August Reading

It hardly seems possible that August is here, the shops are already full of 'Back to School' displays, and summer will soon be over – though this year it never really seems to have started. Perhaps we'll get an Indian Summer during the autumn, with plenty of sunshine. Anyway, I always find it comforting to curl up with a book when the weather is bad (mind you, I can curl up with a book no matter what the weather is like). So here I am, trying to plan my reading for the month ahead, after taking a quick look at my my progress during July.

Things went pretty well on the whole, I thought, and I got through most of what I' intended, plus some extras along the way. I didn't get round to Kate  O’Brien’s Without My Cloak, or To The Lighthouse, but I loved 'Mrs Dalloway' so much that after years of being scared to read Virginia Woolf, I'm now scared to read more in case I don't like it as much! And I only read one novel for Paris in July, although I aimed to read more. I think the secret of success with challenges is to read (and write) ahead, so you have something there if reading doesn't proceed as planned. I also read The Provincial Lady Goes Further (EM Delafield), but thought I would wait to write about it until I've managed to find the other two books.

So what am reading in August? Well, obviously I have my two roll-overs to look forward to, and my monthly look at Elizabeth von Arnim's The Solitary Summer, and I've got two books on the go at the moment - Their Eyes were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Pick's Far To Go, which is part of my Canadian challenge. I was going to read along at a nice leisurely pace (13 books over the next year) without actually joining in. However, various people kindly made recommendations and, to my amazement, I found I had quite a number of Canadian authors in the TBR pile without even realising it, so I am joining in.

I seem to have lots of Viragos in the TBR pile so I've selected Rose Macaulay's Told by an Idiot, because 'The Towers of Trebizond' is an all-time favourite, and Rumour of Heaven, by Beatrix Lehmann (Rosamond's sister), and a non-fiction (I don't read novels all the time, honestly), Love Among The Butterflies, by Margaret Fountaine, a Victorian clergyman's daughter, who travelled the world collecting butterflies and married a Syrian dragoman (and no, I don't know what a dragoman is, but when I find out I will let you know).

There's two poetry collections from the library, Alice Oswald's Woods etc, and Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees. I particularly like Oswald's work ('Dart' is fantastic) and I've meaning to read more of Duffy for quite some time, since I only really know her collection 'The World's Wife', which I enjoyed immensely.

And I found a copy of WB Yeats' Fairy Tales of Ireland, which I think is really intended for children, but I couldn't resist it because I love Yeats, fairy tales, and Ireland, so it seems a perfect combination, and it was only 99p, in a charity shop, and I can post it for my  Irish reading challenge.

Finally, the make-over of Elder Daughter's Room to provide us with a book/needlework/music room is proceeding very slowly indeed, and there are lots of things in little heaps all over the flower, which is not what we had in mind at all. The idea, says The Man Of The House, is to put things in boxes, and to put the boxes of shelves, and perhaps I should stop reading and put things away, especially the books. And in case you're wondering what's with the pictures, I was experimenting, somewhat unsuccessfully, and now I can't get them back the way they were to start with.

Poetic chains that link past and present

Can someone tell me how have I managed to miss Seamus Heaney for so long? Why didn’t I make the effort to read his poetry years ago? Now I have discovered him I can look forward to exploring – and enjoying -the rest of his work at a leisurely pace, and find out a little more about him.

Actually, if I give the impression that I’ve never read anything by Heaney that’s not strictly true, because earlier this year I studied The Burial at Thebes (based on Sophocles’ Antigone) as part of an OU course, and we looked at Heaney’s notes on how he created the play, which is informed by his own Irish heritage. At the time I thought ‘I must read more of his work’, but moved on to something else.

Then a friend sent me a copy of In Memoriam MKH, 1911-1984, from Clearances, after I told her how my non-Catholic mother attended a convent school evacuated to her home town, where she attended mass rather than peel potatoes, which reminded my friend of the lines in the poem:

“When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.”

Then I stumbled across the Ireland Reading Challenge  organised by Carrie K at http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com, and there seemed to be a certain synchronicity in the course of events so, since synchronicity is about coincidence and links, I headed to the library and borrowed a copy of Human Chain – after all, a chain is a series of links. I’ve been reading it slowly, a poem a day, savouring every moment.

Like so many Irish writers Heaney is passionate about words and chooses his with care. For me even the title of this volume has layers of meaning – it references the twisted chains of DNA that make us human and connect us to our past, not just our immediate forebears but also our distant ancestors. Then there are the chains that bind people together; the shared relationships and experiences between husband and wife, parent and child, child and their child, friend and friend. And there’s the chain of events which takes us from past to present to future on the journey from life to death.

Additionally, there’s a kind of link, or progression, with the poems themselves, from Had I not been awake with it ‘wind that rose and whirled until the roof Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore’ through to A Kite for Aibhín where ‘The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall’. Like the kite, Heaney is himself. He knows himself, and is able to accept life for what it is, standing a little apart as he looks back from where he is now, with love and sorrow, but no regrets.

Here are his personal memories about the journey through life. In Album we see a heartrending image of his frail father’s final days, his own feeling of inadequacy, his inability to show his love, and how ‘It took a grandson to do it properly’.

His parents are there again in Uncoupled, his mother, carrying the weighty firebox, walking to the ashpit, while his father, ashplant in one hand, is ‘Waving and calling something I cannot hear’ and ‘...his eyes leave mine and I know The pain of loss before I know the term’. The repetition of the word ash – such a simple word – echoes the ritual of the funeral service, so we are aware that his parents are dead, and share his grief.

But the poems aren’t all about death. Past and present intermingle with birth, marriage, and descriptions of life in the rural County Londonderry of Heaney’s childhood. He himself has said many of the poems are shaped by Virgil’s Aeneid and Aeneas’ journey to the Underworld. Heaney is a very learned and erudite poet, but he’s very accessible because alongside the classical allusions and the references to Irish myth, culture and history,  are observations of the commonplace things of life, all couched in the rhythms and language of ordinary speech set in older poetic forms. His love of words and his joy in language shine through – his poems sing with a life of their own, and his imagery is startling, but always apt, like In the Attic, with its boy ‘Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life’ now grown old and ‘ghost-footed’, which is a personal favourite.

I also loved Hermit Songs and its exploration of the writer’s craft,  linking the 21st century Heaney back to the scribes of old who left us beautiful, miraculous works, like the Book of Kells, and A Herbal, after Guillevic’s ‘Herbier de Bretagne’, with its ‘elsewhere world’ , looking at life, death and self-discovery through nature. “I had my existence. I was there. Me in place, and the place in me,” says Heaney, and it’s true, for he is of Ireland, just as WB Yeats was, held in thrall to the land, its heritage and its people as surely as if he were linked with an iron chain. 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nice little boy named baby tuckoo...” Those opening lines from James Joyce’s  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have to be among the most original first sentences of any novel – and they show us that here we have a writer determined to use language in a new and different way.

Words and language are an integral part of book, offering a child’s eye view of the world at the start, and evolving with the protagonist Stephen Dedalus (you really can’t call him a hero) as he grows, physically, intellectually and emotionally. By the end of the book the simple language of the early section changes, becoming as complex as the philosophical ideas expressed.

A handful of experimental writers had influenced Joyce (just as he himself influenced those who came after him), but even now, nearly a century after it was first published, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man still shocks with its ground-breaking techniques. The ‘stream of consciousness’ and internal monologue that he developed to such a high degree in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are evident, but to a lesser degree, and he does away with quote marks, using a dash to indicate the start of speech. It is semi-autobiographical account of Joyce’s own Catholic upbringing, but lacks a conventional hero and has no real plot or storyline, being more concerned with Stephen’s thoughts and feelings than with actions or events.

The text is peppered with fragments of rhyme and cultural references, and is suffused with the history, religion and politics of Ireland in the years leading up to the Easter uprising. Ireland has always been a divided nation, and the divisions are apparent here – not as part of the action, but simply because they exist. There’s the secular world of Parnell, the flawed leader who wanted some form of autonomy for the Irish people, and whose fall from grace split his supporters and opponents alike. Set against that is the rigid, restrictive world of the Christian Brothers, who refuse to countenance change and new ideas.

Stephen’s battle for personal freedom could be seen as an echo of his country’s fight for independence. Always something of an outsider, he’s a poet, seeking truth and beauty in his art and his life. He explores the nature of belief in God, and the form that belief takes through rituals in the Catholic Church, as well as the nature of heresy. At times it is hard to tell is Stephen is struggling to acquire faith – or struggling to escape its shackles. In the end, unable to live a lie, he rejects the conventions of the church and his upbringing and decides to leave Ireland and pursue his career pursue his career elsewhere, however uncertain and lonely the future may be.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not as lyrical and poetic as Ulysses, but I admire the way Joyce bends language to his own ends. However, I admit I found it difficult to grasp some of the ideas discussed – partly due, perhaps, to the fact I didn’t have a religious upbringing myself, so fail to appreciate the church’s hold over people, or to fully understand the philosophies involved. I feel as if I haven’t really done it justice with this review, and need more time to reflect on the book, then read it again and re-evaluate my opinion.

By the way, in case anyone wonders, this was one of my choices for Carrie K’s  Ireland Reading Challenge  which you can find over at http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com. I have been reading, but I'm a bit behind with the blogging. Next up is Seamus Heaney - I'll post something on Friday. 

Lyrical Language with an Irish Lilt

TIME to post a review on the first of my books for the Irish Reading Challenge 2011 run by CarrieK at http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com. I first read The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry last year, when I wrote about it on my other blog, but I read it again earlier this year, when I was studying 'created tradition' in Ireland as part of an Open University course, so Carrie said I could include it in the challenge.

I've had a quick skim through and I love it just as as much as I did first time around. It is a wonderful read that could only have been written by an Irishman. The lovely, lyrical language sings with an Irish lilt, following the cadences of speech in the author’s native land.

Roseanne McNulty has been incarcerated in a decaying mental hospital for the last 60 years. Now, nearing 100, she keeps a hidden journal, an account of her past life and how she came to be in care. It tells of her childhood, when her Presbyterian father was superintendent of the Catholic graveyard in Sligo town during the bitter days of the civil war, as Republicans fought supporters of the recently formed Irish Free State.

It tells of her job in a café, her marriage, her fall from grace in a society where a married woman had no life of her own, the birth and loss of her child, and her life today. It tells of the parish priest whose word was law in the local community, and whose decisions had such a terrible impact on Roseanne and her family, and it tells of her life and feelings today.

Alongside her tale another story unfolds in the Commonplace Book written by Dr Grene, the hospital’s senior psychiatrist. He sets out to chart his efforts to oversee the closure of the hospital and the moving of patients to a new facility. But he also writes about his own life: his youth, his failed marriage – and his search to discover more about the elderly woman in his care, who seems to have been erased from history, nullified by those who knew her.

Roseanne and Dr Grene have both known love and loss, hope and disappointment, joy and despair as they search for identity. Their testimonies augment each other and eventually converge in an ending which is not unexpected – even though the book blurb describes it as a ‘shocking secret’. There are echoes in Roseanne’s story of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene ‘laundries’ for fallen women, and we should not forget that there are still societies where women pay a heavy price for not conforming.

Verdict: This is a wonderful novel. It made me angry and sad and joyful in turn – and sometimes all at once. It is a beautifully written (almost poetic) tale that I know I will return to again and again. 

I was going to make barm bread to go with The Secret Scripture, but we had lots of oranges, so I baked an orange cake instead, adapted from a Mary Berry recipe, with orange juice, and orange zest, and grated rind on the icing, which went peculiar because it was too runny, but the cake was delicious. Home-made cake and a good book - what more could anyone want?