The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier presents a vivid story. It features two central characters, both women, who inhabit the same places but are separated by four hundred years. The two women discover not only similar experience, but also suffer similar responses, perhaps because they share the same genes. The two women are of the same stock. Ella Turner is an American, a trained but not practising midwife, who has moved to France. Her husband, Rick, has a new overseas posting. 

They seem to get on well, but Rick is very focused on his career and hardly seems to notice how difficult is Ella’s transition to European life. Ella’s surname, Turner, is in fact derived from the French Tournier. There is a recorded immigrant in her family’s past. So life in France is potentially a return to roots of a kind and she decides to take the opportunity to do some research. Luckily, her family used to live in the region where she and Rick have settled. And thus she discovers a family of Hugenots, French Protestant converts who migrate to Calvin’s Switzerland in search of security and tolerance. As Ella carries out her search, her hair, perhaps coincidentally, changes colour. Isabelle de Moulin was the ancestor that Ella discovers.

She found herself moved by a vision of the Virgin Mary in which a blue, a vivid, variable blue of a fabric features memorably. It’s a blue that appears in dreams, is recalled when her sexual maturity beckons experience. And her hair turns red, giving her the nickname, La Rousse. She is soon pregnant. And the father, Etienne Tournier, does the honourable thing, but, as is customary for him and his family, without a great deal of honour. But there is turmoil around. There is a new faith, a protester’s church that the Tourniers espouse. Isabelle’s visions of Virgin Blue cause internal conflict, a conflict that seems to focus in her daughter, Marie. 

Threat of persecution forces flight over the border. Ella, meanwhile, is learning a lot about France, Hugenots and her family’s origins. She visits a library, finds a family bible and meets a librarian called Jean-Paul, perhaps not coincidentally named after a Pope. They share and interest, pursue it and then find more in common. Ella begins to suffer blue visions of her own. And, with her own life in turmoil, she follows her ancestors to Switzerland to uncover more of their history. What she finds shocks her and reveals how a fundamentally female energy has the power to transcend time in order to colour experience. The novel’s denouement is truly surprising and not a little shocking. But what Tracy Chevalier does not do in The Virgin Blue is tie up all the ends or explain all detail. And this is eventually one of the book’s strengths. 

When all of Isabelle’s and Ella’s trials and tribulations have passed by, there are still questions, loose ends and unmade decisions. The Virgin Blue thus presents rounded characters whose vulnerabilities and inconsistencies render them thoroughly credible. There are few writers who present women as complete characters pursuing their own independent, incomplete lives, but Tracy Chevalier is one of them. View the book on amazon The Virgin Blue

Antonio Mari on show at the Sculpture Garden in Alfas del Pi

Sometimes, perhaps rarely, people have a vision. They not only see, they see through or beyond, allowing them to appreciate, often quite suddenly, a bigger space, more powerful than the immediate. Often it’s an artist that prompts such realisation. After all, it’s the artist’s role to help us see and, at the same time, to interpret. But alongside the art it’s sometimes also the setting that helps us to find an experience that lies beyond mere sight. Such a perfect blend of expression and content can be seen at the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where works by Antonio Mari are on display. 

Toni Mari is a Javea-born artist who sculpts in iron. His work is often highly naturalistic, with bulls, birds, fish and sheep and other farmyard animals featuring. But it is the human form that dominates his work, despite the fact that most of his figures are often more air than substance. His figures often stride like a Bocchioni or dance like a Degas. 

Charging bulls display a life-force. A strangely light iron bird seems ready to take flight. A Good Shepherd strides, superhuman in scale, across his meadow, his joints – characteristically for Mari – twisted tendons of metal. At the hip a lunch satchel swings, no doubt crammed with the cheese of his following sheep, whose delicate fleece is soldered springs. A welded dog eagerly awaits its master’s call. A series of dancers add pure grace, their clothing and costume flowing into ribbons that do no more than punctuate their back-drop of sky. Though welded to their rusted plinths, surely they move, thus claiming their freedom of life. 

But Antonio Mari’s work is also revelatory, an aspect that is only amplified by the setting. This special exhibition sits alongside a permanent sculpture collection, amongst which are other works by the same artist. The whole is set in the beautiful gardens of the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi, on Spain’s Costa Blanca. 

Established in 1998, the gardens are the vision of Johanna Klein-Schreuder and Johannes Klein. Twelve years ago they bought a plot with some three hundred decrepit orange trees. Their unique vision was to create a sculpture garden, a space to exhibit human and natural creation both to contrast and complement. Now more than a decade into the project, Johanna and Johannes have achieved their goal. 

