The View Forum 16th May

Fantastic gig at the forum Saturday night. Saw the View just over a year ago at The Astoria. They have come a long way since then a well received second album and a fancy and complex light show. Still the same scamps though and I had forgotten how god their songs were and how good their lyrics are.

Thoroughly good time

PS Sun night there was a Libs reunion just to think one day I might be posting here about seeing them live

The Road Home

The Road Home was my choice for book group and one that was universally liked by the group with an average score of probably 8.5. It was heartwarming, moving, optimistic beautifully crafted and people just didn't want it to finish. the food the interiors and the friendships were what did it for me. the variety of Rose Tremain's writing is also really inspiring.

Observer review Below

On his interminable bus journey across Europe, bound for London, Lev practises his English: 'Excuse me for troubling you.' 'Do you have anything you could give me?' 'I am legal.' Lev's home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukaemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev, a former lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe's long-term unemployed, is travelling to London to find work.
Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dusty, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: 'I'm going to their country now and I'm going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck.' Things, however, do not start well: his first night in the city, spent in an Earl's Court B&B, uses up almost all his savings. On his uppers after only 24 hours, he gets a 'job' delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he's paid 2p a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate, lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wistful dreaminess.
For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'.
Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, sometimes comic, often painful, journey through London, which Tremain uses to illustrate broader themes: how it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on others can induce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom's girlfriend, Larissa, a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia's country. Tremain handles this culture clash with adroitness and humour: sitting on Tom's lavatory, Lev relieves himself 'as quietly as he could. The idea that he was taking a shit in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid'.
Through Lev's eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success. As Lev's Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: 'Life's a feckin' football match to the Brits now. They didn't used to be like this, but now they are. If you can't get your ball in the back of the net, you're no one.' Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia's invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is forced to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend's feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.
Despite slowly improving circumstances, and the fact that he is now able to send money home, Lev's conscience tugs at him: his daughter, who has lost her mother, is now worried that her father, too, will never return, and the reader also begins to ask why he has really gone and what he is running from. For, in trying to escape the pain of grief, Lev has, ironically, inflicted an experience of terrible loss on his small daughter. All too slowly, he becomes aware of this dilemma and, as he wrestles with it, so the novel approaches its moving and satisfying climax.

The Closed Door

Another fantastic Persephone Book completed. These just are the most fantasic collction of books. Not a big fan of the short story but these were fantastic. Favourite was rhe one abou the affair and the handbag.

