(Illustration from Harlan Ellison’s graphic novel ‘Dream Corridor’)

Spinning out of the common genre fiction labels of ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘horror’, the period following the Second World War would see the development of a series of sub-genres that have gone onto redefine literature. Early examples include speculative fiction (a 1940’s term) and weird fiction (a 1950’s term). We have both these genres to thank for some of the most popular books of the late twentieth century. Examples include ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (which is speculative fiction) and ‘Norwegian Wood’ (which is weird fiction). Boosting this trend came the major sub-genre breakouts of the 1980’s, the most notable of which are probably steampunk (think Philip Pullman’s ‘the Northern Lights’) and cyberpunk (think Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’).

These subgenres all have their roots in the graphic novel. The format of the graphic novel, and the term itself, were invented by Will Eisner. A writer and artist of Jewish descent, Eisner struggled with poverty and antisemitism in the US during the run up to the Second World War. However, Eisner ultimately found his feet developing this type of fiction (for want of a better term), as a way of being able to speak to the American wartime GI in their own language. Eisner is now widely known as the ‘godfather’ of the graphic novel.

(Illustration from Will Eisner’s graphic novel ‘To the Heart of the Storm’)

The graphic novel subsequently blossomed and with it came radical new approaches to genres, like science fiction and horror, whose traditional routes had led to criticisms of their irrelevance in the post-war period.

Amongst the most notable artists/writers of this movement was Harlan Ellison. Born in the 1930’s, Ellison was also Jewish-American and the antisemitism that he experienced led to an early life spent in isolation. He would eventually manage to escape into the strange worlds of his fiction and graphic novels, going on to be awarded multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. He is now considered one of the founding members of New Wave science fiction, a subgenre of science fiction which attempted to reinvigorate the genre in the technologically advanced post-war period. Famous and recognisable writers considered to have been part of this subgenre are Philip K Dick and Ursula Le Guin.

(Illustration from Harlan Ellison’s graphic novel ‘Dream Corridor’)

The cousin of science fiction, horror fiction, also went through a similar regeneration based around the influence of the graphic novel, albeit slightly later in time. Perhaps the most famous of the graphic novel writers, Clive Barker, developed the horror comics Candyman and Hellraiser during the early 2000’s (an image from ‘Hellraiser’ is the cover image for this blog). Widely accepted by the major horror writers of the early 2000’s as having reshaped this genre, Stephen King himself said ‘I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker.’ Clive Barker later described his work as falling within the subgenre of ‘urban fantasy’ but having horror elements.

(Illustration from Nick Craine’s graphic novel ‘Hard Core Logo’)

So, did TikTok (or ‘BookTok’ as the reading community on the platform is known) ruin everything? Perhaps one of the greatest fears of the publishing industry when BookTok was developing, was the influence of algorithms on book buying narrowing the diversity of books that were being bought and read, meaning that smaller subgenres such as cyberpunk would get left out in the cold.

However, the story isn’t a sad one. Whilst TikTok did change reading habits and lead to the runaway success of specific authors and their novels, the novels that the platform pushes are actually situated within the sub-genres that have their roots in the graphic novel, particularly horror and fantasy. TikTok has also been responsible for the enormus spread in usage of certain niche subgenre labels, such as grim-dark, hope-punk and romantasy.

These genres continue to be a way that we can relate to the ‘weird’ and technologically advanced modern world. Moving away from the mainstream, towards subgenres, helps us all to deal with the way that we situate ourselves in relation to our feelings of ‘strangeness’ in a changing world. Perhaps that is best expressed by one of my favourite genre terms, ‘slipstream’, which is a word for writing that blends science fiction and fantasy elements. ‘Slipstream’ was described by the famous science fiction writer Bruce Sterling as follows: ‘a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.”

(Image from Will Eisner’s graphic novel ‘A Life Force’)

_{(An early paperback edition published by Fontana Books)}

I made my first foray into Agatha Christie after watching Lucy Worsley’s excellent documentary about Christie’s life. In the programme, she traces the interrelation between Christie’s novels and her life experiences, including her descent into a ‘fugue state’ where Christie crashes her car and forgets her identity. Examining the differences between the Poirot novels (written earlier in Christie’s life) and the Miss Marple novels (which were her later works), Worsley comments that there is an evolution in how each crime is solved. Where Poirot uses logic and reason, Marple relies on a form of psychoanalysis grounded in feminine intuition that reflects Christie’s later psychology.

