The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Margaret

The Mirror’ Cracked From Side To Side by Agatha Christie first published 1962

Miss Marple was feeling rather down and a bit weak after an attack of bronchitis. Her doctor prescribes ” a nice juicy murder” for her to unravel and not long after the ideal opportunity arose with the death of Heather Badcock. Heather had gone to a fete at Gossington Hall held by her idol, the glamorous movie star Marina Gregg. She died after drinking a poisoned cocktail, just after meeting Marina. The title is taken from Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalot, a convincing image of Marina’s reaction on meeting Heather – “… ‘the doom has come upon me’, cried the Lady of Shalott.” Heather was the sort of person no-one would want to murder, she was a very kind woman who always did things for other people. Her trouble was that she was sure she knew the best thing to do and she was only really interested in herself. Such people Miss Marple observed “live dangerously – though they don’t know it themselves.” So why was she killed and was Marina really the intended victim?

I remember seeing the TV adaptation of this book with my favourite Miss Marple – Joan Hickson – and although I did remember who had committed the murder I didn’t remember the motive, nor how it had happened. As I read on it all came back to me – just what the doom was. As usual with Agatha Christie’s books,which are so deceptively easy to read, all is not straight forward and there are many complications and twists before the denoument.

There was lots to enjoy in this book – not just the puzzle of the murder, but also the setting and the characterisation. The setting is St Mary Mead, once an idyllic English village, now threatened by the “Development” of rows of new houses and Miss Marple’s attitude towards it as she explored it. At first it didn’t seem real to her – it “was like a neat model built with child’s bricks” and the people looked unreal to her, she thought it all looked “terribly depraved”. Then she realised that although everything and everyone looked and sounded different the human beings were the same as they always had been. It’s from her understanding of human nature that she is able to solve the crime.

I also liked the characterisation of Miss Marple, now an old lady thought incapable of looking after herself and the neat way she handles Miss Knight her live-in companion who talks to her as though she is a child. In fact all the characters have that touch of reality that brought them alive. Their idiosyncracies are what makes them seem real people.

For more reviews of Agatha Christie’s books have a look at the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Carnival.

This is the ninth library book I’ve read this year so I’m well on target to read at least 25 library books by the end of December. Click on the logo for links to other bloggers reviews of library books.

The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Margaret

I’ve not been writing much on here recently as I’ve been researching my family history and it takes up so much time. I only wish my ancestors had left letters and journals like Alice Munro’s did. Her book The View from Castle Rock is an excellent mix of fact and fiction. She has taken what she knows of her family history and woven it into an imagined version of the past. She explains in the Foreword that in every generation of her family there was someone who “went in for writing long, outspoken, sometimes outrageous letters, and detailed recollections.”

The Laidlaws emigrated to Canada from Scotland in 1818 and the first part of the book is about their journey across the Atlantic and their early years as settlers. The title of the book comes from a story about Andrew who when he was ten was taken by his father to see the view from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. His father, who wanted to emigrate to America, told him that the land they could see in the mist was America;

There is where every man is sitting in the midst of his own properties and even the beggars is riding around in carriages.

Of course it was not America and Andrew knew that. But it was years later before he realised that he’d been looking at Fife!

Story follows story as the years pass spanning several generations of the Laidlaw family moving forward to the present generation – Munro herself. I found the second half of the book even better than the first as she tells of her parents and their hard working lives. Her father bred silver foxes and before she became ill her mother made their pelts into scarves to sell to American tourists. Munro then relates stories based on her own life. These are first person stories based on personal material but as she puts it in an

“austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself at the center and wrote about that self as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality. … In fact, some of these characters have moved so far from their beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with.

These are stories.

You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative.

Fact or fiction this is a fascinating book.

It’s also the eighth library book I’ve read this year – for accounts of more library books see J Kaye’s Support Your Library Challenge.

Le Grand Meaulnes – Reading Notes

Posted on March 12, 2009 by Margaret

It’s been a few weeks since I finished reading Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier and my memory of it is fading fast. I prefer to write down my thoughts soon after finishing a book but other books took precedence and as I didn’t take any notes whilst reading it these are just brief notes of my impressions.

I thought the first part of this book was better than the rest of it. It begins in France in the 1890s with the arrival of Augustin Meaulnes at Monsieur Seural’s secondary school at Sainte Agathe. He is quickly popular and called ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ by the other boys. He and the schoolmaster’s son Francois a shy, younger boy become friends. Augustin on an impluse goes to meet another boy’s parents and gets lost on the way. He stumbles across a chateau where preparations are being made for a celebration of the marriage of a young couple. This has an almost fairy-tale feel to it especially as Augustin falls in love with the beautiful Yvonne, the daughter of the family – a bit like Cinderella in reverse.

The celebrations are broken up with the news that the wedding is not going to happen and everyone departs, including Augustin. He has no idea where to find the estate, the ‘lost domain’ as he is given a lift back to Sainte Agathe. The rest of the book is about his search to find the chateau and Yvonne, which became increasingly implausible and by the end I had lost interest, although there were parts that I found poetical and richly descriptive. I didn’t really mind what happened to the characters and was glad when I finished reading the book. But other people enjoyed it more than I did – see the discussion at Cornflower’s Book Group.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Margaret

gargoyle-1 I didn’t know what to expect from this book, which was just as well as I probably wouldn’t have considered reading it if I had, and that would have been a pity. Despite having to read it too quickly – see yesterday’s post – by the time I’d finished it I discovered that I had actually enjoyed it very much. It was the title that made me pick it up in the first place as I find gargoyles fascinating in their ugliness.

The first part of this book is ugly too, with its all too convincing descriptions of the horrors of burning and its treatment. I won’t go into detail – there’s enough of that in the book. At first I thought the car crash was illusionary, that the unnamed victim was playing a computer game, but no it was real.

I was in a car crash when I was seventeen, nothing like this one fortunately but that has made me more aware of the horrors that this particular crash involved and I remember even now the slow-motion yet immediate impact of the experience of going through the windscreen. This describes it well:

There was a brief moment of weightlessness: a balancing point between air and earth, dirt and heaven. How strange, I thought, how like the moment between sleeping and falling when everything is beautifully surreal and nothing is corporeal. How like floating towards completion. But as often happens in the time between existing in the world and fading into dreams, this moment over the edge ended with the ruthless jerk back to awareness.

And back to reality and pain.

But what follows after left me wondering. Just what was going on with Marianne Engels, the beautiful, wild and clearly unhinged sculptress who takes the burns victim, once a beautiful young man and a porn-star but now a hideous distortion of his former self , home with her to live. Is Marianne a manic-depressive schizophrenic or is she really 700 years old having formerly lived as a nun in medieval Germany when the two of them were lovers?

I was really taken with the references to Dante’s Inferno. Marianne claims that she produced the first translation of Dante’s poem into German soon after it was written. Dante’s epic allegorical poem describes his descent into Hell where sinners recieve their just rewards. The poem begins with an exciting episode at the gates to the underworld in a dark, confusing wood, symbolising doubt, sin and the sterility of the soul. Dante, the narrator, has lost the path and is guided by Virgil through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. So The Gargoyle too starts with the car crash on a mountain side within a dark wood and the narrator is plunged into his own inferno. By the end of the book he is in the City of Dis the lower part of Hell, with winged monsters, and the Circle of Deceivers. Or is he; is he delusional, hallucinating as a result of morphine withdrawal?

Then there are the gargoyles themselves, screaming out to Marianne to be released from the stones that imprisons them. Gargoyles are the grotesque figures on the roofs of buildings designed to convey water through a spout in their mouths, or to ward off evil spirits, or even to portray evil forces. Marianne is possessed by them; as she seeks to free them from the stone she barely stops to eat or sleep for days on end in a frenzy of work.

There are so many topics within this book – too numerous to go into any detail here – and I did find them just a bit wearisome by the end. The stories Marianne tells cover many legends and fantasy tales, from Viking raids to Japanese feuds, from Victorian England to medieval German mercenaries and monasteries.

descent-into-hell1 As a result of reading this book I’ve already started to read The Descent Into Hell, Dorothy L Sayers translation of Dante’s Inferno. This is a small easily manageable book and then I really must finish reading the much longer book – Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which I began last year.

A Final Thought, which does contain a spoiler:

Whilst reading this book I kept wondering whether the narrator was manipulating Marianne to his own advantage. She is wealthy and mentally sick. He is cynical, by his own account a liar and deceiver of women, and he doesn’t believe the stories Marianne tells him. I think he did love her but I also think he knew she had left him everything in her will and he did nothing when she went into the sea knowing she was not coming back . He doesn’t say he didn’t know about her will just that

They questioned me at length but the investigation showed that I had no knowledge of the will, and the teenagers who drank beer on the beach testified that it was not uncommon for “the burnt guy” and “the tattooed chick with the weird hair” to come late at night. She often went swimming, they confirmed regardless of the weather. On that particular night, I had done nothing but sit on the beach while the dog ran round in circles.

How convenient for him!

Georges Simenon’s The Man On The Boulevard

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Margaret

I borrowed The Man on the Boulevard by Georges Simenon, translated by EileenEllenbogen, from my local library. It is the third Maigret book I’ve read in the past few months and all the way through I was thinking this was the best of the three, until the end that is. It has a puzzling murder to solve – Louis Thouret is found stabbed in a little alleyway. Seemingly a perfectly ordinary man of regular habits who leaves his home in the suburbs to go to his job as a storekeeper in Paris for the past twenty five years. His wife is surprised to find he was wearing light brown shoes because he always wore black, a flamboyant tie unlike the one he normally wore and that there were two cinema tickets in his pocket as well as more money in his wallet than he normally carried with him.

So it turns out that Louis has a double life that his wife knows nothing about. It appears he has been having an affair and for the past three years he has not had a job, so how has he managed to bring home his monthly salary? Where does he change his shoes every day and why? It’s the shoes that set Maigret on the right track to solving the mystery. The book was originally called Maigret et l’homme du banc or Maigret and the man on the bench – it just so happened that Louis spent part of the day sitting on a bench talking to an unknown man, ‘the sort of person who sits on benches’ and that forms another important clue.

There were lots of things I liked in this book – the attention to detail, the descriptions of the weather (cold and wet), and the characters themselves. It’s set in Paris and without knowing the location of the various boulevards I could still get a good impression of the city and its suburbs. I liked the theme of a man following a double life and the way Louis resolves his problem of keeping up appearances with his wife and family although I thought his method of maintaining his income was rather implausible.

Maigret and his colleagues gradually discover Louis’s secrets and I was beginning to wonder just where this was taking me as I couldn’t work out who had killed him. I really had no idea who it could be. And then the book was spoiled for me by the abrupt and unsatisfactory ending. The culprit was someone who hadn’t been mentioned at all. It was such an anti-climax as though Simenon just ran out of inspiration.

When Will There Be Good News?

Posted on February 18, 2009 by Margaret

Complex but so very satisfying! This has had very mixed reviews on Amazon which just goes to show that you have to make up your own mind about a book. I read it very quickly because I loved it. I know I missed bits - just when did Jackson lose his jacket? I’ve tried to track it down but I can’t spot it, so I’m thinking of reading it again before I have to take it back to the library.

It really is a case of bad news all round. To start at the beginning – six year old Joanna witnesses the murder of her mother, older sister and baby brother. It goes from bad to worse with several interlinking plots (some with convenient coincidences) to keep me guessing what disaster would happen next.Thirty years later the killer is about to be released. Joanna, is now Dr Hunter, and has a baby and an unlikeable husband Neil. She is helped by Reggie, an extremely likeable and resourceful sixteen year old girl. When Joanna goes missing Reggie is the one who insists the police in the form of Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe (not very likable) investigates. Louise has her own problems in the form of a likeable husband. Then there is Jackson Brodie, formerly a police officer and private investigator, who gets involved due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At times the plots got so complicated that I couldn’t quite remember who did what – one problem of reading too quickly. Reggie had to leave school after the death of her mother. She is still doing her A-Levels and is tutored by her former teacher, Ms MacDonald who is suffering from cancer. Her brother Billy and his ‘friends’ threaten both Reggie and Ms MacDonald with unpleasant consequences. Then there is Alison living in dread of the return of her homicidal maniac of a husband who is on the run, a train crash, and the unexplained murder of two men in a burnt down house – etc, etc.

It seems like a catalogue of disasters but it’s also funny and light at the same time and there are plenty of allusions to keep me working out where they come from. The easiest were the nursery rhymes Joanna sings to her baby and that Kate Atkinson works into the text. It’s set in Edinburgh, a place that is new to me, but as my son and family are now living nearby, of great interest and I could identify some of the locations. There is plenty of action, good characterisation and dramatisation of how relationships work – or don’t work.

I’ve previously read Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, also featuring Jackson Brodie and I thought I’d read One Good Turn, the second Jackson book – but I haven’t. It’s a toss-up now between re-reading When Will there Be Good News? and One Good Turn (which I own). I just hope no one has reserved the library book!

Fire in the Blood

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Margaret

I bought Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky ages ago, full of enthusiasm to read it at once. I read a few pages and then for some unknown resaon left it lying around unread. A few weeks ago I borrowed Fire in the Blood from my local library and once I started to read it I just had to finish it. Now I’ll have to read Suite Française as soon as possible.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Russia in 1903 and fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a best selling novelist. She moved from Paris just before the German occupation in 1940 and went to live in the small village of Issy-l’Eveque (in German occupied territory). She was arrested in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.

Fire in the Blood is set in a small village based on Issy-l’Eveque between the two world wars. The narrator is Silvio looking back on his life and gradually secrets that have long been hidden rise to the surface, disrupting the lives of the small community. The people are insular, concerned only with their own lives, distrusting their neighbours. All Silvio wants now is a quiet life, but he cannot avoid being drawn into helping Colette, his cousin Helene’ s daughter, when her husband Jean is found drowned in the mill stream.

Although only a short book (153 pages) it is an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men, lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. Silvio in his old age feels rejected by life and lonely. In his youth he had travelled the world, seeking his fortune, propelled by the fire in his blood. Now his passions are extinguished and he no longer knows who he is. He remembers :

When you’re twenty love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it’s over you can hardly remember how it happened … Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out. Faced with this blaze of dreams and desires, I felt so old, so cold, so wise. (page 45)

The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire … That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest. (page 152)

The characters are drawn with simplicityand detachment, but this is deceptive as there are layers upon layers and there is a brooding, silent and haunting atmosphere, almost menacing as the truth emerges. Added to this is the writing itself full of rich descriptive passages of the land and the people. It is indeed a gem of a book

The First Blandings Castle Book

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Margaret

I wrote about my first reactions to Something Fresh by P G Wodehouse in a Sunday Salon post – click here. I finished it a week or so ago (I borrowed it from the library) and it’s made me want to read more of Wodehouse’s books. It’s very entertaining and amusing, indeed farcical at the end.

I did find it mildly confusing when I read that Ashe Marson, the young English writer looking for ‘something fresh’ to get him out of the rut he was in, was renting a flat off Leicester Square in London for five dollars a week and there was a later reference to the cost of something (I forget what) in dollars. Wodehouse to me was a British writer and wrote very British books and this book was published in the UK. So I had to look it up. Ah – Something Fresh was first published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post between June and August 1915, (American), then in the USA in book form as Something New on September 3 1915 and nearly two weeks later in the UK. So some Americanisms appear to have survived.

Once I got over this little stumbling block I read the book without any interruptions. As I wrote in my earlier post Ashe and Joan Valentine are both employed to retrieve the scarab that Lord Emsworth absent-mindedly pocketed when visiting Mr Peters his son’s future father-in-law. Lord Emsworth under the impression that Mr Peters has given him the scarab has exhibited it in the museum at his family home Blandings Castle.

Alerted to the plans to steal back the scarab, Baxter – the Efficient Baxter – Lord Emsworth’s secretary, sits on guard all night to foil the thief. The result is pure farce, with fights in the dark, mistaken identites, crashing furniture and valuable china smashed – most enjoyable mayhem. I much prefer farce on the page than on stage!

I loved the language -just one example picked at random:

The Efficient Baxter was coming down the broad staircase. A general suspicion of mankind and a definite and particular suspicion of one individual make a bad opiate. For over an hour sleep had avoided the Efficient Baxter with an unconquerable coyness. He had tried all the known ways of wooing slumber, but they had failed him, from the counting of sheep downwards. The events of the night had whipped his mind to a restless activity. Try as he might to lose consciousness, the recollection of the plot he had discovered surged up and kept him wakeful. It is the penalty of the suspicious type of mind that it suffers from its own activity. (Page 160)

Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge 2009

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Margaret

I’d decided that I wasn’t going to join any more challenges for next year because I don’t want to feel that I’m reading to deadlines, but this one is ideal for me as I always borrow books from the library. The rules are simple:

There will be three sizes of challenges.

** The first is to read 12 books from your local library in 2009.
** The second is to read 25 books from your local library in 2009.
** The third is to read 50 books from your local library in 2009.

You decide which one of the three challenges is best for you.

You can join anytime as long as you don’t start reading your books prior to 2009.
This challenge is for 2009 only. The last day to have all your books read is December 31, 2009.
You can join anytime between now and December 31, 2009.

So far this year I’ve read 33 library books, so I can easily attempt the second challenge. If I do read more than 25 that’s a bonus and I may even reach 50. If you want to join in click here.