The Tapestry of Love

In one of the most gracious moves ever made by an author, Rosy Thornton responded to my lackluster review of one of her earlier novels, Crossed Wires, by sending me an email in which she offered to send me her newer one, The Tapestry of Love.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that such an offer, followed by the receipt of the book directly from Cambridge (with a nice note), did predispose me to give the book every benefit of the doubt. So when I say I liked it, that will come as no surprise. But there's also a reason I would be predisposed to dislike it. Let me tell you a bit of a story.

Once there was a young mother who had reached a stumbling block in her academic career and was staying home with two preschoolers.  She had a friend who would pass on bags full of paperback romance novels brought to her by her mother.  Every couple of weeks, this friend would bring over a new bag of books.  The young mother didn't have to dress the preschoolers, (who were often nebulizer-sucking sick), get them in carseats, and take them to the library.  She didn't have to worry about when the books were due.  She could read for ten minutes, dog-ear the page rather than scrambling for a bookmark, and answer the next pressing preschooler need.  A fast reader, the young mother read almost all the books she was brought, passing over only the occasional title with a half-naked Scots warrior on the front.  At least a third of the paperback romances she read featured a divorced woman who moves to a new place, starts her own business--usually a restaurant, a bakery, or a catering service--makes good friends very quickly and easily from among her new neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who truly appreciates her talents.  The young mother got very tired of this formula.

Okay, fast forward to this same mother, years later, getting a novel in which a divorced woman moves to a new place (the Cevennes mountains, in France), starts her own business (sewing and upholstery--a change from the cooking, at least), makes good friends very quickly from among her neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who appreciates her talents so much he buys and frames something she sewed.  I think you're now aware of why I might be predisposed to dislike this novel.

But I didn't.  Putting both my predispositions aside, I enjoyed the writing style and got immersed in the story, pretty much from the point where the main character, Catherine, who has moved to the Cevennes, is talking on the phone to her daughter Lexie, in England, and Lexie says to her:
"I know what the trouble is....Completely understandable, you poor thing. All very scenic over there and everything but naturally you're missing me."
Since this is almost exactly what I think my own daughter would say to me in similar circumstances, I started identifying with Catherine.

In fact, Catherine is almost completely happy with her own company and her sewing.  Even though I'd personally rather do almost anything than be made to sew, the appeal of it for Catherine is clear to me:
"As she started to stitch....She saw it all clearly, translated into the colors of silk. It was funny how, even as a child, she had been able to visualise a picture or pattern as soon as she began to sew; she had only to begin and the image would emerge, a template for her to follow, like the outline that forms on closed lids after staring at something too long."

It's amusing to watch Catherine adapt to rural life, especially in terms of eating locally.  The first time she is offered a dish of fresh wild boar, she "stared at him; she had a horror of killing in the raw. She was no vegetarian, but she preferred her meat without its claws."  The dish is delicious, of course, and she asks for the recipe.  Later, when she smells lamb cooking after a day spent helping herd a neighbor's sheep to summer pastures, she asks "Is it traditional....Sheep farmers who've walked all day with their flock, keeping them safely on the path, then when they stop for the night, dining enjoyably on a nice piece of mutton. It's a little close to home, don't you think?  The matter-of-fact answering question, from the local man she fancies, is "What better than food that transports itself?"

I love the part where Catherine's neighbor Madame Bouschet tells her a story about how hard her husband Augustin has always worked, even on vacation, because it sounds like what my friends always say about our sand castle projects at the beach:
"You should have seen him...with his trousers rolled up to the knee, digging holes in the sand. Jean-Marc wanted him to dig a hole as deep as the well at home, and he was at it a whole morning. I said to him, when the children were in bed, I said, it's typical of you. Supposed to be on holiday, and here you are, digging like it's time to lift the potatoes."

There is sadness in this story but it too is well-described. I particularly like the simile Catherine uses to describe how she felt when her mother died after spending years in a nursing home:
"I don't mean it was a surprise, because it wasn't. I didn't feel surprised, in my mind. What caught me unawares wasn't the fact of her dying, but the force of it. The physical impact, if that makes any sense.
Like standing ankle deep in the surf and knowing full well a cold wave is going to hit you, but the knowledge doesn't lessen the brunt of its strike."

