A letter written as long as six decades ago has recently elicited a lot of excitement in the Welsh press and particularly in southeast Powys where I live, and especially in the town of Crickhowell; a GoFundMe page has even been set up to raise funds to bring the original to the town.
It’s up for auction at Christie’s in a week or so with a guide price of between five and seven thousand pounds sterling, £5,000–£7,000, and you may now be asking why a one-page letter to a Miss Jenny Hall in Hertfordshire in the mid-sixties is estimated to be worth so much?
The answer, simply, is that it’s from a certain John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, and the interest in it is generated by the fact it mentions the name of the town as being the inspiration for Frodo Baggins’s house Crickhollow, as cited in The Lord of the Rings.
Oleander, Jacaranda: a Childhood Perceived by Penelope Lively. Penguin Books, 1995 (1994).
This memoir for me was a fascinating reading experience, not only for the details of growing up in Egypt before and during the last global conflict but also for the author’s ruminations on the particular difficulties of relating one’s early memories to the contextual realities that an adult would be more aware of.
As she clearly states in her Preface, “This is a book about childhood. It is also a discussion of the nature of childhood perception and a view of Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s.” What she sees as distinguishing this memoir is the recording of a lived life where one belongs to neither one or the other of two cultures, along with coming to terms with being brought up by a woman who was not her mother.
What I found was especially enlightening were the similarities and the differences with my own upbringing, brought up fifteen years later not in Cairo but in Hong Kong, and being also removed from one culture, aged 10, to be schooled in another; in addition, in attempting a memoir of my own I have encountered the same contradictions Penelope Lively had had with aligning memories with realities.
Emma at Words and Peace is now hosting Six in Six, a flexible meme in which at or around the end of the sixth month one may list six titles in six categories chosen from books one has read so far during the year. For 2026 therefore it’ll be six books in six categories in the sixth month in the twenty-sixth year of this century, which is kind of neat.
Having read enough books so that, theoretically, I don’t have to replicate any title, I thought I’d have a go at this as a bit of a divertissement, and – wonder of wonders! – I seem to have succeeded. You be the judge!
And, appropriately, I’m posting this the day of the summer solstice. However, to spare you any possible pain, I’ve resisted the temptation to link to my reviews, especially as I’ve yet to post my final two assessments for this month …
When Jane went in to put Mabel’s light out Maurice crept in too. (H R Millar, 1907)
‘The Cat-Hood of Maurice’ and ‘The White Cat’ in The Magic World by E Nesbit, illustrated by H R Millar and Spencer Pryse. Facsimile Classics Series, Macmillan Publishers, 1980 (1912).
Edith Nesbit’s 1912 collection of short stories called The Magic World is indeed magical, and I’ve previously read and enjoyed the dozen pieces it contains (as you may read about, here).
Amongst the tales of children, hedgehogs, dragons and fish are two items concerning cats. Thanks to the artist Louis Wain popularising cats by producing anthropomorphised illustrations of them, the species had by the turn of the 20th century become quite a fashionable pet in British society.
In Nesbit’s hands that anthropomorphism took a slightly different form in her two tales, involving metamorphosis and animism, and it’s worth focusing on how she treats what was once regarded either as a witch’s familiar or a controller of pests rather than a family friend.
The Scent of the Night by Andrea Camilleri; L’odore della notte (2000) translated by Stephen Sartarelli (2005). No 6 in the Montalbano series, Picador, 2007 (2005).
A missing investment manager is the focus of this latest case for Commissario Salvo Montalbano, the chief detective inspector based in Sicily’s fictional town of Vigàta. But has the financier skedaddled off with his investors’ money to the South Seas, as financial investigators think, or is it a case of murder, as our protagonist comes to suspect?
As regular followers of Montalbano’s cases know, this won’t be just about forensically examining evidence before eventually fingering the guilty party: Camilleri was never really interested in merely concocting a puzzle with clues for armchair sleuths to solve; as with previous instalments he’s more concerned with character, relationships, local politics, moral ambiguity, food and, frankly, the ridiculous.
This accessible translation with informative notes is englished as ever by the reliable Stephen Sartarelli. In the novel we witness Montalbano interacting with colleagues – many very familiar by now to some of us – as well as outwitting bumptious superiors and inadequate rivals, failing to commit properly to his longtime girlfriend, and bending if not actually breaking sundry rules to bring the guilty to justice or even to vent his rage at philistinism. And in between it all he finds time to enjoy meals, especially sea food from Trattoria San Calogero, named after a saint which, it comes as no surprise, happens to be the author’s middle name.
Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat by Ursula Moray Williams, illustrated by the Author. Puffin Books, 1965 (1942).
Here is a tale that must surely speak volumes to its intended audience, the kind of narrative that, consumed in short chunks, is perfectly designed to be read aloud to a young sleepyhead at bedtime. Like the stories told by Scheherazade each episode ends if not on a cliffhanger then inconclusively, leaving the child of whatever age so uncertain about a resolution that they will be looking forward to the next visit.
And, since it involves a young innocent abroad – in this case a naive but trusting cat – it should be easy for the young listener or reader to identify with Gobbolino as he makes his perilous way through a potentially hostile world.
But will this story by Ursula Moray Williams, published at the height of the last global conflict, appeal in the same way to a modern audience?
‘A peice of the great circle … at Abury’: engraving by the 18th-century antiquarian, William Stukeley.
Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, illustrated by Marjorie-Ann Watts. Faber Children’s Classics, 2006 (1958).
Ten is a transitional age, when a child moves from single to double digits, potentially not achieving triple digits for another nine decades. And – like everyone moving from one stage to another – the first step may take them over the threshold to an exciting adventure, but it also brings with it anxiety; moving from the known to the unknown is likely to be fraught with fear, and that fear can be palpable.
Marianne lives in a comfortable postwar house; although the father is absent she has a younger brother, Thomas, whom we only hear about but never meet. The only individuals she comes in contact with are her mother, a strict but sympathetic tutor called Miss Chesterfield, and the family doctor, the last two introduced because Marianne falls ill on the day of her tenth birthday with what sounds very much like glandular fever. Confined to bed for weeks with this debilitating disease, Marianne is bored and frustrated as well as being easily fatigued.
Eventually she makes an attempt to draw a simple house using what appears to be an ordinary pencil she finds in her grandmother’s box of oddments. But that childish house she draws – four square with a central door, smoke emerging from a chimney, the building separated from the surrounding grassy plain by palings and a garden gate – proves to be an archetypal Gothic residence, one inhabited by a mysterious boy and menaced by megaliths that seem to be besieging the property. And it exists in a world that, every time she draws with the pencil, Marianne is able to access by way of dreams that, too often, verge on nightmare.
The Water’s Lovely by Ruth Rendell. Arrow Books, 2007 (2006).
[Ismay] closed it and came back, pausing to look at a picture Pamela had newly hung on the wall where the towel rail used to be and Beatrix’s bowl of coloured soaps had stood. Ironically, the only thing to remind you it had once been a bathroom was that picture, a Bonnard print of a nude drying herself after a bath.
When a novel gets reactions on both sides of the critical divide that are as far from each other as one can get, the reader coming to it for the first time will realise that sitting on the fence may not be an option, quite apart from how uncomfortable that position is likely to be.
After all, it doesn’t take very long to appreciate that not only is there a mystery about an apparent death by drowning, but that almost every individual we’re introduced to is deeply flawed and probably also unlikable, even unlovable. Here are possessive parents, male predators, insensitive relatives, conniving acquaintances, moral and monetary blackmailers and undemonstrative individuals, a good few with motivations that remain opaque for a good while.
Whom then amongst this gallery of undesirables – many the architects of their own misery – can one empathise let alone sympathise with? Who’s weak, who’s strong-minded, who is hiding secrets, who’s not right in the head? And who really is responsible for the death of stepfather Guy?
‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ (1974) by Ursula K Le Guin from The Compass Rose (1982), in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose, introduction by Graham Sleight. SF Masterworks, Gollancz, 2015.
A cat has arrived, interrupting my narrative. It is a striped yellow tom with white chest and paws. He has long whiskers and yellow eyes. I never noticed before that cats had whiskers above their eyes; is that normal?
In fact nothing’s normal in the accepted sense of the word about this short story: it’s surreal, it’s unreal; the plot seems to paint a scenario that’s credible one moment, incredible the next. Absolute certainty is never guaranteed, of that you can be sure.
Le Guin plays around with notions from quantum mechanics and quantum physics. Along with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes Shrödinger’s thought experiment with a cat: one involves superposition (when two or more entities, or states, or waves can overlap, existing in the same place at the same time) and the other involves observation (certainty about which one of several possible scenarios truly exists is only established the moment the actual outcome is witnessed).
