Guest review by Nick Manns: THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE by W G Hoskins

 

"Once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way..."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

The stump of an old windmill can be seen a couple of hundred metres from the A43, just outside Easton on the Hill in Northamptonshire. The mill is situated at a high point on the upland that looks down on the Welland valley and its sails would have been turned by winds coming from the west.

The relic is a mile or so north of RAF Wittering, which is marked by the rotating clam-shell radar dish at the end of the runway. The aerodrome, originally constructed for the Royal Flying Corps, dispensed with the acres of arable farmland that would have given the windmill its reason for existing.

This process of picking up signs in the landscape and reconstructing a past world is at the heart of Hoskins’ book. Published in 1955, it expanded the notion of ‘landscape’ from simply an idea of ‘nature’ to include how people have interacted with (and changed) the natural world. In the case of RAF Wittering, that change could have been more than simply retiring an old technology: a Valiant bomber accidentally dropped a thermo-nuclear device onto the runway in the late 1950s.

Hoskins came from a family of Exeter bakers but after studying economics at the University College of South West England, he became a lecturer in the subject at University College Leicester, subsequently Leicester Universit). His research into local history and articles on ancient farming, deserted medieval villages and so on led (in 1948) to his appointment as head of the newly formed Department of English Local History. He became convinced that visual evidence was vital to understanding the historical landscape.

In the preface to his study, Midland England (1949), he wrote:

‘… the whole of the English landscape is a manuscript written on again and again, a palimpsest with endless discoveries waiting to be made; and one can learn, with sufficient patience, skill and imagination, how to decipher this manuscript and make it yield its hidden meaning.’

The phrase, ‘one can learn’, is inclusive. People don’t have to be academics to ask questions and seek answers, however tentative. And although it might be tempting to rely on the internet to find answers to questions about localities, sometimes those localities raise their own questions.

For example, three miles below the nuclear near miss at Wittering lies the market town of Stamford. It’s small and compact and largely consists of 17th and 18th-century houses. They’re made from the local limestone, weathered to a honey colour. One of the interesting features about the town is the great width of some of the streets. One of them is called Broad Street, and another, Sheepmarket. The town layout, the width of the streets, reflects its medieval past as a major market for sheep and wool. Great herds of sheep would fill the town on market days.

These observations are entirely in keeping with Hoskins. At the end of his book, he writes: ‘towns …ought to be approached for the first time on foot. For only on foot does one detect the subtle rise and fall of ground to which the earliest settlers were so sensitive, or alignments in the town scene that may throw light on some fundamental change of plan: or the names of streets and lanes that set the mind working at once.’

The Making of the English Landscape is, in modern parlance, a ‘mash-up’: it combines different elements that are normally encountered separately. With-it French cultural theorists in the 1960s would have regarded it as a work of bricolage and that Hoskins was a bricoleur. A bricoleur, since you ask, is an odd-job person who uses whatever is at hand to complete a project. A project is usually a problem-solving exercise: why was this village built here? How old is it? Why is the church on the edge of the settlement?

Consequently, once you’ve spent time in Hoskins’ company, you start to interrogate a familiar world in a new way, the book working as a kind of exemplar. He’s at home when commenting on the use of hawthorn to demarcate fields; ruminating on the significance of place-names; considering the bits of pottery found in his back garden. And he’s not afraid to express sympathy for past calamities that would seem strange in the pages of a standard academic work. When reflecting on the many abandoned medieval villages across England, he notes that rural depopulation following the Black Death meant that it was more cost-effective for some landowners to switch from arable (and labour-intensive) farming to pastoral practices. Large, open fields could be parcelled up into smaller units and tenant farmers evicted. Hoskins writes:

‘The village houses were demolished – an easy business, for above their rubble foundations they mostly had mud walls – and men, women and children departed in tears to find a new livelihood elsewhere.’

