Maya Panika's Blog, page 11

Review: The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

by Jude Morgan

4*

I just realised that I never posted my review of this book, which I finished reading on 14th July 2012.

I finished this book some days ago but couldn’t write a review right away, I needed time to think through the conflicted feelings I was left with when I turned the last page. The writing definitely deserves five stars, it is rich and lush and lavish, dense with metaphor; it took me a long time to read, I could only digest it in small bites. The story on the other hand, is odd. It’s not really about Shakespeare at all; Jude Morgan doesn’t seem to ever get to grips with him as a character. Will’s father, his brothers, his wife, all come off the page with far more life than Will himself, who seems a colourless, emotionally dead person, which – unless he put absolutely everything of himself on to the page and left nothing behind for his day to day life – seems unlikely to have been the case. It’s as if Jude Morgan couldn’t find Shakespeare, at least, not find enough to build a character of substance around the few facts we have (and in which case, why choose to write about him?) Ben Jonson gets almost as much page-time, the two lives run parallel through the tale (and why not bill this as a life of two men, because that is what this is). Jonson comes across with much more vigour, Marlowe with more colour, Shakey himself is the least interesting, least vibrant, least engaging character in the book. The relationship with Anne, his wife, is one of the best parts of this tale but even here, Jude doesn’t seem to truly get to grips with the story. Marital discord, infidelity, the part long separations play in the life of a marriage – these are all there, but there’s no real depth to the emotions. `My second-best bed’ doesn’t appear and there’s no apparent reason given here for the famously mighty snub. At the end of this tale, Will and Anne seem to have reached an accord for their future. And then the story stops – not at the end of Will’s short life, not even when he decides to quit the theatre and return to Stratford, but at the end of his affair with his Dark Lady.

This is not a bad book, not at all! The writing is (as always with Jude Morgan) sublime, and there are interesting takes on what might have been Will Shakespeare’s life, but I can’t help but feel that the title is wrong; this is not a book about Shakespeare’s secret life, but about his domestic situation (the writing features very little) and pretty much all of it on the surface, there’s little hidden. It could as easily be titled Shakespeare and Co, because it is far more about those around Shakespeare than the bard himself.

It is, for all that, a wonderful book, the language is worth 5 plus stars and well-worthy of your time for that alone.

 

The post man just brought…

 

This.

For me to read and review.

It looks very tempting.

It’s Halloween…

And the veil between worlds is tissue-thin. What better time to light the sacred fires, set out soul cakes and wine for the dear departed and cosy-up with a spooky tale of haunted books and ghostly libraries, a Victorian serial killer lost in time, dis-possessed souls, a wicked shaman, an eerie mirror and a very naughty vicar.

For yea and verily, ENTANGLEMENT is FREE for Kindle again all day today. From 8am in the UK (3am EST. Midnight PST) till the same time Thursday morning. A click on the front cover takes you to Amazon UK, the back cover takes you to Amazon.com. Please do go and pick up a copy. I hope you enjoy it. Thoughtful reviews are always very welcome.

  

Why Ebooks Are Inspiring A New Age Of Print

Sharing an interesting article from the Huffington Post. Just click on the pic.

Review: The Cleaner of Chartres

by Salley Vickers

3 and a half*

Agnès Morel is a cleaner who touches lives, bringing happiness and new life to many, but to some she seems to inspire only spite and bile. There’s a mystery about Agnès that gradually unfolds across two time-lines – Agnes’ s past and present – gathering up the threads of the lives of the other characters along the way, threads that that finally come together in an unexpected way with the least probable character at the apex of the tale. The settings are beautifully written, the characters well drawn, all true-to-life personalities. There few blacks or whites here, only many shades of grey.

My only real complaint (but it’s a biggie) is that the book lacked depth – most especially in the character of Agnès herself, who seemed remote, removed from her own story as if we were watching the events of her life through a veil. I never truly warmed to her and never felt I knew her the way I felt I did with all the other characters, even the vicious ones. Many things about her history went unexplained. I was constantly asking the question, ‘why? Throughout, the Cleaner of Chartres felt as if it wanted to be a far longer book. I certainly wanted more, more depth, more detail. It’s an absorbing tale but it needed more time in which to be told.

