The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

The back cover of my copy of The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets says "Eva Rice's novel is an utterly engrossing read, in the tradition of Nancy Mitford and I Capture the Castle".  Now I Capture the Castle was one of my favourite books of my teenage years and Nancy Mitford is just...well words don't describe how amazing I think Nancy is.  I mean talk about a publisher setting expectations high, for this was the description from the publisher rather than a quote from a reader.

Although I might not agree with the description 100%, I do get where it's coming from.  The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is about upper class people who are simply marvellous darling, some of whom live in a decaying house in the 1950s which doesn't sound too far from the plot of a Smith or Mitford novel.  The story is told by Penelope Wallace, a young student, and starts when a chance meeting with Charlotte turns into a firm friendship which changes Penelope's life.  Charlotte introduces Penelope to her cousin Harry who is hopelessly in love with the engaged American Marina and much of the plot involves Penelope helping Harry to make Marina jealous.  We are also introduced to Penelope's family, her young, beautiful and widowed mother Talitha and her brother Inigo who has hopes of making it in the music business. 

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is a great book.  Yes, it's "in the tradition of Nancy Mitford" but I don't think it's as good as The Pursuit of Love because it's just not as funny (I would never normally bring something like that up but the publisher did so I feel like I should address it, you can't throw around comparisons to Nancy lightly).  It's absolutely got all the things you want from a romance novel about the upper classes in the 50s, it's got characters that I care about, decadent parties with beautiful people and stuff happening that I could never imagine happening in my own life and that's what I really want from a book like this. 

If you like books set in a different era, before people had mobiles and the internet but did have telephones and record players, then this is a book for you.  If you're looking for a novel that has a silly, romantic teenager as the heroine but isn't in the YA genre then this could be just your cup of tea.

One sentence back cover quote

A delicious novel full of romance and 'beautiful people'

Buy The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets at Waterstones

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Sometimes I have a good ol' Amazon blitz.  I look through all the reviews, pick out some books I quite fancy reading, and then I order them from the library.  Ordering books from the library is brilliant because there is no pressure.  If I hate a book after 20 pages then I can just throw it to the side and pick up another one, just as I did the other week as I'm sorry but I can not read a book about someone who makes a scrapbook about vintage teacups for her wedding because if I knew that person in real life, I'd throw fruit at them.  It was thanks to this Amazon and library method that I got my hands on The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

The Lit & Pie Soc is written in epistolary form, hey look at me using a fancy word that basically just means the book is a collection of ficticious letters, and is set in the aftermath of the second world war.  It focuses on Juliet Ashton, a writer living in London, who receives a letter from one of the members of the eponymous Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and so begins her fascination with the club.

Guernsey was actually invaded by the Germans during the second world war and so Juliet learns all about life under their rule, first from Dawsey Adams and then from other members of the group.  As she learns more Juliet becomes mesmerised with their story so that it takes up more of her thoughts than her real life does.

The Lit & Pie Soc is a nice book.  It moves along, things happen, there are a couple of twists, but, for me, it never really elevated itself to being a great book, despite the initial promise.  I certianly learnt a lot, and not in a lecture-y 'let me tell you everything I can about the war' way but in a very natural way.  I suppose my biggest concern was that the London lot were made to sound positively fantastic and frightfully clever darling and the gang on Guernsey, at times, came across as quite simple.

I felt like it had promise at the beginning, I like books that are letters and I used to love books about WWII so it had things going for it, but it didn't surprise me and was just a nice, standard, formulaic book with some of the characters morphing into each other.

If you're looking for something that's a bit different, that rocks the boat, that makes you think, then this isn't the book for you.  If you know what you like and you like a love story with a couple of twists but nothing too drastic then I'd suggest you should maybe think about getting this out of your local library.

One sentence back cover quote

OK, formulaic love story that lacks spark

Buy The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society from Waterstones

Bridget Jones is back: Manc Lit Fest with Helen Fielding

I'm an idiot who forgot to bring a camera so
this cover will have to do

Last Thursday was Super Thursday, a day when publishers push out all the books they hope (fingers crossed, make a birthday wish) will be Christmas bestsellers.  There were autobiographies galore - Jennifer Saunders, Mo Farah, Harry Redknapp, Andrew Strauss, Sharon Osborne - and cookbooks from Rachel Khoo and Lorraine Pascale but all anyone could talk about in the lead up to Super Thursday was our favourite granny pants wearing lady, Bridget Jones.

I was lucky enough to see Helen Fielding on one of her promotional stops, at the Manchester Literature Festival, talking all about the world of Bridget.  The stage of the Royal Exchange was still set for their current production of All My Sons and Fielding, along with Miranda Sawyer who was "in conversation with her" (hey, that's the way they word it on the website), was sat on the front porch, chatting in front of a packed out crowd.

Fielding told us that she was quite surprised by all the uproar surrounding the fact that she'd killed off Mark Darcy, she couldn't believe that she was sat in her pyjamas watching the news where they were reporting on the crisis in Syria and then the death of Mark Darcy suddenly popped up.  It was also weird for her to see her own face staring up at her from the front page of the newspaper all because she'd killed off a fictional character, especially as she used to be a freelance journalist who had to follow up with The Guardian to make sure that they had got her article on car alarms.

Sawyer asked Fielding about the killing off of Darcy and Fielding told us how she had wanted to tell Colin Firth about it in person but they'd not found time to meet up and so she had to phone him up and make sure that he was sitting down so she could tell him of the death of this person who has never even existed.

Another reason that Bridget had been in the news recently was because of the publishing error that meant that 40 pages of David Jason's autobiography had found their way into some copies of Bridget Jones.  Did Fielding mind?  Did she heck, she thought it was "perfectly Bridget" and hopes to get her hands on some of the copies.  She thought the whole thing was funny and hoped that no one got into trouble for the mistake.

Had she based the character of Daniel Cleaver on anyone?  Well the characters in the book are often based on bits of various different people although she did divulge that one of the characters was named after a real life person.  Mr Wallaker in the book was actually named after a real life Mr Wallaker at Fielding's son's school.  The surname was just so perfect that Fielding used it as a placeholder name for the character and tried to come up with another, equally appropriate surname (Mr Walloper etc) but nothing seemed to fit.  By the time she was two weeks away from the deadline, Fielding decided that she had to phone up the headmaster of the school to check that it was OK to go ahead with the name.  The head thought it was hilarious and didn't see a problem with it but thought that she should check with Mr Wallaker himself and so Fielding put a call through.  The real Mr Wallaker was bug hunting in the New Forest when he got the call and also thought that it was excellent, he didn't mind one bit, and so Mr Wallaker it remained.

Some more questions from the audience also provided some interesting information.  One lady had lived in the same halls at uni as Fielding (St Anne's College, Oxford) and remembered her acting performances including her Marlene Dietrich.  Would Fielding ever consider acting, she was so funny (the audience was constantly laughing during this talk) and we often see that there aren't enough funny women on our screens?  Fielding, sadly, would not.  She remembered that she used to get given parts in the University Revues which would then gradually be taken away from her until all she ended up with was the role of mute milkmaid.  She'd much rather write than act.

"How did you feel about some of the negative reaction towards Bridget Jones and do you feel protective of her?" asked one of my fellow festival attendees.  Fielding told us that she did feel protective of Bridget and that she couldn't believe some of the comments, especially given that the characters are all essentially kind people.  People can be mean about Bridget but she's someone who is nice and is kind to her friends and Fielding obviously feels that's important.  She also told us that, as a general rule, she doesn't like conflict and so has found it hard to write dramas in the past. 

And then there was probably my favourite question.  What sort of books did Helen Fielding like to read herself?  I loved this question because it tells you a lot about someone.  What does the person whose books you like reading like to read themselves?  And the answer is that Fielding (who read English at university) mainly likes to read 19th Century novels.  She likes to read novels from before there was such a great split between literary and popular fiction, novelists such as Thomas Hardy, Charles Dicken and Edith Wharton, and of course she loves Jane Austen.

And then our time was up (Fielding obviously said a lot more, but my brain's only so big and I can't remember it all).  Fielding made her way outside the theatre where a stand had been set up for her to sign copies of her books and the queue of audience members snaked its way round to almost the other side of the circular theatre whilst Royal Exchange staff prepared for their next event, a talk with Roddy Doyle.  I'll post a review once I've finished the book but if you've beaten me to it, let me know what you think.  Did you attend the talk?  Or any other Manchester Literature Festival events? 

Buy Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy at Waterstones

Check out the Manchester Literature Festival

Check out the Royal Exchange

The Rehearsal

I popped a copy of The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton onto the desk at Waterstones (because I like to shop in physical bookshops, I'm mad like that) and the girl behind the desk asked me if I'd been looking for Catton's "new one". 

"Oh no, just this one" I replied

"Oh right, just because her other one (The Luminaries) has been Booker Shortlisted and so we've sold out of it"

This is why authors, editors, publishers, other people whose job title ends in 'or/er' laugh themselves silly when their book gets nominated for an award.  People gobble the book up in their droves or the name of the author sticks in their head so that they give their other stuff a go.  Basically, nomination = £££

But how ugly to talk about money on a book blog, I'm sorry, how terribly vulgar of me.  Let's get down to the book itself.  The Rehearsal wasn't nominated for a Booker prize but it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the Betty Trask Award and has so many lovely quotes written on it, it looks like a physical manifestation of Tumblr.

The main focus of the novel is a high school sex scandal and the fall-out from it.  It follows two different paths, one mainly looks at Isolde, the sister of the girl involved in the scandal and her saxophone lessons and her teacher, known simply as 'the saxophone teacher' which is very Piggy in Lord of the Flies.  The other looks at Stanley, who is auditioning for drama school.  Each chapter swaps both the narrative and the tense over, though I have to admit I didn't notice the tense thing until chapter eleven (whoops).  This helps to give the novel a jarring feeling, something I definitely did notice.

The Rehearsal is...weird, but in a good way.  In Isolde's chapters it's hard to tell what's real and what's not.  Which are the things that have been said and done and which are those that the characters imagine or fantasise.  I still don't really know whether some bits were real but I'm OK with that, even though I normally like things to be pretty definitive.

The saxophone teacher's point of view makes you think the hardest.  She sees everybody as playing a part, I guess in a kind of 'All the world's a stage' way, and she imagines what everybody else would be like in different roles.  So, using Hollywood as an example, what would Jennifer Aniston be like playing the role of Angelina Jolie?  What would you look like in the role of your best mate?  How would you play it?

The Rehearsal is not like anything else I've read.  It doesn't follow a formula, it makes you guess, it gives you a little bit and then moves back in time to show you the beginning.  It lets you in on things that might not even have happened and reading it never felt like a chore.  It's a good job Catton was nominated for the Booker or I might never have picked it up.

One sentence back cover quote

An unpredictable treat

Buy The Rehearsal at Waterstones

O Claudia Winkleman, please write another column

Claudia Winkleman's a swell dame.  She's smart, funny, self deprecating and just all round awesome.  But did you also know that as well as being a marvellous presenter she used to write a weekly column for The Independent?  What, you didn't.  Well then pull up a chair and let me prattle on about it.

It's for things like this that I love the internet.  I never came across Claudia's column Take It From Me whilst it was being published, it's only in the years afterwards when trawling the webnets looking for extremely useful stuff (read: procrastinating) that I came across the articles.

Claudia wrote the column between 2006 and 2008 and it's a mixture of personal and topical so you can have a good old laugh at how we were back in the mid-late 00s.  There's the obligatory explaining what Facebook is and why it's so good column, there's the one where Claudia talks about how crocs are stupid and if it was all about comfort we'd be walking round wearing adult babygros (haha, as if.  Oh wait....) and there are the columns about things which are more general and less rooted in the time they were written in.  All you really need to know, though, is that the columns are a right old hoot, they're hilarious.  It's hard to write funny but Claude pulls it off with aplomb.

The articles are so good that I have been tempted to print them out so that I can read them away from a computer screen but I'm lazy, printing 70ish columns is a little bit of a hassle and ink is pretty darn expensive (we obviously need to breed more octopuses).  Instead I just remember their existence every year and spend hours clicking through the links and re-reading them.  The Independent are missing a trick not publishing the articles as a book as, despite the fact they're 5-7 years old, I'm sure people would gobble them up.

If only Claudia was still writing columns.  I would buy a paper just to read her 700 or so words.  I know that she's a busy lady with all her presenting gigs and being a mum of three but there's just no one else who writes like her.  If you've never read any of her articles then you've got a delicious treat instore and if anyone's got some other great columnists to recommend then I'm all ears, eyes, knees and toes. 

Read all of Claudia's Take It From Me columns at The Independent

Follow her on Twitter

Listen to her Radio 2 Arts Show

Image via Sjoerd ten Kate on Flickr

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