2024/110: A Land — Jacquetta Hawkes

The mountains would endure to feed those roots of human nature which are starved in cities and even among cornfields. It was a hunger that began to be felt in the eighteenth century when Englishmen had won their battle against too much darkness and began to be conscious of too much light. By the end of the Palaeozoic era the possibility of Wordsworth was assured. [p. 62]

This post-war classic, published in 1951, is an account of the geology, archaeology, history and geography of Britain: 'the image I have sought to evoke is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece'. It's beautifully written, vividly imagined, and sometimes patriotic (as Robert Macfarlane writes in his introduction, 'its well-intentioned rhetoric of ‘the land’ and ‘the people’, its mobilising of a ‘blessed heritage of farmers, sailors, poets, bravely advancing into the age of radar and jet propulsion’'). 

Hawkes is good, and often very poetic, on prehistory and the shifting geology of the British Isles, and on the migrations of prehistoric people. She is perhaps less convincing when she asserts that the eighteenth century was the height of human achievement ('Only the most prejudiced can deny that the eighteenth century, and especially the reign of Queen Anne, was for all classes one of the best times to have been alive in this country.' [p. 184]) and that the Industrial Revolution was a step backwards. But she does excuse her observations on the 20th century as 'murmurings representative of a consciousness subjected to the conditions of the year A.D. 1949.' (p. 198)

This was my bedtime reading for months, and it was a pleasurable experience even when I disagreed with the author. I fell asleep with Hawkes' images in my mind: 'the three eyes of trilobites perhaps dazzled by flames and flashes while the floating colonies of graptolites were flung into the air, when volcanic energy was enough to break through the water and make a true eruption in mid-ocean' [p. 44]; of Roman statues buried beneath the earth: 'did these impassive and unseen heads remain unchanged by the mental tides flowing above them; can they be said to have been the same objects in the Dark Ages, in medieval times, in the eighteenth or the nineteenth century?' [p. 169] She pokes gentle fun at America, refers to Robert Graves' The White Goddess as history, and discusses the Bronze Age custom of burying sea-urchin fossils with the dead. Engrossing, occasionally outdated, and often full of joy.

...what could be more youthful than England in April? It has taken three thousand million years to create that youthfulness, those fierce young buds and frail eggs, greenness that seems to cry aloud, those songs in the throats of birds... [p. 37]

2024/109: The Pigeon Tunnel — John Le Carré

... my readers will see for themselves to what extent an old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them. [loc. 3938]

Subtitled 'Stories from My Life', this is a collection of essays that Le Carré describes as 'true stories told from memory', with the roles of nuance and creativity acknowledged. Here we find Margaret Thatcher arguing with Le Carré about the Palestinians; Yasser Arafat with a soft and silky beard; Rupert Murdoch, who has 'that hasty waddle and little buck of the pelvis with which great men of affairs advance on one another'; Alec Guinness, who became friends with Le Carré after starring as Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Nicholas Elliott, whose friendship with Kim Philby was the focus of Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends; Graham Greene, who was delighted to find that there was a code sequence for 'eunuch' ... and newsreader Reginald Bosanquet, whose inexplicable largesse kept Le Carré (or rather David Cornwell) at Oxford when he'd run out of funds. There are poignant passages about his difficult relationship with his father (con artist and gambler) and his emotionally unavailable mother. There is surprisingly little about his time as a spy ("I feebly protested that I was a writer who had once happened to be a spy rather than a spy who had turned to writing") or about his personal life.

But what engaged me here was the same phenomenon that engages me when I read his novels: the precise observation of minutae, like that description above of Rupert Murdoch's waddle-and-buck, and the ear for voices which is evident in his accounts of meeting warlords, journalists, businessmen, politicians. Some of these, he tells us, were foundations for some of his characters. He is interested in them as people: he is profoundly interested in people.

2024/108: Mary Ellen, Craterean! — Chaz Brenchley

Her friends were made of sterner stuff, seemingly -- or else just more used to being schoolgirls, and therefore deceiving adults for their own good. [p. 86]

I enjoyed Three Twins at the Crater School enough to sign up for the author's Patreon, which recently bestowed Mary Ellen, Craterean! on its subscribers. (This is the third in the series: must get around to the second ...) Imperial Mars, the Eternal Empress in her coccoon, and boarding-school hijinks! Mary Ellen has been granted a scholarship to the Crater School, funded by a best-selling lady novelist who's an alumna of the school, and who visited Mary Ellen's isolated farmstead to do some research. At first Mary Ellen is overwhelmed by her schoolmates -- especially the Crew, a gaggle of nine girls who support and help one another and who are honourable, good sports et cetera. Mary Ellen is the one who's good with words: but school is so full of opportunities that it drains her energy, even before a horrid revelation that may mean she has to turn her back on friends, school magazine and all those books, and return to the farm where she grew up.

