Books Do Furnish A Room

The masters' voices

I heard, on Radio 3 at the weekend, a snatch of T S Eliot reading from Four Quartets.  It is a slightly eerie experience listening to a great poet, particularly one from an earlier age, on record.  It could be in some way definitive (that's how the stress falls), but why should a great poet be a fine reader?  With Eliot, his greatness as a poet is as clear as his flatness as a reader.  Even in Macavity, he reads almost tonelessly, and with no changes of pace; this is deliberate, he says he wants the words to stand alone and not be coloured by the reading - but if so, why read the poetry aloud at all?  To listen to Waste Land and Four Quartets read by Eliot is a wonderful, intense experience, but its not at all the most enjoyable or even illuminating one.  That honour goes, for these poems, to Alec Guiness, in a recording I now longer possess (Paul Schofield is truly terrible).

But some poets are wonderful readers of their own work - Dylan Thomas is one, reading with such verve and passion that the words seem new minted and glistening in the light for the first time, as in The White Giant's Thigh, for example.  Another is John Betjeman, whose teddy bear voice is so suitable for his teddy bear poetry.  Summoned By Bells, his verse autobiography of childhood and youth, is particularly fine.  And finally, Seamus Heaney is a fine reader - and him I've heard live in a London theatre.

And talking of Eliot and Betjeman, do you know this passage from Summoned by Bells, when the young Betjeman at school gives a copy of his poems...

To one who, I was told, liked poetry -

The American master, Mr. Eliot.

That dear good man, with Prufrock in his head

And Sweeney waiting to be agonised,

I wonder what he thought? He never says

When now we meet, across the port and cheese.

He looks the same as then, long, lean and pale,

Still with the slow deliberating speech

And enigmatic answers. At the time

A boy called Jelly said “He thinks they’re bad” -

But he himself is still too kind to say.

Swans' down

A visual post today, of three contrasting textures.  I like the oppositions: small - large; part - whole; white - black; soft - hard; curve - lines.

Friday poems

I have been watching Harriet build up her series of pictures of women reading, which I'm really enjoying, and I thought I would shamelessly steal her idea and produce a series, too.  I'm going to produce a Friday poem - not every Friday, but often enough - as a way of sharing my passion for certain poems with the rest of the world.  Some will be well known and utterly marvellous, some will be unknown and not very good - and I hope there will be a few you don't know but which you will regret intensely not having known.  Sometimes, I'll have to excerpt, but mainly I'll try and use whole poems.

Today, I'm starting with e e cummings' maggy and milly and molly and may.  I didn't want to like cummings, with his silly little letters and his preciousness, but some wonderful phrases enslaved me - such as i have seen death's clever enormous voice in a fragility of poppies.  I love this poem too - I think the beach is something different for all of us, and there is always something to find there - a foreign bottle, a piece of twisted wood, or even a you or a me.  And what would you give to have written "as large as alone"?

maggy and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

its always ourselves we find in the sea.

Bushmen

I have just read three books about Bushmen (or, as anthropologists tend to call them, the San people), the inhabitants - possibly even the original inhabitants - of large swathes of southern Africa, now almost entirely restricted to parts of Namibia, South Africa and Botswana.  The three books are very different, and their differences help me understand the issues they deal with - and also stress how little we know about some things on which we have been pronouncing with certainty for 200 years.  They are Laurens van der Post's 1958 classic, The Lost World of the Kalahari; Sandy Gall's The Bushmen of Southern Africa; and an academic work by R J Gordon, called The Bushman Myth (1992).  I enjoyed the van der Post for its writing, its enthusiasm, and its pioneering joy.  And Sandy Gall's book, though very derivative, is concerned, humane, and reasonably balanced.  But the Gordon, though no doubt excellent in every way, is sometimes dense to the point of unreadability - why do some academics persist in writing as if putting people off, making the plain idea impenetrable, was a badge of honour?

