I’m sorry, blogging friends, I should have made it clear in those first sentences of the previous post that I wasn’t leaving immediately. But this IS the last post now, so you needn’t worry that you’ll be saying goodbye and bon voyage endlessly!

But a few final reviews before I go. First up, Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton. We have long been big fans of Crompton in this family as my son has loved the Just William stories since he was little. He still listens to them on tape while falling asleep at night and they have entertained us on many a long car trip. I had no idea that Crompton had written adult novels, however, until alerted to the fact by the wondrous blog world, and Danielle’s posts in particular. Well, Family Roundabout is everything I had hoped it would be. It’s the story of two families, the Fowlers and the Willoughbys, each headed up by powerful if very different matriarchs. Mrs Fowler is gentle and distracted and infinitely loving. Mrs Willoughby is strong and fearsome and completely controlling, and the difference in their managerial style, particularly in the absence of husbands (both are widows when the novel begins) means that they are set up against each other as alternative possibilities of mothering. In the early stages of the novel, Mrs Fowler’s approach seems infinitely preferable. Mrs Willoughby’s children are completely under the thumb, unable – and not in any case permitted – to think for themselves, which causes all kinds of problems for her daughters in particular, whose husbands justifiably resent the extent of their mother-in-law’s meddling in their lives. Mrs Fowler, by contrast, remains the epitome of loving kindness in her children’s minds, and nowhere is quite as wonderful as by her side. Her children are more disparate in temperament but, as the story progresses, it turns out they are not noticeably better at dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I call them children, but we’re talking about young adults on the brink of their independent lives here, and the narrative follows their passage through the complications of love affairs, marriages, decisions about what profession to undertake. The families are joined (awkwardly) when bossy, smug Helen Fowler marries the eldest Willoughby son, Max, a jolly, mindless type who now runs the family business. This is a triumphant union, against which their siblings measure themselves. Anice, Helen’s sister, burns with old, tenacious jealousy; Oliver, Max’s brother, tries to summon the spirit to evade the family business and find an occupation that’s truer to his spirit; whilst Peter, Helen’s brother, struggles in marriage to the manipulative, hysterical Belle, who uses her beauty to fulfill her almost psychotic need for fraught emotional battles. As the years pass, the generation of grandchildren grows up to face its own difficulties – a hated boarding school, the uncertainty about a lost father, a sad, shrewish mother. It’s a book about reaping what we sow, but it’s also about the way that life, in its brutality, outwits us all, but provides us, in its unbidden bounty, with a series of crux points in which we have the chance to change our ways, learn our lessons, or expand into a new level of being. Mostly, Mrs Fowler’s and Mrs Willoughby’s children make the usual human choices; they take the easy route, the one that salves their pride or conforms to their egotistic image, and thus they end up with decidedly mixed fortunes.

In the end, Crompton is exquisitely even-handed in her evaluation of different kinds of mothering. Both Mrs Fowler and Mrs Willoughby suffer and emerge with dignity, their children still loyal and more or less loving, even if somewhat bruised from life’s collateral damage. This was a delightful read, as I’m coming to expect from Persephone, compassionate, insightful and most of all, very amusing. Crompton has a glorious turn of phrase, which I would be quoting here, if I hadn’t already lent the book to my mother.

The other books I must review are a bit unusual. The Ox-Tale books are four collections of short stories (Earth, Water, Fire and Air) that feature the work of some of the best and most exciting authors writing in English at the moment. For instance, the collection entitled Earth features stories from (among others) Kate Atkinson, Jonathon Coe, Marina Lewycka, Rose Tremain and Hanif Kureishi; the collection entitled Water features Zoe Heller, Esther Freud, William Boyd, Joanna Trollope and Michael Morpurgo. Vikram Seth has written a cycle of element poems that are spread across the volumes, too. They’re the product of a collaboration between Profile Books, Oxfam and Hay literary festival to raise money to combat poverty; all royalties from books sold will be going to charity. Frankly, I would be behind this venture on the strength of the writing alone but the good cause makes them irresistible.

One reason why I wanted to read them was as a way of sampling several authors who interest me but whose novels I have yet to tackle. The majority of the pieces compiled here are short stories, but in some cases authors have submitted a self-contained piece from their work in progress. In the Fire volume, I read a piece by William Sutcliffe about a hopeless father left to look after his two small children on the beach that was funny and true, until it suddenly turned dark – that’s a novel I’ll be looking out for. In the Earth volume, I read a story about the death of Tolstoy by Rose Tremain that made me wonder why I had ever held back from her work. Hanif Kureishi provided a story about a grown man meeting his long dead father in the pub and returning home with him, giving him unexpected and illuminating insight into his childhood. I’d be interested in reading something longer by him now. Geoff Dyer is another author I’ve long wanted to read, and his contribution, an essay about three potentially disastrous events that occurred to him but from which he escaped unscathed, is clever, bleak and compelling; his work is most certainly on my list. But naturally, I’ve also been enjoying stories from authors I love. Zoe Heller wrote an acidic little story, ‘What She Did On Her Summer Vacation’ that details a shocking loss of innocence, and Kate Atkinson’s extraordinary story, ‘Lucky We Live Now’ is touched by the fantastic as a young woman realizes that everything she owns is reverting to the state of nature from which it was made. That’s been the standout story of any of the collections so far and shows that she’s a writer at the height of her powers. I’m looking forward to the contributions I have yet to read from Ali Smith, Esther Freud and Lionel Shriver.

These stories are really edgy and contemporary and enticing and the quality of the writing so far has been excellent. I’ll be taking one of the books with me on holiday, although what goes too is still undecided. I will probably take The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and possibly Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. But then I’m torn between Anita Shreve’s Testimony, Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française, Owen Sheers’ Resistance, Tana French’s In The Woods and Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves. Aren’t decisions tough? Well, I hope everyone in the blogworld has a peaceful and fulfilling fortnight – take care and enjoy your reading while I’m gone.

Next week we are going away on holiday, and I seem to have a pile of books I haven’t reviewed. What have I been talking about here lately? Anyway, I must get through them because I’ll forget them otherwise, and I fully intend to spend a good part of my holiday stuck in a book, thus clocking up yet another backlog.

First up, two very different thrillers. River of Darkness by Rennie Airth is set in 1921, under the long shadow of the First World War. It opens with the discovery of a massacre at a manor house in Surrey, the victims all stabbed apart from the lady of the house who has been killed in a strange and disturbing manner. It’s a gruesome crime and a seemingly motiveless one, as the family was highly respectable and much loved in the area. Airth’s novel features Detective Inspector John Madden, a man haunted by the horrors of the trenches who is using his job as a shield against his own despair. For some time the collected police forces, both local and metropolitan are stumped, and Madden and his boss, Chief Inspector Sinclair, know they need results before the case is taken from them and placed in the hands of Chief Superintendent Sampson, a man who puts his own PR before procedure and who they are convinced will take an unimaginative line on the case. But a few breakthroughs put them on the trail of a very damaged man, and their unorthodox use of the new science of psychoanalysis starts to uncover a picture of a criminal who will stop at nothing to satisfy his desires.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It creates a strong sense of place and beautifully reproduces the atmosphere of the early 1920s. It’s also extremely well plotted, inexorably drawing its strings together and then winding them tight as the climax is approached. Yet for all its pace, it’s a spacious book with plenty of time to present and develop characters. John Madden gets himself a love interest in the feisty local doctor, Helen Blackwell, and the emerging portrait of the criminal is so cleverly and delicately done. I loved it; very superior crime fiction.

