Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 10

Review of Georgian Harlots and Whores, by Mike Rendell, pub. Pen & Sword Books

“Bum-shops are opened in many parts of Westminster for the sale of cork bums. Tall ladies and short ladies, fat ladies and lean ladies, must have bums.”

Thus the December 1779 number of the Town & Country Magazine records a fashion for padding one’s rear with cork. The thought of entire shops being devoted to these appliances gives some idea of the importance of fashion at the time. It was an age when, thanks to the growing reach and affordability of engravers and printers, not to mention newspapers and magazines, ordinary people could for the first time inform themselves (sometimes very inaccurately) of the doings of the rich and famous, and even see images of how they looked and dressed. There could, in fact, be a cult of celebrity, much as there is today.

What is interesting is that the influencers, role models and fashion leaders whom female readers wished to emulate were not only titled ladies but famous actresses/courtesans. (Occasionally they might be both; the celebrated courtesan Nancy Parsons became a viscountess and the actress Elizabeth Farren, Duchess of Derby.)  In the primmer, or more hypocritical, Victorian era, this might not have been so much the case; there was more disapproval of the wages of sin being made to look so attractive. But the Georgians were more laid-back, if that is not an unfortunate term in the context, and mostly saw nothing amiss in fashionable bonnet styles being called the Fanny Murray or the Kitty Fisher, after the legendary ladies who sported them. This is of course the point of the title: the ladies owned these terms and declined to be embarrassed about their profession.

Mike Rendell has been immersed in the study of the Georgian period for many a year, as devotees of his blog “Georgian Gentleman” will know. He makes a convincing case for the likeness between the celebrity cults of then and now – driven by the popular press, capable of being manipulated by the celebrities at its centre if they had the nous to do so, or of destroying them if they did not. He also shows one great difference from modern times: how little choice they had, in an age when women were lucky if they had an education or any means of making a living other than the obvious. Mary Robinson’s mother, deserted by her husband for another woman, opened a school in which her well-educated daughter taught. Mary might have remained a teacher for aught we know, had her father not objected to his wife running a business, which she could not legally do without his consent, and had it closed down. In the circumstances it would be singularly inappropriate to tut-tut at Mary’s decision, instead, not only to take to the stage as Perdita but to accept the Prince Regent, watching besotted from his box, as a rather portly Florizel.

For while Rendell is properly non-judgmental, he does not deny agency to these enterprising women. Kitty Fisher’s celebrity status was cemented when, riding in Hyde Park, she fell in such a way as to make it clear that, as was normal at the time, she had no drawers on. Since Kitty was a good horsewoman, it is most unlikely that this was anything but a planned publicity stunt, which succeeded brilliantly and was all over the papers in a way a Kardashian might envy. Mary Robinson and Elizabeth Armistead exercised considerable intellectual talents apart from the physical; Mary was an author while Elizabeth could hold her own intellectually with her lover and eventual husband Charles James Fox, who had no time at all for fools. Meanwhile Frances Abington, after a childhood of poverty and a failed marriage, earned enough on and off stage to reverse the “kept mistress” stereotype by “keeping” male lovers of her own. These ladies were of course at the top of their profession and Rendell does not minimise the miseries faced by those further down the line. But there is much pleasure to be had from seeing how women sometimes turned the tables on the kind of men who could describe them, in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, as “a good side-box piece – will show well in the flesh market”.

The one criticism I have of the book’s presentation is that I would have liked an index. But the illustrations, albeit not in colour, are a delight - portraits by Reynolds and others, cartoons by Rowlandson and Gillray and some exquisite fashion plates - for that reason I would choose the hardback rather than the Kindle. I also like the tone of the writing, which manages to be properly scholarly while retaining a trace of humour eminently appropriate to the racy ladies who form its subject. And who wouldn’t want to know more about those cork bums?

Edith Wharton and Video meliora proboque

(A small witter inspired by several months' binge-reading)

I’d liked The Age of Innocence a lot, so when I discovered I could get a lot more of her free on Kindle, I started binge-reading. This is easy, because she has a very readable style, with a pleasantly sarky edge reminiscent of Rose Macaulay – at least in those of her books set in New York and Europe; those set in rural America are different.

The New York ones tend to feature well-born young folk who don’t have much to do except live a gilded lifestyle; the snag is that quite often they don’t have the money to keep up with the circles in which they move. Hence quite a lot of debt, parasitism and fortune-hunting. If the men have a profession,  it’s liable to be the law, finance or something in the arts; the women, of course, unless of independent means, have no real option except to “marry well”.

This might all sound unattractive, but it mostly isn’t, because it turns out that Wharton has a slightly surprising theme which surfaces in book after book: she is interested in people trying to live a better life, not financially but morally. This is the theme of Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, but that is as far I can see the only novel in which she tackled that subject. Wharton keeps returning to it: her most interesting and appealing protagonists are continually worried about the superficiality and uselessness of their lives and trying to keep to higher moral standards. This isn’t easy, because they move in a society that positively encourages materialism, snobbery and petty deceit. Very often they fail in their aims, and when they do succeed it is often at the cost of their happiness. But it is this struggle that is really at the heart of most of the books of hers I have read so far. In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer effectively renounces happiness in favour of family duties.  In The Reef, Lily Bart, brought up to be decorative and useless but without the money to sustain it, and hanging on to the fringes of high society by the tips of her fingers, is constantly torn between the only way of life she knows or is fitted for and the higher ideals she sees in her admirer and her best friend: if that novel had an epigraph it would be Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor.

Perhaps the most entertaining take on this theme is The Glimpse of the Moon, in which Nick and Susy Lansing, another pair of impoverished social butterflies, have devised a splendid plan to live rent-free for a year. They will marry, whereupon their richer friends will offer them the use of their Italian villas, Scottish hunting-boxes and Paris flats for the honeymoon. By accepting all offers, they hope to spin it out for a year, after which they will divorce and go on with their separate lives. It’s a great wheeze; the only snag is that they turn out to be rather less cynical and materialistic than they thought…

If this sounds a serious theme, it is, but it is never solemn or less than entertaining, because of Wharton’s dry wit. “In the well-regulated, well-fed Summers world the unusual was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited” (The Reef). “What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.” (The House of Mirth).

Now and then she deserts New York and Europe for rural America (Ethan Frome, Summer). These books are bleaker, sometimes sombre, but the same theme predominates, of a protagonist striving to be better than he or she is. It’s a situation all too easy to identify with, though I think it’s still mostly her writing style that attracts me.

Review of The Bones of Barry Knight, by Emma Musty, pub. Legend Press 2022

This is a multi-narrator novel in which the various speakers are all converging on one point, a refugee camp. Seven-year-old Saleema lives there; Amanda works for a charity partly responsible for its running; ageing rock star Barry is hoping to resurrect his career via a well-publicised visit there; journalist Ana is pursuing an investigation into both him and the charity, while Sol and Omar have connections with people already there and are going for their own personal reasons.

All the narrators are believable; some, inevitably, are more engaging than others – Saleema, the lively, curious child, especially so. She and her friend Noor have aged prematurely and known too much tragedy, but they are still children:

“even though it is too hot to do this and we are nearly too old for such childish things, suddenly the very feeling of running is everything. My body wakes up as we take a corner too tight and have to jump a tent peg, leaving adults shouting in our wake. ‘Where are we going?’ I scream after her and she briefly turns to me and then starts laughing as she runs, like it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever said, or she’s ever heard. ‘Are you crazy? We’re not going anywhere! We’re just running because we can!’ And then I start laughing too, because of course we’re not going anywhere and because the running feels good and then we collapse in the shade of the big tent for the kids with no parents, but round the side, where no one else can see us. I can hear my mother’s voice; she’s telling one of them off for making a mess, and I can tell from the tone of her voice that she doesn’t love them more [than me]. For a moment, everything feels lighter.”

Amanda, troubled by the impossibility of keeping clean hands in a situation where helping people also involves turning a blind eye to bribery and corruption, has developed a cynical edge that individualises her voice:

“the governments think that the camps should be worse, potentially with no toilets at all, so they don’t create a pull factor, as if having an adequate number of toilets will bring thousands running – ‘Have you heard, in the camp a little further north they have loads of toilets!’ ‘Praise be to God, we must leave everything and go there now!’”

And Barry, who for most of the book has little enough to recommend him as a human being, nevertheless has a degree of self-awareness and sense of humour that render him rather more likeable than one might expect, particularly when he gets to the camp and shows more sense of fitness than the staff:

“She says we’ll start with a little tour, like we’re in some sort of bloody theme park or on safari. I almost make a joke about looking forward to seeing the hippos, but I stop myself, and congratulate myself a little for doing so.”

Sol and Omar I found slightly less engaging than the others; Amanda’s acid description of Omar as “righteous” is on the money, and though phrases like “How can any of us move forward without first examining our past, understanding our present and looking towards making our future a better place?” are believable from him, they do not endear him to a reader. By and large, the multi-narrator strategy does not create undue problems in keeping up with the story; we always know more or less where we are. Now and then, one comes on a name or detail mentioned earlier and thinks “who or what was that?” – but that is what second readings are for.

Tension builds up gradually through the novel, until everyone arrives at the camp, when both the speed and tension of the narrative really take off. The ending, even though it is foreshadowed in the prologue, and hinted at in later chapters, is still capable of surprising a reader; I think because these characters have all become quite well known to us, and unlike Saleema we have not needed to absorb the fundamental truth she voices when remembering her father:

“I remember how it felt when he smiled at me with his hope all over his face and I knew I didn’t have to worry about anything and that he would keep me safe. And then they took him away and put him in prison, and then they killed him, and then he was dead, and that is how sudden life is, and how sudden death is.”

This is very much a novel about contemporary political issues, specifically what sometimes gets called the “refugee crisis”, which appears in novels less often than one might expect. But fortunately, it revolves around believable people, without whom no issues can long engage a reader. The writing is assured and has that credibility which convinces one that the writer knows her subject matter well.

Review of Notes On Water by Amanda Dalton, pub. Smith/Doorstop Books 2022

Everything is river and the river is more than itself

This fascinating concept consists of a pamphlet of two long poems, both circling around the themes of loss and grief and using images of water, particularly flooding. It is set and printed so that you can, literally, begin with either, meaning that the one at the back of the pamphlet is always upside-down in relation to the other, rather as if it were reflecting it in water. Even the numbering goes from each end to the middle, as it were, thus giving no clue as to which, if either, is meant to be read first. 

I began with the one on the side where the gatefold cover (or French flap, as I’m assured its technical name is) showed the author photo. The narrative of this is the death (by illness) of a man, and his widow’s attempts to come to terms with it. Meanwhile the town floods, as it has clearly done before, and what with this and her memories, the poem ends with the woman dreaming of swimming in a pool in the basement of a derelict building. 

The second poem begins at this point and is indeed far more dreamlike and disjointed, flashing between different memories of water and the lost man. Where the first poem was in third person, more detached and observational for all its emotional charge, this is in first person and veers between sense and dream-sense, the reality of flood and death and the unreality of dream until the two seem to merge – or, perhaps, the eternal reality is glimpsed beneath the transient: 

   I think I am in the river Cocytus,
  or maybe this is just black water
  running underneath an urban street. 

In the first poem, the build-up of water imagery is both unobtrusive and massive. Individual phrases, like “soaked in pain”, “pooled in his blood”, “seeping away”, could pass unnoticed in themselves, except that they all add up to the “slow drip of loss” at the poem’s heart. Of the two, this is the more centred on the man, the manner of his death: 

   In just seven weeks he goes
  from coffee and wine
  to peppermint tea
  to tiny fruits
  to water
  on a spoon

and her reaction in the immediate aftermath, when she is “overwhelmed/by his presence and by the absence of him”. The second poem is both more centred on the woman and more wide-ranging, exploring what water has meant in her life. In both, though, the floods which have in recent years devastated towns and villages in the area figure, both as a reality and a symbolic counterpoint to what has happened in the woman’s life. In the first poem, the description of the flood follows directly on her consciousness of his absence, and the “rage” of the flooding river might be read as an expression either of her feelings or of the destructive force that has taken him: 

   Everything is river and the river is more than itself,
  carrying vehicles on its back, a fallen tree, trying to
  drag its feet to calm the rage but it’s too headstrong,
  churning silt and gravel, spewing up a pushchair,
 plastic shoe, dead jackdaw, bin. Everything is brown
  and broken. Everything is wet.

