The Blue Grotto: Mark Haddon, Leaving Home

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I think I approached a great deal of my childhood and teenage years in much the same way that I approached the Blue Grotto, weeping internally and with a towel over my head, pretending that it was not happening and waiting till it was all over, and consequently forming very few memories of what was happening outside my head on the other side of the towel.

When Mark Haddon was a child, he had such an acute phobia of deep water that when his family went on a holiday to Malta and his father decided they would “take a boat tour of a marine cave called the Blue Grotto,” he was so terrified that he “spent the entire journey crying with a towel over [his] head.” As he goes on to note, this miserable experience, combining overwhelming dread with a combination of shelter and denial, was typical of what it was like for him growing up–and, as his memoir Leaving Home frankly details, what it was often like for him as a grown up as well.

It’s hard to know exactly how to classify Leaving Home. “Memoir” doesn’t quite capture its combination of family history, personal experience, observations on imagination and creativity, and copious illustrations, including many drawings of Haddon’s own along with family photos, reproductions of paintings and graphics, and the “Weetabix” chart of the solar system. I was so engrossed in the narrative–which, despite being structured as a series of short somewhat fragmentary parts, has a lot of forward momentum–that I am actually quite sure I did not give the illustrations the attention they deserve, so something I’ll be doing before I return the book to the library is leafing through it again.

One photo that definitely made me linger in the moment is of Haddon’s mother at a beach, around the time she and his father married. “She radiates something I never saw her radiate in real life,” Haddon remarks of it,

nor in any later photos, even those in which she is smiling and appears happy. It’s partly those freckles, which she came to hate, which she covered in foundation and which rarely came out in summer because she avoided the sun for fear it would trigger a migraine. But the real difference is internal. The woman on the beach seems confident in her own beauty and at ease in the world. Maybe the picture’s deceptive, but I think that soon after it was taken some kind of light died in her.

She does indeed look radiant and confident in the photograph, quite unlike the dour, oppressively conventional, critical, wholly unloving woman we get to know from the rest of Haddon’s account. After his mother is moved into an assisted living facility, she complains once to Mark that his sister Fiona rarely visits.

I decided, for once, to answer the question honestly by asking a question in return. ‘Mum, when was the last time you said something positive about, or to, Fiona?’ She bridled, but I insisted she give me an answer. She thought for a while before saying, ‘Well, I remember her bringing some homework back from school . . .’

‘That was over forty years ago.’

‘And there was a project she did at college . . .’

‘You can’t remember a single positive thing you’ve said about her, or to her, in forty years? Are you fucking surprised she doesn’t want to visit?’

Enraged, he storms out. “Mum never referred to the conversation again.” That kind of emotional neglect would be bad enough, but there’s more, worse: “Both Mum and Dad dismissed the multiple sexual assaults from which [Fiona] suffered”; when Fiona is hospitalized with meningitis, neither of her parents visit her; dying, Mum says to Fiona, her last words to her daughter, ‘I’ve never believed a word you’ve said.'” “We assume it’s hard when a loved and loving parent dies,” observes Haddon,

but it can be just as hard when you lose a parent whom you don’t love and who never loved you. When Mum and Dad died it was a relief for me. For my sister it was the moment when she knew for certain that she would never hear them say sorry.”

We learn a lot about “Mum and Dad” in Leaving Home, and about their parents, Mark and Fiona’s grandparents, as well. Unsurprisingly, given the kind of people, or at least the kind of parents, they were, their son’s account of them is not particularly tender or kind or forgiving. It is, occasionally, understanding, and Haddon does do what he can–as with that photo of his mother–to show them to us as real people, complicated and flawed. Does he owe them anything more than that, especially now that they are both dead and unable to offer their own versions of their stories? “What does it mean,” he asks at one point, “the injunction to not speak ill of the dead? Which dead? For how long after their passing are we meant to hold our tongues? And does speaking ill mean telling lies or telling the truth?” Leaving Home is, unsparingly, the truth as Haddon sees it about two people who taught him by negative example everything he himself has tried to be as a parent:

I’ve not been a perfect father. I’ve been bad-tempered, impatient and oversensitive when wrestling with problems of my own, but I”ve always tried hard to be a good one, and I’ve been guided in part by the cautionary example set by my own parents. Talk to your children. Listen to them. Say sorry when you make mistakes. Wish for them to be happy and kind and to find something that excites them. If you can, give them the tools to do these things. Don’t expect them to fulfil your ambitions or settle your debts.

Leaving Home is not just a litany of grievances, though (however justified they are), and it does not read like an angry settling of scores. It’s a reflection on Haddon’s own life, framed by the aging and deaths of the two people who might have made it a happier, safer one but didn’t. He talks about the freedom and joy he found in reading, and then in writing, and with his wife and his own children. He talks about his struggles with his mental health, including his ‘cutting’ (there’s a photo related to that topic which is not great to come upon unprepared), his heart surgery, his wife’s terrifying experience of being hit by a car at 6 months pregnant. There’s quite a bit about a very strange sounding Swedish TV series called Jordskott, which he says he finds “profoundly consoling” and has watched all the way through four times.

And there are moments of peace, in his life and in the book, like this one, when Haddon finds himself free for once of his terror of the deep:

Years later I was running regularly up the Thames. Godstow, King’s Lock, Eynsham, Babcock Hythe. It was shame that did it in the end, the realization that I was running beside this beautiful outdoor pool and missing something very special on every occasion. So one July afternoon, nearing home, I caught myself by surprise, stopped beside the river on Port Meadow, stripped down to my running shorts and walked in. It remains with me as a moment of revelation. Hopkins’s Binsey poplars shimmering overhead and the sun going down, monumental peach-coloured clouds. Swallows, midges, Canada geese, cows at the water’s edge. A C-17 banks over Wytham making its final approach into Brize Norton, all that suspended tonnage a kind of miracle. Being inside the landscape. And the fear gone.

