Seashaken Houses by Tom Nancollas (2018)

 This is a really interesting history of what are called rock-lighthouses, those built not on a mainland patch, or on something definable as an island, but on reefs or rocks, often out at sea, but not always. The author is a building conservationist with a strong interest in engineering. So the fascinating history of these special places, often so extraordinarily battered by the elements, is taken up from those points of view. The first of them, Eddystone, was originally a late 17th century ornate wooden tower with extending wrought-ironwork, including a weathervane, designed by the infamously impractical Henry Winstanley, and, in a sense anyway, lionised in the Victorian period through Jean Ingelow's epic poem. Of course, it was blown to smithereens within a few winter gales, and Winstanley with it. Subsequently, the keystone design went through various revolutions, ending with the tapering shape we know so well today, and the stone construction. What interests me is the perfected design having the stone sections all purpose-created with interlocking shapes, both vertically and horizontally, to make as sure as we can of steadfastness - no square mortared blocks here. Nancollas even managed to visit a couple of the remaining ones - all automated now of course - with permission to go inside, and came across the vestiges of the interior style of prior times: specially-designed curved bunks and dressers, ornate mouldings, mosaic floors and so on. Sad to think of all that beauty, now cut through of course with the wiring conduits and suchlike of automation, sitting way out at sea and not appreciated often by human eyes, as was intended. As a writer, he's an unusual mixture. Every now and then will come a really strong piece of beautiful phrasing. Most of the time, his style is reasonably straightforward, though there is a somewhat overused tendency toward the symbolic - lighthouses becoming markers of all sorts of things, their significance toyed with to outline any point currently to hand, which feels a little heavy-handed. And the recent curse of hyperbolization does creep in from time to time: calling a lighthouse finished in the 1880s "barely two centuries old" is a bit much. But, as a revelation of the otherworldly romance of these places, and the contrasting practical exigencies of keeping them standing strong, this little book is a pleasurable excursion.

Commonplace Book

 '...Others tried to avert personal attacks by discussing war and peace in the abstract, adducing uncertain historical parallels and wondering academically whether it was wise to aim at humiliating a great country too much; were we not sowing the seeds of future wars?'

from Sonia Married by Stephen McKenna (Chapter Five, part III)

Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World edited by Henry Hitchings (2016)

 This is a collection of essays around the idea of the importance of bookshops in the lives of writers. Some of them have taken this to mean their part in their childhood and development, others their part in their lives as writers later on. While none of them are dull, I can't say I was wildly inspired, either. This is one of those books that has 'also-ran' written all over it, part of the 'books on books' efflorescence of recent times. I'm not sure what the problem is: the feeling is somehow the same as when someone tells you in great detail about a dream they've had. The content of dreams is fascinating, so why is it dull to hear them? This has the same quality of "ooooh, this shop was significant for me, and this book bought in it changed everything" but the reader has that sinking sense of searedness, trying to care and not quite succeeding. What occasionally changes this prescription is originality of viewpoint. So, Saša Stanišić playing with drug concepts, with books as matter for dealers, is more fun than most. Writing style also does it, so Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor speaking about a very plain but significant Nairobi shop in stark terms somehow lifts its head above the parapet. And the pyrotechnics of Iain Sinclair's prose make his piece about a St Leonards bookshop slightly beyond standard, though the matter isn't. This book as a whole is something for the 'just OK' basket.

