Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel is the sequel to Wolf Hall, which I read and loved in 2010.  I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since I finished reading Wolf Hall. So, even with a large backlog of books to be read, I just had to start Bring Up the Bodies straight away. It’s like catching up with friends you haven’t seen for a while – it begins in September 1535, just a few days after Wolf Hall finished. Thomas More was executed and now Henry VIII and his retinue are staying at Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymour family. And so, the story continues. This book covers the fall of Anne Boleyn, but like Wolf Hall, it’s about the career of Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to the king, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and deputy to the king as head of the church in England.

I’m now on page 101, a quarter of the book read, and am trying to read it as slowly as possible, soaking up the atmosphere and Hilary Mantel’s richly descriptive words. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that every now and then, she qualifies who ‘he‘ is: ‘he, Cromwell‘, removing the ambiguity found in Wolf Hall. I hadn’t realised until I read the Author’s Note that this is not the end of Thomas Cromwell or the end of Hilary Mantel’s efforts to write about him:

This book is of course not about Anne Boleyn or about Henry VIII, but about the career of Thomas Cromwell, who is still in need of attention from biographers. Meanwhile, Mr Secretary remains sleek, plump and densely inaccessible, like a choice plum in a Christmas pie; but I hope to continue my efforts to dig him out. (page 410)

But I’ve also realised that I need to read Fatherland by Robert Harris, because this is the book we’ll be discussing at my face-to-face book group at the end of May and I hadn’t started it yet. So this morning I began to read it.

Whilst Bring Up the Bodies is most definitely historical fiction, Fatherland is more difficult to categorise. It’s set in Germany in 1964, but not the historical Germany of that date, because Hitler is approaching his 75th birthday, and Germany had won the Second World War – it’s historical fiction that never was – an alternative history. And yet many of the characters actually existed, their biographies are correct up to 1942 and Harris quotes from authentic documents in the book. The Berlin of the book is the Berlin that Albert Speer planned to build. What is definite is that this is a murder mystery, beginning with the discovery of the naked body of an old man, lying half in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. The homicide investigator is Xavier March of the Kriminalpolizei and the victim is a member of the Nazi Party. It promises to be a thrilling page-turner.

I don’t think I’ll have any trouble reading the two books in tandem, as there’s no chance that I’ll mix up the characters or plots.

 This photo was taken years ago, when I used to belong to a spinning group.  We had an open spinning day, demonstrating how to spin. That’s me, on the left of the photo using the smaller, dark wood spinning wheel. You can tell how old this photo is because I’ve got dark hair and am not wearing glssses (I had contact lenses).

We spun the wool from fleeces, first of all carding the unwashed wool, thick with lanolin – very good for your hands! I knitted the finished wool, making mittens and a cardigan. But eventually I gave up spinning as really I preferred knitting and it’s hard to spin enough wool at  the right ply to make a garment successfully.

It’s good to have a record of a hobby from the past and I enjoyed remembering my spinning days! We also dyed the wool and made felt.

See more Saturday Snapshots at Alyce’s blog At Home With Books.

It is a remarkable book about the French Revolution concentrating on three of the revolutionaries – Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilian Robespierre, from their childhoods to their deaths. Along with these three main characters there is a whole host of characters and without the cast list at the beginning of the book I would have struggled to keep track of them. In fact, some of the lesser characters were just names to me and I never saw them clearly, but that didn’t surprise or deter me, given the enormity of the task of chronicling the events of the French Revolution.

But the main characters stand out and there are also vivid portraits of such people as Mirabeau (a renegade aristocrat), Lafayette (a general in the American Revolutionary War and a Commander of the French National Guard), Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. I was also fascinated to read about Jean-Paul Marat  (he who was murdered in his bath), the Marquis de Sade and Pierre de Laclos (Les Liaisons Dangereuse) – I didn’t know anything about de Sade’s and de Laclos’s involvement in the Revolution.

