Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer is eventually both surprising and deceptive. It is surprising because of the twists and turns of the lives of its characters, all of whom become completely, sometimes endearingly, always engagingly real. The deception arrives subtly to enlighten, because these apparently ordinary lives with their pressingly everyday concerns grow to illustrate and then eventually represent something of great significance, being the natural world and our place within it. Thus Prodigal Summer, a novel that begins suggesting a snapshot of a single season in the lives of just three households grows into a profound statement of their relationship – all of our relationships – with the natural world and indeed life, itself.

Deanna Wolfe is a mid-forties idealist who has chosen to live as a warden and ranger in the National Forests near Zebulon in the southern Appalachians. She is studying predators, especially coyotes, but apparently yearns to worship living things, especially those that are not human. She is beginning to anticipate the menopause of her own life-cycle as she marvels at nature’s ability to both regulate and reinvent itself. Crucial in this process, she feels, is the role of the predator, the animal at the top of the food chain, and especially the females of those species, those charged with husbanding its renewal. Her work seems all absorbing.

Then one day she meets Eddie Bondo. He is not from those parts. He is a hunting cowboy-type from out West, not the type, you might think, that Deanna would have time for. He is twenty-something, almost two decades her junior and he has a body plus a way of handling it that stirs the autumnal debris of Deanna’s psyche, debris that has accumulated in her continued, self-imposed and desired isolation. After all, in magnetism opposites attract.

Not far away there is Lusa. She came to these parts to marry Cole. He was the man who lured her away from her biology and installed her on a smallholding, where even the hardest work would hardly make a living, let alone create wealth. Lusa has some relationship problems with Cole’s family. After all, she is not one of them and, perhaps more importantly, her parentage has European and Middle Eastern roots. And - at least in theory - she is not even a Christian.

And then, one day she finds herself a widow. Cole’s family are immediately closer and yet further away at the same time. Sympathy partly overrides the tensions. Lusa has to begin dealing with them directly, not through the mediation of her husband’s filter. Problems of making a living might just be solved by going into goats. Goats? At least she still has time to study her beloved insects.

Not too distant are the neighbours Garnett and Miss Rawley. They are, shall we say, at the senior end of their citizenship and perhaps as a result rather set in their ways. Garnett is not just a Christian, but one of the breed that interprets the Bible, including its timeline, quite literally and can thus locate an exact date of creation just beyond 4000BC. He might profess not to be impressed by science, but in many ways he worships it by regularly dousing parts of his land and its flora in insecticides. If only…

If only that darned neighbour, Miss Rowley, would clear the cuttings and clean up that compost where al the pests breed. But she is a declared worshipper of science and cannot bring herself to interfere in any natural process, lest human intervention gets in the way of the inevitable. Miss Rawley and Garnett are not the most companionable of neighbours.

In Prodigal Summer these three households, each with their own tensions, relationships, feuds and priorities live cheek by jowl with nature. Animals, plants, the weather, chance and inevitability press themselves to the forefront of daily concerns. Thus they find they are in contact in more ways than one. Not only must they commune with the natural world, they must coexist, even communicate as assumption, motive and consequence push them in different, sometimes conflicting directions.

Of course, given Prodigal Summer’s theme of renewal and at-oneness with nature, it is no surprise that all things female are predominant. Reproduction, its necessity, its mechanisms, its intended and unintended consequences, its intended inevitability, runs not like a thread but like a strong, perhaps unbreakable rope that ties everything together. No matter what we do or think or feel, experience tries to lead us all in the same direction, as if the destination were pre-ordained, in spite of our determined meanderings designed to deny it. In Prodigal Summer, a many of the encounters are sexual. If it does not form the main argument, then the need to mate is at least preamble. There is never time to review. Life has a habit of taking us where it wants, ideas of control or self-direction being perhaps illusory.