The second thriller was a most unusual one. Bluethroat Morning by Jacqui Lofthouse is the story of Harry Bliss, a man who cannot get over his wife’s suicide and who, six years later, decides to return to the lonely beach in Norfolk where she took her life to solve the mystery surrounding her death. He’s aided in this by a new love interest, Helen, the 19-year-old daughter of his best friend, a girl who really ought to be out of bounds, but who joins forces with him in part because she’s as obsessed by his wife as he is. The enigmatic center of the novel is Alison Oakley, a once-famous model who left the profession dangerously emaciated. Rebuilding her life, she meets Harry, marries him and writes a bestselling novel about anorexia. So far so good, but faced with the obstacle of the second novel, her self-esteem tumbles again and Harry fears for her state of mind. And then, she comes across an old family photo that shows Harry’s great-grandfather and his second wife, the lovely Arabella who committed suicide by walking into the sea. Alison determines to find out as much as she can about the woman and travels alone to Norfolk to work on her novel, only to end up in, a surprising twist of fate, burning the pages she wrote and re-enacting Arabella’s tragic death.

So as you can begin to see, this is a novel of recurrent patterns, of obsession and of recreating stories from the past. Harry falls in love with Helen because she looks so similar to Arabella, and Helen has read the newspaper reports about Harry that unjustly claimed he caused Alison’s death by neglecting her in her depression and failing to support her in her work. Their edgy relationship, a strange mix of passion and antagonism, propels them on a headlong dash to Norfolk to the cottage where Alison lived and the strange local character, the 98-year-old Ern Higham, who seems to hold all the answers. There’s a great list of secondary characters including a journalist with a grudge against Harry and an American academic seeking to write the biography of Alison’s life. This is a beautifully written novel that moves at a slow, dreamy pace, building up layers of suspense. It makes you wait for the answers, but they are worth it when they come -  it’s a sophisticated, intense read.

Finally, a word about Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones. This novel really does deserve all the accolades it’s been given. What a classy, clever story this is, but you do have to keep your wits about you reading it. It opens with Polly, aged 19, staring at the painting on her wall (of ‘Fire and Hemlock’) and finding a door open in her mind onto a second, hidden set of memories. These take her nine years back in time to a difficult period in her life when her two self-centred parents are divorcing and she is spending most of her time at her grandmother’s house. Playing with her friend, Nina, they gate crash a funeral at the somewhat forbidding manor house at the end of the lane, where Polly is befriended by Thomas Lynne, a man who seems as out of place as she is. Tom, a grown-up, a cellist and possibly the most unlikely but charming hero of fiction, joins Polly in her favourite activity of story-weaving, harmless enough until it seems that the stories they create are coming true. And the more Polly gets to know Tom, the more she realizes that he is bound by curious and worrying ties to the owners of the grand house where they first met, Morton and Laurel Leroy. They seem to have a magical hold over him, and Tom’s safety depends on Polly giving him up as a friend.

This is a covert love story that delights in inserting fantastic elements into recognizable reality. It’s funny and completely engaging and transports the reader effortlessly into a plausible, supernatural world. The ending is complicated, however, and Wynne Jones just loves the art of subtle suggestion. I think I understood about 75% of it, but the effect of this was only to make me want to read the novel over again. It was such a pleasant journey. If you enjoy YA fiction, this is a must, and if you’ve never read any, it’s a great place to start.

Phew! I’ll do some more reviews on Sunday – as you can appreciate, it’s been a great stretch lately.

If I ever happen to be in conversation with a woman expecting her first baby, the chances are I’ll say something encouraging. I’ll talk about how much fun children can be, how much they make you laugh, and how, as a mother, you discover depths of strength and patience and compassion that you never thought you had. But I don’t talk about the relentlessness of a child’s demands, the hollow exhaustion you drag from day to day when things are going badly, the feverish anxieties, and that strange self-dislocation that takes place when you realize you’ve not asked yourself what you want for so long that you don’t even know any more. Earlier this week I read a book by Susan Maushart called The Mask of Motherhood, which suggests that by telling only half a story, mothers do a disservice not only to themselves, but also to the community of women at large. The urge to downplay the darker side to being a parent creates a mask of motherhood that can lead many women into making poor decisions for themselves, and governments, employers and fathers into making poor decisions on their behalf.

The problems begin with the unrealistic expectations we take into parenthood, Maushart argues. Being ill-informed about the nature of the task that lies ahead is never good, and particularly not when the task is a life-changing one. Our culture sends us messages about mothering that promise the possibility of effortlessly combining child care with work, leisure and relationships, messages that are pleasant to receive but which make the reality of modern parenting actually much harder to bear. Maushart argues that the hidden truths create all kinds of dissonance, widening the gap between the generations, between people who have children and people who don’t, and also between the import of the verbs ‘to mother’ and ‘to father’. She offers a list of some of the effects of the mask of motherhood, for instance, ‘the values of a culture that glorifies the ideal of motherhood but takes for granted the work of motherhood’, ‘media images of Supermom, complete with briefcase’, ‘the secret worry of the new mother that “I wasn’t cut out for this|”, and the gnawing fear that it shows’, ‘child-care manuals that imply that “easy” babies are made, not born, and that an infant’s digestive tract is somehow linked by fiber-optic cable to its mother’s state of mind’, ‘the tolerance of women for the selective deafness of fathers at 3.00 am, especially in the belief that “a man needs his sleep” so he can “go to work in the morning”. That’s just a few of the highlights, and they show up a pattern of quite ferocious self-denial on the mother’s part, as she denies her right to complaint, to uncertainty and to weakness in the burning desire to be good; a good mother, a credit to society, a pillar of her family.

I found Maushart’s arguments very convincing, not least because my own memories of becoming a mother remain fraught with the blows to my self-esteem that accompanied the traumatic upheaval of giving birth. I was most certainly not expecting what came my way with the baby, most of all the sense that I had somehow lost my life and my sense of self. In retrospect I can see why I felt the transition so keenly. I was always someone who liked to have the feeling of control, which is the first thing to go when you have a newborn. I also gain all my deepest pleasures from solitary pursuits – reading, writing, even just being alone. With a child, these look like the worst forms of selfishness. And I also had high standards for myself when it came to nurture. I was good at looking after people, and would expect a great deal from myself even if dealing with a complete stranger. You can imagine the standards I set when it came to my own child. Maushart suggests that ‘the neediness of the helpless newborn presents a woman with the ultimate test of her fitness to nurture. Even for the “best” most settled baby, the new mother must confront the realities of being on 24-hour-a-day call; of long periods without proper rest; of the physically grueling routines […] In this virtual frenzy of caring, many women have reported feeling as if they have ceased to function, or even exist, in their own right.’ Well you can tick that box for me. And like many women, my response to all this was to stop looking after myself, to think of my own comfort, rest and pleasure as luxuries for which I had no more time or energy.

