Books Do Furnish A Room

Garden blues: the patient begins to recover

When I had my little town garden designed, about 10 years ago, it was very beautiful and very much under control.  But I have moved things occasionally, to repair a failure or improve a sightline; somethings have thrived ridiculously - and some have crashed and burned (normally the ones where my garden designer said they were indestructible, of course).  But the really intense preparation of the site - lots of deep digging and soil enrichment, and a wonderfully warm aspect, meant that some things grew much, much bigger than foreseen.  This crowded out other, weaker things.

One odd outcome of this is that I have a lot of late winter and spring colour, and quite a lot of autumn and winter interest, but there's a deadish time around July and early August.  We will come out of it, and there is stuff to see, but it needs a bit of finding and looking at, often up close - its not great impressionistic washes of colour you can see from the house.  These pictures give some idea of the colour I've got now - but its a jungle out there!

At the top is a lovely leggy plant with delicate white flowers - quite common in gardens, but I can't identify it.  Any suggestions?  Below are the coarse and vulgar rudbeckia and the delightful blue flowers of a ceratostigma (which is bidding for border dominance, and which, with the Jerusalem Sage, has to be viciously cut back every year - which probably just encourages it!)

Then the aforementioned Jerusalem Sage, (phlomis fructicosa, previously featured with bee a few days ago), and a rampant jasmine.

Finally, two less conventional splashes of colour - a clematis which normally finishes flowering months ago, but which has had a rebirth on just a few shoots - and the lovely warm red of a photinia leaf caught in the fountain in my pond.  Although this looks autumnal, this is the colour of the spring growth, which has kept remarkably well.

This post is a bit like the garden itself, splashes of colour in a disordered and rather messy way.  But I have always preferred the wildness and the unplumbed pools to the neat clipped hedges!

In memoriam Kate

About 10 days ago, a group of friends went to Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire to remember a friend who had died a year before.  It was inexpressibly sad when she died, but this occasion was also warm and affectionate, with friends from different parts of her life coming together in places which had meant much to her.  We all had dinner together, and climbed a local hill called Beamsley Beacon.  These photographs are not sad, but take interest and joy in life, which I am positive is what she would have wanted us to do.

I stayed in Skipton, where I admired the fine church, including these unusual windows..

.. and this marvellously named solicitors.  It sounds like a phrase meaning a hard fought dispute to me, as in "we never got on well, but we had a real savage crangle over the right of way".

Up on the moor, we could admire the bracken croziers, the heather, the vibrant moss and lichen - tiny but determinedly alive in every crack of stone - and finally, the glorious open view.

Fumbling the flowers

Cornflower today calls her post Naming of Parts in reference to the Henry Reed poem of the same name.  Curiously, I heard it read on Radio 3 only a couple evenings ago, and was very struck by the way the rifle instructor's heavy, over-emphasised delivery is shown up by images from the natural word outside, and especially by this stanza:

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
          They call it easing the Spring.

The line about the bees immediately brought to my mind this photograph, which I took about a week ago for a post which never (well, not so far) got written.  The bee was head deep in the flowers of the Jerusalem Sage, and hardly noticed the presence of my camera a few inches away.

Layers of history

I’ve been reading a couple of books on Afghan history recently, the first time I’ve returned to anything about Afghanistan since I got back from a year in Kabul last February.  The first is by a man called George Mitford, and is briefly entitled The Chronicles of a Traveller or, A History of the Afghan Wars with Persia (plus a further two lines of explanation – the title runs to 30 words before even explaining that it is a translation of another work!)  It was published in 1840, and is a translation of a Turkish translation of the original Latin of a Jesuit priest, J T Kruzinski, writing in the 1720s.  It is therefore a veritable palimpsest of attitudes and history, and this interests me almost more than the history itself, which is extremely difficult to follow and seriously suspect through the original author’s lack of balanced sources - and his apparent credulity about some of the almost mythic versions of history which have come down to us.

Chronicles describes the very complex ebb and flow of three powers in the region we now think of as southern Afghanistan and Iran – the Moguls, the Afghans, and the Iranian empire.  The Moguls were centred in northern India, but originally were founded by Babur from the Fergana valley in Central Asia; his capital and final resting place was Kabul. The late 1600s and early 1700s in our calendar saw the alternate dominance of the Moguls, the Iranians, and the Afghans in Kabul, and at one stage, the Afghans took the important Iranian city of Isfahan, the ancient capital (locus of part of Maalouf's Samarkand, which I reviewed a few days ago).  One of the Afghan heroes of this time was Mirwais (or Meer Veis), a name which still resonates among Pashtuns at least – the President of Afghanistan called his first son, born earlier this year, by the name, rather like an Englishman calling his son Nelson.

I don’t intend to bore you with the almost unintelligible history of the period, but to share some typical text from different layers of the onion.  At a time when British and other NATO soldiers are fighting - and dying - in Afghanistan, on a United Nations mission to rebuild the country and resist the insurgency against Karzai’s government, it is significant and troubling to read the Imperial confidence and arrogance of 1840:

“The translator has spared no pains ... at a time when [Afghanistan’s mountains] have rung with the peals of Britain’s artillery, and with the cheers of the onward moving columns of her intrepid sons, and [of] their fellow-warriors raised in her own Indian provinces...”

“May Britain succeed, however, in long maintaining her power in these countries; and by warily proving herself to the natives to merit the influential rank she seeks, by progressively gaining strength from their gratitude and fidelity.”

The Turkish view, from the introduction of 1729, is more humble, giving much honour in florid prose to Allah and his creation and his word, the Holy Koran, and then to the Defenders of Religion; then he dedicates the work to the Sultan (“the Amulet of Faith and Security ... the most Potent Sovereign, Always Victorious, in whom may God delight”) ; finally, after comments about the text and translation, he ends with a humble plea to his readers:

“Furthermore, we earnestly beg our kind readers to excuse the typographical mistakes, and benevolently pardon all our errors” !

The photographs in this post are from my visits in 2006 and 2007 to Farah and Herat, the main western provinces of Afghnaistan nearest to Iran, and very Iranian in culture.

Walking round London 6

My final day north of the Thames, and I went to West Ham in really hot weather, to resume my walk along the Great Drain, Bazalgette's amazing sewage system, which is now dignified by the name "Greenway".  Altogether I did 6 miles, ending up crossing the river at Woolwich, and if I'm honest, it was one of the least interesting days on this walk so far.  The Greenway is a tarmac path with grass verges, giving a very distant view of the City, but there is little of interest to see.  Then you get into a perfectly pleasant but unexceptional park, until you eventually find yourself on the north side of Albert Dock, where the interest revives.  To the left are the accommodation buildings on the University of East London campus at Cyprus.

On next to the river itself, and a choice of crossing the river by foot tunnel or ferry.  I chose the ferry (or "fairy" as my mother tells me I used to say when very little), although the entrance to the tunnel is a fine piece of Victorian architecture, with a very reassuring sign outside, telling me how far I have come since Richmond.

Then across the river, with views up and down the river - the new towers of Thamesmead downstream on the south bank over by the Arsenal, and the Dome, Canary Wharf and the Thames Barrier upstream.

I can now look forward to the green spaces and historic buildings of south of the river, likely to be quite a contrast with the last two walks, and much more like the early stages from Richmond northwards.

No such thing as a free book?

I am grateful to Harriet for pointing out that The Book Depository was giving away a limited number of free books to bloggers.  I put my name in, and am rewarded with a copy of Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Names, which I shall read and review as soon as it arrives.  I know nothing about it at all, so it could be a big surprise!

Samarkand

Amin Maloof’s Samarkand is "about" Omar Khayyam, the poet – as we think of him, but he was more of a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer – of C11th Persia.  It starts in Samarkand (modern Uzbekistan) but Khayyam comes from further east, in Khorasan in modern Persia, and spends much of his life in Isfahan, the ancient and apparently gorgeous capital of Persia - now, allegedly, being spoiled by property developers and urban planners.

The novel is in two distinct parts, one set in Khayyam's lifetime, one in the late C19th and early C20th, mainly in Persia too.  In the first part, Khayyam needs the protection of a powerful figure in Samarkand to protect him against accusations of heresy and alchemy, and is advised to keep his innermost thoughts secret.  Later, he becomes caught up, through his friendship with the Nizam al Mulk, the Vizir in Isfahan (allegedly a schoolfellow), and through his love affair with a woman of the harem, in high politics - but is never a willing participant. Always, he focuses on his studies, and as a respite, he writes verses (rubaiiyaat) in a secret book - secret because he was writing in a lowly, unesteemed form, and touched on matters, such as alcohol and sexual love, which would create strife with the militant mullahs).  At the same time, the Assassins, led by a man who had once been his friend, threaten the Empire and expound the Ismaili Shiite heresy in a virulent form.

After many twists and turns, he retires from public life, but his book is stolen.  He dies in honour, and rose petals bestrew his grave.  In the second part of the novel, an American tracks down the book, through the political turmoil of turn of the century Persia, has a passionate love affair with the Shah's granddaughter, Princess Shireen, in a clear echo of the first part.  Eventually, after an abortive visit to Samarkand to find the city Khayyam knew, he returns to Europe and thence to the United States.  He travels to New York in April 1912 (hint), and loses both the precious manuscript and his princess.

This is a fine novel, not passionate but dealing with things of passion, and written with a very Eastern restraint - "Why should one be afraid? After death, there is either nothing or forgiveness".  It deals of heroism and loss, and of the tension between action and meditation.  I enjoyed it a great deal. And I cannot leave it without a quatrain of Khayyam's, translated by Edward FitzGerald:

"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"

An interesting question is posed by the book's title: Samarkand was a great city in Khayyam's time, and would be again under Timur - but it is not the scene of much of the novel.  Was it just the essence distilled in the name, of beauty, learning, and yearning remoteness?  As Flecker has it in Golden Road to Samarkand:

"Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand."

The photographs in this post are from a trip I made to Central Asia in 2003; they are of Samarkand itself, but nothing remains of the city Khayyam visited - so I have included the Kalon tower from Bokhara, 150 feet high, which is that old - spared (alone in the city) by Genghis Khan because he was so impressed with the builders' achievement.

This crown of prayer and praise

Salute the last, and everlasting day,

Joy at the uprising of this Sunne, and Sonne,

Ye whose just tears, or tribulation

Have purely washed, or burnt your drossy clay;

Behold the Highest, parting hence away,

Lightens the dark clouds, which he treads upon,

Nor doth he by ascending, show alone,

But first he, and he first enters the way.

O strong Ram which hast battered heaven for me,

Mild lamb, which with thy blood, hast marked the path;

Bright Torch, which shin'st, that I the way may see,

Oh, with thy own blood quench thy own just wrath.

And if the holy Spirit, my Muse did raise,

Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.

(John Donne, the last sonnet of La Coruna)

Harmless drudgery

I have spent an hour or two glancing through a very academic book about English dictionaries, a collection of essays entitled Words and Dictionaries by John Considine and Giovanno Iamartino.  It’s a bit of a caricature of academic texts  - one of the essays is called “A Synchronic and Diachronic Study of Food Idioms in 200 years of The Times”, which concludes – inter alia – that “the claim that idiom behaviour is erratic can be confuted”; I hope you’re wiser – I’m not.  But most of the essays, though deadly earnest and meant for specialists, have some real interest to the general word lover like myself.  To  save time and patience, I will not reference each essay separately, just give a summary title so that you can find it if you wish.

To “Finde Wordes Newe”  discusses Chaucer’s contribution to the vocabulary of modern English, concluding that while the older view of Chaucer as an almost unique fount of adaptations from Latin, French and other languages, and a creator of neologisms, too, was over-stated, he nevertheless was a very major contributor.  Even more important, in many ways, is the fact that he was widely and lastingly read, so his coinages gained currency; over 1,100 first citations testifies to his influence, and he was quick to take up and popularise others’ coinages, and extend their meanings. Many of these words are now so familiar we normally do not appreciate his inventiveness: imagination, complexion, deface, comparison and compassion are just a few examples.

The Real Richard Howlet attempts – and is gravelled for lack of matter – to write a concise account of the sixteenth century author of the Abcedarium, a Latin-English dictionary of 1552.  He sounds to be important only to specialists in the field, but I enjoyed the frankness of the would-be biographer’s first sub-heading:  1.  Howlet’s obscurity.

Another essay, Alphabet Fatigue, reassures us that lexicographers are only human – most early dictionaries have proportionally more entries in the early letters than the later, as authors became bored, tired, or pressed to meet their deadlines!  And someone has actually measured this: the 1955 OED provides a benchmark, and its mid-point is “machinable”, and the New Penguin of 2004 has “Lycra” - this seems about normal for modern dictionaries.  Johnson, however, had his midpoint at “landmark”, and others in the C17th are so unbalanced as to have midpoints like “insult” and even “humiliate”.  I find this picture of declining energy or will reprehensible but entirely charming.

Probably the best essay in the book, and the most accessible to the lay reader, is Reporting Eighteenth Century Vocabulary in the OED, which argues convincingly that the original OED, magnificent endeavour though it was, is inevitably full of invisible judgements about language which can easily but erroneously be taken as representing scholarly truth.  The two most obvious are the reliance on literary sources and the very significant under-representation of the C18th.  The first of these is easily explicable in terms of both the high canonic view of literature amongst the Victorians, but also the lack of electronic searches and concordances – inevitably, they relied heavily on Shakespeare, the Bible, and a range of well known literary sources.  But the second omission is surprising, particularly in the light of Murray’s desire to have at least one quotation a century for each word; the essay’s author, Charlotte Brewer, puts this down mainly to the disdain in which C18th literature was held in the C19th, a view she illustrates with a quotation from Swinburne (1886): “a time when the very notion of poetry .. had totally died and decayed”.  Knowledge of this bias, and the availability of online searching, means that the current e-revision of the great work is correcting this and other imbalances – Blake had but 108 quotations in the first OED, but in OED3 (which is work in progress) there are 56 from M – philandering alone.

Finally, there is an essay about The Great Un-Crisis, when the huge scale of words beginning in "un-" caused great friction between the editors of the OED and the OUP, which became very worried about cost and time.  It was a serious and prolonged dispute, and while it was eventually resolved, it is interesting to see how un-academic issues threatened the completion of the Dictionary on historical principles for several months or even years.  It was definitely not an uncrisis!

Walking Round London 5

A half-day's leave last week, and a nine mile walk in the sunshine from Finsbury Park to West Ham - leaving North London, and entering Docklands, with the smell of the Thames ever nearer.

I started at Manor House, and after a short walk through the park, joined the New River, which I followed on a great loop for over a mile, ending up passing the two reservoirs which the river (really a carefully engineered canal) has supplied since 1613, and finishing by The Castle.  The Castle is an extraordinarily fanciful building, now a climbing centre, but originally a water company pump house.

Only five miles from central London, and you can see the space and the greenery that the New River and the reservoirs generate.  The river itself is clean as far as the water goes, but there's quite a lot of rubbish - the flow is very steady, it only drops 2 inches every mile, and there are frequent run-offs for excess water.  So there's little flushing action (a metaphor that become relevant later), and the steep banks put off bird life.  So this seems a pleasant artery, but it's a little neglected by even those nearby, I suspect. 

Above, The Castle with a heron on guard, and below, the brass insignia of the original owner of this architectural fantasy.  They were proud of public works in those days, although many of the public works were private.

Through Clissold Park into Stoke Newington, less than four miles from Charing Cross, the closest this walk gets.  The High Street is notable for its Defoe pub, as the author of Robinson Crusoe took refuge here (maybe, I think, because he was a Dissenter of some sort, and was excluded, either legally or socially, from London itself).  Robinson Crusoe is based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, but lacks any kind of verisimilitude, though it's a jolly good yarn for pre-teenage and teenage boys.  There is an amusing and informative essay about this (Why the "Single Print of a Foot"?) in John Sutherland's Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, which I thoroughly recommend to all interested in nineteenth century English literature - short essays about mistakes, difficulties and irrelevancies in literature, which will enlighten and entertain you, and make you realise that you don't read the texts as closely as you think you do! (As a reward for reading about Defoe, you can read the next essay, and find out where Fanny Hill kept her contraceptives - essential literary knowledge.)

On into the cemetery in Stoke Newington, a slightly wild area of trees, graves and sun, featuring the founder of the Salvation Army, "General" Booth, and Issac Watts (When I survey the Wondrous Cross), and many others.  Note how confident they were of Booth's destination after death!

Leaving Stoke Newington, I passed a mosque converted from a row of Edwardian terraced houses, then headed through Springfield Park, being used for filming, with the odd effect that a First World War army officer and his lady were reading The Times of 2007 surrounded by children and mothers playing.  Then out into Walthamstow Marshes, and a long stretch of wide greenery, built up on the western side, but expansive across march and meadow right across the Lea valley. 

A couple of miles of this, then into the world of the urban canal, with warehouses and locks - at Old Ford Locks, where I swung east, round the corner of the Olympic Park (nothing there yet, but much

promise, and a lot of bright blue fence). I walked along the Greenway, a path a few feet above the scrapyards and waste of east London, conscious that I was walking on top of the world's largest sewage pipe, a monstrous cloaca leading to yet another pumping station, the Byzantine Abbey Mills, above, which did over a hundred years sterling service in clearing London of its waste. (I am indebted to Anne and Dave for the photograph, as my own were unusable - I hope they don't mind, but I couldn't ask as there is no contact point on their posting.  But there are lots of great pix, so visit if you'd like to see more of this Victorian engineering masterpiece).

I ended with a short walk to West Ham station and a tube home, right across London.  Next week, the final leg north of the Thames, as I head for Woolwich.

Growing Up

Somewhat to my surprise, and completely serendipitously, I have just read Angela Thirkell's "Growing Up" (1943); I'd read about her in Slightly Foxed, and this caught my eye on the returned shelves of the London Library.  It's a cosy novel about a group of families living remarkably comfortable and ordinary lives towards the end of the second world war.  They live in upper-middle England, in Barsetshire, of all the worn out and rather cod literary devices.

Hilary Temple, in her Slightly Foxed article (No 7, Autumn 2005), says "Her main appeal is almost certainly to women", and I'm glad she said it because I might not have dared.  I said this novel was cosy; it might be truer to say that it could smother you in its kindness, like Nannie being over-solicitous about a wounded soldier who is staying with her.  It's cloying and deferential, and happy - not to say glutinous - endings seem promised from the beginning, and are delivered in spades.

So why did I finish it?  Partly out of duty, a feeling that one owes any book this courtesy; partly because (like Thomas Hardy, who is much much better but just as impossible to take seriously as a novelist) you really do want to know how it all ends; and partly because there's a lively, mordant wit and observational acuity which keeps poking through the cottonwool and which is wonderful:

For example, the stationmaster and his wife talk about their son, a prisoner in Germany:

""It doesn't seem right, him being a prisoner", said Mr Beedle ... "Him being so fond of the country and christened after Sir Harry and all."  ... "Don't you worry, Dad", said Mrs Beedle ... "He said in his last letter that he was liking the land work fine.  It's not as if he was an officer, having to sit about and read a book all day, poor gentlemen.""

Or Nannie, hoping a young married couple will start a family soon: "After all, with a war on, there's not much else to do, madam".

Or: "By an oversight [the railway company] had chosen a good architect to [repair its staff cottages]".

Or this exchange about early flowers - and what price global warming? - in January:  ""And a primrose" said Leslie in disgust .. "And catkins", said Lydia with equal scorn. "Well they'll find what time of year it really is before long.""

This novel is a period piece with a vengeance, and I gather there are lots of them; but interesting as the experience was, I don't think I shall be reading them!

Balzac: Sarrasine and the Sahara

Not very long ago, Harriet Devine reviewed a short story by Balzac, Sarrasine.  It was a stimulating piece, although it admitted to initial doubts as to whether she'd liked it or not.  Being a more professional reader than me, she resolved this doubt by reading it again!

I was inspired to read it too, partly because I haven't read any Balzac since a schoolboy infatuation and I hadn't realised that he ever wrote anything shorter than a four hundred pager.  So I bought this, which includes A Passion in the Desert, which is even briefer - the two stories total about 60 pages.  I was not taken with them, but somehow felt their intensity.  They both, to revert to an earlier discussion, suffer from what seem to me to be wooden translations - although they are so formal, and the dialogue so stilted, that I suspect there is a real reflection of the original.  They both take the form of a story narrated at some distance from the events - in Sarrasine by an onlooker whose involvement we never really understand, and in A Passion in the Desert by the only (human) protagonist, but many years later.  This artificiality creates tensions and dramas, which Harriet has caught well in her piece, but which means there is little fire in the stories. But there is a density and a dark ambiguity about them which is very thought provoking.

Balzac always makes me think of the Trollope loving General Liddament in Powell's The Soldier's Art: Liddament asks Jenkins if he likes Trollope; he says he's never found him easy to read and gives nervous reasons "..."Rubbish" said General Liddament.  He sounded very angry indeed.  All good humour brought about by the defeat of the Blue Force had been dissipated by a thoughtless expression of literary prejudice on my part ...  Possibly I should be put under arrest for holding such mutinous views."  The General asks who Jenkins does like, and he, after a pause for thought, essays Balzac.  "..."Balzac!"  General Liddament roared the name.  It was impossible to know whether Balzac had been a very good answer or a very bad one.  Nothing was left to be considered between." And we never know, because the conversation veers away, and is then interrupted by a renewed attack on the their headquarters.

Quotidian

A new list in the right hand column from today, Quotidian, a rough pun on quotation and daily, in which I plan to put a word or quotation of the day (or such other period as I wish!) - things which are fun but which don't deserve a full post.

Today's, the first, is from John Buchan's The Free Fishers, which I have just finished.  It's a romantic Scottish adventure which is a bit weak in the plot, certainy not the equal of the Hannay books by the same author, though fun enough in its way.  But there are lots of great Scots words, of which this is one.  Translation, anyone?

Ondaatje: Divisadero

A new novel by Michael Ondaatje is a real event, and Divisadero will be published in Britain next month (17 September), having already appeared in North America.  Ondaatje is most famous for The English Patient, made into a memorable film, and I personally greatly enjoyed In the Skin of a Lion, a rawer, earlier work of considerable drama.

The action of Divisadero starts with a rather unusual household in California in the 1970s, though it feels rougher, more primitive than that, with four people living together in rural isolation - a father, his daughter, and two other children adopted in different circumstances: Claire is raised as Anna's twin sister, although she is not, and Coop has a somewhat separate existence as a farmhand and general help.  Their rather odd life is destroyed by a shocking incident which is at the same time entirely foreseeable, and they go their separate ways.  Although a cataclysm in their small lives, it is "in retrospect something very small, something that might occur within just a square inch or two of a Brueghel". To give you some idea of what he means, Pieter van Brueghel the Younger's "Flemish Proverbs" (courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library) appears at the end of this post.

I have a copy of the book from the US, rather charmingly with pages which are rough edged, as if cut manually, giving the book a very physical existence, which is not inappropriate. Divisadero plots the courses of the four protagonists' separate lives and how they think about each other, and moves between California, Nevada, and rural France.  Ondaatje's writing is precise, subtle, and moving, although there are hard scenes here and there, and an economy of phrase which can beguile you into lazy reading.  The great George Steiner used to say that once you can read, you need to be taught to read, and this book is a prime example.  There is great depth, a lot of information and a lot of ideas are trailed, but you have to concentrate and you have be alert to changes of voice.  It could seem empty, but is really chock full of meat.

The realtionship between man and nature is important in several passages of the book, and he has this wonderful line: "The forest, Rafael says, always so full of revival and farewell".  The farewells in this book are not graceful - they are sudden, often unmediated and single minded, often involuntary - but one of things Ondaatje seems to be saying is that you never succeed in saying farewell.

It is beautifully written, and in parts it is even beautiful.  There were paragraphs, pages, whole sections that I was entranced by, and which spoke to me clearly and almost lovingly, even when the loss of love was their message.  But there are great dislocations at the heart of this book, between lovers, between others who should love each other, and between different places at the same time and different times in the same place.  I am not absolutely sure that he he has brought off the cohesion and synthesis he was presumably aiming at, but he has certainly brought off something well worth reading, and this is a book which will make you think long and hard about who you are.

Ancient trees

Fossilised trees -that is, trees which are now stone - are not uncommon; I remember looking at some in Edinburgh very recently.  And there are well preserved forests, mainly stumps and fallen trees, several thousands of years old in places like Rannoch Moor, preserved by the anoxic peat.  And, of course, we burn ancient trees all the time in the form of lignite or coal.

But now comes news of ancient trees perhaps 8 million years old in Hungary, which are still wood, and still brown.  They are swamp cypresses, some of them 10 feet in diameter and 20 feet high, discovered in a lignite mine, but protected by sand until now.  They will have interesting things to tell us about forests of the period, and the climate, and probably too about small insects which may be in the wood.  The link at the beginning of this paragraph has more, and a short film of these amazing relicts.

Bath

Yesterday's post was about Jane Austen in Bath - but the city is so beautiful (stand fast the local authorities' ham-fisted attempts to modernise the area by the station, and the litter field in front of the Royal Crescent) that I need to say more.  Jane Austen's visits and novels are confined to the narrow chronological compass of the 1790s and 1800s, and the books give little hint of the rest of Bath - the Abbey is hardly mentioned, and the Roman glories of the town were unknown.  But I visited the Roman Baths, and very fine they are - and here is the Abbey reflected in the largest Roman pool; that white worm is the flagpost on the tower!

The Royal Crescent was crowded and littered, so I visited the Circus instead.  It's a complete circle, which must create interesting room shapes, and the pillars are arranged in tiers, rather than rising the whole height of the building as they do in the Crescent.  There are magnificant plane trees in a group in the middle.  The order is an adapted Doric (curious word that, meaning vulgar or untutored even in Greece, and used to describe Quiggin's north counrtry accent in A Question of Upbringing, yet full of sturdy proportion and even sometimes elegant in architecture, though without the grace of the Ionic or the glory of the Corinthinian).  This gives the architect a whole range of small decorative panels in the frieze immediately above the architrave (what there is of it here), called metopes - the spaces between the triglyphs you can see below.

On the left is an anchor, a suitable maritime ornament for the period, when the Navy was doing great things; Austen has several naval relatives, and Naval officers feature very substantially in both Persuasion and Mansfield Park - Captain Wentworth and Admiral Croft, and Fanny's brother William.  On the right are an Aladdin's lamp, a club crossed with fasces, and a stylised flower.

Decoration of a different type on the west front of the Abbey, where the ladders up to heaven on either side have stuck in my memory ever since my first visit almost 40 years ago.  These figures are about life size (assuming angels are roughly the same size as us!), and the ones climbing up are are calm and measured - but the ones being hurled down are plummeting violently to an horrible end - Hell, presumably. 

In the Roman baths, I focused on small details - the underfloor heating, or hypocasut, the piles of coins thrown into the sacred spring by the credulous, both warm red colours in contrast to the dominant pale honey of the Bath oolite.

This little chap is a thunderbolt.  I didn't know what one looked like, so I was glad to see it; it seems to be breaking free of the metal clasp holding it in place, and may hurl itself furiously outwards to punish someone who has annoyed the gods at any moment.  "Take it carefully, O presumptuous Little One, for it is hot to the touch!"

And back outside, and back to Regency Bath, a fine view of Pulteney Bridge, built in the 1770s across the Avon, and very unusual in having shops right across on both sides - like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.  The centre of Bath is to the left, and Laura Place down to the right.  Altogether, it's a lovely city, which has kept more of its soul than Cheltenham or Brighton, the other regency cities of southern England, and is surrounded by fine countryside still.

Persuasion

After a particularly unpleasant day at the dentist recently, I wanted comfort reading - but something of very high quality.  What could be better than Persuasion, particularly appropriate as I was just about to visit Bath.  I spent a couple of hours there, just walking round many of the main areas mentioned in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, in pleasant evening sunshine.  While I'm not someone who gets a big buzz out of seeing the desk on which a famous book was written, or the sterile remains of the room the author used to read in, I do find it interesting sometimes to look at the locale of the fiction.  There are no great topographical puzzles to solve here (as there are, for example, in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway) but there is pleasure in turning left from my hotel to Lady Russell's lodgings in River's Street (with no apostrophe in the book, but see picture below), right and go down Gay Street, where the Crofts lodged, or across the river by Pulteney Bridge to Laura Place, where Jane Austen herself lived for a while.  And Milsom Street is still the main shopping street in the Georgian area, with a lot of the same feel to it as two centuries ago.

I had not always appreciated her skill in such matters; Mrs Smith lives in Westgate Buildings, down at the bottom of the town near the Abbey and the Theatre, because she is not well off and these are unfashionable areas for smart people - all that is clear enough; but Sir Walter chooses Camden Place, already known as a smart address, but apparently one where speculation had outrun practical sense, and some of the extensive plans were unbuilt, and some collapsed - the parallels with the vain baronet's empty glory are precise and delightful.

Persuasion is not my favourite Austen novel, but it is exceedingly fine; in The Janeites (in Debits and Credits), a Kipling character says it is the best: "There was one called Persuasion, first; an’ the rest in a bunch, except another about some Abbey or other—last by three lengths".  The general modern view would probably give the palm to Pride and Prejudice, while agreeing that Northanger Abbey was the weakest of the big six.  Persuasion is wonderful in many ways, but the ending betrays her unease; a better solution might have been found had she strength and time, and the current ending is already a rewrite of the original final chapter.  But there is still much unnecessary stress on the delay in telling everyone of Mr Elliot's iniquity, so we guess another twist in the plot was envisaged once; and Mrs Clay's final abandonment of the Elliots does not ring true.  But what remains is magnificent, wonderful writing, sharp observation and wry humour, and some very creditable drama at Lyme as well.

One of Austen's most endearing skills is the one or two sentence encapsulation of a character, and there is a cracking example in the early pages of Persuasion: "Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and situation...he considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion" (what a sharp little definition of the man and the vice!).

Hotel reading

On a recent trip to Bath (upcoming posts on Bath itself and on reading Jane Austen while there), I stayed in a very expensive hotel which had been highly recommended in a boutique guide.  After a long walk round the town, I returned to my room to find the late evening sunshine picking out the hotel's offered reading on the fireplace. 

I am to piles of books as a moth is to a flame, so I went across and had a look.  And in this city (it feels like a city, but has no cathedral?) of gorgeous regency architecture, of the great Jane Austen, and with wondrous remains of both Roman and medieval civilisation, they offered me Hannibal Lector and Maeve Binchy.  Really!  The best written books here are almost certainly those written for children, by Pullman and Morpugo, the rest is just appalling.

By contrast, one of the lovely things about staying in a house owned by the Landmark Trust, apart from the sheer pleasure of the buildings and their locations, is the attention to detail.  In every property there is a collection of books - novels, poetry, biography and autobiography, maybe of history or science or art - that reflects the area; there are books writtten by local authors, by people visiting, books set in the region, etc.  Apart from Austen, my hotel could have offered me relevant Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Sheridan and many others.  And there is an excellent book which the bookish might like to consult when travelling, though I'm not aware if it's been reprinted since its original publication in 1977 - The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles, by Dorothy Eagle and Hilary Cornell, which allows you to look up a place and find its real and fictional literary associations.  I was given my copy by Mr Cornflower in 1977, complete with a Greek inscription I can no longer read!

Walking round London 4

Last weekend, I went off in glorious sunshine to do the fourth leg of the Capital Ring, from Hendon Central to Finsbury Park - this is not exactly what the book recommends, but it was convenient for me for transport.  It was a very warm seven miles, and contained some of the most marvellous sections I have encountered so far, and also the worst - though that was mercifully short.  I started off in Hendon Park, and then worked my way along the North Circular for about 150 yards - probably the low point of the entire circuit!  But then along the River Brent, past disused duck decoy pools, and then through the elegant spaciousness of Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Then on to East Finchley, across a small public wood and park, and out into more posh suburbia - and the first time I've ever seen branded paving stones!

Then the real joy of the day began, with a whole succession of wonderful places, many of them probably only locally known.  First, into Highgate Wood, with its very smart gates (below) and then into the adjoining Queen's Wood, just north of Highgate station - a walk of over a mile in the two woods.  Highgate Woods boasts a working water fountain, with taps for men, and different height troughs for horses and dogs, complete with an unreadable quotation from Coleridge's Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath, not really one of his master works.  These are both very fine woods, well kept but with a natural feel to them, and both justly famous for their spring flowers, though these of course were long gone in early August.  But the sun through the trees was reward enough, and I admired the wonderful patterns of light and dark, of brilliant almost translucent green leaves with dark moody masses of trunk or felled wood.  Below the gate is a close up of beech bark: a fine delicate texture compared with many British trees.

Out of the woods at Highgate, and a quick view down (south)the A1 into London.  It was meant to be in a tunnel here, but it collapsed during construction, and was eventually bridged by the graceful and eponymous Archway.

Quickly off the road again, onto a two mile or more stretch of abandoned railway, now a path and nature reserve.  It was originally part of a line from Finsbury Park to Edgeware, and conversion to be a branch of the Northern Line was halted by the Second World War.  The line closed in 1954, and since then, the trees have grown high - and it's a mature, completely hidden ribbon of nature reserve across a swathe of north London  - you might live two streets from it and not know.  The people below are at Stroud Green station near Crouch End, but are, I trust, not waiting for a train.

Bursting out of the railway path into Finsbury Park, I was gratified to find myself only 15 miles from Woolwich - where I stop going east and turn homewards (indirectly) again, and a satisfying 28 miles from my starting point in Richmond.

I went home from Manor House tube; these smart eaves opposite Finsbury Park explain why architects say you should walk "looking upwards".

Go

I have just read The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa; it's full of interest, a two person first person narration (in alternate short chapters, which takes a bit of getting used to at first) which brings together a Chinese (Manchurian) girl and a Japanese soldier.  What brings them together is the game Go, a Japanese (originally Chinese) game of containment, occupation and strategy, which mirrors the political themes of the book exquisitely.  The cultural distance one inevitably feels reading books of this kind is increased by the author who is Chinese, but wrote in French, as she now lives in Paris.  Did someone mention translation?

Shan Sa has written an exhilarating novel which I would thoroughly recommend; it has a vigorous action background, and a number of important but not distracting sub-plots.  The male lead - he's not a traditional hero at all, though far from contemptible - is in a prison made of his honour and his love for Japan and the Emperor; his female counterpart is similarly trapped, but through family obligations, the limited role of women, and the alienation created by a foreign upbringing.  They are two moths dancing round a flame, and the novel explores their need for each other and the difficulties which hinder them coming together.  It's a tragic and moving book, which I greatly enjoyed.

The other book about Go I know is Yasunari Kawabata's brilliant Master of Go. This is a very different book; The Girl Who Played Go is at heart an emotionally intense action novel written by a Chinese; Master of Go is a finely written, taut meditation on the nature of greatness and failure by a Japanese.  You don't need to understand Go to read either, though a basic grasp would be helpful for Master of Go.  An easy introduction is available from the British Go Association.

Kawabata's is a work worthy of a Nobel prize winner (not always a recommendation, I agree).  The old man, the Master, is Shusai.  He is reserved, traditional, courteous - and dying.  And the young tiger Otake wants his crown - and while he observes the etiquette, he is impatient, hungry, ebullient.  Their struggle is the struggle between every generation and the next, and between one way of life and another.  The short novel is not really a novel, it is a shosetsu, a rather wider term, and is based on the real events of the great match of 1938, which seems to have held Japan's attention as Fischer-Spassky held the world in my schooldays.  At that match, Kawabata was a journalist, so this is both a chronicle and a fiction.  After the disaster of 1945, Kawabata declared that henceforth he would only write elegies - and that is what he has done here.  Master of Go was published in 1954; it is elegiac, elegant, and very fine.

Lindsay's Canon

Some of you will have noticed a new list, a little way down on the right hand side, called Lindsay's Canon.  I have always been attracted by the idea of a canon of literature, an unfashionable one now.  Simply, the idea of the canon is that there are some essential books, which we all need to know to be part of the culture.  Clearly, this is dynamic - the classics have declined and non-European literature has become more essential - and also personal, but there clearly was a time, probably up to the early twentieth century, when cultured people had a very large body of reading in common, reinforcing its value and richness.  The timing of Eliot's Waste Land in 1922, a cry of despair for western culture, is no accident.

But, by definition, a canon is exclusive - and in the sixties, accusations that it was populated by dead white European males to the exclusion of women, blacks, and non-Christians to name just a few, gained ground.  I was greatly influenced in the opposite direction by reading Loose Canons, an exploration of these themes by a prominent black American scholar, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and by the irrepressible Howard Bloom's The Western Canon.  They argue, in very different ways, that there is such a thing as good literature, and we should welcome it wherever we find it, even accepting dead white Europen males - but also of course, many others.

My list, Lindsay's Canon, is a light hearted attempt to define a personal canon, and I've done it by choosing eight authors (as in Desert Island Discs!) that I would find it hard to be without.  I've excluded some wonderful and much loved work, and I don't pretend these are the eight greatest books ever, or even the best that I've read.  I'm just saying that if my library had to be reduced to eight books today, these are the ones I would keep - I think.  Maybe I'll do eight without a single dead white European male one day as well.

• Homer:  for me, irresistible, and the only classical author I still read regularly.  Although I think the Iliad is the greater work, I've chosen the Odyssey because of its greater variety, and the number of wonderful stories contained within it;
• Borges: such a master of language and thought, and tiny jewel like works which contain the world.  I couldn't decide which volume was my favourite, so I have cheated and chosen his collected stories, Fictions;
• Le Carre: I love this man's writing, and rate Little Drummer Girl as one of the best spy thrillers ever written, but it's edged out here by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, possibly the first spy story to be a respectable novel in it's own right;
• Donne: another 'collected', this time his poems, although the sermons (especially Death's Duel) also have a claim.  My favourite poems are the seven linked sonnets of La Corona, which start "Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise";
• Austen: for me, the greatest novelist of them all.  Probably Pride and Prejudice is my favourite and the best, but I have chosen Mansfield Park because it is a very close second for me personally, and gets much less attention;
• Kipling: to my mind, the finest short story teller ever, with fantastic range and amazing empathy and passion; picking one volume was very hard, but I've chosen the late Limits and Renewals for its variety, grief, passion and comedy in different stories, and even an account of the operations of Heaven; Dayspring Mishandled is the most amazing story of love and forgery;
• Powell: I think you will know my views on Powell by now, a wonderful writer of illuminating, understated comedy; here I have picked The Military Philosophers, but I wanted the whole of Dance to the Music of Time and The Fisher King  - but I wouldn't allow myself!
• T S Eliot: I have chosen poetry, and being able to get The Waste Land and Four Quartets in together was a bonus, though it's the first I regard as essential.  I really wanted Murder in the Cathedral as well ("I am not in danger, only near to death") but I felt I couldn't have all the poetry and plays.  Here I've picked a CD with Eliot himself reading, flat and unemphatic - but utterly compelling.

Perhaps if people are interested, we could throw this idea around a bit - I bet we get a lot of different books, with a lot more women writers and non-Europeans than I have - but let's see.  Perhaps Cornflower would like to start us off with her eight books, and then tag someone else?

Verissimolitude

On a whim, and partly out of my great love for Borges (and partly because it was short!) I recently bought Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo.  It's a murder mystery - the crime is committed at an international convention on the writings of Poe - in which Borges is one of the men attempting to track down the killer, which he does by sitting and thinking.  Its full of fun, and clearly is written by a man whose love for and understanding of Borges is very great indeed, yet it's very disappointing.  It's very (overly) complex, symbolic and cabbalistic, and while the ending is satisfying (although you will know the answer, I suspect, before you are told - but not too far before), the bulk of the book is a bit hard to digest.  One of the ironies of this judgement is that the writer who is the first person narrator makes much of his own clumsiness and inability to write like Borges ... I rest my case.  What the great man had is given only to one man in a generation, and we should leave him be, and read him, not make pastische of him.  I wouldn't recommend this book either as a mystery thriller, or as Borgesiana. 

But there's always one line that's worth remembering, and in Borges &c its the narrator explaining why he has never married:

"I had always thought of a permanent domestic commitment ... as an intellectual threat.  Not that [she] would steal my soul, but she would fatally interfere with the organisation of my books".

Fast Fforde-wards to Thursday

At the recommendation of a work colleague, I have recently read my first Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair.  For those of you, like me, who are ignorant of Fforde, he apparently writes two series of books - one known as Nursery Crimes, I am told, and the other - of which this is the first - known by the name of the heroine as the Thursday Next books. 

The Eyre Affair is set in the present, but a radically different present to the one we know; the Crimean War is still being fought, Wales is an independent socialist republic, and the uniting thread of the state is love of literature.  Much crime, therefore, is centred around books, and Thursday is a literary detective, dealing with a master criminal with some supernatural powers who is intent on changing Jane Eyre in a way I ought not to reveal in case it spoils the story for you.  Some characters can - at great risk of eternal imprisonment or exclusion - slip in and out of real life and works of literature.  And time travel is possible, though occasional and hazardous, and Next's father is a rogue member of the Chronoguard.  One of their songs has the lines: 

"For I dipped into the past, far as SpecOps twelve could see   

- saw a vision of the world and all the options there could be!"

You get the idea. There are some lovely fantastic touches, and the whole book is well written and amusing, with lots of literary and historical jokes (though you don't need to be a walking library to get them or to follow the story), and a jolly good, strong plot.  An excellent book for a plane or train, rather better than that recommendation would normally suggest.

In choosing his heroine's name, Fforde must have been concious of the echo it would create from G K Chesterton's delightful story, The Man Who was Thursday, a pleasing anarchist fantasy with some lovely adventures.  Although utterly fantastic (the sub title is A Nightmare) there is no time travelling.  But I also think of the mighty Borges, who as usual does in half a dozen pages (well, eleven) what most authors can't manage in a full length novel in The Garden of Forking Paths.  At once, this is a spy story, a meditation on time, labyrinths and multiple universes, and a gloss on some aspects of Chinese thought - and it's sheer delight to read and re-read.  You can find it in the collection, Labyrinths.  Let me offer you just two sentences:

"He turned his back on me for a moment; he opened a drawer of the black and gold desk. He faced me and in his hands he held a sheet of paper that had once been crimson, but was now pink and tenuous and cross-sectioned. The fame of Ts'ui Pên as a calligrapher had been justly won. I read, uncomprehendingly and with fervor, these words written with a minute brush by a man of my blood: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths."