Haunted by Disappointment

Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley, was one of the most delightful novels I’ve read, so I had high hopes for the follow-up, The Haunted Bookshop, but it failed to live up to expectations, and I was really disappointed.

Since this is a post about a book about a second-hand  bookshop,
here is a picture of me in one of my favourite second-hand bookshops,
G&J Chesters, at Polesworth.

In this book (downloaded free from Project Gutenberg, which is a wonderful resource) Roger Mifflin and Helen have settled down to married life in a second-hand bookshop which seem to be open almost all hours. They live ‘above the shop’ and have just taken on an assistant – the beautiful Titania Chapman, daughter of a millionaire businessman and booklover who wants her to learn a proper job.

At this point advertising whizzkid Aubrey Gilbert appears on the scene and, very predictably, falls in love with Titania. Here the story starts to get complicated: there’s a missing book (Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, in case you’re interested), which mysteriously turns up rebound; a sinister chemist, and a chef who is obviously not what he seems.

Aubrey (is anyone still called Aubrey I wonder? I shouldn’t think many people were named Aubrey even in 1919 when this was written) determined to unravel the puzzle and protect Titania, he becomes embroiled in chases and fights as he is pursued and attacked by unknown villains. At one stage he even suspects Roger of being involved. There’s a bomb, an explosion, and a German plot to assassinate the American president, but eventually the villainous spies get their come-uppance, and everyone else, presumably, gets to live happily ever after.

If it all sounds a bit far-fetched, that’s because it is.

And Roger’s lovely comments about books, which were peppered throughout Parnassus on Wheels, have become much lengthier discourses, often with other bibliophiles, and seem much more forced. So there we are: an interesting read, but not one I would wish to repeat.

Flawed Judgement - or Failing Memory?

This is the final leg of my Irish reading tour for Carrie K's Ireland Reading Challenge and, sadly, things didn’t go according to plan. I wanted to read the Flann O’Brien collection, The Best of Myles, but had trouble locating a copy in time, so when I spotted The Irish RM, by Somerville and Ross, in a charity shop I bought it. I had high hopes of this.  Not quite the anarchic  humour of O’Brien which I had been looking forward to, but a gently funny account of life in rural Ireland at the end of the 19th century – or so I thought.  My view was coloured by fond memories of the roguish charms of Peter Bowles in a TV adaptation of the book back in the 1980s.  All I can say from a distance of almost 30 years is that either my memory has played me false, or else my judgement was seriously flawed.

Set in the west of Ireland, the book is a series of short stories centred on  Major Sinclair Yeates , who has retired from the British Army and taken up a position asResident Magistrate (the  RM of the title). The major is, he assures us, part Irish, but despite this he spends most of his time  trying to understand the Irish and exert his authority over  his servants, neighbours, the local villagers, and the ‘villains’ who appear before him. They, however, are determined to keep him in the dark about their not quite legitimate goings-on. This conflict forms the basis of what passes for humour. For example, in the first chapter it transpires that spooky noises in the night are caused not by the ghost of Great Uncle McCarthy (the previous tenant) but by two of his relatives who have taken up residence in the attics and are selling foxes and drinking the major’s whisky...

Another yarn revolves around the major’s efforts to retrieve casks of rum from a shipwrecked vessel, while the local community concentrate their efforts on spiriting the cargo away. And so it goes on... and on... and on... Oh, yes, and there’s  lots about hunting, and racing, and horses, which is fine if you like hunting, and racing, and horses, but I don’t.

Most of the plots are sketchy in the extreme, and there is no growth in any of the characters. Indeed, from a modern perspective the portrayal of the local Irish population could be regarded as patronising since  they all seem to be ridiculous caricatures:  battle axe women, country yokels, cunning wheeler dealers and so on. Visiting dignitaries, on the other hand, are invariably English.

I think it’s fair to say that this is the sort of book which could never be written today. It was published in 1899, before the Easter Rising,  the Civil War, the creation of the Irish Free State, or the birth of the Republic of Ireland.  This is the Ireland of ‘the big house’, when the British were still in control, and people knew their place and were happy with their lot – or at least that’s how it seems in The Irish RM. In reality the nationalist movement was gaining widespread support, and  people in all walks of life were working to forge a national identity, but  you’d never know that by reading this book . Authors Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (the pen name of Violet Martin) were, presumably, harking back to an earlier time.

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. 

An Irish Reading Challenge

I am taking a break from the book cull (it’s hard work shifting books about) to consider the Irish Reading Challenge 2011 posted by CarrieK at  Ireland Reading Challenge on http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com and since a gentle ramble around Ireland is just what’s needed to unwind, I have decided to join in.

There are three levels, for two, four or six books (Shamrock, Luck o’ the Irish or Kiss the Blarney Stone) and you can read anything you want – fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose. The only rule is there must be an Irish connection: to qualify for the challenge books must be written by an Irish author, set in Ireland, or about Ireland. I’ve come to this more than a little late, because it ends on November 30, which isn’t far away, but re-reads are allowed and I’ve actually done some Irish reading this year, so I’m going to brave and aim for four books – unless I’m allowed to include the two I’ve already read (and blogged) without knowing about the challenge, so if I’m allowed to race through them again that would make it six!

The Grianan of Ailech, in Donegal - we used to picnic here.

Even if that’s cheating, I think I’ll race through them again, as a kind of introduction. I’ll start with Sebastian Barry’s The  Secret Scriptures, which I read  in August last year, then looked at again earlier this year when I was studying ‘created tradition’ in Ireland as part of an OU course, because the Irish Civil War setting helped bring the period to life. Then, in May I celebrated St Brendan’s Day by reading The Brendan Voyage, Tim Severin’s account of sailing across the Atlantic in a leather boat, to prove St Brendan and his fellow Irish monks could have reached America in the 6th century,

As far as the challenge itself goes, I’m currently re-reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and on the waiting to be read pile is A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne, so there seems to be a certain synchronicity here, which is strengthened by my next choice. Another of my OU assignments was on Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (his version of Sophocles’ Antigone). Since then I’ve meant to read his poetry, because I’m not that familiar with his work, although I like what little I have read.  So tomorrow I’m off to the library to hunt out a collection of his poems. And while I’m there I’ll see if I can find a copy of  The Best of Myles, by Flann O’Brien, another author whose work I don’t know all that well,  but I do know he is very, very funny, and the most amazing wordsmith. 

It may sound daunting to read to such a tight deadline, but I’d love to do this because my grandparents moved from England to Ireland and when I was young we spent holidays there, up on the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal. Maybe I’ll try and create an Irish atmosphere by baking barm brack or soda bread, and asking The Man of the House to sing and play Irish folk songs and jigs.

By the way, many thanks to Margaret for posting a link to the challenge on her blog at http://www.booksplease.org/ .

Me on an Irish beach many years ago.