The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

March 19, 2014March 19, 201424 Comments

I have never enjoyed reading short stories as much as full length novels and my various attempts over the years at increasing the number of short stories I read have generally failed. However, one of the few authors whose short stories I do enjoy is Daphne du Maurier (in fact, I’ve loved almost everything I’ve ever read by du Maurier, whatever the format). I have actually read The Birds before (soon after reading Rebecca for the first time as a teenager) but I never went on to read the other stories in this collection so when I saw that this book was available through NetGalley, it seemed a good opportunity to rectify this.

I read another du Maurier collection a few years ago – The Rendezvous & Other Stories – which contained some of the earliest examples of her work, but I found the stories in The Birds and Other Stories much stronger – the work of an accomplished author rather than a beginner. There are six stories in the book, including The Birds, and all of them are excellent, although I felt that two were slightly weaker than the other four.

The Birds, made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name, is the first story in the book and one of my favourites. For those of you not familiar with the plot, this is the story of Nat Hocken, a farm worker who lives with his wife and two young children. When Nat notices an unusually large number of birds in the skies above him, he senses that the weather must be about to change. The next day a national emergency is declared: Britain is under attack from huge flocks of birds. Nat begins to board up the windows and doors, but will he and his family survive the night?

This is such an atmospheric story; you can feel the claustrophobia inside Nat’s house, you can hear the sounds of pecking and tapping at the windows, and you can see the birds gathering in the sky:

He walked down the path, halfway to the beach and then he stopped. He could see the tide had turned. The rock that had shown in midmorning was now covered, but it was not the sea that held his eyes. The gulls had risen. They were circling, hundreds of them, thousands of them, lifting their wings against the wind. It was the gulls that made the darkening of the sky. And they were silent.

I loved this story and it was certainly worth re-reading, but the next two that followed were also very enjoyable. Monte Verita is a haunting tale of a lonely monastery high in the mountains, an isolated community of priestesses and a village of superstitious peasants. The Apple Tree is a great little story about a man who becomes obsessed by the old apple tree in his garden, believing that it is taking on the characteristics of his dead wife, Midge. Whether this is really happening or whether it’s all in his imagination you will have to read the story to decide.

Stories four and five were the ones I didn’t like as much as the others. The Little Photographer tells the story of a beautiful married woman who has a summer affair with a photographer and gets a lot more than she bargained for when she tries to end the relationship. In Kiss Me Again, Stranger, the narrator remembers a girl he once met and fell in love with, only to have his heart broken when he makes a macabre discovery. There was nothing wrong with either of these stories, but they didn’t have the eerie, otherworldly feel of the previous three.

Finally, The Old Man is the shortest story in the book, but also the cleverest. I’m not going to give any more details except to say that when I reached the end of this particular story, I was so surprised and delighted that I had to go straight back to the beginning and read it again!

So, a very impressive selection of stories! They contain many of the same elements that du Maurier uses in her full-length novels, such as the male narrative voice, the unnamed characters, the ambiguous endings, the wonderful use of atmosphere and the vivid sense of place. They are the ideal length too – each one is long enough to allow the reader to be fully drawn into the story, but short enough to read in one sitting. I would highly recommend this collection even to those readers who, like me, don’t often choose to read short stories.

Thanks to Little, Brown and Company for providing a review copy via NetGalley

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

March 13, 201422 Comments

This was the book chosen for me by the recent Classics Club Spin and yet again the Spin has been very good to me by selecting a book that I loved. Can You Forgive Her? is the first in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series and based on this one I can’t wait to read the other five. Before starting this book, the only Trollopes I had read were his six Barsetshire novels and I felt so comfortable in that world that I was slightly worried about venturing away into the unknown world of the Pallisers. I needn’t have worried, of course, because as usual with a Trollope novel, I was completely drawn into the lives of the characters and enjoyed all 690 pages!

Like the other Trollope novels I’ve read, this one has several different storylines running alongside each other, meeting and intersecting occasionally. First we have the story of Alice Vavasor, the woman whom Trollope is asking whether we can forgive. Alice is twenty-four years old and at the beginning of the novel she is engaged to be married to John Grey, a country gentleman from Cambridgeshire. But there is also another man in Alice’s life – her cousin, George Vavasor, with whom she was romantically involved several years earlier. John is a good, honourable, dependable man, though slightly bland and boring, but he truly loves Alice, whereas the selfish, untrustworthy George only seems to be interested in using her money to further his political career. Throughout the book Alice wavers between John and George and even after it becomes obvious to the reader which of them she should choose, her own nature makes the decision much more complicated than it should have been.

