Before I Die by Jenny Downham

I came across this paperback in the Oxfam shop; the young girl serving me enthused, ‘this is a really good book’. I didn’t realise how good, even for someone middle-aged like me. For teenagers confronting it it must be very powerful, almost shocking.
Tessa is 16 and dying of leukaemia; her journey is narrated in the first person as she draws close to her estranged parents, younger brother, best friend, Zoey and the unlikely love of her life, Adam, the boy next door. The author said it took two and a half years to write, often writing 40,000 words and keeping 2,000. She says, ‘I had to get rid of all the cliches by writing through them’. I cried reading Tessa’s matter of fact letter, Instructions for Dad, detailing her funeral wishes. Although unbearably sad, the novel is a celebration of life, expressing the contentment of falling in love, however fleeting that may be. It reminded me of the poignant poem Raymond Carver wrote when he was dying of cancer: And did you get what you wanted?
It seems that, at whatever age it happens, our dying wishes are to spend the time that’s left with those we love most.
Tessa’s choice of poem for her funeral is equally poignant:
Don’t under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It’s been done to death (ha, ha) and it’s too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare.

So here it is.

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Before I Die is an intensely moving, accomplished first novel for all ages.

A Good Year by Peter Mayle

There is nowhere else in the world when you can keep busy doing so little and enjoying it so much.
A Good Year is an easy read about an Englishman inheriting a run-down house and vineyard in southern France. All the stock characters are there: a reluctant Englishman in the shadow of his eccentric late uncle, his wine-buff friend visiting from London, an elegant female notaire, a mysterious man tending the vines who knows more than he’s saying, a young American girl fresh from Napa Valley, an eccentric cleaner and a local love interest. Despite humorous twists and turns, all ends happily in a haphazard yet predictable way but it is lightweight and fun and Max has some good chat-up lines along the way. Peter Mayle writes with authority on la belle vie and I enjoyed it as much as his collection of essays: Bon Appetit!
Just back from Bordeaux, I savoured his descriptions of the city:
He was particularly taken by the elegance and human scale of the eighteenth-century buildings… He admired the architectural set pieces – the Place de la Bourse, the Esplanade des Quinconces, the Grand Theatre, the fountains and statues – and he delighted in the tranquil surface of the broad, slow-flowing Garonne.
The film, although beautifully shot around sunny vineyards in the loveliest of settings, is really disappointing in comparison. The novel is much more entertaining.

One Day by David Nicholls

One Day is a very readable modern novel spanning twenty years of an on-off relationship between two kindred spirits, albeit opposites, who met at university in Edinburgh on graduation day. We witness their lives spiralling both up and down, portrayed movingly in a recent film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.
I’m interested that David Nicholls was inspired by Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Emma and Dexter are a contemporary Tess and Angel Clare: soul mates, though poles apart in background and experience. I find myself thinking what if Angel had pursued Tess on meeting her by chance at that summer evening dance; their happiness would not have been so fleeting nor ended so tragically. And so it is with Emma and Dexter, but that is the stuff of which novels are made and why we love reading them. There are parallels: Dexter’s unsent letter from India (cut from the film) reminds me of Tess’s unread letter, pushed under Angel’s door the night before their wedding. Angel’s middle-class family and comfortable background mirror Dexter’s privileged upbringing. Both heroines are strong, yet fated by circumstance.
I loved reading their witty conversations and letters, made all the more poignant by the hands fate deals them, as it does all of us as we grow older in the game we glibly call life.

You’re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.

The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

I read this novel recently following some sad news and it has been an easy comforting read. It is not a clever academic novel; much of it is predictable but it is carefully written and well researched. I found myself caring about the characters and what was to become of them as I quickly turned over the pages, travelling with the heroine, Elise, from Vienna to a country house in Dorset, shortly before outbreak of the Second World War.
There is a dream-like quality that embraces both emptiness and possibility as loss is explored in all its fullness.
Somewhere a clock ticks backwards and midnight is un-struck. Juliana plays and plays and it is every time at once. Burt is fishing in The Lugger on the Danube at dawn, and Mrs. Ellsworth and Hidegard bake a game pie together in the small kitchen of our old apartment.

Perhaps nothing is really lost; memories endure for those left behind. The accompanying Concerto in D minor for Viola, composed by Jeff Rona, expresses that beautifully in addition to these lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, 1590.
Nor is the earthe the lesse, or loseth aught.
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought...
For there is nothing lost , but may be found if sought...

All that remained were the stone steps leading down to the lawns. The lawns themselves had reverted to meadow grass and weeds tore through the lavender and thyme borders. Then the sun slunk out from behind a cloud, casting a watery light across the valley and catching a treasure-hoard of golden daffodils and the red flash of a kite’s wing. The song of a Dorset warbler punctured the stillness, and in a shaft of pale sun I glimpsed clusters of buttery primrose speckling the path leading to Flower’s Barrow.

