Cat carton

While walking to the coffee shop (I do that a lot, so sorry for keeping mentioning this), I spotted a nice medium empty cardboard box on a corner.

I spent a chunk of last month searching for, re-assembling, and generally coveting medium cardboard boxes because I was donating Demeter's books to the annual Times-Colonist book drive, and my mother was a voracious reader.

I ended up with 19 boxes of books:  my Friend of the Right Hand transported 16 of them, and one of Demeter's merciful neighbours kindly fitted the other three into her car, alongside another neighbour's 3-box donation.

At the coffee shop, I mulled over whether I should take the abandoned box, seeing as the book drive is long over, and reasoned my recent experience indicates that containers are hard to come by -- and there are at least a boxful of books left in Demeter's apartment.  I figured that if the box was still there, I was meant to take it home.

It was.  I did.  I shook out the grass and leaves and insects first.

At home, I put it out where I would see it and remember it.

Now I don't have the heart to move it.

Advent-tageous

Have you ever had an Advent Calendar so witty, you've not been that anxious to open the doors?

This year is the year for me.

This morning, I was searching in vain for door #3, and I fell to perusing and enjoying the loopy titles, and rather wishing they were actual books.

So far, my favourite is The Red Nose of Courage.  My least favourite is the extremely unappetising Green Egg Nog and Ham.

(Door Number 3 turned out to be on the spine of Les Mistletoe.)

We readers are very witty

So, I'm minding my own business this morning in the coffee shop. I've just taken a big bite of my cherry/yoghurt Danish (my favourite, which is not always available), when two gentlemen approach my table. They're a bit Mutt-and-Jeff-ish - does anyone know what that is, anymore? - one fellow is pleasantly plump with a short groomed salt-and-pepper beard, and the other is very tall indeed with white hair and mustache.

The shorter man excuses himself and begins: "This may seem a little strange..." I chew and swallow quickly and apprehensively.
He continues: "We're from the Zone, and we noticed that you have a lot of books on your table. Are you a reader?"

I know The Zone is a local radio station - that's about all I know about it, except it's a rock/pop station, and, thinking they're doing some sort of survey, I quickly explain, "Well, these are mostly journals, but..." I pluck a library book from the pile. ". . . I do have an actual book here."

"So you are a reader!" they exclaim.  One of them fishes out a envelope.
"We'd like to present you with this fifty-dollar gift certificate for Bolen Books!"

My surprise and joy is unfeigned.  Bolen Books is the largest independent book-store in Victoria; they have everything.  I stare at the envelope and say, in a rather high-pitched rush of emotion:  "This is like coke!"

The two men laugh heartily and walk away, wishing me a wonderful day.  The tall one says, over his shoulder, "That was very funny."

He apparently doesn't realize that I wasn't joking.

This is a hold-up

Got a message from elder daughter this morning. I was in the middle of my art lesson at the time, and my fellow students looked around for the harp. (I find it less stressful than the whistles and bells usually used for notification.)

When you have library fees, she texted from Hades, you are a "delinquent" user. Just one more delinquent book to go and then I should be on the straight and narrow.

She's been piling up and extending library holds since obsessively insisting on reading all seven books in the Harry Potter series in French. She thought she could do it over the Christmas holidays. She was wrong. She finished last week, and there's an impressive stack of library books on her coffee table.

Not that I can talk. I annually insist - that's "annually", not the other adverb you might be inserting - on watching as many Oscar-nominated films as I can manage before the Academy Awards ceremony. I got to five of the eight so-called Best Film nominees, plus a half-dozen films that figured in other categories.

This means I will be reading books from my own suddenly burgeoning holds list. Most of the films were "based on real events". We all know what that means, don't we? Two books on Dick Cheney (Vice) have just become available, and I expect my requested book on Queen Anne (The Favourite) to follow fast. I'll have to wait quite a bit longer for the books Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Black Klansman, the latter being the inspiration for this:

For the record, my favourite of the bunch was Roma, and my least favourite was Bohemian Rhapsody.

Sure, I like Queen, but this movie had every cliché in the book - which isn't on hold.

Book buddies

At Russell Books, I'm searching for a book that Demeter has long desired, the third part in an out-of-print trilogy about Elizabeth I.

A fellow is camped out by the British History shelf, so we have to pick our way around him -- good-naturedly, of course, as he is clearly a kindred spirit, just by being here.

"Such a wonderful shop," he glows up at me, as I step over him gingerly.


"Amazing!" I agree.  "What a selection, and the books are in great shape!"  (Russell's, if you haven't heard of it, claims to be the largest shop for rare, used, and out-of-print books in Canada, and the books are usually in pristine condition.  Elder daughter managed to acquire a large fraction of the works required for the Foundation Year Programme in her first year at the University of King's College in Halifax -- and that was one hell of a list.)

"I shouldn't be allowed in here with a credit card."

"There should be a buddy system for Russell's, like in AA."

This amuses him mightily.  "That's right! 'Just put your money in your pocket; I'll come get you...'"

He proudly tells us that the volume he's holding has more than twenty references to an ancestor of his, who had a position in the Elizabethan/Jacobean courts, and who miraculously survived, even after getting mixed up with Walter Raleigh.

A fellow family researcher, I think to myself as I head to the cashier to get help in my own quest.  I might have known.  Russell's must be crawling with them.

Demeter's book, as it turns out, is in the basement with the "vintage" books.

Another wrinkle

Yesterday morning I woke early, after a late night, unwilling to get up and dress just yet, but not wanting to wake my husband.  I padded down to the living room to retrieve my laptop, because I've been deliberately keeping it downstairs to discourage myself from going online before the day has properly begun.

