Novel Ideas from Manly Library

House of Names

2017-05-31T14:56:00.000+10:00

House of Names

AUTHOR: Colm Toibin

PUBLISHER: Pan MacMillan (April 2017)

ISBN: 978 1 7605 5142 1

PRICE: $29.99 (hardback) 272 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

Clytemnestra’s husband, Agamemnon, on the instructions of the gods, has ritually sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to obtain a fair wind for his becalmed ships so that they can sail to wage war on Troy. During the ten years he is away, Clytemnestra takes his cousin Augisthus as her lover, and on the day of Agamemnon’s glorious return she welcomes him lavishly then murders him in his bath. Electra, their second daughter knows all this and has watched her mother’s behaviour with disgust and anger. She arranges for her young brother, Orestes, to be taken to a safe haven so that he can grow up and return to claim his rightful heritage.

In the Ancient Greek myths about Orestes, family relationships are interwoven and complex and the gods are heavily involved. In House of Names, Colm Toibin avoids these complexities by focusing only on Orestes’ immediate family, which is probably a blessing for those unfamiliar with the ancient myths. And he dispenses with the gods almost completely.

I read House of Names before refreshing my memory of the original myths, in which there are several different versions of the story. It is a powerful story however it is told, and Toibin manages to capture vividly the sacrifice of Iphigenia and Clytemnestra’s thoughts and feelings as she watches this happen. Clytemnestra’s voice is compelling and we come to understand some of the reasons for her subsequent anger, dissimilation and duplicity. Electra, too, has a voice of her own and we feel her disgust and anger at her mother’s behaviour, her fear of Augisthus, and her growing desire to avenge the murder of her beloved father. We understand her longing for Orestes to return and exact this revenge.

Toibin says, in a publicity sheet which accompanied my copy of this book, that he did not find anything much about Orestes in the Greek texts. Orestes, he says, “has been away; he returns; he performs. That is all. He remains a mystery”. This is true only in so far as Orestes’ exile is concerned. It is certainly not true of what happens to Orestes after he murders his mother. In 458BC, for example, when Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Oresteia, won a major prize for drama, the audience learned in the first play of the adultery deceit and murders in the House of Atreus at Argos, to which Orestes is heir. In the second and third plays they would have seen the terrifying results for Orestes of these acts, and his subsequent trial for matricide. Justice and law, the struggle between the old earth gods and the new Greek gods of Olympus, all was played out with Orestes at their centre.

It is an author’s privilege, however, to tell a story and invent its contents as he or she wishes. Toibin says that he gives Orestes “a memory, a conscience, a way of noticing and feeling” and he creates him “at two different ages; as a young boy and then later as a young man”. Toibin also invents what happens to Orestes during his exile. After his father’s murder, Toibin’s young Orestes, at the command of Augisthus, is forcibly taken to a far-distant, violent and cruel prison where other boys from the city have been incarcerated. Orestes and his friend Leander escape, taking a sickly boy called Milos with them. They flee across dangerous war-scarred land and eventually find refuge with an old woman who tells stories which reference (for those who recognise them) old myths about Orestes’ family history. Eventually, Orestes returns to Argos, meets Electra, is reunited with his joyful mother and, following a plan devised by Electra, he murders his mother. All this is dramatic enough but since Toibin chooses to tell Orestes’ story himself, rather than giving him a voice, the result, compared to his creation of Clytemnestra and Electra, is rather flat and dry.

For anyone who knows even just the broad outline of the ancient Orestes’ story, there are things here which will jar. Why, for example, does Toibin change the name of Orestes’ closest friend, Pylades, to Leander? It was in the noble house of Pylades’ father that Orestes of the early myths spent most of his exile and it was there that the two boys formed their close bond. Toibin keeps the homo-erotic suggestions of their friendship but eventually separates Orestes and Leander, kills off Leander’s family, and gives Electra the role which Pylades originally plays in supporting Orestes in the murder of his mother.

In spite of such quibbles, for those who know nothing of the original myth Toibin’s House of Names is as dramatic and bloody a psychological thriller as any modern, murderous, TV family drama.

The Essential Paradise Lost

2017-05-23T13:49:00.001+10:00

The Essential Paradise Lost

AUTHOR:   John Carey

PUBLISHER: Faber (May 2017)

ISBN:   978 0 571 32855 0

PRICE:   $32.99 (hardback)      235 pages.

Check availability - Manly Library catalogue

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

John Carey’s introduction to his Essential Paradise Lost is a masterly piece of analysis of John Milton’s most famous work. Not only does it make this great epic poem more easily approachable and enjoyable, it is also an invaluable and enlightening introduction for anyone approaching Paradise Lost for the first time and it will be invaluable to any students of Paradise Lost.

In a clear and interesting way, Carey guides the reader through the background to the poem. He discusses Milton’s relationship with his Muse (who dictated the poem to Milton in his sleep). He suggests the way in which Milton’s blindness is reflected in the imagery of the poem; and the way in which the dramatic and harrowing political and personal aspects of Milton’s life may be seen reflected there. He comments on the original style of the poem and its place in English poetry. And he discusses the Devil’s questioning of God’s foresight and omnipotence.

He even touches on feminist issues which have been the topic of 20th and 21st century criticism of Milton. Yes, he says, Milton’s Adam does regard Eve as inferior to him, and that is the way the Bible describes them. But Milton’s Eve has a mind of her own. At her first sight of Adam she thinks him “less fair / less winning soft, less amiably mild” than the image of herself which she has just seen reflected in the lake. So, as Carey notes, “She turns around and heads back to the pool with Adam chasing after her and comically shouting in protest”.

As can be seen from this example, one of the delights of Carey’s ‘Introduction’, as well as of his footnotes, the summaries which he offers for the parts of the poem he has chosen to omit, and of his discussion of the poem at the end of the book, is his wry sense of humour. He clearly loves and admires Milton’s great work but that does not stop him from occasionally mocking Milton’s vision. He accuses Milton, on one occasion, of “an unfortunate attempt at mannish jocularity (p.89)”; he describes Adam and Eve “preparing for a day’s gardening”, and God, whilst being praised by the heavenly host for his justice, amusing himself by making “some meteorological adjustments” which alter the relative motions and positions of the sun, earth and planets so that “seasonal weather-changes” cause “a proto-Darwinian battle for survival” (p.194).

Carey’s judicious pruning of Milton’s epic poem cuts 11,500 lines and 12 books by two thirds, so that instead of being confronted with dauntingly long, unbroken passages of poetry, the reader is given shorter ‘chapters’ of the story separated by brief commentaries which tie it all together. Milton’s text is unchanged, the structure of the poem is preserved and the music of the poetry is as strong as ever. Occasional, very brief, footnotes explain unfamiliar names, mythological references and words which are no longer in frequent use. Above all, Milton’s ‘voice’ remains loud and clear and the action he describes (especially the war in heaven between Satan and his angels and God and the heavenly host; the building of Pandemonium in Hell; and the tempting of Eve) is vivid and his characters are full of life, full of human emotions, goals, ambitions, envies, deviousness and self-deception. This applies not only to Adam and Eve but also to the Devil and, to some extent to Milton’s God who, at one point, admits to teasing Adam (p.141).

Milton’s Satan is a superb creation and Carey quotes and comments on William Blake’s statement that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote about Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet & of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. Milton’s Satan, says Carey, was “English literature’s first terrorist”. He undertook “the destruction of the innocent for political ends”, and Milton allows him to explain his reasons for challenging God’s omnipotence and, in so doing, to reveal not only his ambitions, his yearning for power, his manipulation, craftiness and deceit but also his moments of self-doubt and weakness, all of which gives Milton’s Devil realistic psychological depth.

Carey wisely retains the episodes which Milton invented and which may surprise those reading Paradise Lost for the first time. At the gates of Hell, Milton sets two allegorical figures, Sin and Death. They hold the keys to Hell, and Milton gives them stories of their own. Milton’s Devil persuades them to unlock the gates for him, and he is adept at conning information out of God’s guardian angels and deceiving them in order to get into God’s newly created world. Having leapt over the wall of Paradise and entered the garden for the first time, he disguises himself as various animals - “now one / now other, as their shapes serve best”. Finally, he becomes a toad and squats at the ear of the sleeping Eve. There, he whispers evil thoughts into her mind and gives her dreams of eating from the forbidden tree and becoming angelic and equal with the gods. Satan is discovered in the garden and Gabriel sends the angel, Ithuriel, to prod him with his spear and burst his disguise. He is sent back to Hell and it is only on his second visit to the garden that he takes over the body of a serpent and, with his beauty, charm, and very plausible arguments, he beguiles Eve into tasting the forbidden fruit.
Once Adam, too, has eaten the fruit and God has discovered their disobedience and decreed their punishment, Eve tries to persuade Adam that they should refrain from having children who will inherit the results of their sin, or (amazingly, given Milton’s knowledge of the Church’s and the State’s long-standing sanctions against such an act) commit suicide.

There is, as is evident in Carey’s choice of the essential parts of Paradise Lost, much more to Milton’s story than the bare outline of the Creation and Fall as given in the Bible, but all that is there, too. Carey’s brief and easily-read analysis of some of the issues raised by Milton in the poem - God’s omnipotence and foresight, and his reasons for creating human beings and giving them free will, for example - add to the interest. So, too does his answer to the self-imposed question “Is Paradise Lost a Christian poem?” and his suggestion that Milton’s God is “morally repellent”. And in spite of his labelling of the Devil as a terrorist, he comments that “there is only one speaker in the poem who thinks deeply enough to point out the futility of violence as a means of settling disputes, and that speaker is Satan, who remarks crisply: “Who overcomes / By force, hath overcome but half his foe’ (I: 648-9)” - a statement which has very contemporary relevance.

Crucially, Carey gives book and line references for quotations from and references to the original text of Milton’s Paradise Lost. This allows readers to look up anything which they wish to pursue further (the Guttenberg Project web-site has copies of Milton’s original text). What is missing from Carey’s book, however, is an index which would allow the reader to refer back to particular passages, events and characters in his selection from the poem. Carey’s comment that “for first-time reader the style of Paradise Lost is likely to come as a shock” is true and his discussion of the originality and purpose of Milton’s blank verse and his long and complex sentences is interesting, but although many passages of the poem read smoothly and easily there are still parts which first-time readers are likely to find difficult on first reading. Carey wisely advises that the poem should be read aloud, since the sound of the poem (just as blind Milton dictated it) helps to make the meaning and power of the poem clear.

Everything Carey has done in The Essential Paradise Lost has been done with care for Milton’s original poem and the whole book provides compelling support for the long-held view that Milton’s poem is a sublime masterpiece. If Carey can bring new readers to enjoy it, as he aims to do, then there are many who will thank him for it.

The Lost Pages

2017-04-19T16:04:00.000+10:00

The Lost Pages

AUTHOR:   Marija Peričić

PUBLISHER: Allen and Unwin (May 2017)

ISBN:   978 1 76029 686 5

PRICE:   $29.99 (paperback)      259 pages.

Check availability - Manly Library catalogue

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

The Lost Pages is the 2017 winner of the prestigious Australian Vogel’s Literary Award. It is an innovative, imaginative and well-written novel based on the real friendship of Franz Kafka and his fellow writer and contemporary Max Brod.

It was to Brod that Kafka left all his writings, with instructions to burn them when he died. Brod, of course, did no such thing and it was due to him and his belief that Kafka’s writings held hidden Zionist messages that Kafka and his work eventually became more famous and more widely-known that Brod himself.
Due to complicated legal proceedings over the ownership of Kafka’s papers, this great archive has never yet been seen. It is known, however, to contain Brod’s own diaries, in which his friendship with Kaafka is documented.

In The Lost Pages, Marija Peričić, inspired by the complex and bizarre story of Kafka’s papers, as told in a 2010 New York Times article, ‘Kafka’s Lost Papers’ by Elif Batuman, has invented Max Brod’s memoirs. There, Max writes in detail of his difficult relationship with the elusive Kafka, who never seems to be where he is meant to be, whose success threatens to surpass Max’s own, and who becomes, in Max’s eyes, his rival in love as well as in his work.

This is an ingeniously contrived novel but sadly, for me, the Max Brod revealed in these pages is a depressing, depressed, self-focussed and unsympathetic character with whom I soon lost patience. However, I did continue reading and the final dramatic chapters of the book do explain his obsessions and delusions, and it becomes clear that these character traits are essential to the outcome, and that this has been hinted at and prepared for throughout the book.

Whether Franz Kafka and Max Brod were anything like their namesakes as depicted in The Lost Pages is impossible to tell, but Marija Peričić’s extensive research suggests to her that Kafka was far less bleak a character than is usually supposed, and that Brod, who was born with a physical disability may well have resented Kafka’s success when it began to eclipse his own.

Brod was a successful and popular writer and composer. He acted as promoter and editor of Kafka’s work during his life and, as his literary executor, after his death. In fact, there seems always to have been a complex relationship between Kafka’s and Brod’s work and it is possible that the archive papers will reveal much more about Brod’s influence on Kafka’s novels. It is this closeness which Marija Peričić has cleverly and inventively exploited in The Lost Pages.

The House at Bishopsgate

2017-02-22T13:27:00.000+11:00

The House at Bishopsgate

AUTHOR: Katie Hickman

PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury

ISBN: 978 1 4088 8221 4

PRICE: $27.99 (paperback) 430 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

“A’az ma yutlab” - My heart’s desire - is the tiny, almost invisible inscription carved into a diamond the size of a baby’s fist. This is the Sultan’s Blue diamond, a magnificent gem which, according to legend, must never be sold or misfortune will happen. And this is the diamond which weaves all the many threads in this book together.