The story is intriguing, it kept me guessing. The two threads of the story are nicely woven. There’s a true sense of anticipation and wonder about Agnès’s history – which is built up, brick by agonising brick, till past and present finally meet in a sudden flurry of revelation and event. Then the end comes far too soon. Timelines crash and the whole edifice crashes down like a bulldozed wall. The long-anticipated answer to the mystery comes too quickly and is, as a result, a bit disappointing, unsatisfying, not fully resolved and a wee bit too pat for me.

I did enjoy The Cleaner of Chartres very much, but was a bit disappointed by the end. The story seemed to promise much more than it ultimately delivered and was over much too soon.

Review: John Saturnall’s Feast

by Lawrence Norfolk

4*

This is a delightful book that I liked very much, but not without reservation. The premise of a universal Feast, the feast of life that dates back to a time before the Romans was a fascinating one, but it got lost in the welter of detail about the many more mundane feasts of a great house in the seventeenth century. The everyday story, of John’s slow rise from scullery boy to head cook and his unrequited love for the spoiled and wilful lady of the house was slow to unfold, but quietly fascinating. For a while, I became completely enveloped in the gentle pace of these lives, lived by the seasons and the days of feast and fast.

But the pacing is odd. It starts out very slow, with John’s early life, as he learns to read, learns of meadow herbs and seasonings and how to cook – from his mother and from a near-sacred book, learning about ‘The Feast’. There’s an almost aching attention to detail, but so beautifully described that the lack of a solid story hardly seems to matter. This slow pace continues as John leaves his home to learn how to cook in the kitchens of the great house where his mother learned her art, then everything suddenly speeds up as we race through the Civil War and John leaves to fight for the king, then hits breakneck speed; John leaves the house for – who knows where? His years away are omitted completely. And then he returns for something of a predictable end.

Maybe the pace is meant to reflect the times? The daily round for the people in those days must have been as predictable, as un-changing as the seasons and holy calendar that confined and consumed their lives. The sudden advent of war – and such a cruel war, bringing with it unimaginable destruction, undreamed of change – must have come like a bolt of cruel lightning, burning everything ever-known and replacing it with harsh religion and cold misery. If this was Lawrence Norfolk’s intention, I have to say, I don’t truly think it works. I personally loved the slow un-folding of the pre-war chapters with all their fine-worked details, the sudden change of pace and omitting of important chapters in his protagonist’s life was just confusing.

For all its fine-crafted beauty, there is something empty at the heart of this book. There’s a wealth of detail about the things that go on, but very little depth of feeling because the characters never really came alive – and there are some marvellous characters: the childhood sweetheart subsumed into the church, the manic puritan priest, the foppish wastrel suitor, and Heron Boy! Who was heron boy? Where did he come from, what was his story? I would have loved to know. All of the characters could have been magnificent, but none of them came fully fleshed, they all seemed devices to hang the story and the details on. John Saturnall was the most nebulous of all, he seemed somehow colourless and ghostly; at times I felt I could see right through him. So much happens to this man, but there’s never any sense of anticipation, of wondering or conjecturing what might happen next, because he never felt like a real man to me and so nothing he said or did could move me.

And after all my moaning, you’re probably wondering why I’ve given this book 4 stars. Three stars would simply not do it justice; there’s a beauty in the language and a depth of intricate detail that’s astonishing and lovely. I did enjoy it very much, but couldn’t love it.

Review: The Stockholm Octavo

by Karen Engelmann

3 and a half*

Fans and cards, prophecy and history mingle in the tale of Emil Larsson and his pursuit of a future predicted for him by the enigmatic Mrs Sparrow. An interesting and original story, though far from flawless.

I enjoyed the story. I loved the cards, the prophecy, the location – 18th century Stockholm is certainly an unusual setting for a novel, and adds greatly to its strangeness and charm. The history – which was all new to me – was never dull. The large cast of characters were wonderfully well drawn, the massive, intricate plot well-wrought. Using the octavo – a sort of Tarot-spread – and the prophecy it heralded was a fascinating way to draw apparently disparate storylines together, though it, like other important elements of the story, got lost at times.