This is bleak, and so too, in the second poem, is the woman’s dream of being in an underground river, so much in the dark that she herself loses colour and the use of her eyes, like a “cave fish”. But the dream ends, as it does in the first poem, with waking: “she wakes” and “I wake” are the last words of each. It isn’t so much upbeat as inevitable: rivers reach the sea, dreams end, life goes on.  

The way these twin poems play against each other, picking up references and looking at the same things from different angles, is impressive. There are 24 pages of writing here, but a great deal of reading; like the source of its imagery, this pamphlet is deeper and more various than it looks.
 

Review of The Crescent Moon Fox, by Metin Murat, pub. Armida Publications 2022

“It was the first time that Zeki was seeing Cypriots as Cypriots – for once they were neither Greek nor Turkish. Here they were one people. Here on the ship he saw people sharing food – even if it was just a hard-boiled egg or a tomato – talking, playing cards and backgammon. Why do we have to be away from our island to be one people he asked himself?”

What constitutes identity? This is a question that concerns this novel throughout. Set mostly in Cyprus, over a period from 1933 to 2007, it tells the story of the British withdrawal from the island and the subsequent strife between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Zeki Aziz, from a Turkish village, is a promising student who wins sponsorship to study at the LSE. At first he sees England very much from an outsider perspective (and quite amusingly, for though this is a novel about deadly serious matters it is leavened with humour): 

“The couches and oversized armchairs were upholstered in a deep burgundy-coloured leather that was stitched into patterns that seemed to resemble a series of fat bellies and dimples. The tables in the room were made of wood but not of a type he had ever seen. The wood was highly polished and looked as if it might be very old – which he thought was a shame for a house which otherwise gave signs of belonging to someone so rich.” 

But by the time he returns, not altogether willingly, to Cyprus, he is very much betwixt and between two cultures and seeing both as a partial outsider. Ironically the same is happening in reverse to Major Gamble, a British diplomat in Cyprus who had helped to finance Zeki’s studies and who now finds himself faced, post-independence, with going “home” to a country with which he no longer identifies: 

“But where and what was home now? The truth was that he no longer recognised the place that Britain was becoming. Everyone around him seemed to be getting younger. And on every street corner you could hear that awful noise that they referred to as ‘pop’ music. As he made his way along the coastal road, past Boğaz, he thought to himself that he had spent so much time away from England, perhaps he should stay on in Cyprus after all.” 

Meanwhile Zeki’s childhood friend Aydin is finding that some aspects of identity can trump the geographical and political. There are in fact several individual instances in this novel of Greek and Turk forming relationships. But over and over, when it really matters, people revert to tribal groupings, as Zeki notices when he becomes a representative in the new parliament:

“His fellow representatives were waiting in the courtyard taking refuge from the heat by standing in the shade of the orange trees. He looked at these groups of men clustered together by the trees and realised that not a single group was mixed. Greek stayed with Greek. Turk stayed with Turk.”

I found this novel quite a page-turner; it never loses itself in “issues” so as to forget that novels are essentially about people, and the lure of “what happens next” to the various characters in whom the reader has become interested is strong. So I don’t want to go too much into plot details. But one thing I really like is the novel’s refusal to provide glib solutions to the problems it raises. People become personally close to individuals of the other community, yet this does not change their attitude to “the other” in general, nor prevent them from participating in atrocities against them.  

The writing is subtle and delicate. When Zeki, during his time in London, visits Paris, he is excited at “visiting, for the first time, a properly foreign country”. This points up very economically what has become apparent: that of the various solutions for Cyprus, the only one neither side really wanted was the one they got, namely independence. The Greeks wanted enosis, ie union with Greece, the Turks, being heavily outnumbered, wanted the British to stay and protect them, and to Zeki, Britain has never been a “properly foreign country”.  When, back home, he meets Aydin again after several years, he is taken aback when Aydin, who in the meantime has come under some Greek influence, looks forward to the British departure; “Can you believe it? No more British büyük efendis to lord it over us.” Later in Zeki’s village, when he is greeted with “Zeki, lad, hoşgeldiniz, my you look like a real büyük efendi.!” we do not really need the glossary at the end to know what is going on. 

I suppose we must come to the fox of the title. It is real, but also a sort of symbolic protector of the village, in which role it didn’t really do a lot for me, other than give the book a quirky title. I would rather end by quoting another instance of writerly subtlety. Here, Zeki is on the point of leaving Cprus for the LSE. The sense of belonging that comes over him in this passage is powerful, but the reader should not overlook the first sentence of the paragraph.

“Zeki did not go home. He turned instead and took the path that led up to the hill behind the village. When he reached its brow he breathed more easily and stopped to look around him. This was his land, he said, as if to reassure himself. In front of him he had the sea, perfectly blue, and the rocky shoreline that disappeared into the distance, virgin land as far as the eye could see. He turned and took the track that led towards Avrigadou. He walked slowly, taking his time to follow with his eye the flight of different birds; looking to see which of the shepherds were out in the hills with their flock. He saw goats standing up against a carob tree chewing at the pods that were blackening in the sun.
Across the sea he could make out the coast of Turkey, and he stared at the pale outline of its mountains. Then he heard some stones falling down the hill from the ridge above him, almost as if someone or something had lost their footing. He called out. No one answered. For a moment, for an eternity, the landscape seemed quite silent as if some higher force had called for quiet. He had the distinct impression that someone or something was observing him. He called out again. Nothing. He could no longer hear the cicadas which a few moments before had been deafening the hills. He was all alone, but not alone, for an overwhelming sense of peace took hold of him. He knew that he was from and of this piece of earth.”

Review of Ravenna, by Judith Herrin, pub. Penguin 2021

This is a history of Ravenna between the fifth and eighth centuries, focusing on its troubled relationship with both Rome and Constantinople and its consequent role as a sort of fulcrum of early Christianity. It is well illustrated, with maps, a comparative chronology, notes and index – in fact a proper, scholarly history. 

The book does face one major difficulty, which the author admits in the introduction: historical records from the time have mostly not survived well, and those that do were invariably written by clerics who naturally prioritised their own concerns. The result is that while sources like Agnellus obligingly provide us with endless lists of bishops and their works, plus the kings and emperors they quarrelled with, it is, in Herrin’s words, “extraordinarily hard to work out how people lived then”. This book will tell you all about the various churches of Ravenna; it won’t tell you how they related geographically to each other, how people got from A to B and what they would have seen on the way. I assume Ravenna was built around two main streets, one running north-south and the other east-west, because that’s how most Roman towns worked, but even that is not certain because Ravenna, rather like Cork, was built for defensive reasons in a marsh, and in such terrain, the location of streets is often determined by where the watercourses happen to be. There is no map of how Ravenna itself was laid out at the time, and I assume this is because it would be guesswork, though even that might have helped.

Herrin does her best with this problem; there are sections on “living in Ravenna” at various time points, but they mostly consist of records of people’s donations of land and property to the church (it sometimes seems as if the only purpose of lay people in Ravenna was to furnish income for the clergy). The few times we do hear about the life of lay people are fascinating – there is an absorbing chapter about a sixth-century doctor and another about eighth-century gang warfare between different districts; “these local residents went out of the city on Sundays to fight each other […] using slingshots, throwing stones and beating each other with sticks”. By then, it was actually rather a relief to know that at least some inhabitants did not spend the entire day in church.

Essentially then, this is a political and religious, rather than social, history, and very interesting it can sometimes be, particularly when the participants come alive as individuals (Galla Placidia, Attila, Theoderic). It throws light on a society whose priorities were often hugely different from our own; most readers will feel baffled that, with Arab troops practically at the gates, Rome and Constantinople were still arguing and issuing edicts on whether Christ should be portrayed in painting and mosaic as a young man, or an older one with a beard. Seemingly it mattered at the time.

