Susan Green

A few days of sweet and nostalgic re-reading last week; The Painted Garden by Noel Streatfeild and The Rescuers by Margery Sharp. I loved them both when I was a child; reading was my ‘happy place’ and these two were re-read many times.

I’m always slightly nervous about beloved childhood books disappointing on an adult reading. I expect them to be dated, that’s not a problem. What is problematic for me is when the racism, sexism and class-based prejudice really stick in my craw. And that happens sometimes, even though I generally regard these books and these attitudes as basically artefacts from another time and another world.

(An example: last week I also tried to read an Agatha Christie novel, A Murder is Announced which was first published in 1950. I went through a Christie phase in my mid-teens, and was spellbound; this time, I wasn’t able to even get half way through. Christie may have been trying to show what horrible people her characters are, but their constant references to ‘foreigners’ as greasy, weaselly, dishonest, hysterical and prone to exaggeration led me to abandon ship even before Miss Marple came on board to solve the mystery. And the whole thing was so snobbish! Besides, if you’ve seen the TV series, you know who did it.)

The Painted Garden didn’t disappoint. Hooray! It sees an English family, the Winters, relocate to California to stay with their Aunt Cora. It isn’t a holiday. The father, John, needs somewhere in the sun to recover after a nervous breakdown caused by killing a child in a car accident. How’s that for heavy? The three children are all not keen, for different reasons. Rachel, a ballet student, is missing out on a role in a big ballet; Tim, a piano prodigy, is missing out lessons from a famous concert pianist, and Jane, who wants to be a dog-trainer, is just going to miss Chewing-gum, her dog.

But things turn out fine. John gets better. Tim, in his search for piano to practise on, makes friends with the piano-owning Antonios, who run a drug store, and gains a spot on a Hiram P. Schneltzworther’s radio show. Rachel is befriended by Posy Fossil, a famous ballerina. And Jane, the plain, grumpy, angry, untalented, unpopular one of the trio, gets to play Mary in Bee Bee studio’s film version of The Secret Garden, and in the process learns a lot about other people and herself. This is a sunny, optimistic story which whips along at a cracking pace.

It wasn’t one of those ‘children against the grown-ups’ stories; though there were struggles and disappointments and a few crabby or difficult adults, so many helpful and interested people came into the children’s lives. And another – John and Bee, the parents, listened to their children, took their concerns seriously and let them make their own decisions. Which seemed pretty unusual for a book published in 1949. Streatfeild had lots of fun with the differences between London and Los Angeles. Manners, language, food, accents, attitudes, clothes –  and from the names of characters, lots of different ethnicities. The two Black characters are Joe, a railway steward and Bella, Aunt Cora’s housekeeper. Bella is a significant character; they grow to love her, and she loves them. She becomes part of the family. The Winter family goes home happier, healthier and with lots to look forward to.
A delight.

…this theme – this transcendent theme – of fulfillment and non-fulfillment; and those who bind themselves to limitations…

Shirley Hazzard, with a small output, has a huge reputation. And this biography, by Australian academic Brigitta Olubas, is also huge – 780 grams, 467 pages plus another hundred or so comprising photographs, notes, acknowledgements and index.
That’s a lot of Shirley. For this reader, perhaps a bit too much.

Everyone seems to agree that Hazzard was a great stylist. The Great Fire was certainly full of sentences and phrases and paragraphs that are literary, precise and often beautiful or striking. Or depending on your point of view, mannered or even intrusive, with more than a touch of Henry James* (though she always denied his influence), with that way of interrogating every little detail until you want to scream. I didn’t enjoy it much, but I do plan to re-read The Transit of Venus.
I remember loving that book when I was in my early twenties. It’s spoken of as her best novel, and I think I’ll be able to appreciate it more than The Great Fire.

Maybe. After reading this biography, I’m hesitant about spending any more time with her. It’s going to be quite a task to separate the writing from the woman.

Hazzard was born in 1931 into a middle-class Sydney family. Her father Reg worked for the company that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and later for the Australian government as a diplomat exploring international trade possibilities. He was also an alcoholic, with a long-term mistress who followed the family to their overseas postings. Her mother Kit, an elegant and beautiful woman, was probably bipolar, and a difficult, demanding and turbulent presence in her life. Her older sister, Valerie, contracted TB when Shirley was a teenager. They were not close. It doesn’t sound like a happy childhood.