Which is the problem with this novel, there is altogether too much of everything. The story is SO drawn out; every piece of it takes an age to tell. It is over-written and desperately slow. There is far, far too much detail about the cards and the fans and the politics and the dresses – it muddies the waters and gets in the way of what could be a corker of a tale. It wasn’t as if each of these elements was in any way dull in and of itself, but there is just far too much of each and it ruins the whole. At times, the story becomes completely lost, buried in the mire– which is not to say it wasn’t enjoyable, it is very unusual and packed with intrigue, interest and beauty; at times it was utterly riveting. If it had been two thirds the length, it would have been magnificent.

Thank you, everyone who grabbed a free copy of Entanglement

yesterday. I hope you enjoy it. Reviews are very welcome.

If you missed out and  still want to read it, I’ll be doing another free-giveaway day next Saturday.

Courgette leaves

Catching up to Gardener’s World this week, I see Monty Don clearing the spent courgettes from his veg plot to start his autumn planting. He, like most people, has had a dreary summer and had very few courgettes, but he’s done a lot better than me. I never even got as far as getting a plant, every single one I planted – each one carefully nurtured on the sunny bedroom window-sill – was eaten by slugs or mashed into the earth by the perpetual hard and heavy rain. He might not have had many fruits, but he had a wonderful crop of leaves and flowers that he was merrily chucking into the compost.

What a waste! Courgette leaves are delicious, with a strong, earthy flavour somewhere between spring greens and nettles. In North-Eastern Cuba (the only part with anything like a Caribbean cuisine) they’d have made a soup with those leaves, cooked green onions gently in a little coconut oil, then shredded all but the toughest, oldest leaves and thrown them in the pot with a bay leaf, some allspice and nutmeg, a little salt and coconut milk and simmered till the leaves were softly disintegrating.

A simpler soup, and one of my favourites, is made by just cooking thinly sliced red onions, garlic and shallot in olive oil until transparent, then the shredded leaves (again, leaving out only the oldest, toughest leaves) – you can add the tenderer stems, sliced or chopped too – until they wilt, then add stock and a little fresh thyme and simmer till soft. Or cook a stiffer mixture, add chopped tomatoes or a little passata and serve on pasta.

A more elaborate soup is sopa de guia, a Oaxacan dish that uses all of the plant, traditionally made in the rainy season and served with corn dumplings.

Corn, onion and garlic are simmered in stock for half an hour, then finely chopped courgette leaves, thinly sliced courgettes and any blossoms you can spare are added, salted to taste and simmered another half an hour.

There must be lots of recipes. Courgette leaves are too tasty to be consigned to the compost. I wish I had some in my garden – I wish I had anything in my garden. It’s been a disastrous year for everyone I know who grows vegetables and  fruit and makes me glad I live in a time and a place where I can get what I need in the market. In other times, in other places, we would have starved this year.

The lovely picture of tasty leaves is not mine, I have none to photograph. A click on the pic takes you to its source.

Do I look tired? Exhausted? Shattered?

My life this week: Clean up puppy-poo. Mop up puppy-wee. Mop up another, previously unnoticed, pool of wee (found when mopping the first pool of wee) that is now ice cold and thoroughly soaked into the carpet (and slippers).

Take puppy for a LONG walk. Then clean up the fresh pool of wee deposited on the rug the moment the puppy got back in from the long walk. Bath the muddy puppy. Remove the now-wet puppy from the cushions and feed her. Prize your toothbrush from the jaws of the puppy. Collapse into stupor, fail to care that the puppy is depositing fresh poo on the rug.

Whose idea was it to get a puppy anyway? If I’m not writing this blog/reading books I really need to read/writing reviews quite as actively as I used to, the reason is small, white and furry, puppy shaped and if not actively engaged in wickedness, is probably plotting it. Or else asleep. In my bed.

And I find that the mice have been in my best coffee beans. I am now living in terror of caffeinated hyper-rodents ripping it up under the stairs.

In other news, I have started writing CHAOS! It’s the first sequel to Entanglement and I wish the plot would stop thickening but it seems quite determined to be as complex as it can. I suspect it may take longer to write than anticipated.

 

And finally, anyone who hasn’t read ENTANGLEMENT yet and would like to, the kindle version is FREE again all day today, Saturday 13th October, from 8am UK time (Midnight PDT, 3am EDT) until the same-time Sunday morning. Please do pick up a copy. I hope you enjoy it. Reviews are very welcome.