When a Great Story Calls. . .

     It's getting chilly and A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is the perfect one-sitting read on a couch, huddled under a blanket with a cup of tea close by.  Reading this amazing book full of thrilling writing and storytelling, I really felt transported to my younger bookworm self. The kid in me was scared and seduced; the adult in me was an emotional wreck by the end.
     Conor is a thirteen year old going through a tough time.  His mother is getting treatments for her cancer and doesn't seem to be getting any better, his father has moved to the U.S. with his new wife and baby, he's getting bullied at school and his brash and opinionated grandmother is coming to stay. Worse of all are the nightmares he keeps having.  One of them involves the yew tree he can see outside his window.  This tree turns into a raging monster at night, breaking windows to enter his room and insisting that he will tell Conor three tales. After he's finished he promises that Conor will have to tell one of his own, whether he wants to or not.  Conor wakes up convinced it's all a dream.  Until he sees that his floor is covered with a carpet of the tree's needles. . .
     I'm not going to reveal anything further except to say that the monster's stories have wonderfully unexpected and ambiguous endings.  I love books that challenge the reader's imagination without being overly didactic. This is also a gorgeously designed book with menacing illustrations used to great effect by Jim Kay. Make sure you take the dust jacket off if you get your hands on a copy. The book was "inspired" by Siobhan Dowd, a favourite YA author of mine  (her novel A Swift Pure Cry is terrific) and there's an added layer of sadness that she died - also from cancer - before she could write this last book.  Patrick Ness has paid an excellent tribute to her.

A "Tessering" Type of Weekend. . .

Yes, I just finished reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time which I enjoyed very much though it was far darker than I expected, and while I wasn't jumping from planet to planet this weekend, it did feel like I was crossing a lot of cultural borders and travelling back and forth between various books. I got a surprising amount of things accomplished and yet none of it felt rushed. I have a new "slow" strategy for Saturdays and Sundays in which I continue to wake up at 6am as I do on weekdays, but instead of hitting the shower right away, I make a cup of tea, crawl back into bed and read for four hours - purely pleasure reading; whatever takes my fancy. Then I'm up officially at 10am and the whole day still stretches in front of me. Reading children's literature is a particularly delightful way to start a weekend.

But I was also feeling a bit scholarly so I started dipping into a recent anthology that I've acquired - The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry edited by Tim Kendall. I read the essays dealing with women's war poetry, containing some of the usual blather about how women's poetry has been ignored in the canon because most of it wasn't very good and the genre is masculinely predicated on having actually fought at the front etc. etc. Simon Featherstone's essay on Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy was interesting in its argument for expanding the definition of war poetry to include "an exploratory aesthetics and politics that develop through unexpected, often understated experiences of wartime change." And a footnote in Stacy Gillis's overview essay led me scrambling to my WWI bookcase to dig out The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, edited by Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout. This is another anthology of interesting essays and Deborah Tyler-Bennett's look at women poets who used myths or folktales to critique the impact of war had me foraging for my Collected Poems 1912-1944 of H.D. (I really need to organize my bookcases) and making a note to find and read Edith Sitwell's poem "Clown's Houses" and the poetry of Iris Tree (who I know primarily as a subject in paintings by Bloomsberries) and Phyliss M'egroz (never previously heard of her). Hours worth of other interesting essays in both anthologies to read, so I'm keeping them at the ready on the bedside table.

I have to thank George at Great War Fiction for this post on Patrick Hamilton's Gorse Trilogy which contains a character who is a WWI poet. This led me to the previously unknown Black Spring Press, which not only publishes the trilogy, but also the works of Julian Maclaren-Ross, a writer I've been interested in since I read he was the inspiration for the writer X Trapnel, in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, one of my favourite books. In addition to ordering the Hamilton, I also bought a copy of Maclaren-Ross's Bitten By the Tarantula and Other Writing which includes short stories, some novellas and unpublished work, and a bunch of literary and film criticism. My books arrived at the post office on Friday night and I read his film essays, including one on the early films of Hitchcock - it has me itching to watch Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt. From the introduction to this collection, I also learned that Maclaren-Ross married a niece of Leonard Woolf. All roads apparently lead to Bloomsbury . . .

My evenings have been spent at Cinematheque Ontario which is running its Best of the Decade series. I saw three very beautiful films by Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke (Platform, Still Life and The World) and he was actually there in person to introduce them which was a treat. Then today it was a 1954 Italian melodrama, Senso directed by Luchino Visconti followed by Silent Light, directed by Carlos Reygadas, a Mexico/France/Netherland/Germany co-production which was also of interest since it starred Canadian writer Miriam Toews.

Whew. That's enough travelling for the moment. At least I didn't have to pass through "The Black Thing" - just a bit of rain.

Re-reading: The Secret Garden. . .

It's been a goal of mine to consciously make time to re-read books from my bookworm past to see if I react differently to them many years later. This morning, a pot of tea at the ready, I tackled Frances Hodgson Burnett's beloved 1911 classic The Secret Garden. It must have been over thirty years since I first read this. It was a favourite of mine as a child because I was born (although not bred) in Yorkshire and have always kept a certain romantic notion of the moors in my imaginative consciousness. I found that I remembered the first half of the book extremely well - the sullen Mary Lennox's first arrival in England and her lonely first days until she finds a way into the secret garden that has been locked up for ten years until, with the help of the Yorkshire lad Dickon, she brings it, herself and Colin, the sickly master of the manor, back to life.

Reading it again, I'm struck by how many echoes of the Bronte sisters reverberate through the pages. The reverence and love of the moors is constant of course, but Colin's strange crying in the night as he's hidden away, not in an attic but a forbidden corridor, surely is a nod to Jane Eyre. As is the "voice" calling back Mr. Craven from his aimless European wandering (I had completely forgotten this entire chapter). I was also intrigued by the insistence of "Magic" as a life-force that Colin calls upon to make things happen. There are certainly religous implications in the novel, and today, it's what we'd probably call the power of positive thinking. But time and again, the word "Magic" with a capital M is repeated. Which is interesting having just read Hartley's The Go-Between, about a child who believes in his magical powers and the ability to put curses on people. That novel is written much later than Burnett's, but set only ten years earlier. So was there an intense interest in the occult then, particularly among children? Hmmmm.

I also found myself thinking of the first part of Rupert Brooke's famous sonnet, "The Soldier", whenever Mary's request for "a bit of earth" is referred to.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Dickon is thirteen in the novel - he'd be sixteen when the war started. What would have happened to him? And after finishing the last chapter, I'm surprised by how suddenly Mary disappears from what has been mostly her story. Now that she has helped heal Colin and he's reunited with his father, is that the end of her usefulness and she can just fade into the background again?