Books Do Furnish A Room

Vale

This is by way of being a farewell, as I've decided to stop blogging, at least for a while.  The challenges of a new job in a new location, and the daily workload of getting the children to school, mucking out the horses, not to mention bell-ringing rehearsals and tending to the garden, mean its all just too much.  When I found I was reading with even a thought of duty in my mind, I knew it was time to go!

I've enjoyed the writing, and I've enjoyed the occasional comment - whether witty, informative, or challenging, and I shall be sorry to lose that.  But I haven't enjoyed the difficulty of dealing with typepad's clunky and inflexible system, or trying to get things put right when anything goes wrong (often), nor the occasional bouts of offensive spam.

But let me leave you on two positive notes:

• Last weekend, as part of the Chipping Campden literary festival, to Burnt Norton, locus of T S Eliot's poem of the same name (the first of the Four Quartets).  I only heard about this the morning of the event, a moment of Eliotesqe serendipidity in itself. As this is a private garden, this was a treat, in spite of driving rain and freezing winds.  A learned Eliot scholar took us round, and the garden is well worth a visit in its own right.  Burnt Norton is enhanced and personalised by this visit.

• I recommend Timothy Garton Ash's recent book of political journalism - Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name, which is erudite and entertaining on the politics of the past decade, without ever being a heavy read.

Enjoy all your reading, try something new every now and then; never let your reading become a duty or a bore.  You are old enough to give up an uninteresting book, now, and free not to read the classics or the fashionable.  Go well!

Lindsay

Break, break, break

A week or so ago, I quoted Lady Anne Gregory’s Cold, Sharp Lamentation and remarked that it seemed rather Tennysonian to me.  So, to demonstrate that, is one of the earliest poems I ever learned by heart, with a similar emotional charge and very similar physical milieu.  Tennyson is incomparably the better poet, of course, but this is an early work and the gap in thought and feeling, and the Romantic passion, is less than one might expect.  This is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break:

 

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

Lord of the Dance: TK

Opening in Venice, perhaps around the mid 1950s, Temporary Kings, the eleventh novel in Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, is immediately more spacious, more relaxed, than previous novels.  Both the setting and the action is more modern, more cosmopolitan, though not without disturbing hints of darker forces beneath – such as threatening relations between East and West.  Nick is in Venice for a literary conference, and meets new characters but also, as always, links backwards in time to understand more of Trapnel, Widmerpool, and others he has known – and known of – all his life.  Understanding grows, but the questions multiply as well; but as new themes are introduced, you also know that the story will not be finished, ever – or rather that you will not be here for the finish.  Your regret at planning to leave early, so to speak, is added to by the regret of others leaving, early as it seems.  But the book is not melancholy, just comprehending and knowing the limits to comprehension.

·     “Do you think the soubrette is his mistress, or his great-granddaughter?  ... They seem on very close terms.  Perhaps both.”

 

·     “Why do the British always ask [about a man’s background]?”  “One of our foibles.”  “That’s not what Americans do.”  “But we’re not Americans.  You must humour our straying from the norm in that respect.”

 

·     [A committed admirer of the USSR on modern art at the Venice Biennale]:  “I can guarantee that the only sanctuary from subjectless bric-à-brac here will be in the national pavilions of what you no doubt term the Iron Curtain countries.”

 

·     “... he remains essentially American in believing that all questions have answers, that there is an ideal life against which everyday life can be measured ...”

 

·     “Well, I mustn’t waste the whole morning coffee-housing on this vile instrument [the telephone]”

 

·     Reunion dinners, to the point of morbidity, gave the chance of indulging in ... reminiscent scrutinies.

Gilbert & Gilbert

I always enjoy Michael Gilbert, and I have written here before about his masterpiece of murder and legal shenanigans, Smallbone Deceased.  However, he was so prolific that I am still finding new books, and have recently read two for the first time:  Flash Point and Ring of Terror.  They are very different, but both very readable, and I enjoyed them both.

Flash Point is typical Gilbert – a contemporary setting (London in the 1970s, at a guess), and a smart but very irritating lawyer who has discovered something very discreditable about a member of the Cabinet just before an election.  He finds evidence of the cover up, and evidence of the original crime, but has set in motion dark forces from “the Establishment”, which try and sabotage his efforts, and the efforts of a sympathetic journalist.  After a few twists and turns, a sort of justice is done, although the difficult lawyer never brings his case – preferring to retire to the country and stoke up trouble for a local landowner who has blocked a right of way.  A good read, well written and almost plausible!