We also meet Alice’s cousin and best friend, Kate Vavasor (George’s sister), who would love to see Alice marry her brother and decides to do everything she can to influence Alice’s decision. Kate herself has no plans to marry and spends a lot of time with her Aunt Greenow, a rich widow who has two rival suitors of her own, Captain Bellfield and Mr Cheeseacre. Cheeseacre, a farmer, is in the better financial position of the two and believes he has more to offer a wife, but Mrs Greenow makes no secret of the fact that she prefers the poorer but more attractive Bellfield and it seems that Cheesacre is the one who is going to be disappointed.

The third storyline involves the Pallisers themselves. Plantagenet Palliser is a politician who is devoted to his work and is considered to have a good chance of becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. His young wife, Lady Glencora, is another cousin of Alice Vavasor’s. Before their marriage, Glencora was in love with the handsome but irresponsible Burgo Fitzgerald, and as she struggles to understand her new husband, she realises she may have made a big mistake. She and Burgo are still part of the same social circle and when he tells her that he still loves her, Glencora must decide whether to run away with him or whether to stay with her husband and try to make their relationship work.

Whereas the Barsetshire novels revolve around the church and the lives of clergymen and their families, the focus in this series is on the lives of politicians. This hadn’t initially sounded very appealing to me, but luckily I found that the level of political detail in this book was easy enough to follow and understand. I don’t know a lot about the way parliament worked in the 19th century but the thing that does come across very clearly is how corrupt the system was, where a man like George Vavasor, for example, could simply try to buy his way into parliament whether he was actually a good candidate or not.

One of the things I really love about Trollope is the way he makes me care so much about each of his characters, even the ones who seem uninteresting or unsympathetic earlier in the book. As he moves from one character’s perspective to another, he changes my perceptions of each one. In the case of Plantagenet Palliser, for example, I was inclined to agree with Glencora that he was dull and boring and indifferent to his wife’s feelings – until Trollope allows us to get inside Palliser’s head for a while and we see that he does care about his wife after all and is prepared to make huge sacrifices on her behalf.

I think Trollope shows a good understanding in this book of the choices and difficulties facing women, though he offers no real alternatives other than marriage and after a certain point in the book, the outcome of each storyline becomes quite predictable. Each one features a woman forced to choose between two men – one who is respectable but not very exciting and the other who is less respectable but more exciting. However, the way in which each woman deals with the situation she is in varies depending on her personality and her experience of life.

So, to go back to the question the title poses: could I forgive Alice? Well, I could forgive her for vacillating and having doubts and struggling to make up her mind. I understood that although she loved John Grey she was frustrated by what she saw as a lack of passion and ambition and that she wanted to feel she was doing something worthwhile with her life. I found it harder to forgive her for some of the ridiculous decisions she made regarding her money and who to give it to. But really, I don’t think she was in any more need of forgiveness than most of the other characters in the book as they all made mistakes and all had their flaws.

This post is starting to get very long and I haven’t even mentioned the fox hunt, Aunt Greenow’s picnic, the disputed will or the two trips to Switzerland! This is definitely one of my favourite Trollope novels so far and I’m now looking forward to reading the rest of the Pallisers, starting with the second in the series, Phineas Finn.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

March 10, 2014March 10, 201420 Comments

“It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches.”

A Discovery of Witches is the first in Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy. I’ve come to this book years after everybody else, as usual, but it seems I’ve picked a good time to read it as the third book is due out this summer. I did actually receive a review copy of the second one, Shadow of Night, a while ago but as I prefer to start at the beginning of a series I couldn’t read it until I got round to reading this one first. I haven’t been actively looking for a copy of A Discovery of Witches as I really wasn’t sure it was something I would like, but when I noticed it was available through NetGalley I decided it was time to give it a try.

Our narrator, Diana Bishop, is an American academic who has come to England to research the history of alchemy in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. She is also a witch. Not the kind who wears a black hat and flies on a broomstick, but a young woman who is able to live and work alongside humans while possessing magical powers which even she doesn’t fully understand. When Diana discovers an old alchemical manuscript known as Ashmole 782 in the library, it draws the unwelcome attention of several other beings – not just witches, but also vampires and daemons. It seems that the manuscript is bewitched and contains hidden information these other creatures desperately want.

