A Venetian Spring

A rather wonderful coincidence happened last week.

First I had better set the scene. I was in London, in my flat. It was raining. It had not stopped raining for months. In an attempt to look on the bright side I had written a blog for the Spectator about what happens when it rains in novels (here) … but I was nevertheless feeling glum. In part to cheer myself up, I began to read Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge, the sort of charming, witty, graceful 1930s novel for which I have a particular weakness. Daunt Books has just republished it rather prettily. It begins with a very good line:

Lady Kilmichael took her seat in the boat train at Victoria hurriedly, opened The Times, and hid behind it.

Oh how I longed to hide behind a paper on a boat train to Venice! Lady K, as we will come to know her, sojourns at Venice before going on to Croatia. Venice is where she meets young Nicholas, who she will befriend and help to become a painter.

My thoughts right then were: 1. I bet an Illyrian spring is better than a London one, especially as I still need my winter coat outside and 2. wouldn’t it be heaven to be in Venice!

That’s when the husband said, Ems, do you think we could go to Venice on Saturday?

Now, much as I would love to be the sort of person who might just happen to pop over to Venice – or, come to think of it, Florence, Rome, Naples or anywhere else hot and foreign, preferably Italian – just for the day, I should admit that we were actually already going to Italy for a friend’s wedding. The wedding was on Friday, by Lake Garda, so going over to Venice on Saturday suddenly seemed surprisingly feasible.

It transpired that the husband had architectural reasons to be in Venice. The fact that they just so happened to coincide with my own reading was fortuitous to say the least. And so on Saturday, not unlike Lady K, I found myself on a train bound for Venice. Although I wasn’t hiding behind a newspaper. By then I wasn’t even hiding behind Illyrian Spring, having polished it off on the way to the airport; I was hiding behind Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles.

I first came across Giorgio Bassani a couple of years ago, when I was last in Italy and read The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. (Here is my post about it.) I very much enjoyed it, with its coming-of-age story set on a tennis court amongst the Jews of Ferrara. Set in the 1930s, you know it’s only going to end badly for them – and you’re told that right at the start – but it’s beautifully written and terribly poignant.

Well evidently I wasn’t the only one to appreciate Bassani’s work, as Penguin seems to be on a drive to publish new translations of the rest of his ‘Ferrara Cycle’. First out is The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. Perhaps it’s the first as it’s so short – really more a novella than a novel – but perfect for a quick Italian mini-break (and lighter than a Kindle!).

I’ve a feeling I’m going to enjoy the Ferrara Cycle, as it seems as though Bassani does that clever and deeply satisfying thing of sharing characters between books – a character who gets the limelight in one book plays a cameo in another. (This tends to happen in the best sort of short story collections, which I wrote about here.) So in The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, originally published four years before The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, we get a mention of the F-Cs while the narrator’s non-Jewish friend is talking about the ominous Racial Laws:

That kind of policy could ‘operate’ only if there were more cases like that of the Finzi-Contini family, with their most atypical impulse to segregate themselves and live in a grand, aristocratic house. (Although he himself knew Alberto Finzi-Contini very well, he had never succeeded in getting himself invited to play tennis at their house, on their magnificent private court!)

It certainly whets the appetite for a glimpse of their ‘magnificent private court’, on which so many games of tennis will be played in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

As well as characters, the two books share many of the same preoccupations: a coming-of-age moment, Jews, bicycles, tennis and local dialects. The latter is particularly interesting for a foreigner travelling around Italy and naively imagining that everyone there speaks the same language, Italian. Not so. Bassani’s characters often have recourse to a word or expression in their native local dialect to express something more deeply felt. For instance, at one poignant moment, the narrator’s father says of Fagati – the wearer of those spectacles – ‘Puvràz’, meaning ‘Poor thing’ in the Ferrara dialect. It feels like a more heartfelt, more genuine expression than if he’d used the standard Italian term.

It’s interesting that Bassani has called his book The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, whereas of course it’s not about those actual specs, it’s about the wearer of them – Fadigati. The title suggests that those spectacles are – sorry to use a silly word – a synecdoche of Fadigati, i.e. they represent him. Indeed, a glint of the gold rims in the darkened cinema is all that’s needed to betray his presence. And, if Bassani’s saying that these specs represent Fadigati, he’s also inviting us to take it along a step and wonder who Fadigati represents.

Fadigati is rich, cultured and gay. Let me remind you that this is 1930s provincial Italy, a time and a place where being outwardly gay was socially unacceptable. Fadigati does fine while his sexuality is under wraps, but as soon as it’s out in the open he is cast out from society. Then it’s a pretty rapid downward spiral. You better read it to find out how it ends.

Given the background to the novella is the introduction of the Racial Laws, which essentially legislated to cast Jews out from society, I don’t think it’s a leap to take Fadigati as representative of the Jews. So in writing about this outsider, Bassani is obliquely writing about these other outsiders. As in the Finzi-Continis, one worries that it can’t end well.

Inevitably Illyrian Spring was a much happier book than The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. While there is a journey of realisation in both of them, things wind up rather better for Lady K than they do for Fadigati or for the narrator of the latter.

A feeling of optimism pervades the first, whereas the second is laced with doom. The self-discovery of Illyrian Spring is joyful, self-affirming, full of excitement at the future (albeit tinged with a pang of lost love), but that of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is the realisation of forever being an outsider:

The sense of solitude that during the last two months had never left me, at that very moment became, if that were possible, even more acute: absolute and definitive. From my exile, I would never return. Never.

Of course this is the opposite of Lady K, who returns from her exile into the loving arms of her husband and fond embrace of her daughter. Her exile is self-imposed, not demanded by society.

The timing of the two books is uncanny – Illyrian Spring was first published in 1935 and, although The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles wasn’t published until 1958, it is set in 1937-8, just two years later. Two novels that meander by the Adriatic in the mid-1930s could not have more different narratives. Reading them one after the other, I couldn’t help but think just how much one’s fate was determined by class and by ethnicity. Thank god that these days there’s more of a level playing field.

Toys

This week was a very exciting one – my first ‘By the Book’ column was in the Spectator. Those of you who have been reading EmilyBooks for a little while might have seen some of my pieces for the Spectator’s Book blog, but this was the first time I was in the actual mag, in the physical printed thing. For the inaugural ‘By the Book’, I thought that David Cameron and George Osborne – who were accused of being too posh to know the price of a pint of milk – should take a leaf out of Brideshead Revisited and be a little more like Sebastian Flyte. You can read it here. The best bit is my little bookish picture!

Amidst the tremendous excitement of seeing my name in print – repeatedly showing smiling friends, proud family members and even bewildered newsagents my column – this week I have been rather preoccupied with toys. In my column I wondered what David Cameron and George Osborne would call their teddy bears, if they were to follow the example of Sebastian, with his dearly-loved Aloysius. (Perhaps Ted Heath?) The thought crossed my mind again when wandering through the magical Pollock’s Toy Museum this weekend and seeing such lovely creatures as this:

According to his label, he has a military bearing and a squeaker in his body. There was even a little teddy bears’ picnic assembled in another cabinet. (I suspect that David Cameron’s bear wouldn’t be allowed any milk with his tea.) But my trip to Pollock’s Toy Museum wasn’t just to hunt out possible parliamentary teddies, it was to seek inspiration for my novel.

