Overheard

The delightfully witty Ms Musings tagged me ages ago for a meme in which I had to list seven personality traits. I thought about this for a while but never could seem to come up with seven, and I wasn’t all that sure about the authenticity of the ones I did identify. So finally I decided on a variation on a theme. Below you’ll find seven representative snippets from my life, and you can judge my character for yourselves.

1.  From a job interview, which was nearly over before it began:

Him: How do you do, I’m the master, and here on my right is the tutor for modern languages. We’re both astrophysicists.
Me: Oh how lovely. You’re practically in the arts.

2. From an email from my academic publisher:

‘It is quite extraordinary how much your emails are representative of you (the you that you represent when you meet others, or … this could be protracted).’

3. From reviews of an academic book:

‘An empathetic teacher, she frequently introduces a ‘difficult’ movement or work by adopting what she imagines to be the perspective of her audience, injecting a dose of humour that may amuse some readers (while irritating others).’

‘Written in a witty, incisive style which punctuates first-rate research with amusing asides, this book is far too enjoyable (I read it on holiday around Italy) to seem like serious academic reading.’

4. From an aborted attempt at cognitive behavioural therapy, which I loathed, but which remained archived on cassette tapes (I threw them out when I moved college room):

Him: This fear you say you have. Well you don’t have it. If you found yourself broken down in the middle of a traffic jam, you’d be fine.’
Me: No I wouldn’t.
Him: Yes you would. You’d go and sit on the side of the road until the AA came.
Me: I might do what I needed to, but I wouldn’t feel fine exactly. I’d be overwhelmed with anxiety.
Him: No you wouldn’t.
Me: Yes I would.

5. From a conversation with my son:

Me: Would you say we were a critical family?
Him: Ha! You? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you criticize me, not even when I deserve it.
Me: Oh, but. Well, I suppose I don’t think you ever do things that deserve criticism. Apart maybe from French, I think you try at whatever you do.
Him: Well you’re right about the French.

6. From a conversation with my husband at 10.45pm one evening as my son and his two friends walk out the door:

Me: So they’re going to spend the night at Stefan’s?
Him: I know, I thought they were going to Fergus’s.
Me: And what did Stefan say as they left?
Him: I asked him if it was okay with his parents and he said he was sure it would be fine. This is when I’m glad we didn’t have a girl.
Me: Oh no. Unless there are boys involved, girls make sensible decisions. I can imagine this lot being turned away by Stefan’s parents and then thinking that the park looks good.
Him: [Brightening] They’ve got their sleeping bags. They’d be okay.
Me:  One of my old school friends used to tell me about the evenings he spent down on the railway lines with his mates. They discovered a hollow under one of the tracks, dug it out deeper, and then lay in it while trains thundered by overhead. I told him, “If you ever tell that story to my son in a way that makes it look attractive, I will kill you.”

7. From a friend’s email:

‘I have to say you have a very catching way of giving tantalizing snapshots of your life in your blog. It’s not full-on revelation – it’s like the occasional emergence of real life, which meshes intriguingly with the insight into who you are via your book reviews. It reminds me of that Colette quote about playing cache-cache with the reader.’

Update: I don’t know where my head is at the moment; let’s be charitable and put it down to late summer madness. The charming John Ray at Bookflap interviewed me last week and if there is anything at all that you don’t know about me after this meme, I’m pretty sure it’s answered here.  Meant to add a link to this the first time around….sorry!

Promised Pictures

Ages ago I promised pictures from my new room. Well, yesterday I was in college and did my best. It was a beautiful day, which was lovely if you were there, but problematic for cack-handed photographers like me with the sun coming from all the wrong directions. Anyhow, I’m in a crescent-shaped court on the far side of college, that you reach by going through a rather elegant archway. If you go through and look backwards, this is what you see.

Entry Arch

The courtyard you are looking into is one of the main thoroughfares of college. To the left (out of shot) is the forecourt porter’s lodge, where the fellows collect their post, and alongside it, the chapel. Opposite, on the right (out of shot), is the college library. I did try to take photos of these parts of the building as they are all rather gorgeous, but they are also huge and refused to accommodate themselves to my viewfinder. The windows of my room look into this courtyard, and I can see it’s going to be difficult to get anything done with so much people watching on offer.

Anyway, here’s the entrance to my new staircase.

This part of college has recently been refurbished, and you can see that the gardens are unfinished. Well, there’s just two big expanses of earth at present, but hopefully the gardeners will get to work in the autumn.

So, you head up the stairs and for once, I’m not at the top of the building but only on the first floor. Now, I’m really sorry about this shot, but my room is dark-paneled, as I’ve mentioned, and the sun was streaming in, and it was difficult to get the camera to handle the contrast (that’s my excuse).