You can’t outrun your past, but Leaving Home shows that you can make something pretty remarkable out of your memories, even the grim ones.

In(di)visible: Jeanne Ray, Calling Invisible Women

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

For maybe the first time since I was fourteen I don’t care what I weigh. I don’t care how my clothes look because most of the time I’m not wearing any. I don’t care that I’m getting older. I don’t feel bad about my neck. I feel like a source of good in the world. Everywhere I go I’m making things happen. My life hasn’t been like that in a long time.

Jeanne Ray’s Calling Invisible Women is what I think of as a ‘concept novel’: she clearly had an idea–what if we made the metaphorical invisibility older women so often experience quite literal?–and then carried it out. It might well have fallen completely flat, and I think it’s fair to say that in fact Calling Invisible Women walks a fine line between being sharply funny and being pretty silly. On balance, though, I think Ray pulls it off: the novel is a pointed but mild feminist satire softened by empathy, including for those who are too busy or self-absorbed or distracted to notice that they can’t actually see the wives or mothers who are doing so much for them while dealing with so much themselves.

“What would it be like to be actually invisible?” is the initial starting point for the novel’s plot (tl;dr version? pretty disorienting, and yet oddly familiar, for these women). Annoyance quickly follows: it’s one thing to joke about being so familiar to your spouse that he hardly sees you anymore, and another for him to be oblivious to your literal disappearance! Then comes, for our protagonist Clover at least, a growing sense of exhilaration. “Had I really spent that much time on personal grooming?” she wonders.

On small exchanges with the postman when he came to deliver the mail? Now I dressed for rmaximum coverage without any thought as to how I looked. No one cared how I looked. no one saw. I felt like I was under quarantine, except that I could go wherever I liked. I picked up Arthur’s suit from the cleaners, I went to the grocery store. Sometimes someone would notice something was off and it was always a young girl who wouldn’t allow herself to believe what her eyes were telling her and so she’d look quickly away, the way she might have if I’d had one eye in the middle of my forehead. It was obvious her mother had drilled a lifetime of good manners into her. It isn’t polite to stare. But I always wanted to say to the girl, stare all you want, there’s nothing here to see.

Once she embraces nakedness (so there’s nothing to be seen at all), she likes being able to intervene in ways she never dared before. She can whisper in ears like an externalized conscience; she can give a nudge or a push; she can even foil bank robberies!

Clover’s courage grows out of the solidarity she finds with other invisible women–it turns out they have a support group (bonus: you don’t have to pay booking fees for hotel conference rooms if nobody can see you in them!). She also finds other older women quicker to notice and quite ready to help: if they haven’t actually been invisible themselves, they have felt like it. (I sure have! Now sometimes I stand stock still on my side of the sidewalk when being approached by a group walking three abreast and showing no sign of noticing that there’s someone they need to make room for.) Some sensitive men also are in on it: “A woman becomes invisible and nobody seems to care one way or the other,” one young fellow says; “But it’s my mom, you know, and now it’s Evie’s mom. I’m going to do something about it.”

It’s Clover and her fellow in(di)visibles (Invisibles Indivisible!) that really get a movement underway, confronting the pharmaceutical company whose products are the one common factor in every case of invisibility. This part of the plot is neat enough but also a bit strained. Would the novel maybe have been more fun and, oddly, more convincing if there had been no attempt to give us a “real” explanation? The drug combo that’s to blame does work well enough to represent the kinds of self-perpetuating trap older women might fall into (menopause, loss of bone density, depression, in a cycle both created and treated by Big Pharma). Once you’ve taken the risky move of literalizing a metaphor, though, how far do you want to lean into “and this is how it happens,” even if that too is obviously pure fiction (if rooted in reality)?

I picked up Calling Invisible Women at the library because I recognized Jeanne Ray’s name from her pretty delightful novel Julie and Romeo, a rare romance about middle-aged lovers. (Is there a name for this, as a trope? Please don’t it be “elder romance” or something like that!) It reads quickly and I found it both enjoyable and (sorry) relatable–and sometimes even touching, as when Clover suggests that her exhausted paediatrician husband doesn’t notice her invisibility because “he knows me so well [that] he sees me even when I’m not there.” “That is a very beautiful thought,” says her interlocutor, “but I do not believe it is true.” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but it captures Ray’s care not to make her feminist critique too one-sided or unforgiving, as does the shock and penitence thoughtless husbands and children show when they realize that (to adapt Sherlock Holmes’s famous quip) they have been seeing, but not observing.

July Reading: Pushing Through the Dog Days

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Summer: not my favourite season, as I have said here many times before. July included – as it so often does – a stretch of really hot weather. I was grateful for my portable air conditioner, which I trundled from living room to bedroom as needed (sorry, downstairs neighbours!). Fred finds the heat a bit dispiriting as well: she has not been as playful as usual (but the vet has given her a clean bill of health, don’t worry) and she even gets off my lap sometimes and just stretches out on the floor. I get it, Fred! It’s weird to find myself almost (almost!) looking forward to winter, just for the snuggles.

My reading slump has somewhat improved this month, I am glad to say. The most fun I’ve had with a book in a while was Belinda Bauer’s The Impossible Thing, which was one of those serendipitous bookstore choices. Its cover caught my eye–I had never heard of it, or Bauer, before–and the premise both amused and intrigued me, so I decided to risk it and was glad I did. It’s not a particularly weighty or cerebral book, but it’s an entertaining story set in a world I never knew existed: the world of high stakes and now illegal egg collecting. Who knew! The Impossible Thing is based on a real historical incident to do with a fabulous rare egg that disappeared. It’s got good characters, a nice sense of time and place, and a twisty plot that just avoids being too wacky to care about. So many much-hyped books these days aren’t much fun (I DNF’d John of John, just for instance–I’m sure it’s very good and all, but it’s so dour!). If you are in a slump yourself and trying to gin up more enthusiasm for reading, you might give this one a try. I am curious now about Bauer’s other novels, one of which, I see, was a Booker nominee.

