The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

This is not the cover I have... but look how pretty!

'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' is a rare book. Perhaps its feeling of rarity is underpinned by the fact that it is the first and last book by Mary Ann Shaffer who sadly passed away before the manuscript was completely finished. (It was completed by her niece, Annie Barrows, who is listed as the co-author of the book.) I read this book as one of those rare treasures- the kind that you can't wait to tear through but that you also can't bear to finish. When I turned over the last page I went back to the first without hesitation and read the book for a second time laughing, crying, and generally feeling that I was in the warming company of good friends. This is an epistolary novel which I thought at first would put me off as it is not my favourite format, but here it is treated perfectly and displays how, sensitively handled, there can be no better way for a writer to truly embody a cast of different characters. I believed in them all utterly. I was completely distraught when I had to leave them.
The book is the correspondence between Juliet Ashton (lovely, lovely character) and a peculiar mixture of individuals who make up a literary society in recently occupied Guernsey. It is extraordinary how cleverly the plot and characterisation are embedded in these letters. If you want an example of 'show don't tell' in writing then this is it. There is something elegant and understated about this quiet book which charmed me completely. When I had finished (for the second time) I pressed the book into Paul's hands with an urgent request to put down what he was reading right now, NOW, and read this because I needed to share it, I needed to talk about it. I think I needed him to make friends with it in that way we have when we press our favourite books onto loved ones. And he did. He loved it too, and we talked and laughed about characters like Isola and Sidney (best of all Isola and Sidney together) like we knew them. I then gave a copy to my mum and talked it up so much to her that I was afraid she would be disappointed. She wasn't, SHE loved it, and when she finished it she took it over to my Nan. When I saw my Nan a couple of weeks ago I asked her what she thought. No surprise, she loved it too, but what was a surprise was that she had had cousins living in occupied Guernsey, right there where the book is set, and she told us about their big house there and how there was a working well actually inside it, and all about her cousins, and what I'm trying to say is that this book was the gift that KEPT ON GIVING. I think it's so special when a book does this, when it brings people together and uncovers thoughts and stories that you might not otherwise hear. This is why my job is the best, why English degrees are the best, because what could be better than sitting and talking about the shared experience of a book read?  'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' is something that I have shared, that I have carried around with me ever since. Now, I hope you will read it, or share it, or talk about it, and I hope all this talking it up won't disappoint you.

Just Poetry- Mary Oliver

As I am writing this Lauren Laverne is on Radio 6 asking people to help create an autumn themed playlist. I am working at my desk wrapped up in a cardigan. Outside it is bright and sunny but there is a definite chill in the air. To paraphrase Ned Stark... Autumn is coming. Which is wonderful. I love the autumn. I love back to school and new post it notes and pencil sharpenings. I love it when the leaves start to change. I love snuggling under blankets with a cup of tea and a book, I love scarves and pink cheeks and cold fingers, and hot chocolate. Most of all I love the feeling of 'fresh start' that autumn brings. I wonder if it is because I am so immersed in 'school life' that the start of the academic year always feels like a clean slate to me. I am excited about what this year has to offer.

This poem is one of my favourites. It's right at the top of the list. And to me, this poem feels like autumn. I don't know why. I'm not sure if it's because I first read it in a crisp Tennessee autumn (the most beautiful I have ever seen) or because subconsciously I knew that autumn is when all the wild geese turn up in the UK. (It's true! I just looked it up here. Isn't it strange the things you don't know you know.) This morning I felt a real need to sit down and read it, and it felt good, and warm, and comforting.

Wild Geese

By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

And, if you can handle any more loveliness:

Happy autumn. 

Much Ado

My not brilliant picture of the actually brilliant set.

Just a quick post. We went to see this brilliant RSC production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon on Monday. When Paul and I first met we bonded over our shared love of the play and of the Kenneth Branagh/ Emma Thompson film version, so it seemed like such a good sign that our first Stratford theatre experience after moving up here would be a play so special to both of us. We were not disappointed.  Never before had it occurred to me that the plot leant itself so brilliantly to a slice of Bollywood. Paul Bhatacharjee and Meera Syal as Benedick and Beatrice were wonderful- she had me in tears (both kinds). The rest of the cast were great too, even the Dogberry scenes which I have never liked before were perfect, and the music... the music was amazing. You could see everyone wiggling around in their seats because the whole atmosphere was so infectious. I really enjoyed seeing such a fresh interpretation, the way that the dialogue stood up so well to such a creative rendering is testament to the timelessness of the play, to the flexibility and immense possibility ever present in language. Funny, moving, truly joyful, if you can catch it then I would highly recommend doing so. Here is a trailer that gives you a little taste of things:

Mr Gum... and Elizabeth Bowen

"summer was almost at an end and the day stretched out long and lazy like a huge glossy panther made of time"- Andy Stanton, Mr Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire

When Paul's niece and nephew came to stay with us last week we spent two evenings with all four of us propped up on the spare bed laughing like drains and taking it in turns to read Mr Gum and the Biscuit Billionaire by Andy Stanton. What a joyful experience it is to read aloud like this, and one which I don't get to do often enough. The Mr Gum books are a particularly wonderful example of this pleasure because they mix an offbeat sense of humour with a sort of madcap poetry. The quote above was right at the start of the book and I found myself turning it over in my mind for days afterwards. It's just so...pleasing. As an image, as a sound, as a celebration of language. And it was in a children's book. I have a real passion for children's literature both because I was an avid reader as a child and because as an adult I still find a very specific kind of imaginative escapism may only be found in reading children's books. It is because of this love of children's literature that I found myself running a children's bookshop for a while, and why I have taken care to carve out a space for children's literature in my thesis. 

It is funny how these things come about in research, how every so often you will read something that stays with you and somehow shapes what comes after it in your work. This happened for me when I read Elizabeth Bowen's essay 'Out of a Book' while researching my MA dissertation. I knew even as I was reading it that I was changing, that some chord had been struck. I read with a gleam of recognition, of words that made manifest half thoughts that my brain hadn't been able to verbalise. Any reader will know this feeling and when it happens it is such a moment of elation... a moment in which a text and an author become a friend and kindred spirit.

Elizabeth Bowen

"I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experience, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

Reduced to the minimum, to the what did happen, my life would be unrecognizable by me. Those layers of fictitious memory densify as they go deeper down. And this surely must be the case with everyone else who reads deeply, ravenously, unthinkingly, sensuously, as a child."

"The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child. I mean that, admittedly, the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind. At any age, the reader must come across: the child reader is the most eager and quick to do so; he not only lends to the story, he flings into the story the whole of his sensuous experience which from being limited is the more intense. Book dishes draw saliva to the mouth; book fears raise gooseflesh and make the palms clammy; book suspense makes the cheeks burn and the heart thump. Still more, at the very touch of a phrase there is a surge of brilliant visual images: the child rushes up the scenery for the story." -Elizabeth Bowen, 'Out of a Book' in The Mulberry Tree

This is what I meant earlier when I talked about that specific escapism to be found in children's books. It is because for me they hold the echo of those periods of childhood reading, of trembling hands pressed to pink cheeks and heart thudding excitement and physical sensation born of a total immersion in the other world and other life on offer between the pages of a book. Andy Stanton's 'huge glossy panther made of time' is one of those phrases Bowen speaks of, one whose very touch creates a surge of brilliant visual images, and it is because this image called out the child reader in me that it has remained in my mind long after the book itself has been put away.