Bedtime Story, Chloe Hooper
This is a beautifully written book, Michael McGurr called it ‘Life stripped to its essentials’. It’s in the form of a bedtime story to her five or six year old son. She’s pondering how to tell him that his father has terminal cancer. This is Don Watson and there is a younger boy in the family. She intersperses beautiful descriptions of their daily lives with research into fairy tales and children’s stories – bedtime stories. It’s the choices she makes about what to include and what to exclude that make this something of a masterpiece of autobiographical writing. It’s the small things she observes that are the most telling. It is all very well done but at times it feels too intimate. As though the reader is an interloper into the family’s private life. She’s a beautiful writer.
The Arsonist, Chloe Hooper
So I read this, having had it here for ages. I have enjoyed all of her earlier books – The Tall Man was a wonderful depiction of life on Palm Island and notable for it’s even-handedness for the parties involved. And her fictional novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was a wonderfully strange whodunit involving some magic realism – animals that can talk – set in Tasmania. And I enjoyed this. Beautifully written in the same style as The Tall Man. Another difficult subject – both are about horrible events and here she has the same even-handed approach between the different groups involved. In this case describing the horror that victims of the fire endured / continue to suffer, the police and forensic experts and prosecutors who are seeking to prove who did it, and the suspect, his family and defence team. An incredible amount of research distilled into a readable narrative that provides illumination without judgement. As with her other books, it’s the vignettes she chooses to spend time on that make this a compelling but sympathetic read. The writing is both beautiful and clear. Terrific.
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, Agatha Christie
I read this book because I watched the Hugh Lawrie directed series advertised in this picture and thought it was terrible. So I wanted to compare it to the book. Hugh Lawrie who also played one of the characters. I couldn’t see any sense in the changes he made to the story – doctors with wooden legs, suicides, navy bonhomie and so on. All not in the book and all not fulfilling any narrative function! The underlying issue between the two principles – that of class status – gets buried under banter that is completely contrary to the tone of the book. It’s interesting how many bad adaptations have been made of Agatha Christie stories. They are all quite straight forward and best left unaltered. But people tend to camp them up and rely on period costumes to capture audience interest. Unnecessary. Series one star, book 5 stars.
Ever, Dirk: The Dirk Bogarde Letters, Ed. John Coldstream
I really thought I’d read enough of Dirk Bogarde’s writing but I picked this volume up at a book sale in Ballarat about six months ago. Feeling under the weather with a cold I pulled it out expecting it to be repetitious of the biography and of the autobiographies – all of which I’ve read. And lo and behold it wasn’t. The editor is the author of the biography and he explains in his preface that he has taken care not to repeat extracts from letters that were used in that and he’s true to his word. Dirk, who I loved as an actor, is a terrific writer. I’ve read all of his seven autobiographical books – two beautiful, lyrical books about his childhood, one about his wartime experience and the others about his life as an actor and about living in France and then London. I’ve also read a volume which collected the book reviews he wrote for a London paper when he came back to England – they’re opinionated and pithy and make you want to read those he recommends. And I’ve read one of his six novels which was also quite good; set in Indonesia and based a bit on his wartime experience. I’ve written about this already in this blog.
So, what more was there to know? Not much, but all of it beautifully written. He obviously loved writing so was pleased to write these long, interesting letters. He wrote the ones collected here mostly he was living in France. He maintained a lively correspondence quite a number of people – mostly women. A couple of whom just wrote to him out of the blue and with whom he then corresponded for years – an American (whose letters he published after she died) an English woman and later, while he was back living in London, with a French woman. Others were film critics, wives of friends, colleagues. They are long letters often up to three typed pages. He’s terribly interesting about the people he worked with, his films, his gardening, French and English customs and lots else. He reminds me a bit of Patrick Leigh Fermor who he knew and who he played once in the film Ill Met By Moonlight. Letters are an easy read. Good for when you are sick.