I also quite liked Kate Worsley’s Foxash, which I bought with similarly little advance knowledge and thus no clear expectations. It wasn’t fun, exactly, but it’s very atmospheric, and its attention to growth and renewal and life cycles nicely draws together its farm setting and its plot about pregnancy and birth. I am not sure how to characterize Foxash in terms of genre. Is there such a thing as “a novel of foreboding”? There is a mounting sense across the novel that things are not quite what they seem and are not going to turn out well (both of which are indeed the case) but Worsley avoids heavy-handed signals of suspense or threat. Like The Impossible Thing is is very detailed about its time and place, in this case the farms established by the British government’s Land Settlement Association during the depression. Its main characters have fallen on hard times with the closing of a mine and taken up the opportunity to resettle in the country. There’s a lot in the novel about lettuce, in case that piques your interest.

I already wrote about finishing Woolf’s diaries, and I have also written before about Peter Grainger’s mysteries (I have read more since then!). Thinking about Elizabeth George for that post inspired me to go back to one of her earlier ones so I reread With Noone As Witness–the one with the BIG plot twist, IYKYK. It’s pretty good, better (more focused and engaging) than the more recent ones I’ve struggled with. But then I tried Careless in Red and my interest ran out. Basically, she gives as much if not more attention to all the characters in the case as she does to the ‘main characters’–and they just aren’t the ones I care about, which is on me really, not on her. I have never enjoyed Louise Penny in print but I saw that the narrator of the audiobooks of her Gamache series has won prizes so I listened to Glass Houses and the narrator is indeed very good, though the book itself still seemed heavy-handed and portentous.

I also struggled with Tana French’s The Keeper–which as I noted on Bluesky clarified for me that this series is really not set up as crime fiction, or at least not as ‘mysteries,’ but as inquiries into Irish village life. I would have to reread the Dublin Murder Squad to be sure but I expect you could frame them the same way: that in them, she is using the structure of detective novels to explore and expose aspects of Irish culture, especially the way the country’s past weights on people in its present. I got through The Keeper by allowing myself to skim when I got too impatient with the lengthy reports of conversations: yes, I have defended the scenes at the Rainbow in Silas Marner on the grounds that (as GE herself argued) you can’t expect country rustics to be scintillating, but hey, I wasn’t reading this one for work! I will say, though, that the last 100 pages or so were quite gripping, and I know that the slow build-up and the attention to the community lading up to it contributed to that effect. Still, I have put my stack of Cal Hooper novels into my ‘donate’ pile as I can’t imagine rereading them.

I have tried to keep up my summer art (and other) adventures. I had an enjoyable trip to Fisherman’s Cove which turned out also to have a little gallery; I particularly liked the watercolours by Edward Wedler, whose work you can see at his own website. I bought a small print of his painting of the Margaree River in Cape Breton (which you can see on page 5, if you are scrolling through his web gallery). I also took the little boat out to Georges Island in Halifax harbor, something I really should have done years ago. It’s a nice 10-15 minute trip (they go once around the island on the way there, so you get a full circle view) and an interesting historical site.

“Observe Perpetually”: Woolf’s Diaries

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I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome [sic] of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. (VW, Diaries, 8 March 1941)

When Woolf wrote those words in her diary, she had 20 days left to live. She didn’t know it yet, though perhaps (it is hard not to wonder) she suspected it wouldn’t be much longer. “Oh dear yes,” that entry concludes, “I shall conquer this mood,” but she didn’t. I resist saying that it conquered her; that seems to strip her of both courage and agency right when, arguably, she showed both qualities the most.

In any case, it is difficult reading the last volume of her diaries in that poignant condition of dramatic irony created by our inescapable knowledge of her suicide–both the fact of it and the specific date of it. “The end,” she wrote in June 1940, “gives its vividness, even its gaiety & recklessness to the random daily life.” At this point war had become a reality and she and Leonard had made their plans: for “suicide if Hitler lands. Jews beaten up. What point in waiting? Better shut the garage doors.” For her, the omnipresence of death seems to have given extra vividness especially to the landscape, which she writes about with particular attention over what would indeed be her final months. “Ought I not to look at the sunset rather than write this?” she wonders in October 1940;

A flush of red in the blue; the haystack in the marsh catches the glow; behind me, the apples are red in the trees. L. is gathering them. Now a plume of smoke goes from the train under Caburn. And all the air a solemn stillness holds till 8.30 when the cadaverous twanging in the sky begins; the planes going to London. Well it’s an hour still to that. Cows feeding. The elm tree sprinkling its little leaves against the sky. Our pear tree swagged with pears; & the weathercock above the triangular church tower above it.

“Why try again to make the familiar catalogue, from which something escapes,” she wraps up the passage; “Should I think of death?”

The last time I wrote about how it was going with my project of reading all the way through the diaries, I admitted to being a bit bored by their mundanity. Her approaching death gave that day to day reportage–the dinner parties, the endless rounds of visits and visitors, the fussing about servants and payments and deadlines, the stress about her dresses and her reviews–a different quality, both in the moment, for the final months’ entries, and in retrospect. Because what becomes clear and wonderful and terrible as March 28, 1941 approaches is that we, her unanticipated audience, have now been with her for twenty-six years, since 1915. Not her entire life, but a lot of it, probably the most important parts of it, for her as a person and especially for her as a writer. The diaries are as close as we can get to Woolf unfiltered. Of course we can’t really know her; she comments herself (as most diarists probably do once or twice!) that she tends to write in her diary in particular moods and about particular things, and even when she doesn’t expect any reader besides herself she is self-conscious in the way that a highly reflective, observant person is bound to be. After so much time in the company of this version of Woolf, to reach the end–of the diaries and of her life–feels like a strangely personal loss. We have been through some things with her! On a more personal level, since May of last year I have had a volume of the diaries on the table by my reading chair. I’m going to miss that!

