Monthly Archives: August 2021

The Spring of the Ram by Dorothy Dunnett – 20 Books of Summer 2021

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The Spring of the Ram by Dorothy Dunnett was first published in 1987 and it’s the second book in her Niccolo series. The setting is Europe and the Levant in 1461. Honestly I had my doubts that this series would come up to the high standards of her Lymond Chronicles but I was completely wrong about that.

Helped by financial support from Cosimmo Medici Nicholas/Niccolo has kitted out a ship and is preparing to sail from Florence to Trebizond.

Unknown to Niccolo his very spoiled 12 year old step-daughter Catherine has run off with Pagano Doria, his business rival. Doria has promised to buy her a dog and earrings, whereas Niccolo and her mother had refused to allow her to have a dog! Her mother doesn’t even know that she’s missing as she’s thought to be staying with friends. It isn’t enough for Doria to have Catherine and ruin her, he’s also determined to ruin Niccolo.

It’s all part of a family feud with Lymond despising Niccolo, his own son, and doing his best to obliterate him.

This was one of my 20 Books of Summer 2021.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

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The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker is the first book in her re-telling of Homer’s Iliad. The story is narrated mainly by Briseis who has been given to Achilles as his prize although from time to time we get things from the perspective of Achilles. It’s a big change in the fortunes of Briseis as she’s gone from being a queen to being a slave and concubine and she knows that at any time if Achilles feels like it he could hand her over to the ordinary soldiers to do what they want with her. Some of the women have chosen to commit suicide rather than be used by their conquerors, but Briseis can’t bring herself to do that.

There’s a clash of personalities between King Agamemnon and Achilles. Agamemnon is keeping safe in his ship, just observing fighting and this is infuriating Achilles who decides that if Agamemmnon isn’t going to risk his life in battle – neither will he. Agamemnon insists on stripping Achilles of his war prizes, meaning that Achilles must give Briseis to him. Achilles had begun to think of Briseis as his wife, he has mental health problems stemming from his mother (of course) who as a goddess had returned to the sea, wading out of it to visit him frequently. Briseis had realised that her own sea bathing had been what had caused Achilles to become interested in her. When he had to give her up to Agamemnon he was bereft. With his army begging him to fight Patroclus decides to pretend he’s Achilles. It’s all going to end in tears!

I enjoyed this although I did think that it is mis-titled as the ‘girls’ don’t feature hugely in the book – on second thoughts maybe that’s the whole idea. Apart from Briseis the most prominent characters are Achilles and Patroclus.

If you’re interested in reading a far more detailed review you can have a look at Jack’s here.

Murder at Standing Stone Manor by Eric Brown

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Murder at Standing Stone Manor cover

Murder at Standing Stone Manor by Eric Brown is the eighth book in his Langham and Dupre mystery series. Donald and Maria have just moved from London into Yew Tree Cottage where they have a distant view of Standing Stone Manor from across their snow-covered garden. The villagers of Ingoldby in Suffolk are mainly very welcoming, but it seems that Professor Robertshaw who owns the manor can be a bit of a thorny character. When Donald is invited to the manor he’s surprised that the professor is very affable, but he wants help from Donald to get to the bottom of something strange.

The professor is an archaologist and he’s been digging on land that apparently doesn’t belong to him and obviously that’s causing tension, particularly from the man who believes the land is his. But Robertshaw’s own household is not a comfortable place to be. His wife Xandra is seriously ill and is being nursed by her niece Nancy who would otherwise be homeless. Xandra’s son Randall is arrogant and bullying towards Nancy, as is the professor, and they are both especially obnoxious to Nancy’s friend, an ex-RAF man who is living rough in an old caravan.

When the professor is found dead there are quite a few people in the neighbourhood who would have been glad to see the back of him and of course Donald and Maria sort it all out.

The book is set in the 1950s and Brown does manage to evoke that era well. I enjoyed the mystery which I suppose comes under the category of cosy, and there are some really likeable characters, not just Donald and Maria. I do wish that we could have more of Charles who is Donald’s agent and appeared more in the earlier books, I really liked him. I don’t think it’s necessary to read the others in this series although if you can get a hold of them then you should definitely give them a go.

Thank you to Canongate Books/Severn House and NetGalley who sent me a digital copy of this book for review.

Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian – 20 Books of Summer 2021

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Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian was first published in 1980 and a new 40th anniversary edition has been published. I hadn’t read it before although I had seen the film. It’s a great read.