Easton on the Hill is not a site of dereliction: a compact village of limestone houses that date from the 18th century. Hoskins writes that hill-top villages are ‘suggestive of great antiquity’ where height (working like radar) might allow the early identification of hostile forces, but the oldest buildings here are the Priest’s House (late 15th century) and the charming All Saints Church (12th century). The name, Easton is probably Anglo-Saxon (the ‘-ton’ suffix indicating farm or settlement). So, what attracted the early settlers?

All Saints Church, Easton on the Hill: Les Hull (WikiCommons)

Part of the answer can be found if you park just off the main road, south of the village. Hoskins had emphasised the desirability of walking as an aid to discovery and the wisdom of those words was immediately apparent on the day of my visit. There was a stiff westerly wind blowing across the upland, but Easton lies below the crest of the escarpment, on gradually sloping ground. It is largely sheltered from the elements.

The village is clustered around the junction of Church Street and High Street. There’s a war memorial there now, but it’s probably the site of the village green. The streets themselves are narrow, originally designed for the passage of farm carts. That world is evoked by the sign on one of the houses, The Old Forge.

Google Easton on the Hill and you’ll find it’s recorded in Domesday Book and that Romano-British objects were found in various digs. It’s therefore quite possible that Easton on the Hill replaced an earlier name.

So, what drew the various settlers to this (obviously) desirable site? There’s no clue on Wikipedia, but on the village map, Spring Close pocket park is identified. Walk there, to the very northern edge of the village, and you’ll discover a grassed area and a pond, surrounded by flag irises and ragged robin. A sign warns of Deep Water (and danger to children). Although inconspicuous, this is the spring that explains thousands of years of settlement: the omphalos of the community – the centre of their world.

Hoskins noted the importance of ‘patience, skill and imagination’ as qualities necessary to make sense of a landscape and he went on to say: ‘I am not much interested in surface impressions. The three visible dimensions of a building or landscape are not enough: they may entrance for the moment, but they make no abiding impression on the mind. One needs the fourth dimension of time to give depth to the scene: one wants to know as much as possible about the past life of a place, about its human associations, and to feel the long continuity of human life on that spot before it can make its full impression on the mind.’

The Making of the English Landscape is published by Little Toller Books.

Photographs by Nick Manns

More of Nick's choices:

The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

Billy No-Mates by Max Dickins

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: LISTEN WITH FATHER - HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE CLASSICAL MUSIC by Caroline Sanderson

 

"A wonderful journey full of fascinating asides."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

Caroline Sanderson has written a very touching and erudite hymn to her father. I should say at once that I have a personal interest in this book because I know Caroline. She is a kind and generous person, is easily moved and when she does a thing she does it to the best of her ability. This book is a perfect example of that. All the same, I wouldn’t have chosen to review it if I hadn’t been so impressed by it.

When she was a little girl, Sanderson adored her Father and enjoyed listening with him to the classical music he liked so much. As she grew older she still loved her Dad but came to prefer David Bowie’s take on music. It wasn’t until after her Father had died that she began to wonder what exactly he had loved so much about classical music. She decided to choose some of his favourite CDs and listen again. That decision and what followed became a paean to her much loved Father and a new appreciation for her of classical music.

A short overture sets the scene and then she begins with Mozart. The book has chapters on 8 composers and one singer, the unforgettable Kathleen Ferrier. It would be entirely possible to use this book as a primer, a way in to music one has never appreciated before, but there is much more to it than that. This well researched book will tell you about the composers and their lives, as well, importantly, how Sanderson felt when she heard the pieces again as an adult. The audience reaction to the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is fascinating, as is Sanderson’s unsettling memory of watching Fantasia with her Dad. How brave of her to re-visit Stravinsky’s work after such a disturbing introduction!

I love the way Sanderson is so down to earth about her musical journey while also thrilled when she realises she is beginning to hear the music at a different level. I also enjoyed the little asides, the realisation, for instance, that she’s probably particularly enjoying the triangle while at a concert, simply because she enjoyed playing the instrument at primary school. Her attention wavers; she notices what members of the audience are wearing, she wishes her Dad were with her to explain why he loved Brahms so much. And yet, she sticks at it and slowly gets there. The hard work of deep listening pays off. And more, she finds other pieces that her Dad didn’t introduce to her, but for which she develops an affection all by herself.