Some of you might remember that I’m writing a novel about a derelict house. Yes, I’m still writing it. But it is going well – I’m edging towards 60,000 words of the first draft, which means I’m substantially nearer the end than the beginning. The novel is about a young woman called Anna, who moves into a canal boat with a strange older man called Roger (first Jolly Roger, then Dodgy Roger), makes friends with a barmaid called Eliza and then the two girls explore a nearby derelict house. So far so Swallows and Amazons I hear you think… but here’s the twist. We learn about who’s lived in the house over the past hundred and fifty years, through remaining traces such as layers of wallpaper, the coal hole, a mysterious piece of wood with Hebrew writing on it, even the very bricks in the walls. And all these historical chapters are based on fact.

Which means that sometimes I have to do rather a lot of research, and some other times I get to go on jaunts to rather idiosyncratic museums. Anna and Eliza are going to find a little broken bit of a boy’s toy from the 1930s. Luckily Pollock’s Toy Museum had several contenders. I thought perhaps a wheel from this rather smart car:

Or else there were masses of train sets to choose from. I suppose they could find a train wheel, but I am particularly fond of these little mini advertisements, which were used to decorate train sets:

And I loved this destination board too:

Tough choice. Perhaps the train paraphernalia is a little more original, but then it would be so easy for a wheel to come off a car, and spin off into the corner, where it could lie covered in dust for a very long time indeed. Although, I suppose those little advertisements or place names are very slim pieces of tin. Slim enough to slip between the cracks in the floorboards, for instance. Hummm… I shall have to get my imagination whirring into action.

Pollock’s Toy Museum is utterly enchanting. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Every inch is packed with so many things. The Victorian science experiments sets were far more exciting than the ones we get today – they included little jars of mercury and the like. There are early building blocks from brands like Meccano, old Penny Dreadfuls, beautiful dolls houses filled with mini-everything, and – best of all – E.M. Forster’s toy soldiers, donated to the museum by King’s College Cambridge. Quite why Forster had his childhood toys with him up at Cambridge is psychologically intriguing to say the least.

My very favourite toys, when I was little, were my cuddly animals. I had a selection, ranging from Charlie the caterpillar (who had different coloured socks on each foot), to Jeremy Fisher and, most favourite, were Chip and Dale the chipmunks, with their respective black and red noses.

When I was about five years old, I had a rather traumatic revelation about my cuddly toys. We went on a holiday to Disneyworld, where my parents bought me an Eeyore soft toy. I really loved that Eeyore. I was going through an acute Winnie the Pooh phase, and felt particularly affectionate towards the poor melancholy donkey. He was instantly drafted into the upper echelons of my soft toy society, and Chip and Dale were made to move up to make room for him at bedtime. So far so good. Until we left Disneyworld and went on to some other bit of Florida. Once we got to the new hotel, we made a terrible discovery. Eeyore had been forgotten. I’d like to say that I handled it with sophisticated and mature aplomb, but, of course, I was a nightmare. The previous hotel was telephoned. Had housekeeping found it in the room? Could they perhaps find out and then post it to us? But all this to no avail. Eeyore had completely disappeared.

I think perhaps I might have got over this loss. I did, after all, still have Chip and Dale, who were very trusty companions. And perhaps, I reasoned, Eeyore had just wandered off to find another home. Perhaps he didn’t like all the company – he definitely keeps himself to himself in the books. But then the thunderbolt came:

‘Oh well, we’ll just buy another one,’ said Mum.

I didn’t understand. There wasn’t another one. Eeyore had gone away. That was Eeyore, there couldn’t possibly be another Eeyore.

‘Don’t be daft,’ I was told. ‘There are plenty more Eeyores. We’ll just go to a shop and buy another one. It will be exactly the same.’

It was a horrid moment. Because if there were millions of Eeyores, all exactly the same, then there were also millions of Chips, Dales and Charlies too. These were my friends – and suddenly they were made to seem just mass-produced things, not real at all.

Looking back on it now, it reminds me of Margery Williams’ classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, which is about a boy’s toy rabbit who is desperate to become real. It’s a very sweet story, and there is a very sad bit in it too. There’s also that famous quotation, often pulled out for weddings and the like, about becoming real. I won’t quote too much here as it’s too naf, but the gist is, you become real when you’re really loved. It can hurt, and it takes a long time:

That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept … Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand… once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.

Bit schmaltzy, but I think it can just about be forgiven in a children’s book.

The point is that toys are only toys to adults – to children, more often than not, they’re real. And wandering round Pollock’s Toy Museum, bearing this in mind, is completely astonishing. It is filled with all these things that so many children have loved so much. One can peer around inside other people’s imaginations, glimpsing all those funny scenarios and whole worlds that have sprung up around these little props.

I suppose really that’s what writing the novel is all about – recreating some of these lost worlds from a few little clues. At least for one of these 1930s toys, one little lost world might be resuscitated.

 

Persephone, Elizabeth and Harriet

I love Persephone Books. I admit that they momentarily sank a little in my esteem when they were featured on Made in Chelsea, but I can’t get too high and mighty about that as I was the brainless fool guiltily watching Made in Chelsea and noticing.

To clear up any possible resulting confusion, Persephone Books is not in Chelsea. It is in Lambs Conduit Street, which is one of London’s best streets, full of other Bloomsburyish delights, such as Folk, The People’s Supermarket and (nearby) Ben Pentreath. Persephone Books sells, with a few exceptions, books written by women, usually ones that were written during the fertile-yet-overlooked years between the wars. Best of all, not only do they sell books, they publish them too. Their books are paperbacks, yet have sturdy jackets, which are plain grey, drawing attention to beautifully patterned endpapers, chronologically appropriate to the book. They are printed on good thick paper, with nice solid print. To date Persephone has published 98 books. (Incidentally, there is also a very beautiful collection of Persephone Classics which have lovely paintings on the covers. I wrote about Monica Dickens’ Mariana, one of these classics and also one my all time favourites, here.)

You can probably imagine my excitement when I discovered that Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone Books, writer and feminist extraordinaire, had discovered EmilyBooks. It made my month. In her fortnightly letter to keen Persephonites she noted my mention of Persephone in a Spectator article. It just so happens that Persephone have just published Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins, so when she found my blog and saw my piece on The Tortoise and the Hare, also by Elizbaeth Jenkins, she saw fit to link to it. Oh joy! When I wrote to thank Nicola for the mention, she very generously sent me a copy of the new Persephone book.

And what a book.

Harriet is terrifying. I was gripped by it in a truly horrific way, like the way people can’t help but turn to stare out of the window when they drive past an accident on the motorway. Here is the gist of it:

Harriet is a ‘natural’. (Yes, it’s an old-fashioned word but it sounds kinder and less clumsy than saying she’s not quite right in the head.) In spite of this, she has quite a happy life, having a substantial amount of money, a well-meaning mother and taking pleasure in pretty trinkets and fine clothes. Along comes Lewis Oman, a handsome auctioneer with not much money and very bad intentions. He carries on with young, pretty, terrifically vain Alice Hoppner, whose sister Elizabeth is married to Lewis’s brother Patrick.