However,  I had gone to sleep with the briefly glimpsed corner of a mystery on my mind.  It seems that the Disney corporation will be attempting to bring A Wrinkle in Time to the big screen.  There have been attempts before, including an adaptation to the small screen, an unsatisfactory televised version.  I'm wondering if a satisfactory version is possible, but I have a daughter living on the autistic spectrum, and thus have acquired an appreciation for movies, television specials, and graphic novels based on classics, so I tried to find out a little bit more.

In doing so, I noticed a sentence fragment in a Google search just before I went to bed, something about her son's death in 1999.  Madeleine L'Engle herself died in 2007, but I do not ever recall her writing about Bion Franklin's death; she devoted nearly a whole book to the final year of her husband Hugh. It was late, and I was working on something else, so I set my puzzlement aside for the morning.

With the covers over my head to block the dimmed light from the screen from the sleeping Resident Fan Boy,  I went back to the link --- and learned that Bion Franklin had died in his forties from the effects of alcoholism.  Bion?  The little boy who was the model for Charles Wallace Murry and Rob Austin?  I entered a few more search terms and stumbled on a 2004 New Yorker article, which said, among many other things, that Bion and his adopted sister Maria loathed the cycle of books about the Austin family, and that L'Engle's children and grandchildren alike detest L'Engle's Crosswick Journals series, especially Two-Part Invention which was L'Engle's memoir about her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin. Hugh Franklin drank quite a bit and had at least two extra-marital affairs.

Their eldest child Josephine read it and apparently thought: Who the hell is she talking about?

The New Yorker article, which has become quite notorious amongst L'Engle fans and which somehow I'd managed to miss, is not a hatchet-job.  It also reflects the love L'Engle's family had for her along with the exasperation.  But I, huddled under the covers with my glowing laptop, was fighting back my shock and a sense of loss.  I've read everything L'Engle wrote, with the possible exception of her poetry.  I grew up with the four books that begin with A Wrinkle in Time, and of course, I loved the Austin books which were about the sort of family I'd never had.  It turns out that L'Engle may not have have had that sort of family either.  The Crosswick Journals were the sort of books to which I'd turn again and again for comfort, wisdom and perspective.

As the shock wore off, an odd sense of relief took over.  I felt consoled by all this dysfunction somehow, and besides, I recognized something about her children's feelings -- anger, bewilderment, and the sense of having no say in the story.  It was the same feeling I had when I read the biographical essay featured in my father's order of service.  I wonder if they too had the cold sweat when they read the matriarch's version of their family?  Coincidentally, Alan Jones, L'Engle's ex-son-in-law, was the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco when my dad's service was held there.  Possibly he still is.  Speaking of L'Engle, he refers to the "confirmed construction of the self by means of narrative" which could also be a charitable way of describing the legend my father built up to support his life in California.

I don't know what I'll find now when I revisit L'Engle's books, particularly the Crosswick Journals, but I've been rereading many of my favourite books this past year (no L'Engle ones, as it happens), and I'm rediscovering that no book will ever be the same, anyway. That's probably true of most things.

Saving Robertson Ay

I don't think it's an overstatement to say that I was obsessed with Mary Poppins when I was eight.  There were no videos or DVDs when I was that age, so I spent most of my spare time playing the music and replaying the movie in my head.

The fetish continued. I dressed up as Mary Poppins the Hallowe'en I was nine and insisted on saying "Supercalifragilistic thank-you!" when we got treats, until the friends with whom I was trick-or-treating begged me to stop.

On windy days, I'd feel the pull on my umbrella and pray that just this once, I'd finally sail over the rooftops.

It wasn't only the film. (Although, frankly, I would have killed to become Julie Andrews.)  The movie brought me to the books which I collected and devoured and re-read.

By the time my little girls discovered Mary Poppins, the magic wore off a little, possibly rubbed away by sheer repetition, DVDs being readily available.

Still, I'm not sure if I can fully articulate my excitement when I discovered last fall that Emma Thompson (Emma Thompson, the closest I've come to a full-on girl crush) would be playing PL Travers in Saving Mr Banks.  Elder daughter emailed from Halifax:  "We're going to this, right?"

And we went. And it was a skillfully-made picture -- entertaining, a wee bit manipulative, but it's Emma Thompson, people.  (All I ask -- all I ask, please -- is a movie, or television series starring Emma Thompson, Julie Andrews and Alex Kingston.  Wouldn't you watch it?)

And at the end, I found myself fighting tears.  Now, they have PL Travers watching Mary Poppins and weeping, giving the erroneous impression that she was moved.  (As far as I can tell, she never came to terms with the Disney-fied versions of her precious characters.)  But I was weeping -- struggling not to weep --- because I had been blind-sided by memories.  I had forgotten about how much that movie had meant to me when I was eight, and how much the books meant to me when I was nine.

And I had completely forgotten Robertson Ay.  There's a story in Mary Poppins Comes Back (the second in the series) when we hear the back-story of Robertson Ay, the Banks family's perpetually sleepy gardener.  Part of me thinks that Robertson Ay, not Mr Banks, is based on PL Travers' dreamy and alcoholic father.  And I know a little bit about that.

So I sat while the cinema emptied, thinking about a nine-year-old girl with an umbrella on a windy day.

Evil comes in increments

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had to wait about seven months in the library holds queue for this, and when I finally got my sticky fingers on it (which I wiped off, because it was a library loan), I was at first anxious because this audiobook version has a different reader and part of the reason I'd enjoyed Wolf Hall so much was because of the performance of Simon Slater.  I needn't have worried; Simon Vance is every bit as talented as the other Simon.

