God's property

I went to the Soho Theatre last night to see a new play – God's Property, by Arinze Kene. Nigel, who's one of my regular culture companions, and I had realised we were seeing a lot of Shakespeare and opera, but nothing much that was new, so our visit was the result of that. (In fact, it all started when I read Peter Hall's autobiography a couple of weeks ago. Really interesting, and he was somehow breathtakingly ambitious but low on ego. A local boy, too – when Hall was at Cambridge, his father was station master at Whittlesford, the nearest rail station to here. Anyway, there's a great moment when he's about six weeks into his first job as a director of a London theatre, and the script of Waiting For Godot lands on his desk. His experience with that, and his willingness to innovate, made me realise that my theatre experience had got rather fossilised.)

Last night was remarkable. The theatre is a great space, very like the Young Vic and the Donmar, with long benches and no prescenium arch. Below us was an eighties kitchen, and the first thing that happens is that a black guy comes through the door carrying a bag and some groceries. He goes upstairs to see if his Mum is at home. The door opens again for a younger guy with a guitar, and when he sees the first he pulls out a knife. From that moment, the drama never lets up.

There are some lovely moments of humour, but where the play really works well is in ratcheting up the tension. What struck me most is how beautifully it's constructed; the entry of new characters and the revelations of the plot are perfectly paced. There are no lulls, and no false steps. The dialogue is batted to and fro like a ping-pong ball, and the humour feeds into the drama. We were on the edge of our seats for most of the ninety minutes, and I spent the last ten minutes at least in tears.

None of the actors seemed to miss a beat at any point – all four were utterly believable. The lighter scenes also had me almost in tears, remembering what it was like to be sixteen and in love. Ach.

I'm going to be a regular customer of this place, I think. In the bar afterwards, I heard about at least two other plays and one cabaret act that I've just got to see!

More info at the Soho Theatre site.

Also this week.... I read J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, and enjoyed it more than I expected to. I don't get on with Harry Potter: Rowling's world never strikes me as fully realised, and the way some characters are realistic and some farcical, so you can't tell who you're meant to take seriously, makes me uncomfortable. This novel avoided those pitfalls, and made the most of her ability to wind a lot of plot strands together. I thought her range was impressive, too: it's the characters at the bottom of the hierarchy who have stayed with me, and they're the ones who don't get to be in many novels.

Oh, and lastly: go and see Medea at English National Opera: it is bloody amazing. 

Total miscellanea

Lawks, I feel as though I haven't stopped scudding around for a fortnight. I really, really have to write about our fabulous musical week at La Maison Verte, but I've got behind myself. To the Globe last night for A Midsummer Night's Dream - I was sorry to miss Timon of Athens, but we couldn't find a babysitter so A went alone - and found it surprisingly pertinent. Dream was great fun, though boy it's long - a solid three hours. As ever with Shakespeare, packed with quotations. "In maiden meditation, fancy-free" I'm sure is quoted in Alcott somewhere. Now I'll have to reread everything. Oooh.

I've been reading a shortened version of Pepys's Diary, and loving it. He's only 28 at the point I've got to, but so thoughtful and entertaining. I really need the unabridged version, with footnotes, though - the editor of this one rather charmingly says that they decided to have fewer notes so as to have 'more Pepys'. The mixture of history - at the pace it actually happens, not the speeded-up version of history books - and domesticity and trivia is uttterly beguiling. And everyone is so cultured: always popping down to the pub to sing part-songs, or staying up late playing the lute. I suppose that's because nobody below a certain level of income is involved. It's obvious what a tough time the servants have: the amount of physical punishment they get is notable.

I'm pleased I read Tomalin's wonderful biography first, to get an overview. I'll have the fun of reading it again afterwards, too!