This is immensely evocative of all those breathless boarding-school novels -- Malory Towers, Chalet School -- though the discipline is sometimes a little harsh, and perhaps I did not need to read quite so many pages about game-playing: but Mary Ellen and her friends are cheerful and likeable, and there's something very cozy about the setting. I long for more of the Imperial Mars, and the naiads, though ...

Hmmm, I see I do own the second in the series, Dust Up at the Crater School. Soon!

2024/107: The Duke at Hazard — K J Charles

Daizell was ingenious, and Cassian was a duke, with all that entailed: wealth, power, authority. Between them, they’d come up with something, just as soon as Cassian admitted that he’d been lying to him from the moment they’d met. [p. 211]

The Duke of Severn is an unassuming young man with many names and titles. He goes by his favourite of those names, Cassian, when he's travelling the West Midlands incognito -- ostensibly because of a wager with his cousin Leo, that he couldn't survive for a month without the trappings of his title, but actually because, following an ill-judged liaison with a handsome young fellow at an inn, the Duke's ancestral ring (along with everything else he carried, including his clothes) was stolen. Cassian is still smarting from having been duped, and he's determined to find the man in the mulberry coat. 

En route, he encounters Daizell Charnage, disgraced minor nobility now making a living as a shape-cutter. (Think silhouettes, but as per the author's afterword, 'the word silhouette was not used in English until around 1825... you can't find this more annoying than I did'. [p. 324]) There's a strong mutual attraction, but Cassian dare not reveal his true identity: or rather the identity he's trying to escape from. The novel also features a carriage accident, an eloping heiress, Cassian's other and much more likeable cousin Louisa, a kidnapping, and the dastardly Sir James Vier. And there are cameos from some of the characters from previous novels in the 'Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune' books (A Thief in the Night and The Gentle Art of Fortune-Hunting).

This was an absolute delight: I raced through it, reread the two earlier works and then read it again. There's something about the dialogue, or the ways in which even minor characters feel like glimpses of people with whole lives, or the ever-present class conflict, or the fleeting allusions to other novels by the author... whatever it is, it has me hooked. I especially enjoyed the contrast between 'Cassian' and 'the Duke', sometimes in a single scene: Cassian says at one point that 'I cannot be Severn all the time, only doing what Severn does and behaving as Severn must, with no life of my own ... I will die in there.’ There is an absolutely splendid shape-cutting metaphor for those two identities, which made me want to applaud. Daizell, too, is a likeable and complicated man with a great line in metaphor: and the scandalous events that overshadow his life may not be entirely insoluble, either.

A splendid read, with complex emotional stakes, lots of period detail, sex scenes that are thoroughly in character, and plenty of humour.

2024/106: The Instrumentalist — Harriet Constable

He lifts his arms. They lift their instruments.
A curl of red from the violins, a spiral of gold from the cellos.
And his face instantly drops.
Because this is not what he planned. This is not what he expected at all. [loc. 4840]

As a baby, Anna Maria della Pietà is deposited at the Ospedale della Pietà by her sex-worker mother. Like her mother, Anna Maria 'sees' colours. She is a naturally gifted musician, and attracts the attention of the music master, who agrees to teach her. (His full name is not given in the text, but he is Antonio Vivaldi.) Anna Maria grows up determined to make a name for herself, sacrificing everything -- especially friendship -- for her ambition to be a famous composer. She certainly receives a great deal of popular acclaim, and the famous Tartini declares her 'maestro'. But this is 18th-century Venice, and her teacher (having taught her and the other girls of the figlie di coro to compose in his own style) makes it clear that no female name shall appear on any of the compositions they have worked on together.

Constable evokes the sounds, scents and tastes of Anna Maria's world, from the fish and salt and spices of the waterfront to the colours of the music that drifts through Anna Maria's dreams of drowning. Though Anna Maria's life is sheltered, the darker realities of life are never far away: illness, unwanted pregnancy, theft, the men who attend concerts solely because they wish to marry Pietà girls. And the girls themselves can be cruel -- Anna Maria most definitely included.

Perhaps the novel would have been better without the introductory chapter, describing Anna Maria's conception and birth and the origin of her nightmares about drowning: and perhaps her behaviour is sometimes anachronistic. But her rage at her teacher's duplicity, and her determination to perfect her art, are all too familiar, and Constable weaves an engaging account of Anna Maria's disillusionment, and her vengeance. The novel is well-researched and the author's afterword provides a useful list of sources, and a summary of Anna Maria's life after the end of The Instrumentalist.

Fulfils the ‘Author debut in second half of 2024’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 15 AUG 2024.

2024/105: Shark Heart — Emily Habeck

...it was happening: the holiest of creative experiences, when two ingredients, the actor and character, combined to form a new substance entirely, one resembling nothing of its parent components. Lewis would enter the uncomplicated consciousness of a great white shark in extended flashes, desiring nothing but food and survival, and then return to himself, the human, with all his hopes, loves, dreams, and memories. [p. 72]

This is the story of Lewis (failed actor and enthusiastic high-school drama teacher) and his wife Wren, in their only year of marriage. Soon after the wedding, Lewis begins to suffer mysterious symptoms, and is eventually diagnosed 'with a mutation. Carcharodon carcharias'. He is turning into a great white shark: the mutation is rare, but not unheard of, and the process is irreversible. In parallel to his narration (some of which is presented in the form of a script), we see Wren's fear and determination. But not until the second part of the novel, which is the story of Wren's mother, do Lewis and Wren's stories begin to come together, to make something more than the sum of their parts.

This is a love story, and a novel about a world in which zoomorphic mutations (which have a genetic basis) afflict some small percentage of the population. The animals these people become are typically released into a 'placement' when their mutation completes. Before that, their animal instincts may overcome their human impulses. While Lewis is mourning the loss of colour as his eyes mutate, Wren is trying to negotiate life with a dangerous predator.

Which may be a metaphor. 

And it's possible to read the mutations as metaphors for illness, especially the forms of illness that transform a person into something unknown and unknowing. But this beautiful novel (which I needed to read twice to fully appreciate) doesn't require interpretation. I think it will live in my head for a long time, and I shall follow the author's career (this is her first novel) with hope and fascination.

2024/104: Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs — Barbara Mertz

Admiring students of ancient Egypt have credited the Egyptians with the invention of many interesting and useful pursuits, but no one has ever given them their due as the originators of the pernicious habit of scribbling on tourist attractions. [p. 56]

First published in 1964, and updated several times since then (for instance, to acknowledge the 'enormous fun' of Raiders of the Lost Ark), this is the classic 'popular history' of Ancient Egypt: it turns out also to have influenced Rosemary Harris' trilogy (starting with The Moon in the Cloud) set in Old Testament times, in which Canaanite animal tamer Reuben visits Egypt several times. And Mertz, as Elizabeth Peters, also wrote the immensely popular Amelia Peabody books (starting with Crocodile on the Sandbank) with their 'lady Egyptologist' heroine, and mostly set in late 19th century Egypt. Excellent credentials, and this book did not disappoint.

Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs is an enjoyable and informative read, covering the history of Egypt from Menes, the first King of the Two Lands, to the decline of Egyptian civilisation under the Romans -- a period of three thousand years. It's enlivened by the author's distinctive voice and sardonic observations: she has no time for 'pyramidiots' but is fond of theories that have a romantic resonance. Her love for her subject is evident on every page. I learnt a lot about the different dynasties, the role of women (and especially royal women), and the changing fashions in burial, from pots of aromatic ointment to mere depictions of those pots. 

She also has an excellent summary of Egyptian artistic style, with its faces in profile and eyes in front view: 'The Egyptians did not work in this way because they could not draw a face in front view; behind their technique was a concept of the universe that made visual impressions unimportant. They did not care what something looked like, but what it was like, and they worked out a way of expressing the essential qualities of objects that satisfied them so thoroughly that they continued to use it for three thousand years.' [p. 73] And her account of some of the enduring puzzles of Egyptology (empty sarcophagi, Akhenaten's physiognomy) are engaging and clear.

One vexing issue was that 'off' had been replaced by 'of' nearly everywhere -- 'she cast of the trailing skirts of a woman and put on the kilt and crown of a king, and she carried it of for twenty years' and, even more egregiously, 'the of spring of the reigning monarch'. Confusing, until I'd identified the issue.