But I’ve jumped the gun here. ‘Shrödinger’s Cat’ should ideally be read before any discussion, its relative brevity enhancing individual appreciation. Still, I guess a précis won’t go amiss, and may indeed give a flavour of Le Guin’s own thought experiment.
During the last month’s emergence in western Europe of cloudless skies and wall-to-wall sunshine I’ve been suffering adversely from seasonal rhinitis, otherwise known as hay fever.
Despite sensibly dosing myself up with antihistamines I’ve still been needing regular recourse to paper tissues, while simultaneously considering how flimsy and inadequate our usual ones were.
Then I remembered the existence of Mansize Tissues marketed by a well-known global company, a product since 2018 officially rebranded as Extra Large Tissues after justifiable accusations of sexism. But then my devious yet literal brain immediately went to the notion of tissues the size of a man before hurtling headlong down a rabbit hole of lexical ambiguity.
The Escape of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc, from Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur, 1907) translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (2007). Penguin Archive, 2025.
Four short stories in translation are here selected from Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur, the first collection of stories about the extraordinary French antihero published in book form in 1907.
Nine Lupin short stories had originally appeared from 1905 to 1906 in the French magazine Je sais tout; this Penguin Archive selection features ‘The Arrest of Arsène Lupin’, ‘The Escape of Arsène Lupin’, ‘The Queen’s Necklace’, and ‘Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late’.
Master of disguises and yet a burglar with a heart of gold, no one knows Lupin’s background, his true appearance, his real name or even where he will turn up next – unless he chooses to announce it. A scourge of high society and the French police, he reminds me a lot of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley: a man who lives to dupe others, a chancer but also a meticulous planner, a criminal whom despite ourselves we have a sneaking regard for.
For me May was a month dedicated to reading fantasy in all its variety – or at least what titles I mostly have lurking on my shelves – courtesy of Wyrd and Wonder. Dragons, a haunted house, shapeshifting, a numinous object that triggered retrocognition (yes it’s an actual word!) and a city infused with magic all featured.
Then there is the tag #Logophile as my excuse to explore words, their meanings and etymology; this month I looked at museums and vellichor. But I also explored The Black Prince in depth for a A Year with Iris Murdoch, a follow-up to reading the novel for last month’s Reading the Theatre.
Finally, having spent a few enjoyable days in Oxford after heavy involvement in our Welsh town’s music festival for the long May Day weekend, I prolonged the pleasure by subsequently reading a children’s fiction by Penelope Lively mostly set in the city of dreaming spires, close to a museum and near to where she herself attended St Anne’s College.
A Victorian mansion in Oxford’s Norham Gardens (Google Street View).
The House in Norham Gardens by Penelope Lively. Puffin / Penguin Books, 1986 (1974).
It seemed profoundly unwise, to tamper with time itself. — Chapter 10.
Penelope Lively’s novel, theoretically aimed at younger readers, is a novel that doesn’t in any way talk down to its readers. In fact, if it was published as a straightforward literary novel you wouldn’t guess it to be for young adults, or even a fantasy. It gets so close to not only the protagonist’s thinking and feelings but also to the various individuals she interacts with that it’s nigh impossible not to feel you know them, or are there in the room they’re in, or wherever they may be.
So, Clare Mayfield, born September 1959, may be only 14 when this story begins but she has a thoughtful, sensitive head on her body. An orphan, she lives with her two aged great-aunts in an old house in north Oxford overlooking the Parks. As visitors all remark one way or another, the house is like “a museum where you’re allowed to take everything out and mess about with it.”
But there’s one object that, as autumn turns to a chill, deep winter, Clare really doesn’t want to mess about with – an object from the other side of the world which is not only a repository of memories and traditions but one which affects her in ways that Clare finds impossible to ignore, such as having vivid dreams disturbing both sleep and equanimity.
Three short fantasies: ‘Simple sentences’ by Natalie Babbit, ‘Jamie’s Grave’ by Lisa Tuttle, and ‘Words of Power’ by Jane Yolen, in The Year’s Best fantasy: First Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. St Martin’s Press, 1988.
A few decades ago, and certainly pre-blogging, I happened to pick up a promising yet chunky compendium secondhand proclaiming itself ‘the Year’s Best Fantasy’ and couldn’t resist acquiring it. I even remember noting a number of authors I was familiar with – Joan Aiken, Ursula Le Guin, Gwyneth Jones – and resolving to start delving into the nearly forty short stories and poems as soon as possible.
