Elidor by Alan Garner

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I’ve been meaning to re-read this classic children’s fantasy novel for a long time and was motivated to move it further up the TBR pile after reading a wonderful review by Chris of Calmgrove Books earlier this year. I first read it at the age of about nine or ten – or rather, it was read by a lovely teacher who used to read aloud to us at the end of the day. I enjoyed it so much I got my own copy to read for myself a few years later.

Elidor was published in 1965 and has a strong 1960s feel which contrasts with the eerie, otherworldly nature of the fantasy land of Elidor. It begins with Roland Watson and his older siblings Nicholas, Helen and David wandering the streets of Manchester one cold afternoon, looking for something to do to pass the time. The post-war urban slum clearances are under way and the children stumble upon a church being prepared for demolition. When one of them accidentally kicks a ball through the church window, they go in one by one to look for it and don’t return, until only Roland is left.

Following his brothers and sister into the church, he discovers a portal to another land: Elidor, a world that was once beautiful but is now dying and decaying, under attack from the forces of darkness. Here, Roland meets the mysterious Malebron – a blind fiddle player, or is he a king? – who tells him that three of Elidor’s four golden castles have now become dark, but all hope isn’t yet lost. The Watson siblings must find the four Treasures – a stone, a spear, a cup and a sword – and keep them safe in their own world until light can be restored to Elidor.

For a fantasy novel, we spend a surprisingly small amount of time in Elidor itself. Most of the story takes place in Manchester, once the children have returned with the Treasures (which, away from Elidor, are transformed into everyday objects to make them easier to hide). However, the boundary between the two worlds is thin and the dark forces of Elidor begin to find their way through. There was a scene I found quite terrifying as a child, where the hidden objects begin to create static electricity, causing interference with all the electrical items in the Watson household. I still found it very unsettling as an adult! It’s this encroachment on the characters’ ordinary lives that makes Elidor darker than, say, the Narnia books. It reminded me a lot of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, which also features a battle between light and dark and the intrusion of evil forces on the real world.

Another thing this book and the Susan Cooper series have in common is a strong mythological background, with various allusions to myths and legends woven into the plot. Roland’s name, for example, is significant because the first part of the story has parallels with the folktale Childe Rowland, in which Rowland also has two brothers and a sister, Burd Ellen, who also disappear after kicking a ball over a church. Then there’s the title Elidor, inspired by a medieval Welsh folktale (Elidyr and the Golden Ball); the four castles and four treasures, which correspond to the Irish legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann; and the untamed unicorn, Findhorn, whose song is the key to saving Elidor. Don’t worry, though, if you’re not familiar with any of these myths – they’re not necessary to understanding the story.

Although I enjoyed reading Elidor again after so many years, I didn’t find it an entirely satisfying book. There’s not much worldbuilding regarding Elidor itself; we only get a brief glimpse of it early in the novel and we never really learn exactly why it is being destroyed, who the evil forces are or what their aims are. Everything is kept intentionally vague and although this does add to the general eeriness of the book, I would have liked to have known more. We aren’t told the ages of the children either – we just know that Nicholas is the oldest and Roland the youngest. I found it surprisingly frustrating not knowing how old they were! Of course, none of this bothered me the first time I read it and it is a children’s book, after all.

I’m not sure if I ever read any of Alan Garner’s other books and can’t remember them if I did. Maybe I should try some of them now that I’ve reminded myself of this one.

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Vampire Books for Halloween!

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Halloween Freebie”.

I’ve joined in with the Halloween Freebie topic every year for the last few years and have already posted lists of books with Halloween related words in the title, horror novels I read before blogging, books with monstrous animals and creatures, and books about witches. This year, I’ve chosen books with vampires in them. I decided to only include books I’ve actually reviewed on my blog – as you can see, I struggled to find ten, but managed it in the end!

1. Dracula by Bram Stoker – The obvious first choice for any list of vampire books! I enjoyed this one, but as with any classic story that has become such a big part of popular culture, it’s difficult to fully appreciate it the way readers at the time would have done.

2. The Vampyre by John Polidori – One of the earliest vampire stories and an influence on many that would follow. I read this along with Byron’s unfinished Fragment of a Novel and both are fascinating to read from the perspective of understanding the origins of vampire fiction.

3. White Teeth, Red Blood: Selected Vampiric Verses – A poetry anthology with a vampire theme. It includes classic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling and Emily Dickinson as well as some contemporary ones.

4. The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia Velton – The story of Countess Erzsébet Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman accused of murdering hundreds of peasant girls (and sometimes considered to be an inspiration for Dracula).

5. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu – Le Fanu’s classic novella about a lesbian vampire is thought to have influenced Dracula, which was published more than twenty years later, but it’s also an entertaining story in its own right.

6. Vlad: The Last Confession by C.C. Humphreys – This is not technically a vampire novel, but historical fiction about Vlad Dracula (also known as Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler), the real life Prince of Wallachia whose name inspired Bram Stoker’s character.

7. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness – Matthew Clairmont is one of several vampires who arrives at Oxford University in search of a magical manuscript discovered by Diana Bishop, a witch. Matthew and Diana’s story continues in Shadow of Night, but I never read the other books in the series.

8. He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr – There’s no actual vampire in this book, but it deals with a murder in which the prime suspect is a woman believed to be a vampire!

9. A Remedy for Fate by MA Kuzniar – Although he’s just a minor character, Wojslav the vampire runs an antique shop in the Magic Quarter, a magical land hidden beneath the streets of 18th century Prague.

10. The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter – This is a short story which appears in The Bloody Chamber and features a beautiful vampire countess who lives in an abandoned chateau in Transylvania.

~

And that’s my Top Ten for this week. These books don’t all contain vampires, but they do at least have vampiric connections! I wanted to include Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, but I read that one just before I started blogging. I’m also currently reading The Last Handmaid by Clare Whitfield, another novel about Countess Erzsébet Báthory.

Have you read any of these or any other books with vampires in them?

The Country Schoolmaster by Kate Grenville

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This book wasn’t what I was expecting at all. It was listed as fiction on NetGalley but feels much more like non-fiction, although I can understand why the author and publisher could be hesitant to describe it that way as there is a lot of imagination involved! Regardless of the label, I found it absolutely fascinating.

Kate Grenville begins by describing a visit she made to the NSW State Archives to research her mother’s life. During this visit she came across a file relating to Currabubula Public School and was immediately intrigued by a collection of letters written by or about the teacher Joseph Connor implying that he was abusive towards the children. Deciding to dig deeper, Grenville read all eighty-eight letters in the file, dating from the 1880s to 1890s, changing her mind back and forth about Connor with each new piece of information. Were the allegations against him true or was he the victim of a vendetta pursued by a group of parents for reasons of their own?

Stories floated up but then sank again. Characters came forward as one thing but on a second look turned into something else. Meanings took shape, then evaporated. My sympathies, like a school of fish, wheeled towards Joseph Connor. With the next letter, they gathered, regrouped, wheeled the other way.

Currabubula is a rural village in New South Wales where Kate Grenville’s grandmother, Sarah Catherine Maunder, grew up (her story is told in Restless Dolly Maunder). In 1884, Joseph Connor was appointed sole teacher of Currabubula Public School, responsible for up to seventy children at a time. The recent Public Instruction Act had made school attendance compulsory in NSW and teachers willing to go and work in small rural communities were in high demand. Grenville’s first impression of Connor, as she worked through the letters and other documents in the file, was of “a straightforward, honest fellow doing his guileless best”, a man trying to educate children in an overcrowded classroom, having to virtually beg for money from the Department of Public Instruction to purchase new chairs or get the toilets cleaned, while also dealing with the needs of his own rapidly growing family.

Some of the complaints against Connor seem malicious and spiteful, but others are more convincing. Grenville examines the complaints, along with the responses given by Connor and the School Inspector and the outcomes of inquiries and court hearings and tries to decide what was really going on. Was he really beating the children and punishing them excessively? Was it true that he was keeping livestock in the schoolyard where the children played? Was he being unfairly strict in enforcing the rules regarding non-attendance? With no evidence beyond the documents in the file, Grenville tries to read between the lines, studying the choice of words and phrases and filling in the gaps by imagining how the people involved may have felt.

