Six degrees of Separation: May 2022

Six degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate of http://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com. 

This month’s starter book is True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, which I haven’t read and probably never will. It did get me thinking, however, about gangs – and this led me to a recent re-read,  The Otterbury Incident by C Day Lewis which was published in 1948. 

The Otterbury Incident is narrated by George, aged 13, and is the story of two rival schoolboy gangs, and what happens when they decide to come together to save their friend Nick, victim of an unhappy home life and a very unfortunate accident. 

The ‘Incident’ is the bomb site that one of the gangs has chosen for its HQ – for the story takes places just after the war – and indeed the reason why Nick has such a grim life is that this very bomb obliterated his own house, killed his parents and left him ‘not very bright’. He now has to live with his horrible uncle and aunt, so when he manages to kick a football through the school window the consequences are going to be especially dire. 

The boys – who until now have spent their time building ‘tanks’ to ambush one another – all like Nick and want to help him. How the money is raised to repair the window, what happens along the way, and more importantly afterwards and how the boys eventually get the better of the local spiv, Johnny Sharp and his sidekick The Wart makes for an exciting and entertaining story, the more so because George is a brilliant creation whose narrative rattles along;

Speaking for myself, I always skip the bits in novels where they describe people: you know – ‘her eyes were like pools of dewy radiance, her lips were redder than pomegranates’ – that sort of thing doesn’t get one anywhere, I mean it doesn’t help you to see the person, does it?

Yet the characters in The Otterbury Incident come alive – George/Day Lewis animates them with an economy of detail that could teach some modern authors a thing or two. The writing is understated, drily funny (George reminds me at times of Oswald Bastable, narrator of Edith Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers), and a pure joy to read. My copy is illustrated by the wonderfully talented (and equally understated) Edward Ardizzone. 

The boys in The Otterbury Incident attend their local school, but C Day Lewis, who was a professor of poetry and for four years the Poet Laureate, was educated at Sherborne. And my next book, also set in a school, is by another alumnus of Sherborne, John Le Carré (David Cornwell). 

A Murder of Quality was published in 1962, and was Le Carré’s second novel. Although it features George Smiley it is not a spy story; Smiley, now retired, is asked by a friend to investigate the death of Stella Rode, the wife of a junior master at a boarding school in Carne. It’s now many years since I read this book, but I still remember its outstanding sense of place – Le Carré is another master of the understatement, a writer who can bring a character or a scene to life with just a few perfectly chosen words. I still remember the snow in the quad as Smiley makes his silent way back to his rooms. 

I recently listened to an episode of Andy Miller and John Mitchinson’s excellent podcast Backlisted in which their invited guest was Jenny Colgan. I have to say that any appalling and shameful assumptions I had about romance writers were well and truly skewered – Colgan is not only a prolific author, she’s read just about any book you’ve ever heard of and hundreds that you probably haven’t, and can talk about them all with tremendous knowledge and enthusiasm. 

For the podcast the book Colgan chose to recommend was RF Delderfield’s story of life at an English boarding school between the wars, To Serve Them All My Days. She’s also a fellow addict of series like Malory Towers, and explained that she had long wanted to write a ‘grown-up’ school story. In 2016 she published Class, the first in her The Little School by the Sea series; my elder daughter and I both devoured it. 

Class introduces us to Maggie, a teacher who decides to leave her home in Scotland and her job at the local comprehensive to take up a post at the exclusive Downey House on the Cornish coast. Behind her she has also left her dependable boyfriend Stan. He’s still her boyfriend – but for how long? While she’s working that one out, we are introduced to the rest of the staff, and of course the girls – some from wealthy backgrounds and unhappy about that, others on scholarships and desperate to make their families proud. 

There’s a real art to writing good romances (I’ve borrowed a fair few from the library that were absolutely dire) and Colgan certainly has it. She’s become a favourite comfort read for me (and my daughter.) 

I mentioned that Jenny Colgan is smart. This was proved, if proof were needed, in January 2019 when she won Celebrity Mastermind (her very erudite subject being The Manhattan Project, a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons.) My next author won the contest two years before Colgan, but with the perhaps slightly more accessibly subject of AA Milne. 

Stuart MacBride lives, as do I, in Aberdeenshire. He’s one of the few modern thriller writers to put this area on the literary map and is now well established as one of the Tartan Noir authors, along with such luminaries as Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. 

