I went to the public library a while back to pick up the audio-book of The Clock-Maker's Daughter I'd put on reserve after reading a review, and of course I cast an eye over the new-books shelf (as one does), and picked up Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce. The premise sounded fun -- an aspiring journalist in 1940 London get a job that she thinks will be her first step to becoming a Lady War Correspondent but turns out is mostly just typing up letters for the agony aunt of a second-rate women's magazine. From the beginning, the book feels like a screwball comedy, with Emmy's tendency to speak in capital letters, her light-hearted dialogue with her best friend and flatmate, her larger-than-life boss (who would doubtless Take Umbrage at the term "agony aunt"), and the increasingly-sticky situations she finds herself in when she begins to secretly reply to the desperate letters that Mrs. Bird refuses to even consider. But because Emmy's sympathy for the unfortunate letter-writers is genuine, the serious turns that the plot takes once she is deeply embroiled are wholly believable. Pearce's writing is deft and intelligent, and aside from a very few slips ("on Such-and-such Street" or "called me on the phone") has a real 1940s ring to it, which surely is much of the book's strength, that despite it tottering at times on the brink of farce, it feels, like Emmy, very genuine.
(I have bemoaned a number of times before about the inexplicable tendency of a number of historical novelists to set their books in a period about which they seem to have done little research, about which they seem not even to care very much. Why do they bother, if they don't know, or care, why people did the things they did, behaved the way they behaved, talked the way they talked in a given period of history? Pearce, though, clearly does care about this late 1930s/early 1940s period, and it shows in her novel and in its characters, who are both believably 1940s Britons and people that we understand ninety-some years later, because they too have to deal with love and loss and friendship and uncertainties. If there is a period about which a novelist feels compelled to write, then the story needs be thoroughly rooted in that period, however universal its themes, or it makes no sense to set it there and then. This can be done with manners and behavior, with clothing -- the much-vaunted attention to detail in "Downtown Abbey" comes to mind, even though it is film and not a book -- but language is also an important part of this. (It is also one of the things that "Downtown Abbey" fell strangely short on.) As I said above, Pearce's diction in Dear Mrs. Bird had a few anachronisms that leapt out at me,
but on the whole succeeded very well. I applaud, for example, Pearce's deliberate use of the word "gay," as in "the conversation became gay," which would doubtless cause many a snicker now among schoolchildren, but was an entirely appropriate, even ordinary, thing for someone to say in 1940, probably even the first word they would think of in that context.)
(Google n-grams -- how cool is that?)
I also picked up no less than three of Alexander McCall Smith's novels -- A Distant View of Everything, My Italian Bulldozer, and The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse, all of which I enjoyed. The composer Vivaldi has been accused of "writing the same concerto five hundred times," which could be said also of McCall Smith and his books, but it would be doing both an injustice. There is much about his books that is "predictable," for want of a better word -- in the the Isabel Dalhousie series, she meets someone, either again or for the first time, she thinks of something which reminds her of something else, she talks with Jamie, she thinks of something else that reminds her of something else, she has dinner, and this one was pretty much just that, but I found it all charming and endlessly absorbing. The second book is one of his "farcical" stand-alones, with an absurd situation -- here, while on holiday in Italy, a rental-car snafu lands the main character driving not a Fiat but a bulldozer to his Tuscan destination -- gradually turning almost surreal, yet in McCall Smith's gentle hands it is still somehow not quite unbelievable. And the third is one of his "serious" stand-alones, still with all of his hallmarks -- interesting characters, intelligent and thoughtful writing, some plot twists, and an ending that is if not entirely happy still utterly right.
And last but not least was The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton, in an audio version read by Joanne Froggatt, who I think was pretty much perfectly suited to this novel. The story uses multiple viewpoints and historical periods to tell the story of what happens after a small circle of artists centered around the young Edward Radcliffe (who is not unlike the Pre-Raphaelites in his passion to reinvent art and design) spend the summer of 1862 at Radcliffe's country house on the idyllic upper reaches of the Thames -- his fiancée is murdered, ostensibly during a break-in, and someone else is missing, and afterwards the broken-hearted Edward never paints again. Pieces of the story gradually emerge through the voice of Edward's younger sister, who grows up to inherit the house and turns it into a girls' school, through the voice of Edward's model and muse and lover, a girl from the London slums, and the voice of a young archivist in the present day who discovers an old leather satchel containing an artist's sketch-book with a drawing of a house by a river, and an old photograph of a strikingly beautiful young woman. There are other voices as well, other storylines, and I think the fact that I never lost hold of the different threads was in part due to Joanne Froggatt's excellent reading -- she used, even more literally, different voices for each, sometimes varying only the timbre of her voice, sometimes her accent as well -- from upper- and lower-class English to American to Australian, always beautifully judged.
During the listening of this, I finished up a miniature carpet that I had started some time ago, playing around with a skein of new-to-me DMC Coloris, the familiar six-stranded embroidery floss but in variegated colors. This one is 4515, also known for some reason as "Paris" -- some of the colorways are rather vivid, but this one is beautifully subtle. I decided to make a sort of "rag rug" just to see how the colors worked on a large field, so this is simply basketweave stitch, which is said to be good for covering large areas of canvas since it distorts less than continental or tent stitches. (Basketweave, and even more so basketweave-plus-Coloris, is also, not coincidentally, a great choice for listening to a suspenseful audio-book, as you don't need to pay much attention to the stitching! no changing colors or counting!) I'm not entirely sure about the "good coverage" part as there were frequently strange diagonal streaks of canvas visible across multiple rows, but in this case it worked out all right as the canvas (as many of the cotton ones do) shrank a bit in the blocking, thereby tightening the stitches. I used shade 931 to edge the carpet with long-legged cross-stitch -- according to the chart Mary Corbet gives at Needle 'n Thread, the component blues are 930 and 932, but 930 seemed a bit too dark to edge this, and 932 too light, so I used the one in between. You can see that it's ever-so-slightly darker than the light blue in the Coloris, but it's a good compromise between the darker and the lighter ones.
One of these days, I might try working the wrong side of the basketweave stitch on the right side -- it has a fascinating "woven" texture that I'd like to see without all of the worked-in thread ends!
And last but not least, though not actually from the library as it is on my Kindle, the D.E. Stevenson list is currently reading Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, the 1947 continuation of Hester Christie's diary. Here, with Tim off with the Army in Egypt and their children heading to boarding school, Hester finds herself unexpectedly accepting a job offer as the assistant to a woman who has turned her Scottish country home into a small hotel. Hester is a thoroughly engaging character, like many diary-keepers rather reserved in public but with so much to say in her diary that you quickly warm to her, even though if you thought about it, she would be one of those people in the corner of the train carriage of whom you are often vaguely aware but don't really notice. The diary format is unique among Stevenson's novels to Mrs. Tim, but like all of Stevenson's books, it is full of her quiet intelligence, humor, and philosophy that everything works out pretty much all right in the end.
I usually try to make at least some effort in choosing a pattern for my D.E. Stevenson virtual knitalong, not wanting to just take the first old thing that pops up, but this was the very first one and suited in at least three ways. It's charming, obviously, that is certainly a plus! But the story is set in Scotland in the very early spring, and while the weather is glorious, and gloriously described, often enough for us to feel Stevenson's love for her native land, it cannot be denied that Scotland in March and April, even southern Scotland, can be somewhat, well, let's say bracing -- according to a chart of average temperatures, perhaps only towards the end of the latter month does it get up to a high in the mid-50s F (10 C). One would be glad of a few jumpers, I expect! And this one is immensely practical in the post-war time of continuing clothing rations too -- the title is in fact "A Fair Isle to Use Up Your Small Scraps of Yarn". The list of recommended colors of wool brings up an uncomfortable reminder of the casual usage of certain words in the 1940s that today make us shudder -- curiously, but thank goodness, the abbreviation in the instructions is just B for brown. The first pattern of open and solid diamonds is brown on yellow; the second pattern of diamonds is saxe blue on white (I had to look it up); the third is red on turquoise (!); the fourth is green on white; then a bit more plain yellow ground, and the pattern repeats from there. (I very much hope that that diamond just under the opening-point of the collar is centered ....) Amusingly, Sirdar's "Super Shetland" is the same wool that the Victory Jumper uses, my choice for the previous Mrs. Tim book!
This pattern is available free courtesy The Sunny Stitcher at the Vintage Knitting Pattern Archive.
Talking of libraries, I very much enjoyed the short piece "From Bag End to Babel: Top 10 Libraries in Fiction" in "The Guardian" --
