Month: August 2011

R.I.P VI is here!

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I’ve been trying not to sign up for any more reading challenges, but I knew I’d have to make an exception for the R.I.P. challenge. This was my favourite of all the challenges I participated in last year and I’ve been looking forward to taking part again this year. If you’re interested in joining in too, please see the R.I.P. VI blog post at Stainless Steel Droppings!

There are several different levels (or perils) to choose from and I’m signing up for Peril the First. This means reading four books that could be classified as:
Mystery.
Suspense.
Thriller.
Dark Fantasy.
Gothic.
Horror.
Supernatural.

I’ve listed below some of the books I’m thinking about reading. I’m not expecting to read all of these and it’s also possible that I’ll decide to read some other books that aren’t on my list.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – I was meaning to read this for R.I.P last year but didn’t have time. I’m making it a priority for this year as it’s one of those books I feel I really should have read before now.

A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley – I enjoyed the first two books in the Flavia de Luce series and am hoping the third one will be just as good.

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux – I’ve seen very mixed opinions of this book, so I think it’s time I tried it for myself.

The Quarry by Johan Theorin – This is the third in a series of spooky Swedish crime novels. I loved the first two so I’ve been looking forward to this one.

The White Devil by Justin Evans – I noticed this book appearing on a lot of American blogs a few months ago and I’ll finally get a chance to read it now that it’s being published in the UK.

Uncle Silas by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – I read some of Le Fanu’s short stories earlier in the year and can’t wait to read this gothic novel.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson – Another book I can’t believe I still haven’t read!

Florence and Giles by John Harding – I hadn’t even heard of this book until recently. It’s described as a gothic thriller and sounds like something I would love.

Awakening by S.J. Bolton – I loved her first book, Sacrifice, and immediately bought two more of her books but haven’t had a chance to read them yet. I could either read this one or Blood Harvest.

Have you read any of these? What are you reading for this year’s RIP?

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan

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This is one Persephone book I had never heard anything about, so I picked it up and started reading without having any idea what to expect. I didn’t know who Joanna Cannan was until I read the biographical information on the cover and saw that she was the mother of Christine, Josephine and Diana Pullein-Thompson, three authors who were famous for their horse and pony stories. I remember reading some of the Pullein-Thompsons’ books as a child, so this made me more curious about reading Princes in the Land.

This novel has very little plot but like most Persephone books it raises a lot of interesting issues including marriage, parent/child relationships and class differences. The book itself is well-written and I liked the setting and the time period, but unfortunately this is the first Persephone I’ve read that I didn’t enjoy much at all.

Princes in the Land, published in 1938, is the story of Patricia Crispin and her experiences of being a wife and mother. We first meet Patricia as a child, shortly after her father has been killed in the Boer War. Patricia and her sister Angela are being taken by their mother to live with their grandfather, Lord Waveney, at his mansion in the countryside. While Angela is the quieter and better behaved of the two girls, Lord Waveney takes a special liking to the red-haired, freckled Patricia, who is more courageous and shares his love of horses.

Several years pass and Patricia marries Hugh Lindsay, a student from a poor background, much to the disgust of her mother who wanted Patricia to marry someone of her own class. Patricia and Hugh have three children, August, Giles and Nicola – and as they grow older they begin to disappoint Patricia as much as she had disappointed her own mother.

The biggest problem I had with this book was the characters. I don’t always need to like the characters to be able to enjoy a book, but in this case I think it would have made a big difference if there had been just one person I had been able to identify with and care about. Patricia and her mother both seemed to be complete snobs. Patricia’s attitude towards her daughter-in-law, Gwen, is particularly nasty and based purely on the fact that she thinks Gwen’s family are ‘common’. I don’t mind reading about snobbish characters if they are written with a touch of humour or satire, as in Jane Austen novels for example, but that wasn’t the case here. Patricia seems to think her attitude is perfectly acceptable and I felt that we, as the readers, were expected to agree with her.

The portrayals of marriage and parenthood were very cynical. The sad thing is that I really liked Patricia when she was a child at the very beginning of the book but as the years went by she changed into a person even she herself didn’t appear to be comfortable with. It’s tragic that despite devoting her life to her children, they barely seemed to know or understand each other at all. None of them really did anything bad and were children who Patricia could have been proud of, but because they failed to meet her expectations she ended up feeling disappointed in them and dissatisfied with her own life.

I’m sure a lot of people would enjoy reading Princes in the Land much more than I did, so please don’t let me put you off reading it. It was an interesting book, worthy of being a Persephone title and I can’t fault the writing either, but the amount of snobbery and class-obsession was just too much for me.