As a girl and young woman, Shirley must have been intense company, constantly reading, thinking, noticing, describing, analysing…and writing, turning her life into literature. She was mad for poetry, learning Italian so that she could read her Italian poets not in translation and memorising whole poems which she could (and did) recite at the drop of a hat. Perhaps because of all that poetry, she was also mad for love. All-consuming, passionate, romantic capital-L Love.

Which she found when her father was posted to Hong Kong in 1947. She was 16. The man’s name was Alexis (Alec) Vedeniapine, a white Russian, an officer in the British army in his early thirties. He was charming, handsome, an intellectual as well as a man of action  – and importantly, a lover of poetry. Forming the model for Aldred Leith, the hero of The Great Fire, he was “her first great love”. It was an experience she never forgot, and in many ways she carried the torch for that love her entire life. Though in 1947 they were separated (by her father’s further postings and medical treatment for Valerie), she considered herself engaged to Alec, exchanging letters when he returned to England to become a farmer – but not meeting. Olubas tells the story sympathetically but his 1950 letter asking her to break their engagement is actually quite funny. He painted a picture of himself and his farming life that is so bleak, so unappealing.

I feel and have felt for a long time that I have made a mess of things in thinking I could shape this life into something that I could ask you to share with me…I get up at half past four and work till dark. I never go out for pleasure and am too tired to live and think as a human being… There is nothing and nobody – it’s just that the life I had visualised is not coming out as planned and I see no light in the distance…

Oh God, he must have prayed, get me out of this, please! Did he feel hunted? How exhausting to be with a 19-year-old who was incapable of sharing his working life and practical interests, but who must always live at the “extremities of romance”, as Olubas describes it.  Though Hazzard kept in touch with Alec for the rest of his life, she considered him a failure. He hadn’t met her high hopes for him (or expectations), and the things that meant so much to him – his marriage, his children, his farm –  were negligible to her. She wrote, ‘He renounced his larger life.’ He had bound himself to limitations.

When her father was posted to America, Hazzard began working in secretarial roles for the UN in New York and indulged in a string of relationships with married or otherwise unavailable older men. She even went on family holidays with one lover, his wife and children. A trip to Naples to recover from one of her failed affairs changed her life; she fell under its spell, and almost until she died, she divided her time between Italy and New York. Her writing began to be published, the literary world of New York opened to her and in 1963, marriage to the much older, distinguished (and wealthy) writer and art lover Francis Steegmuller completed the picture. It was then she began to live her ideal life. She and Steegmuller went to the opera, collected art, socialised in artistic, cultured, intellectual circles, had an apartment on Capri, kept a gold Rolls-Royce – and wrote until old age and dementia took them both.

Her bibliography is sparse; four novels, three short story collections and a handful of non-fiction works, among them a couple of highly critical accounts of the UN, a memoir of her friendship with Graham Greene. Both The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire were highly acclaimed and awarded, but there was a 23 year wait between them for eager readers.

Olubas has written an admiring and almost fawning biography. I was left with the impression of a woman who was fastidious, refined, cultured, elegant, cultivated, beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent, brave (she took on the UN in her exposure of Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past) and ambitious – but decidedly unappealing. Dominating, demanding, sensitive to coldness or criticism but often unable to understand other people’s needs and differences – or even to listen! – and almost emotionally stunted.

‘And who the devil are you?’ asked Lawrie.
Mr Scratch appeared uneasy. He even blushed.
‘That’s what they used to call me,’ he said. ‘But it’s very old-fashioned. I don’t like it. To tell you the truth, I never did like it. It seemed so crude. Though in the old days it meant something.’
Lawrie did not understand what the old gentleman was talking about…
‘It all used to be so simple when people believed,’ Mr Scratch said. ‘We used to know where we were. There was no need to explain. Faust knew what he was doing. But,’ he waved the papers in his hand, ‘today there are all these forms. If it were possible, I’d say it would be the death of me. I long for the days when they signed in their own blood on parchment.’

I never cease to be astonished at the range and quality of British children books published in the late 1950s and into the 1970s. Some of them would never get into print today, and not because of the – to us, now – unacceptable depictions of gender, race, class and identity (have I covered them all?). It’s because they are so odd. Like The Fair to Middling. What would an editor or agent say on reading it now? Very probably, “Sorry Arthur, we will pass on this one”. It seems as if an author could get away with writing whatever they wanted. Now, that’s an idea…

A visit to the Middling Fair is a treat for the children of the Winterbottome’s School for Incapacitated Orphans. It’s busy and noisy with sideshows, food stalls, rides, and games booths with silly prizes. All the usual fun. Only it is not usual at all. A series of life-changing choices and chances are on offer by the diabolic, sinister and weirdly powerful fairground operators.

Peter, a musical prodigy who is going blind, is offered the opportunity to regain his sight. But seeing drowns out hearing, and so it’s a choice between ‘seeing what everyone else can see and hearing what nobody else can hear’. His friend and teacher, Miss Oxley, can lose her disfiguring scars and have a glittering career but there’s the chance she will also lose the two loves of her life – music and Peter.
Wally, a junior thief with thyroid problems, and his friend Florence get a taste of a dystopian ‘perfect society’ whose motto is ‘We-dom or Death’ – shades of the USSR under Stalin. Albino Lawrie knows what it’s like to sell his soul and look like everyone else. Mr Enticknapp, the headmaster and the orphanage’s generous patron and fairy godmother, Lady Charity Armstrong, enter the Amazement Park and undergo a return to childhood which gives them empathy with their disabled charges.

Even Mr Carruthers, the crippled teacher who knows something strange is going on but experiences none of it, is changed forever, determining to overcome his bitterness and write the story of the Fair. The only child who takes up the offer is Emma, who is cured of her colour-blindness which – typically, for this novel – is a mixed blessing of wonder and disappointment.

This is an intensely moral story, full of compelling and serious life lessons while conveying some of the absurdity of the adult world to child readers; there are echoes of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, some of Roald Dahl’s stories, Alice in Wonderland, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. It’s funny, loaded with puns, wordplay, sophisticated allusions and humour but at the end I was left with an impression of something troubling, strange –  and quite unique.

And by the way, the illustrations and cover are by Raymond Briggs, one of his very first commissions.

The world out there seems so broken and divided and ugly and violent. Is it bothering me more than usual because it’s nearly Christmas? In the West, anyway, isn’t it the time of love and peace, over-eating and gifts? I’m trying to avoid the news but it’s hard to do.

I was feeling in need of comfort yesterday, and so I turned to childhood and “The Little White Horse” by Elizabeth Goudge. My old Puffin copy has been so well-loved that it’s falling apart and, when I opened it I found I’d used as a bookmark one of the deckle-edged little thank-you cards we had printed in early 2002 after my father’s funeral. Oh, dear. It was a difficult time. Apart from the obvious – my beloved Dad had just died – my husband had pneumonia, my grieving mother was in poor health (so many times in that first year I thought we would lose her) and I had a job to get to and a house to run and a child just starting school. I’m not naturally a stoic (and as I often say, ‘nobody likes a martyr’), but I scarcely cried as I carried on. No wonder I turned to The Little White Horse for comfort.

The novel starts in Gothic novel territory, with 13-year-old orphan Maria, her governess Miss Heliotrope and her Cavalier King Charles spaniel Wiggins in a dilapidated carriage bumping though a dark and cold night. They’re going to live with her uncle in his ancient manor house. They’ve never met him before. Moonacre Manor is in the depths of unknown country…
But instead of heading into the dark and dangerous, the story swerves into the joyous, delightful and magical. Maria is an enchanting heroine; fastidious, clever, loving and loyal, sensible and brave. (And somewhat vain, with a relatable love of clothes and pretty things). But she’s not passive. She’s up for action and adventure, willing to challenge the adults, fight for what is right and even, occasionally, to get dirty. There’s Maria’s dream playmate Robin who turns out to be a real boy, a quartet of protective animals who keep her safe on her adventures and two bittersweet romances from the past that end in middle-aged marriages. She goes on a quest to right old wrongs, is haunted by the vision of a little white horse and manages an earthy, joyous ending with reconciliations and forgiveness and lots of tea and cake all round.

Ah, cake! I always loved the food in this book. It’s quite a feature. Not only afternoon tea, but breakfast, lunch, dinner and various other incidental comestibles are provided by Moonacre’s astonishing cook, Marmaduke Scarlet.

