Just a Hat …

… but a very specific hat.

The Brief

This is what my fiance requested:

• A simple, lightweight hat for the summer.
• It should be plain and unfussy. A classic style.
• It should have a brim that can be turned up.
• It should be loose fitting, but not so loose it could slip off.

The Pattern

With all of that in mind I set out to find a good basic hat pattern in a fine gauge. I found this one. It’s simple and clear and it would be very easy to modify, though all I did was lengthen the ribbing so that it could be turned up – as per the brief!

The Yarn

I dug through my stash looking for something variegated in fingering weight. All of that stocking stitch  would be so boring in a plain colour. I came up with the perfect skein:

• Green – because he’s a gardener
• Blue – because he lives by the sea
• Pale grey – to match his hair!

I bought it on Ebay a very long time ago, and it was handpainted by Misty Yarns. Lovely!

The Hat

After some hours of not very exciting knitting a hat emerged. The knitter in me would like to block it, but the wearer is happy with his new hat as it is.

A very simple hat, but a very satisfied customer.

The View from the Side

The View from Above

Great House by Nicole Krauss

Sometimes a book stay in your head long after you have finished reading and put it down, not allowing you to let go and move on to something else.

You have to recall passages, theme, images. You have to think about the questions it left you with. Maybe you even have to pick it up again, because you know there will be things you missed, more that will reveal itself on subsequent readings.

Great House has been one of those books for me.

It wasn’t a book I rushed to read, but as time went on I became more and more curious. So much praise and the idea stories spun around a desk did appeal. I’ve always liked a desk.

I acquired my first desk when I was eight years old, and I’ve considered one to be an absolutely essential part of the furniture ever since. I can recall scratching the year – 1973 – on to that case in case it should need dating in the future. With the benefit of hindsight I doubt that the simple child’s desk survives. These days I have a lovely bureau that my godmother had made and later left to me, together with her cookery books.

But I digress. This book is built around a different desk. A bigger, older, darker desk with many drawers and compartments.  A desk with a longer more complex history. A desk that has been looted, gifted, loaned, recovered …

But Great House isn’t the story of a desk. It is a story of lives linked, sometimes closely and sometimes tenuously, by the desk. At some times the desk is at the heart of the story, and at others it is distant. Just there. Or maybe not there.

There are four narratives that move the book back and forth , between eras and locations. The chronology isn’t straightforward and the links aren’t immediately clear. Some will be revealed and others will need to be deduced. This is a book that needs to be worked at.

Those four narratives are distinctive and I had no problems moving between them. Each time the story shifted I was pulled in again by intelligence, emotion and such elegant prose.

And the underlying themes came through, giving some relatively simple stories depth. The importance of emotional ties. How easily they can be damaged. How easily we can misunderstand, and what damage that can do. How one generation can determine the fate of the next. And the Jewish diaspora…

Serious themes, and these were serious stories. At times it was too much.  It was relentless. I wanted a little light, maybe even a dash of humour. They never came, but I still held on. Those four narratives held me, my head and my heart.

 Individually they had their weaknesses. One felt rushed. One veered dangerously toward sentimentality. Another teetered on the brink of melodrama. One though was perfect. Strangely it was the one least connected with the history of the desk. And yet they came together to make something greater than the sum of their parts.

I’ve written little about the plot. Much has been written about Great House, and if you want to know more you will find it quite easily. But it is a book I would recommend coming too with as little foreknowledge as possible. I can’t quite explain why, but I think it’s because there’s so much there is so much there, both said and unsaid, that focusing on any one aspect would distort your view…

I didn’t find Great House an easy book, but I am very glad I read it.

And I’m still thinking about it …

Four Things

and four books with four in the title!

My writing muse seems to have deserted me, and so I am borrowing this meme that I saw at Books and Chocolate to say hello, I’m still here and this is what I’m doing.

I’ve tweaked the questions as some of the originals don’t work for me (I’ve only lived in three different places in my life, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here), and because I want to reflect where I am this weekend.