Lewis decides to get Harriet’s money and to this end he woos her and persuades her to marry him. Harriet may be thirty-two, but she has never yet been romantically pursued and she falls at his feet. Her mother realises something is up but can do nothing to stop them. Harriet is too old to be under her legal protection, the circumstances are too suspiciously sudden for her to be able to get Harriet certified as a lunatic, and so powerful is Harriet’s love for Lewis that she pays no attention to her mother’s objections.

So Lewis marries Harriet and gains her fortune. It isn’t long before he’s manipulated the situation so that he has farmed her out to Patrick and Elizabeth for a pound a week, as they need the money. Lewis, meanwhile, sets up a very comfortable home nearby with Alice, who pretends to be his wife.

Harriet is gradually deprived of more and more. First her fine clothes, then her own place to wash, then food, then even the freedom to move. Eventually she is reduced to a filthy, lice-infested creature, regularly beaten, kept in a small dirty room with a boarded up window, starving to death.

Worst of all, this is the fleshing out of a true story, tightly based on court records of a notorious Victorian court case – the Penge Mystery.

Elizabeth Jenkins certainly had it in for marriage. You might remember how upsetting I found The Tortoise and the Hare. Well this makes the dying marriage in that look positively heavenly! I wonder what drew Jenkins to examine unhappy marriages to such an extent in her novels. If these fictional portrayals of married life are really how she imagined it to be, then it’s no wonder that she refrained from tying the matrimonial knot herself.

A little aside here to say that I read the majority of Harriet on Saturday night when I was feeling rather unwell. I had cancelled all my plans and had slept through most of the afternoon. The husband was out on a stag do. I awoke at elevenish, feeling ghastly and not sure what to do with myself. There was nothing much to eat, other than a dwindling supply of frozen hot cross buns from Easter, and I was feeling too shaky and fragile to go out and buy anything. So I ate a hot cross bun and felt sick and read Harriet on the sofa. I finished it at about two o’clock in the morning and was in a terrible state. There I was, confined to our flat, feeling dreadful, starving to death… not unlike Harriet herself!

When the husband arrived home a little later, reeling from the stag, he found my behaviour to be peculiar to say the least. ‘What is it, Ems?’ he asked. ‘Why are you so tearful and upset? What’s wrong?’

The dreadful thing was that because I’d reacted so miserably to The Tortoise and the Hare, sobbing uncontrollably in a way that he’d found completely puzzling, I felt I couldn’t admit to being in such a state thanks to another Elizabeth Jenkins novel. All I could say, quite feebly, was that I was all alone and wasn’t feeling well and he hadn’t left me any food. He was terribly unimpressed.

Yes, this is a very upsetting and shocking novel, but it is completely brilliant. It would be so easy to write it badly. Here’s a sensational court case, full of drama – greed, murder and evil. How easy it would be to overdo it! Jenkins takes an altogether different and masterful approach. Instead of revelling in the horror, she employs a magpie’s eye for finery.

The book is as much a fashion magazine as a chronicle of despair. When we first encounter Harriet, we learn not only of her ‘sallow countenance’ but of her ‘garnet earrings and a shield-like brooch of pinchbeck pinned to the front of her dress, which was a handsome blue silk’. Throughout the novel, everything is rendered in exquisite detail, be it the rose-red velvet looped on Harriet’s mother’s mantelpiece or the lilac crepe dress of Alice’s fantasies. Appearance is everything.

Perhaps paying so much attention to fabrics and surfaces is a kind of feminising of a horror story. Certainly a surprising amount of horror lies dormant in these luxuries. For instance, Harriet’s mother catches Alice wearing one of Harriet’s favourite brooches, which confirms her suspicions of something being wrong. One of the most chilling moments in the book is when Elizabeth sees Alice ironing:

Then she saw for the first time what Alice was doing. All around were spread pieces of a dress that had been unpicked and was being pressed before it was made up again; pieces of stiff silk, a beautiful, deep blue like a jay’s wing. Elizabeth looked away without saying anything.

The same comparison to a jay’s wing was used earlier in the book to describe one of Harriet’s dresses. Alice wanted the dress and now Alice has got it. What a metaphor! Alice is taking Harriet to pieces. She is taking her finery and refitting it to her own design. She is stepping into her shoes – or into her dress – as Lewis’s wife. It is a brilliantly revealing scene.

This keenly focused attention to appearance also calls up its opposite – disappearance. Harriet’s mother eventually realises something terrible is happening to her daughter and tries to find and rescue her. She looks and looks, but to no avail. Harriet has been made to disappear. Alice has ostensibly become Mrs Lewis Oman in her place. Harriet is confined to an upstairs room, seen by scarcely anyone. On Harriet’s mother’s suspicions, a policeman is stationed at the end of the road to keep an eye out for anything untoward, but Harriet doesn’t leave the house – she never appears – so he has nothing to report.

It is with tragic irony that when Harriet does actually disappear – when she dies – it is her physical appearance that gives the others away. In the words of the doctor at the subsequent trial:

The body was fearfully emaciated and filthily dirty all over, particularly the feet. The skin of the feet was quite horny, as if from walking without shoes for some time. There were lice all over the body. On the head I found real hair and false hair very much matted. We pulled the false hair off with forceps to get to the scalp.

It’s too terrible for words. Except, of course, against the foil of so many words throughout the novel describing beautiful tactile things, here Elizabeth Jenkins has found the perfect words to convey the terror and the horror of it.

A Time of Gifts

People tend to expect me to have read everything, so it always comes as something of an embarrassment when I have to admit to a glaring gap in my literary landscape, to not having read Middlesex, The Corrections or Proust, for instance. I can see their faces fall and a gleam of suspicion enter their eyes as they wonder if I’m no more than a fraud, someone posturing as an avid reader, for really, how can I pretend to talk about books when I’ve not even read any Faulkner.

In such an instance there is always a shameful impulse to lie. Or, as one inevitably knows something about the book or author in question, it’s easy to employ what my old boss used to term ‘an Oxford answer’ – that is responding to a question by answering a different one. For instance:

‘Have you read much Proust?’

‘You know, I found the Proustian connection in The Hare with Amber Eyes completely fascinating. I loved that chunk on Charles Ephrussi, especially that bit about the asparagus!’

Then it’s easy peasy to divert the course of conversation on to firmer ground and the question of Proust is all but forgotten. Never underestimate the power of a good Oxford answer.

Failing that, there are all those silly books with titles like ‘How to talk about books you haven’t read’ or ‘An idiots guide to the Classics’ which are of tremendous help to a bluffer. But I think such books are a real shame. Surely the whole point of being able to talk about a book is the pleasure one gets from having read it in the first place?

But, in any case, when one does finally get around to reading one of those books that one is supposed to have read, it is deeply satisfying. So I am very pleased to announce that I have at last read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts.