I also read a biography of Jaqueline Kennedy, as fallout from a brief obsession with the JFK assasination: I remembered one evening that I'd meant to look up the Zapruder video on YouTube as I hadn't ever seen it. About five hours later I looked emerged from the internet, pallid and slightly paranoid. Actually, Wikipedia, the wonderful thing, had a perfectly cogent analysis of the best current thinking. Anyway, Jackie. Gosh, she was a boring woman. There's a photo of her as a stunningly arrogant six-year-old, then as an airily arrogant teenager. Then she marries JFK - for the money and prestige, it seems (they didn't seem to talk to each other much) - finds her vocation and becomes a calmly arrogant clothes horse. Then she marries Onassis for money. What's to like? The biographer obviously loved her, but even so couldn't come up with any reason anyone else should. I dipped in and out and then put it on the Oxfam pile.

I was going to say something about Berty, so I could put in a link to his site, which I built recently using iWeb (free Mac software, pretty results but I suspect rubbish with screen readers as the code must be a dog's breakfast, and you can't reliably increase the font size, which is pants). If anyone knows of something better - maybe a simple CMS system - do let me know: the Fagiolini site is in desperate need of an overhaul, but neither A nor I is any good at building websites, dammit. Have a look at Berty's site and tell me what you think - it needs more visitors as it's not showing up on Google yet.

Hurrah (again) for Libby Purves

I've just been re-reading Libby Purves' Holy Smoke, subtitled Religion and Roots: A Personal Memoir. A wonderful book: very affecting. I suppose in essence it's a defence of religion, and in particular Catholicism, but it's so very well written. I think it's partly that Purves is intellectual, so there's nothing sloppy about it: she knows her doctrine and her CS Lewis. But she's also not afraid to have, and to declare, moral standards, and rigorous ones at one. It impressed me, and made me cry.

The bits of autobiography in it made me realise that Love Songs and Lies has quite a lot of her own life in it, and I think that may be why it doesn't quite come off as a novel: the first-person narrator doesn't quite convince, being a mixture of fact and fiction. Given the amount of thought I've now devoted to this novel, though, I have to admit that it made a strong impression. In comparison, the last Joanna Trollope I read, Second Honeymoon, I looked at the spine of a couple of days later and found I couldn't recall a thing about it: not characters, not plot, not nothing.

Libby Purves has always cheered me up. Even when I had no intention of having children, I would read How Not To Have A Perfect Child just to be cheered by its good sense and decency: it restored my faith in human nature. Later, it made me realise that bringing up children might be more interesting -- in an intellectual sense, I suppose -- than I'd ever thought.

Holy Smoke is a really convincing defence of religion. It makes me feel that it would be a lovely thing to be a Christian and do it properly: it would make life both simpler (in terms of moral choices) and more rich, and be rewarding; a source of comfort. A counsellor once told me that her happiest patients were Christians, and that seemed perfectly logical.

I could never overcome my Darwinist principles enough to truly believe, but if I can't accept Christianity intellectually, I think I can understand it emotionally. Having been a Catholic helps, of course, but mostly it's the music, and the words. Some hymns still choke me up. (Singing on Sunday with a not very musical congregation and an effortful organ, I still choked up at the lines 'A thousand ages in thy sight/Are like an evening gone.' I like the grandeur of those sentiments. The modern liturgy seems to have somewhat neglected grandeur. Possibly in favour of Relevance, which is almost always A Bad Thing.)

It's time to go to bed. I've been stacking all my books into alphabetical piles, but there are still lots of them. Maybe double-shelving them is the answer. As it took me two years in this house just to get them all out of the boxes, I don't know that shelves are going to happen any time soon. How long, how long?

First person singular

I was thinking about the Libby Purves novel again and realised that the real problem with it for me is that the first-person narrator is so self-conscious. This only works, I think, if there's an explanation for the first-person narration. If it's unexplained, too much intrusion from the narrative voice can destroy the whole illusion -- after all, a first-person narrative is intrinsically artificial. ("Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense," as Fielding says in Shamela. There is nothing new under the sun...)

