Life is a Cabaret

Alternatively Life is a Cabinet. Richard Mabey (one of the Environment

Triptych above sculpted by Jon Edgar) wrote a selection of musings about Botany and the Imagination and called it The Cabaret of Plants. It reminds me more of a Victorian Cabinet of Curiosity than Liza Minnelli trying and failing to make Michael York look sexy in the musical. Oh what fun they had in Weimar during the rise of the Nazi party! 

Anyway, back to this book. As you'd expect from a miscellany of writings on plants and how they have played multiple roles in civilisation - through mythology, medicine and culture - it ranges from the fascinating to the slightly dull. But don't let that put you off. The highlights, of which there are many, are worth catching the cabaret. I particularly enjoyed tales involving the Yew, how to hide a body in a Boabab, the wreckless destruction of the Sequoias and speculation about plant intelligence. So if you don't know what these plant names are then dust off that old vinyl copy of Stevie Wonder's Secret Life of Plants (a more appropriate choice I think than some nice blonde boy belting out Tomorrow Belongs To Me) and find out more about your planet.

Meet On The Ledge

Nick Hornby is a happy chappy. His 2005 novel A Long Way Down reads like a film script and I nearly saw the film on Netflix before I'd read the novel. I have no problem with authors doing this because all it means is that the novel is cut up into small scenes (which also makes it easily readable) and there is an ear for dialogue (which in this case is presented from four different viewpoints or characters). I don't think it is too much of a spoiler to reveal that it revolves around a bunch of people that meet on top of a tall building as they are about to commit suicide (or not). A person less likely to take the plunge than Nick Hornby is hard to imagine as his novels tend to a warm and slightly sentimental bonhomie. Nonetheless I would have liked a little more musical reference in one of the characters and that probably reflects a lack of depth to back story in general - but at least the characters are believable and he pulls off the difficult task of helping the reader identify with (whilst objectively condemning) each of these very different people.

Norfolk is a Mystery

I spent 5 years of my life in Norfolk and by the way it isn't flat - although parts of it are wet. The Norfolk Mystery is, I'm sorry to say, a bit wet. I've just seen too many Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers and similar jolly murder adaptations set in or around the nineteen thirties. The lead non-narrative character in Ian Sansom's Nortolk Mystery is always quoting Latin or literary sources in a way which is potentially funny but becomes irritating on repetition and excess. I understand that this is satire. I get that. I also quite like the idea of this being a series of County based travelogues. But as farce it is just slightly the wrong side of PG Wodehouse for me. I never engaged in the 'whodunnit' element and it probably needed a dash of PD James to bring some gravitas to the murder. I just don't think he took the Norfolk motto "Do Different" seriously.

Lemons, peppers, almonds and buses

Photo: Randi Hausken

There were a few "what's not to like" factors for me when I picked up Driving Over Lemons. The first was that the company I worked for had just been acquired by a Spanish parent company and I was hungry for anything on the geography and culture of my new employers, the second was having more than a passing interest in farming/horticulture and the clincher was that Chris Stewart was an-ex drummer of Genesis. He played on their first single Silent Sun and a few other pieces although they were barely more than a glint in Jonathan King's eye at the time. Genesis had a few other forgotten drummers before Phil Collins finally filled the seat but Chris was one of the five originals. He chose a different path and, whether or not it was as lucrative as some, you have to admire the rich and rewarding life he has built for himself and his family at the remote farm of El Valero in the Granada province of Las Alpujarras.in Andalucia.

In the Last Days of the Bus Club he writes engagingly about serving Wild Boar to Rick Stein, how not to start a tractor, doing an author tour with a sheep shearer, having to consult a hands-on faith healer about his inflamed private parts, the devastating affects of flash floods and most poignantly about having to let his daughter out into the wide world (the bus club of the title being the end of meeting fellow parents at the school bus).

Maybe it's just me...

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book as Nathan Filer has a good ear for making the narrator speak from inside the character's thoughts in a refreshingly simple and sing-song way. I liked the degree to which his view of people and events was off-kilter with the sensible adult's world. But this becomes a prison - as it does for the character himself and his real and imagined relationships. The intervention of official letters and dialogue with other characters doesn't really interrupt his internal dialogue and that ultimately makes this book, ironically, too one-dimensional an experience.

