My name is Judith McPherson. I am ten years old. On Monday a miracle happened. That is what I'm going to call it. And I did it all. It was because of what Neil Lewis said about putting my head down the toilet. It was because I was frightened. But it was also because I had faith.The book is narrated by ten year old Judith. She and her father are members of a Christian fundamentalist sect. Her mother is dead. Judith's not like the other children and she's being bullied at school.
Poor Margaret Steggles, 'unlovely and heavy in manner, and craving for beauty both earthly and divine that could never be hers', takes a job as a school teacher in London just after the Blitz. She finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath belonging to the daughter of famous playwright Gerard Challis.A few minutes later she stood breathing the faint breeze and gazing out across London, that beloved city, that wounded, unmartial group of villages, lying spread for mile upon mile, east and west and north and south, as far as the eye could reach, under the darkening summer sky. For the clouds had drifted away, and now every tower and dome and factory, every palace and church and stadium, stood out ghostly clear in the soft afterglow. Sometimes the myriad grey and cream tints were broken into by a dark-green mass of summer trees and occasionally, like bones, white or yellow ruins reared up.Gibbons is, of course, best known for Cold Comfort Farm, but she wrote more than thirty books, fourteen of which are being reprinted by Virago.
Due to end of term celebrations and summer school commitments, I couldn't join the Lancashire Ladies for their last book group meet. I was disappointed to miss the discussion not only on last month's choice, The Song of Achilles, but also on an unexpected third nomination for summer reading, E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey. I gather that this suggestion caused great debate, not least from J who refuses to read it on the grounds of not wanting to jump on the bandwagon. I can understand where she's coming from. I too am stubborn enough to refuse to watch, read or listen to something when it becomes too popular. Being at the cutting edge, when you can find it, is very good indeed, but come to something too late and you risk feeling like a sheep.'My name is Sister. This is the name that was given to me three years ago. It is what the others called me. It is what I call myself. Before that, my name was unimportant. I can't remember it being used. I will not answer to it now, or hear myself say it out loud. I will not sign to acknowledge it. It is gone. You will call me Sister. I was the last woman to go looking for Carhullan.'As a result of terrible floods and a desperate energy crisis, an authoritarian government known as the 'Authority' has taken over Britain. People have been herded into the towns and cities where life is grim. Living conditions are cramped, there's no fresh food and women have enforced contraception. The only hope of having a child is winning the 'baby lottery'.
Sister can bear the repression no longer and flees the town for Carhullan, deep in the Cumbrian hills. Carhullan is home to a community of women who live outside the law and survive by farming the land. The community is run by the charismatic, but fanatical Jackie Nixon:'The conditions were hard on all of us. Life changed in every way and it was difficult to adjust. There was despondency and resentment, food shortages, humiliations. Any small feeling of bliss, any cheap narcotic substance available to mask the difficulty, to make people forget what they once had, was easily sold. In the poorest quarters people took low-grade drugs, ketamine, and hits of silverflex, which rotted their jaws. They passed syphilis among themselves and the clinics cut out tumours from the genitals of those who abused the animal tranquillisers for too long. There was almost no money, and what little there was seemed meaningless. People traded with their bodies, their possessions, they signed up for futurised loans.'
'There was a fierceness about her, something amplified and internalised, an energy that my father would have described as Northern brio. Growing up in Rith, I had seen girls with this same quality. They had carried knives and had scrapped outside the school gates with little concern for their clothes and their looks, and there was an absence of teasing when they flirted with men. Jackie looked like a more mature and authentic version. Sitting beside me she seemed too inanimate for her voltage, too kinetic under her restfulness. It was as if her skin could barely contain the essence of her.'
The TBR pile is multiplying rapidly, but what to choose? Rummaging around on my Kindle I came across Westwood by Stella Gibbons, better known as author of Cold Comfort Farm. I'd downloaded it several months ago after reading The Guardian's review. Set in London after the blitz, it's the story of plain bookish Margaret Steggles who makes the acquaintance of the terribly pretentious playwright Gerard Challis.'This is a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue, with a pair of pleasingly intertwining plots, and great comic scenes. It is beautifully written by an author whose precision with idiom was unerring. It deals with heartbreak and hope, longing and disappointment; and is underlined by a genuine love for natural beauty.'
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' we forget sometimes that a vital part of loving literature is hating certain books and certain writers, just as hating Spurs is an important part of supporting Arsenal; and the embarrassing truth is that I have probably got far more satisfaction out of trying to persuade friends that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a tawdry piece of misogynistic torture porn than I have out of discussing the reasons why Wolf Hall is a masterpiece.'This comment in Mark Haddon's wonderful essay 'The Right Words in the Right Order', really made me smile. I'm with him all the way with the Dragon Tattoo. Am I the only one to think so? It seems churlish to blog about books I hate, best not mention them at all. It's true though that our most entertaining book group debates have been between book haters and book lovers. It's great fun to heap scorn and vitriol on a book and equally to defend a book against its detractors.
Imagine waking up every morning with your memory wiped clean. You wonder who you are, where you are and who is the man lying in bed next to you. This amnesia is the problem faced by Chrissie, a middle aged married woman. Every day she must learn afresh, only to lose it all again once she goes to sleep. Then a doctor persuades her to keep a journal and slowly she begins to rebuild her life. But is everything really as it seems? Why does her husband keep so much from her?
