Summer School 2013

It’s Summer School time again, or more accurately, it’s time to start organising this year’s Summer School.  Those of you who have followed this blog since its inception will know that every year I put together a literary Summer School for a group of friends who, like me, can’t afford the sometimes four figure sums charged by those commercially run organisations who offer something similar.  Four years ago now, I decided that there was no point in gazing longingly at the professional brochures, rather it was time to stir myself and orchestrate a Summer School I could afford.  So, I gathered together around a dozen like-minded friends and suggested that we should nominate a week in August when we would meet on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons to discuss three books linked by a shared theme or characteristic.  We would meet in a different person’s home each day and there would be a different leader for each book so that no substantial burden would fall on any one individual.  Tea and biscuits would be provided, for which we would contribute the princely sum of fifty pence a day.  Thus, our Summer School costs us all of £1.50 a head.  It’s worked well for the past three years and so here I am putting together five possible sets of three books for the participants to choose from for Summer 2013.

Last year, with the Olympics in mind, I went for books set in the same country – one from each of the major continental land masses.  This year my selections are rather more random.  Participants are asked to rank the five lists from one to five, with one being their preferred choice and then the list with the lowest score is the one chosen.  Here are their options:

Investigating Art

(Three books all to do with investigations around either works of art or the artists who created them.)

‘The Swan Thieves’ ~ Elizabeth Kostova

‘Headlong’ ~ Michael Frayn

‘People of the Book’ ~ Geraldine Brooks

The Perfect Spy

(Speaks for itself, really, three books based on spy stories.)

‘Sweet Tooth’ ~ Ian McEwan

‘Spies’ ~ Michael Frayn

‘Restless’ ~ William Boyd

From Dublin’s Fair City

(Three books with associations with Dublin)

‘Paddy Clarke, Ha-ha-ha’ ~ Roddy Doyle

‘Christine Falls’ ~ Benjamin Black

‘Dracula’ ~ Bram Stoker

Resurrecting the Past

(These books are all to do with bringing the past back to life in one way or another.)

‘Remarkable Creatures’ ~ Tracy Chevalier

‘A Month in the Country’ ~ J L Carr

‘The Dig’ ~ John Preston

Made in Brum

(Each of these authors was either born in Birmingham or has made their home there.)

‘After Such Kindness’ ~ Gaynor Arnold

‘Astonishing Splashes of Colour’ ~ Clare Morrall

‘The Crysalids’ ~ John Wyndham

It will be about a month before I know which set has been chosen, but in the meantime I wonder which you would select?  It would be interesting to know if your option would be the same as those who are going to participate.  Perhaps we might even be able to set up an on-line group to run parallel.  What do you think?

Making Sense of ‘All’s Well’ ~ The Two-Story Story.

I am still battling away at All’s Well That End’s Well, specifically at the moment I am trying to work out why Helena is such a dynamic force in the first half of the play and such a shadowy figure in the second.  It’s almost as if you are dealing with two different characters.

Do you actually know the story?  As briefly as I can…..

Helena is the orphaned daughter of the physician at the Court of the Count Rousillon who has recently died.  She is obsessively in love with the Count’s heir, Bertram who is about to leave for the Court of the King of France where, being underage, he will be the King’s ward.  Bertram is unaware of her passion. Distraught at his leaving, she decides to follow him and offer her healing gifts to the King, who is mortally sick.  When she cures him she asks as a reward that she be given the hand of whichever of his wards she requests.  Of course, she chooses Bertram.  Bertram is horrified but forced to obey the King’s decree.  However, as soon as they are married he absconds, making off for the Florentine wars and leaving behind a letter that says he will not recognise Helena as his wife until she has got the family ring from his finger and carries a child of which he is the father.  That’s the first half.  How she manages to fulfil these conditions is the subject matter for the second half of the play.

But, as I say, the character that we see in those two halves seems to be two different people.  In the first she confides in the audience, actively seeks ways to get what she wants and is generally a positive and active force.  In the second she is much more passive, far less open about her thoughts and finds a way to meet the conditions laid down by Bertram almost accidentally.  And, I have been struggling to understand why this should be the case, struggling that is, until I realised that what we have here is a two-story story.  

Now I would imagine that this is a technical term that you haven’t come across before.  That would be because it was coined by one of my Year Six classes after we had been looking at a particularly interesting retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  This specific version of the tale began with the expected markers of the onset of story, indicating, time, place and character and the inciting moment when the Bears decide to go for a walk to let their porridge cool.  However, the next section began in same way, only this time the character was Goldilocks and the inciting moment was her getting bored and opting to go for a walk.  After some discussion as to how they should describe this, the children decided that what had happened was that two separate stories had collided and then combined to become one and before we knew it the notion of the two-story story was born.