This second part of the trilogy about the controversial life and career of Thomas Cromwell covers a much shorter period of time than Wolf Hall -- the brief period that Anne Boleyn was the official consort of Henry VIII -- while being about the same number of pages.  I trust you know what happened to her. This has the effect of intensifying the narrative.

I was looking forward to discovering how Hilary Mantel, who portrayed Thomas Cromwell in a sympathetic light in the previous book (the story is from his viewpoint, after all) would transform this chief minister of the king from a fairly decent man into someone who could send a woman to the scaffold, knowing full well that the charges against her were fabricated.  Anne Boleyn is not shown in a flattering light, but being a bit of a cow shouldn't be a death sentence. The answer comes in increments, as most evil things do.  In Bring Up the Bodies (a sinister title, but actually a legal expression), Cromwell has no grand plan to bring about Anne's death, but one unfortunate statement after another gradually seals the queen's fate.

I particularly enjoyed the imagery in this novel, from the eerie descriptions of Cromwell's hunting hawks (named after his dead wife and daughters) which open this part of the story to the description of the doomed queen's reflection in the Thames as she is led out to the boat that will take her to the Tower of London.

It will be a long wait for the third part of the trilogy -- Mantel is still writing it, and then there will be many holds ahead of me at the library.  Judging from what has come before, the wait will be worth it.



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Another argument for not getting your history from films

Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Relationship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley by Geoffrey C. Ward

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When I saw the film Hyde Park on Hudson a few months ago, I had never heard of Margaret Suckley (pronounced "Sookley"), but I do know something of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his era, so I found myself questioning what I was seeing.  Of course, the thing with so-called historical films is that there is a time constraint and a need to create dramatic tension, so you know the facts are going to be meddled with.  Still, the President getting a blow-job in an automobile in a secluded field?  A bit Bill Clinton, isn't it?  The King and Queen of England becoming anxious at the idea of consuming hot dogs?  A bit over-the-top, wouldn't you say?

As the credits rolled, I noted that the movie was based on a play, and the play was based on a book.  I went home and placed a hold on the only copy in the library.  It took three months for my turn to come up.

At first, I thought the wait had been a waste of time.  Geoffrey C. Ward, a well-known biographer who has collaborated on occasion with the documentary film-maker Ken Burns, is not the author of this book, but the editor and annotator of this collection of the letters and diaries of Margaret Suckley, whom he had met while researching his own books on FDR.  My disappointment gradually abated as I read further.  Margaret (known as "Daisy") was articulate, idealistic, and absolutely in love with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was her distant (sixth) cousin.  (His wife Eleanor Roosevelt was her fourth cousin, while FDR and Eleanor were themselves fifth cousins once removed.)

Daisy is very much a product of her time and class.  Although her family had lost much of their wealth during the twenties and thirties, she speaks from a viewpoint of privilege and her attitudes towards people of colour, although liberal for the times, would get her into a lot of trouble today.  She does, however, come across as sweetly naive, and you will not find a word of criticism against FDR whom she worshiped. 

It was this very lack of criticism and her willingness to keep in the background that, no doubt, kept her in the very inner ring of FDR's circle long after the intensity of their friendship slackened. It was a friendship that lasted more than thirty years, and she was present at his death.  Did this relationship ever involve a Bill-Clinton-ish encounter in an automobile?  After reading Daisy's letters and diaries (some of FDR's letters and notes are included), I somehow doubt it.  Both FDR and Eleanor had intense and romantic friendships, and I supposed some of them may have involved physical intimacy.  However, Daisy's starry-eyed adoration over many years doesn't seem to fit in with that.  We need to remember that it was a very different time.

For anyone interested in Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his era, this is indispensable, and Ward's annotations are even-handed and unobtrusive.



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Psychopaths I have known

Last autumn, I came across this article in the Globe and Mail which includes an interview with author Kevin Dutton and an overview of his book The Wisdom of Psychopaths. I felt a dropping in my stomach as I read it, because at the end of the article were two lists: one denoting leadership traits, the other the corresponding psychopathic traits. The first list came fairly close to describing my father. The second list pretty much nailed him. I sat in a mild state of shock for a few minutes, then logged into my local library's web site and put a hold on the book.

Dr Kevin Dutton begins The Wisdom of Psychopaths with tales of his own father and his father's audacity. Neither Dutton's dad nor mine was a serial killer (so far as I know). This is the point. We use the term "psychopath" as a synonym for "serial killer". This isn't so, and Dutton is by no means the first person to make this point. Most of us probably personally know people living with autism, Parkinson's Disease or schizophrenia. (I certainly do.) Why wouldn't we also know functional psychopaths?

Dutton describes how the very qualities that help politicians, surgeons, military intelligence operatives, CEOs and sales people rise in their professions and succeed in what they need to do are similar to traits shared by some of the most dangerous people in our society. He calls these "The Seven Deadly Wins": ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness (as in living in the here and now), and action ("Psychopaths," Dutton declares, "never procrastinate.").

As I read, I thought of the possible psychopaths I'd encountered in my own life: a boy at school who could turn friendliness on and off like a tap, a teaching partner whose relationships with the students we shared made me uneasy, at least two of the Resident Fan Boy's bosses, and yes, my own charming, reckless, and heartless father.

I admit, though, I'm nothing but an armchair psychologist and this book, written in a glib, popular-science style, is nothing more than food for thought. An interesting read, but not something on which to base your life philosophy. Unless, like a psychopath, you have little in the way of a conscience.

HHhH (The brain of Himmler is Heydrich)

This may be a first. I'm not a consumer of the latest books. I'm a slow reader and a picky reader and most things I read have been published for at least two or three years, usually longer.

