Six degrees of Separation: October 2021

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate of  booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com. 

Our starter book this month is not a book so much as a short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery.

I have read the synopsis of The Lottery and am quite sure I couldn’t cope with the full story, it being about the sacrifice of living people, so instead I will have to make a rather tortuous link to another Shirley, although this time it’s a surname…

Anne Shirley, an 11 year old orphan in turn of the century Nova Scotia, is sent to Prince Edward Island to live with siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. The Cuthberts had asked for a boy to help them on their farm, Green Gables – instead they get impulsive, excitable, imaginative Anne. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s most famous book Anne of Green Gables is the story of Anne’s life with the Cuthberts, her schooldays, her friendships (especially those with Diana Barry and Gilbert Blythe), adventures, disasters (who can forget the famous attempt to dye her hated red hair black?), and later, her time at teacher training college.

Like many people of my generation, I was first introduced to Anne in the BBC’s 1972 Sunday afternoon adaptation of the book, in which Kim Braden took the title role, so Braden will ever be Anne for me.

I am sorry to say I have never visited Prince Edward Island, which looks wonderful. I did, however, spend almost a year living on another Canadian island – Newfoundland. This was a long time ago, and I was unprepared for the harshness of the maritime winter that sweeps numerous storms of sleet, snow, ice and hail across the island for months on end. I did, though, enjoy reading Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, in which a down-on-his-luck (to put it mildly) journalist, Quoyle, moves from New York state back to his aunt’s dilapidated home at Quoyle’s Point, Newfoundland, bringing with him his two young daughters. 

Bunny and Sunshine’s mother has died in a car crash while running away with her lover, having attempted to sell Bunny and Sunshine to sex traffickers.

As you may possibly already have realised, this is definitely not one of those ‘home town girl moves to the big city, is obliged to go home because someone has left her a mansion/farm/bakery etc, only plans to stay a week but soon discovers the joys of rural life and falls in love with the hunk next door’ books (which is not to say I don’t enjoy those too.)  Strange things happen in Aunt Agnis’s house, storms storm in, secrets are revealed and they’re not necessarily nice ones. Quoyle gets a job on the Gammy Bird, the very local paper, and ends up writing the daily shipping news.

One thing I have a very clear memory of from my time in Newfoundland is driving into town every evening to collect my husband, and hearing on the radio the Fishing News, which began at 6pm with the sound of a ship’s horn booming through the fog. I don’t know about Newfoundland today, but back then boats and fishing were of tremendous importance (and the subject of acrimonious disputes with, I think, Spanish and Russian trawlers.)  Along with the fishing update, the daily departures of the local coastal ferries would be announced. These called at many remote outports, bringing essential supplies to small and isolated communities, some inaccessible in any other way. This hour of local detail was, in retrospect, a wonderful insight into a vanishing way of life.

The Shipping News won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Last month I spent a week on Islay, an island in the Inner Hebrides, and a day on Jura, Islay’s much smaller neighbour. While Islay has several small settlements, at least ten major distilleries, and moving memorials to some of the terrible shipwrecks that have happened off its rocky coast, Jura is the island of ‘ones’ – one (community) shop, one village, one primary school, one hotel, one café and one distillery. It has a population of around 200 humans and 7,000 red deer. The whole island is in fact split into seven estates; only one of the owners, Andrew Fletcher, actually lives there; the rest are absentee landlords, and the title to one of the estates is so hidden behind trusts that the identity of the owner is shrouded in mystery.

The Corryvreckan Whirlpool (c) isleofjura.scot

George Orwell famously wrote 1984 while staying in a remote farmhouse on Jura (during which time he nearly drowned his young family on an ill-advised boat trip to the notorious Corryveckan whirlpool), but as I haven't read it, my next book is a much lighter affair. 

In The Careful Use of Compliments, Alexander McCall Smith takes Isobel Dalhousie, convenor of The Sunday Philosophers’ Club, on a fact-finding trip to the Jura Hotel. I find Isobel an annoying character – she lives most of the time in monied comfort in Edinburgh, and seems to do very little except edit a very boring journal and float about interfering in people’s lives in the guise of Being Helpful. 

