The Blue Horse by Philip Miller, reviewed by Ali Bacon

For me the city of Edinburgh and the intrigues of the art world always make fascinating reading and I wasn’t disappointed in this novel which happens to combine the two. But The Blue Horse isn’t just a book about art. The excellent opening sets the tone. George Newhouse loved his wife and his wife was dead, because it is George’s journey through bereavement which is the real story and his shifting mindscape as much as the cityscape of Edinburgh which dominates the book.

At the beginning, George has a new job as curator of Flemish art in the fictional ‘public gallery’ which I immediately recognized as The Dean Gallery but he is distracted from work by grief, intertwined with his personal quest to trace a painting by a minor artist mentioned by Rembrandt which contrary to expert opinion he believes exists (this is The Blue Horse).
George is already living on the edge and so it doesn’t take much to tip him over when his work situation disintegrates (the gallery is to lose most of its collection) and his mentor dies unexpectedly. He also fails to form new relationships with the women who excite his interest and his old friend, the boisterous Dutchman Rudi, is focussed on his own projects.

George has the added pressure of being in charge of the gallery’s installation by a renegade contemporary artist at the Venice Biennale. And after more evidence about the Blue Horse and George’s continuing failure to address his own grief, Venice is where everything comes together – or falls apart – in a bravura climax.

I admit I wasn’t always sure what was going on in this book but then neither was George. What mattered was that all of the art background rang absolutely true (the author is an art correspondent) and there was always a question that needed answering. Although they are miles apart in many ways it’s hard not to think of Donna Tart’s Goldfinch in the way that the painting exerts its influence all the way through the book.

This is a literary novel which I think deserves a wide audience. The Kindle edition (a very reasonable £2.99) has one or two glaring typos and has been criticised by reviewers for this, but they weren't enough to distract me.
Also in paperback from Amazon or via Freight Books.

As a footnote, here's the Dean Gallery now part of the National Galleries of Scotland (and renamed 'Modern 2'). It does have a very particular character which seems to attract fiction writers. I used it in my novel A Kettle of Fish and in The Lewis Man by Peter May, it appears in its original incarnation as an orphanage.

(Photo courtesy of The Edinburgh Blog on Flickr: creative commons license)


Ali Bacon was born in Fife and lives near Bristol. She writes novels and short stories and blogs for Authors Electric on the 22nd of each month.

The Centauress by Kathleen Jones

‘The biographer, Alex thought, was always the observer, the outsider, the one whose job it was to be objective and impersonal. But how was she to do this in Zenia’s case, when she was getting more and more involved? Drawn into the story and in danger of becoming part of it? Wasn’t this what anthropologists feared? That the very act of observation affected the behaviour of those observed, the chain of events?’

When biographer Alex Forbes travels to Istria to research the life of eccentric artist Zenia de Braganza, she can have no idea how personally significant the experience will be. Alex, still suffering the after-effects of a terrible personal tragedy, is gradually drawn deeper into the life of her subject, and the unconventional household that has formed around Zenia. Zenia herself is now elderly and in poor health – though her spirit is as strong as ever – and is keen to tell her story to Alex before she dies. And what a story it is, encompassing war, death, secrets, familial disputes, tangled love affairs, and the tortured question of sexual identity.

Though she has lived her entire life as a woman, we learn that Zenia was in fact born intersex, with both male and female characteristics. Like many intersex children, past and present, she underwent surgical intervention designed to make her definitively one sex or the other. Zenia was transformed entirely into a woman – at least on the surface. The experience has left her feeling incomplete, and yet it also gives her an outlook that few others have: ‘This is what makes me unique, because I can see things from both sides.’

The issue of intersex – still little understood, and rarely discussed – is explored sensitively, sympathetically, and never pruriently. Nor does Jones present it in unduly simplistic terms; another writer might have been tempted to characterise Zenia as a straightforward heroine, or an uncomplicated victim. Jones resists this temptation: Zenia is reckless, vain, mercurial, and occasionally cruel. She is as flawed and fickle as any of us. She is not a heroine, and she is certainly nobody’s victim.

Fittingly for someone who is neither entirely one thing nor entirely another, Zenia has made her home in Istria, a region of Croatia which once belonged to Italy and retains a distinctly Italian culture and feel. Istria exists, appropriately, in both worlds. It is brought to life in beautiful detail here; reading, you can almost hear the church bells ringing and see the Adriatic in the distance. Yet, for all its beauty, it is also a place of sadness and horror, ravaged by war and tainted by remembered atrocities. Zenia’s story is, in part, the story of the twentieth century, and of the wars that ravaged Europe in that century.

Zenia’s personal history is also, as soon becomes clear, something of a warzone: friends and relatives do not necessarily want all the facts to come out, and often for very good reasons. Zenia insists that she wants the biography to tell the truth; but she herself, as Alex finds out, is not necessarily always reliable: ‘I often wonder just how much of the truth she told. Does memory lie, or does it just accommodate itself to the conventions of story-telling? Or does it, as in dreams, create narratives of its own?’

Certain loose ends in the story are never quite tied up, but I think this is probably a reflection of the frustrations inherent in biography. How does one arrive at the truth? How do you decide which one of several competing narratives is most accurate? (Kathleen Jones no doubt knows more about this than most. She is herself a biographer, having written about Norman Nicholson, Katherine Mansfield, and Christina Rossetti.) But the story has a strong narrative drive, not least because Alex, far from remaining a passive observer, becomes deeply involved in events.

And, despite all the uncertainty that arises during the story, there is a happy ending, at least for Alex. Coming to terms with past tragedies and disappointments is a theme throughout the novel, and a matter of great personal significance for Alex. We’re happy for her when, at the end, she succeeds in triumphing over her own past and can finally look forward to a happier future. A perceptive, beautiful, and ultimately inspirational novel, The Centauress is highly recommended.

The Centauress can be downloaded from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Virginia Woolf - A Critical Memoir by Winifred Holtby, reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir 

by Winifred Holtby

Published by Continuum International

Winifred Holtby, although herself a successful novelist, was very afraid of Virginia Woolf.  So much so that when she began to write her memoir she talked to everyone but Virginia, until she received a royal command to appear at Hogarth House to take tea.  Holtby was right to be nervous. Virginia Woolf’s first impressions of her were typically caustic;  ‘a Yorkshire farmer's daughter, rather uncouth, and shapeless’.  In a letter to a friend Woolf called her ‘an amiable donkey’. But if Woolf had ever troubled to read what Holtby wrote, she might have been very surprised indeed at the way her contemporary had understood what she was trying to achieve in her novels, as well as the contradictions of her character.

Winifred Holtby

The book is constructed as a series of essays on various aspects of Virginia Woolf’s character and writing. Written by a clever novelist, they are light and easy to read. The first, called ‘The Advantages of being Virginia Stephen’, focusses on Woolf’s birth and upbringing.  Winifred Holtby quotes the portrait of Katherine Hilbery in Night and Day, drawn from Woolf’s own childhood as the daughter of an eminent scholar and critic living at the heart of literary society.  ‘Again and again she was brought down into the drawing room to receive the blessing of some awful distinguished old man who sat apart, all gathered together and clutching a stick’.

Woolf  lived her life at the centre of the literary hub - Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were among the formidable old men who sat in the parlour. Later she was a contemporary of TS Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, EM Forster and Lytton Strachey - the Bloomsberries, as Mansfield called them.  For Woolf, literary legends were people you met at dinner alongside Cabinet Ministers, judges and titled aristocrats.  It was a world apart, but it was also an education - as Holtby says, Woolf ‘lived among people before whom the whole range of European literature is spread like a familiar map’.

Virginia Woolf

The fact that Woolf didn’t have a conventional education (she was home-schooled) and allowed free run of her father’s library, shaped her future as a writer and critic.  Holtby, for once, gives Woolf’s critical writing equal status with her fiction.  For Woolf theory and practice were closely tied together; more people have read A Room of One’s Own than have read To the Lighthouse or The Waves, and her critical essays - Three Guineas, Letter to a Young Poet, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, have had considerable influence on her successors and are still relevant.

But Holtby, writing in 1931, is quick to point out their underlying prejudices - ‘Every second Englishman reads French’, was a ridiculous thing to say, at a time when only 15% of the English were educated beyond the age of 14.  Woolf  didn’t understand the uneducated.  Whenever she tries to draw a working class character, Holtby writes, ‘she loses her way. They are more foreign to her than princes were to Jane Austen.’

Holtby also writes about Woolf’s complex relationship with suffragism.  Many women involved in the Suffrage movement were her friends.  They appear in her novels and their ideals are expressed in Woolf’s non-fiction. Characters like Orlando in the novel of the same name change gender, revealing prejudice and hypocrisy.  In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf  coined the expression ‘reflecting men at twice their normal size’.  But she did not take part in the campaign herself and, in most of her essays and reviews, she uses the male pronoun as convention demanded. The artist/writer is always ‘he’.

Winifred Holtby not only discusses Woolf as a woman and a writer, but also Woolf as a reader - the author of pithy reviews and essays of writerly instruction. Even though her own books were consumed by a literary elite, Woolf knew who the ‘Common Reader’ was, though she erred on the gender.  ‘The Common Reader differs from the critic and the scholar.  He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.  He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge.’  This is the person that we are all writing for - someone of only average education, neither a scholar nor a critic, reading for pleasure, and sometimes also a woman. (Statistically more often than not)

According to Woolf there are strict rules.  Ideas, morality, historical lessons, can only be presented in terms of character and plot.  Any research has to be invisible.  ‘Whatever facts, emotions and experiences the artist tastes, he must digest completely . . . There must be no foreign matter unconsumed.’  And she hates novels with a message that seem to encourage people to ‘join a society’ or ‘write a cheque’. The ‘business of the artist’, Woolf says, ‘is to provide one with a vivid and complete experience’.  There must be a reality - and reality is ‘what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of the past time and of our loves and hates ...  It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.’

Form must always serve the material - and here Woolf was extremely subversive.  ‘Mrs Woolf does not really like plots’, Holtby observes.  Nor does she like traditional ways of establishing character by description.  Woolf asks the Edwardian novelists how she should present her character Mrs Brown and gets this answer:
‘”Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate.  Ascertain the rent.  Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878.  Discover what her mother died of.  Describe cancer.  Describe calico.  Describe . . .”  But I cried “Stop!  Stop!”  And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs Brown, that vision to which I cling . . . would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.’

Woolf threw plot and narrative out of the window too and explored new ways of telling stories, taking ideas from Katherine Mansfield and adopting the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique developed by Dorothy Richardson.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Winifred Holtby’s short memoir is a real delight (which is probably why it’s been re-issued) and, if I had my way, I’d put it on the list for every creative writing student in the country.  It’s one brilliant writer’s take on another - illuminating and useful.  Woolf apparently told her friends that it had made her ‘scream with laughter’, but there’s no evidence that she ever read it.

Kathleen Jones  

Kathleen blogs at 'A Writer's Life'
and has a website at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Review – Schrodinger’s Cat, By Eileen Schuh

Reviewed by Chris Longmuir

I found this to be an unusual and intriguing book. The theme is based on quantum physics and the theory of Schrodinger’s cat, as well as Everett’s Many Worlds Theory. I did look these theories up on the internet, but I’m afraid I don’t have the kind of brain which assimilates quantum physics and the Schrodinger’s cat theory was beyond me, while the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that ‘The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is an approach to quantum mechanics according to which, in addition to the world we are aware of directly, there are many other similar worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time. The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory and thus from all physics.’

Chorie, the main character in Schrodinger’s Cat, is living two lives. In one life, her daughter is dying and in the other one, her daughter is healthy and Chorie is pregnant. But which life is the real one? Or is she indeed living in two alternative worlds? Or is the first life the real one, and the other one just wishful thinking? These were the thoughts circulating in my mind as I delved deeper into the story.

In the first life, Chorie is trying to prevent her husband taking her dying daughter from their home in Canada to Seattle, for experimental treatment which he believes will prolong her life, while Chorie just wants her daughter to die in peace. The situation becomes increasingly ugly with legal proceedings and a custody battle. In her second life she goes to Seattle to consult with a rather sinister Dr Penny, who tells her about the Many Worlds theories and convinces her she is living two lives. He offers to help by getting rid of one of her lives for her. But which life will she get rid of? And what if she chooses the wrong one?

While reading this book I found the movement between the different lives, confusing, and I was never really sure which life I was reading about. However, on reflection, I think this mirrored Chorie’s own confusion, because she was never sure either, and the sign of a good writer, is one who is able to invoke in the reader the same feelings the character is experiencing. As the story progressed I felt that Chorie was becoming more and more disturbed, and I started to wonder whether she was actually crazy. Chorie was wondering the same thing.

The book does actually come to a satisfactory conclusion which is, on the whole, understandable, although there is sadness as well as joy. I’m really glad I read this book because it gave me lots to think about, and was certainly something very different to my usual choice of reading.

Chris Longmuir

You can buy Schrodinger’s Cat at amazon.co.uk

and at amazon.com

Orkney, by Amy Sackville - Reviewed by Kathleen Jones

Orkney

by Amy Sackville

Published by Granta

After reading Peter May's dark thrillers set in the Hebrides, I was definitely in the mood for more about remote Scottish islands.  I bought Amy Sackville's Orkney a while ago, but (after one or two false starts) I hadn't got round to reading it.  The night of the Great Storm over Britain definitely provided the right atmosphere - the TV screens, even in Italy, were filled with images of surging tides and wild winds.

I loved Amy's first book, The Still Point, and really rate her writing - poetic, atmospheric prose of the kind that isn't fashionable in main-stream publishing these days. Fortunately Amy's published by Granta who like the experimental and unashamedly 'literary' - one of the best of the small 'boutique' publishers.