Willie Beech is a 9 year old who has been evacuated from Deptford in London to the rural community of Little Weirwold. He has been allocated to Tom Oakley, an elderly widower who has been a bit of a recluse since the death of his wife and child 40 years previously. It doesn’t take Tom long realise that Willie has suffered terrible abuse at the hands of his mother. All his life Willie has been told that he is wicked and has never heard a kind word from his mother. Tom Oakley copes with the bed-wetting and tends to the multiple bruises and scabs on Tom’s emaciated body.

Slowly Will or William as he is called now gains confidence and even learns to read and write helped by Tom. But it isn’t only Will who blossoms, Tom becomes more involved with the other villagers who are surprised at the change in him. He had cut himself off from people after the death of his young wife and was a bit of a curmudgeon until he had another human being to nurture and protect.

Of course Will’s mother writes to say he must go back home to London as she needs him. Tom and Will are both devastated, but after horror comes happiness, all’s well that ends well! I was sent a digital copy of this book by Penguin/Puffin via NetGalley. My thanks to both.

This is a great read. This 40th anniversary edition also contains the short story which the author wrote which inspired her to write the book. I also enjoyed the 1998 film which featured John Thaw as Mr Tom, it looks like you can watch the whole film on YouTube.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was first published in 2018. The setting is Barkley Cove which is a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. The book begins in 1952 when Kya the youngest of a large family is only six years old, and her mother has just left the family home, a shack on the marsh. The mother was a very much abused woman, but she has left her two remaining children in the care of her abuser, and he hasn’t been slow to lift his hand to his children in the past. It’s a tough life for Kya as it’s not long before Kya’s older brother leaves her and then her father abandons her. She barely manages to feed herself, but when Jumpin’ Jackson who runs a small store that sells fuel realises that Kya is on her own, he, his wife and the congregation of their black church end up helping to clothe Kya.

The white people in Barkley Cove have closed their eyes to everything as they don’t want anything to do with those ‘marsh people’ and when Kya does have to go into town she’s shunned and avoided. So when years later the body of Chase, a well thought of local married man is found on the marsh, fingers are pointed at Kya.

This was a new to me setting which I really liked, the author’s descriptions of the surroundings brought it all to life and I loved that Kya was able to rise above a disastrous upbringing. Although the ‘mystery’ part wasn’t much of a mystery to me I thought that the treatment meted out to Kya by her supposed betters was so authentic, as was her nurturing at a distance by the poorer members of the society.

Henrietta’s House by Elizabeth Goudge

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Henrietta’s House by Elizabeth Goudge is another reprint from Girls Gone By Publishers. I enjoyed this one more than her book Smoky-House which I read fairly recently. The book was originally published in 1942 and it’s a sort of fantasy. At the beginning of the book the ten year old Henrietta is excitedly waiting at a railway station for the arrival of a train carrying her adopted brother Hugh Anthony. He’s a bit of a handful, older than Henrietta and has been sent to boarding school in an attempt to make him more civilised. The setting is Torminster, a cathedral city which was apparently based on Wells.

Most of the tale takes place over one afternoon. It’s Hugh Anthony’s birthday and he’s having a birthday picnic with some relatives and adult friends. The setting is the forest and the various guests are making their way there in separate vehicles, mainly horse drawn carriages – a victoria, a landau, a governess cart and one car which has shocked the country folk and would terrify the horses. They split up and everyone gets lost on the way to the forest, some even ending up underground. During the journeys the characters of them all are improved as they realise what the important things in life really are. This book was just a bit too churchy for my liking, I suspect that that will be the same with all Goudge’s books, but it definitely has its charming moments.

For me this one was very much of its time with heavy emphasis on the food being prepared for the picnic. Well if food is strictly rationed as it was in the UK during World War 2 and right into the 1950s, people fantasised about what they couldn’t have, and feasts featured heavily in books of that era, especially children’s books such as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series.

Neither Five Nor Three by Helen MacInnes

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Neither Five Nor Three by Helen MacInnes was first published in 1951, but the setting is New York in 1950, and the book reflects what was then the beginning of the ‘reds under the beds’ era which was taken far too far by McCarthy.

It begins with Paul Haydn on an aeroplane travelling home. He had stayed in the army after WW2 but now intended to get back into civilian life, maybe back to his old job on Trend magazine as they said that his job would be kept open for him. He had been engaged to Rona a work colleague at the beginning of the war but she had broken it off. It turns out that she’s still working at Trend and has just got engaged again, and Scott is a jealous fiance.

Rona has worked hard at her new relationship but it all seems to be on her side, Scott seems to spend all his spare time going to ‘discussion’ parties and it has taken him ages to get around to proposing. It seems that Scott has been wooed by communists who are trying to undermine American society.

This was different from the previous books that I’ve read by MacInnes as her books often feature espionage in WW2, Nazis or post war Nazi hunting. I believe that she got a lot of the ideas for her books from her husband who worked for MI6 and they did move to the US where he took up a post at Columbia University, while still working at MI6, so basically he was a spy.

