2024/143: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic — Tabitha Stanmore

...it is not my place to say whether the magic practised by cunning folk was real: I don’t know, I wasn’t there. What we can say is that there was a variety of spells to draw on, and that they got results often enough to maintain belief in their efficacy. [loc. 599]

A social history of what Stanmore terms 'service magic': the everyday assistance offered by 'cunning folk', rather than learned magi or wicked witches. Cunning folk would help find a lost item, identify a thief, provide a healing potion, or tell a fortune. Midwives were often also cunning folk.

It's all too easy to think of witchcraft and magic in the medieval and Renaissance centuries as something to be feared, punishable by death. Stanmore draws on her research to argue that service magicians were seldom accused of malevolent magic. Indeed, one of the services increasingly in demand was curse-lifting and 'unwitching'. Many spells invoked saints or angels: religious faith and magic were complementary, rather than opposite, ways of understanding and affecting the world.

Stanmore recounts some fascinating cases in this book, and examines the portrayal of magic and magic-workers in early modern literature. She also points out that superstition is by no means extinct: 'In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic many psychics reported being busier than ever: the online business-reviews website Yelp apparently saw searches for ‘Supernatural Readings’ more than double in April 2020, after lockdowns had been announced across the globe.' [loc. 3144]

This was an interesting read, though occasionally repetitive and sometimes a little discursive. Lots of intriguing research, though -- as Stanmore explains -- many of the cases are incompletely recorded. If there's a flaw in the book, it's her reluctance to explain how 'magic' had credible effects. There are a couple of instances where she suggests a real-world explanation for an outcome, such as leaving the most likely suspect last in a magical test to increase their nervousness and thus their likelihood of failing. (Granny Weatherwax would just call it headology.) Cunning Folk is frank about its focus on the social aspects of service magic, rather than the psychology of practitioners and their customers, and it's well-researched and referenced.

2024/142: Scarlet — Genevieve Cogman

‘No society that’s ruled by kings and vampires can ever be the right thing,’ Fleurette said firmly.
‘But can a society that sends innocent people to the guillotine be right?’ Eleanor asked. [loc. 4374]

In which Eleanor, a simple housemaid, is recruited by a dashing gang League of aristocrats to travel to France and aid in the rescue of a woman to whom she bears a striking resemblance: Marie Antoinette, the former queen, now imprisoned by revolutionaries. Why yes, this is the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, with the added twist of vampires -- the sanguinocrats* who live for centuries, are barred from holding offices of state, and who feed upon the living. Eleanor has the scars to prove it: being a blood donor was a requirement of her employment in the household of Lady Sophie, Baroness of Basing.

Eleanor isn't stupid, though she's young and rather naive at the outset of the novel. She quickly proves her worth to the League and to Sir Percy Blakeney. And she attracts the attention of Lord Charles Bathurst, aristocrat and scholar. When it comes to the crunch, though, Eleanor must (initially) rely on her own wits to escape Paris and her pursuers. Fortunately, she's a straight-faced liar: even more fortunately, she finds herself in a position to assist someone who can return the favour. And then some.

This is basically a heist novel with a long, dramatic pursuit through the sleaziest parts of Paris, in the shadow of Madame Guillotine. There are vampires and revolutionaries; there is plenty of opportunity for Eleanor to keep a cool head in the face of mortal peril; and there are moments when her inner voice sounds just like Irene from the Library. But that is not a bad thing.

This didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped, but it's the first in a trilogy and I already own the second, so qui vivra verra.

* Cogman's Afterword adds: 'the term ‘sanguinocrats’ was actually used during the French Revolution – admittedly in reference to the Jacobins who acquiesced in the September 1792 massacres'.

2024/141: Our Endless Numbered Days — Claire Fuller

I sat next to the fire and imagined our microscopic white and green island adrift in the blackness – an overlooked crumb, left behind when the Earth was gobbled whole by the Great Divide. My father told me many times that winter that the world ended beyond the hills... [p. 192]

Peggy is eight years old in 1976, living in north London with her concert-pianist mother Ute and her father James. James and his friends, the North London Retreaters -- who believe the apocalypse is imminent, most likely via economic collapse or a Russian nuke -- meet at the house, and Peggy is fascinated by their planning. Then something changes (Peggy doesn't understand what, but it's fairly obvious to the adult reader) and Peggy and her father flee to Die Hutte, deep in a German forest, for what is initially termed a holiday. Except that one day her father returns from the forest, weeping, and tells Peggy that the rest of the world has disappeared. They are alone in the forest: and so they remain for nine years.

Because the novel is not structured chronologically, we know from the start that Peggy does return to the world, to the North London house and her mother and a younger brother whose existence she never suspected. The story of how she left the forest, and of what happened to her father, alternates with her readjustment to the mundane world. It's partly a survival story (Peggy and her father used to watch Survivors on TV: I remember that programme) and partly a psychological study of obsession and self-delusion. The prose is great, and Peggy's account of life in Die Hutte reminded me at times of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle: the little rituals, the skew of her world-view, her focus on small elements of their environment.

I found the ending deeply unsettling, and in fact I think reading Our Endless Numbered Days made me feel differently about The House at the Edge of the World -- also about father and daughter, and about family relationships. It's unfair to draw a comparison, for the emotional tone is very different: but the finale of Our Endless Numbered Days, even with Peggy's aside that 'my brain plays tricks on me, that I have been deficient in vitamin B for too long and my memory doesn’t work the way it should', was horrific, powerful, and cast the whole story into a different light. Despite that, I'm looking forward to reading more of Claire Fuller's fiction, which I have been accumulating...

I bought this in November 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/140: The Amber Fury — Natalie Haynes

This is why I like the play we’re reading. It’s about the things which can’t be forgiven, even if no-one meant to do the wrong thing. [p. 78]

Alex Morris is grieving the death of her fiance Luke. She moves to Edinburgh, where she studied, to take up a job teaching at a pupil referral unit. Her fourth-year class has five students, all with definite views on drama and plays (not Shakespeare, they've done him at school; not The Misanthrope, Mel 'can't stand' Kiera Knightly, who's on the cover of the film tie-in edition; not Jerusalem, because who cares about the state of England?). They end up reading Greek tragedy, which may be why everything goes horribly wrong.

The novel isn't told chronologically: we begin with Alex talking to lawyers, because one of the class has done something monstrous. We don't find out what has happened, or who has done the monstrous thing, until quite late in the book. Meanwhile, we (and the class) learn more about what happened to Alex, and why she goes to London every Friday and comes back the same night.

Alex, at least initially, is broken by grief: she doesn't really care about anything, which means that she makes mistakes in her handling of the fourth-year class. (We don't get to see any of her other classes, or anything about how well or how badly those go: the fourth years are the emotional focus of her work, and of the book.) Alex's narrative is punctuated by extracts from diaries written by the class at her behest: a lot of hinted backstory, but most of the focus is still on Alex and the plays they're reading and discussing in class. Haynes' afterword explains why she chose these plays: Oedipus for crimes committed in ignorance; Alcestis for love and self-sacrifice, the Oresteia for vengeance and difficult family relationships. Each of these speaks to the students in ways Alex probably never thought about.

This is a well-paced novel, though rather claustrophobic in its focus on Alex: the students are not as fully characterised, but they have distinct personalities. Haynes also depicts the dark and cold of an Edinburgh winter very vividly. (Maybe I don't want to move to Scotland after all.) And amid the monsters, there is kindness and support. If only it had been there sooner for the fourth-year class.

I bought this in May 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/139: Forest of Memory — Mary Robinette Kowal

Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable. The cloud is just there, all the time. You reach for it without thinking and assume it will be there. [p. 25]

Novella set a century or two in our future: Katya Gould is a dealer in Authenticities and Captures, seeking out old tech such as typewriters and selling them to collectors. She's fascinated by wabi-sabi, the marks of use and decay on an object: 'something that witnesses and records the graceful decay of life'. And she records everything she experiences, thinks, sees -- until she meets a man in the forest and he somehow severs her connection to ... everything.

Kowal explores our increasing reliance on technology and the way it distances us from the real world, and especially the natural world. Katya's abductor, who calls himself 'Johnny', at first seems to be hunting deer: but perhaps his real purpose out in the forest, out of the connected world, is something more like Katya's own.

The story is presented as Katya's account (typed on a 1918 Corona typewriter) of the days she spent in the forest with Johnny. She's constantly questioning her own memories, wondering what she has forgotten. And her fear of the forest, of a world for which she has no map, is vividly described.

I hadn't realised this was a novella when I started reading, so was surprised by what felt like an abrupt and sudden ending. When I thought about it, I realised that although Forest of Memory has the bones of a novel, it stands complete and solid in itself.

I bought this in March 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/138: Miss Pym Disposes — Josephine Tey

If God did dispose -- as undoubtedly He did in the latter end -- then perhaps the disposing was already at work. Had begun to work when it was she and not someone else who found the [evidence]. It had not been found by a strong-minded person who would go straight to Henrietta with it as soon as she smelt a rat, and so set the machinery of man-made Law in motion. No. It had been found by a feeble waverer like herself, who could never see less than three sides to any question. Perhaps that made sense. But she wished very heartily that the Deity had found another instrument. [p. 123]

Miss Pym is a former teacher, now the bestselling author of a popular book about psychology. She visits the all-girl Leys Physical Training College at the behest of her old friend Henrietta Hodge, the Principal, who has invited her to give a lecture. Miss Pym is at first discomposed by the early-morning bells, the wholesome vegetarian diet, the lack of a reading-lamp in her room. She is a lonely woman, though, and welcomes the warmth, kindness and liking bestowed upon her by the students. Then a terrible accident occurs: and Miss Pym, with her close observations of students and staff, with her knowledge of human nature, cannot help but suspect that it is not an accident at all.

This is an unusual mystery novel, because the bad thing occurs very late in the book, and the guilty party seems evident. Tey's pacing is admirable, but it's her eye for character that impressed me most. Miss Pym is well aware of her own failings ('Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency') and, later in the novel, berates her own inadequacy. ('As a psychologist she was a first-rate teacher of French'.) She interprets physical appearance as an indication of character, despite understanding that 'face-reading' is not regarded as a credible science, and is prone to forming snap judgements. By the end of the novel, Miss Pym's disposal -- her decision to act on the basis that the 'right' thing is not always the 'proper' thing -- seems monstrous. While Tey has told us that Miss Pym is sweet, kind and well-meaning, she has shown us Miss Pym's flaws in merciless detail.

Miss Pym Disposes is in some respects a dated novel: there are prejudices of race, class and nationality (Teresa Desterro, a talented and flamboyant Brazilian dancer studying at Leys, is known as the Nut Tart), and references to the friendship of head girl 'Beau' Nash and gym star Mary Innes as 'not normal... David and Jonathan'. Although the novel was published just after WW2, I suspect that it's set in the 1930s: there is no mention of the war, of rationing, of Germans being in any way undesirable as colleagues or friends. There are very few men in the novel: even fewer with anything approaching a role in the story. So perhaps the shadow of wartime is present after all.

I bought this in July 2018, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/137: The House at the Edge of the World — Julia Rochester

We were conjoined at some point of the soul. It was a terrible epiphany. Combined, we made a monster. Somewhere I had read that in a case of conjoined twins one tends to be stronger, sapping the other’s blood and organs. I wondered which of us was the parasite. [loc. 2401]

John Venton fell off a Cornish cliff on his way back from the pub one night. After his death, his twin children -- Morwenna and Corwin^* -- go their separate ways: Morwenna eventually to London to bind books, and Corwin to volunteer in far-flung corners of the world. But seventeen years later, their grandfather Matthew's illness brings Morwenna back to Thornton, the family house.

Matthew, whose ambition to leave this corner of Cornwall was foiled by ill health, has devoted much of his life to painting a huge and intricate map of the area around the house, a circle with a radius of twelve miles, which is as far as he could walk in one day and still be home by evening. The map is full of iconic representations of Matthew's life and its events: a seagull's nest with one egg, a viper in a heap of leaves, a farting devil. And it hides (of course) a secret.

The focus of the novel is the relationship between Morwenna, the narrator, and her twin brother. Morwenna is thoroughly unlikeable, but honest and self-aware. Corwin is superficially lovely, but perhaps rather hollow. Their close bond excludes and alienates their parents, as well as Morwenna's boyfriend and the shared friends of their teenage years. (There is a splendidly catastrophic scene at a wedding when Morwenna and their mother argue.) Morwenna knows if it's Corwin calling as soon as the phone rings. And she has a plan to bring him back to Thornton.

This was a beautifully written novel that, with hindsight, was also quite depressing. It's hard to warm to Morwenna, and her mother is pitiable and unpleasant. I didn't get much sense of Corwin, perhaps because Morwenna thinks of him as an extension of herself. The only truly likeable character was Matthew. And the secret at the heart of this novel, which could have blossomed into something positive, became poisonous. Fascinating emotional interactions, and powerful evocations of the Cornish coast and countryside: but, like Corwin, something hollow at the centre.

Splendid and positive review by the much-lamented Diana Athill.

I bought this in June 2017, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

^* I am unable to read the name 'Corwin' without being immersed in memories of Zelazny's 'Chronicles of Amber'. The twins were named by their mother, who always felt out of place at Thornton, 'overcompensating for not being local'.

2024/136: In Cold Blood — Truman Capote

“Am I sorry? If that’s what you mean—I’m not. I don’t feel anything about it. I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. Half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we’re not human." [loc. 4734]

Capote claimed to have invented the 'non-fiction novel' with In Cold Blood. Serialised in the New Yorker in 1965, the decades since its initial publication have cast considerable doubt on Capote's 'immaculately factual' account of the Clutter family murders. Still, this work provides a thorough, if dramatised, summary of the case.

Capote's prose reads like fiction, with metaphors aplenty (the stray cats gleaning roadkill from radiator grills, for instance) and explorations of character. His study of Perry Smith (who may have committed all four murders, or just two of them) is sympathetic, and reads as a depiction of a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The album of bodybuilder pictures; the protests such as 'Some queers I’ve really liked. As long as they didn’t try anything'; the way that Dick, his co-defendant, calls him 'honey'. Perry's own letters show that he's articulate and ambitious ('I happen to have a brilliant mind. In case you don’t know. A brilliant mind and talent plus. But no education...'). Capote makes it clear that Smith was psychologically damaged by a rough childhood. Dick, on the other hand, is a rapist, a paedophile and a man who enjoys running over stray dogs. (Perry, by way of contrast, tames a squirrel after he's imprisoned for the murders.)

The Clutter murders were opportunist, difficult to tie to the culprits because so random: Smith and Hickock drove hundreds of miles to rob a man they'd never met, a man who a fellow prisoner told them had a safe full of money. (He didn't.) Capote writes 'The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning.' And though his depiction of the victims is sympathetic and touching, he never met them: it was the murderers, and especially Perry Smith, who held his attention.

Read for a 'true crime' reading challenge on StoryGraph, and because it's a classic work. I liked the prose more than the subject matter.