I
have a whole slew of recent reading I need to catch up on here—something like
two dozen books altogether, and some of them quite interesting (though some
will have to be mentioned only briefly as my notes haven't always been all they
might have been). But before I do that, I can't delay in writing about a wonderful
book I just finished, and a brand new one to boot. Me reading a book hot off the presses?
Unheard of!
Many
of you will recall that Tindall is—as well as one of the foremost history
writers in the world today (and, earlier in her career, a successful novelist
as well and therefore included in my author list)—also the daughter of Ursula
Orange, author of three novels reprinted as Furrowed Middlebrow titles, and the
niece of Monica Tindall, author of another FM title. She also surely has the
most seductive approach to historical writing I could imagine—such that even if
you think you're not really "into" history, you really owe it to
yourself to give her work a try. I couldn't put The Pulse Glass down and finished it in two days (it would
certainly have been one if not for that dratted dying computer).
I
first read and became a fan of Gillian's when she emailed me after I'd written
about her mother's books, but as soon as I picked up Three Houses, Many Lives (2012) and, a bit later, Footprints in Paris (2009), I was
hooked. Her focus, as she herself described it, is on the study of place and
urban history, but that hardly does justice to the scope and elegance of her work.
The Pulse Glass, for example, has four
epigraphs—one from the periodical History
Today, one from a poem by Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, one
from children’s author Philippa Pearce, and one from Proust—which might just
begin to suggest the varied sensibility and array of learning Tindall brings to
her work.
The
book begins on a somber note, as Tindall scatters her brother’s ashes along a
disused railway line. This leads to meditations on the perishability of both
people and objects, and on the randomness with which some objects manage, often
by pure happenstance, to survive their inevitable contemporary irrelevance before
taking on new, richer meanings for later generations. It's difficult to find a
snippet from the book that can really give a sense of the power of the
connections Tindall makes between personal events, objects, and history, but
this passage gives a hint of the random survivals which particularly fascinate
her and in turn make the book so riveting:
Let enough time pass and any written missive from the world
that has vanished becomes precious. How glad a museum would now be to receive a
medieval shopping or laundry list! And glad they are when some unexpected
windfall comes their way. About a dozen years after the beginning of the
present century, someone doing repairs to a wall in Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, noticed that a tightly folded paper had at some point been stuffed into
a crack between stones, presumably to keep out a draft, and had subsequently
been plastered and painted over. When the paper was retrieved and deciphered,
it turned out to be a fragment of a musical score by Thomas Tallis, complete
with words, from a special service held in St. Paul's for Henry VIII in 1544,
two years before his death. It is known that the service was arranged by
Catherine Parr, the final wife who survived the much-married kind, and it is
thought that the words may be by her. With similar serendipity, two much-folded
sheets of paper were found lining the spine of a seventeenth-century book in
the printing and publishing archive of Reading University. The sheets had
apparently been used to reinforce the binding, and turned out to be from one of
the first books printed in England by Caxton's press—a priest's handbook,
dating frtom 1476-7. An interesting example of a printed page being, for once,
more significant than a handwritten one.
Papers so unvalued that they are reused for bindings are
clearly a fruitful source for lost writings, for in 2018 the Vice-Chancellor of
Northumbria University, while rummaging in Cambridge University Library, made a
similar find. As part of the backing of another manuscript, and divided into
several different scraps, he discovered the score of a lost Christmas carol
that had been sung in his own district in the early fifteenth century—'Parit virgo filium'. So, after five
hundred and fifty years, the mute carol proclaiming a virgin bearing a son was
given voice again in Newcastle Cathedral.
From
its melancholy opening pages, The Pulse
Glass proceeds with interlinking discussions of the blooming and wilting of
railway lines, and the surprising afterlife of some disused stations; the
enormously unlikely survival of a medieval Latin gospel; the centuries-old
letters of several prominent families; rediscovered treasure from the attics of
Westminster Abbey, which connect up with the intriguing vicissitudes of a small
ivory figure of Christ that sits on Tindall’s bookcase; and the sometimes
misguided urban "renewal" of London. That's just to name a few. And her
tale touches on such disparate topics as the English Civil War, Richard III and
the Princes in the Tower, Rudyard Kipling, and Florence Nightingale, as well as
compelling details of Tindall's own family, earlier books, and the house in
London in which she's lived for half a century.
And
what wonderful connections she is able to make along the way, and what
wonderings she inspires!
The
book ends, too, on a personal note. The second-to-last chapter sheds charming
light on Gillian's aunt, Monica Tindall, author of The Late Mrs Prioleau, one of my favorites of the Furrowed
Middlebrow reprints. And in the final chapter, she offers her most thorough and
heartbreaking discussion of her mother, Ursula Orange, and of Ursula’s suicide.
I read this chapter with tears in my eyes and that little quiver that comes
from real life poured elegantly, measuredly into great writing.
On
our recent vacation, I largely took a vacation from blog reading as well. One
of the utterly non-blog-related books I read was Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize
just a few days before we set out (I had bought the book at least a couple of
weeks before the announcement, so I was in the unusual position of being right
on point). I loved Flights, with its
unusual and lovely weaving together of disparate stories into what must be
called a novel, even if it resembles few novels before it. Tokarczuk also reminded
me of another contemporary author I love, W. G. Sebald, whose haunting,
melancholy novels are among my favorites.
Reading
The Pulse Glass, in turn, brought
both Tokarczuk and Sebald to mind. Which is why I can't yet bring myself to put
the book on my "have read" shelves and am keeping it right by the
side of the bed. A re-read is surely imminent.
It's
possibly my favorite book of the year, and (here's a sentence I never thought
I'd write) the fact that I'm briefly mentioned in the final chapter has nothing
at all to do with it!