A lot of specific things happen in this final volume, including the writing and publication of The Years and Three Guineas as well as her biography of Roger Fry; the Spanish Civil War and the death of her nephew Julian (which I wrote about before, not long after Owen’s death); and then the lead-up to and early stages of World War II. One striking feature of the 1940-41 entries is the juxtaposition of the Woolfs’ ongoing ordinary concerns and the anxieties and dangers of the war, which grows increasingly disconcerting during the Blitz. “I cant get the odd incongruity of feeling intensely & at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling,” Woolf notes in May 1940. And yet life, and the feelings it stirs up, always does go on. “Paris is in the hands of the Germans,” she records in June 1940, “Battle continues. We spent the day seeing Penshurst with Vita – picnicked in the park.” “I feel, if this is my last lap,” she writes a few days later, “oughtn’t I to read Shakespeare? . . . oughtn’t I to finish something, by way of an end?” (She did–Between the Acts, although she wasn’t satisfied with it.)

I’ve talked and written many times now about my admiration for Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir. Something I always comment on is how exuberant it is as Holtby looks ahead to what Woolf will do next and celebrates what she sees as Woolf’s most inspiring quality:

She is in love with life. It is this quality which lifts her beyond the despairs and fashions of her age, which gives to her vision of reality a radiance, a wonder, unshared by any other living writer. . . . It is this which places her work, meagre though its amount may hitherto have been, slight in texture and limited in scope, beside the work of the great masters.

Because Holtby died before Woolf, she was spared the shadow that has to come between us and that radiance. While there is plenty of struggle visible in the diaries, though, (and more suffering offstage, signalled only in the editorial notes that explain gaps in the chronology), I don’t think that overall they contradict Holtby’s joyful version of Woolf. I know there are many Woolf experts and aficionados who regret the extent to which her public image has become dominated by her depression. The diaries convey such a sense of energy, of vitality, of curiosity. If ultimately she decided that the examined life too might not be worth living, it was not without having given all she had to the effort.

Art Adventures II

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I have been on two more small art adventures so far.

One was accidental! I was cutting through the lane that now runs between Birmingham and Queen (past the new Fluevog store, locals will know what I mean) to get to Weird Harbour (again, IYKYK) and happened across a small gallery that had just opened a few days earlier. It is called ARTport, and it features “local artists from the Halifax Regional Municipality.”

Once again, I was particularly drawn to the watercolours, especially those by Judith Orr. You can see an array of them on her Facebook page. I am wary about posting photographs of working artists’ originals, so I don’t have specific examples to show you, but it struck me again that the qualities I like include looseness, transparency, and simplicity.

Then last night I took advantage of the AGNS’s free Thursday evening admission to go check out their exhibition of watercolours by the early 20th-century artist Henry Rosenberg before it closes in early August. I did take a photograph of one of these just as a sample; it is the same one that they reproduced on a much larger scale on the wall.

Visiting local galleries means, probably inevitably, seeing a lot of paintings of local scenes. In addition to whatever I might learn about art or art appreciation, it is possible that spending time with these works is going to enhance my appreciation of Nova Scotia’s landscape, with which I have long had an ambivalent relationship. It is just so not like the landscapes I grew up with in B.C., which are not only precious in that way our childhood landscapes are because they are so entwined with our earliest memories and oldest loves (see The Mill on the Floss for more eloquence about this) but just more grand, I might even say more sublime. Everything here has always seemed so flat, and for so many months of the year, so drab.

I have come to love specific nearby locations, especially Point Pleasant Park, which has reconciled me somewhat to those strong horizontal lines and the colours of the Atlantic, but I do not get excited about Nova Scotia landscapes in general. I realize that I have never been to some of the more spectacular parts of the province, including Cape Breton. Heck, I still haven’t even been to Peggy’s Cove! That’s also on my bingo card for this summer – but because I hate car travel so much, it’s just really difficult for me to get around and see what I might be missing. By showing me what they see and love, these artists are helping me see the province a bit differently, perhaps a bit more positively.

I popped in to look at Maud Lewis’s house again. It’s very sweet but I am not really sold on the artistic merits of her paintings. I get that they are “folk art,” not . . . whatever the alternative is. They are bright and cute, I guess. And I wandered for a minute in the Joan Jonas exhibit “We come from the sea” but it was not for me.

June Reading

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

June was an odd reading month for me. I read six books by the same author, Peter Grainger, and two books about another single author, Daphne du Maurier. I didn’t read much else, partly because I went to Vancouver to see my family for a week. Sometimes I get in a good chunk of reading on the flights, but this time there was fairly constant turbulence in both directions, not enough to be truly frightening, but enough to keep this nervous flyer from concentrating. I spent a lot of time just listening to calming music (thanks for your help, Kasey Musgraves and Emmy Lou Harris!) and doing deep breathing exercises. What a miserable experience air travel has become, right? Overcrowding, seats that don’t recline, having to pay for every little thing as if it’s an “extra.”

I have read another two of Peter Grainger’s mysteries since I got back from Vancouver as well: I have now read all of the ones that are easily accessible from either my library or Kobo (for some reason, a whole bunch of them were very cheap at Kobo – the ones I haven’t read yet are the middle ones that remain full price there). I have been trying to put my finger on why they are so enjoyable. They were highly recommended to me by a couple of other readers, but that’s not always a guarantee, especially for mysteries, a genre I have been feeling a bit weary of in recent years. It’s especially notable to me that I started the series via audiobook: usually I find novels too slow on audiobook, compared to how fast I can read them to myself, so I prefer non-fiction, which also (for the books I choose, anyway) tends not to demand quite such minute attention, especially at the sentence level.