Among the crowds of otherworldly creatures descending on Oxford in search of the manuscript is scientist Matthew Clairmont, who happens to be a vampire. Together, Matthew and Diana attempt to unravel the secrets of Ashmole 782 and in the process they begin to fall in love. But relationships between witches and vampires are strictly forbidden and the Congregation – a council made up of three representatives from each group of creatures – will do anything to put an end to their romance.

This book was a nice surprise, because I enjoyed it much more than I’d expected to! If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you will know that I don’t normally read books about vampires and witches, but I think it was precisely the fact that I don’t normally read books about vampires and witches that explains why I found this one so much fun to read. It was something different for me and the complaint some readers have, that it’s too much like Twilight for adults, meant nothing to me as I haven’t actually read Twilight (am I the only person who hasn’t?) so I’m not really familiar with what might be seen as vampire romance cliches. There were echoes of lots of other books, though. The way the story began with the discovery of a manuscript in the library was reminiscent of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (one of the few vampire books I have read) and the backstory involving Diana’s parents reminded me of the Harry Potter books.

There were lots of things to enjoy about A Discovery of Witches. I loved the combination of romance, history, adventure and fantasy. I liked the idea of creatures (the collective term for witches, vampires and daemons) co-existing with humans and doing the normal, everyday things that humans do – studying in libraries, drinking tea, checking their emails, even going to yoga classes. I loved the descriptions of the various locations Diana and Matthew visit, beginning in Oxford before moving on to a remote castle in the French countryside and then finally a haunted house with a mind of its own and several resident ghosts. And I enjoyed all the little scientific and historical details that are dropped into the story – information on evolution, genetics and the history of alchemy.

The book was not without a few flaws, though. I thought the pace was uneven – after a great start there was a long period where not much happened and while I wasn’t exactly bored, I did wonder when the plot was going to move forward again. Somewhere in the middle of the novel I started to feel impatient with Diana as she seemed so content to have Matthew protect her and make all the decisions in their relationship, which was disappointing after she’d appeared to be such a strong character at the beginning. I found it frustrating that she was so reluctant to use her magic, although I did eventually understand the reasons why she couldn’t or wouldn’t.

It also seemed that the sole purpose of the final few chapters of the book was to set things up for the sequel. This was not a big problem for me, as I already have a copy of the second book and could have started it immediately if I’d wanted to, but I’m sure it must have been annoying for people who read the book when it was first published and wanted to know how the story would be resolved!

I don’t think I’ll be rushing to fill my shelves with vampire books now, but I did enjoy this one and will certainly be continuing with Shadow of Night soon.

Thanks to Headline for providing a review copy via NetGalley

Classics Club March Meme: Literary Periods

March 8, 201412 Comments

It’s been a while since I last answered one of the Classics Club’s monthly memes, but this one appealed to me and I thought I’d join in. The question this month is:

What is your favorite “classic” literary period and why?

This is a very easy question for me to answer. My favourite literary period is, and always has been, the Victorian period (1837-1901). I love the style of Victorian writing and while I do also enjoy reading books from other periods, I usually feel much more comfortable with a Victorian classic than with a classic from the 20th century. The reasons people sometimes give for disliking Victorian novels – the length, the wordiness, the long descriptive passages, the habit of directly addressing the reader – have never really been a problem for me. And some of the greatest characters and most memorable plots in literature can be found in Victorian fiction too.

One of the first Victorian novels I remember reading was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which I was given as a Christmas present as a child. It was a lovely illustrated hardback edition which I still have and sometimes re-read at Christmas. This was followed several years later by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, both of which I read as a young teenager and loved. It took me a lot longer to get to Anne Bronte’s novels but when I eventually did I enjoyed those as well, particularly The Tenant of Wildfall Hall.

Despite enjoying A Christmas Carol when I first read it all those years ago, it’s only more recently that I’ve come to appreciate Charles Dickens’ other work. Our Mutual Friend found its way onto my books of the year list in 2011 and A Tale of Two Cities did the same in 2013.

Dickens and the Brontes are probably the first names that come to mind for most people when they think of Victorian novelists, but there are so many others that I love too. As the Victorian period covers several decades, it obviously encompasses a wide range of different types of books and authors from Gothic novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas to the wonderful Victorian sensation novels of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood (The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne are some of my favourites) and the comedy of Jerome K. Jerome who wrote the hilarious Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel.

Anthony Trollope is another of my favourite Victorians (I have now read all six of his Chronicles of Barsetshire and am currently in the middle of his first Palliser novel, Can You Forgive Her?) and so is Thomas Hardy – I’ve loved all of his books that I’ve read so far, especially Tess of the d’Urbervilles and A Pair of Blue Eyes.

As I come to the end of this post I realise I haven’t even mentioned George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell – or any of the non-British authors who I’m never quite sure whether to class as ‘Victorian’ or not but who wrote during the same period. And there were some classic children’s novels published during the Victorian era too. I think Black Beauty may actually have been the very first Victorian novel I ever read!

Do you enjoy reading Victorian literature or is there another period that you prefer?

If you do like the Victorians, do you have any favourite authors or books that I haven’t mentioned here?

Girl on the Golden Coin by Marci Jefferson

March 5, 2014March 5, 201414 Comments

For more than three hundred years, an image of Britannia with her shield and spear or trident has been depicted on the reverse of certain British coins. In the 17th century, the model for Britannia was said to be Frances Stuart, who was described by Samuel Pepys as a great beauty and who famously refused to become a mistress of King Charles II. Girl on the Golden Coin is Frances Stuart’s story.

At the beginning of the novel, Frances is one of a family of Royalists who have been living in exile in Paris since Charles I was defeated in the English Civil War. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Stuart family return to favour and Frances joins the household of Henriette Anne, Charles II’s younger sister, who has just married the brother of Louis XIV of France (the ‘Sun King’). When Frances catches Louis’ eye, he sends her to the English court where she is faced with the task of seducing Charles, converting him to Catholicism and helping to form an alliance between England and France.

The rest of the novel follows Frances at the court of Charles II, exploring her relationships with the King, his noblemen and the other women of the court including the young Queen, Catherine of Braganza, and the King’s favourite mistress Barbara Palmer, Lady Castlemaine. As Frances grows closer to Charles and begins to replace Castlemaine in his affections, she finds herself under pressure from the Queen Mother, the French ambassadors and various courtiers to use her influence with the King to help further their political intrigues – and failure to do so could result in her own family secrets being exposed.

Girl on the Golden Coin is Marci Jefferson’s first novel and was only published in February, but has been attracting some excellent reviews already. I can see its appeal, but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy it as much as most other readers have. It was fun to read but it was too light for me and didn’t have the depth I prefer in my historical fiction – although to be fair, that’s what I had suspected before I started reading but decided to still read it anyway as the Restoration is such an interesting period of history and I had never come across a book written from Frances Stuart’s perspective before.

I suppose given who Frances was and her position at court, it’s understandable that so much of the novel concentrates on her love life, but I would personally have preferred less romance, fewer descriptions of pretty silk dresses and beautiful jewels, and more focus on the history. The novel does touch on important issues such as religious conflict (in the form of two of Frances’ servants, one of whom is a Catholic and the other a Quaker), and the Anglo-Dutch War but I was disappointed that there were only a few pages devoted to some of the most significant historical events Frances lived through, such as the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. I couldn’t help making comparisons with Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor, another historical romance set at the court of Charles II, but which captures the drama and atmosphere of the Restoration period in a way which, in my opinion, this book doesn’t.

I don’t want to sound too negative because I didn’t actually dislike Girl on the Golden Coin – it was a quick read that kept me entertained for a few days and a good introduction to the life of Frances Stuart, someone I previously knew almost nothing about. As the response to this novel so far has been overwhelmingly positive I’m sure Marci Jefferson has a very successful career ahead of her. This just wasn’t the right book for me.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

March 3, 201422 Comments

Cat Among the Pigeons, published in 1959, is one of Agatha Christie’s later Poirot mysteries and combines a girls’ school setting with the story of a revolution in Ramat, a fictional country in the Middle East. I still have a lot of reading to do before I’ll have finished all of the Poirot books, but this is one that I’ve particularly enjoyed.

Most of the action takes place at Meadowbank School, an exclusive girls-only school in England which is still run by its two founders, Miss Bulstrode and Miss Chadwick, but first we visit Ramat, where Prince Ali Yusuf is preparing to escape the uprising in his country. In an attempt to keep some of his fortune safe, the Prince gives some valuable jewels to his pilot and asks him to smuggle them out of the country. The pilot’s sister and young niece, Jennifer, have been visiting Ramat but are due to return to England the next day, so he hides the jewels in their luggage without telling them what he has done.

Back in England, Jennifer begins attending Meadowbank School, one of several new girls to join the school that term. There are also some new teachers, a new secretary and a new gardener. When a murder takes place at the school a few weeks later, it seems that whoever committed the crime may have been trying to find the missing jewels. Is there someone at Meadowbank who shouldn’t be there? In other words, is there a ‘cat among the pigeons’?

Well, I was completely fooled by this one! While I found it very easy to guess the hiding place of the jewels, I did not guess who the murderer was until the truth was revealed. The most annoying thing was that I did originally suspect the right person but was thrown off the scent halfway through the book and decided I must have been wrong. After that, I think I suspected almost everybody!

As I was reading I kept wondering when Hercule Poirot himself was going to enter the story and I was surprised to find that he doesn’t actually make his first appearance until the final third of the book. By the time he arrives on the scene the mystery has already been partially solved and while he does unravel the rest of the clues and identify the murderer, I’m not sure Poirot’s involvement really added anything to the story.

Although the mystery was a good one that kept me guessing, the reason I enjoyed this book so much was the setting rather than the plot. Like many British children I grew up reading Enid Blyton books and still have very fond memories of them. I loved her two school series, St Clare’s and Malory Towers, and in Cat Among the Pigeons Agatha Christie captures the same sort of atmosphere. The school setting, the focus on the lives of the girls and their teachers, and the very late appearance of Poirot, gives this book a slightly different feel from the others I’ve read.

Have you read this one? Which is your favourite Poirot mystery?

Crippen by John Boyne

February 28, 201421 Comments

I read my first John Boyne book, the Gothic ghost story This House is Haunted, last year just in time for Halloween. Since then I’ve been wanting to read another of his books and this novel, based on a real-life crime which took place in London more than a century ago, is the one I chose. It turned out to be a good choice because I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed This House is Haunted, although the two books are quite different.

Crippen is a fictional account of the life of the notorious murderer, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who was found guilty of murdering his wife and hiding the remains in the cellar of his home at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. It sounds very morbid and gruesome, I know, but the book is actually not as dark as you might imagine thanks to Boyne’s sense of humour, colourful characters and storytelling flair.

The story begins in the summer of 1910 and introduces us to a group of passengers on board the SS Montrose, sailing from Belgium to Canada. There’s Mrs Drake, a demanding, overbearing woman, and her daughter, Victoria, who is hoping to find romance on the journey. Then there’s Martha Hayes, who would prefer to hide herself away in her cabin with a pile of novels than mix with the other passengers, and Matthieu Zela, a Frenchman travelling with his obnoxious nephew, Tom. And finally, we meet Mr Robinson and his teenage son, Edmund, who are hoping for a quiet and uneventful journey.

If you’re not already familiar with the Crippen murder case, you might be wondering what the relevance is of the Atlantic voyage I’ve just described. I can promise you it is very relevant, although we don’t find out why until later in the book. Before we reach that point, we go back in time to the 1860s where we follow the young Hawley Harvey Crippen through his childhood in Michigan. As a teenager he decides he wants to study medicine, but when his parents refuse to help him financially it seems unlikely that Hawley will ever become a fully qualified doctor. After marrying Cora Turner, a music hall singer, the Crippens move to London where Hawley becomes an assistant in a homeopathic medicines company. Several years later, Cora disappears, her friends become convinced she has been murdered, and Hawley finds himself under suspicion…

Before beginning this book, I had heard of Dr Crippen but didn’t know any of the details of the case. I didn’t even know that there was so much controversy surrounding it. Boyne presents an interesting theory as to what may have actually happened, though I have no idea whether there could be any truth to this theory or not – I suspect there probably isn’t, but the book certainly does show Crippen in a much more sympathetic light than you might expect. It would be hard not to feel sorry for Boyne’s portrayal of a boy forced to abandon his dreams, a quiet and mild-mannered man bullied and abused by his selfish, manipulative wife.

My only complaint is that it was difficult to know exactly which parts of the novel were fictional and which weren’t. I looked up some factual information about Hawley Harvey Crippen after I read the book and was surprised to find that Boyne had changed so many biographical details, such as the names of Crippen’s parents and the fact that his first wife had actually died of a stroke rather than a road accident as described in the novel. When writing a fictional account of a real person’s life, it’s obvious that things like conversations, thoughts and emotions will have to be invented, but I’m not sure what the point was in altering all those little details.

Anyway, I didn’t worry about any of this until after I’d finished the book. While I was reading I was completely captivated by the twists and turns of the story and by Boyne’s wonderful writing style. I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of his novels now!