Six of the Best

Last weekend Nancy Pearl did a top ten list of neglected classics (in The Guardian) ripe for BBC adaptation. It’s a nice list composed in equal measures of books I love, authors I love, and books I now want because of the good company they’re clearly keeping but... One of the books on the list is F. M Mayor’s ‘The Rector’s Daughter’ which is an amazing moving and eventually heartbreaking book which I can’t help but think would make for miserable television (girl leads loveless and disappointing life with remarkable grace and stoicism than dies) I think it’s a bit subtle for television. All of which started me making my own list of neglected books I’d love to see in glorious Technicolor on a Sunday Evening.

The rules (there have to be rules) were that I had to be able to imagine watching instead of reading, that there shouldn’t already be filmed versions (I broke this immediately), and that the lesser known works of better known authors probably shouldn’t be included (which meant ruling out Wilkie Collins and Trollope amongst others). This all turned out to be a bit tougher than I thought (damn all self imposed rules) but here’s my list of books, ten wasn’t a rule I felt I needed to pay much attention to.

It starts with Gavin Maxwell, there’s already a film version of ‘Ring of Bright Water’ but it doesn’t do justice to either Maxwell or this particular book. Think about it – fast cars, sharks, arctic exploration, brushes with the Mafia, aristocratic connections, confused sexuality, witches, amazing scenery, and of course otters – and that’s just for starters. I could see this being a properly exciting bio pic probably in 6 parts or more and based on all his books (for no good reason I’m picturing Daniel Craig hunting sharks possibly, and for entirely artistic reasons, without a shirt).

Now that the token man has had his mention... Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ is definitely begging for the Sunday night slot, any sensation novel I’ve read would be a good fit, but why this particular book isn’t much better known baffles me; plenty of sex and attempted murder with the chance for some lavish costumes – it’s what I pay my licence fee for.

I would also dearly love to see what E M Delafield’s Provincial Lady books would look like, possibly in a superior sitcom format. All that genteel bitching over the tea cups and pawning of the family diamond to keep up appearances, I’m sure it could be a winner or would it be better suited to radio? Hmmm.

Mrs Oliphant is another TV friendly writer who deserves to be as widely loved as Trollope at the very least. ‘Miss Marjoribanks’ is the only Carlingford chronicle I’ve read so far (though this is soon to change) and I would love to watch it – like a racier ‘Cranford’ with a few good female roles and a nicely caddish villain, a bit of romance, some tragedy, and a heroine who could give Emma a run for her money.

Elizabeth Bowen's ‘The Last September’ has already been made into a film, it’s got an impressive cast and I’ve only just found out about it via Google; the trailer looks rubbish . It took me two attempts to get into this book and I know that Simon Stuck-in-a-book isn’t much of a fan but stay with me on this one because it could be great to watch. The relationship between the Irish, English, and Anglo Irish is ripe for exploration – all those themes of loyalty, belonging, tradition, class, conflict, and then throw in a bit of coming of age drama and romance (but not to heavy on the romance please – there are other things in the world that matter) and bob’s your uncle – a thought provoking feast for the eye.

Angela Carter’s ‘Night’s at the Circus’ would be a belter to watch as well – hopefully ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ will be such a success that those who decide will be looking around for another Victorian set drama featuring brothels (and would be happy to include a winged woman flying through the air with the greatest of ease). ‘The Company of Wolves’ wasn’t a flop - now I’m thinking about it I’d love to watch it again - and I think the world is ready to see more Carter. I love her writing but admit that not so many of her books would be just right for anything but a very specialised audience (I really wouldn’t want to watch ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman’ for example) but ‘Nights at the Circus’ would be a treat.

Making this list has been far harder than I imagined. It turns out that I have a lot of books I haven’t read (I sort of knew that) and so can’t comment on, and a lot of books which are already on film in one form or another whether I knew it or not. I don’t consciously go out looking for tie in novels, more often than not the book comes before the film but I’m clearly more in tune with semi popular culture than I imagined. Now all I want to know is what would make it onto your list?

