News from Nowhere

At the pub quiz, we have just reached the end of our Book Of The Moment, Frances Hardinge's Fly By Night. The BOTM supplies one question a week, working through in a fairly orderly manner; so regular quizzers can pick up a fairly reliable point, if they are prepared to read a chapter or so each week. Fly By Night was my nomination (but the Quizmaster's choice) and I am very pleased with how well it worked. For me, that is: obviously I'd love to have converted other readers to one of my favourite writers, but I have very little feedback. People do seem to have been reading the book, and I wasn't hearing the sort of complaints I've heard about previous BOTMs. I know the First Reserve Quizmaster didn't enjoy it, but you can't win them all...

Anyway, two reasons for this post. First, to record how very much I enjoyed this re-read. It's a book that responds very well to being read slowly, with attention to every detail. I remember the first time I read Fly By Night, I reached the end of - I think it was the third chapter (they are quite short) - which ends with a line that just made me laugh out loud. This time I wondered, what took me so long?. So many lovely phrases, such wonderful descriptions, so much fun...

The final question in its tenure related to this line from the very last chapter. Mosca Mye says "I don't want a happy ending - " What does she want? Well, that's easy: she wants more story." And what makes it even easier is that this quotation constitutes the entire text on the back cover of my (hardback) editions of the book: "I don't want a happy ending. I want more story." It's a great line, but also I was delighted that it runs counter to my usual complaint about cover copy which tells you too much about what comes later in the narrative. It seems that you can get away with quoting even the last chapter, if you do it right.

I learned about this book from an article in the Guardian. Not a review, an article: the curator of Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery had written about his job, and about living in the house that goes with it, within the cemetery. The article describes the book as "enchanting", and deserving of the attention even though it was not yet available in English (it is now).

I resisted for a time, but eventually I cracked and ordered a copy (I try not to use Amazon, but it didn't seem likely that I'd be in France any time soon,so ...) and yes, it's a charming and entertaining read. Gallot hadn't set out to write a book, but had been approached by publishers after the success of the photos he posted to Instagram during lockdown, of his wanderings in the rewilded cemetery which was also his home. Knowing this, you can see signs of the author looking around for material to bulk out his (perfectly adequate but not exceptional) photos into a book: a bit of autobiography here, some history of Paris there, the pros and cons of rewilding a cemetery which is also a major tourist attraction... And I'm not complaining, it's all good, readble stuff. I'm happy to know how you get to manage a famous cemetery (it's in the family) and how you get to be buried at Père Lachaise (you have to be Parisian) and why some of the people buried there died long before the cemetry was founded.

But I stumbled over the explanation of why the chrysanthemum is so very much the flower of funeral (at the briefing course before the year I spent in France as a student, we were warned never to take them a gift for a hostess): the President, explains M. Gallot, gave the order that to mark the first anniversary of the Armistice, flowers were to be placed on the graves of all of France's war dead: since the day falls in November, the chrysanthemum which blooms at that season was a popular choice. I looked for the source of this information, but found only the same assertion on the official website of the city of Paris; the same assertion in very similar words: "Le chrysanthème, qui n’avait pourtant rien demandé mais déployait fièrement une floraison spectaculaire à ce moment-là, fut choisi." I was briefly very pleased to have learned this, but almost immediately realised that 1919 is too late for the origin of this tradition: after all, Howards End was published in 1910:

Evie said: "But those chrysanthemums - "

"Or coming down to the funeral at all - " echoed Dolly.

"Why shouldn't she come down? She had the right to, and she stood far back among the Hilton women. The flowers - certainly we should not have sent such flowers, but they may have seemed the right thing to her, Evie, and for all you know they may be the custom in Germany."

"Oh, I forget she isn't really English," cried Evie. "That would explain a lot."

More than you need to know about chrysanthemums and the Puccini connection.

But with that exception, entirely recommended.

Ushaw is a former Catholic seminary and subsequently part of Durham University which is currently remodelling itself as a historic house. The seminary's Great Library is still there, and although it is not as fully open to visitors as the rest of the building, every now and then you can book a ticket which gives you half an hour's access. That's what we did on Friday.



durham_rambler told me that although parts of the building are by Pugin, his design for the library were rejected as not big enough. I am charmed by this reversal of my usual assumptions (Thing big, Augustus! Really?) but can't find any evidence for it. durham_rambler thinks he may have read it on one of the information boards lining the approach to the library; the nearest I can find on the internet is a FaceBook post saying "The library building was constructed between 1849 and 1851 to plans by architects Joseph and Charles Hansom. It was designed to mirror A.W.N Pugin’s St Cuthbert’s Chapel on the other side of Main House."

( More pictures... )

Serendipitously, boybear sent me this link to the 'Idiom' book tower in the Prague Municipal Library: "You've probably already seen it," he said, but I hadn't, although now I come to look, it is all over the interenet, mostly on really irritating sites which are long on advertising but short on information. It sets out to be massively instagrammable, and it succeeds, but has a certain appeal despite that (not really a practical way of storing your books, though). Appropriately, the Library's own website has a good picture.

It reminded me of Simulacrum, a sculpture on Hadrian's Wall which we visited ten years ago...

I came late to the Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones podcast. What can I say? I am a twentieth century person, and have never really engaged with podcasts (perhaps now I have my new phone...?). So I didn't hear about Eight Days of Diana until it won a Hugo. But I would totally have listened to it if I had, even without that recommendation. And if I had been there from the start, I might have leapt into the discussion of Wilkin's Tooth (which, by a piece of sleight of hand, is the second episode) to say "Never mind Arthur Ransome!" who had been referenced in the context of children being left to play outside unsupervised all day. "What about E. Nesbit?" Can you discuss fantasy literature for children without stumbling across her influence? Probably not, although the reason I see her most clearly in Wilkin's Tooth is not the magic but the mundane: 'Own Back Limited' seems so precisely a sceme the Bastable children might have come up with. Calmgrove agrees about the parallel and takes it further.

Fortuitously, as I was thinking these thoughts, The Enchanted Castle came to the top of the diary pile. It's a tattered paperback copy which I bought in a charity shop in Berwick one midsummer: I knew I had read it before, but I didn't know whether I owned a copy (and I still don't know: if I do, it's on the top shelf and not easily accessible). And it had a very splendid cover: this illustration by Mario Laboccetta for The Tales of Hoffman. (With thanks to John Coulthart's essay on the art of Mario Laboccetta for identifying the original function of this image, and for some other samples from the same book). Splendid, yes; appropriate, absolutely not: Nesbit's castle is behind a hedge in the English countryside, not rising precipitously from the sea. My immediate reaction was that it would make a perfect cover for Sandra Unerman's Spellhaven, about which I have previously posted: poking around the internet reminds me that the cover of that book features the Mont Saint Michel, which is also perfect...

Having judged the cover in its own right, what about the book? (available from Project Gutenberg) As I said, I knew I had read it before, and I thought I remembered it. There's an early scene in which the three children, having found their way through that hedge to what they declare to be an enchanted castle, awaken the enchanted princess they meet there - who very rapidly confesses that she is not really a princess. This was vivid in my memory, where it had solidified into: This is one of those 'magic or not?' books in which the music is not real. But I had completely forgotten that what impels Mabel to own up is that she has become invisible: really, truly and despite her own incredulity, magically invisible. In fact, not only does The Enchanted Castle contain genuine magic, it contains an awful lot of it; the castle eventually turns out to be largely built from magic.

That said, there is something mundane about many of the magical incidents in the book: Mabel's embarrassing invisibility, Jimmy's transformation into an adult (disagreeable enough that I hope this is not really his adult self), the audience improvised from broomsticks, bolsters, umbrellas and hats who come to terrifying life (one scene from the book that I did remember accurately). The problems the characters face are not the dangers of another world, but the embarrassments of concealing the irruption of magic into their daily life. Perhaps this contributed to my false memory?

But there's a point at which the magic shifts gear: and what's more, Nesbit points out that this is happening. Gerald finds himself invisible in the grounds of the castle at night:

...as he went along the dewy lawns and through the groups of shrubs and trees, where pools lay like giant looking-glasses reflecting the quiet stars, and the white limbs of statues gleamed against a background of shadow, he began to feel - well, not excited, not surprised, not anxious, but - different.

The incident of the invisible Princess had surprised, the incident of the conjuring had excited, and the sudden decision to be a detective had brought its own anxieties; but all these happenings, though wonderful and unusual, had seemed to be, after all, inside the circle of possible things - wonderful as the chemical experiments are where two liquids poured together make fire, surprising as legerdemain, thrilling as a juggler's display, but nothing more. Only now a new feeling came to him as he walked through those gardens; by day those gardens were like dreams, at night they were like visions. He could not see his feet as he walked, but he saw the movement of the dewy grass-blades that his feet displaced. And he had that extraordinary feeling so difficult to describe, and yet so real and so unforgettable—the feeling that he was in another world, that had covered up and hidden the old world as a carpet covers a floor. The floor was there all right, underneath, but what he walked on was the carpet that covered it - and that carpet was drenched in magic, as the turf was drenched in dew.

In these moonlit gardens, the book starts to move towards its conclusion, in which all concerned attain their hearts' desire. First Gerald and then others see marble statues come to life: starting with a full-size dinosaur, but later encompassing any number of classical deities - Hebe herself, and "Aphrodite Urania, the dearest lady in the world, with a voice like mother's at those moments when you love her most..." and Eros, "a really nice boy, as the girls instantly agreed." This has the flavour of those chapters in which Mary Poppins has an evening out - so much so that I had convinced myself that there was precisely such a chapter, in which marble statues come to life to acclaim Mary Poppins as their equal. And why not? It seems quite reasonable for P.L. Travers to have read E. Nesbit. Only I can't find the reference. There's the chapter of Mary Poppins Opens the Door in which the statue of Neleus steps from his pedestal to play with the Banks children: have I hallucinated something from this and Nesbit's moonlit garden? Or am I overlooking something obvious? Over to you, hive mind.

In the last pages of the book, the speaker who both is and is not Mademoiselle (and I wish I had time to say more about Mademoiselle, and her relationship with the children) says that magic has a price, and for this reason all the magic that the magic ring has done must now be undone. The castle is definitively unenchanted.

Summer's over, and the winter veg farmers have replaced their summer stand-ins at the farmers' market. The new year begins: I have turned the page of the calendar, and September is very full of writing. Some good things coming (concerts and visits), and some less good (meetings have resumed).

I rescued my sourdough starter from the freezer and restarted it. It didn't look very lively, but I baked a batch of rolls: the logic was that they needed to be finished earlier than I would have liked, because we were going out to a meeting, and rolls required less time in the oven, so more time for rising. Which they did, very satisfactorily, to my relief. Now I have to get back into the rhythm...

New kit for the new term: not because I want its shiny newness, o the contrary, but because I have finally found time to replace the old-and-no-longer-working. My food processor died just before we went on holiday, and a new one has arrived, a huge box of mysterious components; the "instructions" attempt to display in pictures without words what each one does, and I am mystified. Also, my phone has not exactly died, but the 3G network has been switched off in Durham, so it no longer receives calls. I have finally surrendered, and ordered a smartphone, which is in the post. Exciting times...

At the pub quiz, we have finished the Book of the Moment, A Prayer for Owen Meany (hooray!) and started a new one, Frances Hardinge's Fly-by-Night (hooray! hooray!). I didn't hate Owen Meany, but I didn't love it, and the Book of the Moment reading process (estimate how far you need to read to answer a detailed question, and then remember the details as you read) made it very heavy going. Whereas, as of two weeks in, Frances Hardinge's style continues to offer new delights.

First concert of the (Live To Your Living Room) season was Simpson Cutting and Kerr. I was very excited when this was announced, because I so enjoyed their collaboration on Murmurs, and hoped this meant they had found time to renew their collaboration. Alas, no: it had been pointed out to them that that was ten years ago, and maybe they should mark the anniversary. The result was a fun concert, and it was good to hear them revisit that material: but it lacked both the excitement of discovering new things to work on together, and the solidity of this is our current repertoire and we are totally on top of it. No surprise, then, that what I have taken away from the concert was a rare new venture, sung in support of Scottish musician Dick Gaughan, of Hamish Henderson's Freedom Come All Ye. Lots of information about this song on Mainly Norfolk (including a link to Dick Gaughan's version, music and lyrics here.

So come all ye at hame wi Freedom,
Never heed whit the hoodies croak for doom
In your hoose a' the bairns o Adam
Can find breid, barley-bree and painted room.

We had not seen J. since we parted at Pitmedden, so there was plenty of catching up to do when she called in this afternoon.

On her way south, she had visited the Grassic Gibbon Centre for tea and a scone. Inevitably, she had also bought some books. "Did you know," she said, "that he wrote Spartacus?"

I thought Howard Fast wrote Spartacus, and said so.

Eventually we got this sorted out. The film Spartacus was indeed [Edited for clarity: based on a novel] written by Howard Fast, but Grassic Gibbon's version was published twenty years earlier (under his real name, James Leslie Mitchell). The National Library of Scotland's 'Curator's Choice' makes sense of this (and offers a link to the text).

You learn something every day.

Today is cold and grey, and if we had any thoughts about going out, they have vanished.

Last Sunday, though, last Sunday was glorious, and we visited Crook Hall

The person who checked our passes boasted of the tree peony (a huge bloom, rather blotched and blowsy) and the Himalayan poppy (just the one, but they are very proud of it because apparently it is quite hard to get them to bloom). I was more impressed by a fine cluster of wild garlic (which has an apologetic sign in it: This garden in the process of remodelling - oh, well). Randomly, my favourite picture was of some lingering blossom:

There is a new sculpture of a toad, to replace the old wooden one, which was rotting, and has been put somewhere he can rot peacefully and productively; the new, metal toad is, inevitably, by Graeme Hopper. There is a moorhen on the pool. And there is a new second-hand bookshop, but I didn't buy anything (though I did photograph a copy of Pride and Prejudice for the previous post).

'Twas on a Wednesday morning
The electrician plumber came

We now have a fully flushing toilet in the upstairs bathroom. Just in time, because -

- we had a house guest for the end of the week:

Frances's three children, whose homes are scattered across the country, came to Durham to finalise her funeral arrangements, and make a start on clearing her house (in which they had lived as children). Their initial intention was for all three of them to stay at the house, but it would be a squeeze, especially since (and I find this rather sweet, both irrational and entirely understandable) no-one wanted to sleep in their mother's bed. So durham_rambler suggested to L. (middle 'child', with whom he maintains contact on - Bluesky, I think) that he should stay with us. Which worked very well: a practical, rather than a social, visit, but with some time for conversation, those peculiar conversations you have at these times with people who have known you not terribly well for all their lives...

Thursday evening, a civic event:

durham_rambler was invited, as a Parish Councillor, to the opening of 'Two Tales', a pop-up outpost of Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books in Newcastle. One of the many empty units in the shopping centre has been repurposed into a bookshop cum café cum events/ outreach venue: not the aspect of Seven Stories that most interests me, but surely a good thing nonetheless. The gathering was more civic than literary: no conversations about children's books, more (still) about the local elections. durham_rambler commiserated with one unsuccessful Labour candidate: "Sorry you weren't elected - " "I'm not!" was the reply, and I see his point. I almost left without buying a book (which would have been rude); we were already outside when I spotted in the window a supply of a book about illustrations in the Seven Stories collection, and had to go back in again.

Saturday was Eurovision!

But I have run out of time, so that'll have to wait...

After the count on Friday, since we were halfway to J's house, we took the roundabout route home, and called in for a cup of tea. And I'm glad we did, even though we then had a bit of a rush to make the Live to Your Living Room gig we had booked: luckily the start time was not the advertised 7.30 but 8 o' clock, and we used the extra half hour to inveigle our too-smart-by-half tv into showing us the live YuoTube stream.

Breathless, but worth it: a hybrid concert, with Nancy Kerr, James Fagan and Tim van Eyken, not a line-up I'd met before. It seems they used to play together twenty or so years ago, when they all lived on narrowboats, then other things happened - but now Tim van Eyken has moved to Sheffield, and they have relaunched the trio. This had a feeling of celebration about it, and I think was also an anniversary concert for the organiser (Live at Sam's), so it chimed well with our own celebratory mood: and lots of tunes, lots of songs, some old friends (Spirit of Free Enterprise is absolutely not celebratory, but always welcome!), some new to me - a setting of Locks and Bolts to the tune of Lads of Alnwick, dissolving into the familiar tune...

Nonetheless, durham_rambler wanted a small celebration to thank his team of supporters (leaflet distibutors and one brave canvasser). This was of necessity held at short notice (wait for the election result, but as soon as possible thereafter) and this is a Bnk Holiday weekend: so the party ended up being a very small one indeed. I don't know what it says about this household that we had enough fizzy wine already in the cellar even before one of those well-wishers turned up with a bottle before going away for the weekend; but we had to go shopping to top up the supply of wine glasses! We also did some intensive dusting and vacuuming and moving of boxes in the sitting room, which is now looking almost presentable. We had a grand total of two guests, which is in my opinion an excellent number for a party, because you get to talk to everyone in some depth. Conversation was, quite properly, about the election, and what it will mean for Durham, and techniques for pushing leaflet through letterboxes, and gossip about local figures - and then veered off in an unexpected direction when the guest I knew less well removed her jacket and revealed a Sandman t-shirt...

Today we went to the VE Day anniversary celebrations in the Market Place: regard this as durham_rambler resuming his civic duties rather than any desire to commemmorate VE Day. Actually, I'd be happy to celebrate VE Day, and suggested that we should make a 'War is Over' placard to do just that: but as I had feared, the historical re-enactors present did not seem to have heard that news; and the band - well, it was too loud for me to listen in comfort. There were fewer stalls than I had expected, too, but we went round the market, and chatted to people (including the Parish Clerk, so durham_rambler gets his brownie point for showing up) and I bought a book from the bookstall.

On our way back to the car park, we called in at the People's Bookshop, where there was a small selection of hardbacks by Neil Gaiman, and a note saying 'if you want to read Gaiman without him profiting from it, buy secondhand' - I wasn't sure how to take this, but I selected a collection that I don't already have. So I discovered that the assistant who had written that note was a big fan...

Three celebrations and two conversations about Neil Gaiman: how's that for a themed post?

J. gave me Judith Woolf's The Case of the Campus Cat for Christmas: J. doesn't read crime fiction, but Judith Woolf is a friend of hers... The publisher appears to be just a step or so away from self-publishing, but there was nothing amateurish about the presentation of the book: on the contrary, I was wary of a certain slickness, a sense of buttons being pressed. So the title - like the cover (I rather like the cat on the cover) - announces that this is a cat-related crime, itself a flourishing genre; the back cover presents the odd-couple detective team (she is a literary scholar, he is a ten year old maths prodigy, together they ...); and just to be on the safe side, she's a lesbian.

None of these elements is a bad thing, but I was relieved to discover that although they are all present in the book, that doesn't tell you much about what kind of book it is. And I'm not going to say much about that, either, because it would be mean to deprive readers of the pleasure of finding out. Two caveats, though. The first is that if you are, indeed, looking for a nice cosy mystery featuring a cat, you should be warned that the cat does not come out of this well. The second is that although I have described The Case of the Campus Cat as a murder mystery, the murder comes quite a long way into the book, and is solved only in a generic way. Most of the detective work, and most of the emotion, the suspense, concerns the abduction of a baby. This is disconcerting, and I don't think it's inadvertent: given that the person who spots the vital clue and finds the missing child is not any of the people who is actively investigating, surely Woolf is playing with the expectations of her readers? If you are looking for a classic mystery in which the Great Detective gathers the suspects in the library and explains his deductive process, look elsewhere. If. on the other hand, you want the unexpected, and would like to spend some time being both entertained and moved, then The Case of the Campus Cat is worth a try.

The murdered woman is an anthropologist, who has worked with the Kainu, a (presumably fictional) tribal people of South America. This is an important strand of the book, although not one that the publisher chooses to emphasise. So I will say only that, for a number of specific reasons, when I finished the book I picked up Peter Dickinson's Skin Deep / The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, in which the surviving members of a tribe from New Guinea are living in a terraced house in London - and detective Jimmy Pibble is called in to investigate the murder of their chief. I'm always glad of an excuse to re-read Peter Dickinson, and this was far from my first re-read of The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, so it's no surprise that I still like it just as much as I expected. More of a surprise, though, was that the parallel is even stronger than I thought: in addition to the importance of a tribal group with a traumatic event in their past, there's the rôle of a young boy who - oh, that would be telling. Not so much a parallel as an echo, perhaps, is the presence of an exclusive Christian group, Woolf's Sealed Brethren and Dickinson's Pure People.

Both books are recommended, then, but I'm surprised to find myself issuing so many content warnings (very much not my habit). The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest was published in 1968, and is told largely from the point of view of Jimmy Pibble, "ageing, unglamourous, greying towards retirement." I can discern no racial prejudice in his relations with the Ku, but the vocabulary in which he thinks of them was old-fashioned even by the standards of 1968 - and some of the minor characters are worse. They are presented as completely in the wrong, but if you are distressed by the very presence of the words, brace yourself.

I think I have mentioned that one of the quirks of the Elm Tree pub quiz is that we have a Book of the Moment: as a bonus for regular participants, the first question of the last round is always about whatever book we are working our way through at the time. If you read a chapter or so a week, and pay attention, you are pretty much guaranteed a correct answer.

As the end of the year approaches, so does the end of the current book, Swallows and Amazons. This was chosen by a vote from among titles suggested, and has not been an entirely popular choice. I'm not unhappy with it myself: the slow and careful reading doesn't do it any favours, but it's fun enough in its way. For whatever reason, though, the Quizmaster decided that he would take nominations, but would constitute himself an electoral college and his decision would be final.

He called for nominations for the next two Books of the Moment, the first to be more serious, the second lighter. To my surprise, I found it harder to think of a suitable suggestion for the serious option: I think of myself as, if anything, an excessively serious reader. Perhaps there were just too many candidates? At the last minute I proposed Susanna Clarke's Piranesi: I wasn't sure it would work, but it is such a good book.

And indeed, the Quizmaster told me later that he was very much enjoying reading it, but thought that the sort of questions he could have asked about it were just too detailed. I wasn't complaining, though, because he had already accepted my 'lighter' nomination, Frances Hardinge's Fly-by-Night. I am astonished, because I really didn't expect a children's fantasy to find favour; astonished, but delighted. The pleasure of a friend loving a book you have recommended to them, but dialled up to eleven.

I celebrated by reading Hardinge's The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, her second collaboration with illustrator Emily Gravett. The first one was good, but this one is just brilliant, and I would explain why at great length, but I have shopping to unpack and dinner to cook.