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse

Pitiful old Winter has returned,
Limping up and down our roads,
Spreading his white blanket of snow
While the Cers wind cries in the
branches of the pine trees.
Traditional Occitan song

It is 1933. A young man walks into a deserted book shop in a quiet town near the Pyrenees. His quest: to ask the owner to translate a medieval letter written on parchment in the old Occitan language.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ he asks.

And so the story unravels… The solitary young man is mourning the loss of his older brother, missing, presumed dead in the Great War. Alone in his grief, he crashes his car in a snowstorm and seeks refuge for the night in a nearby town. He is invited to the local fete but takes a wrong turning… What follows is both possible and implausible: a masterly ghost story that weaves itself around the reader, drawing him in closer…
Freddie and Fabrissa take comfort in finding each other, across the centuries, worlds apart. A healing takes place; it is enough that their loss is recognised, their loved ones ‘known unto God’.
The next day I reread the account of their initial meeting to find out what really occurred. Had I imagined it? It seemed as clear to me as it was in Freddie’s memory. Or was it? And there I let it rest.

A sad tale’s best for winter: a moving story exploring love and loss. I shall look forward to reading it again in December.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge…was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
I studied this short novel years ago; my paperback is yellow and falling apart. I had the urge to read it again after walking through Westminster and up Bond Street in the early summer sunshine. It takes place on one day in June, a device other writers have since borrowed, but being Virginia Woolf, her ‘stream of consciousness’ frequently breaks through so we are taken back in time to Clarissa Dalloway’s early love, Peter Walsh, at a country house party years before. He is back in London from India and accepts her invitation to attend a party at her Westminster town house that very evening. There is a dark side to the story that tempers Clarissa’s privileged life style: a young man, distressed from serving in the Great War, takes his life; she is deeply disturbed by it. And all in one day.
A masterful, mature story, first published in 1925: a novel to savour and re-read time and again.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. But age had brushed her; even as as mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves.

What is this ecstasy? He thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

My late aunt was a solitary Miss Havisham-type figure; as the light faded on a winter’s afternoon she would sit in her armchair with her feet up re-reading Great Expectations.
This is probably my favourite Dickens novel. Although I grew to love Bleak House later on in life, Great Expectations was with me from childhood, immortalised in a black and white BBC serial on Sunday afternoons. I loved the opening scene in the graveyard, the pie missing from the larder and Pip playing cards with Estella, who calls him ‘a common, labouring boy’ under Miss Havisham’s haughty gaze. The novel stretches out far into the future, from 1812 to 1841, as Pip goes to London in anticipation of fulfilling ‘great expectations’ before returning to his roots, having grown mature and wiser through his misfortunes.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river…the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates…

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me…

She was dressed in rich materials – satins, lace and silks – all of white… But I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre long ago…Once I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out if I could.
Dickens completed the novel in 1860 and was persuaded to rewrite the ending, reuniting Pip and Estella in the ruins of Satis House:
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of that ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
I am going to sit in an armchair and read for an hour in the failing light this cold February afternoon. I owe it to my late aunt and myself to find the time to re-read Great Expectations.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The perfect novel for Valentine’s Day. I first read this novel when I was 14; Celia Bannerman was Elizabeth Bennet and Vivian Pickles her overbearing mother in a black and white BBC adaptation. Every time I watch another adaptation, and there have been several, I go back to the novel; there is so much to re-read and savour. ‘The course of true love’ never did run smoothly but all ends happily. Mr. Darcy is redeemed as a true hero and gentleman; Elizabeth has found true happiness at last. This story is so well constructed, so satisfying in its conclusion that most contemporary romantic fiction pales into insignificance.
They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.
I love the way Jane Austen constructs happy endings; all her heroines eventually find true love to last them a lifetime, like Emma and Mr. Knightley ‘in the perfect happiness of the union’. And that is how it should be, especially on Valentine’s Day. Life is too short and much too complicated to settle for less.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Waterstone’s windows in Piccadilly may be full of romantic books for Valentine’s Day but I am re-reading a novel so deep, so dark it takes my breath away. Published a year before her death in 1848, her sister Charlotte called it ‘moorish, wild and knotty as the heath’, ‘hewn in a world workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials’, ‘from no model but the vision of his (her) meditations’. ‘With time and labour the crag took human shape and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half-statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.’
Emily Bronte died aged thirty; I recall seeing her poems in tiny spidery handwriting in the British Library and visiting the parsonage in Haworth years ago with its chaise-longue, covered in torn black leather, where she lay dying from consumption. What a masterpiece she achieved in such a brief life.
Two scenes from the novel have stayed with me over the years, as if I had read only them yesterday.
The first is when Cathy confides to their housekeeper, Nelly Dean, that she may marry Edgar Linton. Unbeknown to them, Heathcliff is listening at the door, but steals away before Cathy reveals her love for him.
‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’
‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how much I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’

Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights to return a rich man but is only reconciled with Cathy, now married and living at Thrushcross Grange, as she lies dying.
How they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive.
'You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort – you deserve this…'
At the end of the novel the narrator encounters a young boy who has seen Heathcliff and a woman on the heath.
Wuthering Heights will be shut up ‘for the use of ghosts as choose to inhabit it’, the narrator says.
‘They are afraid of nothing. Together they would brave satan and all his legions.’
Or would they?
I sought and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor – the middle one, grey, and half buried in heath – Edgar Linton’s only harmonised by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot – and Heathcliff’s still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Selected Poems by Laurie Lee

I've loved reading Laurie Lee for over forty years. I was standing on a crowded tube train recently, sifting through this selection in preparation for our poetry group. Each month we prepare poems on a different theme; next Thursday we read poems on 'Night'. I found a wonderful selection and have short-listed Night Speech, Town Owl, Sunken Evening, Twelfth Night and Christmas Landscape as some of my favourites.
Field of Autumn, the one I love best from this anthology, is sublime and reading it again makes me love it more.
This slim volume, reprinted in 1983, is compiled from three separate volumes. The poet wrote movingly, 'They were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognise him anymore. They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and friendship.' Laurie Lee died in 1997 but his work lives on.

Out of the Blue by Simon Armitage

Written in memory of three separate conflicts: 9/11, VE Day following the end of war in Europe, and civil war in Cambodia, these poems are compelling reading: lean, strong, masterful.
I watched Out of the Blue, broadcast on Channel 5 to commemorate events five years before. It follows an English trader working in the World Trade Centre on the day of the terrorist attacks. I hope it is repeated later this year, when another five years will have passed. I visited Ground Zero in 2003 and a few years ago, across the river from Manhattan, observed the New York skyline without the twin towers we remembered from years before; re-reading this poem brings it all back. And so it should.
All lost.
Now all coming back.

We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing recalls VE Day, sixty years on. A work colleague once recalled feeling depressed when the War was over and going to her GP to be told that ‘the surgery’s full of people like you’. Simon Armitage explores the aftermath of war in this powerful poem.
Cambodia is close to my heart ever since our trip there eight years ago. I fell in love with this tragic beautiful land, ruined, wrecked but not totally ground into oblivion. I still weep for Cambodia, for those hacked to death during Pol Pot’s reign of terror and those still living through nightmares of the past as they scrabble in the dust, trying to survive. Armitage’s poem was commissioned for BBC Radio thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me?
When Graham Greene died in 1991 Kinsley Amis called him ‘until today, our greatest living novelist’. Having re-read The End of the Affair I am inclined to agree. Published in 1951, it still reads well, evoking a war-time love affair that began in London during the Blitz. It is the perfect novel to read on dark January days and cold winter nights.
A memorable passage recalls Bendrix going to the cinema with Sarah to watch a film adapted from one of his novels.
At first I had said to her, ‘That’s not what I wrote you know,’ but couldn’t keep on saying that. Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for one this was my dialogue and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant.
For a few seconds I was happy – this was writing: I wasn’t interested in anything else in the world. I wanted to go home and read the scene over: I wanted to work at something new…
His obsession with his lost love draws him to find out the truth. Bendrix hires a private detective to find out what really happened to end his love affair with Sarah Miles two years ago.

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Back from a weekend in Geneva I decided to re-read this short novel and Booker prize winner, published in 1984.
A solitary writer takes time out staying at a hotel on Lake Geneva one late September, reflecting on past events and observing others staying at the hotel. This is Anita Brookner’s writing at its best: restrained, elegant, enigmatic.
Dressed for dinner in her Liberty silk smock, her long narrow feet tamed into plain kid pumps, Edith sought for ways of delaying the moment at which she would be forced to descend into the dining room and take her first meal in public. She even wrote a few paragraphs of 'Beneath the Visiting Moon', then on re-reading them, realised that she had used the same device in 'The Stone and the Star', and crossed them out.
She recalls a conversation with her agent discussing the changing romantic market, saying that women still prefer ‘the old myths’. ‘They want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim them. Ah! If only it were true…’
‘Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero… this is a lie, of course. In real life it is the hare who wins. Every time.’
‘In life, I mean. Never in fiction. At least not in my kind of fiction.’
Edith’s solitary existence is upset by the presence of Mr. Neville and she is forced to consider her future.
One rainy day, when I have time to spare, I will gather up all my second-hand copies of Anita Brookner’s novels and work my way through them, slowly, methodically teasing out her detailed descriptions of characters and places. I am in no rush; it is a project I am content to savour.