Black Narcissus

Black Narcissus is the story of five nuns setting up an order in a disused palace high in the Himalayas.  The house has a dubious reputation, only Ayah remains there and she says nothing.  Sister Clodagh is in charge, attractive and capable, it gradually emerges that she became a nun after her Irish sweetheart did not want to marry her.  Sister Philippa tends the garden, Sister Briony runs the dispensary, Sister Honey runs the lace school and Sister Ruth teaches the local children.

Mr Dean the English agent has spent many years in India and provides the carpentry, maintenance and building design for the nuns as well as offering practical advice which the nuns often choose to ignore.  Whether it is the high altitude of the Himalayas or the bad reputation of the palace something begins to affect the nuns.  Sister Phillipa becomes obsessed with ordering plants for the garden, Sister Clodagh keeps reliving her past in Ireland, Sister Honey yearns for a child of her own and Sister Ruth can't keep her eyes of Mr Dean.  Only Sister Briony remains the same.

Sister Ruth is a fascinating character.  Young and vulnerable, there is a suggestion that she became a nun after suffering some sort of mental illness.  She has glittering green eyes and is nicknamed the Snake-Faced Sister by Ayah.  She is convinced that Sister Clodagh likes Mr Dean and is bitter with jealousy.  Rumer Godden builds a tense, simmering atmosphere and events come to a head when a woman brings a dying baby to the dispensary.  Sister Honey tries to help the baby despite being warned by Mr Dean never to treat a dying child.  Sister Ruth then goes looking for Mr Dean ...can't say anymore or it will give the game away! 

Rumer Godden wrote Black Narcissus on the upper birth of a ship travelling from India to England with her baby in the bunk below. She was just 32 when it was published in 1939.  It bought her money, fame, success and unhappiness, too.  You must read it.

Mad Girl's Love Song

I do like a good literary biography and Andrew Wilson's account of Sylvia Plath's early years Mad Girl's Love Song is a very good biography with lots of intriguing detail.  This book should really be read alongside The Bell Jar as many of the events in the novel are autobiographical and the account of the first suicide attempt is particularly harrowing. No doubt, Plath was a tortured genius but there is light and humour in this biography

For example, on a trip to New York with boyfriend Richard Sassoon, Plath's suitcase is stolen from his parked car and some of her favourite belongings are taken - a blue cashmere sweater, a number of poetry books and her Chanel No 5.  When this is reported at the police station she becomes fascinated by the whole procedure and later composes the poem Item: Stolen, One Suitcase.

The book ends when Plath goes to Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship and meets Ted Hughes.  I was left with a couple of lingering questions.  What happened to Eddie Cohen the young James Dean lookalike who kept up a long-term correspondence with Plath and acted as an informal critic of her work?  He seemed to be a voice of reason in her tumultuous life.  I also wondered why Plath seemed to dislike her mother so much. Aurelia was a highly intelligent woman who raised her children alone after the death of her husband.  She worked as a shorthand tutor to pay for their eduction.  There is a suggestion that her self-sacrifice created a constant sense of obligation in Sylvia which caused her resentment.

I now want to read a biography which covers the latter part of Plath's life and also some of the collections of her poetry if anyone has any recommendations.  I feel a reading project coming on ...

PS These jute bags by seasalt are very handy for lugging around heavy biographies!

The Bell Jar

A couple of weeks ago Radio 4 serialised excerpts from Mad Girl's Love Song a new biography of Sylvia Plath's early life by Andrew Wilson.  I found myself completely drawn in and I've bought the book to read.  I've also just re-read The Bell Jar which has been re-issued with a controversial new cover for its 50th anniversary. 

A high-achieving nineteen year old spends a summer in New York working as a journalist on a magazine.  One of several young women selected as fashion interns, Esther Greenwood is taken to parties, galleries and theatres, given clothes and gifts and is expected to appear in photo shoots and at luncheons.  Esther's experiences with men, alcohol and a bout of food poisoning exacerbate her inner conflicts about the possibilities and limitations for educated women in the 1950's. 

On her return from New York, failure to secure a place on a writing course triggers a descent into mental illness and harrowing 1950's treatment for depression including electric shock treatment.  One doesn't usually associate Sylvia Plath with humour but I liked Esther's dark sarcasm:

The movie was very poor.  It starred a nice blonde girl who looked like June Allyson but was really somebody else, and a sexy black-haired girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was also somebody else, and two big, broad-shouldered bone-heads with names like Rick and Gil. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath.

The Bell Jar is a great modern classic.  Yes, it's dark but sometimes we need to read about life as it is.  What do you think?

More Tyler

The time Pauline got lost in her own alley and the time she confused the brake with the accelerator and the time she backed into a pedestrian, knocked him down, stuck her head out of the window, called, "I'm sorry!" and pulled forward, put her car in reverse, backed up and knocked him down again. The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler's last novel The Beginner's Goodbye is now out in paperback.  I bought it in Sainsbury's for the princely sum of £3.49.  Rather nice to put a great contemporary novel into your basket alongside your milk, bread and yoghurts!

That's the thing about Anne Tyler.  She is a writer who is both complex and yet popular enough to be stocked in your local supermarket.  I've just read The Amateur Marriage which I think is one of her finest novels.  It's the story of Pauline and Michael, a couple who should never have married.  There is no domestic violence, adultery or debt - the kind of things that often tear couples apart - but their marriage is toxic nonetheless and the novel examines the relentless grind of being married to an unsuitable partner.

Michael is thrifty, cautious and calm.  Pauline is emotional, impulsive and sensitive.  Like Maggie in Breathing Lessons and Muriel in The Accidental Tourist she can be infuriating but I found her a far more likeable character than cold fish Michael.

The novel spans several decades beginning in Baltimore's Polish community where Michael grows up, becomes engaged to Pauline and enlists.  After being injured in the army they marry and raise a family.  Their marriage is put under further strain by the disappearance of their wayward daughter.  The implication is that she has joined the 1960's Haight-Ashbury 'summer of love' community and developed a serious drug problem.  This theme of the novel reminded me a little of Unless by Carole Shields.

Eventually Michael leaves Pauline and finds (rather too quickly I thought) the kind of cool, self-contained woman who suits his character.  The final chapter comes as a surprise and I'm still thinking about it, but there are hints that Michael still yearns for Pauline.  Vintage Tyler.

The Real Jane Austen

 Whenever a new biography of Jane Austen comes along I'm on it like a car bonnet! Particularly if it illuminates aspects of the novels I'd not thought about before. Paula Byrne's The Real Jane Austen - A Life in Small Things has some very intriguing interpretations of Mansfield Park.

Byrne's theory that Tom Bertram, eldest son and heir, who is not romantically interested in women, or marriage and is fond of theatricals may be homosexual is not conclusive, but it is an interesting interpretation and of course, if he never has children Fanny and Edmund may inherit Mansfield Park.

The suggestion that Mrs Norris is a kleptomaniac because of her eagerness to whisk away the green baize curtain to her own cottage is backed up by the well-documented scandal in Austen's own family where her aunt, the wealthy Mrs Leigh-Perrot allegedly stole a card of lace from a millinery shop in Bath and faced jail, deportation or the gallows.

I knew the business with the locking and unlocking of gates at Sotherton was sexual imagery but I'd never before thought that Maria's stepping outside of the cultivated garden into the wilderness with Henry Crawford foreshadows her own 'ruin' when he seduces her.

This book has made me want to to re-read Mansfield Park and that is the best recommendation for any new biography of Jane Austen.

By the way, there is some very amusing and perceptive Austen criticism on the wonderful Bitch in a Bonnet blog.

Nordic Noir

I've been reading Norway's 'Queen of Crime' Karin Fossum while the snow falls outside.  She writes psychological crime fiction and her novels feature Inspector Konrad Sejer a grey-haired senior detective with a kind heart and steely determination.  In Don't Look Back Sejer investigates the death of a young woman whose body is found by a Norwegian lake. She is lying so peacefully with her face close to the edge of the water she could almost be asleep and someone has thrown a coat over her body as if to keep her warm.  I liked the close-knit small village atmosphere and the descriptions of the Nordic pines surrounding the lake.  Occasionally a sentence or word jars a little and I suspect that something has been lost in the translation but this is an exciting read with an unsettling twist on the final page.

I then read Bad Intentions about the apparent suicide of a teenager.  Sejer is unconvinced by the statements of his friends and when an artist painting at Glitter Lake inadvertently discovers the body of another teenager events begin to fall into place.  Call Me is also about a teenager with a fondness for macabre practical jokes and a pet guinea pig named Bleeding Heart!

I have to say that I raced through these books but after spending so much time in the company of thieves, liars, perverts and murderers I began to think about an interview I read with Anne Tyler in The Guardian where she was quoted as saying 'there aren't enough quiet, gentle, basically good people in a novel.'  I'm enjoying my foray into Scandi-crime, but I'm not sure it is a genre I could read exclusively.

Gaudy Night

I spent Christmas racing through the Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and I'm now compiling a tbr list of Scandi-crime from your suggestions.  Thank you so much.  I've temporarily moved from the seedy underbelly of Stockholm to the dreaming spires of Oxford to re-read Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers.  Published in 1935 Gaudy Night is part of the golden age of detective fiction.  It is highly enjoyable but it has dated and some of the snobbish references to 'common shop girls' can grate.  However, I think if you read a lot of early 20th C fiction you do have to keep a sense of time and place.

The main premise of the story is that detective writer  Harriet Vane visits her alma mater, Oxford University for the Gaudy Night celebrations.  While she is staying there someone sends poison pen letters to staff and students and acts like a deranged poltergeist at night.  The female dons ask Harriet to help them discover the 'poltergeist's' identity without too much adverse publicity for the college.  Harriet agrees but soon finds the situation beyond her and calls in her old friend Lord Peter Wimsey.

I loved the descriptions of Oxford, 'students dashing to lectures their gowns hitched hurriedly over light summer frocks', the porter's lodge stacked with bicycles and punting on the Isis.  Sayers is wickedly funny on academia and there is a long running joke about Miss Lydgate's epic work History of Prosody which always needs just one more footnote.

The actual crime element is pretty slight.  The novel is really about the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet and the dilemma of intellect versus domesticity for women.  I did enjoy it though.  Did anyone who has read it find the business about the dog collar absolutely bizarre?