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg – Dubravka Ugresic

Part of the Canongate myth series, this book ticked so many boxes for me and yet for some reason I’m struggling to pin it down. Still I’m going to try because I found it both a great read and deeply invigorating – I came out of it fizzing with ideas. The box ticking comes from the myth element, myths, legends, fairytales, folklore – it all fascinates me, and Baba Yaga is a particularly intriguing figure. (Just in case she’s new to you Baba Yaga is a hag who lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs by the edge of the forest. Sometimes she helps travellers but more often she entraps them, especially girls. She travels by flying through the air in a mortar steered by a pestle wiping out her traces with a broom. She may or may not eat children).

All of that is well within my comfort zone, but reading an author I know nothing about, whose (indrawn breath) contemporary – well it’s not something I do a lot of, although there are a few more in the Canongate series that I’m adding to my wish list (how amazon must love me). I might even take a chance on another of Ugresic’s books because this one reminded me irresistibly of Angela Carter and I’d like to know if that’s specific to this book because of its explicit basis in myth, or if it’s a shared quality between the two writers. It’s the way that Ugresic plays with reality that reminds me of Carter; things seem real enough and then they become fantastic, strange, worrying, and not quite real at all.

I should also say that this is the second book in a row (after Memento Mori) that’s dealt with the extremes of old age and it occurs to me that the very end of life when neither body or mind works quite as it used to, or quite as you might like it to then things might well be strange, worrying and not quite real.

‘Baba Yaga Laid an Egg’ is split into three parts; the first section chronicles the relationship between the author and her aging mother and includes a trip to her mother’s old home in Bulgaria with a young academic called Aba. Part two takes place in a spa; a triumvirate of old women turn up and wreak a certain amount of havoc on all around them, all in their way are waiting for death:

“Beba sat in the bath wrapped in lacey foam. She could not remember the last time anyone had treated her with greater warmth or tenderness than this hotel bath. This was the kind of painful realisation that drives the more sensitive to put a bullet in their temple, or at least to look around to see where they might attach an adequately strong noose.”

This is the point when strange things really start to happen. Finally there is a ‘Baba Yaga for beginners’ section written by Dr Aba Bagay. It’s an exhausting exploration of Baba Yaga (and incidentally introduced me to the work of Marina Warner who’s now also on my wish list) written as if to the editor of the book. Exhausting but ultimately very worthwhile.

I mean to carry on researching Baba Yaga – here I think she is an avenging fury of sorts - and a neat opposite of the ideal of womanhood, but for all the repulsiveness in her image she’s still a recognisable woman, an angry one at that, and somehow I find that very compelling.

Shadow Dance – Angela Carter

I’ve really enjoyed paperback-reader Angela Carter month, and am rather hoping she does another one. I’ve been a fan of Carter for a few years now and whilst I’ve read most of the easy stuff there are still a few short stories and novellas I could be better acquainted with, plenty of nonfiction that’s unread, and still ‘The Passion of New Eve’ to get through. After my Dr Hoffmann experience New Eve can stay on the shelf for a while, but I did want to read at least two Carter’s whilst there was plenty of encouraging discussion going on around her work so my Oxfam purchase of ‘Shadow Dance' was very timely.

I was far more impressed with ‘Shadow Dance’ than I expected to be - until now I’ve not been so taken with the early novels, but this book felt perfect. Tense and chilling, it’s a very convincing sort of gothic horror written and set in the 1960’s. Essentially beauty becomes the beast – a pretty girl is badly scarred in a knife attack and returns an, at first silent, but always avenging fury to exact her pound of flesh. Her counterpart is the puckish Honeybuzzard – most likely responsible for her injuries he’s a lord of misrule and chaos. Whatever harm they bring to each other though is as nothing to the harm they bring on others.

The thing about the sixties that I don’t often remember is that it’s a generation of twenty and thirty somethings formed by one war and looking hard at the possibility of another. The narrator (Morris) remembers his mother dying in an air raid whilst having sex with a stranger against the outside of his bedroom door. At least he assumes she died – she’s certainly gone, but no identifiable body is forthcoming. In a world where things like that happen nothing can be terribly certain so Morris develops a dependency on Honeybuzzard who seems to be always certain, and always determined to do precisely what he wants.

Honeybuzzard is the sort of fairy who would spoil the milk and put the hens off laying not so much out of personal spite as sheer perversity – as is Ghislaine (the girl he scars). Both are too damaged and to damaging to fit into any sort of society, so all the way through as the expectation for some sort of cataclysmic dénouement built I was getting closer to the edge of my seat, and it’s the end which really shows Carter’s quality. The climax is satisfyingly dramatic but at the same time its woven in with something far more earthy and real than I expected; it’s a combination which reinforces the sense of not knowing what’s real and what’s prevarication on the narrators part all the way through. I’m still unsure of how complicit Morris really is in Honeybuzzard’s actions – even how much blood he may have got on his own hands.

I don’t feel I’ve got anywhere near doing this book justice, but I really do recommend it, which brings me back to my beginning. I’m never sure about traditional reading groups – I’m clearly not enough of a joiner in to find the idea attractive, and time’s a bit short to read books that don’t entirely grab me. Angela Carter month has really appealed to me though – and I’m looking forward to Persephone reading week for much the same reasons – the chance to read discussions on books I know I might be interested in, a good push to get something off the shelf I’ve meant to read for ages, and plenty of feedback about the books I am reading, all without any particular pressure. Heaven for the slightly disorganised and sometimes despairing (desperate) reader.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Well it’s taken me a week and more to do battle with Carter on this one and I’m wondering where to start. Had I any knowledge of Freud, more than a passing acquaintance with Jung, and had I read more than a couple of De Sade short stories many years ago then I might have a better idea of what else I might need to know to really get to grips with this.

I have read Hoffmann, quite a bit of Carter, and many, many, fairy tales and myths all of which rang bells whilst I was reading, but even so I think I’ve got only the haziest idea of what Carter was trying to do with this book. It didn’t help that it felt quite dated/ very much of its time depending on your point of view, and also like relatively young work. I was surprised to find that it came if not quite mid career, then certainly well into it. It’s far more experimental than any other Carter I’m acquainted with, and altogether more explicit as well – the whole book is soaked in blood, sweat, semen, tears and urine. It should perhaps be more shocking, maybe back in 1972 it was, but it’s also somehow cold in a way which makes it really very easy to accept actually quite horrible things, which raises some questions for me about what I’m prepared to entertain in my imagination.

Perhaps it helps that the descriptions are wrapped up not just in words, but also in the most impeccable art historical traditions; Brueghel and Poussin are specifically mentioned but there are whole sequences that feel like reading a Hieronymus Bosch, or walking through a Henri Rousseau forest, and certainly like being part of any surrealist painting you care to think of. There are moments of Cubism and suggestions of Delacroix and the romantics, all I think quite deliberate. The central premise of the book (as far as I can work it out) is that anything that can be imagined can be, that nothing once imagined can be destroyed, and that it’s all powered by our desires.

The action takes place across time; or more precisely in nebulous time, sometimes it’s the present, sometimes the past and sometimes somewhere in-between. It starts in a city at war – Dr Hoffmann is laying siege to reality and things have reached such a state that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not, or even to define what real is. I found it a tough but basically rewarding book, it made me think about it all the way through, and basically I enjoyed the ride, although it was far from comfortable bed time reading and I’m looking for a couple of quick light reads to come next.

Carter was a woman with a remarkable (and slightly intimidating) breadth of knowledge; it’s a huge shame that she died so young. The richness and texture she brings to any story is rare enough but the way she twins it with a blood spattered brutality really gets under my skin. There were certainly moments when I was reading this book that I felt the boundary between page and experience was being broken down – that it would be very easy to be swallowed up by the general sense of anarchy.