Grenville doesn’t reach any real conclusions about Connor or any of the mysteries surrounding him – for example, the cause of a rift with his eldest daughter Bridie, also a teacher, is never revealed – but she encourages us to form our own opinions from the limited clues available. She explains in her author’s note that due to the assumptions she makes about Connor and the other residents of Currabubula and the possible theories she builds around them, she decided to change the names of Joseph Connor and the other key players in the story.

I think how much you enjoy this book will depend on whether you’re interested in historical research, archival information and interpreting sources. It won’t appeal to everyone, but for the right reader it’s a wonderful read. I loved it, partly for the glimpses into the history of education in Australia and the daily lives of people in a small village like Currabubula, and partly for the exploration of how stories can be made from a mixture of fact and fiction.

Thanks to Canongate for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Murder on the Haunted Express by Emma Mason

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This is the second book in Emma Mason’s mystery series featuring retired police officer Midge McGowan. I enjoyed the first, Murder Most Haunted, with a few reservations, so was happy to give this one a try. You could definitely start with this one if you wanted to as it works as a standalone mystery, but reading in order will help you understand the backgrounds of the main characters and the relationships between them.

The novel begins with Midge’s friend, struggling pop star Rona, inviting her on a trip to the Scottish Highlands by steam train. Midge doesn’t really want to go, but accepts, thinking that at least it should be a relaxing break and a chance to do her embroidery. On arriving at the station, however, she finds that Rona, as usual, hasn’t been completely honest. The trip is actually part of a funeral procession, carrying the body of a recently deceased artist to his final resting place. Worse, the train itself has a tragic history and one of the carriages is said to be haunted – much to the delight of paranormal podcaster Noah, another friend who has joined them on the journey.

Before the train reaches its destination, a passenger is found dead in a locked carriage with no obvious cause of death. As the only detective on board, it naturally falls to Midge to investigate, but she’ll need to solve the mystery quickly before the killer strikes again. The suspects include a prisoner on temporary release to attend the funeral, accompanied by his prison guard, an undertaker responsible for the safe transport of the coffin, and a writer working on a biography of the dead artist. Is one of these people the murderer or could there be a more ghostly explanation?

First of all, I love the character of Midge McGowan; she feels so real and human. As a neurodivergent woman in her fifties with a bad knee she’s used to being ignored and underestimated and having spent most of her police career pushed into a backstage position in the property office, she’s an unlikely detective. But over the years Midge has learned to listen, observe and draw her own conclusions, skills that are invaluable when it comes to solving mysteries. She can be prickly at times – she likes her own space and to be allowed to do things in her own way – but her grief for the recent loss of her wife Bridie, who died of cancer, shows a more tender side of her personality. It’s good to see that the friendships with Rona and Noah formed in the previous book have continued although, as someone who hasn’t had many friends before, Midge isn’t always sure how to navigate those friendships.

My problem with the book was the same as with the first one: that apart from Midge, none of the other characters feel like real people and are a collection of stereotypes. Rona, for example, is the classic ‘pop star’ character – temperamental, entitled, in and out of rehab, obsessed with her appearance – and both she and Noah seem to be mainly in the book to provide some comedy. The same goes for the other characters who seem to have no personality beyond being an undertaker, a prisoner, an art curator etc. This isn’t a huge problem as these books are clearly intended to be funny and not taken too seriously (as you can tell from the titles) but I think they would definitely be improved by stronger characterisation.

The mystery is interesting, with some twists and turns, and I would never have guessed the solution! Trains are the perfect setting for locked room mysteries with all of the suspects and potential victims together in close confines, separated from the outside world until they arrive at a station. Despite Noah’s fascination with the ghost supposedly haunting the train, this is never really considered as a plausible theory by Midge, but it does provide some atmosphere.

Like the first book, this one was enjoyable enough to leave me looking forward to the next one. I’m assuming there will be more as this one ends with a new development in Midge’s life which should be interesting to explore.

Thanks to Bantam for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Reviewed for RIPXXI hosted by @perilreaders

Some thoughts on Shakespeare’s Othello #ShakespeareRetold

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I hinted earlier this year that I had a new project planned where I would be reading (or re-reading) some of Shakespeare’s plays and following them with modern retellings or books inspired by those plays. With that in mind, I included some Shakespeare on my current Classics Club list and I’ve decided to begin with a re-read of Othello. Although Othello is not one of my favourite plays, it’s a special one for me because it was the first I read for myself outside of the ones we read at school.

The play begins in Venice with the discovery that Othello, a general in the Venetian army, has secretly married Desdemona, the daughter of the senator Brabantio. His ensign, Iago, hates Othello because he has promoted another man, Cassio, to lieutenant rather than himself. With the help of Roderigo, a young Venetian gentleman who is in love with Desdemona, Iago vows to take his revenge. As the action moves to Cyprus, he does this by convincing Othello that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair, using lots of psychological manipulation – and a carefully planted stolen handkerchief.

Rather than reading the play in a standalone edition, I read it in my RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, a book I would recommend (apart from it being physically difficult to hold). It contains detailed introductions to each play, key facts, photographs from RSC stage productions and definitions/glossaries at the bottom of each page of text. The introduction to Othello helps to put the play into context, looking at Shakespeare’s main source for the play, the 1565 novella “Un Capitano Moro” (“A Moorish Captain”), by Giraldi Cinthio, and discussing how audiences at the time would have viewed a Moorish, or Muslim, character like Othello.

Othello has a relatively simple plot, which makes it easier to follow than some of his other plays (which doesn’t mean it has no depth, of course, but the complexities are in the psychology and in trying to understand Iago’s motivations rather than in following the story itself). The main themes are also quite obvious: jealousy – first Iago’s jealousy of Cassio, who gets the position he believes should have been his, and then Othello’s jealousy, which comes about through Iago’s manipulations; trust – both lack of trust and misplaced trust; racism and prejudice – does Othello have underlying insecurities due to his race and age that lead him to doubt Desdemona (a younger white woman) and fall for Iago’s lies so easily?

I also noticed how little humour there is in this play. There’s a brief appearance by a clown figure in Act III who delivers some puns and wordplay, but otherwise there’s not much light relief even in comparison to Shakespeare’s other tragedies. As ever, though, there are words and phrases from the play that have become part of everyday speech:

“I will wear my heart upon my sleeve”
“The green-eyed monster”
“One that loved not wisely but too well”
“A foregone conclusion”

There are probably more that I missed!

Retellings

I don’t think I’ve read any Othello retellings yet, although I’ve read books that reference it in some way. Farewell, the Tranquil Mind by RF Delderfield takes its title from a line from the play (“Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!”), while in Agatha Christie’s The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I read earlier this year, the narrator, Hugh, directly refers to Othello several times throughout the book and reflects on Iago and his motives.

I’ve just started to read Naomi Kelsey’s new novel Pale Mistress, which is about Bianca, a minor but important character in the play.

Here are some other books about or inspired by Othello. Have you read any of them? Do you know of any more?

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier
Chasing the Stars by Malorie Blackman
I, Iago by Nicole Galland
Desdemona by Toni Morrison
Iago by David Snodin
Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis

Royal Witch by Philippa Gregory

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It’s been years since I last read anything by Philippa Gregory, so I decided to try her latest novel, Royal Witch. It’s the story of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, a woman who has appeared as a secondary character in other books I’ve read (including Gregory’s own The Lady of the Rivers), although this is the first one I’ve read that focuses on her specifically.

We first meet Eleanor in 1421 as a young woman of twenty arriving at Westminster Palace to become a lady-in-waiting to Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault. Jacqueline has taken refuge at the English court after being betrayed by members of her own family who have seized her lands. She is looking for help to regain them and marries Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in the hope that he can provide the military support she needs in Hainault. Humphrey, however, is having problems in his own country – although he has been named Protector of England until his baby nephew, Henry VI, is old enough to rule, he faces opposition in government from his Beaufort rivals.

As the daughter of a minor nobleman, Eleanor arrives at court wanting nothing more than to marry well, but once she grows close to the strong and determined Jacqueline and sees what it’s possible for a woman to do, she starts to believe she should be aiming higher. She turns for help to Margery Jourdemayne, known as the Witch of Eye, but if it becomes known that Eleanor has been meddling in the dark arts, it could lead to her downfall rather than her glory.

I enjoyed Royal Witch; I love this period of history and it was good to see it through the eyes of a woman I haven’t read very much about. The events taking place in England are significant because they lead directly to the Wars of the Roses and the founding of the Tudor dynasty, but I also found Jacqueline interesting to read about – her campaign to reclaim her lands forms a big part of the first half of the novel and I kept thinking that maybe Gregory should have just written Jacqueline’s story instead of Eleanor’s! Eleanor’s own story doesn’t really start to gain momentum until halfway through the book when she sets her sights on the throne of England and begins to set her plans in motion.

Gregory often seems to enjoy making her heroines as unpleasant as possible (like Margaret Beaufort in The Red Queen); Eleanor is another example of this – she’s ambitious, vain, selfish and vindictive, with few, if any, redeeming qualities. Despite this, it’s impossible not to feel for her when she is rejected by the man she loves, Owen ap Maredudd, who chooses another woman over her, an incident which is the source of a lot of her anger and resentment in the second half of the novel. You may already know who Owen is and who he marries instead, but if not I’ll let you find out for yourself! As Eleanor plots revenge on Owen and his new lover, her outward actions become more cruel and her inner thoughts more bitter, which makes her both an entertaining narrator and quite a chilling one as well. Not even the young king is safe from her plots and machinations.

Margery Jourdemayne is another interesting character. She’s portrayed mainly as a herbalist and fortune teller who becomes caught up in Eleanor’s scheming, along with the astrologer Roger Bolingbroke, leading to accusations of witchcraft, treason and necromancy. This is the climax of the story which everything that comes before was building towards, but we have to wait a long time for it – and that’s my only real criticism of the novel; it often felt longer than it really needed to be and the earlier sections could probably have been condensed to improve the pacing. Otherwise I found this very enjoyable and I wish more authors would write about lesser known Plantagenet women rather than the Tudors!

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Arabella by Georgette Heyer – #1949Club

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This is my third and final book for this week’s 1949 Club, hosted by Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Whichever year is chosen for the club, you can almost guarantee Georgette Heyer will have had a book published in that particular year – and 1949 is no exception.

The novel begins with Arabella Tallant, the eldest daughter of a Yorkshire vicar, being invited to London to stay with her godmother, Mrs Bridlington, for the season. On the way, her carriage breaks down and she seeks shelter at the nearest house, which turns out to be a hunting lodge belonging to Robert Beaumaris, one of the richest men in England. When she overhears Mr Beaumaris telling his friend that he doesn’t believe the carriage is really broken and he suspects Arabella of having her eye on his fortune, the offended Arabella impulsively decides to pretend that she’s already the heiress to a fortune of her own. She asks Beaumaris and his friend to keep this information to themselves, but when she arrives in London she’s horrified to find that the story of her great wealth is all over town…

I really enjoyed Arabella. It’s a relatively simple plot; where some of Heyer’s other books have elements of mystery or adventure or include real historical events, this one focuses mainly on the romance and although it’s easy to predict how it will end, the fun is in getting there! It helps that the hero and heroine are both so easy to like. Arabella is warm-hearted and compassionate and has been raised by her father to care about those less fortunate than herself. Beaumaris, despite his sophisticated, cynical exterior and the insensitive comment he makes during his first meeting with Arabella, also has a kind heart. He quickly sees through Arabella’s lie but instead of confronting her with it he waits for her to decide to tell him the truth herself.

Another thing that interested me (and which I found quite unusual for a Heyer novel) was the exploration of poverty and hardship, in contrast with the portrayal of upper-class Regency society. Arabella is moved by the plights of an abused climbing-boy (chimney sweep’s boy), a badly treated mongrel and a disreputable woman known as Leaky Peg, all of whom she foists – or tries to foist – onto Beaumaris, which provides most of the humour in the book! There’s also a subplot involving Arabella’s naïve, well-meaning but easily led younger brother, Bertram, who arrives in London and gets himself into trouble almost immediately. Bertram’s storyline is also quite predictable – there are a lot of similar younger brothers and cousins in Heyer’s novels! – but I didn’t mind that as I found him very endearing.

If you’re new to Heyer, I think this could be a good place to start: the story is easy to follow, the characters are charming and likeable, and it has a classic, sparkling Regency setting. It was also a great choice for my final 1949 Club book!