_{(A rare Crime Club paperback edition)}

This difference between Poirot and Marple is something both detectives are keen to point out themselves:

However, here we need to be careful, for as Poirot himself says “Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas” and sometimes there can be a disjunct between the two.

Poirot for example, ultimately uncovers the perpetrator in ‘The A B C Murders’ by spotting the ‘characteristics’ of the murderer in his list of suspects (a.k.a. via psychological profiling). In contrast, Miss Marple, in ‘A Pocketful of Rye’, despite claiming to solve the murder based on her psychoanalytic prowess, is really involved in a logical piecing together of clues from a combination of newspaper cuttings and nursery rhymes.

_{(A sought after Penguin first edition)}

Christie herself has often been examined in relation to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, particularly with regard to the dream sequences in her novels (such as ‘The A B C Murders’). However, by the time that Christie was in the swing of her career as a novelist, Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ was 40 years old. Christie herself, living and writing in London during the Blitz, would have been exposed to the far more advanced psycho-analytic theories which were abuzz in London at the time. That is, of course, the famous battle between Melanie Klein and Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, which culminated in the ‘Controversial Discussions’, a series of meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society which took place in London between October 1942 and February 1944 (the BBC’s podcast Freud v Klein: The Battle For Our Children’s Minds is a fascinating insight into this debate).

_{(A very rare ‘black top’ first paperback printing by Pan Books)}

These sessions saw the clash between old style Freudian analysis based on the id, ego and super-ego (theories which Poirot is quick to adopt in ‘The A B C Murders’, where he refers to the Oedipus complex, dreams, the sex-drive and the unconscious mind) and Klein’s more modern ‘object relations theory’ which was deeply routed in her clinical experience and more reminiscent of Miss Marple (when presenting her own discoveries to the police inspector leading the investigation in ‘A Pocketful of Rye’, she proclaims, ‘it isn’t a theory, I know’).

By believing what these characters claim for themselves, we have fallen for what I think is Agatha Christie’s most successful sleight of hand. We have, like many of Christie’s characters before us, overlooked Miss Marple, failing to see both her shrewdness and her modernity underneath her fluttering maiden-aunt exterior.

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_{(An early 1940’s Crime Club hard back edition)}

‘Another island: another small eternity,

Many tonight must smell the thunder

Look up uneasily from yellowing books’

- Salamis by Lawrence Durrell

With the humid weather recently it has often smelt like thunder. Particularly today I have noticed myself often looking up from my ‘yellowing books’ to check the sky out the window. However, Lawrence Durrell’s poem concerns a very different island from the Isle of Wight, and that is the Grecian island of Corfu.

The home to many famous writers, including Edward Lear (the painter of the cover image for this blog, which is a picture of Greece taken from our folio set of his journals), Corfu was where Lawrence Durrell began his writing career and where he penned much of his poetry. It’s mediteranean charm is also evoked by the island on which the narrator of Durrell’s famous set of four novels, known as the Alexandria Quartet, finds himself abandoned at the story’s end.

(The cover of an early impression of ‘Mountolive’, the last novel in the series)

Based on Durrell’s experiences living in Alexandria as a diplomat during the Second World War, the Alexandria Quartet focuses on a sequence of intertwined romances that end up looking more like a ‘strange lozenge-shaped affair’ (to borrow Durrell’s phrasing from ‘Sauve Qui Peut’) than a love triangle (YA authors should take notes).

There is also something distinctly ‘foreign’ about the way that Durrell writes and which has led to his distinct fall out of fashion. The London Review of Books, for example, has criticised Durrell’s writing style as ‘caught between a desperate hope that one more word will do the trick, catch the reality or name the mystery, and the reluctant belief that nothing at all is going to work.’

Nevertheless, at the time of writing, Lawrence’s fiction was considered to be amongst the best being produced, with T.S. Eliot himself suggesting that Durrell’s work gave him ‘hope for the future of prose fiction.’

