Michael Johnston's Blog, page 19

Antidotes to snow on the ground

Being what the French call a bouquiniste as well as a blogger, the word ‘snow’ makes me think not only of the frustrating fall of white stuff I can see through my study window but also of a couple of books I have enjoyed in the not too distant past. First there is Orhan Pamuk’s Snow set in the Kurdish region of Turkey and worth it’s space on the bookshelves of every literati. Then there was Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg where the lady’s curiosity and her knowledge of the different types of snow leads her to solve a mystery.  Do you have snow books to recommend?

Best Books of 2012: Blog 5 of 12

One book last year out-performed all expectations and it is the fifth of my top twelve reads of the year. In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details of all twelve every day over twelve days. Please comment and offer your best reads of the year.

The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Home came out in 2011 and is a wonderful debut novel, set in Scotland today, which makes one glad to learn it will not be his only one. A new novel will appear in April this year and I have it on pre-order.

From the opening sequences, the separate strands of the story are skilfully revealed; strands that go on to form a cat’s cradle of complexity where not a single word is unimportant. Indeed, one spoken word that recurs towards the climax of the novel is the hook around which the plot swings towards its dramatic and satisfying conclusion. The protagonist, who carries all the emotional baggage of a well-wrought hero, is Cal McGill, a part-time PhD oceanography student with a macabre interest in bits of bodies floating in the sea. His knowledge of ocean currents and the arrival of severed feet on various Scottish beaches not only draws him into an investigation of global human trafficking but unwinds and explains some of his own personal family mystery. As well as being a real work of art in this genre, this was one of these ‘so gripping’ books that are hard to put down until the final page. I have had to be so careful not to do a spoiler review and when you recommend this to friends, do be careful not to say too much beyond, “You must read this!” Verdict 9.5 out of 10

Best Books of 2012: Blog 4 of 12

In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details every day over twelve days. My reading included a couple of books from the dim and distant past as well as several hot off the press, one of which I post below. Please comment and offer your own best reads of the year. Here then is my fourth.

“When the Devil Drives” by Chris Brookmyre is a fast-paced murder mystery set in a very contemporary Scotland but the seeds of the, literally, dramatic sudden death were sown in years gone by. The personal story of the private detective and former actress, Jasmine Sharp, is wrapped up into the unfolding narrative and solving of the crime. Saying much more would risk spoiling your enjoyment but if this newly published novel is your first Brookmyre don’t let it be your last. He writes about crime with a mordant wit and a love of language. Verdict: 9 out of 10

Look out for the fifth book tomorrow. Happy reading!

Best Books of 2012: Blog 3 of 12

In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details every day over twelve days. My 2012 reading included a couple of books from the dim and distant past as well as several hot off the press and this is one of them. Please click on the title to open the comment box at the foot and maybe offer your best reads of the year. Here is my third choice.

The Rise of Henry Morcar by Phyllis Bentley, contemporary and friend of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, is a book I have read at least ten times since it first appeared just after the war and it was the spur to unlocking the several Bentley novels I went on to enjoy, of which Inheritance is the most significant.  Morcar is a story which runs in parallel with the final chapters of Inheritance and then takes the West Riding wool textile story forward another dozen years or so. (A Man of His Time can be seen as the third of her trilogy.) In the dramatic opening scene, as a ‘doodlebug’ homes in on his London flat, Morcar sees his life in flashback. He has grown up with a love of his craft and a gift for design and management and, after a hard start with several setbacks, he begins to flourish materially, while still suffering psychologically, the impacts of a lost comrade, a failed marriage and a solitary life, until he meets the woman he can love but who insists she will not be ‘free’ until the war is over. From a textile background, the novel has many personal resonances for me and I read it again every so often. You may have to go down the second-hand route for Bentley’s novels these days but starting prices at £0.62 plus postage mean they are very affordable as well as readable. Verdict 6.5 out of 10

Look out for my fourth book tomorrow. Happy reading!

Best Books of 2012: Blog 2 of 12

As ever, the year has been one of delightful discoveries and occasional disappointments. My reading included a couple of books from the dim and distant past as well as several hot off the press. In alphabetical order of authors, I am posting the details every day over twelve days. Click on the blog title and leave a comment below, or tell me about your best reads of the year. Here’s my second book.