I was also in a very isolated position. Our families lived a distance away, I’d recently begun a PhD, a lonely occupation at best, and not one that any other woman I knew with a baby was undertaking, and we lived in a village with an ageing demographic. There weren’t other families around. And I’m sure Mister Litlove won’t mind if I mention here that his response to having a baby was to spend a lot of time at work, and to keep the best of himself in storage in the office whenever he was at home. I had full responsibility, zero knowledge and no confidence: my belief was that everything the baby did that was negative was because of me. It didn’t help that my only support at this time was Penelope Leach and her bible of childcare, the only book that has ever terrorized me and which I would have done better to chuck out the window of a fast-moving vehicle. To this day I remember Leach’s calm assurance that within a few weeks a good mother could easily learn to distinguish her babies’ cries, and recognize hunger from thirst or tiredness or distress. Well, this did not help my state of mind one little bit. I was a linguist; even though I knew no Italian, Dutch or Spanish, I could figure them out in simple configurations, from context, similarity to other Latin-based languages, and good guessing. By contrast, I had as much chance of reading my child’s cries as I had of simultaneous translation of Russian or Arabic. I press the old, old bruise and ouch, yes, I still bear a grudge towards Penelope Leach. She was incapable of writing a sentence that did not lower my spirits even further.

And what would have made me feel better? The truth, undoubtedly. Hearing it said, and being able to express it myself. If only I had known other women with babies who were prepared to look me in the eye and say ‘it’s a living nightmare some days, isn’t it?’ To this day I have a horror of people who gloss their condition, who declare how marvelous their lives are. I never understood it (and probably still fail to give it enough credit) as a coping strategy in and of itself, a way to keep one’s head above water. I wouldn’t ever say it for fear that someone like me would be the recipient, someone quietly, silently berating herself for being continuously unequal to the occasion, of failing at this seemingly simplest, most natural of processes. I’m not sure you can ever adequately prepare a woman for the identity crisis that is becoming a mother, but you can encourage her to put the right kind of framework in place. To ensure she has good, dependable help available at all times, to divide up the burden of responsibility fairly with her partner, to strengthen the bonds with friends, particularly those with children as their experience and sympathy can be invaluable, to write down on a piece of paper a list of the things she thinks are basic nurturing necessities in her own life and to refer to it regularly, and NOT to dismiss them as silly indulgences.

I do think it’s extremely important that mothers have the right and the opportunity to express themselves about the negative aspects of their lives, and that the audience does not recoil in horror at witnessing the glorious image of serene motherhood besmirched. Otherwise, cooped up alone with her children, there is always the risk that the negativity will tumble out, unwillingly, unwittingly, onto them. No mother would ever do this if she could avoid it, but everyone has their limits. And once mothers have got things off their chests, they need two books. A copy of Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood, so they know they are not alone, and a copy of Sarah Napthali’s Buddhism for Mothers, which is by far and away the calmest, most compassionate, most comforting child care book I’ve ever come across, and believe me, I’ve read a few these days. I wish I’d had them both fourteen years ago.

Michael Jackson’s dramatic death last week has, quite rightly, induced people across the world to dig out the recordings and the video footage that he made when he was at the height of his popularity. When he was at the top of his game, he was spectacular, which makes it terribly sad to think of where he ended up: a frail 8 stone, a virtual recluse, a curiously childlike man, dislocated from reality and seeming so isolated and alone, despite that legendary status and the supposed loyalty of his fans. It was like the wave of adulation that crashed over him in the 80s really did leave him all washed up.

Funnily enough I’ve been reading up on Britney Spears over the weekend for my motherhood project and it’s the same plot, even if the details are different. Let’s leave aside the question of respective musical ability; both became famous in part, at least, for being outstanding performers. It’s been the strain of conforming so rigorously to the image the public fall in love with, and the tension created when they’ve tried to alter it, that’s caused them such devastating problems. The more famous you become, the more suffocating the restrictions on your personality. The usual run of mistakes people make – get drunk, yell at friends or partners, fall into ill-advised marriages, trust the wrong people, have a soul-destroying haircut, get seduced for a while by a cult philosophy, all these silly, foolish, usual things get blown out of proportion by a gossip-hungry media into the storylines of mental, physical and emotional breakdown. It’s not surprising that real breakdown follows hot on its heels. Think what it would be like never to be able to make a mistake without the critical, judgmental eyes of the whole world upon you, stories circulating that sell the worst speculation as truth, every tiny thing blown out of proportion and no benefit of the doubt given, ever.

And we just can’t imagine what it’s like to be followed by the paparazzi. In the Britney biography I’ve been reading, the author suggests that readers picture themselves on the tube train at rush hour, only everyone crowding into the carriage is holding a camera, pointed at you. And you have to walk through this, even to get a newspaper from the shop. If you’re in a car, there are thirty cars tailing you, racing you at the lights to get a photo, completely lawless because the cost of a ticket is so negligible compared to the value of a photo. You are a prisoner in your expensive home or on lock-down in a smart hotel, and who you are, not to mention what you have to do every minute of every day, is not a decision under your control. Fame has become a very ugly Faustian pact. I find it extraordinary that anyone would choose this or consider it an achievement.

So to become a performer, and particularly a famous one, you need tremendous emotional resources and, ideally, a remarkably rock-solid strength of character. And, alas, the very character that makes for a magical performer, is the same character that’s vulnerable to the worst side of show biz. I was reading a book entitled Secrets of Performing Confidence by Andrew Evans, an ex-professional musician and Director of an arts psychology consultants, who help performers of all kinds overcome their difficulties. Evans begins his book with a detailed profile of the performing type, drawing on the Myers-Briggs personality profile and the 16 personality traits identified by Raymond Cattell. What would you expect to find in the profile of an artistic person who’s attracted to performance? The trio of high sensitivity, high suspicion and high imagination is wholly typical, often lending a melodramatic quality to their interactions, and a hint of paranoia or hypochondria. But they are also forthright and lack shrewdness (being more interested in truth and self-expression). They are mostly spontaneous and impulsive (only classical musicians and dancers proving themselves exceptions, due to all that dogged practice), which means they hone into the feeling of the moment and react beautifully on stage, but are often disorganized and chaotic once outside the performing arena. They are weak at living in the present or following step-by-step routines, something that the majority of the population can do perfectly well, and so they are regularly criticized for being impractical, unrealistic and flaky. And, endowed with a certain internal distance from themselves, often more introverted than one might expect, they are often their own harshest critics. All in all, a highly performative personality is a sensitive, guileless, unworldly one, that is often prone to anxieties and highly vulnerable to both criticism and self-criticism.

Then there’s the urge to perform that often comes from having been witness to a moment of artistic magic in early youth. Touched by the powerful emotions that a performance can evoke – especially that harmonizing quality that moves a whole watching community, and the belief in the possibility of transcending the normal human condition of flawed, grounded ordinariness – the would-be performer is ready to give everything they have in the service of a transient dream. Anybody who’s ever had any artistic aspirations, or indeed anyone who’s ever had to perform on a more everyday stage, like an interview or a work presentation, or any kind of mediating role, knows the urge that grips you at the point where you have to step up and be better, brighter, sparklier than your usual self. It’s strong medicine, with unexpected side effects. I was particularly interested in the section on the different kinds of life scripts that can come and derail people and prevent them from performing their best. I think these have a relevance for anyone who has ever wondered what holds them back from doing their best:

a)    The ‘Unfulfilled Greatness’ model – if a child has been given too much indiscriminate praise a moment of reckoning with reality will inevitably come. It can cause a vacillation between the ‘grandiose’ and the ‘inadequate’ which may result in the performer blaming the audience for failing to be sufficiently appreciative. Evans suggests we deal with this by accepting that we all have superior and inferior feelings, and then attempting to separate out the fantasy content from reality. From that point on, we may be able to identify and work towards a realistic level of achievement.

b)    ‘If Only’ and ‘Yes But’ – describes the construction of plausible arguments that defer achievement – if only I could lose ten pounds, etc. It avoids the unpleasant anxiety of having to expose ourselves to reality and judgement. The antidote is to ‘make a start somewhere, and then judge one’s progress from there.’

c)    The ‘Rebel’ script – rebellious behaviour is often associated with creative, eccentric individuals who want to change the state of popular thinking. But rebellion also alienates people, often the parents and authorities whom the individual has secretly been wanting to please. Performers need to be loved by at least somebody, Evans says, but often the people their rebellious actions end up enchanting, are not actually the people they wanted to be loved and seen by, and so emptiness and frustration result. Seek some emotional maturity, this guide suggests, grow beyond the need for the approval of others less and be discerning with regard to irrelevant criticism.

d)    The ‘I’m a Fraud’ script – the province of late starters, who were scarred by childhood memories of others always being better, more able, or somehow magically more praised than they ever were. They find it hard to think of themselves as high achievers and are simply waiting to be unmasked. Sometimes this script is like a ‘fear of success’, but that’s a shame, as such people are often rather talented and able.

e)    The Guilt and Punishment script – memories of being criticized in childhood for showing off or having too much fun, or being insufficiently serious can result in the individual feeling the need in later life, in the absence of regulating parents, to punish themselves with stress and anxiety. Self-sabotage can creep in. The answer Evans proposes is to identify the voice of guilt, get it out into the open, own it and consciously, deliberately discard it.

f)    Approach-Avoidance – the closer you get to your goal, the more it holds you up, like footballers who shoot wide at the goal mouth, or actors who plan to do an audition weeks ahead but back out at the last minute. Evans seems to be suggesting that everyone comes a cropper on this at some point or another. His advice is to take some conscious decisions. Treat yourself like a parachutist, who feels worst in the moment before getting into the plane. After that tough decision has been made, the drill takes over. A positive commitment to action helps taut, anxious emotions to relax their stranglehold.

What all of this shows us, is that performing puts us in touch with some of our deepest fears and anxieties, and fears about really fundamental and important things – our sense of self-worth, our ability to act effectively, the nature of our deepest desires. I think that’s why it’s such an emotional experience to witness someone in performance who’s soaring, who’s managed the extraordinary trick of unclipping all the harnesses that keep us regularly earthbound. But it also means that performers who crash do so with profound consequences. It makes me think very sadly about the structure in our culture that artistic performers have to contend with – the brutal criticism they encounter, the big business dominating all artistic endeavour that would wring fragile creativity dry in order to reap rich rewards, the intrusive, unjust, unkind world of the media. Well, I guess we get the creativity and the entertainment we deserve. But just imagine for a moment how the careers of Michael Jackson and Britney Spears might have gone, had they had compassionate, sensitive handling. Had they been allowed to work and create in ideal environments, rested and free, and given the context they required. Why do we brutalise the people we are supposed to love and admire? What music might Jackson have made, properly supported and helped? How might Britney have grown into a mature performance artist, producing spectacular shows that developed her talents as a singer and dancer? And why would we be so interested in seeing them instead broken, dishonoured, debased? I don’t understand all the forces at work, but reading this book is an insight into why we should all preserve and nurture our inner performers, and treat them with the gentleness and spaciousness they require to flourish.

It’s been one of those days when I haven’t managed to get done any of the things I needed to do. We had a half-hearted thunderstorm over the middle part of the day; the skies were black and a premature twilight fell, but the rumbles of thunder and the steady, drilling rain seemed insufficient somehow, as if the storm couldn’t quite work itself up to top gear. I love thunderstorms, but the lowering pressure always affects me disproportionately, and I felt sluggish and headachy and dull-witted. We’ve got a busy weekend ahead (hence the post now) and I ought to have been getting on with lots of other things, but I found myself curled up in the armchair, reading Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock. I very rarely read young adult books, although I have nothing against them in principle. It’s just that there’s so much to read. But on the few occasions that I have – Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now being a particular case in point – I’ve found them to be far better than that teen-friendly label suggests. I’d read Diana Wynne Jones before with my son when he was younger and absolutely loved The Ogre Downstairs and Archer’s Goon, so when Fire and Hemlock seemed to keep cropping up across the blogworld as a favourite novel, I was most intrigued to try it.

Wynne Jones always has highly complex plots involving magic and shifting time zones, but to try to keep things simple, the story concerns 19-year-old Polly, looking back at her 10-year-old self when she made an unusual friend, in the form of Thomas Lynne, a grown-up who is able to join her in making up extraordinary tales of adventure. Polly needs a break from reality as her parents are involved in a messy divorce, and Thomas provides her not only with excitement and friendship, but the kind of gentle, altruistic attention that children so crave. I haven’t got further than the first 100 pages or so, but already this is a beautifully written and gripping read that I am sure Wynne Jones is about to layer with complexity.

But I do ask myself, where was this sort of book when I was a Young Adult? I can remember a tremendously sticky patch between the ages of about 10 and 13 when it was hard to find anything good to read. Back then we used to go as a family to the library every Monday night. The library had recently moved from a large red brick building that looked like a rather nice, posh house to a much bigger, much uglier concrete building that screamed allegiance to words like ‘municipal’ and ‘civic’. I recall the big escalator we rode up, the moment we had passed through the double glass doors. It struck me as so odd that the library was situated on the first floor – what happened on the ground floor? And when you left to get your books stamped, you had to walk down several flights of municipally carpeted stairs. Why have an escalator up and not an escalator down? Well, these were the sorts of questions that preoccupied me and for which there seemed to be no answers. The other big question was why there were so few books that looked any good. At the end of the children’s section was a wire rack that held a printed note covered in clear sticky backed plastic: Young Adult. What a terrible selection that was. There were no less than three copies of Catcher in the Rye, which I never did read on the grounds that the cover was enough to bore a person to tears, there were some school-type books like Carrie’s War and Charlotte’s Web. Then there was a great deal of Alan Garner, who I completely failed to appreciate and refused to countenance as an option. On a good day one of the Judy Blumes had been recycled, and I might check that out. But really, dreary was not the word.

And so I would spend my time wandering in confusion around the adult books. My main impression of the adult hardback world was that no one wanted you to have the first idea what the books were about. I found it baffling that the publishers printed the author’s name in the largest font, with a much smaller, more discreet title. What good was the name to me when I knew who none of these people were? There were endless shelves of books displaying their spines to the reader, each one more meaningless than the last. Covers didn’t give me much more of a clue, probably because I couldn’t read the messages that were implicit in their images, and if you wanted a synopsis of the story, well, you had to get that book off the shelf, open it up and read the inside flap of the jacket. I used to go to the paperback stands of crime, where the covers were at least on display and there was a useful blurb on the back. I kept myself going with Agatha Christie, and the occasional foray outwards, to P. G. Wodehouse, to Patricia Wentworth, to Ruth Rendell (whom I didn’t like then), to Georgette Heyer’s crime novels. It was all most frustrating. It’s funny to think that a mere ten years later, I would be running the fiction section of a large bookstore, five three-sided bays, five tables, and I knew every single book on those shelves and the names of pretty much every author currently in print in the UK. It’s amazing what you can learn when you put your back into it.

Teenagers today are fortunate in having such an amazing selection of books to choose from. What was missing when I was a child was the fun stuff. There were good authors, I’m sure, but I was strongly resistant to worthy literature like Rosemary Sutcliffe or disquieting authors like Roald Dahl or Jill Paton Walsh. I wanted something comic and entertaining, or edge-of-the-seat novels. I wanted romance and intrigue and excitement. I would have loved Wynne Jones, or Stephenie Meyer or Eva Ibbotson, I’m sure. I needed the experience of literature as a safe zone, a meaningful, comforting, thrilling world, to be able to branch out into the serious and demanding literature of later life and trust that I could bear what it had to tell me. Still, I guess I can catch up now, even if it is a bit late, and there really are a lot of other books I ought to be reading – and writing – about.

As you may recall, I’ve been attending a writers’ group in the city where I live which has afforded me all kinds of pleasures. Not least among these is the newsletter that drops through my letterbox once a month. It’s usually a round up of the various groups that have met (short prose, long prose, poetry and travel writing), synopses of passages that have been read (so that we can keep up with the progress of novels) and a whole list of competitions (mostly for poetry, absolutely never for non-fiction) that we could enter if we chose. Recently we were asked to signal our readiness to accept it over the email, thus saving wear and tear on the newsletter editor, but actually I stuck out for my printed version. There’s something about its photocopied format that just tickles me and it wouldn’t be the same as a pdf. Anyhow, in the miscellaneous news items last month was a cry for support from the small, independent publisher, Salt Publishing, who specializes in poetry. They’ve been feeling the pinch, apparently, and are encouraging readers to buy ‘just one book’ to prevent them from going under. Well, ever willing to do my bit, I had a good look around their website, which usefully offers extracts from all the books they offer, and settled on a copy of Voyaging Out by Peter Abbs.

Well, this arrived last week and I have been delighted with it. I’m horribly fussy about poetry; I’m sure it’s a weakness on my part but there is so much of it that doesn’t speak to me. For some reason I have a much broader tolerance for quality in prose, and I’ll struggle to the end of a moderately interesting novel without complaint. In poetry, however, I’ll put the book down and never return to it again if a skim through of a couple of poems doesn’t immediately please me. I chose Voyaging Out on the strength of my curiosity about its second part, which features a contemporary return to the poetry of Rumi, Dante and Rilke. The cover says: ‘These poems are not literal translations but work in the manner of metamorphoses. […] Their purpose is to keep faith with the encompassing spirit of these writers, to bring them forcibly into the modern imagination and, in so doing, to keep alive a conversation with the past.’ Well, whatever; there’s also the fact that these are gorgeous poems in their own right. Here’s one in the spirit of Rumi:

When I heard my first love story
I rushed out looking for you.
How blind!

Lovers never meet.
They’ve always been contemplating each other –
from the beginning of time.

As you know, I am a big fan of Rilke, so I wasn’t sure that any other poet could pull off a poetic tribute that worked. But here’s a little something I thought was marvelous:

I AM

Silent friend,
your breath expands our world
and your existence rings out like a bronze bell

and the night wind blows stronger
from the very touch of you.

All life’s transformation:
lift up whatever pulls you down.

If vinegar tastes bitter turn it into wine!

In this immeasurable night, stand calm
at the congested cross-roads of your senses –

for this is the tryst of life
and you are its dark center.

And should the world ever forget your name; whisper to the
dumb earth: I exist.
And to the running water say: I am.

There’s much to admire in the first half of the collection too, beautiful meditations on art by Hopper and Bonnard that enter imaginatively into the painter’s experience at the genesis of a work of art, some delicately but piercingly evocative scenes of childhood, ruminations on the art of poetry and, true to the title, several affirmations of the power and the insight of travel. It’s wonderful stuff. Seamus Heaney seems to like him, too, as he’s provided one of the endorsements. If you like poetry, I’d certainly suggest you try him, and Salt Publishing, too.

Yes, I’m back again. After missing a post or two last week I’m falling behind in my reviews and I hate that, because I write better about a book when I’ve just read it, than ten days later when I’ve forgotten the names of the characters. And the book in question was a very good one: Justine Picardie’s Daphne, which was a cunning interweaving of fact and fiction around a period in the life of novelist Daphne du Maurier. The era Picardie chooses is the late 1950s, when du Maurier was struggling with both personal and professional crises. Her husband had just had a nervous breakdown, brought on by overwork and the strain of having a serious love affair with a woman Daphne privately refers to as the ‘Snow Queen’. Always a trooper, Daphne rises to the occasion, accepting that her precious solitude in Menabilly is disrupted by a resentful, depressed, impossible Tommy, whilst strenuously repressing her own devastation at his infidelity. But it hasn’t been an easy marriage; Daphne herself has known infatuation, in the form of another man, many years ago, and her father’s former lover, Gertrude Lawrence, in the not-so-distant past. As she clings on to the shreds of her relationship with her husband, the ghosts of past loves rise relentlessly to the surface of her mind.

Then there’s work, which isn’t going so well either. Determined to be taken seriously as a writer, Daphne envisages a long-cherished project: a proper, scholarly biography of Bramwell Bronte, whom she believes has been wrongfully neglected and overlooked. To aid her in her researches, she enters into correspondence with bibliophile and ex-curator, J. Alex Symington, a man who has devoted his life to sourcing and protecting the manuscripts of the Bronte family. Symington lends her his qualified support; initially he is jealous of her project, wanting the revelation of Bramwell’s genius to be all his. But he needs Daphne too. Unbeknownst to her, his career collapsed in scandal when he was asked to resign as curator and librarian at the Bronte Parsonage, having taken various books and documents into his possession and not returned them. For Symington, this was an act of loving salvage on his part, as well as an obsessive need to possess, but he is not the kind of character to acknowledge wrong-doing on his own part. His whole sorry ageing life is dedicated to the internal pursuit of recognition and absolution and the fact that a famous lady novelist, even if a popular one, should turn to him for help, represents a vestige of glory that he cannot forgo, and that must be balanced with his desires to hoard his collection and his knowledge to himself.

The narrative splits into three voices, then: Daphne’s, as she tries to put her biography together, despite Tommy, despite the ambivalent help of Symington, and despite the ghost of Rebecca, who haunts her still as her most successful creation; secondly, Symington, engaged in his own internal warfare still, with the ghosts of authority who dismissed and humiliated him; and thirdly, a young nameless girl who is researching Daphne du Maurier and her connection to the Brontes in the present day. This final thread of the narrative appeals to the legend of Rebecca herself, as she is married to a much older lecturer whose first wife, Rachel, exerts a powerful hold over the couple. Left on her own too much, scorned by her distant husband for her interest in such a critically unexciting figure as du Maurier, she starts to feel her personality dissolve in her fascination with the life of du Maurier and her fantasies about the enigmatic Rachel. As you can tell this is a narrative structured by multiple hauntings and full of porous, uncertain states of mind. I felt this was the strongest part of the novel – Picardie is particularly good at showing people on the crumbling edge of madness, and the scenes where Daphne, overwrought with the strain of pretence and stoicism, starts to collapse into paranoia are especially striking.

Before I read this book, it just so happened that I had reread du Maurier’s Rebecca, the first time I had done so since reading it and being completely swept away by it in my early teens. It felt very odd indeed to read it with my 40-year-old critic’s mind. What struck me was the brilliant balance that du Maurier manages to strike between her characters. The book would be all wrong if Mrs Danvers’ chillingly obsessive love for Rebecca, her machiavellian darkness, weren’t balanced out by Frank Crawley’s honest, awkward goodness. And Maxim, suffocating as a character in the binds of his impenetrable masculinity, needs his tweedy, careless-tongued sister, Beatrice to demonstrate a female version of that particular, emotionally constipated upper-classness. The novel’s mad people, the hints of horror that lurk beneath the beautiful surfaces of Manderlay, are equally well chosen; the inarticulate idiot, Ben, who guards Rebecca’s boathouse, and the vulgar and louche Jack Favell, who stands as a clue to Rebecca’s ugly side. I hadn’t remembered them all, had thought of the book as a kind of three-hander, between the narrator, the housekeeper and the ghost of Rebecca herself, but of course it isn’t. It’s the mosaic of those characters, the different sides to the story that they suggest, that makes the narrative so very satisfying. But the other story they have to tell is one that the narrator cannot at first see, blinded as she is by her imaginings.

And here’s the interesting thing: in du Maurier’s novel, the narrator loses her self, loses her confidence and her self-esteem because of her idealization of a ghost, and what the story works to do is give them back to her again by gradually but relentless destroying that perfect image. Rebecca is a kind of manifestation of the narrator’s harsh inner critic; she represents the perfect woman that the narrator thinks she can’t be – dramatic, beautiful, sociable, lovable, all in excessive ways. The destruction of Rebecca is in fact the destruction of the images that haunt most women’s heads, the ones that suggest we are never good enough as we are. The process of watching that ideal image being torn to pieces is one that thrills and terrifies women and it’s no wonder that a fierce price is exacted, in the form of the narrator’s exile from England. We tamper with the bullies in our minds at severe, personal risk. I’ve read critics sneering at the novel for having a dubious morality, but they just don’t see that Maxim is far more lovable once it turns out he’s a murderer, than when he was a man in thrall to a dead woman. He’s avenged the narrator by despising that perfection we’re all supposed to emulate, he’s destroyed it and all it represents. Who wouldn’t love that?

So, in Rebecca, the narrative works to undo those unhealthy attachments to fantasy images. The image of Rebecca in the narrator’s head needs to be expunged, as it’s doing her damage. By contrast, the fantasies and the hauntings in Justine Picardie’s novel are used to shore up uncertain states of mind. Daphne du Maurier, for instance, isn’t whole unless she is creating some fictional life. Her appropriation of characters from the past and her creative imaginings are what hold her in a state of relative sanity. Symington’s projections, too, keep his fragile sense of self alive. It’s only the young girl who, at the very end, frees herself from her literary entanglements with others, and finds a better, brighter future for herself by doing so. Picardie’s novel is extremely easy to read, stylish, clever and compelling, but it does keep to a one-note tone throughout. It isn’t the thriller that du Maurier’s Rebecca was, because the demons her characters want to vanquish are equally the props that keep them going. But that’s an observation, not a criticism. There aren’t enough novels out there about the perils and triumphs of literary creativity and the strange business of criticism, both reverential and destructive, that rises up around it. This is a very good one.

I will review the novels I’ve been reading this week, but a book I finished yesterday has sort of jumped the queue because I was so interested in its assertions. The book is Fame, written by the philosopher, Mark Rowlands, and it explores the modern phenomenon that we call fame, which bears little relation to the aura of respect for extraordinary individual achievement that used to form its bedrock. Instead, the book opens with Rowlands watching a series of short American films entitled Girls Gone Wild. Why on earth would young women present themselves to the camera in a way that has more to say about their low self-esteem and desperation for attention, he wonders, than about any real, admirable qualities that they may possess? The answer is that they are chasing what Rowlands calls vfame, a rogue variant of good old-fashioned fame, that like any mutant virus is theoretically easy to catch, if you stand exposed for long enough in the right places. What Rowlands does which is so interesting is to go right back in time philosophically, to the tenets that formed the basis of the Western world, to show how their gradual degradation has brought us to this sorry cultural state.

Okay, so the philosophy is relatively complex (although perfectly easy to follow in Rowlands’ exposition) so I’ll present it to you by using myself as an example of an average Western civilian, brought up with an ideology that dates back to the Enlightenment and way back to Plato. No really, this isn’t going to be intellectually scary. Let’s start by applauding one of the basic principles of the Enlightenment which is that I am allowed, even encouraged, to build my life according to the choices I make for myself. I am permitted to be an individual, which is great, because if someone decided my life would be better spent working the fields, rather than reading books, I’d be dead miserable. No, I get to follow my own personal star, on the understanding that my intention is to become the best I can be, and make the most of my individuality.  So my choices have all focused on education, because for me, that’s where the value of life lies. And I say this, having developed values that I think have objective worth, concerning the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to see all sides of a question. Those are my values, but I think they may well be your values also, if I could persuade you to see the worth they have, independent of my own personal validation of them.

Now, there’s a little bit of tension here, between the idea of subjective choice and the idea of objective value. What I think of as objective might not be the same as what you think of as objective – well, that’s okay, so long as we’re prepared to be reasonable and discuss it. But let’s suppose I come across a 6’ 5” Hell’s Angel who weighs in at 20 stone and isn’t keen on discussion. It’s not his forte. He tells me that education is a load of old codswollop and there’s something about his 20 stone that seems persuasive, much as I am longing to foist my copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance upon him. Alas, I lack the courage (and the muscle) to point out to him that he has allowed the principle of objective value to degenerate into fundamentalism – the insistence that something is right just because it is, end of story. Nor do I follow it up by pointing out that he has allowed the principle of individual choice to degenerate into relativism – the philosophically illogical idea that all choices have equal value. He has his reasons for wanting me to say that my university-educated, law-abiding life is no better or worse than his drug-taking, rampaging, tax-evading, work-shy life, but in a world where we were being intelligent about these things, that just wouldn’t be true.

So, Rowlands is telling us that we’ve worked hard in the West to maintain two important rulings – that we may cherish individuality and that we may establish objective values, but that if we abandon a certain distinguishing intelligence or give in to what he calls our lazy, grasping natures, they degenerate into fundamentalism and relativism, neither of which is useful to living a good life, not least because neither has any interest in discussing what a good life might be. A good life is what I say it is, okay? Because I say so.

Then, Rowlands brings in two more factors – lightness and weight. Let’s get back to me and my belief in the value of education. If I were to live a light life, I wouldn’t feel particularly bound to my own values. I could cast them off in favour of different ones when necessary, I could change my beliefs and aspirations and not feel that I was compromising who I really was. If, by contrast, I lived a heavy life, those values would anchor me, hold me in place, and confer stability of meaning and purpose. I wouldn’t be able to let them go without altering in a fundamental way my sense of who I am. Now, lightness and heaviness are both necessary in life, Rowlands argues, and the real question is how to maintain a good balance.

If I live my life too heavily, if I decide that education is so essential, I will dedicate my entire life to its cause, I am a few steps away from strapping a set of plastic explosives to my torso and making a messy protest about it. If I live too lightly, then I might find education intriguing at one point, but tomorrow it might be romance that matters, or getting rich, or well who cares as nothing is more valuable than anything else. I might well end up with nothing better to do with my life than give in to the pleasures of the moment, sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, at which point I’d end up like Lindsay Lohan. These are Rowlands extreme examples, by the way, the suicide bomber and Young, Hot Hollywood forming the opposite ends of the spectrum.

And so this is the context in which his variant vfame grows and festers. If we believe that things are good and bad just because we feel it to be so, without reference to objective values, if we insist on relativism, that everything is as good as everything else, then we lose the ability to judge between quality and bullshit. Fame is detached from quality of achievement. Any way of becoming famous is as good as any other, and we confer fame onto people who don’t really merit it. We end up with Rowlands’ test statement: Britney Spears is just as good as Beethoven. There are probably lots of people who believe this, Rowlands suggests. But if we measure both artists in terms of quality, then it doesn’t quite hold true. Rowlands suggests we measure quality by the amount of time it would take to gain skills equal to those possessed by Britney and Beethoven and by their scarcity value, how rare their accomplishments are. Rowlands aimiably proposes that despite the fact he is a hairy man in his 40s, he has more chance of becoming Britney Spears than he does of replicating Beethoven’s achievements. It would be easier. But in a world of vfame, where we are resolutely disinclined to decide what constitutes quality, it’s easier to let economics decide. In today’s market place, Britney is way better than Beethoven because she makes an awful lot more money. When was the last time that Beethoven went on tour and dropped onto the stage from a trapeze wearning black spandex, thus giving the people what they wanted? Well, quite.

But there is a way back from what Rowlands sees as a kind of inevitable collapse of Western philosophy, as it is lived in modern times. And that’s with a little quality attention paid to the concept of the opinion. Now, I know I go on about this, and it’s often a tricky subject, but thanks to Rowlands, I have a philosophical basis for what I’m trying to say. Supposing I love a book, and I want everyone to read it. Now I’m entitled to my opinion, of course, and I could leave it at that and hope that my impassioned awe of it was sufficiently convincing to make you read it. But I could also take a step back and look at my opinion, and give some thought to the values that informed it. I could figure out why it was that it made such an impact on me. In doing so, I might suddenly end up being a lot more interesting about the book, and showing myself to be a person of depth. We all have those depths, the question is only whether we are prepared to look into them or not.

And then I could offer my values up for debate, wanting to see for myself whether they withstood the differences and disagreements of others, whether I still endorsed them or whether I felt they were in need of alteration. And if you were open to this debate, too, then we could really start to talk about what was important to each of us, what we felt would truly make a better world, what really seemed valuable, influential and significant. In this way we could reconnect to the spirit of the Enlightenment, that accepted our lives were in constant tension between our individual beliefs, our need for objective values, our desire for achievement of worth and the respect we need to pay other people in their difference. And that seems to me, and I hope to you, a genuinely worthwhile project. And if you don’t believe me, go and read Mark Rowland’s Fame. It’s tremendously convincing.

I do apologise for sudden air silence, but I’ve been laid low by what I think must be a bug this week. It began shortly after the first two cases of swine ‘flu were identified in the university, an event which triggered a positive storm of ‘information reports’ from some clearly over-excited person in the Old Schools. There was the strangest disconnect in the emails, which told us how we were supposed to represent the occurrence to the world at large and who should be allowed to know, and who should just stay home and not risk it out in the mean cloisters, and that we were to Carry On As Normal in the face of the huge influx of visitors for the university open day season, which starts in a few weeks’ time. It was as if there were two stories circulating with the virus, one that presented a reassuring façade, and a darker, unspeakable truth that it masked. So when I began to feel poorly shortly after receiving all of this, it struck me as not implausible that I had caught the ‘flu through some odd mix of hypnotic suggestion and virtual contact. But hypochondriac as I am, I couldn’t quite convince myself of such a possibility.

Anyhow, my prime symptom was a most peculiar one. I had a pain in my head; not a headache, although it became that over time, but to begin with, a place on my skull, just above my left ear, that was extremely tender to the touch. If someone had clubbed me over the head, it would have explained it perfectly. In fact, at first, I wondered whether my husband had pulled an old trick of his. Sometimes in the night, after having lain asleep with his arms above his head, he’ll bring them down and catch me a cracking blow with his elbow. But the consequence of this is usually that I am extremely annoyed and wide awake at three in the morning, with no long lasting effects. I emailed the college nurse who suggested that I had an infection in a hair follicle, which was a pretty good guess but unlikely again as there was nothing at all to see on my head. My husband, thinking along the same lines as me had guiltily checked me over for bruises. Anyway, by now the rest of my head was aching in sympathy, and my throat was sore and I felt without appetite and about a billion years old, so I took to my bed to try and sleep it off. Two days have passed and I am feeling generally better, although the sore patch is there still, but not as painful as it was. My own best guess is that I’ve had an infection in a gland, as my other symptoms have hovered over the well-trodden territory of good old chronic fatigue, which is a gland-affecting illness if ever there was one. Over the years chronic fatigue has assumed the form of a kind of viral Professor Moriarty for me, an old adversary who turns up in innovative disguises before revealing himself yet again. It’s affected my heart rate, my blood pressure, my temperature, and you don’t want to begin to know what it does to my hormones, so frankly it’s capable of anything.

Once I had come to the conclusion that I was probably going to live and could safely retrieve my sense of humour, I said to my husband:

‘I know what it is. This must be the result of you trying to brain wash me in the night while I’m sleeping. You’ve threatened to do it for years [he longs to have it done for a 25th wedding anniversary present, a way to literally wipe the marriage slate clean]. If I looked in a mirror, I’d probably see a little Matrix-type panel inserted there.’

My husband sighed a happy sigh.

‘I’ll have to wait and see whether I have any sudden and inexplicable urges to…’

‘Put on stockings and high heels in the middle of the day,’ he suggested.

‘Of course, that’s what you’d get me to do.’

‘Now there’s a meme for you,’ my husband said. ‘Ten alterations you’d make to your partner if you could brainwash them.’

I thought about this. ‘Only ten?’

‘I think I said “The Top 10” didn’t I?’ my husband asked disingenuously. ‘I mean, once you’d got a channel open…’

So, I am doing the usual convalescent things now like feeling restless but not having the energy to actually commit to a task, and eating odd things because I think I feel like them and then wondering whether I should have chosen more wisely. I’ve also been reading, although not quite so much as I would like as headaches can spoil a good book. But I’ve been enjoying two investigative-type novels about literary figures, the page-turningly wonderful Daphne by Justine Picardie, and a complex, beautifully written novel by Jacqui Lofthouse called Bluethroat Morning that has Hitchcockian resonances with Vertigo. I’ll review them both next week. And thank you for all your wonderful comments from the past few days; I’ll respond as normal once I’ve got a bit more pep back. Just cross your fingers for me that I don’t come down with the dreaded swine ‘flu next.

I’ve just read two of the funniest memoirs ever, and both have left me with some serious reflections as to the place of humour in our lives. The first was Shirley Jackson’s hilarious account of bringing up a family entitled Life Among The Savages. I’ve never read any of Jackson’s other work, although I did know that she wrote gothic horror novels but in a way that put her on the classics shelf rather than in the genre section. Well, Life Among The Savages is simply one long, uninterrupted hoot from the start, when Jackson, her husband and their two small children move out of New York and into a gloriously eccentric house in deepest Vermont, right until the finish, when Jackson brings her fourth baby home to greet the household (after her husband and eldest son have been surreptitiously running a book on when she’ll finally have it).

There is nothing in here that the average wife and mother won’t recognize from the daily struggle with chaos, from philosophical musings on the mentality of motherhood: ‘I realized how thoroughly the housekeeping mind falls into the list pattern, how basically the idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and a children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely’; to the impossibility of getting children through breakfast and out to school with any semblance of order; to keeping household help (one particularly nice girl she traces via her parole officer to the local jail when she fails to turn up one morning); to the living nightmare that is a family shopping expedition, particularly when one daughter has seven imaginary friends who all have to come along. What makes this so delightful is Jackson’s turn of phrase. The line ‘Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children’ had me laughing out loud. And the great comic set pieces are just a treat.

What Jackson does so brilliantly is to capture the surrealism of family life with its impossible combination of adults forced to explain and impose standards of behaviour that collapse into ludicrousness under the stern eye and wild logic of your average four-year-old. The result is that usual family compromise that looks like madness and indulgence to grown up people who have no children, and parents who have forgotten the tragi-comedy of those early years. Jackson also has a wonderful ear for the eccentricity of child talk, its odd, borrowed adultness, its surreality, its gorgeous self-obsession. Her husband is equally well-drawn, a man who is trying to maintain a steady grip on his own personal requirements, despite everything that happens around him. There’s a beautiful anecdote in which Jackson’s three children fall in love with a big empty box that arrives at the house. After each child has hidden in it and pretended to be a present (which Jackson declares must be sent back to the shop), the children rush off and after much whispered consultation, Jackson hears her husband say ‘All right, but just once’. This time, however, when the children burst into the kitchen to collect her, they get distracted by the appearance of the dinner she is preparing and it’s only when Daddy can’t be found to come to the table that her son recalls he had something to tell her about him, if only he could remember what it was.

Anyway, I was cheerfully reading this book and thinking, fantastic, here’s a prime example of a creative mother, bringing up four children, managing splendidly to attend to her literary life and her maternal duties. Believe you me, I am thin on the ground where healthy, happy, creative mothers are concerned. I had little subheadings running through my head along the lines of: is humour the key to family life? So I looked up Shirley Jackson on wikipedia and who’d a thunk it? It turns out she was a woman who suffered from neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses and got herself into an early grave with a combination of prescription pills and heavy smoking. What shocked me was that you would never guess this in a million years from the tone of her memoir; it’s purely, evenly comic throughout. It’s so even in tone that I had to put it down from time to time, to let reality intervene. But the reality of Jackson’s character to one side, I would thoroughly recommend this book – it’s like Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, only with fewer animals.

Then I read another memoir, equally funny, equally uniform in tone, and yet deeply, profoundly disturbing. This book is a recent release, Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher. Fisher is the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, a marriage that didn’t last long before Fisher ran off with co-star Elizabeth Taylor. Fisher grew up on tour with her mother, and shot to stardom at the age of nineteen by playing the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars (a film that clearly did nothing to aid her sanity). She also married the extremely well-known singer-songwriter, Paul Simon and had her first novel made into a movie before she was thirty. She is careful at all times to tell us that she therefore had nothing to complain about as far as her early life was concerned; she was brought up in luxury, with iconic parents, a talented, creative woman who found personal fame with rapidity and ease. And yet nothing, nothing was normal or orthodox in her life. If you’ve ever believed that this kind of Hollywood existence is something to aspire to, read this book. Within five pages it becomes apparent that it cocoons its victims in the strangest fantasies, desires and insecurities. Fisher claims it wasn’t due to her unusual childhood that she ended up an alcoholic and a drug addict with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress syndrome (that was after her gay friend died of an accidental overdose in her bed, but that’s another story), but the crazy unreality of her life just screams off the pages, even if it takes the form of witty, deadpan humour with probably the best use of the ironic exclamation mark ever.

Here, for instance, is how she got into drugs: ‘The first time I did drugs was when I ws thirteen. Before we lost all our money, my family had a vacation house in Palm Springs, about two hours outside of Beverley Hills where I ostensibly grew up. So periodically my mother used to rent that house in Palm Springs to these people who, after one of their stays, left behind a bag of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe they left it intentionally, a kind of chemical sacrifice on the altar of appreciation for their time there. Anyway, after my mother found the pot, she came to me and said, “Dear, I thought instead of you going outside and smoking pot where you might get caught and get in trouble – I thought you and I might experiment with it together.” Well, frankly at the time, and let’s face it – even now – I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. But what actually came to pass was that after presenting this bizarre, albeit marginally appealing proposal, my mother got swept back up in the whirlwind of her life and promptly forgot about it. But being the crafty, eager-for-the-altered-state person I was destined to become, I absolutely did not.’ I came to the conclusion that you could read the memoir in two voices; the first is perky and upbeat and distanced, the second is slurred and weepy and cynical, and might be accompanied by the sound of a whisky chaser being slung into a shot glass. Of course this fits right in with Fisher’s bipolar disorder, the seamless transition from a monstrous high to a monstrous low: ‘when you’re manic, every urge is like an edict from the Vatican. No plan is a bad one, because if you’re there and you’re doing it, it can’t be bad. It’s like a bank error in your favour. Mania is, in effect, liquid confidence… when the tide comes in, it’s all good. But when the tide goes out the mood that cannot and should not be named comes over you and into you. Because to name it would be an act of summoning.’

By the end of the book, Fishers voice sounded to me like the funniest, most dangerous, most damaged voice I had ever read. Every time she has a little insight, like the one above, it strikes her as too serious, and she rushes off into the realms of surreal fantasy or the cheap joke. It’s a memoir, sure, but a patchy, fragmented, odd one, that chooses a punchline over an explanation every time. It’s good, but in a worrying way. And all of this led me to wonder about the use and abuse of humour. Is being funny on the side of the angels or the demons of our minds? Do we use it to transcend what’s almost unbearable, or do we use it to disguise and distort the things we really ought to deal with? Do we slather it over our worst moments to make ourselves feel better, or to make others feel better about us? I don’t have any answers, but it was curious that two consistently amusing books should make me question just how healthy it is to look on the bright side of life.