Looking at the Stars, by Jo Cotterill

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a gathering of children's writers in Oxfordshire. It's an annual event, held in a mellow golden stone manor house owned by the Society of Friends - the Quakers. It's a lovely setting, and the conference is always a great opportunity to relax and re-charge the writing batteries in the company of other writers.

This year it was all that, but it was also enormous FUN. There were drama workshops (hand on heart, I have to say my Somerset pie-seller had to be heard to be believed, though even that palled into insignificance beside the panel discussion examining the TV potential of poodles juggling avocados), hilarious (no, really) insights into the financial constraints of publishing, and a wonderful variety of readings from works-in-progress, ranging from the chilling-and-absolutely-spell-binding (Katherine Langrish) to the oh-please-stop-our-sides-are-achingly funny from John Dougherty. And outside the set events, there were of course hundreds of conversations about the ups and downs and twists and turns of the writing world.

Charney Manor

Everyone takes a few of their books and leaves them lying around on windowsills and shelves, and on the last morning, bartering takes place, of the you-can-have-my-book-if-I-can-have-one-of-yours variety. (I always find this a bit tricky, because I want everyone else's books, but never think anyone could really, seriously want one of mine.) Anyway, I came home with a lovely little selection, and the first one I read was Jo Cotterill's Looking at the Stars.

Now, I had heard of this book, and I knew that it was up for a number of awards - it was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the UKLA Award, the Oxfordhire Book Award and the Nottinghamshire Book Award - and probably for others too. But I didn't know what it was about. I did know that in the past Jo has written contemporary, hard-edged fiction for teenagers, and that more recently she'd written a series called Sweethearts for 'tweenagers'; and looking at the cover, which shows the silhouettes of two children holding hands against a background of stars and a sort of mosaic pattern, I imagined that this was going to be a sort of romance with perhaps a touch of magic or fantasy.

But it's not. The story is set in an imaginary country, but it's not a fantasy country. It's a paradigm of all the countries which are governed by a repressive regime, where girls and women are not allowed to speak unless they are spoken to, where certain groups are purposely turned into scapegoats, where death is dealt out at a whim, and where the uncertain and desperately hard life of a refugee seems to offer the only chance of safety.

The main character is Amina. At the beginning of the story, where she is living with her family, in poverty but just about in safety, her inability to conform and her lively imagination are seen as dangerous disadvantages. But when their live are turned upside down, these very qualities are the ones which will save her and those around her. There is a magical moment when she tells her first story in the refugee camp, to try and reach out to a little boy who has been traumatised by things he has seen. One by one, people from neighbouring lean-tos and tents creep closer, drawn by the power of Amina's story-telling. Like Scheherezade, she tells a story each night: news spreads, and while they listen to the stories, the refugees are reminded that other lives are possible, that there may be something beyond the horror.

As Jo says in the notes at the end of the novel, it's 'about hope and human resilience'. But it's also about the power of stories. In a sense I was right, because there is magic in it - just not of the wand-and-wizard variety.

Have you read any good teenage novels lately? It would be great to have some recommendations!

In Tearing Haste - letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor

Last week, I was wondering round my local bookshop, Waterstones in Wells. (There are no independent bookshops within easy reach, and this Waterstones, previously Ottokars, is a very good shop which has always been very supportive. They did a lovely window display when The Willow Man came out, even commissioning a willow sculpture as a centrepiece. For six weeks or so, The Willow Man was their best-selling children's book. Oh, those were the days! And they hosted a book launch there for Warrior King, and that was nice, too.)

Anyway, I was in the mood for a non-fiction book - something not too heavy, something to fit the summer season. Nothing about wars or other horrors - something to escape into. And I saw this: In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley. The swallows flying across a blue sky with letters in their beaks looked just right, and besides, I used to be practically a neighbour of Deborah Devonshire. Well - we both lived in Derbyshire. Granted, I was brought up in a council house and then a little terraced house in the ex-mining area in the south of the county, whereas she presided over Chatsworth, one of the grandest stately homes in the entire country, set in the glorious Peak District (and I think the model for Pemberley, in Pride and Prejudice) - but still, I'd been round her place, even if she'd never set foot in mine. And I knew she was one of the famous Mitford sisters, of whom one (Diana) married the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley; another (Unity) became obsessed with Hitler, was very close to him for several years, and shot herself in the head when war was declared. Nancy wrote sharp, funny novels, including Love In A Cold Climate, and Jessica (Decca) became a communist, eloped to Spain during the Civil War with her cousin Esmond Romilly and later became an American citizen and a political activist and investigative journalist, associating with Martin Luther King and Maya Angelou. Debo herself married the Duke of Devonshire and transformed Chatsworth into a massively successful concern which attracts huge numbers of visitors and employs a great many people.

