My Favourite Book of the Year (Part Two)

The Second part of last year’s top ten.

Check out this booklist to see what I’ve read this year in total, and which books would be your favourites. 

With little ado…

5

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Another famous book I’ve never before gotten around to, and enjoyed very much.

The  best thing about the book ‘Jane Eyre’ is the character Jane Eyre. It helps that we meet her as a child and she is not perfect, she is angry - perhaps righteously so, but also vindictively. As she grows up, she keeps that anger in check but she never properly loses it. I can now sympathise with her as a flawed human being rather than a perfect thing.

I found her always relatable but strong. She is a person of strong feelings, in her love as well as hate, but she unites her heart, her head and her morals to decide what to do next without compromising her own self respect.

I wasn’t so keen on the men in her life. 

I sort of liked grumpy Rochester and when we find his secret, his moods make a lot of sense. Seeing a TV version of the story, I wondered how Rochester appeals to Jane because he is so moody. It turns out, that Jane is comforted by his gruffness as that is what she is used to and anything more polite would have turned her off. Also, I was surprised he is not asattractive in the book as portrayed elsewhere.

He is, however, a creepy lover. He says such gems as “I like my name pronounced by your lips” and becomes horribly saccharine and possessive. What I loved was that Jane notices his creepy/sticky attempts at romance and so needles him on purpose to keep him pleasantly spiky. While I think she could have handled healthy Rochester but it’s very clear she has control of the relationship at the end of the book.

As for St John Rivers, I found him fascinating. He’s not a hypocrite, he knows what sort of cold-hearted man he is but he also knows he can plug both his virtues and faults into service to Christ and become something both important and (in his eyes) useful. 

As a modern consumer of texts, I am used to a three act structure, so the part at Morton seemed superfluous, but I found St John so interesting, I forgot. He’d be worth exploring in a book to himself, one where he and Jane have married and are in India living their holy/abusive life. It’d be painful and fascinating.

It’s a book that has made me think about a lot. Especially the idea of admitting to faults. The men in the book think that merely admitting is enough, it is the women in the book who always have to pay for them. I’m not sure things are so different now.

Jane Eyre the character makes Jane Eyre the book unmissable.

4

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

My picking up a Penelope Fitzgerald novel compilation in a charity shop was the beginning of this year’s great books. 

This year I read; ’The Bookshop’, ‘The Gate of Angels’, ‘The Blue Flower’, ‘Offshore’, ‘Human Voices’ and ‘The Beginning of Spring’. I love her tight tales that manage to say more in a hundred or so pages then other books manage in four times as many (and I’ve read a few of those types this year). I also love her rug-pulling manner of ending a book.

‘Offshore’ was probably my favourite of her books so far, but I have picked ‘The Bookshop’ because it was the first I read, and indeed I read wrapped in furs, sitting on one of the North Downs, toasting cheese on a bonfire and swigging single malt out of a bottle - all alone but for the book. Possibly the best way to read a great book.

What about the book itself?

This book is like a small, well-cut stone, perfectly formed and of surprising substance, it manages to fit an awful lot in a hundred pages. Penelope Fitzgerald published her first book at the age of sixty. Such a meticulous work of miniature seems only to be possible for an older person. That said, it’s never a nice book, there are many prickles and thorns in the writing.

Florence Green has a certain naivety and courage. She makes a bookshop as a way of proving her own agency to herself and everyone else. Everything would have been fine if she had not picked the Old House for her shop. Mrs Gamart has plans for the building and does not wish for those plans to be thwarted. 

The village of Hardborough is well drawn in its cold, damp and salt-rotten stagnancy. The Old House is home of a ‘rapper’ a poltergeist as reluctant to change as the rest of the small town. From the patronising bank manager, to the busybody society matron (with an MP for a nephew) and the genial but useless Milo - Florence has a lot to work against. These people show the insidious benefits of class and power, the same benefits that are denied the precise and clever Christine Gipping after she fails her eleven plus. 

Florence is not alone in her endeavours, aided by the more solid and sensible characters, such as  shut-in Mr Brundish and the odd-job man Raven, but resilience and sensibleness are not enough and everything ends in penury, defeat and shame.

