Books Do Furnish A Room

Dreaming of the Islands

From the bookshelf at the lodge where we were staying on Lewis, I have been reading Iain Crichton Smith’s The Dream (one of his poems was up here last Friday). It's an account of a young married couple in Glasgow, both from the island of Raws, although they met in an art gallery, in Glasgow.  They have very different memories of their island upbringing: she is angry and bitter at her loveless rearing by a religious bigot of an aunt who reminded her every day that she was illegitimate, ungrateful, and probably bound for hell, and who stopped her gaining any pleasure or friends from her life; understandably, she fled this existence as soon as she could, and continued to be haunted by the otherness her aunt had always seen in her.  He, on the other hand, had a happy upbringing, full of love and friends, and enjoyed his childhood as some kind of elysium to which he would like to return and on which he draws continually.

He teaches Gaelic at university – language, literature, and cultural context, and one day it comes to him that he’s really wasted in Glasgow and should return to the islands, so that he can help give Gaelic a future, rather than continually living in the past, as in literature lectures and the forced ceilidhs of Glasgow exiles. She is horrified by this idea, and the book is a study of how they debate – or avoiding debating – this issue, and how they eventually resolve it.  It’s a short, powerful book, with a strong poetic feel to, both in the prose of the text and the frequent references and quotations to poetry and song.  It’s not exactly about language, but it does focus on the role of language in making a culture and making individuals – but book is much less dry and forbidding than this might suggest – in fact, it’s lively and vigorous, and I really rather enjoyed it. 

Owl and Mouse

I recently read a novel by Iain Crichton Smith, The Dream, which was a new departure (post soon) - previously I only knew his poetry.  So here is a small poem from his collection The Exiles, Iain Crichton Smith's Owl and Mouse:

The owl wafts home with a mouse in its beak.
The moon is stunningly bright in the black sky.

Such a gold stone, such a brilliant hard light.
Such large round eyes of the owl among the trees.

All seems immortal but for the dangling mouse,
an old hurst strung among the harmony

of the masterful and jewelled orchestra
which shows no waste soundlessly playing on.

Spirits on the moors

Neil Gunn is a writer I only seem to read in Scotland – originally on holiday north of Ullapool, and recently on Lewis.  This time, it was a re-reading of Second Sight, set in a Highland shooting lodge sometime in the 1930s.  There is a small party of visitors, chief among them the impressionable or sensitive Harry, and the slightly irritating and cockily rationalistic Geoffrey.  Among the stalkers are Angus and Alick, and it is their activities and perceptions which play a powerful part in our understanding of the main characters.

The action starts as Alick and Harry are returning from a day’s stalking, and Alick “sees” four men carrying a shrouded body.  His fear and strain are obvious to Harry, who manages to make him tell what he has seen, including the names of the four men who are carrying the body.  Harry tells his companions, but only in general terms, keeping to himself the knowledge  of the four men’s identities, which point to either Geoffrey or Harry himself being the corpse.  Geoffrey belittles the idea roundly and – whether you believe in second sight or not – emerges as a rather sanctimonious and irritating man.  From then on, there are two themes in the book, developing together and intertwined.

The first is the discussion of second sight, especially in the context of the decline of Scottish Gaelic culture; this is sometimes amusing, when it demonstrates the relationships – occasionally rather strained – in the shooting lodge, but also occasionally a little tedious and overdone.  The second theme is the stalking and killing of the top stag of the forest, King Brude.  This is written with tremendous force and imagination, and scenes of coming of the hill in thick fog, or Geoffrey – with the long suffering Angus - being a poor sportsman and going for the king when his stalker has led him to another stag, are very vivid.  In both cases, talk from the stalkers’ and servants world informs our understanding of what is happening elsewhere – and we learn that there is little the stalkers and Mairi, who waits at table, don’t know about their so called betters.

