Month: Aug 2020

#TallandHouse #RandomThingsTours

In Virginia Woolf’s famous novel To The Lighthouse we visit the Ramsay family at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall. I remember a particular dinner scene in the novel, often used as an example of how subjective the sense of self is, as we float between dinner guest’s perspectives of the dinner and each other. Maggie Humm takes one of Talland House’s guests, Lily Briscoe, and weaves a tale of love and friendships across the turbulent decades at the beginning of the 20th Century. We start at the Royal Academy in 1919, when Lily has a painting on display and runs into her one time tutor Louis Grier. This meeting takes Lily back to a time when she attended a painting school in St Ives. Now Lily is a successful artist, and in the time since her student days has been a nurse and a suffragette. She is much more self-assured than back then, when she was lacking confidence and still struggled with the loss of her mother. At a student art show, Mrs Ramsay and her husband buy one of Lily’s paintings and the two women become close. Lily attends dinner at Talland House and asks if she might paint Mrs Ramsay’s portrait. Lily has become fascinated with her hostess who has all the elegance of the model she used to be, but also the soft calming nature integral to her role as hostess, wife and mother. With Mr Ramsay’s violent outbursts, Lily suspects she needs to be patient more often than not. As they meet Louis in 1919, Lily realises two things; she is still in love with Louis, and she must explore what happened to her beloved Mrs Ramsay, who has died suddenly without Lily knowing.

From a historical perspective this novel is fascinating. Not only is this an interesting time in history, but To The Lighthouse was a turning point in the history of the novel – showing a lean towards Modernism in its various perspectives and informal structure. Historically, this is a time when women start to become independent and we see this in Lily’s student years – she studies in Paris before Cornwall and now trudges around the Cornish coastline, sketching with her friend Emily at the weekends. She chooses how she spends her time and with whom, although there are some constraints within her class and gender. With the advent of WW1 women are working in men’s roles as they join up and go to the front, working in retail and in factories to ensure the country keeps running. Lily’s wartime job as a nurse further emphasises her competence and independence. It’s a time of huge change and upheaval for everyone, but on a personal level Lily is shocked to be told about the sudden death of her former friend Mrs Ramsay. Her mind is drawn back to those sudden outbursts of her friend’s husband when she was visiting. It is Lily’s interest in this mystery as well as her potential love story that kept me reading.

The pace is slow, full of beautiful detailed descriptions of surroundings and the art being created. The colours are vivid and I can almost see a particularly colourful part of the Ramsay’s garden where delphiniums flower in a blue haze in contrast to the purple hedge. I loved the descriptions of St Ives, especially the depiction of Pilchard Day with all its activity and noise. Although these descriptions slow the story down, they are very important. Humm is creating a painting with words. The difficulties of women’s roles in society are depicted beautifully in Lily; there is tension between her status as an independent woman and a woman in love. Can both of these roles exist in conjunction with one another? She has the example of Mrs Ramsay before her, a once celebrated model, with her role now confined to mother and wife. Any artistic sensibilities she had now restricted to making Talland House the perfect place to entertain her husband’s contacts. Every skill she has is now used to create the perfect back drop, making her husband more successful in society. Instead of furthering her own independent skills and interests. Does Lily want that same role? There is also the similarity Lily sees between Mrs Ramsay and her mother, whose loss seems to haunt her in some way. Is there a way in which these two women’s fates are linked and what does this mean for Lily?

This novel is a beautiful elegy to the world Virginia Woolf created at Talland House. There is something dreamlike about those early days in St Ives, as if this lifestyle has now been lost in the wake of WW1. This feeling also extends to the love story; can Lily’s infatuation with Louis survive all that has happened since they last met? Would the reality of their relationship be those traditional roles or would Lily be free to pursue her independent career? Everything that has happened gives her room to ask these questions. This is a thoughtful, leisurely novel with bags of historical detail and painterly descriptions. It was a perfect summer story, in the same way as LP Hartley’s The Go-Between. It drifts like a summer breeze, and captures its moment perfectly.

How have I come this far in my reading life without reading Doug Johnstone? The Skelfs are the family I didn’t even know I was missing, but now can’t imagine my reading life without. To prepare for reading the second novel in Johnstone’s Skelf series, I made the decision to read the first novel entitled A Dark Matter. I couldn’t possibly have imagined this incredible group of women, but now I feel like I know them personally. Set within the city of Edinburgh, this is a family of undertakers and private investigators. Just to set up the kind of family they are, the author places their residence and place of work at No 0 – somewhere that doesn’t exist. Grandmother Dorothy is a Californian lured to Edinburgh after falling in love with Jimmy Skelf who has passed away at the beginning of book one. Dorothy works in the funeral business with employee Archie, but also takes on PI duties and in her spare time teaches spunky young girls to play the drums. Mum Jenny is at a loose end so comes into the family business after her father dies. She jumps into the PI business with both feet, which is how she seems to do most things. Granddaughter Hannah is studying physics at Edinburgh University and lives with her girlfriend Indy. She has a good relationship with her parents and her grandmother. The first book concerns the disappearance of Hannah’s uni friend Mel and the shock when her killer is revealed is seismic, hitting all the Skelf family hard.

The beginning of The Big Chill reads like the explosive ending of most books. In a scene as comical as it is tragic, Dorothy and Archie are overseeing a routine funeral at the cemetery when sirens start moving closer and drowning out the service. The guests and undertakers stare aghast as a van driven at high speed forces its way through the cemetery gates followed by the police. As the van careers towards them, mourners start to scatter and Dorothy narrowly misses being ploughed into ground, as the van speeds straight into the grave nose first. Dorothy clambers in to check on the driver and finds he has died instantaneously from a head injury. However, what does survive is a scruffy Collie dog she names Einstein to sit alongside Schroedinger the cat. She immediately offers the Skelfs’ services for the man she names Jimmy X but she would like to find a little more out about him before she conducts his funeral. So, Dorothy sets out, with Einstein in tow, to find out how Jimmy X ended up living in a van that literally ‘ended up’ in an open grave.

Of course, this is only one of the mysteries the women are investigating. Hannah makes friends with an elderly physics professor at university when he asks if she’ll help with a memorial for Mel. Not long after they are performing dual duties for him too, when he dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Hannah can’t accept his death and even if it is just a displacement activity, begins to look into his personal life for answers. Dorothy is overstretched with cases when one of her drumming students doesn’t turn up for practice. This is so unusual because Abi loves to drum and has never missed a lesson. When she visits Abi’s home she is told that she was unwell, but Dorothy senses an undercurrent in the air and eventually finds our that Abi has run away. In order to find her, 70 year old Dorothy will have to start thinking like a 14 year old girl, which isn’t easy when the back ache doesn’t go away as quickly as it used to. The scars of an assault in the previous novel are not just mental.

Hanging over them all is the trial of Mel’s killer, known intimately to the Skelf women and still keeping a hold over them where he can. Not only did he kill the pregnant Mel, but when found out he attacked Jenny, stabbing her in the stomach and beat Dorothy. He has found a psychiatrist to claim he was incapacitated by mental illness at the time of the original killing. Even worse he lures Jenny to visit him, then presses charges when she assaults him. In the aftermath, Hannah is drowning. She’s well supported by Indy, but can’t sleep, feels anxious and when under pressure has panic attacks and passes out. It may take a seismic change to shake her from personalising all these difficult life experiences and thinking she is the only victim. She is having counselling, but there’s so much to unpick and she is in danger of ignoring the one person who helps her most. The women usually gather at the end of the day in the kitchen and catch each other up on the days events, but when even that ritual starts to fall apart Dorothy knows her family are stretched to breaking point. Yet, everyone has to heal in their own time and in their own way. She is wondering whether there is life after Jimmy, and whether her long held friendship and working relationship with a certain Swedish police officer, could become more?

These women are great characters. They’re tough, but still vulnerable. Full of quirky detail and boundless energy. They are also wonderfully good at picking up ‘waifs and strays’. They try not to judge people. I loved Jenny, trekking round homeless shelters and approaching groups in the street, but stopping to pass the time of day or joining a group of homeless men in a beer. As someone who is also very good at collecting people, I know how much it widens horizons, teaches us about our own preconceptions and sometimes brings unexpected, but wonderful friends. Their arms and their home are open. I found myself thinking a lot about the wonderfully patient and wise Indy, who comes into contact with the Skelfs as a teenager organising her parents funeral after a car accident. She is always quietly working in the background: cooking mouthwatering curries when Hannah hasn’t eaten; taking the reins at funerals when private investigating takes over; listening to bereaved family and respecting the person who died with so much attention to detail. There are such hidden depths here and I found myself hoping that Indy is featured and explored more in later novels.

I loved the Edinburgh backdrop. In fact it becomes a character in its own right from the touristy areas, to the student quarter, to the areas that missed regeneration, this is such a varied and richly atmospheric city. I don’t know it well but I feel this has taken me under that tourist facade to find something more interesting. We also see such a variety of people from those on the streets to those who in academia or in private education. Death is a great leveller though and these people are often side by side once they reach Skelf’s undertakers. We also see that these extremes can all be found in one person; there isn’t a ‘type’ that becomes homeless or commits a murder. I also find the way Hannah makes sense of her world through science really interesting. She muses on quantum suicide and whether we, like Schroedinger’s Cat, can be alive and dead at the same time. People often think that science is anathema to concepts like faith, hope and a belief in God. However, there is beauty and wonder in everything Hannah knows about space.

What I take away most from this book is the way the author writes with bluntness, but also kindness, acceptance and wonder about the human condition and the strange galaxy we call home. Hannah muses on the end of the universe with her counsellor:

‘stars will stop forming, the sun will wink out, the solar system will collapse. Then in the black-hole era galaxies disband, all proton matter decays, supermassive black holes swallow everything, then they’ll evaporate too, all the energy and matter in the cosmos gone […] it’s called the big chill’.

Hannah comments that it’s not such a bad way to go, but her counsellor reminds her that it’s a long way into the future. Dorothy has the same thoughts as her mind is flooded with images of everything they’ve experienced. She has felt the cold, icy creep of death:

‘death so close that she could feel its breath on her neck, could smell it every day when she woke, could feel its icy touch spreading from her mind to her limbs’.

So she sits behind her drums, plays the Black Parade album by My Chemical Romance, and starts to tap out a rhythm until she can feel the music within her, warming her veins and bursting to life. While we’re here, she concludes, we have to find a way to keep living. This is an explosive and enthralling novel, character driven and full of life, and death.

#RandomThingsTours #blogtour #TheLotusReaders

This novel was definitely a ‘reading experience’ as I felt confused, then blind-sided with a revelation I wasn’t expecting. If the author wanted to express what a dissociative state felt like in the structure of the novel then he definitely succeeded with this reader. As I read, there were times where I felt like I was in a dream state, others where I felt a piece of time had gone missing and when I reached the end I felt disoriented and needed to go back and piece the story together bit by bit. It was such a clever structure, because it enhanced my doubt of the narrator and every person she met. I didn’t know whether the events she related were happening to her, to someone else, or in reality not happening at all. I found myself left feeling unsettled and ‘jangly’ after each spell of reading.

Alex is a successful documentary film maker, in a great position as her last feature made money and won awards. The question now is what the next subject will be. In this early stage we learn that Alex has a traumatic past, culminating in a hospital stay where she was diagnosed as experiencing dissociative or fugue states. She hasn’t put all of her past back together, but knows there was a squat, drugs and exploitative sexual encounters. There is an element of survivor’s guilt since her success as she feels she’s making money from people who are struggling, where she was several years ago. Her manager suggests going to a town called Blackwood Bay on the coast somewhere up North. The concept is for Alex to stay up there and film local life for a while, but also to get locals to film and anonymously upload their take on Blackwood Bay to a website. Alex likes the idea but is unnerved by the location. Her manager mentions in passing an underlying story of girls going missing, but assures her she isn’t there to film that. Alex knows that if she goes to Blackwood Bay she will have no choice but to get involved in that story, because she wasn’t always from London. Blackwood Bay is her hometown; she is Sadie, one of the missing girls, and what happened there was so terrifying she has dissociated from it in order to survive.

Watson creates a dark and disturbing atmosphere in the bay, where we trust no one and look for clues everywhere. The residents are equally unsure of her, uncomfortable about what she’s there to film and why. This is a typical seaside town, that in spring and summer bustles with life, but in the winter months is practically shut down leaving locals bored, time rich but money poor. The pub is still a centre of activity, but here, and other places in the town, unnerve Alex or take her back to traumatic episodes in her past. Her cottage is rented from Monica, who seems like a mother hen figure to the young girls of the bay and Alex knows better than anyone they need protection. I enjoyed the way the story was built, both on the present film making, but on those moments where Alex remembers something. She remembers knowing all the constellations in the sky, but who taught them to her? She recognises a couple of tattoos on young girls that are exactly the same as her own, but why did she get it? A smokey upstairs room at the pub, is a scene for a quick chat, but induces physical symptoms in Alex like she’s been winded. Her search for answers is compulsive and I noticed there are many times where she doesn’t even consider her present safety, wandering the town and surrounding countryside at all hours of the night and trusting people she maybe shouldn’t. I found myself on tenterhooks all the time and I kept questioning her feeling of safety in the holiday cottage, where both landlord and any number of other locals might have a key.

The truth, when it finally emerges is very dark and disturbing. Growing up in Blackwood Bay is a dangerous game for girls and reading these pages is might be tough for people who’ve had personal experience of exploitation or abuse. There were things I had worked out, but others that came as a shock. I suspected some people very strongly, who turned out to be innocent, and trusted others that were very twisted, disturbing characters. The knowledge that the girls in Blackwood Bay have been unsafe for generations is shocking, but unfortunately all too real. This is a tainted community where people have closed their eyes to the truth for far too long. Alex tries to keep her identity as Sadie secret for as long as possible. She becomes focused on finding out the fate of a friend called Daisy. The story is that she jumped from the cliff into the bay, witnessed by a distressed Monica and filmed by a lonely man who lives in Bluff Cottage. This interplay between what is seen and what is seen on camera is interesting and builds more layers to conceal or reveal. When the final shock twist happened I was genuinely surprised. This version of the truth hadn’t entered my head. This is a book I will be thinking about long after I put it down. The central theme, that the camera can lie, is very effective. More devastating and seen through several characters stories, is that we can even lie to those we profess to love. In fact we can even lie to ourselves.

#TheLostLoveSong #RandomThings Tours #blogtour

Lost Love Song

I’m writing this review just moments after finishing this beautifully romantic book, so I still have a lump in my throat and I’m torn between the desire to capture how I feel in words or go to Spotify and create the musical playlist the author has created for her characters, to stay in the emotions of the book. I feel such a bittersweet sense of love lost and love found, of reinventing oneself, and building a completely new life. This feeling is so bound up with my own life story, that the ending was particularly poignant. I have been where Arie is, but I’ve also been where Evie is. I have felt that confusing sense of falling in love, when I haven’t fully healed from loss. I have also been that open hearted girl, willing to leap in with both feet in that dangerous all or nothing way, only other ‘leapers’ would understand. I have felt that pain of not being wanted enough, of being the wrong person or even the right person at the wrong time.

Minnie Darke’s book centres on music, mainly in the form of a book that once belonged to the beautiful concert pianist Diana Clare. Diana was greatly in demand and flew all over the world to play and record with different orchestras. Known for her flaming red hair, her signature red dresses and the Converse trainers she preferred to play in wherever she was. The book of music belonged to Diana and in it she’d been writing a love song for her long term boyfriend Arie. Arie was a self-confessed computer geek (in my head he looked like Richard Ayoade) who met Diana at the music academy where she studied, when asked to fix a problem with her computer. They seemed opposites, Diana was mercurial and hard to pin down, whereas Arie was solid and even tempered, but what Diana was trying to show him was that when put together, they were like a pair of musical notes that when played together created perfect cadence. Arie only heard her song once, she played it one night when he brought up the question of why, after seven years together, they weren’t married yet. Diana didn’t feel the same urgency, but played the song to show him how much she felt, when words failed her. Sadly, Arie never hears the song again because the next morning, Diana leaves their home in Australia for a concert in Europe. Her plane, flown by Air Pleiades, disappears into the sea after the cabin fails to pressurise the cabin correctly and all the passengers and crew succumb to hypoxia.

Arie feels like their time together is like the part written song, never finished just left hanging in the air without a conclusion. He retreats into his world, living in their house where Diana’s Steinway still sits in the bay window. He still observes festivals with Diana’s distraught mother Belinda such as their apricot jam making day, bonfire night and of course Diana’s anniversary and birthday. There is a beautiful tenderness to the way Arie treats this broken hearted older woman, whilst knowing a time will come when he disappoints her, by making changes or maybe one day moving on. For now he’s okay where he is, treading water. Until one day a few years later he notices that the Air BnB next door is occupied again. He notices the young woman with her Cleopatra dark bob and an easy air of style. This is Evie and one evening, he notices her in the garden. Then he hears a familiar piece of music he’d thought was lost. She’s playing Diana’s song so quietly and tentatively, picking out the chords as if she’s piecing it together by memory.

In fact that’s exactly what Evie is doing because she doesn’t have the music. She heard it being played by a young flautist and cellist as she was leaving Waverley Station in Edinburgh, travelling towards Melbourne. The players were so absorbed in their music and each other, clearly in love. It piques her interest, because she’s walking away from a relationship where she wasn’t loved enough. She has resolved to not be involved with someone ever again unless they truly want her. He must find her and want her as much as these musicians clearly want each other. Darke tells her story through these main chapters that alternate between her and Arie, but there are musical interludes where we follow Diana’s notebook. It slowly wends its way through different people, from different musical backgrounds like classical orchestra to bluegrass. This is such a clever way of following the musical theme, but never forgetting our main pair as they move through the world.

Evie and Arie are possibly perfect together, but does such love come twice in a lifetime? Their tentative friendship is so fragile and I was desperately wiling it to work for both of them. I thought the author handled the emotions of being widowed with such knowledge and care. I’ve been there and have felt every one of Arie’s emotions, but that huge question of moving on is the most pertinent here. When we build a relationship with our in-laws they become our family. For me, and for Arie, that relationship continues after the loss of our partner. I felt that no one understood the enormity of my loss more than my brother and father-in-law, I wanted to continue that relationship with them and keep them as my family, to reminisce and celebrate my husband’s life. Then as time passed and I continued to live, I was very conscious of not upsetting them, respecting my husband’s memory and keeping them part of the new life I was creating. I made mistakes and it added to my pain, the feeling that I’d let them down. Now there is just me and my sister-in-law left and we talk a lot, and try to support each other even from her home on the other side of the world in New Zealand. We keep each other up to date on our children/step-children and reminisce about our husbands (and what a pair of rascals those brothers could be when they got together).

In this book, Arie doesn’t know how to reconcile these two parts of his life; the left behind and the moving on. Perhaps made more complicated, because just like the music Diana leaves behind, there was no real conclusion to her death. One minute she was there and the next, far away, she was gone and there was no funeral. Just the terrible knowledge she was lost somewhere under the sea. It takes Evie’s poetry to express this inbetween place, her talent for just the right words to capture a maelstrom of emotions is similar to Diana’s ability to convert emotion into musical notes. What stands out above everything in this novel is how artistic expression can explain, contain and elevate human experience. Most importantly, in Arie’s case, what comes across so strongly is art’s eventual power to heal.