Needless to say “as soon as possible” became a movable feast, and it wasn’t till I recently read Patricia McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow with its introduction by Lisa Tuttle that I faintly recalled seeing the latter’s name among the contributors.
So for this year’s Wyrd & Wonder reading event I thought I’d take a leap into the unknown and choose three pieces from the collection. Naturally Lisa Tuttle had to be one of the authors, but I also chose Natalie Babbit, whose Tuck Everlastingwas a delight, and Jane Yolen, whose work I’ve come across in one or two other fantasy collections.
Portrait of a Lady, attributed to Girolamo da Carpi.
Ombria in Shadow by Patricia A McKillip, introduction by Lisa Tuttle. Fantasy Masterworks, Gollancz, 2014 (2002).
It was a delicate thing of slender ivory sticks and a double layer of folded rice paper. One side was a painting, the other an intricately cut silhouette, a shadow world behind a painted world that could be seen when the fan was held up to the light.
This exquisite fantasy by the late Patricia McKillip introduces us to a polity where everybody and everything seems to lack something: a ruler who will soon lack the breath of life, with a regent who has not as yet tasted death; a boy prince who lacks father, nurse and perhaps a friend, and a young man who lacks pigment, his father unknown; an ageless fay who has no discernible single form, and a creation of wax who for some time is missing a true heart and the capacity for individual thought – until she receives both, along with the truth.
And they all inhabit a city state with plenty of shadows but lacking a clear light to see what’s true and what’s false; a polity which also lacks good governance; an urban labyrinth with an underworld hidden in shadows, lacking solidity because enveloped in the mists of time.
Its essence is contained in the story of the fan; yet in this kaleidoscopic world – shifting from stark monochrome to streams of colour glimpsed through a prism – spells and ensorcellments rule the pace of life, and if magic doesn’t achieve the ends sought, why then, violence may take its place.
It’s no coincidence that many long-established museums around the world look like ancient temples, usually with entrances aping colonnaded porticos surmounted by triangular pediments and approached by imposing steps that seek to create a sense of awe as the supplicant comes to pay homage. Even Brecknock Museum (now part of Brecon’s Y Gaer cultural centre) is very appropriately located in just such a building from 1842, though originally the Shire Hall.
Particularly in Britain buildings in classical styles such the Palladian were popular for aristocratic mansions, follies and Georgian town residences, and so it was natural for architect Sir Robert Smirke (1780–1867) to design a new building for the British Museum in the 1820s in what was then a very fashionable Greek Revival style, to function as a national temple to the Muses – Calliope, Clio, Polyhymnia, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, and Urania.
I recently spent time at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (the second such temple established in the modern era, in the 17th century in fact, though the present building was built between 1841 and 1845) so I thought it fitting to mark International Museum Day (IMD) – a celebration held annually on or around 18th May and coordinated by the International Council of Museums – with a post inspired by my visit. However, the general history of museums and their purposes is not an entirely salubrious one but a tainted tale worth elaborating on, even if briefly, focusing on the tense relationship between storeyed and storied.
16th-century German image of the four humours: Flegmat / phlegm, Sanguin / blood, Coleric / yellow bile, Melanc / black bile.
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. — ‘Hamlet’ Act III Scene 1.
PART 2/2
In Part 1 of my further thoughts on Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince(here) I considered the complex relationships that permeate the novel, and suggest some parallels which Murdoch may have intended us to make with characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
In this second part I intend to discuss the pretended editor of the novel, P Loxias, the medieval Temperaments called Humours, Murdoch’s aphoristic style, and finally the themes of Art and Truth as presented in the narrative. Again, there will be spoilers, the kind I’ve largely tried to avoid in my review (here).
Of course, while I’m focused on the aspects that interest me I’m well aware that there are many subtleties in Murdoch’s writing that I will have ignored, mainly because I’d not be aware of them but also because a proper study would be beyond me. Nevertheless, whether or not I have anything new to add to scholarly discussion (probably not) I hope you’ll at least be amused, even entertained, by my attempts to make some sense of what is a very clever but deliberately frustrating narrative.
The Chandos Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, identified as William Shakespeare.
O good Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story. . .
—’Hamlet’ Act V Scene 2.
