Some Recent Good Reads

Jane Austen

The Voices of Morebath

The Voices of Morebath, by Eamon Duffy. Yale University Press, 2001

From 1520 to 1574, the vicar of Morebath, a tiny North Devon village of about 33 families, was Sir Christopher Trychay (pron. 'Tricky') Throughout his long ministry, he wrote the parish accounts on behalf of the church wardens, year by year. These accounts have survived, and provide one of the fullest records of how that most turbulent time of Reformation, Marian reaction, and Elizabethan settlement, was experienced by ordinary people far from the centres of power.

Eamon Duffy's sympathetic account, subtitled 'Reformation and Rebellion in an English village', brings to life the events and people of that age of religious and social upheaval. In doing so, it shows the human cost of the Reformation to individuals and communities. It wasn't that a moribund and heretical medieval church was revived and restored to true faith by the Reformers: very often the effect was to destroy a lively local expression of faith, undermine the lives of whole communities, and help widen the wealth gap between classes, which was a feature of Tudor and Elizabethan times.

The devotion of the Morebath parishioners during these years is difficult to determine, but Duffy writes this about the faith of people of that era:

This is a piety for practical people, attached to their families, their locality, their parish, centred on the sufferings of Christ and the joys of Mary, but devoted also to Devon pilgrimage saints like St Urith and the holy places of their own region, people for whom Christianity is about living right and dying well, but also about belonging, both to a place and to a lineage, about winning respectability, ensuring safe child-birth, about the best time to prune apples and the most effective way to ease sciatica or stop a diarrhoea. It is recognisably the religion of John and Joan Greneway, and it is the religion too of the people of Morebath and their priest.

It isn't such a bad description of what Christianity is about.

Cold Mountain

It's about a man who walks away from the carnage of the American Civil War, and makes the long walk home to the mountains of Western North Carolina, and the love he left behind him.

It's about survival, in the face of the cruelty of nature and the unspeakably greater cruelty of human beings. It's about learning to work with nature, to understand it, to read it and to use it.

It's a closely observed and loving celebration of nature itself, the hard beauty and the uncompromising self-sufficiency of the non-human created order.

It's about friendship.

It's about redemption. It tells us "that no matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial".

It's got more words in it that I've never come across before, than any novel I've ever read, and I still don't know which ones are just the author's original coinages, and which are American flora and fauna and farming implements that we just don't have.

It's got one of the most unhappy yet deeply satisfying endings of any novel I've read.

It's Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier. Don't miss it!

Library: An Unquiet History

by Matthew Battles

London, William Heinemann, 2003

This is a short history of libraries, from Mesopotamian collections of clay tablets impressed with cuneiform characters, to the universal copyright libraries of today, now evolving into an age of digital media.

Libraries have always served a dual purpose, wittingly or unwittingly. As well as seeking to collect and preserve all knowledge, and sometimes make it available to those seeking it (though quite often, with stipulations about what groups of people should be allowed to access it), that very act of collection has also made it possible to destroy knowledge. Books burn, and libraries of books can be burned by invaders, conquerors, zealots and bigots of all persuasions. Battles traces some of those book-burnings or biblioclasms as he calls them (surely the word should be bibliocausts?) from ancient Alexandria and the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi, through the Crusades, the Reformation and the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, to the greatest book-burning of all under the Nazis, and so on to the latest round of Balkan Wars, and the Serb Nationalists' destruction of the libraries of other cultures in the 1990's.

In each case, the works that have survived are not those gathered together in the great collections designed to preserve knowledge, but the small scattered and often private libraries of individuals or small isolated communities.

In spite of this 'unquiet history', libraries and the idea of the Library have survived. The rapid growth of computers, the Internet, and new forms of digital media, far from replacing the library or making it redundant, are giving it a new lease of life as a new generation of librarians become the enthusiasts and users of the Internet.

Salley Vickers

One of the things I like about Salley Vickers is that she has only written three novels, so it's easy to keep up with her entire oeuvre. (Different, then, from my next featured author.)

She writes intriguing books with themes often taken from the Bible or from Christian teaching; but there isn't any sense of proselytising or narrowness. Salley Vickers' Christianity (and it's not even clear whether she actually embraces it, or is a sympathetic agnostic / sceptic), is of the open, wondering, questioning kind which makes you think she's probably an Anglican (in its classical, i.e. good sense (meaning, the kind of Anglican I aspire to being).

Her first novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, is set in Venice and based around the apocryphal Book of Tobit. Julia Garnet, staying in Venice, discovers a painting in a nearby church depicting the story of Tobias and the Angel. As she watches the painting being restored, so she uncovers more and more of the biblical story, which strangely mirrors her own. In my copy, either the water has come out of the canals of Venice to wrinkle the pages, or Alison, who likes to read in the bath, had a little accident with it ...

Then came Instances of the Number 3. A middle-aged man is killed in a car crash, leaving a complicated web of relationships with his wife Bridget and mistress Frances, to say nothing of the beautiful Persian boy Zahin he recently got to know. All three of these are brought together in their grief, and become unlikely 'friends'. As the story unfolds, we discover that the dead man is still hanging around somehow, unable to leave his earthly haunts until these relationships reach some kind of resolution. It's an interesting meditation on life, love, death and maybe Purgatory? What do the souls of the departed have to complete, before they can finally rest?

Mr Golightly's Holiday tells the story of a mild-mannered middle-aged author who decides to take a holiday on Dartmoor while he tries to rework his great one-time bestseller (now sadly neglected) into a soap opera. Constantly distracted by meetings with the new neighbours and their lives, he finds that the events taking place around him increasingly mirror and repeat the themes of his forgotten great work. Maybe not so out-dated as it once seemed? As the story proceeds, we come to realise the identity of Mr Golightly...

Precious Ramotswe

Well, yes - Alexander McCall Smith! He's the man I meant who you never heard of before, and suddenly as he becomes famous you find he's already written dozens of books. But maybe he's just been writing for years, but never really hit the big time.

Never mind! In Precious Ramotswe, the sole proprietor of the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, there is something new and different in the world of crime fiction and humorous writing. Definitely a distant connection with my own Harriet Hitchcock, here.

Here's a sample:

[Mma Ramotswe] was a traditionally built lady, after all, and she did not have to worry about dress size, unlike those poor, neurotic people who were always looking in mirrors and thinking that they were too big. What was too big, anyway? Who was to tell another person what size they should be? It was a form of dictatorship, by the thin, and she was not having any of it. If these thin people became any more insistent, then the more generously sized people would just have to sit on them. Yes, that would teach them! Hah!

The Precious Ramotswe books I've read and enjoyed so far, are

Have you discovered BookCrossing yet?

A really great Internet idea, and a site for all booklovers to revel in:

Or you can go straight to my BookCrossing bookshelf

Remember, these are only recent(ish) reads: for older ones and especially for all-time favourites, there's my All-Time Favourite Reads page. (Naturally).