Interlude 3 – Shakespeare and Oxford’s Painted Room

Today is not only St George’s Day, it is also and, possibly more cause for morris dancing, Shakespeare’s birthday and World Book Night. It seemed appropriate then that Oxford opened its doors today to one of the city’s rarest treasures – the Painted Room. This remarkable place is hidden above Oxford’s most slighted and abused main shopping street, Cornmarket. Above a clothes shop and leaning against an upper floor betting shop are the uneven and creaking remains of a medieval inn, known at various times through its long history as Pate’s Inn, Somenour’s Inn, the Bull Inn and the Crown. Interestingly, the Crown is now located across the street.

Sometime during the later 16th century, the main chamber was adorned with paintings and, in the early years of the 17th-century, the tenant John Davenant (a man who was never known to laugh) invited his good friend William Shakespeare to stay. One can speculate and indeed one does that his room was none other than the Painted Room. It was that room which was opened today. A Shakespeare Commemoration Ceremony used to be held soon after the paintings’ rediscovery behind 17th-century wooden panels (now preserved on rollers) in the 1930s but that practice has been forgotten. Perhaps until now.

Intriguingly, the similarity of John Davenant’s poet son William to his godfather Shakespeare was commented upon at the time.

Above the fireplace is the Greek symbol for the name Jesus Christ – a bold statement in those late 16th-century days.

I was grateful to be part of the very first tour today, most ably led by the doctor of the house. There is still time to see the house. It’s open for five days, hosted by Oxford Castle Unlocked. Having been born in Oxford and lived here for much of my life, I had no idea what was hiding just above such a familiar bit of street. You never know…

You can read more details here about the house.

The work of the Oxford Preservation Trust to maintain these and other wonderful treasures in the the city for future generations is to be celebrated.

(Photos by me, Kate Atherton)

11.22.63 by Stephen King

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Pages: 740
Year: 2011 (Pb, July 2012)
Buy: Hardback, Kindle, Paperback
Source: Bought copy

Review
It’s been a while since I devoured Stephen King’s horror tales as a youngster. I loved IT, Salem’s Lot and The Shining so much that when I finally visited Massachusetts a few years ago Salem was top of my list (along with the Crow’s Nest from The Perfect Storm) and it was every bit as spooky as I had depended on it being. While I’m not a fan of horror these days, I am a fan of great storytelling and Stephen King at his best is a master of it. I am delighted to say that in 11.22.63 King is at that best. It might be a ridiculously heavy book weightwise but each page of it is perfectly necessary.

Jake Epping is a schoolteacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, in 2011. His friend Al owns a diner decorated with photographs of his most famous guests. One day, Jake discovers Al, ill and aged almost beyond recognition since the previous day when he saw him last. The reason is miraculous. In the pantry of the diner is a rabbit hole, through which you can pass to a warm autumnal day in 1958. You can stay in the past as long as you like, interacting with it, even changing it, but if you return to the present and then go back into the portal, history is reset. Nothing you have changed is remembered. Everything you wanted to change you must rechange. Everyone you met has forgotten you. Almost. And as far as the present is concerned, you have only been gone two minutes.

Al is desperate for Jake to go back into the past, stay there for five years and change an event that he believes has resulted in monumental misery and suffering – the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Even after a test run to show it works, why would anyone want to leave the present and everyone they love behind and go back to not only the past but also a situation where they may be required to force a change in history, possibly through violence? For Jake, the answer is in an essay written by one of his adult pupils, the janitor Harry Dunning, in which Harry described the night that changed his life, fifty years ago, when his father murdered his mother, sister and brother. Jake will go back into the past, not because of JFK or Lee Harvey Oswald, but for Harry.

But just as the present isn’t simple, neither is the past, a state of affairs which is exasperated by history’s resistance to being changed. The greater the change to the past the more robust is history’s opposition. And then there’s love. What are you to do if you fall in love with someone who is from another time?

11.22.63 takes us through five years of the life of Jake – or George as he is known in the past. Through his story and narration we observe the butterfly effect, the ripples of change, the potential for real danger. This is not a horror novel but it is a world in which horror can happen, a strong feeling which is compounded by the references to characters from Stephen King’s earlier novels. There are monsters in this world, hiding in an ironworks or in the Texas School Book Depository.

While George (Jake) has his mission from the future, he is fully immersed in the past and with the people of the past. The evocation of the late 50s, early 60s is utterly believable and full of the most fascinating details. The love story of Jake and Sadie Dunhill is a beautiful one and is set among numerous other relationships, happy and unpleasant, which form the web that Jake makes from his life fifty years ago. On top of it lie the other stories – Oswald and Kennedy, Harry Dunning and his father to name just two out of many.

