A series of essays inspired by books that I own, talking about their history, some reviews and also how they came to be on my shelves. With over 6,500 books here and several more arriving each week I doubt I'll ever be short of a topic.
Oscar Wilde’s only novel can famously be summarised as the story of a man who doesn’t appear to grow older, but rather the portrait of him ages on his behalf. But the copy I have is 256 pages long so it must be much more than the twenty word precis just given and indeed it is. I didn’t know what to expect when I pulled this book off the shelf as for some reason I have never read it before despite it being a famous work of literature and my owning this copy for at least fifteen years, but I definitely enjoyed it for it is beautifully written.
Yes the story of the painting ‘ageing’ rather than Dorian is there but that just scratches the surface, the picture shows all the corruption, not only of his increasing age, but also the collapse of his morality and does so in real time. So when he views the portrait, which he does regularly as time goes on even though he has it locked away in an attic so nobody else can see it, he can see the effects of his lifestyle boldly depicted on the canvas. Indeed when he kills a man blood starts to show on his hand in the portrait and appears to be dripping onto the floor within the painting from his fingers.
Dorian Gray is the only child from a very wealthy family so has no need to work instead he can just idle his way through life doing whatever he wants and because he can do this he does, dragging other people along with him. We see evidence of his moral dereliction many times through the book and his effect on his friends and lovers, one of his friends is depicted late in the book in an opium den hopelessly addicted and others commit suicide after being abandoned or blackmailed by him. Dorian however does not care about any of them even the social approbation that comes his way with people leaving rooms if he comes in or otherwise shunning his company means nothing to him for he has retained his youthful looks and that is all that he apparently needs. In his rejection of societal norms he is guided by the hedonistic dandy Lord Henry Wotton, whom he meets right at the beginning of the book at the studio of artist Basil Hallward whilst he is painting the titular full length picture. Henry becomes probably his only life long friend, apparently unconcerned about the depravity of Dorian’s life and loves and equally unfazed by Dorian’s never ending youthful looks or his occasional collecting manias. Due to his vast wealth Dorian can pursue any interest he wishes, collecting rare tapestries, perfumes, musical instruments or even jewels amongst other things, becoming an expert in this or that field before moving on and it is this money and knowledge that enabled him to stay accepted by at least part of London society.
Yes Dorian Gray is a repellent character, one that if he had really existed anyone would do well to avoid the company of, but Oscar Wilde’s writing is in contrast truly lovely. The pages just flew past whilst I was reading the book and as the story developed of Dorian’s spiral into vice the writing seemed to get better. It is. I suppose, part gothic horror and part social commentary upon the idle rich that Wilde spent so much time in the company of both in the city of his birth, Dublin, and London but I loved the book and can’t believe I have managed to not read it before. The final denouement, whilst the reader is expecting something of the sort, still had surprising details so Wilde kept me engrossed to the very last word and there are few books where that could be said.
After the awful MC Beaton of a couple of weeks ago I felt that a decent murder mystery was called for. I normally only read a mystery and crime story about once every three months or so but Something Borrowed, Someone Dead was so dreadful I don’t think it counts so back to the heyday of crime novels, the 1930’s. I have several books by Anthony Berkeley Cox who wrote not only as Anthony Berkeley but as Francis Iles, A Monmouth Platts and A B Cox, but it is as Anthony Berkeley that he is, if at all nowadays, best known, especially for the ten amateur detective Roger Sheringham novels of which this is the eighth, first published in 1932. I chose it as it was the only Berkeley novel on my shelves I had not already read, although this is the first of his I have blogged about. He was one of the founders of The Detection Club, a group of then famous mystery writers including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers amongst others who use the meet for regular dinners, sadly several of the early members are largely forgotten including Berkeley whose books nowadays seem to be only reprinted by the British Library Crime Classics series which exists to spread the word regarding such authors.
Murder in the Basement is a classic of the genre in that the discovery of a body in the cellar of a newly occupied house in south London reveals that it was a woman, probably between twenty and thirty years old, five months pregnant but otherwise no distinguishing features as she had been buried for several months and decomposition had set in. The police then spend several chapters not really achieving very much until the chance discovery that a metal plate used to repair her femur after a break some years back was of an experimental type of which only a hundred or so were used before the material it was made from was abandoned as not really suitable for the job. This eventually leads to an identification of the body, as the only person to have that plate fitted that the police couldn’t locate but even then more work was needed to find more about her as she had changed her name to conceal her time in prison for theft. It is at this point that Roger Sheringham appears in the story, but not as the amateur detective but rather as somebody who had for a short while worked with the victim whilst doing a supply teacher role at a boys preparatory school just outside London where she had been the school secretary. The police want him to go back to the school and try to work out what had happened but Sheringham refuses to have anything to do with the case as he had made friends there and didn’t want to be working against his then colleagues.
The police soon decide on their suspect, one of the masters at the school, but cannot prove a case against him no matter how hard they try and they do trawl up some potentially damning but insufficient evidence for court. Sheringham stays out of the case but is kept up to date by the police in case he can be useful and ultimately solves the crime, but again without positive evidence that could be used in court. The lack of a suspect that can be prosecuted is unusual in a mystery novel but because of the way Berkeley concludes the book it is oddly a satisfying ending despite this.
I really enjoyed the book, as I have with the other Berkeley novels I’ve read and it’s a pity that he is so neglected nowadays. My copy is the 1947 Penguin Books first edition, I think Penguin published all of the Sheringham novels between 1936 and 1947 with several of them being extremely rare.
Mensun Bound was the Director of Exploration for the two trips to the Weddell Sea where they ultimately found Endurance so he is ideally placed to tell the story of finding the wreck. In a decades long career as a marine archaeologist (he is now seventy years old) he has been involved in the discovery of many famous shipwrecks and he tells the story in the beginning of this book of being in a coffee shop with a friend ten years ago and how he came to be looking for Endurance.
The book is actually two books, the first is about the unsuccessful 2019 expedition and was written by the author during the 2021 Covid lock down in Port Stanley, capital of The Falkland Islands which is where he was born. At the time he wrote it he never expected to get a chance to go back and try again so after 204 pages it ends with him and his team defeated. The second half of this volume recounts the unexpected return and the elation of success in 2022 and was written partly on his way back from Antarctica and completed at his home in Oxford. I’ll deal with the two parts separately. The combined book, the first section wasn’t printed independently, was first published by Macmillan in 2022 and my copy is the sixth impression which shows that this was a story a lot of people were interested in. The front cover features a famous floodlit night-time photograph taken by Frank Hurley of Endurance stuck in the ice shortly before she was finally sunk by the enormous pressure on the hull.
The Weddell Sea Expedition 2019
This trip was run under the auspices of Netherlands based The Flotilla Foundation and was mainly a scientific expedition with the search for Endurance added on the end once the data on climate change, species proliferation and ice core sampling in The Weddell Sea had been accumulated by the scientific team. Starting on the 1st January 2019 and in a day by day diary format Bound describes the work of the crew, discoveries made and provides comments as to Shackleton and his crew’s movements over a hundred years earlier. Like Bound I’ve been fascinated by Shackleton and his expeditions since an early age and have numerous books on Antarctic exploration a couple of which I have previously reviewed, see a list at the end of this blog. Most of January is dedicated to getting to Antarctica from South Africa and the scientific research which Bound wasn’t involved in so it is referred to but not in much depth. Where he does get involved is the use of the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) and the two Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). ROV’s are controlled via a long cable back to the ship, AUV’s are robots which operate on their own for hours on end before returning to the ship for downloading of the data they have gained, both have advantages. ROV’s provide a continuous stream of data back to the ship but are restricted by where the cable lets them go, AUV’s can go anywhere and as the search area in the Weddell Sea for Endurance was under the pack ice this was vital however they aren’t in communication with the ship so you don’t know what they found until they get back. The expedition was to have serious problems with both sorts.
It was the 25th January before the scientific work completed and the ship set out for the last ‘known’ position of Endurance, it’s latitude and longitude had been taken by its captain, Frank Worsley, just before it sank and he was one of the finest navigators at the time but working in very difficult conditions with no readily available flat horizon and very little sight of the sun due to poor weather, how accurate had he been? One of the AUV’s was no longer available after failing during the scientific surveys and on the way to Worsley’s position it was decided to do a test dive with the ROV to the depth of Endurance (approximately 3000 metres), just before it got there the ROV catastrophically failed, this was now the 30th January, time was running out and so was the equipment. It was decided to try to repair the ROV but this meant abandoning the voyage to the search area and heading off to the nearest ice airstrip to get parts which were going to be flown to them. This used up days of possible search time and ultimately failed as the plane couldn’t reach them due to bad weather. Finally deciding to just use the remaining AUV they went back to the search site with just fifty hours of possible dive time available before they had to leave or be locked in the ice just as Endurance had been. We will never know if the AUV found Endurance as it never returned from it’s dive, it also failed. This part of the book ends in dejection all round, but it’s still a fascinating story and if it had been published with no follow up I would still have really enjoyed the book, however better news is to follow.
The Endurance22 Expedition 2022
As can be told by the expedition title this was an all out attempt to find Endurance and was funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. It is hardly giving anything away to say that they succeeded, news reports early last year went round the world that the ship was discovered and it’s plastered all over the front cover of the book. But that’s not to say there were no doubts as the days went on and very little was found. This time the brand new SAAB built autonomous vehicles were on armoured fibre optic cables so real time images were retrieved and if necessary the cables could be hauled back to retrieve the submarine. The ice conditions were a lot better for exploration as well with significant breaks so they were on station a couple of days earlier than planned and moving around was much less fraught but even so it looked like time was going to run out before the ship was discovered as the Antarctic winter was setting in and they were in to the last few days that they could remain on station before they found her. Again it is diary entry format so you can follow along with the highs and lows.
The ship was just three miles south from where Worsley had said she was and within the search box defined for the 2019 expedition by Mensun Bound which shows what a superb set of calculations both men had made but there was one very odd coincidence that was only spotted the day after the discovery and that was the date. Shackleton was buried on South Georgia on the 5th March 1922 after dying of a heart attack on his rather nebulous Quest expedition. Endurance was found on the 5th March 2022 exactly one hundred years later. It gets stranger, according to contemporary news reports his funeral service was at 3pm and allowing for a half hour service, regrouping of attendees and the twenty plus minutes to get the coffin from the chapel up to the graveyard they probably got there around 4pm, a few last words at the graveside and Shackleton was probably buried a few minutes after 4pm, Endurance was found at 4:04pm.
It’s a brilliant book, I was hooked all the way through and thoroughly recommend it as a read.
Other Antarctic blog entries
Biography of Tom Crean – who sailed with Scott and Shackleton and was one of the crew members of the James Caird, the lifeboat sailed from Elephant Isle to South Georgia to get help for the rest of the crew of Endurance.
Marion Chesney wrote 157 books between 1979 and her death in 2019, 72 of which were as M C Beaton which was the name she used mainly for her mystery romances featuring Hamish Macbeth (35 titles) and Agatha Raisin (33 titles plus a companion volume). She also wrote under the names of Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward, Sarah Chester and even 64 books (mainly historical romances) under her real name. Something Borrowed, Someone Dead was first published in 2013 as the 24th Agatha Raisin story. As can be seen from the sheer number of books published she is extremely popular but this is the first one of her books, and certainly the last, I have read, and I wouldn’t have picked up this one except that I spotted it in a charity shop for £2 and having heard the name decided to find out if she was any good. I knew the local secondhand bookshop sells out of her works almost as fast as they come in, so I thought they must have something to recommend them.
OK lets start with the positive point. The book is set in the fictional Cotswold village of Piddlebury and I can definitely believe that the Cotswolds (a region in south west central England) would have a place called Piddlebury after all they have Stow in the Wold, Moreton in the Marsh, Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter so why not Piddlebury. That however was the last thing I believed in throughout the book, the characters introduced for this novel are mere cyphers with no depth to them, the plot is so ridiculous as to be safely ignored and it frankly felt like a formulaic box ticking exercise on behalf of the author. Lots of random characters that have appeared before so readers recognise them even if they have nothing to do within the story – tick. No explanation as to who the hell these characters are for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read their way through the previous 23 novels – tick. Doomed romance, in this case an odd romantic entanglement between the lead characters’ ex husband and her much younger member of staff who gets mistaken for his daughter when he takes her on holiday to Barcelona – tick. Lead character in constant desperate need for a romantic involvement with any apparently available male (a la the worst of Mills and Boon from the nineteen seventies and eighties) – tick.
I thought for a while that if I ignored the dreadful ‘romance’ part of the book the mystery would get my attention but as it became less and less believable as a possible real situation I frankly lost interest and only finished the book because I was writing this blog. Thank goodness it was only 198 pages long and at no point did I need to engage my brain in understanding what was going on as it was all so superficial. It’s quite possible, and indeed almost certain, that I am the wrong demographic for M C Beaton and I’m glad to say that the book has already been passed on the the secondhand bookshop that does have customers that want to read it.
The Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin books are still being written, and are now credited to M C Beaton and R W Green who is Rod Green, husband of Chesney’s publisher Krystyna Green, see here for how he came to take on the mantle of these characters. Other fiction titles that have been continued after the authors death, such as the James Bond novels by various authors including Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz amongst others, The Hitch-hikers Guide to The Galaxy sixth book by Eoin Colfer, Peter Rabbit by Emma Thompson and many other examples have not continued the odd and somewhat creepy fiction of the original author being involved. It would be much more honest to simply give the author as R W Green as clearly M C Beaton has no input having been dead for almost four years, so equally clearly the publisher doesn’t feel the characters are strong enough to continue on their own without the Beaton tag.
Ramblings on my bookshelves 