…home-made crusty bread, hot onion soup, delicious rabbit stew, baked apples in a silver dish, honey, butter the colour of marigolds, a big jug of  warm mulled claret  and hot roasted chestnuts folded in a napkin.

And then there are the houses – Moonacre itself, Old Parson’s vicarage and Loveday Minette’s little cave-house. You could almost draw house-plans, they are described with such precision. Many of the rooms are lovely, but…ah, Maria’s bedroom! I imagine most little girl readers wished it was their own. I certainly did.
It’s at the top of a tower, with a door too small for all but the tiniest of adults.

The ceiling was vaulted, and delicate ribbings of stone curved over Maria’s head like the branches of a tree, meeting at the highest point of the ceiling in a  carved representation of a sickle moon surrounded by stars.
There was no carpet upon the silvery-oak floor, but a little white sheepskin lay beside the bed, so that Maria’s bare toes should meet something warm and soft when they went floorwards in the morning. The bed was a little four-poster, hung with pale-blue silk curtains embroidered with silver stars, of the same material as the window curtains, and spread with a patchwork quilt made of exquisite squares of velvet and silk of all colours of the rainbow, gay and lovely.

Plates and glasses, furniture, fabrics, pots and pans; dresses and coats and breeches and shoes; everything is gleaming and shining with cleanliness and care and described in caressing detail. Except for the nasty, gloomy Norman keep of the wicked Black Men, who live with their leader Monsieur Cocq de Noir and lead a bachelor existence in the pine forest. But even they change their ways, forsake wickedness, smarten up and do right.

Elisabeth Goudge published The Little White Horse in 1946, right after the end of WWII. The social history of immediate post-war Britain has long been an interest of mine and everything I’ve read would indicate that in 1946 the country was on its knees, in spite of victory. Bombed towns, rationing, shortages of everything – food, fuel, building materials – meant everyday life would have been challenging. Or downright miserable. Demobbed servicemen and women returned to ordinary life…but that could not erase the individual and collective trauma of the war years. Destroyed homes and communities and families. Children who were evacuated to live, often, with complete strangers, for years. And there were so many deaths to mourn.

I haven’t read much about Goudge’s life, but I do know that depression and ‘nervous breakdowns’ were an issue for her. I can easily imagine this book was written as a wonderful warming, comforting ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world’ wish-fulfillment fantasy. It won the Carnegie Medal in 1946. I hope it soothed her heart, even if – with the rationing of sugar, butter, eggs and flour – she could not indulge in Marmaduke Scarlet’s full catalogue of delights:
…plum cake, saffron cake, cherry cake, iced fairy cakes, eclairs, gingerbread, meringues, syllabub, almond fingers, rock cakes, chocolate cake, parkin, cream horns, Devonshire splits, Cornish pasty, jam sandwiches, lemon-curd sandwiches, lettuce sandwiches cinnamon toast and honey toast…

(I’ve taken the pictures of Walter Hodges’ colour illustrations from a 1949 edition I picked up at an opportunity shop.)

I have been re-reading.

All the Light We Cannot See was the last book of the year for my Castlemaine library reading group. I read it seven or eight years ago; I was happy to read it again. It’s an epic story of World War II in Europe, told through two characters. Marie-Laure is fifteen, and blind since she was six. She lives with her father, who is employed to make and tend the locks at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Werner is a German boy who lives in an orphanage in a coal-mining area near Essen in Germany. He and his sister Jutta are close, but there’s a way out of a future in the coal mines; it’s through his technical skill and the Hitler Youth. Their separate destinies are inevitably drawn together over time and space, across Western Europe, to the French seaside town of St Malo near the end of the war.

The word ‘humanity’ was used a lot as we discussed the book. Perhaps we all had different meanings; or perhaps we all had the feeling that Doerr looked into the hearts of his characters, and they touched ours…though perhaps not the few utterly repulsive and evil ones. Love, kindness, decency and grace coexist with fear and cruelty. At times moving, at times harrowing, the humanity of Doerr’s gaze never falters.

We loved the way the writing carries you rapidly along. Partly it’s the immersive, sensual language and selection of detail which make the descriptions cinematic – you have the feeling of actually walking through rooms, tracing the wooden streets of Papa’s models, smelling the seawater and feeling the molluscs and anemones and seaweed. One of our readers is a bit allergic to long static passages of description, but she loved the sense of movement in this. And partly it’s the way Doerr crafts the rhythm of the chapters. Some are very short, only a page or two, and they build suspense so expertly that you’re compelled to keep reading. The changes in chapter length also added to a sense of movement.

It’s an epic story, with many characters, taking in great swathes of European history but we never felt bogged down in a lesson. Nor does Doerr beat us over the head with morality. I wished Werner would ‘do the right thing’ and support Frederick in his stand against the brutal ethos of the training school…but he did what he could, even though it wasn’t enough.

We all wanted our (by the end of the book) beloved characters to live well and prosper, or at least survive. For Werner and Marie-Laure to reconnect after the war, perhaps to fall in love; definitely for him to be reunited with his sister Jutta. For Papa to make it through the prison camp. For Frederick to recover. For everyone to live happily ever after.

But that would have been a fairytale. Instead, there were glimpses of hope, of possibility; in spite of the heartbreak, there was no tear-jerking sentimentality. A beautiful and radiant novel, a worthy recipient of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize.

I’ll start this review by admitting that Thin Places is a book I have not really read properly, but rather skimmed with the occasional comprehensive stop. I have inserted lots of paper slips to mark passages I want to re-read – but much of it I found too harrowing right now. It’s one I will perhaps read again one day, when I am not so preoccupied with the suffering of children in a world of pointless, endless adult violence and war.

What intrigued me was the idea of ‘thin places’ (and anything Robert MacFarlane calls ‘remarkable’, I’m willing to read). Thin places in Irish tradition are those in which you feel the distance between this world and the otherworld (which can be the world of spirit, the ancestors, heaven, inspiration) shrink. We’re separated only by a veil. And the veil is thin and permeable, or it lifts; we are “held in a place between worlds, beyond experience”. Ni Dochartaigh writes beautifully of these places and how they inspire and move her.
But she also writes (beautifully too) about memory, trauma, depression and anxiety, addiction, suicidality and despair.

So, no, not uplifting. Not soothing. Easy clichés about “the healing power of nature” get a look-in; healing, or its possiblilty, is contrasted with ni Dochartaigh’s life of relentless, battering struggle.

She was born in Northern Ireland, in Derry (Londonderry, Doire) and grew up during the height of the Troubles. Her mother was Catholic, her father Protestant and in that fiercely sectarian city, her family fitted nowhere. Literally. The violence sounds terrifying. Imagine, as a five-year-old, seeing a soldier shot dead in front of you. Petrol bombs, shootings, murders, vandalism, abuse were constant. They had to shift multiple times; predictably, her family broke. Even when, in her teenage years, they found a haven in a small village, tragedy dogged her. Her best friend, a young  man, was murdered.

Ni Dochartaigh leaves Ireland – she thinks, for good – to study, work and settle first in Scotland and then England, but the damage of her childhood suffuses adulthood with grief and pain. Gradually, frustratingly slowly, she circles around her childhood trauma and finds ways to heal. I confess that am slightly ashamed I skimmed so many of these pages. Just couldn’t do it. But the moments of discovery and clarity, the epiphanies, I lingered on.
Ni Dochartiagh is drawn to birds, moths, butterflies and winged, flying creatures of all kinds. Studying an endangered butterfly, she realises that though she’s Irish, standing on the soil of her ancestors, she doesn’t know the name for butterfly in her own language.

The loss of my ability to name both the landscape and the creatures we share it with in Irish began to sink in… I started to feel an ache, a deep sorrow, when I began to see it all in the clear light of day. How interconnected, how finely woven every single part of it all was. In Ireland, the loss we experienced has had a rippling effect on our sense of self and our place in the world, which has an impact on our ability to speak out, to protect, to name. Our history, our culture, our land, our identity: we have had so much taken away from us – we were never given any of it back.
For the first time properly in a long time, I felt the loss of things, of precious things – the loss of things I realised I could not name.

I wonder whether some of Ni Dochartaigh’s thoughts and feelings would be understood or shared by Aboriginal people. On my recent travels in Central Australia, standing in awe-inspiring places like Standley Chasm, Ellery Big Hole and Ormiston Gorge, I knew these were not their real names. And I knew I did not understand or feel what the rocks and water were, what they meant. As a friend recently said to me, we (Anglo-Celtic-Australians) can ‘read’ the landscape of somewhere like Yorkshire or Cornwall better than we can read our own. And the central desert country, so austerely beautiful, is just not in our DNA.