Eventually, after rather too much clever talk by silly people, Harry and one of the young ladies fall in love, King Brude is stalked and missed, stalked and killed in unfortunate circumstances, and the prophecy of the second sight is tested to the full .. but I won’t tell you about the outcome, as I think it would spoil what is, at least in parts, a bit of a thriller.  Gunn has a fine reputation among Scottish writers; for my taste, he can be too artificial and too discursive, but there is little doubt that his descriptive powers when unloosed on his beloved Scotland are formidable indeed.

Fishing for men

Is Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous a short novel or “just” a short story?  Well, who on earth cares, it’s a story of genius written with power and agony and emotion, yes, and humour too, which utterly transcend the clichés of the plot – rich boy lost, adopted, found again (and this time, he’s a man) – and show Kipling as an author who understood man and men, yea, even to the uttermost ends of the earth.

Harvey Cheyne is a spoilt brat, 15 years old, the much loved and neglected only son of a multi-millionaire, when he falls overboard – seasick and tobacco sick – from an Atlantic liner.  By enormous good fortune, he is picked up by one of the dories from the We’re Here, a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  The Captain, Disko Troop, refuses to believe that his father is wealthy, and is stung by an ill-advised accusation of theft.  In addition, he had previously lost one of the ship’s boys overboard, so he stays out on the Grand Banks for the next two or three months, putting Harvey to work alongside his son Dan.  In the process, Harvey grows up, learns the value of hard work and realises that other men have different, more painful values – and learns how America’s riches are created.  It’s difficult and dangerous, and Harvey is frightened sometimes, and sees men drowned – but he learns to work on the boat, he learns a little respect for the men who earn their living this way, and he becomes, in short a man.  You can sneer at this construct if you like – and it’s true Kipling believed greatly in the virtues of hard work (and this was written in 1897) – but read these 130 pages and you’ll change your mind:

Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and,since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flag-pole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the [tobacco] joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul. His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep.

This is a wonderful story at numerous levels: it’s a great adventure, with wonderful descriptions of fishing on the Grand Banks; it’s a rite of passage novel; and it’s meditation on working men’s values.  It is wonderfully made, too – all the characters are full of life and individuality, and there are a hundred single paragraph stories of life, death and everything in between.  And the  language is superb, too.

When the We’re Here gets home, Harvey sends a telegram to his father in San Diego – and all hell breaks loose.  Because Cheyne senior is a railroad king, and he orders all the railroad companies in America to get him across to the east coast in a hurry, a very big hurry.  The few pages that describe the arranging of this journey, and the journey itself, are written in a father’s sweat and a mother’s love.

When the reunion takes place, the parents see the change in Harvey, and spend some time with the fishermen and their community; Kipling understands men, and he makes it clear the Cheyne senior’s success is because he understands men too, and these are illuminating, warming pages.  But if you can read the account of Memorial Day, when they remember all those who have died in the fleet this year, without a tear, you must be colder than the grey devouring sea: “My father – my own eldest brother – two nephews – an’ my second sister’s man.  Would you care for anyone that took all these?”, as Disko’s wife says.  Here’s some Kipling - they're reading the list of the fisherman lost that year: 

"September 27th. Orvin Dollard, 30, married, drowned in dory off Eastern Point." That shot went home, for one of the widows flinched where she sat, clasping and unclasping her hands. Mrs. Cheyne, who had been listening with wide-opened eyes, threw up her head and choked. Dan's mother, a few seats to the right, saw and heard and quickly moved to her side. The reading went on. By the time they reached the January and February wrecks the shots were falling thick and fast, and the widows drew breath between their teeth.

"February 14th. Schooner Harry Randolph dismasted on the way home from Newfoundland; Asa Musie, married, 32, Main Street, City, lost overboard.

"February 23d. Schooner Gilbert Hope; went astray in dory, Robert Beavon, 29, married, native of Pubnico, Nova Scotia." But his wife was in the hall. They heard a low cry, as though a little animal had been hit. It was stifled at once, and a girl staggered out of the hall. She had been hoping against hope for months, because some who have gone adrift in dories have been miraculously picked up by deep-sea sailing-ships. Now she had her certainty, and Harvey could see the policeman on the sidewalk hailing a hack for her. "It's fifty cents to the depot" the driver began, but the policeman held up his hand - "but I'm goin' there anyway. Jump right in. Look at here, Al; you don't pull me next time my lamps ain't lit. See?"

T'ang trees

Recently, a T'ang murder graced these pages.  Now, for balance, a lovely poem by a T'ang master.  I like this, though of course I have no idea how good the translation is at catching the essential essence of the poetry.  This is Zhang Jiuling's Orchid and Orange:

Here, south of the Yangtzi, grows a red orange tree.
All winter long its leaves are green,
Not because of a warmer soil,
But because its nature is used to the cold.
Though it might serve your honourable guests,
You leave it here, far below mountain and river.
Circumstance governs destiny.
Cause and effect are an infinite cycle.
You plant your peach trees and your plums,
You forget the shade from this other tree.

T'ang murder

Robert van Gulik was a Dutch scholar of, among other things, Oriental languages, and wrote a series of fictional detective stories, starting by following Chinese models very closely, and then moving away to a more inventive and perhaps freer idiom.  So his first book of this kind, The Chinese Bell Murders, follows the original models pretty closely – so there are three stories, not one, told one after the other, with only very slight overlaps; at the end, an external view of events is offered, in this case by group of high officials in Pekin.  Gulik’s knowledge of China is clearly pretty extensive, and he is clearly deeply sympathetic to the cultured Chinese Confucian gentry class and hostile to Buddhism and Taoism.  The book is illustrated with his own illustrations, inspired by 16th century Chinese blockprints.

But the stories are straight judicial detection.  The magistrate of the town of Poo-Yang is a real character, Judge Dee (Dee Den-djieh), who lived in the seventh century AD, under the T’ang dynasty.  He achieved this position by passing a literary examination (and what could be more sensible?), and was judge and investigating officer, with a staff of sergeants and policemen.  He is new in Poo-Yang, and finds that there is one simple case left outstanding by his predecessor – which, of course, turns out not to be so simple at all.

He is a fine judge and detective, although the occasional use of strong arm tactics is not in the best classic detective story tradition – but is justified by the Chinese law that does not allow punishment until the guilty party has confessed, justifying torture and intimidation.  But it is all rather formulaic, and you need not fear for a moment any gory descriptions.  The prose is simple – it seems vaguely Chinese, but how would I know – and I found the stories very entertaining.  It is not genuine Chinese, of course, like Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine, but nor is it pastiche and parody like Ernest Bramah’s three Kai-Lung books, amusing and entertaining as they are.  I would recommend this book to any aficionado of the murder mystery – this is an unusual variety, and one you are unlikely to have encountered elsewhere.

Selfish Genius

Fern Elsdon-Baker has written The Selfish Genius (How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin’s Legacy) to challenge Dawkins’ fiercely atheistic and intolerant version of Darwin’s evolutionary theories.  I approached this book with some mixed feelings: Darwin is a hero of mine, one of the very few thinkers who have genuinely reshaped our perceptions and understanding of our world (with Newton, Einstein, Adam Smith), and an engagingly nervous and hesitant one.  Dawkins, too, I have immensely admired for books like The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene (spot the pun in the title of Elsdon-Baker’s book), but I have felt uncomfortable at the violence and exclusion of his atheism (though I too am an atheist), and I have found his interpretations of evolutionary adaptation too severe, too unlikely to be acceptable, much preferring the more measured, richer approach of Stephen Jay Gould (an even better writer and, if the Nobel judges are to be believed, a better biologist too).

So I approached this book with interest, and with mixed feelings.  On some points, I was quickly reassured – the author is not favouring any half-cocked evolution theory, and she is not trying to merge evolution and religion in any way.  She staunchly defends evolution through natural selection, and declares herself without religious belief.  So what is the book about, in that case?  Well, she wants to make it clear that Dawkins’ view of evolution is just one view, and that others – eg, that of Gould – are perfectly credible, and the existence of differences do not threaten the fundamental validity of the theory, just raise questions over its details. 

Specifically, Dawkins believes that selection takes place at the level of the gene, whereas others wonder if it might be at the group level, or even the species level;  Dawkins believes in a broadly continuous process, whereas Gould supports a view called “punctuated equilibrium”, a term which is pretty much self-explanatory; and Dawkins tends to believe that all attributes of the phenotype must have been positively selected for (including your ginger hair and the ability to wiggle your ears), whereas Gould and others allow for some to arise by chance or as a by-product of some more useful attribute.  Well, this is all good and true, but we knew it already, and you can read many other books to find it much more fully explored and generally better expressed.

She is also concerned that Dawkins' violence with language is unnecessary, gives the impression that scientists know more than we do, gives fuel to opponents of evolution like the utterly discredited creationism and intelligent design, and can also alienate those who have religious belief, but are still sensible supporters of evolution, Christian and Muslim alike (the two religions she talks about mainly).  Well, I agree with her there – I find Dawkins' ideas wonderfully stimulating and brilliantly expressed, but I increasingly recoil from his violence of view and his bullying partisanship. 

So the book serves a useful purpose, and is worth reading; an annoying omission is any form of index, which would really be useful.  But the organisation is a little odd, with discursions into the theory of knowledge, for example, and not enough on evolution itself, and the prose is a little wooden.  She tries to skewer Dawkins for crimes against the philosophy of science, which is slightly tedious, and I suspect Dawkins wouldn't care - but she does roundly rebuke him for misleading some of us, and antagonishing others. If you are at all familiar with the state of current thinking on evolution, even at a non-technical level, you will learn little and might find other texts more valuable  - Dawkins himself (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker), or any number of Gould essays (try a collection like The Flamingo's Smile) or a range of general reader books such as Steve Jones’ Almost Like A Whale (a lovely, easy, entertaining book) or The Language of the Genes.

Peculiar London

Cornflower quotes Iris Murdoch on London in the summer, and reminds me of two or three wonderful passages about London from favourite authors of mine.

First, Powell in Temporary Kings:

How unchanged remains the French view of English life - phlegmatic, sadistic aristocrats, moving coldly and silently from one atrocity to another through the fogs of le Hyde Park and les Jardins de Kensington.

Then T S Eliot in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes   

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,    

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,   

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,    

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And then, the magnificent Lugg in Margery Allingham's Tiger In The Smoke:

The fog was now at its worst, rolling up from the river dense as a featherbed.  It hung between street lamp and street lamp in blinding and abominable folds ... [whilst driving the car] Lugg manoeuvred into Park Lane and sat on the tail of a late bus for Victoria.  "I could do with with a spot of p and q in a padded cell myself.  That was Marble Arch I was 'ootin' at.  I thought she was taking her time."

By the way, the title comes from the nickname of the thick, choking fogs of coal-burning London - "a London peculiar".

Miranda

Last week's poem was about, in some senses at least, memory, but it was quite sombre.  Here is another thing altogether, a dance poem, a poem of love and laughter and foot stamping.  And, yes, of course, doom at the end.  But for the first part, the poet is back in the happiness of youth, when the girls went dancing and "chancing".  This is Hilaire Belloc's Tarantella.

 

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in - 
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.

The Scottish Innocent

You might have seen my piece on Shakespeare's Macbeth, questioning whether this was - however wonderful a play - very plausible history.  But I cannot compete with Ian Rankin, whose short story, Macbeth Was Innocent, was published in the Saturday Times recently.  It's very enjoyable, a commentary on the play and a modern crime short story based in Edinburgh all in one.  But, of course, as both Rankin and Macbeth are Scots, it would have to be "not proven" - as innocence is a quality the Scots do not feel man alone can recognise.

St Petersburg - the Hermitage (again)

And here are some more of the sights of the Hermitage in St Petersburg, one of the grand, useless rooms of which is above, gaudy and expensive, littered with pointless urns and grand and gloomy masterpieces.  But there are a lot of wonderful things elsewhere ... 

Above is Jan Mandyn's Landscape with Legend of St Christopher (the saint is at the bottom left, holding the world as an orb, with the infant Jesus astride), a Bosch like fantasy of great complexity and some horror. 

 

To the left is Kees van Dongen's Lady With a Black Hat, a distant, alluring vision of a very modern beauty.  And below is the marble statue of Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy, small but powerful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a lot of Rembrandt at the hermitage, all of it (of course) very fine, but some exceptional, as his Portrait of an Old Man in Red,  serene and knowing, with the wisdom of old age.  And finally, a surreal marble bust, swathed in plastic during some building work.  Here, it was a practical piece of protection - but I bet at the Tate it would have been great art in its own right - subversive and unsettling!

 

Lanterns on their Horns

Beautiful Books has sent me Radhika Jha’s new novel, Lanterns on their Horns.  It’s not exactly what I’d normally read, but it sounded quite intriguing (and it had a lovely cover – no danger of anyone thinking I was reading chick-lit or airport pulp).  I found the early pages a bit confusing, as character after character is introduced without being much developed, and there is one early appearance which seems to lead nowhere.

But it's also engaging: the main early theme is of a young idealistic man who wants to help the poor villagers of rural India through improving their cows through artificial insemination.  The local authorities deny that there are any poor, and the headman of Nandgaon, the chosen village, has prospered for years through cutting his village off from new ideas and relying on the old traditional ways, dispensing a beneficent but absolute authority, tempered by his own personal generosity.  But Manoj Moshra is determined, a determination which is strengthened by his chance encounter with a beautiful western blonde with whom he had an afternoon fling, and through the guilt of living off his wife’s generous dowry, which has come to him through an arranged marriage.

Manoj inseminates a poor junglee cow in Nandgaon with the sperm of a mighty European bull, and a strong but ugly calf is born.  The villagers are worried – why is it ugly, how did the cow become pregnant without being mounted by a bull, will the bad luck of the owners (the man a simpleton, the woman the daughter of a suicide and worse, educated).  The emphasis now turns to the village of Nandgaon, and in particular to the headman or Patel, who has tried to use his personal wealth to keep the village well looked after, his own authority to dispense good tempered justice, and his own influence to rebuild the village across the river, away from the road and all evidence of modern development.  Against this natural authority, the simpleton Ramu and his energetic, clever wife Laxmi mount an almost invisible and sometimes unconscious challenge; when their cow is inseminated by Manoj, this leads to plentiful milk, relative riches, and in due time, to a powerful and imposing bull, all threats to the established order.

Their luck is begrudged by some, envied by others, but they are generous and gradually, especially after the village falls on hard times, more and more people come around to their way of thinking – or rather, to hers – all he wants to do is love his cows and be with them in the forest.  Children are educated, even the girls, and money begins to trickle into the village.  The headman falls on hard times, and in a passionate sexual battle between his lead cow, Nandini, and their bull, Shambhu, village leadership is won and lost.

This book has a great deal going for it: it is well written, and captures the beauty and some of the chaos of India quite brilliantly.  I am glad an Indian wrote it – albeit one who now lives in Tokyo – because on occasions, it borders on the patronising, with its portrayal of post colonial bureaucrat wallahs, and of stupid, ignorant villagers.  It would not have been easy for an English writer to get away with this, and quite rightly too.  And I found the basic story full of interest, and the portrayal of village life, with its numerous hidden jealousies and pettinesses, very engaging; she captures well the complexity and the challenges of a very simple life; and her portrayal of the greedy and the ignorant in the nearby town is amusing and pointed.

But there are disappointments, too.  First, this book just goes on too long – it’s 550 odd pages, and it just doesn’t need to be; much of the detail and the narrative is superfluous and the point, already well made, could be left to speak for itself more often.  And it leaves a lot of intriguing trails unexplored – who is the idealistic European who is so important in setting Manosh on his life’s work, and who excites his lust?  Where does she go after page 10?   And why is the idealist Manosh such a mean spirited, whore hunting, bootleg drinking little tick?

I wouldn’t want these criticisms to put off readers who are attracted by a more than commonly understanding novel of rural India.  It really is very well worth reading, and there is enough variety and narrative drive to engage and arouse your interest; my disappointment arises because I feel that this is a good book, but Radhika Jha so nearly wrote a really fine one.

Break, break, break

Alfred Lord Tennyson was born 200 years ago, as you will have noticed if you have been listening to radio 3 this week.  I have given you Tennyson before - Locksley Hall, Morte d'Arthur, The Brook (the inner poem), and The Brook (from the greater poem).  But that does not mean I can pass this anniversary by, so here is a simple seeming, very moving shorter poem: Tennyson's Break, break, break (and a photograph from Reggie Thomson's photography blog):

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

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

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

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

St Petersburg - the Hermitage

 

The Hermitage in St Petersburg is a huge gallery, a kind of mission impossible in sightseeing terms.  What is on show is a tiny proportion of the whole, and fills the Winter Palace and three Hermitage buildings, as well as other museums elsewhere in the city.

I don’t intend to describe what we saw, or to recommend some things over others.  All I can do is say that this is one of the great collections, and if you have any interest in the arts, you will find something here.  It is mainly a gallery of paintings, but there are many other fine collections, including silver, porcelain, archaeology, as well as displaying the State rooms of the Winter Palace itself – and some interesting restoration of Peter the Great’s first, very modest palace, nearby.  Inevitably, the numbers of visitors can overwhelm, with three hour queues to get in (book online at least three days in advance and skip the queue) and terrible crushes in some rooms.  Also, they allow photography which is convenient (though can it be good for the paintings?), but it encourages asinine behaviour, where groups take photographs of each other in front of some famous Gauguin or Rembrandt, apparently oblivious of the fact that others would like to see the paintings too – even, indeed, oblivious of the idea that you look at the painting, not just record your lover’s beauty in front of it!

But here are some wonderful things we did see – enjoy – and do go and visit yourself.

At the top of the post is a magnificent piece, previously unknown to me - Bernardino Fungai’s Magnanimity of Scipio (charmingly but puzzlingly called The Continence of Scipio in the Hermitage label).  I love the balance of this - foreground and great distance, crowded centre and empty wings - very pleasing graphically as well as pictorially.

Next is a piece of pocelain made for Catherine the Great, part of a dinner service - this plate featuring the humble House Sparrow, Passer domesticus.

To the left (I hope) is an unidentified saint reading, by Gentile da Fabriano. Glorious, golden, and other-wordly.

And below are two magnificent Matisse paintings -  a Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya, and one of the versions of Dance. I'm not normally a great Matisse fan, but these are tremendous.  There is so little in the portrait, that i wonder at the source of its power, but it is amazingly forceful and yet intimate and understanding as well. 

Finally, there is a fine piece of modern sculpture, Crocetti's bronze Pacing Horse, full of life and energy, with a surface made of modern shapes like bolts - tremendous virility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Malice in Wonderland

Nicholas Blake’s Malice in Wonderland (1940) belongs to that large proportion of thriller writing which dates from or after the war in fact, but pre-dates it in attitude.   The plot centres around practical jokes at Wonderland, a holiday camp, a new invention when Blake was writing.  It’s a bit arch, and its characterisation and language is a little stilted and patronising, but it’s worth a couple of hours escapism.

Strangeways, the young detective who is called in, does not appear until half way through the book; until then, we are in the hands of Perry, a nervous and rather priggish young man who is doing research for the famous Mass Observation project of the 1950s, and who completely fails to notice the feelings of admiration he arouses in a foolish young woman he meets on the train and again at the camp.  He struggles to come to terms with the problem of the practical jokes, and twice his nerve fails him; but later, in an ending which confuses both Perry and the reader himself, he reasserts his manhood, plays a part in countering a threat to Britain’s security (nothing to do with the practical jokes), and gets the girl.

Meanwhile, Strangeways punches on through the complexities of the case, encountering false clues, misleading and unhelpful (although well intentioned) interventions from well-wishers, accident and deceit, and eventually uncovers the motive and the guilty party, exposing them in an elaborate and unconvincing set piece which nevertheless caps the book rather well.

I always feel with these vintage crime books that part of the fun is in the period prose and society, and with Malice in Wonderland this is certainly true.  The casual snobbery, sexism and imperial assumptions are breathtaking and amusing, and the story has enough pep and interest to take you through that train or plane journey.

Goat Song

Brad Kessler and his wife leave New York for Vermont, and they raise goats.  From being complete beginners, they are soon breeding them successfully, collecting a lot of milk all through the summer, and making a range of cheeses.  These experiences are captured in Goat Song, published earlier this year.  (Not to be confused with several other books of the same or similar names, including Chantal Pelletier's Goat Song, a Montmatre Murder thriller!).  I enjoyed Kessler's book, and I would warmly recommend it, perhaps particularly to American readers, but also to anyone interested in cheese making (!) or, more generally, the ideas of moving to the country, producing food by hand and on a small, local scale, and the issues of quality and variety in a world used to uniformity and national scale.

The Kesslers fence an area of pasture and orchard in a newly acquired small farm, then buy a couple of young Nubian goats, and a couple of kids.  They are rather beautiful creatures, famous for their rich milk, and they quickly become used to their new home.  They establish a pecking order, and Brad and his wife Dona soon learn to recognise their individual voices.  They take them herding, effectively long slow walks in the woods – they are browsers not grazers – and each animal, individually belled tinkles or chimes slowly from the woods while Brad reads and dreams.  They come at his call, and are affectionate and pretty trouble free.

Kessler describes the joys of getting the hay in, of the different hays that result from different crops or even different times of year; he describes the threat from coyotes (which he deals with by tracking them and urinating on their faeces to let them know that he is challenging their mastery of the woods!); he describes the rituals of mating and the struggles of a difficult birth; of learning to milk; and of nursing a goat through a severe parasitic illness which affected the animal's nervous system.  He describes the seasonal joys of farming, the worry and the joy; the disappointment of having to sell some of the kids and the warm pleasure of passing on their enthusiasm and growing skill.

And he describes making cheese – the very young and almost immediate faisselles (named after the containers they're strained in), a range of chevres, a mozzarella, and a Pyrenean tomme of matured cheese.  He explains that the cheese has, like wine and olive oil, a distinctive taste which reflects the season, the geology and the fodder – a terroir all its own.  He describes the clean tastes and additive free milk he drinks daily, the perfect cheeses – and that he could be thrown in jail for selling either in the US, as they are unpasteurised.  This is not an ideal life, but it is a very rewarding one, and – while I would never go this route myself – one with which I feel great sympathy.

Goat language:

• ‘capricious’ refers to the goats' choosy browsing, picking preferred plants out of the hay and leaving others;
• from the descriptions of the adult billy goats, the expression ‘randy old goat’ has more than a hint of truth in it; 
• ‘kicking the bucket’ and ‘crying over spilled milk’ while not exclusively to do with goats, refer to the not uncommon accident where a irritated goat kicks over, or steps in, the bucket of milk she has just yielded, rendering it worthless;
• kidnapping;
• tragedy, from the Greek, 'cry of the goat'
• and (thanks for the reminder, Glo), scapegoat, the goat sacrificed to atone for the sins of the community.

Pondlife

I have built a pond in my Dorset garden – stripped turf from the lawn, dug through loam, clay with flints; lined the hole with fleece and butyl, and filled the whole – and the hole – with water.  Put in plants, turfed the banks – and am already entranced by watching raindrops splash, leaves fall in and drift aimlessly.  Weeks, months and years will bring much more life, but even on the first day, a cat came to drink, and a dragonfly hovered over.

Women reading: August

The August painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Ambrosius Benson's Young Woman Reading a Book of Hours.  Benson was a Dutch (Netherlandish) artist, working around 1495 - 1550.  I love the calm, the serenity, the concentration of the image, and the restraint of the palette and the composition.  This is one of my favourite periods of painting, and I could look at images of this sort all day long.  There is no need to speculate what she might be reading, as the title tells us - a book of hours was a devotional aide, including liturgical calendars, prayers for the different times of day, lists of saints, Gospel texts etc, and they were often lavishly illustrated in their own right.

Below is the kind of thing she is reading, the Dutch Bout Psalter-Hours from around the same period.