Book review

Adventures in Bookland: North York Moors & Yorkshire Wolds by Mike Bagshaw

11 March 2016
Edoardo
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I spent over ten years writing and editing guide books for Time Out, so I know a good guide book when I see one – and this is a really good guide book.

First, it fulfills the primary role of a guide book: it guides. When we visited the North York Moors in February, the book showed us where to go and what to see and, being published only last year, the details were all correct. But the mark of a really good guide book is when it goes beyond the basic guide book function and this one does. Reading it before we left, it made us even more eager to visit, by unveiling all sorts of places that we would never have known to visit, from the stepping stones across the River Esk in Egton Bridge to loneliest pub in England, the Lion Inn atop Blakey Ridge, to which we repaired for some much needed hot food as the wind blew spindrift over the snow fields atop the moors. And looking at the book after we have returned has helped us appreciate even more what we saw, as well as firing a determination to return again.

Mike Bagshaw fills the book with the sort of detail that comes from many years intimate knowledge of a place and its people – I was particularly struck by the story of his late neighbour, a true Yorkshireman, who through all his three score years and ten never once set foot beyond the county’s boundaries.

Having seen the demise of Time Out’s guide books – which were pretty well the best city guides out there – it’s good to see a publisher, Bradt, that is still prepared to invest in producing a high-quality, well written guidebook. Well done Bradt and well done Mike Bagshaw!

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Touchstone by Andrew Norriss

9 March 2016
Edoardo
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Go on ask me a question. Any question. You know you want to.

It can be anything, anything at all, and I’ll tell you the answer. Which stocks to buy, who will win the league, how to build a destructor death ray shooting pink plasm. All you have to do is ask, and I’ll tell you the answer.

I reckon I’d like to be able to do that – but then, I’m the sort of person who likes quizzes. My dream job would be as the Chaser on The Chase (which, if you don’t know it, is a daytime quiz programme where a team of four attempt to escape the Chaser, a professional quizzer, as the Chaser hunts them down: each time the contestants get a question wrong and the Chaser gets it right, he draws closer).

Sadly, I don’t even know enough to be the Chaser, let alone the Touchstone. Because the Touchstone really can answer any question you ask it. Any question at all. Including the one about how to make a destructor death ray shooting pink plasma.

Ah. So, perhaps not the sort of thing you want to give to just anyone. Quite right. But, the question is, who should you give it to? The Guardians? (They are, in fact, the Guardians of the Galaxy, only this version does not feature talking raccoons and ambulant trees but rather a somewhat ruffled civil servant.) Now, this is the first of Andrew Norriss’s books where I don’t think I agree with the answer. I’m not sure any institution could guard such knowledge since the knowledge would, in the end, corrupt the institution, leading the, in this case, Guardians, to see themselves as more important than that which they’re guarding, ie. everything else. It’s what happens to institutional bureaucracies over time. I’d much rather have Douglas, our 12-year-old hero, in charge of the Touchstone than the Guardians. I sort of think I’d even prefer the gung ho adventuress who gives him the Touchstone to have it. But then, there is one question that will answer with surety what your attitude to the Touchstone would be, and it’s the same question that was posed to Achilles: to have a long and happy life, or a short and glorious one.

When I was fourteen, I posed that question to my classmates and, to my surprise, received a unanimous reply: long and happy. I was the only one, at the time, who wanted glory and fame. I suspect that was because, to that point, I’d never really been unhappy, and, when you’re 14, the prospect of dying at 28 seems just as dim and distant as dying at 78.

The Touchstone is for those who want a long and happy life and, as I’ve got older, I have come to appreciate that much, much more. But, in our increasingly safety conscious world, I fear we lose something by giving no avenue for the young glory hunter: in previous ages he could sail off to strange lands, now there’s no such opportunity.

Another thought: with the internet increasingly omnipresent and omniscient, have we, in effect, given a Touchstone to everyone? If so, it’s chief effect seems to be a proliferation of cute cat videos and the further loss of personal memory; if everything can be called up, why bother to recall it? But, I suspect, memory is an underappreciated aspect of intelligence. We are currently applying a worldwide test to see if we can do without it. I suspect the answer will be no – and I don’t think I need the Touchstone to tell me that.

But I do need The Touchstone for another take on how to write a book without a single excess word or spurious phrase (like that one!).  Read it, tell others about it, answer questions on it. Make it your touchstone, if not your cornerstone.

Adventures in Bookland: Mr Fitton’s Prize by Showell Styles

23 February 2016
Edoardo
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I remember it exactly. The first time the natural physical insouciance of youth was cracked. I was on the hovercraft crossing the Channel – back then, there was no tunnel, and the quickest way across was by the giant, car-eating hovercraft that roared over the strait – and, naturally, on boarding I had rushed to the front, where the seats looked out past the captain’s bridge to the approaching shore – and the choppy waves of the Channel. Setting off, I discovered something unexpected, although hardly unforseeable, about hovercrafts: since they hover, they follow the line of the waves, rather than ploughing through them. Oh, how I laughed with glee as the front of the hovercraft rose up towards the crest, opening up a prospect of sky and foam, then dropped, precipitously, into the trough beyond, changing on the instant from clear blue sky to roiling green water. The other passengers sought calmer berths further back, but we youngsters stayed at the front, revelling in this natural roller coaster. Or some of us did. After about twenty minutes, my exhilaration began to feel a trifle… forced. Something seemed to be forcing its way upon me. Unfortunately, it was my lunch.

I just about made it to the toilet in time.

I had not known before that I could get sea sick. Turns out, I’m about as bad a sailor as ever turned green over the big greeny blue. Further confirmation was supplied when learning to dive in Australia (did you know, they even have barbies on boats – not that I was eating anything).

So it must be the nautical equivalent of rubbernecking that produces my fascination with naval literature, in particular stories set in the heyday of the Senior Service during the Napoleonic Wars. Patrick O’Brian, CS Forester – you merely have to point me at a ship of the line and I’ve cast off hawsers and settled down to read.

But I’d never heard of Showell Styles and now I must give thanks to Faber Finds. It’s stated purpose is to restore to print great writing across every genre of fiction and non-fiction – and with Mr Fitton’s Prize it has succeeded. This is a masterclass in writing, its apparent effortlessness concealing a real mastery of the craft. Looking up the author, I find that he wrote over 150 books in a 50-year career, both fiction and non-fiction. In fact, I find that he was what I want to be. Plus, he has pretty well the coolest name ever. So, Mr Styles, may you sail home, and be my guide.

Showell Styles (1908-2005)
Showell Styles (1908-2005)

 

Adventures in Bookland: Railhead by Philip Reeve

2 February 2016
Edoardo
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In this day and age when the old shames, for good or ill, no longer embarrass, when I can go to dinner with old friends and be told, apropos of nothing, that their son is gay and the conversation move on as if nothing more remarkable has come up than that he has switched jobs, there yet remains one love that dare not speak its name. I would not speak of it myself, where it not for the fact that someone I know is subject to this-this compulsion. But the time has come to face society’s scorn and incomprehension, to take on the last prejudice and say it.

Say it loud.

My son’s a trainspotter and I’m proud.

There, I’ve said it.

What’s more, I’ve done it. I’ve spent endless hours on windy platforms, warmed only by a thermos flask of tea, while my son has jumped up and down in excitement as a Black Five has gone steaming past (see, I even know the terminology now), or a class 66 has trundled through, pulling a long train of troublesome trucks. So I’ve been there, I’ve got the anorak (a vital accessory at some stations, where there really is no protection against the wind).

So, now, after all this time spent alongside railway lines, whether I would or not, what do I really think of trains?

They’re all right.

Get you from London to Birmingham pretty well. Or, in Philip Reeve’s new book, from one planet to another. Only, in the future, the trains talk. They’ve got guns. And some even fall in love. So, on the face of it, a little different from the 8.14 First Capital Connect service from Harpenden (or First Crapital Connect as commuters, not particularly affectionately, called it).

But, standing on the platforms, surreptitiously looking at my son, and the other spotters, shining faces turned to the tracks, I realised that, in fact, it’s true. Trains do talk; they do sing and maybe some even fall in love. Only, most of us are too blind to see it. Only those derided blokes in the anoraks down the end of the platform get it. Someday, they will catch that 7.37 service to the Greater Magellanic Cloud that departs from Euston.

Although Philip Reeve keeps it quiet, I’m willing to bet he has his own anorak hung up on the back of a door, and a thermos flask ready to go. Only a trainspotter, closeted or otherwise, could have written this book and it’s time Philip Reeve joined me in coming out of the closet.

Come on Philip, say it loud.

We’re trainspotters, and we’re proud!

The future is arriving, and it’s coming on rails.

Adventures in Bookland: Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood

22 January 2016
Edoardo
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Some people are christened to their art: parents beware, when you start flicking through that baby name book, you might be doing more than just choosing a name, you might be fixing the pole to which your child’s life is forever aligned. Put Chanelle around her neck and, I’m afraid, the best she will ever aspire to is coming third on Big Brother. Usain Bolt – well, what else. And the parents of Algernon Blackwood had clearly decided they wanted their son to write weird fiction – particularly when they added in to the cocktail of potential the combination of genes that meant little Algie grew up to look like this:

Algernon_Blackwood

Luckily – although that may not be quite the right word – Blackwood turned out to have the literary and imaginative gifts necessary to write ghost stories – and other fictions, that skate around the edge of the supernatural and indefinable, hinting at things that, if seen, would either shrivel in the light of sight, or shrivel sight in the light of seeing.

In The Willows, one of the stories in this collection, and the best known, one of the characters says:

‘All my life I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region – not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind – where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul…

[He continues] ‘You think it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought it was perhaps the old gods. But I tell you now it is – neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.’

 Now, this is pretty well what I think. Our seemingly so, so solid world is cut through by other realities, most of which are completely beyond our reck. But, sometimes, things slip, in the thin places, the rubbed through areas, and worlds that were not meant to meet, mix, for a while, before the wheels of creation drive them apart again.

So, I loved this collection of short stories. While Blackwood might not have the wit (or sheer talent) of our best known contemporary writer of weird fiction, Neil Gaiman, he has one great advantage: he knows he’s dealing with something more than mind stuff, and that imbues his work with the edge, the bottom, to use an old-fashioned word, that Gaiman lacks.

But at least Gaiman isn’t subjected to the dubious talents of whatever artist drew the cover illustration for this book: isn’t it dreadful. Blackwood must be blue.

Adventures in Bookland: The Wind Eye by Robert Westall

7 January 2016
Edoardo
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This book changed my life.

There. Five-word review. There aren’t many books that do that, and this one did. Perhaps slightly unusual for a life-changing book, in that it’s a children’s book (and I read it as an adult), it’s set in Northumberland (which I’d barely even heard of when I read it, let alone visited), and it’s about an obscure 7th-century monk and a dysfunctional 1970s family. But there you go. Life-changing books come in all sorts of strange packages.

As to why it was so life-changing, think on this. My parents are immigrants. They settled in London. Our friends were in London or the south east. So, when we travelled in England, we went to them. Yes, we made the occasional trip further afield, but without a familial sense of where to go and what to visit, we were limited to the most obvious places. Our family trip to Scotland took in Edinburgh, Loch Ness and (for two young boys) an exciting night spent sleeping the back of our estate car when all the B&B places that had ‘vacancy’ signs in the morning had changed them to ‘no vacancy’ signs by the afternoon (for the adults, it was no doubt a hugely uncomfortable and deeply mortifying night, but we thought it was great). Most of England was beyond our knowledge and budget. So, by the time I’d grown up, I really hadn’t visited very much of it.

Going to university meant that I actually met and became friends with some actual English people – and then, quite a few years later, I went and married one. Now, my wife’s family knew quite a lot about England – they’d been here for centuries. And, although undemonstrative, my father-in-law’s patriotism is deeply rooted in the understated nature mysticism of the English: the same sort of feeling that permeates the Piper in the Gates of Dawn chapter of The Wind in the Willows, or the poem Adlestrop.

The other strand to this feeling for place is history: a rootedness in the land and landscape that comes from centuries within it. I can see this but, at root, I can’t feel it: my roots stop with me. But there is a further, deeper connection, and in this book I began to see the hints of that.

St Cuthbert lived in 7th-century Northumbria. He was a miracle-worker, a bishop, a hermit, a man kind to animals and plants and plagued by demons and devils; he was fierce in love and harsh on evil. With eyes turned to God, all other eyes turned to him, pulling, plucking, trying to pinch a little of his holiness from him. In defence, Cuthbert went exile in view, on one of the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland, and remained there until called back to act as bishop, although he did manage to return to the island for his final few months of life.

The saint lives. In the book, he stirs, opening up the wounds of pride and angry disbelief in an Oxford professor, lashing him to his duty; this is no plaster saint but a man of danger. This is holiness as whirlwind and fire, burning and breaking, making.

Men are broken, bent things. Sometimes they have to be broken further before they can be remade. This book broke some of me in its fire. I hope it remade that part of me in its image.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3: Guardians Disassembled

31 December 2015
Edoardo
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Rocket Raccoon may be the best character in comics right now – Groot is certainly the best talking tree and, since there’s not that much competition for the title of best anthropomorphic raccoon, Rocket definitely takes that crown, but I think he’s the best character out there, with or without fur.

But this volume is a disappointment, and one that bears all the marks of a Marvel corportate cash in. The first half at least is connected, with the Guardians disassembled and trying to get back together again, but that story isn’t even completed here. Instead, the second half is a collection of random stories, with no relation to each other, that neither highlight nor complement the original. But even if they did, there would still be no excuse for putting out an incomplete book such as this. Best avoided (or borrowed through a library, which is how we thankfully avoided having to pay to learn how disappointing this was).

Adventures in Bookland: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

30 December 2015
Edoardo
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A minor disadvantage of growing up as the child of immigrant parents for whom English was not a first language (well, it ranked equal with Sinhala and Tamil for my father), is that there is no familial list of children’s reading classics to go through. I learned to read young, got a library ticket, and was set loose. My reading reflected the magpie tendencies and path following of a child: Enid Blyton (all the Famous Five and Secret Seven, plus the Adventure series); The Wind in the Willows; Dr Doolittle and his many adventures. But it missed out many books that a familial familiarity with English would have presented to me: Winnie-the-Pooh, Narnia, Treasure Island, Middle-earth. Some of these I caught up with as a teenager (there’s no better age to enter Middle-earth for the first time than when you’re fourteen years old), but the others I’ve been working through as an adult. Narnia saw me through my university finals. Nephews and a niece provided the chance to read Winnie-the-Pooh for the first time (the first chapter left me limp upon the sofa, as my nephew tried to figure out why Pooh Bear, hanging from a balloon and attempting to impersonate a small black cloud so that he could raid a hive for honey, should leave his uncle wheezing and unable to move for laughing). Treasure Island was marked out on the map of a fortysomething. And, finally, fifty two year-old me followed Alice down the rabbit hole.

It’s pretty weird down there.

I’d say the book has the logic of dreams, apart from the fact that I have the most boring subconscious known to man. Do you want to know how boring it is? My recurring childhood nightmare was falling from our bathroom window. Do you want to know how boring it is? I’ve dreamed of VAT rates. Do you really want to know how boring it is? When I have sexual dreams, I dream of having sex with my own wife.  So, whatever logic the book has, it certainly isn’t the logic of my dreams. But it does make sense: non-sense. And, as such, I was really getting to like it, until I came to the end.

No, no, no, no!

And again, no, no, No, NO!

Lewis Carroll, how could you?

If there is one ending I hate above all others in stories, it’s the and-then-he-woke-up-it-and-it-was-all-a-dream ending. In this case, the he is a she – Alice – and it was all a dream. I mean, why should a homicidal Queen of Hearts be a dream? Let alone a white rabbit, or an alternately elongating and shrinking Alice? All sounds quite sensible to me, particularly a century and a half since first publication (1865). Better for Alice to have been kidnapped by the Cheshire Cat than for it all to have been a dream.

So, Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, I ask again, how could you?

 

 

 

Adventures in Bookland: Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

24 December 2015
Edoardo
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Take a look at the shelves of a second-hand bookshop or, even more mournful, the library of a country hotel with pretensions. It’s where books go to die, standing unread and unremarked upon bookshelves, their authors’ names slowly fading. It’s an achievement in itself to get a book published but… then what? A career, if you’re lucky, writing, but those melancholy shelves tell the likely truth: most writers are forgotten as completely as most books.

So, in that respect, Stella Gibbons is luckier than most of us. Cold Comfort Farm, possibly the funniest book I’ve ever read, means that she stays in print and thus, in literary terms, alive. And, being alive, publishers have cast through her back catalogue and hung a collection of short stories on Gibbons’ brief return visit to the Starkadders’ farm.

It’s the other stories that impress here, though. They’re an insight into a vanished Britain, an England and English banished by the cultural revolution of the last few decades: repression and restraint, propriety and prudishness, and the smart, usually literary, set that pioneered the revolution: as complacent and self-obsessed group of people as one could imagine.

Without Cold Comfort Farm, this book would never have been republished. But Gibbons lives on, and worthily so.

 

Adventures in Bookland: Of All the Gin Joints by Mark Bailey and Edward Hemingway

16 December 2015
Edoardo
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I was about to begin this review by saying this is the perfect coffee-table book but then… coffee has very little to do with it. Better to say it’s the ideal toilet book: two- or three-page chapters on Hollywood legends and their drinking in particular and debauchery in general. Speaking as someone whom nature has, perforce, made abstemious, I read the exploits of the people here with something like wonder: how can the human system cope with such vast amounts of alcohol? I, certainly, cannot. One or two pints and it’s the sick pit for me.

On a more general point, just what is the connection between excess and creativity? For some, they seem entwined – although how much this is learned reinforcement and how much necessary spark I wonder. Writing, acting: it’s like diving, head first into the deep blue. Scary stuff, and not so surprising that some might resort to a snifter or two. But, done once, it easily becomes a habit, and a dangerous one. To make, to create, is to enter into God’s province and his plan: it entails, it demands sacrifice, whether one knows it or not. And the sacrifice will be made, whether one knows it or not.

Otherwise, just enjoy the gossip about the famously beautiful (and a few writers too).