“Toby’s Room by Pat Barker, Book Prize winning author of The “Regeneration” trilogy – but please try to read her Life Class first which is, more or less, its prequel. The characteristic Barker traits of close observation of human behaviour, perfectly chosen language, and total immersion research allow her to take up again the lives of the young artists studying at the Slade before the Great War under the real-life Henry Tonks, a surgeon and artist whose drawing of the appalling facial disfigurement of many war-wounded soldiers are both a work of record and an artistic achievement. The three fictional characters can, if one wishes, be read as composite pictures of a number of real artists who are fused together in a way that art lovers will enjoy. Barker leads the reader through the self-discovery of each character to a final resolution in a very satisfying way. Verdict: 7.5 out of 10

Look out for the third book tomorrow. Happy reading!

Best Books of 2012: Blog 1 of 12

As ever, the year has been one of delightful discoveries and occasional disappointments. My reading included a couple of books from the dim and distant past as well as several hot off the press. In alphabetical order of authors, I shall post the details every day over twelve days. Please comment and offer your best reads of the year. Here is the first.

“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery, is beautifully translated by Alison Anderson and very elegant in French too. The basic premiss of this delightful novel is that Renée, a widowed Parisian concierge of later middle age, seen by the residents as honest, reliable and uncultivated, has a secret; the fact that she has profitably used her private time to study philosophy but, in order to enjoy her quiet, though erudite life, has managed to conceal her learning from those she serves until an unguarded remark is picked up by a new Japanese apartment owner. In parallel with her own story we are given the diary account of Paloma, aged 12 and three-quarters and a classical angry, teenage, younger sister of another family who seems to be contemplating whether or not to contemplate whether or not to commit suicide before her thirteenth birthday. Just as Renée seems to find genuine appreciation, and the alluring prospect of more besides, and as Paloma sorts herself out, the author, with bravura and perfect timing, uses her omniscient authority to bring the story to a conclusion just before it risks getting out of control. Verdict: 8.5 out of 10

Look for the second book tomorrow. Happy reading!

Review of my 2012 Reading

As ever, the year has been one of delightful discoveries and occasional disappointments. My reading included a couple of books from the dim and distant past as well as several hot off the press. In alphabetical order of authors, here are some highlights.

“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbary, translated by Alison Anderson [London: Gallic Books, 2008]. The basic premiss of this delightful novel is that a widowed Parisian concierge of later middle age has profitably used her private time to study philosophy but, in order to enjoy a quiet, if erudite life, has managed to conceal her learning from those she serves until an unguarded remark is picked up by a new Japanese apartment owner. In parallel with her own story we are given the account of the angry, teenage, younger sister of another family who seems to be contemplating whether or not to contemplate whether or not to commit suicide. As the concierge seems to find real appreciation and the prospect of more besides, and as the teenager sorts herself out, the author, with bravura and good timing, uses her omniscient authority to stop the story before it risks getting out of control.

“Toby’s Room” by Pat Barker [London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012] – but do read her “Life Class” before this one which is, more or less, its sequel. The characteristic Barker traits of close observation of human behaviour and total immersion research allow her to take up again the lives of the artists studying at the Slade before the Great War under the real-life Henry Tonks, a surgeon and artists whose drawing of the appalling facial disfigurement of many war-wounded soldiers is both a work of record and an artistic achievement. The three fictional characters can, if one wishes, be read as composite pictures of a number of real artists who are fused together. Barker leads the reader through the self-discovery of each character to a final resolution in a very satisfying way.

“The Rise of Henry Morcar” by Phyllis Bentley [London: Victor Gollancz, 1967] is a book I have read at least ten times since it first appeared just after the war and it was the key to unlocking the several Bentley novels I went on to read, of which “Inheritance” is the most significant. “Morcar” is a story which runs in parallel with the final chapters of “Inheritance” and then takes the West Riding wool textile story forward another dozen years or so. In the dramatic opening scene, as a ‘doodlebug’ homes in on his London street, Morcar sees his life in flashback. He has grown up with a love of his craft and a gift for design and management and flourished materially while suffering psychologically the impact of a lost comrade, a failed marriage and a solitary life, until he meets the woman he can love but who will not be ‘free’ until the 1939-45 war is over. For a variety of reasons, the novel has many personal resonances for me and I read it again every so many years.

