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Adventures in Bookland: Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood

22 January 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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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:

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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.

A Solution to an Age-Old Problem

18 January 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Fatherhood, Things You Never Knew

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I offer here, free of charge and entirely without obligation, a solution to the age-old problem of how to get your son or daughter out of bed in the morning. Whisper in his or her ear, as they burrow down under the duvet trying to get away from you, the words, ‘It’s snowed,’ and, I guarantee, the child in question will rocket out of bed as if a Saturn V launcher has ignited under the mattress.

It will help, of course, if it actually did snow overnight (which it did yesterday here in London) and, even more so, if this is the first snow of the winter (which it was).

There, problem sorted. The said child (or children) will be downstairs, dressed, breakfasted and ready to go within five minutes. All you then have to do is find the slope and off they go!

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Adventures in Bookland: The Wind Eye by Robert Westall

7 January 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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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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Categories: Book review

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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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Categories: Book review

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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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Categories: Book review

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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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Categories: Book review

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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).

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

16 December 2015
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Well, I knew it was rude, but I didn’t know it was this rude. And, yes, I know there’s all sorts of other literary and historical significances to The Decameron: the foundation of Italian vernacular literature, the introduction of a new, earthy style of writing, a witness to the social dislocation produced by the Plague, the emergence of an urban, mercantile class. But, really, I challenge anyone reading this to come away with any other first impression than that it is astoundingly, jaw-droppingly rude.

You want to know how rude? I don’t think I can tell you without blushing. Oh, all right then. How about this then. A priest, Dom Gianni, convinces his rather dim friend, Pietro, that he can turn Pietro’s wife, Gemmata, into a mare and back again. Very useful for getting to market. Pietro and Gemmata agree, but Dom Gianni warns them that, when making the spell, they must not speak or the magic will not work. Suffice to say, the spell involves Gemmata naked and on all fours and a most unusual tail.

Throughout the book, priests, monks, friars and nuns are rampant, women demand their conjugal rights, and seek satisfaction elsewhere if left unsatisfied; craft and cunning is rewarded, stupidity gulled.

I don’t think I will ever see the Middle Ages in quite the same light again.