I first heard about HHhH about six weeks ago at Scott Pack's blog Me and My Big Mouth. He'd listed it as Number Two of his top books of 2012. It looked interesting, so I put a hold on it at the library, and it came up surprisingly quickly. I had just begun reading it when I spotted it at The Bluestalking Reader blog, this time because HHhH has made the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2012.

So some pathetic excitement in my life: I've actually read something that's up for an award. The irony, of course, is that HHhH was published in French in 2009; it's the translation that is copyright 2012. I wonder how much of the award is for the author, and how much for the translator (a man from Nottingham named Sam Taylor who has written three novels of his own)?

This book is about Reinhard Heydrich,

head of the SS, a chief creator of the "Final Solution", and terror of Prague, where he was eventually assassinated in 1942. I first heard of him when I was in elementary school, reading a simplified Scholastic version of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which included a brief and rather sanitized description of what the Nazis did to the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia in reprisal after Heydrich's death. To put it simply, they killed everybody except a handful of kids who could pass for Aryans. They even shot the dogs before razing the place.

This story is also about Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, the Czech and the Slovak assigned to kill Heydrich. Apart from what Heydrich represented and the horrors he unleashed, according to Laurent Binet, the Czech government-in-exile needed a powerful act of resistance so that London would remember to revoke the Munich Agreement after the war.

To interweave the stories of the marksmen and their target, Binet writes -- not a novel exactly, but a series of impressions about writing a novel about Heydrich and Kubis and Gabčík. In 257 sort of blog posts, Binet veers from Heydrich's childhood and rise to power, to the choice of Gabčík and Kubiš for the suicide mission, from Babi Yar to a brutal and possibly mythical football match between Nazis and Ukranians, from whether Heydrich's Mercedes was black or dark green to which of the Czech families who aided Kubiš and Gabčík (the vast majority of whom were shot or gassed) will be sacrificed from the narrative for brevity's sake.

Does it work? Well, yes. It's a bit distracting at times, especially when Binet hauls us back into the present to stew over details, but the final third of the book as we hurtle toward the assassination and its horrific aftermath is engrossing -- and frankly getting jerked into the present from time to time is a relief.

Will it win the award? Heck, I don't know; I never read the latest books, so I have no idea what the competition is like. This book is worth reading though, whether it wins the award or not.

In the company of cheerleaders (a tale of two novels, although one really isn't a novel)

One of my Facebook pals is a school librarian, so her postings are pithier than some I could mention, that is, she doesn't share glorified chain letters, urban legends masquerading as real events, nor quotes attributed to the wrong people. A couple of months ago, she posted a link to a Publishers' Weekly item entitled "The Top 10 Essays Since 1950".

I had a look and the one that really got under my skin was by Jo Ann Beard, a description of a day no one should have involving a dying pet, a dead relationship, and an incident that resulted in the deaths of half a dozen of her co-workers. It originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1996 and it's called "The Fourth State of Matter". I really recommend that you follow the link and read it; it's clear, engrossing, heart-breaking.

I recognized a voice I wanted to hear again, so I immediately checked the catalogue of my local public library and put a hold on In Zanesville, a novel Beard published in 2011, about that terrifying time when a girl feels her way over the chasm between childhood and adolescence.

There are three Zanesvilles in the United States; this one appears to be a tiny community south of Springfield, Illinois. (The towns of Heyworth and Waynesville are mentioned.) The time covers the months between the summer of 1972 and the following winter. ("Ooh Child" is called an "old" song and "Ben" [released the summer of 1972] is quoted.) Our heroine, whose name may be "Jan", is definitely not "Joan", and is in all likelihood Jo Ann, is fourteen, gifted, and a late-bloomer. In 1972's small-town America, this means she is still a little girl emotionally when the book opens. We follow her through a series of seemingly unimportant adolescent incidents which are, of course, life-changing to her, and by the end, we are hearing the thoughts and ideas of a teenager.

This is not a Young Adult novel. This is closer to being a memoir from someone who remembers exactly what it was like to be no longer pre-adolescent, but only barely -- and to have no idea what to do about it. Beard writes skillfully and truthfully. It may be lacking in sex and violence, but it is, nevertheless, a book for grown-ups.

The audio-book is inventively read by Jo Anna Perrin.

One of the turning points for the narrator of In Zanesville is her unexpected inclusion in a slumber party for cheerleaders. It just so happened that before I got out this audio-book, I was listening to the audio-book version of Girls in White Dresses

I felt compelled to get this book out because Marie Phillips has been rhapsodizing about it for months. Marie is a gifted writer herself, the author of Gods Behaving Badly (now a forthcoming film) and co-author of the BBC radio comedy Warhorses of Letters and the spoof Fifty Shelves of Grey, so when she recommends something, I pay attention. I don't always agree. Marie may be a fellow Taurus, but she isn't the boss of me.

Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close claims to be a novel, but it's really a series of short stories, all concerning a clique of girls from Philadelphia who get jobs (mostly) in New York. They may not be cheerleaders exactly, but they seem to share a similar sort of mentality, being privileged, well-educated, pretty girls who get jobs in areas like publishing, and when they don't, sourly contemplate how these are "not the kind of people (they are) supposed to be around". The men they date are two-dimensional and described in terms of their physical attractiveness or lack thereof (making this rather like a lot of novels by male authors, I suppose). One of the least pleasant chapters concerns a member of their set who will only go out with ugly men. Another woman wails when she is set up with an overweight date: "What about me says, Set me up with an obese person?"

