Tag Archives: Maggie O’Farrell

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

Posted on by
2

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker was first published in 1991. In some ways it reminded me of I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith which I liked but I ended up liking this one more, possibly the Scottish setting had something to do with that.

At the beginning of the book we are told that 16 year old Janet, who is the narrator has been murdered. Then in chapter one we’re told that Janet had been born in Edinburgh during wartime, she was her parents’ first child and as her father went back to the war having been unimpressed by his new baby daughter, her mother settled with the baby in her in-laws’ house by the sea, it was a cold and damp manse. But Janet was adored by her grandparents and the nanny, then 14 months later her brother was born, and all was right with the world as far as the grandfather was concerned, boys being much more important! According to grandfather Janet is a plain girl, girls are supposed to be pretty I presume.

Luckily as the family grows larger and larger they inherit a castle in the Scottish Highlands, but Janet has never fitted in. As she grows up her mother longs to have girly conversations about clothes and make-up with her, but Janet is only interested in books.  Luckily for Vera the mother, the younger daughters are pretty and girly.

When they were given the castle it was on condition that they allowed the father’s cousin Lila to stay there too and Janet is more like Lila who is seen especially by Janet’s mother as being a misfit, she collects fungi to study and draw – as well as drinks a lot of whisky.

When Janet is sent  to a boarding school she’s also a misfit. Not only is she bookish and studious but she dislikes playing games and has nothing in common with the other girls, so they pick on her.

Janet’s closest ‘friend’ is Claws a young jackdaw which had been blown out of its nest during a storm. Claws roosts on the end of Janet’s bed, she’s like the mother the bird can’t remember, but inadvertently Claws will settle his beloved Janet’s future, or should I say – lack of future.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell – 20 Books of Summer 2023

Posted on by
2

I’m finding The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell quite a difficult one to write about, but I really enjoyed it, which is the main thing. I always enjoy her books,  despite or maybe because they are all different.

At the beginning of the book we’re told in an historical note that Lucrezia di Cosimo de Medici had died within less than a year of her marriage, but the time slips all over the place so you have to pay attention to the date at the beginning of each chapter. The time wanders from 1544 just before Lucrezia’s birth to 1561.

Lucrezia is the fifth child of a Grand Duke and is regarded as strange, she’s always being compared with her older sister Maria who is the parents’ favourite and has been set up to marry a powerful Duke. When Maria dies suddenly Lucrezia is put forward as the replacement bride, it’s a political alliance so it doesn’t really matter who  Alfonso marries, as long as it’s into that family.

As Lucrezia isn’t even 13 her nurse decides to conspire with Lucrezia to keep her unmarried as long as possible, hiding from everyone that she has hit puberty, as that’s  the time when there can be no more excuses to delay her marriage. An unfortunate leak leads to celebrations and the marriage is quickly planned and in no time Lucrezia has left her family and moved to her husband’s estates. She’s expected to get pregnant fast and  Alfonso  arranges to have her portrait painted, it is after all a time when women often died in childbirth, but ominously Alfonso describes Lucrezia as being his first duchess!

This is a good read, but it isn’t my favourite by Maggie O’Farrell. You can read Jack’s much more detailed review of the book here.

 

 

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Posted on by
4

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell hops around a bit time wise but not in a confusing way, I really enjoyed it.

The tale begins in 1596 with young Hamnet searching the house, looking for an adult to help him, but the usually bustling household is empty, just when he needs them most. His twin Judith feels so ill that she’s gone to her bed and he’s desperate for their mother’s help as she is a herbalist, and a bit of a white witch as far as some people are concerned.

Then the story flits back fifteen years to the Spring when Shakespeare met his wife at Hewlands, the family farm. They were both leading unhappy lives, William’s father was a violent bully who took most of his rage out on William, and Agnes (known better to us all as Anne Hathaway) was living with her step-mother and a houseful of half siblings. It hadn’t been too awful when her father was alive but life had become miserable since his death. The two were drawn to one another when William’s father ordered him to tutor some of Agnes’s half brothers, to help pay back debts. Agnes and William would become each other’s escape route – or so they thought.

