Ivory tower spooks

William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea.

High Spirits by Robertson Davies.
Penguin Books, 1983 (1982).

—is there something about me that attracts such manifestation? There are men who attract dogs. There are men of a very different kind who attract women. Can it be that I attract ghosts?
— ‘The Ugly Spectre of Sexism’.

Between 1963 and 1981 Robertson Davies, as Master of the newly-founded Massey College at the University of Toronto, made it his business to tell a Christmas ghost story to academics and their guests at the college’s Gaudy Nights. In this role he cited the example of penning spooky anecdotes set by writers such as Henry James, M R James and Sheridan LeFanu.

Naturally the best way to establish authenticity in such an account is to place oneself at the centre of a first-person narrative so as to assure listeners and readers that the events described are true, and this indeed is what Davies does in these eighteen tales.

However, to achieve the illusion that – in what’s supposed to be a thrilling but chilling report – any seeming humour which emerges is accidental, the tone of voice must remain serious throughout, without any mugging, nudges or winks, otherwise the spell will be completely shattered. Does this collection of ghost stories maintain the illusion – if illusion it is?

My #1970Club plans

#1970Club

In a week’s time Karen and Simon will be hosting one of their biannual reading clubs, and this year it will feature books published in 1970.

I plan to have read and reviewed one or two of these for next week, but I thought it would be interesting to see which 1970 titles I had actually already reviewed on this blog, and maybe also those read pre-blog but not reviewed anywhere.

Then there are those titles already on my TBR shelves, from which I may well choose what will feature in posts from 14th to the 20th October, and those I’d love to read at some indeterminate date if I can locate copies!

Uncomfortable cozes

Image from the magazine ‘Le beau monde’ of Kensington fashion, 1808.

Jane Fairfax:
a novel to complement Emma by Jane Austen
by Joan Aiken.
Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1990.

“All the fairy-tales tell us that if we utter our wish aloud, the bad Fates will intervene to prevent its being granted.”

Have you ever wondered who exactly the mystery woman in Jane Austen’s Emma was? What was her backstory, the bare bones of which Austen deigned to reveal to us while our focus was almost wholly on the deluded Miss Woodhouse?

Wonder no more, for Joan Aiken’s novel gives us Jane Fairfax’s story, one which effectively runs parallel with that of Emma Woodhouse. In this companion to Emma the spare biographical framework to Jane’s career which Austen offered us is strengthened, clothed and suitably realigned.

In Aiken’s rendition Jane is clearly presented as a sensitive foil to Emma, the latter a character whom Austen herself described as “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” Unsurprisingly we’re not given much cause here to question that particular appraisal; but is Jane the embodiment of all that Emma is not?

Multi-layered page-turner

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

Helliconia by Brian Aldiss.
Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter.
Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2010.

The Helliconian trilogy is a multi-layered composition, as long and as rich as The Lord of the Rings, as colourful as a medieval tapestry and as polemical as an eco-warrior’s handbook.

Aldiss is a prolific author in various genres, not just in science fiction; but SF at its best can itself include a great many genres, and this trilogy therefore has aspects of romance, epic, fantasy, prose poetry and science writing all flourishing in symbiosis with each other.

And, like any great narrative, it is not only a great page-turner but has you caring about its characters.

A particular charm

Stowe House, Buckinghamshire.

Mansfield Revisited:
A Jane Austen Entertainment
by Joan Aiken.
Indigo, 1996 (1984).

“I believe,” [Mrs Osborne] said, “that Mansfield has a particular charm, a particular power to instil affection into the hearts of those who reside here.”

Set a scant four years after the end of Jane Austen’s third published novel Mansfield Park (1814), Mansfield Revisited reveals that Sir Thomas Bertram has just died, and that his son Edmund, now married to Fanny Price, has to leave the village where he’s now rector and travel overseas to settle the family estate’s affairs in Antigua.

They leave behind one of their two young infants, Mary, in the charge of Fanny’s 18 year old sister Susan Price, herself the companion to the indolent Lady Bertram in place of Fanny. Patronised by Tom, the remaining son of Sir Thomas, and subjected to consistent carping from Julia – one of the married Bertram daughters – Susan is expected to act as Mansfield’s chatelaine but without due credit given to her efforts.

Susan’s only friends are Edward’s replacement, the curate Mr Wadham with his widowed sister Elinor, on whom she relies for civil conversations and sensible advice. But who is the new resident at the cottage adjacent to the mansion, and what scandals are trailing in her wake?

Nearly three-quarters

© C A Lovegrove.

“Sunday church bells peal,
starlings whirring, buzzards squeal;
black glove jackdaws wheel.”

— Rhyming haiku, 10th November 2017.

It’s autumn, Keats’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” the name possibly related to Latin auctus, meaning “growth, increase, abundance” and thus very fitting for a time of harvest.

The last of the grass has been cut and baled, the early morning wisps of Welsh “dragon’s breath” curls round the hills overlooking the river valley, and there’s a decided chill in the air.

The autumn equinox has come and gone and late September’s Michaelmas beckons, yet it’s hard to believe that nearly three-quarters of this year has passed, as has nearly three-quarters of the 21st century! A good time to take stock perhaps of what one has reaped?

Sympathy but no scholarship

St George and the dragon: Albrecht Dürer.

The Green Man and the Dragon
by Paul Broadhurst.
Mythos Books, 2006.

Paul Broadhurst is the author of several books, such as Sacred Shrines and Tintagel and the Arthurian Mythos, and this work, claiming to reveal the mystery behind the myth of St George and “the dragon power of nature”, argues that the symbol of the dragon represents forces that exist in the natural world. Like the other Mythos titles which Broadhurst self-publishes it is beautifully illustrated and presented, and looks to be a quality product.

The premise of the book is as much faith-based as any monotheistic belief. Do we now all believe that there was once a universal religion in these isles where faith in the old gods and goddesses survived despite persecution by the church?

Moreover, can we believe it remained hidden from the authorities (despite its visibility, for example, in church carvings such as dragons and foliate heads) only to be recognised as such by initiates over the centuries and by modern-day spiritual detectives such as the author?

Ordinary things transfigured

Castello Brown, Portofino, Liguria (photo: trolvag).

The Enchanted April
by Elizabeth von Arnim.
Introduction by Salley Vickers.
Penguin Modern Classics, 2012 (1922).

“She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it.” — Chapter Six.

The British have traditionally had a fascination with Italy: from at least the period of the Grand Tours, undertaken by minor nobility in the early modern period, visitors from a rainy island in the northwest corner of Europe have found in this Mediterranean peninsula intimations of heavenly delights.

So it proves for Lotty Wilkins and her slight acquaintance Rose Arbuthnot – women trapped in marriages with frosty or distant husbands – when they see an advertisement in The Times offering a month’s sojourn in an old castle on the Italian Riviera.

To eke out the cost of renting the place they advertise for two other women to join them, and after interviews they invite a widow called Mrs Fisher and a certain Lady Caroline Dester. They all then make their various ways to a promontory overlooking the Gulf of Spezia on which stands the Castle of San Salvatore. But not one can anticipate how their lives will be changed by the end of April.

Word hoards

A collocation of dictionaries. © C A Lovegrove.

I love words. (You may possibly have noticed.) It’s one of the delights of reading, not just the storyline or characters but the way that sentences and phrases break down before being reassembled, the collocations or how their constituent words are juxtaposed or arranged.

I’m partial to commas, colons, brackets and semicolons (again, you might have noticed) because the more that words and phrases are put together in different relationships the richer the language becomes. So much nicer than the jumble of clichés that we customarily read, hear, write and say, at least to my way of thinking. (Of course, it’s almost impossible not to avoid those habitual collocations — as, for example, erm, my way of thinking.)

And let’s not forget the secondary meaning of ‘collocation’, literally ‘the positioning of things side by side’. I present above a conflation of both definitions, a collocation of dictionaries. You’re now itching to know the background to those volumes, are you not? ‡

Metamorphed

From Weird Tales 29/1: ‘The Thing on the Door-Step’ (January 1937) by Virgil Finlay.

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan.
Jonathan Cape, 2019.

‘That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.’

In Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, originally translated The Transformation) Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning from uneasy dreams only to find himself transformed into an enormous insect, clearly one we’re expected to regard as vermin.

But could the reverse transformation occur, from cockroach to human? If so, why could it not happen more than once? And what if those so transformed were somehow in positions of power, able to affect the lives of millions?

That’s what McEwen proposed in this 2019 novella, published in the wake of a referendum for Britain to exit the European Union but before the advent of coronavirus further added to the country’s woes. Why would so many British citizens appear to act against their own interests?

The Alchemical Master

‘Love Locked Out’ by Anna Lea Merritt (1890), Tate Britain.

What’s Bred in the Bone (1985)
by Robertson Davies,
No 2 in The Cornish Trilogy.
Penguin Books, 2011 (1991).

‘That alchemy is a pretty kind of game
Somewhat like tricks o’ the cards to cheat a man
With charming.’
— ‘The Alchemist’ (1610) by Ben Johnson.

This, the absorbing central title in Robertson Davies’s Cornish Trilogy, follows The Rebel Angels (1981) before the series is completed with The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). Like the preceding volume it deals with the fallout from the death of Francis Cornish on his 72nd birthday in 1981, and some of the dilemmas faced by the three trustees of the Cornish Foundation for the Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship.

We meet the trustees, all of whom had appeared in The Rebel Angels – nephew Arthur Cornish, Arthur’s wife Maria (née Theotoky), and Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt – of Toronto’s University of St John and the Holy Ghost – who’s also the executor of Frank Cornish’s will.

However there’s a problem: Darcourt is trying to write an official biography of the deceased, a man of great renown in Canada and Europe as an acknowledged art expert; but there are lacunae in Frank’s career and whispers about forgery, and nobody living seems to know much about his upbringing or what really motivated him.

Towards a neurodiverse world

https://openclipart.org/detail/229515/multicolored-jigsaw-puzzle-pieces.

NeuroTribes:
the legacy of autism and how to think smarter about people who think differently
by Steve Silberman.
Foreword by Oliver Sacks.
Allen & Unwin, 2016 (2015).

I have to admit that this wasn’t quite what I was expecting when I began it. I was looking forward to an updated discussion of what autism actually is and how people not actually on the spectrum can learn to think about those who are on it. Instead I found I was reading a 500-page doorstop of a book which provided complex case histories and followed a rigid but discursive timeline down from the 18th century.

Much of the time I felt that the promises contained in the title and subtitle (particularly on describing autism’s ‘legacy’) and a confused impression about the book’s targeted audience (was it the general public or those directly affected by autism?) were being lost in a catalogue of contradictory opinions, varying terminology and distressing detail.

But then I realised that there was method in this apparent madness. By examining the general public’s confused reactions to autism’s manifestations over the centuries and the conflicting diagnoses and prognoses offered when individuals exhibited the condition Silberman was able to build up a picture of what autism was not; how those with the condition presented in a multiplicity of ways; and how — after many years seen as passive victims who might or might not be ‘cured’ — a significant number of those on the spectrum have started to self-advocate and be proactive in proclaiming its potential.

A wild, rum place

Jeake’s House, Mermaid Street, Rye, East Sussex, where Joan Aiken was born. © C A Lovegrove.

Tales of London Town by Joan Aiken.
Introduction by Kiran Millwood Hargrave,
Afterword by Lizza Aiken.
Illustrated by Annabel Pearl.
Manderley Press, 2024.

Where exactly in London is a certain rum area, Rumbury Town, and nearby neighbourhoods like Kimball’s Green? A rather wild part of the capital, we’re told.

Somewhere in Rumbury Town is a house, “very old and cornery and cupboardy,” where Daisy Sculpin and her son John live and where rather rum things happen to them and the people who lodge with them.

And how do we know this? Well, Joan Aiken chronicled stories about these wild parts over a period of twenty-five years, and they’re now handily available in this handsome compilation of four short stories and one longer for us to enjoy and wonder at. If we dare.

Joan Aiken 1924–2004

Young Joan Aiken. Photo https://www.joanaiken.com/pages/gallery.html.

Today marks the centenary of the birth of Joan Delano Aiken, MBE. Born in Rye, East Sussex on 4th September 1924 she left us on the 4th January 2004 having bequeathed us an extraordinary legacy of short stories, novels and other work.

Though possibly best known now for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and the sequence which followed she was remarkable as a writer for excelling in several genres, which included children’s fantasy, alternative history, historical fiction, the supernatural, science fiction, suspense and sequels to Jane Austen’s novels. Thanks to her daughter Lizza Aiken, that legacy is celebrated online in the form of one of the most beautiful and absorbing websites I’ve ever seen, www.JoanAiken.com. And there’s the associated blog hosted by Lizza at https://joanaiken.wordpress.com.

But her legacy is also remembered by a loyal legion of devoted fans which includes in its number published authors, academics and publishers keen to preserve and re-present her work, as well as ordinary lovers of stories told well (including yours truly). For the latter group – and for others yet to dip their toes into Aiken’s world – here are some avenues into exploring her legacy.

Summing up summer

20 Books of Summer 746books.com

For some time now I’ve aimed to read at least ten, fifteen or twenty book titles for what in theory at least is the warmest quarter of the year in the UK, using Cathy of 746books.com’s flexible meme, #20BooksOfSummer. Though I’ve heard faint noises this may be the last time she’ll host it I’ve found it a useful motivation to get on with enjoying books. But rather than just reading anything and everything that comes to hand I try to partly guide my reading by selecting other memes that appeal to me.

This year that has included Mallika’s #ReadingTheMeow2024 and Emma’s #ParisInJuly2024. And of course just finished is co-host Mallika’s #MoominWeek in combination with Paula’s #ToveTrove, which has been wonderfully supported by so many book bloggers to celebrate Paula’s imminent marriage with her partner.

So now the time of reckoning has arrived. Did I have time to fit in these memes, Brona’s #ReadingOrwell24, or Lory’s #ReadingRobertsonDavies, or mark Kafka‘s birth centenary? Did I also mark Women in Translation Month or complete the two review copies that had been sent to me (as detailed in my post from 1st June ‘The Longest Days’), as well as all the other titles I hoped to read? Let me count the ways I possibly might have.