Here comes Holden: Further adventures in forgotten books

I hate reading books in the wrong order. I am a tidy girl who irons her bed sheets and has a neat sock drawer. I like things to be in their proper place and that includes books. Regular readers of this blog may recall my joy at discovering the work of Ursula Holden back in April when I reviewed her novel Unicorn Sisters. Well, drunk on discovery, reckless in pursuit of more, I ordered another of her little novels: Tin Toys on Amazon. It was a good read which I do not regret at all, but for anyone who may like to try it – it should be read before reading Unicorn Sisters. That’s right folks: there is, emerging from my Ursula Holden detective work, evidence of a trilogy of books, starting with Tin Toys then Unicorn Sisters and finally A Bubble Garden. So bare that in mind all ye who enter here.

Tin Toys is an odd and disquieting little book. It is the story of Ula – a little girl in the 1930s whose father has died, whose mother is woefully negligent and whose two older sisters have built a protective world for themselves, from which she is excluded. The household is riven with divisions of age and class and nationality and gender and for the most part, the segregation reinforces and breeds an atmosphere of dark loves and lonely prejudice. This is not a kind home in which to grow up and so it is no real shock that Ula herself is a peculiar child who struggles to connect with others. She is at once too cagey and also too candid.

When tragedy strikes the household Ula is packed off to Ireland and it is there that she will encounter the shock of cruelty and the web of deceptions and half truths that make up adult mores. Ula is a child and her judgement is both infant and flawed. She does not know whom to trust nor whom to love. She reaches out to several people but many of them will prove to be sorry friends. Maggie, the Irish cook/cleaner impresses Ula with her warmth and cosy tales of her homeland. Lucy, the child whom Ula meets at ballet class bewitches her with her wedgewood blue eyes and air of confidence. In Tin Toys, Ula learns the hard lesson of childhood; that adults can be as cruel and deluded and children.

It is the style and atmosphere of Tin Toys that really causes one to remember it. It is clipped and savage as a fairy tale. Things happen and they cannot be stopped or even explained. It is like all the world is locked into a fast train rattling who knows where with no hope of escape. Which brings me neatly to the front cover. The Methuen Modern Fiction paperback that I have is illustrated with Mark Gertler’s famous first world war painting Merry-Go-Round. The Merry-Go-Round is a frightening response to the mechanisation and horror of warfare in black, white and blood red. At first I thought it was an odd choice for the front cover of this book, but now I understand.

If pushed, I would have to say that Tin Toys did not quite have the emotional power of Unicorn Sisters, but it is still very good and they are so clearly from the same pen. Ula’s development is not necessarily an easy watch – but it is extremely well written and deserves not to be forgotten.

I have included a picture of the book and also (by popular acclamation!) pictures from our garden.

A brilliant way to treat entangled lives: "A Crisis of Brilliance" by David Boyd Haycock

I am standing in our kitchen wondering why I chose David Boyd Haycock’s A Crisis of Brilliance as the first book I read at our new home in France. Only tiny traces of the massive snowfall that greeted our arrival remain in the garden and half remembered schoolgirl French is slowly coming back to me. I do still feel like a bit of a newbie – a student on an exchange trip rather than a permanent resident. So maybe that is the reason behind choosing such a quintessentially English book for my first read.

A Crisis of Brilliance is that rare and excellent thing: a collective biography. It traces the lives of five British artists of the early twentieth century – Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler and Richard Nevinson. These artists all entered the Slade School of Art by wildly divergent routes at approximately the same time. They met, fought, loved and formed there and they are rightly associated with one another. When Britain went to war in 1914 they would be shattered apart – never to be reunited – never to recapture the glory days of their youth. For each of them the war would mean something different – alienation; disintegration; fear; grief; development; fame. For all of them their best work would emerge from the horror of conflict. The images that they produced, of landscapes torn asunder and men treated like machines have become standard ways of looking at the Great War – but at the time they were groundbreaking.

There are too few collective biographies in the world. Thinking about people in groups makes so much sense – we all live love and work in groups and the traditional format of the cradle to grave individual biography is often limiting. The subjects of Haycock’s book were drawn inexorably together and so Haycock has treated them together. They were all brilliant subversives who rejected the ordinary and the respectable. Individually and collectively, they lived for their art. In some cases they are already well known. Anyone who has seen “Carrington” will know the tragedy of Dora Carrington’s end as well as the unlikely subject of her most abiding love. Visitors to Cookham will know of the gentle, gauche Stanley Spencer whose paintings have come to represent so much of English identity. The brilliance of Haycock’s book is that he shows the staggering level of entanglement between these people.
This tale is a whirlwind of passion, repression, love, intelligence and alienation. Although it is non-fiction, Haycock’s prose reads effortlessly and often has the power of a novel – it moves from one scene to another, taking in a vast array of colourful characters. In many respects the beguiling, enchanting, often dishonest Dora Carrington, or “Carrington” as she preferred to be known stands at its centre. Crop haired, charming, confused, deceitful, she attracts almost everyone but struggles to respond to their affections. Mark Gertler, the Jewish émigré artist is the brooding, difficult heathcliffe – tormented by his visceral love for Carrington. Paul Nash stands aloof: courteous, urbane and thoughtful. Stanley Spencer, that genius of the English countryside is locked into a world where the verge of Jordan meets the Thames valley. Richard Nevinson is the angry, difficult young man who pushes away those whom he loves the most. Although we have all heard about them before, because Haycock has been brave with his format and approach, they come alive afresh on the page.