This was a good read which probably reflected the atmosphere of the US at the time, in common with the UK it seems that people were expecting another war to come along soon. It was interesting that at one point Rona says ‘we don’t execute traitors any more’. Well she was wrong about that and it seems that the authorities ended up executing people who weren’t really traitors at all, such as the Rosenbergs.

The Corn King and the Spring Queen by Naomi Mitchison

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he Corn King and the Spring Queen cover

The Corn King and the Spring Queen by the Scottish author Naomi Mitchison was first published in 1931 but my copy is a Virago reprint from 1989, I think I might have owned it since then, the chunkiness of it put me off reading it. I think this book would have been improved if it had been edited down to about 500 pages instead of the 719 that it is. It dragged terribly at times.

The setting is Marob, a small state on the Black Sea, and Greece, the story switches between both places – between the years 228 BC and 187 BC. Some of the incidents are fictional while others are historical. In Marob the society revolves around the Corn King and Spring Queen as they and their ceremonies are most important in making sure that there will be a good harvest. Tarrik, the Corn King chooses Erif Der to be his wife and Spring Queen. Her father doesn’t want Tarrik to be Corn King as it’s a position he wants for himself. Erif in common with many of the women can perform magic and her father expects her to use it against Tarrik.

When Tarrik rescues Sphaeros a Greek philosopher from a shipwreck he is wooed by all the new ideas that Sphearos has and decides to sail with him to Greece. In Greece they meet King Kleomones of Sparta, he has decided that he wants a more equal society and so the rich are persuaded to give up their jewellery, money and possessions and to free their slaves. They will be given some land of their own. But everyone becomes poor and eats black soup as the peasants had to before. The previously rich people aren’t happy. King Kleomones seems to have kept all the wealth that had been given up so that he could pay for wars against his neighbours, using the money to pay the wages of mercenaries.

This is very much just the bare bones of the book which goes into detail about the ceremonies, particularly the fertility ones which end up with the Corn King ‘ploughing’ the Corn Queen and everyone else joining in in what was basically an orgy, to ensure a good harvest of course! It struck me that this was very racy for the original publication date of 1931. No doubt the mythological aspect of the book helped in that regard.

The book is split up into nine sections and at the end of every section there’s a shortish summary of what happened in that section. Just in case you didn’t understand it I suppose. I don’t think there’s anything particularly difficult about the writing style, it’s just rather wordy, but it is mainly an interesting read.

Mitchison came from a fairly aristocratic family, she was born in 1897 and had a long writing career, as you will see here. She died in 1998. I read a Virago edition of the book which was first published in 1983 and has an afterword from Mitchison.

Jack read this a few years ago. His thoughts are here.

Mamma by Diane Tutton

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Mamma by Diane Tutton was first published in 1956 but it has recently been reprinted by British Library.

The book begins with Joanna Malling travelling to the house she has bought, it’s moving in day but nothing seems to be going to plan, she’s even having second thoughts about the house. Joanna has had quite a sad life, widowed at just 21 with a small daughter to look after, Libby. It’s now twenty years later, Joanna hadn’t expected to remain a widow all those years but only one man had proposed to her and he was so much older she regarded that as an insult.

Now it’s Libby’s turn to get married, and her husband is 15 years older than Libby, so there’s only a six year age gap between Joanna and Steven. Joanna just can’t understand what Libby sees in him, they seem such a mismatched couple, but as she gets to know him better Joanna realises that she has much more in common with Steven than her daughter has and things get a wee bit awkward.

In an era when 41 year old women were regarded as being over the hill and fairly superfluous members of society this book has some rather uncomfortable moments with the horribly immature but pushy Libby not seeming to regard her mother as a human being at all. This was a good read.

Thank you to British Library for sending me a copy of the book for review.

There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union by Reginald Hill

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There are no ghosts in the soviet union by Reginald Hill is a compilation of short stories, the first of which is the title story and could be described as being a novella. The collection features various different styles, the title story being set in the Soviet Union was one of my favourites and surprisingly I really enjoyed Hill’s continuation of Jane Austen’s Emma, Poor Emma. I’m usually not at all keen on Austen ‘rip offs’ but this one was entertaining and surprising. Reginald Hill’s tale takes us to 20 years or so after the marriage of Emma to her Mr Knightley, the marriage has not fared well as over the years Knightly has turned into a ghastly man, but Emma has learned a lot over the years and is driven to actions which would have shocked her younger self, and so survives in that very male dominated society.

I’m way behind with my book review writing, but Jack decided to read this book too. If you’re interested you can read Jack’s far more detailed thoughts on this short story collection here.