So in order to get the best out of this, you need to have a real interest in the political and religious development of Constantinople in the east and Rome and Ravenna in the west, and the complex relationships between the three. For those who can enter into this, it is a most thorough and well written study. And if at some points it does read rather like a list of bishops, there are still the sort of glimpses that bring history alive. The most telling for me, as a writer, was Archbishop Felix, decreeing in his will that all his works should be burned, because, being now blind, he could not edit them and preferred them to be destroyed altogether rather than risk them surviving with copyist’s errors. I mean, we all hate typos, but really…

Review of Letters on Shetland, by Peter Jamieson, pub. Northus Shetland Classics, 2022

The latest in a series of reprints of Shetland classics, this was first published in 1949. It is a series of descriptions of various aspects of Shetland life, couched in the form of letters to a probably imaginary correspondent living outside Shetland. The “imaginary” is not certain, but while many of the anecdotes and descriptions would have been delightful to receive in the post, I personally decline to believe that any correspondent, anywhere, would have welcomed reams of statistics, or wanted to know how many hooks go to a cod line or how much tarmac was laid at Sumburgh airport. They don’t read like letters to me, especially by contrast with the genuine letters from others which are often quoted, and I think the letter form is purely a literary convention here.

 His description of people, places and events, often from personal experience or the accounts of those who had known them, can be very lively. In November 1939 the Lerwick blackout, in a town already dark enough in winter, began causing accidents:

"The night watchman at the pier, a man over 80 years old, fell over the side of the pier. He got caught in the steamer’s hawser just in time and managed to hang on while men came to his rescue. After this he walked home by himself and returned to work soon after." 

Then there is his account of religious observances in Fair Isle: 

"There are two churches, Wesleyan and Church of Scotland, and as the population is not large enough to make two congregations, it used to be the custom that people able to go to the kirk would go to the Wesleyan Chapel for morning prayer and to the “big kirk” in the afternoon. Then the following Sunday the order would be reversed; in this way any jealousy was dispelled." 

The chapters (or letters, as he calls them) deal with history, notable individuals, topography, fishing and sailing, crofting, politics, the dialect and social change in the islands. Writing in 1949, he could not foresee either the oil boom or the rise of the SNP, and in the last chapter, where he considers “what could be done to bring about a higher standard of living in the islands”, his answer revolves around Labour Party policy of the time. Before the war he had helped to found a short-lived branch of the Communist party but by 1945 he was campaigning for Labour, in the person of his wonderfully named friend Prophet Smith, in the constituency of Orkney & Shetland. It wasn’t to be; Jo Grimond won the seat for the Liberals in 1950 and the Lib Dems who succeeded his party still hold it, uninterrupted, over 70 years later, with the SNP second and creeping up, while Labour and the Tories try desperately to save their deposits. 

He is at his least gripping when he gets mired in statistics. If he hadn’t determined on this ”letters” convention, he could have put them out of the way in appendices, but I suspect he actually finds them interesting for their own sake and does not realise how quickly they make most people’s eyes glaze over.  

Nevertheless, this is a fascinating record of life as it was in the islands in his time, and for some time before. It preserves a great deal of riveting material in the form of memories, letters, court cases and newspaper reports. This is Reynolds’ News, in October 1939, reporting on an interruption to the Lerwick blackout: 

"Lerwick, Shetland Islands, witnessed a magnificent aurora borealis which changed night almost into day on Friday. The whole sky was illuminated by great swiftly moving shafts of brilliant yellow, green, mauve and red lights. ARP wardens threw in the sponge and called it a day."

Review of The Artist's Daughter, by Caz Eddy

"‘Clearly there’s no point talking to you while you are in this mood,’ her father said, stubbing out his cigarette into the ashtray that always appeared and disappeared with him."

It is irritating enough for Saffron that her father talks to her as if she were still the child she was when he saw her last; it must be even more so that he still does it when he’s dead. Saffron is the child of an artist and a musician (hence the fancy name they stuck her with). Her mother died long since; now her estranged father, an artist called Neil Shaw, has also died, and left her his estate in Devon. 

