Signs for Lost Children: Respectability is all in this an Untidy World… Mari Howard

Living room at my maternal grandparent’s first home…

**Last month my blog post for Authors Electric partly looked back at couple of interesting facts about my own family ancestry, including two studio photographs showing middle class women smartly dressed in the fashion of the time. In this post I want to talk about Sarah Moss’s follow-up novel, Signs for Lost Children, which continues the story of Alethea, (once ‘poor baby’), begun in Bodies of Light, the book which brought to mind for me the strange fact that the two families who would be later joined by my parents’ marriage both had connections to the Pre-Raphaelites.

One thing which has really struck me reading these novels, and was brought to the fore of all our minds in the past week or so, is that the position of male and female has not changed since Victorian times. What do I mean by this? Surely today’s woman is an independent person, capable of earning her own living in any field she chooses, spending her own money without necessary reference to any male relative?  Of course she has the vote, won by the hard campaigning of the suffragettes, and we hope should she be walking alone at night, she would not be taken for a prostitute, picked up by the police, and subjected to an ignominious,  degrading, painful (and ultimately meaningless) “virginity test”.  (The intrusive tests are considered a violation of human rights by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations, which want to see them banned. e.g.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-55078634)

I say we hope – this lawful abuse of women was a common occurrence at the time Signs for Lost Children is set. The streets were dangerous, made even more dangerous for a woman on her own, (for what decent woman would be out alone in the dark? it was argued). Obviously, only one who is a sex worker, seeking clients. Such was male thinking of the time, at least where the law and the police were concerned.  Does your memory resonate here with events of the past week? Is this not a hideous irony? 

In this sequel to Bodies of Light, Sarah Moss has written how her protagonist of that story, newly qualified as a medical doctor among  the very few women so qualified at the time, and also newly married, begins work in the Truro asylum. I will not spoil the story of Signs for Lost Children for you, but her conclusion, after six months working in the terrible conditions and reflecting on the treatment of the assumed mentally ill, is this: “It is not that some people’s minds are so fragile that they require the permanent protection of an institution but that some people’s homes are crazier than institutions for the mad.” * 

As anyone who has read Bodies of Light will know, Alethea – known as Ally – was raised by a kind and ineffectual father more concerned with his art than his children’s welfare, and a mother fanatically obsessed with the plight of the poor, especially of poor women. This wasn’t bad in itself, but it was carried out as an all-engaging duty, accompanied by contempt for all those who weren’t concerned. She also skimped on any comfort both for herself and for her family, denying warmth (physical and emotional), interesting  food, and more. Whether her motivation came from religion or not, her attitude towards her children and all other middle-class people amounted to hatred for soft and easy lives. Ally, already rejected as an infant due to her mother’s post-natal depression, suffered terribly from her mother’s cruelty. It is surely this which gave her adult self insight and compassion into how asylums were being used, and the (convenient?) medical assumption that all unconventional behaviour must be the result of madness. One example from the inmates whom she had to treat is of a teenage girl who constantly attempts to take her own life: clearly this poor girl had suffered rape, (possibly within her family?).  Totally traumatised, she had been committed to the asylum as mentally ill. After all, this tided life up, didn’t it?

As a professionally qualified woman herself, Ally, at a low point, thinks about public attitudes: she was, in their eyes, ‘An unnatural, undomesticated being, very probably subject to mental instability herself, , for what woman would declare herself unsatisfied by her own family life and seek to usurp the feminine role?’

It is not really the place here to continue with descriptions of the treatments –  to discuss whether the attitude comes from the practice of religion (no doubt we have often seen its misuse across the centuries and across the world). The salient point for us today is that we have been woken up to the continuing existence, hardly camouflaged by talk about equality, of institutionalised misogyny, and this is supported by some of those very women who have benefited from the chance to appear to compete and succeed in what continues to be a man’s world. Signs for Lost Children is certainly a significant book.