I’m very much looking forward to paperback-reader's review of this; I want to know what others make of it, especially anyone with a more formal education in English Lit than I have, so Claire – I’m relying on you for some proper insights!

The Wolf print is one I bought because it put me in mind of  'The Company of Wolves' - thats how much of a geeky fan I am.

Hoffmann

Simon Savidge was talking about Classic v Contemporary reading recently – he’s worried about reading too much contemporary fiction and missing out on some older gems. I worry about reading too much older stuff and missing out on what’s going on now, I also worry that my reading habits are to set – I mean there are only so many books by middle class English women out there, and although I’ve barely scratched the surface it wouldn’t do to entirely ignore books by a) Men, and b) anyone who isn’t from the UK.

Still life is too short to worry much about things like this. I keep up with the contemporary stuff vicariously and otherwise mooch along picking up whatever captures my imagination – and really what other way is there to read? This is all a very long preamble for an upcoming review of Angela Carter’s ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann’, because it was via Carter that I discovered Hoffmann, and Hoffmann which led me to buy the Carter.

How interesting (I imagine you saying) please, tell us more – well okay then it was like this... With books to return to Waterstones (it’s happened) a couple of years ago, and wandering what to exchange for I found ‘Tales of Hoffman’. It rang a Carter bell so I bought it as Christmas reading, he turned out not to be the most festive writer I’ve ever read, but creepy enough to suit winter very well, and as he’s a he, and also German I feel like I made a gesture to diversity as well.

The first tale I read in the collection, ‘The Sandman’ was unexpectedly familiar, the ballet Coppelia is based on it. Hoffmann’s like that, he creeps into things (like your subconscious) and jumps out unexpectedly. He writes romance with a twist of the freakishly weird and grotesque; plenty of demons and devils along with a shifting sense of what’s real and what’s not. I’m finding ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman’ a challenging read but all the better, and sort of clearer, for having encountered Hoffmann in person, he and Carter have a lot in common.

It’s April so it must be Angela Carter

This is basically a roundup of things I’ve been reading on other blogs, so apologies if that seems lazy, but after my final and resounding victory over the sink (okay so my mum came and helped, but still it’s washing up free, and looks like it means to stay that way) I can take it.

Paperback Reader is having an Angela Carter month, and as a bit of a Carter fan I thought this would be a good opportunity to read some of the titles I’ve found a little bit less than tempting in the past (I feel vaguely sacrilegious saying that but there you have it).

My love affair with Carter started with ‘Nights at the Circus’ continued with ‘Wise Children’ and the ‘Bloody Chamber’, took in ‘The Magic Toyshop’ and more collected short stories then sort of stalled with ‘Several Perceptions’ which I found less appealing. After hunting high and low for ‘The Passions of New Eve’ I never read it, I also have ‘The Sadeian Woman’ (destined to remain unread for a while longer) and ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’ which I am currently struggling through. I do wish that I’d started reading her a good bit earlier in my life, and that I hadn’t started with ‘Nights at the Circus’ – it’s by far my favourite, and I think by far her best book; nothing after has ever quite lived up to it for me – but that’s only a reflection on how good I think ‘Nights at the Circus’ is. Anyway if you like all things Carter and you haven’t had a look yet do check out Paperback Reader...

Who is also hosting a Persephone reading week with Verity from Virago Ventures and the The B Files in May. I’m looking forward to this too, I have a couple of Persephone titles that have been hanging around unread for a while so this is just the encouragement I need, hopefully there will be a good deal of Persephone based conversation going on with insights aplenty to take advantage of.

Finally Simon Savidge has followed up a really interesting post about blogging ethics (okay really, really, interesting to bloggers and perhaps mildly interesting to non bloggers) with questions about what sort of reviews people want to read – contemporary v classic. Both have raised some really interesting debates in the comments and assuming anyone who reads this hasn’t already looked at and commented upon Simons thoughts...