Their garden is worth a visit in itself. Though formally laid out, its main features are trees, themselves apparently living sculptures presenting a remarkable variety of shape and form, some in flower, some hardly yet in leaf. Interspersed between these natural forms are works of contemporary sculptors, including other works by Toni Mari, including Love Dance and Man On Stilts. In the former, angels dance a round while in the latter a perfectly formed person who has hardly any physical form seems to stride through the garden at tree-top height. 

Ausencia by Jorge Castro Flóres is a reclining figure whose very substance has been torn away. Here the reduction of the human to a kind of essence is as painful as Mari’s use of the same idea is uplifting. Elsie Ringnalda’s On Top Of You features two elongated but anonymous figures. He is lying on his back. She is upright walking towards him along his legs. Thus natural and human creativity mix, the whole producing its own life. The vision of Johanna and Johannes works beautifully with the joint focus of garden and sculpture augmenting and amplifying each other. The Jardin Escultorico is a wonderful place to visit for residents and tourists alike. And it would also repay repeated visits, since the featured exhibitions change regularly and, of course, the trees are never the same, even from one day to the next. You can visit this beautiful place at Cami del Pinar 23, Alfas del Pi. See http://www.klein-schreuder.com for further details and opening times.

The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe

Novels in translation always present at least twice their share of pitfalls for the reviewer, or even the reader. A translated novel has to be approached as a package, experienced as such and reviewed in kind. After reading The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe I am presented with a wholly new dilemma, however. An entomologist disappears while out bug hunting. He finds himself a virtual prisoner in a sand pit, a pit inhabited by a woman with whom he soon finds a predictable solace. He tries to escape, and does not. He dreams of escape, and does not achieve his goal. The characteristics of his new environment seem to contradict all of his assumptions. Nothing helps. The Woman In The Dunes might be described as absurd. Equally, the term nihilistic might be appropriate. It might even be deliberately trivial. As such it presents an intellectual challenge to the reader who, of necessity, must constantly interpolate the banality of the book’s inaction into a sub-text of potentially enormous significance. I say “potentially” enormous significance because I remain unsure, having finished the book, whether any significance at all might apply. But then again, perhaps that’s the point. The Woman In The Dunes has been likened to Kafka’s Trial or the absurdity of Samuel Beckett’s plays. As an experience, however, none of the suspense of the former nor the bald linguistic power of the latter. Perhaps the novel’s rather one-paced prose was a true reflection of the original. If so, then I might suggest that the writer rather over-stated his point. View the book on amazon The Woman in the Dunes (Penguin Classics)

Sir Phoebus’s Ma by Zoë Teale

Zoë Teale’s Sir Phoebus’s Ma is more of a travelogue than a novel. It’s a series of impressionistic reflections, experienced during a year in Japan. The year was spent by a twenty-two-year-old English teacher in a regional northern town, where the students are not as motivated as the stereotypical oriental swot. Teaching methods are traditional, downright boring from the point of view of a recently-qualified practitioner, but they are as unquestionable as they are ingrained. Anna’s supervisor is a traditional Japanese male, at least that’s what Anna thinks. He is called Moriya sensei. There is a suggestion of eccentricity in his habit of translating tombstone inscriptions. There is also a hint of a willingness, nay desire to sample a foreign taste or two, especially when it comes in the shape of a young female teacher subordinate. 

If only our central character, the teacher herself, who is the book’s first person narrator, could have willingly sampled a few of the local tastes for herself… Not that I thought an affair between herself and Mr Moriya was ever likely or desirable, perhaps from either party’s point of view. But without that tension, the book would have been quite plot-less, since the plot was never allowed to intrude on recalled experience. Anna and some other expatriates are keen to experience tradition and the indigenous. They can’t cope with the food, of course. 

Anna herself travels to the other side of the world eager to seek out the authentic, but she refuses to leave her vegetarian preference at home. She compromises on eating fish, but when seriously asked an opinion on whether she would eat whale meat, she seems to have no position, which is strange, which ever way you view the character. In some ways Anna embodies the confusion of Western identity. She is keen to experience the authentic and professes respect, a romanticised, perhaps self-obsessed respect, of course, for its assumed value. But at the same time she is unable to participate in what she encounters and is thus rendered a permanent spectator by the pressure of her own neuroses. She emanates from a culture that is ignorant of itself, but afraid to be anything else. Anna’s Japanese hosts are tolerant. Imagine a Japanese visitor to a rural English town insisting on eating only Japanese rice. How far would she get? 

 But Sir Phoebus’s Ma is still worth reading. We are told snippets of legend, participate in the odd celebration or two and nose our way into a taste of Japanese domestic life. Anna’s trip to Kyoto, though brief, is mildly evocative, despite her difficulties at the Golden Temple. There is a sense of contemplation, a ceremony of tea and a hint of wasabe. But a hint is as far as Anna will go, since the tingle in the mouth seems to repel her. Eventually, we see this as inevitable, given the confused, arm’s length English reserve with which she cloaks all life. View the book on amazon Sir Phoebus's Ma

The Successor by Ismail Kadare.