What I'd have done -- and this may only make sense if you've read the book -- is address the whole novel to the daughter, so that the story is the mother's explanation. That would also avoid the problem that if it was real -- which you are by implication being asked to believe while you're reading it -- there's no way the daughter would let it be published.

I read Espedair Street again, to compare it. What I like most about it is the physical sense you get of the protagonist: Banks is very consistent about it, and I like that. Purves's narrator was a bit too generic, in comparison. Hmmm. Need a close textual analysis, really. I'll stop there. Oh, but yes, I have read The Business: I've read all Banks's fiction, but not all the science fiction, which I think it's fair to say is more variable. I started one that was purely about robots and was obviously a bit of an experiment, and it didn't really grab me. My favourite, which I suspect I share with a lot of people, is The Player of Games. Also re-read Complicity. It was nastier than I'd remembered. I wonder if Banks's politics are going to make the books date really badly?

Lies and Love Songs

I read Libby Purves' latest novel last night. Love Songs and Lies: an interesting one (and wouldn't Lies and Love Songs have been more mellifluous?). I think it's the first of hers with a first-person narrator, and it's quite awkwardly done: the first twenty or so pages were so self-reflective that I almost gave up. She's an interesting author: some of the novels, particularly More Lives Than One, are obviously written with a particular issue in mind, but they're often none the worse for that. I should be able to make an intelligent comparison of Purves with Joanna Trollope, but it's tricky (I am rubbish at analysing novels -- wish I'd realised this before I did an English degree...).

They both focus very much on families, which presumably is what gets them pigeonholed as 'for women's'. This one was, in fact, partly a chick version of Espedair Street. (By Iain Banks, and terrific stuff if you don't mind a large does of his usual wish-fulfilment: it's only really bothered me in Dead Air, where it seemed to take the story beyond the bounds of reasonable possibility -- perhaps because it affected both the narrator's job, and his love life.) The idea that you could write pop lyrics by paraphrasing great literature must be one that occurs to lots of English graduates -- I'm reminded of the narrator in Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers writing a letter persuading a girlfriend to sleep with him, based line by line on Marvell's To His Coy Mistress. But it was nicely done here.

As usual, some sloppy sub-editing: possibly not at all, of course. What is, for instance, 'a Burne-Jones Ophelia'? Is she thinking of Millais or Waterhouse? (Or is there a Burne-Jones I don't know about? I can't think of any Shakespearean subjects in his stuff.) And why does she think that Durufle's motet Ubi caritas starts with upper voices, when in fact it begins with divided altos and no sopranos? And, oh dear, on the penultimate page it suddenly goes horribly rhetorical. I'd have been getting out the red pen as soon as I saw "Life!". But I'm nitpicking. I enjoyed it.

Also read Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant for our book group. Really liked this -- the narrative voice was so unobtrusive and understated. It seemed to me a sign of great confidence to write so subtly: in my experience it's the worst writers who feel the need to over-describe. Nothing conventional about the story or the plot, either. I'd only previously read The Accidental Tourist, so I'll definitely be reading more of her work.

Hurrah for Blogger's automatic draft saving: I managed to press some combination of keys that shut down the PC. Very fat fingers indeed.

There's glory for you!

Glory be. Sasha has finally started having an afternoon nap, just as normal babies do. For two days it was twelve-thirty to two-thirty, then just as I was getting complacent it was summarily changed to one-thirty to two-thirty plus half an hour of screaming. Today, it's been an hour since four-thirty. So not exactly Gina Ford, but fab nonetheless. Finally I can type with both hands and have semi-coherent thoughts.

I have finally repaired the bathroom door handle so that the door can be firmly shut. This is so that certain people cannot have the fun of dropping things down the toilet, including brand-new toilet rolls (docked from future pocket money! You have been warned!!) and their sister's toothbrush (rinsed and replaced -- she'll never know...)

Forgot to add to my book list a novel by Lynne Truss, Tennyson's Gift. Like her other two novels (and incidentally I do wish that people would stop writing 'as with' in that formulation -- it's no less wrong (or informal, I should say) than 'like' is, but it sounds stupid), Going Loco and With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, this was a comic romp that teetered of the verge of being very silly indeed but was redeemed by thoughtful characterisation. Golly, that sounded poncey. The other two had plots that got really preposterous, and then there was a twist that made sense of it all -- cleverly done. TG was also stuffed full of quotations from Alice, which is always a good thing. I read some crummy piece of journalism the other day (I've had some free subscriptions to women's magazines, and boy there's some dross out there) by some idiot woman who thought the White Queen went around saying "Off with his head!". Not only the wrong character -- it's the wrong bloody book. Gah! And where was the sub-editor? Double gah!

Truss also had an interesting take on Dodgson (that's Charles Lutwidge, who translated his first two names into Latin and switched them around to make his pen-name, Lewis Carroll), which I much appreciated. While depicting him as extremely eccentric, and his relations with little girls as rather peculiar, she didn't have him pegged as an outright paedophile. I was pleased about this, as it seems to me to be an essentially modern interpretation of his behaviour, and one that doesn't allow for the notion of innocence, or of a strict morality that would know just what boundaries could not be crossed. I also think that some people are genuinely asexual. And that Dodgson was one of them.

Bother -- screams from above. Unless it's someone else's baby, in the High Street. Many books say that the Mother can recognise her Own Child. They are wrong. Sometimes I can't even tell whether it's Sasha or the cat.

Camp fun

Gosh, time has galloped by. We went to Sizewell last week, camping with all three children. The weather was wonderful -- it only rained at night, just as in Camelot. It's all thanks to Grandma Pam, who gave us money for a family holiday a couple of years ago which we invested in the kit. I was used to the technical stuff -- lightweight thermarest, down sleeping bag, and all that, but for family camping in summer with a car, the cheap kit is amazingly effective. A's top tip was to get a six-person tent even though there were four of us. Since the manufacturers expect you to pack in like sardines, this has worked out well. Those red and blue inflatable mattresses are very comfortable too. The sleeping bags are a bit flimsy, but as they are £20 for two we've just bought another pair (they make cheap cushions for the garden loungers). We got it all from Argos.

I spent two years dithering about a gas hob for my kitchen, and during that time we cooked on a meths stove -- eventually upgrading to two meths stoves. So getting them out again is all very nostalgic. My top recipe for camping is corned beef hash. In its simplest form, you can just put a standard sized tin of baked beans (other brands don't seem to be as good as Heinz) and a half-sized tin of corned beef (otherwise there's too much beef) into a pan and stir them till they turn to sludge. (A half-sized tin of corned beef is almost the same price as the full size, but there's no point keeping a half tin in the fridge because you won't eat it, will you?). That will feed two people; for four it's easier, of course: two tins of baked beans and one tin of corned beef. A dash of Worcestershire sauce makes it even nicer. Or you can grate cheese over the top. For the poncey version, start by frying an onion: A uses olive oil but I prefer butter. Is there a more glorious smell in the world than onions frying in butter? Anyway, there you have it: a spendid dinner or a really fabulous breakfast.

Other top tips: wherever you go on holiday, whatever you're doing, take a headtorch. It's as useful as a swiss army knife. By the way, I got mine as a present when I did a concert in Switzerland, from Mr Victor Inox himself. I always thought it was a brand name, but it's not.

I read an Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery, which was really rather silly. Also read recently: Swallowdale, the sequel to Swallows and Amazons. Really lovely, and so wholesome I felt cleansed by the experience. Also Wolf Wing by Tanith Lee, which was pretty inconsequential: a series that seems to have run out of steam, especially when the novelty of the diary format has worn off to leave it just plain irritating. Steaming on with Lois McMaster Bujold, I read Memory, which was a stonking tome and immensely enjoyable. Also a story called 'Winterfair Gifts' in an anthology called (can't remember, I'll fill it in later). I'm sure an Amazon review said it wasn't worth bothering with, but after Komarr and A Civil Campaign I loved having this to tie things up. I also read Diplomatic Immunity, which was a nice uncomplicated detective mystery in space.