Listen With Father is a wonderful journey full of fascinating asides. There are people and books between these pages as well as music. It is a private journey that is also a wonderful signpost to the world of classical music.

Sanderson doesn’t forget the bibliography, arranged by composer. To complete the work, a useful note of the recordings Sanderson listened to is also there. What a perfect volume to enjoy and maybe to set one off on one’s own journey into deep listening and a new love of music.

Listen with Father is published by Boundless.

More of Cindy's choices:

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

The Master by Colm Toibin

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Special feature Q&A: Dennis Hamley talks about SPIRIT OF THE PLACE

 

"The cat is, in some ways, the most significant character in the book ... the cause of Fowler’s greatest sin and the subject of a failed poem. His final guise explains the whole story."

Dennis Hamley's first novel, Pageants of Despair, was published in 1974. He read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester. After teaching, lecturing and acting as County English Advisor for Hertfordshire, he retired to write full-time. He has written widely for children and young adults; one of his best-known books, The War and Freddy, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. His recent adult novel, The Second Person from Porlock, is a fantasy riff on the chaotic life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was published in 2021. He lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist.

Spirit of the Place is now reissued by Writers Review Publishing. First published in 1995, the novel was described by Philip Pullman as "a marvellous story, put together with great ingenuity. Dennis Hamley seems to have got right inside the eighteenth century (one of my own favourite places to visit), heroic couplets and all. It made me want to go out at once and build a Grotto in the garden."

Dennis lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist. Here he answers questions from Linda Newbery.

LN: Congratulations on the reissue of this marvellous novel! I loved it on reading it soon after its first publication, by Scholastic, and am delighted to see it reissued as the fifth title from Writers Review Publishing. It struck me as very different from anything of yours I'd read before. What was the sparking point?

Dennis Hamley: I remember the first tiny inklings of the novel. We (my first wife and I) lived at the time in Hertford. Three miles away, in Amwell, on the outskirts of Ware, was John Scott’s grotto, built in the eighteenth century. Scott owned Amwell House. Once it was part of a great estate, now it is built over and the grotto exists almost by accident. Scott was a Quaker and a poet. His anti-war poem shows both qualities:

    I hate that drum’s discordant sound
    Parading round and round and round.
    To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields
    And lures from cities and from fields.

His grotto, open to the public on Saturdays in summer, is a magical place. A gatehouse, underground passages with walls lined with quartzes, glass, and shells which shine eerily in the light of your torch or your ancestors’ lanterns. You emerge into the daylight feeling that you have experienced a marvel.

Well, I did, anyway, and knew I must write a story about a grotto. And, as there seemed a connection between grottoes and poetry, I had to have a poet to go with it. Thus Nicholas Fowler was born. I saw him in eighteenth-century gentleman’s costume, a small figure, green jacket, blue waistcoat, beige breeches and hose encasing withered legs, walking across his estate, supported by a gold-topped cane.

The great poet Alexander Pope built a grotto in his garden in Twickenham and wrote a poem about it. So my Nicholas Fowler must do the same.

    What secrets are exposed by human toil?
    What great new work replaces sullen soil?
    A thing of beauty forms for all of time.
    Its epithet is clear. It is sublime.

LN: The novel uses a split structure. Can you explain about that?

DH: I think this came to mind as a necessity even as I emerged from Scott’s Grotto. Here was I, standing in the twentieth-century having just had an eighteenth-century experience. The centuries had to be merged.

Fowler is the novel’s main character. The poetry he writes is eighteenth-century in style. I am imitating the heroic couplets of Pope, Dryden and a host of lesser poets.

Spirit is a time-slip novel and present-day characters are equally significant. Chief among them is Lindsey Lovelock, a university student. Lyndsey has chosen Nicholas Fowler as the subject for the long study she must write for her degree in Philosophy and Literature.The ‘Now’ part of the novel is seen though her eyes. She comes to consciousness in hospital but with temporary amnesia, injuries she can’t explain, and with Kath Welland, a detective-sergeant to pull the extraordinary truth out of her. For Lindsey’s boyfriend Rod is in police custody, accused of breaking and entering Coswold, a mansion house once Nicholas Fowler’s home, now owned by the University and let out to a big pharma company doing secret research. Rod, a science student, longs to know what that research is: something to do with genetics. His garbled evidence suggests that he doesn't need the police, but a psychiatrist.

LN: The novel deals with big subjects. Can you explain how you made thematic use of them?

DH: Well, first of all there’s Jack, Lindsey’s microcephalic brother. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student, going to the university just up the road because she and her mother are his sole careers.

Quite apart from that, great changes are coming to our world. The implications of the human genome project, the dawn of cyberspace and AI might (or might not) seal humanity’s mastery of nature. But in the eighteenth century Man was seen, as Fowler puts it, ‘God’s viceroy on Earth’, whose purpose was to improve on nature, discover its laws, find the great principles and driving force of His power. In effect, these aims are the same.

Fowler doesn’t see himself merely as a poet. He is a scientist. He learned from Priestley, who discovered oxygen, how to build a friction machine which can trap a strange power, enough to make a needle swing seemingly of its own volition. The first hint of electricity. A vision vouchsafed to humanity by God himself? Yes, thinks Fowler. This new hubris will have grave consequences for him.

LN: Class distinctions are very important in the ‘then’ chapters.

DH: Yes. The concept of The Great Chain of Being was at the centre of the class system. As Fowler puts it:

    For in this panoramic scheme
    Each actor’s purpose long has been
    Ordained in mighty plan .
    Green frond to insect, fish to cat,
    Ascending rungs in stairways that
    Lead up to God through Man

Fowler is a gentleman. ‘I am a man of substance, a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge, a member of the Church established and shall succeed to my father’s estate.' A very precise definition, but in the Great Chain of Being nowhere near the aristocracy. As Sir Charles Witherpole, an angry neighbour, says, ‘This is not Blenheim or Woburn. These are the modest estates of Squires, not Dukes.’ Which puts him in his place

Several rungs below on the class ladder is Mr Perry, clerk of works and a salaried man responsible to Mr Landskip Peters, an avatar of Mr Capability Brown. Perry and Fowler are at constant loggerheads.

In Coswold’s kitchen are four characters far below Fowler and even Perry. The cook, Mrs Mundy; Mr Grainger, a handyman and general factotum for the estate; Verity, a serving girl; and the boy, unnamed until the very end. And the cat.

LN: Yes, you made very clever use of that cat – an endearing and important character.

DH: The cat is, in some ways, the most significant character in the book. He appears in different guises throughout, in both ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. He is a sagacious creature with a mind of his own. He is the boy’s only friend. He is the cause of Fowler’s greatest sin and the subject of a failed poem. His final guise explains the whole story.

LN: Nicholas Fowler is very convincing as an 18th Century poet - i.e. you are! Did writing Nicholas's poems come easily to you?

DH: I’m not a poet. But I love capturing the feel of real poets. I suppose you could call it pastiche. Well, yes. But I think it’s something more. I love writing it anyway. Once, I managed about ten lines of T S Eliot’s Fifth Quartet. And once I wrote a Shakespearian play for students to act, The Tragicall Historie of Dogmaticus, Prince of Academe, his fall. I put it about that it was a lost Shakespeare play recently discovered and to my amazement some people believed me! Sadly I don’t have a copy, but I can remember whole chunks still.

LN: Can you tell us about Lindsey's brother and the treatment he receives? I was particularly interested in that, as one of my late uncles was very much involved with Conductive Education as a trustee and fundraiser. Again, you made clever thematic use of this character to link past and present.

DH: Well, Jack, Lindsey’s brother, is microcephalic. He is the reason Lindsey is a home student. In the prelims, I thank the Morrissey family, who live near Galway in Ireland. Their son was microcephalic and though it was a long time ago that we met I shall never forget him. Later on, I met a family whose child had cerebral palsy. It was then that I learnt about ‘Pathways to the Brain’, Conductive Education and the Peto Institute. This was important to the novel because it defines Lindsey’s professional purpose in life.

LN: What was it like returning to your earlier novel to revise it?

DH: It was wonderful. I had already looked at it again twelve years ago, when I brought out a hardback limited edition, 100 copies numbered and signed. It was not a very good idea because I’ve got fifty left!  When I came to look at Spirit again I realised I had a difficult task. First of all, there’s a fair bit about computers, nineties technology and speculation about future social media. So I had to bring the technology up to date. That wasn’t as hard a task as I had feared. Then I thought about the novel’s structure. It had been written in alternating chapters. I felt that this wasn’t really suitable. So I divided the book into separate parts. Part 1 –‘Then’, two chapters. Part 2, - ‘Now’, two chapters. I think it makes the story move better and connects the separate themes more clearly. The last chapter deals with Fowler and his end. But when I did the limited edition, I wrote a postscript showing what had happened to Lindsey and Rod. Not good enough I thought now, so I lengthened it and, I think, provided a real ‘sense of an ending.’ Yes, how I enjoyed writing Spirit of the Place. And now I can enjoy it again, somewhat rewritten and radically reorganized.

LN: Thank you, Dennis. I hope this revised reissue will give enjoyment to many new readers.

Spirit of the Place is published by Writers Review Publishing

See also: Dennis's introduction to The Second Person from Porlock

and reviews by Dennis: Possession by A S Byatt

The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe

A roundup of three Booker-shortlisted titles: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, Elmet by Fiona Mozley and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

Guest feature by Paul Dowswell: THE MANY-SPLENDOURED OBSCENITY OF VIZ

 

Paul Dowswell's journey from foolish youth to mithered old codger is near to its end. In between these two points he has written some books and hopes to write some more. His website can be found here.

The Inuit, famously, have over 40 words for snow. That’s nothing. Readers of Viz’s Profanisaurus, their “ever-expanding dictionary of contemporary profanity, euphemism and obscenity”, will know that the British have hundreds of words for the perineum. And there are probably just as many for assorted other nether regions and what you might be doing with them. And there are certainly scores more terms than the Bristol Stool Chart’s eight, for what might come out of your bottom.

Those who have never read it will probably regard Viz as an Olympic-standard wallow in schoolboy puerility. Well, I can’t argue with that. But it can also be very funny, and just as witty as anything the last 40 years has conjured up to amuse us. The Guardian ran a piece about Viz in 2021 and over 500 readers wrote in to share their favourite thing in it.

In its early ’90s peak it was selling almost as much as the Radio Times and TV Times. When I first started reading it in 1987, it seemed fantastically fresh. It spawned a host of short-lived imitators too, with titles such as Zit, Spit and Poot. They were equally obscene but they all lacked the spark of genuine invention and joie de vivre that Viz possessed in abundance. That’s not to say that Viz wasn’t also prone to alarming lapses of taste and judgement. But this piece is about the best things in Viz so I’m going to leave that can of worms unopened.

I could attempt to intellectualise its appeal and employ words like scatological, Rabelaisian, earthy, ribald – but in essence it was four young men who should have known better, trying to make each other laugh in a Newcastle pub with the most outrageously obscene ideas for comic strips they could think of.

Chris and Simon Donald, Simon Thorp and Graham Dury, and a rotating cast of contributors, certainly had a lot of them. And most of them were very funny. The initial idea – take the template of the Beano and the Dandy but have the characters you create doing bizarre and inappropriate things – was an instant success. The titles of the strips alone will give you the idea: ‘Buster Gonad and his unfeasibly large testicles’, ‘Sid the Sexist’, ‘The Fat Slags’, ‘Bertie Blunt, his parrot’s a c***’, ‘The Bottom Inspectors’, ‘Terry F***wit – the unintelligent cartoon character’.