McBride’s Logan McRae series is set mainly in Aberdeen, and starts, appropriately enough, with Cold Granite (Aberdeen being known as ‘the granite city.’) It’s about a killer who is kidnapping, murdering and mutilating children. It’s the only one of MacBride’s books I’ve read, as although it is a gripping and very well written story (the scenes in Tyrebagger forest – a popular dog walking location just a few miles from my home, and somewhere we used to take not only our dogs but also our children – will remain with me forever), MacBride’s writing is just a tad too gory and visceral for me. My son has, however, read most of the series and loved every one. 

I once saw MacBride at the Edinburgh Book Festival. At such events most authors trot out the standard chat about their latest novel, so I was unprepared for MacBride’s completely different approach to it all. Talking at 100mph throughout, he, together with his friend and fellow author Philip Ardagh (who barely got a word in edgeways) gave us an hilarious hour about everything but his latest book. If you’d like to find out what he did say, here is the review I wrote at the time. 

There aren’t too many famous Aberdeenshire authors, but one of whom (along with Stuart MacBride, of course) we can be justly proud is Nan Shepherd. 

Shepherd was born in Cults (now an extremely upmarket Deeside suburb) in 1893, and there she lived  until her death in 1981. For most of her adult life she worked as a lecturer in English at Aberdeen College of Education, but her passion was the Cairngorm mountains, about which she wrote what is now her most famous book The Living Mountain. Before she turned to non fiction she wrote three novels, all of which are now seen as major contributions to early Scottish Modernist literature. The second of these was The Weatherhouse, published in 1930, and it has become one of my favourite books. 

 I first read The Weatherhouse for Simon and Kagsy’s #1930Club back in 2019. This is what I said about it then: 

The Weatherhouse was written in 1930, twelve years after the war in which it is set had ended. It is about a small, fictitious farming community in North East Scotland, and more particularly about a small group of women living their circumvented lives – but it is about much more than this. In describing a few, seemingly insignificant, events, Shepherd is able to examine the nature and perception of truth, the meaning of war, and what was for her the essential oneness of the physical, spiritual and natural worlds. 

I wrote quite a bit more than this, so if anyone would like to read it they can do so here. 

Robert MacFarlane, who has written extensively about nature, landscape, place, people and language, has been one of Nan Shepherd’s great champions in recent years. A chapter of his acclaimed book Landmarks is devoted to her and to her beloved Cairngorms, and was adapted for BBC4 and BBC Scotland. 

In 2016 MacFarlane published The Gifts of Reading, an essay (published as a small book) in which he talks about the pleasure and the importance of giving and receiving books. He cites five books that he regularly gives away, among them Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. 

I so enjoyed this beautifully written little book when I first read it, and yes, I have even given a copy to a friend or two, but the more I think about this, the less I agree with what it actually says. 

It may be wonderful to give and receive books if you have the kind of friends and family members who know what you will like and vice versa. In reality (at least in my reality!) people often want to lend or give the very books that you know you will never read in a month of Sundays. MacFarlane also talks about giving without expecting anything in return, and I think that is perhaps the key to this – I have so often been waylaid by people asking me what I thought of a book they’ve given/lent me that if I ever give someone a book now, I always say ‘I’ll be more than happy to discuss it if you want to, but I’ll never ask you about it, so if you don’t like it or just don’t want to read it, don’t worry.' 

I appreciate that we all have different reactions to books, but sometimes I think it’s best if we just choose our own, or at least make a list for our family to choose from if they are kind enough to offer to buy us books for a birthday or Christmas. I did this last year and received some great books of my choice (Mary Essex's Tea is So Intoxicating, Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns and Weatherland, Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting.) And I know we should have open minds about books and indeed everything else in life, but my TBR stacks are towering, and I also review for a few publishers; I often don’t have time even to read the things I do want to read, so I don’t want to feel pressurised to read something somebody else wants me to. 

Having said all of that, I’m always delighted to get recommendations for books and I add lots of them to my wish list, but then I can look at them in the library or bookshop first. Sometimes they live up to their promise, sometimes I quickly realise that they are not for me. 

So that’s it for this month. I can’t find any link between my first and last books, but never mind, it was fun. 

Next month we will begin with Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.