So here are my four questions, and four answers to each:

Four Long Books I’m Reading and Loving

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
• Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch

Four Nice Jobs Done

• One bookcase tidied, and a few books thinned out to make space for recent arrivals
• Knitting needles sorted out and put away in an orderly fashion
• Spin it Again software, to covert old cassette tapes to MP3, reinstalled
• Summer clothes brought down from the attic, and winter clothes taken up

Four Upcoming Novels Added to my Wishlist

• The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Elizabeth Speller
• Herring on the Nile by L C Tyler
• Gillespie and I by Jane Harris
• Girl Reading by Katie Ward

Four Outings with Briar

• Bluebell Woods, where those flowers are in full bloom
• The park, to chase squirrels
• The beach at low tide, so we could go out on the rocks and look in rock pools
• Trevaylor Woods, scheduled for tomorrow morning to escape the crowds that have descended on Cornwall for the bank holiday weekend

*****

Normal service will be resumed very soon!

Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie

“We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”

(Julius Caesar IV.ii.269–276)

I couldn’t resist picking up a lovely facsimile reprint of the first edition of Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood. A lovely cover, a story that I couldn’t recall either reading or watching, and that wonderful Shakespearean epigraph.

Yes, Taken at the Flood looked very promising.

A few weeks after marrying an attractive young widow, after a whirlwind romance, Gordon Cloade is killed in an air raid.

A tragic loss, and there is a second blow to the family. There was no valid will, and so Rosaleen, a widow for the second time, was left in possession of all her husband’s wealth.

Gordon had always supported his family and his widow would have done the same, but her brother stopped her. And David told her that they should stand on their own two feet, as the two of them had always done.

The Cloades would see no money during Rosaleen’s lifetime. Only when she died would the estate revert to them.

They struggled to manage in the economic downturn that followed the war.

And so David was popular with the Cloade family. But one of them, Lynne, a demobbed WREN, understood his point of view, agreed with him. They were drawn together.

And Lynne began to have doubts about her engagement to her cousin Rowley. He was a farmer, a reserved occupation, and so he hadn’t been away to war like her. Maybe she had changed. Maybe they had grown apart.

All of this is set out wonderfully. The characters are beautifully drawn, the period is caught perfectly and there are definite story possibilities.

And there is more.

A story becomes known. That Rosaleen’s first husband had spoken of disappearing, faking his own death, to set his wife free. And then he had spoken of starting a new life with a new name. Enoch Arden, after the hero of Tennyson’s poem.

An Enoch Arden arrives at the village inn. And shortly after he is found dead …

Hercule Poirot is drawn into the case: he heard the story of Robert Underhay being told and he has been consulted by one of the Cloade family.

An intricate and very clever mystery, with lots of lovely details, unfolds. And it is a mystery driven by the characters. As facts about them, and about what happened,  emerge. I reevaluated them and I rethought what might have happened.

Everything worked beautifully until the end. I can’t say why, but I felt a little cheated by the resolution of the mystery. Though the epigraph did fit …

And then there is a final twist. The concept was perfect, but I’m afraid the execution was  a little melodramatic.

Taken at the Flood works beautifully as a character study and a period piece, it’s just that the mystery creaks a little.

Yet it held my attention from start to finish.

A Dog Blogs: My Thoughts on Grooming

Hello, this is Briar, writing a post about grooming.

Us dogs need regular grooming to keep our coats clean and tidy. And we sometimes need some human assistance, because we can’t reach some bits and because we don’t have opposable thumbs.

There are lots of different dogs in the world and we have lots of different sorts of coat. It is very important that you find out how to look after your dog’s coat and that, if your dog needs professional groomer, you choose one with proper qualifications who knows what your dog needs and how to do it.

Us border terriers have double coats. I have a rough topcoat to protect me from the weather and a soft undercoat to keep me warm. It is a very good system!

Jane brushes me most days to get rid of dirt and loose hairs, but my coat grows a lot and twice a year I have to go to the groomer to be handstripped. That gets rid of old dead hairs that don’t come out on their own and makes room for the new hair to grow.

And she found me a very good groomer with proper qualifications who knows how border terrier coats work.

