Lines in Books

Three books, The Wine Widow , The Champagne Girls , and The Last Heiress tell the tale of how women have always been the mainstay of a Champagne dynasty. They leave an impression not of grandeur but of fragility: the vines are fragile, and lives even more so. Standing up for one's beliefs can have unspeakable costs and there is only so much money can do to protect one from war, from disease, from all of life's vagaries.

Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making … You learned to ration your commitment to them. In Regeneration , Book 1 , after objecting to the failure to negotiate peace with Germany, the poet Siegfried Sassoon finds himself in a mental health institution (instead of prison, thanks to his friend Robert Graves), where he encounters Dr Rivers who treats patients affected by shell shock.  Being a Victorian taught that men must be strong, Rivers' gentle methods based on talk therapy, the interpretation of dreams, & having men accept fragility requires him to 'excavate the ground he stands on' & are in stark contrast to other methods such as electric shock therapy. It is at the hospital that Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen whose work he was to influence. Owen, of course, was soon killed in action at the age of 25. The novel also introduces a fictional character: Billy Prior, an officer with working class origins who arrives at the hospital mute. The Eye ...

'In the hour of shipwreck and darkness, somebody will save you...' The title drawn from a Neruda poem, this meditation on the freedom exile can bring but which wealth may not, on the consequences of the choices we make and those which are made for us, on the violence that lives just beneath the respectable everyday, explores life in Chile through a disparate cast of characters: the daughter of an exile who has returned — the mermaid, a Scottish academic writing about Chile's violent past and present, an activist who takes avoidable risks, and an aging aristocrat who has claimed as his son the child of a woman he cared for after she was raped and tortured, amongst others.

“I know what it is to watch my child fall from my body at the hands of a man. And while my story is terrible, every woman has faced a man’s wickedness to some degree. Even you.” A woman with an interest in history, whose husband has been unfaithful to her, goes mudlarking in London, and finds an apothecary's vial. This sets her off on a quest to discover the origins of the vial. Although time has shrouded some of the details, she learns that it came from the well-hidden shop of a woman apothecary who was spurred to provide other women concoctions that would help rid them of the abusive men in their lives, after she herself had been mistreated, at a time when women had few escape routes available to them. However, both the mudlarker and the apothecary decide to change course: the former decides to prioritize herself after her husband drinks eucalyptus oil in an attempt to gain her sympathy while the latter gives up dispensing poisons and chooses to honour the legacy of her mother fr...

As the deaths went on and on, and people buried their relatives, neighbors, friends, customers, and employees, the constant horror seemed to brutalize many of them, until no violence or cruelty seemed shocking. People who thought they were about to die lost all restraint and followed their impulses, regardless of the consequences.  Church politics in a fast-changing society and the human fall out of the Black Death in England. Wave after wave of death... In many ways, entirely different from the current CoVID-19 pandemic. In others, eerily similar.

'A person who breaks a promise diminishes herself. It’s like losing a finger. It’s worse than being paralysed, which is merely physical. Someone whose promises are worthless has a disabled soul.'   The trilogy describes the three main wars of the twentieth century. Book 1 , Fall of Giants , is about great powers falling: not just empires but also patriarchy; women began to win the vote in the early 20th century. However, WWI and how the collective guilt that led to it was somehow all funneled on to Germany once the war was done dominates the tale. Who knows? Minus the vicious retribution which the victors exacted, there may never have been created the situation which led to WWII. Book 2 , Winter of the World delves into plans for peace, the failure of the League of Nations, the fiasco that was WWII, the compromises made to ensure the survival of a nascent UN, and the many arguments used to support or fight various ideologies.  The thread of the Russian Revolution runs through...

So that the mines were worked, and their profits made, it did not matter for the rest. They were used to casualties, so well used to them in fact, that unless a fearful loss of life occurred, they were not alarmed or even roused. As to the injuries done to a man's health, and so on—they had not time to inquire into such things. There was danger in all trades, for the matter of that. An engineer at a coal mine falls in love with a pit girl, and ultimately manages to persuade her to marry him. The girl herself is level-headed and does what she believes to be right, standing aloof from most others and having the courage to take unpopular paths. Despite looking at the world through a decidedly moralistic and privileged lens, the author deals with issues of women's rights, class discrimination, socially mobility, and labour rights all within the framework of a romance. Her writing is as engaging as ever although her very liberal use of dialect makes the work somewhat hard to read. 

I had wavered between their worlds and their truths, and had found that just as I declared my loyalty, the truth had shifted, and the world had changed. I have always been uncomfortable in my own skin, as if I was wearing a hair shirt made to somebody else's measurements. I stopped at every moral crossroads, paralysed, unable to choose.   A woman from a Devadasi family marries a Brahmin man: The Undoing Dance, which draws from the author learning from Kittappa Pillai , tells the tale of worlds in flux, of what it means to embody one's art, & of how change tears down as much as it builds up.

'I don't know if you have achieved name and fame, tai, but your music has definitely reached the gods.' A woman writes of learning music from Dhondutai Kulkarni, a classical musician who, despite her prodigious talent, never quite became as well known as she might have become perhaps, in part, because she was devoted and uncompromising when she came to her art, not watering it down to suit audience sensibilities.

The lady broke away from them, but in her headlong flight she missed her footing and tumbled straight over the parapet's edge, plummeting to her death in the yard below, her cloak billowing out as she fell, like the wings and the plumage of an exotic scarlet and black bird of paradise.   (Phineas Fox #4) A singer receives three unpublished pieces of music by Liszt after his death and uses one of them as a snatch of music that women might be able to use to warn each other of Jack the Ripper being in the area, and teaches the music along with lyrics to the community at local pubs along with a young woman who works for her. The woman's father was abusive, and after his daughter fails to kill him, the singer arranges for him to be locked up in an asylum, the same asylum in which Jack the Ripper is detained. The asylum, a tunnel house from which inmates never emerge, burns down letting out both the abusive father and the serial killer. The singer is believed to have murdered the kil...

A good researcher should be able to plumb the depths of all kinds of darknesses and remain objective. Especially when his bank balance is dwindling with alarming rapidity...   (Phineas Fox Mystery #1)   A tramp runs on to a road as he tries to escape a priest whom he has just seen rape a young girl; he doesn't know it but she is the priests cousin. A car carrying a father and a daughter swerves to avoid him but still hits him; the girl burns to death and it is believed that the other person who dies is her father except that it isn't: it's the tramp. The father loses his memory and so too, later on, does the girl who was raped. No-one knows who the man is so he adopts a name he sees on a gravestone which happens to be the true name of the son of a Russian man who had been set up and sentenced to die for his alleged role in killing the tsar. Both the girl and the man ultimately regain their memories; he is reunited with his wife while she is forced into a confrontatio...

They never tell you, those poets and those lovers, that hatred and agony can take on solid substance on a green and gold spring morning, or that it can smell of newly-fried bacon and eggs. (Nell West/Michael Flint #1)  A young girl sees her mother being murdered without quite realising who has committed the murder: her father. She thinks it is an intruder, a clockmaker, while her father, thinking that both the clockmaker and she herself know what he's done sets out to neutralise them; he places his daughter in an asylum and kills the clockmaker. The latter's corpse is found decades later and, in the intervening years, he's wandered the area as a ghost looking for the girl and trying to protect her. She doesn't know what he's doing though and, while she lives, she lives in fear of him.

As with any good weather, there was always more rain on the other side. A woman self-destructs with alcohol and men who are always around to push her further down. Despite occasional sobriety, she loses two of her children who escape her and live their own lives as far away as they can, while the third, a young boy, stands by her till the day she dies. His brother comes back to arrange the cremation; council funding doesn't stretch to a burial, and there seem to be no sad faces at the funeral after which the boy, by then a teenager who being gay has never quite fit in anywhere, is left to fend for himself though, thankfully, he does at least seem to have found friendship in the person of a girl about his age.  It's a bleak novel but it's also realistic, and the hope it offers doesn't feel false.

No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.  An overlooked woman artist married to an art dealer who did not help her career exhibits a series of her works after his death through male artists whom she uses as masks although, of course, they are neither husks nor silent, and all their voices put together reconstruct her life posthumously. The woman's own voice is energetic and erudite often verging on the frenetic as she rages against gender discrimination, and the experience of engaging with her life is like looking through a kaleidoscope while listening to polyphony that sometimes descends into cacophony simply because that is what life often is: messy, disjointed, unrelenting, and utterly exhausting.

He noticed, as he flicked through the pages of his judgment, that the handwriting, especially when he wrote something quickly, had become exactly the same as his father's, a set of round squiggles, indecipherable to most others. Through the story of a High Court judge, The Heather Blazing explores how we are all rooted to our pasts: the places and persons we once knew, and how we grow into them not just by acclimatising ourselves to them but by actually becoming them…  The judge treats the Constitution as his sacred text by middle age, and he has no firm convictions about morality which is, perhaps, as it should be. Although through all that he professes, it's impossible not to see his past — his upbringing — creep into his present, and to see that the patterns in his life keep repeating themselves. Tóibín's novel, however, is at its most familiar and its most heartbreaking when it speaks of the weeks following the judge becoming a widower — how many of us have not wanted t...

She makes her way through the high book- shelves to the staircase, and up the stairs. In daylight, this is her territory – her hunting ground, where everything she could possibly need hides in an index or a footnote – but after the clock strikes midnight she's glad to leave with the last scholars, while the bleary-eyed attendant extinguishes the lamps. No one has been allowed here alone since the London Library was destroyed: but even if she could, she wouldn't. On bad days it's too easy to imagine losing control, dropping a match, and the dance of flame- shadows on the plaster ceiling… A girl makes her way in a man's world by masquerading as a man, a boy to whom nothing but winning matters ultimately learns that principles matter and that there are compromises which even he cannot make, and the two of them together, as adults, are forced to acknowledge love and good intentions are not enough to make for happiness in the world, their own or anyone else's — all this ...

All we can hope for is that sometimes our actions produce the results we intend. But what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. Still, there is nothing more sacred than the labour of being. Through the tale of how a devadasi's body came to be found in a well in Tanjore, Gitanjali Kolanad brings alive the milieu in which she lived. A Devadasi may have had more autonomy than many a housewife but hers was a freedom hard to envy as it also made her susceptible to exploitation. By the 1920s, in which Girl Made of Gold  is set, there were attempts to outlaw the devadasi practice although, as the novel alludes to in passing, there were no alternative arrangements made for the women who were devadasis and they were left to fend for themselves neither entirely free in the emerging world nor entirely free of the old world.

The past and the future are just different presents — a present memory and a present hope — and both are equally out of our grasp. It is our experiences in the moment which hold meaning for us and make us who we are. Life is about the now. Whoever we are, we are now. Some members of an ancient order of druids weave back and forth through time via trees which they can read, their passion to protect nature although they themselves lead full lives filled with love and camaraderie.

 'I know a place in the hills,' he had written in one of her favourite bits in the book in her father's study, 'where the gods walk the earth. A place where each life you encounter the emerald lizard, the drop-eared goat, the wheeling hawk – regards you silently, without fear For here you are scarcely more than they, in the face of a greater power.' Two love stories two millennia apart, one doomed: that of a poet-soldier in Roman Empire, the other of an archaeologist determined to learn the identity of the woman he loved so that, in the afterlife, they may be re-united. 

To be loved is craved, sought out and prized, then fiercely protected. This basic human instinct is at the root of the problem, where foolishness begins. A woman is drawn into a relationship with an abusive man who gets into human trafficking and ultimately tries to kill her. Thankfully, her family supports her although some friends drift away... She tells her tale many years after the relationship itself with the benefit of hindsight.