Category Archives: Memoirs

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter I

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Rebus’s Scotland: A Personal Journey by Ian Rankin is my choice to illustrate the letter I in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet.

If you like the Rebus books, like me, then you’ll also like this book. It is fascinating to read, with insights into Ian Rankin’s own life and that of the character he has invented, along with his thoughts on Scotland and the Scottish character. It’s partly autobiographical, blending his own life with Rebus’s biography. It also describes many of the real life locations of the books, in particular Edinburgh, Rebus’s own territory.

I particularly enjoyed Ian Rankin’s views on writing – how writers mine their own experiences, reshaping their memories to create fiction and the similarities between novelists and detectives:

Both seek the truth, through creating a narrative from apparently chaotic or unconnected events. Both are interested in human nature and motivation. Both are voyeurs. (The Edinburgh-born Muriel Spark says that she and her fellow novelists ‘loiter with intent’ – playing on the idea of a criminal activity.) I certainly enjoy dipping into other people’s lives, giving fresh texture and tone to them, while Rebus has his own reasons for prying into everyone else’s secrets. (page 31)

He went on to quote from The Hanging Garden and then The Falls giving Rebus’s reasons – which were ‘to stop him examining his own frailties and failings.’

I’ve read all the Rebus books – links to my posts are in the Author Index (the tab at the top of the blog). Some of these are brief and last year I decided to make a page on each one to flesh them out a bit more. So far, that just remains an intention, although the parent page has a list of all the books. In preparing to write Rebus’s Scotland Ian Rankin re-read all his Rebus books. Here is his own analysis:

Authors seldom read their own work: by the time a book has been published, we’re busy with our next project. When a story is done, it’s done – reading it through would only make most authors want to tinker with it. Having said that, I enjoyed the majority of the Rebus novels. Knots & Crosses I thought wildly overwritten – definitely a young man’s book. Dead Souls possesses too many characters and story-lines: at points it confused even its author! But several books which had seemed real chores to write surprised me with their deftness - Set in Darkness and Let it Bleed especially. (I think they probably seemed chores because of the amount of political detail they had to embrace – it’s never easy to make politics seem exciting to the layman.) (page 125)

Throughout this book Ian Rankin quotes liberally from his books to illustrate the points he makes. He begins with a chapter on the place where he was born and grew up, which was in the same cul-de-sac as John Rebus – even in the same house. But really, of course, Rebus was not born there. He was created in a bed-sit in Edinburgh where Rankin was living and writing. He deals with Rebus’s ‘prodigious intake of alcohol‘, the Oxford Bar, his taste in music, the city of Edinburgh (Rebus’s territory) and Fife, where Rebus and Rankin have shared memories. I like the way he writes about Rebus as though he were a real person, sometimes admitting that he’s not sure what Rebus will do, but at the same time acknowledging that he is his creation.

An excellent book. My only criticism is that I would have loved it to have an index – maybe I’ll do one for myself

  • Paperback: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Orion; New Ed edition (1 Jun 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0752877712
  • ISBN-13: 978-0752877716
  • Source: my own copy

Teaser Tuesday – The Tent, the Bucket and Me

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I’m reading Emma Kennedy’s The Tent, the Bucket and Me.  As the subtitle explains this is about her ‘Family’s Disastrous Attempts to go Camping in the 70s‘, and that is not an understatement. I wish that I had the same powers of recall as Emma does to remember what I thought, felt and said at the age of 3. Emma is of course, writing comedy. It reminds me of those TV programmes that make you think ‘this just wouldn’t happen in real life’. I’m not saying that what she writes about didn’t happen, but I do suspect it’s been embellished somewhat.

Emma Kennedy would be great on Rob Brydon’s programme Would I Lie to You? All the events she describes would be ideal for the programme because no-one would believe they were true from the way she describes them. Passages in this book both make me laugh out loud and groan at the stupidity that led up to them. Just imagine you’re three, you’re drenched in wee (from a bucket full of the stuff that had tipped over when you tried to sit on it) and your parents told you to run naked round the car in a howling gale to wash off the wee! And that was Emma’s introduction to the joys of life under canvas.