On her way down to sort out his effects, the scenery might give her a hint of what is to come:

"The train glided along the edge of the River Exe. The tide was out and wading birds pecked at stranded marine life. Old timbers from wrecked boats jutted upwards from the muddy estuary bed, like broken teeth and unearthed rib cages. They steamed in the hot sun, temporarily drying their skeletal remains. The air conditioning in the carriage was broken and had been since London."

What is about to be “unearthed” is a great deal of resentment and misunderstanding about the past, much of which was also broken. The narrative alternates between past and present, between Saffron’s troubled childhood as the daughter of constantly arguing parents, and her adult self. A connecting link between them is Tom, her childhood friend who still lives in the area and figures largely in both strands. This narrative technique does a good job of marking the passage of time, differentiating between child and adult voices of the same character and seeding and delaying the reveal of information.

At first it may seem as if this is going to be a typical love story, with the progression from friendship to love between Saffron and Tom being key. But it gradually becomes clear that in fact the most important relationship is that between Saffron and her estranged father, who not only divorced her mother but abandoned his daughter after her mother’s death, and that until this is sorted out, nothing else can be. Since Neil is dead, this would seem to present a problem. But Saffron finds a cache of letters, which after his divorce he wrote but never sent to her. She also finds him, or at least his ghost, which seems to have been allowed to return to try to sort out what he has left undone – though even then, this hopeless non-communicator finds it difficult to actually say what he feels.

The novel, then, is much concerned with communication, or rather failures of communication, between people. It is leavened with quite a lot of wry humour, as in Saffron’s description of her father’s kitchen, “a bit like someone put the 70s in a blender and turned it on without putting the lid on”, and her reaction to Tom’s ultra-modern kitchen (he’s an architect), “This is one of those kitchens where you have to guess how to open the cupboard doors and find where the fridge is hiding, isn’t it?” There are some subtle touches, as when the giving away of a certain article, and a later offhand remark, "I wasn’t bothered about it”, shows, as nothing else could do, how Saffron’s mother, who did at least make efforts with parenthood, though it clearly did not come naturally to her, was actually far less emotionally important to her daughter than was the absent and inadequate Neil. 

Neil, both as human and ghost, does come over as a blend of the exasperating and the oddly sympathetic. Saffron’s parting words to one of his many mistresses, “My father was a shit, Mrs. Philips, we both know that, but he wasn’t a bad person”, encapsulate how she eventually comes to terms with his memory, and it seems fitting that he has the last word (an inaudible expletive).

The Artist’s Daughter can be bought here

Telescoping time

I’m not a great fan of Henry VI part 3 (needed fewer writers and more editors). But it does contain one of my favourite lines:

     My parks, my walks, my manors that I had

and I’ve been thinking about why it moves me. It is of course spoken by the dying Warwick, on Barnet battlefield. Warwick has not been a sympathetic character; as the line, with its three "mys" rather indicates, his guiding principle has been acquisitiveness. Now, however, he is on the point of death and inevitably attracts a certain degree of sympathy from those of us conscious that we will all be going that way soon enough. It’s partly that, partly also the line’s rhythms and longing repetitions. But mostly, I think it’s about time. 

 At the point when Warwick speaks this line, all the things he wistfully mentions are in fact still his, in the present. He could say “that I have”. But it is the last time, literally the last moment, he will be able to call them his: as soon as he is dead, they will become what he “had”.  And for the audience, watching a play set in the past, they already are the things he “had”. It was Philip Schwyzer’s brilliant book  Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III  that first made me aware of how often characters in plays are speaking of what for them is the future but for the audience is the past – a past which may very well be used by the playwright to hint at parallels with the present. Warwick in this line telescopes past, present and future into one vanishingly short moment.

This is why I feel sure, despite the fact that the play had more than one author, that this particular line is Shakespeare’s. Not because of its quality: many Elizabethan playwrights, on form, could produce a memorable line, but because of its preoccupation with time. What it does is reminiscent of what happens in the famous opening lines of Richard III where, as Schwyzer points out, the audience is, or thinks it is, momentarily misled. “Now is the winter of our discontent” could easily be a complete sentence. But the next line, “Made glorious summer by this sun of York” subverts it and seems to totally change the meaning: not “we are in a winter of discontent”, but “our winter of discontent has become a glorious summer”. 

