Angela Carter : Wise Children

Angela Carter pulled the stops out with this, her last book. As if she wanted to show her humour, her erudition, and her dazzling writing skills all in one book. Written in the voice of Dora Chance we have a history of England, a history of music hall, theatre, and film and an account of the life of people in the same family born on either side of the class divide. And don’t forget the Shakespeare, for the whole book in each of its five section has riffs on many Shakespeare plays; Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Othello, A Midsummer’ Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice and at least twelve more. The title of course comes from The Merchant of Venice where Launcelot says, ‘It’s a wise father that knows his own child’, which is Shakespeare’s twist on Homer’s line in the Odyssey where Telemachus says, ‘My Mother tells me I am son to Ulysses, but it is a wise child that knows his own father.’

Mary Karr: The Liars’ Club

COLM TÓIBÍN -THE MAGICIAN

Having written a novel, The Master, based on several years in the life of Henry James, Colm Tóibín has now written a book based on the life of Thomas Mann, the German writer. The Magician takes its title from the name Mann’s children gave him, for his love of doing magic tricks to amuse small children.  Being the Mann family, though, it wasn’t an altogether affectionate term; there was some element of denigration about it. Never was there a family with so much rivalry. Brother against brother, sister against brother, child against father. So the name The Magician, has elements of ‘You think you are a magician, above all the rest of us, but we know what you really are.’

Rebecca Stott – In the Days of Rain, Kim Barnes – Hungry for the World:A Memoir

The Gert’s father was a very quiet man. He was either absent for months on expeditions or else sat reading books in foreign languages, occasionally growling in his throat if any of the subject matter went against his beliefs. Sometimes our mother said to us accusingly, ‘You know, your father’s a genius.’ Meaning what? ‘You don’t appreciate him?’ ‘You’ll never be as clever as he is, especially if you don’t do your homework?’ We would have loved his approval, but as we were all hopeless at Maths, there was no hope of that.

Basil – Wilkie Collins

Here in my rural fastness the weather is uncertain; one minute the storm lashes the eucalypts, the next the magpies are chortling and the sun sparkles on the leaves. Inside the fire is blazing and we are churning through the wood. Perfect weather to read a good meaty Victorian novel.

Buddha Da – Anne Donovan

 

This is the story of Anne Marie’s Da, the painter Jimmy, and his involvement with Buddhism. The story is told in the voices of Anne Marie, almost twelve years old, Liz her mother and Jimmy’s wife, and Jimmy, the Glaswegian painter, ‘ma Da,’ who becomes more and more drawn to the practice of meditation. This obviously throws up conflicts within the family and among Jimmy’s friends and colleagues. A good idea to examine the practice of Buddhism through the eyes of a fairly uneducated working class man? Well, yes, but there is just one snag.

The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre

Roger Ackerley died in 1929. At his funeral, the obituary in The Times states, ‘Nearly a thousand business men from all over the British Isles as well as from the Continent attended the funeral at Richmond Cemetery yesterday, and the wreaths were so numerous that four men were especially engaged to load and unload them.’