The van der Post is the most famous, the first of his extensive writings on the Bushmen, and justly iconic. It's finely written, in a style which is now a bit dated, but not aggressively so, and it's full of warmth and sympathy for the Bushmen.  Sadly, it's also credulous and mystical, which I personally find off-putting: the objectively true tales of these people are staggering enough - managing to live off water hidden deep in the desert and sucked to the surface through grass stems, hunts in which they run down antelopes such as the mighty eland, their most revered prey - without stories of cameras jamming at the Tsodilo Hills because the spirits were angry.   But he succeeded in inspiring a whole host of other people to care about the Bushman's terrible plight, and occasionally something - never enough - has been done.

Both Gall and Gordon describe that plight forcefully, but Gall, though purely a personal reminiscence and secondary account of history, is readable and straightforward, whereas the Gordon is jolly hard going.  Both describe the way in which the Bushmen were pushed away from the Cape by Dutch and then British settlers, and then effectively hunted and enslaved by Germans in Namibia and Boers in South Africa; nor was the violence white on black, as the Bushmen have been victimised by the Zulu in the past and the Tswana in more modern times.  They have been regarded as animals - less than animals, because the settlers often had a semi-religious regard for game animals - and as thieves and worthless layabouts.  Efforts to help have often been obstructed by governments - even the highly regarded Botswana government has an extremely poor record - and have sometimes been misplaced (turn hunters into settlers) or foolishly idealistic.  But there have been brave men and women prepared to fight for them, and in some areas, there are signs of modest progress.  For example, the South African government has given them land rights (an example which the other two countries have yet to follow, I understand), and murder and rape are no longer regarded as trivial because they involve Bushmen as victims, an attitude which persisted in some areas well into modern times.

They are a noble people, the indigenous inhabitants of much of sub-Saharan Africa (some of their languages have close relatives in East Africa), and they live in and on the desert.  They have gods, arts and the dance, and they seem to have loose knit social structures which are effective at cooperation but which do not rely on a chief.  They are brave and effective hunters, but until they were forced off their lands by the Dutch settlers, no military history.

The pictures on this post are of the eland, one of the largest animals dwelling in the desert, and the remarkable rock paintings of Tsodilo, isolated hills in the far west of Botswana near the Namibian border.

Library Book

I recently bought, from the London Library, a small book by Tony McIntyre, one of the trustees, simply called Library Book.  It's about the architecture and history of the London Library, and it's a little gem.  If you know the Library, it's an added layer of interest and pleasure in what is clearly a magnificent but slightly eccentric institution; if you don't, it's still full of both architectural and bibliophilic anecdotes.

The library is a million volumes strong, almost all of which can be borrowed and taken home - and unless another members requests one of your books, they are very generous about loan times.  The present institution, a veritable architectural palimpsest in the corner of St James' Square, has grown steadily since it was founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841.  Past Presidents have included Carlyle himself, Tennyson, H A L Fisher, and Lord Clark; the current incumbent is Tom Stoppard.  The library is very old-fashioned in some ways - comfortable reading room, plumbing which has a heavy vitreous quality which exhorts you to remember the great days of Empire, cast iron book stacks, and a classification system which owes nothing to Mr Dewey.  But the collection grows steadily - 8,000 volumes are added every year - and the catalogue is computerised and efficient.  The Library throws nothing away, which means they often have books you cannot find anywhere else, but also that an aimless bummel along the stacks can lead to wonderful serendipities.

McIntyre's anecdotes include Arthur Ransome - yes, he of Swallows and Amazons - using an angry letter from the librarian on impressive headed paper to get past intransigent officials in St Petersburg (where he was writing for the Manchester Guardian), and the redoubtable Mr Cox on the front desk, treating all comers with Cockney equality - finishing a discussion with one member after saying to an importunate member, "One moment, if you please, Miss Sitwell.."!

Writing this, another library came to mind, a fictional one from Michael Innes' Secret Vanguard, Dr Borer's Library in Mecklenberg Square, where the librarian Tufton has "a great deal of work on hand since Dr Borer died".  Only slowly do you find out that this sad event occurred in 1877, and Tufton is still editing his journals and correspondence in 1939!  The stairs are so crammed with piles of books that visitors "would have been the better for a chart"; and Tufton, on hearing of the death of a modern poet remarks "Dear, dear.  The poets are all departing from us.  Meredith gone, and that fat fellow Rossetti, and now this lad Ploss."  As Ploss himself remarks in his diary (found after his death, a vital clue), what a blessing to be led to this haven.