And finally, you can't beat this novel for a happy ending. The local man turns out to have been wildly in love with her all along, and he finally has the sense to say it to her:
"When you ate my wild boar with such delicious reluctance. I fell at once. I have been quite enslaved."
If you're going to use a romance novel plot, you might as well do the romance part right. But there are other good parts to this novel, and I enjoyed them all.  It's like one of the wonderful French casseroles it describes, full of unexpected ingredients that end up better in combination than I could ever have hoped.

So who will like this book? Women, particularly women over 30. Anyone who wants a good story with lots of descriptions of French food in it--I got some of the same pleasure from reading The Tapestry of Love that I always get from rereading Peter Mayle's books about Provence.  Anyone who loves France and is curious about what life is like in the donkey-trodden Parc National des Cevennes.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What Elizabeth Enright classic sends Portia and Julian to a deserted resort community on the shores of a forgotten body of water?

Classics: What name did Jem and Scout use to address their father, in To Kill a Mockingbird?

Non-Fiction: What mystery writer set out to chronicle the year following her 77th birthday in Time to Be in Earnest, but ended up with a full autobiography?

Book Club: What European nation is the setting for the final days of The English Patient's title character?

Authors: Who's written 55 books under her own name, and 77 as Stephanie James, Amanda Glass, Amanda Quick, Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley or Jayne Castle?

Book Bag: What horror writer received instant acclaim in 1984 for his debut three-volume Books of Blood series?

The House at Riverton

Do you believe in the kind of altruism that would cause a person to give up her own happiness in order to serve another and never even tell that other person what she'd done?  Can you possibly believe in a nineteenth-century female character who would make plans to run away with the love of her life and then shoot him because she thought he was threatening her sister?  If so, have I got a shaggy dog story of a novel for you!

The House at Riverton, by Kate Morton, is intriguingly structured, with the story of what happened to the narrator's employers told at the end of their former housemaid's life.  And some of the dialogue is fun:
"I'm tired of reciting The Lady of Shalott while she snivels into her handkerchief."
"She's crying for her own lost love," Emmeline said with a sigh.
Hannah rolled her eyes.
"It's true!" Emmeline said. "I heard Grandmama tell Lady Clem. Before she came to us, Miss Prince was engaged to be married."
"Came to his senses, I suppose," Hannah said.
"He married her sister instead," Emmeline said.
This silenced Hannah, but only briefly. "She should have sued him for breach of promise."
"That's what Lady Clem said--and worse--but Grandmama said Miss Prince didn't want to cause him trouble."
"Then she's a fool," Hannah said. "She's better off without him."
"What a romantic," David said archly. "The poor lady's hopelessly in love with a man she can't have and you begrudge reading her the occasional piece of sad poetry. Cruelty, thy name is Hannah."
But, as in this passage, the foreshadowing is unrelentingly heavy-handed.  Yes, these sisters will end up quarreling over the same man! Surprise!

The writing only occasionally takes on the flavor of the early twentieth century, with bits of odd nineteenth-century tone completely pulling me out of the story:
"It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation."

In the end, what happens is simply unbelievable. People do not act like this, no matter how much the narrator protests that they were different back then.  I felt cheated that I had actually read more than 400 pages, only to have such a wildly improbable ending thrust upon me.  It was like listening to one of those shaggy dog stories that goes on and on and then has a stupid ending, and you discover that the only funny thing is that you actually listened to that nonsense for so long.

Tigana

Because I kept seeing enthusiastic reviews of it, I had Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay, on my wish list, and got a copy of it as a Christmas present, just in time to sign up for the Tigana read-along, which begins today.

And if I hadn't wanted to at least get through the prologue and Part I for today's discussion, I might have put the book aside. I think that a lot of good fantasy and science fiction requires you to read like a teenager, in large swathes, without anything else pulling at your attention.  I don't get those large swathes right now.  But I kept reading the seemingly disconnected sections until they finally came together.  Now that I'm ready to start Part II, I find I have a reason for continuing to read, and it's the same reason that the good guys are fighting.  We want revenge; I want to see the bad guys get what they deserve for what they've done to these good guys that have become my friends.

Another way in which I'm no longer able to read like a teenager is that I don't identify as much with the obvious hero, and so I relate to Devin like a mother when I'm told that "a certain kind of pride at Devin's age is perhaps stronger than at any other age of mortal man" because if that isn't an apt description of what's been going on with my almost-fifteen-year-old son, I don't know what is.

The badness of the bad guys is duly testified to by the brutality of Alberico, a sorcerer who "cannot...be poisoned" and who mercilessly tortures and kills entire families for both imagined and real slights against him, and the mercilessness of Brandin, who not only killed all the women and children of a country, but used magic to make sure that "no one living could hear and then remember the name of that land."  The land, of course, is Tigana.

The good guys are smart and they're also good musicians.  Devin's Tigana ancestry is revealed by his father's decision to teach him a melody.  He is told that:
"Your father chose not to burden you or your brothers with the danger of your heritage, but he set a stamp upon you--a tune, wordless for safety--and he sent you out into the world with something that would reveal you, unmistakably, to anyone from Tigana, but to no one else."

Devin learns to appreciate a lesson taught by the prince of Tigana, who is going by the name of Alessan and traveling with him:
"There will be people put at risk by everything we do, the Prince had said."  This is a lesson that I think you do have to begin learning at 14 or 15, and one of the reasons that the last two videos we've watched at my house have been Charlie Wilson's War and The Three Kings.

So even though I'm too old to be reading Tigana, I'm enjoying it in a more detached, intellectual way.  I think the ideal reader for this book is a teenager who can identify with Devin or be immediately infatuated with him, or both.

Peas

It's easy to startle me. Come up behind me and say something, I'll leap six inches into the air. The other afternoon in the movie theater, when the characters on screen were in a haunted house, I knocked over my almost-empty drink cup. And if I get woken up by an alarm, I'm jumpy all day.

This morning I got woken up by the telephone. It's actually a cell phone, and it plays a gentle little melody, but nevertheless it made me sit up in bed, heart pounding, dreams rushing away from me.

It's a snow day here; we got four or five inches. I would have liked to sleep through more of it, but now here I am, very wide awake indeed, feeling like the titular peas in this poem by Michael David Madonick:

Some things don't want to be
uncovered. My son, in the morning
especially, doesn't want to be

uncovered. The egg, deep in its shell,
tight as the can of coffee, or
the milk, quiet in cardboard, or the chicken,

almost gone in the ice-box, they don't
want to be uncovered. They give you a hard
look, like you've caught them by

surprise, you've been rude when there
was no thought of being rude.
I remember how black sea bass would run

close to the shore at low
tide. Sometimes I would see them there,
through the water at my knees,

darting like comets after crabs or
smaller fish. They were fast.
I imagine if they bothered to look up,

they'd look like my son,
startled, unnerved, insulted by the fact
they were being watched,

simply observed. Sometimes when I open
a can of peas I think
about the universe, about the depth of

darkness, about whether if
the sky full of stars were turned back
like the top of a can, I'd

be angry, annoyed, or would someone
else, looking in
from the other side, complain.

Now I'm thinking of the Heinlein story "Goldfish bowl" and whether the bunny who is spending the winter in our dining room minds when we do have to get up for school and someone turns the light on, rather than letting the dawn illuminate his room slowly, the way he's used to from all his years outside.

Waking up to this much snow was a kind of rude awakening all by itself, I think. Did any of you have a rude awakening this morning?

Among Others

Saturday we took our non-necromancy show on the road and entertained ourselves in the city an hour away while Walker played three chess games on the first day of a tournament. He now plays at the "expert" level, which means there's less drama; he knows many of his competitors and more of the games end in a draw. So we left him to it. Eleanor and I got haircuts while Ron sat in a next-door coffeeshop, and then we had a fancy lunch at the restaurant next door on the other side (Eleanor had her favorite, brie and pear pizza). We went to see Gnomeo and Juliet, which was mildly amusing. Walker went out to dinner with us, and then we took him back for the evening game and headed for the place we always go when we've done everything else and need somewhere to hang out: the bookstore. We all found some books and settled in for a while. When the while was over, I discovered that I was totally hooked on the book I'd picked up to see if it was as good as I'd read over at Things Mean A Lot-- Among Others, by Jo Walton. I had to buy it and carry it with me on the long, moonlit road home and wait until the next day after I'd taken Walker back for the second day of the tournament until I could finish reading it.

The first-person narrator of Among Others is a young girl who reads a lot of the kind of poetry and science fiction and fantasy I read when I was her age. Throughout her story, she says what she thinks of this book and that, and--especially because we don't always agree--it's kind of like having a conversation about the kind of most-beloved books that live deepest and longest in your imagination, the kind that have provided you with the metaphors through which you've always seen the world, like thinking that huorns should be coming to help when you've finally had the courage to do the thing that will vanquish evil.

Among Others is, first and foremost, a book about books-- not a genre I often like, because it usually strikes me as somewhat artificial and precious. This book isn't like that, though; it's more like a Victorian children's book in which the children have read a lot of the same books you have and loved them for most of the same reasons. She reads and talks about J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Plato, Poul Anderson, Mary Renault, C.S. Lewis, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon, among others. And if you've read some of the same books she has, you know exactly what she means when she says that sometimes a person she knows "gives me the creeps. Who could help wanting to Impress a dragon in preference? Who wouldn't want to be Paul Atreides?"

At one point when the narrator has to make a choice between life and death, she chooses life simply because "I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out."

The book-loving theme is the main attraction of this book, and it has an ending more fulfilling and satisfying than any I could have imagined. There are huorns, finally, and a reference to Burnham Wood, and the narrator says she had tears in her eyes, and I definitely had them in mine. This is the line you want to get to in this book: "If you love books enough, books will love you back." I'm glad I hadn't read Jo Walton's "big idea" post over at Whatever before I read her book, but now that I have, I like what she says about this line.

The other thing this book is about is fairies. Yeah, but don't look at me like that. Again, it's more like a Victorian children's book where the fairies are treated matter-of-factly than the kind of thing you might be imagining. Part of what the book is about is magic. And that's one of the reasons why I'm not mentioning the narrator's name.

Let me try to give you some of the matter-of-fact flavor:
"One of the first questions they asked me was about what kind of car my father has....They couldn't believe I didn't know....It turns out it's a Bentley--I wrote and asked--which is an acceptable kind of car. But why do they care? They want me to be able to place everyone very precisely....
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic."

The narrator occasionally wrestles with the necessity for using magic:
"I think I ought to do something about the way the universe is unfolding, because there are things that need obvious and immediate attention, like the fact that the Russians and the Americans could blow the world to bits at any moment, and Dutch elm disease, and famine in Africa..."

And she thinks about the way magic works:
"I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn't exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming around the corner, it isn't as if I'd be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they're going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I'd have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn't have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that's just for a bus."

What I like best about the magic, besides her descriptions of what particular fairies look like, is the way she always wonders about what she's trying to do in the world: "was it all going to happen anyway and I only think the magic did it?"

There are people you meet who fall in step with you, like the friends the narrator meets in town who turn with her towards the bookshop because they're "bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop." Reading this book is like meeting friends like that. And the book is about people who know how books can be friends--reading it gave me the pleasure of seeing how this new friend--Walton's narrator-- first met many of my old friends, and the pleasure of adding her story to theirs.

This book is for anyone who loves reading, anyone who claps during a performance of Peter Pan, and anyone who has been a teenager.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What Harry Potter confection comes with a wizard card in every package?

Classics: What novel by Aldous Huxley shipwrecks reporter Will Farnaby in the faraway utopia of Pala?

Non-Fiction: What best-selling high-tech author described his fascination with spoon-bending and other psychic phenomena, in Travels?

Book Club: What novelist contrasts the marriages of two Bangladeshi sisters in her debut novel Brick Lane?

Authors: Who helped Zora Neale Hurston turn her short story "Mule Bone" into a play, before a rift caused it to go unpublished for 60 years?

Book Bag: What William Goldman book included the first chapter of its unpublished sequel, Buttercup's Baby, in its 25th anniversary edition?