Orkney has no plot, only 2 main characters (a few walk-on parts) and feels as though it's written in real time.  But the prose compels and draws you in the further and further you go - rather like the sea around the island.

Richard, an elderly academic, has married one of his students after a very short acquaintance.  She has no family he is aware of and no friends.  But we only have Richard's word for that - he is obsessed with her and can't see anything very clearly outside what his young wife calls 'the frame' he has drawn around her.  In Richard's first person journal, her name is never mentioned.  She has no identity other than the one he creates for her.

Richard has brought her for a honeymoon on the Isle of Orkney - to a remote cottage where he is going to make endless love to his wife and work on his book about mythologies.  They are his speciality - particularly where they relate to women:

'Transformations, obsessions, seductions;  succubi and incubi;  entrapments and escapes . . . Curses and cures.  Folk tales and fairy tales retold.  And all the attendant uncertainties, anxieties and aporia. Do I wake or sleep? Fantasy and phantasm.  Beautiful terrible women. Vulnerable lonely cursed women.  Strange and powerful women.  It's an old obsession.'

And it's one that should worry his wife.  Everyday she goes to sit on the beach to watch the sea.  And Richard watches her from inside the window.

'She's staring at the sea now.  My young wife.  There she stands on the barren beach, all wrapped up in her long green coat, among the scuttle and clatter of pebbles and crabs.'

Gradually more information about her past emerges - her father had disappeared when she was a young child - perhaps lost at sea.  She is fascinated by tales of Selkies and Finfolk - men and women who come from the sea to land, but must always go back again.  She can't swim and dreams of drowning, night after night.  The novel creates a real intensity and claustrophobia as the relationship between the two is exposed within the four walls of their tiny cottage buffeted by wild Atlantic gales.

'I lay awake for hours, on my back, listening, eyes open or closed, I could not tell, an equal darkness within and without.  Our bed a berth in a boat, below deck, the sea pressing up at the window and rolling and moiling below us;  the fish swimming by the glass indifferent;  tiny shrimp coiling and stretching in meaningless Morse code;  all the sightless, glowing life of the ocean floating past. A Leviathan's eye, filling the portholes, peering in.'

I won't spoil it by writing about the ending, but I'm still speculating about just how reliable Richard is as a narrator - he has a tendency to see everything one way and can't be contradicted.  The clues to what is happening are in the fairy tales, re-told by firelight, the myths and superstitions that inhabit the abandoned hearths of the island.

http://www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com
More book reviews at: http://www.kathleenjonesdiary.blogspot.com
www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Threads of Time by Cally Phillips

Reviewed by Chris Longmuir

This book was completely out of my comfort zone, but I found it unusual, intriguing, interesting and readable. It is a literary novel, well written with language that is not only beautiful but which also has a lilting poetic quality.

Paul is an archaeologist who is undergoing an identity crisis. He is a questioning, unfulfilled man who is struggling to find meaning to his life, and is looking for answers to questions which are unanswerable. Disappointed by his philosophical and historical education he seeks to pursue a career in archaeology, and hopes to find answers to the past, the present and the future through this occupation. The reader first meets him when he is knee deep in muddy water on an archaeological dig in Galloway.

He becomes involved with Diane, ten years older and a senior archaologist. They embark on a tempestuous affair which has to be kept secret. Diane, however, is scheming against the senior archaologist who is her boss, and there is a feeling at this stage that she might be using Paul for her own ulterior purposes.

The story takes a turn to the strange and mystical after Paul discovers a bog-body. A man who has lain preserved in the peat of the bog for centuries. The theme of the bog-body has several strands. There is the link Paul feels between himself and this ancient man, but this is all mixed up with the use of the body to discredit the senior archaeologist’s theories. It is at this stage that Paul’s affair with Diane intensifies, and his dreams start.

It is not clear whether the dreams Paul is experiencing are simply dreams or whether this is a timeslip novel. However, the dreams which transport him back in time to live the bog-body’s life have an uncanny knack of being geographically accurate, and lead to many new archaeological finds.

Paul becomes split between his present day life and the past life he is experiencing. He develops a love for the bog-body’s wife Maedbh, and thinks her child is his own. This creates conflict within him because he also loves Diane, and it became an interesting, if somewhat unusual, love triangle. I felt at this point that Paul’s mind was disintegrating, and I worried about his mental health. But, as he sinks deeper into the life of his dreams, it generates questions about which life he will choose if given the choice. And does he have any choice?

I won’t discuss anything further about the plot because I would not want to spoil the story for other readers. It is sufficient to say I found this book so interesting I had to know what happened at the end.

You can buy the ebook here:

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com