How Sir Paul Pindar, a wealthy and well-travelled merchant of the Honourable Levant Company, comes to have it in his possession is a curious and compelling story. And in 1643 his unexpected appearance with it at Whitehall Palace and his demand to see the King himself causes quite a stir.

Yet it is the events which lead up to this moment which are the substance of this book. And especially it is the extraordinary lives of Paul’s wife Celia and her close companion Annetta; the search for Paul’s childhood friend John Carew; and the mystery surrounding the widow Lady Francis Sydenham which fill the book.

In 1611, Paul and Celia returned to England after having lived in Aleppo for an extended period of time. Both have been away from England for many years and Celia, especially, is so attuned to Mohammedan culture that the customs and formalities of English society are quite foreign to her. The details of her earlier life are almost unbelievably strange and exotic but the skill with which Katie Hickman reveals them as the story progresses makes them a fascinating and acceptable background to Celia’s present troubles in Paul’s grand, richly furnished London house at Bishopsgate.

Strange and exotic, too, is the life of Annetta, the tiny, irascible, Italian ex-nun whose caustic voice often fills Celia’s imagination long before she arrives to join the family in London. And the life of Paul’s childhood companion, the elusive miscreant, John Carew, is no less adventurous.

On the voyage to Venice, immediately before Celia’s planned marriage to Paul, she and Annetta had been captured by corsairs and sold into slavery in the Great Turk’s House of Felicity in Constantinople. Annetta, in particular, had become the favoured hand-maiden and confidant of the Valide - the Ottoman Queen - and the great diamond had come into her possession on the Queen’s death. It is she, on her release from service, together with her long-ago love, John Carew, who engineer Celia’s escape from the Ottoman court.

Celia’s subsequent abuse by pirates, a miscarriage and her unexpected re-union with Paul, all form part of the back-story, but the difficulties of her present life in Paul’s Bishopsgate house have more to do with Lady Frances Sydenham, who, as a recent widow, has prevailed on Paul’s generosity to accompany him and Celia from Aleppo to England, and who has become a temporary part of the family. Her initial capable assistance in helping Celia to handle the household and in introducing her to women of high social rank becomes increasingly manipulative and controlling. Celia, into whose confidence she has worked her way, eventually begins to question her motives and the tiny, sharp, questioning voice of Annetta, even before she arrives to join the family at Bishopsgate, often fills Celia’s head and fuels her doubts. Paul, however, is busy with his dealings in the City, and he dismisses Celia’s doubts. His relationship with Celia is loving but distant and he refuses, for some unstated reason, to sleep with her. Frances Sydenham, meanwhile, sets out to charm him.

Paul’s own search for his long-lost friend John Carew, his strained relationship with his jealous, socially ambitious brother Ralph, and his increasingly onerous duties in the City which prevent him from visiting his aged father in their country manor-house in Berkshire, all add to the complexities of the plot.

Katie Hickman is a fine story-teller. She writes well, creates interesting characters and an absorbing story, and she knows how to make what could have been an unbelievably exotic and romantic scenario fresh and acceptable. The House at Bishopsgate combines mystery, history, excitement, exotic settings, royalty, jealousy and family dramas in a very readable and fascinating story. That it is, apparently, the third in a series of novels concerning the same characters is never a hindrance to its enjoyment as a stand-alone tale.

Crash Land

2017-01-30T10:23:00.000+11:00

Crash Land
AUTHOR:   Doug Johnstone
PUBLISHER: Faber (January 2017)
ISBN:   978 0 571 33086 7
PRICE:   $29.99 (paperback)      255 pages.

Check availability - Manly Library catalogue

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

Finn is waiting for a flight which will take him from the small airport at Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands (just off the North coast of Scotland) back to his flat in Dundee. The small aircraft is delayed due to fog and in the airport waiting area a woman is being harassed by one of four men going on leave from the offshore oil rigs.

She chooses Finn to rescue her and they drink together and chat at the bar until the flight is ready to take off.
On the plane, the oil worker continues his harassment, a fight breaks out, and both Finn and the oil man end up being shackled with restraints by the cabin crew. Following airline procedure in the case of a disturbance, the flight turns back to Orkney, but the woman Finn has been befriending manages, whilst the cabin crew are occupied, to get onto the flight deck and grapple with the pilot in an attempt to prevent this. Then, in sudden turbulence, the plane crashes.

This dramatic start to the story is just a taste of the thrills which continue throughout the book.

Seven people die in the crash. Finn survives and so does the woman, but whilst he is rescued from the plane and hospitalised she, and the holdall she has been carefully guarding, vanish.

Finn is allowed to return from hospital to his grandmother, Ingrid’s, house on Orkney, where he had been visiting on the anniversary of his mother’s, her daughter’s, death. The oil man with whom he fought remains in hospital in a coma and, since Finn had been seen to throw the first punch, and the cause of the crash is not yet established, Finn is regarded with suspicion by the police. Meanwhile, the woman, Maddie, contacts him wanting him to hide her. She gives him believable reasons for wanting to remain hidden and drug-running, a violent husband and large sums of money are involved.

Finn is sexually attracted to Maddie, and she uses this to manipulate him into helping her. It is never clear to Finn, or to the reader, how much of what she says is true, but when her husband and another woman are found murdered the mystery deepens and Finn is already deeply entangled in it.

This is a fast-paced story with plenty of excitement, twists and surprises. And Doug Johnstone uses the Orkney Islands, their remoteness, their ancient stone-circles and tomb-burials, their harsh beauty and their close-knit community, to make a fascinating setting. The people of Orkney, Finn’s grandmother Ingrid and her friend, Grace (who counsels Finn), a woman police officer, a local journalist, are all interesting characters; and Maddie remains an unpredictable puzzle:
“He thought about what she’d said. A dead husband, a bag of money, her panic on the plane. What did it take to kill someone? Would it show on your face if you could do that? He stared at her now.”

Finn, is just an ordinary man taking an ordinary plane journey. His basic good-nature, his intelligence and kindness, all contribute to his involvement in a situation which changes his life dramatically, dangerously and permanently. And Doug Johnstone tells his story skilfully, so that you almost believe that what happened to Finn might happen to anyone.

Crash Land is a gripping, well-written and enjoyable read.

Landscapes

2017-01-24T15:28:00.001+11:00

Landscapes AUTHOR:   John Berger
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury (January 2017)
ISBN:   978 1 78478 584 0
PRICE:   $34.99 (hardback)      254 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

“Yes, I’m still amongst other things a Marxist”

The essays in this book can leave the reader in no doubt about the truth of John Berger’s statement. In spite of its title, and in spite of the landscape in Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews’ which graces the dust-jacket, this book is not about landscape art. Instead, as Tom Overton puts it in his Introduction, it is about “searching for the conditions from which [art] arises, or the climate into which it was received”.

So, Berger expresses his views on what constitutes “a valid work of art”; on what art is, its purpose and what it does for us. And always, he comes back to its social and historical context and value. He writes of “the bourgeoisation of the finished work”; of “the revolutionary meaning of the works”; and of the increasing view of art as property - a commodity embedded in the capitalist economic system. In spite of speaking of the spiritual value a work may have for the artist, he calls the idea that art “is a depository of transcendental values” and idealistic view. In order to rightly judge a work of art, he tells us, we must ask “Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?”. “Art is born out of hope” he claims, and an artist’s way of looking at the world “increases our awareness of our own potential”.

These are statements of his own beliefs but the arguments he offers to support them I found confusing, often irrational, and hard to follow. Take, for example, this passage from ‘The Moment of Cubism’ where he discusses the consequences of historical change: “There was no longer any essential discontinuity between the individual and the general. The invisible and the multiple no longer intervened between each individual and the world. It was becoming more and more difficult to think in terms of having been placed in the world. A man was part of the world and indivisible from it. In an entirely original sense, which remains at the basis of modern consciousness, a man was the world which he inherited”.

In ‘The Moment of Cubism’, Berger writes perceptively and clearly about the historical context which helped shape the Cubists’ unique view of reality (even if they were unaware of these influences as they worked) and about the way they constructed their work. Unfortunately, one has to work through several pages of Berger’s political ideology in order to get to this analysis.

Amongst all this, however, there are clear and demonstrably true descriptions of the state of the art world in the most recent decades; of the commercial imperatives which drive museum curators; of the subjectivity of art and art criticism; and of the trends and cults which influence present-day art and artists. Commenting critically on the Venice Biennale of 1958, he writes that the works displayed had one thing in common: “the image of muck and garbage”. He sees pettiness, poverty, gimmicks, and a ‘thinness of ideas and aims’, which he puts down to social and psychological factors which produce fear, cynicism and human alienation and which make this “non-art” possible.

Also, there are parts of essays, reviews and poems which, for me, provided valuable insights into particular historical periods and the art and artists who reflected current life and helped shape the ideas and work of those who followed them. In particular, I appreciated Berger’s descriptions in ‘To Take Paper, to Draw’ of the artist’s perceptions of line, space and arrangement in the development of a drawing. Anyone who has attempted life-drawing will recognise the process he describes, even if they were unaware of it beforehand. His essay ‘The Basis of All Painting and Sculpture is Drawing’ is similarly enlightening and enjoyable
Just occasionally, there are passages such as his description of his encounter in a field with two donkeys, where he shows that he can be a superb story teller, but these moments are rare.

This is not an easy book to read. The pieces in were written between 1953 and 2015 and it would have been helpful if they had been clearly dated so that one could see how Berger’s views changed and matured. Also, Berger discusses and compares the work of specific artists and refers to many named works of art, many of them well-known but others more obscure, yet there is not a single picture in the book. Unless you are extremely familiar with a wide range of art, you need to have a computer handy so that you can look up images of the works discussed.

John Berger died at the age of 90 on 3rd January 2017, whilst I was reading this book. Tom Overton, who knew him and his work well, and who wrote the ‘Introduction’ to Landscapes, said of him: “His great themes were the experience of exile and the disastrous relationship between art and property”, and that his legacy was “one of encouragement and hope, and a massively diverse range of work in all genres”.

Landscapes is a map of the beliefs and ideals which shaped Berger’s view of art.

You can read an obituary for John Berger in The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/02/john-berger-obituary.

Pond

2016-12-19T14:27:00.002+11:00

TITLE: Pond

AUTHOR:   Claire-Louise Bennett

PUBLISHER: Picador (22 December 2016)

ISBN:   978 1 760550936

PRICE:   $24.99 (paperback)      176pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

"Because if you want to know I don’t recall ever regarding anything I remember from my past as being particularly interesting or poignant, or even especially reliable actually…. real events don’t make much difference to me,…".

This, I think, just about sums up this book. I have to say from the start that critics in the press have given it, almost exclusively, rave reviews and I found only a few dissenters on Goodreads, but I have read the book twice now and I am at a loss to know what so impressed them.

The writer (the protagonist, not the author) has moved to a tiny, poorly equipped cottage in Ireland. She has abandoned a Ph.D thesis and has some random things to say about academics and speech-giving. She drops a few famous names (Sappho, Seneca, Roland Barthes, Nick Cave). And she is fond of long words and strange adjectives: her vegetables are “illustrious”; she “deracinates” the weeds in her garden; jam in small cartons is “vapid” and “stupid’; and her life develops in “kariotic shifts”. One whole chapter, entitled “Morning, 1908” is for no apparent reason written in the antique style of that era. And two pages of another chapter are gibberish. Some might think, since the writer makes much of her Irish setting, that this gibberish is a nod to Molly Bloom’s monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses, but it has none of Joyce’s brilliance or skill.

To reach for another Irish analogy, the Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously described Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens twice. Pond is a book in which nothing happens again and again and again. The woman finds herself a small garden and muses on gardening, but nothing happens. She imagines giving a speech at the village Big Day, but nothing happens. She considers throwing a party, “a low-key soiree”, and she describes it in detail, but it never happens. She believes, twice, that she is about to be raped and writes of it as if it is taking place, but nothing happens. And she spends a whole chapter inconsequentially pondering the thought that she has to be drunk to form even the briefest relationship with a man.

At times she is funny and occasionally, as in ‘The Deepest Sea’ chapter, she writes beautifully. But her wit, which some critics have praised, is fleeting, her indecisiveness and her constant digressions fill page after page and mostly the reader is subjected to the random wanderings of her indecisive mind.

So, if that appeals to you, and if you really want to know, for example, what to do with stale tomato puree (a two paragraph chapter) or that she has just thrown her stir-fry in the bin (a one sentence chapter), then this could be the book for you.

This woman, like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, is just filling in time with trivia and I have enough trivial thoughts of my own without being immersed in those of a stranger. As far as I can tell, there is no deeper meaning to the book.

2016-11-15T12:01:00.005+11:00

TITLE: Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and Painting the Water Lilies

AUTHOR:   Ross King
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury (October. 2016)
ISBN:   978 1 4088 6195 0
PRICE:   $49.99 (hardback)      403pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

In 1914, at the age of seventy-four, with failing eyesight and with war between France and Germany imminent, Claude Monet began to paint a series of huge canvases for which he had very precise plans. Each canvas was five feet (approx. 1.5 metres) high and more than six-and-a-half feet (approx 2 metres) wide. Eventually, Monet would donate twelve of these paintings to the French State, but only on condition that he be allowed to design a purpose-built pavilion, oval in shape, in order to display his “Grande Décoration” to its best advantage.