There’s a film of it coming soon, I’ll be there.

Small, not sweet but sort of sublime.

3

Rebecca by Daphne De Maurier

I was unsure at first… the first line is justly famous but the following chapter is vague in the way that irritates me. It’s a tease, nudging and prodding and whispering ‘guess what’s happening’. What’s more, the first chapter is a diversion, a dream that is being had by the narrator after all the events of the book.

It leads to a second chapter which forms a frame that we never return to. This annoyed me greatly - but finishing the book, I find it a stroke of genius because when the book ends, it ends utterly abruptly - the end of the story is actually at the beginning of the book, in the second and first chapters. This makes those chapters unsatisfying on initial read but fascinating in reflection.

Also… Daphne Du Maurier uses the word ‘quest’ in strange ways.

Once we were off, I was utterly gripped, biting my nails and flicking the pages feverishly. I was reading the book at an Indian takeaway when I came across the big twist and I audibly gasped. I had to put the book down and look around to remind myself of real life. I was expecting a twist which I guessed, what took my breath away was how much the twist changed everything else. 

I also realised that I had been utterly manipulated… and I have to say that I enjoyed it. 

Having finished the book, I realised that I had been rooting for a very bad man and the spineless, puppy-dog who is prepared to cover for him. The only sources for Rebecca’s supposed ‘evilness’ was from Maxim and the un-named narrator, who has her own agenda. Why was I prepared to take their side? Good writing I suppose.

A gripping novel that leaves the reader complicit.

2

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

Another writer I've got very into. I read this book as well as ‘Hangover Square’ and the ‘Twenty-thousand Streets Under the Sky’ trilogy.

‘The Slaves of Solitude’ was my favourite though.

London has been compared to a great monster many times before. Usually it is a voracious eater, plundering the local countryside and resources but this book described it’s main function as respiration. It breathes in people from the surroundings and at the end of the day breathes them out, following bus and train lines like oxygen in the bloodstream. It was striking. It was sombre. It was utterly gripping.

It is narrated by Miss Roach (nearly all the people in this are Mr, Mrs and Miss). She is a spinster, approaching forty with a failed teaching career and a minor job in publishing. It’s 1943 and she’s been bombed out of the city and lives in a dreary converted tearooms in a lightly fictionalised version of Henley on Thames. These lodgings are ruled over by the odious Mr Thwaites so she escapes for coffee visits with her friend Vicki, a german ex-pat who wants to live in the same building; and Lieutenant Lummis, an American who is taking advantage of being away from home.

It seems strange that this is the third novel of Hamilton's (of the four I have read) narrated by a woman. Especially strange considering a lot of his work seems to have a deeply ambivalent attitude to women and he is so good at creating female monsters. Roach, for all her quiet unexcitingness, is a character who is easy to warm to. Part of this is due to the reader siding with her against the nasty characters.

Mr Thwaites is a total bully. His main object of abuse is the English language. He often lapses into a jokey 'olde-English' manner of talking when he is in a good mood. The protagonist describes this as 'trothing' and she (and we) find it excruciatingly embarrassing and irritating. For example, he describes a pretty woman by saying “The damsel doth not offend the organs of optical vision.” He constantly torments Roach in subtle ways and makes all life at the house revolve around him. He was the very best depiction of an over-opinionated bore I have ever read.

The main plot of the book concerns Roach and Lummis and their strange kind of relationship. He once asked her to marry him but has never brought it up since. Mainly he spends his time away somewhere or drunk. The other is about Vicki, a German who seems very nice at first but becomes Roach’s archenemy/ arch-frenemy, especially in her attempts to muscle in on Lummis. Roach has to realise she doesn’t really care for Lummis, isn’t threatened by Vicki and can overcome Thwaites in order to relinquish her slavery, go back to London and start to live again.

That said, it’s not really about plot, it’s about mood and tone. There’s a dry dinginess to the whole thing that is really resonating with the time of year I read it. I frequently laughed at this book, especially when Thwaites was at his most awful and I was liberated and delighted by the ending. 

I also happened to see a play of the book at the Hampstead Theatre. I was disappointed. There was too much sympathy given to Vicki and Mr Thwaites so that, rather than liberating herself from bullies, she seems more of a bully herself. I didn’t like it at all.

A warm, and ultimately triumphant, slice of small life.

Finally, at Number One, no surprise here….

1

Rookwood by William Harrison Ainsworth

Again, I have a bigger review here.

What can I say that I haven’t? I love this book.

Next year promises more of the same but will inevitably have more surprises.. we shall see.

My Favourite Book of the Year (Part One)

It’s been a strange reading year.

Round about July, I was beginning to think that I’d somehow lost the ability to enjoy my reading. Much of what I read was relatively enjoyable but nothing was really taking to heart. Then, in the second half of the year, I started loving almost everything, finding books I now love and writers I adore.

If you wish to see the full list of this year’s reading, I have a link to a booklist here.

Now…here are the countdown on 10-6 of the best books I have read this year…

10

Death’s Jest Book by Thomas Lovell-Beddoes.

A play that was never performed (though it would make a great creepy stop motion) and a plot involving mistaken necromancy, suicide practise kits and a host of sudden but inevitable betrayals, Death’s Jest Book does not score high in realism. However, as an amped up Jacobean tragedy seen through the eyes of a late-romantic depressive, it’s surprisingly good fun.

The version I read was the ‘fool’s tragedy’ version of 1829 (which incidentally didn’t include the poem ‘dream pedlary, which was the main reason I wanted to read it). This version tones down the poetry and songs, making the plot a fairly tight and followable affair, at least when comparing to other Jacobean tragedies - it’s no less plausible then ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’.

Aside from the wonderful whiplashes of betrayal; the changes of Isbrand from fool, to revolutionary leader, to dictator, to fool, to dead person, and the subplot where Mandrake believes he has died:- the most remembered parts of this play are the sombre poetry in it. Whether it’s a man describing himself as a ‘murder-charged thunder cloud’, death’s scythe punctuating lives with a ‘?’, having revolutionaries described as, ‘holding the latch string of the new world’s wicket’ or a duck’s feet as having, ‘webby mud-patted toes’ - the writing is often surprising. 

I particularly like the discussion of how we may love a soul, but we love the soul through their body and however much we might be pleased about the soul’s ascension into heaven (if we blow that way) we can’t separate soul and body utterly.

Macabre pleasure at it’s dark/bitter chocolatey-est.

9

The Troublesome Priest: Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey by Jonathan Tucker

Strange that a man’s life should feel that it inexorably leads to being savaged by a lion live on stage, in Skegness.

This book is a clear, reasoned (and it feels to me) very fair look at Davidson’s life. It doesn’t shy away from his faults; that he was an incorrigible egomaniac, made no efforts to follow rules of propriety or punctuality and with no thought to the consequences of his actions. He is a complete idiot; visiting a nudist camp the day after being convicted of immorality, allowing himself to be photographed with semi-nude women the day before that trial… But at the same time, I don’t believe he was exactly what he was accused of being. 

The big problem seems to be that he had a taste of theatre and theatrical life and took it into his clerical life, with all his kissing and hugging and suchlike. Did he revel in his infamy? I’m not sure, but it seems only right and just for his end to be as strange as it was (and for his actual end to probably be caused by a mistaken insulin injection).

As for the writing, it is very sober and clear with an officious use of footnotes and many quotes from letters, trial transcripts and later reflections. The book allows the reader to think and decide for themselves what Davidson’s faults were and weren’t.

A fascinating man and book to match.

8

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

I find that many books are  full of build-up and consequence to end in an entirely inconsequential manner - this book felt like it was doing little but entertain until the ending hit like a sledgehammer.

Fanny is our narrator, Fanny is boring. Let’s have no more about Fanny.

But her monstrous, whimsical, passionate Uncle Matthew is a brilliant character (and like most of the people in the book, based on people Nancy Mitford knew, in this case, her Father). A man who hunts children with dogs, is deeply xenophobic and utterly prejudiced should not be as endearing as he is. He is one of many fascinating characters and there is a real feeling of family at the heart of the book, as odd as it may sometimes be.

I loved Davey, with his faddy food but genuinely good heart. I love Lord Merlin (basically Lord Berners) who creates elaborate practical jokes and wears sunglasses abroad because his ‘kind eyes’ are too alluring to beggars. 

Then there are the jokes. The one about finding a book on duck rearing more useful on sex then the sex textbook made me laugh. The joke about Moira, a not particularly loved child, being so dull that she doesn’t even imagine air raids, made me wince. 

This book is packed with entertaining characters, good jokes and semblance enough of a plot to keep it going. I wasn’t particularly enthralled to the loves and bolts of Linda. She was an interesting enough character and I liked the way her three loves were different to each other and was invested enough to see her find love in the end.

Then the war comes, the jokes still play out and the family tighten together to tough it all out. And Linda is killed in childbirth in one sentence. A paragraph later and the book is over.

The laughs, the fun and the very inconsequential nature of the book then take on a certain dismal quality and in one short sentence the whole book becomes retroactively like an old photo or a fading dream - something lovely that is now lost.

I also read ‘Love in a Cold Climate’ but I didn’t find that book as charming or ultimately as moving.

A book with more than meets the eye.

7

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Fun, daft and silly, the reader is reminded before the book begins that of course the events in this book are fiction, they are too unlikely, even in Oxford. I was charmed even by the chapter titles, which are described as ‘The Case of….’ followed by something in the chapter.

It starts off with a poet going for a trip to Oxford to get some adventure and within twenty-four hours includes a murder, a toyshop in the wrong place, a weird will where everyone is given a monicker from Edward Lear, an army of drunk undergraduates and a shootout on an out of control carousel - all of which was served up with clever, snarky and literary jokes.

The characters were all eccentrics, I particularly liked Wilkes, who turned up and tagged along for no real reason but to drink all the whisky. I liked Fen’s coldness beneath the jolly facade and I liked the ludicrousness of the mystery.

There are also a number of fun literary games, brazen fourth-wall jokes, some Jane Eyre bashing and little bit of Samuel Johnson fandom. 

I also read ‘The Case of the Gilded Fly’ which was fun but not as sparkling as this book.

A whodunnit with a wit and class.

6

The Virtue of this Jest by James S Montgomery

I’ve already talked about this book at length here. For almost half the year this book was top of my list. Needless to say I recommend it if you can find a copy... Also, I should have guessed there would be a Jacobite element to the book - the S in James S Montgomery stands for Stuart.

A fun romp as fun romps should be.

Next week I shall reveal the top five books I’ve read this year. Looking at the book-list, can you guess what it might be? Which books would you choose as the best?

What About.... Rookwood?

A little short video about the amazing Rookwood opera that doesn't exist.

Jacqueline Riding's 'Jacobites: A New History of the '45 Rebellion' at the Dr Johnson Book Club

Two days (and a couple of hundred years) after the Jacobite army of 1745 reached Derby, the Dr Johnson Book Group reached the 2nd floor of Gough Square. We were there to discuss ‘Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion’, a dense 600-odd pages about 18 months that failed to change the world. Even better, we were joined by the author, Jacqueline Riding.

The best thing about having a book group with the author, is the ability to sound out the author on their aim for the book and how they did it. This is especially good as there is an astonishingly large amount of material marshalled and organised within ‘Jacobites’.

The aim was to write ‘to the moment’ (as Richardson’s phrase has it). Riding spent hours going through the Stuart papers, including those included in Cumberland’s records. These papers include many letters, each bringing little parts of the fragmented story, my particular favourites being the letters from Old to Young Pretenders which are full of love and hope. We also learnt that rooting through these papers in Windsor Castle, Jacqueline Riding was mistaken for the Queen by various groups of people who cheered whenever she passed the library window.

Another aim of the book was to let the characters ‘hang themselves by their own words’. Orders from the Jacobite army to give no quarter, letters from poor Highlanders having their lives threatened and homes burned by either Jacobite or British armies and spies passing on information, misinformation and other such stuff. The people get to talk for themselves and they are all more real, conflicted and nuanced than our usual myths. 

Another point was to emphasise that Cumberland’s troops were British army and not Government army. Indeed, the Jacobites seem to be have been regarded as an invasion by most of the towns that received them. Even supposedly Jacobite towns like Manchester seem to have accepted the army out of surprise and lack of planning then any real loyalty to the cause.

Finally, there is the shock of realising that pretty much everyone involved in the ’45 rebellion were 25 years old. Riding described herself was delighted when she found the portrait that graces the cover of the book. Instead of the baby-faced, bonnet-clad, bonnie laddy, the cover shows an actual man. of great surprise was that Charles Stuart was actually older than Cumberland, who had his 25th birthday during the campaign.

Other things we talked about were how the British Army was used to marching around flat Flanders and had a great deal of difficulty with the damp of hills of Britain - and parading straight into the unknown, alien world of Scotland. We also discussed the importance of shoes. An army may march on its stomach but it still needs shoes and the Jacobite army frequently abandoned whatever they were doing to load up on decent footwear.  

Then there was the dressing up. In an age when the King of France went to a party dressed as a yew tree, dressing up was a way of life. Charles wore many disguises; from a priest, to a maidservant as well as his frequent adopting of Highland and Lowland guises. At the end of his ‘adventures’, with his hair growing long and ginger, wrapped in some genuine plaid - it was almost as if he was no longer pretending.

For many, whose idea of the ’45 begins and ends with the Skye Boat Song (incidentally written by an Englishman) this book is a good exploder of fanciful myths, dealt as even-handedly as such a topic could be. For those who wanted to retain a bit of the romance, we ended the session with a glass of Drambuie and a toast to the King over the sea.

The book was full, complex and fascinating and so was the discussion. Jacqueline Riding is working on another complicated issue, the massacre of Peterloo, if that is as nuanced as this one, it should be another great read.

Under the Glass...Eight: Worms in the Rain

Many of these ‘Under the Glass’ sections have included various phrases I use to perk myself up in times of need - but sometimes a phrase is needed to celebrate the good times, those little golden moments when everything is just right.

Again I turn to my old pal Christopher Smart and my old favourite, ‘Jubilate Agno’ for the following; 

For I rejoice like a worm in the rain

Okay, they could be smiling more in the picture but my mental picture isa lovely image of happy, dancing worms. Sometimes life is like that, you feel the right kind of creature in the right kind of place. It’s probably not a shower of rain that does it for you but you may be dancing around your kitchen chopping onions and singing Captan Beefheart… or you may be doing something else.

So, whatever hard road you walk on, whatever shadowy places you wander through, I hope there are some times in your life when you can rejoice like a worm in the rain.

Review: The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith by Katherine Balderston

One day a really good Goldsmith biography will come out that doesn’t cast him as genius or buffoon. Norma Clark’s ‘Brothers of the Quill’ came closest but wasn’t a biography as such, more a recontextualising of his life within the parameters of an Irish immigrant writer. Until then, collections like Balderston’s one of Goldsmith letters are essential.

It doesn’t matter that most of the interesting letters are copied word for word into those dodgy biographies, nor that the lesser known ones are mainly thank-you or begging notes, it’s important that they stand alone for the reader to pour over and make decisions about Goldsmith’s character.

The main conclusion seems to be that he wasn’t quite as letter happy as the rest of his contemporaries. Johnson’s fill shelves, Walpole’s fill bookcases - Goldsmith’s barely fill a slim volume. A volume that is bulked out with a brief biography and appendices featuring forged letters and a retrospective of him by his sister. 

To make any judgements on Goldsmith based on these paltry works is difficult, but even in his letters he has a habit of making juicy little nuggets. My favourite quote ‘ I shall laugh at the absurdities of the world - and at myself, the most ridiculous one in it’ comes from a letter. His awareness (and playfulness) around his ugly face is one his most pleasing characteristics.

To the author of the Goldsmith biography that pictures him as unfeeling, it’s clear that he does have warmth to some members of his family but a distinct coldness to others. It’s not that he couldn’t feel strong feelings for people, more that he didn’t often. And when he did…he didn’t write many letters. It is clear from things Reynolds have written, that theirs was an extraordinarily strong, yet very quiet relationship that was conducted in person rather then in letter. These letters show how warm and yet how exclusive those relationships were - he’ll be mates with everyone, but only few people will reach that special level.

I have to say that I feel, as I often do, a certain sympathy with Goldsmith. Were I to become a great writer and were historians to ransack my emails and texts, I’m sure they’d discover little that shows the warmth of my relationships or the variety of my connections and communications. Someone reading my texts would find me a very cold person indeed, this is because my awkward fingers aren’t happy manipulating a phone and my messages are terse. I’d need a Boswell available to capture how I really am with my friends - Goldsmith had a Boswell around, but a Boswell who didn’t understand him at all. Poor Goldsmith, he has so little to recommend or explain him but his works, including those few letters, so we have to be thankful for them.

As to the copy of the letters, it seems vigorous in its scholarship, but it did come out in 1924 - has anyone found a cache of useful Goldsmith letters since? Could someone? Please…

Review: A Trip to Canonbury House

"I bless God for my retreat at CANBURY, as it was the place of the nativity of my children.”

Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

I had long wanted to go and visit Islington’s oldest building, Canonbury Tower. It’s not an easy thing to do. Owned by the 7th Marquis of Northampton, who mainly uses it as a storage space for various masonic tat and only opens once a month. Even Susan Hahn, our very knowledgeable guide, wasn’t allowed a key. 

The Tower today

I had mainly wanted to go because of the Newbery link. John Newbery is now famous for his children’s literature (and the literature medal now named for him) but he was a publisher who Johnson described as ‘Jack Twirler', a constantly moving go-getter who can’t sit still for two minutes and helped ‘raise the worth of literature’. He owned the nearby Canonbury House, a modern Georgian mansion which also gave him access to the tower. He would house writers in the tower, including Goldsmith and Christopher Smart. Goldsmith describes himself wandering the fields of Islington trying to be funny ("I have been strolling around the hedges studying jests with a most sorrowful countenance"). Smart even raised his children in the house with his wife, Anna Maria Carnan, Newbery’s stepdaughter. 

I wasn’t expecting those stories to be some of the smaller ones.

The tower in countryside Islington

The tower is the main physical remnant of Canonbury Court, a  medieval manor house owned by the canons of Smithfield. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, the tower was given to Thomas Cromwell, who used it as a comfortable country retreat. He didn’t have it for very long before his downfall where the house, along with his other properties, were used as part of the divorce settlement for Anne of Cleves. She rented it to John Dudley, the Earl of Northampton who was decapitated for trying to install Lady Jane Grey as Queen instead of Mary I…the house doesn’t seem the luckiest of places.

Another rentee was Francis Bacon, a source of many stories in the house. There are bullet holes in one of the tower rooms that are attributed to an argument between him and Walter Raleigh. I’ve also read a novel (A Dead Man In Deptford) where Bacon and Marlowe are doing secretive alchemy-esque things in the tower. If you are one of those people who believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare (I don’t), it is in Canonbury Tower where the original manuscripts are supposed to have been hidden.

The house was later sold to an ex Lord Mayor of London, whose daughter was reportedly locked in the tower to keep her away from the amorous intentions of an improvident Lord. This Lord, being well bred, reputedly disguised himself as a baker’s boy and snuck her out where they had a Fleet wedding. This Lord being a Northampton, the tower passed to that family and has been ever since. The family lived there when they were trying to be quiet during Cromwell’s protectorate but haven’t lived there since.

Irving and Goldsmith's room.

At one point, rooms were rented out and Washington Irving moved in to write his Goldsmith biography and feel close to him but was driven to distraction by the landlady charging people to peek through the keyhole at him. 

The place smells funny, there are some intricately carved walls and the ever-present notion of damp but the view is wonderful, the history fascinating and the atmosphere palpable. I loved it and I recommend it is an unusual and special trip for anyone near Islington.