Things are often not what they seem. Usually when this applies something ostensibly great turns out to be merely mundane. Occasionally, however, we meet an iceberg, an apparently small presence that becomes something vast and consequential. This latter case applies to The Successor by Ismail Kadare. The Successor is apparently a small book. The cover shows a head in silhouette while a hand with a gun points from the left. “Just another predictable little thing in a predictable genre,” were my initial thoughts. The cover illustration is apposite, however, and remains so throughout the book’s short duration. But in fact The Successor then reveals itself as a vast work, despite its obvious brevity. It’s about nothing less than a whole country, its politics, its very identity in a world that is changing around it. The country is Albania and Ismail Karade is clearly born of its very soil. At least that truth is reliable. But how would we describe a successor who does not succeed, a guide who has lost the power of sight, an architect whose plans are ignored and a young woman engaged to be married who is not in love? Things are often not what they seem to be. The Successor has been shot, hence the cover. And yes, The Successor is a whodunnit, but in no way is it predictable. When a whole nation identifies with and is driven by the political choices of its leadership, how can it ever change organically from within? The figurehead has to go, even if he has already gone! And if change was the product of poor judgment, then should history record a suicide? And from whose perspective do we assess success? And who has the right to change history? In his preamble, the author humorously sets the tone by announcing that “any resemblance between characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.” Thus, in a short book about a feud within an inner circle, Kadare creates a poetic world that mirrors reality, whose delicately-drawn images beautifully construct much larger ideas. The poignancy of a secret door that can only be opened from the outside is an idea that will last for a long time in a reader’s memory. The Successor is a great little book. View the book on amazon The Successor

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

I approached Rose Tremain’s The Road Home expecting a vivid story drawn on a life of struggle, whose central character might grapple with life’s traumas, opportunities, joys and disappointments. I also expected that all of this would be placed in a setting where landscape, physical, social and psychological, but perhaps not political, would both inform and influence the characters’ lives. I was not disappointed, but for the most part I remained less than surprised, apart from the fact that Rose Tremain in The Road Home approached a contemporary political issue. 

The Road Home has modern day economic migration at its core. Lev is Polish. He has worked in a sawmill in his home town, the less than prosperous Baryn. He has a family and he used to be married. But now, as a single parent, despite the assistance of friends and family, he finds there is no future at home, no visible means of support. So he leaves for London on a bus in search, presumably, of streets paved with gold. On that journey he meets Lydia, a compatriot with connections and in some unlikely way or other they manage to stay in contact throughout the book.

Clearly their lives were never meant to intertwine, but circumstance, in The Road Home, is forever a local confinement. It simultaneously restricts and empowers, and then conspires with time to create a bond of friendship between Lev and Lydia that transcends class, interest, geography, expectation and assumption. Rose Tremain’s story takes Lev to different jobs, a kebab shop, two quite different restaurants, an old people’s home and a vegetable form. She has him encounter low life on the street, the high-brow in a concert hall, and also the other-worldly in a theatre. He spots pretence – it might not be that difficult! – but he also appreciated sincerity. He encounters self-obsession, honesty and love, always in unequal measure in every aspect of life. 

Eventually, his travels become both self-revelatory and enriching. He comes to terms with loss and turns the void in his life to personal gain. There is no fairy-tale get-rich-quick ending for Lev. The Road Home is no sugary advertisement for individuality, no attempted apology for market capitalism. This is a personal quest to cope with personal tragedy and unacceptable economic reality. The road does eventually lead home, but only when Lev and his destination have both been transformed. In their own way, neither is the same as they were at the start. 

And, I suppose, that’s the point. Life takes us wherever it goes. As it drags us along, either we learn and survive, or merely survive, or not. The process is given. The result is speculative. Lev survives. And he learns. He is a credible, real character, with a credible, real life. But there were aspects of The Road Home that I found disappointing. The scenario that adopted Lev at his destination was, for me, too isolated. Migrants often rely heavily on networks, but Lev has no contact save for Lydia, whom he met on the bus. He has no relatives to phone, nor friends, nor relatives of friends, nor someone from his home town who knew someone from somewhere else who just happened to be in business in Essex. This I found unlikely.

In a literary sense, this liberated Lev from his background and thus enabled Rose Tremain to layer upon his experience exactly what she wanted. This was convenient. It also rendered Lev’s point of view wholly individual. He apparently experienced everything in the naiveté of complete isolation, the foreignness of British behaviour thus presented as if seen in a laboratory analyst’s test tube. In this context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rose Tremain used Lev’s trials and tribulations merely as a vehicle to let off some steam about aspects of contemporary British culture that she finds abhorrent, embarrassing or reprehensible. This, and not Lev’s economic migration, is the rather failed political aspect of the book. Christy, Lev’s Irish live-in landlord, was rather more stereotypical than he needed to be. A plumber with a broken marriage and a drink problem might be plausible, but the last Irish plumber I met in London had so much work he earned a fortune and owned several London houses on which he collected rents. Maybe his name was Christy. Lev’s relationship with the eventually predictable Sophie also seemed unlikely. They worked together in a ground-breaking new restaurant, encountered the pretentiousness of a cutting-edge playwright and together even got involved in some social conscience. 

I would have no criticism here if Lev, throughout all this experience, had seemed more engaged, rather than experiencing everything as if he were merely a recipient. Out of your own context and background, you have the opportunity, even the right, to be super-opinionated, and this is a right that Lev seems to forego. Overall, The Road Home is an excellent read. Its characters are engaging and its events are eventually both credible and poignant. I felt, however, that it lived too much outside its principal figure’s psyche. But then it chose to concentrate on his experience of change, one aspect of which is travel, itself, rather than his responses and judgments. Sometimes travel itself intensifies responses, and it is possible that Lev’s experiences explore this aspect of experience. So when he returns home, as the book’s title requires he does, he is a changed man. But now he is also newly skilled, enriched and motivated. The Road Home does more than a little of that for the reader as well. View the book on amazon The Road Home

City Of Spades by Colin MacInnes

Colin MacInnes wrote City Of Spades over fifty years ago. At the time its depiction of London from an African immigrant’s point of view both shocked and revealed. I wondered whether a contemporary reader might now find its perspective hackneyed, its impact diminished by changes in attitudes towards race that we assume have happened in the intervening years. Half a century ago, the bones of Johnny Fortune’s story might have shocked. Somehow, at least for those anywhere near the issues, I doubt it. 

He arrives in London from Nigeria to study meteorology, an activity that, for a whole host of reasons, he manages singularly to avoid. A newly-appointed welfare officer is charged with the task of easing the exigencies of life for youngsters from the warmer parts of the Commonwealth who come to be weaned by the mother of the Empire. He is appointed to care for Johnny’s file. But before long, while Johnny designs his own curriculum, it is our young civil servant who is receiving the education, an education about the nature of his own society, or at least a side of it that he might previously have been totally and blissfully unaware.

Perhaps paradoxically, Johnny meets people who regularly do things that are less than legal. He encounters substances with their associated informal retail trade, dubious service-sector occupations with their associated facilitators, activities behind closed doors that would be unseemly at the street corner. In short, opportunities in several shapes and sizes appear at almost every step. And then, of course, the police turn up and try to call a halt to the party. Suffice it to say that Johnny Fortune’s fortunes lead to various encounters, some of which are within the law, and some with the law. Invariably, they involve little prosperity and even less formal learning. 

If the plot’s content might have shocked residents of areas outside inner London in the late 1950s, then today it would not. Times certainly have changed. But then shock was not the book’s intent, even fifty years ago. Shock would have encouraged exaggeration which Colin MacInnes only ever suggests to create comedy. What City of Spades tries to do, in my opinion, is question those assumptions we all make about the nature of our society, our identity, our ideas of culture, nationality and history. And the book still manages to achieve this, because those themes, if not their settings, are eternal. I was reminded, on this reading, of The Rake’s Progress. When we follow the exploits of Tom Rakewell, we make allowances that accommodate differences between eighteenth century life and its contemporary manifestation in order to see through to the principles and ideas. We do not, for instance, need to believe that Nick Shadow is actually the embodiment of The Devil, as advertised, to understand the folly of Tom’s decision to seek personal aggrandisement in London rather than a slower-paced but perhaps more sincere provincial predictability. We do, however, have to understand a certain moral landscape in order to interpret the schemes that Tom pursues, despite the fact that they now seem strange and a tad unlikely. It’s in this spirit, I believe, that we should approach City Of Spades in order to identify, experience and understand much in the work that clearly transcends merely historical significance.

Also like The Rake’s Progress, City Of Spades is a highly witty and humorous look at some aspects of its contemporary society. In the latter’s case, it reveals double standards relating to race, class difference and a host of societal characteristics whose existence received middle class sentiment might seek to deny. Nowadays, we might see many of these revelations as highly unremarkable, despite the fact that, for many, they remain not quite mundane. Colin MacInnes’s City Of Spades still retains the ability to make its point in its original, apparently durable terms. In the 1950s, a stereotypical view of Britishness might have included claims to trust, honesty, integrity in public life, a police force that was the toast of the earth and a society that both cared for the vulnerable and had time to love animals. In City Of Spades, Johnny Fortune had drugs planted on him, was beaten up in custody and lived ordinarily in layer of society whose existence the polite either denied or ignored. But then he has African. Times don’t change. But the title might have. View this book on amazon City of Spades