More often than not, these strips were as one dimensional as their names would suggest. But occasionally, Viz would come up with something deeper and more disturbing. Victorian Dad, for example, featured a nightmarish modern-day parent with the mindset of a puritanical Victorian. He becomes sexually aroused by the sight of table legs and beats his son every day to remind him that life isn’t fair. Another character goes by the unlikely name of Fru T. Bunn. A baker by trade, Frubert Bunn, whose daughter is, of course, called Chelsea, is an extraordinarily vivid portrait of middle-aged male sexual frustration. He channels his sex drive into the creation of gingerbread sex dolls and most episodes end with him grievously injured in Beano-style bandages and Plaster of Paris.

In its heyday the writers often seemed to be vying with each other over who could scrape through the barrel and go right down to the Earth’s core. Dr Poo (Tom Baker era Dr Who searches in vain through time and space for a quiet, unoccupied lavatory where he can ‘go’.) Dr Poolittle (a Doolittle-like character suffers from constipation), Billy Bottom and his zany toilet pranks – go on, have a guess…

The similarity in style to the Beano and the Dandy even presented the characters talking directly to their audience. ‘Hello readers. Today I’m going to…’ Funniest of all, and nearest to the Beano in its lack of swearing and material of a sexual nature, was Johnny Fartpants (Tagline “There’s always a commotion going on in his trousers.”) Schoolboy Johnny even has a German pen pal called Hans Honkyhosen, who visits from time to time. On one occasion (best suspend your disbelief here...), as an April Fool prank, Johnny furtively ‘buries’ a fart in a cake mix his mother is preparing for a visit from the vicar. The fart then springs out when the vicar cuts the cake. (Of course it does…). Even if you are appalled by the subject matter I invite you to admire the sheer ‘leaping off the page’ gusto of the artwork. The episode takes a nightmarish turn when Johnny’s exasperated parents feed him quick drying cement disguised as porridge to clog up his alimentary canal and put an end to his ‘bottom pranks’.

 Viz’s fondness for mixing high art and science with low humour was also a frequent feature. One quiz tie-breaker invited readers to name their favourite noble gas. The comic strip The Bach that dogged in the night featured JS Bach taking a break from his cantatas to go dogging in a nearby forest, much to Mrs Bach’s displeasure. Max’s Plank featured the German atomic physicist Max Planck as a schoolboy, getting up to mischief with a magic plank.

More than anything, Viz loved a pun – evidenced here in a one-off 2003 strip by relatively new boys Barry Farmer and Lee Healey, and their terrifying creation Vidal Baboon:

 One thing I quickly grew to love about Viz was their complete disregard for the bottom line (so to speak). They took enormous risks in offending both a potential readership and the advertisers that flocked to present their wares in their unexpectedly vast circulation publication. The Clown Chat Line spoof below is a perfect example of Viz having its cake and eating it too. At the time (early 1990s) the back pages of their comic, along with the UK’s downmarket tabloids, were festooned with real-life telephone sex lines, the advertising of which no doubt brought their publisher a substantial income.

 True, most of the Viz output was and remains cheerfully obscene, but they could also be admirably prescient. One long running character Timmy Timpson (appearing in Spoilt Bastard) is a hideous eight-year-old in a sailor suit whose adoring mother Cissy submits to his every whim. He has milkshake and Skittles for breakfast and habitually calls his poor mother a ‘fat old toilet’. The strip had the unsettling effect of making the reader wonder if they had ever behaved quite so appallingly, or indeed allowed their own child to do so. But one particular episode, shown below, from a 1997 edition of Viz, uncannily predicts the political landscape of 2026:

 And Viz could produce contemporary satire just as sharp as Private Eye. Here’s a strip featuring the vainglorious Luvvie Darling – a rather Daily Mail inspired caricature of those actor types – approaching a vanity publisher with his memoirs. I grew to detest vanity publishers while teaching creative writing classes and hearing stories about them from students, so there is much to relish in this depiction:

 And finally, I have to include one of Viz’s magnificent advertising spoofs, this one for a ‘Sexual Temperance Spoon’, designed to discourage unwanted amorous advances. Whoever came up with the slogan ‘The only spoon that stops stirring’ has earned my undying admiration. 

All illustrations reproduced by kind permission of Fulchester Industries/ Diamond Publishing.