Oh, bloody hell

Oh lord, I so hate fixing concerts. Well.... certainly at this point of maximum stress when you get to the end of your list and you still haven't got enough singers and the date is getting closer and closer and you send out increasingly desperate emails to increasingly distantly known people and some of them still just don't answer at all and and and. It must be grim to do it professionally, where you do all the organising and don't even get to perform -- which at least you do, when you're an amateur, and fixing things you can sing in yourself. At which point it does at last seem worthwhile. Thank goodness.

Professional music really does sound like a dog's life a lot of the time. Well, I suppose in essence the perks aren't much better than those you get as an amateur, and the cons are very large cons -- the endless travelling, the constant pressure, the scrimped rehearsal time, the uncertainty... Yuck. Anyway. One of our tenors -- and we only have three, because of only having three each of everything -- has gone down with this week's nasty throat bug. What a bugger. Actually, it's probably worse for him: when you look forward to these things for ages, it often turns out that you get six months in peachy health and then some disgusting lurgy strikes just as throat-related fun was on the horizon. Yah, and boo, and sucks.

I've got behind with my book listings: it's actually quite hard work to write down everything I read. If I simply zap through a children's book in an hour or so, I don't mention it here, but I suppose, actually, a reading diary would be illuminating as a food diary if I didn't mind finding out what an addict I am. I'm currently reading a book online, which is wretchedly inconvenient: it's by the unwieldily named Lois McMaster Bujold, who seems to be recommended by most of the other people on the couple of mailing lists I'm on. Going well so far, but I'll post when I'm done. A couple of weeks ago I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which had some fancy reviews. It's essentially a fairly stream-of-consciousness account of how she felt when her long-term partner died suddenly of a heart attack (this is on the cover blurb and therefore Doesn't Count as a spoiler). It was honest and candid and all that, but not, to be brutal, terribly interesting. Maybe I don't bottle up my own feelings enough to admire someone else for unbottling theirs. The fact that struck me most -- callow youth that I am -- was that she'd named her daughter 'Quintana'.

I've just reread Scoop for the umpteenth time, having recommended it to our reading group. It's one of the funniest books I know, and doesn't pall with re-reading. Amazingly, the satire has dated very little. It has a lot more heart than earlier works of Waugh's such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, I think: Boot's relationship with -- have I got this right? -- Katryn is really rather poignant. But the sheer number of things the novel takes digs at is really pretty remarkable. It's in my list of my top ten books, which admittedly has never managed to shrink below fifteen and currently stands at twenty or so, but there you are. If you want to give Waugh a try, I'd also recommend A Handful of Dust, which has the distinction of being both very funny and one of the saddest stories I know (I'm deliberately quoting from Ford Madox Brown's The Good Soldier, which touts inself as 'the saddest story I know' and rather overplays its hand, I thought -- it's rather fusty, and never worked at all for me.).

I can't remember whether I said: we solved the last-minute alto crisis by going back to the top of the list and starting again. Genius. That was A's suggestion, of course: I was in too much of a flap to think straight. What's especially unhelpful, you know, is that it's never the same voice part twice. I've had a soprano crisis, an alto crisis, a tenor crisis and a bass crisis, at different times. Aaaargh. Imagine fixing a whole orchestra. (No, actually, I can't. Or mustn't. It makes me hyperventilate.)

To patronise or not to patronise

I was just wondering... My comment about the 'O' level was essentially saying 'Look, I'm only quoting this because I happen to know it, not because I'm frightfully intellectual'. Is this terribly patronising? I'm never quite sure whether it's worse to assume that people do know things, or assume that they don't. People on the Dorothy L Sayers mailing list sometimes get very worked up about DLS putting chunks of French into the novels untranslated, and even having a short story that hinges on one knowing one's genders -- and of course you miss one whole vital denouement if you don't know Latin. Is this patronising? If it's assuming greater knowledge than readers actually possess, then presumably it's the opposite.