The ten short stories in The Closed Door and Other Stories, Persephone Book No. 74, are a selection we have made from the three volumes of stories that Dorothy Whipple published in her lifetime: On Approval in 1935, After Tea and Other Stories in 1941 and Wednesday and Other Stories in 1961. Five of them were read on BBC Radio 4 in October 2007: ‘The Handbag’, ‘Family Crisis’, ‘Wednesday’, ‘Summer Holiday’ and ‘Cover’.
There can be few people reading this Persephone Biannually who are new to Dorothy Whipple, who is one of the stars of our list, so most will recognise the themes explored in her novels. One of the reasons we know that Avery and Ellen (in Someone at a Distance) are good parents is that they speak to their children with courtesy and interest – they would never treat them as ‘dogs’, even puppies. Indeed one of the very worst things about Geoffrey in They Were Sisters is that he is cruel to puppies.
Dorothy Whipple's key theme – it is one with which most Persephone readers will (we hope) identify profoundly – is ‘Live and Let Live’. And what she describes throughout her short stories are people, and particularly parents, who defy this maxim. For this reason her work is timeless, like all great writing. It is irrelevant that Dorothy Whipple’s novels were set in an era when middle-class women expected to have a maid; when fish knives were used for eating fish; when children did what they were told. The moral universe she creates has not changed: there are bullies in every part of society; people try their best but often fail; they would like to be unselfish but sometimes are greedy.
Like George Eliot, like Mrs Gaskell, like EM Forster, Dorothy Whipple describes men and women in their social milieu, which in her case is the inter-war period, and shows them being all-too human. But her books are not nostalgia reads either, any more than reading George Eliot or Forster is a nostalgia read, nor are they old-fashioned or simplistic. We do not read A Room with a View because we want to go to Florence when there were still hansom cabs, or come back to a Surrey where the grocer’s boy delivers. We read Forster because he tells us so much about human nature, and that does not change; and because he is funny, perceptive and writes wonderfully.
Dorothy Whipple’s prose is more straightforward. Here are a few lines from ‘The Closed Door’: ‘There was a dead silence. Even Ernest, so ready with words, was bereft of them. He gaped, with Alice, at Stella, as if she had suddenly gone mad. “Going out with a man!” Alice got it out at last. She leaned forward and thrust her face at her daughter, the better to realise the astounding creature. “You! With a man!” she repeated. Stella smiled radiantly. “Yes, Mother.” “When we thought you were with Beryl Payne, do you mean?” asked Alice. 'Yes, but it doesn't matter now, does it?”’
The prose is pure, uncluttered, straightforward, pared down to the bone; it never labours the point (the key word in these few lines is ‘radiantly’) but most writers would expend sentences telling us about Stella’s demeanour rather than the subtle, throwaway and poignant word (poignant because we know that Stella, like Babs, will be slapped down). Dorothy Whipple's subtlety is the reason why so many people – generally those who have not read her – overlook her excellence. But the TLS wrote in 1941, about After Tea and Other Stories, ‘Nobody is more shrewd than Mrs Whipple in hitting off domestic relations or the small foibles of everyday life’ and in 1961, after the publication of Wednesday and Other Stories: ‘Economy and absence of fuss – these are Mrs Whipple’s outstanding virtues as a writer.’ While Anthony Burgess, notorious for his dislike of ‘women writers’, commented in 1961 that ‘these stories of the commonplace, with their commonplace-seeming style, are illuminating and startling.’Today one of Dorothy Whipple’s most devoted admirers is Sarah Waters, who has written for the cover of the forthcoming Persephone Classics edition of Someone at a Distance that it is ‘a quiet masterpiece of a novel’. Yet ‘editors are mad for action and passion’ her publisher told Dorothy Whipple in 1953 when there were no reviews of Someone at a Distance. What chance does a quiet writer have if action and passion are what is called for?
Dorothy Whipple’s other great strength is that she is a storyteller par excellence. We have published four of her novels and each one is a page-turner; but it is a feat indeed to make a short story into a page-turner since normally a story is a photograph, an impression, an atmosphere. The plots are certainly ‘quiet’ – Ernest and Alice oppress their daughter, a woman is divorced by her husband and only allowed to see her children on Wednesday after-noons, a man puts flowers on his late wife’s grave – but the effect on our empathy for, and understanding of, her characters is profound. Dorothy Whipple is a deeply observant and compassionate - and timeless writer; at last she is being acknowledged as the superb writer we know her to be.

The Blank Wall

Latest of the Persephone books I am getting through them quite well 12 are published a year so I am just ahead of the game. Another thriller god but not as plausible as others I have read.

Persephone Review Below

A suburban matron, harassed by wartime domestic problems - her husband is overseas - finds herself implicated in the murder of her young daughter's extremely unattractive beau' (The New Yorker). An outstanding example of the psychological thriller genre, 'worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself,' as Lady Antonia Fraser said in the Spectator. The Blank Wall (1947) was filmed as The Reckless Moment in 1949 and as The Deep End in 2001, starring Tilda Swinton. In 1950 Raymond Chandler asked his English publisher, 'Does anybody in England publish Elisabeth Sanxay Holding? For my money she's the top suspense writer of them all. She doesn't pour it on and make you feel irritated. Her characters are wonderful; and she has a sort of inner calm which I find very attractive.'
This tense and fast-paced novel is about maternal love and about the heroine's relationship with those around her, especially her children and her maid. The Daily Telegraph said that 'the mix of the everyday and the extraordinary is deft... A most welcome return to print' and the Observer called it 'a classic of suspense fiction.'

Friendly Fires The Forum

Last Thursday 30th April the four of us went to The Forum to see Friendly Fires, Boy crisis and Hockey. We sat in the front row upstairs so had a fantastic view but were sadly unable to join the the manic dancing. Really great sound , had a brass section and loads of percussion. I thought this was not the sort of music I would expect posh boys from St Albans to produce but George told me I was wrong. Much to be recommended.