* apologies for no page numbers, as reading on an old Kindle

**This piece was first published on Authors Electric March 2021

Bodies of Light, and Reflections of Ancestors

Re-blogged from my monthly contribution to the Authors Electric blog

Women’s Fashion c. 1870

My maternal grandfather was a civil servant at the Treasury, but his hobbies (possibly ‘real self’) were Astronomy and Pottery. Evidence suggests he was rather good at both — but here we’re concerned with pottery, taking place at Putney School of Art, around World War 1. Here he made friends with a number of artists, one of whom was the elderly William Shakespeare Burton, who worked in the Pre-Raphaelite style and occasionally had paintings displayed at the Royal Academy. My mother’s sister was named Violet Christina, after one of Burton’s daughters, and rumour added that the latter’s godmother had been Christina Rossetti…

 This, and another piece of family history (wait for that one), drew my eye to Sarah Moss’s novel Bodies of Light, featuring fictional artist and designer Alfred Moberly, working in the mid-19th century, and influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

 The novel opens to the world of industrial Manchester in the 1870s.  Alfred Moberly is about to marry Elizabeth Sanderson. What draws these two young people together? Alfred Moberly, artist and designer of elegant wallpaper and furniture, and Elizabeth Sanderson, committed to the rescue of poor and abused women? Contrast the male artists’ world with what we could call ‘the real world’ of women — poverty, hard work, and short, bitter lives. Particularly those left without income and forced into prostitution — not only the mothers but the teenage daughters. Alfred’s painting featuring his fiancée sets the scene: he considers the idea of using Elizabeth as the model for an Annunciation, but this then morphs into a portrait, as the angel Gabriel is removed. 

 Whatever basis this marriage has, it produces two children: the older daughter destined for a miserable childhood, victim of her mother’s feelings of loss of self and purpose on producing a child. Clearly this is postnatal depression, which, contextualised into a Victorian set of moral values combined with a fear of moral weakness, sets Elizabeth on a path of self-pity, blaming “baby” for her plight, and as far as possible ignoring the child’s needs. As she pushes the pram obsessively around the streets of Manchester, ignoring the crying of the baby, a ragged woman, obviously a victim of domestic abuse, looks inside and exclaims, “Poor baby!”      

It is a sad encounter: “Nobody says, poor Elizabeth, tired and thirsty and bored beyond despair,” thinks Elizabeth. Mired in exhaustion and depression, she cannot act Lady Bountiful, her accustomed presentation of self, giving her the only power she can have.

Later in the book there’s a brilliant description of Alfred changing and dressing the ignored baby. Followed closely by his (supposed) adultery, contrasted with Elizabeth bringing home fifteen-year-old Jenny, forced into prostitution and abused, apparently to be cared for and to remain as their ‘maid of all work’. Elizabeth shows kindness of a sort, day in day out, dutifully, but without compassion. If inspired by a belief in God and religious duty, then respectability and ‘knowing your place’ has sadly prevailed over inclusiveness, compassion, and acceptance — which indeed it has. A home is a house, not a home.

Wallpaper, by May Morris (daughter of WilliamMorris) 1883

From this conflict of mid-Victorian values — the public practice of politeness, self-restraint and middle-class elegance, dependent on exploitation of the industrial poor — Sarah Moss has constructed a captivating book. She often chooses fashions in dress or furnishings, or little incidents, to highlight the contrasts, giving a believable picture of life in mid to late Victorian England, with its empire and successful, growing industrialisation supporting the newly well-off and comfortable middle class, who embrace “consumerism” and respectability. While conveniently ignoring those who have moved to the cities through necessity and whose support is necessary for their lifestyle. And as Alfred employs his creative talents on Pre-Raphaelite inspired waterlily —or intertwined roses — wallpaper, his two daughters attend an early girls’ school, delightfully described. Here the “poor baby” — Alethea, known as Ally — discovers how she might please her mother. She acquiesces in her mother’s ambition, and having been introduced at an early age to the suffering of ‘rescued’ women, and indeed women in general, she applies her considerable intellect and application to a prestigious career, aiming to qualify in a new area for women and become a doctor. 