Ring of Terror covers more typical Gilbert ground – the efforts of the police to prevent foreign terrorists mounting a campaign of bombing in London for political reasons, but it is set (uniquely, for Michael Gilbert, as far as I know) in an historical context.  In fact, the action takes place in London around 1912-13, and the terrorists are Russians.  Two young policemen, Luke Pagan and Joe Narrabone, friends from school in the country, are in the forefront of the battle; they have many adventures, not all of them very believable, as the story has not only the setting of an earlier age, but is written partly in that style, homage or friendly parody.  All, of course, turns out well, after some hair-raising narrow escapes and plenty of exciting action.

I’m off to Abebooks to see if there are any more Michael Gilbert I haven’t read.

By Anne Gregory

I have at least once used Yeats’ poem For Anne Gregory as my Friday poem.  I thought it might be of interest to hear something of hers, as well as just admiring her yellow hair, “the honey coloured ramparts at your ear”.  I have chosen a poem that she has translated from the Irish of Douglas Hyde, which is a desperate lamentation of loneliness, rather Tennysonian in mood, it seems to me – think of Break, break, break, for example.  This is Lady Anne Gregory’s Cold, Sharp Lamentation, from the Irish of Patrick Hyde:

Cold, sharp lamentation

In the cold bitter winds

Ever blowing across the sky;

Oh, there was loneliness with me!

The loud sounding of the waves

Beating against the shore,

Their vast, rough, heavy outcry,

Oh, there was loneliness with me!

The light sea-gulls in the air,

Crying sharply through the harbours,

The cries and screams of the birds

With my own heart! Oh! That was loneliness.

The voice of the winds and the tide,

And the long battle of the mighty war;

The sea, the earth, the skies, the blowing of the winds,

Oh! There was loneliness in all of them together.

Kipling lucky dip

Delayed on a train last week, I reached for my Kindle, and decided to read some Kipling short stories.  I have long thought him the best, most skilled and versatile, and most psychologically perceptive short story writer in English – and three stories, chosen almost at random, did nothing to change that view: The Bridge Builders, The Walking Delegate, and The Ship That Found Herself.  Each of these is 20 or 30 pages at most, yet each encompasses a whole world with conviction, passion, humour and the ability (to use a Kipling phrase) “to see further through a millstone than most”.

In The Bridge Builders, an engineer sees his new bridge, not quite complete, threatened by the violent and unseasonal floods of “Mother Ganga”, after a heart-breaking struggle with the bureaucrats to turn drawings into reality.  Finlayson knows the

violent and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that knows it should be busy on other things ... and the blank despair that a man goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in the gun-case.

The floods come, and his bridge is saved, not before he has worked all night – honest work is Kipling’s God – and his native overseer has urged his men on with abuse:

“O sons of unthinkable begetting - children of unspeakable shame - are we here for the look of the thing?"

And in the night, Finlayson, half dead with fatigue, hunger and opium, sees the Hindu gods argue about the bridge, and the end of the world, and the love of the common man.  And every word of it, oh best beloved, is true!

In The Walking Delegate, a group of horses on a farm – every one a wonderfully drawn individual - see off a visiting horse preaching rebellion, because they know that the Utopia of now work he promises is illusory.  You learn how they all work, and one of them, who used to pull trams in New York, prides himself on his strength and quickness: “an' time's what dey hunt in N' York."

And The Ship That Found Herself is a warm tale of a new ship which, in an Atlantic storm, ceases to be a collection of parts, and becomes a whole.  The description of the storm is masterly, as is the description of the ship working; but the genius is in the understanding of the individuals becoming first a team and then a unity.

Brilliant, quite, quite brilliant!

Yawar Fiesta

When planning my trip to Peru last Christmas, I was recommended to read Yawar Fiesta by Jose Maria Arguedas.  At the time, I was unable to find it in English, but I put it in the London Library suggestions book and, lo and behold, here we are, in a version translated by Frances Horning Barraclough.  It’s quite a short novel, some 150 pages, but clearly packed with intense emotions.