Considering that such a lot of Shakespeare’s life is a complete mystery I think the author made a good job of filling in the gaps in a feasible way, and she neatly tied up the speculation over his will and that second best bed left to his wife. I loved the ending which paints William as a loving father, something that even his wife had doubted.

I noticed that some readers have been upset by the fact that Anne’s name had been changed to Agnes, but it’s a name which is not popular, it was my own mother’s name, she was dutifully named after a grandmother but was always called Nancy by everyone, so it seems very likely to me that Ann was her pet name, perhaps O’Farrell should just have stuck with that rather than reverting to the official name which appears in her father’s will.

Guardian Review links

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve really enjoyed the few Maggie O’Farrell books that I’ve read fairly recently, so I was interested in reading her article My working day ‘A book has its own engine that is always running somewhere at the back of your mind’ You can read the article here.

There’s an article by A.S. Byatt which you can read here.

There’s a new TV drama about the Bronte sisters coming on soon and Sally Wainwright talks to Tracy Chevalier about the siblings here.

If you can stand to read anything about politics you might find this article interesting. Siri Hustvedt is writing about feminism, the arts-science divide and misogyny in the presidential election.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

Posted on by
6
Instructions for a Heatwave cover

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell was published in 2013 but the setting is that hot summer of 1976, mainly Highbury in London although the action does switch to Ireland near the end of the book. If you aren’t old enough to remember 1976 you might not know that there was a drought in the whole of the UK, the heat was incredible and the lack of rain meant that there were rules about how much water could be used, hosepipes were of course banned and gardeners emptied their bathwater onto their precious plants to try to keep them alive. Government posters encouraged couples to share baths and showers, that seemed very risque at the time.

Gretta Riordan’s husband Robert has gone missing, it seems he has just walked out and Gretta needs the help of her adult children to track him down. Monica, Michael Francis and Aoife aren’t exactly close, in fact the two sisters haven’t spoken to each other for three years and they all have their own problems but drop everything and make their way to London to find out what has happened to Robert.

Gretta is one of those very annoying women who conduct a constant running commentary on everything, has a conversation with her shoes as she tries to get them on. Basically if it comes into her head it finds its way out through her mouth. Her children have been a disappointment to her, despite her giving them a traditional Catholic upbringing they’ve all lapsed, got divorced or married non-Catholics. Her children eventually discover though that nothing is as it seems in Gretta’s own life.

This is just the second book by Maggie O’Farrell that I’ve read but I do like her writing style. However as a nit picker I was really annoyed that she has one of her characters going into a phone box a couple of times and phoning New York, from London once, and then again from Ireland. O’Farrell was born in 1972 so she may not realise that that sort of thing was just an impossibility back then.

When I lived close to London in 1978-80 I had to use a phone box to phone ‘home’ to Scotland and of course they only had slots for 2p or 10p. By the time you got your 10p in and it dropped into the money box you only had a matter of seconds before having to put the next 10p in. If you wanted to phone abroad in those days, even if you had a phone in your home you often couldn’t pick up the phone and dial, you had to book the call through an operator, and make sure you were at the phone at the correct time otherwise your line was used for the next person in the queue. If you didn’t have a phone you had to go to the Post Office HQ and phone from there. It was all very complicated compared with nowadays.

So I had to suspend my disbelief when one character phoned the US and I found that very annoying, I do like things in fiction to be possible, it’s just bad research really.

Mind you people can’t believe whenever I tell them that when I got married in 1976 there was a two year waiting list to get a phone line into your house and even then it was a ‘party’ line, which meant it was shared with other people in the same town, and if you lifted the receiver and they were already on their phone you could hear their conversation and had to wait for them to be finished. It was very frustrating.

Anyway, I’ve gone way off the subject. Instructions for a Heatwave is an enjoyable read, apart from that glaring impossibility in the storyline and I’ll definitely read more of Maggie O’Farrell’s books in the future.

Books and such

Posted on by
2

I hardly dare say it, but today it didn’t rain and there was this strange yellow orb hanging in the sky. No doubt it was just an aberration and normal services will return soon – rain and storms are forecast for later in the week again. Very depressing, but I mustn’t grumble as at least we aren’t living in any of the many flooded areas of Scotland and northern England. You can read about storm Desmond here. We had intended going down to Dumfries and Carlisle for a few days before Christmas too, thank goodness I suffer from terminal procrastination otherwise we would probably have been caught up in it all. At least I’ve been getting plenty of reading done.

In the Guardian Review section this week there’s an article you might be interested in if you are into Jane Austen. Is anyone not a fan? – I ask myself. You can read How Jane Austen’s Emma changed the shape of fiction by John Mullan here.

Meanwhile, back at the library I’ve been borrowing these:

Borrowed Library Books

the distance between us by Maggie O’Farrell
A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes
Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid
Whay Matters in Jane Austen? by John Mullan

I’ve finished Go Set a Watchman which I swithered about reading but I really enjoyed and have plenty to say about it, soon I hope.

I’m annoyed about the Louise Penny book because it’s one which I somehow missed when I was working my way through the Three Pines series, so it’ll be all out of whack!

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

Posted on by
2
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox cover

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell was first published in 2006. I bought it in Linlithgow in what I think was a temporary bookshop near the palace, and it’s one of those books which was originally given away free for World Book Night 2012.

I hadn’t read anything by the author before but I really liked this one so I’ll definitely be seeking out her other books. In fact I don’t even remember reading about her books on any other book blogs, maybe I’ve just been missing the posts, but the author is obviously well known by others. The blurb on the front says: ‘Almost ridiculously pleasurable…. shocking, heartbreaking and fascinating’ The Times.

This book isn’t a rewrite of The Secret Garden, where I’m sure you’ll remember that the main character is a young girl called Mary Lennox, but it does have many of the same elements. Children brought up in India and sent ‘home’, to a lifestyle which is completely alien to them. In this book it’s Edinburgh which the sisters are sent to. I do love an Edinburgh setting but I think I would have loved this book, no matter where it was set.

Esme is the youngest of two sisters and she just doesn’t fit into her Edwardian family. Her older sister conforms to expectations but Esme has ideas of her own, which are seen as being outrageous. This eventually leads her parents to get rid of their difficult child as best they can, which in those days meant sticking her in an asylum, where she can’t be a social embarrassment to them – out of sight, out of mind. But of course Esme isn’t out of her mind.

I can’t wait to read more by Maggie O’ Farrell, I hope her other books are as good as this one.

So far this Book Night book hasn’t travelled very far, I wonder if anyone does check up to see how far their books reach?

I think I can say that I read this one for the Read Scotland 2015 Challenge as although O’Farrell was born in Northern Ireland she apparently grew up in Wales and Scotland, and of course the setting is mainly Edinburgh.

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

Posted on by
2

Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns was first published in 1950 and it’s very much autobiographical. The setting is 1930s London which has always been a grim place if you don’t have money.

The tale is told by Sophia who is about to get married to a young artist called Charles who is fairly feckless. His whole family seems to be against the marriage, apart from his father who is happy to go against his ex-wife’s feelings any time he’s given the chance.

Sophia is very immature for a 21 year old and Charles is completely self obsessed meaning that Sophia has all the worry of finding money for them to live on, but she is a really likeable character and the wonder is that she managed to put up with her husband for as long as she did.

What is it they say? – when poverty comes in the door love flies out the window – something like that anyway, and when you don’t even have money for milk or baby clothes then the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

In some ways this is a sad read with Sophia pushed to the limit with a husband who isn’t even interested in his child but on the other hand Sophia manages to be so stoical in awful circumstances and being quite matter of fact in the face of tragedy, she has a knack of getting on with all sorts of people, in the end I was really happy that she fell on her feet.

Maggie O’Farrell comments on the back page: I defy anyone to read the opening pages and not be drawn in, as I was… Sophia is a heroine in every sense – and one you will never forget.’