We follow Ally into medical studies in London, where she lodges with her Aunt Mary (Elizabeth’s sister) and begins at last to find the unbelievable: a happy, supportive home, and friends. The “poor baby” begins to learn that self-respect, and the love of others, is normal. Through various encounters with patients, we see a capable young woman, putting behind her the wounds inflicted by her mother’s tongue and regime.

Where her father was — despite the rule of patriarchy at the time — is significant: there’s far more in the book than space to tell here, but Alfred continues with art and design, and with his inability to mitigate his wife’s treatment of their older daughter. This uselessness speaks volumes about the Pre-Raphaelite mentality — those pale knights and even paler, emaciated, red-haired ladies with the pouting lips: decadence, dalliance, dilatoriness. Indeed, faerie, or fey. It would take the power of determined, intelligent women to break it… We see the very first stirrings, perhaps, in some of Ally’s supporters in her studies — women like Miss Johnson, her head teacher at school, Mrs Lewis, married to one of the academic doctors, Dr. Garrett Anderson (a real person), who combined her career with raising a family.  Even Aunt Mary, and Ally’s fellow student Annie’s mother, at least unshocked by their boisterous children.

 Back to family history, book-ended by Pre-Raphaelite connections. As a child I knew my father’s father was half Greek. What I didn’t know was that his mother, Maria Sakilariou, had been, before her marriage, lady’s maid to Euphrosyne Cassavetti, the wealthy widow of Greek/Italian merchant Dimitrius Cassavetti, and mother of artist Maria Zambaco. Maria Z, back home after fleeing a broken marriage, was introduced by her mother to Edward Burne-Jones, one of many artists who attended her salons. He and Zambaco, who was both his model and his pupil, began a passionate affair. This was just around the time my great-grandmother was employed by the Cassavettis: she must have been privy to the whole thing. Euphrosyne obviously kept up with her ex-personal maid, for daughter Maria and son Alexander were witnesses at my great-grandparents’ wedding. Their three children, Dimitrius, Alexander (my grandfather) and Euphrosyne (my Great Aunt “Effie”), were all named after various Cassavettis, and baptised Greek Orthodox. Several Cassavettis were Godparents, along with Euphrosyne Spartali (mother of another Pre-Raphaelite artist, Maria Spartali Stillman, who with Maria Zambaco was one of a group known as the ‘Three Graces’).

 How interesting… I wonder if my two grandfathers knew or discussed all this? Alexander and Euphrosyne must’ve known the Cassavettis quite well, and heard stories of those salons, and the visiting painters, from their mother.

Maria Sakilariou and daughter Euphrosyne, about 1884, (smartly dressed for the photographer)

How much I’d love to know more. And how I admired the gaudy, sentimental, Pre-Raphaelite paintings as a child, and look so differently at them today. There is something very Pre-Raphaelite about that novel.

*Photos, Victorian studio studies, from my own family collection. ‘Woman’s fashion’ modelled by Ellen Reeve Barnett, another Great-Grandmother. 

Wallpaper, 20th century reproduction,  from May Morris, 1883

Bringing smiles to the child refugees held in a toilet paper factory: guest post by Paul Alkazraji, author of ‘The Migrant’

The Migrant – a road adventure tale first caught my attention with its exciting cover, promising a step away from my usual kind of reading, along with entering the world of South Eastern Europe (and I do have a few Greek genes myself). It turned out to be a road trip story, set with danger …  the author, fellow writer Paul Alkazraji, now lives and works in Albania, and writes below about visiting Greek camps where very many Syrian refugee families are living. I’ve followed that up with my review of this fast-paced novel, which takes place in Albania and Athens …

First, welcome, Paul, and over to you…

As the ‘Migrant Crisis’ began to develop in Greece in 2015, I felt that we in the church in Albania might be able to do something to help the situation. One of the worst trouble spots, Idomeni Camp at the border of Greece and North Macedonia on the ‘Balkan Route’, was only a three-hour drive away.

On our two visits there we loaded my old Mercedes Benz 240d with water, plastic sheeting, tinned food and basic medical supplies, and gave them to the groups of volunteers and NGO’s who were arriving too. Up to 10,000 migrants would become stuck in the muddy fields and along the railway lines in makeshift shelters and tents. Frustration would eventually erupt and some died there.