But in the end these people all realise that they are part of the same natural world that, independently of human-created desires and prescriptions, sets its own pace, follows its own rules, precludes exemption and decides consequence. This Prodigal Summer thus reveals its surprises to all concerned, leaving them changed and transformed, older and wiser. The reader makes the same journey.

Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris

In Blackberry Wine Joanne Harris presents a novel about Jay, who is a writer. Some years ago Jay created a character in Three Summers With Jackapple Joe, the novel that made his name. But since then, Jay’s products have been mediocre and his career has stalled. We meet him looking at his life, especially his relationship with Kerry, whose own media career seems to go from strength to strength. There is tolerance in the air, but resentment and envy are not far from the surface.

Jay reminisces about Joe, the ex-miner in Yorkshire who became something of a local hero for the young writer. Back in the 1970s, when Jay Mackintosh was an impressionable lad growing up in Yorkshire, Joe seemed so sophisticated, a much travelled man of the world whose collection of exotics from all over the planet facilitated the concoction of strange brews from the fruit of his plants. Blackberry Wine is actually written from the point of view of one of Joe’s bottles of home brew that survived for decades after its initial fizz. The device is interesting at the start and end of the book, but for the most part it is best ignored. It remains a good idea, but does not quite come off.

Chapters describing Jay’s present in London and then France and his past as a child and adolescent in Yorkshire are interleaved. Joe’s magic seemed to work those years ago when talismans cast spells that protected Jay from local bullies. They also seem to work when, disaffected with city life and frustrated by his continued lack of achievement, Jay disappears to a rural French farmhouse. There, lubricated by some of the home brew preserves, Jay finds himself haunted by old Joe and, once again transformed, as if by magic, newly able to write.

Jay finds that there is more than meets the eye in his little French town. The small community is riven by family feud and accusation, alongside general disagreement about how the area should develop in the future. Should it retain its rural roots or appeal to the holiday trade? Perhaps displaying latent Romanticism, Jay finds himself securely on one side of the discussion. He negotiates his way through new relationships, some mixed with a little local politics. Meanwhile his muse, Joe’s old wine and its associated ghost, encourage him to write a new and successful book.

Jay’s neighbour in France is Marise. She has a daughter, Rosa, who apparently is deaf after an illness contracted when an infant. For some unknown reason, Marise is determined to buy the very farmhouse that Jay himself has bought. The competition from over the fence intrigues Jay. He is at a loss to explain how passionately Marise appears to want his property.

Joanne Harris’s characters are thoroughly credible. Their weaknesses are truly human and their reserve makes their shortcomings understandable. But overall Blackberry Wine fails to convince. Not only is the setting in which Jay finds himself too soon accommodated by both himself and the locals, but the book simply has too many themes. Jay’s relations with the locals could have been the single focus of the book, but we also have his childhood, his inspiration, his relationships with two different women, his coming of age. As a result, none of the themes is thoroughly examined. This gives the book a lightness that aids a skimming read, but which simultaneously undermines any real engagement with the character. Some of the book’s themes, indeed, become submerged and apparently forgotten, only to spring up again without warning. The novel remains, however, a rewarding read and an interesting take on what really has the power to motivate people to achieve. There might be an added dimension of autobiography, but that would be another story.

The Stranger In My Life by Janet Holt and Helen Parker

“Sorry, please look after the animals” was scribbled on a note that Fred pinned to a door. It was intended for the eyes of Janet Holt, who had helped out on Fred’s farm for years and had become his business partner. Presumably, Janet heeded the message. The word “presumably” may seem strange, but it is relevant because the note was read during a four day period in March 1976 that became elided from Janet’s memory. For thirty-four years, she had no recollection whatsoever of what transpired in those days and it is the search for the story of that blanked out time that forms the centrepiece of Janet Holt’s autobiography, The Stranger In My Life.

At one point, late in the book, a misprint tells us that her dogs have “tales wagging with excitement”. Janet had always been close to animals and loved to care for them. And if the animals described in the book – the dogs, horses, cattle and pigs in particular – could in fact tell their tales, then we would know for sure that Janet did in fact heed the note and remember to look after them. In the absence of their first hand witness, we must rely on Janet’s perhaps incomplete account, reconstructed with therapist help more than three decades after the event.

The Stranger In My Life begins with a conventional, perhaps quiet childhood. Janet Holt’s interest in animals was manifest from an early age, and by ten she had Lucky, her own pony. A rural setting in a village near New Mills in Derbyshire in the north of England offered her an excellent setting to pursue her interest. And then Janet got to know Fred Handford, a farmer who in the nineteen sixties still ploughed with shire horses. Janet helped on the farm and soon became skilled in animal husbandry, milking, pig feeding, mucking out and the like.

Janet wanted to pursue this outdoor life, but her parents insisted she get a real job, so she eventually became a clerk in a New Mills legal firm. Janet’s dependability, interest and enthusiasm allowed her to combine a full time desk job and the farm work she loved. Indeed, a financial arrangement with Fred saw her become a partner in the business.

And then, in 1976, in her mid-twenties, Janet suffered a kind of mental and physical collapse. Four days disappeared from her life and her business partner Fred disappeared from her and everyone else’s life, having left what was interpreted as a suicide note. But then, there never was a body…

Janet took over the farm, but needed to continue with the paid work. In many ways she became a stranger to herself, since she left herself no time to reflect, relive events. A career and a farm, plus sleepless nights and recurring nightmares seemed to leave little time for anything apart from the here and now. And by then that included an affair with her boss from the legal firm, an arrangement that was to last twenty years. The four days around Fred’s disappearance remained stubbornly blank, but ever dominant. In any case, just how much do we know of ourselves? Given the task, could any of us recall the events of a particular week in our lives well enough to relive them? But in Janet’s case, the emptiness of the missing time continually returned to dominate the present.

Years later, after serving a prison sentence and with the help of a loyal friend and a therapist, Janet Holt attempted to relive those days with drastic results. But even then the story remained incomplete. The affair with the boss had lasted all those years and had ended in acrimony. Janet had never been afforded status above the mistress used for sex, and she had shared that status with others in her boss’s life. Scorned, she exacted revenge where it hurt the man the most, in his wallet, but she paid the price for the fraud. Her time inside did nothing to alleviate the pressure still exerted by those missing four days from two decades before, but it did help to identify new priorities for her life, and eventually an attempt to relive the trauma materialised. Once through proved to be less than adequate as complication compounded complication and in the process Janet, the storyteller of her own life, seems to meet a stranger she knew only in nightmares, a person who lived those four missing days.

The Stranger In My Life is an autobiography. Its style is matter of fact, its language transparent and often deceptively simple. But the content is stranger than fiction, revealing a person who became a stranger to herself, her very existence denied. There is an immediacy that brings the past to life, though never literally, and it is a past that still might not have fully revealed itself. We have to believe what Janet tells us, but still we are never sure of events. “Sorry, please look after the animals” is what Fred’s note said, but it is only the animals themselves who could tell us the detached detail of whether Janet did as she was asked.

England In The Late Middle Ages (1307-1536) by A. R. Myers

England In The Late Middle Ages (1307-1536) by A. R. Myers forms the fourth volume of The Pelican History Of England. Now sixty years old, this particular text examines a period of transition, perhaps from the traditional towards the modern, at least in spirit. The author cites the fifteen thirties as the decade beyond which medieval values and assumptions were in terminal decline. The modernity that replaced them was merely incipient, however, and took centuries more to transform English society, but the case made in this book for the fifteen thirties forming the cusp of that change is compelling.

The book certainly presents history as a top-down affair. The king and his concerns are ever central, and most of the rest revolves around this core. It is Myers’s case that medieval societies were characterised by a need for an all-powerful figurehead whose authority was perceived as derived directly from God. And given this, the history of the entire period was thus the history of the exercise of this authority. There were strong kings, who commanded the allegiance of those who held power of their own, and there were weak ones who thus invited plot, conspiracy and instability. The divine right of kings, it seems, was subject to Darwinian market forces: those who succeeded in attracting sufficient authoritative godliness prospered, while those who did not were deposed.

A measure of the monarch’s strength during this period seems to have been the ability to fight foreign wars. The word “foreign” is problematic if the Angevin origins of this empire are acknowledged. In the eyes of those who viewed contemporary life, perhaps, England and their France were never perceived as separate entities, but merely part of the same, unified heirloom estate that happened to have a strip of sea through the middle. This view of the political geography of the time is not stressed by Myers, so a sense of England versus France pervades the narrative.

Myers devotes time to the arts, economy, society in general and ecclesiastical life, as well as to descriptions of court life, intrigue and military campaigns. His discussion subtly charts the growth of trade and the rise of a class of nouveau riche business families who eventually supplant the older, land-owning aristocracy. And it is these people who eventually provide the stimulus that encourages the adoption of humanism and other renaissance traits that had developed a century earlier on mainland Europe. They thus appear to occupy the role of a modernising elite.

The fourteenth century in England was a century of plague amidst almost constant warfare, either with France or, if that had temporarily run out of steam, internally, where the Wars of the Roses saw the Houses of York and Lancaster vie for the English throne. It was perhaps this conflict that resulted in medieval values persisting in England when elsewhere they were already in decline.

But what is really satisfying about Myers’s account of late medieval England is that in a short volume he manages to communicate and illustrate the complications and exceptions, as well as the general thrust. This is a work of true scholarship and understanding that strives to portray the big picture, but accomplishes this via an attention to detail that brings the story completely to life.

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

Edgar Drake is a piano tuner and is the principal character of Daniel Mason’s novel. Based in late nineteenth century London, he is also something of a specialist. No doubt he will tune any instrument, but Edgar Drake advertises himself as a specialist the Erard, the brand of piano that Franz Liszt had chosen for its special, perhaps unique qualities. And so, perhaps, Edgar Drake is not just any piano tuner: he is a tuner of Erards, a star performer of sorts, though personally he aspires to no sort of stardom.

He is clearly not short of work. He and his wife, Katherine, live a thoroughly middle-class life from his earnings. They could afford to support a family, but after several years of amorous marriage they have no children. It appears that Erard pianos might just be Edgar Drake’s children, so dearly does he care for their well being, their present and their future, there being no space left for any other concerns.

A letter arrives to disrupt this professional and domestic blissful stability. It’s a request to tune, re-voice and perhaps repair an Erard piano. There is nothing special about that, perhaps, but the letter domes from Surgeon-Major Anthony J. Carroll from his outpost on the very edge of the British Empire, deep in the jungle highlands of Burma. Anthony Carroll, Edgar Drake is told by a gentleman in the War Office, lives in the highlands of the Shan states which span the Burma-Siam border, an area noted for its political and military insecurity. How on earth did an Erard grand piano make its way to such a place? And why? Is it a mere plaything of a serviceman stationed far from home? And why is the request to repair it being handled through official channels? Edgar Drake will be well rewarded if he accepts the commission, but he will be away from home for months and, unfortunately, such a journey is not suitable for a woman.

Well, of course he accepts. Edgar Drake’s journey by steamship via the Mediterranean, Egypt, Arabia and India form the first part of The Piano Tuner. Some of those whom he meets along the way - especially a man who tells every traveller just one tale - play a part in the book’s story, but these roles are revealed much later, and subtly. The true significance of any event or claim by any character in The Piano Tuner in never immediately apparent.

Edgar Drake is hosted by the colonial military during his stays in Rangoon and Mandalay. He is reassured that the official, thoroughly British establishment is behind his venture. But as time passes it becomes clear that the task that he is being asked to accomplish is not considered by anyone with an opinion as being a simple, technical job on a musical instrument. And it is not just the threat of raiding bandits, the trials and tribulations of a river journey, the oppressive climate and threatening diseases, or even a visit to the politically unstable Shan kingdoms on the edge of imperial influence that provide the complication. There is clearly something that Edgar Drake is not being told.

The piano tuner grows ever more frustrated while he waits to start his assignment. When he eventually travels, it is unclear whose support he retains or whose commission he is undertaking. It is then that the place, its beauty, its culture, mysticism and promise begin to bewitch Mr Drake. The more he is exposed to the stimuli of Burmese life, the more he becomes absorbed by his surroundings and obsessed with a task that he does not want to end. Soon he finds himself at the centre of events and relationships he could never have imagined when he first read the letter that explained his commission back in London.

Edgar Drake is very much at the centre of The Piano Tuner’s plot. It is his story, his perceptions and reactions as life reveals itself to him that are described. The book unfolds from his consistent point of view, but Drake’s views are changed by experience and we live through these experiences with him. He becomes a competent, reserved hero who responds to surroundings and experience and is changed by both. The true success of the novel is that the reader feels these same transforming sensations as the story unfolds.

Any Old Iron by Anthony Burgess

Any Old Iron by Anthony Burgess is a work that almost defies description. The only way to get a sense of its world is to enter it by reading the book. The novel’s journey is vast, it’s absurdity often hilarious and its dark humour often tinged with a biting perception of the real.

As with many Anthony Burgess novels, the start is staggering. The first hundred pages - as is usual for Anthony Burgess - race past at a hilarious pace. Reginald Morrow Jones - inevitably Vegetable Marrow Jones to his friends – is a Welshman. Enough said… So was King Arthur. What links them? Precious little until you have read the book and then, perhaps, quite a lot less.

But then, as ever with this author, after the initial headlong spurt the pace seems to fall away. It could come as a relief to many readers, since being dragged along at the rate of the opening could easily exhaust. There is, of course, the necessity to develop the characters and their predicaments. Anthony Burgess does this by viewing their lives from different perspectives. This works in part, but the overall similarity of style tends to blur this use of different points of view.

Merely listing the scenarios in which the characters find themselves raises the breathing rate. Anthony Burgess does not need to reinvent history so that his characters may live through it. So, in Any Old Iron, we have a Titanic survivor, Russians in New York with a restaurant business and a sex-starved daughter who seems to like the new cook. After a visit to the First World War, there’s an escapade or two on the streets of St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad eventually - take your pick - as the Russian revolution unfolds. We participate. This is a long way from Wales, about twenty pages or so. Somehow we find ourselves in Manchester. There is a Jewish family with an even more sex-starved daughter. She takes up percussion with her musical ear. World War Two? Thought you would never mention it… Yes, let’s have a bit of that. How about a trek across the frozen wastes of the Soviet Union? Did I forget the posting to Gibraltar that had such a profound effect on a soldier’s career? And what about fluency in Spanish? Where did that come in? National identity is always good for the soul, so while we are talking about the foundation of Israel, why don’t we have a bash at Welsh independence?

The text is peppered with puns, intellectual references, linguistic tricks and occasional insight. We learn, for instance, in quite relevant circumstances, that for Russians water and vodka are regarded as being just about the same thing, the letter k being the only difference. We learn that a letter A embossed on a once shiny, now corroded steel sword originally signified ownership by one Attila the Hun. I mean, can we really dislike Attila the Hun? The same sword later became the property of one Arthur of Wales, the legendary King Arthur of the Knights and Round Tables. The sword, by the way, was later nicked, by theft, not corrosion, and had to be nicked back via an inside job at the Ermitage in Leningrad. (Got the name right this time…) Oh, and there’s that tour of duty in Gibraltar, where a serviceman kills an off duty German as part of the war effort and is accused of murder. What about the trek across a Soviet winter? Already mentioned that…

Any Old Iron, frankly, defies description. Right from the first paragraph, “I’m no metallurgist, merely a retired terrorist and teacher of philosophy” to the last, “It was a pity that Reg had lost his sense of smell,” Any Old Iron taunts the reader with innuendo, humour, double-entendre, intellectual challenge and linguistic trick. What it perhaps does not do is offer a rounded and familiar character that we thoroughly get to know. But part of the point in this novel that addresses ideas of identity is that none of us is knowable in that way. Life presents itself and we live it as it comes along. Circumstance, chance, imagined magical association and loyalty are all quite real and often get in the way. Any Old Iron is seriously funny.

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys

In his One Hundred Best Books, John Cowper Powys confidently selects a reading list for all humanity. Written in 1916 by a man already in his forties, it offers a selection that can be labelled as distinctly pre-war, pre-First World War, that is. Given that the author was the product of an English public school - that means private, by the way, if you are not English - and then Cambridge University, one would expect the list to be dominated by the classics, ancient and modern. And, indeed it is, but there are numerous surprises.

One Hundred Best Books is a short text and offers only a potted critique of the works chosen. More often than not, John Cowper Powys chooses an author rather than a work. So, for example, Sir Walter Scott manages to have three books listed, and Dostoyevsky four, while Chares Dickens manages just one. So, in fact this list is not one hundred best books, more like a hundred favourite authors. The critiques, therefore, more often than not relate to the author’s perception of the writer’s overall oeuvre, rather than to a specific work.

This list might be almost a hundred years old, but it remains an enlightening and enjoyable tour of the literary perception and, to a certain extent, the bigotries of the time. Selections are often more revealing in what they omit rather than what they include and One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is no exception. Indeed, towards the end, the text appears to descend into mere advertisement, but this part can be safely skimmed or ignored.

A statistic that reveals much of its time is the stark reality that only two of the hundred writers listed are women. A third woman, who chose to write under a male non de plume, George Eliot, is omitted altogether, which, given that she had died over thirty years before this list was published, is a surprise. Though the list covers ancient classics and includes works from Russia, France, Italy, Germany and the United States, there is no place for the naturalism of Emile Zola.

But neither is the list merely a safety first trip through big names. A number of the French and Italians listed would not be immediately recognised by a contemporary reader. And some names, such as Gilbert Cannan, Vincent O’Sullivan and Oliver Onions have apparently almost disappeared.

John Cowper Powys is not afraid, however, to describe those he has chosen in colourful terms, sometimes revealing much about prevalent ideas of the day. How many people, in the twenty-first century, would advise the following: “a few lines taken at random and learned by heart would act as a talisman in all hours to drive away the insolent pressure of the vulgar and common crowd,” especially when referring to The Odes of Horace? And today would the phrase “the greatest intellect in literature” be attached easily to Rabelais?

On Nietzsche, we are advised that “To appreciate his noble and tragic distinction with the due pinch of Attic salt it is necessary to be possessed of more imagination than most persons are able to summon up.” Theodore Dreiser is lavished with praise: “There is something epic—something enormous and amorphous—like the body of an elemental giant—about each of these books…  All is simple, direct, hard and healthy—a very epitome and incarnation of the life-force, as it manifests itself in America.” What literature of the Unites States in the early twenty-first century, I wonder, aspires to simplicity coupled with directness, hardness and health? If it exists, I bet it’s not fiction.

Thackeray has one work included. One wonders whether John Cowper Powys really wanted it. “Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy.”

Charles Dickens is nowadays credited with being a great social realist. Powys includes only Great Expectations and seems to regard Dickens as something less than real. “His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal and human voices of divine imagination.” And who, today, would say this about a writer? “Mr. Shaw has found his role and his occupation very happily cut out for him in the unfailing stupidity, not untouched by a sense of humor, of our Anglo-Saxon democracy in England and America.”

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is a quick and easy read. It is always useful to remind ourselves that perhaps the way we think about the world changes our psyche as much as changes in fashion alter our appearance.