Monet’s “Grande Décoration” was, of course, the sequence of magnificent water-lily paintings which are now housed in the Orangery in Paris. Getting them there, however, was a long and complicated process, not least because of Monet’s stubborn and difficult character.

Ross King tells the story of their conception, their creation and the many and varied vicissitudes which accompanied their completion and their public display. He also captures the irascible and often tormented character of Monet, for whom they became a “mad enchantment” bordering on obsession.

Monet, at 74, was a highly respected and well-established artist whose work attracted very high prices, especially amongst American collectors. However, this was not always the case. Ross glances back at Monet’s impoverished early years when bailiffs once seized his paintings from the wall of an exhibition and he claimed to have survived one winter living on potatoes. He looks, too, at Monet’s early links with the Impressionists, some of whom became lifelong friends. And he writes of the times of public derision which eventually turned to acceptance and then to renown. Most of the book, however, is centred on Monet’s home in Giverny.

Over the course of the book, we gain a vivid picture of life at Giverny, where Monet drained marshland and diverted part of the river to create the lily pond beside which many of his most famous works were painted. One of his greatest pleasures was entertaining friends and, as Ross writes, “lunch chez Monet was a delightful but demanding gastronomic odyssey” after which guests might be conducted past Monet’s extensive art collection to his studio. Monet himself, habitually began the day with a large breakfast and a glass of white wine, started lunch with a shot of home-made plum brandy, and dined on “huge quantities of food and wine that satisfied his refined and discriminating tastes”. He also smoked heavily – an “eternal cigarette” burning in the middle of his nicotine-stained “crumb-catcher of a beard”.

Monet’s daily painting routine was strict but painting was frequently a torment to him. His attempts to capture the infinite fluctuations of light and to chase the “merest sliver of colour” were often frustrating and exhausting. “Oh how I suffer, how painting makes me suffer! It tortures me.”, he complained to one art dealer. He was known to slash and destroy canvases in fits of rage and, at times, especially after the death of his second wife and later when his eyesight was failing, he sank into depression and stopped painting altogether. All of which threw the completion of his “Grande Décoration” into question, at a time when the State had gone to considerable expense to comply with his wishes for a specially designed place to display it.

Monet could also be incredibly rude to prospective buyers and was especially rude about Americans, a number of whom had lived and painted in the town of Giverny before the war began in order to be near ‘The Master’. Towards the end of his life, too, when his eyesight was so bad that he could not paint, he became unpredictable and impossible even with his closest friends.

Georges Clemenceau, the politician who steered France through the war years and became a national hero, was one of the few close friends who knew how to deal with Monet. His presence in this book is almost as large as Monet’s. And it was he who dealt with the problems posed by Monet’s donation of his “Grande Décoration” to the State; he who persuaded Monet to have a cataract operation; and he who bullied and cajoled Monet back to work when the worst depressions hit him. It was Clemenceau, too, who ignored Monet’s sudden, last-minute decision to cancel his donation of paintings to the State, and who finally pushed Monet to complete the work ready for hanging and public exhibition.

Monet, who had once declared that the paintings would be with him until he died, had his wish. The number of paintings grew to twenty-two, and although he had seen and approved the rebuilt Orangery as their home, they were not publicly displayed there until after his death.

Ross brings to life the short, stout, prodigiously bearded man in the photographs which are scattered throughout this book. He also manages to include something of the history of French art; a picture of life when war-time shortages were acute (although Monet managed to find ways around many of them) and bombs were falling on Paris, just forty miles away from Giverny. He writes about Monet’s interest in Japanese woodblock prints and how this influenced Monet’s art. And he even manages to include a disquisition on water-lilies. He manages to do all this in an easy and digestible way, but often this extends the story of the creation of Monet’s great water-lily paintings so that the twelve years of their creation seem like a lifetime.

What Ross does best, however, is to reveal the genius and acuity of Monet’s vision and the painstaking effort and skill with which he worked. When paintings are as well-known and as much reproduced as Monet’s many water-lily paintings, it is easy to overlook the originality of his vision and the individuality of his techniques. I, for one, will now look at his paintings with renewed interest and understanding.

Goodwood

2016-10-18T16:48:00.000+11:00

Goodwood
AUTHOR:   Holly Throsby
PUBLISHER: Allen & Unwin (www.allenandunwin.com) (28 Sept. 2016)
ISBN:   978 1 76029 373 4
PRICE:   $29.99 (paperback)      378 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

Goodwood is a fairly typical Australian country town. Its main street boasts Bart’s Meats, the Goodwood Grocer, the Village Bakery, a Real Estate agent, Woody’s service station, Mac’s Police station, the Bookworm second-hand book shop, Vinnie’s (the St Vincent de Paul charity shop), and The Wicko (the Wickham Pub).

There is also a school, a small dairy farm and the Bowlo (the Lawn Bowls Club, which the locals frequent for meals and family celebrations).

Goodwood, as teenage Jean Brown tells us, is “a glass half-full kind of town” where everybody knows everybody and the most dramatic events are “minor traffic-accidents or a lack of rain”. That was before August 1992, when young Rosie White, the coolest girl in town, “dropped off the face of the earth”, and then a week later popular old Bart, of Bart’s Meats, went fishing on the lake and never returned.

Everyone is affected and a pall of gloom hangs over the town. The lake is searched but no body is found. Missing Persons bulletins are circulated and distant family and friends contacted but Rosie remains unseen. And Jean, out walking her dog, Backflip, finds a plastic bag containing $500 hidden in a willow tree that she has climbed in order to watch the lake. Jean dreams of all the things she could buy with that money but worries about how she could explain these purchases to her mother, so she puts the bag back and tells no-one. A few days later she finds the bag still there but it contains only a small plastic horse. This is her secret. But other people in the town have secrets, too.

Gradually, we hear from Jean what happens over the next week or so, and we get to learn some of these secrets, some of which are very dark. Jean’s view of the town and it people is that of a typical, intelligent, questioning teenager. She is blunt, mostly honest and often very funny, and she is also dealing with her own sexual awakening. Life for most of the people she knows goes on almost as usual but there is an underlying sense of danger, unhappiness and unease. Jean’s relationships with her mother, with George her female best-friend, with local boys, with the new girl in town, and with the adults around her are as much part of this story as the mystery of the two missing people.

Since this is an Australian story told by an Australian teenager there is a strong flavour of life in a small Australian country town. And there are words and references peculiar to Australia. Place names are abbreviated; nicknames and the use of first names is common; ratbag kids are “bogans” (or they were in 1992); the notorious Lindy Chamberlain trial which featured a baby-stealing dingo and an unusual religious sect is mentioned; so, too, are the ‘back-packer murders’ which dominated Australian media reports in 1992.

Having been told early on that the mystery of the disappearances would eventually be solved, I was very tempted at times to skip to the end for the revelation, especially when Jean’s account of daily happenings seemed a little over-long and irrelevant. But I didn’t, and on the whole the book held my interest and was a pleasant and amusing read.

The House Between Tides

2016-10-04T15:12:00.000+11:00

The House Between Tides
AUTHOR:   Sarah Maine
PUBLISHER: Profile Books, Allen & Unwin (22 June 2016)
ISBN:   978 6029 140 2
PRICE:   $29.99 (hardback)      389pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

It is 1945. We see a boarded-up house, its last contents burning on a shore-side bonfire, and a woman, now an outsider on this Hebridean island, is filled with childhood memories as she watches the remnants of that life go up in flame.

It is a nostalgic, sad beginning for this book. And sixty years later the discover of human bones in the ruins of this once grand house becomes a puzzle which draws its new owner into the lives of her ancestors and stops short her tentative plans to rebuild the house as a luxury hotel and executive retreat.

Now, in the twenty-first century, Hetty (Harriet Deveraux) has inherited Muirlan House and its land, and she is still recovering from the death of both her parents in a car accident when she travels to Scotland to see it for the first time. She is shocked by its dereliction and her visit begins disastrously – not only because of the just-discovered human remains buried under the floorboards. Her first meeting with James Cameron, whose family have a long history of association with the island, is not propitious either, although her negotiations with him are to become increasingly necessary.

Hetty’s great-grandmother, Emily, was half-sister to the second owner of the house, Theo Blake. In 1919, Theo brings his new young bride, Beatrice, to live on the island. And it is Beatrice’s story, alongside that of Hetty, which this book follows, moving backwards and forwards in time to gradually unfold the mystery of the bones. That mystery, however, lies buried in the complex interweaving of the island’s history and the lives of its small, close-knit community - families whose lives have been closely linked with the owners and inhabitants of Muirlan House for several generations in both good and bad times.

Beatrice’s husband is an artist who had left the island some time earlier for reasons he will not disclose to her. His changed behaviour on his return; his strange closeness to Cameron Forbes, the son of the factor who farms the estate on Theo’s behalf; and his unfeeling passion for shooting rare birds which nest on the island so that he can add them to his taxidermy collection and paint them – all threaten their marriage. Beatrice’s first feelings of pleasure at the beauty and the peace of the island are also marred by the hostility some of the islanders show towards her and her husband, and her ignorance of its historical origins.

Hetty, meanwhile, is resisting the pushy assertiveness of her partner, Giles, whose business associates have big, expensive ideas about what she should do the develop the house and the island. They are full of assurances that the project will bring work to the island and benefit its people, and that extra finance can easily be arranged, They seem well on the way to taking over the whole project, and Hetty’s uncertainly about James Cameron’s honesty and his own plans for developing the island only make things more difficult for her. As Hetty spends more time on the island, however, she learns more of her family’s history there and she gets to know some of islanders and begins to understand their resistance to her plans.

This is a complex plot but Sarah Maine handles her book’s many themes and characters very skilfully. For a first novel, Maine’s book is impressive. I found it absorbing reading and apart from my own occasional problem keeping the two Camerons from two different eras distinct, it was easy reading with a mystery to unravel, a Scottish island to explore, loves, hates, betrayals and family secrets to be revealed.
An enjoyable, well-written, imaginative and satisfying read.

Constellation

2016-09-27T14:48:00.000+10:00

Constellation

AUTHOR:   Adrien Bosc
TRANSLATOR: Willard Wood
PUBLISHER: Profile Books, Allen & Unwin (24 August 2016)
ISBN:   978 178125 536 0
PRICE:   $27.99 (hardback)      171pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

There are many constellations in this book: constellations of stars, constellations of circumstances and coincidences, constellations of related facts and, especially, the constellation of people on the Air France Lockheed Constellation passenger plane F-BAZN which left Paris’s Orly Airport bound for New York on 27 October 1949 and disappeared five minutes before a scheduled refuelling stop at Santa Maria the Azores.

Forty-eight people were on board. Their forty-eight “story-fragments” formed, for a short period of time “the world” of this aircraft and Adrien Bosc has created a novel, based on fact, from these fragments.

Every person’s own story is special and in such a small group - an elite group travelling on a luxury airliner - some had extraordinary lives. On board F- BAZN were highly experienced pilots who had flown combat missions during the war; a champion boxer known as the ‘Casablanca Clouter’; a renowned young female violinist; an entrepreneur who had lost one empire during the Wall Street crash of 1929 and had then successfully built another for Walt Disney; and a distinguished but eccentric portraitist who had painted Ingrid Bergman for the RKO Picture Jeanne d’Arc and had chivalrously given his seat on an earlier flight to an actress with excess luggage.

Not all the passengers were wealthy. Amongst them, five Basque shepherds emigrating (temporarily) to take up contracts as ranchmen in America’s vast grasslands. And a young working-class woman - a poorly paid spool-operator in a textile mill – summoned to America by her wealthy industrialist grandmother who had chosen her to be her sole heir. Marcel Cardan, the boxer, is the lover of the famous French songstress, Edith Piaf, and Bosc re-creates their letters to each other. He brings all these stories to life.

Families and friend are brought into his picture, too, and some of the extraordinary things which happened after the crash. One young woman is buried twice. Part of the valuable and rare Guadagnini violin which the violinist carried with her is found and, thirty-three years after the crash is presented, live on TV, to the violin maker who, as a novice, had worked on her equally old and valuable Omobono Stradivarius. And an obsessive music fan commits suicide.

Interwoven with these stories is Bosc’s re-creation of the search and rescue operation, body identification procedures, various different subsequent funeral and burial rites, and the investigative flight which was designed to discover what went wrong – the black box flight recorder not yet having been invented.
Bosc, too, visits the crash scene, climbing the mountain as the rescuers did, and finding no trace of the aircraft, only a memorial stone (a alminhas - “little soul”), erected by local people in memory of the forty-eight who died.

This small, lively and absorbing book, is beautifully bound so that a dark star-filled sky is seen through a round aircraft window in the steel-grey dust-jacket. It has been the well-deserved winner of an Arts Council of England Pen award for literary translations and the Academie Francaise Prize.

A Chinese Affair

2016-09-13T14:17:00.000+10:00

A Chinese Affair

AUTHOR: Isabelle Li

PUBLISHER: Margaret River Press (www.margaretriverpress.com) (July 2016)
ISBN: 978 0 9943167 6 9
PRICE: $27.00 (paperback) 340pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

“As if walking in a snowstorm, I look back to find my footsteps have been erased. I do not know where I am and can no longer find my way back”.

So muses Crystal, a young woman who has left her Chinese homeland to live and work in Australia. She has left behind her family, her culture, her language and even her name, since it is too difficult for Australians to pronounce correctly. Instead, she chooses to call herself ‘Crystal’ – “perfect in structure and form, hard and clear in every molecule".
Crystal is not hard, she feels the disorientation that every migrant feels, although those who move to a place where language and culture are similar to that of their birthplace may feel it less acutely.

We meet Crystal first, married to an older Australian man with a grown up family. He has ‘had the snip’ but she is pregnant. How this came about is not stated but a later story allows the reader to believe she may have had a loving liaison with a young Chinese artist who is about to move to America. Crystal’s dilemma is how and when she should break the news to her husband but this, frustratingly, is never resolved. Often in later stories, too, situations are developed but the outcomes are not revealed. This can be frustrating, but the stories themselves are beautifully told.

There are sixteen short stories in this book and the venues range from China to Singapore, Australia and a tropical island in the Philippines. Crystal turns up in a number of them, sometimes under her Chinese name, Xueqing, or at other times identifiable by her work as a translator. She is not always the focus or the narrator of the story and, at one point, this confused me when two consecutive stories, the first subtly linked to Crystal and the four previous stories, and both told in the first person, turned out as the second story progressed to be about two completely different children of different genders.

Other stories tell of Chinese relatives, of tragedies and love tangles, and of work experiences - including house-sitting in Australia and working as a translator at a conference. Without spelling things out, Li is expert at using telling details of situations and conversations to imply underlying tensions and cultural differences. She knows well what it is like to have, as one of the four sections of the book is titled, “Two tongues”, and two very different perspectives of the world.

In ‘Blue Lotus’, late in the book, we meet Crystal again when she describes a return visit to China and the growth and industrialisation of the village where her mother, father and brother still live. She feels the changes which others note in her and she stands out as different with her new intolerance of noise and her Australian styled hair. In this industrial, polluted landscape, she thinks of the creative fantasies she weaves when Australians ask about her birthplace: “In spring the fruit trees blossom all at once....In summer, the willows burst against an azure sky like green fireworks...”. And she writes of her Sydney flat in its beautiful setting. But neither that nor her Yoga practice can allay the well of sadness at the bottom of her heart. In Sydney, too, she is different, however hard she tries to fit in: “Looking at the fine food on the table, I wonder who I am, why I am here”.

Isabelle Li, who grew up in China and has lived in Singapore and Australia, writes well and many of these stories have been published before in literary magazines. She clearly knows and understands the feelings of her characters, and she writes sensitively of their loves, losses, failures, achievements and resilience as they deal with the complexities of moving between cultures.

At one point Crystal tells her mother of her plan to write about their family history. Many of Li’s stories seem to be a realisation of a similar plan, dealing with the stories of relatives and describing fragments of their lives during vast political changes in China. Some stories, however, would not fit this pattern at all. One rather oddly out-of-place but very good story, describes the feelings and experiences of a young woman and her partner as she undergoes IVF treatment.
My only real criticism of the book is the structure, which I found somewhat random and confusing. Overall, however, it is a most enjoyable read.

Pearl (c.1390s)

2016-09-06T11:52:00.000+10:00

Pearl (c.1390s)
AUTHOR:   Anonymous
VERSION BY: Simon Armitage
PUBLISHER: Allen & Unwin (May 2016)
ISBN:   978 0 571 30295 6
PRICE:   $32.99 (hardback)      103pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

As an expression of grief, hope, love, loss and yearning, Pearl is a sad yet beautiful poem by an unidentified Medieval poet who lived at about the same time as Geoffrey Chaucer. Just one manuscript copy, written in Middle English, has survived. It is less well-known than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is also part of this old manuscript, perhaps because it has less story and drama. It is, however, a beautiful poem, and Simon Armitage has translated the difficult Middle English into fluent, easily-read language which vividly captures the imagery and the powerful emotions for the present-day reader.

The poem is spoken by an unnamed narrator who, on visiting a flower-filled garden where his infant daughter (his “precious pearl”) is buried, experiences a sudden soul-soothing vision of the nearby forest in which suddenly every leaf is “like burning silver”, every stone underfoot gleams like precious Oriental pearl, so that “even sunbeams” seem “dark and dim”. He walks, full of wonder, through a forest filled with light and music until he comes to a river, on the far side of which, beneath a “crystal cliff”, he sees “a child/ a noble girl, a young woman full of grace” and recognises her as his lost “pearl”.

The conversation he has with this young woman, the questions he asks and her responses, form the remainder of the poem. And the whole poem becomes an allegorical lesson, based on Biblical stories and laced with Christian teachings on how to live, how to cope with grief and how to understand God’s ways.

Yes, the teachings and the purpose of the poem are now no longer central to many readers’ lives. But the poetry, the feelings and the beauty of the imagery are timeless.

Armitage, in his Introduction, speculates that the poet himself had felt the loss and grief which he expressed so powerfully in this poem. So, as a parent of one daughter, he offers his translation “in memory of the lost pearl – as a tribute to the courage of her father and as an act of condolence”. As a poet, too, Armitage describes the careful and intricately complex structure of the poem, the ordering of rhythm and rhyme, the alliteration and the repetitions which, especially when read aloud as it used to be, carry the narrative along. He also writes feelingly of the difficulty any translator has in choosing whether to stick to the author’s rhyming scheme and retain archaic words in order to do this; or to adopt the difficult alternative of maintaining the “musical orchestration” of the piece and finding appropriate modern alternatives to replace old words, many of which have no exact modern equivalents. “Every decision”, he writes, “feels like a trade-off between sound and sense, between medieval authenticity and latter-day clarity, and between the precise and the poetic”.

His own choice is to try to keep as much of the rhythm and rhyme as possible whilst making the text clear and modern. In this he succeeds admirably, and although I missed the formal rhythm and rhyme and was jarred at one point by his substitution of the modern-day slang word “yobs” for the archaic “boyes bolde”, I found this new version lively and moving. It will certainly bring the poem to many who would never read the original.

Ann Skea to be Associate Scholar at Pembroke College Cambridge

2016-05-02T15:12:00.003+10:00

If you are a regular reader of Novel Ideas you will recognise the name of Dr. Ann Skea who reviews many of the titles on this blog.

Ann has been elected as an Associate Scholar for the English summer at Ted Hughes’ old college, Pembroke, at Cambridge University. She plans to make the most of it.

It is a beautiful old college, with a chapel built by Sir Christopher wren, and Ann will access to all the university libraries and will eat at the Pembroke equivalent of the Top Table in the Fellows' (Dons') dining room, which is called 'The Parlour'.

Ann will be attend social functions organised by the Fellows and that she will be invited to give talk to the Fellows after dinner one night. Sound like a lot of fun, and if we hear from Ann before she's back we'll certainly post an update here.

Granta 134: No man's land

2016-03-29T09:30:00.000+11:00

TITLE: Granta 134: No man's land

Granta 134: No mans land [Cover]

EDITOR: Sigrid Rausing

PUBLISHER: Granta (Winter 2015)

ISBN: 978 1 905 881 93 2

PRICE: $19.95 224 pages

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

In her ‘Introduction’, Granta’s editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing quotes the earliest Doomsday Book definition of ‘No Man’s Land’ as “parcels of land outside the London city walls”, and she goes on to describe its later uses when it became associated with land disputes and executions, with war and with “marginal spaces and activities”. This issue reflects just such a broad definition.

Rausing’s background in anthropology, her work for Amnesty International and her support for human rights organisations through the Sigrid Rausing Trust, all have clearly influenced this issue of Granta, so the pieces she has chosen to publish are not always comfortable or easy reading. Her broad interpretation of ‘no man’s land’, however, has allowed her to include work which ranges from Peter Pomerantsev’s reportage from all sides of the Ukrainian/Russian conflict to David Rakoff’s story about a woman’s encounter with her schizophrenic brother. She also includes Lorenzo Meloni’s evocative photographs of life and colour in the grey, war-torn city of Kobane and Matthew Welton’s poems “in imitation of Thomas A. Clark” – a poet whose own poetry deals with the sparsely populated, lonely terrains of the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

As usual, the standard of work in Granta is excellent, there is a wealth of good and interesting reading, and some of the articles in this issue, together with many more varied pieces are freely available at: http://granta.com/

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate

2016-03-18T14:54:00.000+11:00

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

AUTHOR: Jonathan Bate

PUBLISHER: Flamingo, Harper Collins Australia (October, 2015)

ISBN: 978 0 732 29970 5

PRICE: $49.99 (hardcover) 672 pages

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

Telling Tales: A Review of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate

From the start, the style of this book is that of storytelling and it fits well into the current fashion for novelised biographies. The first chapter, ‘The Deposition’, begins like a courtroom drama, with dialogue taken from the deposition made by Ted Hughes as a defendant in the trial occasioned by Jane Anderson’s charge of libel over the representation of her in Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar.

Bate’s text is fluent, sometimes poetic, and richly embellished with descriptive and emotive adjectives. A respected female BBC producer is “dumpy”, “bustling”, “middle-aged and unmarried”; one Cambridge man is a “paunchy friend”; the clergyman who married Ted and Sylvia is “twinkle eyed” (“bright-eyed” was Sylvia’s description); and the influential critic Al Alvarez is “the pugnacious, poker-playing boxer” whose own poetry “was thin gruel”.

All this makes for easy reading for the general reader. It is worrying, however, when this storytelling approach is applied to interpretation of Ted’s poems.

I was stopped short on page 4 where Bate interprets the “you” in Ted’s poem, ‘You claw the door’, as Sylvia trying to “escape the house” after a quarrel with Ted. On its first publication in Remains of Elmet, the first line of the poem - “you claw the door” - was also its title. The second line contained only one word “rain”, isolated on the far right of the text and followed in the third line by “Crashes the black taut glass”. Lights do not “twinkle in the valley”, as Bate has it, but “splinter from their sockets” in “foundering valleys, in the gulf”. In Ted’s poem a generic domestic scene of “conversation and telly and dishes” is contrasted briefly with the wild elements. There is no Beacon (this title appeared first in the slightly re-ordered version of the poem in Elmet), no Sylvia, and no “trapped animal”, only the “wolf’s wraith / That cannot any longer on all these hills / Find her pelt”. If a student of English literature presented Bate’s version in an essay, they would be marked down for offering imaginative interpretation as fact and for not quoting the poem correctly.

It gets worse. On page 342 Bate repeats that “a woman claws the door of the house” and states that Ted “explicitly linked” this poem to Sylvia. Only in a more extended discussion of the poem on pages 393-5 does he revealed the original placing of this poem in Remains of Elmet as the first of four poems, the second, third and fourth being respectively ‘Emily Bronte’, ‘Haworth Parsonage’ and ‘Top Withens’. Here, he states confidently that “there is no doubting the identity of “you”: it is Sylvia, trapped in the Hughes family home”. He then refers to Sylvia’s poem ‘Wuthering Heights’ from which, according to him, Ted borrowed “the lights twinkling from the valley” (in Sylvia’s poem they “gleam like small change”). And he goes on to link Sylvia with Emily Brontë and her death, and, via Sylvia’s treatment for depression and Ted’s word “electrocuted” (in ‘Haworth Parsonage’), with Bramwell Brontë. From here, it is a short step to suggesting that Sylvia is also the ‘you’ in the poems ‘Churn-milk Joan’ (which he describes as “the story of a rape and murder”) and ‘Bridestones’ (which has “a grave” in which, according to Bate, there lies “the dead bride”).

This is just one possible imaginative interpretation of ‘You claw the door’. Given its original placement, and the locations and the imagery of this group of four poems, I could as easily imagine that the ‘you’ is the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, which in Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, fights to get into the house on just such a wild night as Ted’s poem evokes. In his desire to see Sylvia present in all of Ted’s work Bate makes similar imaginative and questionable interpretations of many other poems.

In Remains of Elmet, which Ted told Stephen Spender was mainly “childhood impressions filtered through my mother’s feelings for that landscape”(TH to SS, 9.10.79), Bate suggests that Ted’s naming of Esther and Sylvia, amongst other family members named in ‘Heptonstall Cemetery’ presents “Sylvia in double form, as both herself and as the Esther of The Bell Jar”. It seems highly unlikely that Ted would want to resurrect the soul of a fictional character like Sylvia’s Esther Greenwood, especially one associated with the trouble and expense caused him by the USA libel trial. Admittedly Esther seems not to be one of the Hughes/Farrar family actually buried in the cemetery at Heptonstall, but Ted did know another Esther, Leonard Baskin’s first wife, with whom he and Sylvia had been friends. In January 1959, Sylvia sent Esther Baskin Ted’s poem ‘Esther’s Tomcat’, which includes the legend of the Knight-killing cat of Barnburgh – a town within easy hiking distance of Ted’s childhood home in Mexborough.

The Westward flying swans in ‘Heptonstall Cemetery’ are certainly a traditional symbol of faithfulness as Bate says, but they are also, as Ted well knew, the totem animals of the bards - creatures of air, earth and water which, in Celtic myth, are symbols of the soul, and which fly across the Threshold between life and death. The West is where the Celtic Otherworld is located.

In his ‘Deposition’ chapter, Bate lays out his own rule for tackling the biography which Ted always said should never be written. “The cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what it is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical”.

In a defensive Endnote, as if he might be accused of some nefarious purpose in writing this book, Bate claims that one of his principal aims “is to explicate, celebrate and immortalise the writings of Ted Hughes, both published and unpublished, so as to bring him new readers… and thus to further the interests of the Estate”. Since the Estate has, since the publication of the book, pointed out errors and protested at “unsubstantiated claims”, he seems not to have achieved the last of these aims. But what about the first?

