The Myth of Normal

Another book group recommendation (thanks, Chris). I had this book on reserve at the library for months, but when my husband brought it home for me, I almost fainted. The Myth of Normal is a BRICK! Subtitled Illness, Health and Healing in a Toxic Culture, Gabor Maté and his co-author, son Daniel, explore the ways in which our modern lives are quite literally making us sick. Maté argues that not only is modern civilisation literally poisoning us with a cocktail of toxic chemicals, pollution, poor food and
 environmental destruction, we are also psychologically suffering from a disconnection from the natural world and the supports of community. 

Maté makes a strong case for these imbalances and stressors being expressed in our bodymind -- physical manifestions of mental and emotional stress. He draws on his own long clinical career as well as others' observations to point out examples like the fact that 'nice' people, mostly women, seem to suffer disproportionately from motor neurone disease, and postulates that it might be the result of being TOO nice, squashing down their own needs to help others. I'm not entirely sure that I buy this particular example, but it's definitely an interesting concept and well worth exploring.

It's hard to disagree that we would be a healthier culture if we were better connected to each other, if we thought of ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it, if we prioritised the joys of life rather than accumulating money and power. Isn't it odd how all these books end up coming to very similar conclusions? Perhaps the ancients were wise after all.

Finding Phoebe

Finding Phoebe by UK writer Gavin Extence was a recommendation from my book group. I'm not sure I would have picked it up on the strength of the cover, because Phoebe (presumably) looks quite miserable, and that's not the tone of the book at all, though there are definitely moments of sadness and stress and confusion. What makes this novel distinctive is Phoebe's voice: she has ASD, she is extremely articulate and observant, but the disconnect between her intellectual precision and her misunderstandings of social interaction and subtext is where much of the humour of the book resides. 

It took me a couple of chapters to ease into Phoebe's voice but once I was there, I was utterly charmed and delighted to spend more time in her company, which mirrors the character's own social experiences. She is 'weird,' but she is also very intelligent, kind and insightful. I loved that this is mostly the story of a friendship between two girls -- Phoebe and Bethany have been friends all their lives, and when Bethany gets into trouble, it's Phoebe who comes to the rescue in all sorts of ways. That's not to say that Phoebe is perfect -- she reacts strongly, she doesn't always recognise her own emotions, and she is clinging to some illusions about her own family that she has to learn to let go.

Extence says he wrote this book for his own ASD daughter, who is not yet a teenager but is coming up to it fast, so that she would have a character to relate to. But I think everyone, and not just young people, would benefit from seeing the world through Phoebe's eyes for a while.

All About Yves

Yves Rees' memoir, All About Yves, is subtitled Notes from a Transition, and it's a fascinating and often moving account of a search for identity. Yves' story is very relatable; they are a Melbourne person, they hang out on the north side of the river, work at La Trobe University, and went through the gruelling Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. I was very impressed by the nuances of their journey, and the pressures from all sides to conform to gender stereotypes -- including transgender stereotypes! Yves describes a crucial assessment from a psychologist during which they felt obliged to downplay the fact that they were not particularly 'tomboyish' as a child, playing with Barbies and dressing up in sparkles, because in order to be judged as 'properly' trans, the conventional narrative is that one is supposed to reject all things from the assigned gender as early as possible.

Yves has tried on various identities -- straight, lesbian, transmasc, non-binary -- before settling on simply 'trans.' I loved the way they describe trans as resisting all the boxes, not necessarily on the way to a particular destination, but forever travelling. It was interesting to read about their struggle with feminism, having worked as a feminist historian, and then wrestling with what it meant to reject the identity of 'woman' in that context (fortunately it is possible to be a feminist without being a woman).

All About Yves is a nuanced, thoughtful and engaging account of one person's story -- a story that's not over yet. It gave me a lot to think about.
 

Antonia Forest Again

It's been a few years since I last read Antonia Forest's Marlow books, and I'm not sure that I've ever had the opportunity to read them straight through, as a series, back to back. It's difficult to come to them fresh, being so familiar with the later volumes and all the fan canon, but I still think Forest does a masterful job of juggling multiple complex characters, giving us insight especially into Nicola's mind, and handling engaging (if occasionally implausible) plots. But character is her real strength, and it's a testament to her talent that she presents us with three strong stories in three quite different genres, with pretty much the same cast: Autumn Term is a school story, The Marlows and the Traitor is a spy thriller, and Falconer's Lure is a country holiday story, complete with ponies and a local performing arts festival to showcase everyone's various gifts. However, in each book there is a twist of difference -- instead of succeeding at school accomplishments (netball, Guides, academia) as they'd planned, the twins find an entirely new way to shine (the play). The Traitor turns out to be someone the children find appealing, sometimes kind, and even worthy of pity. And the emphasis in Falconer's Lure is really on the hawks rather than the ponies.

Some themes definitely begin to emerge as the characters are fleshed out. Quirky, self-absorbed Lawrie; poor selfless Ann, despised by all; Peter, perpetually battling his own perceived cowardice and realising that it's just going to be 'one paper hoop after another' for his whole life; brusque, sensible Rowan; and perhaps most poignantly of all, pretty Ginty, who coasts through life but tends to fail at any real test. It's a bit harsh when her father, at the start of FL, says 'she should have got over it by now,' when in the previous book, she's been kidnapped at gunpoint, locked up in a lighthouse, very nearly drowned, and faced the prospect, as a claustrophobic, of being forced into a Nazi submarine... and then forbidden to discuss any of it! The stiff upper lip required by this class, at this time, and particularly in this family, is a constant refrain in these books, and the examination of how that affects each of these young people differently is what really sets these books apart from conventional YA.

The Gift of Asher Lev

I read My Name is Asher Lev in high school (from memory, my mum had been studying The Chosen in adult education, so naturally I read it, too, and that led me to Asher Lev). I was very moved by the conflict between Asher with his genius for drawing, and his disapproving Hasidic religious community, especially his father. Asher's art-making was clearly presented as something he was compelled to do, a gift from God just as much as the words of the Torah or the wisdom of his elders. I didn't realise this sequel existed until I found it recently in a street library.

Years on from Asher's exile to France, he's now married, a celebrated painter, and has two children of his own. He and his family are brought back to Brooklyn by the death of his uncle, and his parents' desire to spend time with their grandchildren leads to their stay becoming extended, though Asher insists that they will have to go home to France soon. Gradually Asher (and the reader) becomes aware that the venerable Rebbe, the frail and elderly leader of the community, is harbouring a succession plan that involves Asher's six year old son, and most of the novel concerns Asher's internal wrestling with this scheme.