Good reviews of bad books

Did you see Howard Davies' comments on reviews a week or so ago?  Davies, chairman of the Man Booker judges this year, said that reviewers were often too inclined to praise works by established authors, and not open enough to new writing.  That created a bit of a furore, but I have some sympathy: it's less common than it ought to be to read a review which is critical of a living great (not necessarily pans it, just says, not his greatest).  Most authors are human, after all, and the standard is bound to go up and down a bit!  To give (some of) his exact words:

“There appear to be some novels where people leave their critical faculties at home. They decide ‘so and so is a great novelist’ or ‘an up-and-coming novelist’, and give them the reverential treatment,” he said.

Recalling reviews for Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, he said: “Jeanette Winterson’s book is an odd book, unlike anything she’s written before and, in my view, doesn’t come off. Yet it was treated with absolute kid gloves by pretty well everybody.”

Too many critics, he said, shied away from real criticism. “The only way you can detect that the reviewer doesn’t like the book is when they spend the whole time simply describing the plot. They’re not brave enough to say, ‘It doesn’t work’. [They] are tolerant of untidy novels. They don’t care whether they’re readable or not.”

I make no comment on the Winterson, which I know nothing about.  But my attention was caught by this, from Sandra Parsons in The Times, under the heading Wise Words:

"The reason I am never going to read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year but didn’t win) is because his previous novel Saturday received rave reviews when it was in fact mediocre. The sense of betrayal when you buy a book because of the review, only to find it dull, ill-written or unreadable, is huge. Which is why, despite never having met him, I now worship Sir Howard Davies, chairman of this year’s Man Booker, for saying what the book-buying masses have known for years: never judge a book by its review."

I've really enjoyed McEwan before - especially Enduring Love - but I so agreed with Parsons on this one;  I looked at a lot of reviews when Chesil Beach came out, and I was impressed by their tone, and predisposed to like the book - both from my familiarity with his earlier work, and also because I really like Chesil Beach itself (there, isn't that a bad reason for reading a book!).  But ten minutes in a bookshop looking through the book made me sure I would never buy it, and never read it:  I thought it grotesque and extremely unattractive.  Whether you agree with me or not is almost irrelevant, because I'm very prepared to admit that there will be people who find it sensitive and fulfilling as a novel - but the point is that I don't recall seeing a review which was critical at all (though I'm open to correction on that, I don't read them all by any means).

But, finally, it gives me an excuse for quoting the angry X Trapnel, from Books Do Furnish A Room by Anthony Powell, on reviewers:

"How one envies the rich quality of a reviewer's life. All the things to which those Fleet Street Jesuses feel superior. Their universal knowledge, exquisite taste, idyllic loves, happy married life, optimism, scholarship, knowledge of the true meaning of life, freedom from sexual temptation, simplicity of heart, sympathy for the masses, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity - particularly the last, in welcoming with open arms every phoney who appears on the horizon. It's not surprising that in the eyes of most reviewers a mere writer's experiences seem so often trivial, sordid, lacking in meaning."

Wow!  If in any doubt, of course, you can rely on a small selection of carefully written, honest blogs - even if we are all a little idiosyncrastic (or ignorant) at times!  Happy reading!

Eco of greatness

I have been browsing Umberto Eco's on literature (the lower case letters are deliberate, as this is how it appears on the cover).  This is a collection of incidental writings, some very short, some longer, on a whole variety of subjects.  The common theme, he says in his introduction,is that "they are concerned with the problem of literature". This is not a formulation I find sympathetic - I do not think there is such a thing - but I have so enjoyed Eco's novels, particularly The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, and some of his critical writings, including the auto-reflective Reflections on "The Name of the Rose", that I pushed on regardless.

The essays are so different, both in quality, weight and content, that I shall read them over a long period, just noting one or two here if I feel moved.  The first is On Some Functions of Literature, which is a title to fall short of.  And although my respect for Eco is unbounded, I feel several of these essays do fall short, that they are unanchored, that they might have been wonderful essays or lectures in a particular context, but seem weaker standing naked in a book.  For example, I found this first essay interesting, but it didn't begin to live up to the title: indeed, he admits as much, ending with "... one of the principal functions of literature lies in ... lessons about fate and death.  Perhaps there are others, but for the moment none springs to mind" !