Commonplace Book

 '"Efficiency is the gravest menace that the war holds over us," said O'Rane reflectively. "Whenever I've met it, it means being unkind一with Government sanction一to someone weaker than yourself; Jesus Christ would not have been tolerated by the Charity Organization Society, all the bourgeois press would have said that He was pampering the incompetent and maintaining the survival of the unfit. Efficiency frightens me."'

from Sonia Married by Stephen McKenna (Chapter Two, Part II)

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (2016)

 I could air the usual complaints about the overzealous critical hailing of this book, but am in danger of becoming boring about the current reviewing world's acritical lack of penetration. It is the story of a young American gay man teaching English in Bulgaria, and of a hookup which meant a lot in his life. He takes the opportunity to taste the variety on offer through casual trysts when he can, and in one popular spot at the National Palaces of Culture in Sofia meets a slender, handsome and seemingly streetwise young fellow called Mitko, who gets under his skin. They have a couple of subsequent encounters and develop a connection, with Mitko tapping him for cash and help on occasion. These he is happy to provide, balancing in his mind the cash-relationship and the far less usual one of growing interpersonal empathy, backed by his own feelings of loneliness and isolation resulting in part from a troubled and slightly loveless family history. His sense of blankness and sometime inadequacy for life's brighter story, which has always seemed a little out of reach, is broadly emotionally convincing. He goes through a relatively brief honeymoon period with Mitko under these mild shadows, and then they start to come apart. He finally puts an end to it, knowing it's going nowhere. But somehow Mitko keeps re-emerging into his life - arriving at the door of his block of flats, needing to come in, because he just wants to see him, needs some money, has nowhere to sleep that night, and so on. And our narrator gives in, still quite attracted physically, also registering Mitko's charm, and the delimited power of the special bond between them. In one of their breaks his father falls mortally ill in the States, and we follow him, loosed into the Sofia suburbs during the day after the news has been delivered, wandering through waste places in an anguished musing state, still holding the note which brought the news at his school, it slowly turning to sweaty mush in his hand. The memories and questions of a childhood which started out as bright as might be expected, and gradually dulled as his parents separated, he lost emotional contact with others, realised his homosexuality, withdrew into a diminished and nervous personal state, obsess him. After a couple of other rapprochements between he and Mitko, where he notices Mitko getting thinner, and more dishevelled, his constant drinking and dangerous lifestyle clearly taking a toll, we reach the most effective part of this by far. A precursive section of a visit by his emotionally grasping mother, which develops with maturing sweetness on a train journey into something more positive, is followed by a stilly sad last meeting between them. Mitko arrives, vulnerable and weeping, banging at the door again in terrible condition, with the news that the condition of the liver which has plagued him since his childhood in Varna has become terminal, not of course helped by his alcoholism. What follows is a really clear evocation of the pain of compassion, as the narrator realises, in a troubled few hours with him, what it looks like when someone who hasn't been given many chances, and has manipulated like hell in more blooming times to survive, finding response in others through personal charms both genuine and affected, becomes small in the face of the great blackness about to engulf them, and in the decrease brought on by the wear and tear of want. All of the above is really good material for fiction, and the last couple of sections are indeed very affecting in their unclouded reach for truths of emotion. But prior to these final stages, this work suffers. The problem is mainly in the 'voice' of the prose. It is a voice which feels incredibly well-trained. It reaches for profundity with really fine modulation. But it does so anonymously. There is such carefulness here that the reader feels they are witnessing a highly emulatory 'exercise in good writing'. But of course only part of what makes writing good is being addressed: the technical part. There is a potential reason for this - that it was an attempt on Greenwell's part to express the carefulness and blankness of his narrator. I'll wait to see if his next novel booms off the page with great personality, then, as he exemplifies a different sort of character, or allows his own much more arresting authorial voice to be heard? But my instinct tells me that's not the case. This guarded and dulled conscientiousness is his authorial voice for the moment. The word that keeps coming when considering the style here is dutiful. A feeling of meticulous care taken to reach one particular mark, but another vital care of his art ignored. This is a first novel, though - there could be a lot further to go, where that voice will be found. Given how skilled he is technically, the hope would be that that happens.

Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (1914)

 My new domicile in Shetland has brought on the wish to look further into Scotland's literature. The reading of this extraordinary novel forms the first fruits of that intention. What a first step. It is a moral tale, expressed poetically. Many novels can be described in this way, so I need a likening which will bring further focus, and the one I feel impelled to choose is Moby-Dick. There is grandness here, the wrack and twist of human greed, the impulses of fate swinging humanity around by whichever failing they leave exposed. There is something of that drench of negativity here too, like a wash applied which seeps into all the corners of the portrait, making the shadows a little darker, the fearful grey of the sea a bit more impending, the flailing of the characters under their instincts and whims a little more misdirected. It's set in a coastal town of western Scotland in the late 19th century, early 20th. It is the time when the herring trade became industrialized, or at least a lot more organized and mechanized. Gillespie himself is a grasping sort who has an unending wish to rise above the work of fishing or shop-keeping which is the usual lot of people of his class. He wants to control the fishers, command all the trade, inveigle himself into various positions of authority in the town. His attention is solely with this, and anyone who either gets in his way, or takes too much of his attention away from the core task, gets short shrift. So his wife and sons are sorely neglected in all ways except perhaps the material, but even there his growing wealth is severely protected, and enjoyment stinted. His emotional neglect though is perhaps the key arena - his wife quickly develops a reliance on alcohol, his sons' dislike of him curdles their personalities to varying extents. His exploitative career begins with the takeover of the farm of a widow after her husband's death, in league with a greedy farmer whom he eventually double-crosses. The widow realizes his perfidy too late to save her home, and Gillespie makes an enemy for life. Mrs Galbraith is a talisman figure through the whole novel, her soul soured and made duplicitous as she manipulates quietly to expose Gillespie, playing the long game. Of course, all that Gillespie does in these cases is completely within the law, and incontestable - a matter of gaining the agreement of the unaware, and then pressing his advantage home. But as he does it, again and again, the roster of those calling themselves 'enemy' grows. He has a showdown with desperate fishermen at a time of drought and plague, driving several to virtual madness. His control of ostensibly the entire fleet is confirmed, and then the desperate ones connive, against their own interests, to burn the boats that used to be theirs as they wait in the harbour, at least hoping to ruin Gillespie, echoing their own downfall, engineered by him. He is indeed seemingly laid low, and wanders the streets of Brieston disconsolately, but he finds a way to survive, and rubs their foolishness in their faces. As the novel matures we hear more of his sons as they grow up. Iain, the older and more genial of the two, becomes a fisherman and drowns in a boat which has been poorly fitted out by his father, just at the entrance of the harbour, nearly home in a storm. Eoghan, the younger, is a nervous, intelligent and somewhat religiously-obsessed boy. We see a lot from his point of view. He vacillates, torn between his growing horror of his mother's alcoholism, his wish to head to university, and his love of a cousin, Barbara, who has been tricked by Gillespie into handing over her fortune. His mind has been soured by his upbringing, unstrung between these parents. As his mother's shame turns into madness, entirely traceable to his father's baleful effect, he begins to have thoughts of killing her, to lance the family boil. In the end, in a truly horrifying scene, instead it is his mother who, unrecognizingly taking him for an enemy who will take away her beloved drink, and addled utterly, grabs a razor and slits his throat in a struggle in the dark of the house. She is killed in the process, hitting her head on the fender as he thrashes around and knocks her flying in his death throes. So Gillespie is finally undone. His entire family is gone, and his culpability in their accursed ends is manifest. Broken, he goes to visit his father, who is dying from the effects of a stroke in the family pub, around the other side of the harbour. A long-unpaid debt, which caused the rift which has separated them for many years, starts to torment him. Unable to engender a response from his father, and starting to feel the effects of lockjaw brought on by stepping in the dark on a shard of one of his wife's broken bottles, he collapses, and over the period of a couple of days, his skin going black in patches as the infection takes him over, he breathes his last in agony, tended by a somewhat chastened Mrs Galbraith, who has been caring for his father. This chronicle of single-minded greed, and its laying waste of many lives, is written with almost toppling fervour, the agitated intensity and rolling poetics recalling the grandness of Melville's restless vehemence. Some parts, particularly where Eoghan's story starts to take shape, feel episodic, almost as though this was originally a much larger opus which Constable asked Hay to cut down for its initial publication. Certainly one of the ringleaders of the fishermen's revolt is Barnacles, who forms the centre of Hay's only other novel. Was Barnacles an expansion of an excised portion of this book? There seems so little published information about Hay - I wonder if much remains of his papers. Perhaps a reader's report in Constable's archives? Correspondence there also? Now there's a flavoursome arena of research calling.

