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Off The Shelf

These are a few recent good reads I've enjoyed during January, in case anyone is suffering shortage of reading matter during the dark winter months. 

"Ooh! It's a new Shardlake..." 

C J Sansom – The Shardlake Series

(Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign, Revelation, Heartstone)

The research which has gone into these satisfying historical crime novels puts them way ahead of the rest of the genre. The mysteries are set thoroughly into the historical and political context of Henry VIII’s reign, with a wealth of detail that even Philippa Gregory would struggle to match – although arguably Sansom’s love of detail gets somewhat overwhelming in his most recent novel, Heartstone. The books are sequential, featuring the same main characters, but are sufficiently self-contained that you could start anywhere in the series quite happily. The first three – Dissolution, Dark Fire and Sovereign – are the best of the bunch, with standards slipping slightly with Revelation (good, but drawing a little too obviously on Eco’s The Name of the Rose) and Heartstone (where the increasingly-tiresome Shardlake survives the sinking of the Mary Rose), although not enough to make you wish he’d stopped after three. Read it if you like historical fiction, crime fiction, combinations of the two, the medieval period, or history in general. Worth a try even if you don’t.     

Did you see...?

Douglas Adams – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

For anyone who saw the BBC adaptation over the Christmas period – no, the book is almost nothing like it. However, this follows in the fine tradition of most Douglas Adams’ adaptations, including ones done by the man himself, and thus is almost permissible. The book is less well-known than the Hitchhiker’s series, but is quite my favourite of the Douglas Adams canon. In typical Adams style, it features a plot based on an unmade Doctor Who story, several highly-eccentric Cambridge dons, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a dodo, and the beginning of life on earth, as well as the marvellous line: “There is no such word as “impossible” in my dictionary. In fact, everything between “herring” and “marmalade” appears to be missing.” Worth reading if only for the beauty of lines like that.  

Christian reading

Julian Hardyman - Glory Days in the Bible

Somewhat against my will, I’ve found myself rather liking this book. Written by the pastor of a Baptist church in Cambridge which is a hang-out for a third of Cambridge’s CU, it’s an engaging exploration of how Christians can apply their faith to their “non-religious” jobs. Many of us have the sense that we can somehow do our ordinary work to the glory of God – this book articulates this nicely and backs it up with plenty of Bible quotes. The Bible studies at the end of each chapter are probably helpful, if you like that sort of thing; and the chapter on creativity and the arts is worthwhile and written with real feeling. For a relatively easy read, it provides plenty of food for thought.     

Further Off The Shelf recommendations to follow on an irregular basis... If you would like to continue keeping up, please follow my blog (cer52.blogspot.com) 

Fifteen in Fifteen: JK Rowling

10. JK Rowling

Of all the authors in my fifteen, JK Rowling must count as the most successful. Her name, of course, is synonymous with that of Harry Potter. I recently re-read the full series of seven books under the auspices of “research for my blog”, and they remain a masterpiece – cleverly and grippingly-written, with an overarching story strand sustained through all the books, engaging and well-rounded characters and a very believable setting. The threads which make up the books and the characters are sufficiently complex that even now, I can still have in-depth discussions with friends about topics such as the tensions in the Dursley household and why Petunia agreed to take Harry in. None of these things are particularly unusual, but they are a mark of good writing nevertheless.

  However, the Harry Potter series is more than this. I count myself as extremely fortunate that I am one of the generation who grew up with Harry Potter. I read the first book at age 11, before starting secondary school; the seventh book was published in the summer of my first year at university, by which time I was nineteen, two years older than Harry. Nearly everybody of my age that I knew had read and was to some degree obsessed by the books. We all had theories as to what would happen in the next book, and got over-excited with the release of its title or the least snippet of information. We knew someone would die in the Goblet of Fire, and there was a great feeling of let-down when we discovered on reading it it was only Cedric Diggory. We grumbled about Ginny’s relationship with Harry and were somewhat saddened by Sirius’s death. A month before the Deathly Hallows came out, my university friends and I sat round one evening and discussed what might happen in the seventh book – whether Harry would die, whether Snape was evil, what the Horcruxes were – with an intensity usually reserved for our conversations about religion. It was common practice to pre-order the books, and you would have the release date written in your diary months in advance. I never queued overnight to collect my copy at the midnight openings, but my friend and I would race one another to finish the book (she won. Every time), and normal life was suspended until you did. I read the Half-Blood Prince over my friend’s shoulder between opening acts at an REM concert in Hyde Park, and the Deathly Hallows with my cousins when they were visiting. I’m often surprised when people tell me they haven’t read the Harry Potter books, or on attempting to engage them in a discussion about the underlying themes of the books I discover they don’t know them well at all. If you are one of these people, then I’m sorry. This is why.

The Harry Potter books are more than just a well-written series of novels which have since been turned into some very disappointing films. For me, Harry Potter is a cultural context, a common language, an experience shared with the majority of my peers. Whether it’s Facebook quizzes to determine your Harry Potter boyfriend, or a friend providing chocolate to cheer a lot of miserable students up “because chocolate keeps the Dementors away”, we all know what these things mean. A friend who was struggling with practical work was even relieved to be told he was “a bit of a Hermione”. For anyone who hasn’t read the books… well, it’s a reasonably good series of fantasy stories about a schoolboy wizard, with an interesting undercurrent about the nature of good and evil. If it’s not your thing, fair enough. But for anyone who grew up with Harry Potter, these books will always hold a certain magic – a remembrance of an experience that none of us will ever quite get again.

And if there is anyone remaining out there who hasn’t seen Potter Puppet Pals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4

Fifteen in Fifteen: George Herbert

9. George Herbert

I have been struggling for most of the previous month to work out what on earth I can say about George Herbert. Why, of all the poets I could have chosen, was he the one who ended up on my list of fifteen? Hasn’t any influence he may have had on me been superseded by my rediscovery of John Donne? If I was writing again, would I even pick him, or would I swap him for Liza Picard, Wendy Cope, Tony Harrison, Jostein Gaarder?

There is a certain amount of sheer blind chance when it comes to which poets I become most familiar with. I buy almost all of my poetry books cheap, in charity bookshops or clearance sales, and I’m sure there are many poets whose work I don’t know at all (Yeats) or very patchily (Tennyson), simply because I haven’t found a dog-eared, annotated selection of their work going for two or three pounds. In the case of George Herbert, I was introduced to him (or rather, his work, Herbert being from the same era as John Donne) via Girton Chapel in my first year at Cambridge , spent quite a lot of time reading a borrowed copy of his work on train journeys, and was fortunate enough to stumble across a selection of his poems in a second-hand bookshop a couple of months later. This volume, by virtue of being small, light, paperback and sufficiently battered that a bit more won’t harm, has been my companion to places as diverse as a monastery in North Yorkshire and an island fishing town in Adriatic Croatia. I’ve not always opened it, but it has been there.

But there is a reason to why I like George Herbert which goes beyond mere chance and portability. The influence he has had is subtle enough that it’s hard to recognise, but important enough for me to consider him a valid and valuable part of my list. George Herbert is a Christian poet, a man from the 1600s who devoted his poetry to trying to work out something of what God was and who we are in relation to Him. It’s a task that joins him with poets, hymn-writers, musicians and psalmists through the ages – people who believed and doubted and questioned and wrote down their beliefs and doubts and questions in the best words they could, for those of us who followed. I’m fairly sure that reading George Herbert did not inspire me to use my poetry to explore my faith. Nor can I pin down any particular teachings from Herbert’s work which have altered or improved my understanding of God. Poetry isn’t a sermon, or a book by Philip Yancey – it doesn’t work in that way. What I find in George Herbert is what I find in the Anglican liturgy, the hymnals, sacred choral music, contemporary worship songs, albums by U2, the poetry of Donne and Coleridge, and the sight of a church spire when you’re a long way from home. It is a rooting in the past and a connection in the present, a reminder of just how far our communion spreads. It’s something you don’t even notice until it isn’t there. It is a message I find both in good poetry and at the base of Christian faith – and the message is simply, “You are not alone.”       

Fifteen in Fifteen: Charlotte Bronte

8. Charlotte Bronte 

A classic, according to Mark Twain, is something everyone wants to have read but that nobody wants to read. I have a certain degree of sympathy with this view. There is very little “classic literature” dating from the 18^th century onwards which counts as an “easy read” – Hardy is depressing, Austen upper-class and subtle, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald deeply alien. Even the authors I appreciate – Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Gaskell – can all be a bit of a slog. Foreign classics are scarcely better – if it’s Russian, it’s long; if it’s French, it’s longer (unless it’s Maupassant, in which case the least said the better); and if it’s Spanish it’s very very weird. “Modern” classics are, if possible, even worse – I have not come across a single person who has enjoyed Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. That’s not to say that some tough classics aren’t worth reading, but it does go some way towards explaining why, when my brother presented me with a copy of Jane Eyre whilst we were on holiday in Austria, I was less than thrilled. He told me it was “a damn good read” – I thought it was more likely to be “a damn good cure for insomnia”. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Guys, bear with me. Jane Eyre is one of those rare books which appears to have a universal appeal to women, matched only in its extent by Dirty Dancing. Part of its appeal may lie in the fact that it is a typical rags-to-riches narrative, and a rags-to-riches story twice over, as Jane goes from orphan to governess to runaway to heiress. Part of it could be to do with the fact that it is such an unusual love story. Unlike Gaskell or Austen, which end with the perfect relationship established between Margaret and Mr Thornton, Lizzie and Mr Darcy, Emma and Mr Knightley, the relationship between Jane and Mr Rochester is never entirely equal. From the outset it needs to be worked at and managed – just like a real relationship. For me, however, the appeal of the story is mostly to do with the character of Jane herself. Most heroines are beautiful, intelligent and outspoken. Jane is poor, plain, modest, somewhat unusual, and yet indomitable. Her first person narrative lets us in to all of her flaws and failings. Most of us, most of the time, do not feel as intellectually-superior as Elizabeth Bennett or as charitable as Margaret Hale. We don’t think of ourselves as particularly attractive or as having anything all that much going for us, and most of us are acutely aware that we might be considered a little bit weird. Which of us cannot sympathise with Jane when she decides that as a poor, plain governess, Mr Rochester cannot possibly love her in preference to the beautiful, wealthy Blanche Ingram? And which of us cannot celebrate the fact that, poor, plain and unusual as she is, he does – and more, that these are the very qualities he loves her for?

Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, wrote the nineteenth-century love story par excellence. Elizabeth Gaskell, in North and South (the TV adaptation of which also appears to be oddly popular with us girls), gave it teeth and social unrest. Jane Eyre follows a similar pattern, but manages to be a very different story, with quite a remarkable protagonist. Following that holiday in Austria, where I read Jane Eyre with more avidity than I had ever read a classic novel with before, I have read good classics, bad classics and indifferent classics. I made the mistake of thinking all Brontes were the same – a mistake which was only rectified by a tough few weeks with Wuthering Heights. I could not get on terms with Austen’s Emma, but completely fell for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, was thoroughly enjoyable, whereas I’ve never got beyond the first chapter of The Three Musketeers; and Victor Hugo… well, he’s a story all of his own. But Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Eyre, stand to me as a reader as proof of two essential points. Firstly, a novel written before the twentieth century can still be enjoyed by a reader today - a belief which has sustained me through thin (A Christmas Carol) and thick (Les Mis). And secondly, whatever Mark Twain might say, some “classics” can be a damn good read.        

For those who are still Sussex-bound...

A very happy new year to everyone reading! New years bring many excellent things: resolutions, the end of Christmas, slightly longer evenings, and, in my case, the awful realisation that my railcard has just expired. Not being a natural driver, I spend a lot of time travelling around Sussex on the train. I hope the following "litany of names" poem is recognisable for all of us who grew up on the weald and the downland, and the London to Brighton line.

Weald and Downland 

The next train to depart across the ancient Weald

Keeping sunrise on the left as it arrows down south

calls at Three Bridges, Balcombe, Haywards Heath…

Set the capital behind you and dare to breathe

Deep. Into the oak woods and the drifted leaves,

The dead in their barrows on the silvered Downs.

Plumpton, Cooksbridge – the castle keep.

Some kind of homecoming, to stand again

in the land of your ancestry, the resonating names

full of the history stretching deep below your feet,

steeped in the silence of those who loved this land before.

Lewes, this is Lewes. Please change

for services along the riverside and past the ditched hillfort.

East to Polegate, Pevensey, Hastings and Ore,

Into the dawn. Or swing southeast: Southease;

Newhaven; Bishopstone; Seaford. The sea.