On Some Functions of Literature is more a discussion about how widely we can interpret a text; Eco (like every other reader) is interested in two things: how wide an interpretation is permissible or valuable - and how much of the detail in or implicit in the text is useful or relevant.  I have a fairly narrow view on the first, and rather a wide one on the second, and I think (though it is not easy to be sure) that I take the opposite view to Eco in both cases!  He gives us some wonderful examples - summed up in this paragraph:

"Literary works encourage freedom of interpretation, because they offer us a discourse that has many layers of reading and place before us the ambiguities of language and of real life.  But in order to play this game, which allows every generation to read literary works in a different way, we must be moved by a profound respect for the intention of the text."

So you can read Shakespeare as anti-colonial, or anti-Fascist, or analytically psychological - but you cannot say that Hamlet marries Ophelia.  So you can worry about some detail which the author makes the crux of the story - like the position of the letter rack in Poe's Purloined Letter, but you can't build theses on things which the author clearly regards as irrelevant - like the date on which d'Artagnan joins the other three musketeers.  Personally, I have always been fascinated by the minutiae of novels and stories - so I read with interest Sutherland's essays, such as who betrays Elizabeth Bennet?  How do the Cratchits cook Scrooge's turkey? What sex is Lady Bertram's pug?  Why are there no public toilets in Casterbridge? But I fear that Eco would regard this as all rather irrelevant!  But we share a horror of novels being rewritten so that Anna Karenina does not commit suicide - it might be fun, but it's not beautiful, it's not true, and it's not the text.  He quotes Victor Hugo tellingly:

"Was it possible for Napoleon to win at Waterloo?  We reply no.  Why?  Because of Wellington?  Because of Blucher?  No.  Because of God."

Michael Gilbert

I read crime fiction as my default escape, or when I am just too tired or stupid to cope with meatier fare.  But I try and stay within the bounds of good, intelligent writing - a mere page turner without style or sense just annoys me and cannot hold my attention.  A writer my mother introduced me to, on the edges of crime fiction, is Michael Gilbert.  I understand he was a solicitor who wrote his books on the train to and from work each day.  His output was prodigious, and the quality therefore can be a bit variable - but his mastery of a simple, compelling narrative is always evident.  He eschews sex completely, and his violence is very restrained by today's standards; his books are thrillers, often with a significant legal element, and often interested in the relations between men and women who want different things. 

He wrote at a time - from 1947 until the late 1990s - when the order of things was changing fast. As a result, he can sometimes seem a little old-fashioned, but he understands how the world was moving, and some of his stories deal with very modern issues - organised, violent crime; corruption in high places; and the psychologically perverted criminal.  He does not write about just one detective or other central figure, though several characters recur.  Much of his huge output is out of print (though I can't believe that will remain the case for long) but is readily and cheaply available in secondhand shops and on sites like Abebooks.  Let me recommend you a few (though I've had to leave out a number of real favourites):

• Smallbone Deceased  (1950)  A classic murder yarn in a legal setting; some wry observation and a good twist - and some wonderful post-war detail.
• Young Petrella  (1988)  Short stories about the early career of a very unusual detective constable.  Great fun.
• Night of the Twelfth  (1976)  A dark, clever book, in which two stories get mixed up -but it's hard to know which is which.
• Long Journey Home  (1985)  A casual decision not to re-join a plane leads to a fascinating story of Italy, industrial espionage and a brutal denouement in England.  A commercial story with crime at its heart.
• Close Quarters and Black Seraphim (1947, 1983) Two fine crime novels from the heart of the great tradition, set in an ecclesiatical setting, one with a powerful clerical cast, one with a real puzzle at its centre.
• Mr Calder and Mr Behrens  (1982) More short stories, this time about two unusually qualified special agents.  Urbane, cultured, and quite deadly.  The show is occasionally stolen by Rasselas, a Persian deerhound.

Enjoy!

Chiswick House: seeing the house for the trees

I explained in a recent post that I had been round Chiswick House gardens to hear more about their planned restoration.  Some of the main features, although they may not mean a lot to people who don’t know the garden, are worth more discussion.  They illustrate very effectively the challenges and compromises which have to be faced in a project of this sort – with a complex house and garden history, limited funds, and extensive public access.

The main changes fall into five main categories – improving the views of the house, restoring the goose’s foot, reconfiguring the lawns and walks at the rear of the house, and providing good access features.  In addition, there is a certain amount of work, mainly removing or lopping trees, for health and safety reasons – which I am always a bit sceptical about, but that this is a real issue was highlighted by a major fall from a cedar of Lebanon over the summer (though there was no sign of any weakness, so it does raise the question of whether the real risks can be identified satisfactorily).

·        On this 60 acre site, there is an extensive belt of woodland, which is pretty overgrown and wild in a Wind in the Willows sense. But it’s not all in good condition, with a lot of straggly young trees not growing well, and a real lack of ground cover, brambles and spring flowers and the like, which is a real shame for insects, birds and flora.  There is also concern that rain runs off the compacted earth and is not easily absorbed by the soil and trees.  So the plan envisages some removal of trees to create space and light – there are no browsing animals such as deer in the gardens, so this doesn’t happen  naturally – and coppicing of a percentage of trees, typically hazel, on a long (20 year) cycle.  The woods will also be mulched in some areas, so the overall effect should be to lessen footfall and encourage more ecological variety.

·        There are two views of the house which the plan aims to restore – one from the western side from near the cascade, and one from the north west, from the so called Fulham oak, along an open grove between trees to the corner of the house across the north west lawn.  The first of these views is, in my view, nothing very special and I think it a shame to chop down good trees to reveal it; there are a number of fine, large specimen trees along this line, but they are to be kept – what are planned for removal are three 10-20 year old trees which will gradually obscure the view more and more over coming years.  It seems a shame to me, but they are not wonderful mature standards, and I am not inclined to chain myself to any of these!  The other view, across open glades and the lake, would be very fine but is completely obscured at present.  It can be reopened by removing some willow scrub but keeping most of the large lakeside trees intact.  This seems a real gain, and will also maintain the lake margin as a small wetland area, which if not dealt with, will dry out.

·        On the north side of the house is a feature called the patte d'oie (goose's foot), which actually pre-dates the house by some years.  Here three paths (now four, with a later addition) splay out from a central point to give distant views of architectural features at the ends of lines of dark yew hedges – an obelisk, a gateway, a small temple folly.  Here, the tarmac paths will be replaced with hogging, the yew will be trimmed to be shorter and in one case realigned to the original line, and a mass of scrubby holly will be removed.  All this seems very sensible.

·        Around the lawns, grove and paths at rear of house, there are some real improvements planned, and some changes about which I am much less convinced.  Two rows of Italian poplars, full of poor specimens and indeed gaps, will be taken out and replaced with matching specimens of the same species. The grove area will be largely cleared of trees which do not match the original plan, and the grove formally replanted with lime (not pry, sadly, but a hybrid).  This is not really my taste in garden planting, but it was Burlington’s own plan, so cannot be charged with being inauthentic.  On the lawn, the mighty cedars of Lebanon will be retained, the odd Atlantic cedar which looks quite out of place will be removed, and a number of other small and medium trees removed to give a more open effect down to the lake.  I am very happy with the Atlantic cedar’s removal – it’s an eyesore – but I would argue for a slightly more tree'd lawn than is planned.  Oddly, two terrible oaks, gaunt and damaged, near the house have been reprieved.

·        Finally, the restoration will open up walled gardens currently closed off to the public, and will provide a much improved cafe and toilets, which is important in such a heavily used and significant site; these will be built where there have been service buildings in the past, so no historic garden will be lost.

Overall, I think the scheme will represent a real improvement in the grounds, and while I have concerns over some individual trees, I look forward to someone taking decent care of the gardens for the first time in many years.

Brandy for the parson

I have been reading Richard Platt’s Smuggling in the British Isles (or, as a recall letter from the library said, "Snuggling ... "!).  It’s not a history, he says, but an informal discussion of smuggling, largely from the point of view of the smugglers and their confederates.  It’s a collection of interesting facts and anecdotes loosely thrown together without much in the way of social or cultural analysis; nor did I get the impression that his understanding of the realities of C18 and C19 life was very profound.  But it’s quite a lot of fun, and some of the material is quite entertaining.