The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier

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After reading the first few chapters of Daphne du Maurier’s The Parasites I had a feeling I wasn’t going to enjoy this book. I was finding the story very difficult to get into and I didn’t like any of the characters. But because Du Maurier is one of my favourite authors I decided I didn’t want to give up on the book just yet…and guess what? I ended up loving it! I should have known Daphne wouldn’t let me down.

The Parasites is a study into the lives of the Delaney family: Mama, a famous dancer, and Pappy, a successful singer, and their three children, Maria, Niall and Celia. The story begins one day in the 1940s when Niall and Celia, now adults, are spending the weekend at the home of Maria and her husband, Charles. It’s Charles, losing his temper with them, who refers to the three siblings as ‘parasites’…

“You always have been and you always will be. Nothing can change you. You are doubly, triply parasitic; first, because you’ve traded ever since childhood on that seed of talent you had the luck to inherit from your fantastic forebears; secondly, because you’ve none of you done a stroke of ordinary honest work in your lives, but batten upon us, the fool public who allow you to exist; and thirdly, because you prey upon each other, the three of you, living in a world of fantasy which you have created for yourselves and which bears no relation to anything in heaven or on earth.”

He then leaves the house in a rage, and Maria, Niall and Celia are left alone to wonder what his words meant and if it’s true that they really are ‘parasites’. Through a series of flashbacks and memories, the Delaneys spend the rest of the novel looking back at their childhoods and the things that turned them into the adults they are today.

One of the striking things about this book was the lack of one distinct narrator. Sometimes the three siblings seem to be narrating together, all speaking with one single voice, which was very unusual. It’s difficult to explain, but if you read the book you’ll see what I mean! As I read, I couldn’t help thinking that Maria, Niall and Celia must represent three different sides to Daphne du Maurier’s own personality; she writes so convincingly about all three characters and really gets inside their heads. And of course, her own father was the actor Gerald du Maurier and her mother the actress Muriel Beaumont, so she would have known what it was like to be the child of famous parents and could bring some of her personal experiences into this novel.

Maria, who becomes a famous actress, and Niall, who finds success as a songwriter, are stepbrother and stepsister and have a very strong bond. In her introduction to the book, Julie Myerson compares Maria and Niall with Cathy and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. I don’t think this would have occurred to me, but after it was pointed out I could definitely see the parallels.

Celia is half-sister to the other two, sharing a mother with Niall and a father with Maria. Although she also has a strong bond with them both, Celia often feels left behind. Despite her own talent for drawing and writing, she puts other people before herself and stays at home while her brother and sister go off to pursue their dreams. Of the three main characters in the book Celia was the only one who I liked and understood; some of the chapters where she takes a central role are very moving. I really disliked both Maria and Niall, who seemed to me to be very selfish characters who only ever thought about themselves. I found it difficult to feel any sympathy for either of them.

The Parasites may sound like a very serious novel, but there’s actually a good balance of drama and comedy. Some of the scenes are quite funny – in one of my favourite chapters, the Delaney family visit Charles and his parents at their country estate for the first time after Maria’s wedding and completely embarrass themselves! It was nice to see du Maurier’s sense of humour really shining through in this novel.

There are other du Maurier books that I’ve enjoyed more than this one, but after a slow start The Parasites turned out to be much better than I expected. It reminded me a lot of I’ll Never Be Young Again, one of her earlier novels, which was also very character-driven and personal. If you prefer her gothic, suspense-filled novels you may be disappointed, but if you want to try a different type of du Maurier book then hopefully you’ll enjoy this one as much as I did.

Passion by Jude Morgan

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Passion is a historical fiction novel which tells the story of four women and their relationships with the Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley and Keats. There’s Lady Caroline Lamb, a married woman who has an affair with Lord Byron, and Augusta Leigh, his half-sister who also becomes his lover. Then there’s Mary Godwin, future wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein, and finally, Fanny Brawne, John Keats’ fiancée. This long and ambitious book takes us through the lives of all of these characters, describing the passionate and unconventional relationships that scandalised the public during the early years of the 19th century.

Although the book concentrates on the four women I’ve already mentioned, there are several other women who also play an important part in the story. One of these is the writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary Shelley’s mother) and in the prologue we learn a lot about her life and death. We also meet Byron’s wife, Annabella Milbanke, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, who becomes involved with both Byron and Shelley. All of the female characters in the book are portrayed as interesting and complex people in their own right, not just because of the men they loved.

As well as providing information on the historical and political background of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Morgan also shows exactly what it was like to be a woman living during those times. It was this attention to detail that made me really believe in the story. And he takes us right inside the minds of Mary, Caroline, Augusta and Fanny, imagining what they might have thought and how they might have felt. I thought the characterisation of Lady Caroline Lamb, with her excitable, emotional personality was particularly well done. I also enjoyed reading about Augusta Leigh’s relationship with her half-brother, Byron – the dialogue between them felt completely believable and the scenes where the two of them were together were some of my favourite parts of the book.

At over 600 pages long and with its variety of narrative styles and techniques this is not the easiest of books to read. The story is told from several different perspectives, there are shifts from past to present tense, and from the third person to first person, sometimes with the characters (particularly Caroline) talking directly to the reader. I had an idea of what to expect as I recently read one of Jude Morgan’s other books, The Taste of Sorrow, and although his writing style does take a while to get used to, I really like it.

Of the three poets, Byron comes across as the most charismatic and colourful character, which I expect was also true in real life, but Shelley was fascinating to read about too. He had such interesting ideas about vegetarianism, religion and marriage. Keats, however, doesn’t appear until near the end of the book and although he and Fanny Brawne do take more of a central role in the final chapters, the focus is definitely on the other characters. Keats’ and Fanny’s story felt disconnected from the others and this is the one thing that disappointed me about the book. I do understand though that Keats was slightly younger than Byron and Shelley and their paths didn’t really cross until later, so maybe it would have been difficult to incorporate him into the earlier parts of the book.

The last few chapters are very sad, with one tragedy and death following another. The scenes towards the end of the book which take place in Keats’ house at the bottom of the Spanish Steps in Rome were particularly poignant as I had visited the house a few years ago and so could picture his final days very vividly. (I would highly recommend visiting the Keats-Shelley House to anyone thinking of going to Rome, by the way.)

Although Morgan’s book about the Brontës, The Taste of Sorrow, had more personal appeal for me because I’m more interested in the Brontës than I am in the Romantic poets, I thought this book was equally impressive. Now that I’ve read it and know a lot more about Byron, Shelley and Keats, maybe I should have another attempt at actually reading their poetry!

Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn

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Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England is a biography of Henry VII, England’s first Tudor king – a king of whom Francis Bacon said, “he were a dark prince, and infinitely suspicious, and his times full of secret conspiracies and troubles”.

I previously knew very little about Henry VII and was drawn to this book in the hope that it would be a good introduction to the subject. The book opens with a prologue which details the years of unrest and uncertainty that accompanied the Wars of the Roses and explains how Henry VII came to the throne in 1485. Penn then takes us through all the important moments of Henry’s life and reign, including the marriage of his eldest son Arthur to Catherine of Aragon and Arthur’s subsequent death which led to Henry’s second son (the future Henry VIII) becoming his heir.

Henry VII himself is portrayed as a complex and secretive person, clever and shrewd, manipulative and controlling (especially where money and power are concerned). Something that is emphasised throughout the book is that Henry knew his claim to the throne had not been a strong one and that he went to great lengths to convince his subjects to accept him as a legitimate king of England and to prove to them that the rival houses of York and Lancaster had been reconciled under the Tudor name. Despite his efforts, though, he found himself the constant target of plots and conspiracies. The book goes into a lot of detail in recounting some of these planned rebellions and the reasons why they failed.

As someone who doesn’t read a lot of historical non-fiction and who is not an expert on the Tudors, I still had no problems understanding any part of this book. Although it does require some concentration, I found it a very interesting and absorbing read from beginning to end. For those of you who do already have a good knowledge of Henry’s reign, there might not be anything new here but I’m sure you’ll still find plenty to enjoy. Penn’s descriptions of royal weddings, funerals, court pageants etc are particularly well-written and vivid.

The book is very thorough and detailed, with all sources and references provided in the notes. It’s not what you could describe as a quick and easy read, but it’s still very enjoyable and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning about the reign of Henry VII and the early life of his son, Henry VIII. Thomas Penn appears to have stayed objective and resisted the temptation to let his own opinions and theories get in the way of the facts, giving us a balanced and unbiased view of a fascinating period of history. I hope he goes on to write more books as he’s definitely a name to look out for.

I have to admit, before I started reading this book I already had a very negative impression of Henry VII due to the way he is portrayed in novels such as The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman and The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Winter King hasn’t done much to change my opinion of him, but I’m pleased that at least I’ve now had the chance to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge.

