Stravinsky's Lunch

I have read Drusilla's Modjeska's Stravinsky's Lunch before, but not for many years. I wrote above (below, actually!) about the anecdote which sparked her thinking around this subject, at a dinner with Helen Garner and other friends, mostly writers. Stravinsky's Lunch is a biography of two Australian women artists, but it is also a mediation on the clashes between the demands of any creative practice, love, family and the world that women artists experience particularly acutely. (Rachel Power's The Divided Heart is another excellent book on this topic.)

Naturally this is a subject close to my own heart, as I try daily to juggle writing with the multiple needs of family, domestic responsibilities and self-care. The two artists Modjeska writes about, Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith, took very different approaches to the compromises and conflicts they both endured for their art. Bowen left Australia to pursue her artistic studies, but ended up sacrificing her own work for many years after falling in love with the much older writer, Ford Madox Ford, who was supportive of her work (up to a point) but took it for granted that his writing should come first, barely conscious that a quiet house, regular food, and the pleasures of domestic comfort (including children) require work by someone (not him). Eventually they separated and she enjoyed late success as a war artist, but she died relatively young and under-appreciated.

Grace Cossington Smith never married, and in fact, never left her parents' home. Her middle class family supported her financially through the ups and down of artistic recognition, though again she didn't receive the accolades she deserved until late in her long life. Cossington Smith doggedly followed her instincts, painting mostly in isolation and suffering the derision of male critics, and eventually amassed an incredible body of work. But again, her independence was bought at a cost -- in this case, her sister Madge, who kept house and cared for their ageing parents, and then for Grace herself. Modjeska is careful to acknowledge Madge's presence and sacrifice which made Grace's achievements possible.

Annabel Crabb's The Wife Drought makes the same point -- any individual who wants to combine a demanding career (in any field) and a fulfilling personal life (family, children, love) needs a WIFE to do the endless, tedious, draining, time-devouring work behind the scenes. Or a Madge, or a faithful servant, or a partner who is willing to sacrifice a bit of their own time or success or leisure to share the load. Only some us are lucky enough to score one of those.

The Mirror and the Light

I asked for the final volume in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy for my birthday back in September, and I've been reading it off and on ever since. The Mirror and the Light is over 800 pages long -- does that mean the whole trilogy comes to about 2000 pages?? The length alone would make this series of novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell a magnificent achievement; but these books are also wonderfully written. I'm not really surprised the judges of the Booker Prize didn't feel they could award Mantel a third gong, but this book deserves it just as much as the previous two.

Reading this book, I felt deeply immersed in Cromwell's life -- we see every event through his eyes, and he sees everything. In this final volume, he is especially reflective about his hardscrabble childhood on the mean streets of Putney, and the envy and resentment of his nobly-born fellow courtiers begins to bite as they constantly remind him that he has no 'great family' to back him up, and that his common birth means he doesn't deserve the honours and riches with which Henry has rewarded him (or let's be honest, with which Cromwell has rewarded himself). 

There is a growing sense of dread as we know that Cromwell's life is inexorably moving toward its unhappy end. Cromwell has plenty of blood on his hands, and he is quite stoic in the face of his own downfall, still planning how best to save his household and protect his family until the very end. All the threads of this remarkable life draw together in this moving conclusion.

I must say reading these novels has piqued my interest about the Tudors in general, I've even started watching The Spanish Princess which deals with the life of Catherine of Aragon, who is not portrayed terribly sympathetically by Mantel -- the TV series certainly makes her a much more glamorous figure than the novels do! And it's been fun spotting other characters in this earlier story -- a dour Wolsey, not yet a cardinal, and a very dashing young Henry, but also the scheming Pole family who will make so much trouble for Thomas Cromwell in coming years. I don't think Cromwell himself will even appear. But I'll know he's there, lurking in the shadows, ten steps ahead of everyone else, even if we can't see him.