I have a theory that the reason why Patrick Leigh Fermor comes up so often in conversation is because, until he passed away last year, he hung around rather a lot in Gentlemen’s Clubs and at Oxford dinners, so a surprisingly large number of people – usually oldish men – have met him. And everyone loves to indulge in a little name-dropping. ‘Oh you simply must read A Time of Gifts. Such a wonderful book. Oh those descriptions. Marvellous. You know, I met him a couple of times. Terribly nice chap. Fascinating stories.’

I suspect it must be thanks to this that I have been told I must read A Time of Gifts a gazillion times. I even own a rather handsome edition of it, published by the Folio society, that my father gave me a few years ago. (Yes, he met him a couple of times and thought he was fascinating.)

I certainly loved reading such a smart edition. Everyone makes such a fuss about hardbacks being so heavy, but really I am terrifically weak with especially spindly wrists and didn’t find it a problem in the slightest. Although I did feel like I had to be a bit more careful when reading it in the bath, drying my hands a little more assiduously before turning the pages, as it really is too smart to trash and wrinkle. It’s such a lovely book that someone even sparked up a conversation with me in a café, wanting to know where I’d found such a beautiful edition. Alas, as the Folio Society operates by subscription only, for once I couldn’t direct her to my bookshop.

A Time of Gifts is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s record of his journey across Europe in the 1930s. He sets off on a terribly rainy day, when ‘a thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly’, to catch a ferry to Holland from where he will walk all the way to ‘Constantinople’, or Istanbul, as we might call it.

Admittedly, it’s a small thing, but therein lay my first disappointment. I was expecting him to reach Constantinople, the destination of which he boasts to anyone he meets en route. I found it increasingly troubling, as the number of remaining pages dwindled and he was still only in Austria, or Czechoslovakia, to imagine how he was going to make it all the way to Istanbul before the end. I wondered if my mental map of Europe was way off, or if he’d cave in and take a train. But no, the book ends when he reaches Hungary. You’ve got to read the next one to get further, and even then you don’t make it to Istanbul. The third and final volume is to be published posthumously, albeit only ‘near-finished’, next year.

His route more-or-less follows the Rhine and then the Danube. It was certainly a fascinating time to tread this ground,  just before so much of it would be destroyed by war. Some of the most interesting bits are Patrick Leigh Fermor’s encounters with Nazism. He meets one young man who has covered his room with Nazi memorabilia, who is quick to admit that a year ago it was all Communist. In Munich, he sees ‘a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika’d arm … unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours’. So many school history lessons were spent studying Nazi Germany and yet these anecdotes seem to capture something unexpected.

Although the journey was made in the thirties, Patrick Leigh Fermor didn’t come to write the book until forty years later. And while the knowledge of what was to come casts a harrowing light on what he sees, all the time elapsed means that the text has lost rather a lot of immediacy. As I read it, I felt like I was moving from one set piece – one polished dinner party story – to another. For instance, here is a snippet of the very long description of Melk:

Overtures and preludes followed each other as courtyard opened on courtyard. Ascending staircases unfolded as vaingloriously as pavanes. Cloisters developed with the complexity of double, triple and quadruple fugues. The suites of state apartments concatenated with the variety, the mood and the décor of symphonic movements. Among the receding infinity of gold bindings in the library, the polished reflections, the galleries and the terrestrial and celestial globes gleaming in the radiance of their flared embrasures, music, again, seemed to intervene.

I hate this kind of writing. It is so overblown, over-the-top, pompous. And, if he’s going to indulge in this silly over-extended metaphor, then at least accompany it with a straightforward paragraph saying what Melk actually looks like! Perhaps it’s lucky that, unlike most people, I never met Patrick Leigh Fermor. If he’d gone off on one like this over dinner, I might have nodded off into my soup.

So instead of being able to see Melk in my mind’s eye, I’m left with a complicated musical metaphor. Instead of being able to see the landscape, I can only see Brueghel’s The Hunters in the Snow, which he uses as a frequent comparison.

Perhaps I found this particularly troubling having so recently read Olivia Laing’s To the River. Alongside her digressions into literature, myth and history, the descriptions are so real that I could smell the meadowsweet, hear the wood pigeons and feel the biting cold of the river water. I missed all that in A Time of Gifts.

And I missed listening to the walker’s rambling thoughts. We don’t get the wonderings meandering through his head as he wanders along the rivers, instead we are given a list of the works of literature that he recites to himself (sometimes backwards) as he walks. It made me curse my terrible memory and made me think that I’d quite like to reread the Aeneid and that I wished I knew anything like the amount of Latin he did. But mostly it made me think that Patrick Leigh Fermor was a bit of a show off. It certainly doesn’t spark much empathy.

At least I’ve read it now. And next time someone asks me if I’ve read A Time of Gifts, I can forestall their bragging about having met Patrick Leigh Fermor, once or twice, by saying, ‘Yes, I’ve read it and I thought it was a bit of a let-down actually. So many people seem to have met him, and they all say he was such a charismatic, fascinating man, so it was a bit of a shame that he comes across as so arrogant and pompous in the book.’ I can already imagine the horrified reaction. I can certainly see it far more clearly than many of the things written about in A Time of Gifts.

The Wind in the Willows

Last week, I reread The Wind in the Willows, a childhood classic brought back to my attention by Olivia Laing’s mentioning it a few times in her beautiful book To the River (which I wrote about here). It is very much a book about life on ‘River Bank’, a happy idyllic life, full of boating expeditions and picnics.

In honour of the book, some friends and I set out at the weekend to walk around Cookham and Maidenhead, along the stretch of the Thames which is said to have inspired The Wind and the Willows. We even brought a picnic including some of Ratty’s favourite things:

coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwidges

pottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater

We omitted the coldtongue. And added in cheese. And cake.

The stretch along the Thames was certainly beautiful, even if the river was in its current somewhat depleted state. It was easy to imagine animals larking around here, content in their pretty, secluded spot. We also walked through some beautiful woods, which at this time of year, with the leaves just pushing their way out, felt particularly lovely.

Although these beautiful woods, filled with greenish light and elegant lines of trees, weren’t the inspiration for Grahame’s ‘Wild Wood’. That wood, we passed to our left. It was fenced off, and looked a bit too scary to risk going in. Indeed, in the book, the Wild Wood is terrifying:

He penetrated to where the light was less, and the trees crouched nearer and nearer, and holes made ugly mouths at him on either side. Everything was very still now. The dusk advanced on him steadily, rapidly, gathering in behind and before; and the light seemed to be draining away like flood-water. Then the faces began. It was over his shoulder, and indistinctly, that he first thought he saw a face: a little evil wedge-shaped face, looking out at him from a hole. When he turned and confronted it, the thing has vanished … He passed another hole, and another, and another; and then – yes! – no! – yes! certainly a little narrow face, with hard eyes, had flashed up for an instant from a hole, and was gone … Then suddenly, as if it had been so all the time, every hold, far and near, and there were hundreds of them, seemed to possess its face, coming and going rapidly, all fixing on him glances of malice and hatred: all hard-eyed and evil and sharp.

