Audio Update

Tuesday afternoon at the University is proving a good time and place to blog simply because of the way the computers are set up here.  The seats are what my mother would have called ’sit up and beg’ and force my back into a better position than would be the case at home.  I’m seriously thinking of trying to hide one under my coat as I leave, but I have a nasty suspicion that someone might twig what I was doing.

So, I may not blog as often as I used to and I may not get round to visit quite so frequently, but bit by bit I am managing to find solutions that work.  And the greatest of these is the audio book.  I am having a great time with what I have managed to find.  I even got a copy of A S Byatt’s new novel, The Children’s Book the other day which I’m saving for after Christmas when both my reading groups will be discussing it.

The Bears and I are thoroughly enjoying the experience of being read to.  We draw the curtains, light the candles, turn off the lights and settle down to let someone else do the work.  For the most part it works extremely well, but there are a couple of things that are going to take some getting used to.  First, there is the question of how long it takes to listen to a book compared with the time it takes to read it.  We have been listening to The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest for two weeks now and although it is a whopping great big book, it wouldn’t have taken half that long to read it; we still have a third of the story left to go.  This means that the thirty hours of  The Children’s Book  is going to take three weeks of evening listening at the very least.  I am going to have to plan my group reading much more carefully in future.

Secondly, you have to listen to every word.  Now you can take that last sentence two ways.  You have to listen to every word first time round because you can’t go back and check what you might have missed, or at least you can’t do it easily.  But also you have to listen to every word, you can’t skip the equivalent of the scenes in the film where you would have your head in a pillow, the bits that I would normally skim over because they were too gruesome for my taste, the recording goes relentlessly on.  I’m sure we will get used to this as we become more accomplished listeners. 

In the meantime, I’m still trying to make up my mind about buying a special chair.  It is a terrible expense.  Watch this space for further developments.

Back Update

Thank you all for your good wishes.  As you can imagine, suddenly being told that reading and typing were threatening my long-term health was a tremendous blow and for the first few days I really didn’t come up for air.  However, I don’t do being defeated and if you start searching around it’s amazing what you can find to help you overcome any difficulty.  So, allow me to introduce you to my new life saving device.

 

My osteopath says that this is going to solve ninety percent of my problems.  Not only does it take a book and hold it before your very eyes, but it also supports a laptop and stops you from hunching over the keys as we all tend to.  (I won’t tell you what Nick (the osteopath) has to say about laptops, but I can assure you it isn’t polite, although I suspect they are doing his bank balance no harm.)  This space age looking device isn’t exactly worth its weight in gold.  It’s so heavy that would run into a seven-figure sum.  But I already know that cumbersome though it may be it is going to be indispensable.

I’m also going to be making more use of audio books.  I’d already taken out a subscription with Audible, but now I’m exploring what the library has to offer as well.  If there is an audio version of something I want to read then I’ll go for that first and leave the actual reading for those texts I can’t get any other way.  I decided to start with something really challenging, the third of Stieg Larsson’s Salander books, on the grounds that if I could follow all those Swedish names and the complexity of the plot then I was going to be able to follow anything.  And, so far so good.  Last thing at night, The Bears and I draw the curtains, light the candles and settle back to listen to a bedtime story.  (OK, so maybe it isn’t the ideal bedtime reading, but it hasn’t kept us awake yet.)   We run the i-pod through the speaker system so that we can all listen at once and up to press we have only good impressions.   As more and more people use their i-pods for audio books I can only think that publishers will offer increasing numbers of novels in this format and we’re looking forward to getting together quite a collection.

After a lot of searching, Audible seem to be the best company out there in terms of finding reasonably priced downloads, but if anyone has any other suggestions then I would be really grateful.

The other thing I’ve been investigating is a really supportive chair, preferably one that will recline and allow me to rest level if need be.  There are plenty on the market, at a price, but what has really left me dumbfounded has been the number of companies who will deliver said chair to your door, but then expect you to get it inside the house and set it up yourself.  Given that by default the vast majority of people ordering these chairs are going to have back problems already I fail to see the logic in this.  Certainly, if they haven’t got a back problem before they take delivery they are going to have one afterwards.  This has meant that several companies have ruled themselves out of my reckoning before I’ve even started.  I suppose we are looking at health and safety issues here.  But I would have thought it would have paid manufacturers to have found a way round this.  Some have obviously managed it and the others must be losing an awful lot of custom.  I haven’t quite made up my mind about the chair, so again, if any of you have any experience I would be very glad to hear about it.

