A catch up ramble

And latest books and a "discovery"

I always seem to start these things by goggling hopelessly at the passage of time. It’s June July. I’ve been 41 years old for months. My son is now eight. The solstice has passed. This morning I spied an onion weed blooming in the long grass. It’s freezing cold and the tūī outside look more ragged than regal (though still undeniably well-dressed). And I’m listening to Joni Mitchell again which is always a sign of … something. I am seasonally mixed up in June July and Joni Mitchell sounds like my confusion. ‘Free man in Paris’ is the song I have on repeat, actually after hearing it again on GIRLS. I did a full re-watch recently and had forgotten how good that song is (especially when used ironically to accompany Marnie and Hannah and Desi on a desperately ill-fated weekend away).

Seasonally mixed up because I lust for Northern Spring and sometimes the light in Autumn lands like it does in Spring. Plus the climate is so ruined there are hot flushes among the cold and cold flushes among the hot.

Last month I did actually make it to that Northern sun made horrifying by the climate crisis. I went to London for a conference, among other things, celebrating 100 years of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel Lolly Willowes which I’ve written about before, and have since and will do again. London was sweltering in its first heatwave. I lay on top of the covers at night with a fan beside me and sort of passed out. I walked everywhere and drank litres and litres of London water. Delegates sweated together in the conference room at UCL – I bought STW’s biography of TH White (author of the Arthurian cycle starting with The Once and Future King which I adore) – I’d been trying to find a copy online from down here for a long time. It was so much cheaper in the UK, without the heinous shipping costs, and comes with a slip proving that Margaret Drabble once read this very edition.

For me the conference unearthed three outstanding ideas: one, that the novel can be read as a text on mortality and death (my own readings tend towards a focus on viewing part two of the novel as a second childhood though I am always derailed by that enigmatic ending so a close reading with the death-lens was fascinating to me); I learned that Valentine Ackland read Tarot for STW more than once and that STW put some stock in what the cards told her; I re-read Lolly Willowes again on the second half of my trip looking only for representations of childhood and voila! An entirely new facet was revealed. I won’t bang on about it here but will at some stage.

If you’ve not read Lolly Willowes yet, and my constant nagging isn’t enough, then perhaps you can be convinced by the wise and fabulous writer with great taste Sinéad Gleeson’s vote for Lolly at number 4 in her top 10 list of best ever novels, feeding into the Guardian’s (not uncontroversial) top 100 novels of all time (my list as well as yours would of course look differently).

My reading this year has so far been erratic and strange. I’ve snatched at books from in front and behind: reading backwards and forwards. These are my favourites so far:

Oscar’s Lion by Adam Baron and illustrated by Benji Davies

This little novel was recommended to me by The Next Chapter Bookshop in Wānaka. I fell incredibly hard for this story which is perfect, light as a feather and weighty as a classic as the story comes into full view towards the end. It begins with Oscar waking to find a lion in his parents’ bed, and no mum or dad to be seen. We all assume the worst, naturally. Oscar and the lion go about curious days and we learn that Oscar is coping with some brutal instances of bullying. The days are surreal, gently adventurous. There are metamorphoses and portals but our feet are always on the ground with Oscar navigating what this lion might mean. In the end there is a very material resolution that made me weep. It’s a gorgeous book for all ages. Lovely to read aloud to a child but perfectly alluring for them to read on their own and discuss with you, too.

Stakes by Noelle McCarthy

I loved it even more than Grand because in this second memoir Noelle flashes her literary critic teeth and leans her life up against the spine of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I read Stakes with me on my travels, deliberately waited for it, because I was going to Whitby Abbey (Stoker’s inspo). I’d also recently read Nicola Griffiths’ majestic novel Hild (also a favourite!) about the early Medieval seer, early Christian convert St Hilda, Abbess of Whitby Abbey. So it was a triply literary pilgrimage to wander among the soaring ruins with these three books in my mind. Stakes is so sharp, poetic in its quick brush strokes: Noelle at once flutters and punches the sentences into you, holding nothing back and it is an exhilarating experience. I think she is one of the most deft and inspired writers out (and sort of said so in my review, here).

I took Stakes to Whitby Abbey with me. I like how my rain jacket (the heatwave was long gone by this time) and nails match the cover. Totally intentional and as planned.

Said The Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

I read this, too, on my travels, wanting to read it close to Stakes after Noelle told me that the Asylum of Ní Ghríofa’s focus is the very same one that Noelle’s mum Carol worked in. I adored A Ghost in the Throat and so had been eagerly anticipating this second hybrid work of excavation, memoir and fiction. It’s an unsettling experiment: combing through the archived case books of the medical staff at Cork Mental Asylum and inserting herself as “The Reader” into the lives of both doctors and patients, unearthing them from obscurity by writing them out and herself with them. Ní Ghríofa walks us in and out of lost lives based on the evidence she has in front of her and through adjacent research. It’s a fine line at times: evoking through fact and then taking it further and colouring with fiction. It’s an act of compassion — these women are unforgettable now. But still there’s a discomfort, an intrusion which the author acknowledges over and over.

Night, Ma by Elizabeth Knox

I adore Elizabeth’s non-fiction. She is such a remarkable writer: so precise, so intelligent but with such compassion the pages are always warm. This is a shocking memoir, though — layers and layers of events building trauma across generations. It is one of the great works of memoir from an Aotearoa writer: undeniably literary in its decisions about time, about how to place the narrator and what distance there is or isn’t. I learned a lot about motor neurone disease and the horrors of it, and am grateful for the knowledge. It strikes me now that all three memoirs I’ve written about here are full of horrors and there is such strange comfort there. To be able to take these people and what they’ve gone through into our minds and care for them with our responses and thoughts. I wrote more coherently about this book over at The Spinoff.

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

This novel did make it to the Guardian’s top 100 – number 52. But I didn’t read it because of that, I read it on my friend Helen’s recommendation (she has excellent taste). I am always grateful for books that don’t let me go. I’m forced to ignore everything and immerse until it’s over. I was forever gasping at sentences; such startling figurative language. I was forever in awe of the treatment of dialogue — so often without punctuation, only some given the attention of those little stroking quotes so that this novel is built in layers not just in terms of motif and repetition (of which there is a lot) but style, too. It’s a novel of fate, of the pain of loving in the wrong direction along ill lines: catastrophes you can see coming if you’re watching closely enough (or know the signs from experience). But Hazzard’s narration also articulated so astonishingly the discordance of coming from a colonial country (in this case, Australia) and going to live “back” in England as if that is somehow the destiny itself: to make it there. It can be brilliantly funny (blood Dora), sly-slippery – dazzling.

Art!

In London I tried to whip around galleries taking in as much as I could. I finally saw the Wallace Collection, visited Soane House, reacquainted myself with the Tate Britain and loved seeing my favourite Ithell Colquhoun – Scylla; and the Hurvin Anderson exhibition. I knew nothing about Anderson but spent a long time with the paintings — sweeping, luminescent but with shadows that seemed to play and shift. His style is lush, drenched in light, and plants and breeze that suited the heatwave outside. I have deep regrets that the day I set aside for Tracey Emin at the Tate Modern got derailed by travel interruptions but maybe Aotearoa will get her… ? PLEASE.

My favourite Hurvin Anderson that I saw. I can feel the sun, the shadow, the breeze.

But, in the strange way of the world, the artist I’ve “discovered” lately seems to illustrate something of Lolly Willowes and a character (for a book) who is starting to speak to me … she’s Gertrude Abercrombie, an America artist working over a similar clutch of decades to STW. I don’t even know where I first saw this painting, ‘Searching for rest’, 1951. Only when I saw it I recognised the moon at once — it’s the moon in the sky right now, lately magnificent and exuding unearthly light. So much of Lolly Willowes, to me, is about exhaustion. The woman is tired. She wants rest and within that, life. This painting though contains death: her zombie, grey state. The sweep of those dark clouds leaving the moon as an eye, a witness, its gaze beaming down the path towards that final destination. Such a fascinating image: like a Tarot card in its arrangement: water, giraffe, trees both dead and alive, that distant structure. Abercrombie sometimes identified as a witch and wove cats, crystal balls, broomsticks and lone women into her work – she styled herself in a velvet pointed hat that she thought suited her long features. The witch means/meant so much to unconventional women and to many of my favourite artists. It fascinates me endlessly.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Search for Rest, 1951, Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra. Photo: Sandy and Bram Dijkstra.

The short winter hours make me sleepy: I’m a she-bear yawning and grumbling. Then that moon rises up and the night is a new land. Is this why I wrote a story set over a night? Cass and the Beast written by me and illustrated by the marvellous Jill Calder is out on 1 August (US, UK, NZ, AUS) and I still don’t really know where Cass came from. But she is a child of the night and its possibilities: her way lit by the moon … witchy!

I am going to try and write more frequent and organised posts … aiming for every two weeks, reading round up and maybe even some author Q & As…. will keep you updated!