Two or three of the short stories have genuine humour and show our protagonists in a more sympathetic light. One, entitled "Showers", is a neat illustration of the giddy excess and embarrassing silliness of pre-wedding rituals. Another, "Button", follows a young woman's underground power struggle with her mother-in-law. Close does best when she writes about the girls as children, or when they interact with children. This is when they come across as real human beings, perhaps because these women are nowhere near growing up. By the end of the book, there is no sense that they have developed any further than the people they were at the beginning.

Oh, I might be missing the point. Perhaps I'm failing to notice devilishly clever social satire, but the fact is, none of these women are appealing, hold my interest, nor resemble anyone I would care to meet in real life, while the heroine of In Zanesville is all three.

I think Jennifer Close is a very young writer with room to improve, while Jo Ann Beard is an accomplished writer whose further works I will seek out.

(Sorry, Marie.)

For your amusement, I leave you with two musical moments featured in In Zanesville: the - uh - remarkable Seventies soul stylings of The Five Stairsteps


...and Michael Jackson at fourteen years of age, when his face was unmarred and he was still "one fifth of the Jackson Five" That's Charlton Heston before he became the face for the NRA and yes, Michael is singing a song about a man-eating rat. Gosh, the Seventies were twisted...

Canadian actors need work too

Still Life by Louise Penny

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think I'd have given this four stars if I'd read the book instead of listening to it. Not that I have anything against Ralph Cosham as a narrator -- he's been haunting me for the past six months, showing up as the reader of Watership Down and The Woman in Black.

The thing is, those are both British books, and Still Life is a Canadian novel set in a small town outside of Montreal. There are no shortage of English accents in Canada; I grew up surrounded by them, but there are no such accents in Still Life; the characters are all anglophone and francophone Quebeckers. Come to think of it, I had similar problems with a collection of Alice Munro's short stories read by an American reader. Canadians do pronounce words differently, no matter what non-Canadians think.

Cosham's accent wraps itself awkwardly around the colloquialisms in both languages (his bio says he speaks French, but evidently not Quebecois French), and robs some of the funnier bits of their humour. Please understand, he's won awards for book narration and deservedly so, but he is ill-suited for this book. Would you enjoy a British audiobook read by an American, French, or Spanish reader? Wouldn't you find it distracting?

In spite of these reservations, I quite liked the style and plot of this mystery, even though I'm not an unreserved fan of the genre, and look forward to reading more of Louise Penny's books. Reading them, not listening to them. (Sorry, Mr Cosham; I'm sure I'll enjoy your renditions of other British works, just as I have in the past.)



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You need never read this book

Neverland: J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan by Piers Dudgeon
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

First off, I finished reading this book out of pure altruism: so you won't have to. All right, it's also because I paid for the damned thing. I found it in the bargain bin of my local bookstore and it certainly looked interesting.

And it's not a boring read, it's just a really really really irritating read. I was about a third of the way through when I pulled Andrew Birkin's J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys out of my shelves to remind myself what a good book on the subject is like. (And seriously, Andrew Birkin's book is what you need if you want a better picture of the truly eerie story of James Barrie and his relationship with the five young Llewellyn-Davies brothers; trust me, the film Finding Neverland is nowhere near what really happened.)

Then I found myself reading other, totally unrelated books because I was wasting too much time hurling this one across the room.

Finally, I forced myself to finish it and will now try to get Piers Dudgeon's general arguments in a nutshell. This will not be easy because his book swings back and forth like a pendulum, between the DuMaurier family -- particularly Daphne DuMaurier, author of Rebecca and The Birds among many other things, and her grandfather George DuMaurier, creator of Svengali -- and Barrie himself. (Daphne's aunt Sylvia DuMaurier was the mother of the five Llewellyn-Davies brothers.)

Ready?

James Barrie, author and playwright and creator of Peter Pan, was Satan.

He used his plays and books as "alchemic texts" to ensnare and mesmerize Sylvia and her vulnerable sons, as well as Daphne DuMaurier and her handsome and shallow father Gerald DuMaurier. This was apparently done by Barrie's imagining what he wanted his targets to become (inspired by the works of George DuMaurier, even though there is no evidence that the two authors met -- although Dudgeon thinks they did and says so repeatedly) and then writing them into his plays and novels, thus gaining power over them: "Theatre-goers lapped up his supernatural plays, but never quite understood why," Dudgeon claims, even though he states in a later chapter that Peter Pan is the one work by Barrie that has endured. Are we to gather by this that only early-twentieth-century audiences were susceptible to Barrie's demonic machinations?

Furthermore, J.M. Barrie was apparently responsible for the deaths of:
a)his brother David (no actual evidence, but Dudgeon thinks it's likely);
b)his sister's fiancé (Barrie gave him the horse that threw him);
c)Captain Robert Scott (Barrie apparently planted the idea in Scott's mind that he was a heroic explorer and dissuaded him from using dogs in his fatal expedition to the South Pole);
d)Arthur and Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies (who both died of cancer four years apart, but Dudgeon assures us that Daphne DuMaurier killed off Gertrude Lawrence the same way, also by the use of "alchemic texts");
e)Michael, Peter, and Jack Llewellyn-Davies (possible suicide, definite suicide, ill heath -- but Barrie, by then long-dead, had never liked Jack that much...)

Remarkably, Dudgeon does not seem to blame Barrie for the falling in battle during the First World War of his favourite Llewellyn-Davies brother, George, nor for the demise of his producer Charles Frohman who was on his way back to England at Barrie's request on the Lusitania which was torpedoed by the Germans.

At one point, Dudgeon quotes Daphne DuMaurier's biographer Margaret Forster who criticized Daphne for mixing documentary fact 'in the most awkward fashion with entirely imaginary suppositions, greatly to [the book's]detriment'. That sums up this book perfectly. Go read Birkin's book instead.

