Apricots at Midnight by Adèle Geras

My housemate Melissa (not to be confused with a different housemate Melissa, who has also written the odd book review for SIAB) wanted to borrow a book, and ended up with one I was given but have yet to read - Apricots at Midnight (1977) by Adèle Geras. As always, I encourage my friends to write reviews for SIAB. This is seldom taken up, but thankfully Melissa said yes, and wrote this fab review! Do (as always) make my guests feel welcome in the comments section... and enjoy the review:

Small pleasures. I picked this book off Simon’s shelf at his first words of description, without waiting for the rest: ‘That one is a children’s book.’ I love books written for children; the unpredictable-but-safe plotlines, the freshness of the detail, the firing of the imagination; and this one did not disappoint.

Actually, this is the sort of book that as a child I didn’t really appreciate. It’s one of those books which describes someone’s childhood memories, and why, I would wonder, should I read about another person’s everyday life when my own was so interesting and there were plenty of books about daredevil escapades, fantastic worlds, or true-to-life explorations? It’s only through growing up (a little bit) that I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of the everyday and of simple, happy memories.

This book is built around a quilt; a quilt sewn together, patch by patch, by the narrator’s elderly relative Aunt Pinny, from fabrics picked up throughout her life. Each patch is tied to a story, the cue to a memory of long ago. The apricots of the title relate to the first ball Pinny attended, a little girl sneaking down to join her working mother for a midnight snack.

A child’s perspective is so different: everything is fascinating, but nothing is truly surprising. For Pinny, the line between make-believe and reality is not particularly important; there’s no disappointment when the adventurer Major Variana admits his limp was gained by dropping a crate of oranges on his foot rather than being bitten by a crocodile, and no questioning of his reassurance ‘That was the only made-up story, I promise you’. In her old age, Pinny retains this childlike ability to take her experiences at face value, so that the tone of the book hinges slightly on the fantastic.

The individual salient events, people and places slowly build a picture of the beauty of Pinny’s daily life. The emergent character in the backdrop is her mother: thrown from prosperity at the death of her husband, and fighting to build a life for herself and her daughter on the strength of her dressmaking skills. She is the constant in Pinny’s life, tying the book together, providing stability and a structure. It is she who first suggests the quilt and teaches a tiny Pinny to hold a needle and make her first stitches. Like a fairy godmother, she can always produce something from whatever nothing is to hand: a garden for a convalescent Pinny from scraps of flowered fabric; an extra sixpence when Pinny’s allowance isn’t quite enough for the music box she wants to buy; an overnight job at Mrs Triptree’s ball so that Pinny can see the ladies in their beautiful costumes.

There is a chance for Pinny to be involved in everything she does – sitting in on meetings with unusual and exotic guests, contributing a not-so-successful stuffed zebra to the soft toy stall at the church fair, cutting out the jam tarts for a picnic. Her tears and remorse on the day she is delayed picking Pinny up from school, and gratitude to the teachers who took the child home for tea and entertained her, is a moment of revelation for Pinny:

It occurred to me then that I had not once, even in the worst depths of my misery, thought what it must have been like for her, knowing she would not be at the school gates, knowing that she was making me more and more unhappy every minute she was not there.

Her selfless love and care for Pinny comes out at every turn. On one occasion, she covers for her daughter, losing a rich client in the process, when the little girl recovers a roll of cloth that she believes belongs to the future king and queen of Borneo but was actually the client’s curtains. I fell in love with her at the point when she stretches a tiny budget to provide Pinny with bulbs for her garden:

I do not remember that we had trouble finding the money. I was too excited at the prospect of my own garden. But now I can see that my mother must have gone without something she needed or wanted, in order to save what was necessary.

Her generosity is not reserved for her daughter alone: when Pinny asks a visiting gentleman at a loose end to stay, she hesitantly but not unwillingly opens her home to him until he is able to find his feet again.

To my delight, one of the stories turns out to take place in Oxford. This is Pinny’s first taste of what she calls ‘the country’. ‘”It’s not the proper country, Pinny,” my mother warned me. “Oxford is a large town, and quite near.”’ Unperturbed, Pinny’s imagination runs wild: ‘Milkmaids in mob caps and farmers in knee-breeches, small houses with roses growing round the doors, stiles, carthorses, shepherds coming down from the hills at sunset, wooden bridges curving over brooks.’

The reality is quite different, of course, but turns out to be no less exciting. Not least, St Giles’ Fair, ‘the most splendid, exciting, glorious fair in the whole world’, as Pinny’s Oxfordian friends, Miles and Kate, delightedly inform her. The description is priceless, a snapshot of the fair a century before I experienced it. Some things are quite different – the long-banned prizes of live goldfish, the penny charge for each game, the steam powering the organs. The exhilaration of the fair, however, is unchanged over generations, and the bright colours of the rides which draw the children’s attention, the reckless spending on hopeless attempts at skewering a prize, the loud music and bustle of the crowd, sound tantalisingly familiar.

Ten patches, ten stories; yet a quilt is so much bigger than that. I’m left wondering what else is in there; the stories that Pinny would not tell till her listener was older, the ones she perhaps would never tell at all? 

The Red House - Mark Haddon

What with reader's block, moving house, and not having internet for a bit, it's been a while since you had a proper review from me.  And today is no different, because I'm handing over to somebody else to write about The Red House by Mark Haddon, which I was sent as a review copy.  Tom (who recently married my best friend) spotted it on my shelves, and commented on it, so I decided it would find a better home with him.  Whether or not he ended up agreeing, you can discover below... Tom, by the by, can also be found at the blog Food, Music, God.  Over to you, Tom!

I promised Simon a while back that I'd read Mark Haddon's The Red House and review it for him, and have sincerely been reiterating that promise to him ever since whilst getting distracted by other tasks like getting married or trying to qualify as a teacher. However, the other day my mother rang me up and told me that my father had recently read The Red House and she had just started it, and so it occurred to me that now might be the time to take action and stop anyone else having to read it ever again. That way, we can pretend that it didn't happen, that Mark Haddon can still write novels with razor-sharp characters and compelling narrative, and that this clichéd series of adolescent writing exercises is the work of someone else.

The novel is about two families united by estranged siblings who are trying to reconnect with one another after the death of their ferocious mother. There's Richard, the hospital consultant who remarried recently but doesn't really know how to talk to his new wife Louisa, and may have A DARK SECRET. His estranged sister, Angela, who's haunted by the ghost of her stillborn daughter, but of course she can't tell anyone about that, and married to Dominic, who seems reasonably normal but may also have A DARK SECRET. Richard's kids - Alex, a sex-obsessed teenager; Daisy, a buttoned-up Christian who also thinks rather more about sex than she'd like; Benjy, who is eight (I think) and I can't remember much more about. Angela's daughter Melissa, who is a self-obsessed cow who's kind of hot and whom Alex fancies, of course. Then there's the house itself, allegedly the conduit for all of these stories for some reason, although that's arguably just an excuse for the fact that Mark Haddon couldn't decide which character to focus on. The house seems to know quite a lot of poetry, and it talks like a travel guide written by James Joyce.

If you think that sounds like a lot going on, you'd be right, and that's part of the problem. It's a shame, as there are some good ideas here, especially with the teenagers in the cast - Daisy's struggle with her sexuality and where it fits with her faith is clearly aiming for some wider significance, for example. Alex and Melissa's teenage angst is sharply drawn, if rather aimless, and the differences in Angela and Richard's approach to their upbringing and the effect on their families could have been channeled into something effective in the manner of Jonathan Franzen. However, it just doesn't feel like it's been edited into any kind of coherent shape. It's this huge splurge of styles and influences and this, rather than seeming ambitious, comes across as amateurish instead. It doesn't build, it doesn't have much of a climax to speak of, and the central narrative just isn't strong enough to provide any real mooring.

It's also overwritten and laden with unnecessary detail. What is one supposed to make of a passage like this:

Louisa works for Mann Digital in Leith. They do flatbed scanning, big photographic prints, light boxes, Giclée editions, some editing and restoration. She loves the cleanness and precision of it, the ozone in the air, the buzz and shunt of the big Epsons, the guillotine, the hot roller, the papers, Folex, Somerset, Hahnemühle. Mann is Ian Mann who hung on to her during what they called her difficult period because she'd manned the bridge during his considerably more difficult period the previous year.

It's like Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian", that, only about photocopying. And that's not even the worst linguistic crime in the book - reading about Angela reading modern poetry, with snippets of Robert Browning woven through the text, is pretty painful, as is Richard's attempt at reading ancient Greek poetry, not to mention the inexplicable quoting of something that seems to be an encyclopaedia about lorries.

Or what about this:

Richard slots the tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and pre-molars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offence to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant's arm no doubt. Ridiculous man.

If you can find another novel in which you can find a narrative reason to justify spending this much time on one of the characters brushing his teeth, I'd be interested to hear about it. It's a testament to the way that The Red House is written that the author thought that this belonged, but it is apparently a novel about the mundane and the ordinary (or so the blurb says), and so there's plenty of that. Again, perhaps it's an attempt at being clever; to impart some wonder into the everyday processes of how peoples' minds work. If you feel a sense of wonder at the above, I'd be interested to hear about that too.

You should not read The Red House. Tell your friends not to read it. If people suggest taking it on holiday, don't. If you find it in your holiday home, leave it there. It's not a good holiday book. It's not good literary fiction. No, it's not lightweight, and yet it also doesn't seem to mean anything. It's shockingly dark in places (and shockingly dull in others) and it doesn't seem to known what to do with that darkness. Curious Incident was (and still is) magnificent, thanks to an exceptionally strong narrative voice. A Spot of Bother was flawed, but still gripping and surprisingly visceral in places - and the characterisation was second to none. In The Red House, despite a couple of strong passages such as Richard's disastrous run out on the moors, there's nothing to make this stand out. It's an ambitious experiment, and perhaps an admirable one; to his credit, at least Mark Haddon is still pushing his craft and trying new things. However, it's a huge disappointment that in doing so he has moved so far away from his strengths.