The Gift of Asher Lev is a slow-paced novel but I really enjoy the way that Potok builds up the story, brush stroke by brush stroke. We see everything through Asher's observant eyes but he lets us know what he's feeling only rarely, either in occasional emotional outbursts, or through his drawings, or through his description of his body's reactions to what he's seen or heard -- fingers tingling, spots before his eyes, a sensation of dizziness. It's very cleverly done, and so much more effective than giving us direct access to Asher's feelings.

The Gift of Asher Lev was published in 1990 and set in 1988, and it was striking how the litany of the world's troubles hasn't changed that much. In Brooklyn, they swelter though a cripplingly hot summer, the summer that first made the American public aware of global warming; there are elections in the US and in France, and in France there are fears that 'that racist Le Pen' might be elected -- of course it's the present Le Pen's father, and that particular outcome seems to have been averted for the present. The eager Zionism of Asher's father and the Rebbe is hard to read about, as is their agenda for Israeli politics; but this isn't really the point of the story. It's a very personal, intimate account of a war within a family, a war conducted largely without words, through hints and parables, meals and pictures, even dancing, and a war fought ultimately inside one man.
 

Grief Works

Julia Samuel's Grief Works was recommended at the back of With the End in Mind, though it deals with a slightly different angle on death. Samuel is a therapist, and there is possibly no genre of non-fiction writing I relish more than psychological case studies. Each chapter of Grief Works tells the story of one person's grief, divided into sections like death of a partner, death of a parent, death of a sibling, and, most shatteringly, death of a child.

Obviously a handful of individual stories can't possibly cover every facet of the grief experience, but it's nonetheless illuminating to see how different people approach their loss and learn to live with a new reality (while never 'recovering'). I have a Facebook friend who is in absolute anguish after the death of his partner, and another friend whose partner died over a year ago, and even from this tiny sample I can see how different their experiences have been, though the depth of their pain is very similar. The stories in Grief Works, though brief, are very moving. One interesting observation was that it was the generations before ours, who suffered through the immense losses of two world wars, who had to suppress their mass grief to enable society to keep functioning, and it's that suppression that's been transmitted unhealthily down to us.

The books finishes up with helpful advice both for the bereaved themselves and for their friends and family trying to support them. The main thrust of that advice is just to be there, and above all to listen, and to expect grief to last much longer than perhaps we believe it will. Fear of saying or doing the wrong thing often paralyses us, and we shouldn't allow it to -- not saying anything is far more hurtful than saying something that's not perfect. Grief Works was a sensitive, fascinating and valuable contribution to my death investigations.

The Golden Child

Having discovered Penelope Fitzgerald, I'm now investigating her entire ouevre, and I thought I may as well start with her first published novel, 1977's The Golden Child. It's a dry, sometimes farcical, sometimes violent satire, taking in museum politics, espionage and a quite nerdy mystery. This is another slender novel, under two hundred pages, though apparently the original manuscript was much longer. Fitzgerald's publishers demanded the excision of a whole subplot, several characters and multiple chapters. I'm not saying they were wrong, because this is a tight, weird little book that skims along (after a rather slow start).

I most enjoyed the chapter where conscientious underdog Waring Smith is dispatched to Russia to check the authenticity of an artefact with a Russian expert (who turns out to be fictitious). His few days in Moscow are surreal and Kafka-esque, as he is shadowed by a mysterious man who is not who he seems to be... After his return, events escalate with alarming speed and several bodies to a terrifically taut and frantic climax. 

Fitzgerald wrote The Golden Child partly to amuse her dying husband, and to have some digs at the 1972 Tutankamen exhibition in London. She was also getting revenge on someone at the museum who was rude to her while she was researching another book; I think I can guess who that character might be! I might not have loved this book if it was the first Fitzgerald I read, but her economical style and absurdist wit is already in evidence, and I'm looking forward to exploring the rest.
 

The Sitter

When I was younger I loved big fat novels that I could lose myself inside for days, but these days I've become a fan of the slim novel. Angela O'Keeffe's The Sitter fits the bill, in fact it's so slim that when I was looking for it on the library shelf, I overlooked it at first and had to go back and search more carefully. But sometimes slender books can pack a hefty punch (eg Cold Enough For Snow, The Gate of Angels) and The Sitter beautifully weaves together big themes in relatively few pages.

The story is partly told by Hortense, the wife of Paul Cezanne, who sat for 29 portraits, and the subject of a novel being written by an Australian writer, currently stuck in Paris in 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic. We see the unnamed writer (she later calls herself 'Georgia') in her hotel room; writing about Hortense, who is watching her; writing an email to her daughter in Sydney. All these narratives intertwine to build layers of reflection about art and story, points of view, love and sacrifice, men and women, distance and closeness, darting between France and Australia.

These very short novels can behave almost like poetry, each line carrying more weight than it might in a longer narrative. The Sitter is an accomplished, graceful work, easy to read but hauntingly sad.

With the End in Mind

My parents are both still with us, but they are getting frailer and I'm uncomfortably aware that I'm not well prepared for the day when they will leave us. I also have a friend who works in palliative care, and I'm keen to understand more about what she's dealing with. Come to that, I'm not getting any younger myself and it's just as well to start thinking about the pointy end (though I'm not planning to arrive there for a long time yet).

Considering all this, I'm so glad I borrowed Kathryn Mannix's wonderfully calm and matter-of-fact book about death, With the End in Mind. Mannix has worked as a palliative care doctor in the UK for decades and has been present at thousands of deaths. Perhaps the very first chapter is the most comforting, as she talks a terrified patient (and us) through the typical progress of an ordinary death, through growing tiredness and diminishing energy, through periods of sleepiness and brief unconsciousness, to increased unconsciousness and breathing changes, to the very last breath. Most deaths, she emphasises, are peaceful and painless (though of course there are exceptions).

Each chapter is a case study of a patient Mannix has encountered, and the chapters are grouped in themes, beginning with the physical process of dying and moving through psychological questions to the spiritual aspect of the end of life. Death is a subject that we, as a society, are not good at talking about. I recommend With the End in Mind as way of starting that conversation.
 

You Are Here

I'm not sure if David Nicholls visited Australia recently but he was certainly all over the radio spruiking his new novel, You Are Here. As a big fan of One Day, I was primed to enjoy this new one -- a middle-aged romance, both poignant and humorous, set over a long walk across the UK (mind you, a coast-to-coast walk from west to east takes less than a week, so 'long' is a relative term.)

You Are Here centres on WFH copy editor Marnie, settled into hermitude since Covid lockdowns, and geography teacher Michael, licking his wounds after the relatively recent breakup of his marriage. They've both actually been set up with other people by mutual friend Cleo, but they are getting along well and Marnie extends her intended stretch of the walk to spend more time with Michael. But although they both definitely feel a spark, they are both carrying baggage (literally as well as figuratively) and they both make mistakes.

You Are Here is a charming, wry and gentle novel that is honest about the difficulties of falling in love the second time around. Michael and Marnie are delightful company, and there are moments of darkness and pain as well as humour and fun. Realistically, there's no simple epiphany at the end of the trek, in fact it's bloody awkward, but by the end of the novel things are looking hopeful. You Are Here is comforting and refreshing as slipping into a warm bath at the end of a long wet hike.

Servo

  

I was so charmed by David Goodwin's Conversation with Richard Fidler on RN that I reserved Servo immediately from the library; perhaps I wasn't the only one listening, because I had quite a wait. I felt a certain fellow feeling with Goodwin from the start, having also spent my young adulthood working in a menial service job (in my case, phone sales and admin at a record company) while finishing uni and aspiring to be a writer, interspersed with odd bits of overseas travel. However, my job in phone sales took place during daylight hours, rather than between midnight and sunrise in a service station, and I never had to deal with the levels of weirdness and drugged up lunacy that Goodwin faced on a nightly basis (at least, only at conferences...) On the other hand, I worked at the record company for thirteen years, while Goodwin lasted a paltry six, so I'm not sure who really had more stamina in the end.

Working at the servo changed him, Goodwin says. Firstly, he found confidence in being able to stare down the various 'characters' he encountered (good). Then he tried drugs (bad). Then he discovered meditation (good) and a kind of Zen peace with whatever life threw at him, as well as fistfuls of random scribblings to turn into a book. There's not a lot in the way of plot, but Servo's glimpse into the hellscape of someone else's job is both entertaining and a cautionary tale. Bonus points for Goodwin being a Western Bulldogs supporter.

As Happy As Here

Jane Godwin is becoming (in my mind) one of those reliable authors whose books you can relax into, knowing that you're in safe hands for the journey. As Happy As Here, like Look Me In the Eye (though it was published earlier), features a trio of girls aged around thirteen, one of whom is more troubled than the other two. In this book, Evie, Lucy and Jemma are thrust together in a hospital ward, and while there is a mystery to solve and danger to face, the real focus is on the gradual friendship that stutters between the three of them. Evie and Lucy are comfortably middle class and secure in their parents' love (though Lucy has lost her mum, and is also facing her own health battles); but Jemma is an unwanted, lonely child who displays her insecurities in undesirable behaviour -- lying, stealing, being rude. But Godwin is skilful in helping the reader to understand the challenges that Jemma faces, even though she's not easy to be around.

Godwin captures precisely the atmosphere of a busy hospital, the constant activity, the fact that even the nights are never truly dark or quiet, the close but brief relationships with nurses and physios, the boredom, the discomfort. The mystery plot is clever, too, even though it ends in a shocking way. And there are big questions sprinkled throughout -- about fate, and choices, luck and kindness.
 

Sensitive

Thirteen year old SJ (formerly Samantha) has just moved to a new town, a place where no one knows her shameful secret and she has a chance to start again. Maybe here in Kingston, she can be cool, and pretty, and carefree? Things begin well: SJ makes a new friend, Livvy, and a cute boy is paying attention to her. But her secret can't stay hidden forever...

SJ's shameful secret is her skin. Like Webster herself, SJ has terrible eczema which flares up unpredictably, and also severe allergies, not all of which have been identified. She reacts to grass, to the flowers the class dissects in science, to eggs, and who knows what else. Her worried mother puts her on an exclusion diet which eliminates almost every food, but SJ can't stop scratching, and she's tortured by the thought that people might guess that under her clothes, her skin is a red, painful, itchy mess. And what if the cute boy wants to kiss her? He'll be repulsed!

Sensitive draws heavily on Webster's own experiences; she almost died (twice) as a result of her conditions. Some of the strategies in the story seemed outdated to me, and it was hard to believe that a contemporary family (especially with a librarian for a mother) who avoid Dr Google so completely. My heart really went out to SJ and her family (and by extension, to Webster herself), and of course anything that makes you different, and especially look different, is all the more agonising at thirteen. Sensitive would be such a useful, compassionate book to give any child or adolescent suffering from skin complaints

Ghost Species

 James Bradley's novel Ghost Species has been on my radar since it was published in 2020, and I finally got around to reading it. The premise is intriguing. In a near future, an eccentric billionaire is bringing species back from extinction -- a kind of extreme rewilding project! But in addition to resurrecting mammoths and aurochs, he is also bringing back a Neanderthal child. (One niggle: the singular of aurochs is aurochs, not auroch -- like ox, I guess?)

The novel follows the child, Eve, and the woman who becomes her mother, Kate, secluded in Tasmania, as the world begins to disintegrate around them, until the final catastrophic 'Melt' brings about the end of society as we know it. Ghost Species makes for uncomfortable reading, as this future apocalypse is all too plausible (though I did find it hard to believe that container ships would still be sailing after the total breakdown of global civilisation). It's interesting that the novel was written before at least one cataclysm hit the planet in the form of the covid pandemic -- it must have been spooky for Bradley to see some of his predictions unfold. And it was particularly good to read this book just after Wilding (which reinforced the view that our eccentric billionaire was barking up the wrong tree in trying to preserve single species rather than habitat). Ultimately the conclusion is unavoidable: we all depend on each other.

Fixed It

Ten years ago Jane Gilmore, fed up with the reporting of men's violence against women, came up with a brilliantly simple and effective way of highlighting the defects in headlines. Her project, Fixed It, took off on Twitter and is still going strong, and I'm sure has led to at least some change in the way that reporters and editors choose to describe crimes against women and children. A typical example: POLICE CHARGE YOUNG MALE WITH ILLICIT ATTACK ON YOUNG MOTHER became MAN CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED RAPE OF A WOMAN. As Gilmore points out, softening the crime of attempted rape to 'illicit attack' is misleading at best and at worst reduces serious crimes to the level of 'a schoolyard incident.'

This book is a few years old now but it feels particularly timely with the current spotlight on men's violence. Gilmore's focus is on the way media chooses to report this topic, but this book also gives a useful summary of men's violence against women and other gender issues in sport, politics, pop culture and the legal system. Fixed It shows the power of a simple idea -- that red pen correction of offensive and inaccurate headlines has become iconic. In a way it makes depressing reading because we clearly still have a long way to go, but it's encouraging to note that change is occuring. Although when I hear about the growing influence that misogynists like Andrew Tate have over young men and boys, I do despair. One step forward, two steps back? Let's hope not.
 

The Gate of Angels

Good old Athenaeum Library came up trumps again, with a whole chunk of shelf devoted to Penelope Fitzgerald novels which I look forward to investigating in future. On the recommendation of the reluctant dragon, I started with The Gate of Angels. And what a treat it was!

Penelope Fitzgerald could teach some modern writers a thing or two about writing with precision. Each of her chapters is short, usually only a few pages, and the whole book is less than 200 pages long. And yet she packs an entire world, a whole society, a vivid moment in history, into each scene. Fitzgerald's writing is intensely cinematic; I could definitely see The Gate of Angels as a film. And she knows how to leave gaps for the reader's imagination to fill in. We see the characters act, but we aren't always witness to their thoughts and feelings. Even the happy ending has to be inferred as occurring after the end of the novel. This is fitting in a book which is about chance, luck and randomness, with a series of accidental events pushing Daisy and Fred in one direction then another.

I'm so looking forward to discovering more of Penelope Fitzgerald, even if The Bookshop sounds rather sad. There is a surprising amount going on in so few pages, which is infinitely preferable to the reverse, I think!

Look Me in the Eye

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started this book, it seemed that it might be a vaguely dystopian story about surveillance and online data, but it isn't really about that at all. Look Me in the Eye focuses on three friends -- well, two good friends, Bella and Connie, who have just started high school, and Connie's slightly older cousin Mish, who becomes an unwilling companion to the others after changing schools under a cloud.

The plot of Look Me in the Eye might seem fairly low-stakes. Mish is up to no good, having contact with a mysterious older man. She shoplifts and tells lies, and does her best to evade her father's attempts to keep tabs on her. Bella's mum is pregnant and her new partner Pete has just moved into the family's ramshackle house. Connie has a fragile younger sister, who might be at risk from Mish, and Mish herself seems to have stopped eating. Pete's valuable swap card goes missing. Did Mish steal it? Bella doesn't know what to believe.

Low-ish stakes, perhaps, but by the end of the book I was totally caught up in the suspense of the story and desperately hoping for a good resolution. Mish's father is a domineering and controlling character who exudes a genuine sense of threat, and Connie's complicated position, torn between competing loyalties, is subtly drawn. I really enjoyed Look Me in the Eye, which also describes a world immediately post-pandemic, a world of masks and germ-phobia and general nervousness, where lockdown memories are vivid, a world which is already receding into history.

Going Gray (sic)

In some ways this is a very trivial issue; yet it's deeply personal, particularly for women, and Anne Kreamer found that whenever she raised it, the subject elicited lively responses and strong opinions. I borrowed Going Gray on a whim and read half of it on the tram on the way home from the city. It's not a demanding read, but it is a surprisingly interesting one.

Grey hair strikes early in my family. My mother was completely grey by her mid-thirties. Combined with my father's unusually youthful looks (which were a curse to him in a macho-dominated industry), people often thought she was her husband's mother. I was also totally grey by forty (quite white now), and my poor teenage daughter is already finding grey hairs. I don't think my mother ever dyed her hair (I must ask her), and while I had streaks which eased me over the transition, I never seriously considered returning to my original mousy-brown colour, though before I went grey I was an enthusiastic home dyer. Part of the reason was laziness, and partly I actually preferred the streaky depth of my going-greys to my boring brown.

Kreamer had been dyeing her hair brunette for years until she had an epiphany after seeing herself in a photo, realising that her helmet of dark hair wasn't really making her look younger. However the period of transition to grey was more difficult and disturbing to her sense of self than she'd expected. Does grey hair really signal over-the-hill, un-sexy, let-herself-go?

It was interesting to read Going Gray (2007) after the pandemic, when many women (including one good friend of mine, who'd been conscientiously blackening her roots for years) took the opportunity of forced seclusion to make a clean break. I'm not sure when the fashion for young women to dye their hair silver took hold, and I'm not sure if it's still a thing, but it definitely was for a while. I feel as if at least some of the stigma around grey hair has faded. But it's easy for me -- I'm not in a job where I'm competing against younger, hotter women (well, not much anyway!), or in a professional environment where greyness might render me invisible. Anne Kreamer certainly looked great after going grey, more confident and comfortable in her skin, and that was unexpectedly borne out in experiments with online dating and employment recruitment. I personally think grey, silver, salt-and-pepper and white hair looks amazing -- as long as it's smartly cut. Straggling greys don't really do it for me, but otherwise I say, bring it on!
 

Wilding

Wilding was recommended in a list of uplifting books in the Guardian, and it definitely lived up to the description. Isabella Tree recounts the story of how she and her husband Charlie made the difficult decision to stop intensive agriculture on his family's ancestral estate (yes, they are very posh) and return the land to wilderness. It was in some ways a hard-headed financial choice, and the wilding project was made possible with EU funding, which I assume would no longer be an option since Brexit.

At first their neighbours were appalled as fields were ploughed up, a canal returned to a messy, shallow river channel, and deer and cattle were allowed to roam free on the property. A thistle outbreak led to howls of outrage and cries that Charlie's ancestors would be ashamed of him. Why were they 'wasting' perfectly good land in this way?

And yet within a very short time, the results were extraordinary. Birds thought lost to the local landscape, like nightingales and turtle doves, returned to breed. Clouds of rare butterflies descended (and ate up all the thistles). Torrential rains, which resulted in horrendous floods all over the country, were avoided at Knepp, and the natural flood plain sopped up excess water. Insect life and soil health flourished. It really demonstrates the importance of preserving, not single species in isolation, but whole ecosystems, allowing balance and richness to return to the land.

There are obvious parallels here with First Nations management of Country -- careful observation, a holistic approach, respect for nature, and a light touch with interference. The land at Knepp was not really allowed to 'run wild' but was carefully and thoughtfully watched. The introduction of hardy cattle and pigs resulted in the unexpected creation of 'woodland pasture,' which Tree argues was the most likely landscape in pre-human Britain, in contrast to the dense forest which is often assumed to have covered the island.

This was such a fascinating and heartening story, and I'm thrilled to see that a documentary of the same name is about to be released in the UK, and as part of the Sydney Film Festival. I hope I get to see it soon.

A Legacy

 

An uncharitable reader might accuse Sybille Bedford of re-hashing the same material over and over. I've now read three versions of the story of herself and her own family -- in the autobiography Jigsaw, the fragmented non-fiction Quicksands, and now in this novel, A Legacy. But frankly, when the material is so rich and so fascinating, I don't blame her at all for mining it as deeply as possible.

There's really not much crossover with Jigsaw. A Legacy is largely the story of what came before Sybille herself was born, the tangle of two families, scandals, forbidden marriages, mental illness, murder and suicide. Bedford's sometimes elliptical style, the large cast of characters, and the unspoken social conventions of turn of the 20th century Berlin meant I was sometimes confused about what was actually happening, though to be fair to Bedford, I did take a break from A Legacy to read a couple of library novels, and I lost track of events. 

I was chuffed to see an endorsement from Nancy Mitford on the back cover: One of the very best novels I have ever read. Wow, you could certainly die happy with a blurb like that under your belt. I might not go that far, but I did enjoy A Legacy and its peek into a vanished world.

Five Children

As a child in PNG, I loved the Five Children and It trilogy more than the Bastables. I preferred anything with magic to something similar without, and I re-read Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet over and over. The covers I remember looked like this:

and H.R. Millar's illustrations (name misspelled on the dust jacket of my ex-library omnibus!) are deeply embedded in my memories. So I settled in for a re-visit of these old favourites with great anticipation.

Alas, one element of these books which hadn't sunk into my memory was the awful, gratuitous anti-Semitism that surfaces several times in these volumes. Though Nesbit never uses the word 'Jew,' the stereotypes are easily recognisable, down to the big noses and love of money, and are even transported (inaccurately) into the ancient past. It's so sad and so unnecessary, I wonder if modern editions have been altered, because it would be so easy to do without affecting the stories at all.

Because in many other ways, these books stand up so well! The magic is straightforward and unfussy; the children get themselves into natural scrapes, especially when the Psammead is granting wishes (my favourite is when they wish their sweet toddler brother was already grown up, and he is transformed into a languid and patronising young man with a moustache and a bicycle). I'm sure the ancient history described in the Amulet adventures has all been debunked, and this volume contains the worst anti-Semitic episodes; yet it also contains my very favourite scene, when the 'learned gentleman' of their own time and the Egyptian temple priest become one in their love of learning.

I suppose one good thing is that clearly the anti-Semitic parts had no effect whatsoever on my childish soul; at the time I simply didn't understand them, so they glanced off without penetrating. And it would be perfectly possible to read these aloud and skip the bad bits. But I'm very disappointed to find these beloved books so stained and spoiled.

Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect

I absolutely gobbled up Benjamin Stevenson's previous murder mystery novel, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, and its sequel, Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect, did not disappoint. Stevenson has immense fun playing with the conventions of rules of the mystery genre, pointing out when the rules are broken, and when he's adhering to them (hm, we're at the 60,000 word mark now, we're due for another murder). In fact the key word for Stevenson's books is playful, despite their sometimes gory and dark subject matter. 

There was an extra element of fun in this book for me, because it features a collection of murder writers, who each specialise in a different kind of mystery and thus contribute a special expertise to the deduction. Thus we have forensics, legal, psychological etc. Ernest himself is suffering from the insecurity of the debut novelist, and there are plenty of enjoyable digs at the publishing industry, literary festivals, writing snobbery and rivalries (of course this wouldn't be possible with a collection of kidlit and YA writers, because everyone in that community is so supportive and simply lovely -- I'm not even joking).

The idea of a crime writing festival held on the Ghan is simply gorgeous -- what a dream! I hope Stevenson got a grant for research. Trains, writers, murder and self-aware playfulness, as well as a genuinely clever and twisty plot: what more could you ask for? Oh, and it's Australian, too.

About A Girl

I wasn't really aware of Georgie Stone's story -- despite her starring on Neighbours, and being featured on Australian Story and Four Corners. But I'm so glad I picked up this memoir by Georgie's indefatigable mother. Rebekah Robertson, herself a staunch trans ally and activist. Reading an account like About A Girl, you're left shaking your head at the confected panic stirred up by conservatives. Georgie has known she was a girl since she was two and a half; all she's ever wanted is to be able to get on with her life, as an actor, musician and school student. And yet she and her family were forced to fight every step of the way for the treatment she needed to live in a body that was profoundly alien to her deepest sense of self.

Who the hell does it hurt for an individual to choose how they want to express their own gender or sexuality? And yet the word 'choose' is also misleading, as it doesn't feel like a 'choice' but an undeniable inner reality. Georgie has always maintained that her identity was a private affair; she didn't come out at high school for years, though she had to live with the threat of exposure, bullying and abuse every day. The obnoxious lobbying around the same-sex marriage vote was also incredibly damaging to kids like Georgie, and recently (this book was published in 2018), while awareness of trans people has grown, so has the vitriol aimed at their very existence. I've been deeply disappointed at the anti-trans stance taken by JK Rowling, for example. Earlier this year, the story of Nex Benedict, a non-binary teenager who was beaten up in a school bathroom in the US and died the next day, brought me to tears.

And yet even as I type these words, an episode of All In the Mind has just come on the radio, discussing 'gender euphoria' -- the utter joy experienced by trans people finally living as their true selves. As Georgie Stone reminds us, there are good stories out there and we have to hang onto them.
 

Dreams Must Explain Themselves

I wish I had discovered The Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels when I was at school, but somehow, even though I loved fantasy, they passed me by. I used to read quite a bit of science fiction in high school, too, but again, I somehow failed to find Ursula Le Guin's classics, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed until I was an adult. However, once I found her -- not coincidentally, just as I was embarking on writing my own fantasy novels -- I was an instant, utter convert to her writing. Her influence on my work is probably clear to see, though I haven't read everything she's ever written. (The character of Ursa in The Singer of All Songs is a nod in her honour.)

I was thrilled to stumble across Dreams Must Explain Themselves, a collection of some of Le Guin's non-fiction work, arranged chronologically, from 1972 all the way to 2014, just a few years before she died. There are speeches, articles, meanderings, and rants here, from an indignant defence of the importance of gender in Left Hand of Darkness (complete with later admissions that she got some decisions wrong at the time), to a wonderful wander through the history of animals in children's fiction, including praise for a 1930s Australian novel which was much lauded at the time, but which I'd never heard of: Man-Shy by Frank Dalby Davison (published as Red Heifer in the US).

It's sobering to note that Le Guin is writing about the banning of her books way back in 1984, and discussing the same issues that arise in Wifedom in 1988. Le Guin's wisdom, her wry humour, her sharp intelligence, shine from every page. I wish she was still around, but I'm glad we had her for as long as we did.

My Sister Rosa

I finally caught up with Justine Larbalestier's 2016 novel, My Sister Rosa (thanks, Athenaeum library). Larbalestier likes to dance on the dark side -- Razorhurst featured legions of Sydney ghosts in the gangster dominated 1920s, Liar centred on a murderous unreliable narrator. My Sister Rosa is about a bad seed, a malevolent manipulative psychopath -- who happens to be a cute ten year old girl. How far will she go, and can her big brother Che stop her in time?

This is a sinister story, raising uncomfortable questions about the nature of evil and morality. Is Rosa irredeemably wicked, or is she just a child with some issues around social adjustment? Rosa is very good at picking holes in other people's arguments, pointing out correctly that everyone else also lies, sometimes takes pleasure in others' misfortunes, wishes people dead, and puts their own interests first -- so what's wrong with her doing it too? And what about Che? With the same family genetics and upbringing, is there a chance that he could be the same as Rosa? His mother is concerned that Che loves boxing, which as far as she's concerned, is just pure violence. Is there a difference between violence in the ring and on the streets? (On this issue, I think I'm on Sally's side rather than Che's, but it's clear Larbalestier is a boxing fan.)

My Sister Rosa doesn't have a happy ending, and there's a twist that I didn't see coming which raises even more awkward questions. As well as a family and friendship drama, the novel also contains a beautiful love story and a peek into the world of the super rich. It would make a great Netflix drama.

A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep

After devouring the second part of Rumer Godden's autobiography, A House With Four Rooms, a few weeks ago, I pounced on A Time To Dance, No Time To Weep when I saw it on the shelves of the Athenaeum. Some of the material was familiar to me from reading Godden's novels, but I'm fairly sure I haven't read this first volume of autobiography before.

It was so fascinating to read another memoir of young adulthood spent in India during the 1920s and 30s, the same time as M.M. Kaye, though I don't think they ever crossed paths. But Godden is fathoms deeper and more thoughtful about her experience, more aware of the local inhabitants outside the Raj bubble, and with many more personal relationships outside of the servant circle. Kaye certainly had fun; but Godden had joy.

I especially love the final section of the book, which deals with Godden's time living in a simple wooden house in the mountains of Kashmir with her two young daughters. Her marriage had broken down and she couldn't afford to live in the town; but the family could afford to live for almost nothing in Dove House. The frightening story of how this idyll collapsed is also told in Kingfishers Catch Fire, but the truth is even more painful than the novel.

I absolutely adore Rumer Godden's writing, and A Time To Dance alerted me to several early novels of hers which I have never come across. Reader, I broke. I have ordered six previously unread (by me) Rumer Godden novels from World of Books; I couldn't live without them any longer! No Book Buying resolution totally smashed.
 

Seeing Other People

I was equal parts jealous and admiring of Diana Reid's whip-smart debut, Love and Virtue, partly because I was also working on a novel set in the first year of a university residential college, and she'd taken all my best material! In Seeing Other People, the stakes feel lower, though really, what could be more important than being in love, and family?

The spiky triangle at the heart of Seeing Other People consists of two sisters, Eleanor and Charlie, who both fall in love with the same woman, Helen. But there are other complications, in a Sydney summer of beach swims and share houses, backyard parties and theatre auditions. It's eminently readable, clever and touching, and as the cover art suggests, sits comfortably alongside Sally Rooney and Nina Kenwood (albeit for a slightly older audience than Kenwood's books).

BUT! I was appalled by the sloppy editing which really irked me -- I noticed break instead of brake; discrete instead of discreet; hairbrained instead of harebrained. My daughter scolds me for my pedantry and says I should chill out about the fact that language changes. I can accept that, up to a point, and I'm struggling to relax about it, but perhaps my 'braking' point is here.

The Bastables

I loved E. Nesbit's books as a child, I borrowed them over and over again from the Mt Hagen library, and while my favourites were the magical Five Children stories, I also read the Bastable novels multiple times. However, I'm pretty sure I didn't know that New Treasure Seekers existed until very recently, and I broke my 2024 No Buying More Books resolution to instantly purchase a copy.

The covers of these three volumes make an interesting comparison. The Treasure Seekers is the first Puffin edition, from 1958; The Wouldbegoods is a 1981 TV series tie-in; and New Treasure Seekers is a brand new (2021) reprint complete with blurb by Neil Gaiman. While it's heartening to see that a hundred and twenty year old children's book is still in print, I must take issue with the cover illustration, which bears NO relationship to the contents within -- there is no skating, there seem to be four girls and two boys on the cover while any Bastable aficionado knows that family consists of two girls and four boys...grr. 

The books were originally published in 1899, 1901 and 1904 and yet in many ways they seem as fresh as if they were written yesterday. Obviously the details of the daily lives of these Victorian children are fascinatingly different from our own, and were even when I first read them decades ago, and distressingly there are some words and attitudes that have not aged well (the chapter in New Treasure Seekers where they search for their lost dog in a Chinese quarter of London is... not good). And yet the Bastables are wonderful company -- striving to be and to do good, but constantly getting themselves into trouble.

There are quite a few references to soldiers and war (the Boer War) in these books and Oswald's dearest dream is to die heroically on the battlefield. It's sobering to realise that he is exactly the right age to do precisely that. (I note that Michael Moorcock uses the name Oswald Bastable for the protagonist of his 1970s early steampunk novels.)

The conceit of having one of the children recount their adventures, but not specifying which one, adds a delicious flavour to the narrative (I remember how proud young Kate was at figuring out that our story teller was Oswald). I wish I'd thought to read these books aloud to my own children, perhaps I didn't have them at the right time? With some judicious pruning, they would make wonderful stories to share and discuss. I'll have to save them for the grandchildren!
 

My Life in France

I went through a bit of a Julia Child moment a few months ago, which was when I picked up My Life in France from Brotherhood Books. I'd watched the first season of Julia with Sarah Lancashire, and I must have seen something else too, because I became quite intrigued by this tall, practical woman with the love of French cooking (and don't tell me that Bonnie Garmus' Lessons in Chemistry doesn't owe something to Julia Childs' story).

I finally got around to starting My Life in France while I was on holiday in Cairns, and due to many interruptions I've only just finished it now. I have absolutely zero interest in French cooking, but I am very interested in life in Europe in the post-war years, the gusto for life's pleasures displayed by Julia and her husband Paul, and Julia's unlikely television and publishing stardom. My Life in France was a late-life book, a collaboration between Julia and her great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, who wrote down her memories and anecdotes and shaped them into a book. It's episodic and meandering, but often very charming, punctuated with evocative photos by Paul (an accomplished photographer and visual display producer, despite being blind in one eye) and Julia's idiosyncratic exclamations -- 'Whoops! Merde alors! Ouf!'

It's Julia's appetite for life and her determination to wring every ounce of enjoyment from her experiences that makes her such an appealing character. Her classic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was a labour of love over many years, and she was convinced (rightly) that American housewives weren't just content to produce over-processed, quick and easy gloop. I'm sure it's no accident that there was a bit of a Julia Child rediscovery during pandemic lockdowns, when we were all trapped inside our own kitchens and with time on our hands to learn how to make bread properly. And now I want to catch up with all the other Julia content I haven't seen yet -- season 2 of the Lancashire show, the film Julie and Julia (tied in with this edition of My Life in France, as the cover attests) and a documentary, also called Julia, on SBS. Bon appetit!

Queen Bees and Wannabes

I can't remember where I picked up Rosalind Wiseman's classic 2002 book about teenage girls, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which informed the making of the equally classic movie Mean Girls. It might have been around the time that I was writing novels for the Girlfriend Fiction series; I'm pretty sure that my own daughters were not teenagers yet, and I wanted all the information I could lay my hands on.

Re-reading Queen Bees and Wannabes at least a decade later, my children have passed through the teen years (well, almost -- the younger one is still technically a teen for a few more weeks) and I can appreciate how much influence this book had, not just on my writing, but on my parenting. Even though it was written before the tsunami of social media crashed over us all, before the strains of lockdown life, and before new awareness of neurodiversity and gender fluidity, there is so much wisdom in these pages. The key messages -- like keeping lines of communication open, no matter what -- are just as helpful now as they ever were.

Much of the focus of Queen Bees is on helping your child to navigate the social hierarchy of high school, and some of it does have a particularly American slant. In this edition at least (I believe there is a revised version available now) there are some glaring gaps like the ones mentioned above, but the heart of the book hasn't changed much. Wiseman insists that the most important priorities are to build and maintain trust, establish boundaries, model the behaviour you want to see. She is realistic about the issues that teenage girls face and the limits of what parents can control. Better to equip your child to solve her own problems rather than march in and to fix everything for her.

It was a relief to put this book down and realise that, despite often stormy waters, maybe we didn't do such a bad job after all.

Black Duck

When I was a baby writer, and Bruce Pascoe edited Australian Short Stories, I sent him a few of my attempts. He rejected them all, but sometimes he'd write a kind note on the rejection slip which was almost as good as an acceptance. In latter years I have become a big fan of his, for his revelatory work on Dark Emu and for his dignity and patience in dealing with the sometimes vicious and deeply personal criticism that the book has attracted.

Black Duck is a very different book from Dark Emu. It's subtitled A Year at Yumburra, Pascoe's Gippsland farm where he is putting some of the discoveries from Dark Emu into practice, growing and harvesting native grains and making delicious flour from them. I love the loose diary format of this book, divided into seasons, and I marvel at the amount of labour that Pascoe undertakes at a time of life when most of us would be planning rest and retirement. It's not just the heavy work of farming and managing a rural property (fencing, clearing, cool burning, chopping wood, mending, building, caring for animals), but the endless demands on his time from the media and from interested visitors. Some are just breezing through, some are more deeply committed, but Pascoe takes the time to show them around and explain his work. He's also deeply involved in the local First Nations community; though he doesn't go into details, there was clearly some conflict to sort out during this particular year, which also takes up time and energy.

What I loved most about this reflective, generous book was the model Pascoe presents on how to live in harmony with Country -- grateful for its bounty, tending it with care, sensitive to the presence of birds and animals and vegetation, always aware of its stories. It's a glimpse of an approach to life which holds the possibility of so much richness and nourishment for us all, just as the native grains might teach us to appreciate the flavours of our own place instead of food imported from the colonisers. The shadow of death, infirmity, the disastrous Mallacoota fires, and petty back-biting falls over Black Duck, but at its heart this is a joyous and celebratory book.
 

Golden Afternoon

As a teenager, I had a very romantic view of the British Raj. In my mind, it was all potted palms and linen suited chaps sipping gin and tonics on shaded verandahs; the miniseries of Paul Scott's Staying On and The Jewel in the Crown, which led me to Scott's Raj Quartet novels, as well as the film of A Passage to India, created a misty, glamorous image of the exotic East and the melancholy of lost glory. I had no idea of the cold economic reality, oppression and violence that underpinned these romantic images.

I started reading M.M. Kaye's memoir of her 1930s youth in the light of this nostalgic glow. Oddly I have never seen or read The Far Pavilions, Kaye's novel which propelled her to bestseller status and was certainly a contributor to the rosy-hued view of the Raj which was floating around in the 1980s. I have read and loved Rumer Godden's memoirs and novels of her Raj childhood (like The River and Two Under the Indian Sun), also tinged with romantic nostalgia, but also informed with at least some political awareness. Perhaps I'm drawn to memoirs of colonial childhoods because I grew up in a colonial milieu myself, though expat PNG was a long way less romantic than British India. In any case, I suppose I was expecting another wistful, elegiac remembrance of a vanished world.

However, Golden Afternoon did NOT fulfil this brief, and my reading of it was interrupted, and complicated by, reading Empireland. I was expecting something of Rumer Godden's exquisite prose; I was not expecting a posh, breezy voice not unlike my English aunties (may they rest in peace), chattering about endless parties, high jinks on Kashmiri lakes, feasts with local princes, death-defying drives through flooded landscapes -- 400 pages of largely unreflective japes and frivolity in a gorgeous but politically neutered setting. The occasional remark is tossed out: 'No wonder they wanted to get rid of us!' but the existence of empire is accepted as merely a colourful background to a very personal story.

I had been reading Golden Afternoon (which is only the middle volume of a three volume autobiography, mind you) as a bit of a guilty pleasure, but after finishing Empireland, the pleasure largely drained away and only the guilt remained.
 

Empireland

I found Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland at the local library after hearing him speak on a podcast in the middle of the night -- it was probably Empire (funnily enough) with William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, which is reliably fascinating -- because he's spruiking his new book, Empireworld, which examines the ways in which the globe has been shaped by British imperialism.

Empireland has a more modest scope, focusing on the sometimes unexpected ways in which imperialism has created modern Britain. While the Brits often congratulate themselves on their part in abolishing slavery, they tend to skate over the part where it was a major part of their economy (and I was shocked/astonished to learn relatively recently that the British government has just finished paying abolition compensation -- not to the descendants of the enslaved people, mind you, but to the slave owners!)

Sanghera sees the roots of many contemporary British attitudes stretching back to the imperial era: for example, the exceptionalism that encouraged many to believe that Britain would be better off out of Europe than in it; the foundation of so many venerable British banks and companies; the distrust of 'cleverness' when what was needed to run empire was solid, unquestioning loyalty; the amnesia about the presence of people of colour all the way through Britain's history, right back to the Romans; and the unsurprising desire of the colonised to move to seat of empire. 'We're here because you were there,' as some activists have pointed out. And that's not even touching on the topic of loot (see another excellent podcast, Mark Fennell's Stuff the British Stole), including human remains. While of course Australia was part of the empire project, Sanghera focuses mostly on India.

This is quite a short book, only about 250 pages, but it's eminently engaging and readable, and it made me think a lot. Elements of Empireland have kept popping into my head while I'm reading other books, and I think I will need to read the follow up, too.

Green Valentine

I'm a big fan of Lili Wilkinson; she has got better and better with every book. From my observation, her career has gone through three phases -- the early quirky rom-coms, the serious 'issue' novels, and now she has embarked on a rich and colourful fantasy series (which, like Green Valentine, centres on plants).

Published in 2015, Green Valentine is, I think, the last of the quirky rom-coms, a genre which Wilkinson perfected with books like A Pocketful of Eyes, Pink and The Zigzag Effect. Though thoroughly enjoyable, it's perhaps not her strongest entry, and maybe it's significant that after this she turned to darker subject matter. Gardening has always been a passion of Wilkinson's and in the author's note she says she wanted to write a book about gardening that wasn't 'totally boring.' With guerilla gardening at midnight and a delicious romance, she certainly achieved that, and the message that solutions aren't found with a single silver bullet, but from hundreds of small ideas, is still extremely timely.

Green Valentine is an uplifting story about hope and making change and community, and it would be a great antidote for a young person who might be feeling despair about the future of our fragile world.
 

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales

The story behind The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales is a sad one. The first Virago Book of Fairy Tales, edited by Angela Carter, was received with such acclaim that a second volume was commissioned. Tragically, Angela Carter died before this book was finished, though her notes on many of the stories are published here, and she chose each tale for the compilation.

This is an eclectic collection of folk tales, some evidently quite ancient, some so recent they are hardly more than single page jokes. There are stories from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas featured here and almost the only thing they have in common is that they all centre women. There are cunning witches, resourceful maidens, downtrodden and vengeful wives.

I'm not sure if I enjoy fairy tales and myths as much as I think I should. Perhaps it's the distillation of story down to almost pure plot -- characters are barely sketched, and if they have any distinguishing personality traits, they are boiled down to a single adjective: 'clever,' 'kind' or 'jealous.' I'm not sorry to have read this collection but I don't think I'll be hunting down volume 1.
 

The Durrells of Corfu

I was looking for a light read and The Durrells of Corfu hit the spot. As a teen I adored all Gerald Durrell's memoirs about his childhood on Corfu, My Family and Other Animals and its sequels, I found the family anecdotes hilarious and the nature writing vivid and delightful. It's now clear that those memoirs were quite heavily fictionalised -- different stories were exaggerated, some people erased and events shifted around to suit the narrative. I have no problem with any of that but it was interesting to find out what the actual facts were. For example, big brother Larry was presented as a temperamental, aspiring author, while in fact he'd already had two novels published and was an established member of the London literary scene. Moreover, his wife Nancy came with him to Corfu, and mostly the couple lived apart from the rest of the family -- but poor Nancy doesn't appear at all in Gerald's books! (Another literary wife deleted, a la Wifedom??)

There are lots of photographs included in Michael Haag's book and he does a great job of filling in the family background as well as the historical context. The Durrell idyll only lasted a few years, ending of course in the outbreak of war, and it seems that the antics of the bohemian clan were not universally approved by the island's other inhabitants, who took a dim view of nude sea-bathing and what they saw as a patronising attitude. At this distance, who knows the truth? But I think I will still hang onto the golden memories of Gerry's perfect childhood and the eccentric characters that surrounded him, including his siblings.

The Borrowers Aloft and Avenged

 I thoroughly enjoyed these last two adventures of the Borrowers, which see them in genuine peril, especially in The Borrowers Aloft, where they are abducted from the model village in Fordham and imprisoned by the villainous Platters, who plan to put them on permanent display as an attraction in their own rival model village. The horror of being gawked at by humans all day is very real. I remember visiting the model village at Bourton-on-the-Water in England as a child and being enchanted by it -- surely this was the inspiration for the creations of Mr Pott and Miss Menzies (the goodies) and the unpleasant Platter pair?

 

(By the way, with 26 letters to choose from, was it really necessary for Norton to name her small cast of characters Pod, Peagreen, Pott, Platter, Pomfret and Parkinson? But I digress...)

The Borrowers Aloft begins with a long dull set up involving the Platters' financial woes -- I don't love the framing of the borrowers' adventures with human activities, I just want to get into the borrowers' world immediately -- but once the borrowers have been kidnapped, the story really gathers pace, culminating in a daring escape by balloon (not really a spoiler since you can see the scene on the cover). The Borrowers Avenged sees a new borrower introduced, the gentle Peagreen Overmantel, and I wonder if he will one day become a rival to Spiller for Arrietty's affections? However we leave the borrowers in their new home (complete with ghosts) long before this becomes an issue, and there is only one fleeting reference to the First World War to shadow the otherwise tranquil ending (the stories are set in 1911).the

For a lovely nostalgic journey, The Complete Borrowers was the best $2 I've spent for a long time.