There are more than enough toilet incidents, but these are not the only disasters that befall Emma and her teacher parents Tony and Brenda.  Having put up a frame tent in a howling gale in a field on the side of a cliff they abandon the tent and break into an empty caravan on the campsite, only to find that it went from bad to worse. The caravan was ‘ a stinking hole’, the back window blew out and, fighting against the wind the front end of the  caravan came off its bricks. They managed to jump out just as:

The caravan groaned; a deep crunch shattered out from its underbelly. With one terrifying yaw, the rear cracked up to the verical, tipped over and then rolled end over end, crashing down the field, metallic smashes punching through the howling wind. Then with one sliding finale, the caravan fell off the edge of the cliff.

‘We’re in hell!’ wailed Mam, as she watched it go. ‘Hell!’ (page 37)

They’d been in the eye of a force-ten gale, without realising it. Nothing daunted they carry on camping (holidays, that is) for the next 9 years.

100 Days On Holy Island: a Writer’s Exile by Peter Mortimer

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After I finished reading 100 Days On Holy Island the main impression it made on me was that Peter Mortimer endured his hundred days there, feeling insecure, wanting company and to be accepted. He always felt an ‘outsider’, not accepted by the locals. He recognised his paranoia:

Part of Mortimer’s paranoia while on Lindisfarne was of being constantly observed and judged, that my every act was noted and recorded by some amorphous body established purely to note down all behaviour of nosy incomers such as I. The truth, of course, was that people had their own lives to live but anyone in a similar position to mine will know what I mean. (page 199)

This sense of being an outsider pervades the book. It can’t have helped that people knew he was on the island in order to write about his experience. He wasn’t there as a tourist, nor had he gone to settle there, but he went with the intention of seeing how he coped with living there  for one hundred days and writing about it. This book is written with empathy for the island and its inhabitants but because of his sense of being an ‘incomer’ all the time I was reading it I found it uncomfortable, whether he was sitting in one of the pubs on his own, or visiting some of the people he did get to know, or spending time on St Cuthbert’s Isle alone. 

I now know a bit more about the geography of the island, and the way the tide cuts it off from the mainline (which I knew before but this book emphasises the isolation it brings). Most of all I suppose I know more about Peter Mortimer, a writer I had never heard of before. He is a playwright and a poet. His other memoirs are The Last of the Hunters about the six months he spent at sea working with North Shields fisherman, and Broke Through Britain, about his 500 mile odyssey from Plymouth to Edinburgh.

His time on Holy Island was from January to April 2001, when foot and mouth disease swept through the UK, and although it never got to Holy Island it was affected by the closure of the countryside. The islanders were hit by the threat to the tourist trade. It was freezing cold, blasted by snow storms and afflicted by power cuts. It was also a bad time for Mortimer to be away from his family, as his father died just before he went, his mother was in hospital desperate to see him, his son had his 17th birthday and his nephew was seriously ill. Although he did go and visit his mother, he couldn’t have picked a worse time, which may well be a major reason he struggled there on his own.

Holy Island (also known as Lindisfarne) is a place of pilgrimage, known as the Cradle of Christianity, a place of spiritual heritage. I don’t think Mortimer mentioned Lindisfarne Priory in his book and very little about Lindisfarne Castle, either. This is not a guide book, nor is it about the history of the island, or about Christianity. He does examine his own beliefs and went to the talks on faith at the Heritage Centre, but realised that he

was having trouble with these lecture overall; not the people so much as the basis. I wasn’t enthused. They didn’t tap into my own life passions, the things that excited and moved me, which I was becoming increasingly aware, had very little to do with religion. (page 194) 

He spent time doing jobs such as clearing the overgrown garden of one of the island pubs, painting Ray Simpson’s (who ran the society of St Aidan and St Hilda) bathroom and decorating it with a haiku, dragging a stone from one of the beaches and inscribing it with another haiku. He also helped out at the island school, went to lots of meetings, and walked around as much of the island as he could. The days he spent on St Cuthbert’s Isle are interesting. He called that his Three Tides for St Cuthbert. St Cuthbert taught at the monastery on Holy Island and when he died in 687 he was buried in the church, although eventually his bones were buried at Durham. St Cuthbert’s Isle is the place Cuthbert went for solitude and to meditate. Mortimer describes it thus:

The island was bleak terrain, tortured volcanic rock on the top of which was tufted spongy grass whose uneven surface and hidden potholes made walking difficult. The stone remains of Cuthbert’s cell were slightly sunken, offering some slight protection from the wind, which was, it appeared, on a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a week contract. At one end of the cell was an impressive oak cross erected 60 years previously. …

The sky seemed massive. The view back to Holy Island took in the Priory ruins, St Mary’s church and the row of desirable properties named Fiddler’s Green. Through the binoculars I could trace the progress of the Dinky-sized cars on the distant causeway. This would continue to 11.30am. To the west, across the water, lay the mass of the Northumberland mainland. (page 195)

In some ways I found it a remarkable book which kept me wanting to read it but by the end his own wish to go back home got the better of me and I was glad it ended.

His own summary of the book and his stay on Holy Island ends the book:

I wrote various small poems during my 100 days and finish with another tiddler completed soon after my return, an image that stayed in my mind and in some ways reinforces the fact that I can never belong to, yet never will be free of, that small huddled island which is simultaneously well known and yet not known at all.

On the Cullercoats carpet

My yanked-off boots

spill North Shore sand.

Sunday Salon

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I’ve now started reading 100 Days on Holy Island: a Writer’s Exile by Peter Mortimer, a diary of the time he spent living on Lindesfarne, off the coast of north-east England, in a close-knit community of a 150 people. This is not a book about the history of the island but it is about what it was like for Mortimer to live there on his own away from his  family from January to April 2001.

It began badly as his father died just before Mortimer had planned to leave, and his nephew was very ill after an emergency operation. As it was winter there were few, if any, visitors to the island and the pubs and village store were closed for most of the time:

 It was silent in the way cities are never silent, silence not as a brief interruption from traffic, the humans, the incessant noise of civilisation, but silent as a way of being. What lay beneath the surface of this small settlement I had no idea. But on a bitter cold January night in 2001, it offered up silence as a totally natural state. (page12)

In preparation for his stay he had asked ten northern writers to select  a book (not written by themselves) that they thought might amuse,divert or challenge him during his stay. Nine of them gave him a book and I’m looking forward to discovering what they were. 

I can see already that I’m going to enjoy this memoir and hope the rest of the book lives up to the beginning.

I’ve dipped into The Breaking Point by Daphne du Maurier (short stories) this week and will continue reading that later on. Qiu Xiaolong’s Death of a Red Heroine has had to take a back seat for a while whilst I read these two books and I’m also tempted to start reading Martin Edward’s Take My Breath Away. I just wish I had more than one set of eyes and one brain to cope with reading multiple books – that would be excellent.

Sunday Salon

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Not much reading here today as D and I are off out with the family this afternoon.

This morning I’ll be reading more from Griff Rhys Jones’s memoir Semi-Detached, which is coming on nicely. I’m now up to the part where Griff is in his final year at school. I loved his description of cricket that I read yesterday.

I hate and abhor cricket. I loathe cricket. I abominate cricket. There is only one thing more boring than the abysmal English habit of watching a game of cricket and that is an afternoon playing the wretched game. It is sport for the indolently paralysed. Only three people out of twenty two are engaged in any proper activity. The rest simply sit and wait their turn.

The excruciating tedium of ‘fielding’ – standing about, like a man in a queue with nothing to read, in case a sequence of repetitive events, ponderously unfolding in front of you, should suddenly require your direct intervention … (page 179)

Football is a game. Tiddly-winks is a game. A sack race involves energy and fun. Cricket is like a cucumber sandwich: indulged in for reasons of tradition, despite being totally eclipsed by every other alternative on offer. (page 181)

I can well imagine that fielding would be much more pleasurable if one could read at the same time. One of my fond memories of childhood is going with my parents to watch cricket, but then I did used to lie in the grass making daisy chains.

I’d like to finish reading Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig this evening, if I have time before I fall asleep. I have very mixed ideas about it right now, varying from liking it to wishing I’d never bothered to pick it up. It’s a tough read – from a subject point of view, that is. This is by no means a ‘comfy’ read, more of a rollercoaster to batter and bruise. But I must finish it before writing about it properly.

Coming up next week I’m looking forward to reading one of these books:

At the moment it’s King Arthur’s Bones that is calling out to me. It’s five interlinked mysteries from Michael Jecks, Susanna Gregory, Bernard Knight, Ian Morson and Philip Gooden.

The Music Room by William Fiennes

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The Music Room must have been a difficult book to write and in parts it’s a difficult book to read.  It’s lyrical and strong in setting the scene – the castle with its battlements, secret rooms and spiral staircases where William grew up and the landscape, the moat, the fields and birds all came vividly to life as I read it. And yet as I read more and more of it I almost began to tire of it. There was little variation and it felt detached and over-stylised and impassive. But on reflection, I think that maybe that’s the only way Fiennes could write this book.

I never felt I really got to know William himself or most of his family, certainly not his mother, father, or his twin brother and sister. Most of the book is about his brother Richard, who was epileptic, and about the brain – the discovery of how it worked and the causes and treatment of epilepsy. William’s reactions to Richard are there – how as a small child, eleven years younger than Richard, he just accepted that that was how Richard was and how as he got older he became fascinated with the anger and aggression that could dominate Richard, how William almost tested him to see how far he would go. His love for Richard is also evident and Richard himself is a strong presence, with his violent outbursts and his passion for football, his mood swings and  his tenderness and remorse for what he has done.

William and the rest of the family almost faded into the background and I wanted to know more about them. There were glimpses of them such as the passages where  his father finds strength from the castle itself:

One afternoon I saw Dad standing next to the house, his right arm stretched out, palm pressed flat against a buttress, his head dropped. He didn’t move.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

He said he was asking the house for some of its strength. (page 131)

William describes hearing his mother playing the viola in the music room. The music room is a place of refuge – his mother

… didn’t want to leave the music; she wanted longer in that private room, away from everything, playing each piece as if she were trying to say how much she loved it. (page 48)

Music played its part in Richard’s life too. He had a ‘clear, soft baritone voice’ and liked to sing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan and Welsh hymns such as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’.

He sang in the music room. Often he started too low or too high, and when the melody got away from his range he’d change key like someone shifting gear in a car so he could keep a grip on the tune. Sometimes in the evening, inspired, he’d dress up in suit, waistcoat and bow tie, and stand in the music room with the score held out in front of his chest just as a professional would, the Anglepoise at full extension over his shoulder. (page 210)

A disturbing book that has stayed with me over the last week or so, the idyllic setting, an extraordinary childhood and an outstanding portrait of his brother.

Book Notes

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I’ve read a few books recently and not written about them.They’re library books and due back very soon so  I thought I’d jot down a few notes about each one.

  • Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell (audio book)

    • Dave and I listened to this in the car whilst travelling to Northumberland and back. This is an Inspector Wexford mystery – a man taking his dog for a walk discovers a severed hand, which turns out to be part of a skeleton wrapped in a purple sheet. The police have to discover the identity of the victim – and of the body of a second corpse found in a nearby house. Both have been lying undiscovered for at least ten years. I’m not used to listening to books and I did find it a bit difficult to follow. Of course, the sat nav and traffic news kept interrupting which didn’t help, but even so I did get confused. There were too many people and sub-plots. Maybe I should read the book.

    It seemed overlong. I thought it would have been improved if it had been shorter and less rambling. It was narrated by Christopher Ravenscroft who plays Mike Burden in the Wexford TV series. He took Wexford’s voice so well I could almost imagine it was George Baker reading that part.

  • Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

    • I loved this memoir. Diana Athill comes across as an honest writer, not afraid to say what she thinks, now she is no longer an editor. As the title indicates, she writes about what it is like getting towards the end of her life. At the time of writing she was 89 years old and looking back on her life with few regrets. This is a book I may well buy to re-read at leisure.

  • All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson 

    • I have mixed feelings about this book, parts of it really interested me, but I could have done without the terrorist attack and involvement of MI5 and MI6. This is only the 2nd Inspector Banks book I’ve read and it’s the 18th in Robinson’s series. I think that doesn’t matter as I had no difficulty in sorting out his relationships and although other cases are referred to this reads OK as a stand-alone book. What I did have difficulty with was believing the spy stuff – one of the victims had been a spook. What I do like is Robinson’s descriptive writing eg:

    It was after sunset, but there was a still glow deep in the cloudless western sky, dark orange and indigo. Banks could smell warm grass and manure mingled with something sweet, perhaps flowers that only opened at night. A horse whinied in a distant field. The stone he sat on was still warm and he could see the lights of Helmshore beneath the tree, down at the bottom of the dale, the outline of the sqaure church tower with its odd round turret, dark and heavy against the sky. Low on the western horizon, he could see a planet, which he took to be Venus, and higher up, towards the north, a red dot he guessed was Mars. (page 224)

  • Murder in the Museum by Simon Brett

    • This is the fourth in Simon Brett’s Fethering Mysteries series. It’s set in Bracketts, an Elizabethan house, the former home of Esmond Chadleigh, a celebrated poet during his lifetime. The house is about to be turned into a museum, although not all the Trustees agree. Carole Seddon has been co-opted onto the Board of Trustees and when a skeleton is discovered in the kitchen garden she soon becomes involved in solving the mystery. Then Sheila Cartwright, the bossy domineering former Director of the Trustees is shot, and Carole finds her own life is in danger.

    I haven’t read any of the other Fethering mysteries so have yet again  jumped into the middle of a series. In this case I think it would have helped to read the earlier ones. Carole and her neighbour Jude obviously have acted as sleuths in the past. I liked this book, once I’d read a few chapters and thought Carole and Jude’s relationship was well described. Carole likes everything cut and dried and out in the open with her friends. She cannot understand and resents Jude’s reticence. I’m going to look out for more of Simon Brett’s books.

    Seventy Years Ago Today …

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    … Neville Chamberlain broadcast that Britain was at war with Germany. In Wartime Britain 1939-1945 by Juliet Gardiner she quotes from the diary of  a twenty-four year old civil servant living in Croydon on 3 September 1939:

    The sun is shining, the garden never looked lovelier – everything is in bloom. Tiger [the cat] lies there in the sun; all looks happy and peaceful. But it’s not. War has broken out between England and Germany, beastly, beastly war.

     Winston Churchill’s frame of mind was rather different. He wrote in his memoirs, The Second World War Volume 1: The Gathering Storm, that he knew if war came a major burden would fall on him. On 3 September 1939 he wrote

    As I sat in my place [in the House of Commons], listening to the speeches, a very strong sense of calm came over me, after the intense passions and excitements of the last few days. I felt a serenity of mind and was conscious of a kind of uplifted detachment from human and personal affairs. The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation.

    And so it began …

    Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

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    In the first chapter of Hilary Mantel’s memoir she writes, “I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done.” She then advises herself to trust the reader, to stop spoon-feeding and patronising and write in “the most direct and vigorous way that you can.” She worries that her writing isn’t clear, or that it is “deceptively clear”. It comes across to me as being clear, honest and very moving. She’s not looking for sympathy but has written this memoir to take charge of her memories, her childhood and childlessness, feeling that it is necessary to write herself into being.

    When I read Beyond Black a couple of years ago I was struck by the biographical information at the end of the book – that as a child she believed their house was haunted and that she was often very frightened. She expands on this in her memoir. From the age of 4 she believed that she had done something wrong and she was “beyond remedy and beyond redemption”. She thought it was because of her that her parents were not happy and that without her they would have had a chance in life. It didn’t get any better as her father left home and she was left to live with two younger brothers and their mother and her mother’s lover. Home was a place where secrets were kept and opinions were not voiced. Her experience of ghosts at the age of 7 was horrifying she felt as though something came inside her, “some formless, borderless evil”.

    She wasn’t happy at school; and by the age of twelve she no longer believed in God and as she was at a convent this must have been difficult. She went to university to study law, and was married at 20, struggling to combat the prejudice against women prevailing in the early 1970s:

    “It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of the mental one. It was assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book-learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for an interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to ‘start your family’.”

    Oh yes, I remember that too!

    Life got worse for Hilary as her health deteriorated and the doctors thinking depression was the cause prescribed anti-depressants, which in turn damaged her further. From being underweight she went from a size 10 up to size 20 and developed akathisia as a side effect of the drugs she was given. This condition looks and feels like madness and was the worst thing she had ever experienced, apart that is from the horror she had felt as a child of 7. As a result of the misdiagnosis of her condition (eventually it was diagnosed as endometriosis) she was unable to have children. She sees the children she never had as ghosts within her life; ghost children who never age, who never leave home. Ghosts in her definition are also

    “the tags and rags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don’t know what to do with, knowledge that you can’t process; they’re cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page. … It’s just the little dead, I say to myself, kicking up a fuss, demanding attention by the infantile methods that are the only ones available to them.”

    I found it a remarkable memoir.