WRITERS REVIEW PUBLISHING marks its first birthday

 

Great reissues and new fiction - more on the way this year!

Our new venture, an author publishing collaborative, launched last April with titles by Judith Allnatt, Mary Hoffman and Linda Newbery. Since then we've announced the publication of Sheena Wilkinson's Miss McVey Takes Charge and most recently Dennis Hamley's intriguing Spirit of the Place. 

We're very proud of our small but excellent list, which will soon see the addition of a sixth title: Sue Purkiss's first novel for adults, An Ordinary War, based on her father's experiences as prisoner of war in Poland. Christina Hardyment plans to join us with her next Alyce Chaucer mystery novel, and Linda Newbery's The Hide will appear in October. 

Coming soon on the blog - a piece by Dennis on the inspirations behind Spirit of the Place.

Find out more about our authors and their books on our website. 

See also:

Q&A with Judith Allnatt about The Poet's Wife

Q&A with Mary Hoffman about David: the Unauthorised Autogiography

Q&A with Linda Newbery about The One True Thing

Q&A with Sheena Wilkinson about Miss McVey Takes Charge

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE ROMAN TRIUMPH by Mary Beard

 

"Beard’s book offers at least an inkling into an answer … never the answer, and that is the mark of an outstanding historian and communicator."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

Mary Beard is deservedly celebrated for the way she brings to life the ancient world by plucking what might seem trivial information from inscriptions, the treasure trove of artifacts, what one might call ‘the unconsidered trifles'.

This study of one of the most egregious customs of the Romans is an essential insight into the workings of those people, their Empire, the way it was acquired and held, by law, language and brute force. The parallels with later empires, like them or despise them, are obvious.

The Triumph was all about show, an adjunct of political power. Words filling out that conceit spring immediately to mind: fame, from the Latin word for being talked about (an infant is so called because he or she cannot talk); glory – from their word for boasting; ambition, which meant walking round but it hides the purpose of walking round which was canvassing support ... Julius Caesar, of aristocratic birth, doing the populist thing by walking the streets of the poorer district of Rome and his Gallic Wars - how many parts is Gaul divided into ...? Oh, come on, it starts the whole history and copies of those war despatches were widely distributed as political flyers. He was self-advertising and wildly successful at it.

For the triumph - not lightly awarded – the conquering general, imperator, entered Rome with his army (in normal times no army was permitted to enter Rome: that counted as belligerent sedition) and a gaggle of captured slaves, carriages laden with booty ... it was bringing the glory of conquest home to the central hub, Rome. Interesting that in Latin the word for to or towards, ad (advent, address etc), is not used with two words: home and Rome.

Beard launches her fascinating study of this phenomenon of high-style propaganda, with the words of Seneca, tutor to Nero: ‘Petty sacrilege is punished; sacrilege on a grand scale is the stuff of triumphs’. Given what many men of power, political or financial, do these days, doesn’t this ring so horribly true? Seneca was being mildly cynical, of course, but he was telling the truth and not everyone bought into the whole lookatme lookatme schtick.

One of the best known advertisements of the Triumph may be Caesar’s triumphant return from swift victory over an upstart king (any warlord who opposed Rome was an upstart) in 47 BC. His despatch with the same words had already reached the Senate but they were used again, painted on boards, to impress the people who thronged Rome’s streets in their thousands to watch the parade: Veni vidi vici. Those three snappy words in a way encapsulate his appeal: he wasn’t messing around, he got on with the job. For example, the procession ended with the ascent of the Capitoline Hill to the Temple of Jupiter. ‘Julius Caesar,’ writes Beard, ‘is reputed to have climbed the stairs to the temple on his knees in a gesture of humility’. Pure showmanship: as if to underline that he was one of them, the ordinary people, the voters.

Placards, cardboard cut outs, the soldiers singing bawdy songs about their general - to avert the jealousy of the gods because their general, riding in a chariot, his cheeks raddled in imitation of the father of gods and men, rode with a slave whispering ‘Memento te mortalem’ ‘remember you are human’ that is not a god … as if.

So much of it was sham: in modern terms, the TV celebrity masquerading as a leader. Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars says that the emperor Caligula (named by his father’s soldiers when he was a child with them on campaign – the word means ‘little marching boot’) drew up his army on the beach of the Channel and told them to fill their helmets with sea shells, the ‘spoils’ for his intended triumph over the waters of the sea.

Beard writes with brisk energy and insight. At the heart of this fine investigation into how show is connected to political ambition and the overweening desire to own, to conquer, in the words of one of today’s greatest political shams to be king of the world, is her lucid scholarship and the ability to question herself in her inquiry as much as the commentators on the actual event on whom she must rely. She says: ‘Why on earth did the Romans do it? Why did they invest such time, energy and expense in this ceremony? Why?’

Purification? Glorification? Symbolic capital …?

Beard’s book offers at least an inkling into an answer … never the answer, and that is the mark of an outstanding historian and communicator. For there never really is a full stop, only ever a hanging comma on which we sit as on a swing in a secret garden.

The Roman Triumph is published by Harvard University Press

LOVE LANE by Patrick Gale, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Harry is such an endearing character and his story so quietly compelling that I'm sure many readers will want to seek out or revisit his earlier incarnation in A Place Called Winter."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her latest novel is The One True Thing; her second for Writers Review Publishing, The Hide, will appear later this year.

It's twelve years since readers were introduced to Harry Cane in A Place Called Winter, a novel based on the experiences of Patrick Gale's great grandfather. Caught out in a scandalous affair with a male dancer, Harry leaves wife and baby to seek a new life in Canada. After many threats, trials and hardships, he finds a happy relationship with neighbouring farmer Paul, after first believing that he's been killed in the Great War.

As with all Patrick Gale's work, Love Lane welcomes readers to its pages with warmth and empathy. Although it's not essential to have read the first novel, we pick up Harry's story years later. First he suffers the hurt of seeing his lover marry a woman for the sake of respectability; then, when Paul dies unexpectedly, Harry is manipulated / blackmailed by Paul's stepson into parting with the house and land he's devoted years to, for far less than they're worth. Rootless, and prompted by a letter from his daughter Betty, Harry sails back to England to reunite with family members in Liverpool and Wakefield.

We're now in 1950s England in the company of characters based on the author's grandparents and parents. From these perspectives we see Harry as much older: a scruffy elderly man with meagre possessions who must be accommodated, entertained or tolerated, his future uncertain. Betty's husband Terry is a prison governor with little time for visiting relatives, in one episode deeply preoccupied with preparations for a double execution by hanging of two men in their twenties. The burden of supervising the deaths of these young men whose guilt is far from certain weighs heavily on Terry, yet he's contemptuous of men sent to prison for homosexuality and aghast when he realises that Harry, as described by his sister-in-law, is 'a sexual deviant of the Oscar Wilde sort. Not at all someone I'd consider safe around grandchildren.' 

Loneliness, repression and misunderstanding form a pattern; Harry isn't the only male character to conceal his sexuality. We experience the disappointment of compromise not only from the men but from the women they partner. The sad fate of an affectionate but huge and hungry (at a time of rationing) Pyrenean mountain dog seems to echo these unsatisfactory human accommodations. Throughout, in the background of various family groupings, Harry demonstrates a quiet empathy, often intuiting what others are feeling, or concealing - particularly with his troubled granddaughter, Whistle. But he knows he is in the way; how and where will he spend his remaining years? Several poignant surprises and developments keep us anxious for him until the end. 

As in the novel that preceded this, Mother's Boy, Patrick Gale is adept at conveying the demands and rituals of domestic life of the period: removing stains from clothing with Omo, the novelty of television, making the most of rations, recommending a meal of mashed brains to nourish an ailing baby. Harry is such an endearing character and his story so quietly compelling that I'm sure many readers will want to seek out or revisit his earlier incarnation in A Place Called Winter.

Love Lane is published by Tinder Press.

See also:

Q&A with Patrick about Mother's Boy

Take Nothing With You reviewed by Linda Newbery

Notes from an Exhibition reviewed by Julia Jarman