Later in 2016, I visited the ‘Softex’ camp on the industrial periphery of Thessaloniki where over a thousand mostly Syrians had been hastily accommodated after the camp at Idomeni was closed in May. It was one of many where some 57,000 refugees were held in official government camps throughout Greece after new border fences were built and the Balkan migration route closed.

Teams from our group of Albanian churches had been making weekly runs since the spring to bring children’s activities including face painting, action games and a bouncy castle. They also bagged up and distributed fresh vegetables tent by tent up to 600 portions a day.   

Many of those tents were erected inside the former ‘Softex’ toilet paper factory to provide additional shelter from the not-too-distant winter. In the gloomy darkness children pushed each other around in rickety prams and played with broken bricks. There were makeshift street stalls, coffee shops and flat-bread bakers, and it had all the aromas both sweet and foul of a Damascus souk.

“When we first came here, I saw they were living in bad conditions, and if you’d asked me to enter, I would not,” said one church team member Klaus Kalemi. “But I did because I wanted to help. I think that all of them were hoping for a better future, because I saw the writing on the walls here everywhere.”

I met one small boy, Mohamed, from Deir ez-Zur in eastern Syria, there with his parents, two sisters and four brothers. “We came at night in a boat. It had a motor and there were no waves. In the morning we were in Greece. I did not see any fish,” he said.

“One of the most needed things in the camp is something for the children,” said church team leader Lysiena Topi. “You can see them fighting because they don’t have anything to do. When we went in, at first the managers would say to us, ‘Okay you can try!’ But after we had finished the (activities), they would say, ‘We don’t know how you do it. These kids love you!’ We see the smiles in their eyes…”

My review of The Migrant …

Here’s a thoroughly enjoyable, page turning, adventure read. Even though I don’t usually choose books in this genre, I was caught up by the story from page one. The fast paced road trip was vividly described, and the characters believable. This is a story of youngsters who disappear from their village, attempting to climb out of rural poverty, their hope to find work in another country.  There they find themselves in the clutches of criminals and traffickers.  As pastor Jude, the ex-criminal Mehmed, and policeman Luan drove hell for leather from Albania to Athens in a borrowed car, we are with them in all the thrills and spills, their mission to find out what has happened to Alban, and Kela, from their village. Descriptions of the landscape and of daily life in Albania, and of Athens in the riots created by the austerity program in 2012, form the backdrop to their desperate journey, their fears, and the conflicts between them.

We are catapulted into an ending which is both believable and redemptive, though not for all the characters, and certainly not for every hopeful young adult who starts the journey. It could be repeated in many countries of our world, and should be told.

When beginning the book I had not known that there was a prequel novel, involving the characters of the pastor Jude and his wife Alex, and how Mehmed’s former life was changed. When I discovered this, it helped me understand their situation and relationship. I feel that some of that story could have usefully been introduced near the start of The Migrant, and would’ve explained some literary references!

My other critical thought is that a bit more ‘content editing’ could have made for a clearer and more smooth flowing text. In such a fast paced novel, this would have transformed a good reading experience into a very good one.

Recommended to take as a companion on a long journey: you will be transported from your plane or train!

The Migrant was published by Instant Apostle in February 2019

Links: Chapter 1 of The Migrant is free to read here

Or on Goodreads  Or Amazon:Amazon

Paul is on Twitter @paul_alkazraji

 

 

 

 

Being Authentic: Three seek Identity

My pile of recently read books 

Summer reading: mine has been ‘serious books’ so far: all very recently published, each has a very 2018 feel.  The only novel is Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fires, a sobering take on today’s culture and politics. But here I’m concerned with three non-fictions on the theme of being authentic: not ‘who do we think we are?’ but ‘who do we know we are – and will our society allow us to be this?’