The War-Workers by EM Delafield (1918)

 This is enormously different to her debut a year earlier. That was a standard novel, in a sense anyway, of a young girl of established means starting on the journey of adult life, albeit with a nice comic conceit of her self-storytelling giving it swing. This is a troupe-novel. The crew are the female clerical workers of the Midland Supply Depot in 1915-16. The Depot is run by Charmian 'Char' Vivian, a forceful high-up, the daughter of one of the local country-houses. The majority of the office staff are in awe of her, idolizing her huge attention to the work, and of course, true to the times, her social status. She has a free ride with them therefore, and the fact that some of her attitudes are much more to do with self-aggrandisement than belief in the importance of their work (despite her great protestations to the contrary), is one they miss in their adoration. The main purpose of the piece is comedy, though there are the obvious moral undertones. So we get the snotty and devoted secretary, the bumbling but loveable stats-keeper, the salt-of-the-earth general staffers locked in a tart mesh of status and posturing. The main part of the action aside from the office is set in the hostel over the street where they live. There, the slightly inefficient but delightful Irish superintendent tries to keep them all alive and rested under the phenomenal wallop of Char's regimen. The focus comes when an under-secretary is recruited to help snotty with her duties. Grace Jones is a young Welsh woman of great straightforwardness, and an ability to get on with most people despite her honesty. Char finds her skill and lack of nonsense irritating almost subconsciously - the sublimated knowledge of her less altruistic motivations playing in her quite freshly. Grace just gets on with it. The key comes when Char's father has a stroke, and she is drawn away from the Depot for a while. Grace is deputized to go out to Plessing, the family home, to keep up the work pace. But there she furthers her friendship with Lady Vivian, Char's mother, who sees very clearly what a gem she is, and respects her. The tension between daughter and mother is never very far from the surface - Lady Vivian is clear-sighted about her daughter's failings and not afraid to enumerate them. Grace keeps clear of this of course, but can't help confirming Lady Vivian's prejudices. Various contretemps play out, as Char's father experiences another stroke, and her unwillingness to leave her work at the Depot to be there for her father in his last days is revealed inadvertently to the staff back at the hostel. Though the bursting of this bubble is one of the main centres of the climax, and the much more realistic view of Char held by all the staff bar the snotty secretary is the result, in Delafield's hands it doesn't turn into a pantomime, and the resolution is realistically muted. Some staff resign, their delusions blasted, but they're still friends with those who remain. Lady Vivian's plan to turn Plessing into a convalescent home for badly wounded soldiers comes to pass with the help of a local doctor. They manage to keep it from Char's empire of control with some deft moves, and the hostel superintendent, who has been summarily dismissed by Char for no good reason, goes to work there independent of her arbitrary influence. The friendship between Lady Vivian and Grace has developed to such an extent that Grace also heads there to work, extricated from Char's dominion. But Char carries on with the Depot, and is still the centre of her own small world of orders, the same old work carrying on at the same cracking pace. The fact that this one has that muted denouement, where someone of great energy and effectiveness is nevertheless a very faulty character, and still contrastingly quite successful, and yet taken by those who know her well with an enormous grain of salt, gives it the edge of modernity. These nuances show that Delafield was wanting to embrace, I think, modern psychological tropes, whilst showing a lot of evidence of the traditional expected in her times. A very interesting balancing act.