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

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One of the books I hope to be reading soon for the Transworld Book Group challenge is The Water Room, the second in Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series. As I already had a copy of the first in the series waiting to be read and I would prefer not to read them in the wrong order, I decided to read Full Dark House first. And I’m glad I did, because Full Dark House definitely has a ‘first in the series’ feel about it.

Arthur Bryant and John May are two elderly detectives who work for the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a branch of the London Metropolitan Police created to deal with unusual cases. When the PCU office is destroyed in an explosion, Bryant, who was inside the building, is presumed dead. His partner, May, who has worked with him for over sixty years, is determined to find out who killed Bryant and why.

In order to understand who may have been responsible for Bryant’s death, we are taken back in time to November 1940, when Bryant and May worked together on their very first case during the London Blitz. While bombs fell on the city night after night, the two young detectives were investigating the murders of several cast members of a controversial new play at the Palace Theatre. As the story moves backwards and forwards between 1940 and the present day, May searches for a connection between the ‘Palace Phantom’ and Arthur Bryant’s death.

With their different strengths and weaknesses, Arthur Bryant and John May complement each other perfectly and each of them approaches the investigation in his own way. Bryant has unconventional ideas, an active imagination and an interest in the paranormal, whereas May is the more logical and methodical of the two. Setting the story in two time periods sixty years apart was a good idea because it allowed us to watch the two detectives meeting each other for the first time in 1940 and to see how their relationship had developed over the intervening years. I liked both of them and am looking forward to getting to know them better throughout the rest of the series.

I loved the descriptions of black-outs, bomb shelters, rationing and other aspects of daily life in London during the Blitz – it all felt very convincing and realistic. In fact, of all the books I’ve read recently set in wartime London, this is probably the one that evokes the era best, which was something I hadn’t expected. I can tell Christopher Fowler must have researched every part of his book very thoroughly, because as well as all the little details that make his portrayal of London so believable, there are also some very detailed descriptions of the backstage layout of the theatre and lots of information on Greek mythology too.

Apart from a section in the middle of the book where the plot moved forward very slowly and nothing seemed to happen for a while, I really enjoyed my first introduction to Bryant and May. With two mysteries to solve, lots of plot twists, and a large cast of colourful characters both within the Peculiar Crimes Unit and at the theatre, Full Dark House is a great opening to the series.

The Observations by Jane Harris

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After I read (and loved) Gillespie and I, I knew I would have to find a copy of the first book by Jane Harris, The Observations, as soon as possible. Luckily my library had a copy so I didn’t have to wait too long to read it! I found this book just as entertaining and enjoyable as Gillespie and I, which puts Jane Harris firmly on my list of favourite authors.

The Observations is set in Scotland during the 19th century. Bessy Buckley, a young Irish girl, is on the run from her troubled past when she arrives at the estate of Castle Haivers near the village of Snatter. The lady of the house, Arabella Reid, offers her a job as maid and Bessy jumps at the chance. But Bessy is puzzled by the series of bizarre tasks which Arabella orders her to perform – and when she discovers that a previous maid, Nora, may have died under suspicious circumstances, it becomes obvious that things at Castle Haivers are not quite what they seem.

The Observations is a long book but was so gripping I read it in half the time it would normally take me to read a book of similar length. What makes this novel so different from all the others I’ve read set in the Victorian era is Bessy Buckley herself. Bessy is a fabulous character and narrator: funny and witty, poorly educated but bright and intelligent, tough and outspoken yet sensitive and warm hearted. When you first begin to read you might come across some unusual language and slang, not to mention some unconventional grammar and punctuation, but don’t worry about that – it’s all part of Bessy’s unique voice and her narration was a delight to read. The only thing that irritated me slightly was seeing numbers written as figures rather than words (1/2 instead of ‘half’, for example).

The relationship between Bessy and her mistress forms a big part of the story, but there are a few other interesting sub-plots, as well as the story of Bessy’s own childhood which emerges slowly throughout the book. There are shades of other Victorian novels, as well as some elements of the gothic novel and the ghost story, but the overall result is something completely original. The one criticism I have is that, after a very strong start, the story seems to lose momentum in the second half and the ending was slightly disappointing in comparison to the rest of the book.

Finally, I want to say how impressed I am that Jane Harris could take two such different narrators as Bessy Buckley and Harriet Baxter (from Gillespie and I), who are complete opposites in almost every way imaginable, and make them both so convincing! That’s a sign of a talented author in my opinion.