Afua Hirsch has written an extensively, carefully researched book on the hows and whys of being Black and a Brit. Significantly, it’s called Brit (-ish). Damien Le Bas decided to take to the road in a Ford Transit van (visiting all the places where his Gypsy ancestors probably stopped in their travelling days). His book, The Stopping Places, is an account of his physical and emotional journey, packed with reflections on the Gypsy lifestyle. Vicky Beeching’s book, Undivided, a memoir, tells of the pain of growing up and becoming. All three have been students at Oxford University: Hirsch and Le Bas among the few of ‘minority’ background, Beeching outwardly ‘mainstream’.

The problem of ‘labels’

A quest for ‘authenticity’, alongside the chaotic state of our world, is a defining aspect of life in the 21st-century. Tradition, with its rules and boundaries, gave some cultural stability, each culture led by generally acknowledged and imposed beliefs. But in reality, to think that it created a happier, more stable life is to ignore history and the contributions of those often intelligent and thoughtful individuals whom traditional ways have set outside the boundaries of the culture’s rules, labelling them as less than ‘us’.

Once labelled, anything can happen to you. Once a labeller, you lose sight of our common humanity – Black people can be seen as slave material, Travellers and Gypsies as trash. Traditional societies can lull anyone into accepting that the ‘other’ is harmful, not truly human, worthy only of servant status, marginalisation or even  death.

Afua Hirsch’s book carefully traces the history of Black people in Britain, revealing that their position worsened once this country was involved in the slave trade. And that in the 1920s ‘mixed race’ children were regarded by official bodies as less intelligent by nature and unable to benefit from education. ‘Liverpool’s “half-castes”…were pronounced to be…intellectually inferior, with intelligence “below the average”’, (Hirsch, page 148). Labelling the children of parents with different skin colours as morally inferior perhaps reflected an idea that a Black person ‘having sex with’ a white person was wrong and disgusting. This idea was repeated in a report on East London children in 1944. And Apartheid was alive and well in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (see Enoch Powell’s speech 1968, Hirsch page 149).

Crossing boundaries

What is true of Black Britons is in its own way true of Gypsies. Le Bas’s book includes research into his people’s history alongside reminiscences from his amazing Nan and his own experiences both growing up and on the road. Like Hirsch, Le Bas studied at Oxford (after first gaining one at an independent school, at the instigation of his parents, the Romany artists Damien and Delaine Le Bas). And like Hirsch he has become an outsider both to his own community and to the surrounding culture.

Knowledge and inheritance from two communities carries both useful understanding and painful awareness. It is far more difficult to bridge two cultures than to entrench yourself in the tradition of one. Hirsch, well aware of her Black heritage as she went through first a highly academic independent girls’ school, and then her university life, felt that she belonged more to Africa than to Britain. She tried emigration to Ghana, her maternal grandparents’ country, but found that as a ‘mixed race Brit’ there was as much ‘you don’t fit’ in the attitude of West Africans as there had been in the white culture of Wimbledon. Before, as a teenager, she had learned that African hair cannot be straightened with the products which her European friends used; now, that her skin was too pale in Africa just as it was too dark in Britain, and her accent was wrong. But the experience of the inner person was neither African nor European. She now lives and works in London, which is of course a cosmopolitan city.

Hidden ‘Difference’

Vicky Beeching’s Undivided, tells of how, while appearing to be just another white woman from the mainstream, she ‘wore a mask’ for the first 35 years of her life. Vicky is neither Black British nor Gypsy British, but Evangelical Christian British. Yes, it’s another tribe – a tribe in the white, ‘respectable’ community, and a tribe with firm traditions, beliefs, and rules. They mightn’t like it, but Le Bas’s comments on his people, apply equally to Vicky’s birth and faith families. He says (page 265) ‘Gypsy culture can be stifling in its demands for living in line with its hidden rules’.

And Evangelical rules are not hidden. They are taught in church, in families, and in the very air they breathe.

