Book #25 Pyotr Tchaikovsky: Critical Lives

Pyotr Tchaikovsky by Philip Ross Bullock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am very fond of much of the music composed by Tchaikovsky. The ballet suites Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker all contain beautiful melodies. There is melancholia too in his work. Who is not moved by the 2nd movement of the String Quartet No.1, the requiem like Symphony No.6 Pathétique or the soaring Romeo & Juliet Fantasy?

This account of Tchaikovsky’s life by Philip Ross Bullock, Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford is just one of the series Critical Lives published by Reaktion Books. Bullock draws extensively on the composer’s uncensored letters and diaries and explores Tchaikovsky’s central place within the artistic culture of nineteenth-century Russia. The composer was recognised as a figure of international renown.

Nadezhda von Meck was the wealthy widow of a railway magnate and became an influential patron to Tchaikovsky for many years. Much of his income came from her. Astonishing then that they never met, although they exchanged hundreds of letters. It came as a shock then, when in 1890 she suddenly withdrew her patronage following what appeared to be her own financial ruin.

It was well known amongst members of his family and his peers and associates that Tchaikovsky was homosexual and naively confessional. He yearned for a quiet life and found the social obligations that fame entailed - burdensome. His marriage ‘of convenience’ in 1877 to Antonina Milyukova was short lived. His letters at that time showed a sense of anxiety and foreboding. The marriage was never consummated.

Tchaikovsky’s sudden and unexpected death in October 1893 occurred just nine days after the first performance of the Pathétique. He died from cholera at the age of 53.

Bullock’s account will be of significant interest for all those who enjoy classical music, containing as it does introductions to the composer’s most recognised pieces and a select Discography.

5 stars from me for this comprehensive insight into Russia’s most celebrated composer.

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Book #24 Trains And Buttered Toast

Trains And Buttered Toast by John Betjeman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This wonderful book is a record of most of the best of John Betjeman’s radio talks for the BBC - most of them broadcast in the 40s and 50s, the golden age of wireless. Betjeman had a boundless capacity to delight and inspire and is undoubtedly one of our best-loved poets. His great passion was for architecture, particularly churches and he is reckoned to have visited more than 5,000 in his time. Eccentric, enthusiastic, whimsical and often belligerent he is at home here with his tales of trains, buttered toast, hymn-writing vicars and Regency terraces.

For me this is a book full of nostalgia (a word that Betjeman disliked, said it reminded him of neuralgia! He preferred the word sentimentality). Nevertheless, in these pages I am reminded so much of my own carefree childhood, spent in Kent in the period following the end of the 2nd World War. Here are a few lines taken from ’Coming Home, Or England Revisited’, broadcast on Thursday 25th February 1943:

’For me, at any rate, England stands for the Church of England, eccentric incumbents, oil-lit churches, Women’s Institutes, modest village inns, arguments about cow parsley on the altar, the noise of mowing machines on Saturday afternoons, local newspapers, local auctions, the poetry of Tennyson, Crabbe, Hardy and Matthew Arnold, local talent, local concerts, a visit to the cinema, branch-line trains, light railways, leaning on gates and looking across fields….’

These talks are a fitting memorial to what set Betjeman’s pulses racing and what he feared the loss of and are no longer of course a guide to what can be seen today. But as a picture, a snapshot of past times in the country I love, this is nostalgia (sorry, sentimentality) at its best.

Thank you Sir John. I loved it.

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Book #23 Quieter Than Killing

Quieter Than Killing by Sarah Hilary
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A new DI Marnie Rome novel is always something to savour. This is the fourth in a remarkable series and Sarah Hilary just keeps getting better. Erudite writing with a very complex plot.

A vigilante is at loose on the streets. A child is in danger. Sometimes staying silent is the only way to survive...

DI Marnie Rome and her bagman DS Noah Jake are once again treading the mean streets of London investigating a series of vigilante assaults, that are terrifying in their horrific nature. The attacks seem random. There are victims - and victims of victims, enough to make your head spin. And suddenly it becomes personal for Marnie when her family home is ransacked, the tenants savagely beaten and there are signs that the burglary (is that what it was?) can only have been committed by someone who knows her.

When a child goes missing Marnie is horrified to learn that no one has reported it and it becomes evident that the young boy is the son of a man currently incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Does her step-brother Stephen have anything to do with this? Past events are brought into the chilling present, where street gangs are rife. And where does Noah’s brother Sol fit into this? What is Sol so scared of?

There are pages of brutality that are hard to read. The treatment meted out to the kidnapped child is harrowing. And how are all these events linked?

This is dark, compelling and emotionally intense. There are passages that I read over several times for the sheer quality of the writing:

” ‘Detective Inspector Marnie Rome’. He liked the round sound of the words, like pebbles, like those from the beach where his dad carried him down to the sea. He whispered the pebbles to the room, ‘Detective Inspector Marnie Rome’, and stared at the light under the door until the yellow line came back. When it opened——“

Set aside time for these 400+ pages because, once started, you will not want to put it down. And I wonder how soon it will be before we read about a newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Marnie Rome? It might be just speculation on my part; I will just have to wait and see….

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Book #22 Burial Rites

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Burial Rites is a haunting novel, set in Iceland, and based on real events. Agnes Magnúsdóttir was the last woman to be executed in Iceland, along with Fridrik Sigurdsson, in January 1830, for the murders of Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson. Hannah Kent has spun her own take on the events that led to the convictions, based on a great deal of research and historical documents and has created an intriguing story. Agnes’s story. I recall the harsh landscape that forms the novel’s background, having visited Iceland several times myself.

There are those who have interpreted events differently. There is much speculation here. But in writing this book from the viewpoint of Agnes, Kent has composed a heartbreaking story. There is no redemption, no forgiveness. The evidence of Agnes’s guilt is compelling. But there is room for compassion from the family forced to take her in, as she awaits her execution date, and the priest tasked with absolving her and offering comfort in her desolation. We know Agnes’s fate from the beginning, but her story is utterly compelling. The final pages are heartrending.

In some respects Burial Rites reminded me of Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck. Both are Scandinavian crime stories told with great creativity.

I recommend Burial Rites without reservation.


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Book #21 Corpus

Corpus by Rory Clements
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Corpus crackles with derring-do, constitutional crisis, conspiracy, Cambridge and a maverick history professor, in a rollocking tale set in 1936, peppered with Bolsheviks, British Communists, Fascists, Blackshirts and Falangists in a potpourri of skulduggery that reminded me of the exploits of Dick Barton (unless you are of a certain age you might have to Google him!) with a whiff of Richard Hannay (although he populated an earlier era).

It’s 1936 and Europe is in turmoil. King Edward VIII wants to marry a divorcee, Wallace Simpson but the machiavellian Stanley Baldwin is having none of it. He is insisting that Edward abdicates to make way for his brother, Albert. There are supporters for the king, who see nothing wrong with his nuptial intentions and those led by the prime minister, who view this as completely unacceptable. Meanwhile, the Nazis have marched into the Rhineland, Stalin continues his murderous campaign in Russia and Spain has erupted in Civil War.

What then of two English women who attend the Olympic Games in Berlin? One of them has a clandestine meeting with a Jewish scientist. Weeks later she is found dead in her Cambridge bedroom, a silver syringe clutched in her fingers. Following the horrific murders of a renowned member of the county set and his wife, our protagonist, Professor Thomas Wilde - a history master at Cambridge University - finds himself unwittingly dragged into a world of espionage. Are these deaths linked? Why does Wilde become involved? What does this have to do with the scandal surrounding the king and his mistress? Who is Lydia and what is her rôle in a conspiracy that could rock the nation?

Rory Clements cleverly intertwines actual historical events within a fictional plot that seethes with tension and suspense. Historical fiction, based on factual events, at its best. And Dick Barton would have made a great sidekick for Thomas Wilde….


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Book #20 My Name Is Lucy Barton

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 and bestowed with numerous critical appraisals, My Name Is Lucy Barton deserves to be read in one sitting. Owing to other commitments it has taken me four days and that has detracted from its appeal. It handles the nuances of human relationships with great skill; Lucy's relationship with her mother who visits her for the first time in six years whilst Lucy recovers from an operation in a New York hospital. The conversations between mother and daughter result inevitably in Lucy recalling a troubled rural childhood, a frail marriage, her children - a re-evaluation of times lost. The memories reveal a longing for better things to come, a forensic examination of her family relationships.

It is a tender story told with Strout's sympathetic approach to life. It is worthy, as I have said, to be read in one sitting.

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Book #19 Sirens

Sirens by Joseph Knox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

More noir than a bucket of tar. Although perhaps the protagonist does not quite fit the noir bill. Detective Constable Aidan Waits is a disgraced officer working in the sleazy drug world of Manchester. He is coerced into running a sting operation by his Superintendent, against a local drug lord. Nothing is as it seems though when he is summoned to the penthouse home of David Rossiter MP, a manipulative man with powerful friends. His daughter Isabelle has run away again. Waits is to find her but not bring her home? Waits' investigation takes him into the nocturnal, Mancunian world of drug dealers, users, prostitutes, BDSM and all things perverse.

In retracing Isabelle's steps he finds an intelligent seventeen-year-old girl who is scared to death of something. And how is her predicament linked to the unsolved disappearance of a young woman just like her? All along, Waits struggles with his own redemption. He is a user - cocaine, uppers, downers - more often than not he doesn't know whether he is 'up' or 'down'. How can this troubled junior detective come out of this alive as he is stalked by an unseen killer.... Is there a common denominator that links all of these events?

This first novel from Joseph Knox is a tough read, not for the squeamish. It is dark and brutal and utterly compelling.

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