I don’t know why I find her so irritating, as I suppose in some ways she is similar to my beloved Kate Fansler, Amanda Cross’s equally wealthy academic and amateur detective. Like Cross, McCall Smith uses Isobel to look at various ethical questions. I think I just find Kate so much more fun. Isobel is tedious beyond words (except unfortunately she’s not, as Smith has written a whole series about her. I wanted to like these books - and I do enjoy the author's No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Scotland Street series - it's just Isobel I have a problem with.)

The Jura Hotel: image (c) isleofjura.scot

Anyway, in pursuit of some mystery or other, Isobel takes herself off to Jura – McCall Smith loves nothing better than to mention his friends in his novels, so I have little doubt but that he knows the owners of the Jura Hotel. I haven’t stayed there (early booking advised: https://www.jurahotel.co.uk/), but it does look absolutely lovely, and I hope I will one day manage a night or two there myself.

Which leads me happily to Kate Fansler (again). Kate lives a monied life in Manhattan with her wonderful and adoring husband Reed. And staff, of course. She is a professor of English Literature, so she is well read and she is clever, but most of all she is witty and she is smart. I’ve just read Amanda Cross’s fifth Kate Fansler novel The Question of Max, in which Kate’s art historian colleague, the elegant, erudite and civilised Max Reston, asks her to accompany him to the remote coastal home of the late Cecily Hutchins. Hutchins had, late in life, become an acclaimed author, and Max is her literary executor. He has heard reports of someone snooping around her empty house, and asks Kate to drive with him to Maine to check the property (the contents of which include all of Cecily’s letters and papers.) Climbing on the nearby rocky shore, Kate comes across the body of one of her own graduate students, drowned in a tidal pool. Or was she?

The solution to Geraldine Marston’s death is, in the end, quite straightforward, but the plot gives Kate good cause to dig into the lives of women who were students at Oxford in the 1920s – including Hutchins, Dorothy Whitmore, and Max’s own mother, Frederica, who were close friends. Being as rich as Croesus, Kate also takes herself off to modern day Oxford, where her friend Phyllis is suffering a year of boredom while her husband Hugh does research and dines at High Table. 

So – as in all of her novels – Cross looks at the position of women, and at how much it has changed, and more importantly how much it has not, in the space of over 60 years. Frederica gives up academia to marry and have a family, Dorothy dies young, and Cecily puts her career on hold until her children are grown and her husband deceased. All these years later, Phyllis (temporarily) leaves her post as headmistress of a prestigious girls’ school in New York City to follow Hugh to Oxford, where she has nothing to do all day and is excluded from college life.

Meanwhile, running parallel to the main plot, Kate’s nephew Leo, gives her a startling insight into the highly questionable practices of expensive private schools who need to get their richest pupils into Ivy League colleges, and also into the ways in which cheating and bullying are standard practice on the basketball pitch. And Kate being Kate, there follows a consideration of when it is right to blow the whistle.

And always in the background is the Watergate affair – in those days a scandal so huge that no-one could imagine anything worse. Now we can only look back and sigh.

Watergate leads me naturally to All the President’s Men, the ultimate whistle-blower story of American politics. It documents Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s investigation into the 1972 break in at the Democratic National Committee HQ in the Watergate Building, a crime that eventually led to the resignations of Chief of Staff HR Haldeman and Assistant to the President, John Ehrlichman, and ultimately to the downfall of President Richard Nixon himself.

I was still at school when I first read this book, and I later saw the excellent film adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. I even attended a weekend study course about Watergate run by the University of Sussex, and was entirely riveted by the whole thing. Forty years later one of Edinburgh’s independent cinemas ran a season of films about Watergate and Nixon; I attended some with my teenage daughter, and I am glad to say that the film held up very well, as did Frost/Nixon, in which the outstandingly good Michael Sheen played David Frost, and Frank Langella was a perfect Nixon, smooth, slimy and sweating as Frost manoeuvred him into an inescapable corner.

I find myself completely stuck for a sixth book this month – in fact it took me several attempts even to get this far – so instead of digging up some tenuous link, I’m going to stop here and hope for more inspiration in November (6^th), when our starter book will be What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez.