Mini Reviews

Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden

This old Rumer Godden title from the 50s was a secondhand shop discovery. It's about a single mother named Sophie who takes her two young kids to live in Kashmir, India. Sophie is idealistic and rosy eyed about living like peasants. She glorifies being poor and has a heavy-handed approach, assuming she can just lob there and fling on another culture like a change of clothes. Her young caretaker, Nabir Dar, often bears the brunt of her naivety.

Sophie reminds me of some hardcore fellow homeschooling parents I met over the years. She thinks she's providing her children an awesome, hands-on unit lesson lifestyle, but she's a source of stress to her young daughter, Teresa, who is a practical little worry-wort.

Sophie sees herself as sparing and aesthetic while her neighbors think she's lavish and fancy. And she falls into the error of assuming her western ways are superior and trying to foist them on everyone else. She even unwittingly becomes a quack, setting up her own herbal distillery. I couldn't help but imagine her speaking in an annoying, know-it-all voice.

The action builds up to a climax, possibly inevitable with two clashing outlooks. Godden herself lived in India for many years from her childhood and understood both sides if anyone could. Her bottom line is that some people can't bend out of their shape and trying to do so for the sake of pleasing other people to fit in never does anyone any good.

'Be true to yourself,' may sound like a trite, overused theme, but Godden really threshes it out and makes us think.

Are you a fan of this 20th century British author? Have you come across this title? I never had. She was a prolific author. Not one of her best known, but I doubt she wrote anything bad.

🌟🌟🌟½

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Who's for some sci-fi time travel set in the Victorian era?

I hadn't heard of Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Connie Willis before. But my friend and fellow creative writing student Brian lent me this book, and it was compelling and hilarious.

The hero Ned Henry is a time-travelling Oxford student who's part of a team attempting to reconstruct the Coventry Cathedral, which was blitzed in WW2. He's sent to track down a crucial artifact from the Victorian era, and suffers the age-old time travel dilemma of potentially stuffing up circumstances to create major incongruities.

I love it that two animal character, Cyril the bulldog and Princess Arjumand the cat, have pivotal roles. And woven through is a comforting notion that circumstances have a way of veering back on track themselves, despite clueless blunders by visitors from the future.

Ned has a fun encounter with Jerome K Jerome and Co. while they're actually living their adventures later recorded in The Men in a Boat. Connie Willis is full of historical detail and must have an almanac for a mind.

Unlike many other readers, I think the hideous Bishop's Bird Stump, at the heart of the tale, sounds quite cool. Call me tacky but there you have it. Those over-detailed, mawkish Victorian relics from the past are quite endearing. The monstrosities to which it's compared (Prince Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station) are fine, come on!

Lucky for Ned, the idyllic Victorian era he finds himself in is not that which is represented in Dickens poverty ridden sections of seamy London. It includes, 'long dreamy afternoons boating on the Thames and playing croquet on Emerald lawns with girls in white frocks and fluttering hair ribbons. And tea served under willow trees by bowing butlers anxious to cater to one's every whim.'

Have you read any Connie Willis? Are you fascinated by the Victorian era as I am?

🌟🌟🌟🌟

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

'To have pens and pencils, and the tools of writing all your own, to see and feel them in your fingers ready to do anything you tell them, such is pleasure indeed. God bless the craftsmen who give their fellow men such feelings, even out of pieces of wood.'

I found this old book at a secondhand shop. It was published in 1939 and became the bestselling fiction tile of 1940 throughout America and probably the rest of the world. People just couldn't get enough of it. Having now read it, it is a pretty special story.

It's a tale of coal miners living in a remote Welsh community, narrated by a smart boy named Huw Morgan (pronounced Hugh). He says so many appreciative, philosophical nerdy comments without ever once feeling ashamed or apologetic before his peers. ('A good friend of mine is a cup of tea indeed.') And he never big-notes himself, yet his personal narrative still has the effect of making us cheer him on, 'Yeah, you go, boy.' 

His was a background of unrest, union strikes, and harsh local justice delivered at the hands of Mr Gruffyd, the pastor, with his 'eye for an eye' logic. And it's worth reading just for the hilarious discussion about the birds and the bees between Gruffyd and Huw, who genuinely has no idea. It's so cringeworthy and hilarious. (And he figures it out on his own soon enough.)

All through, the singing seems to soar out of the pages as the gift from God it probably was.

Here's one more reflection from Huw, after unfair corporal punishment at school. 'Pain is a good cleanser of the mind and therefore of the sight. Matters which seem to mean the world in health are found to be of no import when pain is hard upon you.'

Have you read, How Green was my Valley?

🌟🌟🌟🌟½

The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

'A room takes the stamp of its owner as helplessly and surely as soft wax.'

Although ours is more of a rosemary pot and nothing as lavish as a tree, it's lovely and fragrant ☺️

I've just finished this next Elizabeth Goudge novel from my shelf. This one is a post-war village tale set in the 1950s and featuring many characters. They include Michael, a former bestselling author of horror stories who has served a jail term; John, the self-deprecating pastor and Daphne, his restless wife who hardly knows what she's seeking.

Goudge writes weirdly, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. She has introspection in the strangest places, info-dumps of backstory galore, head-hopping like rabbits and meditations that come across as gross overreactions. I doubt anybody would write like this anymore because it upsets too many literary conventions, aka sacred cows. Yet there's just something special about it.

Hers are sacramental, mystical sorts of novels and I'll keep reading them even though they're surely not everyone's cup of tea, or even mine in the wrong mood.

However, if you have a commonplace book to fill with quotes, her novels are just the thing to fill them thick and fast. I expected more thoughts to ponder and she didn't let me down.

Have you a favourite Elizabeth Goudge novel? I think mine is still The White Witch so far.

🌟🌟🌟½