So quite an interesting bunch.

Chatsworth House - Debo called it 'the old dump'.

About Patrick Leigh Fermor, I only knew that he was a famous travel writer. I had never read.his books, though I knew we had one or two on the shelves.

Well, In Tearing Haste turned out to be a tremendous treat. They both lived very long lives: Patrick - Paddy - travelled a good deal, and eventually settled in Greece, and so they wrote to keep in touch. (How will this work in the future? Will there be compilations of emails and tweets...?) They moved in some very lofty circles - Debo writes of meeting the Queen Mother at various functions (Debo was fond of nicknames, and for some reason refers to the QM as Cake - Paddy becomes 'Whack'), and she was a good friend of the Prince of Wales. But she knew people in very different circles too: she was a friend of Lucian Freud, the painter - which by all accounts wasn't at all an easy thing to be; she knew Kennedy and Harold Macmillan well, and she had lots of farming friends - she was very knowledgeable about rare breeds and obscure cattle diseases.

Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire

Although they had many friends in common and some of their circles touched, they had very different interests. Paddy, above all, was passionate about writing and was immensely widely read: Debo declared that she loathed reading - she freely admitted that she had never read even any of Paddy's books. But she certainly shared the family talent for writing; her letters are lively, funny and entertaining, with a tremendous zest for life and a complete lack of sentimentality. She must have been about 85 when she wrote this; she was moving out of Chatsworth into a  much smaller house (well, obviously!) in nearby Edensor, and writes to Paddy about the difficulty of sorting out what to take. If I were in that position, I think I'd be feeling mournful about the passing of time and life etc etc - but not Debo:

There are marvellous entertainments called car-boot sales and that's what I need. You can buy a Rembrandt for a few quid in any old field. So why not sell a few?... I MUST go and fill a cardboard box.

Paddy's letters are marvellous. He was an inveterate traveller and adventurer (he swam the Hellespont
when he was 70), and he clearly loved company, even though he chose for his home a remote spot on the coast of Greece. During the war, he worked undercover with the Cretan resistance: in one famous exploit, he and a group of friends kidnapped the German general in command of the island. At one point, he tells Debo, the general was gazing out to sea, quoting thoughtfully from a Latin poet; Paddy picked up the quotation and completed it, and from then on the two men developed a rapport - and many years later, they met again and reminisced about old times.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Neither Debo nor Paddy ever seems to have wasted time feeling sorry for themselves. Of course, they had huge advantages and, compared to most of us, they led very privileged lives. But they experienced personal tragedies too - inevitably, in such long lives. They don't dwell on these, just write in a very matter-of-fact way about, for instance, the death of a dearly-loved spouse or sister, and then go on to talk about other things. They both seem to have had a great capacity for enthusiasm and joy, and I think this is what makes them such good company.

Am now reading A Time Of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor's account (written thirty or forty years after the fact: how did he do that?) about his journey on foot from London to Constantinople (through, amongst other places, the Germany of the 1930s), begun in the winter when he was 19. As you can imagine, it's fascinating. And there it's been, sitting on our shelves for heaven knows how many years, somehow just ignored until now. So many books, so many treasures.

Congratulations to Tanya Landman, winner of the 2015 Carnegie Medal!

The Carnegie Medal is the big one for writers of children's books - the one we'd all like to win. (Well, we'd like to win any prize - but this one would be the cherry on anyone's cake!) The titles are chosen by librarians, and it's judged by a panel of librarians - but it's also 'shadowed' by lots of school children, who read the shortlisted books and discuss them, and can post their reviews on a special site. So there's a lot of buzz around it, a lot of excitement.

Well, this year it's been won by Tanya Landman for Buffalo Soldier, a book about a former slave girl who, in the chaotic aftermath of the American Civil War, decides her safest course of action is to pass as a boy and join the Yankee Army. It's remarkable, with a unique and consistent voice which absolutely draws you into the story and the head of its heroine.

Tanya Landman earlier today at the Carnegie presentation

The award ceremony was today, and Tanya, who is lovely and is a friend, used the occasion to make a speech in which she expressed her dismay at the effect that continuous testing and a highly prescriptive curriculum is having on children's creativity - and also her concern over the pressures on libraries, which are losing staff and funding to the point where many have closed and more are threatened with closure. It was a very good speech, and I expect it will be widely reported.

But to return to the book - I reviewed it not long after it first came out, and you can see that review here.

Marbeck and the Gunpowder Plot, by John Pilkington

Before he took to writing novels, John Pilkington wrote television scripts and plays for radio and theatre. Clearly, he has used the skills he learnt there in creating his historical thrillers: they are tightly plotted and full of reversals and surprises, with cliffhangers which are - literally, in the case of some of the characters - to die for!

It's obvious from the title of this novel (the fourth in the Marbeck series) that it features the famous gunpowder plot. Yet it's a tribute to Pilkington's writing that the outcome does not feel at all obvious; there is no loss of tension as you follow Marbeck's investigation. For Marbeck is an 'intelligencer' - a seventeenth century spy. His immediate master is called Monk, but he ultimately answers to Robert Cecil, spymaster first for Elizabeth and then for her successor, James. Marbeck discovers that there is a threat from Catholic insurgents, but he doesn't know what it is. He receives hints and clues from various sources, and it's a dangerous game piecing the story together and finding out who he can trust; the answer to that last question, of course, as in any good thriller, is very far from obvious.

The Tudor and early Stuart periods are so popular with writers that their significant movers and shakers have become familiar figures. Marbeck's world reminded me a little of that of C J Sansom's investigator, the lawyer Matthew Shardlake - the two are very different characters, but they operate in similar territories, though Shardlake is from the time of Henry V111. Cecil is a significant character in Watch the Lady, Elizabeth Fremantle's recently published novel, and he and his father appear in Philippa Gregory's novels about the Tradescants, Earthly Joys and Virgin Earth. And of course, the Tudor court and its dangerous politics are the subject of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

So the murky world in which Marbeck operates is a familiar one. It's certainly familiar to Pilkington; he re-creates each setting with great assurance. He seems to know early Stuart London better than most people would know the London of today - but more than that, he knows the detail of everyday life: little details, such as that 'muscadine' and 'alicante' were among the tipples of the time. And he can paint a vivid picture for us of what the hiding place of a Catholic priest would have looked and smelled like, of the vaults underneath Parliament, or of the seedy back streets and lodging houses.

Unlike the rather fragile Shardlake, with his crooked back, Marbeck is physically tough. He's a skilled and ruthless fighter, and the body count rises as he pursues his investigations. But he has his areas of vulnerability too: in particular, there is his love for Meriel. The story of this is obviously carried over from previous books, and I'm not sure what the obstacles to it were: in this book, she tries to put him off, but it's clear to the reader that they love each other. He is convinced that he's lost her, but by the end, it seems that there may be hope. But nothing is resolved: the ending is a triumphant cliff-hanger, and the book is a gripping read.

Liberty's Fire, by Lydia Syson

Like Lydia Syson's previous books, A World Between Us and That Burning Summer, this novel has as its subject love in a time of conflict. The first was set in the Spanish Civil War - about which probably most of us know a little, but not very much. The second was set in WW2 - but in a seldom-explored corner of it: it deals with conscientious objectors. (We know a good deal about the fate of conscientious objectors in the First World War, but we hear far less about them in the second one - perhaps because we have come to see the first conflict as a largely shambolic bloodbath, whereas the second is broadly seen as a 'just war'.)

Liberty's Fire is set during the Paris Uprising of 1871, when the workers, starving and desperate after being besieged by the Prussians, declared that the people would govern the city through a Commune. It's a time about which I knew virtually nothing: after reading the book, I know a great deal more!

However, Lydia Syson is far too skilled a writer to overload the book with historical context. In the foreground of the novel are four vivid and appealing characters, and it is the stories of their relationships and the shifts they have to make to survive the turbulent times that drive the novel forward.

Anatole is a young violinist. I'm not sure that we're ever given a physical description of him, but it becomes clear that he is very attractive, in his personality as well as in his appearance. He has tremendous joie de vivre, and he's the kind of person whose charm and enthusiasm make him a magnet for other people. He is vaguely aware of this, but almost entirely guileless; impulsive, warm, generous - but perhaps a little careless about the effect he has on others. This is particularly so in the case of Jules, a young, well-to-do American with whom Anatole shares an apartment. Jules is a photographer, which means among other things that he is invited to be present at some of the significant events of the uprising - he is a witness. It quickly becomes clear to the reader that Jules is in love with Anatole. What's less clear is how aware Anatole is of this. He seems to have some sense of it, but chooses not to explore too deeply what Jules' feelings are for him; perhaps it's more convenient for him that way. Jules is a marvellous character, very subtly drawn.