It starts with a careful, and quite fascinating, account of an Indian town, Puquio, in a remote area of Peru, explaining how it is laid out, and who lives there.  This may sound pedestrian, but the population is full of conflict, between Indians, mestizos (mixed race people) and those mainly of Spanish stock.  The tale is told of where the power is wielded and how, and how the rural Indians were driven off their grazing through bad law and a compliant church, reinforced with violence and brutality.  The prose is simple, sharp, and brilliantly captures the attitudes and motivations of individuals and groups in plangent, slightly bitter words.

Then the central government moves to ban bull-fighting.  The main part of the novel is an account of how all these different groups react to this, and how it affects their relations with each other. The Yawar Fiesta of the title is the "bloody fiesta" in which bull fighting  of a particularly bloody sort is both the central part of the "fun" for all, but is also a competition between the various parts of the town.  In the end, a bull of magical reputation, Misitu, is captured in the mountains and brought to the town, where both the traditional Spanish style bullfight, and a more brutal local version take place.  The town throughout is fierce, savage, uncompromising - but these latter pages are very strong meat indeed.  I found them compelling but distasteful, and the picture of the relations between classes became increasingly hard to follow and confusing - though this was partly rooted in the reality Arguedas is describing.

This is not an easy book to read; partly the material is intrinsically remote from our experience, and the issue an incomprehensible one for most of us.  But it is lively and powerful, and I wish I'd read before travelling to Peru.  But I think it would be easier if the translator had translated everything, rather than leaving Spanish and Quechua word scattered through the text, to be interpreted with footnotes and a glossary.

Lord of the Dance: BDFAR

As I progress through Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, arriving at Books Do Furnish A Room marks a crucial stage of the journey.  First, the war is in the past, with its heavy load of external events and inevitable tragedies – though all the war novels are also intimate and funny; but perhaps more importantly, the pace slows.  We have roughly one book each decade after the war, compared with three, and a good part of a fourth, covering only six years or so.  And finally, the main protagonist Nick and his peers are showing signs of settling down, readjusting after the war and accepting that they are older and occasionally wiser now they are in their forties or more.  The last three books are just as wise and perceptive as the earlier ones, but there is maturity, judgement, experience and tolerance which belongs to the characters and not just to the author.

For me, of course, Books Do Furnish A Room is particularly poignant, named as it is after this blog.  And as I read it, I found it a veritable feast of insight, laughter and understanding.  The pattern of the dance is not yet clear, but more and more of the earlier movements are making sense, while more new ones crowd in thick and fast, here simplifying or resolving, here confusing or alarming, and here laying the ground for future exploration and resolution.  And finally, this novel is an absolute treasure trove of quotations I felt I just had to give you – so I have split this post into two!

·     Returning to the university at forty, one immediately recaptured all the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition.

 

·     ... that law of nature which rules that the whole confraternity of politicians prefers to operate within the closed circle of its own initiates, rather than waste time with outsiders. 

 

·     [Jeavons on marriage] “I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way.  Married couples usually do. ... People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other.”

 

·     Camel Ride To The Tomb [a tour operator’s cry in Egypt, and the title of X Trapnel’s novel] ... Camel Ride To The Tomb ... I grasped immediately that’s what life was.  How could the description be bettered?  Juddering through the wilderness on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t control, along a rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely yet truly stated.

 

·     The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters.  It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

 

·     Accidents will happen even with the best regulated secret police.

 

·     ... he belonged to a generation which continued to use that excellent masculine invocation of surname, before an irresponsible bandying of first name smothered all subtleties of relationship.

 

·     “[Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy] Rather a morbid subject.” ... He may have thought reading or writing equally morbid, whatever the content.

Poetry of a thriller writer: out of steel a song

I reviewed, not long ago, Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, unaware when I ordered it, that the writer was poet Cecil Day Lewis.  Inevitably, it was well written, although not perhaps in the top flight for plot and for excitement, but I thought we should also see Lewis as a master wordsmith in his main field, of poetry.  After all, he was Poet Laureate, and while that job has not always gone to the best and brightest poets of their generation, there is no doubt of Lewis’s credentials, though I suspect he is not much read now. 

