverness has been forbidden and it's a crime to be clever. There is no distinction between intelligence and stupidity, but no one is to be called stupid or dumb or thick or any synonym for these words. This conceit is taken to the extreme: our protagonist, Pearson, almost loses her job as a college lecturer because she dares to teach The Idiot by Dostoevsky in one of her courses. She was born a Jehovah's Witness but has escaped from her background and now has a husband who's a tree surgeon and three children. She has a son and a daughter, (born with the use of a donor) who are very clever indeed. Her second daughter, born to Pearson and her husband after the introduction of the new laws, becomes a danger to the household by her adherence to the rules. The results of such a law play out in disasters. Bridges collapse. Planes fall out of the sky. Doctors are no longer required to study medicine. There is no such thing as intellectual rigour or careful science. So far, so Swiftian. It's written with all the sharpness and brio we associate with the author of We need to talk about Kevin but it's also about the importance of close friendship and love (of your spouse and your children) and personal betrayal and forgiveness. It's about the way we navigate our lives in the face of horrendous goings on in the wider world. It's quite a short book and very fast moving and even if you don't agree with Shriver's take on things, you will never not want to turn the page.
I haven't yet watched the Netflix version of One Day by David Nicholls but I was very upset by the book because (no spoilers!) it didn't end in the way I was expecting. His latest novel You are Here is a joy from start to finish. And starting and finishing is relevant. It's about a walk undertaken by a group of people: the Coast to Coast walk. Maps are provided throughout and many details about this walk are included seamlessly in the story. The main narrative is about two people: Michael, a Geography teacher with problems and an editor, Marnie, who is also far from happy in her private life. She has made the mistake of bringing some work along with her for the walk and her descriptions of the book she's editing and her remarks about editing in general are a really hilarious highlight. The fact that Michael teaches Geography is a short cut to having the landscape and natural surroundings described for us with enormous skill and subtlety. We learn things without knowing we're learning them. I try to say as little as possible about the plots of novels but this is the perfect book to take on holiday. It's truly engaging and engrossing and totally satisfying. Read it before it's on Netflix.
My final choice is a poetry book. Nic Aubury writes short, rhyming poems in the Wendy Cope tradition and I guarantee that even if you think poetry is not your thing, you will find something here to make you laugh and think at the same time. The collection is called Things my Children Think I'm Wrong About. Instead of telling you about it, I will quote two poems in full. They're that short!
No Right Turn
We'd rather go on suffering the pain of our mistakes,
pretending this was really what we wanted all along,
and promising to see it through, no matter what it takes,
than face the mild discomfort of admitting we were wrong.
Polonian
If I were more convincing and
my children more convincible
then this would be the wisdom I'd impart:
be ready to abandon an
opinion, not a principle,
and learn to tell those different things apart.
Linda:
All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison is set in rural Suffolk in 1933, narrated (with hindsight) by fourteen-year-old Edith. The First World War is still a recent memory, the farm affected by the loss of Doble's son and the emotional scarring of horseman John, while there are also foreshadowings of the war to come, brought into focus by the arrival of Constance, a young journalist from London. At first Constance seems to offer Edith an escape route from the inevitability of marriage to a local lad, childbearing and farm work; but her obsession with rural traditions soon reveals a disturbing affinity with Nazi ideals of nationalism and racial 'purity'. Melissa Harrison's beautiful observations of countryside, weather and routines give the novel a real grounding in time and place, with a sense of wistfulness - the corncrakes, nightjars and turtle doves are part of Edith's experience but largely lost from ours. Middle England by Jonathan Coe moves from 2010 through general elections, the Brexit referendum and London Olympics and on to 2018 (in the future at the time of publication). Known as a chronicler of our times and the various attitudes, biases and aspirations of the public, Coe looks at this turbulent time from the perspectives of characters including political journalist Doug, Ben Trotter who finds unexpected success as a novelist, and lecturer Sophie who deplores her mother-in-law’s casual racism, finds herself at serious odds with her new husband over Brexit and is suspended from her university post over a casual remark to a transgender student. In this larger-than-life, still topical, left-leaning but not one-sided novel, Coe blends pathos, seriousness and comedy with a deft touch. I especially enjoyed the snippy conversations between socialist Doug and a Downing Street press apologist for ‘Dave’ (i.e. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton). Lauren Bravo's How to Break Up with Fast Fashion may seem a peculiar choice for someone too old and certainly not enough interested in fashion to be the target audience. But a friend lent it to me because I was organising a Clothes Swap for Great Big Green Week, and I found it both entertaining and a source of information and advice. Knowing nothing of Lauren Bravo, I immediately warmed to her humour and empathy. Once a self-confessed fashion victim, she challenged herself to a year of nothing new, and realised how addicted she'd become to the thrill of seeking out and buying new garments - something the fashion industry is adept at encouraging, with temptations and 'must-haves' flaunted everywhere. Alongside shocking facts about the waste and pollution of fast fashion and the abysmal working conditions and pay for many textile workers, she suggests ways to do better: seeking out charity shop bargains or vintage clothes; swapping with friends; hiring outfits for special occasions like weddings instead of buying something that will spend the rest of its life in a wardrobe; and of course simply buying less and making the most of what we already have. She looks too at ethical fashion and how to avoid 'greenwashing'; most brands now make some kind of sustainability claim, but how can we be sure we're not paying for worker exploitation, use of hazardous chemicals in the dyeing process, or animal abuse? There are websites such as Good On You and Ethical Consumer where fashion brands are assessed and compared. An irresistible read that looks beneath the surface of new-new-new.