11.22.63 may be intricate but it is also superbly written. Stephen King is at the top of his formidable powers here. With just a few words or sentences we believe the full history of his characters. We know so little about Jake Epping’s life but we know an awful lot about what he wants. At the very beginning, the very first line, Jake states that ‘I have never been what you’d call a crying man’ but this is an emotional tale without doubt and it moved me to tears more than once. The pace of the prose and the possibilities it suggests make the book, for me, impossible to resist after reading the first couple of pages. There are mysteries too and you have to know what happens to them – not least, who is the Yellow Card Man? Why does he seem to know Jake? And then there’s history itself – it exerts a presence here that is not entirely benign.

There are numerous characters and layers of story in 11.22.63. The novel rewards a luxurious thorough read. There are gifts too from much of its language. For instance:

‘But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-harem, they had been blue. But when he turned his attention to me – however briefly – I could have sworn that they turned gray, the color of water beneath a sky from which snow will soon fall.’

I would recommend that you not be put off by the bulk of 11.22.63, instead be thankful that it is such a size that it will obsess you for a fair few fortunate days. And afterwards it will not let you forget it.

The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

Publisher: David Fickling Books
Pages: 307
Year: 2012
Buy: Hardback, Kindle
Source: Bought copy

Review
Margo Lanagan’s Brides of Rollrock Island began its life as one story among several in the collection Sea-Hearts. Now it is expanded and the results are wondrous. With the most beautiful prose, Margo Lanagan transports us to an island, a little timeless, on which men live with their silky-haired, large-eyed wives. There are no daughters, just boys, all of whom love their graceful mams, and this relationship between the men of the island and their enchanting women gives life to the heart of this novel.

The men of the island have turned their backs on the local red-haired fiery, spirited women. Instead, Misskaella, the island’s sea-witch, has offered each of them the gift of naming the women that she can draw out from their seal skins. The price is great, huge debt ensues, but the prize is a non-questioning and loving wife who, deprived of her locked away sealskin, is unable to leave the land and her man. These women have to suffer the double pain of losing their seal children and their human daughters. Their husbands are too enraptured to help but their sons are a different matter.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is told by a succession of different narrators, covering two or three generations and regularly referring backwards. The most dominant figure on the island is Misskaella who has ensnared the husbands and terrified the sons. But this menacing witch who knits seaweed on the beach has her own story and this forms a substantial part of the tale. This is one of the true strengths of the novel. The witch we see later on, ugly and predatory, was once a young girl we empathised with, the smallest daughter among many in a family that loved her. But from the moment that she discovered that she could charm seals from the seas, she couldn’t live a normal life again. We see both – the young and the old – and that brings another very human dimension to a tale of witches, seals and enthralled men.

The island is timeless. There is little reference to events or things that could date it. It could also be anywhere. The red-haired women on the mainland know about the men on the island – it doesn’t seem much of a secret – and the sons are accepted as being part land part sea. While some men stay true to the red-haired women, the majority have no power to resist at all. The problem is, though, that Misskaella has warned them all of the high price they must pay, and this doesn’t necessarily refer to money.

The language of The Brides of Rollrock Island is beautiful. The stories are distinct but flow from one to the other. The selkies are enchanting but the human women are full of life. There are moments of wonder here – the boys swimming through the sea, forgetting their human lives, to name just one. Despite the heartache, the worry and the loss, one abiding feeling to emerge from The Brides of Rollrock Island is the power for love.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Publisher: Headline Review
Pages: 416
Year: February 2012
Buy: Hardback
Source: Review copy

Review
A middle-aged couple, Mabel and Jack, are about to endure their second Alaskan winter. Far from their families, they are trying to make a life for themselves farming land that for much of the time is either too frozen or too wet. With Jack labouring all day, Mabel is left in their cabin, remembering a lost child and contemplating whether to take a walk across the barely frozen nearby river.

Yet, when the first snow falls, Jack and Mabel are enchanted and for the first time in a long, long while they play together and build with great care a snow girl, complete with red lips, red mittens and scarf and yellow hair. The next morning, the snow child is gone and, when they begin to catch sight of a young girl in the trees, watching them, Mabel becomes convinced that the child is a snow girl, brought to life, just like the snow child fairy tale in the Russian book that she treasures, even though she can’t read a word.

The Snow Child is a wonderful novel. Wonderful. Extraordinarily, it is Eowyn Ivey’s first book, something that is quite incredible as you realise that not a word is superfluous and not a sentence detracts from the beauty of the story and its characters, not to mention the atmosphere of the harsh but magnificent Alaskan setting. As the story unfolds, there is something inspirational and very moving about Mabel’s rediscovery of herself and her husband and her new found love affair with this most beautiful and ultimately giving of environments. As for the snow child herself, there’s every chance that you’ll fall as much in love with her as Mabel and Jack.

I don’t want to talk too much about the story of The Snow Child because the novel’s mystery is entrancing. There are few characters, not surprisingly considering that it is set in such a remote part of the world in a time (the thirties) when deprivation and hardship caused many to give up their dreams and return to the cities. The people who survive in Alaska have to adapt, be able to live off the land and its animals for food and warmth, and must find comfort where they can. The ties that bind Mabel to her husband, neighbours, the girl and even her family back home, are tender and unbreakable.

Eowyn Ivey’s prose is truly bewitching and at times you may catch your breath, smile or cry a little. She has achieved the sophisticated air of simplicity and naturalness while going straight to the heart of her fully-rounded, breathing characters, yet still always making sure that the Alaskan environment is never more than a cabin wall from us, even when we read this novel wrapped up and snug in our homes. It is a marvellous achievement and Eowyn Ivey has a great talent which we must watch in the years to come. The fact that Eowyn lives in Alaska and clearly knows and understands it brilliantly well is apparent in every page.

I’ve read many novels this year but The Snow Child ranks high among them and I don’t think I’m going to forget it. The book isn’t out until February 2012 so I’ll make sure I remind you of it again nearer the time.

Huge thanks to my good friend Liz for the read.

Queen of Kings by Maria Dahvana Headley

Publisher: Bantam
Pages: 448
Buy: Paperback, Kindle
Source: Review copy

Review
The love story of Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most enduring and popular tales from antiquity and its tragic end is well known. But, while Antony was a Roman through and through, Cleopatra was queen of a more exotic land and she was regarded as the the embodiment of the goddess Isis. In Queen of Kings, Maria Dahvana Headley, takes this idea to its extreme and looks at the choices that Cleopatra may have made if she could have used the dark power of Isis to save the man she loved.

Trapped in the Mausoleum, waiting for the victorious Octavian to claim her for his triumphant return to Rome, Cleopatra uses an ancient spell to merge with Isis. The bite of the asp transforms her into something crazed and monstrous. She can take on the form of snakes and lions but she has become even more fearful than that. She is now a vampire that must feed on her own people by night and is never sated. Of course, it’s not them she wants vengeance on. It’s Octavian she wants.

Like any good book, there are several layers to Queen of Kings. On the one hand, we have a dark and quite sexy tale of Cleopatra’s deep passion for Antony, a passion which drives her to inhuman deeds. On the other hand, we witness Cleopatra’s growing realisation that when all’s said and done, no matter what she does, Antony will never be more than a ghost. In that sense, we follow Cleopatra’s journey into despair and sadness as she begins to deplore what her grief has made her and she begins to come to terms with her new skin. There is something unbearably sad about Antony’s lot.

We witness the fear and loathing that others feel for Cleopatra but our feelings for her are not allowed to be straightforward. Most painfully, we see what Cleopatra’s selfishness has done to her daughter Selene. Selene turns from this monster of a mother to none other than Octavian, the murderer of Cleopatra’s son, in search of security. We also follow much of the book from the perspective of Cleopatra’s scholar Nikolaus who, better than anyone, knows what Cleopatra has unleashed and fears it. He runs from it while also trying to destroy it.

Rather than being a tale of Cleopatra with elements of horror, this is first and foremost a vampire story with lashings of historical detail thrown in for the mix. You won’t find Cleopatra, Antony of Octavian from history here but what you will read is a dark and very sensuous tale of a woman, the original femme fatale, so stricken by grief, rage and guilt that she will turn the moral order of the world on its head in order to win vengeance.

To sum up, Queen of Kings is a fast and undemanding read that pumps new and original blood into the vampire genre.

The Watchers by Jon Steele

Publisher: Bantam
Pages: 560
Year: 2011
Buy: Hardback, Kindle
Source: Review copy

Read my interview with Jon Steele here.

Review
Set in Lausanne, Switzerland, The Watchers follows a few days in the lives of three seemingly disconnected people: Jay Harper, a private detective with a thing for the History Channel, who wakes up without memories; Katherine Taylor, an expensive courtesan who discovers that her life is worth far less than she’d thought; Marc Rochat, the young man with a limp who guards the nine bells of Lausanne Cathedral, marshalling their efforts with his lantern, encouraging and admonishing, but always vigilant. And not only the bells, because Marc sees ghosts from his past and present. For all three characters, nothing is what it seems in life. Figures outside their lives seek to manipulate their fate. Finally, it comes down to a battle between good and evil, with much more at risk than the lives of those seeking refuge within the cathedral.

The pace of The Watchers is deceptively subtle. The story is character-driven but that does not mean that it is slow. On the contrary. Harper, Katherine and Marc each have their own demons. Once the three characters come together there is no let-up in the energy of the story, which builds and builds and you will not be able to put the book down. A book of 550 pages or so disappeared into two nights of reading. This isn’t just because of the story, which combines reality and fantasy in a seamless and magical fashion, but also because of the writing. The Watchers breathes beautiful prose, reaching poetic heights in places, sometimes literally.

‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on’ – a line by poet Edward Thomas, a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, who died at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917 at 7.30am. This line resonates through The Watchers. It begins the novel in a prologue that wrung my heart til the tears fell from my eyes. How common is it to begin a novel, read a prologue, and feel like that? It’s so rare. But when you read these opening pages about a young man facing the end in the trenches of the Great War, you know that you are reading something very special indeed. You’ll commit to it and you won’t be disappointed. The rest of the story, and the characters, lives up to this unbelievably strong and emotional opening.

There is a fantasy element to The Watchers but, and I’m speaking as someone who doesn’t tend to read fantasy novels, it emerges so gently that it doesn’t disturb the reader’s acceptance of this world. This is a masterly exercise in atmosphere.

I did not want this book to end. My only comfort when The Watchers finished was knowing that this was the first in a trilogy. Jon Steele has assured me that he already knows the final sentence of the third novel. I will try and be patient…

The Watchers is the debut novel by Jon Steele, an award winning cameraman and editor for ITN for over twenty years, a journalist who’d experienced war and conflict across the globe but quit on the day that war broke out with Iraq for reasons of conscience. The Watchers is not, however, Steele’s first book. War Junkie (2002), described on the cover as ‘One man’s addiction to the worst places on earth’, presents an impression of the horror of human behaviour and the unexpected brevity of human life, and this impression is carried through to The Watchers. It might be a first work of fiction, but it comes with a history of feeling.

‘Rain’ by Philip Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

The Map of Time by Felix Palma

Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 528
Year: 2011
Buy: Kindle, Paperback
Source: Review copy

Review
Without doubt, The Map of Time is a very strange book. Peculiar, even. But there’s a very high chance that it will catch hold of your imagination and, through the sheer quality of the writing, you will not want it to let go.

The Map of a Time has a plot that defies description. However, to put it as simply and as non-spoilery as possible, it is set in London at the end of the 19th century, a time when Jack the Ripper terrorised the East End, when women longed for freedom and many people were newly aware of the tremendous possibilities that scientific and industrial inventions opened up. The novel follows three people: Andrew Harrington, a young gentleman who will do anything to save the life of his Marie Kelly, a victim of the Ripper, and in so doing save himself; Clare Haggerty finds nothing to fit in her own time, she dreams of the future and a mysterious Captain; H.G. Wells, the creator of The Time Machine, to whom everyone looks for answers.

The answer may be found in one man’s claim that he can take you, in his carriage, through the fourth dimension into the future. The year 2000 to be precise when man fought his most epic battle against the automatons.

But that is the bare bones. This novel is like watching a story through shards of a broken mirror. Absolutely nothing is what it seems and yet everything is fascinating. Even the narrator has a persona that is mysterious. The layering is intricate and superb in its knitting together. But what drives this novel on, except for the reader’s sheer curiosity in what on earth may unfold in it next, is the characterisation. Not only the three principal characters but also everyone else we meet along the way. Many of them are presented as giants, stamping their path through people’s lives and history, and some are familiar, including the Elephant Man. But others, although imagined, feel just as real and it is difficult to determine who and what is to be trusted.

You can pick your genre for this one: historical fiction, crime fiction, thriller, science fiction, time travel, steampunk, romance. Felix Palma picks his way through the genres with a skill that must be read to be believed.The author’s, or narrator’s, persona has a powerful presence in The Map of Time. It will play tricks on you. But the language of this book is beautifully crafted, and credit is certainly owed to the translator.

Above all, The Map of Time is a fun read. It’s extremely difficult to talk about without spoilers but once you start it’s hard to stop.