This poem I particularly like, though meaning is obscure in places, with an odd mix of Communist and Christian symbol.  What a light looking construction this is, with short lines in rhyming quatrains, but what power in “For we lie down with tears / And waken but to weep.”  This is Cecil Day Lewis’s Tempt Me No More:

Tempt me no more; for I

Have known the lightning’s hour,

The poet’s inward pride,

The certainty of power.

Bayonets are closing round.

I shrink; yet I must wring

A living from despair

And out of steel a song.

Though song, though breath be short,

I’ll share not the disgrace

Of those that ran away

Or never left the base.

Comrades, my tongue can speak

No comfortable words,

Calls to a forlorn hope,

Gives work and not rewards.

Oh keep the sickle sharp

And follow still the plough:

Others may reap, though some

See not the winter through.

Father, who endest all,

Pity our broken sleep;

For we lie down with tears

And waken but to weep.

And if our blood alone

Will melt this iron earth,

Take it. It is well spent

Easing a saviour’s birth.

Three Cups of Tea

This is a book which should inspire and command admiration; it is the story of Greg Mortenson (written by Mortenson himself and David Oliver Relin), who is climbing in the Himalayas, and profoundly disappoints himself by failing in his quest to climb K” in the Karakoram mountains.  He was doubly disgusted, because he had made success in this climb essential to honouring his recently deceased sister, Christa.  But on the way down, after getting lost, weak and ill, he is taken in by the villagers of Korphe; after spending a lot of time there, getting to know the villagers and their problems, he decides to pay his debt to them – and to honour Christa – by building a school.

He does this, after much difficulty raising money and managing all sorts of problems in Pakistan.  He is generously helped by Jean Hoerni, who demands to see a photograph of the completed school before he dies – and who then leaves him a million dollars for the Central Asia Institute, which goes on building schools, over 50 f them.  It is a fascinating story, and well worth reading, but the writing is a bit dull, considering the excitements of the story (which include Mortenson being kidnapped by the Taliban).  In the end, I was overcome by amazement at the energy and dedication of the man, who achieved so much others, including big humanitarian organisations, can only dream about.  But the tedium of the prose and the weak-kneed admiration of Relin for Mortenson and all things Pakistani, and the cod philosophising over “so called primitive societies” teaching Westerners lessons about “living in harmony with the environment” and achieving greater happiness than we would ever manage (I paraphrase, but you get the idea) all got me down.  So I kept the faith until the first school at Korphe was complete – a little over half the book – and called it a day at that point.

So, inspiring story, not told in an inspiring way; but still of great interest if you know the area or are concerned with development, especially in Central Asia.

 

 

Collect for Trinity Sunday

This week’s piece of prose is short, but strong.  It is a collect from the first Prayer Book of Edward VI, published in 1549.  Although completely unreligious myself, I cannot but admire the power of the prose, and marvel at the way religious writing - notably the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible - have shaped our language.  This is earlier than both, but greatness is burgeoning.  This is the Collect for Trinity Sunday from the first Prayer Book of Edward VI:

ALMIGHTYE and euerlastyng God, whiche haste geuen unto us thy seruauntes grace by the confession of a true fayth to acknowlege the glorye of the eternall trinitie, and in the power of the diuyne maiestie to wurshippe the unitye : we beseche thee that through the stedfastnes of thys fayth, we may euermore be defended from all aduersitie, whiche liueste and reignest, one God, worlde without ende.

The beast must die

Unable to find a recommended novel by Nicholas Blake, I ordered The Beast Must Die from abebooks, and read it with even greater interest when I found that Blake is the nom de plume used by Cecil Day Lewis for detective fiction.  This is, as you would expect, a well crafted, well written novel, and it has plenty of literary references – rather a symptom of the time, but also what one might expect from such an accomplished poet.  I enjoyed it, and will read more – and will recommend Blake to those with a taste for period detective fiction – but that his greater fame is as a poet is probably just.

The motif is now familiar, but must then have been innovative and ingenious.  A writer of detective fiction, one Frank Cairnes plans a murder – and writes everything down, as a diary.  He plans to keep the diary secret, as an essential psychological release for himself, but in any event can always pass it off as a new novel by his nom-de-plume Felix Lane, an identity he adopts and drops as needed.  His victim is the unknown driver of a car which knocked down and killed his young son.  We are in a world when every passing car is noticed, and where yokels remember details of the drivers of cars three moths past, and a fair bit of demanding coincidence is required to put Cairnes on the track of his victim.