This is one of the bits that Olivia Laing notices in To the River. She remembers it gave her ‘a creeping sense that the world was not always as pleasant as it seemed’.

The Wild Wood is somewhere one shouldn’t venture, Rat instructs Mole at the beginning, and as for the Wide World, beyond that – that is something never to be referred to again, it ‘doesn’t matter … I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all.’ The idyll of River Bank, with its sunshine and picnics, is dependent on being separate from these dark, unknowable places, protected from the outside world.

Woods are places where strange things happen. Often things that can only happen in the dark. Think of Hansel and Gretel. Shakespeare used the idea in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, sending the lovers into the woods, where the magical mishaps can take place. Last night I watched Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, where the nail-biting climax takes place once the train has been decoupled and then sent down a branch line deep into the woods.

Surely the most unnerving thing about the Wild Wood are the little narrow faces with their ‘hard eyes’. Their disembodiment is alien and threatening. Reading this, I was reminded of a deeply unnerving moment in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring. There’s a night walk far out into the woods, and then:

Dolly began to see on each side of her, among the thronging stems of the birch trees, what looked like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness.

There’s the same horror and strangeness from only being able to see bits of things – hands, or faces, or eyes. It is as though the darkness and the woods have completely undone the wholeness of things, undermined the very foundation of reality.

Woods might be terrifying places, but they are also essential. The River Bank wouldn’t be such a paradise if there were no opposite force casting shade against its sunlight. People need a place for which they must summon every ounce of bravery in order to get through. When Rat goes off to rescue Mole, he:

strapped a belt round his waist, shoved a brace of pistols into it, took up a stout cudgel that stood in a corner of the hall and set off for the Wild Wood at a smart pace … Here and there wicked little faces popped out of holes, but vanished immediately at sight of the valorous animal, his pistols and the great ugly cudgel in his grasp.

Rat is called upon to be ‘valorous’, and Mole, although terrified, in some ways needs to go through the Wild Wood in order to prove himself. Later, when the weasels and stoats of the Wild Wood rise up and take over Toad Hall, the other animals bravely band together to throw them out.

In The Lady Vanishes, the two Englishmen Charters and Caldicott, only emerge from their cricket-obsessed bubble when they are in the woods and forced to confront the world outside. And, in The Beginning of Spring, it is only in the woods, in this strange unnerving scene, that we get an inkling of who the mysterious Lisa Ivanovna might be.

Woods force one to confront one’s fears, and be faced with the truth. No wonder they can engender such an ominous, threatening feeling. But yet, people normally get out the other side, and do so stronger and wiser. For us, happily, we got through the woods, sat on a meadow by the river bank and then feasted on our picnic. Until it began to rain.

who i was supposed to be

I think it must have been around Christmas when one of the bookshop’s most loyal – and eccentric – customers ordered a book, bought it and then gave it to me. I said I couldn’t possibly accept, my stomach slightly sinking at the thought of having to read a book that I didn’t want to and then having to enthuse about it to the customer. This has happened once before when a man, seeking vengeance for my recommending him Jane Gardam, made me read Haldor Laxness’s The Atom Station. His verdict on Jane Gardam – ‘I think my mum would like it.’ My verdict on Haldor Laxness – ‘I think my imaginary teenage brother would like it.’ Although I didn’t actually say that to him. I said I found it very interesting, politeness masking honesty, but perhaps not especially well.

Anyway, to prevent a real blarney from happening at the till in front of innocent bystanders, when the customer really insisted on my having the book, I said I’d gladly borrow it from him and return it when I’d finished. (He said he wasn’t in a rush for it, before you accuse me of stealing his book for so many months.)

The book has been hiding amongst my nag pile – a heap of books that I must get round to reading, and am only slowly inching my way through. When I finished Olivia Laing’s marvellous To the River (not on my nag pile), to ease the guilty pleasure of rereading The Wind and the Willows (not on my nag pile either), I made myself take a book from the pile too. Susan Perabo’s who i was supposed to be – the book in question – is rather shorter than Proust. At least I’ll whizz through it, I thought.

I have to admit, it was better than I’d expected. I also better admit that I went into it with a bit of a prejudice. Thing is, I slightly hate American short stories. I know that’s a terrible, unforgivable thing to say. I can, occasionally, love them. But when I love them, it’s almost in spite of slightly hating them. Hear me out. (Just for the record, I also resent the way the title is all in lower case. It worked for e.e. cummings, but that’s it.)

I find that short stories can be a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation. It can be a pleasurable experience, but you can only go so far. Just as you’re about to join in the conversation, or really get to know the characters, poof, that’s it, over, and on to the next. This makes short stories very good reading material for those occasions when one might otherwise be eavesdropping. Tube journeys, cups of coffee, lunchbreaks etc. But a short story collection is a bit tricky to settle in with for the night.

Now, I love it – in fact there are few things I love more – when short stories are linked. Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag, Jumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Caroline Oulton’s Unsafe Attachments, for instance. The characters slip and slide between the different stories, so that the main guy in one flits past the in the background of another. It’s tremendously satisfying, a bit like a jigsaw.

That jigsaw feeling was what made me like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad so much. Although, strictly speaking, it isn’t a collection of short stories, each chapter takes a different character as a focus, so it definitely springs from Egan’s short story habit rather than standing as a more conventional novel.

But sadly Susan Perabo doesn’t offer this jigsaw satisfaction. All her stories are independent of each other, albeit drawn together into a collection. Yes there are, of course, ‘themes and ideas’ shared amongst the stories. The near-vomit-inducing ‘Discussion points’ at the back of the book tell us what these might be. Things like ‘the complex relationships between fathers and sons’, or ‘the grieving process’, or ‘friendship’. GCSE déjà vu.

But really, I found it hard to read more than two of these stories in one sitting – despite the shared themes. I find it too tricky to get my head around a whole new scenario every twenty minutes.

And yet, and yet … none of the scenarios is particularly new. Each story is set in some small town in the middle of America, where people are preoccupied with all those things that feature in American indie flicks – neighbours’ gossip, drugs or gambling problems, softball, ailing marriages, difficult children, not having enough money, the meaningless mundanity of life. And everything’s written in a very detached way, I suppose in imitation of the Xanex-filtered existence that it renders. Sentences look like this:

The old guy in the sweater, he was the only one who knew.

So we sat there in silence, still holding hands, listening to the distant hum of the highway.

He went to the window and saw that the boys were throwing gravel at the back of the Wexlers’ house.

The whole book is littered with old guys in sweaters and highways and people throwing gravel at other people’s windows. Perhaps this is an accurate portrayal of America. If it is, please don’t hate me, I just don’t particularly want to read about it.

Perabo’s saving grace is that every now and then she gets a really bonkers character. There’s a father, for instance, whose son has got megarich and – of course – dreadfully unhappy thanks to his meaningless rich existence. The father comes and stays with him in his rich house and meets his rich friends. But it transpires that the father gets off on thieving, and swiftly steals as much as he can from his son’s friends and from his son too. I quite liked the father. Shame that we spend far too little time with him and rather a lot more with his quite awful son. Same goes for a different story, in which a mother spends hundreds of dollars a week on lottery tickets. I’d love to know what’s going on in her head! Instead, we get lumped with her boring patronising daughter, who has split up from her boyfriend and come home to whichever small town it is and realised her life is meaningless.

It’s not fair to keep tempting us with these wacky characters and then not letting us hang out with them properly, forcing us to see them through the eyes of conventional middle America. I kept finding myself wanting to read The Wind in the Willows instead, where one can spend ample time with all the wonderful wacky characters – Mole, Rat, Badger, Toad and the rest of them.

Well, I’ve finished it now, so I can hand it back to the well-meaning customer and tell him I thought it was very interesting. I have always been under the impression that ‘interesting’ is a word that doesn’t mean anything much at all.

Walking To the River

One of my most favourite things is going for a walk. I am at my happiest when strolling along – definitely not too fast or strenuously – looking at beautiful scenery, be it on Hampstead Heath, Hampshire, or Hackney Wick.

Aside from the views, one of the things I love most about walking is talking. I wrote about Matthew Hollis’s biography of Edward Thomas here, in which he wrote about Thomas and Frost’s habit of ‘talk-walking’. They’d go off into the fields and walk for hours, talking all the while, usually of poetry and other lofty things.

No doubt my own talk-walks are a little less high-brow than Edward Thomas’s. But I love the way that once one’s limbs are loosened, one’s tongue is loosened too. All sorts of things that one might normally struggle to talk about come bubbling up like water from a spring – and one babbles away quite easily.

Of course, if there’s no one for company on a walk, then babbling away to oneself looks at best eccentric. Virginia Woolf did it, striding through the Sussex countryside, stomping out the plots of novels, talking to herself all the way. I might hum to myself a little, but usually, if alone, the talking goes on in my head, my thoughts chattering away silently to themselves.

When I feel a bit stuck with my writing – when I get a horrid feeling like there’s a blockage in a key synoptic pathway in my brain – a walk usually sorts it out. Although, when I walk, my thoughts refuse to follow a straight trajectory and dart all over the place making nothing at all coherent, just a very satisfying scribble. It’s when I get home afterwards and sit down to write, that I find the scribble’s unlocked the blockage and I’ve leapt ahead. Phew.

I feel sure there must be plenty of women who walk and write. There’s Virginia Woolf for a start, and there’s also Olivia Laing, whose To the River is just out as an attractive paperback. But, with these exceptions, I really can’t think of any other women who write about walking.

It’s so peculiar! If you think of the big names in English nature-writing (aka walk-writing), they’re all men like Edward Thomas, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin. Travel further afield and there’s Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis and Laurie Lee. Where have all the women gone?

Well perhaps they just walked and talked or walked and thought, without writing it down afterwards. Perhaps we women don’t share the stereotypically ‘male’ impulse to spot and catalogue things obsessively, or perhaps we simply don’t have enough confidence in our walks to commit them to paper. Or perhaps I am just yet to find these elusive women walk-writers. I’d be grateful for any pointers, those of you who know something I don’t.

Well, I’m very pleased that Olivia Laing wrote about her walk along the River Ouse. She walks alone, letting her mind meander along all sorts of fascinating watery diversions. Among other things, we get a folklore tale of faeries, a good bit about the Styx, the tragic story behind The Wind in the Willows and there is the frequent tug of Virginia Woolf, who, of course, drowned herself in the Ouse.

I particularly like the way Olivia Laing doesn’t always pretend to be in a bucolic dream in the middle of nowhere. We are jolted back to the twenty-first century by having to cross an A-road, gobbling a curry for supper, or overhearing a filthy conversation in a pub car park. This is definitely the English countryside of today, which makes the moments of wildness all the more special. Our countryside is now cris-crossed by noisy roads, and our rivers, often as not, end in container ports, changed from meandering streams into ‘an industrial river, dark as oil, its surface opaque and unrevealing’.

But the rivers are still there and one can still find beauty in their surroundings, even if that beauty can be jagged and rather unexpected. Laing gives us both ‘the elder foaming with flowers the colour of Jersey cream’ and the sugared fennel seeds in the Indian restaurant, leaving ‘the ghost of aniseed … on the tip of my tongue like a word I knew but could not speak’.

It’s an intensely lyrical book, beautifully written about beautiful places. It’s a book that above all has made me want to put my shoes on and stride out towards a river. And I would never neglect to bring with an enormous and delicious picnic a la Kenneth Grahame’s Ratty:

coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater

Thanks Olivia for the reminder. Yum.

Dinosaurs at Dungeness

My husband and I got out of London and spent the weekend in Dungeness – a coincidence of a lucky break in the bookshop rota and six months of being married was too happy a thing to let pass us by.

It’s a strange place, Dungeness. The man in the hotel described it as ‘Mad Max country’. It certainly feels wild, unkempt, eerily disregarded and forgotten about. Old boats, shipping containers, and rusted winches strew the endless expanse of shingle beach; industrial flotsam left behind by the retreating sea. A nuclear power station gently hums, looming behind two lighthouses, which look almost like fairground rides.

The person most associated with Dungeness is the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who moved there when suffering from AIDS. He eked out a strange garden from the inhospitable shingle, scrubby plants arranged around odd bits of flotsamed rusty metal. His house, Prospect Cottage, still stands, and you can walk right up into the garden, which is overlooked by a John Donne poem mounted on the side of his house. The poem is the beginning and end of ‘The Sun Rising’, setting a peculiarly hopeful scene of daybreak and beginning, given that Jarman’s life was drawing to its close.

But Derek Jarman and John Donne weren’t so much on my mind. Instead, as we wandered across this strange landscape, I kept thinking of Virginia Woolf. This was in part because I am reading Olivia Laing’s wonderful To the River (of which more in a future post), in part because Dungeness is just a short hop along the coast from Woolf’’s East Sussex, and in part thanks to the profusion of lighthouses. This, in spite of the fact that Woolf never, to my knowledge, went to Dungeness. I can’t see any mention of it in her letters or diaries, in any case. I’m not sure she would have liked it much. So bleak and strange the landscape.

But the feeling I got at Dungeness reminded me very much of a preoccupation in her last novel Between the Acts. At university, I always felt this was the novel that I understood the least, the one that I didn’t quite get, in which I couldn’t quite discover the genius that was, doubtless, there. When I’ve read it, read about it, and thought about it since, I’ve admired Woolf’s playfulness with words, the feeling of her listening to language as it is spoken, and her success in capturing that on the page.

But what I was drawn to at university was her preoccupation with prehistory. Time and again in Between the Acts the long-ago past is summoned and strangely conflated into the present day. Perhaps this is clearest near the beginning:

… [she] had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend.

It took her five seconds in actual time, in mind time ever so much longer, to separate Grace herself, with blue china on a tray, from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree in the green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest. Naturally, she jumped, as Grace put the tray down and said: ‘Good morning, Ma’am.’

I hope you don’t mind the long quotation, but it really is so tremendously clever, I couldn’t bring myself to cut it short. I love it when novelists bring dinosaurs into the equation. One of my favourite bits of Dickens is the opening of Bleak House, when ‘it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill’. But back to Woolf. What the hell is she doing with time?!

First of all we are told quite clearly that the real time of the present are the two hours, ‘between three and five’. But she (who is, in fact, Mrs Swithin) uses those two hours to think of a strange prehistoric time, imagining it both in the large scale of continental geography and in the minute realisation of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly. The ‘monsters’ are really quite extraordinarily described – I like the way Woolf picks out their imagined movements: ‘heaving, surging, slowly writhing’, and then there’s the threat of violence, felt so often in Between the Acts, in ‘barking’. But this strange vision of the past is made relevant to the present. Here we are back in the moment, ‘jerking the window open’ and the link is openly stated: ‘we descend’ from the monsters.

On to more odd time stuff: there’s the ‘actual time’ of ‘five seconds’ contrasted with the ‘mind time’ of ‘ever so much longer’ and this time is used to try and separate this strange conflation of worlds: to distinguish Grace, the servant, from the monster of Mrs Swithin’s imaginings. The monster hasn’t been left behind in pre-history, he is still there and – now we get a flash of the future – ‘about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree’. This very clever episode is brought to a brilliant, bathetic close: Mrs Swithin jumps at the servant putting down the tray and wishing her good morning. The reality of mundane life is here. It is ‘morning’. The monsters of the past are gone.

But the monsters stay lurking close to the surface throughout Between the Acts. Again and again, we feel that time can conflate, that something that happened so long ago could burst through the surface of the present. Mrs Swithin says, later on, ‘Once there was no sea … no sea at all between us and the continent.’ Later, Giles kicks a stone ‘a flinty yellow stone, a sharp stone, edged as if cut by a savage for an arrow. A Barbaric stone; a pre-historic.’ History and pre-history are there, in the stones, in the landscape, literally, just below the surface.

No there weren’t any dinosaurs at Dungeness. But there was something about the feeling of abandonment there, something about the way the sea drifted ever outwards, exposing more and more shingle, rendering the boats and winches useless, that felt epic, connected to a bigger time scale than we can easily imagine.

Not far from Dungeness, we sought out the ‘Listening Ears’. These things, of which I’d never heard, but which the husband was determined to find, are extraordinary old concrete structures that were built to ‘listen’ to approaching aircraft and act as an early-warning system. They were built around the time of Woolf’s writing, in the twenties and thirties, but were swiftly rendered obsolete by the invention of radar.

You can only see the Listening Ears up close on special tours in the summer, so we climbed to the top of a shingle bank and looked at them in the distance across a vast moat. The husband threatened to swim over there.

The Listening Ears are magnificent and strange. More abandoned things. More relics of a time that’s past. More pieces of obsoletism. Looking at them there, standing huge amidst the scrub and gorse, they seemed impossibly ancient and indestructible. They looked so odd they could almost be Aztec. And I couldn’t help but imagine them in thousands of years’ time, overgrown with jungle – perhaps forests of rhododendron bushes. What would they think, whoever discovered them? Would they think they were methods of worship, of praying to the sky gods, ways to listen for omens in the wind? I felt as though time were conflating before my eyes, that something from the thirties could be from an ancient civilisation, and yet could also date us as an ancient civilisation.

Perhaps I can’t convey the feeling quite as elegantly as Woolf, but it was certainly very strange indeed.

The Queen of the Night

I do hope that none of you forgot it was Mother’s Day yesterday. Last week, appropriately enough, I spent a little while thinking about mothers in literature for the Spectator. It transpires that good mothers in books are few and far between. However tricky your mum, she’ll seem a treat after considering the likes of Medea and Mrs Bennett.

These ponderings about literary mums were buzzing around at the back of my head, when I went to see my younger brother-in-law conduct a very impressive student production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the weekend. This was actually my second Mozart experience of the week. The first was during an MRI scan, when I spent a peculiar sci-fi half-hour in a tunnel having my protons very noisily magnetically aligned, while Mozart was played to me on huge noise-cancelling headphones.

I hate admitting to this, but I really don’t like Mozart. Not quite as bad as Haydn, who I really can’t stand, but still too twiddly and fiddly for me. Give me some meaty Beethoven any day. When the MRI lady asked what music I wanted to listen to, I said classical please; she then said, what sort of classical, I said, oh any sort. She suggested Bach. I said perfect. So there I was, in the tunnel, having been told not to move at all, worrying that I was breathing too vigorously, the weird drilling sound of the magnets began and one of Mozart’s piano concertos twiddled into action. Bonus, I thought. As if it could have got any worse. But I did find myself wondering if it could ever have occurred to Mozart that a couple of hundred years after his death his music would be played in such a deeply weird situation.

For me, Mozart operas are the exceptions that prove the rule. I absolutely love them. All the silly trilly bits that I find so annoying in his other music, no longer sound twee and fiddly, just wonderful and fun and even quite beautiful.

The Magic Flute was a far more pleasurable Mozart experience than my MRI scan. Although, after the MRI scan I was left with some far-out pictures of my wonky spine, whereas The Magic Flute just left my spine feeling distinctly tingly. My favourite arias from the opera have always been the fun and silly Pa-pa-pa-pa, pa-pa-pa-pa one sung by Papageno and Papagena towards the end, and the wonderfully melodramatic Queen of the Night one, ‘Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart’. Here is Diana Damrau singing the latter:

I bet now your spine’s tingling too.

The Queen of the Night is really an amazing lady. She is undoubtedly my favourite literary (or operatic) mother. First of all, she enters with thunder and lightening. Here is a picture of the set design for her arrival from an 1815 production.

Pretty impressive.

Her first aria is almost as wonderful as her second. Here’s Natalie Dessay:

Within five minutes, she manages to get a man under her control and sends him off to rescue her kidnapped, beautiful daughter. Just like that, the Queen of the Night has set her daughter up with a Prince. Mrs Bennett, touché.

Then, via her three ladies, she gives Prince Tamino the magic flute of the title, which enchants and brings happiness to anyone who hears it. She also gives Papageno, the bird catcher, the silver bells which will end up saving his life more than once. So far, so perfect. She is the bestower of magical gifts. She sets the plot in action. She gets her daughter a princely husband. Really, a bloody wonderful mum.

But everything becomes more complicated once Sarastro comes on the scene. Suddenly, the Queen of the Night is cast into shadow, she is just ‘Ein Weib tut wenig, plaudert viel’ – a woman who does little and chatters much. Chatter! Definitely the wrong word for that incredibly striking aria.

Now we’ve reached the bit of the opera which can drag a little. Here is all the Masonic stuff, where everything is about the number three, and Tamino has to go through various (well, three) tests in order to prove himself worthy of Pamina and a successor to Sorastro. When Pamina asks to be freed and go back to her mother, Sorastro says she can’t because her mother is ‘stolzes’ – proud, and that:

Ein Mann muß eure Herzen leiten,

Denn ohne ihn pflegt jedes Weib

Aus ihrem Wirkungskreis zu schreiten.

