Summertime by JM Coetzee (2009)

 This is a different beast to its two predecessors. They were conventional autobiographical narratives, although they did kick against the pricks in terms of the disavowal of hindsight in the main - they were written from a contemporaneous viewpoint. The question raised therefore was how the author had gone about avoiding hindsight, it being possibly hidden in terms of subject choice, or other (conscious or subconscious) manipulations which may have been buried in his processing of the material. This one is bracketed by sections from notebooks, where pieces of prose have been developed as inspiration hit, covering the period of the author's return to South Africa from the United States, and the publication of his first books, in 1972-1975. These endpieces contain interesting tidbits on politics, the nag of the exile's return, and poignant discussion of relationships, particularly at the end with a focus on his father's final years. But the main part of this, sandwiched between the end parts, is a series of five 'interviews' - which are imaginative recreations. Four of them are with important women in his life - two lovers, one cousin and one unattainable love aspiration. The other is with a male colleague at an academic institution. The imaginative construct is that he has died, and the interviewer is preparing a volume on this hitherto less appreciated period of his life. There are several elephants in this room - the most conspicuous being "how did these people feel about being 'interpreted' in this way?" and "how accurate is the portrait of their attitudes, and if it's inaccurate, what does this rewriting of history do to the record?" I guess. But it's not that those questions don't come up anyway in thinking about any autobiography - it's just the standard nag of representation, and they do have the right of reply if they want it. Unless they're dead, of course, and I don't know the body count there - here's hoping it's zero. I have a complicating concern, centring on the technique: sometimes the voices here are too similar. Each of these interviews has a moment or moments where the interviewee gets a bit snaky, and sends a tart 'no' to Mr Vincent, the interviewer, accusing him of overstepping the line, being a bit uninformed, and so on. These ripostes are way too similar to be convincing, and give us an insight into how the author is forming his idea of where the pressure points in the conversation would be, and not quite perhaps finding the individuality of the voices he is recreating. Of course one needs to set that against what he does achieve, which is an interesting mixture, and does evoke a strong sense of who he thinks he was in these times, warts and all. The one which hit home the most for me was the second, a talk with his cousin Margot, known as Margie, which somehow incorporates a greater sense of the visceral ache at the base of the existences of white South Africans in the Karoo in the second half of the twentieth century, and also lends that very homed-in sense of the origins which define someone, their proto-self. By contrast, the short one with the male colleague was nowhere near as impactful. The fact that this volume is non-sequential interests me, too - why has he skipped the period in America between Youth and Summertime? Is this covered in one of his novels? Or is it still too sensitive for some reason? This one's redolence of gnawing and doubt hit me a lot more than the other two, especially housed as they are in a dried up landscape and atmosphere. Its high-stakes modus, and mixed success in it, also give it a sense of teeter, which is more absorbing. 

The Angel and the Demon and other stories by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (1901)

 This is a very obscure footnote in Fowler's career. These are her first efforts at fiction writing disinterred from oblivion in the pages of the British Workman magazine, which seems to have been a very paternalistic temperance publication, leading the biddable working class to a less debauched life, typical of the late Victorian era. Her breakthrough, Concerning Isabel Carnaby, had occurred in 1898, so was fresh when Partridge, famed purveyors of Godly and improving literature, pulled this volume together. These highly moral stories of the triumph of the good and the just deserts of the evil, complete with hearty advice and admonishments, show her skill with bright plotting - and not a lot else.

Those of the Forest by Wallace Byron Grange (1953)

 I'm guessing this book lies in the wake of classic nature writers like John Muir and so on, though I haven't read them. It is painstaking, meditative, philosophic and in awe of the rhythms of the natural world. None of those things are negative for me, in fact they represent something close to my own attitudes, so I responded positively to it, but I can imagine others would become impatient with its slow unfolding. It takes the reader through a couple of years of the life of a family of rabbits, and of in fact an entire ecosystem, but it does this in the wild, and well into it. We are nowhere near human activity - we are deep in a wilderness forest area, where the landmarks are a ridge, a swampy area, a beaver pond made on a stream which runs into a lake, and the forest which mottles in various densities and species the whole landscape. Grange is interested in having us see the minutiae of animal, plant and weather activity which makes up the pulse of life there. He doesn't mind showing it in both its happy and less happy aspects - there is little or no anthropomorphism here, and death and want comes as baldly as does regeneration and plenty. In fact, these things are emanations of his mantra - "it's all just life" effectively. This is recognizable as science tinted with philosophy and soundly-based in essence. What he also does is talk a lot about "Creation" and the fact that he sees some sort of mystic grounding or First Cause for all these rhythms, which is a little less comfortable. He also is of course working from how biological science was understood in the early 50s, and some of his great questions have been answered, more or less. Most of the books I read are obviously about humans, because they are by them, so it's good to get out into this space and have a rest from their concerns to a reasonable extent - a big, long, slow, quiet sojourn in the Great Green. Well, it's red in tooth and claw often, too, so perhaps not always so quiet.