Fresh Water For Flowers, Valérie Perrin
It’s been a while since I’ve read a really good novel and I was a bit wary starting this. I can’t remember why I it on my to read list – a good review from somewhere – from now I’m going to add that detail to my list. Maybe a review in The Guardian as it’s quoted on the front. In any event I loved it. As the quote says, quite correctly, it is both melancholic and yet ebullient. It’s written in the first person; something I’m generally not keen on, but here it works. Our narrator is a woman who is working as a caretaker of a cemetery in a small French village. A house in the grounds comes with the job. Hers is a knowing but believable voice. She slowly tells us about her back story and how she has come to be here – living by herself, doing this job. She describes her day to day activities – opening and closing the cemetery gates, feeding the cemetery cats, preparing for funerals, providing tea and cake to her co-workers and to visitors, watching who comes to clean which graves. She’s and observant lady , knowing everything about each of the residents in the cemetery – the state of their marriages, their lovers, their children. She takes notes at the funerals and records details of eulogies spoken. She’s an isolated figure. And over the course of the story we discover why – abandoned as a baby, foster families, education abandoned early, dead-end jobs, barmaid, then an unexpected marriage. Husband a strange kettle of fish. His family hostile to her. This might have strained credulity but somehow works. You know that some disaster has led to her being here – where she is alone, but cared for by those around her – the grave diggers (one of whom is an Elvis fan – Elvis is following me around these days!), the undertakers, the families of the recently departed the visitors to those who’ve gone before. A visitor arrives to fulfil a strange request from his recently deceased mother, disrupting our narrator’s quiet life. her erratic husband re-emerges. And so we speed on to the denouement. It’s all quite beautifully done.
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
I found this Elizabeth Bowen novel in my study – either from the community library across the road or from one of the independent book shops I’ve been keen to support. Either way I’m glad I had it. I liked it a lot. About a young woman – I think about sixteen years old. She’s the result of her father’s extra-marital affair to which his wife acted uncharacteristically – beautifully explained by the family maid midway through the book. Who was wronged wife or husband? Either way father and paramour live in exile on the continent, latterly just mother and daughter after father dies. Now mother has died and half-sister has landed on her half brother and his wife living a fashionable, upper middle class life in London. It’s incredible how Bowen gets into the head of this young woman – unsophisticated, unknowing, full of judgements and emotions – who upends the comfortable lives of the sophisticated circle into which she is thrown. The maid her only link to the past. So much is left unstated – it’s not necessary to have everything outlined, underlined, put in bold letters! The reader is left to read between the lines. The young woman doesn’t understand polite society, grown up relationships, her own, let alone, others emotions. And so she is a wrecking ball – and the adults around her are left to look honestly at themselves and their lives as they pick up the pieces. I loved this.
This is Happiness, Niall Williams
And lo and behold another terrific read. No idea where it was recommended. An old man is remembering his grandparents and their lives in the remote village where he joined them as a naive seventeen year old. His mother’s early death has led to thoughts of the priesthood but he’s having a rethink about that. There’s not too much about that despite a humorously drawn Mother Superior who descends alarmingly on the village at one point. The local priest is a progressive fellow – which makes a nice change in Irish stories. His grandparents and their relationship is dissected – surface appearances are just that, all surface, not deep seated. The rest of the villagers are beautifully, sympathetically drawn. Each with their own particular characteristics. Quirky but not too much so. Our seventeen year old is smitten with the Doctor’s daughter – he has three, and each makes an appearance in our narrator’s life. Village life is upended when it is announced that finally electricity is to be connected – a project long delayed after the rest of Ireland has had it for years. We are out in the remote west. There is much quietly delivered humour in the descriptions of this project – from the sourcing of trees for the electricity poles in Norway, to approval of the poles being put up on private land and finally the contracts the villagers are inveigled into signing – or not. A rakish older man takes up residence in the young man’s bedroom – his grandmother has accepted as a paying guest one of the workers on the project. And so our narrator commences on life’s journey – being tutored in matters of the heart. The Doctors daughters play their part as does the past life of the guest. Why is he in the village really, what’s he is seeking? Absolution? Restitution? Closure? The language is beautiful. The story sweet. I liked this a lot.
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