The Children of Green Knowe

 

Lucy M. Boston's Green Knowe books were among my very favourites as a child and it's such a delight to return to them. They had an atmosphere like no others, partly because of the etching illustrations by Peter Boston, the author's son, which had an eerie, other-worldly feel, very appropriate to a story about a young boy meeting ghostly children in his great-grandmother's house.

However, The Children of Green Knowe is never frightening. When Tolly meets Toby, Alexander and Linnet, it is the most natural thing in the world; the house and garden welcome Tolly and peacefully hold layers of history which occasionally intersect. There is very little plot to this first book in the series, but the magical house of Greene Knowe (based on Boston's real home, The Manor in Hemingford Grey), Tolly's wise and comforting great-grandmother, and down-to-earth Boggis, create such a delightful setting that story becomes irrelevant. 

This was a book that I returned to many times, a book to dwell inside.

One Day I'll Remember This

Reading Helen Garner's diaries is such a treat. I had to ration myself to twenty pages at a time or I would  have gobbled up this volume in a single sitting. One Day I'll Remember This covers the years between 1987 and 1995, when I was in my twenties: living in share houses, going to uni, travelling overseas, single. 

Garner was negotiating a very different stage of life: mired in an affair with a married man ('V'), then marrying him herself; moving to Sydney to be with him; working on the screenplay of The Last Days of Chez Nous, about the breakdown of her own previous marriage, and writing the 'angel' novel, Cosmo Cosmolino. This volume of the diaries ends with the publication of the hugely controversial non-fiction book, The First Stone, about allegations of sexual assault at Ormond College. This was the book that has poisoned her reputation with young feminists (though not with me), as she was seen to be way too sympathetic to the man in the case. I'm guessing most of the fallout will appear in Volume 3.

Garner has always grappled with relations between men and women, in a way that might seem old-fashioned and almost deterministic to a younger generation. I was excited to read one entry where V recounts an anecdote about Stravinsky: that when the great composer was working on a piece, he would demand that his wife and children remain absolutely silent at lunch, so as not to wreck his mental concentration. Later, this story is repeated at a dinner with friends (including Garner's writer friend 'E'). All the men are admiring or at least understanding of Stravinsky's demands -- this is what Art requires. All the women are up in arms -- why didn't Stravinsky eat his lunch in his room, on a tray? How dare he impose his own whims on his whole family in this arrogant way? Why couldn't he prepare his own damn lunch? It goes without saying that a female artist would find it extremely difficult to impose herself on the rest of her household in this way. 

The reason I was thrilled to read about this discussion is that I had recently bought (to re-read) the book Stravinsky's Lunch by Drusilla Modjeska (who is surely 'E'), who also tells the same anecdote in the introduction and says it came up at a dinner with friends. Stravinsky's Lunch tells the story of two Australian women artists and the struggles they faced in carving out space for their work -- a struggle that most female creatives must still grapple with.

Reading about Garner's own difficulties with 'V' made my blood boil. He assumes that she will leave their tiny flat when he is working, even if she is also writing. She finds herself tiptoeing around his feelings, yet he accuses her of being 'moody' and 'hypersensitive.' I wanted to give him a slap and give Helen her own flat.

The saddest episode concerns a long-standing friendship, with R and O, which is wrecked after Garner hurts 'O' by using him as a character in Cosmo Cosmolino. When the volume ends, a tentative rapprochement seems to be taking place; I hope the friendship can be rescued. Overall, these mid-life diaries seem to be wrestling with the price of making art, the cost in independence, in love and friendship, in money, in time. The costs are huge, and yet the need to keep writing is a compulsion that refuses to be denied.

Knowledge of Angels

 

I'm embarrassed to say that it took the death of Jill Paton Walsh late last year to bring her to my attention. I had never read any of her books before, though I've since been assured that Goldengrove/ Unleaving and A Parcel of Patterns will be right up my alley (now on the hunt), and I'm also looking forward to reading her Lord Peter Wimsey novels.

I wasn't aware, either, that she'd almost won the Booker prize for Knowledge of Angels, which despite being an established author, she had to self-publish. This is a beautiful, cruel and shining book that chimed well with Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (where heretics are also tortured for their beliefs) and also, oddly, with the jigsaw I was working on at the time:

Escher's Cascata captured the austere, medieval feeling of the book perfectly. At first I read with delight of this Mediterranean island, with its olives and snows, its sparkling seas and serene nuns, each image as rich as an illuminated manuscript. I was intrigued by the discovery of the wild wolf-child and the arrival of the civilised stranger, naked from the sea. For a while, all unfolds peaceably. The stranger, an atheist, disputes philosophy with the learned ruler and the scholar; and the snow-child is slowly tamed.

But then the inquisitor arrives, and everything turns dark and senseless and brutal, and I read reluctantly, knowing what the inevitable end was going to be. 

Knowledge of Angels was written under the shadow of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, but it takes faith seriously. Neil Philip has said he doesn't consider this book her finest work, because it lacks humour, and I could see what he means. Still, this is a novel that will haunt me for a long time.

          

 

Beyond the Vicarage

 

This was a sneaky last minute Christmas present for myself, and I enjoyed it so much! Noel Streatfeild wrote three volumes of fictionalised autobiography: A Vicarage Family was one of my very favourite books as a child; Away From the Vicarage covers the years of her acting career (including a tour of Australia in the late 1920s!); and Beyond the Vicarage (1971) describes the war years and Streatfeild's writing career. I still need to get hold of Away From the Vicarage, but Beyond the Vicarage was a huge treat.

I knew that Streatfeild had written novels for adults as well as her huge output for children, but I hadn't realised how many she'd written. Several of her adult titles were lost when her publisher's warehouse was bombed during the war and the printing plates were destroyed, so I guess we'll never know exactly what they were like. It surprised me that Streatfeild was rather dismayed by the sudden success of Ballet Shoes, which has of course remained immensely popular and really set herself up as a children's author. In the fifties she decided to give up writing for adults, sensibly understanding that her style of adult novel was going out of fashion in an over-supplied market, and from then on focussed entirely on writing for children.

Like Nancy Mitford, Streatfeild's writing strategy was to write in bed for a few hours before getting up -- that way, naughty friends couldn't entice her out on excursions until she'd done her work for the day. It was fascinating to read about her experiences in London with the WVS during the war, running a mobile canteen which travelled around to bomb shelters providing hot drinks and food. She saw some terrible sights and her lovely flat was completely destroyed. I must say, reading about the horrors of wartime London (and, as Streatfeild points out, things were far worse in Europe) puts our pandemic whinges about border closures and isolation into perspective.

Beyond the Vicarage ends with Streatfeild sliding into comfortable old age. She was to live for another fifteen years, dying at the grand old age of one hundred: a pretty good innings.

Reading Round Up 2020

 

Thank God that year is over -- though 2021 might be just as difficult, who knows. Getting through 2020 for me was all about comfort reading, jigsaws, knitting, and riding my bike through empty early morning streets. So last year featured lots of children's books and lots of re-reading of old favourites, both of which I am completely unapologetic about.

For most of the year I had three books on the go simultaneously -- one children's or YA, one adult fiction and one non-fiction book. I think my concentration was a bit all over the place and it was easier to hop from book to book, chapter by chapter, than try to maintain my focus for a whole book. Maybe this is just modern life, maybe it was COVID, anyway it seemed to work. I read a total of 85 books this year, seven fewer than last year.

Kids/YA vs Adult

I read 30 children's and YA books, and 55 adult titles (which does work out to about a one third/two thirds ratio, as mentioned above). Mostly I read children's books, I wasn't really in the mood for YA this year, I needed comfort and reassurance, and the majority of those children's books were plucked from my own shelves. (Oddly, I read 9 fewer kids books this year, though I felt as if I read more!)

Author gender

Another one third/two thirds split! 56 books were by female authors and 29 by males, and about one third of those were by one author, Alan Garner. It did work out to slightly more books by blokes this year, but the proportion is fairly steady.

Fiction/non-fiction

My impression was that the need for escape drew me toward fiction this year, and again the three-books strategy led to a rough one third factual, two thirds fictional split. Actually, comparing to 2019, I'm surprised to see that I actually read more non-fiction in 2020! Fiction was 51 (down from 63), non-fiction 34 (up from 29).

Book source

I bought only two new books this year (I actually bought a lot more than that, mostly for my children) (down 12 from 2019); my daughter and I invested in a mystery box of books from Book Grocer which actually ended up being pretty poor value, for me, at least. Oh well, it was still exciting to unpack the box!

33 books were purchased secondhand (down 7), all from Brotherhood Books, some leftover from last year and some bought through the year. I managed to borrow 13 books from the library, despite lockdown (down from 24). A whopping 24 titles were re-reads that I already owned (up 20!). I borrowed 6 books from friends (down 3), and bought 7 e-books on the Kindle (up by 5 -- instant gratification was particularly important this year!)

Nationality

Because of all the old favourite re-reads, UK authors were heavily featured this year with 38 titles. Next came Australian authors on 23; US writers with 15 books; one Irish author, Tana French, with five titles; and four authors from assorted other countries (Finland, Germany, Japan). I haven't done a very good job of reading foreign books lately!

Notable books of 2020

The year began with the tail end of a Noel Streatfeild binge, and progressed with binges of several other authors, notably Tana French (5) and childhood favourite Elizabeth Enright (6). I had intended to re-read all of Alan Garner's books this year but I didn't quite manage it -- I read nine of his works and still have a couple to go which I'll finish off this year. I had a Jane Austen mini-binge as well, starting with a biography that sent me scurrying back to her novels. (I'm looking forward to re-visiting Pride and Prejudice when my remaining school age daughter studies it this year.)

In spite of all the comfort reading and re-reading, my standout reading experiences were actually mostly non-fiction, and mostly by Australian authors. Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner and Chloe Hooper's The Arsonist both made a deep impression early in the year. Judith Brett's From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage was both educational and thoroughly enjoyable. I lost myself in Richard Fidler's Ghost Empire, and as usual was bewitched by Robert Macfarlane as he took me Underland.

Delusions of Gender

 

Huzzah, a science book that's fun to read as well as being knowledgeable and scholarly! I enjoyed this book so much. Cordelia Fine smashes through all those pop-psych books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and Why Men Can't Find Butter in the Fridge and Women Can't Mend Taps, or whatever they're called (I must confess here that in a weak moment I may have picked up a couple of these titles from the library book sale to amuse myself...)

Anyway, Fine completely dismantles the so-called 'science' behind the claims that men's and women's brains are fundamentally different, demonstrating that any observable differences in behaviour are much more likely to be a product of social and environmental factors than genetic 'hard-wiring' (which isn't even a thing).

I do worry, a lot, that even in the last couple of decades, the gender boxes seem to be becoming more and more rigid, especially for kids and even babies. I had no desire to dress my girls in pink and frills (they did have a couple of princess dresses). I didn't go out of my way to raise them in a gender-neutral way (something Fine believes is basically impossible anyway, as even tiny children swim in a soup of culturally mandated assumptions and expectations). I now have one quite girly girl, who has to show me how to put on makeup properly, and one who hasn't worn a skirt since Grade 2. They both have friends who are trans and non-binary, which is of course completely fine; but I do feel it's a shame that society seems not to offer a wider, more elastic range of ways of being male and female in the world. I look back at myself when I was eleven or twelve -- not pretty, bookish, not interested in fashion or pop music or celebrities or handbags -- and I wonder if that girl was growing up today, if she might not start to question whether she was really meant to be a woman? I don't know, I don't know.

Anyway, Delusions of Gender is a terrific read and I'm going to scour my shelves for any stray books about Why Men like Guns and Women Like Knitting and I'm going to throw them in the BIN.

Big Sky

I had Big Sky on reserve at the library for months before I was able to read it. I must admit I think Kate Atkinson's recent books have been less brilliant than her early novels (Transcription was quite disappointing) and there are aspects of Big Sky that were a little annoying: a couple of blatant, cheating cliff-hangers (in one case, literally); a murder mystery that ends up being almost an irrelevance; and of course, Atkinson's trademark coincidences. But it was nice to be back in the company of Jackson Brodie, who is a dependable protagonist, and it was lovely to see Reggie Chase, from When Will There Be Good News? make a reappearance, now a policewoman herself.

Big Sky treads some dark territory, namely child abuse and sex trafficking, and it takes a while for the separate threads, which Atkinson painstaking lays down, to tie together in a satisfying conclusion. Big Sky might not be brilliant, but it is a solid, reliable read -- not unlike Jackson Brodie himself.

Dragonfly Song

 

I've always been intrigued by the mysterious Minoan civilisation, centred on bull worship and ritual 'dancing', the origin of the legend of the Minotaur, so I thoroughly enjoyed Wendy Orr's award-winning middle-grade novel, Dragonfly Song, set in Bronze Age Crete.

Told partly in prose and partly in verse, Aissa's story begins on a small Mediterranean island, ruled by the snake priestess. Aissa is the priestess's daughter, cast out at birth for a small imperfection; adopted into a peasant family, but cast out again as a cursed child when brutal raiders visit the island. But mute Aissa is destined for a bigger fate than slavery -- to become a bull dancer, sent in tribute to Knossos.

I was slightly bemused by the parts of the book that talk about 'servants' when Orr clearly means 'slaves', and I wondered if the publishers felt this was too touchy a subject, even for a historical narrative; but then there are other sections when 'slaves' are openly discussed, so that can't be right. I wasn't entirely comfortable with this apparent eliding of the two. But that's a very minor quibble in a lively, fascinating story, which will surely spark further investigation for young readers. 

There is a sequel of sorts called Swallow's Dance, which I will also keep an eye out for.

Stargazing

Stargazing by Peter Hill was not at all the book I was expecting. With its meditative cover and poetic title, I had anticipated a nature memoir in the vein of Robert Macfarlane or Helen McDonald, something thoughtful and lyrical. 

(I must also confess that another reason I grabbed this from Brotherhood Books was because in another life, I knew someone else with this name, who coincidentally took me up onto a rooftop blindfolded so I could gaze at Halley's Comet with dark-adjusted eyes.)

But -- this was not the same Peter Hill, and Stargazing was no reflective hymn to nature's wonders. Instead I found myself reading a jaunty account of Hill's 1970s stint working on Scottish lighthouses as a nineteen year old, the eccentric characters with whom he shared his duties, and a way of life now lost to automation. He casts a wry retrospective eye over his teenage self (addicted to poetry and drawing, obsessed with music) and popular culture of the time (Dr Who even makes an appearance, along with Captain Beefheart and Jack Kerouac). 

Okay, I must admit there is also a pinch of Nature's Wonders -- the wild seas, the creepy night when one of the lighthouses was swamped with migrating birds. But most of Hill's nostalgia is centred on his fellow lighthouse keepers, some young, some old, and the stories they had to share. At the change of shifts, one keeper had a duty to make sure the next one was fully awake, and so they'd sit and drink tea and eat cheese and biscuits, and talk about their lives. As he says, it was the only profession* that paid you to tell stories -- a sad loss indeed.

*Except, you know, author, I guess.

Dear Dodie

 

I first came across Dodie Smith as the author of the beloved children's classic, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. I'd enjoyed the book as a child but came to a deeper appreciation of it when I read it to my own girls -- it was one of the few books, apart from Harry Potter, that both my daughters loved and demanded repeat readings of. It was so warm and funny, so witty and clever, with jokes for adults as well as children, and the illustrations were so charming, that I never minded going back to it. The sequel, The Starlight Barking, was a little weird, with a science fiction/mystical premise; that wasn't such a big hit, but still enjoyable.

I was well into adulthood before I encountered Smith's second best known work, I Capture the Castle (originally written as an adult novel, but now regarded as YA). What a beautiful, moving, eccentric, yearning novel -- I'm so sorry that I missed it as a teenager, I would have lived in it. It's rapidly become one of my very favourite books.

Then I found another novel, It Ends in Revelations, in a second hand book shop -- quite a modern take on homosexuality, for its time, I thought, but not amazing. I had no idea that Dodie Smith had enjoyed a stellar career before the war as a playwright, long before she wrote any of the books that have remained her lasting legacy. She and her husband Alec moved to America when the war began, so that Alec, a pacifist, could avoid conscription. They remained there for fifteen years, with Dodie earning a comfortable living working on Hollywood screenplays, but she always felt guilty and conflicted about the move, which she regarded as a betrayal of her country, and more pertinently, as cutting her off from public sentiment in England. She was never able to recapture her former success as a playwright, even after returning to England and remaining there until her death.

No wonder she had enlightened ideas about sexuality; half her friends were gay, including Christopher Isherwood, and she was also a good friend of Julian Barnes, who eventually became her literary executor. In later years, she and Alec lived in virtual seclusion in a country cottage, content with their many Dalmatians (naturally) and a beautiful garden (Alec) and writing her autobiography (Dodie). Over her lifetime she wrote endless letters and diary entries, all of which Valerie Grove must have read to produce this biography.

Grove is quite judgemental about Dodie and describes her as 'self-indulgent' and 'pampered,' which is no doubt true, but she was also determined, humorous, generous (when she had money) and thoroughly enjoyed life's pleasures. In her youth she was an (unsuccessful) actress and then worked in Heals, a furniture shop, where she set out to seduce the much older owner and had a long affair with him, before marrying the young, handsome and devoted Alec. So good for her! 

I think I Capture the Castle is by far her best work, and it showcases her best attributes: clear-eyed self-reflection, whole hearted emotion, appreciation of beauty, and a wry, witty sense of humour.

Nothing New

 

Robyn Annear is a prolific Melbourne writer (actually I think she lives in Castlemaine) but I'm aware of her from her history of early Melbourne, Bearbrass, and A City Lost and Found, which is the story of Whelan the Wrecker. It's not surprising that she's chosen to turn her pen to a history of second-hand -- well, everything! (Ironically Nothing New is one of the few books I've read lately not sourced from that massive trove of second-hand reading matter, Brotherhood Books; I borrowed this one from the library.)

Nothing New examines many different aspects of secondhand goods and trading, but focuses particularly on clothing. In the olden days, there was no such thing as vintage -- clothes were worn, cut down, and adapted until they simply wore out, whereupon they were transformed into multi-purpose rags. Everyday clothing doesn't get preserved for museums, which is why the historic clothes we see on display tend to be strictly for special occasions - silk dresses, bridal gowns and parade uniforms.

Annear also looks at the enormous trade in used clothing in Africa, the valorisation of mending and making do during times of shortage during the First and Second World Wars, and the subsequent backlash in the 1950s when consumers were encouraged to throw out the old and embrace the new in order to help the economy along. 

These days we are encouraged (perhaps vainly) to reuse and recycle what we can, but at the same time, society isn't organised to facilitate this. It's almost impossible to get major appliances repaired -- why would you, when it's just as cheap to buy a new fridge or washing machine? I'm constantly horrified by participants on House Hunters who cast an eye over a perfectly functional kitchen or bathroom and pronounce that it 'needs to be updated.' Does it, really? Having lived in many houses with sub-standard kitchens and bathrooms and survived perfectly well, I can tell you that having everything new might  be nice, but it's by no means essential.

There is, however, a sub-section of society (which clearly Annear belongs to) which celebrates the pre-loved, the historic, the shabby, the characterful. My sister-in-law is currently making a fortune connecting discarded items with new owners. Long may she and her kind flourish.

The Shepherd's Life

 

James Rebanks' unexpected 2015 bestseller, The Shepherd's Life, chimed well with my recent readings of Underland and Alan Garner -- and also with Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk. Rebanks is part of a farming family in England's Lake District: Beatrix Potter country. For generations, his ancestors have farmed sheep on the fells, and he has witnessed the rise and fall of farming fads, eventually returning to the traditional methods of managing sheep on these marginal lands.

His connection to the land is unbreakable; he glories fiercely in the deep family connection to farming that stretches back for hundreds of years, and which he in turn is passing to his own young children (though he accepts that they may or not not also become farmers). He is no fool, and doesn't suffer fools either, like well-meaning outsiders who take a more romantic view of the countryside and see the sheep and the farmers as a picturesque decoration rather than an integral part of the landscape. His people are proud and prickly, and that comes through forcefully in his prose.

Just as when I read Alan Garner's Stone Book Quartet, I was struck by the parallels, half a world away, with Australian First Nations' visceral connection to country and how these English authors experience their own deep roots in the land. It's not the same experience, but it chimes, and it makes me wonder if all traditional societies share this fundamental sense of connection to the landscape -- if it's a universal experience that modern, mobile societies have lost. 

The Shepherd's Life is divided into seasons and describes the rhythm of the farming year; the book also traces Rebanks' own life. He drifted through school and didn't think much of it, dropping out as soon as he could to help on the farm. But clashes with his father contributed to driving him back to education. He ended up at Oxford (he describes wryly how he found himself suddenly rebranded locally as 'clever') and now finds himself a writer. (I didn't know it, but he has a new book out: English Pastoral.) I've also just discovered a Conversations podcast with Richard Fidler which I am now itching to listen to.

The Stone Book Quartet

 

I think The Stone Book Quartet is my favourite Alan Garner novel. It's really a collection of four novellas, each focused on a child of a different generation of a family strikingly similar to Garner's own: he has said that this is his most personal book. In these slim but tightly controlled stories, each taking place over a single day, Garner explores themes of family and history, memory and craft, belonging and loss.

In The Stone Book, Mary's stonemason father takes her up to the stop of the church spire and then deep into the earth to discover a secret painted cave. In Granny Reardun, Mary's son chooses to come a blacksmith rather than a mason, to work with metal instead of stone. In The Aimer Gate, Robert helps with the wartime harvest but alone of the children, can't find a moment of joy or a vocation. Finally, in Tom Fobble's Day, set during the Second World War, William's grandfather (the smith of Granny Reardun) makes William a perfect sledge on his last day of work.

There are echoes and resonances between the four stories. The demolished house from Granny Reardun reappears as rescued rubble in The Aimer Gate. Robert climbs inside the church tower and finds his grandfather's mark hidden in the 'cave' of the belfry. In each generation, there is deep skill and respected mastery. And Alan Garner himself, descended from these craftsmen, has created a homage to them using the tools of his own craft: words.

There are also gaps and mysteries here. No one seems to know what the 'aimer gate' means. Mary, who longed to work in a great house and care for beautiful things, can't afford to care for her own firstborn son. Robert is not drawn to any particular mastery and we don't know what becomes of him; the last tale centres on William and his grandfather, and William's father doesn't even appear. 

Hot on the heels of Underland, it was especially wonderful to read of the ancient painted cave of The Stone Book with its vivid animal scenes, overlapping footprints and handprints, a secret handed down through a single family. Do the later children know of it, or is the secret lost? The broken loom of Mary's uncle becomes William's perfectly balanced sledge four generations later; some knowledge, some possessions, are passed down unknowingly. 

Like the sledge, swift and balanced, sweeping and sure, the product of hand and eye and history, The Stone Book Quartet itself is close to perfection.