Ten of the best / Cathedrals in literature

Ten of the best

Cathedrals in literature

John Mullan
Monday 7 November 2011 

Salisbury resident Golding imagined the building of the cathedral whose spire towers over the city. Ignoring the warnings of others, the obsessive Dean Jocelin drives the work on, convinced that an angel is prompting him. As he becomes madder, the miraculous building takes shape out of the dust and chaos.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Dickens's last novel is set in the precincts of the cathedral of Cloisterham. "… a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath." Murderous passions are nursed in the shadow of the great cathedral.

Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

The cathedral is the central character in Hugo's huge historical novel. All his characters gravitate to it. Quasimodo is the bell-ringer and swings down on a rope from the towers of the Cathedral to rescue the Gypsy girl Esmerelda from the gallows. They seek sanctuary in the great church, but violence and death pursue them there.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Housewife Emma Bovary has an assignation with student Léon Dupuis in Rouen cathedral. "In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating …" For Léon, the religious solemnity is fitting: he is a devotee of love. Emma arrives, tries to pray, but is overwhelmed by "the tumult of her heart".

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

The clergymen of Barchester find the pursuit of God's purposes is an often ignoble business. The unworldly Septimus Harding, precentor at the great cathedral, is drawn into a furious dispute about church corruption, his only solace being the sublime sound of the cathedral choir as its songs ascend to heaven.

Old St Paul's by Harrison Ainsworth

Ainsworth's best-selling Victorian romance is set in the 1660s. During the great plague, the old cathedral becomes a hospital. At the climax, the great, dilapidated old building burns down, trapping two of the novel's villains in its vaults where they are drowned in molten lead.

The Choir by Joanna Trollope

Trollope's tale of submerged provincial passions is set in the cathedral city of Aldminster, where the cathedral itself is falling down and the costs of repairs seem likely to be met by abolishing the costly boys' choir. From the worldly dean to the idealistic choirmaster, everybody wants the best for the cathedral, the good of which becomes the justification for whatever they want to do.

"The Cathedral" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke wrote a sequence of six poems inspired by a visit to Chartres cathedral with the sculptor Rodin. In the second, the poet muses on what the influence is of this huge tracery of stone, overwhelming rather than elevating. "And in the towers' quelled ascent, / and sudden spurn of skies, sat Death".

"A Cathedral Facade at Midnight" by Thomas Hardy

The poem recalls a night walk in the cathedral close at Salisbury, where Hardy took the movement of light across the building as a metaphor of ancient belief in the light of modern unbelief. The facade is thick with "the pious figures" of saints and clerics, holy men and women seen "Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress / Of Reason's movement, making meaningless".

The Cathedral by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Huysmans has his alter ego, Durtal, who has converted to Catholicism, explore the elaborate symbolism he discovers in stone in the great gothic edifice of Chartres cathedral. An apparent rejection of modernity, it was a bestseller.

THE GUARDIAN

TOP 10

Madeline Miller / Top 10 Classical Books
Esther Freud's top 10 love stories
Francesca Simon / Top 10 Antiheroes
Alex Carnevale / Top 10s Novels
Alex Carnevale / The 10 Greatest Writers of All Time
Alison MacLeod's top 10 short stories
Tessa Hadley's top 10 short stories
Top 10 things you need to know about Alice Munro
Top 10 immigrants' tales

AL Kennedy's top 10 controversial books

Charles Graeber's top 10 true crime books
Alison MacLeod's top 10 stories about infidelity
Vogue / The 10 Best Books of 2014
Ten really long books you should read right now
Leonardo Padura / Top 10 Cuban novels
Top 10 modern medieval talesTop 10 holidays in fiction
Paul Bailey's top 10 stories of old age
Paul Auster's Top Ten List
Top 10 novels about unfaithful wives
Jonathan Franzen's Top Ten ListThe best LGBT sex in literature
From Gatsby to Darcy / The top 10 liars in fiction
Top 10 John Updike short stories
Leonard Cohen / 10 of the best
John Banville's Top Ten List
James Salter's Top Ten List
Top Ten Works of the 16th and 17th Centuries

The 10 Best Debut Novels of the Decade

Téa Obreht

The 10 Best Debut Novels 

of the Decade

Emily Temple

23 December, 2019

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists, and it’s only appropriate to begin our journey with the best debut novels published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below.

***

The Top Ten

TÉA OBREHT, THE TIGER’S WIFE
(2011)

It’s easy to forget, reading The Tiger’s Wife, that Obreht was only 25 when it was published in 2011 (that year, she became the youngest-ever winner of the UK’s Orange Prize—and did you know it was the first book ever sold by her agent, and the second book ever acquired by her editor? Yes, I feel bad too.). I say “easy to forget,” but it might be more accurate to say “hard to believe,” because this debut is so ambitious, so assured, and so richly textured that it feels like something that could only come from decades of toil.

It is an astonishing book for a writer of any age, half fable, half gritty portrait of an unnamed Balkan country recovering from civil war. It is a novel about story, and about family, two things that inform and describe one another. “Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories,” our narrator Natalia tells us, “the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life.” Part of the magic of Obreht’s writing (it’s also true in her latest novel, Inland) is how secure you feel in the worlds she creates—the feeling is akin to stepping into a photograph, or a documentary: you look around and clock every detail; you never doubt. You can feel reality hovering underneath the sentences, even when they’re describing something patently impossible. And yet in this novel, she’s always reminding you how these worlds can change, and how we can change them in the telling.

Ten of the best / Mirrors in literature

Ten of the best 

Mirrors in literature

John Mullan looks in the glass

John Mullan

Saturdad 30 October 2010

Richard II, by William Shakespeare 

A weak king but a consummate drama queen, Richard II sends for a looking glass when he finds himself about to be deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke. "Give me the glass, and therein will I read. / No deeper wrinkles yet?" Pronouncing his regal glory "brittle", he smashes the mirror on the ground, "For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers."

"Snow White", by the Brothers Grimm 

Those famous lines addressed by the evil, vain queen to her magic mirror were originally in German: "Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand / Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?" "You are," is always the mirror's answer, until one day the mirror tells her that her beauty has been surpassed by that of her step-daughter, Snow White . . .

"The Lady of Shalott", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

The eponymous lady is condemned to watch the world indirectly, via a mirror that exhibits to her the shifting scenes of Camelot. "A curse is on her" if she look directly from her casement. But then Sir Lancelot rides by, and she cannot resist a gander. Oh dear. "The mirror crack'd from side to side; / 'The curse is come upon me,' cried / The Lady of Shalott."

Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll 

Alice is playing with her kittens in front of a large mirror. "How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty?" she asks. Before you know it, she is up on the mantelpiece. "Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through."

Dracula, by Bram Stoker A mirror shows Jonathan Harker that he really is in a fix. "This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!" Gulp!

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde 

Dorian is in the habit of taking a mirror up to the locked room containing his portrait and comparing his reflection with the increasingly horrid image on the canvas. When he realises what a monster he has become, he becomes another mirror-smasher. "He loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel."

"I Look into My Glass", by Thomas Hardy 

For the ageing poet, a mirror is a cruel thing. "I look into my glass, / And view my wasting skin, / And say, 'Would God it came to pass / My heart had shrunk as thin!'"Hardy sees his wasting frame but feels the old "throbbings of noontide".

"Mirror", by Sylvia Plath 

Plath finds a mirror thoroughly uncanny. "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike." A woman gazes intro this glass, which is as unpitying as Hardy's. "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish".

"The Mirrror", by Paul Muldoon 

Muldoon's poem in memory of his father imagines another malign mirror, taking his father's "breath away" when he took it down from the wall. Now the dead man's life has gone into the glass. "When I took hold of the mirror / I had a fright. I imagined him breathing through it." Father and son seem to replace the mirror together.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters 

The most overtly supernatural event in Waters's novel involves a mirror. Rod, heir to spooky Hundreds Hall, tells the narrator that he has just seen a mirror on a stand walk its way across his bedroom. Is he cracking up? Or is there a poltergeist? Hauntingly (in every sense) the novel ends with the narrator catching his own reflection in a mirror. 

JM

THE GUARDIAN

Ten of the best / Femme fatales

Ten of the best 

Femme fatales

John Mullan
Saturday 16 may 2009

Circe

One of the earliest femmes fatales in western literature is also one of the few to be tamed. Having turned Odysseus's men into pigs, the lovely sorceress beckons the hero into her bed in Homer's Odyssey. However, he has been armed by Hermes with the protective herb Moly and told how to guard his manhood from her wiles.

Acrasia

The most alluring of the various deadly females in Spenser's The Faerie Queene. "Upon a bed of Roses she was layd, / ... / And was arayd, or rather disarayd, / All in a vele of silke and silver thin". The virtuous Sir Guyon resists her.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Somehow knights are especially susceptible to the spellbinding charms of a deadly woman. Long after she has abandoned him "on the cold hill's side", Keats's "palely loitering" hero is still in thrall to the beautiful, pitiless "faery's child". A few hours – or is it minutes? – in her "elfin grot", and he is lost forever.

Geraldine

In Coleridge's unfinished narrative poem "Christabel", the heroine meets the lovely Geraldine in the woods. "Her stately neck, and arms were bare; / Her blue-veined feet unsandaled were; / And wildly glittered here and there / The gems entangled in her hair." Look in Geraldine's "serpent's eye" and you will see what she is up to ...

Carmilla

Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a female vampire predates Dracula and established the character of the supernaturally beautiful young woman who is after your blood – literally. Living in a castle with her father, lonely Laura is befriended by the moody, mysterious Carmilla, who seems to sleep most of the day. Bad dreams and bite marks follow. Will Laura discover her lovely companion's true identity in time?

Lady Audley

Victorian novelists liked to make you feel sorry for their femmes fatales. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's bestselling sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret featured a beautiful anti-heroine who manages to entrap a doting aristocrat. She has (of course) a past, and when a previous husband turns up to reclaim her she shoves him down a well. Madness and doom await her.

Salome

Taken from the gospels of Matthew and Mark, Herod's seductive step-daughter is famous from Oscar Wilde's play (in turn made into an opera by Richard Strauss). Wilde's Salome fancies John the Baptist and confronts him with her unambiguous desires. After she has demanded the prophet's decapitation, she amorously kisses the head that is brought to her on a silver platter.

Nana

First appearing on the Paris stage in the part of Venus, the eponymous protagonist of Zola's novel becomes a courtesan who bewitches men and drives them to folly or disaster. One of them kills himself (with a pair of scissors) when she rejects him. She leaves a trail of male egos and corpses in her wake, on her way to a very nasty end indeed.

Lulu

At the end of the 19th century audiences were deliciously shocked by the sexy heroine/villainess of an infamous pair of plays by Frank Wedekind, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. Lulu sexually intoxicates her lovers, before destroying or abandoning them. She ends up confronting Jack the Ripper.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy

In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Brigid has hired private eye Sam Spade to protect her. Spade sleeps with Brigid even though he knows that she killed his former partner, Miles Archer. In the end, he turns her in.

THE GUARDIAN