Two books

Yesterday I finished Joy Cowley's book, Navigation: a memoir. Today it was Ruth Rendell's Kissing the Gunner's Daughter.  I'd been reading the Cowley on and off for a couple of weeks; the Rendell I started yesterday and finished this afternoon, amongst other things that I've been doing.   So just a few comments about that book first.

I haven't read a lot of Rendell's books, though I've listened to abridged versions of a couple of them on tape when we've been travelling.   I read one called Going Wrong in 2008 and seem to remember it was rather odd, and another, which she wrote under the pseudonym, Barbara Vine, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, which was absorbing but terribly gloomy (here are some comments I made about it at the time).

What struck me about Gunner's Daughter is the stylish writing, writing that expects the reader to keep up and to enjoy the prose; writing that's perceptive and occasionally witty, with characters who have plenty of life and variety.  These elements on their own made it an enjoyable read, quite apart from the intricate plot.  I kind of guessed what the trick was, but had to wait to the end to be sure and find out how it had been worked out.

It concerns a young girl who's the only survivor of a mass attack on a family in their own (somewhat palatial) home: three other members are shot and killed outright.  Wexford is the inspector in charge of the case, (along with his faithful ally, Mike Burdon), so there is an ongoing background story relating to Wexford's own daughter as well.   There is no immediate connection between the two parts of his life, but the two branches reflect each other considerably, it turns out.   There are some wonderful red herrings, and a gradual uncovering of all manner of intriguing elements.   I found it very readable.

Navigation isn't an autobiography, though there's plenty of autobiographical material in it.  It's subtitled a memoir, and I guess this is how it works.   It gives Cowley the chance to look at her life in a more topical way -  she discusses her three husbands within the same part of the book, her children in another, her faith right towards the end, her adult fiction in a different section to her children's writing.  

It begins a little too 'mystically' (for me) and occasionally wanders off into this vein at other points, but once I got past the first few pages I began to enjoy it thoroughly.   I've extracted three sections on another blog: one on her method of bringing up children (not at all formally, and not at all PC); one on the bleakness of New Zealand adult fiction; and the third on the surprising literacy of New Zealanders.  I could have easily quoted other sections as well.

Cowley appears to have packed an enormous amount into her life - innumerable trips abroad, vast numbers of books written, appearances at a host of conferences, ongoing engagement with the retreats she and her third husband hold, and of course, her family, with whom she's continually involved.   I guess when anyone sits down to write about their life it seems more action-packed to a reader than to the person themselves; we don't tend to note down all the breathing spaces that we've also experienced.

Listening to stories

We’ve been listening to cassette tapes in the car when we’ve been travelling. We usually tend to wait until we get to a stretch of road that several miles long because it isn’t easy to concentrate while we’re also trying to listen to instructions from our Sat Nav, or when we‘re looking for signposts and turn-offs and so on.
We’ve done this for years in New Zealand when we go on long trips. Because we know the roads there better, we don’t have to interrupt our listening pattern quite so much, and it certainly makes the trips go faster.
However, one of the disadvantages of listening to stories in the car is that you can miss vital bits, especially in mystery stories. We often have to ask: was that character the husband of some other character, or the father? When did that character come into it and why is he now being accused of murder? Is she married to him or the other bloke?
Overall, we manage to make sense of the stories - it can depend on the storyteller as to how clear things are. Most of them tell the stories at a listenable pace, but that’s fine when you’re not trying to drive at the same time. What’s listenable when you’re lying in bed trying to go to sleep is different altogether to what’s listenable in a car, especially when there’s a lot of other noise.
So far on this trip we’ve got through one of Dick Francis’ stories (To the Hilt) which neither of us remembered reading before, although we must have. And then it got to a point about three-quarters of the way through and it all came back to me. We listened to The Marketmaker by Michael Ridpath (not an author I was familiar with) and it turned out to be an exciting story, though complicated by the details of large scale wheeling and dealing. The latest story was Asta’s Book by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendall’s alter ego). This seemed a slow-paced mystery, told partly through diary entries, but as it went on the complications increased and it needed careful listening. We listened to one of Rendall’s Inspector Wexford’s stories, A New Lease of Death, which was written way back in 1967 (the last time I came to England, in fact). This was a rather odd story, in which a man who committed a murder and was hung for it turned out to be the murderer all along, rather than someone else. But the murder was being investigated again by an amateur detective and his son, rather than Wexford, for the most part. We listened to C S Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which had the most delightful and evocative harp music scattered throughout. Michael Hordern was the reader, and the harpist and composer was Marisa Robles.
Finally, we began to listen to Clive James’ autobiography. But by the time he’d begun to describe his fifth or sixth masturbation episode, and the length of other boys’ penises, and the sexual behaviour of other boys he knew, we gave up. There’s only so much of that sort of stuff you can take. And did we really need it at all?