Now, I'm going to toss this into the give-away box, but not before marking it up in pencil to warn the unwary. Then I'm going to read something by someone who writes well, has a good editor, and doesn't use speculation instead of research.

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Daytime viewing

I've blogged about ghosts before:  ghosts in houses I've been in, my husband's dream encounter with his recently deceased mother, and, most unnerving of all, a haunting by someone who is still alive.  Do I believe in ghosts?  Let's just say I've never actually seen one, nor do I particularly want to.  But I will admit that one of my guilty pleasures is Celebrity Ghost Stories on the Biography Channel.  I guess I don't mind other people's experiences of the paranormal.  Frankly, I feel rather the same about family weddings -- they're great if they're happening to someone else's family...

I've just had a birthday recently and a rather ghoulish theme emerged in the presents I was given.  This was not by design; the Resident Fan Boy has found it simpler to consult a rather ancient wish list I set up at Amazon.ca, and thus I was rather startled to receive an old Granada Television anthology of ghost stories first transmitted in the early eighties entitled Shades of Darkness and the audiobook version of The Woman in Black.

Just as well the days are getting longer because there was no way I'd be working through these at night.

So I settled myself down with the DVD which features six stories, and discovered I'd remembered two of them well (which was why it was on my wish list), one vaguely, and the other three not all.  These are very old-fashioned ghost stories, none of them set any later than the 1940s, and filmed in the leisurely detailed way  which is verboten these days when the greatest crime of all is to keep anyone waiting.  The two I remembered the best were the two I found the creepiest:  The Intercessor, based on a short story by May Sinclair, with John Duttine (above) encountering the pitiful spectre of a little girl , and Afterward, based on a short story by Edith Wharton about a ghost which isn't revealed to be a ghost -- until afterward...

*Shudder*

About six years after these stories appeared on television, some bright spark came up with the idea of dramatizing The Women in Black, an 1983 novel by Susan Hill, for British television --- on Christmas Eve, of course.  (Is this a British thing?  Why does their Christmas programming involve vampires, murder mysteries and Doctor Who?)  Being a Canadian, I didn't see this production until a year or two later (and definitely not at Christmas), but I remember being scared rigid by it.  I don't remember being quite so frightened by anything else on television with the possible exception of the Gulf War.

Based on the memory of that, I headed off to an early evening show of the latest incarnation of The Woman in Black starrng Daniel Radcliffe, having made a pact with Friend With Whom I Have Coffee.  (I figured this film might be a bit too intense for younger daughter.)

 I understand that many showings have turned into adolescent scream-fests.  I'm happy to report that this was not the case where we were, although FWWIHC and I may have cried out involuntarily from time to time while futilely attempting to climb into our medium popcorn bags.  For most of the flick, I coped by watching the action through my fleece top, and concentrating on the anachronisms (example:  death certificates would not have been typed; I'm a family historian -- I know about death certificates), and clinging to them like lifelines.  At one point, I willed myself to imagine the film crew in the haunted nursery with Daniel Radcliffe, anything to take myself out of the story.

So yeah, the movie was scary. FWWIHC told me, as we worked on suppressing our shivers during the drive home, that she would definitely not be taking her three daughters who range in ages from eleven to fifteen.  Smart move.  I've met her daughters. No point in giving them more ideas. They share a macabre sense of humour.  At least, I think they're joking...

By the end of the week, I'd calmed down a bit and wondered if the 1989 production (which stars, ironically enough, a young Adrian Rawlins who would later portray Daniel Radcliffe's father in the Harry Potter movies) was indeed as scary as I remembered.  I found it on YouTube of course and spent a cold afternoon watching it.  Like Shades of Darkness, the story-telling is at a slower pace, aimed at viewers from an era of  longer attention spans and perhaps a lower threshold of squeamishness. It's a quite different story from the current movie, set in a later time and featuring an ending that doesn't resemble that of the film in the slightest. (And the book is something else again, by the way.)

I found it creepy but not quite as terrifying as I remembered.  Until I walked into the kitchen and glanced out into our neighbour's backyard and saw someone standing by the fence....

It was a sagging line of coloured pennants which had somehow tricked my eyes.  I fixed myself a warm drink and sat down until my heart stopped pounding.

The episodes of Shades of Darkness are also available on YouTube.  Take a look if you have a taste for that kind of thing.  But I'd recommended viewing them in the daylight.  With someone in the house.  Alive, that is.

Merry Titanicalia?

Last September, we had an orgy of 9/11 retrospectives, rather like a bleak sort of holiday celebrating the vaporization of three thousand people. We have now reached the end of a week-long festival of Titanic remembrances, a loving itemization of the freezing/crushing/drowning/imploding of 1500 people in 1912. There was a parade in Halifax (where many of the recovered bodies were buried); the newspapers have had series of articles on the disaster, and of course, as with 9/11, we've been treated to a week of Titanic documentaries and movies. The Turner Classic Movie Channel showed The Unsinkable Molly Brown and A Night to Remember (which features one of my indirect links to the Titanic). The fellow responsible for Downton Abbey has come up with his take on the sinking, four episodes shown repeatedly. (I've only managed to watch bits before wanting to hurl stuff at the TV.) The History Channel and The National Geographic Channel have had a field-week.

Predictably, those that aren't interested were crying "Enough!" within a couple of days, but I've been, while not exactly a "Titaniac", a follower of things to do with the big ship since I was ten, so I've been having rather a lovely time. Or does that sound morbid and inappropriate?

