Yes, I'm still reading ...

It's been a while since I last reviewed a book - November saw the last, I think - and I've almost forgotten what I've read since then. However, two of the books are sitting on the desk beside me, mute reproaches, and if I deal with them now they can find a home on a shelf. If there's any room, that is.

The first of them takes up the story of Robert Merivel, who first appeared in Restoration. In Merivel, A Man of his Time, Rose Tremain shows us a much more mature Merivel, a man in his late 50s who considers himself "much decayed" (ouch) with a life to look back on and one last great adventure to undertake. There is a lover, a trip abroad, a bear. There is the King, now also much decayed, and there is the melancholy of the end of a life imperfectly lived. Merivel is self-mocking and sad, and Tremain and her hero take us expertly through a world in which glitter disguises squalor and favour is given and withdrawn in turn. I was absorbed by the writing and made melancholy by the inevitability of ending, whether of a novel or of a life. So there.

And then I read Toby's Room by Pat Barker. A strange, inconclusive story of the 1914-18 war, of a brother and sister and their friend whose face is destroyed by shrapnel, it is described as "a riveting drama of identity and damage, of intimacy and loss", and "Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet". I dunno about that; I found myself driven to explore some of the history of Queen Mary's Hospital and the work of the artists who recorded the progress of early plastic surgery there, and in some ways I wish I hadn't. Having read the bood some months ago now, I find I've forgotten the conclusion of the narrative and can recall as it were the incidentals - but incidentals that are themselves far more important than any fiction could be.

I'd saved up the fat paperback The Villa Triste by Lucretia Grindle for a trip - the other two were hardbacks - and was engrossed by her story of wartime Italy and its resulting deaths in modern Tuscany. The time-switching typographical devices became easy after the first time, and the mystery remained - for me anyway - a mystery until satisfyingly late in the story. I liked Palliotti, Grindle's detective, and I loved Florence and the descriptions of backstreets and Sunday family eating.

And now I'm reading War and Peace, in the new translation. I've read about 200 pages of very small print, and there are another 1000 to go. I'm enjoying it more now than I was at first, having arrived in a War bit rather than the opening Peace section, and I shall certainly say more once I've finished it. Suffice it to say that I've learned from a translator's note that Russians consider the book an easy read, and I'm actually seeing why ... but of that more anon. Just don't give me any more books till I've finished it!

Warmth, light and love: the Advent journey

If you're really old - a silver surfer par excellence - you might remember this book: Footprints in the Snow, by the author with the unlikely name of Racey Helps. It seems to have been the first book he wrote, in 1946, and I must have been an early fan. (No, I couldn't read in 1946, but ...). I was thinking, as I wrote my last post about Advent, about what it is that we feel in this season, and it was when I was musing that it is certainly not a feeling confined to Christians that the memory of this book surfaced.

Today as I write the darkness of the early night has already engulfed us at 4.30 in the afternoon. It has been a foul day, and though the weather this week has until now been sunny and cold, it was threatening - the menace of black ice under the sun, the stubborn slush that would have you upended in a trice. It gives me pleasure to have returned to my warm house, to put on lights and fires - central heating isn't enough: I need orange flames to complete the setting - and to be safely inside for the evening. Better, we are expecting friends to come round and sing with us, sing Advent music and enjoy the shared experience.

That is a particular instance, fixed very specifically in time and place and inclination. The child's book above reaches the same area of contrast: that which separates cold, wet darkness, loneliness and threat  from warmth and love. From my memory, the little anthropomorphic characters with names like Millicent, Barnaby and Nubby Tope (that's the mole) find themselves frightened and menaced on a cold winter night and end up warm and safe and loved. It happens all over the place - in Wind in the Willows, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, even in Spooks (MI5 HQ being the safe hub where danger only rarely and shockingly obtrudes and usually happens outside). And it is there, I believe, at the heart of what happens in Advent, and particularly poignantly when Advent is experienced in the cold darkness of a northern winter.

That's where the rush to put up lights, to flock to warm, cheerful shops, to drink in cosy pubs comes from especially strongly at this time. The world is a hard place, but we can crowd together in a communal setting that will give us the illusion at least of being part of a group; we buy presents and send greetings and when these are reciprocated we have the warm glow of ... love? And whether it's real or commercialised, people feel the need for it, feel this need always but especially in the dark times.  If we are mature participants in a tradition that says wait, prepare, sense the darkness because of what you know will come, don't try to break it too early, then we savour the possibilites of our tradition to nurture our need and supply us with the realisation of love that did come, that does come. But if we are so wretched because of our physical situation, or our emotional or mental state, it can be harder to feel beyond the loneliness and threat of the season - and that's when the stories come in.

I loved that little book Footprints in the Snow. I can remember reading it, in my bed, in the winter - and I cannot recall reading it on a light summer evening. Very early, I think, I realised the attraction of the warmth and light and love at the end of a hard journey. I believe we are all like this, and we are all searching, whatever we believe, for just that: warmth, light, love. If we can help to provide that as well as need it, we are doing well.

I and me and chord sequences

Oh bother. I'm feeling a grump coming on. Having spent longer than is sensible reading old green Penguins - see past entries - I buy a couple of books at the church coffee morning. One, the first Simon Serrailler thriller by Susan Hill, I enjoy immensely and am glad to discover there are many more - though a chance conversation with a pal who has most of them leads me to guess at the dénouement earlier than I would have liked (deduction based, if you're old enough to recall it, on memories of the TV series The Virginian).

There is, however, one fly in that particular ointment - a solitary grammatical howler that stabs me to the heart in the middle of such a well-written book. As it's about two-thirds of the way through, I find I'm slightly on edge for the rest of it. Will it happen again? But it doesn't, and I'm glad.

And now I'm onto an American murder story - just started it. The Faces of Angels by Lucretia Grindle. Follow the link and read the reviews - sounds good, eh? Set in Florence, interesting perspective on a murderous attack near the beginning - all very promising. And then the glaring errors slip in, one after another. "I" instead of "me" - that sort of thing. I don't know if I can go on reading it, for I suddenly find myself becoming critical of descriptions, names (Kirk. I ask you...), vocabulary. I develop a sudden loathing for the word "gotten".

I used to get irritated when Mr B didn't like some piece of music because of some poor chord progression or somesuch (many a modern hymn suffers from this). But I shall not be irritated again. Not by that, anyway. Because I am just as bad, and right now I'm sufficiently irritated at myself, let alone at writers who should know better or composers who didn't do enough harmony at school.

As I said: bother.

Old haunts again

Back at the old paperbacks again - my third Michael Innes in three weeks,  a reversion to almost-childhood with one of my favourites, Operation Pax. And before that, although I read a new book in between, I re-read Hare Sitting Up. I could remember very little of the latter; but the former - as its dog-eared appearance testifies - is another matter. Strangely, although I could remember whole chunks of the narrative, the outcome of the plot eluded me once again until I was nearing the end and began to pick up the clues that the incisive Sir John Appleby was noting.

You don't really read these books for the detection. I never did - I loved instead the frequently baroque plots and poised prose - even when I was 18, as I know I acquired this copy when it was newly out. It was the summer holidays before I began university, and I can't help wondering now if the Oxford-based setting of the plot gave me romantic illusions about the next three years.

The story is fantastical, rooted in its time (the early '50s) with ex-forces undergraduates and biological warfare to the fore. Innes recreates the language, the society and the preoccupations of the day in his books - so reading them 60 years after they were written brings a familiar echo to someone my age. (I'd be fascinated to know how a 30-something feels about them - chaps? got a moment?) And he is a master of the telling impression - the figure seen out of the corner of an eye, the sense of danger conjured up by a fleeting footstep, the shadow in the Oxford mists.  He is also the master of the literary nod: in Operation Pax the central character of the first section is Kenneth Graham's Toad if ever anyone was.

I shall doubtless soon return to modern fiction, give up the re-reading for new paths. But I have a journey coming up, the small Penguins beckon, and I feel self-indulgent and idle.

What's new?

Fragmentation capured in a first novel

Writing on Shakespeare's birthday, I'm tempted to report that my withers are wrung by Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness.  This is a first novel, and it's masterful. From the opening section, written in the present tense, the confusion that so tellingly mirrors the state of Jake's mind began to seep into my understanding of what was happening: is Henry really in that prison? and why was Helen slumped at the kitchen table?

Jake is suffering from Alzheimer's, the condition progressing as does the novel. His story unfolds in a series of episodes, and if I were sitting down to do a study of it - as I might have had I still been teaching, for example - I would confirm for myself the precise uses of past and present tense: I suspect the sections in the past are reliable and rationally perceived while the present is used for the increasingly random impressions conjured up by Jake's disintegrating brain.

Harvey captures convincingly the struggle of the early moments of disease - the strategies adopted to disguise or foil its depredations, the ease with which others can cope with something that is filling the sufferer with dismay. The story goes on its fragmented way, some moments recurring while others open up aspects of the mysteries of life and relationships, until we reach what feels securely like the present - only to find that Jake has almost disappeared.

I can't say I enjoyed this book. It was too disturbing for that - too threatening of the glib reassurances we give ourselves. The writer is in her 30s, and I marvel at the depth of her imagination and - presumably - research. I don't know that I could bear to write such a novel at the age I am now.

But I'm glad to have read it.

Deeply satisfying

A couple of weeks ago now I finished reading Vikram Seth's An Equal Music - though if I'd read the review published on the Amazon page to which that link takes you, I don't know that I'd have bothered. This book is another of several lent to me by a good friend who knows my taste to such an extent that if she thinks I'd enjoy one I tend to give it a go, and so came to this book cold, as it were, with very little handle on what it was going to turn out to be.

It's a story of music, of love and of loss. The hero, Michael, plays second violin in a string quartet, and though he has a girlfriend - who is a less than satisfactory pupil on the violin - he is filled with regret and longing for the girl he loved when he himself was a student. So in that respect it is a love story, in which I felt he involved himself almost without will, as if he was unable to prevent any of the actions he took after seeing Julia on a London bus. It is significant that it is not the bus he is on at the time - they are bound in different directions and the tension of the situation builds gently but inexorably through the story.

The main player in this novel, however, is music. The tension between the members of the Maggiore quartet rings true, their individual temperaments as taut as the strings of their instruments, the differences between them sublimated in their combined music or - occasionally - wrecking it. I felt I knew these musicians and their constant preoccupation with their art, the way everything is seen in terms of how it will affect their music. When Michael is threatened with the loss of his violin, it is like an impending death; when a fridge in the house where they rehearse makes a noise somewhere between two notes it is identified and it disturbs. Bells sound a perfect G and music enters dreams. And when the Maggiore decide to play Bach's The Art of Fugue it takes over their lives.

The sense of loss permeates the story from the start, although at first I was not sure whose loss it was going to turn out to be. I'm not about to give away this most telling feature, but it works. Seth has brought off the feat of writing about music in such a way as to convince someone who is involved in music-making. And that is where I'll leave this deeply satisfying book.

Wrestling with Swedish hornets

I managed, for reasons associated with where I live, not to see the film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, though I wish I had and still hope to. But at Christmas, I was given the book on the left. "You like detective stories, yes?" said Ewan. And yes, I do - right back to when I began with Edmund Crispin. So I began on my Christmas books with this one, thinking "fat book, get it read before I go on holiday". But I'd reckoned - as, I imagine, had Ewan - without the travails induced by reading the third book of a trilogy in which all the characters have appeared from the start - or so I imagine - and have, furthermore, Swedish names that stubbornly resist internal pronunciation and therefore memory.

That said, I ended up thoroughly enjoying The Girl who kicked the Hornets' Nest.  Perhaps there was an element of triumph in my enjoyment, but it meant that I ended up lugging the two-thirds finished tome all the way to Dubai in my cabin bag so that I could read it on the long flight.

Apart from the intricately worked-out plot that had me thumbing backwards to find out where the clues were laid (and to check out which Swedish name belonged to which plot element) I found myself revelling in the hacking that formed the backbone of the latter part of the story. (How sad is that?) I regretted my inadequate knowledge of Swedish geography and the lack of a map at the front of this book, and I marvelled at what Swedes seem to eat for breakfast. It was such an engrossing experience that I found myself bereft beneath the palm trees when I finished it in a late afternoon after a swim, and it was hard to start on another book - which I may also review - that evening.

Several people have offered to lend me the other two books - I shall be ready to start one in about a fortnight, the way my life is looking right now. And I want to see the movie ...

Another small discovery

I've mentioned before how wonderful old Penguin books are for travelling. Compact little things, with small print and little in the way of fanfare or decoration, they are just what is needed for a train journey to Glasgow, or even - as recently - a trip to the hairdresser, involving, as it does for me, a rather chancy ferry service and subsequent irritating waits when I've just missed one. The book on the right, Josephine Tey's mystery story The Franchise Affair, has been back and forward across the Clyde several times, resulting in a certain degree of dog-earing and culminating in yesterday's trip to wait for Mr B in Inverclyde Hospital. It was there that I finished it, and was so aware of the loss of my distraction that I began to make a nuisance of myself ...

But I digress. This is another book that's been on my shelf for years, and I don't know why I never got round to reading it. Published in 1948, it would have been completely contemporary in its language, mood and setting - former soldiers in all walks of civilian life but possessed of unlikely skills, life in a small English town returning to quiet normality, church and tea-shops the centre of life and gossip. The mystery concerns the accusations made against two women who live in a dilapidated big house, The Franchise, to the effect that they kidnapped and beat up the fifteen-year-old girl who accuses them. The burden of helping them falls on a local lawyer, whose quietly contented life is changed for ever as a result. The story was apparently based on a similar event from the 1800s.

I find it hard to pin down what makes me so sorry to have finished it. The language is quietly perfect, the descriptions of life in Milford, 'where the last post goes out at 3.45', effective and completely suited to be the voice of Robert Blair, bachelor, golfer and the senior partner in Blair, Hayward and Bennet. The details describe much of my childhood, so that the women in their hats and gloves step obediently into line and the subtle differences in class and breeding are as soothing as they would now seem hilariously anachronistic. Perhaps it's simply the business of feeling safe in a novel - safe from grammatical blunders as much as from any device of the plot.

The detection side of the story is less complicated and less requiring of any genius on the part of the main protagonist than many, with the result that once the last piece fell into place the result was a forgone conclusion, but the characterisation and the subsequent lives of the women and Robert himself were of sufficient interest to keep me gently involved. The novel seems at some time to have been made into a film, and I could see it being a TV series that would pander to the Downton audience (I know - there are 30 years between them, but ...). It is, however, the book I have enjoyed so thoroughly. I'm glad I discovered it, lurking there ...

Helped by The Help

Belting through fiction as I am this summer, I feel that at least this one merited the (relatively brief) time I spent on it. I rattled through Kathryn Stockett's The Help in the way I recall from my childhood holidays, when friends would come calling at the door and I would be hidden upstairs reading something I couldn't bear to put down. And yet, as someone says on the Amazon page linked to above, it was also a book I was sorry to leave.

Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, the story is told in three different voices as Aibileen, Minny and Miss Skeeter tell their part in it. My heart sank a little at the beginning when I realised that at least one of the voices replicated the Southern speech of the narrator, for that was one of the things that stopped me from reading The Color Purple, but it's so cleverly accomplished that it soon became an integral part of my enjoyment. I think it may have to do with the complete lack of self-consciousness in the writing - there are no apostrophes underlining missing consonants, for example. It was no time at all before I was hearing these voices in my head, and relating them to my own contact with the Deep South a few years ago.

As with all novels set against a historical background, there is an inevitability about the grand sweep of events, but the individual experiences of the extremes of racial prejudice in Mississippi are gripping in their awfulness, their humour and their variety. The two maids and the lone white woman who takes their part against the prevailing mood are resourceful and brave - and cast a bright light not only on racial attitudes but also the assumption that 'help' is a necessity for a middle-class white woman and that white gloves and polished silverware are the norm in polite society.

I loved this book. At times I was horrified, at others I thought I knew what was coming and was proved wrong. Sometimes I had to put the book aside so that I could sleep. I loved the descriptions of the ... food, actually. I have eaten that food - the fried squash, the cornmeal, the grits - and it all came back in a flood. And over all I have a new respect for my dear friends Ruth and Ed, who lived through this time and fought for the rights of the black people of Alabama. The Help added another layer to the understanding that grew when I visited the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, and for that I am grateful.

But aside from all that, it's a great read.

Chew, don't swallow.

Another blog post, another novel. It's not that I've been devouring fiction more than usual, more a failure to blog that brings this about. I began Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin before I went to France - a mistake, as it is a fat book and not mine own, so I didn't want to stuff it into my flight bag. I had just begun to feel at home in the complexities of the tale when I left, and it took me a while to get back into it, for there are different voices narrating the components of Iris and Laura Chase's life together and I was, frankly, confused.

I think it was the effort required that initially put me off reading a book that's sat on the bookshelf for long enough to acquire a sun-tanned lower half (sorry, Morgane) - but it was self-disgust that kept me at it this time. I don't want to subsist on Mills & Boone in my declining years, after all ...

Iris Chase is remembering, as her body ages and her heart gives warnings of mortality. She is recalling the circumstances of her younger sister's death, and in doing this tells the story of their childhood together and their adult fates. As Iris is now old, the story covers much of the twentieth century - wars happen and mark the novel's protagonists, political events hinder their aspirations, society changes and with it their own lives.

The blind assassin of the title appears in the strange fiction that runs through the novel - much as the odd story of the sorcerer in Oranges are not the Only Fruit - but seems to seep out into reality as Laura Chase suffers in real life only to survive as a legend. Newspaper items surface as a contemporary commentary on Iris' memories, and Atwood's mastery of tense and person, of location and mood, pervades the whole, as it did in Alias Grace. I feel I've had an introduction to two centuries of Canada after these two books - and want to re-read the classics I read twenty years ago to check on what I found there.

Another holiday book for when you know you won't be disturbed - a book to chew rather than to swallow, and deeply satisfying.

Emma Donoghue's Room

I've always had a difficulty with books entirely written in a voice with which I'm uneasy. I never managed, for example, to read The Color Purple all the way through, because the narrator's English was so heavily Deep-South that the spelling of it gave me a headache. I managed with Sunset Song, but that is a masterpiece. And I managed with Room, by Emma Donoghue, although I nearly gave up after the first ten pages. And maybe the fact that I didn't points to the masterly handling that makes this book extraordinary.

We all read in horror, watch the news with unbelieving avidity, when a story breaks of someone held hostage, sexually abused, exploited, and then, miraculously, discovered and liberated. We unite in condemnation of the abusers, and wonder at the shadowy figures of their victims - but we don't often think about the effect on their lives of what they've been through. They're free, and we thank God, or the police, and move on.

This novel forces you to stay in captivity, physical and mental. It is told by Jack, who is five and was born in the room where he lives with his mother, Ma. He watches carefully regulated television, but the rest of his experience is of the confined space in which they live - a space where the beeps of the security lock on the door herald the nightly visits of Old Nick, the provider of Sunday Treats and the abuser of his mother - and Jack's father. The five-year-old's perception of what he experiences means that for a while after reading the book you too start seeing things differently, and even when he is able to experience Outside for the first time he has his own particular interpretation of what he finds there.

Jack is a captivating and fascinating narrator who has no judgement to pass on his prison because it is all that he knows. By the time he cuts off his long hair and finds that he still has the strength to cope with the world, we too have developed a changed perspective of our lives.

A book group would have a ball with this disturbing and engrossing novel.

A plank of the past

I first read The Moving Toyshop in my teens. In fact, I may have been swotting for my Highers, or maybe the few O Grades I was compelled to sit in case I didn't make Higher (Science, Maths - that kind of thing). Be that as it may, I have a strong recollection of sitting in the small park in Marlborough Avenue, in the leafy environs of Glasgow's Broomhill, laughing aloud in the sunshine, to the distress  - and I think this is in itself a Crispinism - of all animate nature. And it was The Moving Toyshop that was so entertaining me that irregular French verbs didn't get a look in, though why I would be reading in the park instead of the garden I can't think - unless I knew I would be caught not swotting if I stayed at home.

I didn't read the book again - you tend to remember the plot of a 'tec if you re-read it too soon - and found that the intervening decades had in fact wiped all memory of plot clean from my slate, and left me with only the quotations that have become part of my daily discourse. I can only give a flavour here: this moment comes so near the beginning of the novel that my delight at having begun a re-read was unbounded. Cadogan, a poet, has missed the last train and hitched a late-night lift from a lorry driver. As he climbs into the cab of the lorry, this conversation ensues:

 "The Ancient Mariner did this better than me," said Cadogan cheerfully as they started off. "He at least managed to stop one of three."
"I read abaht 'im at school," the driver replied after a considerable pause for thought. "'A thahsand, thahsand slimy things lived on and so did I.' And they call that poetry." He spat deprecatingly out of the window.

I will leave the present reader to deduce what kind of life has allowed me to quote that bit of Ancient Mariner in that particular accent. Frequently.

Oh all right - I know it's a specialised sort of amusement, but it is so beautifully written - and I'd just love to replicate the moment when a bell-boy wanders through the bar of a hotel calling "telephone call for Mr T.S. Eliot" and Fen, the amateur sleuth who is also Oxford Professor of Eng. Lit., says "that's me" and leaves the room. (Oh all right again - I'd have to be Sylvia Plath or somesuch...). And it was in this very book, before I'd ever darkened the door of an Anglican church, that I learned that the Lord's Prayer at Evensong is curtailed before  "...for thine is the Kingdom..."

So there you have it. An education in itself, beautifully written, extremely silly, utterly dated - and completely hilarious. I'm going to go back to another Crispin soon ...

Guilty pleasures

Just spent a guilty hour (reading fiction in the afternoon - heavens) finishing one of my birthday books. What's a girl to do, when her sister gives her three novels and a box of sinfully melting chocs? Reader, I did it. Blame the post -injection lassitude if you like. I still feel guilty.

Trouble is, Kate Atkinson is so gripping. She has a wonderful way with atmosphere, with weaving stories in such a way that though you suspect there will be connections you can't for the life of you see where they lie ... I'm hooked. I'm getting to know Jackson, the retired cop, retired soldier, dispirited investigator with the sad history that's revealed only piecemeal - and I'm beginning to ache with his toothache, sympathise with his undramatic acceptance of the misfortunes that keep careering through his life.

I've always loved a good detective novel, ever since I found Edmund Crispin and Michael Innes in my parents' bookshelves, going on through Dorothy Sayers to P.D. James. My tastes tend to the literary, so Agatha Christie was never a starter, not even when I was fifteen. Now I've discovered a new seam to mine, and I'll have to resist starting another one right away. Case Histories is a complex, moving tragi-comedy, so if you've got a holiday coming up, or a duvet day, or simply a nice box of chocs waiting for your attention, go for it.

Enjoy the guilt!

Pandaemonium

Not only do I forget to blog - or even to think - during the holiday period; I also give myself permission to read "holiday books", whether I'm in a foreign place or snatching some sunlounger moments in the back garden. This, chums, is such a book - and boy, did I enjoy it. Christopher Brookmyre writes the kind of stuff that I used to suggest to non-reading chaps in S5, and the author apparently once chastised my no. 1 son for letting his mother read his first oeuvre. But I have to confess to the inner tomboy, the one that climbed trees and ran wild all summer, and she (the I.T.) loved Pandaemonium in the way I remember from my childhood: carrying the book around with me, reading it on the ferry and in the hairdresser's, putting it reluctantly aside at 1am in the knowledge that I was about to read myself out of any desire to sleep.

It's a crazy story, of course, with supernatural elements juxtaposed with the more usual Brookmyre fare of stroppy Glasgow kids and a challenging environment, in this case somewhere beyond Inveraray. There's a horrific incident involving a burning bus, a crash, and a deer on the roof - but that's just to introduce the various kids as they head for a weekend of bonding and debriefing after a fatal stabbing in their school. The real horror comes from a parallel tale of an underground facility and a top-secret military experiment, long since out of control - and in the same area as the base for the bonding weekend.

The language is foul, the descriptions gory, and the discussions among the staff about the nature of belief surprisingly serious and interesting. The tension builds beautifully - perhaps hideously might be a better word - and the climax is unexpected. I didn't expect it anyway. I just enjoyed it.

At this rate I'll never read a serious book again.

Unreal city ...

There are some benefits to having a cold bad enough to keep you grounded, of which reading - even, as I suggested in the last post, reading turgid Victorian accounts of Alpine ascents - must surely be the most enduring. I've positively galloped through Amanda Craig's Hearts and Minds", enjoying it so much that I've just ordered another of her novels. I shall never see London and Londoners in quite the same light after reading this - the Guardian's description of "the big, panoramic London novel we've been waiting for" just about hits it.

I was impressed by the skill with which the five main characters are drawn, gradually filled in and slowly and inevitably pulled together, and delighted by the strings that weren't tied - the suspicion that there was a further connection left unmade, the doubt left as to precisely what another character might have done or not done. I noted yet another contemporary fiction brought alive by the constant present tense, and the different pace of modern speech after the Greene I read earlier last week. This is skilful, flowing prose that kept me reading instead of fretting, a book I lugged on the train to Glasgow after only a chapter, because I was too hooked to leave it for a day.

I suppose what I learned most from Hearts and Minds was just a hint of the way so much ordinary life teeters on top of so much that is extraordinary - made so by the problem of asylum seekers, economic migrants and the immigration laws. In a way that reminds me of Roman citizens closing their minds to the implications of slavery in their culture, we see the middle classes' reliance on the services of illegal immigrants and their willingness to ignore why, for example, their au pair works for so little, or seems so exhausted by mid-afternoon. When Polly's au pair vanishes suddenly, her reaction is one of irritation, disappointment, panic for her child-care arrangements - but not panic for the au pair or her fate. All this changes as she, like the novel, starts making connections.

Enough, already. Read it!

A Burnt-out case

Another old, small paperback - and I've found that there are some of this edition of Graham Greene's A Burnt-out Case for sale on Amazon, though as it's only the 1980 edition it hardly counts, surely, as vintage? The novel, about a famous architect hiding from the world in a leper colony in Africa, was written in 1960, though it has that timeless quality of Greeneland, and, like the other books I've been re-reading, that same effortlessly elegant prose. The opening two sentences give a taste of what is to come:

The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: 'I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive,' then sat pen in hand with no more to record. The captain in a white soutane stood by the open windows of the saloon reading his breviary.

There you have it. The assumption that the reader will know the original of the parody, the nameless characters about whom we will gradually learn more, the Catholic priest captaining the boat promising that there will be Catholic guilt at some point. Querry, the passenger, doesn't in fact suffer from guilt - he has lost the ability to feel much about anything at all. Famous in his field, victim of a terrible attack of indifference, he arrives at the Congo leper village where the doctor diagnoses him as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper who has gone through the stage of mutilation and in whom the disease is no longer active.

A strange book. It depressed me when I read it in the 70s, though understanding has grown in the intervening years. The end comes with shocking banality - but is perhaps the only conclusion that would satisfy. I'm glad I read it again - I'd forgotten big chunks of it, and became immersed in the heat and difficulties of Querry's new life and the awfulness of the white community beyond the leproserie. And yes, it was immensely portable.

Sacred Hearts and their secrets

I've just finished reading Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant - though I see they've brought out a new (and cheaper) edition with an unfamiliar cover. Never mind. It seemed a strangely appropriate book to be reading at the end of Lent - even though all the time I fretted uselessly about the fact that I was yielding to the temptation to read fiction rather than the serious reading I'd lined up all those weeks ago.

Set in the convent of Santa Caterina, in 1570 Ferrara, the novel tells the story of one reluctant novice and her fight to escape the prison of convent life to which she has been condemned by her father after an unsuitable love affair. Her mentor, the scholarly Suora Zuana, works in the dispensary, and we see the story through her eyes and through those of Serafina, the novice, although the use of 3rd person narrative keeps a certain distance and balance.The sense of convent life unfolding inevitably is intensified by the use throughout of the present tense - there is no feeling that anyone in the novel already knows what has happened in this momentous year; no omniscient narrator to hold our hands as the changes in the Church threaten the stability of what some might see as a home for women who are brides of Christ only because they have not become brides of anyone else.

Dunant again creates a believable picture of life in Renaissance Italy in what one critic described as "A rip-roaring tale in which gutsy vulgarity and ferocious academic intelligence go hand in hand". She also shines a probing light on such fascinating topics as holy anorexia, lesbianism among nuns, pre-modern teenagers and music in convents at this period. But in among all this scholarly knowledge there is a sixteen-year-old girl who could belong to this century in the turbulence of her emotions and her rebellious spirit, whose attitude to the faith she is supposed to embrace would seem familiar to many of us. And, despite the odd syntactical glitch, it's an absorbing read. I couldn't put it down.

Dark skies over Dunoon

Dark skies over Dunoon
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Another gloomy morning, the kind of day when getting on with it seems pointless and the book you're nearly finished (Pat Barker's Life Class) calls you to the red chair under the light. I would say I was depressed, but it wouldn't be true, for in depression books have no charm. But I am reminded of wet days in Arran, scene of my summer holidays from the age of 9 months until fairly recently (and I'll be there at the end of this month).

The house we rented every year had a cupboard at the top of the spiral staircase, watched over by two wally dugs - these china spaniels of unsurpassed hideousness. In the cupboard were two shelves of the most strangely-assorted books, among which I burrowed. By the time I was fourteen or so I must have read Dreadnoughts of the Dogger eight times, although there were also paperback Westerns and a hardback copy of The Flight of the Heron. (Does my younger son ever wonder where his Christian name comes from?)

And I used to welcome days like today, days when it seemed unlikely that we would be out for more than a few hours, days when I wouldn't be summoned by holidaying friends -"Is Christine coming out to play?" I would curl up on the step under the dormer window of the front bedroom and lose myself in the lost cause of the Jacobites or the adventures of Sea Scouts caught up in the naval activities of World War 1. I would be so far from the present moment that I would find it truly hard to join others in play, or even the family for food.

And that, of course, is the magic of fiction. Television, DVD, film - none of these has the same hold, the same secret lure to another world. I feel keenly the fact that as an adult I am no longer free to do this withdrawing from the world, and that as an online addict I have distractions which can prevent the immersion which is the true secret of enjoyment. And I shall never forget the time when I realised that being depressed - in my case post-operatively - stops the magic in its tracks.

The photo, by the way, somewhat contradicts the opening message of this post: this is the kind of sudden brightness that would signal the end of an afternoon's reading. I can almost hear my father's voice: drag yourself downstairs - the rain's off!

A strange Resurrection

I've just finished reading The Resurrection of the Body by Maggie Hamand. It was sent to me by a friend whose recommendations I trust, but for a while I wondered why I was reading it. Beginning with an apparent murder on Good Friday, this short novel explores belief, incredulity and loss of faith in the course of investigating a mystery, and is written in the simple, direct style of someone recounting a story they have gone over so often that all artifice has gone.

I read the greater part of the book today, having reached the point where I couldn't bear not to know what the outcome would be. I had grown accustomed to the dry style of narrative, to the short chapters with their artless titles. And now that it's done I find myself wishing it wasn't, and wanting to go on - except that the end of this story can't be written in twentieth-century terms. For how would we cope with the Resurrection? Would we not all be like the first century sceptics who said the disciples had hidden the body of Christ to prove a point? In giving us this very ordinary Anglican priest with all his flaws and hangups, Hamand has given us the chance to look again at our own beliefs - and perhaps our own deepest needs as well.

Not bedtime reading

Just been reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a book which I borrowed on my recent trip south and soon realised was not the bedtime reading I needed. This is the author's first book, and apparently the first to be written in English by an Afghan, and the writing delivers the insights into life in Afghanistan with telling directness. But the insights into the narrator's childhood perceptions and the horrifying results for himself and his friendship with the boy closest to him are such as to grip and repel simultaneously, so that my need to discover what lay ahead vied with the grim inevitability of the outcome.

This is a story of friendship, betrayal and redemption, beautifully told. It is also a window into a world which was changing even as I realised it existed - with the Russian occupation, and the subsequent horror of the Taliban. It tells of moderation and worldliness in a country which became synonymous with religious and social repression, and points up the plight of the asylum seeker in a strange land. It disturbs and provokes. I'm glad I read it.