The Commune has thrown out the normal conventions of social intercourse, and so when Anatole meets a working-class girl called Zephyrine, he is able to get to know her. They fall in love. Zephyrine is gripped by the ideology of the communards, by the idea of freedom and justice for all, and Anatole is swept along by her enthusiasm - only for both of them to see that neither side has a monopoly on cruelty and injustice. The fourth member of the quartet is Marie, a singer and friend of Anatole. She is ambitious, and she sees that the Commune may give her unexpected opportunities. But her brother is a soldier with the Nationalist (opposing) forces; as far as she knows he's a prisoner of war. She is desperate to help him, but she finds that her attempts to do so lead her into murky moral territory.

So the scene is set for conflicts of all kinds. Lydia Syson writes about all of them with skill, but it's her descriptions of the fighting which, as a writer, particularly impress me. I've written about battle scenes, and it's not easy; unless you can find good first-person accounts, how can you really imagine what it was like to be under a particular kind of fire? Well, Syson makes an utterly convincing job of it. Here, she writes of an explosion at a cartridge factory:

...the cloud had a capricious, uncapturable beauty: innumerable silvery ostrich plumes, continually unfurling, whirling, twisting in the air, revolving round themselves and others, endlessly and speedily rolling in and out of one another...And from the sky fell burning timber, molten lead, empty bullet cases and human remains.

The Commune only lasted a few short months, and the communards were ferociously punished. The issues are complex, but Syson handles them adeptly. And as we see how this movement by the people and for the people starts with passionate idealism, but becomes mired in the politics of necessity, perhaps we may reflect with perplexity on how the same story continues to be told - over, and over, and over again.

The book is marketed at young adults, but as is so often the case, I think it's also entirely suitable for 'old' adults!

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

The first book I read by Kazuo Ishiguro was An Artist of the Floating World. I had taken my son up to Warwick University for an open day, and while he looked round, I bought this from the book shop. (I wonder if it still has one? Neither Bristol nor Exeter, where I've recently been working, appears to have one - which I find bizarre beyond words...) I read it in one sitting: I found it completely absorbing. I was fascinated by the world that was described - Japan pre and after the second world war, and by Ishiguro's subtle manipulation of the reader's response through his viewpoint (and unreliable) narrator.

Since then, I've read and enjoyed some of his books but found others more challenging. Now I've just read The Unburied Giant, his most recent one. The setting - a just post-Arthurian Britain - is very different from his other books, but there's a similarity about the voice, which is calm, apparently reflective and rational - almost monotonous. He certainly doesn't go in for flourishes. It's a semi-fantasy world, peopled with ogres, pixies, demons and a dragon - though none of these seem very real, and the ogres and pixies in particular don't appear to have an obvious purpose. (Well, not to me - though I'm probably just being dense.)

Arthur is dead, and the Saxons and Britons are living in a slightly uneasy harmony. Relations between the two communities are eased by a strange forgetfulness, which Axl and Beatrice, the elderly couple whose quest for their son forms the central narrative, call the 'mist'. They are puzzled by the way snatches of memory tantalise and then elude them; they want to regain their memories of the past, but they come to suspect that there may be things that would better remain hidden.

Along the way they meet other significant characters - notably Wistan, a brave Saxon warrior, and Sir Gawain, Arthur's nephew, now elderly (and a little reminiscent of the knight with the Questing Hound in T H White's A Once and Future King), and sometimes comical, but still noble and courageous. And they meet the boatman, a Charon-like figure (or is he an angel? He's described once as having a 'shining back', and he does his duty with a kind of sorrowful determination) who, it seems, cannot ultimately be escaped.

I don't think it's a particularly successful creation of a fantasy world, but I think that probably wasn't what Ishiguro was interested in. It's an allegory, with huge things to say about love, memory, war, reconciliation - about the very nature of humanity, which seems to leap from one conflict to another. A terrible onslaught is foreshadowed at the end of the book - one which took place fifteen centuries ago: but what have we learnt? Not a lot, when you cast a quick eye over the news.

This is just a preliminary response; it's not a book that reveals everything it contains in one quick reading.

Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts!

Visiting Vincent

I recently visited a museum in Amsterdam devoted to the art and life of Vincent Van Gogh: it's one of the best museums/art galleries I've ever visited. Follow the link here to read about it - and about the poignant story attached to this particular painting.