“When the Devil Drives” by Chris Brookmyre [London: Little Brown, 2012] is a fast-paced murder mystery set in contemporary Scotland but the seeds of the sudden death were sown in years gone by. The personal story of the private detective, Jasmine sharp, is wrapped up into the unfolding narrative and solving of the crime. Saying much more would risk spoiling your enjoyment but if this is your first Brookmyre don’t let it be your last. He writes about crime with a mordant wit and a love of language.

“The Sea Detective” by Mark Douglas-Home [Dingwall, Sandstone Press, 2011] is a debut novel and makes one hope and pray it will not be his only one. The protagonist is Cal McGill, a part-time PhD oceanography student with a macabre interest in floating corpses. His knowledge of ocean currents and the arrival of severed feet on various Scottish beaches not only draws him into the investigation of human trafficking but unwinds and explains his own personal family mystery. This was one of these ‘so gripping’ books that are hard to put down until the final page.

“The Sportswriter” by Richard Ford [New York: Vintage, 1995] came to my attention listening first to Radio 4’s “Book Programme” when Mariella Frostrup interviewed Ford about his latest novel, “Canada” and then when I heard him give a talk to the Royal Society of Literature earlier this year. “The Sportswriter” is the first of the first-person narrated Frank Bascombe trilogy. Bascombe is the laureate of the American suburbs and an American Proust in the sense that his entire novel takes place over the Easter weekend in and around fictional Haddam, New Jersey. The stories meanders always return the reader to the main flow and the novel’s language is a joy.

“Life and Fate” by Vassily Grossman [London: Vintage, 2006]. Inevitably one is drawn to compare and contrast this book with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. It has a cast almost as numerous as it tells the story of the siege of Stalingrad. The book almost never appeared in print and its author did not live to see its current success. The BBC cleared every slot of its drama schedule for a week to broadcast a massive adaptation of the novel but unless one happened to be a bedridden insomniac it was impossible to follow in that medium. If you have a large hole in next year’s reading plan, this can fill it for you.

“Now all roads lead to France: the last years of Edward Thomas” by Matthew Hollis [London: Faber and Faber, 2011] is the first prose work by one poet recounting beautifully the final years of another: yet another poet who was slaughtered in the Great War. Maybe most widely known for “Adlestrop”, Thomas might never have become a poet and remained an insightful literary critic and hack prose writer but for his friendship with Robert Frost whose work he admired. Frost was responsible for encouraging Thomas to begin writing verse and, once started in 1914, for the next three years he produced a steady stream of image-packed poetry that uses language as straightforwardly as does Frost. Nick Dear has written “The Dark Earth and the Light Sky” which premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London this year and draws on the Hollis account and other sources for a profoundly moving play.

“Bring up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel [London: Fourth Estate, 2012] was eagerly awaited and, for those who enjoyed “Wolf Hall”, was the sort of sequel we had all wanted to read. Justifiably, it won its author a second Booker Prize and set readers wondering not only when the promised third volume will appear but whether it will win again. The book is both a delight and a challenge to the reader’s concentration. The pace is in part sustained by the effective use of the historic present in which to recount Thomas Cromwell’s story from Henry VIII’s divorce until the death of Anne Boleyn.

“Provenance” by Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo [New York: Penguin Press, 2009] is another art-related, crime story but every word of it is a true account of how a self-deluding fantasist enlisted the, at first, unwitting help of an accomplished painter who, in a harsh world for creators, had not made a sufficiently rewarding impact with his own work, in order to generate a series of wonderfully realised forgeries and pass them off in front of experts and auction houses. Why the fakes, made from house paints and K-Y jelly, were not discovered sooner and how the fantasist still probably believes all his own contradictory stories despite being jailed, is recounted with the excitement of a detective story. There is also one semi-innocent victim, John Myatt, who has now gone on to make a reasonable living as the painter of acknowledged ‘genuine’ fakes and who drew the cover illustration for my own novel “Rembrandt Sings”.

“Umbrella” by Will Self [London: Bloomsbury, 2012] was also on this year’s Booker short list and would have been a worthy winner if there had been a tie with Hilary Mantel. “Umbrella” does for Barnet what James Joyce did for Dublin although Self’s story extends over a longer time period. The novel’s epigram is in fact taken from Joyce’s Ulysses: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella”. In one cintinuous narrative, uninterrupted by chapter breaks and moving through different times and narrative streams without warning, it recounts the reflections and observations of, inter alia, a psychiatrist, Dr Zak Busner, and of his sometime patient Audrey Death, to whom he administered L-Dopa. The story has echoes of “Awakenings” by Oliver Sacks that translated so well to the screen but these parallels only heighten the intensity of the story given that one is aware of how the experiments will turn out. As psychiatrists will understand, the umbrella of the title becomes at different stages a penis and a syringe as well as a means of keeping off the rain. I confidently predict the novel will be on university syllabi before the end of 2013.

“The Hopkins Manuscript” by R C Sherriff [London: Gollancz, 1939] is an apocalyptic but very witty novel, after the style of H G Wells, but seemingly narrated by someone as innocent and naïve as the Grossmiths’ Mr Pooter. The end of the world is forecast when scientists realise that the moon is slowly but surely falling out of its orbit and will collide with the earth. Mr Hopkins’s manuscript is, according to the foreword from ‘the Imperial Research Press, Addis Ababa’, all that survives from that prehistoric period when, apparently, life and civilisation was flourishing in Europe. After all that I have been reading about forgeries and fakes, it is salutary to realise how easily uncorroborated accounts of earlier events can become accepted as the Ur-text.

The Museum of Drawers

In 1979, I was responsible for bringing Herbert Distel’s Museum of Drawers to London, Edinburgh and Dublin and a story about it appearing on the BBC’s Arena programme produced by Alan Yentob. I was reminded of this by coming across an MA dissertation by Julia Green at the University of Wales, published in 2008. How it all comes back to me!

Earlier that year, I had visited an old friend in New York. On his coffee table was the latest issue of a glossy French magazine, Connaissance des Arts. Leafing through it, I came on an illustrated article about a fascinating artefact and art project put together by the Swiss artist Herbert Distel. He had come across a vertical set of shallow drawers in a cabinet made to store and display sewing thread on spools (rather than the wooden reels more common in the UK). Each drawer had 25 compartments. It looked like a miniature skyscraper and in his imagination it became an art gallery with each compartment becoming a room devoted to one artist. He bought the cabinet and began to curate his Museum of Drawers.

By approaching hundreds of artists, he began to acquire specially created miniature works that he carefully placed, each in its own ‘room’. Julia Green’s dissertation has many of them illustrated. Some of the exhibits and their stories, as Distel later told me, were fascinating. For example, one artist used a phail of his own blood and buried it in concrete. On hearing that Frank Stella, whose canvases are enormous, would not produce a miniature, another artist painted miniature Stella works on the walls of his tiny room. Someone else donated a tiny illustrated book by Picasso.

On my return to the UK, I contacted Arena who liked the idea but said the Museum would have to be on show in London. I spoke with Distel in Berne who suggested the ICA in London and they were very keen. Distel pressed me to arrange for a show in Edinburgh where I was living, and then ship it on to a gallery in Dublin. That was when I discovered that the deal for each exhibiting gallery was to cover the hefty insurance for its journey to the next venue. Edinburgh College of Art were willing to stage the show but it was not until a Swiss Bank agreed to pay the insurance to Dublin that I could get it all set up. There was, however, a catch. The insurers said I had to take the crated Museum to Dublin personally.

While the Museum was at the ICA, Arena filmed it. I even have a credit in the titles as a Consultant. The show in Edinburgh was a great success and then I had to set off in the late afternoon to drive to Holyhead and the ferry to Ireland. The van’s engine played up all the way and I was never certain I would reach Holyhead in time for the 3.00 a.m. sailing. When did get there, the final hurdle was HM Customs and Excise. What was in the van? Works of art: did I have an export licence? Ho, Hum! That was when I showed the Customs Officer the catalogue. That changed everything. He had two sons, both at Art College, and he had actually watched the Arena broadcast. With a smile and chalk mark on the crate, I was waved aboard.

Today, the Museum of Drawers is back home in Berne and is well worth a visit but, in the meantime, have a look at Wikipedia where it is call the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’.

Rembrandt – the early years

When, as a teenager, I went up to my father’s studio, carrying a cup of coffee for him and a copy of The Observer for me, I set down the coffee and paused for a moment to look beyond the headline that had caught my attention. My father asked me to hold the pose and I eventually stood there for a couple of hours in my pyjamas and dressing gown. The headline is long forgotten but there is a permanent record of the moment, a rear-view portrait of the artist’s son, which now hangs in his grandson’s house.

