January and February reads. I loved them all especially Piranesi.
January and February reads. I loved them all especially Piranesi.
2023 was a year the colour of blue for me. The muted silver blue of a Tasmanian sky and sea. I loved being home in July, inhaling Hobart’s salty air, walking familiar streets, knowing I’m close to Antarctica. After years of mountain life it was a week of blue bliss.
It was also a big transitional year for my daughter who started at Sydney University. I wrote (nearly every day). Read (over 62 books). Reading was once again my haven, comfort, my joy this year. If you’re interested in the books I’ve posted them on my Goodreads, Instagram and Author Facebook Page.
I didn’t achieve my personal target of reading more classics but that’s something to aim for in 2024. So grateful for authors, bookstores, libraries including street libraries.
As the world continues to seem more fragmented and volatile I found stability and grace through books.
I continued to write and I am now querying agents. I completed the Curtis Brown Creative Course in Writing a Psychological Thriller with Erin Kelly which I loved and would recommend.
I facilitated Moon Circles for my Mystic Rose Clinic, continued building my Reiki business and did evening care for an elderly lady in the village. We finally staged David’s Ghost Hunting play in January. It wasn’t the best year of my life (hard not to be overwhelmed with the fragmented state of the world) but it was still a year filled with blue. There was much to be grateful for. And I am.
May 2024 bring you unexpected blessings.
I know I am deathless…
Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself, 20 – from The Book of Sand
This was never going to be an unbiased review as I was friends with the author of The Book of Sand. Even though I rushed to preorder, I was tentative about reading it when it arrived. Would it be too distressing because of Clare’s recent death in 2021? As a huge fan of her Jack Caffery gritty crimes and standalone novels under her pseudonym Mo Hayder, would I be able to enter the world of her fantastical fiction?
I needn’t have worried. The Book of Sand is a joyful reading experience. I devoured it over a few nights and truly didn’t want it to end. It can’t be compared to any of Clare’s previous work as it stands on its own unique legs and roars. Clare could have continued writing her Jack Caffery dark crimes – she was top of her game – but this series demanded to be birthed and it’s obvious by its exuberant tone that she loved creating it.
The story is set between two seemingly disparate worlds. The Cirque is a sand world where the Dormilones, a group of individuals of varying ages, incomes and faiths from different places on Earth (Sri Lanka, Stockholm, Paris, Jaisalmer, Great Britain) connect with the disconcerting feeling they already know each other. The Family aren’t biologically linked but have been summoned to the Cirque on a quest to discover the Sarkpont under the guidance of the mysterious Mardy. Mardy informs them they have twelve chances and twelve Regyres without revealing much more information. The group face all the challenges of a sand desert as well as the sinister and dangerous Djinni who hunt on the second night (known as the Grey Night) when the family have to ensure they are safely enclosed. Other family groups are also competing for the Sarkpont and are prepared to fight to the death to win. Failure to locate the Sarkpont after twelve tries will result in a consequence so horrible the Dormilones team leaders cry when Mardy reveals it to them. Time is different in the Cirque. Days pass there as years pass on Earth. Travellers known as Scouts are sent out to different time periods back to Earth. No Scout knows what country or year they will arrive in when they transition to Earth. The only constant they have is that they will always die there and will return to the Cirque. Scouts can pass each other on the street in Earth and not recognise each other. Balzac is mentioned as naming the Virgule in the Cirque. When he was in Earth, he was driven mad, possibly by his vague memories and connection with the Cirque.
The second world is set in contemporary America in Fairfax County, Virginia, the home of teenager Mckenzie Strathie, a high achiever who feels alienated from her family and peers and is haunted by longings for the desert. A lizard appears in her bedroom, a woman in a sari talks to her from a tree, and a high school science fair experiment involving the lizard goes disastrously wrong. Then a stranger texts her that he too can see the lizard when nobody else can. Mckenzie is taken to a therapist but begins to suspect the motives of the people closest to her. The dual worlds begin to snake together in a surprising twist.
I love the visual images shimmering through the book. Spider, head back screeching in triumph into the hot desert air, his petticoat blowing around him as he rides his Sandwalker. Mardy, in her bobbly pink cardigan covered in cats. Desert sunsets and sunrises with their brilliant colours ranging from the grey-pink of a dead rose petal into clear shocking blue.
The sand world, an eerie distorted mirror world of Earth, has McDonalds, deserted petrol stations, a can of Sprite Zero suddenly appearing. Meals of kangaroo haunches, mutton, ears of corn, sheep cheeseburgers, date wine and a bong filled with ganja. It’s a strange and terrifying visual weave of dreams and consciousness.
The Djinni, or as Amasha calls them – the hungry ghosts – are malevolent and mysterious. Their faces are described as small, fat and pink, like a white human baby; they are stick-thin, white and much taller than human beings. They rip bodies to pieces in seconds when they encounter them in the Grey Night. Some of the Dormilones believe even uttering their name summons trouble. They are the fallen angels of this world. “God ye shall know, yet falleth the Angels so fast.”
Cross Alice in Wonderland with a Tarantino movie and The Hunger Games and you still can’t come close to describing The Book of Sand.
Clare first told me she was writing a book vastly different to her dark crimes in 2017, when we met up Avebury, UK. I excitedly wanted to know what it was about and she laughed in her mischievous way. ‘It’s weird,’ she said. It is indeed wonderfully weird – and wonderfully clever.
Like all the best fantasy, The Book of Sand examines major life questions – faith and religion, who we are and where we go when we die, the inner knowing that the world we inhabit is not our true home and the blood tribe we are born to may not be our true family. Death is not an end but a transition that happens repeatedly.
At the time of writing, Clare had no idea her own death was so tragically near but there are so many references to transitions and other states of consciousness throughout the book that it’s impossible not to think a part of her being knew.
Readers of her graphic crime books won’t be disappointed with the energy and heat of her fight scenes. There are severed ears, scalpings, unexpected shocking deaths, mutilations and one of the characters (no spoilers) dies a very sad death. I actually had to skip those paragraphs as I couldn’t cope with it.
When I reached the end, I had expected to be emotional. The tissues were ready but instead I felt a deep peace. I couldn’t stop smiling. I was – and will always be – awed by her vision, courage and talent. I’m so relieved to hear Clare finished other books in this dynamic series and I can’t wait to rejoin the Dormilones as they continue their quest.
The Book of Sand is dazzling, lyrical, surreal and a beautiful legacy to Clare’s legion of fans by a brilliant, totally original gutsy woman.
This weekend it snowed in the Blue Mountains, always a joyful event. I spent the time in bed with the fire glowing (no cosier sight), snowflakes drifting outside, wind gusting, dog snoozing beside me, lost in the gothic world of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
I’ve read Rebecca several times in my life, and just like my favourite of her books, My Cousin Rachel, my perception of it shifts as I’ve grown older.
Rebecca opens on an iconic cracker of a line: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’
The scene is set for a strange, dreamlike world where everything seems so normal on the outside, but unsettling undercurrents are evident.
The narrator is an unnamed young woman. Daphne set herself the technical challenge of not awarding her a Christian name. We first meet the narrator in Monte Carlo where she is a paid companion to the snobby and wonderfully portrayed Mrs Van Hopper. The narrator meets Maximilian (Maxim) de Winter, who is recovering from his first wife’s (Rebecca) death a year before in a boating accident.
After a rushed courtship, Max proposes to the narrator and despite grim predictions from Mrs Van Hopper, the woman travels to Cornwall, to Maxim’s grand home, Manderley.
Here the shy and socially awkward young woman, feeling hopelessly out of her class, battles inferiority and envy about Maxim’s first wife, beautiful accomplished Rebecca, whose presence haunts Manderley.
Mrs Danvers, the grim housekeeper, who was devoted to Rebecca, carries malice towards the new Mrs De Winter and goes out of her way to ensure the new bride can’t relax in her role. Everyone the narrator meets praises Rebecca extravagantly and the Narrator becomes more cowed and insecure.
Maxim becomes more distant and after a disastrous masked ball where Mrs Danvers spitefully excels herself by encouraging the Narrator to dress in the same costume Rebecca had worn at the previous ball just before her death, causing Maxim to retreat further.
After a shipwreck occurs, a second boat is uncovered – Rebecca’s sailing boat with Rebecca’s body in it. Suspicion is cast upon Maxim, as he previously identified a body found washed up on the coast as Rebecca.
The twists continue until the grim ending which contains lines just as potent and evocative as the opening.
‘There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.’
Daphne du Maurier began Rebecca in late summer 1937 when she was stationed with her husband Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning in Egypt. Tommy was the Lieutenant Colonel of the Grenadier Guards.
Daphne made slow progress on the book in Egypt and on their return to England in December she spent Christmas away from her family to finish Rebecca. The book was published by Victor Gollancz in April 1938.
Daphne was toying with themes of jealousy. Tommy had been engaged to marry a beautiful, dark-haired woman, Jan Ricardo. Daphne found herself obsessively thinking about Jan, and comparing herself unfavourably.
Like the narrator in the book, Daphne was introverted, disliking social events and small talk, whereas Jan/Rebecca were extroverted, flamboyant glamorous women. Daphne had found and read old letters between Tommy and Jan and was struck by the self-assured tone of her predecessor and the florid way she signed the R in her correspondence compared to her own spidery writing. Rebecca has this trait in the novel. Tragically, Jan Ricardo committed suicide at 39, throwing herself under a train on August 4, 1944.
Daphne was surprised by Rebecca’s popularity – and also that it was marketed as a romance. Today it is seen as a gothic psychological thriller.
On this read, I was struck by how passive the narrator is. Her very passiveness gives her power. I found myself empathizing more with the absent Rebecca. Even before arriving at Manderley, the narrator is ripping out pages from books that Rebecca has inscribed with her distinctive R. She began to irritate me with her inability to stay in the present and her paranoia.
When Maxim reveals his secret to his second wife, she barely seems to care about his admission.
I also had a lot more empathy for the archetypal crone, Mrs Danvers. She is loyal to her first mistress and she probably guessed the truth of what happened at Manderley. She genuinely mourns Rebecca and it must have appalled and infuriated her that Maxim marries such a young woman a year later.
There is something sickly and rotten about Manderley and its inhabitants. The overlong driveway with overgrown red rhododendron bushes. The sprawl of rooms with a web of secrets contained within.
Manderley – a conglomeration of Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire, where Daphne visited as a child and Menabilly, a Cornish estate that obsessed Daphne and which she leased from the Rashleigh family – has gripped readers since its first publication. She called Menabilly ‘her house of secrets’ and she loved it, as she admitted, more than she loved people.
‘That corner in the drive too, where the trees encroach upon the gravel, is not a place in which to pause, not after the sun has set. When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealthy movement of a woman in evening dress, and when they shiver suddenly, and fall, and scatter away along the ground, they might be the patter, patter, of a woman’s hurrying footstep, and the mark in the gravel the imprint of a high-heeled satin shoe.’
The writing is atmospheric and the words convey a haunting, ominous beat. There is a terrible inevitability to where the novel is leading us. ‘Rebecca has won,’ Maxim says at the novel’s closing chapter.
Rebecca is a dark novel filled with complex characters and shadows. I’ve no doubt that when I re-read it in another five years or so, I’ll have a different perspective on it.
The novel has been in print since 1938. In 2017, it was voted the UK’s most popular book of the last 225 years. It’s been adapted for film and television several times and we will see a new adaption in 2020 from Netflix. Not bad for a novel that Daphne declared in a letter to her editor when finishing:
‘Here is the book. I’ve tried to get an atmosphere of suspense. It’s a bit on the gloomy side. The ending is a bit brief and a bit grim.’
Hello,
if you are in Sydney I will be In Conversation with bestselling author Rosalie Ham at Five Dock Library. More information can be found HERE.
‘There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a wilful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.’ – from DEVOTION ✨ Happy Birthday Patti Smith. 🌿
#pattismith #devotion #whyiwrite#goddess #muse #creativity #inspiration#amreading