Ni Dochartaigh writes of the Celts, ‘…almost everything in the natural world was tied in some way to the greater being – the spirit – of the earth. For our ancestors, our role in it all as guardians was one of unshakeable magnitude’.

I have a tendency to think of nature, the natural world, as somewhere beautiful and calm that you go into, like a garden, or somewhere remote or wild you have to travel to. I loved Ni Dochartaigh’s discovery of the small wildnesses of an urban environment.

I took my anxious body a different path. I made my way around the football pitch instead of along the stream, up a hill with empty energy drink cans and one discarded stiletto into a wee copse. Burnt grass and shards of glass from Tesco own-brand vodka bottles, no light to be found at all. And then she came, wild and beautiful, in flight in the least likely of settings –  a mottled brown and white moth. I followed her path above broken glass bottles – things that speak of the addiction and poverty…  Later, before the night fell, I looked her up and found that she was an Oak Beauty. She is very specific to woodland in this wooded, broken city of mine. Even as I thought I was open of mind and eye, the moth that afternoon told me to come closer still, tells me – even now – that all is not lost in this place, not yet.

I have always enjoyed looking out of the window of a train. Even as a little kid, I was fascinated by back yards, the rear views of buildings and especially the weedy edgelands along the tracks. Last year, on my way to a particularly upsetting funeral, I occupied myself by noting the names of the plants I recognised. Ivy, periwinkle, nasturtium, geranium, arum lily, cotoneaster… In that way, I came back to myself, and was able (I hope) to be of some use to the bereaved daughter. Are those neglected margins of unwanted wild growth thin places? I’ll give it some thought.

The merging of knowledge and experience can happen because we have a multi-tiered brain memory system, where new experience is held in the plastic hippocampus, the memory maker, and gradually integrated into the less plastic, more consolidated  cortex. Current experience and memory are integrated in the complicated networks of the prefrontal cortex, the storyteller. At the highest pinnacle of this complexity, memory is consciously manipulated in imagination. At this level, memory can be worked without external sensory input, and this faculty can be used to form new patterns of thinking, to imagine and create, to modify one’s understanding of the world…

I’ve been fascinated by brain science for years now, ever since the research about things like psychoneuroimmunology (how’s that for a big word?) and neuroplasticity have been popularised in accessible mainstream books like Norman Doig’s The Brain That Heals Itself and When the Body Says No by Dr Gabor Mate. I think I’ve wanted learn about myself, really; how my brain creates the mind that creates my sense of a self. How both the good stuff like creativity and sensitivity and problem-solving, and the not-so-good like stress, anxiety, and physical and emotional pain, struggle and wrestle and battle it out… I was going to write “in my head”, but of course that’s not the case. The brain is not for thinking! We’re not a robot body controlled by a computer brain. We are our bodies, irreducibly so. (And yes, it’s hard to get your head around that idea). As Dr Veronica O’Keane writes, “The fundamental point that we cannot make memories without sensation may be so familiar to us that we are blind to it. It is difficult to believe that it took many hundreds of years to understand the now self-evident fact that the five senses bring information to the brain so that one can learn and categorize information and ultimately form a coherent sense of the world”.

The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us adds another layer of information. It’s science-y, but not dry. Actually, it’s beautifully done. Dr Veronica is a fine writer, who combines personal reflection with her medical explorations, as well as literary references – like Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett and John Berger – and stories from her years of practice with all kinds of people, from new mothers with post-partum psychosis caused by birth and pregnancy hormones, to non-verbal ‘locked in’ psychotics whose lives are transformed by the right medications.  If I ever need a psychiatrist, I would love to have a Dr Veronica. She sounds thoughtful, compassionate and kind; she writes about her patients as if they’re real people with real lives, not just illustrative case histories, and her medical and scientific focus still leaves her alive to the beauty and wonder and mystery of the human mind.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history…

Isn’t this a great beginning? Hooked in, straight away. Who’s Bunny? What’s the deal with melting snow? Who are the ‘we’? For that matter, who is the ‘I’ who is so casually telling us about a death and a manhunt and the melting snow?

The Secret History by Donna Tartt was our most recent Book Group novel. It was long (at 629 pages of small print, very long) but most of us finished it, and some of us whipped through the pages despite the length. This includes me, and I’m one who really loves a short book. I read it when it first came out, though ‘devoured’ is probably a better word. I hadn’t read anything like it before; it was one of those rare beasts, a literary page-turner. I read with a little more attention this time, not quite so beguiled – and even a little picky – but not once did I struggle to keep going. I’d say it held up well.

The narrator is a young man called Richard Papen, yet another brilliant misfit way out of his league and trying to fit in. The book group could all refer back to the narrator in one of our previous books – the damaged Enderby – but Richard is a much more successful imposter. One of the group members recalled Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. I thought of Gatsby.

Fleeing an unsatisfactory future in sunny California, Richard applies for a place at Hampden, a small New England university –  and to his surprise, he’s accepted. He wants to register for the Greek (ancient, that is) class but the brilliant, charming and unconventional Classics professor, Julian Morrow, accepts only a select few acolytes and keeps apart from the rest of the language and literature department. Which intrigues Richard. As do Henry, Bunny, Charles and Camilla (twins) and Francis, Julian’s chosen ones. They’re all rich and well-connected. The elite. When finally he’s accepted into the class, he invents a new background (money, glamorous lifestyle, private schools) and despite his deepening friendship with the five, he never drops the deception.

I loved the way Tartt evokes young adult college life, with its mix of intense friendships, intellectual and philosophical and spiritual discovery allied with drugs and alcohol and freedom. Made me remember my art school days! Though thankfully we never killed anyone on one of our rampages though the inner suburbs. With Julian as their guide they attempt to immerse themselves in Greek language and philosophy and thought. It’s an ancient mindset where the rational was in an uneasy balance with the irrational, the inspired, the frenzied… and the mad.

There is – Tartt makes it clear from the first pages – a murder, but it’s not really so much a ‘who done it’ as a why done it and what comes after it’s done. The big themes and questions of life – morality, responsibility and guilt, truth and beauty, good and evil –  swirl around in contrast to Richard’s everyday life. When he’s not with the group, he’s working, scoring drugs and information from his fellow Californian Judy, living in student digs. There are a few remarkable set-pieces.  The freezing winter in the hippie’s attic is gruelling to read. I thought the languid days at Francis’ country house where Richard becomes increasingly infatuated with the group and in particular, Camilla evoked Brideshead Revisited. The closely observed, nightmarish trip to stay with Bunny’s hilariously hideous and tragic WASP family for his funeral stood out. It could almost have been part of another, different, non-campus novel – one without a murder in it, perhaps by Ann Patchett.

Our book group agreed that The Secret History could have done with an edit. One member thought the smallness of the Hampden College – at 500 students – was unrealistic. I felt that Bunny was too much of a lazy clod to learn ancient Greek. Another member pointed out that if they had only sensibly reported the death as an accident, they would all have been off the hook. But then there would have been no story.

My haul at the Friends of Castlemaine Library book sale on the weekend was mainly gardening books, but I threw in a battered and much pencilled student edition of Euripides The Bacchae. Good lord, it’s horrific!
As priestess leading the Dionysian rites, Agaue kills her own son, Pentheus, despite his pleas to her.

Agaue was foaming at the mouth; her rolling eyes
Were wild; she was not in her right mind, but possessed
By Bacchus, and she paid no heed to him, She grasped
His left arm between wrist and elbow, set her foot
Against his ribs, and tore his arm off by the shoulder.
It was no strength of hers that did it, but the god
Filled her, and made it easy. On the other side
Ino was at him, tearing at his flesh; and now
Autonoe joined them, and the whole maniacal horde.
A single and continuous yell arose – Pentheus
Shrieking as long as life was in him, the women
Howling in triumph. One of them carried off an arm,
Another a foot, the boot still laced on it. The ribs
Were stripped, clawed clean; and women’s hands, thick red with blood,
Were tossing, catching, like a plaything, Pentheus’ flesh.

The thing is, I’m crook. Possibly dying. I may have to speed this up. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I have time to burn, and time to think. And writing, jotting thoughts and memories down, is a salve. It gets my mind off things.

When Sam Neill was diagnosed with stage III angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, he used his ‘time to burn’ to write this lovely, gentle memoir. From chapter to chapter he skips around, but basically it’s the story of his life so far. Along the way he talks – this is a very conversational book – about his childhood in Ireland, his parents, grandparents and siblings, his education, the move to New Zealand, schools, first jobs, his progression into film-making and then acting and his long career in film. Interspersed with this personal history and the progress of his cancer are chapters about his loves – wine and wine-making, music, architecture, New Zealand art and artists, friends (he has many), the acting life, Bali, cars, dancing, his children and grandchildren. Lovers and wives and relationships aren’t a big part of this memoir, which makes Neill seem decently reticent about his private life. A gentleman.
He’s a modest man, too. He’s been a working actor for around 40 years, starting with My Brilliant Career; he’s made some amazing artistic films like The Piano and some money-spinning blockbusters like the Jurassic Parks movies. But there is only a little showbiz gossip, though quite a few funny stories and a few tart comments about actors who behave badly. He loves and admires women – there is a whole chapter titled ‘Women Are Better’ –  and has nothing but praise and admiration for nearly all of the female actors he’s worked with.
With the dire state of the world preying on my mind – an old friend used the phrase ‘shit and desecration ‘ –  and a knee injury keeping me from my ‘happy place’ (the garden) I’m looking for books that aren’t going to make me feel any worse. This memoir made me feel better. A companionable chat with (Sir) Sam, who is warm and funny, with a soft heart and feet on the ground, has been a real pleasure.
He writes towards the end of the book that though he’s not scared of death, he’d rather live. And he will. He’s in remission. What a sweet way to end.

…the Russian psyche, forged through centuries of abuse by the country’s rulers and enemies alike, is not “like us”…

I borrowed The War of Nerves:Inside the Cold War Mind thinking it was going to be about spies, but it was really about fear. The arms race between the USSR and the US took the world to the brink of destruction. East and West lived for decades in a state of mutual incomprehension, misunderstanding, mistrust and paranoia that nearly killed us all.
After millions of Soviets suffered and died defeating the Germans in WWII, there was a brief honeymoon of gratitude for their enormous sacrifice…but then the West (particularly the US) managed to pretty comprehensively stomp all over their sensitivities. Thus, East Berlin and the Wall and the Iron Curtain.

Fearmongering, as we know from our recent experiences here – looking at you, John Howard et al –  is effective but heartless politics. The Soviets feared the that the US was going to attack them; the leaders projected their own experience and psychological understanding onto their counterparts and saw lies, disinformation, dissimulation and conspiracies everywhere. And in the US, with its McCarthy witch hunts and ‘reds under the beds’ campaigns, it was vice versa. Thus when each side suspected the other of planning nuclear strikes, we had ‘brinkmanship’ – a game of ‘chicken’ played with weapons of mass destruction.
Did you know that the WWIII was narrowly averted in 1983? Communist propaganda reinforced the idea that the individual was not to be trusted, that Party protocols or automation were the superior decision-makers. Well, a computerised Soviet early warning system misfired. It was only because Stanislav Petrov, the Russian officer on duty, chose to hang back, re-check and await corroboration instead of blindly following the order to launch that bombs weren’t launched. Whew.

We hear about the big players  – Stalin, Churchill, Reagan, Truman, Khrushchev – and high-level international politics but Sixsmith also explores the psychology of the times through personal stories and anecdotes, through art, literature, religion, science, music and popular culture.

The anecdote that has stayed with me is about the Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who went knowingly to his death in 1967. Increasingly lagging in the ‘space race’, the Soviet authorities demanded the Soyuz launch go ahead at all costs.  All the scientists knew that the ship was not space-worthy; the program had been dogged by technical problems, cost-cutting and time-saving shortcuts. But no-one could tell the authorities because questioning the superiority of Soviet technology amounted to treason. And Komarov knew that if he pulled out, they would instead send his friend and colleague, Yuri Gagarin. So he chose to go, with predictable results.

This is a gripping stuff, and it seems (sigh) like history is repeating. Disinformation, lies and wacky conspiracy theories spread like the plague via social media and Sky commentators. When I was young, it seemed unthinkable that there would ever be another world war but I wonder if we are getting closer and closer to another brink.