Although my father’s day job was running a woollen mill that wove his very popular fashion fabrics that were transformed into haute couture garments in London, Paris and New York, at the weekends he worked off his creative head of steam in the sketches, watercolours, pastels and oils he produced, exhibited and sometimes sold. One day, working up a watercolour on a painting trip to the picturesque fishing village of St Abbs, he sold the painting straight off the easel with the purchaser carrying it, still damp, to dry off in his holiday cottage that, by chance had featured in the painting. As I write this, I can look up at a pastel of our garden under snow in 1956. It’s so real and so full of memories that I want to stand up and walk right into it.

The sights and smells and even the sounds of his studio, as the palette knife gathered up oil paint and placed it unerringly on the canvas can all be conjured up, more or less at will. Wordsworth, in his famous Preface, is often quoted as saying poetry is the recollection of emotion in tranquillity. However, when I had to study Wordsworth in depth, I realised he said rather more than that. He not only recalled but, as he was writing down his verses, recreated the emotions he had felt at the time. I believe this is one key to great writing. When the writer inhabits the world he is describing and feels its pain, then the prose flows hot and strong.

Like Bill Maguire, my novel’s narrator, I spent several months in Roubaix and went swimming in the local piscine. Imagine how I felt the last time I was there and my friends took me to the new gallery of modern art which, for obvious reasons, is called La Piscine. It was not only déjà vu for quite a few of the artists whose paintings I had seen decades earlier but also for the very building in which they are now displayed.

Writing Rembrandt Sings, I was able to summon up many art and painting related memories and shape them to add feeling and realism to the text. So much so that, re-reading the book, I not only access the places and events that I used in the story but multiple layers of memory stretching back, and back, and back again. These were my building blocks for the scenes against which my characters acted out their own stories.

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky

Over the year, I have been on a journey, tracing another man’s footsteps. I finished the journey this morning. Now I have three books on my shelf, each a source of pleasure and satisfaction such that I already plan to retrace my steps from the beginning. I have been walking alongside the First World War poet and one of that destructive conflict’s victims: Edward Thomas. And the reference to walking is deliberate. Thomas walked as much as Wordsworth and worked demotic language into his verse just as effectively.

At the beginning of the year I savoured my Christmas present of “Now all roads lead to France: The last years of Edward Thomas”. Written by a poet about another poet, this was indeed Matthew Hollis’s first prose work. Hollis takes up the story with the opening of the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street, Theobalds Road in 1913 which became a magnet for writers, readers and lovers of poetry. The list of those who attended the opening and those whose work was to be published under the shop’s imprint or in its journal can be found in all the anthologies. Most significant for the future career of Thomas was the presence of the 38-year old Robert Frost. The friendship between the literary critic and ‘hack’ writer of biographies and guide books and the American poet which would, over the next very few years, draw out of the doubting Thomas the realisation that he could and should write poetry. Yes, we all remember ‘Adlestrop’, his poem about a train stopping unexpectedly at a rural station and the poet hearing ‘all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ but Frost would later say that, although Thomas was a late starter, was able to write in ways Frost had never attempted. At his death near Arras in 1917, Thomas left behind a body of work that would have been no less admirable had it been the product of many years of writing.

Inevitably, the biography led me to the volume of Thomas’s work that had, I am ashamed to admit now, been on my shelf for years, largely unread: “Edward Thomas: Selected Poems” in the Everyman’s Poetry series. I have dipped in and out over the year until, last night I went to the Almeida Theatre to see the new play by Nick Dear, “The Dark Earth and the Light Sky”. The principal characters apart from Thomas are Frost, Thomas’s wife Helen, and Thomas’s devoted admirer Eleanor Farjeon. All three would outlive him by forty years or more and write about him from their individual perspectives. While I was familiar from the Hollis book with the years leading up to his death, the later decades in which his reputation grew were brought out by the playwright in his beautifully constructed work that concluded on the perfect note as the character Thomas spoke one of his very last poems, ‘Lights Out’ of which the third stanza reads, “Here love end,/ Despair, ambition ends;/ All pleasure and all trouble,/ Although most sweet and bitter,/ Here ends in sleep that is sweeter/ Than tasks most noble.” I bought the play text and read Act One on the journey home and Act Two this morning.

So, if you are looking for a package of books to give a good friend then the biography by Matthew Hollis [London: Faber and Faber, 2011], the anthology edited by William Cooke [London: J M Dent/Everyman, 1997] and the play by Nick Dear [London: Faber and Faber, 2012] would be my recommendation.