My European History at school stopped at 1789, so although I remembered listing the causes of the Revolution and the events that led up to it, my knowledge of the main event, as it were, is patchy and incomplete, mainly gathered from books such as Les Miserables and A Tale of Two Cities and TV programmes over the years. I found the first part of A Place of Greater Safety covered much of the ground that I was familiar with, but seen through the eyes of the three main characters as they grew up.

Despite Mantel’s insight into the personal lives and characters of the three main protagonists I never really sympathised with any of them – after all they were responsible for the deaths of many people, including their own friends and played a major part in the Reign of Terror. But at times I was drawn into hoping that they would escape their fate – they were all guillotined. They were all lawyers who grew up in the provinces, knew each from their youth and moved to Paris.

Camille Desmoulins is perhaps the star of the book. It was he who instigated the storming of the Bastille. He was by all accounts a charismatic character, despite his stutter. He and Danton lived close to each other, and Danton, a large, loud and ugly man who had the power of captivating his audiences, had a liaison with Lucille, Camille’s wife. Robespierre was a much cooler character and his involvement in the Terror (in which many people lost their heads) was chilling. But even he came over under Mantel’s pen as almost a likeable human being, revealing his weaknesses as well as his power. As long as he could he shielded Danton and Camille as opposition to them grew.

Unlike Wolf Hall, this book isn’t written in the first person, but it moves between the first and third person points of view, giving an almost panoramic view of the characters and their attitudes to the Revolution. It really is written in a most diverse style, moving between locations, characters and even tense. There are also passages written as script-style dialogue, passages from recorded speeches and pamphlets, ‘woven’ into Mantel’s own dialogue. She writes in her Author’s Note that this is not an impartial account and she has tried to see the world as her characters saw it, so where she could she used their own words.

The events of this book are complicated, so the need to dramatize and the need to explain must be set against each other. …

I am very conscious that a novel is a co-operative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. …

I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true. (pages ix-x)

I think, for me, that Hilary Mantel succeeded with this book. I have struggled reading other books written in the present tense, but either I’m getting more used to it, or Hilary Mantel’s style has won me over. Either way, reading this book and Wolf Hall has been a pleasure – ‘real journeys’ into other times and places.

• Paperback: 880 pages
• Publisher: Fourth Estate; (Reissue) edition (4 Mar 2010)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 000725055X
• ISBN-13: 978-0007250554
• Source: my own copy
• My Rating: 4/5

Today I’m eagerly waiting for the follow up to Wolf Hall to be delivered to my letter box: Bring Up the Bodies is published today and I’ve had an email saying it’s on its way to me.

Here’s the reason.

This is something I’ve been thinking about writing about for a while now, but now seems the right time. Last August I was diagnosed with a breast cancer. I couldn’t feel a lump, but my breast didn’t look right and I thought it might be a cancer. My GP couldn’t feel a lump either but thought it best to check it out at the local hospital’s breast clinic. It was still a shock to have it confirmed- even more so when the consultant said he thought I needed a mastectomy and he could do it very soon. But when they examined the biopsy it turned out that the type of cancer I had was oestrogen receptive and it was possible it would shrink by taking hormone therapy tablets. I was amazed to say the least. Apparently if you have to have a breast cancer, this type is the best one to have!!!

And so, from August to February I faithfully took the tablets, with practically no side effects – and they worked, shrinking the cancer by about a third. Still, I did need an operation, but a wide local excision, or lumpectomy in everyday language, and not a mastectomy. I had the operation at the beginning of March. It was just day surgery and went well. It was a strange experience, having surgery to correct something that wasn’t causing me any pain or discomfort and coming round from the operation with scars and discomfort – and that was all it was discomfort, soreness, massive bruising and swelling.

But all the cancer has been removed, the bruising has disappeared. It’s still tender and I get darting pains every now and then. Currently I’m having 20 sessions of radiotherapy as a precautionary measure. It’s every weekday, but the sessions are only 10 minutes long, with the actual radiation only taking about two/three minutes. There was a planning appointment where they pinpointed the area to target, and I mean pinpoint as I have at least four (I lost count) minute tattoos that outline the area. For someone who hates the idea of having tattoos, this was quite daunting, but they are such small dots I can hardly see them and it didn’t hurt (much) when they did them.

So far, I’ve had 8 treatments and it has all been painless. I’m told that tiredness kicks in after about a fortnight’s treatment and by the end of the sessions my skin may get red and sore, as though I’d got sunburn. I hope that is as bad as it gets. The most difficult thing so far has been the travelling to Edinburgh for the treatment. It takes 1 hour 20 minutes each way, which is tiring enough on its own. D is driving me and we’re listening to Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves, the fourth in her Shetland series with Detective Jimmy Perez investigating murders on Fair Isle, which is keeping us both guessing who the murderer could be.

I’ve always had a dread of cancer, made more personal when my mother had a mastectomy, when I was in my twenties. She died five years later, after it had spread. My father died of bronchial cancer, after smoking since he was ten years old and four years ago this August my sister died of lung cancer – she’d smoked since she was 15. But, I have to say, that so far it’s not been too bad. I’m a terrible wimp regarding needles and injections and that has been the worst thing for me – the most painful was the injection before the doctor took the ultrasound core biopsies, but it wasn’t much worse than injections I’ve had at the dentist. It’s the fear of the unknown that has been more terrible than the treatment itself.

I am so grateful for the NHS – speedy appointments, kind and caring medical staff, and practically pain free treatment (I won’t mention the nurse who had great difficulty taking blood from me). I’ve had so many tests and scans and thankfully the cancer hadn’t spread anywhere else. Even so, the surgeon took a biopsy of my lymph nodes when he did the lumpectomy just to make sure, which confirmed the cancer hasn’t spread .

I like to know as much as possible about what’s happening to me and I asked the breast care nurse if there was anything I could read about breast cancer. She warned me off reading statistics online as these are often out of date and gave me a pack produced by Breast Cancer Care, which is an excellent introduction. What I have found most helpful are the Macmillan Cancer support publications, particularly Understanding Breast Cancer and Understanding Radiotherapy. Books on cancer are rather more problematic, as so many are out of date, or are aimed at the medical profession. There are some written by patients, but I’m a bit wary about them as symptoms and treatments differ from person to person. Treatment in the future looks promising as I’ve seen on the news about progress that’s being made in diagnosing cancers and less invasive ways of treating them.

This may have slowed me down, writing about the books I’ve read, but it certainly hasn’t slowed down my reading. It has brought home to me just how many books there are and that it really is true – ‘so many books, so little time‘. It’s not just books, of course, because no matter how young or old you are, how well or ill you are, life is unpredictable and we should make the most of it whilst we can.

I am optimistic, because as my breast care nurse said ‘the cancer’s away and the prognosis is good.’

View of River Tweed from the public footpath

We walked through the woodland above the Tweed back home climbing over the ladder style from the woodland into the adjoining field. The photo below shows our  grandson climbing the style:

Climbing the ladder style

And this one is on the footpath in the field :

Walking back home

For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home With Books.

So, I picked up Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death by W J Burley, which is much shorter at 192 pages and easier to read – and to handle. It’s a murder mystery about the death of Matthew Glynn a respectable bookseller.

But I’m also thinking ahead about what to read next. I have started The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, but I’m thinking of leaving it for now as it too is another long book. So, the possibilities are:

Fresh from the Country by Miss Read, (219 pages) about Anna Lacey plunged into her first teaching job in London. I’ve read most of Miss Read’s Thrush Green and Fairacre novels, but this one is new to me. Dora Jessie Saint, who wrote under the pen-name Miss Read, died earlier this month at the age of 98. She wrote over 30 books, gentle and unsentimental observations of English country and village life and I’ve loved each one I’ve read.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. This was my face-to-face book group choice this month, but I missed the meeting because it was the same day as our grandson’s birthday, and I hadn’t read the book anyway. I’d like to read it, though, because the group disagreed about the book – with some people disliking it and others who thought it was good. Maurice and Sarah had begun a love affair during the London Blitz and then Sarah had broken off the relationship. Maurice, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief sends a private detective to find out the truth. It would also be good to read it as it fits into the Classics Challenge.

And looking further ahead, I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to get any of the ‘free’ books offered in newbooks magazine, which arrived recently. I’ve narrowed my choice down to two books:

The Somnambulist by Essie Fox. This is set in Victorian England. Seventeen year old Phoebe takes a job as companion to Mr Samuel’s wife and encounters betrayal, loss and regret as she tries to adjust to life away from home.

The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, a debut novel by Wendy Jones. In 1924 Wilfred lives in rural Pembrokeshire where he runs the local funeral parlour. He fantasises about Grace, the daughter of the local doctor and on the spur of the moment he proposes to her. But then he realises that this is a mistake and tries to undo it.

Another book that has caught my eye recently is:

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a debut novel by Rachel Joyce. I saw this in a local bookshop and nearly bought it then. It’s about Harold who walks from his home in Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland to see a dying friend. It’s the idea of a journey along the length of England that I find appealing, but the thought of the friend dying from cancer may be too close to home.

One thing is certain, I’ll never run out of books I’d like to read.

Bamburgh Castle from the carpark

Bamburgh Castle was bought by Lord Armstrong (who built Cragside) and renovated by him at the end of the 19th century. The castle still belongs to the Armstrong family, and is open to the public. It also hosts weddings and corporate events and has been used as a film location since the 1920s, featuring in films such as Ivanhoe (1952), El Cid (1961), Mary, Queen of Scots (1972), and Elizabeth (1998).

The entrance is through two gatehouse towers, which still have some of the original stonework. They were altered and added to in the 19th century.

Gatehouse Towers

From there you walk along the Battery Terrace, with its cannons facing the sea, placed there ready to defend the castle when Napoleon threatened to invade Britain.

Battery Terrace

From the Battery Terrace you can see Lindisfarne to the north and the Farne Islands to the south. Lindisfarne is just a dot on the horizon above the first cannon in the photo.

Inner Farne on the horizon

The photo below is of the Keep, which was originally built in the 12th century. It sits on a massive plinth to prevent attackers digging beneath it and setting fires to collapse it.

The Keep

And finally a view of Bamburgh Castle taken from the road from Seahouses to Bamburgh:

Bamburgh Castle taken from Seahouses

See Alyce’s blog At Home With Books for more Saturday Snapshots.

It rings true to life, with all the anguish and angst of bringing up children as Laura, a divorced single mum struggles to cope as her daughter Beth turns twelve. They live in an old tollhouse, called Ninepins – there used to be a bridge across the lode and the toll was 9d (nine pence), which over time morphed into ‘Ninepins’. To help out with her finances she rents out the self-contained pumphouse, converted from a fen drainage station, to students. Her new lodger is Willow, a 17-year-old student, with a troubled past. She has been in a care home and still needs Vince, her social worker for support. Laura is not sure what influence Willow will have on Beth, who is having difficulties making friends at her new school. When Beth gets into trouble at school, Laura becomes even more anxious and she doesn’t seem able to do right for doing wrong. Then there is Willow’s mother whose appearance on the scene brings about devastation.

This is a darker book than Rosy’s other books that I’ve read and it captures perfectly the precarious relationships between parents and children as they begin to grow up and feel independent. Just how much leeway should Laura give Beth, how much should she intervene in her life, how much should she monitor what Beth is doing are questions that Laura is trying to resolve. Willow’s and Vince’s appearance in their lives bring changes that Laura had just not considered.She knows a little about Willow’s background and what she does know bothers her immensely. It’s the relationships in this book that are the focal point as Laura, Beth and Willow come to terms with their situations. A gripping story that held my interest throughout.

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd (16 April 2012)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 1905207859
• ISBN-13: 978-1905207855
• Source: Author review copy
• My Rating: 4.5/5