The most obvious point is that smuggling covered a lot of contraband in addition to the traditional spirits and tobacco – tea, soap, lace, silk and salt, to pick a few items from a long list.  Much of smuggling is myth, encapsulated in Kipling’s poem:

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,

Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.

Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Five and twenty ponies, trotting through the dark –

Brandy for the parson, ‘baccy for the clerk;

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,

And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

If you see the stable door setting open wide;

If you see a tired horse lying down inside;

\if your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;

If the lining’s wet and warm – don’t you ask no more!

Five and twenty ponies, &c.

Specifically, smuggling often much more violent and bloodier than the popular image of darling ruffians always on the lookout for an opportunity to help the little man, and many of the smugglers’ caves and tunnels around the coast are nothing of the sort.  However, the overt or covert involvement of gentry and clergy in the trade seems well founded, even if books such as Russell Thorndike’s Dr Syn takes the point too far!  And some of Kipling’s details are well attested – the farmer who ‘accidentally’ leaves his stables unlocked on certain nights so his horses can be borrowed, and the espionage aspect of smuggling, especially during the Napoleonic wars.

The book is full of lovely words, too, such as dimityes, fellmonger, arrack, stinkibus ... respectively, a stout coarse cotton fabric, a man who strips the wool from the skin of a sheep, a rough spirit fermented from cane or fruit in Asia, and raw brandy spoiled by salt water (but still drunk!).

The book has its own smuggling website, which you can use to explore smuggling locations near you – obviously, they are largely around the coast and on the major rivers.  I looked up the area where I grew up, near the Hamble river in Hampshire, and found: "Hamble, just a little way to the east, was the home of a smuggling gang led by a man named Sturgess, who bought in 1783 a huge 20-gun cutter called the Favourite. His choice of base was understandable — contraband could be shipped cheaply and safely up the branching river Hamble". And one reader in particular will be glad to know that the Isle of Man, like many islands, was a great centre for smuggling:  in 1751, Gentleman’s Magazine called it the “great STOREHOUSE or MAGAZINE for the French”.

Chiswick House: Woodman, spare that tree!

There has been a great deal of anxiety and even outrage in my local area recently about plans for the restoration of the gardens around Chiswick House.  Correspondence in the Evening Standard and The Times, no less, has centred on the need to remove over 400 trees from the gardens – for a variety of reasons – and the faithfulness of the plan’s developers’ ambitions to recreate an authentic garden of the period of the house.  Chiswick House, as essentially the first Palladian building in Britain, is of national importance, and the plans for the garden are therefore receiving a lot of attention. (There’s a fine model of it in the British Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum).

A lot of issues get tangled up here: most obviously, what is sympathetic restoration, what is pragmatic for today?  Trees grow, people’s tastes develop, and the environment changes.  The owner builder of the house inherited well established gardens, which he developed as he saw fit; and he and his principal gardeners would have changed their minds as things developed, would have had to make maintenance decisions as trees grew or died, et cetera.  They would have had visitors, but would not have needed to worry about mass public use of the garden, about vehicle noise, or artificial light at night (bad for bats).  So we don’t know what the garden would have looked like if they’d still been here to supervise – we can only make intelligent guesses (and Burlington certainly changed the gardens radically at least once himself).

The second difficult issue is at which authenticity should we aim?  The current building is from 1726, but there was a Jacobean house on the site before that; and the most striking features of the garden – the lake and the patte d'oie (goose’s foot) of yew-lined paths – are not exactly contemporary.  The lake was originally a pair of formal pools, and the goose's foot predates the house.  Later still, the Victorians made alterations, and in more modern times, there has been local change here and there to accommodate car parks, cafes, and the like.  There is no one original to which we should return, even if we could.

So I was fascinated to have the chance to go round the garden last Sunday with Fiona Crumley, the recently appointed head gardener, who took a good two hours explaining the main features of the proposed work, and the rationale for it.  I left, not agreeing with everything in the plan, but certainly convinced that the restoration had been approached in a cool and careful way, with a genuine attempt to reconcile conflicting interests.  Not everyone will agree with me, and certainly not everyone agrees with the plans, but my concerns were considerably abated.

