Frank’s story about the two Mongolian brothers who arrive in Bootle and enlist a local schoolgirl as their ‘good guide’ to the area has been warmly reviewed by Betsy Bird of the Fuse #8 blog, who suggests that it might be his best novel and describes the book as:

the kind of book you get when an author gets an original idea and works it into something memorable. This is one story kids will read and then find difficult to forget.

Bird also praises the distinctive layout of the book, with its notebook-style page design and inventive use of Polaroid photographs, combined with Frank’s deft storytelling abilities:

Few authors have a way of turning you over on your head in the course of reading a children’s title. Boyce can. Can and does. This is, without a doubt, one of the best little books I’ve ever read. A brilliant melding of text and image, it’s a wonderful example of what can happen when an author goes for something entirely new.

The story has also caught the eye of Meghan Cox Gurdon in the Wall Street Journal, who praised the book’s positive approach to foreign cultures and described it as:

a funny and affecting book for children ages 10 to 14

So if you haven’t read The Unforgotten Coat yet then we can only encourage you to do so, whatever age you are!

The Reader, reaching 42, has had a bit of a makeover. You’ll be seeing a rainbow of colours coming your way as each issue arrives through your letterbox – making your collection of readers even more stimulating.

Inside this issue, we promised you that a couple of things would be available online, so here they are:

The full interview with A B Yehoshua.

A third poem, ‘Lemons’,  from John Levett.

The remarkable transformation of Croxteth Fire Station into ‘fair Verona’ – market stalls littered with fairy lights and scary costumes (I won’t spoil the surprise for those yet to see it and say why!) - greeted the audience on arrival. After a very slight delay (what opening night goes without its minor technical hitches?) everyone found their seats and the show began in a flurry of activity which introduced them to Romeo (Danyel Roberts), Juliet (Helen Webster), and all of the other characters who were to entertain them for the next two hours.

The market stalls

It's showtime

Romeo and Juliet at the Fire Station is a promenade performance, so as well as being outdoors the audience were asked to follow the action as it moved around the set: from the market scene, to ‘Capulet’s Cappucinos’ coffee shop, Juliet’s bedroom and Friar Lawrence’s cell. Each (OK, well, most) of the movements were smooth and efficient, and with characters running through the audience at points it certainly felt like everyone watching was part of the action.

Though the entire cast put on a great show the highlights have got to be Mico Simonde and Philip McGuiness, who stole the show with their portrayal of Benvolio and Mercutio – although the decision to involve a couple of Fire Engines (again, no clues as to why!) in the action was another show-stopper, adding to the  fantastic atmosphere that came from watching a production take place on a working Fire Station.

All in all it was a funny, moving, and generally outstanding performance, of which all involved should be justifiably proud.

Romeo and Juliet at the Fire Station will be performed tonight at 7.30pm, and tomorrow (Saturday 28th) at 2.30pm and 7.30pm.

www.merseysidecommunitytheatre.co.uk

So – to the point. There is a famous section of the Abbey called Poets’ Corner, which began as the resting place of Geoffrey Chaucer (not then best known for his literary achievements, Jeremy informed me, but for being Clerk of Works for the Palace of Westminster) and has since become the traditional place for great authors, poets and playwrights to be buried or commemorated. It is crowded with stone floor-slabs, carved monuments, busts, and now, given the overcrowding, a memorial stained-glass window too. And what a party of ghosts! What a crowd! Shakespeare, Hardy, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Tennyson, Auden, Austen, Lewis Carroll, the Brontes, Wordsworth, Ben Jonson… I could go on and on and on and on. Had I expected to feel moved, excited? I don’t know. I had expected to feel something. After all, for several years now, especially since joining The Reader Organisation, these people have been powerful influences in my life.  They have, despite being dead, changed the way I live. And here they all were. And yes, it was touching to stand above the gold letters ‘CHARLES DICKENS’ and to think that his bones – his actual bones from his actual body! – were just metres away from me. This wasn’t his wish apparently: he had wanted to be buried “in an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner”.

But on the whole I wasn’t moved. On the whole I felt very little. And as I sat down, looked around and ticked off more and more great names, I realised the cause of my dissatisfaction. Above and on either side of a statue of William Shakespeare, spaced symmetrically high up on the wall, were two stone tablets bearing the names “Keats” and “Shelley”. The meaninglessness of this suddenly became clear to me. Those stone tablets – somehow implying that Keats and Shelley were two of a kind, or basically the same – were nothing but names. Now this is not a complaint about Poets’ Corner specifically – or about memorials generally. I am just as much of a blue-plaque hunter as the next boring person. But sitting in Westminster Abbey I was reminded of a question asked at our New Beginnings Readers’ Day earlier this year: about whether we should do more to mark writers’ anniversaries. Well, it’s a perfectly reasonable question, but to me the fact that it is “200 years since the birth of Anthony Trollope” is just as meaningless as his stone floor-slab in Poets’ Corner. Neither tells you anything about why his name is worth remembering in the first place: what he wrote. Anniversary celebrations can be a very good way to promote the work, of course they can, but they can also be a very poor substitute for actual reading. Those few metres between Dickens and me were light-years compared with how near he is – and how alive he is – when I read him.

These lines occurred to me as well:

But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
     The worth of that is that which it contains,
     And that is this, and this with thee remains.

Shakespeare says that when death, “that fell arrest”, takes away his body, his lover should be contented because his spirit lives on in the writing, “in this line”. There is something wonderful in thinking that a part of Shakespeare’s mind – the best part? – is preserved in his words and can be brought back to life through the simple act of reading. When we read “my body being dead” he is literally speaking to us from beyond the grave! This is an “interest” above and beyond the fixed terms of life. His description of the body as mere ”dregs” is not a dismissal of bodily life - think how emphatically his plays are embodied, how grounded they are in the physicality of their characters – but rather an acknowledgement that, once dead, the body has nothing more to offer: the worth within him, his individual spirit, has gone into his words. “The better part of me” is very like this from John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies: a book, Ruskin says,

is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may; clearly at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him; – this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down forever; engrave it on rock if he could; saying, ‘This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.’ This is his ‘writing’: it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a ‘Book’.

But if books aren’t read, they’re dead. And no number of anniversary celebrations and commemorative monuments to the writer are going to resuscitate “the worth”: that which it contains. It is not the body we are reverencing in Poets’ Corner – many of the authors and poets aren’t buried there, only commemorated – but it is the name, the reputation, rather than what they wrote. And, given that the name and reputation were based on what they wrote, we are in danger of forgetting why we are reverencing certain names at all.

In his workshop at that New Beginnings Readers’ Day, the poet and translator David Constantine presented several poems without revealing, at least till we had thoroughly discussed them, whose they were. Too often, what we think we know about a writer, and the time in which they wrote, gets in the way of our reading. This has been a guiding principle in Get Into Reading too: we don’t let context get in the way of the text. Because, in a very important way, it doesn’t matter who wrote ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, or Bleak House, or Silas Marner, or ‘Tears, Idle Tears’. If you read the words Shakespeare wrote, if you feel them, discuss them, argue them, tweet or Facebook them, whisper them softly to yourself when you’re having a crap day – if you live them, basically – you are doing more justice to Shakespeare than a thousand memorials in Westminster Abbey.

Literature, Iris Murdoch said, as opposed to philosophy, her other concern, is ‘very natural to us, close to ordinary life and to the way we live as reflective beings’. Why then, you might ask, are her stories so rich in extraordinary and eccentric characters, why do they culminate in some explosive event or catastrophe and why do her people behave in extreme ways, incest, attempted murder, suicide? She was writing in rebellion against the reduced scale, as she saw it, of other twentieth century fiction which seemed to assume that every individual was free to make his or her own way in the world with other people as objects of choice or mere background to their lives. She wrote instead about disturbing figures of power, both what it was like to exercise such influence and about those subject to its authority and in doubt or open reaction or delighted acquiescence. She saw very clearly all the non-rational obsessive and desiring elements of a self which was often far from free. ‘Reality is not a given whole,’ she wrote. ‘An understanding of this, a respect for the contingent is essential to imagination as opposed to fantasy.’ Her characters are always articulate middle-class not out of snobbery but because they constantly try to understand their competing and conflicting inner pressures. There’s always an intense excitement in her books as they move, especially in the earlier works, between something close to myth or fairy tale, say The Bell or The Italian Girl and a more recognisable sense of the everyday, say The Sandcastle or, my own favourite, An Unofficial Rose. But the greatest achievement is really the long later novels where the power of the almost magically endowed prophetic figures casts a spell over an immensely varied cast of characters, as in The Message to the Planet or The Book and the Brotherhood. Each novel is a world in itself, compulsively readable, constantly surprising, stimulating of thought but above all, to use her own word, ‘fun’ to be with. If you haven’t read any before, what pleasure is in store for you, and if you have they will seem even more rewarding when you return.

Brian Nellist

Vintage Classics have recently republished most of Iris Murdoch’s novels together with her essays on Sartre and the challenging and brilliant Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

Beautiful, aren’t they?
 
Remember: you can purchase the above books through The Reader Organisation’s Online Bookshop.

Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty
A Memoir by Robin Daniels
(Palatine Books)

We have been sent a review copy of an absolutely beautifully produced new book. Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty by Robin Daniels is a book of charm and insight, combining personal memories, biography, a fine selection of Cardus maxims and extracts, and an appraisal of Cardus the man, the friend and the writer.

Nevil Cardus was born in Manchester in 1888. He was the first music critic to be knighted, the most evocative and most often quoted writer on cricket of all time, (Wisden dubbed him ‘the patron saint of the craft of cricket writing’) and one of the great English essayists of the 20th century.

For more than half a century he wrote about music and cricket for The Manchester Guardian, changing the course of writing on cricket. He developed a style of writing that was intuitive, richly felt, evocative of colour and atmosphere and insightful about player or musician.

In a long and remarkable life, Cardus was a friend of famous writers such as JM Barrie and JB Priestley, cricketers CB Fry, Don Bradman; singers Kathleen Ferrier and Lotte Lehmann; conductors Beecham and Barbirolli and musicians Menuhin and Barenboim. The book is filled with a sense of Cardus’s large and warm personality.

Robin Daniels’ loving reflection on the life and work of his friend is testament to his own lifetime’s love of reading:

Unlike the internet, books offer a place to feel, respond and ponder – safely, slowly and inwardly. Reading is not meant to be an end in itself: it need not be just for escape and entertainment, or the passive gathering of information. Reading invites interpretation and close dialogue (with the text and with oneself); it offers a site for thinking about self and others and the world around us. Reading gives us space to alter rigid pathways of habitual thought. It can touch our own emotions, yielding new links or associations and insights.

In his introduction to the book Andrew Flintoff writes: ‘I am glad to recommend this book, especially because Robin Daniels is honouring the memory of his friend by donating some of the royalties to the Lancashire Academy, for the finding and coaching of Lancashire stars of the future … For specialist and non specialist alike, this is a first-class book about a first class writer. Neville Cardus has many imitators but no equal.’

(You can buy Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty A Memoir by Robin Daniels here at our online bookshop.)

by Angela Macmillan

Perhaps it is Davis’s role as editor of the non-academic literary magazine The Reader that gives him licence to argue vehemently for the role of the reader in Victorian novels and poems… It is readers, he contends, who ‘go to the book to internalize it, personally, emotionally, as if they might just find revealed there a version of the secrets of their lives’… Essentially, Davis’s book is about a philosophy of literature; in it he expands the possibilities of what studying literature can mean, how we can expand our minds in order to reach new and exciting conclusions about things we often take for granted, about ourselves, about the past, about life… Readers – all readers – cannot ignore that they are emotionally moved by literature, and why should they?

So why does Victorian literature still matter? If we are to take part in attempting to respond to the title of Davis’s stimulating study, perhaps it is that Victorian literature is fundamental to understanding ourselves and our past. Like the Victorians, with their fascination with origins (culminating in Darwin’s Origin of Species), perhaps we too feel the need to trace who we are and where we come from. The Victorians left their legacy in our architecture and designs, music and art, politics and science, and even (or especially) our theories of life and death. Yet, most of all, perhaps we find ourselves in their literature.

You can read the review in full here. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters by Phil Davis is available to buy (along with all the Victorian literature you could ever want) from our online bookshop.

CHAPTER 5 Getting Into Reading, Jane Davis.

“Davis writes a stand-out piece on her creation of a project called ‘Get Into Reading’. Get into Reading (GIR) started on a £500 grant, targeted people from the deprived areas of the Wirral and it gave them a venue in which to read for pleasure. It is Davis’ frank retelling of her mother’s fascination with books and her own chaotic young life that suggests the only route for her was to create such a project. Groups have different target members-one group called ‘Feel Better with a Book’ is for mental health service users, another called ‘Book Break’ is for carers. The chapter concludes with several interviews with GIR participants and staff. I would imagine that the resultant glowing evaluation is priceless when it comes to the continuation of funding. In her closing remarks, Davis emphasizes the need for a social space to talk and share enjoyment in books:

Few people are conscious of a need to share conversations about the stuff contained in great books…As one of our first beneficiaries said to me, ‘You need it, but you don’t know you need it.’ We are more aware of our need as a series of negatives: people feel depressed, feel disconnected, see ‘nothing out there’ and feel a library is ‘not for me’…” (p. 93)

I hope those in public libraries will take up Davis’ challenge and start a weekly book group.

Development is well worth reading. However, Francis Bacon’s advice applies here. Many chapters are only to be “tasted”, while a few should be “chewed and digested” (quoted from his essay Of Studies) – my selections are Davis’s chapter and another by Sambell, a fascinating look at futuristic fiction for youth and its increasing complexity since the 1980s.

___

From Worster Danielle , Information Officer, British Heart Foundation. Book review. P.16. Health Libraries’ Group Newsletter, Vol 26, Number 1, March 2009, ISSN 02666-853X

A sobering if not worrying read. Gripping in the usual le Carré manner with believable ‘nasties’ doing their establishment jobs, in-fighting for personal prestige, group prestige and with nowhere an ethic to be seen. Ethics are for outsiders and underdogs of course. Set this time in Hamburg, port of illegal immigration, it focuses on intrigue involving manipulation of the Islamic ‘terror’ scene to cover up the entirely up-to-date huge business of carpet-bagging, East-West (Europe of course), and contents laundering; never mind ‘class’ upper or lower, money glue sticks anywhere, nor the suffering of the little people. Without the little people there would no scabrous political causes and no-one to get in the way. Le Carré is cross and doesn’t mind showing it. Bravo to an octogenarian writer with his finger truly on the pulse, racing with a fast-moving passionate script curbed only by the background beat of bitter realism. After watching Channel 4’s “Oligarts” nothing surprises.

Posted by Maggie Goren

Wizard’s First Rule (1995)

by Terry Goodkind

The book opens with a young man called Richard Cypher, a woods guide living in the forests of Westland. One day he is walking by a ravine when he encounters a young woman under attack by four large armed men. He does the chivalrous thing and helps her fend off three of the men; the fourth is mysteriously despatched by the young woman. She reveals that her name is Kahlan Ahmnell; she crossed the boundary to find the great wizard who created the magical boundary to stop the evil Darken Rahl.

From the outset, this book looks like one of those ‘nice’ books that occasionally comes along where nobody swears and people faint rather than get killed, but you could not be more wrong. There is blood and guts aplenty and torture scenes that made even me wince in sympathy.

This is an explosive series and the first book sets the pace for the entire series. The level of detail is awesome and the locations are inspired. The author jampacks detail into just shy of eight hundred pages, not too much but enough to keep you wanting more. The crowning feature is the characters, from the stout-hearted Richard to the fierce and passionate Kahlan; from the wonderfully eccentric Zedd to the devilishly handsome and utterly despicable Darken Rahl, who is possibly the most evil character I have ever read. I wonder what is lurking in the author’s mind when he creates such characters.

Wizard’s First Rule is a benchmark in the Fantasy genre. It had me hooked from beginning to end. If there is one book you should read if you are a Fantasy fan, it should be this – Tolkien be damned, long live Goodkind!

Posted by Martin