The audience is thus wrong-footed at the start, appropriately for a drama in which deception plays such a large role. But that isn’t the end of it. By the time Richard has finished his first speech, it will have become clear to them that in fact the era of peace which looks like being ushered in is not at all welcome to a man who is by nature and training a soldier and who, because of his physical appearance, feels better suited to a camp than a peacetime court. For him, in fact, it really is a winter of discontent, and the audience was right the first time.

The double-bluff is beautiful and economical, but Warwick’s reduction of all time to one line is even more so, and more universal, for few of us will ever be in quite the position Richard was in, but every one of us, albeit with a few substitutions for parks, walks and manors, will one day be able to echo Warwick.

Schwyzer’s book, with its remit “to observe how the present turns into the past […] and to explore how the past negotiates a place for itself in the present”, is fascinating on the subject of time both in reality and on stage, and well worth a read.

 

Review of Veeve by Christine De Luca, pub. Mariscat Press 2021

This is a collection of 45 poems (46 if you count both the dialect and standard English versions of the title poem), of which about two-thirds are in the Shetlandic dialect. There are footnote glossaries on the pages with the dialect poems, though I could have wished these notes were in bolder type and not quite so crowded up together. There doesn’t usually seem to be any particular reason why a poem is in Shetlandic or standard English, not that there needs to be, but in the two-part “Stumbling on ghosts”, she uses the two dialects to point up both the differences and similarities in the situation of Kaya, a Turkish village deserted as a result of war and ethnic differences, and a similarly empty agricultural landscape in Shetland – this may now be deserted for many reasons, including sheep clearances and modernisation, but the religious passions that killed Kaya are mercifully absent here:  

      dey wirna
     a theological fag-paeper ta discern atween
     tree harvest-homs, tree reformed kirks. 

Some poems will always have a personal appeal to particular readers, and for me, a teenager in the 60s, “Very heaven” had a special resonance. It isn’t easy to evoke the spirit of an era – Ian McEwan, for instance, tries to do it by piling up random details that don’t really add up to much – but here De Luca really captures the excitement and energy which that time had for young people even so far from London and Liverpool as Lerwick.  

     We were all
    “going steady”, bonding like penguins after
     a spell at sea. And the café was suitably baltic.
     Every surface was unrelenting: concrete stair,
     formica tables, linoleum on the floor. 

I suppose someone being particularly fussy might object that the Baltic and penguins are a long way apart, but the humour worked and those hard surfaces were very reminiscent.  

She is very good at evoking places too, often with telling imagery. Anyone who has seen a mussel farm in a sea inlet will appreciate the pinpoint accuracy of her description in “Hinny-spot”: 

     black pearls laid alang da slim neck
    o Stromness Voe. 

Many have commented on the positivity and celebratory nature of her poetry. This can be a difficult thing to pull off, for there is a danger of sounding either too chirpily optimistic or homiletic. These poems are in no way Pollyannaish, but they do now and then sound as if they have designs on the reader: one can see the poem fixing on some object, event or image and proceeding determinedly and inevitably to, if not quite a moral, at least a sort of life-lesson. The title poem, with its image of the snow globe, feels a bit like that. I can buy the comparison of a depressed person’s “inner world lacking peace” to a stirred-up snow globe, but while it is obvious that the snow globe will settle down and become clear again, the poem does not, to me, give any reason why the person’s “inner world” should also become “vivid and crystal clear”. It feels a bit like saying “it’ll all come right in the end”, which we know is far from always the case. 

Often, though, the celebratory note is welcome, especially to those who feel poetry sometimes overdoes the misery. In “Soondscapes”, a chapel is “wheeshtit” (silenced), but a new sound has replaced its music:  

     twa windmills spin new soondscapes owre
     da laand, kert-wheelin alleluias. 

Windfarms are currently a controversial topic in Shetland and not every reader will hear their sound like that. But her last line: “Up owre da hill, airms turn, da haert lifts” uses its rhythms so skilfully to shape mood that it would be hard not to feel that lift.

This review was first published in The New Shetlander.