My enjoyment of the audiobooks is a clue to the general appeal of this series: Grainger (actually Robert Partridge) is a master of pacing. There are other strengths of the series, from the deft and engaging characterization (especially of DC Smith) and the wonderful evocations of the Norfolk setting to the equally deft way in which the cases often touch on broader social and political issues, without ever feeling gimmicky or heavy handed. But a lot of other mystery authors are good at these things too, including, just for example, Elizabeth George and Tana French. Both of these writers tend towards the prolix, however (IMHO etc.) whereas Grainger just gets on with it: there’s a crime, there’s an investigation, evidence and witnesses are pursued, the case is resolved. Even though the two most recent ones, The Late Lord Thorpe and Some Sort of Justice, are about the same case, they approach it differently enough that I still got none of that sense of bloat that I occasionally get from French and consistently now get from George, whose most recent was a DNF for me.

Bringing up French reminds me of Dorian’s recent post about her latest novel, The Keeper, which I haven’t read yet. I’m not quite as big a fan of French as he is, but I do agree with the widespread view that she is among the very best writers working in crime fiction today. In his post, Dorian says that The Keeper is “a terrific example of how crime fiction can chart its post-copaganda future.” Not least because I have so often taught a survey course on mystery & detective fiction, I have thought a lot about the “copaganda” charge, which is often levelled quite generally against crime fiction, and especially against the subgenre of police procedurals, as if to situate the story in a “cop shop” is enough to warrant the charge. (I am not saying that this is something Dorian does, to be clear, in this post or anywhere!) A more nuanced version would be that even if the novel exposes or critiques problems with the police as an institution or a manifestation of state power, the common trope of the heroic or anti-heroic officer counteracts or undermines that critique.

Both George’s Thomas Lynley and P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh are excellent examples of the ‘honourable man in a (sometimes, potentially) dishonourable system’ version of the procedural. Both are fine fictional creations (I am personally very fond of Dalgliesh, and was glad that when he finally fell in love, it was with an English professor!), and their novels often have plenty of moral complexity – but I would say that overall, their series, while not idealizing the police, tend to portray them as mostly serving the public good. (I haven’t reread George’s early books in a while, so I can’t back that up with examples off the top of my head. I wrote about James’s oeuvre here.) Ian Rankin’s Rebus series, I think, looks more skeptically at the police as an institution – and even more so (not unrelatedly) at the army, as is made particularly clear in the one I have frequently assigned, Knots and Crosses. I would actually really like to reread Rankin’s whole series and do a survey piece along the lines of the one I did on James for the TLS: rereading all of the Dalgliesh novels in a row really helped me see what James does and doesn’t do with them, and my sense of Rankin is that he is smarter about his choices in ways that keep his books from having the quality I described as “insular” for hers – or perhaps it is more simply that she is more conservative, politically, than he is, and that this shows up in how they think and write about the police.

Anyway! If I were to fault Grainger’s DC Smith series, it would be on the grounds that his coppers are all pretty much the good guys. The main institutional enemy is incompetence and political timidity. Perhaps there are counter-examples in the handful of titles I haven’t read yet from around the middle of the series, but in the ones I have read, there’s no corruption, no abuse of power, no violation of rights, no skulduggery to “get their man.” Half the time even the criminals aren’t really so bad! The worst we’ve met so far is a kind of Epstein-like figure; even the man who actually kills somebody in that case is a lot more sympathetically portrayed than he is. So maybe there is a bit of “copaganda” going on here: DC Smith is wily and funny and a moral touchstone. It’s true he’s considered difficult to work with by his superior officers and has a tendency to work out his own sense of what is right to do, but (again, in the ones I’ve read) this never veers into vigilantism, and is more about that incompetence and timidity at the top than about Rebus-style willingness to outright skirt the rules or play dirty. This is part of the appeal of the genre, of course: it’s fiction, after all, and I think it’s OK to show us what we think things should be like, not always to hammer away at the way they really are – I say this as, among other things, an unrepentant fan of The West Wing. A citizen’s mental reach must exceed their grasp, or what’s the imagination for, right? We need some sense of the “ought” as well as the “is,” as well as a bit of respite from how awful the is generally is these days. But I do understand why portrayals of the police as benign, or as heroic guardians of justice and protectors of the innocent, are problematic. Dorothy Hughes’s The Expendable Man is just one of many examples of how else to tell the story.

Much more briefly, the other things I read in June. I’m working on a review of Rose Tremain’s The Housekeeper, so I reread Rebecca earlier this summer and have now read Tremain’s novel twice and also read Margaret Forster’s fascinating biography of du Maurier. I’ve flipped back through Restoration and Music and Silence, and poked around in a couple of Tremain’s other novels, including The Colour (about the gold rush in New Zealand). She is a strange writer, I find, one that’s hard to categorize: I had thought of her primarily as a historical novelist because the one I heard most about was Restoration, but she tries a lot of different things. I am not convinced about The Housekeeper – why? You’ll have to wait for my review!

I read one romance novel in June, Loretta Chase’s Not Quite A Lady – this is one of the Carsington series, which also includes Lord Perfect, Miss Wonderful, and my favourite, Mr. Impossible. I think I had read Not Quite A Lady before, but I’m not sure. It is not, I didn’t think, as delightful as the other three I’ve named, but it’s still pretty good.

Finally, I read Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary. It wasn’t really my thing. I am shocked at how quickly specifics about it have already faded from my memory! This is the hazard of posting only monthly, instead of when the books are still fresh in my mind.

Art Adventures I

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

As I have written about here before, I don’t typically enjoy summer all that much. Although I’m not sure how much that has to do with the season itself as opposed to the change in – or absence of – routines and structure and sociability that comes with the break from the teaching term, I did find this discussion of “Summer SAD” interesting (the segment starts about 20 minutes in). It’s definitely true that the expectation that you are having a wonderful time simply because it is summer can make it harder to be honest about how you are actually doing.

The expert advice in that discussion is to get out and do “fun” summertime things, but I don’t swim or bike or hike, and NS’s beaches (like most of its destinations!) are hard to get to without driving on highways, which I hate. So in the spirit of what they call “behavioural activation,” I decided to devise a summer activity list for myself that better reflects my actual interests and preference, including a list of local art galleries to visit. One of the main themes of the painting class I took in April and May was that aspiring artists need to look at a lot of art. Halifax does not have a major gallery on the scale of MOMA or the National Gallery or the Tate or MFA; our biggest, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, is (sorry) not a very rich or inspiring space, though over the years I have had some good visits there. But the city has quite a smattering of small galleries showcasing local artists, most of which I have never checked out. I put their names, and a few other ideas for outings and experiments, on a kind of ‘bingo’ card in my bullet journal. I don’t have a prize picked out for crossing them all off: while gamifying my plans will (I hope) help me actually do the things, the reward should be the experiences themselves.

That’s a lot of preamble – sorry! The main point is that, just as “Poetry Serendipity” has encouraged me to take more chances in the library in an extremely risk-free way, “Art Adventures” will hopefully encourage me to look around at more visual art, moving on from what I don’t like, enjoying what I do like, and not overthinking it. Since I am trying my hand at painting, but not at poetry, though, I am curious about what I might learn from what I see. As we talked about in the painting class, the possibilities are really infinite; figuring out what you actually want your own art to do or be like is easily as overwhelming as trying to master any of the technical stuff.

I have been to two galleries from my list so far. One, the Craig Gallery at Alderney Landing, was a bit chaotic when I was there as one exhibition was literally ending (people were taking down and packing up the paintings as I wandered around). I did see some paintings I liked, but it wasn’t really possible to absorb much, so I’ll have to go back, though I guess I won’t see any of those same ones again.

I had better luck this morning at the Prow Gallery on Lower Water Street. It’s a bigger space and there was quite a lot to look at, including some works in wood, or combining wood and fabrics or threads. I really liked “Mollusk,” by Douglas Drdul: there’s something so satisfyingly glossy and tactile about it, and the wood grain is so beautiful and used so ingeniously to create the look of the shell. If I lived with it, I know I would be constantly running my hands over it. (I was very good in the gallery and obeyed the signs saying no touching!)

I was mostly interested in the paintings, of course and here’s one thing I learned from them about my own taste or aesthetic. Quite a lot of the paintings were done in acrylics and were what I would call very highly finished (I don’t know the right vocabulary for this). They were perfectly smooth all over; the lines of the pictures or designs were also smooth and clear. You could not discern any brushwork; for some of them, even quite close up they could almost have been glossy prints, not originals. I’ll use this one as an example, not to call it out but because I actually think in some ways it is really lovely. Here’s another one: I really loved how the artist did the water and reflections. Despite their clear technical excellence, none of the paintings with these qualities really spoke to me, for lack of a better way to put it: I would not pick them for my wall. There’s something too smooth about them, not painterly enough.

The one artist whose works really did appeal to me was, as it happens, also the only one who had any watercolours on exhibit there. His name is David Lidbetter, and when I got home I looked him up and found his own website, where you can see more of his work, including a lot of oils but also more watercolours and others using mixed media. I’m going to be grasping for vocabulary here, and my previous experience with studying art has not led me to think there is necessarily a good set of terms ready to hand. What I like about Lidbetter’s paintings is that they are not completely abstract (I react much like Olivia to art that just looks like a big mess) but they are also clearly not attempted copies of reality but ideas about it, or impressions of it. They feel like looking through someone’s eyes, rather than just seeing what someone saw – does that even make sense, as a distinction? Something about the other paintings feels too fixed to me, too static; I like how Lidbetter’s evoke scenes without getting too literal about them. I particularly liked both “Northern Lake” and “Fading Light,” which are quite minimalist.

The painting at the top of this post is one of my own, from last year, of Black Rock Beach in winter. It remains a personal favourite, for its simplicity and minimalism. Simplicity is hard to paint, it turns out. Getting an even wash for the sky, for example – I was pretty happy with the way that turned out here, with the lighter glow near the horizon. Stopping before you do too much is also really hard, and, with watercolours, usually irreparable. This is not a very accomplished painting, and yet I haven’t done one since that I have been quite as satisfied with. I don’t know what to make of that, especially as I have been taking more classes and practicing diligently. It is possible that the effort I have been putting in has worked against me by making me more self-conscious.

Poetry Serendipity: “On Growing Old”

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

I haven’t been in the university library much lately so my “poetry serendipity” project has slowed down. The last book I brought home for it was a collection by Wendy Cope inspired by coming across “Being Boring” some other way and wondering if I’d like others of hers as much. I didn’t! But Liz reminded me recently of the “Poem A Day” program from the Academy of American Poets so I signed up for it again and it has been another good means of poetic happenstance. I do delete a lot of the ones that show up in my inbox pretty quickly, but others do catch my attention, and a few really linger, most recently John Masefield’s “On Growing Old,” which opens “Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying,” and ends like this:

Only, as in the jostling in the Strand,
Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud,
The beggar with the saucer in his hand
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,
So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch.
Give me but these, and, though the darkness close,
Even the night will blossom as the rose.

The email with the poem describes this as one of Masefield’s best known poems, but it was unknown to me before now, and Masefield more generally is a poet I know nothing about, except for recognizing his name–in spite of what was clearly a rich and prolific life. Poets.org has only one other of his poems posted, so next time I’m in the library I will be more purposeful and hunt up a collection of them.

Recent Reading: Spring (?) Edition

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments
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Spring in Halifax is always an equivocal season. Eventually the leaves do burst out and first the crocuses then the daffodils then the cherry and apple blossoms appear – but it is often grey and rainy, and it has even been cold enough a few times recently for us to get frost warnings overnight. Every year I eagerly anticipate the end of winter; every year I am surprised and disappointed (yes, even after more than three decades) at how reluctantly the weather actually changes. And in recent years, I also feel how fleeting the nice weather is before it turns too hot to be pleasant, or to sleep well!

However. With the onset of spring comes the end of the winter term and thus more time for reading! I have already written up the the books that really stood out to me: Daphne du Maurier’s Mary Anne, Jo Harkin’s The Pretender, Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. That doesn’t mean none of my other reading in April and May was any good, or at least worth any comment, so here’s a sketch of the rest of it.

I’ll start by highlighting the oddity (for me) that I listened to three audiobooks in May by the same author: all mysteries by Peter Grainger, who was recommended to me by my sister as well as by my longtime online friend Janet Webb. I listened to the first three–An Accidental Death, But for the Grace, and Luck and Judgement–mostly while working on jigsaw puzzles, with the result that I made unusually rapid progress on them! The recommenders were right about the excellent narration by Gildart Jackson, who captures DC Smith’s character wonderfully. I don’t typically stick with fiction on audiobooks: I read to myself so much more quickly than they can be read aloud, for one thing, and often I feel I’m not keeping track as well as I do when I’m doing my own reading. This is why I more usually choose podcasts for my puzzle time. But these novels are not overly long–at 12 hours, the third one was quite a bit longer than the first two, 7 and 9 respectively–and the pace of the storytelling felt pretty brisk. The stories also engage with serious and sometimes difficult issues (such as assisted suicide, a key element of But for the Grace), but in a personal and humane way. As I understand it, Grainger has only recently been picked up by a mainstream publisher, which is why his books have been a bit under the radar. My library does not have nearly all of them; I found a couple of later ones on sale on Kobo the other day, so now I have to decide if I care about reading them out of sequence.

I read a few romance novels: Jody McAllister’s An Academic Affair (it was OK), Emily Henry’s Big Beautiful Life (it dragged), B. K. Borison’s First-Time Caller (cute, I enjoyed the Sleepless in Seattle homage, though it felt a bit too derivative at times), Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy (meh), and Kate Clayborn’s The Paris Match. Clayborn’s ‘Chance of a Lifetime’ books (Beginner’s Luck, Luck of the Draw, and Best of Luck) are probably my favourite contemporary romance novels, with her Love Lettering also in my top few. I have not been as in love with the ones she has written since then, which sometimes seem to pack too much in, or to play the “past trauma” card too heavy-handedly or elaborately. I felt this way especially about The Other Side of Disappearing, which I reread recently to double-check my initial dislike. She’s a good writer, a better stylist (IMHO) than most current romance novelists I sample, but there’s an energy about those first three that I haven’t felt in any since, and the same was true of The Paris Match. It was fine. YMMV.

I read and didn’t much enjoy Terry Pratchett’s The Night Watch. I have read enough about Pratchett to really want to fall in love with his novels: imagine how many I would then be able to work my way through! I have had many recommendations over the years and never really followed up on them. When I saw the Modern Classics edition of The Night Watch I admit I fell for the marketing: this must be the best one, right? But since I reported on my “meh” experience, Pratchetters have corrected me: it’s late in the series, it relies a lot on our already being invested in the characters, it’s darker and less comic and joyful than [fill in preferred title here] etc. I didn’t hate it or anything. I’ll try Guards, Guards next, eventually.

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It’s remarkable how quickly a few of the books on my list have faded from my recollection. This is the price of not making myself write up every one of them here, as I once did! Ben Markovit’s The Rest of Our Lives: what was that about? (Don’t tell me! I’m being hyperbolic – sort of. I do basically remember it.) Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne: why did I even buy it? (I remember why: I’m always scouting for good and especially genre-bending or innovative crime fiction and this sounded like it might hit the mark.) Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork: well, to be fair, it isn’t written to be remembered, right, with its fragmented and wandering and insubstantial quality? For people who like that sort of thing, Dayswork will be exactly what they like. I didn’t dislike it; it just wasn’t for me.

As preparation for reviewing Rose Tremain’s forthcoming novel The Housekeeper, I reread Rebecca (a damn near perfect book! definitely the best book I’ve read in the past two months and probably longer) and am also sampling Tremain’s back catalogue. I had previously read only Restoration and Music and Silence, both of which I really liked and neither of which prepared me for Sadler’s Birthday, her first novel, which is a day in the life of an aging former butler who inherited the estate and is now decaying along with it and remembering. Among his memories is a relationship with a young boy who came to stay on the estate during the war; I wasn’t sure Tremain saw this episode in quite the light we would today (the novel was published in 1976), but I found it hard to tell if it’s Sadler himself or Tremain who is a bit too forgiving. In spite of that, I thought it was a good novel: evocative but not nostalgic, sad but not sentimental.

Finally, I made my way to the end of Volume 4 of Woolf’s diary. I commented back in March that I was flagging a bit in this project, and this continued to be true, even though some parts of Volume 4 were every bit as interesting as anything in the earlier volumes. During much of this volume Woolf is working on what became The Years; paradoxically, perhaps, because I have spent quite a bit of time in the last few years working up an argument about the composition, purposes, and (on the terms I set) failure of The Years, drawing on some material from the diary, that made this volume less interesting rather than more! So far the most exciting part of reading the diaries for me has been seeing Woolf become Woolf–discover what kind of fiction she wants to write, gathering her courage, making the experiment, being exhilarated by finding she can write it. Now that she’s more established, there’s less sense of daring, even though of course she continues to be concerned with trying new things and working out new ideas. She herself seems more excited towards the end of Volume 4 by her ideas for what would become Three Guineas, and I get it: Three Guineas is a better, more radical, more exciting book than The Years. Volume 5 is next–which means that the shadow of how it all ends feels closer and darker. Dramatic irony: we all live our own lives in that mode, unknowingly. That has always been one of my favourite things about Holtby’s book on Woolf, that she wrote it without knowing.

Two About Aging

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Inspired belatedly by the discussion of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel on the One Bright Book podcast, I replaced my donated copy (see, this does sometimes happen, that I purge a book and then reconsider!) with the nice Penguin Modern Classics edition and reread it after–I don’t even know how many years. I am sure that whenever I last read it, at least 20 years ago, I would felt interest and reluctant sympathy for its protagonist, Hagar Shipley, rightly described by her son Marvin as a “holy Terror,” but my relationship with her would have been based on imagining getting old, not on my own experience of it. This time through, though given average life expectancies these days, at just-turned-59 I don’t really count as “old,” I felt her rage and horror and refusal at the indignities and compromises of old age to my core. Nobody every really knows what lies ahead–except that we all know that it’s coming for us in some form (unless it isn’t, which is no consolation).

There is a lot going on in The Stone Angel, through Hagar’s retrospective account her of childhood, her difficult marriage, her losses, her eventual, still difficult, independence. But this seemed to me where the novel’s fiercest care lies: in Hagar’s fierce, ruthless, but inevitable also both foolish and futile struggle to stay unequivocally herself to the very end. Laurence plays out this losing battle artfully through Hagar’s first-person narration, which gives us the immediacy of her voice and her experiences but also lets slip over and over how Hagar herself is slipping, even as she denies, even to herself, that she is.

“Here I am,” Hagar says at one point,

the same Hagar, in a different establishment once more, and waiting again. I try, a little, to pray, as one’s meant to do at evening, thinking perhaps the knack of it will come to me here. But it works no better than it ever did. I can’t change what’s happened to me in my life, or make what’s not occurred take place. But I can’t say I like it, or accept it, or believe it’s for the best. I don’t and never shall, not even if I’m damned for it. So I merely sit on the bed and look out the window until the dark comes and the trees have gone and the sea itself has been swallowed by the night.

“Even if I”m damned for it”: that’s the spirit of Hagar, and also, that’s the spirit, Hagar! She’s a quintessentially unlikeable character–rude and rough and proud and defiant–and yet there’s something inspiring as well as refreshing in her, and also in Laurence’s, refusal to pander to the notion that an old woman should be a harmless creature, gentle, pliant, no trouble to anyone. It’s not the dying of the light Hagar rages against: it’s life, with its injustices, its griefs, its disappointments. It’s odd that such a negative force should nonetheless be uplifting. Her intransigence is surely not exemplary, but the novel conveys with great power the imperative she fights to live up to: to be herself, Hagar, to the bitter end.

Merilyn Simond’s Walking With Beth could hardly be more different in tone or spirit, even though it too highlights truth to self as essential to aging. Walking With Beth recounts the many conversations Simonds had with her beloved friend Beth, mostly during the pandemic when regular walk-and-talk sessions helped them both cope with the stress and isolation of lockdown. They are 30 years apart: Simonds is in her early 70s when the walks begin and Beth is 101. “Now I am the old lady,” Simonds reflects; “Still, I am not so old that I can’t find a woman older than I am. Beth is my old lady now. My last guide into the future.” What wisdom does Beth have for her, from her position as, not just an elder, but one of the eldest? How can her choices, her way of being so old, help Merilyn imagine herself into an old age that is something other than a fading away?

I liked Walking With Beth but I did not find it a particularly revelatory or inspirational read. Beth is clearly an exceptional woman; like her past, her aged present is rich with creativity and generosity. She has no trouble filling her days, as far as her energy and health allow. “Many people reach retirement,” she tells Merilyn,

never having thought about what has given them pleasure or satisfaction in their life . . . What can take them into the next stage. They don’t realize they have no need of a boss or a job description. Any number of activities are self-initiated. I can’t believe how much has happened between 1988, when I officially retired from teaching art therapy at Concordia, and now–dance, embroidery, my collages–clusters of activity, each one different, yet in a way they are part of one long, continuous journey. Every day, at every age, you wake up, your eyes open, your whole being opens, and off you go!”

Is it because I have in fact been thinking a lot about retirement, and also reading books and listening to podcasts about it, that I found this banal? But Walking With Beth isn’t really a self-help or advice book, so maybe that’s unfair: it’s really a record of a friendship, and considered from that angle it is more satisfying. It is low key, episodic, digressive: sometimes that works (for me), sometimes it feels unfinished (to me). Partly because of Simonds’s own medical problems during this period, it highlights physical decline, often in a dispiriting way. “Younger birds,” Simonds observes,

may be more active and have more vibrant plumage, but birds, at least to the human eye, have been spared the equivalent of the white hair, slack, wrinkled skin, stooped back, clouded vision, and tangled mind that mark advanced age in our species.

“It is the terrors of the mind that frighten me the most,” she adds, but “we cannot avoid the endgame; we can’t even choose which one we’ll be forced to play. All we can do is choose where we cast our eyes,” and she and Beth, and her book, nudge us consistently to look towards the light:

Today, the sky is bright, the Sierra Madre mountains lift the horizon as they have done for thousands of years, the birds in the pepper tree outside my window are singing, and my heart, nudging aside my mind, sings too.

OK, that’s nice, but again, it shades into banality. Nice as the book is, lovely as the friendship it centres on is, deft as some of the writing is, it made little impression on me–much less than, say, Death of an Ordinary Man, which is a lot less nice but somehow a great deal more comforting, or at least more bracing. I actually know someone who walks every week with a friend of hers who is a couple of decades older: they both really look forward to their walks. Maybe as a vicarious experience, it’s bound to be less energizing. Simonds, who has had to clear out the belongings of many of her loved ones after their deaths, comments that photographs are rarely of great interest to those besides the photographers: I had something of the same feeling about this book, that it takes a lot to make a friendship of yours mean much to someone else, and Walking With Beth doesn’t quite deliver.

To be honest, I sometimes have the same feeling about podcasts: it’s a lot less fun listening to someone else’s discussion of a book than it is being in the discussion myself. It can make me feel like Frankenstein’s monster watching a happy family through the window. However! Now that I have finally reread The Stone Angel, I look forward to listening again to the One Bright Book episode. And I’ll be thinking about those walks and those talks. I love walking and talking (or sitting and talking) with my own friends, but it’s such an occasional pleasure, as we all seem to be so busy.