One intriguing aspect of having so many television presentations on one topic is the opportunity to compare. We have the really high-end specials involving mind-boggling computer graphics. They have remarkably similar titles: Titanic: Case Closed; Titanic: The Final Word and Titanic 100: Mystery Solved. While all three are engaging documentaries, brimming with well-known experts and high production values, as a family researcher, I'm leery of titles indicating completeness. History is never finished.

A bit farther down the scale are those news specials and TV series suffering from limited time and funds. Real Stories: The Real Titanic, for example, has its heart in the right place, stating (quite rightly) that what really happened was many times more dramatic and tragic than in films made about the disaster. Unfortunately, Real Stories's budget did not allow the hiring of real actors --- nor the purchase of nail polish remover. We're treated to a long shots of "re-enactors" chatting on deck (looking remarkably unmoved), or in impossibly small row-boats (most of the Titanic lifeboats had a seating capacity of between 40 to 60 people). Most distracting and improbable is a scene where a First Class passenger with pearls, a shoulder-length hair-do and blood-red nails pretends to rub invisible cream into her face.

 Aside from the more expensive, less-hastily-made shows, few have been able to resist the basic Titanic myths:
 1) She was out to break a speed record. No, Cunard was after the speed records; White Star was going for the comfort angle. She was going too fast for seas laced with ice-bergs, but that was due more than the crew being unaware of the true danger.
 2) She had been marketed as "unsinkable". The "u" word only appeared in an engineering article which described her as "practically unsinkable". Any public perception of the Titanic being indestructible came from word-of-mouth, not from advertising.
 3) The ship's band went down playing "Nearer My God to Thee".  Oh for Pete's sake. Take a look, if you will, at very similar scenes from the two most famous movies about the Titanic: 1997's Titanic and 1958's A Night to Remember.

 Go ahead, I'll wait: Notice something? There are two completely different tunes. "Bethany" is the setting most familiar to North Americans, while the usual Church of England setting, familiar to most Brits, is "Horbury". Furthermore, Wallace Hartley the band leader, was a Methodist and was said to prefer another setting called "Propier Deo". Walter Lord, the author of the book A Night to Remember, wrote a follow-up in 1986 entitled The Night Lives On (because history is never finished). If you want to read the full argument, someone has thoughtfully posted the chapter and some bonus illustrations online. (Incidentally, the article mentions "Mrs A.A. Dick of Calgary" who happened to be an acquaintance of my late mother-in-law, so there's another of my admittedly very indirect connections to the Titanic.)

 I listened online to BBC Four's The Titanic Minute by Minute which depended heavily on Lord's original book for research and claimed to be an accurate timeline of the sinking. It was a tribute to the Titanic's noble and dutiful musicians, and also featured nifty numbers from the likes of Billy Bragg and Kate Rusbury. I quite enjoyed it until BBC Four, as so many others, could not resist the pull of the legend. They played "Nearer My God to Thee", in the Bethany setting, yet! I actually screamed abuse at the computer, much frightening the dog.

 Maybe I am a Titaniac, after all.

Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run...

Watership Down by Richard Adams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Younger daughter, who is on the autistic spectrum, needed a novel for her independent reading project, so I googled "middle school books" and up came Watership Down which I'd never got around to reading. Perfect, I thought. It's about animals, which younger daughter adores, and there's a well-reviewed animated film which will provide badly-needed visuals for her very concrete-thinking mind.

In preparation for helping her get this read over the Christmas holidays, I downloaded an audio version from our public library, and listened to it on bus commutes. Ralph Cosgrove's narration is lively and doesn't distract the listener from the story. I particularly enjoyed his portrayal of Kehaar the gull as a straight-talking Scandinavian. Three things you need to know about this novel: it's gripping; it's dated; it's looooong.

Adams tells us in the forward that the novel came out of stories he would tell his young daughters on lengthy car rides. Apparently, it was the girls who suggested the stories were good enough to be written down. I can see why. This is the epic tale of a group of rabbits, led by the heroic and self-effacing hero Hazel, who flee their warren on the basis of the mystical warnings of Hazel's psychic brother Fiver. Their journey to establish a new rabbit colony in Watership Down in Hampshire is dangerous and full of death-defying deeds. (I trust it isn't a spoiler to say that surprisingly few rabbits die during the course of this novel.)

Dated? Well, it was published in 1972, and despite the fact that Adams was writing these stories for his daughters, all the main characters are male. We get a hint of heroism from the doe-rabbit Hyzenthlay who helps in the escape from the oppressive warren Efrafa, but she barely figures in the story and few of the other does are even given names. It is clear that Hazel and his fellow-bucks expect little from the female rabbits except for breeding purposes. Adams includes a rather quaint apologetic passage explaining that rabbits are practical and not romantic by nature -- as if the attitudes of the males in the story somehow differs from the attitudes of men of Adams' generation. (Adams' military background is very evident throughout.)

That said, it's an entertaining and clever book, but it does go on, including four or five rabbit legends which, although illuminating, break up and slow down the narrative. It's going to be tough going over Christmas. I wonder if younger daughter will ever forgive me.

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The hell below Haggerston

The Blackest Streets: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this book out of the library for two reasons: 1) someone recommended it in the Goodreads reviews for Lost London: 1870-1945 which I'd recently bought; 2) I thought, based on my struggles with working out historical London streets, that I had ancestors living in the Nichol around 1840. I've since discovered that my lot were actually in Haggerston, several blocks to the north, but never mind.

This is a very readable account of the neighbourhood behind St Leonard Shoreditch which, for about one century, had the reputation of being the dirtiest, poorest, and most dangerous place in London. Sarah Wise doesn't dispute the dirt and poverty, but she has some perspective to offer on the danger. The Nichol was a dangerous place to live, no doubt, but more for malnutrition, disease, and domestic violence than murder. Wise tells the story of how a rather rural area surrounded by gardens became a dark warren of poorly constructed and overcrowded buildings in a few decades. We hear what it was like to grow up in such an area, why so little was done for the residents, and finally, the grand plans to transform the neighbourhood into a wholesome and aesthetically pleasing community for the "deserving poor", with predictable results.

It's an interesting angle on the nineteenth century and underlines how much, and how very little, has changed.

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A matter of time

This picture was taken in October.

October 19th, 1910, to be exact.

I love the timelessness of it, although the rain of that long-ago day has ceased, the pavement dried, the leaves rotted, and actually, the building itself, built in the eighteenth century, was demolished in London in 1960. In 1850, a seven-minute walk away to the west, was the last residence of the Resident Fan Boy's great-great-great-grandmother Harriet Hammond Croose Pasquier where she lived with her second husband, an artist. Between 1820 and 1825, a six-minute stroll northwards from Queen's Square (would it have been called Queen's Square then?) would take you to the house of the RFB's great-great-great-grandparents in another branch, solicitor Matthew and Ann Elgie. This is where they lived briefly with their young, large family and where two of their small boys died. (The Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, which borders Queen's Square, was not yet built.) And a twenty-minute walk to the east, in 1826, my great-great-great-grandparents Richard and Virtue Hales were living in Jerusalem Passage. After a rather disastrous foray into innkeeping in the Barbican area, Richard was back to being a printer and book-seller.

I know about where our ancestors were because I've been plotting them in one of several Google Maps, after being inspired by a British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa lecture a few years ago by John Reid. I now have some idea of what our ancestors in London may have passed on a daily basis because I stumbled upon Lost London: 1870-1945 by Philip Davies in a Chapters bookstore last week. It's a coffee table book, chock-full of gorgeous plate photographs of a London demolished to make way for new structures -- or bombed all to blazes during the Second World War.

The row of buildings in the second picture (taken September 1908) used to stand on Aldgate High Street and are now where The Hoop and Grapes pub is located, one of the oldest taverns in London, with cellars dating back to the thirteenth century. If you walk for six minutes to the north, you'll find yourself in Petticoat Lane, where, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, my great-great-great-great-grandfather William Hales ran another public house, and where his children, including my three-times-great-grandfather, were born. Steps away from the houses in this photograph is St Botolph Aldgate where many of my ancestors were christened and married, probably buried too.

This bleak block of houses (taken just before its 1931 demolition) is Provost Street, Shoreditch where my great-great-great-grandfather James Janes lived with his wife Sarah and my great-great-grandmother Jane was born in 1827, the youngest of five. James worked as a tailor and was still living here at the time of the 1841 census. Did Provost Street look this forsaken at that time? I sincerely hope not.

So many others: the Strand as the Resident Fan Boy's grandmother may have remembered it; the busy streets around St Paul as the RFB's great-grand-father may have recognised it (although he probably would have been shocked by large advertisements cluttering up the surroundings just before the First World War -- he died in the 1890s); sights south of the Thames no doubt passed daily by some of my more recent ancestors.

There were several copies of this lovely book at Chapters, at a rather reasonable price....

A review of the audio book version of Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Some time around 8:30 on the morning of May 18, 1980, I was reading in bed, it being the Sunday morning of the Victoria Day long weekend. Victoria Day is a big deal in Victoria, for obvious reasons, but most of the big events take place on the Monday, so I was mildly surprised to hear what I thought was the twenty-one gun salute down at the Inner Harbour. It sounded like a steady series of explosions: Boom...boom...boom.... I didn't count them, but remembered thinking it was an odd time to be having them; such a ceremony usually took place on the hour, a bit later in the morning. It was only when the news came through from Seattle that I realized that what I'd been hearing was the catastrophic eruption of Mount Saint Helen --- two hundred miles away. Some of my Esquimalt neighbours reported the same thing; others didn't hear a thing, but noticed their windows rattling.

On August 27th, 1883, where the western tip of Java nearly meets the southern tip of Sumatra, the volcano Krakatoa finally blew itself apart, and people as far as 3000 miles away heard what they thought were cannons. Since Morse code and undersea cables were a recent innovation, the news spread quickly. At least 32,000 people had died in the monstrous tsunamis and other horrors generated by this natural disaster, the first catastrophe to be so quickly and widely reported, as well as so deeply studied.

Those coming to Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded and expecting a grisly account of the disaster itself may be disappointed. Simon Winchester begins with the leisurely and detailed objective of placing the event in every context imaginable: historic, economic, geologic, sociological, political, meteorologic.... It's a long journey indeed before he gets down to a meticulous retelling of the events leading up to and those resulting from the series of terrifying blasts in the Sunda Strait.

While it's true the story is especially gripping at that point, I found the roundabout journey compelling as well. This may be because I was listening to the audio version of the book, read clearly and pleasantly by Winchester himself. I enjoyed his dry humour and his multifaceted approach.

I have a bone to pick with him, however. In passing, he mentions the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helen, comparing it with the unbelievable cacophony of Krakatoa a century earlier and stating that in Mount St Helen's case, the blast was not heard beyond the immediate surrounding mountain range. Evidently, Mr Winchester did not speak to anyone in Victoria, British Columbia....

For those hungry for the angst and agony of Krakatoa's death throes, you might seek out the 2006 BBC docu-drama on the subject Krakatoa: The Last Days, starring Olivia Williams and Rupert Penry-Jones, which I believe features interviews with Simon Winchester himself. I haven't seen this film, which is unavailable in Canada, but some lengthy excerpts are available at YouTube: