The new routine

So it seems that once a month-ish will be all I can manage for the time being, brain space being occupied with other stuff. 

'Come to the Edge' by Joanna Kavenna, was excellent fun, it had something of 'Spoiled Creatures' about it, rural idyll that is not so idyllic and populated by crazy people. An unnamed narrator leaves her husband and heads off into the wild north in search of maybe the meaning of life. Instead she finds Cassandra and mud. I found it depressing in the end because the woman does not change; she is bland and biddable at the beginning, and bland and biddable at the end. There is no epiphany where she finds true inner strength, she survives the events and returns to what she left behind. 

Here just an amusing description. I liked that the story plainly did not take itself too seriously and the writer did not hold back from the chaos that ensues from Cassandra's plans:

"Mandy has long straight hair and the atmosphere of the village fete hanging off her, and she would be outraged if she knew what was really happening. She's something of a hippy but not one who wants to get slammed in prison. A peaceable, authority-respecting organic-food-buying type of hippy, not a man-the-barricades and smash-the-pigs type." (p.184)

'The Last Sane Woman' by Hannah Regel (who has no website) was also excellent. It charts the lives of two young women artists. I was endeared to it immediately because Donna has recently graduated from North Staffordshire Polytechnic in the same era that I did. She is a ceramicist with a bright future but of course the world is a tough place for struggling artists. In the 2020s is Nicola, also a struggling ceramicist, who finds a feminist arts archive that contain a collection of letters that Donna wrote to her childhood friend Susan. So we just follow the lives of them both as they try to make their way in the world.

Here Susan reflecting on their friendship:

"If she's interrogated the matter further, she might have said that this dislike came from how her friend now appeared: as letters, addressed to her, and therefore secret. Donna was not the kind of friend they had over for dinner on a regular basis. Even when she was with Dev and they could have done the whole couples thing, the idea had never occurred to her. It was not that she didn't want to share her friend, but that she didn't know how. Not without losing the sense of herself she had build without her; without tripping that self over and falling back into being sixteen, eleven, four." (p.89)

Lovely metaphors:
"As instructed, Donna dries her face and the three of them step out into the blizzard. The snow lands on her head like a cat's paw, padding her hair into a wet white ball and squeaking underfoot." (p.114)

"She pulled a fitted sheet over her own stupidity and smoothed it out, waiting patiently for her accident to dry and for Marcella to finish." (p.159)

And, just how you imagine an artist would exist:
"Nicola surveyed the worktops surrounding her. Every inch was crammed with stuff: anagram fired bowls stacked with ripening plums, their sangria skin waxy with storm clouds, dusty kilner jars full of muesli and dried flageolet beans, piles and piles of rhubarb, freshly pulled with the dirt at the tip, scrunching bags of dried figs." (p.171)

The whole book was a delight of such descriptions. But Donna remains something of an enigma, and when Nicola steals the letters I hoped for a dramatic denouement but was left hanging ...

'The Beautiful Atlantic Waltz' by Malachy Tallack was the book club book for February, about three generations of a crofting family on Shetland. It focusses on Jack, who in the present has withdrawn more into his own quiet existence, keeping to himself, until new neighbours and a cat upset his carefully organised routine and give him a reason to care about others. It was not my sort of thing, a little predictable, but I enjoyed the story and the characters and sense of community. 

The world is going to hell in a handcart but we will soldier on. Green Party win in the by-election was so encouraging; I even participated and so felt permitted to share the glory. 

Stay safe. Be kind.