A man must lead your hearts

For without him every woman is

misguided to step out of her sphere.

Hummm… not really the view of the minute is it? Do we really believe that Sarastro has kidnapped Pamina just so a man can rescue her? This bit of plot feels very problematic to me. I remain unconvinced of Sarastro’s goodness and very reluctant to see the Queen of the Night cast as a villain. But anyway, on it plods…

AND THEN … The Queen of the Night reappears with her infamous aria, in which she commands Pamina to murder Sarastro. Clearly she’s as fed up with his misogynistic waffle as I am! If only Pamina would agree to murder him, then it would be a far more exciting opera. But she refuses. Poor old Queen of the Night has well and truly lost her daughter. She will reappear again at the very end in a last ditch attempt to storm Sarastro’s temple, but fails and is cast out to the night. Perhaps she can at least console herself that she’s succeeded with her match-making and that Tamino and Pamina will live happily ever after.

Whether we see her as good or bad, the Queen of the Night is certainly one of the most demanding parts ever written for a soprano. Mozart originally wrote the part for his sister-in-law Josepha Hofer, who was known for her incredible voice. It’s the part with the best arias, the part for the best voice. The Queen of the Night – if she has the talent – will always steal the show.

Perhaps it was with this good-bad ambivalence in mind that Whitney Houston (R.I.P.) reimagined the Queen of the Night in her epic eighties hit of the same name.

As she puts it, ‘Don’t make no difference if I’m wrong or I’m right’. Who cares if she’s good or bad!? She is the Queen of the Night and has ‘got more than enough to make you drop to your knees’. Really this is the important thing. She’s the most impressive character, the one you come away remembering.

The Queen of the Night is by far and away the coolest literary mother. Only thing is, she might be a bit of a tough act to follow.

The Beginning of Spring

The other day I got chatting to a young lady who used to work as a journalist for a national newspaper. She revealed that online journalism is full of tricks, such as trying to get the words ‘google’, ‘sex’ and ‘tits’ into each story, which apparently makes the article easier to find with a search engine. She also said that they were told not to write anything too long, encouraged to use bullet points and the more pictures the better.

I came away feeling that EmilyBooks is doomed to failure. I don’t think that I’ve ever used ‘google’, ‘sex’ or ‘tits’ in any of my posts. Until now that is. But, in my defence, people looking for any of those three things are unlikely to find what they’re looking for here. Perhaps I’m just writing the wrong kind of blog. Perhaps this should be a blog about googling for sex and tits.

Leaving aside the issue of the three magic words, I’m sure I don’t use enough bullet points or pictures, or write short enough articles. (I mean I’ve not yet said anything really, and I’m already 200 words in.)

Help!

After a couple of days fretting about this, I have resolved not to worry. But I am going to try to use more pictures. I suspect these will mostly be taken (badly) with my mobile phone, whose camera I have only used once before when excitedly taking a photo of the new Routemaster.

Ta da!

Do feel free to tell me if you think these new pictures add anything to EmilyBooks or if I should ignore all this rubbish and go back to my happy luddite ways.

Back to books anyway. I recently wrote a piece for the Spectator about books in spring. It was a bit of an eccentric piece, essentially written to point out that there are three very good books with the word ‘hare’ in the title, which is too brilliantly Marchlike to miss. Well I finished the article having decided to read something spring-y. Which is how I ended up with Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring.

What a wonderful book! I really do think the lady is a genius. I read Offshore a couple of years ago and have been longing to read something else by her ever since. What she does with great dexterity in both books is create a slightly odd situation, peopled with terribly eccentric but completely believable characters. Each book trundles along slightly quirkily until shortly before the end when something REALLY weird happens.

The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow in 1913. I enviously noted how well Fitzgerald has done her research, dropping in casual references to things like samovar sizes or routes taken by taxi sledges. It’s not brazenly in-your-face like historical research can be (such as in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White), rather it is quietly assured, the odd detail filled in perfectly, while the rest is left sketchy enough for the reader’s imagination to have some freedom.

I say that I noted it enviously because I’m currently writing a chapter in my own novel about Picasso, Braque and Kahnweiler in Paris in 1908 and it’s horribly difficult to get right. A couple of months ago I knew very little about Picasso or Braque, had never even heard of Kahnweiler, and didn’t know much about Paris or 1908 either. I’ve been spending many an hour in the British Library trying to learn useful things. The problem is it’s a chicken and egg situation. You need to know something in order to start writing, but as soon as you start writing you realise you don’t know the right thing and so have to go back and research something else. The image that most comes to mind is that of shambling through a three-legged race, the writing and research leaning on each other and helping each other along, but not at all smoothly, often, in fact, tripping each other up.

So well done Penelope. You have succeeded perfectly where many lesser beings fail.

One historical and geographical detail that I particularly loved is the opening of the windows. All through the winter, the windows in Moscow were sealed closed and opening them signifies the beginning of spring:

All morning the yardman had been removing the putty from the inner glass, piece by piece, flake by flake. Blashl [the dog], frantic at his long disappearance, howled at intervals, but the yardman worked slowly. When all the putty was off, without a scratch from the chisel, he called, lord of the moment, for the scrapings to be brushed away. The space between the outer and inner windows was black with dead flies. They, too, must be removed, and the sills washed down with soft soap. Then with a shout from the triumphant shoecleaning boy at the top of the house to Ben, still in the hall, the outer windows, some terribly stuck, were shaken and rattled till they opened wide. Throughout the winter the house had been deaf, turned inwards, able to listen only to itself. Now the sounds of Moscow broke in, the bells and voices, the cabs and taxis which had gone by all winter unheard like ghosts of themselves, and with the noise came the spring wind, fresher than it felt in the street, blowing in uninterrupted from the northern regions where the frost still lay.

Have I just been with an architect for too long, or is this really fascinating? As far as I can understand from this (it’s no point googling ‘opening windows Moscow’ as you just get things about computer programs or articles with obvious metaphorical titles (by the way, do you see what trick I did there??!!)), in Moscow, an extra layer of glass was put in each window for the winter months, which was properly sealed with putty to make very effective double glazing. But see how Fitgerald describes it so minutely, with such thought going into how one would open a window after months of it being sealed. It is a painstaking process. Someone else is called to brush away the scrapings. Dead flies have got in there. The outer windows have become stiff and stuck. And then, finally, she gives us the beautiful climax of the sounds of Moscow blown in on the fresh spring wind. She’s a genius.

I wish we had the same window-opening ritual today in London. How amazing to have been sealed up and cocooned all winter, and then, quite suddenly, to feel connected to the outside. (Incidentally, this all fits in rather nicely with what I was saying about windows in my last post about Ravilious.)

But we have other signs of spring. Like this beautiful tree covered in blossom, which I saw in Hyde Park this weekend!

The funny thing is, when I saw it, I instantly thought of the cover of The Beginning of Spring, with its snow-covered trees. Snow and blossom can give such similar impressions, it is as though the tree shakes off the snow and instantly replaces it with the blossom. Either way, it is covered in white and looks incredibly pretty. Be it in Moscow or in London, I do love the beginning of spring.