Sex and Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido

Well, it’s an attention grabbing title, but I would have rushed out and bought a new book by Barbara Trapido whatever it had been called. It was around the time of Juggling and Temples of Delight that I first fell in love with her writing. And the backlist that I investigated and the new books that I rushed out to find continued the romance.

The words that came to mind were warm, quirky and real. So Sex and Stravinsky came as a surprise! What did it mean?

Well, it seems that the author has drawn inspiration from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. A ballet of complex relationships, stolen identity, missed opportunity and triumphant rebirth. Certainly all of those can be found within this text.

The relationships would be best explained by a three dimensional diagram, but I don’t believe that WordPress has that facility (at least not yet) and so I shall do my best to explain as I work my way down the page.

First there is Josh, a South African who has come to England to study for a PhD in mime studies. Yes, really! He was a simple, quiet character, and so he was surprised that he was the man chosen by Caroline. She was an Australian student, beautiful, witty and the kind of girl who could create her own wedding dress from a discarded festoon blind, cater with panache for pennies, turn a dilapidated terraced house into a stylish home…

Caroline beat Josh in the entertainment stakes, but I’m afraid he trounced her in the believability stakes.

She became a little more believable when her fatal flaw came to light. She felt compelled to support her demanding, widowed mother. So she and Josh lived in a small house and accepted that they could only afford one child, while they supported her mother in a comfortable house of her own.

Josh and Caroline’s daughter, Zoe, reads girls’ ballet books and longs for ballet lessons. She is sent on a school French exchange and finds herself with the family from hell. You feel for her, you really do. But then she meets a runaway boy who shares her passion for dance…

Meanwhile, on the east coast of Africa, Hattie , Josh’s first love, has a successful career writing the ballet books that Zoe reads. But she struggles to cope with Herman, her demanding husband and Cat, her adolescent daughter, who is planning to take a most unexpected step forward.

And finally there is Jack. Also known as Jacques. Also known as Giacomo. The housemaid’s son, who has come home after travelling the world. Why?

Caroline who propels the plot when she discovers that her mother is not as poor as she claims. Indeed, she is positively rich. The worm turns. Caroline takes positive decisive action, and you just have to cheer. Suddenly I loved Caroline!

Her next step is to collect her daughter from France and take her to Africa, where Josh is at a conference. Where he bumps into Hattie. Who takes him home to meet her family.

And so all of the cast is assembled, and an elaborate dance begins. It’s a little contrived, the outcome is a little too neat, but I loved it anyway.

Because Barbara Trapido still has that magic. She creates such a lovely mix of utterly believable characters and relationships, balances quirkiness perfectly with serious themes, and tells wonderful tales that keep the pages turning.

There is more darkness here than I found in Barbara Trapido’s earlier books, but so much light too.

And yes, there are echoes of Pulcinella: stolen identity, missed opportunity and triumphant rebirth.

Not the magic I was expecting, but magic nonetheless.

The Green Child by Herbert Read

“The assassination of President Olivero, which took place in the autumn of 1861, was for the world at large one of those innumerable incidents of a violent nature which characterise the politics of the South American continent. For twenty-four hours it loomed large in the headlines of the newspapers, but beyond an insinuation, the next day, that General Iturbide had formed a provisional government with the full approval of the military party, the event had no further reverberations in the outer world. President Olivero, who had arranged his own assassination, made his way in a leisurely fashion to Europe. On the way he allowed his beard to grow.”

 

I really wasn’t sure after that opening paragraph. Nicely written, but an Englishman rising to power in a South American country, faking his own assassination and returning to England? But I’m afraid I know little about South American politics that I haven’t learned through fiction. Maybe it happened, maybe it could have happened, I really don’t know.

I had two good reasons to continue:

• Graham Green provided a fulsome introduction. Not necessarily a sign that this would be the book for me, but definitely a sign of quality.
• Capuchin Classics, who have a lovely list full of books that I have either loved or aspire too, saw fit to reissue The Green Child earlier this year.

So on I went.

Olivero has escaped to the village in the English countryside where he was born. He wanders happily through places he remembers well, until he sees something very strange:

“The stream as he remembered it – and he could remember the pressure of its current against his bare legs as he waded among its smooth, flat pebbles – ran in the direction of the station from which he had just come. But now, indubitably, it was flowing in the opposite direction, towards the church.”

He follows the stream to a mill, where he finds a pale and fragile woman held captive by a brutish man. Olivero is drawn to the woman, recognising as the subject of many local tales. The Green Child.

Olivero rescues the Green Child from her captor and tells her his story.

And it is here that the story takes a sharp turn – from a lovely fanciful country tale to a gentle political satire.

The young Olivero set out from his home to seek his fortune and, almost passively, travelled along a very strange road from messenger boy to dictator.

Fanciful in a very different way. It was readable, but I read hoping that it wouldn’t be too long before the older Olivero and the Green Child reappeared. And eventually they did.

The Green Child drew Olivero into her own world below the mill-pond. 

Both are welcomed into the community, where life is ordered around a progression : from the pleasures of youth, through the pleasure of work , through the pleasure of opinion and argument, to the final pleasure of solitary thought.

And so I found myself in a dystopian tale

Olivero makes his journey towards what he comes to realise he had always been seeking, and eventually to the end of his life, when he is absorbed into the rocks that form the foundation of the world.

A very different kind of strange. And not my kind of strange I’m afraid.

The Green Child is a novel in three very different acts. And for me, although there was some lovely writing and much food for thought, the book didn’t come together as a whole.

Maybe a little more background knowlege would have helped.

I’m still thinking about the book, but it still has me confused.

Inside The Whale by Jennie Rooney

Such a simple story. Two people meet, fall in love, plan a future. But then something happens that separates them, that changes the courses of both their lives for good.

It’s been done before. It will doubtlessly be done again. But Jennie Rooney’s debut novel does it particularly well.

The story really is that simple, but the joy is in the execution.

The story is told by the two main characters, Stevie and Michael, in alternate chapters. And it moves backwards and forwards in time. We first meet Stevie as a young woman at home with her mother and Michael as an elderly man in a care home.

Often that wouldn’t work but here it does, because this isn’t a book about plot, it’s a book about two lives that met. The shifts in focus made it natural think about the two lives lived rather than a sequence of events that happened.

I warmed to Stevie immediately, and in the early part of the book I missed her in Michael’s chapters. But as I learned more about him I grew to care for him too, and the pages turned more and more quickly.

The meeting and the development of the relationship was completely natural and right. But was separated them, and its consequences kept them apart.

I felt joy, pain love, grief, so many emotions with Stevie and Michael over the courses of their lives, and I miss them now they are gone.

Yes it is a simple tale, but Jennie Rooney tells it so well and presents just the right moments, just the right details to make it wonderfully effective: a very human story of love, life and family told with great warmth and wit.

There’s not quite enough there to make this a great book, but it is a lovely debut from an author who clearly has the potential to write something great.

I shall definitely be looking out for her second novel.

I Coriander by Sally Gardner

“I am Coriander Hobie.

 I was born in the year of Our Lord 1643, the only child of Thomas and Eleanor Hobie, in our great house on the River Thames in London. Of my early years I remember only happiness. That was before I knew this world had such evil in it, and that my fate was to be locked up in a chest and left to die.

This is my story. This is my life.”

And it is a wonderful story, quite beautifully told.

Coriander writes her story of life in 1650s London by candlelight, with each of her seven chapters ending as one of her seven candles burns out.

It’s a fascinating era, under-represented in fiction. The Civil war is over, the king has been executed and the monarchy has been replaced by a commonwealth, led by Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector.

That world comes wonderfully to life on the page, and an engaging heroine, with a fine supporting cast, keeps the pages turning.

Coriander had a happy childhood, but then her mother died and her father was quickly remarried, to a strict Puritan widow.

It’s shocking, but understandable. Remember that England was in  turmoil with suspected royalists being denounced, and Puritans  holding sway. And Thomas Hobie was a silk merchant, allied with the losing side. Maybe he thought he was doing the best thing for his child, ensuing her safety in the new world order.

But he wasn’t. When he had to go away his new wife called in a fundamentalist Puritan preacher and the pair of them waged war on the frivolities of the household. They to take away the name that Coriander’s beloved mother had given her, and re-christen her with the more suitable, plain and sensible, name of Ann. Villains indeed!

Horribly believable villains, and they allowed Sally Gardner to say an awful lot about politics, religion, and the wrongs that may be done in their names.

It’s fortunate that Coriander had good friends to show that there was love, understanding and tolerance in the world too.

Coriander stood up for herself, but she could not win. Eventually she would be shut away in a chest and left to die.

But she didn’t die. She escaped into the fairy world that her mother had come from years earlier.

Yes, Coriander’s mother was a fairy. I might have mentioned it earlier, there were signs that Coriander was being called to her mother’s world, but for me it was the least interesting element of the story.

She meets a handsome prince and she learns more about her past, why she has been called into that world, and what she must do when she returns to her own world.  

It’s lovely, beautifully written and cleverly constructed, but just a little under-developed. And the rest of the story was so good that, I’m afraid, nothing less than perfect would do!

Coriander returns to her life six years after she left, causing much consternation. She is changed, the world is changed, and events build to a fine conclusion in two worlds.

A fine conclusion to a wonderfully rich and absorbing story.

Not quite perfect, but perfection was so very near.

Trespass by Rose Tremain

Often when a new book by a well established author appears it seems to be everywhere. Yet Rose Tremain’s Trespass, her first since the award-winning The Road Home, seemed to slip out very quietly.

Why? Was something amiss?

The opening chapter held great promise. Ten year-old Melodie is on a school trip to the countryside. She is new, and though she is with the group she is not really part of it. And so she wanders off, towards a stream where she sees something that makes her scream and scream…

It was well executed, it made me want to read on, I couldn’t pick out anything that was wrong, but it didn’t quite work. The prose was lovely but it didn’t quite allow Melodie to live and breathe as I was sure she could.

It would not be until much later in the book that Melodie would reappear; the story of what made her scream had to be told.

A stage was set:  the village of La Callune in the Cevennes, an unspoilt, mountainous region in central France. Wonderfully described, but a sense of foreboding is ever-present.

Four principal characters were placed upon that stage:

• Aramon Lunel, an alcoholic who has retreated from the world and lives alone, with only his dogs for company, in his old family home.
• Audrun, his estranged sister, who lives in a bungalow nearby, who feels that she has been wronged.
• Veronica Vesey, a garden designer who has settled in La Callune with her companion Kitty, a mediocre painter of watercolours.
• Anthony, her brother, a London antique dealer, drawn to the area where his sister has settled.

An interesting quartet. Two very different pairs of siblings, with very different backgrounds and relationships. None of them easy to love, but all of them perfectly and distinctively painted in Rose Tremain’s wonderful prose.

They remained characters on a stage though, until the balance was upset: Anthony decided that he wanted to settle and Aramon decided that he was willing to sell. And that set off a series of events that would lead to dark tragedy.

It was then that the characters came to life and the story began to sing. A story with so much to say about sibling relationships, about the importance of having a place in the world, about what happens when cultures clash.

As the end approached it became clear what Melodie had seen, and I wished that I could learn more of her story.

I have to say that this isn’t Rose Tremain’s finest work, but the quality and range of her past work set expectations so very high, and I realise now that it is a better book than I thought while I was reading.

I haven’t grown to love the principal characters, but I would love to learn a little more of Melodie and Kitty, and the place, the atmosphere and the themes are still swirling in my head

The style and the themes hit, but for me, the emotional side of the story didn’t.

I’m still looking forward though to whatever Rose Tremain may write next.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld

It must have been towards then end of last year that I first spotted After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, cover turned out on the new books shelf in the library. Such an intriguing title. Such a beautiful cover. I had to pick it up and find out more. I was intrigued and yet I didn’t bring the book home. I wasn’t sure that it was the book for me.

But then I read so much praise for both book and author that I began to wonder if I had made a mistake. And so the next time it appeared on the shelves I picked it up and held on to it!

When I opened the pages and began to began to read, I was captivated, by rich and beautiful prose and by the quite extraordinary evocation of the stark and savage beauty of the Australian setting. And that drew me into the twin storylines that hadn’t really called to me.

When a troubled relationship finally breaks down Frank moves away, to the coast, to a shack once owned by his grandparents. He wants to put his violent past, his troubled relationships with his father and his girlfriend behind him. He wants to become a new person and build a better life in his new community. And maybe he can, but it is difficult to let go of the past.

A generation earlier Leon grows up in another small town. He works in the family business, his father’s cake shop which when his father is sent to fight in Korea he must take over until his father comes back. When his father does return he is a changed man and cannot pick up the threads of his old life, and Leon struggles to hold his family and the business together. Then he is conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War and he too finds that the experience of war changes him forever. But maybe he can build a new life, in a shack on the coast.

Two compelling stories, quiet and yet intense, are interwoven. At first they seem separate, but gradually the links become evident, and add a whole new layer.

And characterisation  makes this sing. Two complex, flawed, emotionally scarred men come to life, with prose style and characters perfectly matched.

Descriptions too; the landscapes will stay with me as much as the characters.

Indeed all of the elements work together to make this a very accomplished debut novel.

It wasn’t a book that I could quite fall in love with. But I can appreciate its quality nonetheless.