Up-Date and "Noonday" by Pat Barker

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 13^th 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