Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.
First, a journey into the past with Malunkey, who has been reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s Boudicca story, Song for a Dark Queen:
The word ‘song’ is in the title because the story is narrated by the royal harpist Cadwan, who puts the finest of lyrical gauze over what is in fact a brutal and unsentimental tale.
In the space of a short novel, ostensibly for children, Sutcliff expertly re-creates the Celtic society of the Iceni, imagines an authentically Iron Age marriage and subsequent romance between Boudicca and her husband Prasutagus, describes the continuous encroachments of the Romans and the chafing of the hot-blooded Boudicca, the death of Prasutagus, and the awful scene where the queen is flogged and her daughters raped by Roman troops, leading to Boudicca’s transformation into a warrior queen bent on vengeance.
I can’t see that there is much here for any but the most mature and literate of young readers, but for adults it is a treat from start to finish.
Vikram Seth’s long novel A Suitable Boy gets short shrift from allworthy:
Finished A Suitable Boy. I thought it petered out a bit.
R042 has read The Snow Was Dirty by Georges Simenon after hearing about it on the Reading Group:
An excellent bit of writing that had one of the strongest ears for snappy, vivid description I’d run into in some time. It was grim, and compelling, and very believable in its depiction of how awful people can be. Definitely much more than I was expecting, and I’ve been recommending it readily since.
“I have been enjoying George Mackay Brown’s The Island of the Women and Other Stories,” says julian6:
His mystic and pantheistic visionary style has cast its spell. There is heartbreak as well in these stories in the lingering love and seemingly endless emotional starvation of characters like Jandreck in The Fortress. Mackay merges life as it happens, the ordinary heartbeat of people’s communal endeavours - with dreams - to great effect. His narrative power somehow exerts a hold even as the stories meander and digress.
WhyamI is reading The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue’s novel set in Ireland in 1918, the year of the ‘great influenza’:
It’s interesting to note the similarities between the 1918 flu pandemic and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. The novel is divided into four sections named after the gruesome shades of colour the skin of the worst-affected influenza victims took on as the disease progressed. Donoghue’s fastidious research and skill as a writer result in an amazingly intimate view of a makeshift ward where maternity patients were delivered of their infants while sick with flu. The war, the Easter Uprising of 1916, the Catholic church’s abuse of unmarried mothers and orphaned children, the nervous trauma suffered by soldiers returning from the battlefield, are lightly and yet profoundly narrated by nurse Julia. A brilliant novel. For anyone with the tolerance for more in the way of pandemics, I recommend it highly!
The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri has struck a chord with getebi:
It made me go cold to read the recent headlines about the young refugee who was drowned in the Channel, having read the story of a husband and wife leaving Aleppo after the death of their young son, and trying to find safety somewhere in the world. I found the descriptions of their home very moving, and wish the less compassionate members of our society would read it and know that not everyone who migrates to Britain is wanting a handout.
AbsoluteBeginner76 has started reading Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s Diary of a Man in Despair, his journal documenting life in Nazi Germany:
Reck ponders on the idea of a united Europe, something which I have seen in much of my reading from 1940 this summer, from all sides and the good that it could do. Reck is a good companion on my late night diary reads but so far, his own life has only been slightly touched by the hand of the Nazi monster. I know as the war progresses that Reck starts to become a victim too.
Finally, Geoffrey Wellum’s memoir First Light, about his career as a Spitfire pilot, has astonished philipphilip99:
Though it pretty much sticks to the usual myths, it goes along at a cracking pace, has all the stiff upper lip humour you’d hope for, and, like the best second world war books, leaves you amazed at what war asked of teenage boys and young men.
For example, I’ve just read a description of Wellum being locked in an ever-shrinking turn with an enemy fighter on his tail, during which he almost passes out because of the G-force, and then, once that’s over, having to escape by flying at very low attitude - flashing past trees and church clock towers and having to choose whether to go under or over power lines. Terrifying!
Wellum’s manuscript came to light when he showed it to the historian James Holland, and he then passed it on to his publisher. Happily, it sold well, which meant that Wellum, who had been living a very frugal retirement, could splash out a bit in his last years.
Sounds like something to celebrate.
Interesting links about books and reading
Warning if you are squeamish: Joyce Carol Oates’ foot has been causing trouble online.
“The competitive framework of the publishing industry has been fundamentally altered in recent years”: the Authors Guild of America have sent an antitrust letter about Amazon to the House of Representatives.
A shocking story of stealing from future generations.
Ray Bradbury on spending $9.80 to write Fahrenheit 451.
Don’t let this happen: audiobook streaming on Spotify could destroy authors’ income.
Karan Mahajan says that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is “the novel that best captures the mood of our own era of political unrest.” (Pity us!)
If you’re on Instagram, now you can share your reads with us: simply tag your posts with the hashtag #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection in this blog. Happy reading!