Literary reviews have limitations, depending on their purpose. If they are to alert potential readers to the desirability (or not) of engaging with a text then they should tease without revealing too much, persuade without committing the unforgivable sin of introducing spoilers. A statement like “The butler did it” is a crime punishable by death.
Unless, of course, the text is a classic, its theme and plot already known, its significance wholly in the public domain. Jack kills the Giant. Galahad achieves the Grail. The Mountie gets his man. You get the idea. Even then the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ may require a bit of circumspection in a review.
But there’s also those who are neither au fait with the text nor interested in reading it, so may skip the review or any related discussion, and that’s just fine – I’m not judging! But then if you love literature, or don’t mind spoilers, or indeed enjoy my literary ramblings here, then you may get something out of Part One of my further musings on Iris Murdoch’s The Black Princeafter my review here. And yes, there’ll be spoilers galore!
Maurits Cornelis Escher, 1898–1972: ‘Covered Alley in Atrani” (1931).
Rose/House by Arkady Martine. Pan Macmillan, 2026 (2023).
‘… she goes on, crossing the clear white marble, her shoes clicking, and turning left, deeper into the house, into the curving of its maze, towards the chill of its heart.’ — Chapter II
A thriller that’s also a science fantasy – a police procedural with hints of a Gothic mystery – a horror-tinged ghost story with a dystopian edge to it – a novella reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, with death and labyrinths and puzzles and philosophy deeply embedded; Arkady Martine’s tale is all of these and yet not precisely any of them.
Set a century or so from now (the precise date doesn’t really matter) – a future which is both very like ours and yet has clearly moved on from ours – Rose/House presents itself as a locked room mystery focused on a deceased architect’s dwelling in California’s Mojave desert, near a community called China Lake which, though not referenced here, happens to be where the massive Naval Air Weapons Station facility is currently located.
So far, so straightforward. But then a police detective investigating a reported death finds herself being asked the enigmatic riddle, ‘What is a building without doors?’ What’s more interesting than the question being asked, however, is the identity of whoever, or whatever, asked the question. That turns out to be Rose House – the dwelling itself.
11th-century carving on north door, Urnes Stave Church, Norway.
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison, introduction (2026) by Samantha Shannon. Virago Books, 2026 (1952).
The opening of Naomi Mitchison’s fantasy novella depicts the timeless period when myth and fairytale provided its parameters, a world where the beasts and peoples of Nordic sagas and poems existed, when dreamlike Once Upon A Time scenarios could play out to their conclusions.
But at some stage rubbing our eyes we emerge into a historical period, that of the 9th to 11th centuries when migrants Vikings were familiar figures in the Black Sea and in Byzantium and pagan ethics clashed with Christian values (though it’s arguable which then had a monopoly on goodness).
Through it all travels Halla, reared by creatures from legend, a woman who converses with animals, and is alternately revered as a saint or feared as a witch by humans. Though she exists in the liminal spaces between the fantastical and the real worlds, Halla still has to negotiate the delights and dangers of both worlds; in Mitchison’s writing we have a sympathetic protagonist who insists on having both of these worlds.
When you read this we’ll either be anticipating or else enjoying a few days break in Oxford after a long and very busy musical May Day bank holiday weekend for me in Crickhowell: two choral concerts, a festival service with a Bach cantata (BWV 68), and a recital in which I accompanied some of the choral society’s former and present choral scholars.
I intend taking with me a copy of Penelope Lively’s 1974 children’s novel The House in Norham Gardens to read during this break, partly because it’s fantasy (and thus fits in with this month’s Wyrd & Wonder theme) and because the house of the title is actually in a road of the same name in Oxford.
And, as I understand the narrative is centred on a particular object found amongst other musty memorabilia, antiquities and curiosities in the house’s long-established library, I was put in mind of the notion of how smells can evoke memories or a sense of déja-vu, enough for me to remember a piece I posted hereon my old blog, nearly ten years ago in 2016, about a special term for the scent of old books.
Noun: tinkerer | ting-ku-ru(r) 1. A person who enjoys fixing and experimenting with machines and their parts. “The garage was full of half-finished projects belonging to the enthusiastic tinkerer”; 2. An unskilled person who tries to fix or mend. “The amateur tinkerer’s attempts to fix the car only made the problem worse”; experimenter, unskilled person. — World Web Online: ‘tinkerer’.
Are you a tinkerer? More specifically, do you habitually tinker with your posts or your blog generally? (I’m assuming you’ll belong under the first definition!)
I only ask because when I first started blogging fourteen years ago in April 2012 (as WordPress has recently reminded me) I was obviously new to the whole shebang, and learning as I went along how to do it.
Then, when I came to the end of a post and after running a quick eye over it, I used to press the ‘Publish’ button and, ta-da, there was the post online! Which is when I immediately started to notice the glaring mistakes in punctuation and grammar, the non sequiturs and the poor pacing, the inaccuracies and the infelicities. (Insert here facepalm emoji of your choice.) And so I learned to tinker.
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Books, 1975 (1973).
… blest are those Whose blood and judgement are so well comeddled, That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him In my heart’s core. — ‘Hamlet’ Act 3 Scene 2, 72-78).
When you’re faced with a narrative nested within forewords and postscripts from multiple authors you may start wondering who best to believe, or whether they’re all unreliable; but when the editor and then the memoirist batter you from the start with their verbosity you may then question whether you’ll have the stamina to stay the course.
But then you will remember that this is Iris Murdoch, who knows exactly what she’s doing, and that it takes great skill and discipline to write consistently dubious prose while keeping a tight rein on characterisation, pace and mood.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a classicist and philosopher, she didn’t bring her disciplines to bear on A Black Prince: with its overt citations of and covert allusions to Hamlet I’m expecting an underlay of the four medieval ‘humours’ that categorised human personalities: blood, phlegm, choler or yellow bile, and so-called black bile, the source of the Prince of Denmark’s melancholia.
Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius. By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
April frivolity. I only briefly managed to pull the proverbial wool over readers’ eyes on the first day of the month with a review of The Life of St Meontologia, a so-called ‘grazer’ mystic from the Late Roman period who dressed in camel skins and perished from thirst. However it was worth a try, given the current lack of frivolity in the news globally.¹
Some memes. I managed to get through a range of books though thanks to book memes, including a review to mark International Unicorn Day. Other events included Reading the Theatre, World Book and Copyright Day, Shakespeare Day, the 1961 Club (all Club reviews are listed here) and A Year with Iris Murdoch, and I even managed to combine a couple or so events with judiciously selected titles.
Two themes. A couple of other themes seem to have inadvertently marked out this month, the first being a number of children’s titles. And then, after four weeks largely dedicated to Irish and Welsh writers I began with emigrée Scottish author (Muriel Spark), but otherwise April seems to have largely featured writers based in England – Lucy Boston, Angela Carter, Alan Garner, Alan Judd, and Catherine Storr. However Wales (Dahl), Ireland (Iris Murdoch, another emigrée), Norway (Dahl again, and Ibsen) plus the US (Minarik) have also had a look-in.
Theatrum Orbi: second Globe Theatre (1614) by Robert Fludd.
‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘ (1982) and ‘Peter and the Wolf’ (1982) by Angela Carter, in Black Venus. Picador / Pan Books, 1986 (1985).
The orchestra has laid down its instruments. The curtain rises. The play begins.
Angela Carter’s collection of short stories, first published in 1985 as Black Venus and then as Saints and Sinners in North America, consists of eight narratives which had appeared in various publications between 1977 and 1982.
Here I want to focus on two of the stories which, however distantly, derive from dramatic narratives associated with musical performance – Mendelssohn’s music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.
However, just as Shakespeare’s play and the Soviet ‘Symphonic Tale for Children’ are inspired by but aren’t based on traditional fairytales, so Carter’s tales riff on ideas from both works without being either simple retellings or modernised versions; but for all that they – as you’d suspect from Carter’s writings – retain the weirdness, even spookiness, of fairytales and their fantastical worlds.
Shakespeare’s Sword by Alan Judd, foreword by James Naughtie. Simon and Schuster, 2019 (2018).
‘One, two! One, two! And through and through | The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!’ —Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’.
With a title declaring itself as featuring “Shakespeare’s sword” one may have hopes that in these pages one might – figuratively of course – meet the genuine article. After all, antiques dealer Simon Gold, operating out of a Sussex town somewhat like Rye, believes that ‘There is life in things we touch and use, something of ourselves clings to them.’
But what if the rapier (now functioning as a fireside poker in Winchelsea) has a Shakespearean significance other than that our narrator Simon believes the case from his extensive researches into provenance, genealogy and metalworking?
And what if he realises, too late, that he is fulfilling the role played by some Jacobean tragedian, and that the role may have ramifications in the real world? And what if that role involves death?
Calmgrove Books 