Well…it has been a busy summer. We went
to what has become a regular summer tenancy in a mews house just north of
Kensington High Street and west of St. Mary Abbots Church on Kensington Church
Street. Below our rear windows, the children gathered and played each morning
in the little park, waiting for St. Mary Abbots School to open, and in the
evenings the occasional homeless person took up a sleeping position on one of
the benches, leaving his empty beer-can on the grass. Voices carry easily into
the house, and so we have heard business deals and family rows being broadcast
by people sitting on a bench below the windows yelling into their mobile phones.
We made two trips, for a couple of days
each, during our stay in London: one to the stately home of Chatsworth in the
Derbyshire Peak District, and one to the Cotswolds for a performance at the
Longborough Opera Festival. On both trips we also managed some excellent walks.
We also made one day trip to Eastbourne, where we walked nine miles along the
spectacular white cliffs of the Seven Sisters and took a bus back to
Eastbourne—a pattern we followed after a visit to Brian Martin and Peggy Lou in
Oxford, where we walked the Thames Path to Abingdon and took a bus back to our
car in Oxford, where the parking fee seemed grotesquely expensive.
And
in mid-July we packed up in London, left heavy cases at a Heathrow hotel and
flew to Glasgow for ten days or so in rainy, but beautiful, Scotland, where we
met Daniel, my son, and his wife, Karen. The seven or so days we spent together
had only a couple of days free of rain; but we did manage a lot of spectacular
hiking and saw some wonderfully wild scenery, often made more dramatic by
swirling clouds and mist. Dan and Karen--with what seemed like hundreds of other
hikers--got to the top of Ben Nevis. We dropped them off at Edinburgh airport,
whence they flew to Venice, and we had a few more days in the Trossachs, before
taking the car back to Glasgow airport in pouring rain and through a maze of
motorways, flying to Heathrow, spending one night at the hotel where we had
left our cases, and catching a 7.30am flight to Dulles, where we arrived
mid-morning and were home by mid-day on July 26.
But
this is supposed to be a book blog, not a family history; I make this introduction as a way of excusing
myself for neglecting the blog for our time in London. And this means that this
is going to be a major exercise, covering five books, which probably means that
I shall be rather short about them, and maybe that is better than any
pretension of deep analysis. (Getting old: not sure if it is “pretenSion” or
“pretenTion” but the silky pages of the second volume of my Shorter OED—a
pleasure to use rather than the computer—says that the second is simply a
variation of the first)
Here
are the five in the order I read them:
“Noonday”
by Pat Barker
“Number
11” by Jonathan Coe
“Mothering
Sunday” by Graham Swift
“My
Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante
“Sweet
Caress” by William Boyd
At
the start, I should say that I enjoyed them all. You will note that four out of
the five are by English authors, probably the result of reading reviews
(usually glowing) in English newspapers, and we did hear Jonathan Coe discuss
his book at the LSE. And, of course, I have read prior novels by each of the
English authors, who have great reputations in England, and deservedly so. And
my first reading of an Elena Ferrante was a riveting experience and I cannot
wait until I can get into Volume Two when it is my turn to download it from the
DC Public Library.
For
American readers, who have probably already read some of the Pat Barker WW1 novels,
one of which dealt in fictional disguise with Siegfried Sassoon’s time in the Craiglockhart
Mental Hospital and another with the clinic in which the New Zealand surgeon
(whose name eludes me) performed miracles of reconstructive surgery on
mutilated faces. Others deal with a group of art students (the novel “Toby’s Room”
comes to mind) and in “Noonday” we pick up with these characters at the
outbreak of WW2 and during the London Blitz, which--in a way--is the
centre-piece of the novel. The characters, painters and an art critic, are Kit
Neville, whose face was mutilated in WW1: Elinor Brooke, with her brother Toby’s
rather mysterious death in WW1 often on her mind: and Paul Tarrant, limping
with a leg wound, married to Elinor, though clearly the relationship is seriously
fraying. The narrators are each of these characters—and a fraudulent spiritualist
medium called Bertha Mason, whose first person narration I found rather
superfluous to those of the main characters, whose interactions and changing
relationships are the emotional heat of the novel—although the overarching picture
is THE BLITZ, described in both banal and horrifying detail. Clearly, Ms, Barker
has done her research, and she is a great writer.
This
is, incidentally, her 13th novel.
I originally intended to publish one blog
covering all five books, but I am having difficulties in posting the blogs.
There used to be a way of saving a draft, but it seems to have disappeared in
what are supposed to be improvements to the site, but which leave the user
mystified. So I will publish this one and then pick up the other books in the
next four pos