He deals well with identifying and paraphrasing some of the unpublished material in the British Library archives which relates to Sylvia and Assia, although, as he notes on page 17, “Ted’s journal-style writings are scattered across a huge number of yellowing notebooks, torn jotter pads and thick sheaves of loose pages” and the manuscript pages in the archive cover a great range of diverse subjects. Much of the material for his discussion of Capriccio and Birthday Letters is paraphrased from the published sequences but his notes on the existence and content of some of the many pages which relate to specific poems in other sequences may be of value to scholars. And he deals at some length with Elmet, Gaudete and with Crow. But his desire to find biographical content in everything leads to some misguided interpretations and the “biographical impulse” over-rides the “literary-critical”.

He begins his chapter ‘The Crow’ with a story about Ted looking at the sky and seeing an aircraft and a crow. As elsewhere in this book, any mention of an aircraft in Ted’s work is seen as a link with his brother Gerald in Australia, but there is no hint of Gerald in the passage from Ted’s essay on ‘Words and Experience’ (PIM 118-124) to which Bate is here referring. There is a crow, and the description of its flight as “the ominous thing”, “the barefaced bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gypsy thing”, is Ted’s. However, it is not the crow in Ted’s essay which will “unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head” but “art – music, painting, dancing, sculpture, and the activity that includes all these, which is poetry”. And Ted specifically states that there are “more important things than crows to try and say something about”.

Discussing the vacanas which form much of the ‘Epilogue’, of Gaudete, and some of which appear in Orts, Bate again wishes to identify Sylvia as their subject. These vacanas, many of which remain unpublished, were Ted’s response to the Siva-worshipping Indian songs he had found in Ramanujan’s book, Speaking of Siva. They are Ted’s negotiations with the Goddess, and many of them are addressed specifically to his “Lady of the Hill”. Of course, as he writes in one of these unpublished poems, “It has taken every living woman / To make a body for you to live in” (Vacana VN 54. Ted Hughes’ Vacanas: The Difficulties of a Bridegroom, which is my detailed account of Ted’s work with these vacanas, can be found at http://ann.skea.com/THVacanas.html).

There are many instances of small but significant changes to Ted’s text and of the selection and omission of particular parts of his text to suit Bate’s ‘story’. And his dealings with Ted’s poetic sequences are often perfunctory. Many would disagree with his claim that Lupercal is “without doubt… Ted Hughes’ best and most characteristic volume of poetry”. In Flowers and Insects, he deems Ted’s poetry to be “pedestrian”. In this luxurious (in the old sense of sensuous and voluptuous) book, embellished with Baskin’s beautiful paintings, the descriptions of, for example, ‘Big Poppy’ as a “Hot eyed Mafia queen”, and a tortoiseshell butterfly “drunk with earth-sweat” settling “to nod her long spring tongue down / Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s / Thick-folded throat” or “attaching her weightless yacht” to the crest of a Dandelion, are hardly pedestrian. And the imagery in ‘Sketch of a Goddess’ is frankly erotic.

Ted’s translations are dealt with very briefly. Of Moortown, Bate writes “only two of the poems stick in the reader’s mind”. He found Cave Birds “provisional and fragmented” and its “arcane ritual” a “chasm”. And Adam and the Sacred Nine is allowed just one paragraph.

As one might expect, Bate, as a respected Shakespearian scholar, outlines very well the genesis, development and theme of Ted’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being as it maps the “Venus/Adonis/boar (sex/will/death) triad” across Shakespeare’s works. But he hones in on Ted’s suggestions about Shakespeare’s life and links these with Ted’s own biography. In particular, he picks out a single paragraph from Ted’s additional notes, A Working Definition of the Mythic, which Ted intended to be added to his introduction in any second edition. The section in which this paragraph occurs paraphrases an argument about Sylvia’s work which Ted made more fully in ‘The Evolution of Sheep in Fog’ (WP 191-211), and which Ted used as an example of the way mythic poetry, often unconsciously, combines, with visionary intensity, images of a subjective experience. Ted goes on to explain that the sections of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being “follow step-by-step” the development of Shakespeare’s “mythic personality”. It is clear, as Bate says, that Ted’s analysis of Shakespeare’s work reflects the development of his own mythic personality. Ted recognised this himself when he explained that all poets find “metaphors for their own nature”, and this “master plan of their whole make up” is projected into their work. Shakespeare’s “particular knot of obsessions”, as Ted called it, was very similar to his own and Ted was, as I argue in my article Ted Hughes and Shakespeare (Litro 133, April 2014 republished at http://ann.skea.com/HughesandShakespeare.html), uniquely qualified to recognise in Shakespeare an underlying theme which others had never noticed. To equate this insight to an alphabetical formula which, according to Bate, is “Ted’s own story” of the three sexual liaisons which Ted, as an unmarried man, conducted “in the late Sixties” is reductive in the extreme.

Which brings me to another aspect of Bate’s book. In his ‘Deposition’ he writes that: “women play a huge part in the story of his [Ted’s] metamorphosis of life into art. It has accordingly been necessary to include a good deal of sensitive biographical material, but this material is presented in service to the poetry”. Fair enough! The women interviewed by Bate were clearly independent, intelligent, had minds of their own and could make their own decisions. But one should perhaps ask how much their memories are coloured by events and emotions, or by other personal reasons. To report their comments and the contents of Ted’s manuscripts where they appear is one thing: to report the comments of others about them is hearsay and gossip. And to include Erica Jong’s typically sensational and exaggerated fantasies after her one brief meeting with Ted is gratuitous and distasteful. Similarly, to devote four pages to a précis of Emma Tenant’s novel adds nothing to our understanding of Ted’s work. And, later, to provide an extended account of Susan Schaeffer’s “poisonous” (Bate’s word and mine) roman-a-clef, together with comments such as “anyone acquainted with the real Olwyn [Hughes] will smile in recognition…” is unnecessary and callous. I did not smile. And Olwyn herself, in a letter to Shaeffer’s husband, Neil, (a copy of which she gave me) wrote that reading the book made her ill; that it was hurtful and malicious; and that she had always considered Susan and Neil to be her friends and had no idea how much Susan must have hated her and the rest of the family.

Bate draws together information from many sources, coordinates it well and makes a good and varied ‘story’ from the whole. This in itself is interesting. Generally, he acknowledges his sources in his Endnotes. Sometimes he states quite clearly that whole paragraphs are indebted to a particular source: sometimes he does not. Those who have read Gerald Hughes’s book Ted and I, for example, and Steve Ely’s more recent book Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire, can judge for themselves just how much of these books has been paraphrased and/or borrowed by Bate in his account of Ted’s early life: other readers have only a single Endnote reference to each book to guide them. In my own case, at the end of an extract and paraphrasing of my transcripts of two interviews with Ted conducted by Claudia Wright at the Adelaide Festival in 1976, Bate bluntly states: “after the interview they slept together”. Where did this come from? It is certainly no part of the interviews I transcribed and he could not have been told it by Claudia, who died in 2005. So, was it a Festival rumour, like the one he says circulated about an affair between Ted and Jennifer Rankin, and which he later accepts as a fact?

Bate, himself, in the interests of a good story, is not above hint-dropping and innuendo. In a discussion of Ted’s unpublished poem about Shakespeare drafting a will, he suggests there may be “a shadow story that may one day be revealed”. And whilst his outline of Frieda Hughes’s autobiographical poems in Forty-Five is a valid way of reflecting her memories of her father’s place in her life, his cryptic references to her pin-sticking, mythic/symbolic volume Waxworks, which was written at the time of the fierce family conflict over Ted’s will, is not.

He offers no evidence, either, for his suggestion that Ted’s discussion of the theme of the Rival Brothers in Shakespeare’s work “had autobiographical origins”. In fact, his own account of the close friendship between Ted and Gerald shows just the opposite.

In spite of the claims that this is a comprehensive biography, there is much that is left out or barely touched on in this book. Ted’s fishing did not “stand in for sex”, as Bate would have it. The follies Ted spoke of to Lucas Myers were not just sexual follies but, more importantly, the follies of life – the follies he wrote of in his vacanas as money, politics, religion, food – all the worldly things which kept him from immersing himself in “the pure / Water of the source” (Orts 38) from which he gained his inspiration. Fishing, as Ted wrote in ‘Learning to Think’ (PIM 60-1) was “a sort of mental exercise” a way of “concentrating on a small point [the float] while at the same time letting your imagination work freely”. Fishing was Ted’s way of entering “underbeing” (‘Go Fishing’ CP 652); and of experiencing the dangers and the thrill of being immersed in the world of Nature – the world of his Goddess.

Ted would not have, and did not, describe Yeats as “dabbling” in the supernatural. In his essay A Dancer to God to which Bate refers when he uses this description, Ted wrote that Yeats’ appetite for the occult may have seemed “incomprehensible” and “eccentric” to others but Yeats “never abandoned his early resolution to make the work of poetry his first concern, the world of magic his second”. As with Yeats, Ted’s serious interest in magic was not “bonkers”, as Bates would have it. It encompassed, as it did for Yeats, “Eastern mysticism and religious philosophy, the whole tradition of Hermetic magic (which is a good part Jewish Mystical philosophy, not to speak of the mystical philosophy of the Renaissance), the whole historical exploration into spirit life at every level of consciousness, the whole deposit of earlier and other religion, myth, vision, traditional wisdom and story in folk belief” (TH to Sagar 30.8.79).

And Ted’s knowledge of Shamanism did not begin with his reading of Eliade’s book Shamanism. Clearly this book roused his interest but in a letter to Moelwyn Merchant (29.6.90) he wrote that he had “discovered the literature of Shamanism” at University. He already knew a great deal about negotiating with spirits and souls and about “techniques of moving in a state of ecstasy among various spiritual realms”(WP 56) from his extensive reading of occult material. And it is likely that he attended the lectures of Dr Ethel John Lingren, an authority on shamanism in Manchuria, who, as Robert Leighton reveals in ‘What did Ted Learn from Anthropology?’ (a paper he presented at the Royal Anthropological Institute in June 2015) lectured in anthropology at Cambridge University when Ted was an undergraduate there.

Bate claims that Birthday Letters was written over many years but identifies its particular ‘voice’ as first emerging in the Gaudete ‘Epilogue’ poems which were written in 1973-4. I wrote about this in some detail in my vacanas paper. In particular, however, Bate refers to a certain Silvine notebook in the British Library archive which contains many Birthday Letters drafts, and he links its charred cover with the Lumb Bank fire in 1971. He speculates that at least some of the poems were written in it before 1969. Carol Hughes, in reply to a query of my own about the notebooks and school exercise books in which Ted developed most of the Birthday Letters poems, wrote that the books were bought by Ted in a sale at the local school sometime in the early 70s, and that he then began the Birthday Letters “journey” in the late spring (CH to AS 30.4.2015).

Bate’s biography of Ted has already prompted a great variety of responses from journalist and reviewers. These range from outraged headline-grabbing articles about Ted as a sexually deviant monster to balanced pieces of measured praise for the broad scope of the book, the amount of work which has clearly gone into it, and Bate’s easy, fluent style of writing and presentation. Such diversity of opinion clearly demonstrates how each writer brings their own subjective feelings, experiences and background knowledge to the book. The same is true about the way Ted’s work is read. Each reader sees the work through the prism of their own particular background and interest. There have been Lawrentian, ecological, elegiac, Taoist, Jungian, mythic, and (in my own case) mystical, Cabalistic and Alchemical readings of Ted’s work. Bate’s particular prism focuses the light on Sylvia and sex.

Brought together, these readings still would not reveal the full spectrum of Ted’s genius. Like Shakespeare’s, his work offers many different things to many different people. “Finally”, as Ted himself said in a letter to Keith Sagar (23.5.74), “poems belong to readers – just as houses belong to those who live in them & not to the builders”.

Ted also said of biography: “When the subject is somebody else, the accounts & reports & interpretations sound plausible. When it’s yourself you realise what the creative demon is” (TH to Sagar, 10.6.88).

In Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, Bate’s creative demon has been very creative and the “biographical impulse” has outweighed the “literary-critical”. Like the rather bumbling God in Ted’s Tales of the Early World, he does not get things quite right.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

2015-10-15T15:51:00.000+11:00

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

AUTHOR: Max Porter

PUBLISHER: Faber (September 2015)

ISBN: 978 0 571 32376 0

PRICE: 24.99 (paperback) 114pages.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

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This is a strange and wonderful book – sad, funny, realistic, fanciful, moving and utterly bizarre by turns. It has attracted comments like “astonishing”, “extraordinary” and “truly remarkable”, and it was long-listed for the 2015 Guardian First Book Award.

It is a book about grief and Crow – not Ted Hughes’ Crow, although the father of the two small boys in the book is a Ted Hughes scholar, but about Crow: “a template...a myth to be slipped into”.

This Crow arrives in the aftermath of the sudden death of the man’s wife – the boys’ mother. He intends to be “friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom...analyst and babysitter”. And he erupts into the family home as a vulgar, crude, combative, confronting, amoral, ridiculous presence – pure crow, performing, as he says, “crow stuff”. His idea of “therapeutic method” is just to be there, getting in the way, commenting, telling stories and grounding everything in what, in a rare philosophical moment, he calls his “highly articulated care programme”.

The voices of Dad, the Boys and Crow alternate in brief passages of text which are sometimes poetry, sometimes prose, sometimes metaphor, dreams or fairy tale, and which are often funny and always quite unique. This strange mixture effectively captures the disorientating power of grief, and the need to carry on with the everyday activites of living. Dad cares for the boys and argues and fights with Crow, which seems to help him. The Boys behave like any small boys, they quarrel and fight, make up stories about their mother’s death, annoy their father and care for him with simple acts of kindness: “Some of the time we tell the truth”, says one, because.“ It’s one way of being nice to Dad”. And Crow cares for them all as best he can, confusing them, lying to them, horrifying them and making them laugh and cry.

In an interview in The Guardian (12 Sept. 2015), Max Porter spoke of experiencing the death of his father when he was just six years old. Some of that experience makes its way into this book, but mostly it is a unique creation. And this small volume is beautifully crafted in every way, from the writing to the presentation of the book itself, with its black, cawing crow perched atop the words of the title on the cover and its varied page-layouts.

Some of the references in the book will be recognised by Ted Hughes’ readers, which is delightful but not essential. Some of the other references are more obscure but exactly right for the context in which they occur. Crow, for example, boastingly mentions St Vincent of Lisbon, without elaboration. St Vincent was a martyr whose body was protected by ravens. Crow also refers to “George-Dyer-on-the-shitter” (a Francis Bacon painting) and “Grunewald, the nails in the hand”, art and artists which are perfectly suited to bodily functions and death, about which Crow seems to know a great deal.

Such an unusual book takes a little getting used to and its humour is sometime black and often crazy, but the very oddness of the book works a kind of magic, not just for Dad and the Boys, but for the reader, too.

The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir by David Hare

2015-10-05T15:46:00.000+11:00

The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir

AUTHOR: David Hare

PUBLISHER: Faber (October 2015)

ISBN: 978 0 571 29433 6

PRICE: 39.99 (hardback) 347 pages.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

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I only really became aware of David Hare when I saw his trio of plays performed at the National Theatre in the 1990s. I found Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and Absence of War pithy and enjoyable, and they left me with interesting questions to ponder about Great Britain’s national institutions - the Church of England, British justice and Labour Party politics. Amy’s View, which I saw later, also dealt with thorny cultural and political issues, but I was completely unaware of Hare’s long experience in radical experimental theatre, and of the way in which his strong socialist beliefs have shaped his career and his work.

The Blue Touch Paper is a memoir which covers Hare’s childhood, his education, his early fascination with film, his involvement in co-operative theatre, and his life up to the early 1980s when he became Associate Director of the National Theatre. It is, he says, “the story of my apprenticeship” – of the way in which “a young man became a dramatist” and of “the cost and effect” of that. He ends his ‘Foreword’ with the claim that his life “has been no different from anyone else’s: both everything and nothing”. Few, however, have crammed in so much creativity and achievement.

Hare describes his childhood as having been shaped by the absence of his father, who was purser on a P&O liner and was away for eleven months of the year, and his mother, who was “intelligent and sensitive” but naturally nervous. His own insecurity and over-sensitivity was shaped, too, by life in suburban Bexhill-On-Sea where everyone was class-conscious and watchful and critical of their neighbours. His greatest pleasure at that time was to get lost, something which caused no particular distress to anyone else.

School days, first at local prep-schools, then as a bright scholarship-boy at the prestigious Anglican public school, Lancing College, did nothing to make him more confident. Lancing, initially, felt like a foreign country in which everyone else knew, quite naturally, how to behave. However, he did make one friend with whom he shared a passion for film and, being close to London, they would spend their holidays seeing as many films as they could afford.

Hare’s account of growing up and of schooling in those years shows just how much society and education have changed. At junior school, there were teachers with homosexual tendencies but parents were watchful and the boys knew who to avoid. He was aware of one teacher who “fled town in the manner of schoolmasters at that time, without notice and for no given reason”; of one who was platonically in love with a boy in his class and who transferred this love to him; and his mother ended his friendship with a teacher who would take him to concerts, films and plays. There was no fuss and no particular worry about these situations, as there would be now. Lancing was “as austere as its purpose”. There were no lavish brochures, and no luxurious accommodation to attract overseas students. The school was cold, the boys often dirty because of few laundry facilities, and the food “would have provoked a mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house”. But the education there was liberal and good, and debate and independent thinking were encouraged. At Lancing, Hare became sceptical of authority and began to question religious practices. He began, as he says, to scrutinise the authenticity of public performance - to become “a voyeur” - a practice which became invaluable to him as a director when any falseness in the acting or the play was immediately apparent to him.

From Lancing, Hare won an open scholarship to Cambridge University. He chose Jesus College, because he had been deeply impressed by the writings of the eminent New Left thinker, Raymond Williams, who taught there. First, in order to make money for a trip to America, he became a relief teacher at Cranleigh School, where a fellow teacher introduced him to traditional jazz and this, like film, became a lifelong passion. In America, he travelled the country by Greyhound bus; spent a week in New Orleans living on “oysters, doughnuts and jazz”; and had a short, unsuccessful career as a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Manhattan. Political dissent in America was, he says, an eye-opener for him.

Cambridge was a disappointment. Raymond Williams palmed off his teaching to others and the teaching of literature seemed to be impossibly rigid. Hare quotes Ted Hughes as saying that you could only come out of Cambridge a creative writer by “scrambling through the barbed wire and the camp searchlights”. Yet, the opportunities Hare had there through film and other clubs which exposed him to the newest ideas; through the experimental theatre group which gave him his first experience as an actor; through the friends he made, many of whom went on the have highly successful creative careers; all these were invaluable.

After Cambridge, Hare and some friends established The Portable Theatre – a co-operatively run theatre which had no fixed home but travelled around the country producing and performing old and new plays and sharing the expenses and the profits (if any). This was the first of many times Hare put his socialist principles into practice in his career. It was the first time, too, that when a promised script did not eventuate he wrote a play. In four days, on a portable typewriter perched on his knee as they drove “from gig to gig”, he wrote a script from which he learned that he had the ability to write dialogue.

Hare writes interestingly and with flair about his experiences in radical, experimental, fringe theatre, in film-making and in directing and writing plays. He is equally interesting discussing theatre politics at the time when he became ‘Literary Manager’ at the Royal Court Theatre, then later a Director there. He notes the changes which have taken place in the theatre world, the energies which were encouraged and allowed to flourish and the freedoms which have been lost.

He writes of the friends, colleagues, well-know and less well-known actors, directors and others with whom he has shared ventures which sometimes flopped and which were sometime hugely successful. At the same time, he writes of his own life, his marriage, fatherhood, and the love affair with Kate Nelligan which destroyed his marriage.

Always, he writes honestly and revealingly about the world and the experiences which have made him a playwright and director. And he ends this memoir with the death and funeral of his mother just as a new phase of his life is beginning.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

2015-09-22T15:32:00.000+10:00

The Heart Goes Last

AUTHOR: Margaret Atwood

PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury (September 2015)

ISBN: 978 1 4088 6778 5

PRICE: 32.99 (paperback) 306 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

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Margaret Atwood messes with our heads, as one of the character in this book might say. Just when you think this is a straightforward dystopia novel, where society has broken down and new ways of living have been designed, she surprises you with a plot twist and keeps you guessing about the outcome. She also plumbs the psychological depths of her characters and poses moral dilemmas. In a chapter called ‘Headgame’, for example, there are questions of trust and responsibility - can you trust someone who says that for the greater good you must allow yourself to be given what will apparently be a lethal injection but you will not die; and can you administer that injection to someone you love believing it to be lethal?

Stan and Charmaine have been living a fairly comfortable married life until a sudden countrywide economic disaster causes them, like many others, to lose their jobs and their home. They are living in their car, surviving on Charmaine’s casual job in a sleazy bar, which funds only a minimal amount of petrol, stale doughnuts and instant coffee made in the car with a plug-in cup warmer. And they must be ever-ready to drive away from crazy solitaries and roving gangs who threaten to rob, rape and possibly kill them.

They are in a desperate state when, in a quiet moment in the bar, Charmaine see a TV advert seemingly directed straight at her. It offers an ordered life, satisfying work, a house with a luxurious bathroom and soft towels, and a king-size bed with floral sheets. “The Positron Project is accepting new members now”, says the man on the screen. Charmaine and Stan decide to apply for an interview, which they pass, and having been shown around the project and told something about it they are allowed a short period back in the world outside the Project’s gated town to think about it. The only disadvantage seems to be that once they are in, it is permanent.

Stan’s brother, Conor, who is apparently prospering by suspect means, warns him not to sign anything. But the chance seems too good to miss, so Stan ignores this advice and he and Charmaine join the project.

For a while, everything seems to work well. They share a house with another couple, and each month one couple lives in the house in the model town of Consilience, work in a satisfying jobs, and earn Posidollars, whilst the other couple live in the twin city of Positron Prison, which has comfortable cells and where guards and prisoners share the work, and the environment is designed to be economically productive and to rehabilitate genuine criminals. The motto of the whole project is: CONSILIENCE = CONS + RESILIENCE. DO TIME NOW. BUY TIME FOR THE FUTURE. The couples alternate, month and month about, and are never supposed to meet.

As time goes by both Stan and Charmaine develop sexual obsessions about the other couple who share the house. Stan’s obsession is full of sexual fantasies and is all in his head. Charmaine, however, actually meets the other man and explores with him her own unexpectedly passionate sexual desires. And, of course, nothing is as secret as any of them believe.

The results of this takes the story into a different, more complex and disturbing realm in which the dark underside of the Project is gradually revealed. Psychological pressures, conformity, distrust, guilt, sexual desire – all become driving forces. The twists in the plot are unexpected and the situations often bizarre. And the whole thing is also very funny.

As usual, Margaret Atwood exaggerates current trends and extrapolates from current scientific research to present us with some worrying possibilities. But she does so, very often, with her tongue firmly in her cheek and with great humour. She has great skill in creating characters we can recognise and making their speech and behaviour exactly what we would expect of them. They are, perhaps a little caricatured, and the plot often stretches our credulity to the limits, but most readers will nevertheless thoroughly enjoy the book.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

2015-09-08T15:01:00.000+10:00

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

AUTHOR: Natasha Pulley

PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury (2 July 2015)

ISBN: 978 1 4088 5429 7

PRICE: 29.99 (paperback) 318 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

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Can one feel sad about the demise of a mechanical octopus? Yes, if it usually sleeps on your pillow, steals socks and ties, hides in drawers and seems to have a mind and personality of its own. Katsu the octopus was made by Keita Mori, the master Japanese watchmaker whose strange ability to know the future haunts this book. And it is this clairvoyance which leads him to Nathaniel (Thaniel) Steepleton, for very special reasons.

Thaniel is a Home Office telegraph clerk working in London in 1883. Wireless telegraph, steam-driven underground trains, society balls and women university students who must be accompanied to the University library by a man are all part of this world. So, too, are the bomb threats made by the Irish Fenians, Clan na Gael.

On the day that Thaniel takes down a telegraph message warning that all public buildings in London will be bombed exactly six-months hence, he also returns to his boarding house room in Pimlico to find his door-latch open, the stove lit and used crockery washed and put away in his cupboard. On his bed, he finds a small velvet box addressed to him and inside is a fine rose-gold watch and chain. There is no indication of who has left it. Also, it does not seem to be working.

Thaniel’s sister in Scotland knows nothing about it. The police are uninterested in a burglar who leaves things rather than stealing them. And pawnbrokers will not take it because watches like this one “just disappear”. When weeks later the watch suddenly clicks open and starts working Thaniel finds Keita Mori’s name and address inside it. And when its alarm subsequently saves him from a devastating bomb blast, he seeks out Mr Mori and their strange friendship begins.

Mori is expert at making tiny mechanical toys. He uses clockwork, chemicals and gunpowder to create fireflies which fly, fairies and fireworks. But Thaniel is not the only person to own one of his intricate and unusual watches.

Grace Carrow, who is in her fourth year of studying science at Oxford University, owns one in which a delicate filigree mechanism releases a tiny flying swallow when she opens the back. Grace, who is obsessed with experiments which she hopes will prove the existence of luminiferous ether (a theoretical element which carries light-waves and other energies), uses her watch to distract her from boring meetings. Grace also has a Japanese friend, Matsumoto, who is “the elegant son of a Japanese noble-man” and is “not so much a student as a very, very rich tourist”. Grace purloins Matsumoto’s jackets so that she can pose as a man in order to get into the university library. They tease each other and suit each other well, each being smart, contrary and determined, but this is not the story of their romance.

Instead, this is a mystery, a history, a fantasy and a very strange love story. The story moves backwards and forwards in time, and there are chapters set in Japan as well as in Oxford and London. The Japanese community in London is involved; there are tough little orphan children who help out in Mori’s workshop; and Thaniel meets Gilbert and Sullivan at the Japanese village and is hired to a play the piano in an open-air performance of The Mikado.

Of course, the lives of all these people become entangled, but at the heart of the book is Keita Mori, his curious inventions, his uncanny knowledge of future events and his interventions in situations which he knows will occur. He knows in advance what people will say and do; mid-conversation, he casually intercepts a baseball which would have broken his nose; he manipulates the deaths of several men who threaten the life of Ito, who is Japan’s Minister of the Interior and for whom he works; and he is, somehow, closely involved in the bombings which occur in London.

Natasha Pulley has a delightfully wry sense of humour, her characters are likeable and believable, and you keep reading because you never quite know what will happen next. The story is intricately plotted, and towards the end of the book it does get a little confusing as the doubleness, trickery and foreknowledge of some of the characters brings the story to a climax and a denouement.

All becomes clear in the end. But did Katsu the octopus survive? Thaniel, who sees sounds as colours, saw/heard Katsu’s colours linked to a terrible bomb blast. But the sudden appearance of a very significant heavy-duty bolt in Mori’s hands in the final paragraph of the book is suspiciously like something Katsu might have helped to arrange. Natasha Pulley never explains the mystery of the heavy-duty bolt but leaves it as a thought-provoking ending to her book.

The Loxley Trust by John Hough

2015-08-19T19:28:00.002+10:00

The Loxley Trust by John Hough

Reviewed by David Wyatt

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This adventure novel is as much an exposé of international intrigue of the ‘mission impossible’ genre as it is about a super hero of mythical proportions out to redress imbalances between rich and poor. It starts out slowly with the characters developing and changing as we get to know them at different levels who become more colourful through the friends and conspirators they befriend and pursue.

Although the novel blends fact and fiction in a way that leaves the reader guessing where fiction ends and reality starts and what, if any, reaction we should have as citizens of the world, we slowly become aware that the main character seems to be meeting real people and that we should be concerned or at least unsettled by the story.

Robin Hood is the contemporary character who leads us on a wild crusading adventure that becomes increasingly unsettling. Hood explains that he inherited the name based on family sympathies with the original story of immorality based in English feudal times of King Richard I and his nemesis Robin of Loxley.

As the characters develop and form relationships in pursuit of a cause which becomes clearer, we start to imagine such clandestine agents could well be people we know, working tirelessly to expose information about international groups and individuals controlling the arms race and how the large sums of money made flow in only a few directions.

The novel starts to take a twist as more facts emerge (which can be checked in the glossary) and the actual names of groups and people are mentioned. Such ‘facts’ imply the author has such a depth of knowledge about the players (some of which he is sharing with the reader) that it leaves us wondering whether the author is testing our credulity or whether we should be sharing this modern day Robin Hood's anger.

We are finally left to ponder whether a real Robin Hood needs to set up a 'Loxley Trust' to counter the devastation wrought by those in control of the arms trade.

This a novel that will excite and shock with equal measure, and is a must read for anyone interested in international power and politics.

At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

2015-08-14T16:40:00.003+10:00

TITLE: At Hawthorn Time
AUTHOR: Melissa Harrison
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Circus (June 2015)
280 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

“Here is where it all ends”. These are the first words of the Prologue, which goes on to describe a horrifying car crash. So a shadow is cast over the rest of the book which, in many other ways too, is an elegy and a lament. It is a lament for endings, nostalgia for times past, and regret for the things which people do to each other and to the world around them.

As if to mitigate all this, and in marked contrast to the everyday, seemingly ordinary, sadnesses in the lives of her characters, Melissa Harrison prefaces each chapter with notes of springtime blossoming and renewal . Old country names are used - “Borage, self-heal, first wild clematis flowers (old-man’s beard, travellers joy)” - and the writer of the notes is immersed in the land and sees things most people rarely notice - ”Avens, dog’s mercury, harebells, vetch. Otter spoor by the river”. I did not realise until the end of the book that these notes and the Prologue and Epilogue are provided by Jack, an itinerant man who wants only to keep travelling, taking occasional farm work and living, as best he can, off the land. He seeks out the old by-ways and remembers old customs. He knows the land, knows its creatures, knows things about its past, and sees the changes which have happened and are still happening. He remembers “the graceful elms. So did the rooks: you could hear the loss in their chatter still”, but seeing “fugitive” new growth all around him he is hopeful that “One day they might come back. It was something Jack tried to believe.”

But Jack’s way-of-life is threatened by land-owners who suspect him of poaching and want to move him on; by police who will arrest him for vagrancy; and by house-holders who treat any unkempt stranger with suspicion.

Two of these house-holders are Howard and Kitty. New to the village after a life spent in London, they are strangers to country ways. Kitty has always dreamed of living in the country so that she can immerse herself in her art. But she finds this more difficult than she expects, until a chance meeting with Jack changes the way she looks at things and she sees beyond the conventional prettiness and finds freshness and inspiration in the ordinary things about her: the “Brutal footing of a pylon, the way it was anchored in cow shit and dandelions”. Howard immerses himself in his antique-radio-collecting hobby but yearns for London and finds it hard to fit in. Their marriage was already troubled but by letting Kitty follow her dream, Howard hoped to repair it. For the visit of their grown-up children, they maintain a fragile pretence of togetherness, but this cannot last.

Jamie, a young local teenager, lives with his father and his mildly mentally disturbed mother. He works at a big, soul-less local goods depot and also has a Saturday job in a bakery in order to pay for the rebuilding and renovation of an old Corsa car, which is his obsession. His friend, Alex, with whom he has shared much of his life, has suddenly and unexpectedly moved from the next-door farm with his mother and sister, and from early in this book we know that Alex’s father has subsequently killed himself.

For Jamie’s grandfather, change is un-nerving. His past and present are beginning to merge into each other as his memory becomes unreliable. Once a farmhand, then a prisoner-of-war, then a survivor returning to a very different post-war world to work in a factory, he has always longing to go back to the land. His sudden disappearance precipitates the dramatic ending of this book.

Through other villagers and farmers, we learn something of country life: the changes in farming practices and crops; the influx of farm-labourers from Easter European countries; the modified Rogation Day ‘Beating the Bounds’ ritual (which Kitty and Howard attend to try and fit into the village community); the gossip and the rumour.

Melissa Harrison writes compassionately and movingly about her people and about the universal need to belong to the land, the community, and to each other. But nature is a strong presence in this book: birds, flowers, smells, colours and traditions, ever changing and ever renewing. Small details of springtime abundance pervade the book but Harrison is also realistic about the fragility of nature and of life. The tiny bruised hawthorn petals in the treads of the wrecked car, which are the final image of the book, beautifully convey her love and her concern.

Granta 131: The Map is not the Territory

2015-08-14T16:31:00.002+10:00

TITLE: Granta 131: The Map is not the Territory
Editor: Sigrid Rausing
PUBLISHER: Granta (Spring 2015)
256 pages.

Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

In her ‘Introduction’, editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing writes that “The pieces in this issue of Granta all are concerned with the difference between the world as we see it and the world as it actually is, beyond our faulty memories and tired understanding”.

In some ways this explains the more disorientating pieces in this issue. But other pieces, like Ludmila Ulitskaya’s ‘Life and Breasts’, which deals with the way in which one woman adapts to a diagnosis and treatment for cancer, are quite straightforward. And Janine di Giovanni’s ‘After Zero Hour’ is pure reportage of her experiences in Iraq and of the lives of the people she came to know before and after the American troops left that country. Both pieces offer insight into situations beyond the experience of most people, and both make absorbing reading.

Other pieces, like Jesse Ball’s ‘The Gentlest Village’ and Jon Fosse’s ‘Dreamed in Stone’, are disorientating and imaginatively strange. Kathryn Maris’s poem ‘It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible’ is truly and wonderfully bizarre. And China Mieville’s ‘The Buzzard’s Egg’, in which an elderly slave converses with the idol of a god which (who?) he has spent a lifetime looking after, is curious and unexpectedly moving.

Strangest of all, and I hoped it was a joke but fear it is deadly serious, is the work which Nick Caistor (as translator) and a team of digital-analysis professionals have done with Sebastia Jovani’s novel, The Archive. You can see the resulting visual maps of “Contextual Reference Points”, “Temporal Sequentiality and Narrative Voices”, “Protagonists and their Characterisiation” and “Evolution of the Storyline and its Variable Intensities” on the Granta web-pages as well as in this issue. Visual data projects may be the latest tool for journalists to offer a quick-and-easy way for readers to understand complex networks of facts, but reducing a novel to a series of pictorial graphs is horrifying. Given the results, no doubt a computer could come up with a similarly patterned story. But where is the quality and poetry of the writing? Where is the imaginative response of the individual reader? Such a process is reductive in the extreme and perfect proof that the map is not the territory.

Ian Teh’s breathtaking photographic vistas of parts of China’s Yellow River and its basin are beautiful but, with his notes expressing his concerns about its current state, they provide sobering evidence of change and degradation. Noemie Goudal’s curious photographic images, ‘Observatories’, however, is let-down by an introduction which tries, but fails, to adequately describe her methods.

Overall, this is a very mixed issue but readers can sample it for themselves at : http://granta.com/

History of St Mary's Church by Childs Judy

2015-08-11T16:10:00.000+10:00

The Parish Church of Mary Immaculate and St Athanasius

Author: Childs, Judy

Whistler Street, Manly Judy Childs, May 1994, Amended 2014

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FOREWORD My aim has not been to write a full history of the Manly Parish but to incorporate some early research by Joe Cizzio from his unpublished manuscript, 1965, with some original research of my own. I required a short history of the Church for a university assignment but ended up with so much information on the early history. I decided to write it out fully. This history compliments the architectural study assignment that I completed for my course in local history. My hope is that someone who has more current knowledge of the Parish may write a history of the last fifty years of the Manly Parish, as I have only touched on this part of the history lightly and also focused only on the Church. Also maybe someone might know what happened to the two foundations stones laid in 1891 and 1908. My thanks to Father Phillip Murphy for his assistance in explaining various facets of the Church and my Aunt, Val Standen for her memories and vain effort to find the foundation stones. The Parish of Mary Immaculate and St. Athanasius, Manly The Catholic Church in Manly has grown with the development of this sea-side village and filled the memories of thousands of visitors and the people who are fortunate to live there.

The parish church of Mary Immaculate and St. Athanasius had humble beginnings as a small weatherboard church which was built about 1868 at the cost of two hundred and thirty one pounds. The tender agreement, drawn up by Father McCarthy, was signed by John Wilson and William Bagnall and they built a church 40 feet long, 18 feet wide and 10 feet high walls. This building was used until 1917, firstly as the church and later as a school. It stood on the present site of the primary school, next to the present church. Prior to 1867, Manly was part of the North Shore Parish, which was created in 1856. The sparsely populated parishioners were visited by Father Peter Powell who “sometimes swam his horse over the Spit.” The Catholic Directories indicate that in May, 1865, Mass was celebrated in various locations including “… a tent on the paddock facing the Steyne Hotel. A neat altar had been prepared by a Mrs Perry and a Mrs Brown.”

In January, 1867 when Father Powell celebrated Mass “in the large saloon of the Steyne Hotel” he said, “the want of a church is very much felt”. Henry Gilbert-Smith’s dream to make Manly a holiday resort to equal Brighton in England, prompted him to acquire the land between the Corso and Queenscliff. He then had the first hotel built and granted land to various denominations for the building of churches. The Catholic Church availed themselves of the opportunity and acquired a site, “in a most eligible spot” but later exchanged this site “for a far more eligible one, not far from the Pier”. Later in 1867, Manly became a Parish in its own right under the Deanery of North Shore. The Parish extended from Middle Harbor to Barrenjoey Lighthouse, a distance of twenty miles. Father Powell left Australia in 1867 and Father Callaghan McCarthy was appointed the first priest for Manly Parish. The first marriage appears in the register between George Sly and Sarah Whealy on 16 September, 1867 “at the residence of the Catholic pastor, Father McCarthy”. Mass was celebrated alternately at “Spey” and “The Pines”. The latter was later run as a boarding house by a well-known Manly identity, Ma Maloney, and was on the corner of Ocean Beach and Denison Street. “Spey”, later called ‘Strathspey”, was situated on West Esplanade. The people finally worshipped in the new weatherboard church during 1869.

Rev P Hallinan D.D. took charge of the Parish in 1876. He rented a house in Raglan Street and later a more suitable residence at 87 Ocean Beach. The first Baptism was recorded on 14 September, 1876 of Florence Elizabeth Moss. A ‘State of the Mission’ return completed in October 1877 by Father Hallinan states that the Catholic population was 180 and the average number of people attending Mass was 55 at Manly and 20 at Pittwater. Father Hallinan administered the parish for four years. Between 1880-82 there were temporary appointments of Father Edmund Walsh and Father J A Ryan. However, in 1882, Dean Henly was appointed to Manly Parish to administer to the Catholic population that had grown to 424. He lived in a boarding house named “Ocean View” at the corner of Ocean Beach and Raglan Street. The size of the Parish must have become unmanageable for Dean Henly when he wrote to the Archbishop in 1885: “ Send someone after Easter to take my place. I cannot gallop about and attend to Pittwater. The people area about to petition for another priest.” The Archbishop did send someone else in the person of Father George Tuckwell.

On 5 July, 1886, he wrote from the Manly Presbytery “asking for some money to provide for the presbytery and essential requisites for the Celebration of Mass”. He asked if he could raise funds through concerts etc. He also saw the need for a more permanent church. An “eloquently persuasive” appeal for a new church had been made to Archbishop Moran in about 1884 by William Bede Dalley. The Cardinal Archbishop recalled the day some years later at the opening in 1892 of the new church. He had actually been taken by Dalley to the Church lands that overlooked Manly that was an “uninspiring hillside” of rock and a wild riot of ti-tree scrub.” As William Bede Dalley: “pointed out the little wooden structure which did duty as a church” he pleaded “for the erection of a church which would be worthy of the beautiful spot. His Eminence said he promised at the time that the work would be undertaken as soon as circumstances were at all favourable.” However, the Archbishop was conceiving his dream of St Patrick’s College, the first seminary in Australia for the training of Australian priests. Father George Tuckwell became the driving force behind a new church. Father Tuckwell had been a parish priest in Bordeaux, France and may have influenced the style of the future church.

The Freeman’s Journal on February 5, 1887 stated: “The want of a new building has become painfully apparent with the increase of population in the locality, but the bulk of Catholics are working men, and but very few Catholic families have made their permanent homes in the mission, so that the resident priest is obliged to have recourse to the charity of the faithful throughout the diocese.” The article went on to say that Father Tuckwell had collected a certain amount and was appealing to the people of Sydney for donations to build the church “under the patronage of Mary Immaculate”. On another occasion the Freeman’s Journal reports a social evening with entertainment “to assist Catholics of Manly in raising funds to go towards the badly needed new church in the village by the sea.” It is unclear when Father Tuckwell left the parish as the same article in the Freeman’s Journal states that Father Le Rennetel wanted to establish a club for the youth of the Parish. Father Le Rennetel is also mentioned as being present at the opening of the new church in 1892. When St. Patrick’s College was opened in January 1889, Manly Parish was administered from the College under the direction of Monsignor Verdon, the first president of the College. However, the day to day running of the large parish was certainly the domain of one of the priests. This may have been Father Le Rennetel at some stage but was certainly Father Hugh McDermott in 1891.

At last on February 1, 1891, the foundation stone for the new permanent church was laid. The Freeman’s Journal gave a full account of the past and current proceedings. It stated that during 1890 a large plot of ground adjoining the site of the wooden church became available. Previously, in 1888, a foundation stone had been laid on a smaller site but the work did not proceed because of the size. The current land was purchased for four hundred and seventy six pounds and Monsignor Verdon explained that: “We now have as church property, a plot of ground 220 feet deep, stretching from Whistler Street to Francis Street, with a frontage at one end of 144 feet and at the other end of 156 feet, sufficiently large for a church and schools and all other parochial buildings which may in after times be required. We have a house and a plot of ground on the Steyne Road at Ocean Beach, which was purchased some years ago for church purposes for the sum of one thousand pounds. When a favourable opportunity occurs we shall dispose of this property and apply the proceeds towards paying for the new building.” The church was designed by the architects Messrs. Tappin, Dennehy and Smart of 118 Pitt Street. The original design provided for a nave, transepts, chancel and sacristies as well as a tower and spire. But at this time only the nave was to be built. Father McDermott gave an account of subscriptions received to date which amounted to £137 in the building fund, £175 recently collected and after the hat was passed around, the grand total of £400 had been received. But this initial flush of money was short lived as the community was not large. The ‘State of the Mission’ return submitted by Father McDermott in April 1891 showed that the wooden church was in need of repair, the church was devoid of all necessities and the collection of money from the small congregation for the new church was severe.

Although the depression of the 1890s was upon them, the community as a whole pushed ahead with the new church. The proceeds from the annual wild flower show at Manly in September 1892, went to the building fund for the new church. This was a momentous occasion for the community with the attendance of the Governor, Lord Jersey and his wife Lady Jersey. The nave of the church was nearing completion at this time and was opened by the Cardinal Archbishop Moran on December 4 1892. The building was described in the Freeman’s Journal as being of the Norman style and built entirely of white freestone, quarry-faced externally. It was an impressive building, 80 feet long, 30 feet wide and with walls 25 feet in height to the eaves: “The front gable is marked by special treatment of door with circular window over by which door and window are united in one well-defined architectural feature.” The Church at this stage had cost £3200. Another £186 was collected with the Cardinal donating £25 and Mr Lee, an old resident, £25. This gave a total of £1200 towards paying off the debt. It would be seventeen years before the Catholic Church in the village of Manly was finally completed. In the years between 1892 and 1909 there were changes at St Patrick’s College. Monsignor Verdon was appointed to the See of Dunedin, New Zealand in 1896. Father McDermott took on other duties at the College and became President in 1906-1914. During this time Father Thomas Hayden, as well as his duties at St. Patrick’s, served as Parish Priest for Manly. It was Father Hayden who instigated the final additions to the Church. The lack of funds for the completion of the Church was undoubtedly caused by the severe depression of the 1890s. Although the seaside village of Manly and the surrounding districts that made up the Parish, continued to grow, the depression left many people in dire circumstances. However it would seem that a local parishioner, Mrs Isabella Dwyer, was not among them.

Mrs Dwyer, in February 1903, “agreed to purchase the land and home known as “Fernleigh” for the sum of £500, also 2 pieces of land belonging to the estate of the late Michael Kelleher for the sum of £2/15/- per foot”. However, Mrs Dwyer’s generosity was unequalled on February 3 1908, when she presented Cardinal Moran with a cheque for £2000 for the completion of the Church. This allowed Father Hayden to instigate the building program and Cardinal Moran blessed the foundation stone for the additions in June 1908. At this time the debt owed on the original church was £850 on the original loan of £4000 plus 4% interest. The contract for the additions was to cost £3569 and with Mrs Dwyer’s £2000, the Parish debt now stood at £2400. Eight hundred people attended a Solemn High Mass at the Church of Mary Immaculate when the Cardinal blessed the additions to the Church on June 6 1909. The building, of Romanesque style, now comprised transepts, a sanctuary 26ft. by 18ft., and a sacristy 16ft. by12ft. The walls were 30 ins. thick and the roof was slate. The interior of the church was ornamental plaster. The architects were Messrs. Nangle and Nurzey of Elizabeth Street and the builder was Mr. J. Taylor of Camden. The financial statement delivered by Father Hayden gives an insight into the Parish: “The cost of the contract for the additions was £3569, towards which Mrs Dwyer had generously donated £2000. At the laying of the foundation stone of the additions, £176 had been contributed and with £300 realised from the Easter fete, the total sum in credit amounted to £2175/9/- to which would be added the architects’ fees of £75. As the previous debt on the Parish was £635, their indebtedness up to the present was £1800. It gave him pleasure to refer to the generosity of the parishioners and mention that the marble steps in the sanctuary were presented by Mr. Cecil Coughlin, the asphalting had been done by Mr. F. Melit, vases had been given by Mrs. McKelvey and carpets and statues were presented anonymously, while the builder, Mr. J. Taylor had acted generously.”

The Parochial Statement written in May 1912 by Father Hayden gives an indication of how the general population of Manly and the surrounding districts had grown. He estimated the population of Manly itself at 10,625 and the remaining districts at 3700. Of these, 1380 people comprised the Catholic population. The Manly Parish still extended from Middle Harbor to Barrenjoey Lighthouse although there was another Church at Careel Bay. The Church debt had decreased to £847, a tremendous effort in only three years. Groups within the Church at this time reflect the strong commitment the local Catholics had to their Church. The Sacred Heart Sodality for men had 90 members. The Sacred Heart Sodality for women had 156 members and the Children of Mary had 46 members. Father Thomas Hayden became a much admired and well-known person to all the residents of Manly Parish. “His cheery salute as he passes through the streets is eagerly looked for by old and young.” But the man who would leave his mark on this Parish forever more arrived on March 17 1916 to aid the now Dr. Hayden (President of St. Patrick’s College from 1914) with the administration of the Parish. John McDonald was born in Mullinavatt, Ireland on June 2 1884. He was ordained on June 14 1908 at St Mary’s College, Kilkenny and arrived in Australia that same year. Eight years later, in 1916, he was appointed to assist Father Hayden. A letter from the Archbishop in November 1918 advised Father Mac “that from the 1st Sunday of next advent – Dec. 1st 1918 – “he would take over the spiritual and temporal administration of the parish”. At this time Father Mac lived at St Patrick’s College but Joe Cizzio writes that “Father McDonald was forbidden to return to the College after an influenza sick call.” This would undoubtedly be the influenza epidemic of 1919 that claimed so many lives. For nearly fifty years “Father Mac” was the parish priest of Manly. He was admired, not only by the Catholics of Manly, but by the community at large. Stories abound to this day of Father Mac, from visiting his large parish on horseback and later motorbike with sidecar to picnics and concerts with the local schoolchildren and “taking his dip always in a one piece black cotton bathing costume.” Jeanne McGlynn recalls in her article on Father Mac in the Manly Daily that during the dark years of the Depression during the 1930s, Father McDonald grew very close to the people. “No-one would ever know how many children played in Manly in shoes provided by Father McDonald.” His foresight over the years saw the building of schools and a presbytery. And cheap land bought by Father McDonald throughout Manly Warringah later provided land for churches in new parishes such as Harbord, Manly Vale, Balgowlah, Forestville, Dee Why, Avalon, Mona Vale, Narrabeen and Narraweena Another of Father McDonald’s everlasting contributions was the extensions to the church that although it seated six hundred people, was “bulging at the seams” by the 1940s.

An extension was designed in sandstone by the architect Edward Green during the 1940s but the Second World War prevented acceptance. It was not until 1963 that the extensions were completed. This time although using basically the same plan from the 1940s, brick was used instead of sandstone, as the price of sandstone was now prohibitive. Over the years Father McDonald had been honoured by the Catholic Church when he was appointed Rector Irremovable in 1926, granted a Papal Honour in 1940, of being named a Privy Chamberlain, which carried the title of Monsignor, appointed a Parish Priest Consulter, to assist in making clerical appointments in the Catholic Diocese of Sydney and in 1955 another papal honour when he was named a Domestic Prelate. Father McDonald died on September 29 1965 at the age of eighty-one. Present at his funeral were the leaders of the Catholic Church, the State Premier, parliamentarians, civic leaders and his beloved parishioners and friends, the men, women and children of Manly. Father James Delaney was appointed Parish Priest of Manly in January 1966. Interestingly, he had been educated at the same place as Father McDonald in Kilkenny, Ireland. Father Delaney had been Parish Priest of Harbord for the previous twenty five years. Father Delaney guided the Parish through the changes in the Catholic Church from Vatican ll, added the new marble altar and saw to the completion of St Paul’s Regional High School. He remained in the Parish for four years till the next Irish priest was appointed. Father Denis Ryan was appointed to Manly in February 1970. He was made Irremovable Pastor at the same time and continued the work of Father McDonald and Father Delaney. Extensions to the various parish schools continued over the twenty-one years Father Ryan was Parish Priest and although the Church was complete externally, internally changes were made in the context of Vatican ll. A legacy left to the Parish by a parishioner for the purchase of a new organ was the cause of much discussion.

The new large pipe organ was installed in June 1986 at the front of the Church. Unfortunately it has obscured the side altar in the northern transept and one of the large stained-glass windows. Father Ryan retired in 1991. In his years at Mary Immaculate Parish he saw the Church make many changes particularly to the laity of the Church. Finance Committee, Pastoral Council, Acolytes and Readers have been added to the already established Sodalities including St Vincent de Paul and Youth Groups. The community caring of Mary Immaculate is still strong. Special ministers visit the sick and elderly in their homes on Sundays to give them communion and at Christmas, lunch is provided on Christmas Day for people on their own, whether they are on holidays or a bit down on their luck. Since 1991 Father Phillip Murphy has carried on the fine traditions of his predecessors. The first Australian Parish Priest at Manly, he is also, a graduate of St Patrick’s College, up on the hill. To him, I owe a vote of thanks for helping me with this work. ISABELLA DWYER nee Moore Isabella was born 13 October 1840 to Patrick Moore and Mary Ann (nee Tyson). Mary Ann was the sister of James Tyson, a pastoralist who died in 1898. James was unmarried and intestate and after a series of court cases his estate of £2 million was divided among his next of kin. Isabella Moore married John B. Buckley 10 April 1858 and bore him five children. Buckley died circa 1868 and on 14 May 1870 she married Phillip B. Dwyer. They had a further eight children. Her circumstances are unknown but she possibly inherited a considerable amount of money from her Uncle James Tyson’s estate. Her descendants described her as eccentric; she changed her will five times and added codicils to each will. As well as her generous donation of £2000 to Mary Immaculate Church in Manly, she bequeathed £1000 to the Hospice for the Dying at Darlinghurst. Isabella died 20 June 1917.

The Living and the Dead in Winsford by Hakan Nesser's

2015-08-05T13:04:00.000+10:00

Title:   The Living and the Dead in Winsford
Author:   Hakan Nesser
Publisher: Macmillan (July 2015)
ISBN:   978 1 4472 7191 8
471 pages.

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Reviewed by Ann Skea (Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/)

An award-winning Scandinavian author, murder, suicide, a lonely house on mist-shrouded moors, witchcraft, second-sight, a bohemian collective of “practitioners of the liberal arts” in two exotic settings, death threats, rape, romance and a faithful dog. What more could you want?

Nesser manages to fit all this into The Living and the Dead in Winsford. His narrator is Maria Holinek (alias Maria Anderson “with one ‘s’”), and she is intent on making a new life for herself after killing (perhaps) her husband.

I do not read many crime-fiction books, so I am not very familiar with the conventions of that genre. Is it OK for some of the mysteries in the book to remain unsolved? Who wrote ‘DEATH” in the grime of a car parked in an isolated location? Why did Casper the fireside-hugging dog disappear on a bitterly cold, rain-swept night and turn up more than a day later at a local pub? What is the strange presence in the house and what makes that strange clanking noise outside?

And how did “a patch of blue sky” manage to appear after darkness has fallen (page 8)? Nesser leaves us in the dark about all these mysteries.

And, is it an accident that the “much talked about”, famous British poet, Tom Herod, shares the initials of Ted Hughes and also has an equally famous, American, poet wife, whose debut novel will make her a “goddess of scurrilous gossip” and who later commits suicide?

Nesser is at pains to point out that all his characters are fictional but that “The Exmoor environment has been meticulously described in accordance with reality”. Indeed it has. And if you need a travel guide this book would help, provided you can cope with the ever-present mist, the wind and the rain and the cold. Admittedly, Nesser and Maria were there in the middle of winter, but thankfully, the gorse blossoms all the year round. Which means, as Maria discovers, that the ancient Exmoor rule that a boy can only make love to his girlfriend when the gorse is in bloom, is a joke.

Of course, none of this much matters if the book holds your attention and I certainly kept reading to the end where, suitably, the shock denouement appears on the final page.