Before !

Clipping doesn’t work on us. The old hairs don’t go and the new hairs have no space and so we end up looking like powder puffs. I know that the powder puff look is good for some dogs, but not for us borders. We are outdoor action dogs and we need good practical coats, so we can run and swim and roll in things.

Yesterday we went to the groomers. You can see what I looked like before in the picture. Jane had her car keys and my lead, and so I was waiting to see if we were going somewhere good.

When we set out I thought we might be going to the beach. When we went past the beach I thought we might be going to the river. Or the hill. But we went past the turning. Then I thought we were going to the towans, but we drove past again. And I realised we were going to the groomers.

After !

Jane left me there for two hours, and when she came back she said that I looked like a different dog. I still have my topcoat and my undercoat, but they’re shorter and tidier and ready for summer.

When we came home I had to sulk in my chair for a while. I don’t like Jane leaving me, and having your coat stripped is rather uncomfortable.

But I’m a happy dog now. We went to the boating pool this morning and the beach this afternoon and I’ve shown off my smart new look to some of my friends.

Jane says I look lovely, and I agree!

The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

I loved The Novel in the Viola.

It is one of those books in which everything – characters, emotions, settings, writing, period, storylines – is right. And everything works together beautifully to produce a book that is far more than the sum of those parts.

At heart though, The Novel in the Viola is the story of a life. The life of Elise, younger daughter of Anna and Julian Landau. Opera singer and novelist respectively. Elise worries that she is not as talented as her sister, Margot, but that casts just a very small shadow on a wonderful life. Because Elise is loved, and because she loves her family, she is happy and she is secure.

But the year is 1938. The Landaus live in Austria, in Vienna. And they are Jewish.

Anna and Julian realise that their family is at risk and take steps to flee. Margot and her husband secure American visas and they hope that they will be able to do the same. But they know that they will not be able to secure a visa for Elise, and so she writes an advertisement:

VIENNESE JEWESS, 19, seeks position as domestic servant. Speaks fluid English. I will cook your goose. Elise Landau, Vienna 4, Dorotheegassee, 30/5.

A position is secured and Elise is despatched to London. A temporary arrangement, to keep her safe until things change, until the family can be reunited.

Elise, her family, her world were alive for me, and I felt her sorrow as she was separated from them. I admired her character as she coped with the journey, the things she had to do in London. I empathised with her as she worried about making her money last, as she devoured the chocolate her sister tucked into her luggage, as she struggled to cope with the separation from her family and her home.

Or, to put it simply, I grew to love Elise.

She becomes a parlour maid at Tyneford House on the Dorset coast. During her life there she will experience both love and loss. She will make friends, and grow to love the house and the surrounding countryside. But she will also suffer slights and setbacks as she tries to find her place in the world, and reunite her family.

The slights come because Elise doesn’t quite fit. She plays the part of a parlour maid but she comes from the world of the family. The butler observes that, after Elise, Tyneford would never be the same again and he is right, for more reasons than he knows.

It would love to write about so many wonderful details, characters and events, but I mustn’t. This is a book that needs to unravel slowly, so that you can watch over Elise as her life progresses.

The settings, from Vienna to London to Dorset, are wonderfully painted, and the sense of period and the point in history too are never lost. The characters, and their relationships, are fully and beautifully drawn. I believed in them utterly.

That meant that I was completely involved as Tyneford House and its occupants faced both war, and the end of an era. Things would never be the same again.

I knew that.  I had the benefit of hindsight, and that made the story so much more moving.

It was such a wonderful story, so beautifully written, and with such a range of emotions. I think I felt every emotion that a book can inspire before I reached the end.

That end came quickly. Maybe a little too quickly, though it might have been that I just didn’t want to leave Elise and her world. It was unexpected and yet completely right, and it was given extra poignancy by the very real events that it mirrored.

A few small things didn’t quite work.Maybe a few too many nice, understanding characters. One or two modern idioms slipped in. And the story of the actual novel in the actual viola didn’t quite work for me.

But they were small things, and I could happily let them pass by, because the many delights of this novel made them seem unimportant.

And because The Novel in the Viola really is a book that can touch your heart, if you only let it.

And, as I said, I loved it.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: O is for Other

I bought a copy of The Other Half Lives a couple of years ago. I started reading, and then I stopped. Because even for Sophie Hannah, queen of the seemingly impossible scenario, this one just seemed a little too unlikely.

In a London hotel room Ruth and Aidan agree to share their deepest, darkest secrets.

“It doesn’t have to be everything. Just … as much as we can … “

She tells him that years ago she did something wrong to a woman and a man. She was punished excessively, and she has never recovered from it. She is too distressed to say any more.

He tells her that he killed a woman.

She is stunned.

He says that her name was Mary Trelease.

She is confounded. She has met Mary Trelease and she knows that she is not dead.

So why does Aidan insist that he has killed her?

Second time around I read this opening more carefully. I saw that both Ruth and Aidan were complex, damaged characters. That both had clearly left much unsaid. I was intrigued.

Both Ruth and Aidan approached the police. She went to Charlie Zailer and he went to Simon Waterhouse, and so Sophie Hannah’s recurring characters from the Culver Valley Police Force were drawn into the story.

Those recurring characters have grown on me, but the balance between them and the particular story never seems quite right. Once the main story gets going it’s not an issue at all, but this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a rather long diversion away from the main plot early in a novel, that hasn’t added too much value.

But after that diversion the story was off and running, and I was very definitely hooked.

The continued existence of Mary Trelease was swiftly proved, but she was a very strange woman and both Charlie and Simon was both sure that there was something amiss. And so, although there was no case to investigate, investigate they did.

Their stories are mixed with Ruth’s first person account to fine effect.

Initially the story moves slowly, with the case focused on Ruth, Aidan and Mary. I couldn’t say that I like any of them, but I believed in them and I was intrigued. It was clear that all three had secrets and I wanted to know what those secrets were.

Eventually the story opened out and all of those secrets would be revealed.

A positively labyrinthine and perfectly paced plot twisted that way and that. Eventually it built to a very clever ending. An ending that explained everything, and it was psychologically complex and true.

I have deliberately said very little about the plot, because there is nothing I can say without giving too much away. But I think I should warn that it is very dark in places.

Sophie Hannah has pulled off her usual trick of making me believe the unbelievable because her characters are psychologically spot on. And because as the revelations came I could understand each one a little better.

Three distinctive, flawed, complex characters. One in particular will haunt me.

Fine writing and excellent plotting held everything together. The book was long, but there was always something to keep me hanging on, keep me turning the pages.

I spotted a few of the author’s trademarks. I spotted quite a few cliches of the genre. But it didn’t matter.

An unbelievable story held me, because it’s author made me want to believe.

*****

The Crime Fiction Alphabet is hosted by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise.

“Each week, beginning Monday 10 January 2011, you have to write a blog post about crime fiction related to the letter of the week …”

And so in two weeks time, after a break for Easter, P is for … ?

Books for guest bedrooms ….

“I’d read all the romance novels stashed in the guest bedrooms, from Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary to the intriguing Miss Buncle’s Book  and the more troubling Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, but all the novels stopped at the crucial point; the wedding itself, and what came after remained terribly intriguing …”

From The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

Now what could be more lovely than arriving in an English country house and finding such lovely books waiting for you?

I have a proof copy so I shouldn’t really be quoting, but I just couldn’t resist.

The Report by Jessica Francis Kane

“The Bethnal Green Tube shelter disaster took place on the evening of Wednesday March 3, 1943.

173  people died in a terrifying crush as panic spread through the crowds of people trying to enter the station’s bomb shelter in the East End of London.

However, no bomb struck and not a single casualty was the direct result of military aggression, making it the deadliest civilian incident of World War Two.”

Jessica Francis Kane, read the full historical transcript of the enquiry into this, the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War, and she used what she read as the basis of her debut novel, a wonderfully vivid picture of people living through the event and its aftermath.

She tells her story through a number of characters:

• A mother who lost her younger daughter
• Her elder daughter, who survived but would not speak.
• The warden of the shelter, devastated by what has happened.
• A clerk who was delayed, who wonders if he might have been able to make a difference.
• A vicar, looking for answers, wanting to offer comfort and support…

All of their stories are beautifully observed, with just the right details picked to illuminate those lives. A hand held too tightly.  A wireless turned up to mask a conversation. A breakfast left untouched. The picture is clear, and it is moving without ever becoming sentimental.

It falls to Lawrence Dunne, the local magistrate, to investigate and report on what happened. A fundamentally good man, he wanted to understand, he wanted lessons to be learned, and he wanted to show understanding of what people had been through, of what they had to endure in wartime conditions.

His story added another dimension. Much is said about the human instinct to find someone to blame,  about how those who are ready to accept blame often accept more than they should, and about how apportioning blame is not really a resolution.

And, maybe most importantly, I saw the lives of Jessica Kane’s characters. I understood their words and their actions, their strengths and their weaknesses. They were flawed, vulnerable human beings.

I saw the world they lived in, the terrible event they lived through and had to live with. And I learned from it.

Thirty years after the event a young filmmaker, whose family was affected by the tragedy, interviews Sir Lawrence Dunne for a documentary about the tragedy.

Another dimension, it brought a different perspective, and it tied things together nicely, with a devastating final revelation.

The Report is such a  vivid human story, a beautifully written book that made me feel and made me think.

And it is a story that will stay with me.

Clearing The Decks: Quarter 1 Report

I have selected a hundred books from the ridiculous number that I have unread. Those books are now my home library, to be chosen from when I need a book but don’t have one in hand. And, like library books, passed along once I’ve finished with them.

No deadlines, I just want to read and clear from time to time, and to have somewhere to turn when I wasn’t sure what to read.

The first quarter started well, but tailed off. I was distracted by Virago Reading Week, Persephone Reading Week, the Orange Prize longlist ….

But six books are leaving and a couple more will be on their way very soon.

First there was A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. It had been hanging around for ages. It wasn’t that it didn’t look interesting, it was just that its moment never seemed to come. At the beginning of January I read it, wrote about it, and it is now in a stack of things waiting for the car-boot sale we plan to go to after Easter. I liked it very much, but I’m happy to let it go.

And then there was Sister by Rosamund Lupton. A very successful book, I should have waited in the library queue but a copy appeared in a charity shop …. Again I read it, wrote about it, and added it to the car-boot sale stack. The verdict was interesting but flawed. The human story was excellent, but the crime story wasn’t of the same quality. But the good was more than good enough for me to put Rosamund Lupton’s forthcoming second novel on my wishlist.

I picked up Firmin by Sam Savage next. I’ve read some great reviews, but I’ve also read a number that said that the book just didn’t work for them. After a few chapters I decided that I was going to fall into the latter camp, and so I dropped it. Not a bad book, just not the book for me. This one was traded on ReadItSwapIt for a travel book for my fiance.

I did finish The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell but I wasn’t inspired to write about it. She does light as air contemporary romances very well, but this one touched on many serious issues and subject matter and style didn’t quite work together. Readable, but not her best. this one is in the car boot sale stack too.

Lorelei’s Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst was another book I finished but wasn’t inspired to write about. A woman dies and her husband recalled their past while trying to find out what happened from the only witness to her death – the dog. There were so lovely moments but I couldn’t quite believe in the couple’s relationship, or in the quest to communicate with the dog. I know a lot of people loved this one, but it just didn’t work for me. But I did manage to trade it on ReadItSwapIt for a biography of Vera Brittain.

The last book I finished this quarter was Only Say The Word by Niall Williams. A lovely book and I will write about it, but I misplaced the book while I was still formulating my thoughts and it has only just reappeared. It’s another one for the car boot stack once I’ve pulled out a few quotations and written about it a little.

And that’s it for quarter one.

I’ll report back again in three months time, and if you see any books on my Clearing The Decks page that you would recommend or you would like to hear more about, do let me know.