Having recently read ‘Justine’, the first novel of the four, it doesn’t seem to me that these two points of view have to be mutually exclusive. Alternately ridiculous and evocative, the novel could really be described in the same manner that Durrell describes his lead character. ‘After all Justine cannot be justified or excused. She simply and magnificently is; we have to put up with her, like original sin.’ The overblown prose is part of the character of the novel and does not overshadow the galloping plot (think adultery, murder and espionage).

(Four different lovers adorn the faces of the folio editions of the ‘Alexandria Quartet’)

On the other hand, Durrell’s non-fiction writing is witty and sharp, focusing on a satirical depiction of life as a diplomat during the twentieth century. It noticeably lacks adjectives (although the illustrations more than make up for this).

(An example of Nicolas Bentley’s humorous illustrations from an early edition of ‘Sauve Qui Peut’)

Reading Durrell’s non-fiction alongside the Alexandria Quartet seems to make his decision to write something so elaborate all the more extreme, but then extreme writing is perhaps what we would expect of someone who (in the words of their famous brother) ‘was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blonde firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds’.

(The cover of an early impression of ‘Justine’, the first novel in the series)

Reading ‘Justine’ certainly felt like exploding fireworks in my mind and I would recommend it to anyone as the perfect summer novel. Or perhaps I am simply trying to justify my purchase of a fan-girl style Lawrence Durrell t-shirt (see below).

(C. Walter Hodges illustration from ‘The Little White Horse’)

This week I am very pleased to be writing about one of my favourite authors, Elizabeth Goudge. We’ve just received six copies of her novels into the bookshop and seeing each of the familiar titles brought back many happy memories.

Goudge certainly has a unique way of bringing a sense of place to life in her writing. Perhaps the most pertinent of these (at least to this blog!) is her description from her 1936 novel ‘A City of Bells’:

‘“A bookseller,” said Grandfather, “is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of the hungry, very often the binder up of wounds. There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds, all sorts and conditions. There come into him other minds, hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best of his ability he satisfies them all....Yes....It’s a great vocation....Moreover his life is one of wide horizons. He deals in the stuff of eternity and there’s no death in a bookseller’s shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit side by side behind his back, Shakespeare is on his right hand and Shelley on his left.”’

Despite being celebrated by many of the great writers of the fantasy genre (‘The Little White Horse’ is one of J.K. Rowling’s favourite books), and her Carnegie Medal win, which sets her alongside writers such as C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman, Goudge was often criticised during her life as being both overly sentimental and a “low fantasy” writer. Allegedly, she promoted old fashioned Victorian ideals, despite writing in the mid-twentieth century.

(Illustration from ‘Henrietta’s House’)

Goudge herself was undeterred by this criticism and continued to write throughout her life, never being put off from her own ethos, which was to write books that offered her numerous readers a way to escape from their reality. In her own words:

‘As this world becomes increasingly ugly, callous and materialistic it needs to be reminded that the old fairy stories are rooted in truth, that imagination is of value, that happy endings do, in fact, occur.’

Needless to say, with the Second World War taking place during the publication of her many novels, at times this must have seemed like a daunting, as well as a necessary task.

(Internal cover from ‘Gentian Hill’)

Of course, as time has gone on, the concept of “low fantasy” (a.k.a. fantasy rooted in the real world) has gone on to dominate children’s fiction, with writers like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett both publishing novels that sit firmly within this genre.

It therefore seems that we may have Goudge to thank for much of the 21st century’s most popular fiction, which simply goes to show that we should listen less to the strictures of society and instead acknowledge, in line with Goudge herself, that “there is something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.”

(C. Walter Hodges illustration from ‘The Little White Horse’)

With this in mind, it feels highly appropriate to celebrate this year’s Chelsea Flower Show by providing you with some reading recommendations that reflect the breadth of the gardening delights which were on offer! My first recommendation is the beautifully illustrated copy of ‘Shakespeare’s Stories’ by Leon Garfield. The highlight of this book is the depiction of another forgotten forest garden, that of the forest surrounding Athens in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (see illustration below).

The winner of this year’s show was of course Sarah Eberle’s stunning garden featuring an enormous statue of the goddess of the earth, Gaia, which was hand cut using a chain saw (see the cover photo of this blog). Gaia has been a contentious literary figure for a number of years, particularly following the use of her vengeful persona in James Lovelock’s ground-breaking 1970s work, ‘The Gaia Hypothesis’, which was amongst the first books to address the impact of human behaviour on the planet’s climate. Eberle’s Gaia, on the other hand, is a gently sleeping figure. For an extensive examination of Greek myths and their relationship to the rest of the world’s mythology, the best book to read is Andrew Lang’s ‘Custom and Myth’, pictured below.

Sarah Eberle’s garden was not the only one to feature a sculptural work this year. Of smaller proportions is the Barbara Hepworth that formed part of Tom Stuart Smith’s show garden (see my photo above). This garden will soon occupy a larger space, as it is being built at the front of Tate Britain in the heart of London. It is therefore appropriate that it should contain a work by one of Britain’s greatest and most boundary pushing sculptors. For more information about Barbara Hepworth and her life, I would recommend the Tate’s own extensive book about her work, from which the image of her below is taken.

It wasn’t only the show gardens that caught the eye this year. The displays of indoor plants were particularly decadent, especially ‘The Hanging Gardens of Botanica’ by the Botanica Studio (see above). For those encouraged to try their hand at this technique, a good place to start would be the Reader’s Digest copy of ‘Success with Houseplants’.

Another show stopper was this vegetable stand by Sea Spring Seeds:

The vegetables on display were enough to make my mouth water. If you’re suffering from something similar, perhaps you need to buy ‘New Food for a Vegetarian Family’ by Simon Hope.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Chelsea Flower Show reading list if I didn’t include one book about practical gardening. Our recommendation is the classic by A Forbes Sieveking, as Chelsea Flower Show has indeed made it feel like ‘The Praise of Gardens’ is a thing worth celebrating.

The extract above is taken from the dedication page of ‘They Fought like Demons’ by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. This book explores the history of women soldiers in the American Civil War, but its dedication could equally well preface many of the books we stock which explore roles of women in historical conflicts.

Perhaps the most extensive examination of this theme is contained in George and Anne Forty’s ‘Women War Heroines’ . The stories captured in this dense book are eye-opening. They include the tale of Christina Davies, born in Dublin in 1667, who donned a suit and enlisted in the navy (eventually being captured by the French during the summer of 1694) all the while looking for her lost husband, who had been press ganged a year earlier. Or similarly an account of the life of the nun Catalina de Erauso, who cut her hair short and escaped from her convent, eventually joining the army and fighting in Chile in 1619. I suppose in this context it is of little surprise that Joan of Arc is the patron saint of soldiers!

However, it is of course not just as soldiers that women have served during times of war. It was as nurses that many women found an outlet for their patriotism. The picture below is taken from the first hand account of Florence Farmborough, who, following a move from England to Russia in 1908, kept a diary of her experiences as a nurse on the Russian front during the First World War. Nursing took women far afield across both world wars, Angela Bolton’s book ‘The Maturing Sun’ is also a first hand account, recording her life whilst posted to India during the Second World War.

These diaries not only record their writers’ courage, but also uniquely give space to recording the practicalities of living as a woman on the front lines of a war zone. Just freshly on the shelf from a recent collection we have taken in is ‘Mrs Duberly’s War’ a book containing the journal and letters of Fanny Duberly, who accompanied her husband on a trip to the Crimea. Her journal was illustrated with many small sketches, many of which show how she coped with life in Crimea, for example the sketch below, showing her ‘walking dress’.

Whilst each of these books are as unique as the lives of the women recorded in their pages, they each do have a certain thing in common. Their heroines are those who, in the words of Angela Bolton’s own poetry ‘measured life in giving, not in years.’

Another of Rome’s most notable visitors is John Keats. Keats travelled to Rome under a cloud of sickness at the end of his life. His experience of Rome was dominated by the understanding that art and artists will pass into dust, a belief that led to the famous epitaph which he requested for his grave in the city, ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water.’

Whilst we might not share Keats’s sense of the melodramatic, a feeling of the magnitude of passing time is not lost even upon a reader who visits Rome only in the pages of a book. Nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in the image above of a ‘market scene in modern Rome’ from E Bocock’s ‘My Rambles in Rome with Notebook and Camera’. Perhaps nothing could look more different from our current notions of what is modern! Similarly, a reader will be shocked by the emptiness of the square of St Peter’s, in the shot below, which is taken from Gabriel Faure’s ‘Rome’, which was published by the Medici Society.

Reading vintage books could also protect the errant reader from another of literature’s ignominious Roman fates, that of the American tourist in E.M. Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’, who when trying to recall what sites he saw in Rome, comments that ‘Rome’s where we saw the yella dog.’ These books will leave you in no doubt of Rome’s key sites, as their maps and diagrams deliver a detail that would satisfy the most pernickety of sightseers. The two examples below both show the Roman forum. The fold out map is from T H Dyer’s ‘The City of Rome’ and the other is from S. Russell Forbes’s ‘Rambles in Rome’.

Above all, what these books capture is a sense of Rome’s joy, beauty and fun. However, perhaps the essence of a ‘Roman Holiday’ is encapsulated best in the small note I found in the back of the two volumes of Hare’s ‘Walks in Rome’ from the previous owner: ‘we had happy times.’

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“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The anxiety of Virginia Woolf’s protagonist, Mrs Dalloway, also known in the novel as “the ultimate hostess”, over her floral arrangements is palpable from the novel’s opening line. Indeed, Mrs Dalloway is not the only titular character to be caught hold of by this unique malaise. Even Jay Gatsby, another of literature’s notable hosts, is concerned by his floral arrangements, buying hundreds of blooms to decorate the room in which he and Daisy are about to hold their longed for reunion.

However, our blog reader need not fear that they may meet the same fate. Constance Spry’s book “Party Flowers” is here to step into the breach. Featuring decorative ideas for everything from table flowers to flowers for a coronation lunchroom or a cocktail party, this book (with its fabulous set of 42 illustrations) leaves the reader in no doubt as to what blooms might be appropriate for each event. Constance Spry’s eye and style pervade them all. Her arrangements make use, not only of flowers, but also of fruit, vegetables and shells that the reader might have around their home.

It is little wonder, looking at this book, that Constance Spry and her influence has been widely celebrated, including by a London Garden Museum exhibition which named her the twentieth century’s most influential floral decorator. In spite of this, Constance Spry and her legacy can generate a certain amount of drama, in particular the resignation of James Dyson as chairman of the Design Museum. Dyson left after an exhibition celebrating Constance Spry’s influence over twentieth century design in the domestic sphere was proposed by the museum’s director, arguing that flower arranging could not be called “design” in the true sense of the word.

Whether or not Constance Spry’s designs should or should not be considered icons of twentieth century design, I will leave to the reader to determine. In the meantime for by dipping into this book, you can relieve yourself of the ill fated destinies of either of our unlucky flower buying protagonists, Jay Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway.

Part of the ‘new excursions into English poetry’ collection, which was put together in the 1940s, the creation of this anthology saw Bawden, newly returned from his work as a war artist in France, Iran and Ethiopia, team up with Lloyd Thomas, who was a professor of English at Girton College Cambridge. Lloyd Thomas was also a successful figure in her own right, her work on the poet Andrew Marvell having been directly praised by T.S. Eliot.

The selection of verse and accompanying illustrations are certainly striking, as could naturally be expected both from this talented pairing and from a book which has been given shelf space in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renowned archive.

The poems are organised geographically, rather than thematically or chronologically, and Bawden’s images reflect the character of the location that each collection of poems refers to. For example, the journey south from Constantinople to Jerusalem encompasses Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s early 18th century poem ‘Verses written in the Chiosk at Pera, overlooking Constantinople (certainly a far flung trip for a woman of this period!), Y.B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, T.S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ and Edmund Spenser’s ‘Una and the Red Cross Knight Behold the New Jerusalem’, which is extracted from the Faerie Queen.

The anthology moves seamlessly from place to place, from England into Europe, where we see poems relating to Germany, France and Spain. Then to Rome and following the path of the Misses Allan in Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’ on to Constantinople. Like them, we end up travelling the circumference of the globe as we head on to Africa, before taking a quick sea voyage, accompanied by verse from Sir Walter Raleigh, to China and India.

It is a trip round the world, but which can be undertaken in far fewer than 80 days. It is the perfect guide, now that the sun is shining, for deciding your dream summer getaway, whether you end up travelling (in the words of the book’s introduction), in fancy or in fact.