Of course there are many variations of the two-story story and any full length novel is likely to be made up of several stories that intertwine and serve to shine revealing lights one on the other, but I’m particularly interested in those where the different stories do actually collide in some way, especially after my problems with Jack and the Beanstalk.

When I was doing the research for my PhD the one story that really made life difficult was Jack and the Beanstalk.  It starts out as what Propp would call a lack liquidated story.  Jack and his mother are penniless and they need an income.  The hen that lays the golden eggs should solve that problem and so we should, at that point, have a happy ending.  (I am assuming, you understand, that there are no marauding foxes around and that there isn’t going to be an outbreak of fowl pest.)  However, what actually happens is that suddenly it is killing the giant that becomes the most important part of the story and it turns into a villainy vanquished tale instead.  I spent thirteen thousand words in my thesis explaining exactly how this comes about and analysing the markers that point the reader in the right direction.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to repeat the exercise here, not in relation to Jack and the Beanstalk nor in relation to All’s Well That End’s Well, even though it works in exactly the same way.

It’s generally accepted that All’s Well combines elements from two types of traditional tale, each of which is found in various forms in a multitude of cultures.  There is the story in which the dying King is cured by an unexpected healer and then the tale in which someone can only achieve their goal if they pass a number of seemingly impossible tests.  These are the stories in which Helena finds herself the leading character.  The trouble is that rather than being two separate narratives here they are combined in one and that gives us problems.  What happens is that the scene that should simply be the dénouement of the first story also functions as the igniting moment of the second.  Instead of Helena gaining the prize she has been promised for curing the King her reward comes to her in name only as Bertram marries her under duress and then kick starts the second story by leaving her and setting what appears to be a series of insurmountable tasks as the condition for their ever living together as man and wife.   The two stories collide.  Just like Jack it is a two-story story.

Unlike Jack, however, there is no continuity in the nature of the main protagonist.  There are innumerable Jack stories in British Folklore and the chief characteristic that they share is the cheeky optimism of the central character.  In All’s Well having screwed her courage to the sticking post in order to achieve her heart’s desire in the first half, Helena then creeps off and hides her light under the nearest bushel for the rest of the play, relinquishing her role as the most prominent female character to Diana and her widowed mother.  It may be at Helena who devises the means by which Bertram is brought to book in the final scene but it is Diana who carries out the plan and faces him with the accusations.  It is Diana who holds centre stage.

The Jack stories have run together over centuries of retelling and now blend so smoothly that unless you’re looking very hard you would never notice the join.  All’s Well is another matter.  This smacks more to me of a play that was cobbled together at the last minute without the time to make sure that there was continuity of character and action.  I’m back again at the proposition I put forward two or three weeks ago, namely that this was a text put together in a hurry to meet a theatrical emergency.  I’m not suggesting that the two halves were written by the two different writers, Shakespeare and Middleton, there is internal evidence that argues against that, but I do think one may have plotted the first half and the other the second and that they then failed to smooth out all the rough edges that arose as a result.  Two-story stories need a lot of care if they are to work well and writing to a deadline isn’t conducive to that, not even if you’re Shakespeare.

The Shock of Spring ~ Readers’ Afternoon

As part of my relaxing reading weekend on Saturday afternoon I went along to a West Midlands Readers’ Network event entitled The Shock of Spring.  The Readers’ Network stages these twice a year and the ones to which I’ve been have all followed the same format, probably because it’s one that works.  The Network brings together a panel of four authors who, for the first half an hour, talk about the reading that has shaped them or which is engrossing them now.  This is followed by two of the authors talking about their writing and reading a selection from their latest work.  After each section there is an opportunity for questions from the floor.  At this point we break for tea and cake.  It is understood by all that the tea, and most especially the cake, is an absolutely essential part of the proceedings. After tea, the remaining two authors talk about their work and then there is time for book buying and signing before we all go home sated both spiritually and physically.

The authors featured in The Shock of Spring were Helen Cross, Sabine Durrant, Chris McCabe and Nathan Filer and I have to be honest and say that I hadn’t heard of any of them.  However, that being said, good book talk isn’t dependent on famous names and once any group of readers get together it isn’t long before the conversation gets going and then only stops when said group gets thrown out because they’ve outstayed their welcome or because another group has booked the hall.

One good thing about encountering hitherto unknown writers is that very often you discover books that you really do want to read and in the case of Sabine Durrant and Nathan Filer this was most definitely the case.  Durrant had a new novel, Under Your Skin, published in April and Filer’s first book, The Shock of the Fall had been published just two days prior to the meeting.

Durrant’s novel is a thriller which begins with a woman who apparently has it all finding a body while she is out running and then becoming the chief suspect in the murder enquiry.  I really liked Durrant’s style and the first chapter definitely had me wanting to read more, so that’s gone on the wish list for the next time I can have a weekend’s indulgent reading.

Filer’s book appears to be very different.  It’s about a young man’s descent into madness, which must make it sound like a really depressing read.  But that isn’t the case.  The author was quick to acknowledge his debt to Mark Haddon and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the narrative voice has the same quirky kind of tone.  Certainly, we were all smiling a great deal as he read his first chapter to us.  I’m already seeing very good reviews beginning to appear and this is a book that has gone straight onto my ‘read as soon as possible’ pile.  If it develops as I think it will then I suspect it will also be going onto a lot of reading group lists.

As I said, when you put a group of readers together the conversation goes on forever, ranging far and wide, but always centred on books.  One of the things we found ourselves discussing during the course of the afternoon was whether or not the majority of modern novels are written with a forthcoming film script in view.  It was interesting that a few neat side-steps were taken meaning that none of the participating authors either denied or confirmed that this might be true of their books.  However, thinking about it afterwards, I did wonder if this was really such a new phenomenon.  Oh, writers from previous centuries might not have had the cinema in view, but writing with an eye to the narrative form most likely to guarantee the widest possible audience is nothing groundbreaking at all.  Isn’t this one of the reasons that Dickens and his contemporaries wrote in serial form?  And you could even argue that the ‘authors’ of oral narratives structured them in such as a way as to make them easy to remember and therefore to be passed on from audience to audience, widening the participating circle not only geographically but also temporally.  Perhaps it is in the creative artist’s nature to seek out a form that will communicate as extensively as possible.  What do you think?

Recalling Reading

The Conservatory by Frances Jones Bannerman

I’d promised myself three completely unstressed days of reading this weekend and so far that is precisely what I’ve achieved.  I’m halfway through both Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder and Lindsey Davis’s The Ides of April and I think I’m enjoying both of them.  The caveat to that is that I’m finding the Rubenfeld completely unmemorable.  Each time I come back to it I have to really work at remembering what has happened and who some of the more minor characters are.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to read it in tandem with another book, but I need it for a reading group meeting on Wednesday and I don’t like to finish the selection until the day before at the very earliest, so I’ve been rationing myself.

It is interesting that some books are so memorable that whole passages are imprinted in one’s mind, whereas even the most important features of others slip through the little grey cells like so much water.  Although I’m basically a plot person, I suspect that in this respect the action has very little to do with what is recalled and that the most important factor is the author’s use of language.  I can still quote entire paragraphs from Alan Paton’s superb novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, even though it is decades since I read it.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.  Let him not love the earth too deeply.  Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire.  Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley.  For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

Carefully honed passages such as this sing their way not simply into our minds, but into our hearts as well.  The love felt by Paton and by his main character for their home country of South Africa is palpable both in the individual words and in the way in which those words are brought together into what amounts to a prayer with all the linguistic and quasi-musical features we would associate with such a text.

Or, we might remember books and passages from books because in some way they chime with where we are (figuratively if not literally) at the moment when we read them.  Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow is one I recall in great detail because it was the book that brought me the realisation that I was regaining my mental as well as physical health after a long period of illness.  In this novel a group of scientists are trying to come to an understanding of a new culture and, for me more importantly, the way in which its language works.  One of the group thinks that she has identified the conditions under which a particular verb form is used only to have the more senior linguist point out that the rule she is suggesting specifies a set of circumstances that are necessary, but on their own, not sufficient to account for her observations.  The notion that linguistically something is necessary but not sufficient may sound supremely unexciting to you but I can assure you that for me it was like a light coming on at the end of a very long and very dark tunnel.  I can still remember exactly where I was when the revelation that I was not only following their discussion but had come to the same conclusions before they did hit me.  It was the moment I knew I was on the road to recovery.

So, I must assume that there is nothing in the language of the Rubenfeld, nor in the substance of the discussion, that is exciting me.  I’m sure this is just a mismatch and that other people will have thoroughly enjoyed the book and found it far more memorable.  I suspect that these acts of recall are very personal phenomena.  Is anyone going to tell me that I’m wrong about The Interpretation of Murder?  Or will you share your own memorable or unmemorable texts?  I would love to know what books or specific passages from books have lodged in other people’s minds.

Reading With Intent

So, here I am, back in the blogging world, on the other side of the type of reading week that I don’t ever want to experience again.  It was a bit like being back at school and having to read books simply because they were set texts.  I’ve probably told you this before, but it took me almost a year to read Emma when it turned up on my ‘A’ Level syllabus and to this day it is the only one of Jane Austen’s novels that I would never dream of picking up and reading for pleasure.  The same is true of the books I’ve just had to speed read, along with meeting all the other commitments I already had in my diary.  I’m sure they were both excellent books in their way, but they will forever be associated in my mind with the stress of having to read them to a very tight deadline.  Apart from anything else, it isn’t fair on the writers or the books themselves.

With that in mind I’ve been through my diary and set up alerts to warn me when the same thing is likely to happen again so that I can get started on my reading much earlier.  The next time isn’t until October, so the alerts are necessary because by then I’m likely to have forgotten how awful it’s been this month.

And now I’m going to have a very lazy reading weekend.  I have the new Lindsey Davis, The Ides of April, to read, along with Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder and I want to start to re-read Stuart Hill’s wonderful series for children that began with The Cry of the Icemark in preparation for the publication next month of the latest volume, The Prince of the Icemark.  And I am not going to read a word because I have to.  That is not what reading should be about.

How To Fall ~ Jane Casey

Having given myself a dressing down for falling behind in terms of what is current in children’s literature suddenly I find myself reading YA fiction at every turn, although if I’m honest this latest venture into the realms of teen lit came about by accident.  Amongst the quite substantial number of women writers recently entering the field of the police procedural one of those I’ve appreciated the most has been Jane Casey with her tales of DC Maeve Kerrigan.  I’ve seen Maeve described as a young Jane Tennison, which I think is a bit over the top.  She is nowhere near that hard.  I’m not certain, however, that this isn’t a description that might well be applied to the   female ‘detective’ in her most recent book, How To Fall, even though Jess Tennant is just fifteen.

I ordered How To Fall from the library assuming it would be another in the Kerrigan series (and for anyone reading this and is worried that Casey has given up on Maeve, there is a fourth volume coming later in the year) only when I got is home to discover that it is a YA thriller with young Jess as the heroine who sets out to discover the truth behind the death of her cousin, Freya, the previous summer.  Jess and her mother, Molly, have been estranged from the rest of the family since Molly left the village of Port Sentinel to marry and it is only the breakup of that marriage that takes her and Jess back to the place of her birth and into the very welcoming arms of her identical twin sister and the rest of her large family.  However, Jess finds it hard to settle in the small coastal community not the least because she is Freya’s double and her presence brings back disturbing memories, reawakening the teenage rivalries that may possibly have lain at the root of Freya’s death.  For even though the inquest has determined that Freya died accidentally the rumours that she may have taken her own life have never quite gone away.

Well, Jess may be physically like Freya but she is nothing like her in character.  Feisty is a mild word for young Jess and she is determined that she is going to find out precisely what did happen to her cousin; the more so after her first encounter with the town bully, Natasha, who, to put it mildly, is a nasty piece of work.  Get on the wrong side of Natasha and your life is going to be hell.  Ostracism is the least of your worries.  And, Freya had certainly got on Natasha’s wrong side by attracting the attention of Ryan, the young man Natasha sees as her own personal property.  Casey is excellent both at conveying the sheer evilness of cyber bullying and how insidiously it invades the lives of young people and also at exploring the way in which just one dominant character can take over the lives of those around her and destroy their ability to think and act for themselves.  As Jess learns more about what happened the previous summer she becomes more and more convinced that Freya’s death was no accident and even begins to question whether or not her cousin was murdered.

Unfortunately it is not only the teenage inhabitant of Port Sentinel who want to see Jess let matters rest, the police, in the presence of DI Dan Henderson, Molly’s one time boyfriend, are also disinclined to reopen the case and here I think is an indication of the one feature that doesn’t quite work in this novel.  If you are going to write a book for children or teenagers you always have the problem of what are you going to do with the adults.  Your readers certainly don’t want them hanging around and traditionally they are despatched on holiday or taken off to hospital or got rid of in some other convenient if not very convincing way.  The kind of questions that Jess is asking, the problems that she finds herself facing, should mean that she has contact with more adults than she does and certainly that her mother, Molly, should be taking more of an interest in what is going on.  But, there are sections of the book where Molly seems to conveniently disappear and whereas a YA reader might accept this, I’m afraid I don’t.  If you’re going to write a serious crime novel and that is what this is, then you can’t dispose of or ignore your prime witnesses just because they are over the age of consent.

Other than that, this is a cracking good crime novel with a plot that is unfortunately all too believable and a sparkling protagonist who might well grow up to be the next Jane Tennison.  And we will have the chance to find out because the blurb on the back of the book promises that this is the first Jess Tennant thriller.  Now that would be interesting, to take a character through from teenage fiction, introduce her into the police force as a career and then move her into an adult series.  I wonder if that is what Casey has in mind?

Panic Stricken!

Help!  I have suddenly realised that this month the first Monday and the second Wednesday fall in the same week.  Consequently, I have thirty-six hours between having to lead one book group in a discussion of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, and taking part in a second group’s discussion on Franny Moyle’s Constance: the Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde.  Given everything else that’s in the diary for this week I am going to have to spend every spare minute reading (nothing unusual there) but also pinch some extra spare minutes from the blogging world.  Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.  Be good while I’m away.