As a young child, Vicky became aware of her attraction to girls. Becoming a teenager she was being taught that this was a sinful lifestyle choice. From then onwards she donned a ‘mask’, denying herself any close romantic relationships, terrified that to be gay and remain Christian was impossible. Didn’t God hate gay people? She believed that this ‘choice’ (or ‘demon’) could be ‘cured’ by ‘prayer ministry’. When this did not work she continued with her studies and the songwriting she had begun as a pre-teen, took a degree at Oxford, and became a very popular and successful singer-songwriter on the Evangelical church circuit. Until, while working in the USA, singing in mega churches, the stress of hiding her true self caused a breakdown in her health. She wrote Undivided in the strong conviction, and after much thoughtful research, that the Bible does not teach that being born gay is incompatible with being a Christian (unless you can be cured or remain celibate). Like Hirsch studying racial history, Vicky carefully studied the evangelical ‘proof texts’ and became convinced that their interpretation of these Scriptures is flawed.

Where ‘tradition’ comes in

Tradition, with its rules and boundaries, may have given cultural stability in the past, but looking into the sources we can see that these are based on fear of otherness rather than ‘God’s commands for living’. All three books speak of the writer’s longing to fit into the surrounding society, to have a place of acceptance rather than to be treated as a misfit and an outsider.

Is outsider status perhaps one reason why both Le Bas and Beeching chose to study Theology? A search for meaning? Would Social and Political Science or Philosophy have served them better? Both used the resources of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, as did Hirsch, searching for answers.

Whatever, there appears to be a human need to keep our cultures safe by shutting out minorities and those who pose questions by their very existence. In its extreme form we see this need functioning within nations, causing wars, genocide, and suffering. Opening our minds to look at the world through the eyes of the outsider is discouraged. Those of us who do this are likely to join them.

An elderly Traveller man whom La Bas met on the borders of Wales said, ‘The thing is, you say the border…But let me tell you something. I’m living here now, and I’ve lived over there, and my people is all here and there. And let me tell you something about that border. That ain’t no border to us, boy. And never has been. I am a Travelling man, that’s what I am. And ain’t no border stopped my people making their way.’ As the writer thinks in response ‘whether he knows it or not, he’s just struck a heavy blow against my lifelong need to know if I’m one thing or another’  (page 220).

And knowing who we are, accepting who we are, and being accepted as who we are is what we humans  want and need …

‘Reading and writing: what do writers do all day?’

Good question. From a series, asking ‘What do Artists do all day?’

In my writing – well, what do I do all day? 

Is it ‘writing’?  Actually, unwinding the story thread onto the page/screen? In reality: it’s housework, on-line-admin (dreary but dreary!), keep the fridge stocked, keep the garden from becoming a wilderness, keep in touch on-line to maintain a ‘platform’ (!), research for writing, planning for writing, thinking for writing, actual writing …

Trying to reach the point where you can enter the zone and work … without interruptions from real life, on-line life, or the cats … While lots of writing happens in my head, where it queues for the opportunity to hit the keys …

Reading is absolutely essential for writing.

Writers don’t only write reviews of other writers’ books,  and whiter about sales, marketing, and the Amazon algorithms (we do all of that): they exchange gossipy stuff like ‘what are you reading?’ (we’re hoping the others will respond ‘Your book, of course!’)

Today I found this note (to one of my on-line groups), sitting on my desktop:

“You asked the group what we’re reading. I’m reading Jessica Bell’s memoir ‘I Didn’t Mean to be a Rebel’ and Jodi Picoult’s ‘Great Small Things’. In tandem. Alternately. Together. And when I have time! Both insightful and both recommended. I’ve just finished Francis Guenette’s ‘No Compass to Right’ and am writing up a review of this lovely compassionate character-driven fourth novel in her Crater Lake series. (Yes, it’s all the heavy brigade story-wise: thoughtful, thought-provoking, and somewhat sociological … but never ever boring …) Well, you did ask …!”

Reading, like writing, is time-consuming.

But is the way you learn to write. (I happen to think it is one of the very best ways, and am grateful after nearly 50 years (gosh, it really is!) that we read Dickens at school. I never thought I’d be a writer … but looking back, reading Dickens wasn’t a waste of time in a past era where people thought differently, but a wonderful example of how to create and keep up dramatic tension! (Yes, I’d read them straight through, to find out what happened, not chapter by chapter as homework…)

Books I’ve read over the summer …

Have you, reading this, read any of these?

