The Hills of Adonis – Colin Thubron

On October 31, 2023October 30, 2023 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

First published in 1968, Colin Thubron’s second book finds him still in the Middle East, his first book from the previous year ‘Mirror to Damascus’ covered his travels in Syria and for his third which came out in 1969 he stayed in the same geographical region with a book set in Israel entitled ‘Jerusalem’. None of these early works are particularly well known today, especially compared to his more recent travelogues, indeed the most recent publication of ‘The Hills of Adonis’ I can find is from fifteen years ago, whilst my copy was published in 1987 during the last few years of the Lebanese Civil War. Thubron spent four months walking around Lebanon, a country of just 4,036 square miles (10,452 square km) so slightly less than half the size of Wales or for Americans roughly the size of the two smallest states combined (Delaware and Rhode Island) so it was possible to cover most of the sights in the country on foot in this time frame.

Thubron weaves his way up the country from the southern border with Israel, which even in the mid 1960’s was already a dangerous place to be, up to the northern border with Syria visiting most of the significant places on the way. The first part of the book however is also concerned with a breakdown of the mythology prevailing ancient Lebanon and for me this was convoluted and unnecessary in the amount of detail and number of pages dedicated to it. Fortunately after the first few chapters Thubron largely drops the subject and proceeds to describe the history, geography and most importantly the people of this tiny but extremely culturally diverse country. This is where the book really gets into its stride although it can be difficult at times to determine if he is writing about the near or ancient history of a place, he does rather bounce around a lot. But the people he meets are fascinating and because he includes tiny villages as well as the metropolitan centres you start to get a feel for the various peoples, the Maronites and Druze, the remains of ancient and isolated monastic orders, the agricultural people of the mountains and the largely more prosperous people of the coastal regions especially as he moves further north.

In the late 1960’s, at the time Thubron was travelling in Lebanon, it was a place largely at peace. This was before the civil war which would destroy large parts of the country and kill around 150,000 people in the fifteen years from 1975 and Lebanon was still seen as a significant tourist destination in the region. This is what initially drew me to the book, a snapshot of a now long vanished time and place and whilst I was in Lebanon just six years after the civil war ended, the destruction of its once beautiful capital was all too evident when I was there and it would have been impossible to replicate Thubron’s journey as the south of the country was still occupied by Israel and would be until the year 2000. Reading the book and seeing what Lebanon was like, and unfortunately has no obvious way of getting back to, is depressing but at least here is a record of what has been lost.

The cover picture, by Mark Entwhistle, is of the ruins of the palace in Anjar in the Bekaa region of Lebanon, which I photographed in September 1996, although from the opposite side of this particular surviving section. When Thubron got there the people were clutching radios tuned to Radio Cairo and waiting for war and he was deeply troubled by his experience there far from the peaceful scene depicted on the cover. Far from ‘driving the Israelis into the sea’ which is what everyone told him would happen the conflict that actually occurred turned out to be Six Days War where Israel defeated most of its neighbours in a series of decisive air strikes largely destroying the air forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in one day. But before then Thubron had left Lebanon and was presumably working on this book, which with all its faults is still an interesting read. Below are a couple of my pictures from Anjar.

a closer view of the arches

To Bed with Grand Music – Marghanita Laski

On October 24, 2023October 20, 2023 By bookramblings142In Reviews3 Comments

At the end of September I visited the city of Bath in Somerset, England and there found the headquarters of Persephone Books, a small publishing company specialising in the works of various female authors from the twentieth century. They started twenty five years ago in 1998 and all their books are bound in this silver/grey design with an identical dust wrapper but the end papers are different in each book and you also get a bookmark which matches that volumes’ end papers. Also each book, regardless of length, is priced at £14 but with a deal of any three books for £36. Restricting myself to three from the one hundred and forty nine titles available was tricky but at least from this book, number 86 on their list, I seem to have chosen well. It was originally printed in 1946 with the author taking the pseudonym of Sarah Russell almost certainly due to the scandalous nature of the subject matter. For Mrs Deborah Robertson says goodbye to her husband Graham in the early part of of the war as he is posted to Egypt and after moping about at their marital home in the country for a while with their young son Timmy, leaves him in charge of the housekeeper during the week and gets a job in London to keep herself occupied and starts on a series of affairs.