This is a highly rated book and I wondered if it was just me. Maybe I had something to fear from my own mental fragility in the face of this character's story. Certainly I struggled to empathise when he tells well-meaning helpers to f**k off and leave him alone. I know this happens to those trying to help all the time. So maybe it is just me that I gave up on the character at that point. But I didn't stop reading, I just stopped empathising.

A small but perfectly formed inheritance

The hare - particularly a white hare or rabbit - is a complex symbol encompassing elements of harmless madness, purity and rebirth and is closely associated with the seasonal pull of the moon. The hare shares many good characteristics from the Chinese Taoist moon-hare that creates a herbal elixir of life, through the Japanese Usagi, to Buddhist and Hindu incarnations, the Shi'ite reincarnation of Ali and the Celtic origins of the Mad March Hare, the Easter Bunny and Jimmy Stewart's 6 foot 3 and a half inch Pooka called Harvey. But it is not well liked in Hebrew culture, and by derivation Christians, who see the hare as a symbol of fertility and is therefore bad. This kind of nonsense and religious intolerance spread spider-like through different cultures is relevant to Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes which treats art objects as telling a story beyond their creator and cultural origins in the way that they can touch many different lives.

On a recent visit to the Pallant Gallery in Chichester, UK, I saw some really paintings by an unjustly neglected official war artist Evelyn Dunbar rescued from a Kent attic and a collection of paintings, drawings, engravings and poems by an artist called David Jones. Inspired by one of David Jones' poems was an exhibition of minimalist ceramics in cases or vitrines. Visually these were no more interesting that a pile of petri dishes and I walked swiftly past them. None of the group I was with even remember seeing them. A real lesson, and I obviously needed it, that every object, like every person, has an interesting story to tell if you will only take the time to look. This book is part of that story and it is a fascinatingly rich and diverse one that I heartily recommend.

The start or end point is a collection of 264 Japanese Netsuke which are wood or ivory carvings - none of them bigger than a matchbox and all carefully designed to be slightly rounded and easily portable. Although these are figurative it is easy to see the restraint and subtlety of their design in Edmund de Waal's pottery and he won't be the first or the last potter to be deeply influenced by Japanese cultural and spiritual attitudes. This is deeply ingrained from time he spent studying in Japan - but that is only a part of the labyrinthine cultural and art historical connections that run through his family and span the globe. I'm not going to retell the story here - you need to buy and read the book. I've just a couple of other observations to make. The first is how surprisingly cool, pragmatic and level-headed his description is of the psychosis and institutional theft that rich Jewish families suffered across Europe in the Twentieth Century and the second is how heart-warming, but so frustratingly anonymous, is the tale of family loyalty shown by the German lady who hid these valuable Netsuke in her mattress during the Second World War and ensured their success as objects which frame their owner's memories.

PS. Watch The Joyless Street from 1925 on YouTube. It's not Greta Garbo you need to watch it's the fear of the international banker. Some things don't change.

That's No Child

Eowyn Ivey describes waiting to find 'her story' and it becoming her first novel 'The Snow Child'. It's just as well that the making and reading of a book is in how you tell the story not the originality of the plot because 'her story' is also the traditional Russian fairy tale Snegurochka or Snow Maiden. It also leans heavily on Arthur Ransome's 'Little Daughter of the Snow' and less consciously on picture books like Raymond Briggs' The Snowman. Certainly this is a book that would appeal to younger readers but it is more about motherhood than childhood and about the difficult and painful process of letting go. There are some poignant moments in the protagonist's relationships that everyone will recognise - not least the abandonment of pride in accepting help from friends and neighbours.

What I liked best however was the description of the harsh brutality and beauty of the Alaskan landscape where you are forced to make brutal choices such as hunting to survive. As well as paying homage to northern mythology she also generously cites twelve Alaskan writers who mostly use their natural environment front and centre in their works. Shame she didn't mention Russell (Rusty) Annabel's Alaskan Adventures and who Ernest Hemingway described as 'the finest outdoor writer' he had ever read.