(You can find reviews of some the books I’ve recently read, here on the Hodgepublishing website … shall be adding more reviews, including of the Picoult and Jessica Bell’s, soon… You can also read about, or purchase my books Baby, Baby and The Labyrinth Year, on the website …)

Hearing or seeing

Do you hear or see words on a page? Does it make a difference to your reading? In my family, the creative arts are represented by music and visual arts: people don’t write, or at least, they don’t write for a living, or write fiction. Very interesting. I realise that I hear what I read, and when I write, I see it like a movie, and I hear the words as the file out onto the page. There’s the musical ear, then. Despite I don’t play an instrument or sing.

As a writer, it’s almost impossible not to read ‘critically’, studying the style without really wanting to. Cliches can’t not jump out, and slow passages beg to be edited. Authors divide into two groups: let’s call them ‘raconteurs’] and ‘experiencers’. Raconteurs take the reader to a cafe, and having ordered two coffees (let’s say), and palate of delicious cakes, proceed to tell the tale. Or maybe it’s the pub, a pint, and sandwich.

Experiencers take the reader by the hand, and draw them right inside the story. ‘Here we are, step into my book: we’ll share the lives of the characters, we’ll feel what they feel as they feel it, see what they see when they see it, run from it if it’s scary, be embraced by it if it’s friendly, scent it, taste it, live it …’ You are inside, not noticing the story arc, not stopping long enough for a character to ‘tell herself …’ anything, because she has thought it, in the instant it took:  ‘Courage! Take care! Trembling at the roaring of the dragon in the mouth of the cave, I seize my magic sword. Excalibur! I’m charging towards the beast, lungs painfully gulping breaths, legs shaking, as the sweat rolls down my back..’

I love those writers who draw you into the book. I learn from them. A good story, with a great plot, can always be a page-turner as it unfolds. But when are you inside one which gives you the all-round experience … you stop reading, to study how this works … It’s one of the things which writers do – work to improve our writing. Edit and re-write, edit and re-write…

For this of course it’s preferable to be a person who loves solitude, which I am not. To write, I must climb inside my own work in progress, meet my characters once again, and fully engage …

You can find a good article on the process of writing here: (I agree with a lot of it, but not all (for example, I definitely don’t go for the arse on your chair whatever bit (unhealthy, and battering the  brain when it’s empty and needs to relax a while doesn’t work for all of us!… but, it’s comprehensive, lively and entertaining …)

Mari’s reading Life: Four Books from my Kindle

Wrote this in the Summer House office: beautiful sunny day!

Are you a Kindle or a paperback fan? I admit to preferring paperback (easier to underline, and flip back or even forwards …). But, the Kindle’s useful: to buy and read books which aren’t stocked in our local Independent Bookstore (tiny, and very exclusive) or our large but tourist-oriented emporia – Waterstones and Blackwell’s.

So, Four books from my Kindle…

My books featured on postcards – a touch of me-publicity

I write books about women’s lives … (Baby, Baby, and The Labyrinth Year …)

I read books about women’s lives (though not exclusively – I just read one (by a man) about Mindfulness …)

But it’s a paperback, back to the Kindle…

Two are Austen re-writes: the Austen Project rolls on …

I read Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible (updated Pride and Prejudice) with interest. Northanger Abbey was a set text at school. (Ever noticed that name – North Anger Abbey?)  We were set to read, alongside Jane’s ‘spoof’, The Mysteries of Udolpho (published 1794) by Ann Radcliffe, to appreciate the irony of her take on women’s popular literature of her time. Girls back then were in a Gothic Novel phase: sound familiar?

McDermid moves further into ironic observations of teenage girls obsessed with boys, and with reading scary tales of vampires and mysterious discoveries, in this amusing story. Reviews on Amazon vary, some even in the ‘I threw the book across the room’  style. Some reviewers had not read Austen’s original.  Unless you have read Austen’s novel, how can anyone fully appreciate this clever update? McDermid exploits both the Austen writing style and the recent teenage/YA fascination with Gothic themes. Moving the action from fashionable 18th century Bath to the contemporary Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the story is a silly riot just as it should be. A fun read, well written and well observed.