My New College Room

There’s another armchair to the right, with a coffee table between it and the sofa. And behind me is the fireplace with the two cylindrical lights above and either side. This was impossible to get a decent shot of, so you’ll have to imagine it. My friend who lived in the room a while back said it was like living in a cigar box, but I rather like my wood-paneled womb. And if I can get hold of a maintenance man to put my pictures up, then those walls are going to look a lot better.

I’m very grateful for all the suggestions from the previous post for room cleansing, and I will certainly enact a little ritual, particularly if I can find a way to disable the smoke alarms….  My son goes back to school next week, and I’ll be returning to work. If any of you out there are having difficulties with your essay-writing skills, or fancy a little chat about French literature, drop me an email and we’ll fix a time to meet – only kidding! Shame you can’t come over for tea, though.

Queens and Curses

Blogging friends, you are marvelous. Thanks to your help, I now have a whole list of books that are going to keep me cheerful and entertained over the next few weeks. And thanks to your suggestions, I have kicked off that list with Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, which is every bit as delightful as you had promised. I read it yesterday in a matter of hours and found it a little comic gem, but also an astute satire into the roots of philistinism.

You may have already heard the premise of the novella. It concerns Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, who one day, in hot pursuit of her rebel corgis, tracks them down outside the mobile library of Westminster. Climbing aboard to apologise for their behaviour, the Queen finds only the librarian and one member of staff, Norman from the kitchens, who is checking out a photography book on Cecil Beaton. Feeling obligated, she plumps on a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, a name familiar to her from the honours list, and borrows it. This book doesn’t really hit the mark; it’s dry and difficult and the Queen gets through it out of duty, the great guiding principle of her existence. The following week, events conspire to ensure she returns the book in person, and this time she has the happy thought to take out a Nancy Mitford – ‘Novels seldom came as well connected as this and the Queen felt correspondingly reassured’ – and this is a great success. ‘Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work.’ Instead, books exert their spectacular alchemy on the Queen and she becomes an addict, perpetually late to engagements, and waving to the crowds from her carriage whilst keeping her book low enough in her lap to be unobserved.

And what’s interesting here is that the web of folk who surround her, and whose business it is to maintain the public image of the Queen, grow extremely hostile to her reading habits. Her missing copy of Anita Brookner turns out to have been removed by security and exploded; Norman, who becomes her reading guide, is eventually sidelined into obscurity – a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia; the servants fear that her declining interest in accessorizing her outfits and her tendency to jot thoughts down in her notebook are indications of early Alzheimer’s. The biggest culprit in all this is her private secretary, Sir Kevin, a man obsessed with keeping the Queen relevant and focused, and who fears reading as an elitist and isolating pursuit. ‘To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it,’ said Sir Kevin, ‘if the pursuit were less…. selfish.’

And here’s where the premise of Bennett’s novella reveals itself not just as a comic tour-de-force that unbuttons the starchy dignity of royalty, but as a brilliant dig at the underlying cultural disdain for reading. Whilst it may seem that the Queen is someone who is endlessly entertained by others, it becomes apparent that the main force of her duty is to be the tireless provider of an audience. This is particularly evident in the amusing depiction of her relationship with the Prime Minister, a boorish sort, who (like so many before him) just needs the Queen to be a pair of listening ears. His delight at joining the Queen on holiday in Balmoral quickly turns to irritation when it becomes apparent her only interest is in making her way through the Scott Moncrieff version of Proust. As soon as it’s clear that reading is a pleasure, and one undertaken in a solitary state, it starts to get people’s backs up. If the Queen were reading for duty, for some abstract purpose, then it might be deemed acceptable. But reading as a delight, and as one that risks enlightening the reader by broadening the mind or opening the heart, is understood to be a source of displeasure and distrust to the mass of common folk. Bennett is far too clever a writer to express this outright, but the foolishness of such a stance, and the patronizing attitude of those who hold it, is beautifully encapsulated in the interactions between the Queen and her advisors.

Undeniably, reading does change the Queen. It makes her traditional round of duties exquisitely tedious; and at the same time it transforms her sympathy for the people she meets. The Queen might be there for the people, but the unique and bizarre situation she inhabits means that she is not of the people. Reading transports her into a world she has never known, but it also gives expression to feelings she has never been able to share. In her notebook, the Queen writes: ‘Though I do not always understand Shakespeare, Cordelia’s “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth” is a sentiment I can readily endorse. Her predicament is mine.’

Like the best comedy, this brief novella is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, whilst being simultaneously touching, subversive and fierce. I was so impressed by the acuity and concision with which it shows the paradoxes of reading, its transformative power, and its greedy demand on the reader’s seclusion, its ability to take people closer to one another in spirit whilst highlighting their divisions. And this is all wrapped up in a neat little package of pure stylistic economy. I’m so glad I read it, and I get the feeling I’ll be reading it again.

