Windswept

I bought Annabel Abbs' Windswept: Why Women Walk for my friend Christine, who is a woman who walks herself, and enjoys histories of overlooked women, especially creative ones. Now she's lent it back to me and I loved it (maybe I really wanted to buy it for myself, let's be honest).

Abbs explores some forgotten stories of women who found freedom, strength, consolation and creative inspiration in walking, or what our American friends would call 'hiking.' Most of these women walked along rivers and across mountains at a time when long-distance walking was considered an exclusively masculine preserve. Georgia O'Keeffe gloried in the wide empty plains of Texas, while Simone de Beauvoir soothed her soul by walking through French forests. I had heard of Nan Shepherd's writing about the Scottish wilds, and seen her quoted by other writers I admire, like Robert Macfarlane, but I hadn't known her biography: she was one of the 1920s so-called 'surplus' women after the Great War, who would have expected to marry and have children. Instead, she taught, and walked, and wrote, though her writing wasn't fully appreciated till after her death. Painters, writers, philosophers, all found a new sense of self and purpose through walking.

At one point Abbs talks about the strangely liberating, sense-enhancing experience of night walking, an experience that is too often denied to women, barred to us for our own safety. When you think of all the men down through history who have enjoyed the thrill and oddness of walking at night, it's so unfair that this is something that most women will never be able to do with the same sense of freedom and power. I remember as a student the joys of walking the streets around the university by night -- it was a pretty safe area, but we never went alone.

Windswept is an invigorating and thoughtful book, and it makes me think I ought to get out in nature more. I'm relishing my short suburban morning walks, but perhaps I need to strike out into something more challenging...

Atomic Habits

I had James Clear's bestselling self-help book, Atomic Habits, on hold at the library for so long, I can't remember when or why I originally reserved it -- there were dozens of people in the queue ahead of me. But lo and behold, when my elder daughter saw me reading it, she said, 'You know I've got that book somewhere, Mum...' (Unfortunately, 'somewhere' means in storage on the other side of town, so not that useful after all.)

Various members of the family asked why I was reading it, as I'm notorious in this house as having any number of habits -- morning walks, crossword, Duolingo, yoga, tea, no TV before 6pm, no Candy Crush before 4pm. For someone who works flexibly at home, I actually have a pretty tight daily schedule. But perhaps that's not so paradoxical; it's easy to drift off track without guard rails.

Atomic Habits is a clear, easy read, and a lot of what Clear presents is common sense. He describes 'habit stacking' where you add a desired new habit to an existing one (eg take your meds at the same time as you make your morning cuppa). He points out that you want to try to make good habits easy, attractive, obvious and satisfying (put out your running gear the night before, reward yourself for sucess), while bad habits, the ones you want to lose, should be difficult, invisible, unsatisfying and unattractive (lock yourself out of social media and let a friend guard your passwords, put the naughty snacks at the back of the fridge and the healthy stuff at the front). And you need to be patient. Even the best daily habits won't bring results overnight.

I must admit that I borrowed Atomic Habits mostly so I could feel smug, and after finishing it, I do. It turns out I am pretty good at forming habits. But the difference between me and James Clear is that I'm not going to make a ten million dollar career out of it!
 

What Katy Did Revisited

 Here are a trio of books that I haven't read for a LONG time. Of course I was initially drawn to What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next because the heroine shared my name! I knew they were 'old' books but I don't think I realised just how old they were when I first read them: What Katy Did was published in 1872, so they were over a hundred years when I first discovered them at the Mt Hagen library, and they are 150 years old now.

It was fun to revisit them, but they haven't aged particularly well, and they are of interest now mainly as historical documents. There's not a lot of plot in any of the books. In the first volume we meet Katy as a harum-scarum twelve year old, who is crippled when she falls off a swing (which she was warned not to swing on) and learns to be patient and motherly during the four long years when she's confined to her bed, inspired by her saintly Cousin Helen. It's not quite as saccharine as it sounds but it's also not massively action-packed. Miraculously, despite not getting any physio or treatment whatsoever, Katy regains her ability to walk -- not sure how plausible this is!

My favourite was always What Katy Did At School, because Katy and her sister Clover, sent away for a year at a distant boarding school, make friends with a lively, mischievous girl called Rose Red who gets into all kinds of scrapes. I was mystified but intrigued by the habits of the 'young ladies,' but couldn't understand why they were 'ladies' while the boys in the school next door were 'students.' Naturally goody two shoes Katy gets up a society against flirting, but otherwise it's mostly wholesome fun. I vividly remembered the sisters' Christmas box, packed with delicious things to eat and lots of lovely homemade presents.

Lastly came What Katy Did Next, in which Katy gets to travel to Europe as a companion to a young widow and her daughter. It's mostly a travelogue, which I actually quite enjoyed this time round, as I've now visited most of their destinations myself. It reads very much as if it's adapted from the author's own travel diary -- weird to read about the Colosseum being overgrown with ivy! The main event is the illness of the young daughter, which also stuck with me -- she had to have her hair cut off, and her doll's hair, too, while Katy scours Rome for a feather pillow and tries to vain to obtain satisfactory beef tea. Happily, the widow's hot brother does the right thing and falls in love with Katy's nursing skills, so we all know what Katy will do after that...

Given their extreme antiquity, the Katy books hold up fairly well. I wonder it they were inspired by the success of Little Women, which was published a few years before? They are actually less heavy-handed on the moral front, though the characters are less vividly drawn than Alcott's. But I'm not sure if I would have loved them so much if Katy wasn't called Katy.

No Church in the Wild

I heard Murray Middleton's novel recommended on the ABC's Book Shelf programme but didn't know or had forgotten the details of what it was about. I'm so out of the loop that I didn't realise No Church in the Wild is a rap song (my daughter was able to play it to me). This novel plunged me into a world that is close to my own geographically, set in the housing towers of Flemington and Kensington in Melbourne's inner west, but a universe away in terms of experience. The casually racist police officer, the struggling high school teacher (okay, maybe I have come across a few of those), but above all the kids, flailing to keep their heads above the water of disadvantage, trauma and a society stacked against them, are people whose lives I don't ordinarily see.

No Church in the Wild loosely coheres around a planned trip to Kokoda, but the real drama lies in the quietly devastating revelations that Middleton almost buries in the midst of the kids' bragging, scheming and joking around. The ending made me catch my breath. This was a novel that I probably wouldn't have sought out, but I'm so glad that I read it.

Listen to the Nightingale

In addition to being an extraordinary writer, Rumer Godden made her living for years as a ballet teacher and ran her own dancing school in India. So it's not surprising that several of her children's books are set in dancing schools and theatres. Published in 1992, Listen to the Nightingale is a late-written novel, and it has an old-fashioned feel. It's rather like reading a literary Noel Streatfeild story. 

Lottie is an orphan who lives with her aunt, who is wardrobe mistress for a small but superior ballet company, Holbein's. Her mother was a ballerina (natch) and she's been taught by Madame Holbein herself (natch), and (natch) she makes her way into the elite ballet school, Queen's Chase. There is drama involving a rescued (or stolen?) dog, a duplicitous best friend, and a naughty boy who bullies her but doesn't really mean it. It's a charming fairy tale that finishes with a neat happy ending, very comforting to read.

There are poignant moments, too, and it's not all roses in the garden. There are sympathetic but also mean characters, there is anguish and loss as well as triumph and love. It doesn't really feel like a story set in the 1990s, but it belongs in a kind of timeless 'ballet world' where it's perpetually the 1950s, ballet dancers are celebrities, teachers are strict but kind and children wear cloaks to school.
 

The Places In Between

I am a huge fan of Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell's podcast, The Rest is Politics, and though I naturally lean more toward Alistair's Labour perspective, I have come to love and respect Rory immensely. He is a man who likes tradition, a small-c conservative, and although he did serve as a Tory MP, he quit on a matter of principle (he wouldn't serve under Boris Johnson) and he is driven by a deep desire to make the world a better place, a stance which is usually associated with the progressive side of politics.

That's a very long-winded introduction to The Places In Between, which is a memoir of his 2001-2 walk across Afghanistan. He walked alone, a British man in a country where the British and American military were in occupation, from village to village through the mountains, grudgingly accepted overnight, fed most often on bread and tea, suffering from dysentery. He picked up a half-wild dog, Babur, who reluctantly accompanied him most of the way. His life was threatened periodically and he had to talk his way out of trouble. Everywhere he saw evidence of the devastation of war -- wounded fighters, burned villages, traumatised people. 

Rory recounts these events in a very matter-of-fact way, which only underscores his personal courage and determination. Also, he speaks eleven languages! And this Afghanistan walk was only part of a longer trek across India and Pakistan. Although the walk sounds absolutely grim, he says he fell in love with the country and the people, and later returned to set up a charity, Turquoise Mountain, in Kabul, to which he is still committed. There are whispers, as there were about Arthur Ransome, that he might have been a spy; if so, he reserves a discreet silence. He would certainly make a very good one.

Scar Town

Scar Town by Tristan Bancks was the this year's winner of the CBCA Book of the Year for younger readers, and it thoroughly deserved it. At first I thought the cover made this book seem more like a young adult title, but the three protagonists are all twelve or thirteen, which puts it firmly in the younger category. However, the themes and events of the story do lean into older territory, with the kids finding human bones and ill-gotten money in the first chapter.

The pace never slackens -- the action takes place over only a couple of days. The chapters are very short and punchy, perfect for reluctant readers, hauling you through the story with one cliff hanger after another. There are thrills and perils, bike chases, quite a bit of violence, family drama and buried secrets, as Will and his friends fight to solve a mystery and keep ahead of the bad guys.

I was interested to read in the author's note that Bancks first came up with this story idea back in 2009. The plot hinges on a body and some money hidden in a house which has been long-drowned at the bottom of a dam and only revealed as the water dries up during a drought. Meg McKinley used a similar device in her terrific book Surface Tension, and I also based part of Crow Country around a dried-up lake. There is something gripping about that image of the past, especially past wrongs, being covered up but eventually revealed -- irresistible to a writer's imagination! And I'm sure we all saw the same stories and images of revealed ruins during the millenial drought; but just look at the very different kinds of plots we came up with.

Dirrayawadha

Anita Heiss is a best selling, award winning Australian author. She also happens to be a Wiradyuri woman, and in Dirrayawadha (Rise Up) she explores the troubled, tragic history of colonisation around the Bathurst area, Wiradyuri country.

Dirrayawadha centres on a love story between a Wiradyuri woman, Miinaa, and an Irish convict, Dan O'Dwyer. But Dan and Miina work for a pair of white settlers, and Miinaa's brother is the famous warrior Windradyne, who led the First Nations resistance in the eighteenth century. Love, joy and loyalty are inextricably intertwined with brutality, loss and tragedy.

This is an important story, and we need more stories about colonised Australia that centre the First Nations point of view. Heiss also draws an interesting parallel between First Nations dispossession and  the history of Ireland, also violently colonised by the British. I'm not aware of any Irish political prisoners, like Dan, who could clearly see the comparison between the two, but it's a fascinating idea that gave me food for thought. Like Melissa Lukashenko's Edenglassie, this book also includes many First Nations words.

In some ways, Dirrayawadha adopts a modern sensibility, perhaps intentionally, which might help a wider readership more easily relate to the power dynamics of the historical situation. Expressions like hyped-up, maintaining autonomy, racism, culture, self-worth, and you don't get it might be anachronistic, but if they gain this novel more readers, I'll swallow it.

Look Back With Love

Good old Athenaeum comes up trumps again with this delightful memoir from Dodie Smith, author of I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Born in 1896, Dodie (Dorothy) grew up in Manchester in a big house surrounded by aunts, uncles and grandparents -- the ultimate only child experience. Her father died in her infancy, but a plethora of uncles filled the gap.

Are antique author childhood memoirs my favourite kind of book? This one was sheer pleasure. The combination of social history, psychology, family dynamics and richly amusing writing made it impossible to resist. Smith wryly recounts her early acting experiences, casting herself as Sleeping Beauty (a mistake, because she lies unconscious for most of the story) and writing her own plays (terrible). It's interesting that adult Dodie clearly sees her later play-writing and acting as her chief legacy, where I had only the dimmest notion of her work in theatre and love her books above all.

The Athenaeum also holds the other two volumes of her autobiography, gorgeously titled Look Back With Astonishment and Look Back With Mixed Feelings. I can hardly wait.
 

Highway 13

One of my favourite kinds of novel (is it a novel?) consists of short story collections where the stories are linked -- by a single character, like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, or by a theme or an historical event, as is the case here. The twelve stories in Highway 13 revolve around a series of murders in the Australian bush, which bear striking parallels to the so-called Backpacker Murders executed by Ivan Milat. In Highway 13, the murderer is Paul Biga, of Polish extraction (Milat's father was Croatian), but his crimes are very similar -- hitchhikers and tourists picked up by the side of the road, taken into the forest and brutally murdered. I should add that neither the murderer or his crimes ever appear directly in any of the stories, but their off stage presence looms ever more powerfully because of it.

Highway 13 reminds us that the effects of crimes like these ripples out far beyond the victims themselves. We meet a 'tourist,' ghoulishly obsessed with the murders; true crime podcasters; someone who knew Biga's sister-in-law; the brother of a missing woman; one of Biga's neighbours; someone who managed to get away; a police officer who worked on the case. The stories swoop across the years, before and after the crimes were committed, and across continents.

I absolutely loved this book. Each story is beautifully written, shining a different light on something very dark: moving, clever and compassionate. Superb.

Joan Aiken Wolves Chronicles

My signed copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is one of my prized possessions. The rest of the Wolves series I picked up at library book sales or in secondhand bookshops -- they are definitely not the covers I would have chosen, especially The Cuckoo Tree, which has one of the most mediocre cover illustrations I have ever seen and is ironically, probably my favourite to read.

I'm not sure if I've ever read the series back to back. I read them a lot in early high school, except for Black Hearts, which was the only one my school library didn't have, so I was never properly introduced to Dido Twite. She is a fabulous character -- smart, resourceful, brave and loyal, frank and decided -- and the series really takes off after her appearance.

There are so many things I love about these books. I adore the alternate history timeline, where the pesky Hanoverians are always conspiring to remove good king James Tudor-Stuart III from the throne and replace him with one of the Georges. I love the way Aiken writes about creature comforts, in what is quite a harsh world. Sylvia sleeping in a donkey-cart filled with geese and patchwork quilts remains a vivid image of warm, snuggly comfort. The food is evocative, too, whether it's clam chowder or huckle-my-buff (it's a real drink!), it always sounds super delicious and sustaining.

The plots are delightfully lively and inventive -- giant cannons to shoot from Nantucket to London, pink whales, wolves breaking into railways carriages, hot air balloons sailing over London, St Paul's Cathedral mounted on rollers to slide into the Thames during the coronation of King Richard IV.

But the real joy of these stories is the exuberant, intoxicating, rollicking play with language. Many of the words were unknown to me when I first read them, some of them are unknown to me even now, many of them no doubt originated in Aiken's own imagination, but nevertheless they always make perfect sense.

"This is a fubsy kind o' set-out,' Dido said to herself. "Still, no use bawling over botched butter -- have to make the best of it. I'd as soon not tangle overmuch wi' that old witch next door though. Only thing is, how are we going to get summat to eat? Oh well, maybe old Lady Tegleaze'll send some soup and jelly -- or cheese and apples -- no use fretting ahead. Queer old cuss she is, too -- all those rooms in that great workus of a place, and she has to send us to a ken that ain't much bigger than a chicken-coop."

There are other books featuring Dido and other members of her family whose existence I was previously unaware of, but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for them in future.

Inspector Thanet Omnibus 1

Recommended by Susan Green as a classic, undemanding murder mystery, Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Thanet proved to be exactly what was promised on the tin. My Athenaeum library has all five omnibuses, fifteen novels in all, and I must say, having raced through the first three, The Night She Died, Six Feet Under and Puppet for A Corpse, I am quite tempted to settle in with the next twelve and a cup of hot chocolate.

While I do enjoy the pure puzzle aspect of a murder mystery, though I'm not very good at figuring out whodunnit, perhaps the greatest pleasure for me lies in the snapshot of social mores that crime novels provide. This is why I love reading Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers so much -- there is nothing like a murder novel, with its high stakes, to spotlight social anxieties and pressures of the time.

The 1980s don't seem so long ago to me but these three novels, published between 1981 and 1983, were very much of their time. Luke Thanet's wife wants to go back to work now that their youngest child is starting school -- the fact that Thanet would even regard this decision as worth arguing about speaks volumes about how the world has changed in the last forty years. One story featured a deserter from the Second World War -- they are all long gone by now. The descriptions of clothes and furnishings are often hilarious. Most strikingly, the things that characters regard as utterly shameful secrets -- mental illness, male sterility, infidelity -- are much more accepted now and openly acknowledged (even if not exactly enjoyed). Even the reason why Dorothy Simpson gave up writing novels (RSI) seems quite dated!

I must note in passing that Thanet's small daughter Bridget is described as having sci-fi show Blake's 7 as 'one of her favourites.' I devoured Blake's 7 as a teen in the 80s but I can't approve of it as being suitable for an eight year old!

It is rather nice to have a detective who is so resolutely ordinary, rather than, I dunno, a poetry-writing aristocrat or a Belgian egg. Thanet's humdrum personal life allows the crimes to shine. I'm looking forward to his further adventures.
 

The Clearing

Scottish artist Samantha Clark's 2020 book, The Clearing: A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health was in a bundle of books lent to me by my good friend composer Chris McCombe. It's a slender but dense volume, an intensely personal story which I initially found quite tough going. At first I thought the 'clearing' of the title referred to an open space in the woods -- even if it was a metaphorical space -- but no. The book begins with Clark and her two brothers clearing out their family home in Glasgow, a process which eventually ends up taking them three years (!!)

It's immediately obvious that this was not a happy home -- not because Clark's parents weren't loving, but because her mother's severe mental illness made demands on her father and on the siblings which crushed all the joy from their lives. As the memoir unfolds, Clark reflects on her difficulties in connecting with either of her parents, her struggle to find freedom away from home and her feelings of guilt and shame, love and hurt, anger and grief. Though Clark is a visual artist, she expresses these feelings beautifully in words and metaphors -- the concept of ether, which both holds and separates; the light perceptible even within the deepest darkness, the darkness that enables us to discern the light; the dutiful acts of personal care (grocery shopping, nail cutting) performed unwillingly but conscientiously.

I must admit that about a third of the way through The Clearing I was thinking, this is the grimmest book I've ever read! and wondering why Chris had lent it to me. But as the house is gradually cleared, Clark finds her own emotions settling and also becoming clearer, and by the end of the book, she is finding peace and creativity in her artistic practice, moving away from her demanding academic job and swapping the chaos of the city for the wild weather of Orkney. I was thrilled to see that she recently won a major art prize, too. The Clearing is not an easy read, but it is a beautiful and rewarding one.

The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome

 

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels are among my (sometimes problematic) faves; however I did not know very much about their author, Arthur Ransome, of whom the bald, jovial adventurer Uncle Jim Turner in the books is an obvious self-portrait.

So I was very interested to discover this autobiography, written piecemeal and late in life, though it only takes Ransome's story up to 1931 (the remaining thirty-odd years of his life are summarised in a postscript by his younger friend and colleague Rupert Hart-Davies). 

Perhaps Ransome's most intriguing years were those spent as a journalist and researcher of folklore in Russia, before and after the 1918 revolution. He was on intimate terms with many of the major players, including Lenin and Trotsky, and indeed, Trotsky's personal secretary became his second wife. Ransome claims that he was able to become so close to the Bolsheviks because he himself was completely 'unpolitical.' This contention has led to speculation that he was in fact acting as a spy during this period, though naturally there is no discussion of espionage in the autobiography. He and Evgenia made a hair-raising escape to safety into Estonia in the chaos of fighting between White and Red, with Ransome bluffing his way through the front lines and Evgenia riding on the back of a cart (according to other sources, with millions of roubles worth of diamonds smuggled in her petticoats). To be honest, the ins and outs of the revolutionary period, with its shifts in power and double-crosses, were quite hard for me to follow, but it was a good reminder that the narrative of history is difficult to discern at the time of the events -- everything is in chaos, and it's only after the dust has settled that the story becomes clear (and sometimes not even then). Who knows what the established story of our own times will be in a generation or two? The moments that seem crucial to us might end up being insignificant in the broad sweep of history, and perhaps the most important developments are the ones we are not even aware of.

Fire and Hemlock

When I was doing my recent Diana Wynne Jones binge, I remembered that I used to have a copy of Fire and Hemlock, which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared (I must have lent it to someone). Anyway, I bit the bullet and bought myself another copy and plunged in.

You would think that, having read it before, I would find the plot easier to understand. I did not. What did help immensely was finding a blog post from someone which explained the 'problematic' ending and the rest of the story while they were at it. This is an extremely clever, deeply layered, intelligent book which draws on several different legends, most obviously the ballads of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, in which the Fairy Queen takes a mortal as her king for ten years, after which he is supposed to be sacrificed, but is saved by the heroism of his mortal lover, Janet. In Fire and Hemlock, Thomas Lynn takes the part of Tam Lin while Polly is his saviour -- a female hero, loyal, brave and imaginative.

The actual mechanics of the deal that Mr Lynn strikes with the Fairy Queen and her minions, and the way Polly finally overcomes their bargain, are too complicated to explain (maybe I still don't fully grasp them :), but this doesn't at all get in the way of a deeply engaging, playful and original story which races along in a most satisfying way. 

This is not to say that the novel is without flaws. The growing friendship between Polly, aged ten at the start of the book, and adult Mr Lynn, is uncomfortable to read, especially as he really is, in a sense, grooming her. By the end of the story Polly is nineteen and Tom is, at the very youngest, twenty-nine -- still a big gap but not an impossible one -- but still... In fact, most of the relationships in the book are uncomfortable in one way or another, except for Polly's grandmother, who is fantastic.

Fire and Hemlock is not an easy read. It's about as sophisticated as young adult literature gets, considerably more sophisticated than the 'adult' murder mystery I was reading at the same time. And it's definitely a book I will reread in the future.