The Sittenfeld, (which I read second) is set in Middle America, Cincinnati, Sittenfeld’s family home. I noticed, after I’d read it, that Amazon advertises the book as ‘humour’. Humour it may be, but satire is more like it. With far too much about specific Cincinnati eating places, roads, neighbourhoods. Sittenfeld’s Prep I enjoyed, but in her Sisters I found a sleazy and uninteresting slightly satirical take on the foibles of humanity. So how does Eligible do Pride and Prejudice?

The updated characters – Elizabeth is a thirty-something magazine journalist with a selfish married boyfriend, who on fancying Darcy indulges with him in ‘hate sex’ left a nasty taste, because it didn’t capture and update Austen.  Sexual tension between Elizabeth and Darcy in P and P expresses itself cleverly in witty dialogue, not in simple lust. The fact that this is how a 30-something might behave today doesn’t justify substituting foreplay for that Austen’s stylish sharp amusing verbal interplay. Which credits her Elizabeth with a self-confident intelligence and ability not usually allowed a woman of her time. And Austen’s subtle irony doesn’t imply contempt for those she depicts as ridiculous (Mr Collins in P and P). Darcy is attractive, yes, but in Eligible we have the updated Colin Firth in wet shirt, not the Darcy of Jane’s novel. Sittenfeld’s writing lacks stylishness. And she’s lost the plot, updating with no more reference to Austen than writing a loosely based ‘comedy of manners’ which picks out social types and holds them up for our prejudice and amusement. Austen uses wit: Sittenfeld relies on curled lip contempt.

That said, some of it is indeed quite funny, especially the lampoon of a wedding (Jane Bennett the pregnant bride) on reality TV, which brings the story pretty much to a close. But no, I wouldn’t call this, as it is advertised, ‘The Summer Book’. Plenty more out there to choose from for beach reading. Or is it simply that I don’t go for this writer’s work?

Two by One

My other two latest reads in the ‘women’s novels’ genre are delightful books by an unknown, compared to McDermid and Sittenfeld: Vivienne Tufnell’s Square Peg and Strangers and Pilgrims. Tufnell is a fellow member of ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors).

These are straight novels, placed in unusual settings and displaying a deep observation of nature (as in human) and nature (as in the wilderness around us). They are pleasure to read, as Tufnell writes well about what she knows, displaying a real eye for compassion and acute observation/insight.

Square Peg tells the story of a young woman whose husband is studying to be a Vicar. Without satire or lampooning, but with incredible insight, she accurately captivates the culture of a residential College. The men study, while wives languish producing endless babies or darting into the outside world to work in the real world of contrasting environment. It didn’t have to be a Vicar-factory of course: any residential College would do, but an extra spin comes from the religious angle.  Group hysteria among the wives with their inward looking lives, deprived of a wider community or a job, creates the crisis, for the main character, Chloe, (a civil engineer by training, but raised by a sensible, but hippy-type, Gran) is so ‘different’ in so many ways that they spook themselves she’s some kind witch. Okay, today such colleges are mixed: but it totally captures when they weren’t…

Strangers and Pilgrims explores another assorted group, who gather at a remote venue in hope of healing from emotional pain. Cleverly Tufnell weaves her story to demonstrate of how the healing takes place: not by the miracle workings of the mysterious Warden or the holy Well, but by the relating, co-operating, living together, of the six lonely and hurt individuals, over about a week. It is realistic, and down to earth, and the surprise at the end gathers up the meaning: who is this Warden, who nobody has seen?  Does s/he exist? (And it is not a predictable solution, nor is it a spirit or God …)

Tufnell deserves a wider audience. Her books are delightful: great reading on the beach, or anywhere that a person can curl up, undisturbed, with a glass of wine or a mug of tea.

And the Mindfulness book?   That’s for another time!