I've been re-reading the sequence Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, which ends the Lord Peter Wimsey saga with the Wimsey-Vane relationship. It's rather beautifully done, and the last of these is particularly satisfying in taking things on much further than one ever hopes for. I did wonder whether Gaudy Night doesn't flag a little in the first two thirds in which Wimsey hardly appears, but in fact I think on reflection it jogs along nicely but then accelerates when he turns up: the romance and the mystery gather pace in tandem. The whole love story is immensely satisfying. It does seem to me that DLs must be unleashing her own fantasies, but she controls them beautifully.

Most of my copies are a 1970s edition by the New English Library, with just a few typos, but rather jolly cover illustrations (except one that I think if you studied it closely would actually give away the plot), but I have two books in a new reprint, also NEL (except, now, of course, it's in lower case (welcome to the noughties)) which is apparently Hodder & Stoughton. They've been reset incredibly badly, with laughable typos that an infant could spot (double commas; words that even Microsoft's spellchecker would know were wrong) and some real idiocies (a Latin telegram that someone has obviously thought was meant to be in English). They've also got a truly ghastly introduction by someone called Elizabeth George, who obviously thinks she's the bees' knees and is prepared to patronise DLS in order to prove it.

Ooh, I've come around in an elegant circle. That doesn't often happen. In fact, I loathe the way it's almost ubiquitous now as a journalistic technique. It's rare to read an article, or at least a light-hearted one, that doesn't feebly hark back to its opening paragraph. I can see why it's a useful technique, but not every time. Please.

A nasty taste in the mouth

Have you ever read a book that lurks unpleasantly at the back of your mind through the next day, so that you feel grubby? The book was Wideacre, by Philippa Gregory. She seems to be quite a varied author: I've read a post-modern, feminist-slanted Mills & Boonish one of hers called Perfectly Correct; a thriller that didn't grab me at all; and several historical novels that seemd very well researched. The first was The Other Boleyn Girl, then The Queen's Fool, then The Virgin's Lover and The Constant Princess -- they seem to be coming thicker and faster, which does make me wonder whether they're as carefully researched as they seem to be. Anyway, last night's was a great doorstop of a thing: 622 pages of rollocking eighteenth-century nastiness.

The heroine wanted to go on living in her childhood home, and was prepared to do pretty much anything to achieve that. It just went on getting nastier and nastier. I read it in a single sitting, which I think compounded the effect, and it was also a first-person narrative, which I think made me feel more implicated. But it really was horrid. Fairly well written, too, which made me wonder why, with that sort of talent, you'd want to do this kind of thing. Anyway, yuck. I finished it at about four this morning, delibeately not looking at the time so I wouldn't know exactly how silly I'd been. Sasha was suitable confused by being woken up by Mummy instead of the other way round.

I knew I'd do something daft while A was away: staying up all night reading was rather predictable....He's in the US for a week, and set off last Tuesday (I think) at an ungodly hour, and did the half-hour walk to the railway station as getting the car somewhere it could be left for a week was just too horribly complicated. Sasha and I went along to help with the luggage and have a nice walk. This is the kind of thing that it simply wouldn't have occurred to me to do a few years ago. In fact, it's exactly the kind of thing A does: he seems to be just naturally nice. It's even rubbed off a bit: I feel he has upped my game. This is a real cherry on top of the icing on top of the chocolate of the relationship...

The other book I've read in the last few days (I don't list re-reads, as sitting here typing all the names would cut down on valuable reading time) is March, by Geraldine Brooks. This is so clever -- it's the bit missing from Little Women: what happens to the father while he's away at the war. I thought she did a splendid job of making it provocative and dramatic without contradicting anything in Alcott. I remember some outcry on the mailing list I'm on for people keen on children's books, but I don't really think it was warranted. There aren't any cosy little references for real fans of Alcott, but on the other hand it's a lovely complement to the books.