However, I think everyone will agree that the gardens urgently need some loving care and attention.  They’re worn out and in parts neglected, the woodland is overgrown and lacks ground cover, some of the trees are in poor condition or even missing from formal patterns.  And the cafe and the toilets are a disgrace.  The park is essentially a public park, for all its historic importance, squashed between the A4 and the A416, and it has suffered from that.  But even within these constraints, much could be done.  A later post will outline some of the proposals, and discuss the pros and cons.

Buzbee's bookshop

A visiting friend recently gave me Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow Lighted Bookshop, which he describes as “a memoir, a history”.  It’s an engaging wander through the world of bookshops, book salesmen, publishers, etc, set in California over the past three decades.  The subject matter is of itself interesting, and he writes very pleasantly – though it is striking that he speaks a different language to me, and I found many words and phrases which were unknown or just a bit unclear – for example, exactly what is a fern bar? (OK, thanks, I've looked it up now).

I thought the light, slightly whimsical character of the book was slightly more suited to essays rather than a full length book, and I think this would work well left on a coffee table or by a bedside, and browsed when the mood was right.  Reading it continuously, I didn’t quite feel the matter was weighty enough for the form.

But some of the chapters are delightful - on browsing, on the nature of books, and on the history of bookshops.  Others are less compelling - on the economics of publishing, on censorship, on chain stores;  I found some of his explanations and information a little surprising, not least his statement that, until the at least the 1980s, bookshops in the UK arranged their stock by publisher, so you couldn't browse by subject, and couldn't find a book if you didn't know the publisher?  News to me (with the exception of small specialist 'libraries' like Loeb Classics) - and this highlights one real issue with this book, that the author's world is almost totally defined by California and Paris, and he seems unaware of much outside.  Which doesn't matter for whimsy and book gossip, but does for more serious discussions.

A propos of nothing at all, I loved the anecdote about the customer who wanted a book called Roger the Sorcerer (you know these guys, "it's quite big and I think it's red, I saw it on that TV show last week"); turns out he wanted Roget's Thesaurus.  I wonder how he even knew he wanted it?

Norman Lewis

I came across Norman Lewis first through his travel writing; an entirely serendipitous discovery found me reading A Dragon Apparent when I was in Cambodia a couple of years ago, and I then kept coming across references to him as one of the finest of travel writers.  A Dragon Apparent is about Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia (the top picture is of the great temple at Angkor Wat); it was written in 1951, and republished by the impressive Eland.  It shows a dedicated interest in the politics and reality of the country, rather than the incidental and trivial amusements of foreigners or of travel itself, which seems to be the staple of so much 'travel writing' today.  I can honestly say that it changed my view of French colonialism, and of l’Indochine in particular – exposing the cynicism and weariness of the French governing class, while not being blinded by any automatic or thoughtless admiration for the local people.  It was a fine read, and I will read Lewis again when I travel to places he has written about – perhaps I won’t even need that excuse; his other best known travel books are on Sicily, Naples and Burma.  Golden Earth, the title of the book on Burma, is terrible indictment of the brutality and ignorance that passes for government there today.

I found out that Lewis wrote fiction as well by seeing Flight from a Dark Equator on the returns shelf at the London Library; it also appealed because, set in Colombia, it dealt with the very real difficulties of doing good in a corrupt, violent, hugely prejudiced and often unwelcoming society, something I had some sight of in Afghanistan.  The prose style of this book is quite similar to that of A Dragon Apparent – spare, straightforward, unemotional in tone, relying utterly on content.  It may be a style more suited to non-fiction, but I found it effective here too. It is not emotionally engaging, but it is clear, tense and strong.  Much action is described - though some key events happen in the cracks between chapters - but his real interest is the conflict between decency and pragmatism, and the corruption which reaches all people, not just the conventional imperialist bad guys, the US and the multinationals.  He is unsparing of the catholic church and of the indescribably blind, devious and naive Grail Williams, the evangelical missionary - with a wife who is not so blind, so biddable, or so weak as he thinks and hopes.

But the main story centres on Robert Howel, sent to Colombia by the aid organisation SUCCOUR to evaluate their efforts (futile) and bring home Liz Sayers, one of their workers who has been getting unacceptably involved in local politics, then swaying into militaty dictatorship (the second picture is of one of Noriega's headquarters in Panama City, the nearest I could get to Colombia).  They fall in love, in a slightly wooden and clockwork way, and the emotional tension this should generate never quite comes off.  And there is a parallel sub-plot of some aspiring guerrillas who aim to get the local Indians on the side of the revolution - a chilling section is the one in which American helicopter pilots enthuse over the success of their raid on a village suspected of harbouring militants: the village is completely destroyed, and over 200 people are deliberately lured out into the open by presents dropped from the air, then shot and burned indiscriminately:  "We cleared up and got out, and nobody got hurt.  It was clean and quick"; thankfully, his fellow pilot is sickened by what he has done, and by his colleague's reactions. The two strands don't always weave easily together, but for all it's faults, Flight from a Dark Equator is a fascinating read, and it's depressing how little appears to have changed in some parts of the world since this was first published in 1972.

No woman is an island

I've been disappointed with two recent acquisitions, Will and The Lying Tongue, so I was hoping to avoid a hat trick with a third, Pocketful of Names by Joe Coomer, kindly sent to me by Mark at the Book Depository.  It's not my normal reading country, and I might, in other circumstances, have put it down in the bookshop as just another evocative landscape - life is hard - but vaguely happy - and most things in life are fitting  sort of book.  And it is that sort of book in one sense, and it is definitely flawed in some ways - it's a bit too long, and it drags a little in the middle, and then rushes to catch up.  And everything is sort of fitting in the end - there are plenty of future unknowns at the end, but there are almost no loose ends, or at least none that you have been taught to care about.

But it has a certain evocative power, and the central idea - of isolation from a difficult world and difficult people on an island - is such an attractive one (yes it is, you know you've fantasised about it) that you are quickly hooked.  Hannah is an attractive central character, and the first character you meet, even before Hannah, is an absolute sympathy shoo-in.  Hannah's island is gradually invaded, in a benign but not always welcome way, and her life is both remorselessly degraded and enriched.  The setting is the fierce lobster fishing coast of Maine, where locals don't talk to visitors, "and we don't know you're staying til you're dead".  The weather, the unforgiving sea, and and the erratic but generous bounty of the sea, are familiar but well managed themes.

Pocketful of Names reminded me of two other books, the excellent but dated Captains Courageous by Kipling, with a heart rending church service, the manhood of a boy burgeoning through work and the sea, with a similar initial setting on the cod boats of the Grand Banks; and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, set in a Newfoundland town, grim but warmly human and eccentric.

Like them, it's strongly linked to the climate and landscape, though less reliant on nature or weather as tough, unsympathetic teacher.  It's a book about interactions between people, the difficulty of achieving sensible relationships, and a set of interlinked, strong threads about being an artist, being a fisherman, being whatever you are.  It has it's faults, as I've suggested above, but it's very enjoyable and very engaging.  The prose has a fine quality, simple, measured, plangent.  Coomer's dialogue in particular is excellent, both for a wonderful old man who has forgotten everything and who cannot have a conversation anymore, and for disjunction and irritation between the mutually unsympathetic.  I can't catch the quality of the dialogues and indeed the soliloquies in a single line, but the imagination is everywhere.  A building, unused for years, is brought to life, and "The doors swung open abruptly, as if they'd been holding back a sneeze for years".  And, oddly for a novelist, a Salvator Rosa moment: "All of a sudden it comes over me that I've got very little important enough to say out loud.  I hate to burden people with my thoughts".

The technique is assured too, with a double time track managed in parallel in the first part of the book without any of the conceit and self awareness it often shows, and while I think one more fierce edit would have helped, it's a very enjoyable read.

Books without roofs

I came across a fascinating article in last Saturday's FT, about a mobile library service for homeless people in south London.  It shattered quite a lot of misconceptions, and struck me as a brilliant idea.  It runs just like a conventional library, except that the books are donated or bought with donations, and the borrowers are homeless.  They read everything, apparently, from Danielle Steel to George Orwell, in English and other languages, and it seems to have provided a road back to normality for some, and a welcome stimulus and escape for others.  And they return the books.

You might like to read the FT article, and the details of Quaker Homeless Action's service are here.