A complex ploy is hatched, with a degree of subtlety and observation which intrigues the reader, but the action is complicated by several factors which I cannot really tell you now, except that there is an unexpected love affair, and the murder which happens is not the one that is planned!  A an amateur detective, Nigel Strangeways, is brought in to protect Cairnes when death does strike, and the final outcome is certainly not obvious or even conventionally happy or abstractly just.  A good read, and an encouragement to seek out more by the same author.

...and of her father, Harry

A week or so ago, I posted some poetry by Elizabeth, Queen of England.  As I was doing so, it occurred to me that her father, Henry VIII, was an immensely musical and cultivated man – though that is not how he is remembered now, rather as a fat womaniser – and allegedly wrote the words to at least one famous English song.  True or not, it’s a fine story, and here is Greensleeves by Henry VIII (attrib):

Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously.
For I have loved you well and long,
Delighting in your company.

Chorus:
Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my lady greensleeves.

Alas, my love, that you should own
A heart of wanton vanity,
So must I meditate alone
Upon your insincerity.

Your vows you've broken, like my heart,
Oh, why did you so enrapture me?
Now I remain in a world apart
But my heart remains in captivity.

If you intend thus to disdain,
It does the more enrapture me,
And even so, I still remain
A lover in captivity.

I have been ready at your hand,
To grant whatever you would crave,
I have both wagered life and land,
Your love and good-will for to have.

Thou couldst desire no earthly thing,
But still thou hadst it readily.
Thy music still to play and sing;
And yet thou wouldst not love me.

I bought thee kerchiefs for thy head,
That were wrought fine and gallantly;
I kept thee at both board and bed,
Which cost my purse well-favoredly.

I bought thee petticoats of the best,
The cloth so fine as it might be;
I gave thee jewels for thy chest,
And all this cost I spent on thee.

Thy smock of silk, both fair and white,
With gold embroidered gorgeously;
Thy petticoat of sendal right,
And these I bought thee gladly.

My men were clothed all in green,
And they did ever wait on thee;
All this was gallant to be seen,
And yet thou wouldst not love me.

They set thee up, they took thee down,
They served thee with humility;
Thy foot might not once touch the ground,
And yet thou wouldst not love me.

'Tis, I will pray to God on high,
That thou my constancy mayst see,
And that yet once before I die,
Thou wilt vouchsafe to love me.

Ah, Greensleeves, now farewell, adieu,
To God I pray to prosper thee,
For I am still thy lover true,
Come once again and love me.

Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my lady greensleeves.

Paul Sandby at the RA

 
Soon after it opened, I went to the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Paul Sandby watercolours (which remains open until 13 June, so plenty of time still to visit).  Sandby (1731-1809) is called “the father of English watercolour” because of his particular genius, which paved the way for Girtin, Turner and others, but also because he elevated the watercolour to the status of serious art.  Previously, there had been a feeling that watercolour was a working tool, perhaps for colouring maps, or an effete thing that young ladies might play at, but that art meant oils.  This may have been more than a social or cultural issue – depth of colour and opacity may have been technical problems in the earlier periods, though I am straying well beyond my knowledge now.

In this light, the exhibition is full of interest.  First, of course, it is pleasant to walk through half a dozen rooms lightly hung with paintings, and to admire them free of crowds (even on a Friday evening, there were perhaps five to ten people in each room) – thinking of the sweating, obscuring hordes elbowing each other in the rooms below, straining for a glimpse of a Van Gogh at the RA’s main exhibition.

The work of Paul Sandby is varied: there are maps that he worked on for the government, aids to the suppression of Scotland; there are vicious cartoons in the style of – and ridiculing – Hogarth; there are the famous cries of London series of illustrations of street traders; and there are topographical and landscape paintings of countryside, great houses, and other striking views.  As far as I recall, everything is British – I don’t think he painted outside the country, unlike the habit of the painters after him.

I enjoyed it, and I shall probably revisit.  I shall also visit the concurrent exhibition, in an adjoining room, of eighteenth century watercolours from the RA’s own collection, to see what others were painting during his lifetime, and what the young bloods were doing as Sandby came into old age.  But I did feel that, for me at least, Sandby’s work was more purely illustrative than I would like, and seemed at times a little flat on the paper.  This is, I realise, setting a very high standard indeed, and I wouldn’t want it thought that I was dismissive of his work at all.  There is a quiet elegance, a congruity of colour and composition which is very attractive, and a subdued sense of drama in several paintings, especially of trees, and one or two of the views of Windsor Castle (eg View of Windsor on a Rejoicing Night, 1768 - below).  There is also a delicate and sly humour in the characters he portrays – the mincing elegance of two passers-by in one painting, or the improper advances being made in a pavilion in one of the Windsor views (top).

  
Sandby’s work is delightful, and I will visit again.  But I shall look out for opportunities to drink the headier drafts of Girtin and Turner soon, too.

Prosing on: England this England

I enjoy selecting a poem – or, less often, part of a poem - for each Friday’s post, and I am toying with the idea of doing the same with prose, perhaps on a Tuesday.  This is prompted by my purchase, in midsummer last year, of Quiller-Couch’s 1925 anthology, The Oxford Book of English Prose.   Of course, it comes to an end 85 years ago, but no matter.  I was struck, on browsing through it at the weekend, how much excellent prose there was, either by authors I had never read, or by famous authors in lesser known works.  This seemed a rich seam to mine, and I thought I would just work through the centuries, offering you a taster here and there.

Today, I can do no better than quote the very first passage in the book, from John Trevisa’s (1326-1402) translation of Higden’s Polychronicon.  How little has changed – the weather is worse than in France, and we still worry about social class!

As Fraunce passeth Bretayne, so Bretayne passeth Irlond in faire weder and nobilité, but nought in helthe.  For this ilond is best and bringeth forth trees and fruyt and retheren and other bestes, and wyn groweth there in som place.  The land hath plenté of foules and of bestes of dyvers manere kynde; the lond is plenteous and the see also.  The lond is noble, copious, and riche of nobil welles and of nobil ryveres with plenté of fische; and there is grete plenté of small fische, of samon, and of elys.  So that the cherles in som place fedith sowes with fische ...

These men despiseth hir owne, and preiseth other menis, and unnethe beeth apaide with hir owne estate; by what byfalleth and semeth other men, they wolleth gladlyche take to hemself; therfore hit is that a yeman arraieth hym as a squyer, a squyer as a knyght, a knyght as a duke, a duke as a kyng.

retheren: cattle

cherles: peasants

apaide: satisfied

 

Firecrest

I had Victor Canning's work recommended to me, and although I had some reservations about Venetian Bird, the first of his books I tried, I did enjoy it - and Firecrest is supposed to be one of his best, about the doings of the shadowy and ruthless "the Department".

Firecrest is altogether a better book than Venetian Bird.  It charts a slice of life in “the Department”, anonymous,  secret, unacknowledged and occasionally violent child of legitimate government.  Action is fast and compelling, and the plot unfolds with great energy and relative conviction.  Plot is hidden within counter-plot and yet furthers depths, but the reader is never confused or left in the dark as the main character, Grimster, tries to track down the discovery whichHarry Dilling had been trying to sell Government before his untimely (but accidental) death.

The secret seems likely to be held by the dead man’s girlfriend, the charming but not noticeably bright Lily.  Unaccountably, she gives, very convincingly, a completely different account of a critical day to one of the Department’s own men.  Is she a spy, too?  Or ignorant or mischievous?  None of the above, but the truth is hard to find (and just a little hard to believe), and it takes a while to unlock the secret.  This secret, together with the information held by the firecrest, leads Grimster to success – but a success he does not use exactly as his masters wish.

Other parties make a sudden pounce on his find, but he is equal to them, and able to pursue his own agenda.  A final reckoning is set up – but even the final expected run-in to denouement, justice, and even possibly a little personal happiness is dramatically disrupted again and again.  This is a well crafted thriller, rather ahead of its time (1971) in point of literary sophistication and narrative skill, and I shall certainly seek out more.

Poesy of Gloriana

Elizabeth, Queen of England, was daughter of King Henry VIII and an immensely talented and able scholar and statesman.  Fluent in modern and classical languages, she wrote and translated sermons, letters, speeches and prayers, and has a fine turn of phrase, of power and grace.  In this, of course, she was but a product of her age, but also an inspiration of it.

She was the Virgin Queen, and never married, although was often sought after.  There was an extensive marriage negotiation between her and the French nobleman Francois d'Alencon, Duke of Anjou - and a Medici on his mother's side.  Although he was 22 years her junior (and stunted, effeminate and marked by smallpox, according to the less obliging of commentators), they were clearly close, although as a Catholic, he presented a serious worry to many English.  When he left England, no marriage having proved possible, in 1582, Elizabeth had very mixed and painful feelings - and, at almost 50, must have felt her marriage prospects - at least for love - were poor indeed.

A little later, she wrote a moving poem about him (he is "Monsieur" in all her correspondence); this is On Monsieur's Departure, by Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England:

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.

    I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,

    Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,

Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.

His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

    No means I find to rid him from my breast,

    Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

For I am soft and made of melting snow;

Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.

Let me or float or sink, be high or low.

    Or let me live with some more sweet content,

    Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

   Elizabetha Regina

 

On Chesil Beach

No, not Ian McEwan's novel of erotic failure, published a few years ago and reviewed by me here, marvellous though that was.  Rather, an old favourite from school, J Meade Falkner's Moonfleet.  This is set largely in Dorset, although it goes briefly abroad, as it must have seemed then, to the Isle of Wight and then to Amsterdam.  Written in 1898, it is actually set over a century before, covering about 15 years, with the action starting when John Trenchard was a boy, growing up in a Dorset village in 1757.

He lives in Moonfleet, a village on the Fleet, the long thin brackish lake which is trapped between the land and the twenty miles of heavy shingle which is Chesil beach.  He is entranced by tales of pirates and smugglers and ghosts, and these all link up in a surprising way when he is a little too impetuous in his exploring.  He is drawn into smuggling, and after the accidental death of the squire is hunted as an accomplice to murder, though he is innocent enough.  There is much excitement, much good clean fun and a jolly yarn, before he comes home again, pirate treasure found and ready to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart - though Falkner (there really is no "u") is very imaginative in the way he returns his hero to his beloved Dorset coast.  There is much more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil the plot.

This is a novel which my father - born in 1912 - recalled fondly from school.  It is well written, though with plenty of improbability, and is one of those virtuous novels in which the good in heart win out, and there are reasonbly realistic pictures of people and places, including the difficult and unhappy.  It is not, some say, Falkner's best novel (The Nebuly Coat, apparently, claims that prize), but it is certainly his best known.  It paints a fine picture of south coast smuggling in the 1760s, and is a lively thriller as well: you might want to try it, particularly if you are, at heart, a boy between 12 and 15!

The Fleet is still there of course, a fine bird sanctuary, and there is Moonfleet Hotel, set in this staggering and rather unlikely scenery.  Even if you don't read Falkner's book - or the McEwan - you should walk the beach, on a sunny gusty day with the salt on the wind and the sun in your eyes.

Daffodils

I know this poem is a cliche, but after the cold winter we have had, to see the first bulbs of spring fighting out of the soil is a joy of a quite primitive, visceral sort - and while Wordsworth brings a philosophical viewpoint, the joy is unconfined.  Perhaps a dream of April, rather than lion blustery March, but the promise is there! This is William Wordsworth's The Daffodils.

 

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Lord of the Dance: MP

The Military Philosophers is the third war novel, and the ninth overall, in Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time.  Nick Jenkins has not had an interesting war up to this point, although it has made interesting reading, suffering boredom and despair in gloomy surroundings without action or danger.  That all changes in this book, when he finds himself and begins in one sense to enjoy the war, and to do something useful and for which his talents are fitted.  There is some danger, from bombs and the V2, but a great deal of human interest, with a notably international face.  I have written about this novel before, of course, but here are the finds of the 2010 reading.

• I gave up further talk.  Perhaps she had a grievance or the curse ... It occurred to me - one never feels older than in the middle thirties - that she was bored with all but young men or had taken an instantaneous dislike to me.

• Until you have met Blackhead, the word "bureaucrat" will have conveyed no meaning to you.

• Most people's sex life is a mystery, especially that of individuals who seem to make most a parade of it.

• Afterwards, in memory, the apple orchards were all in blossom ... But it was already November.  There can have been no blossom.  Blossom was a mirage.  Autumnal sunshine, thin, hard penetrating, must have created that scenic illusion, kindling white and silver sparkles in branches and foliage.  What you see conditions feelings, not what is.