Now, having proved you can solve any problem, dear blogging friends, I have a real facer for you. You know I’ve just moved rooms? Well, I find out that the person who inhabited them before me has just ended his marriage and the person before that fell ill with MS. I fear they may be cursed. Does anyone have a good idea how to exorcise evil spirits? All suggestions gratefully received, as ever….

Don’t Go Down To The Woods

So I’ve hit a little pothole here in the superhighway of reading. I suppose it began back when I was reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Some novels are just better interleaved with different books or else the sameness of tone can get a bit too much. Well, I found Rand to be like that and diluted her with Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World (published as The Bear Boy in the UK). Now the Ozick was reasonably enjoyable; excellent quality of writing as one might expect from a Pulitzer prize winner, but highly episodic in structure, something I’ve noticed before as being far more prevalent in American novels than British ones. And the story focuses on a Jewish family of startling unloveliness, all spikes and prickles and subterfuge with a helping of despotism and madness on the side. It was just about holding me intellectually but once I’d reached a point of no return with the Rand, I decided to plow forward with The Fountainhead exclusively, because otherwise one gets the sense with a 700-page novel that one might never finish it. So I put the Ozick down and have been notably reluctant to pick it up again.

After Rand I needed a mental palate cleanser and so read a crime fiction novel by Andrew Taylor, Naked to the Hangman. Now this was fantastic. Taylor is a relatively prolific writer and so has a number of series to his name. This novel was something like the eighth in his Lydmouth series, good old-fashioned police procedural stuff, set in the 1950s in a small town near the Welsh border. The stories focus on Detective Inspector Richard Thornhill, married, ambitious, good at his job, and to some extent on Jill Francis, a newspaper journalist with whom he conducts an affair over the course of the novels (it’s over by this one). The affair is an ongoing subplot that is woven around the different cases that provide the focus for each individual novel and I only mention it because it is so well done. The atmosphere of the 1950s is brilliantly conveyed and I love his writing style, so clean and crisp and economic. This novel saw Jill and Edith Thornhill forming an uneasy alliance to help Richard, who seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They don’t know it, but some old trouble he got caught up in as a rookie officer in Palestine has returned to haunt him and his life is in danger. At the same time tensions are running high in the town over the annual youth dance and the steadily rising floodwaters. It was a great read and one of those undemanding, thoroughly enjoyable novels.

After that I still had a taste for crime and so I began In The Woods by Tara French. I’d heard so much about this novel and everything positive, but after the neat, concise style of Andrew Taylor the writing seemed a bit overheated at first. Not that I mean this in a particularly critical way; it was just an abrupt change of style. So I put it to one side briefly to read Molly Fox’s Birthday, which as you know I loved. After the Deirdre Madden, the writing felt fine in the French book and I quickly got into the story. Now those of you who regularly visit this blog know I have a bit of a problem with terrible things happening to children. And because it’s dramatic and designed to keep readers turning the pages, the plotline of terrible things happening to children is utterly pervasive in crime fiction these days. You have to go fifty years back in the past to a time when children weren’t the intolerably precious commodity they are now to find a story where they’re irrelevant. For those people who haven’t already read the French novel, the narrator is Rob Ryan, a detective in the Dublin police force, who was involved in an unresolved crime during his childhood. At the age of twelve he and his two best friends went into the local woods and the two best friends disappeared, never to be found again. Rob – or Adam as he was in those days – was recovered much later on, apparently unharmed but covered in blood and suffering from amnesia. Now another crime has been committed in the same place, the murder of a twelve-year-old girl whose body has been found on an ancient sacrifical stone altar, which disquietingly shows faint traces of blood that may come from the old crime. Rob has never recovered his memory, but as the detectives hunt down the killer, and Rob continues to hide his former identity, so the sense of both external and internal menace intensifies.

This is a very good book, as many other bloggers have testified. So piercing is the sense of intolerable threat that I found myself having nightmares about it last night. Now how embarrassing is that? To be my age and still to be prone to nightmares after scary books! And of course now I don’t know what to do. I want to keep reading, as it’s usually best to go through the fire and out the other side, and I’d like to know what happens. But at the same time, I have a strong inclination to set it aside again for a couple of days because frankly I’m shattered and reading is supposed to be fun. The obvious thing to do would be to retrieve the Ozick and keep going with that, but I can’t say that it appeals right now. It’s also a spiky, uncomfortable sort of book, and what I would like is something soothing and, if possible, funny. Has anybody got any good ideas? I’d prefer something short, fiction rather than non-fiction, and I don’t really want something frivolous, like P. G. Wodehouse, more something charming and kind. Any thoughts?