A Tudor Christmas by Alison Weir & Siobhan Clarke

⭐⭐⭐
I don't think I'd previously read Alison Weir, bestselling popular historian of the Tudors, and if I had, it was over 25 years ago. When I was younger, I was obsessed with 16th century England and also studied it formally. If I was going to read any more about the period these days, it would usually be something specialist. After seeing a positive post about this Christmas book from Roman Clodia, a longtime Amazon reviewer and Goodreads friend who is, I think, a literature academic, I thought it worth a look. Via Netgalley I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook from the publisher, Jonathan Cape / Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
----
I'd have loved this book as a Christmas present when I was growing up. (Even if there is more about Henry VIII's court and less about Elizabeth than I'd really have liked.) The combination of Tudors *and* lots of British Christmas-related historical customs and factoids would have seemed perfect. It's stuff I've gleaned over the years from many separate books, TV documentaries and articles, all in one place. At its best it's the sort of popular history that would work as text in an Usborne (or these days Dorling Kindersley) book.

It is mostly very cosy (if you are the sort of person who finds history cosy in the first place): plenty on Yule-log fires, evergreen decorations, communal revelry and the evolution of the Christmas pudding.

However, in some chapters, the info on royal customs and court etiquette may be excessively detailed for those without a particular interest. Unsurpisingly, given Alison Weir's specialism in pop-history of Henry VIII and his wives, there is a lot in the book about royalty, and rather less for those interested in the middlin' sort and the poor. For other readers, the quantities of meat and hunting in the food chapters may be somewhat unpleasant, and may find that their sentiments chime with one unnamed contemporary's phrase that "the beasts, fowl, and fish come to a general execution". (But, as I reminded myself it's probably still fewer creatures than go on the collective national table now, with twenty times as many people eating, even if 21st century Christmases do leave the likes of larks and wrens alone and usually base the main meal around one turkey per gathering.)

There is also considerably more than you might expect about the Jacobean. James I was enthusiastic about celebrating Christmas, an attitude which was welcome in England, unlike in Scotland, where celebrations were increasingly prohibited from the 1560s onwards and remained unpopular with the Kirk no matter what the King said. (See, for example, Hutton's Stations of the Sun for further details, because A Tudor Christmas does not have much on Scotland.) As Weir and Clarke say of one Jacobean broadside, "It may post-date the Tudor era, but little had changed between 1603 and 1625, and it certainly captures the essence of a Tudor Christmas."


The quantity of poems included in the book was a delightful surprise, and although my copy is only a Netgalley e-ARC, and this is a book which suits hardcopy / coffee-table browsing, I suspected when I read it in mid-December that I'd be looking back at the poems over the Christmas period. Most are by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) - I had no idea he wrote so many Christmas poems. There are a number of Shakespeare excerpts, although not the one which has long been my favourite Christmas verse of this era - even if the double entendre does sometimes get a little wearing - When icicles hang by the wall. (There are quite a few online recordings of it sung to Vaughn Williams' tune, but they are all frustratingly and absurdly operatic in style, very much at odds with its folky communal subject.) My dream book on Tudor Christmas would be a big fat social-history elaboration of what Christmas was like for the kind of workers described in that verse, probably by Ruth Goodman and Ronald Hutton - however I'm not entirely sure there's a whole book's worth of hard evidence to base it on.

I can't help thinking of this as a book suited to bright kids and teens, or to casual browsing for adults, as the scholarship could be a bit better (research can be top-notch regardless of writing style) and I see it as the sort of history which you start out with, and then gradually learn later that not everything was exactly as it says. I would say for bright pre-teens with advanced reading ages, as well as teenagers, but there are one or two passing references that conservative parents might mind - though not my own friends who have kids, or our parents 30-odd years ago who let us free range among the bookcases at home. It's the kind of book I'd have enjoyed looking through from about age 8 onwards - it has too few pictures to have been really interesting before that - and understanding more of it year on year as I re-opened it each Christmas.

There's a bit of repetition and sometimes the themed chapters means the book goes back and forth in history in ways that feel a tad disjointed - but I can't think of a better structure either, and you wouldn't notice if you didn't read the book quickly cover-to-cover. There are a handful of questionable assumptions about the origins of customs. There are, of course, no footnotes. And the bibliography could be better: some decent stuff, but also some a bit old, and a few too many other popular histories which themselves don't use footnotes (some fairly recent such as Ian Mortimer's), meaning that speculation may end up replicated as if it were fact.

There are times when a little elaboration would have added interest rather than complication:
"According to legend, when enemies met under mistletoe they had to lay down their arms and observe a truce until the next day" (Which legend, found where?)
"The Church was well aware of the pagan connection with evergreens, and in some countries such decorations were banned, but not in England" (Which countries?)
The apparent contradictions between midwinter as a spiritually dangerous time when ghosts walked, and a specially time specially protected by Jesus' birth could have been broken down better. (Although there is undeniable appeal to phrasings like this: "the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest at the time of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and that spirits could walk the earth" showing part of the allure of the early modern period in being different enough from our own time to be fascinatingly different and alien, yet also with recognisable similarities in some customs and behaviour.)

In a book which has so much to say about minutiae of court etiquette, a few words could have been spared to explain that some surviving (later) Norse ideas include interpolations from Christianity, as this unsourced one presumably does: "Norse tradition had it that at Yule, the god Woden, the lord of magic and healing, came down to earth on his eight-legged horse called Sleipnir."
Or, closer to the Tudor period, that the enforcement, and effectiveness of enforcement, of prohibitions on various public sports and games was often limited.
The Green Man is a nebulous figure, with many interpretations based on a sort of mystical free-association; I'm not sure if this sort of thing has a place in a history book with no further info:
"the ancient legendary fertility figure of the Green Man, or ‘Ing’, who represents rebirth. The symbol of Ing is the boar, and in ancient times, a boar’s head was traditionally served on a bed of greenery on Midwinter Day."

However, there are also occasions when the authors debunk popular misconceptions, for example, Elizabeth I's order that everyone should eat goose at Christmas to celebrate the victory over the Spanish Armada. This was repeated, for example, by a Harrods manager speaking in an otherwise pretty good BBC documentary about Charles Dickens and Christmas that was repeated this year. "as the Armada was won in August, it is unlikely that Elizabeth ever gave such an order; she would have known that her poorer subjects could not have obeyed it, as goose was an expensive luxury."


There is plenty of fun material here as well, among the less well-known stuff, and it can easily be made multimedia, for want of a better word. Anyone who read A Tudor Christmas this year and also watched the BBC televised church service from Oldham on Christmas Day will have seen a revival of the child bishop tradition, albeit conducted in a more sensible for the 21st century, and more egalitarian, as it was a girl not a boy. There is a video of the est.1344 procession by the Worshipful Company of Butchers - not using a real boar's head in 2014, a stylised model one. If desired you can listen to music, such as William Byrd's Out of the Orient Crystal Skies, described by the authors as "one of the finest musical pieces of the English Renaissance". The writers anticipated endeavours to use the book interactively - they advise companionably at the beginning that recipes "may not appeal to a modern palate, some ingredients are not easy to come by, and quantities may be gargantuan!". Before considering trying them, it might help to look at bloggers' attempts at these historical and literary dishes, for example Perdita's warden [pear] pie from A Winter's Tale: one; two. (Neither is quite GBBO presentation standard but very interesting nonetheless.) Others try out old games, such as shove groat. And in the 21st century, the popularity of hoodies must make hoodman-blind easier than it had been at any time since the medieval: "people turned their hoods back to front, or pulled them forward over their eyes, then chased the other players until they caught one. That person became the next hoodman."


It was interesting from a personal perspective to find myself with more understanding and sympathy for Puritans than I used to have - especially compared with pre-university days when I read only popular histories like this, and Puritans were baddies in boring clothes. I've still regularly used 'puritan' as a perjorative in matters of prudery and language, but in material terms, for environmental and social equality reasons I am totally on board with disapproval of overindulgence, inessentials, the replacement of items that still work or are fixable, and so forth. On a felt level, I realised I found Puritans very relatable - their motivations are just different and their zeal for criticism and change encompassed some things which I consider good.

Such as, for example, the Twelve Days of Christmas, around which the book's chapters are rather delightfully structured. This gives space for discussion of customs which are passed over in other popular histories, including those for Holy Innocents on the 28th and the feast of Thomas a Becket on the 29th. Since childhood it has bothered me that the twelve days are no longer observed: I could never understand why a Catholic school which recognised Epiphany nevertheless started its winter/spring term before 7th January. (Whilst I had to concede that recognising the solstice would never be their thing.) And these days, modern green or left wing forms of material 'puritanism' take as evils overconsumption, overproduction and overwork, so a bit *more* holiday, not less, is good (provided it's not used for long-haul holidays and shopping till you drop) - in contrast to the early modern religious puritan who felt that people needed to work more. It would no doubt be a popular idea with quite a lot of people, like the participants at the end of another BBC programme shown in the last few days, the Victorian Bakers Christmas special. Unfortunately it's a luxury available largely to those who can arrange their annual leave thus and who also have the stamina to manage with less rest at other times of year, or to the better-off self employed in occupations that give scope for it. (It was nice to notice a couple of days after reading this book that George Monbiot had said on his Twitter page that he was staying offline until 7th January.) Although the length of observance in some parts of the country indicates that extended Christmas celebration co-existed alongside work. Not only did a few areas of England keep decorations up until Candlemas, "Some kept open house from Martinmas (11 November) to Candlemas (2 February), welcoming friends and visitors and mitigating the privations of the winter months for the poor who came to receive their charity."

This is an appealing book to browse and to have around at home, and is to be taken in very much the same way as many TV documentaries - not 100% correct, but often enough to be worthwhile, and an interesting and friendly presence. (Some Amazon reviews mention that the physical book is smaller than they expected, however.) If you want a more detailed and referenced take on the same subjects, have a look at Hutton's Stations of the Sun or The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700.


(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)

Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark

A 1981 Booker-shortlisted novella, which I read for the upcoming forum book tournament Mookse Madness 2019, scheduled for March.

-----


The premise befits a nice Sunday evening TV drama - London, 1949: a young writer takes a job as secretary to an eccentric association of minor aristocrats working on their autobiographies - but it soon becomes apparent that this is more discomfiting than cosy. This happens with Muriel Spark books: I expect and want them to be cosy, and then they're not.

Fleur, the narrator, is very interesting, as are the varied responses to her in other reviews - among them 'likeable', and 'unreliable' (in the literary sense). She's strangely unsettling, and part of that is that she also isn't as unsettling as you sometimes expect she may become. In the first couple of chapters, I had déjà vu - perhaps I had read a few pages of this standing in a library or bookshop in the 90s - and I kept thinking how, as a teenager, I'd might have taken Fleur's opinions as right all round and to be emulated. Now I could see that she coded, sometimes, as intended to be unlikeable - yet she never actually became nefarious. In the end I concluded she was a type of spiky individual I like and when I meet one, I'm so glad to find someone who agrees with me about xyz and who doesn't fit in in certain ways I recognise, and sometimes tries to play the game, sometimes not. (‘You know,’ Dottie said, ‘there’s something a bit harsh about you, Fleur. You’re not really womanly, are you?’ …To show her I was a woman…) But on the other hand it's probably best that with them I never talk about abc, because we'd definitely disagree, and that I don't confide about anything that sounds a bit soft. She was another of these characters, like Gretel in this year's Booker shortlisted Everything Under, whom I'd perhaps prefer to talk to than read about within the confines of the novel. Fleur seems so real in her unstereotypical personality, which itself has twists and turns compared with most literary characters who seem cardboard cutouts by comparison: sometimes she's kind when you hadn't expected it, and just when you figured she's actually really nice after all, she says something catty. This is how people are in real life, not in books, perhaps especially when young and still figuring things out.

Yet she is also a notably unrealistic device of 1980s metafiction - a loud, raucous context (alongside Martin Amis) in which I never would have thought, of my own accord, to place this tale of more-or-less genteel machinations. (It's only a few open references to bodily fuctions and sex that indicate it wasn't written in the 50s or early 60s; otherwise it feels very much of that era.) Understanding, via the introduction by Mark Lawson (in the 2007 Virago edition), that there are 'autobiographical associations' lurking in the novel made me more interested in Muriel Spark as a person. I've never especially liked Lawson on TV and radio, but here, without his broadcast manner or the glibness of newspaper columns, it became apparent that he has some good insights into literature. There is plenty explained here which I wouldn't have spotted otherwise, as I've only read two or three books of Spark's previously and had read very little about the woman herself. If I'd ever known she was Catholic, I'd forgotten, and because I was used to seeing her defined foremost as a Scottish writer, had no idea that back in the 70s she'd been seen as one among Britain's major Catholic novelists of the 20th century, along with Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. (I'd tended to bracket Burgess with Ballard instead, as one with an interest in the shock of the new, whilst Waugh and Greene, it's easier to understand grouped together.) David Lodge, too, is mentioned, for metafiction, though Catholics were also a feature of several of his novels.

I love the book's milieu of shabby-genteel bedsit life and full time work with strange characters, which feels far more realistic than most contemporary books about young writers. Regardless of the non-existence of internet, this is still way realler now than Tao Lin or Sheila Heti. (Where are all the great new novels in which authors house-sit and work in temp admin jobs, and pare down that online grocery order to as little as possible over the minimum £40?) Spark's phrase for these circumstances "on the grubby edge of the literary world" also gives me the pithy description I'd been needing for Vernon Subutex - which I've been reading slowly for the last couple of weeks - vis a vis the music world. Fleur has a tacit self-assurance which is unaffected by the differences in wealth and class she encounters at work; there's no reason to believe she isn't English, but this kind of confident semi-detachment from English social structures strikes me as characteristic of educated Scots people, perhaps especially of an older generation. This attitude, and the setting made me want to love the book, although the narrative was too unsettling for that. It was hovering at 3.5 stars a lot of the time - I just don't love 'unsettling' the way some readers do - but the final pages had the warmth I'd been foolishly wanting, and so up it bumps to 4.

This, in its recent Virago edition is my least favourite cover among books I've read this year.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize. A first for a verse novel?


I bloody love long narrative poems, and I wish there were a lot more modern novels in this form. Not sure why I find poetry faster to read - know it isn't the case for everyone. For me, it goes straight into the veins, and it omits the extraneous, leaving only the most vital impressions. Or maybe it's the presentation: shorter lines and more white space on the page make it visually easier to take in.

It was the form that made me keen to read this, but the US setting held little interest. If a prose novel about a demobbed Canadian serviceman adrift in post-WWII America had been longlisted for the Booker, I'd have been in no hurry to get round to it. And if The Long Take had been set anywhere other than North America, I could have seen myself giving it five stars.

I haven't read anything about Robin Robertson yet; it would be interesting to learn why a Scottish poet chose to set a long work there. I have a hunch that the protagonist, Walker, was one of those characters who appears to a writer from the subconscious: a British writer's use of Dad's Army names Walker and Pike for characters who bear little resemblance (other than Pike's youth) to their sitcom namesakes feels like the product of a dream.

The Scottishness of Nova Scotia, where Walker grew up, was a revelation, full of shielings and strathspeys and slaters. (The last of course being a better word than the standard English, reflecting the creatures' hard, flat dark-panelled appearance; 'woodlouse' has always sounded like it ought to mean another, leggier, creepy-crawly.) The place felt Scottish or British even without dialect words: at first in the nostalgic passages about nature, I thought Robertson was writing about Scotland, perhaps from a different viewpoint, maybe his own, and perhaps we would hear later in these sections about the writing process. (There turns out to be no such meta content.) He is at his most vividly poetic and metaphorical when writing about animals and nature - these are largely asides in this book, such as the spider that winches itself from the lampshade in Walker's apartment: were I to read more of his work, it would be nature poetry I'd look for first.

Thank you to this thread for a couple of insights. Firstly, putting me on the alert for elements of contemporary relevance; what jumped out at me, as if it had been highlighted, was the homelessness problem in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, and characters' criticism of the government and media being more concerned with Russians it said Russians rather than Soviets) and McCarthyism than with the housing shortage. A modern feature of the narrative, when set against 1940s attitudes and writing, is that characters are never explicitly described by their race: there were once or twice names that might be Latin, or Native American, and characters who were explicitly stated to be black only once it came up in conversation, in both instances due to racists. (This approach seeks to transmit a sense of comradeship between men in the story as veterans and/or as homeless, regardless of colour, and to imply Walker's progressive outlook, in contrast with some of his contemporaries.) Secondly, a point which is a spoiler if you enjoy working out conundra while you read - but as I read a good chunk of The Long Take whilst I had a headache so bad it hurt even to put my head on a pillow, and could not have read anything very complex, it was simply useful: that Pike is probably more than one person. I would add that I think he only becomes so in the final chapter, 1953. As Walker's mental state deteriorates, Pike becomes a generalised identity he maps on to various antagonists.

The story sometimes felt nebulous, but the final chapter (about 1/3 of the book) pulled it together - and retrospectively it became increasingly obvious that this randomness and half-rootedness, interspersed with episodes of purposefulness, had always reflected Walker's state of mind, as trauma seeped in, even when intrusive memories of horrific army experiences were not at the forefront of his memories. I hadn't bonded with the book until that final third; what led me to was seeing the trajectory of how Walker worked with a group of disadvantaged people with whom he felt an affinity, only to later find his own situation deteriorating so that he gets closer and closer to becoming one of them; to being on the other side of the desk, object not subject. A revelation during that chapter also explains certain points earlier in the story. Though are we meant to be sure that Walker did those things - or to wonder if he imagined them in his traumatised state?

But The Long Take is not all psychological drama. It's immersed in the culture of its time. There is jazz. And it is a paean to US film noir of the late 1940s and 1950s, set alongside the messy real lives of some of the men who watched it in movie theaters, and witnessed it being filmed in the streets where they went about their daily lives. It is suffused with references to favourite scenes (the 'long take' is from Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy aka Deadly is the Female), and characters are described as looking like actors of the period. (And at least one, from a 1958 film seems to denote a lapse of time once years stop being mentioned explicitly.) If you like these films this book will probably be rather amazing. I've hardly seen any of the films referenced, yet something is still added in the general understanding, as they conjure visuals for Walker's story in trenchcoat-clad black and white, and in the symbiosis between man and city, Walker disintegrating as 1950s LA becomes less human in scale, more corrupt and more corporate. (I could imagine just how much I'd love an equivalent prose-poem shot through with cinematic movements I know well, such as French New Wave, or British films of the 1960s and 70s. Or, for that matter, classic Ealing films being made on the other side of the Atlantic contemporaneously with these noirs.)

It is an impressive work in pulling together, as poetry and narrative, elements of this era that the public rarely regards together. The modern idealisation of the Greatest Generation, bulldog spirit and so forth disregards the extent to which the war was traumatic for many, and that not everyone could keep calm and carry on, no matter how much they wanted to. Noir and jazz, still seen as epitomes of cool were created against this backdrop. The death of Charlie Parker, born the same year as the protagonist, is starkly announced to make his and the reader's blood run cold. This is echoed (two years) later with the bombshell news "Bogart is dead", like another big bump downwards in Walker's trajectory: an end of an era and an icon of always keeping it together under pressure. In a very subtle way, using history, cinema and music, Robertson appears to be looking at the demands on men to keep up a façade, and how things may be when they can't. (The white men in the book are dealing with war trauma, the black men with that and racial violence.) But interpretation is optional here: this is a story so fully about itself and its setting (absolutely no sledgehammers here) that it also doesn't have to be anything else.

(read & reviewed August 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

In 2013 or 14, I voted on the Goodreads list 'Books you are tired of hearing about' to express my exasperation at seeing To the Lighthouse every bloody where that summer. If, even six months ago, you'd told me not only that I'd read To the Lighthouse this spring, but that I'd give it 5 stars and mark it "favourites", I'd have told you, if you were the kind of friend I could say this to in a friendly way, to fuck off. Especially because I didn't much like Mrs Dalloway and the imprint it left of grey-grubby dejected aftermathness, a book which on at least half a dozen occasions I've called "the wrong sort of depressing", and my default position was that I didn't like Virginia Woolf apart from Orlando and didn't want to read any more. I am still not very happy to have joined the club of Goodreads bores who love To the Lighthouse, but for what it's worth, the book was rather amazing - and I don't think this way about dozens of other classics and favourites I read before GR or was already determined to read before joining the site, and which people with large followings also go on about, so it'll just have to get re-framed to fit with those. When something's this popular, it goes without saying that you won't be on the same wavelength as all the other fans.

It wasn't instant. I read Hermione Lee's excellent introduction (better than a lot of the recent introductions to classics; the notes, however may be a bit too detailed unless you're doing a dissertation about textual alterations) and then small dribs and drabs of the novel. It was full of odd metaphors that were clearly well-written but which didn't describe my own experience of anything. I was sad not to be connecting when I'd wanted to connect with its superlative descriptions. Though there was a curious sense of its being the platonic idyll of hundreds of early-to-mid twentieth century English stories about elegant families and children and lawns and parties and summer escapades - even though it was written after plenty of examples I thought of, E. Nesbit for instance, and even though a lot of the characters just weren't very nice. (Later, the family structure, with the moody writer father and caretaking mother and lots of kids and guests, would prompt me to wonder if it had partly inspired childhood favourites of mine, the Bagthorpe Saga by Helen Cresswell.)

It was a world I still couldn't imagine as great high art: it's a world that's popularly cosy Sunday evening entertainment, as described much later, in Chapter 16: when the great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their washing-tables and dressing-tables, and the novels on the bed-tables, and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-room for dinner.

Back near the beginning, I couldn't grip it. (These quotation marks are all things I wrote straight after reading.) "The prose is so silky, it slips past my eyes the same way poetry does. Probably because it's very well made. But feels essentially insubstantial. Yet quite often there's a really novel image. I get this with Ali Smith too - I often find it hard to see why she's quite so revered because she doesn't do the Pynchon thing of throwing around huge words and references and gags and it seems enjoyable in a simpler way, but there's a sort of... there isn't a word for it, because I have a sense of its being plainer and more grounded than 'beautiful' would suggest, it's not ornate, but it's incredibly well crafted."

No, to work its magic it needs to be read at length: immerse oneself and swim around in it, stretch out.
"I am getting to like it a lot now. There was a bit from chapters 4-12 that was really enchanting and ethereal, and it worked despite most of the characters being prickly, interesting how it does that. And it gained momentum once I read a lot of it at a time."
"Am starting to feel how some of the curious metaphors in TtL are like paintings. It doesn't matter that I might not have experienced that thing that way, the joy is in the images themselves." [I would later start to feel the nature of the actions in a new way, through their imagery. I can't recall a book that has ever done this before, and so very many times; other great descriptions have merely captured a feeling that already existed, on the edge of consciousness and previously beyond words. This is one of the central and unique achievements of this novel as far as I am concerned.] "It is refreshing to find such a very good book that feels like it's all about other people, the characters (not something for me to identify with or see people I know in it). Totally unconvincing as being about Scotland though. Always feels like the South Coast. Walter Scott was still fashionable in Scotland decades later. Never mind the complete absence of the sense of Scottish weather." It is an airy halcyon world, like the perfectly chosen cover of this Penguin Classics edition; it is Metronomy's English Riviera a century earlier. No one is stung and importuned and tangled, raw-eyed, by perpetual smirring sea breezes that any non-native would rather call gales.

"It's incredible how tiny the moments are that are described in TtL. So much longer to read (and esp to write) than to feel. I've read some reviews that seem to miss this completely. How very fleeting these states of mind are; the sort of thing people don't feel in the long term, nor set out to be judged by, not like writing down a considered opinion." Each moment is not what one character definitively thinks of another; among these are the moments we usually forget, microscopic aberrations and contradictions.

It is remarkable to have created such a beautiful and shimmering book from actively cathartic writing about a dysfunctional, sometimes abusive family , and a delineation of the frustrations of being an intelligent, artistically ambitious woman in the early twentieth century. It still barely seems possible. Just as it is strange to think of Woolf as a Victorian or Edwardian, yet those were decades of her life, drawn here, as she, like Lily, created new strange modernist forms that were anything but characteristic of the century of her birth. (Though perhaps the most modern - the most twenty-first century moments are of the irascible Mr. Ramsay with his nose forever in a book whilst in company, like a smartphone addict neglecting his guests.) It is a book very much about art, about painting, concerned with the creative process - perhaps the central human moment of the story being Lily's resolution to move the tree - as well as these memoirish themes which are often considered the opposite of art, a way to make art unartistic; rather it makes them into a resolutely aesthetic object.

"And how wonderful is 'Time Passes'?! I was expecting something knotty and Joycean - based on a negative review (whose saying it was too similar to Mrs Dalloway continues to puzzle me because this book is so gorgeous and Mrs D made me feel 'urghhh') and someone else saying it was hard to make sense of - but I think it's one of my favourite bits of a book I've ever read. It's almost animist (makes me want to read" [Amitav Ghosh's recent, and I think vital work of criticism on the neglect of climate change and nature in fiction] The Great Derangement all the more" [for this, surely, is its project of writing about and from the viewpoint of the non-human and the absence of humans: here the characters are buildings and the force of nature and history itself, taking over the unlived-in building, ending the Edwardian pre-war eternal summer of the upper classes, combining in the effects of human deaths, and new life in other forms: animals, plants and the renewed interest in poetry after the war]"- but the writing is so superlative: I couldn't believe there was something like that, which mentions things I love hearing about in evocative low fantasy, in an author like Virginia Woolf. And it does actually say what happens, and mostly in full sentences. Makes me want my own paper copy just so I can re-read those pages over and over."

The servants become full characters here in this section whilst the family is gone: they are aligned with nature, which both feels right - because they are local, they are part of the place, whereas the Ramsays belong in London - and feels wrong because it seems part of Woolf's only-half-developed class consciousness to align them with the non-human, with invisible forces.

This is a book which works by accumulation; I am not sure if some favourite moments from 'Time Passes' will seem so special in isolation.
weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane (as well as the darlingly anthropomorphistic 'methodically', it's that collapse of time that suggests both night as a metaphor for the years of awayness, and the speed at which growth occurs in the absence of humans, that it does feel like overnight, yet also it is like fantasy where the plants do grow triffid-like in a few hours)
Toads had nosed their way in (... that adorable way animals affectionately push at you with their snouts: but here directed not at people but at the absence of humans that allows them to truly flourish).

Ideas that arrived earlier in reading seemed to be affirmed subsequently by the book:
And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. (pt 1 Ch 19)

the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome Constantinople (pt 3, Chapter 10)

It was only towards the end of the third part that I realised the reader doesn't actually find out if the Ramsays went to the lighthouse at some off-screen moment during their visit in part one, and it doesn't matter. What matters is what's in the frame, as in a painting.
Yet also not: Lily's Cubist canvases - which she feels driven to work on despite suspecting they will end up as nothing more than attic bric-a-brac (something relateable all too well to writing a 685th Goodreads review) - are created as much by what is left out as by what is shown.
When the Ramsays finally make it to the lighthouse, their boat is out of sight from the mainland, out of the painter's view: the distance of the boat from land is the greater distance from the past Woolf gained by writing about this refraction of her family (as the letters quoted in the introduction more or less confirm). It really is a remarkable achievement to make such very artistic art from this stuff - compared with the thousands of lightly fictionalised memoirs now in vogue - though in its concern with posterity (The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.) and details of the creative process, overtly and in recursive, "symbolical" commentary on itself, it may be an artists' book most of all.

(read & reviewed March 2017; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Excellent Scottish historical crime novel, shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Honestly, "literary crime fiction" can be a bit dull sometimes, can't it? All those chilly, brittle delineations of character and meditations on why. The writing may be absent the tiresome clunks often found in a commercial procedural, but also missing is the compulsive moreishness that means you've read a third of the book before you've even looked up from the page again, perplexed and perhaps worried that something so fucking grim is also so much fun. Not so here. This is a book I'd highly recommend to everyone on my GR friendslist who enjoys superbly-done genre writing. It also has greater depth and interest than much contemporary litfic with more overt pretension.

Among the great fascinations here are the character of seventeen year old Roderick himself and how he is developed - the sort of character whom in the hands of a less skilled author could appear clumsily created to appeal to the typical reader of books, somewhat more solitary and intelligent than those around him, with a few aspie-sounding traits. But he never evoked the heroines or heroes of those cheesy bestsellers about magical bookshops and the like, rather this felt like a completely authentic portrait of the sort of young person who the village schoolmaster wished would go to university, but who had to stay and work the family farm, the ways in which such a person's routine days may have been spent. (I daresay a few of you think of this type as being among your ancestors too.) His blend of thoughts seemed so well chosen it was sometimes hard to believe he hadn't been a real person - the tendencies shared with the men of the Scottish Enlightenment and their intellectual descendants, just communicated more plainly, and others with obvious roots in the remote crofting hamlet (c.f. the miller in the microhistory [book:The Cheese and the Worms|71148]) and his mixture of bolshiness and spartanness that is IMO utterly characteristic of a certain kind of bright Scot. The presentation of multiple accounts of the 'case' leads to a curious co-existence of sympathy and more detached views of Roderick. (The presentation is immersive enough that a few people have tagged the novel as 'true crime' and I felt I should do a search to be completely sure it was fiction.)

This is also a story about religion and class.

The story is set a short while after the major phases of the Highland Clearances, but the same powerlessness in the face of of landowners still exists, and still educated characters from further south just don't get it. His Bloody Project is the type of historical novel that leans far more towards accuracy than towards wish-fulfilment for modern readers, but it has modern concerns about the voices of the voiceless, about well-meaning do-gooders, about snobs and their theories on the degenerate poor. It simultaneously makes one relieved that better checks and balances exist now, but concerned about their erosion. And one may feel we know better than the C19th "criminal anthropologist" in certain of his ideas - but how different are some of our current ones, and can we really know they are correct?

I'd forgotten just how utterly pervasive its puritan fatalism of Scots Presbyterianism can be (a tendency which IMO seeps into the Scots mindset even among the non-religious: where does stoicism and acceptance become passivity, exactly?) - and it's possible I've read an equally good evocation of the way this fatalism held people back in its mind forg'd manacles, but if I ever have I can't remember what it was. This book communicates it so very well to the modern reader without any sledgehammering, using characters who are both within and outwith that frame of mind. It's the great unspoken among the educated characters: have they not spotted its role because it's as pervasive as air, or because it's not yet the done thing to question it? Should I even be blaming it on organised Christianity when its roots in more ancient superstitions are also seen here? It may have been a part of the place for centuries or even millenia before John Knox, no doubt a communal coping tactic in a harsh landscape. It may be ancient, but in Roddy there's something modernist and existentialist about it too.
That which cannot be talked about by the characters is still barely talked about in the book, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. [Major spoiler follows.] It is my theory that Roderick wrote his account in good faith, and that the suppression of sexual topics in his environment, especially his own family, was such that he was unable to verbalise or even think coherently about them, betraying them only through non-verbal discomfort. The contrast between his memoir and the PM report was obvious and I was waiting to see if or how this would be dealt with overtly later in the novel. This type of suppression wouldn't be widely acknowledged until Freud, and so it seems fitting to be frustrated by the mixture of insight and its absence from the C19th experts. I consider that religion, plus some kind of idea of vengeance for Broad's treatment of Jetta and her fate, underlay Flora's injuries - but, being deeply conscious of the following as a historically situated viewpoint just as Thomson's was, that it is possible the lad had some sort of propensity to sexual misdemeanours anyway, and it's impossible to tell whether that would have still existed in him had he lived in a time and place with very different attitudes: whether it's all about the suppression as a trigger to or creator of his propensities, or whether they would always have been there full stop. Both of which likewise relate to the suspicion that hangs around the father sleeping in the same room as Jetta after Una's death. Regardless of these details, Roderick was still a dangerous individual. It was interesting that the way he killed the murder victims so closely resembled the way he killed the sheep; a modern liberal interpretation - which I'm sure would not be looked kindly upon those in the meat trade - would be that the experience of killing a fairly large mammal, and the fact that this was a normal thing to do in his world, had removed some of the empathic barriers to killing a person, leaving only fear and self-interest as the main inhibitions.

This is one of the best crime novels I've read (a surprising proportion of those are Scottish), notable for its intricate attention to larger themes and historical setting, alongside being a thumping good read - deserving of the greater audience the Booker longlisting has brought it, and all the more enjoyable in that context because of the way it zips along and focuses on people somewhere far removed from the typical Booker settings of London/New York/Mumbai.

(read & reviewed August 2016; the review on Goodreads.)