In fact the first ‘affair’ would nowadays be regarded as rape as the man involved got her drunk and they ended up in bed together for what was definitely a one off occasion which Deborah was completely disgusted with. However she soon moves in with a friend and starts relationships deliberately this time, partly for the company but mainly for what she can get out of them and she does seem to do rather well for quite a long time. The first proper affair was with Joe, an American lieutenant with a wife back in the States and this lasted quite a while with Deborah even taking him back to her marital home for what turned out to be an uncomfortable weekend to meet Timmy and this relationship lasted until he was posted out of the UK. He is followed by another American lieutenant called Sheldon who didn’t last very long before she found a French member of the London embassy called Pierre. This is the time when Deborah decides that what she really wants is to be a ‘professional mistress’ and asks Pierre to teach her what men are looking for is their dalliances. Pierre agrees but is also repelled by the task so after a few more weeks takes her for a meal with Brazilian diplomat Luis Vardas and after enjoying the meal simply leaves her with him as her new partner. By the end of affair number six she is completely manipulative over her lovers as can be told from the below extract when she has decided to get rid of her first British lover Anthony.

After Anthony we no longer have a lover by lover account of her partners instead there is a succession of men about who we find out very little and presumably neither does Deborah, she simply sees them as a means to an end although she is by now overspending in order to keep up the appearances needed for the class of man she is aiming to attract. Chapter ten begins…

Geoffrey was succeeded by Martin and Martin by Nils from the Norwegian Navy. Usually Deborah managed to avoid any awkward interregnum by building one up before the last had faded away, but sometimes this would fail and a gap would yawn. Then Deborah would give a party.

At such a party she would invite several possible successors for her favours and pick one to work on. By now Deborah is thoroughly unlikable as a character but the book is written so well that it is difficult to put down. Laski was a lover of words and the novel is beautifully put together so even as the ‘only in it for herself’ nature of Deborah becomes more and more dominant the novel still draws the reader in. Laski wrote six novels, five of which have been published by Persephone Books but her love of words is mainly shown by the fact that she contributed over a quarter of a million illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary and was also a regular panellist for twelve years on the BBC game show ‘What’s My Line’. I’ve loved the book and will almost certainly pick one of her other novels in my next group of three Persephone publications.

The end papers and the bookmark are printed with a design entitled ‘Good Night Everybody’, from a silk scarf made by London based silk specialist Jacqmar around 1940 and held in a private collection.

The Coronation of Haile Selassie – Evelyn Waugh

On October 17, 2023October 16, 2023 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

I’m planning on reading ‘Scoop’, Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel about the life of a foreign journalist in the coming months but remembered I had on the shelves an example of Waugh’s own time as a foreign reporter, namely his account of attending the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. This occurred in 1930, eight years before he wrote ‘Scoop’ during which he was submitting stories for several newspapers in a freelance capacity. The main inspiration for ‘Scoop’ was when he was back in Abyssinia in 1935, this time on behalf of the Daily Mail covering the second Italo-Abyssinian war. Whilst he was not a great war reporter he did get plenty of material for his subsequent novel. But this link does make reading his stories about reporting in 1930 an ideal prelude to tackling ‘Scoop’.

This Penguin 70 book is actually a couple of extracts from his 1931 travelogue ‘Remote People’, a book I’m now keen to track down to read more fully, but for now the two sections included here regarding the coronation and the apparently interminable journey to get home from it are all I have and I have loved the dry humour and observation of detail that are a trademark of his writing. He starts off by introducing a few of the people he has dealings with or are directly involved with the coronation or in several cases both in particular who was originally in Abyssinia as a trader but had somehow ended up as chief, and apparently only member of the bureau of foreign affairs and had an office in the centre of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital. Described as extremely handsome of German and Abyssinian descent he was also an excellent linguist and could apparently arrange anything even finding copies of the apparently non-existent coronation service…

In this last statement Mr Hall appears to be no different to anyone else Waugh has to deal with or indeed just observes. Addis had been the capital for almost forty years by then but large parts of it was still under construction. The hotel the British Marine band had been quartered in lacked a roof and building work all over the city was making very little progress as the workmen would apparently simply stop if they weren’t under constant supervision. Throw into this chaos the organisation of a coronation and the consequent arrival of foreign dignitaries along with the world media to cover it and the difficulties of communication both inside and outside the country and it’s a wonder anything progressed to any sort of a plan. This is where Waugh had an advantage over his fellow representatives of the press he didn’t have a daily newspaper to serve that needed something all the time he could wait and write accurately what happened unlike others he derided such as Associated Press which sent in totally fictitious accounts of the ceremony because of time constraints needing copy before it had even started. Mind you those members of the press that waited to get at least accurate reports of the first part of what turned out to be an interminable event discovered that the only telegraph office in the city had closed for the day so they couldn’t send their reports anyway.

The book doesn’t have any of Waugh’s actual reports in it, rather it is a diary of his experiences both in the lead up to and being at the coronation and the six days of feasting and celebration that followed for the royal family and the numerous tribal leaders that attended and it is at times both an important historical document and also extremely funny. The second account included in the book is entitled ‘First Nightmare’ and describes how Waugh attempted to get at least part way home with ships and trains being either cancelled, not turning up even when expected or even taken over by a Princess and her retinue who could just bounce all the passengers who had managed to find seats out of Abyssinia back out of them again. In all Waugh takes four days to go from Harar to Aden, a distance of 311 miles (500km) with numerous hold ups and false hopes of possible means of moving forward and you can feel his frustration building. At the time Aden was part of the British Empire and regular ships travelled back to the UK all he had to do was get there but it proved incredibly difficult.

I’ve really enjoyed this short book and am now looking forward to reading ‘Scoop’, probably early next year by the look of the planned reading list I already have for the rest of 2023.

Paddington Bear is 65 years old this week

On October 10, 2023September 27, 2023 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

The first Paddington Bear book was published on the 13th October 1958 and Michael Bond went on to write fourteen collections of stories about him along with two specials featuring stories originally published in annuals for the children’s BBC television programme Blue Peter and fourteen other mainly single story picture books aimed at younger readers. The set I have is from The Folio Society and was published as a boxed collection in 2010. Unusually for a Folio edition it wasn’t published by them but rather by Harper Collins, Paddington’s usual publisher and it includes the twelve collections published up until that date in lovely cloth bound volumes. Sadly Michael Bond died in 2017 so there will be no more stories about this lovable bear, but I discovered whilst researching this blog that fittingly Bond is buried in Paddington Old Cemetery in London. The appearance of Paddington Bear in the Blue Peter Annuals came about because Bond was a BBC cameraman, including working on that TV series so he knew the presenters and could incorporate them into stories.

The first book ‘A Bear Called Paddington’ consists of eight connected short stories whilst the remaining thirteen main collections all have just seven each, meaning that there are ninety nine tales in the main block of books, along with those there were a further thirteen stories split across the two ‘Blue Peter’ collections and of course the single story books for small children, so there is a lot to read. The first eleven books were illustrated by Peggy Fortnum and it is her black and white images that came to epitomise the character of the bear as he tries to be helpful but invariably causes more trouble and disasters around him. She however retired from illustrating and the remaining three collections ‘Paddington Here and Now’, ‘Paddington Races Ahead’ and ‘Paddington’s Finest Hour’ were illustrated by R W Alley who clearly based his picture on those done by Peggy Fortnum to maintain consistency.

I’ve loved Paddington since I was a small child, having encountered him first in the Blue Peter annuals and as read out stories on the programme in the late 1960’s. There is just something so beguiling about his well meaning and always polite character and the ways he tries to adapt to his new home in London, which is so different from the Peruvian mountains where he originated from. On arriving at Paddington station having stowed away on a transatlantic ship he is met by the Brown family who take him home and effectively adopt him into their family. Helping him fit in is his great friend Mr Gruber, who owns an antique shop on Portobello Road and escaped from Hungary either to avoid WWII or the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, it is never made clear which, but this gives him useful insights into the problems of assimilation for Paddington. That makes the books sound heavier in tone than they are, whereas they are delightfully comic and clearly aimed at children, although there is plenty for an adult to enjoy. Rereading a few of the books for this review reminded me just how much I enjoyed the Paddington stories in my preteen-age years. The other major character is the Brown’s next door neighbour Mr Curry who is generally unpleasant to Paddington and always calls him Bear, unlike Mr Gruber who calls him Mr Brown. A lot of the stories have Mr Curry getting his comeuppance in some way or other.

Above is the start of the Paddington story in the Fifth Blue Peter annual published in 1968 and this is how I first read Paddington stories and got to know the character, in this one he goes to the seaside and ends up in the lifeboat bought by the Blue Peter appeal that year. Of course the modern films from StudioCanal have brought a whole new audience to Paddington Bear, many of whom have probably not read the books. These adaptations are not based on specific books or tales but rather on the feel of the entire set of stories and they are a wonderful version with the various characters being very much as I imagined them from reading the books and I hope that they do encourage people to pick the books up and discover the vast range of adventures Paddington gets up to. The third film in the series started production earlier this year and it is due out in time for Christmas 2024, the original cast are back together and I hope that when it eventually gets dubbed into Ukrainian the original voice actor for Paddington in that language is available to repeat his performance from the first two movies, although Volodymyr Zelenskyy is rather busy being President nowadays.

Happy birthday on Friday Paddington.

I Wanna Be Yours – John Cooper Clarke

On October 3, 2023September 23, 2023 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

This is my three hundredth blog entry so I have decided to tackle what turned out to be a fascinating autobiography of the famous ‘punk poet’ which comes in at a pretty massive 470 pages, of which more later. Clarke is now seventy four and has lived a fairly unusual life, which he is extremely frank about in the book. This includes his many years as a heroin addict, indeed his descriptions of sometimes desperate attempts to get his next fix make up quite a lot of the last half of the book, it could have been a depressing read and it says a lot about his wordsmith skills that it isn’t. I first came across Clarke’s work when I went to university in Manchester in 1980 although sadly I never managed to see him perform. His famously stick thin physique was undoubtedly aided by the heroin but I hadn’t know until reading this book that at the age of eight he had had tuberculosis and probably shouldn’t have made it out of childhood in Salford, South Manchester. Clarke is brutally honest about his slide into addiction and the subsequent partial collapse of his career as getting the next fix became more important than anything else. He even took to avoiding his mother after she found out and he claimed to her to be getting help when in fact he was taking even more drugs and progressing to speedballs, cocaine and heroin mixed in one shot this is probably the lowest point of the narrative.

I was aware he had had a drug problem but the extent of it surprised me and I wasn’t really prepared for the story of a drug addict being the main part of the book rather than his climb to be performing and comparing at shows at the biggest clubs in Manchester. Thinking about it later I was also aware that he had largely disappeared for years after the late 1970’s, or at least I hadn’t heard of him for a long time until he reemerged to a larger public presence many years later and yet now plays sell out shows around the world. Indeed his 2024 fiftieth anniversary of performing tour, entitled ‘John Cooper Clarke: Get Him While He’s Alive!’ is already having to add extra dates due to demand for tickets.

There is also substantial coverage of his childhood and early years before starting to perform which was characterised by the poverty of growing up in Salford in the 1950’s and the extra problems due to his poor health. He worked as a bookies runner for a while whilst still at school before the police started to crack down on unlicensed bookmakers and going round taking bets and paying out winnings became too hot a job to continue. He was always looking for a way to earn some money but his apprenticeship on leaving school as a car mechanic eventually ended early due to both parties, employer and employee, recognising that he had absolutely no aptitude for anything mechanical. His desire to be a poet was strong even then but his father pointed out that nobody made any money at poetry until they were dead and it was only the arrival on the scene of the so called Mersey poets from Liverpool that proved that it was possible to make it a career. But it took a long time, and the assistance of Manchester club owner Bernard Manning, now a somewhat controversial figure, that eventually got him onto the stage and making some money at what he wanted to do.

As I wrote at the beginning of this review the book is 470 pages long, but by page 430 we have spent so much time on his childhood, youth and addictions we have still only reached 1985 and I was thinking that this was just the first half of a planned two volume autobiography. Instead Clarke basically sums up the remaining thirty seven years as: Met Evie (his wife), tried and eventually kicked heroin, rebuilt the career, started a family, gained an honorary doctorate from Salford University and nothing else much happened. Thirty seven years in forty pages, I’m pretty sure there is more to that period than that and as I had so enjoyed reading the first 430 pages, covering thirty six years since his birth in 1949, I was definitely set up for volume two.

If I have one criticism of the book it is Clarke’s excessive name dropping, usually in long, frankly tedious, lists of people or bands he has met or worked with, or maybe had worked in the past at a venue he was then working at, which I got into the habit of skipping as I got more into the book but as the last line of the book makes clear he isn’t bothered about criticism of the autobiography.