Finally, a health warning of another sort.  Last week I had a maturing insurance policy paid into my bank account before directing the money off elsewhere.  Two days later I had what purported to be an e-mail from the bank’s security section saying that someone had made an unsuccessful attempt to access my account and they thought I should let them help me change my security details.  Obviously, this was a phishing e-mail trying to get at my password and I deleted it accordingly.  But, I’m afraid the timing is too much of a coincidence for me.  Somehow the fact that that policy had been paid out had been leaked.  Whoever sent that message knew that that money was there.  Given that both the bank and the insurance company are national names, I find that very disturbing indeed.

Back Problems

Just a very quick post to apologise for not being around.  I have back problems and until the osteopath and I find a solution, reading and working on the computer are on the banned list.  We are working hard at finding answers.  Anyone with any suggestions please let me know.  Love to you all.  Ann

Sunday Salon ~ Harry Potter and the Medieval Morality Play

One of the questions that I was asked to consider this week as I worked my way though the material I’ve been sent on The Comedy of Errors was what, if any, examples I could think of amongst current ‘literature’ that continued the traditions of the Medieval Morality Plays in a modern form.  The suggestion made in the text was that of the Western with its (normally) diametrically opposed good guy versus bad guy.

Well, as you will know if you’ve read the last entry here, I’m beginning to develop a habit of arguing with the materials that I’ve been sent and I wasn’t too sure about this response either.  I can see the good guy, bad guy argument, but it seems to me that a much more fundamental issue where the Morality Plays are concerned is the question of choice – do I choose to be good or do I choose to be bad and if I choose to be bad is there any hope of redemption.

With this in mind, I toyed for a while with the idea of Star Wars and the choices which Luke and Darth Vedar have to make, but then I suddenly realised that in fact there was a much more obvious answer, Harry Potter.

The question of choice is central to the Harry Potter sequence.  It is there from the very beginning when Malfoy approaches Harry on the train and tries to recruit him to the forces of evil.

‘You’ll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter.  You don’t want to go making friends with the wrong sort.  I can help you there.’

Harry rejects Malfoy’s offer of ‘help’ and reinforces his choice under the Sorting Hat.

Harry gripped the edges of the stool and thought, ‘Not Slytherin, not Slytherin.’

‘Not Slytherin, eh?’ said the small voice.  ‘Are you sure?  You could be great, you know, it’s all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that – no? Well, if you’re sure – better be GRYFFINDOR!’

Just in case we haven’t realised the importance of this choice, Dumbledore makes it very plain when Harry agonises over the similarities between himself and Voldemort and questions whether or not the hat has made a mistake.

‘It only put me in Gryffindor,’ said Harry in a defeated voice, ‘because I asked not to go in Slytherin…’
‘Exactly,’ said Dumbledore, beaming once more.  ‘Which makes you very different from [Voldermort].  It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’

Throughout the sequence the importance of choice is emphasised again and again.  Think, for example of the moment in the Shrieking Shack where Harry chooses not to kill Wormtail and the consequences inherent on that choice.  And, of course, we are reminded of it right at the very end as Harry says goodbye to his son, Albus, on the platform at King’s Cross.  As Albus agonises over the possibility that the Hat might place him in Slytherin Harry tells him,

‘if it matters to you, you’ll be able to choose Gryffindor over Slytherin.  The Sorting Hat takes your choice into account.’
‘Really?’
‘It did for me,’ said Harry.

So, if the question of choice is central, then what about the question of redemption?  There we have to turn to Snape.  For if ever there was a character in literature who has turned his back on the bad, given himself over to the good, despite what it costs him, and who is eventually redeemed by his actions it is Severus Snape.  And, he does it without any expectation of reward.  Indeed, he refuses to allow Dumbledore to tell anyone of what he has done and why.  But, in the end he is willing to give his life for the child he loathes, the son of the man he hates, because of love, because Harry is also the son of Lily Evans.  He is redeemed by his action and has his final reward.  The last thing he sees as his life drains away is the one feature that Harry has inherited from his mother, her beautiful green eyes.

Realising the link between Harry Potter and the Medieval Morality Tales has made me think again about the value of those earlier texts.  I read several during the week and to some extent passed them over as not particularly relevant to me or to the current world, mainly, I suspect, because they are placed in such a strict Christian context.  However, when I think about what they are saying through the context of Rowling’s work I find myself acknowledging that the medium is not always the message.  That sometimes the medium can get in the way of the message.  Whatever tradition we come from, whatever our cultural perspective, our choices are what define us and the idea that we can be ‘redeemed’, that we can recognise the folly of earlier choices and do something to put those choices right, is for me at least, serious grounds for hope.

The Comedy of Errors ~ Morality Play or Not?

One of the areas I’ve been asked to consider as part of my study of The Comedy of Errors is the role in its construction of the Medieval Morality Play.  Consequently, I’ve been reading surviving scripts of texts such as Everyman and Mankind which would have been played in public spaces, inn yards for example, in the fifty or so years before Shakespeare’s birth.  The assumption has been that to some extent these were an influence on the playwright as he wrote this early comedy.

Now, of course, I’ve always known about the way in which these plays do find a voice in Shakespeare’s work, especially through character transfer.  Richard III, for instance, has many of the characteristics of the medieval Vice.  But, I have to say that I hadn’t thought in terms of their having any influence on The Comedy of Errors.  There are clear literary antecedents, but these are the New Roman Comedies of Plautus and the works of Gower that in later years would help to shape the Romance Plays, rather than any obvious medieval theatrical sources.

The reason I’ve been given for seeing the Morality Plays as a source is the very definite influence on the work of St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.  Now, there is absolutely no question that Shakespeare had this in mind as he wrote the play.  The shift of location from Epidamnus in his source to the city of Ephesus itself is something of a giveaway and the manner in which he describes the town with its reputation for magicians and sorcerers echoes what Paul has to say about it in his epistle. Furthermore, some of the themes with which he deals, especially the relationships between husband and wife and master and servant, reflect the issues that are covered in the biblical text.  No, I’m not going to argue that there was an influence.  But, I am uneasy in seeing this as coming directly from the Morality Plays.  Thematically these were much more concerned with the question of redemption.  How does mankind, ever prone to temptation by the devil, find the strength of character to make the choice of good over evil?  I just can’t see them as forerunners of The Comedy of Errors. I know they have a lot of slapstick humour in them but the humour in Shakespeare’s play comes directly from Plautus.  You can practically trace it line for line.  No, I’m uncomfortable with proposition.

Or at least I was until we had the seminar about Darwin earlier this week.  If you read the piece I did about that, you’ll remember that I was discussing the difficulties that got in Darwin’s way as he tried to find the language to express his new understanding of the way in which the world worked.  One of those was the fact that language is a system of inherited conventions.  Certain things are expected in certain parts of the system.  For Darwin the problem was that in scientific writing, and especially in biological scientific writing, it was expected that due reverence would be paid to the role of God.  And this set me wondering if that might not have been the same for Shakespeare.  Although it would certainly be untrue to claim that all his English predecessors had written on religious subjects it must have been the case that much of what the playwright had seen on the stage as a boy had had religious overtones.  One of his inherited conventions where the theatre was concerned was surely the inclusion of spiritual material and with that in mind it does become possible to say that the Morality tradition influenced him, although I would still want to argue that it was in a less direct manner than is being suggested in my course materials.

Any thoughts, anyone?  I know a lot of you who read this have worked in the area and I’m grateful for any other insights you might offer.  In the meantime I will go on arguing with the course materials – after all that’s half the fun of distance learning.

Noah’s Compass

I was late coming to Anne Tyler despite the fact that I have two friends who have read everything she’s ever written.  I finally caught up with her work last year when we read Digging for America in one of my reading groups and since then I’ve also read and loved Patchwork Planet.  I want a local organisation that will send someone to come and mow my lawn or fetch things from my attic.  What a wonderful idea.  So, when I saw her new novel, Noah’s Compass, in the local library I picked it up and brought it home and I have to say that it’s really set me thinking.

I should say straight out that I very much enjoyed it.  Liam has been ‘let go’ from his teaching job and in his early sixties realises that he is unlikely to get another similar position and therefore decides that he needs to downsize.  He moves into a smaller apartment and on his first night there is attacked by an intruder.  He wakes in a hospital bed with no memory of what has happened but with a nasty gash on his head and a knife wound in his hand.

And therein lies, I think, the central point of the book.  Liam is really bothered about the fact that he can’t remember the incident, despite very obvious evidence of what has happened and sets out to try and find a way of retrieving the lost memory.  What he eventually discovers is that this is only one of very many memories he has lost along his way through life.  What is different about this one is that he has had its loss brought to his attention.

As I say, I think this is the nub of what the book is about, but I’m not really sure.  And that is what set me thinking.  Maybe it’s because I belong to two very fine book groups where we tend to read meaty books with a lot in them to discuss, but these days I find that unless I’m reading a crime novel I’m always looking for ‘the message’.  What, I want to know, is this book about?

Well, today I find myself asking, why does it have to be about anything?  Why does a book have to have a message?  Can it not be just a good read?  And Noah’s Compass is exactly that, a really good read.  If you can get hold of a copy and you have the chance to put your feet up over the weekend for a couple of hours with a good pot of tea then read and enjoy.  And I think I need to do some memory work myself and remember that first and foremost reading is for enjoyment, not necessarily for passing on a message.

Cafe Society ~ Charles Darwin’s Language Problems

On Tuesday we had the second seminar in this term’s  series on Charles Darwin, this time given by an expert in Victorian Literature, very boldly venturing into the world of Linguistics.  One of the things he wanted to talk about was the difficulties that have been identified with Darwin’s use of language, most especially concentrating on those pinpointed by Gillian Beer in her excellent book Darwin’s Plots.  In this book, Beer suggests that they were four particular problems with the way in which language works that made it difficult for Darwin to express his theories in writing:

language is anthropocentric;

language always includes agency;

language is a system of inherited conventions;

languages raise problems of audience.

What was interesting was that the one that the Literature expert saw as being the primary problem was not the one that we linguists saw as most troublesome.  For our visitor it was the question of how Darwin balanced writing for an audience that consisted of both experts in his own field and the general, if well educated, reader.  We brushed over that as too obvious for words, hardly giving it a second thought.  Neither were we that bothered about the first, language being centred on humankind, or the third, although I want to come back to the question of writers being in some way bound by the discourse conventions of their predecessors in a post on another subject later this week.  No what bothered us was this question of agency – definitely a linguistic problem and one that must have given Darwin nightmares.

Agency refers to the fact that every clause presupposes an agent or an actor.  So, in my absolute favourite example,

the boy kicked the ball

the boy is the agent or actor.  He did the kicking. 

Even in the agentless passive form,

the ball was kicked

an agent is still presupposed.   You may, for purposes of avoiding paying for the broken window, avoid naming the agent but the presupposition is still that the ball was kicked by someone.

But, if you are talking about natural selection who or what is the agent behind it?  Up to this time (and maybe this is where the third point is relevant) you would automatically have ascribed the agency to God.  Darwin definitely wasn’t about to do that.  But he didn’t have the language to talk about the process that was going on here.  What was DNA?  What were chromosomes?  So, do you then ascribe it to Nature?  But that is to personify a completely abstract concept and that takes us back to the world of Literature.

It is only when you start to look at the practicalities of expression that you realise just what a momentous proposition Darwin was putting forward, an idea that was so huge our very language was unable to cope with it.  This wasn’t just a question of coining a couple of neologisms to account for something newly invented or discovered, this was an issue that troubled the structure of language in its basic propostional form.

I don’t recall how long it took Darwin to bring The Origin of Species to completion, but I do know that it was a long time and the more I think about the enormity of what he was trying to do, of how difficult it must have been to talk about ideas that defied the basic premise of the very language through which he was attempting to express them, the more I understand why that was and the greater my admiration for him grows.

The Secret Scripture

I am really looking forward to our book group meeting this evening when we are going to discuss Sebastian Barry’s Costa winning novel, The Secret Scripture.  I have already heard from three other members of the group as to how much they have enjoyed the book but each one has also added a caveat, that they were shocked and disappointed by the ending.

Well, I think I must have been reading a different book, because I don’t see how else the novel I’ve just finished could have ended.  So, I thought I would float my ideas here and see if anyone else has read the same story as me or whether I’m going to be a lone voice crying in the wind this evening.

If you haven’t read the book it takes the form of two written testimonies, one by Roseanne McNulty, an elderly patient in a mental hospital that is about to be closed and the other by Dr Grene, the psychiatrist in charge of the institution.  Roseanne’s secret writing is a recollection of the life that led to her being incarcerated in a previous home.  Dr Grene’s commonplace book is a reflection on his current existence and what, if any, meaning it has.  Together the two allow the telling of a third story, the question of what is going to happen to Roseanne at a time when all patients are being assessed to see if they can be released back into the community.

Those are the three stories that I’m fairly sure we will all have read when we start discussing the book this evening.  But, I think there is a fourth story that both underlies and overrides all of the others and that is the story of Ireland itself and most especially the story of Ireland in the twentieth century.  For it seems to me that Roseanne’s story is an allegory of the history of her homeland and the two different versions of her life that emerge, the one from her memory and the one from the official records, are the two contending histories that are told by opposing factions as a land torn by civil war tries to find a way to come to terms with the horrors of the past.  It is surely not a coincidence that much of Roseanne’s life has been spent in the shadow of Knocknarea, with its associations with Maeve, the very embodiment of Ireland and its people, or that the pivotal moment in that life takes place on its slopes.

Roseanne is Maeve and what has happened to her over the century is a reflection of what has happened to the Irish people as a whole.  Torn apart by religious strife and forced into a life of humiliation and repudiation by the power of a Church that knows no compassion, Roseanne has little understanding of the forces that are shaping her existence and no hope whatsoever of taking any control.  But, and here is where there is some hope, she is never defeated.  Just as the old lady herself fights her way back to consciousness in the closing pages of the book, so Ireland has put itself in a position where it might just manage to pull back from the brink.

And this, I think is why it has to end as it does.  (Don’t worry, if you haven’t read it I’m not going to give it away.)  Because for there to be any hope of reconciliation the contending histories have to find a way of co-existing and of recognising that perhaps neither of them is the truth and that only by allowing both to rest and the truth of the present to take is there any possibility of a future.  Dr Grene may not have written either of the histories but he is symbolic of those members of the Irish community who have to be prepared to claim their land back and admit their relationship with what has gone before.  Admit it and then move on and find a way of building a new relationship.

What I’m really sorry about is that we don’t have any Irish members of the group because this isn’t really my story and I would love to hear what someone who had lived through these events more directly had to say.  One thing I am sure of, however, is that we are going to have a first class meeting this evening.

Cafe Society ~ Charles Darwin’s Singing Frogs

While I spend a lot of time pretending to be a Shakespeare scholar, in truth I am still first and foremost a linguist and my primary responsibilities at the University remain in the Language Department.  For reasons that would take far too long to explain and which in any case have to do with personalities you don’t know, this term’s English Language Research seminars are all related in some way or other to Charles Darwin.  I don’t know what it’s been like in the rest of the world, but in the UK this year you might be forgiven for feeling that you’d had your fair share and more of information, discussion and argument about Darwin, but in all that time I have heard very little about the quality of his writing and so I’ve been looking forward to these discussions ever since they were first announced.

Last week’s initial session found us exploring Darwin’s style and comparing it to that of Alfred Russell Wallace, who was, of course, writing in the same area at the same time.  Obviously, there are all sorts of variables that need to be taken into consideration, but in general Darwin is much more florid in his writing that the rather more prosaic Wallace.  Take this passage from The Voyage of the Beagle as an example:

After the hotter days, it was delicious to sit quietly in the garden and watch the evening pass into night.  Nature, in these climes, chooses her vocalists from more humble performers than in Europe.  A small frog, of the genus Hyla, sits on a blade of grass about an inch above the surface of the water, and sends forth a pleasing chirp: when several are together they sing in harmony on different notes.

Isn’t that superb?  And can’t you just imagine what Walt Disney would have made of those harmonizing frogs?

Wallace, on the other hand, sticks much more to the point as this passage from the Maya Archipelago suggests.

The island of Singapore consists of a multitude of small hills, three or four hundred feet high, the summits of many of which are still covered with virgin forest.  The missionary house at Bukit-tima was surrounded by several of these wood –topped hills, which were much frequented by woodcutters and sawyers, and offered me excellent collecting ground for insects.

You just know, don’t you, that you aren’t going to get a barber’s shop quartet of singing frogs from Wallace.

What I found even more interesting, however, was the difference in tone between both of these passages and one taken from a leading scientist of the previous century, Malthus.  Here he is in his Essay on Population.  It’s rather a long extract, but I need to quote it all for it to make sense.

Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand.  She has been comparatively sparing in the room and nourishment necessary to rear them.  The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.  Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds.  The race of plants, and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law.  And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it.  Amongst plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness and premature death.  Among mankind, misery and vice.  The former, misery, is an absolute necessary consequence of it.  Vice is a highly probable consequence, and we therefore see it abundantly prevail: but it ought not, perhaps, to be called an absolute necessary consequence.  The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.

Isn’t that wonderful?  Not just a science lesson, but a moral polemic as well.

The Essay was written the year before Darwin’s birth and just over forty years before The Voyage of the Beagle was published.  And in that time there must have been a complete revolution in the way in which the relationship between science and issues of religious and moral import was seen.  I’m not certain that the remaining seven seminars are focused in such a way as to throw any further light on this.  Which means that here is yet another area of ignorance that I want to explore without the time in which to do it adequately.  Because I had always rather assumed that the divorce between science and religion really came about as a result of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, published twenty years after The Beagle, yet this suggests that something must have happened much earlier.  Any suggestions as to what I might read about this?  Something from the For Idiots series would probably be about the right level.

Sunday Salon ~ Sacred Hearts

Sacred Hearts is the third novel by Sarah Dunant to be set in sixteenth century Italy, this time in the city of Ferrara. Like the two earlier books, The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, Dunant’s primary concern is the life that intelligent women were forced to live in those times and places if they wished in any sense to fulfil their potential.

Having previously explored the world of the artist and that of the business woman turned courtesan, this time the author turns her attention to the world of the convent where many women who might otherwise have found themselves bound to despotic husbands were in fact able to develop talents that might have withered in the secular world.  The price however is steep, the loss of liberty and the possibility of family life.

Sacred Hearts is set in the convent of Santa Caterina at a time when, historically, the Council of Trent had turned its attentions to the licence with which many such religious houses were run.  Although, at the time of the story, the nuns way of life is protected by a less than rigid bishop, it is not just those who enjoy rather more luxury than would be found acceptable under the new regime who fear for their indulgences.  Suora Zuana, the convent’s dispensary mistress knows only too well what would happen to the books of anatomy and medicine that she brought with her after her father death, should the Council have their way.  However difficult Zuana might have found her early years as a nun, she recognizes that in the outside world she would never have had that freedom to explore her calling which she has been allowed enclosed behind the convent walls.  If the convent is to continue as a place of learning and relative comfort then it is essential that nothing happens to draw attention to the sisters and the life they have carved out for themselves within its boundaries.

The last thing they need, therefore, is the arrival of Suora Serafina, a teenager gifted to the convent by her parents after she has threatened to disgrace the family by running off with her music tutor.  Serafina’s appearance causes nothing short of mayhem.  A spirited individual, she has no intention of settling to the religious life.  Her first evening behind convent walls is a memorable one for everyone within earshot and as the weeks go on there is no apparent change in her intention to find a way to leave the order and be reunited with her lover as soon as possible.  However, events conspire to make the recalcitrant novice the focal point of an internal dispute between familial factions within the convent and suddenly it looks as if not only her freedom but her very life is threatened.  It falls to Suora Zuana, with whom Serafina has developed some level of trust, to try to find a way to break a deadlock that threatens the foundations on which Santa Caterina’s community is built.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.  Although the specific situation is fictional, I believe the general historical facts are true and the local and temporal colour certainly feels authentic enough.  I’m not so sure about the characters, who had a very modern air to them, but that is a quibble that certainly didn’t distract from the pleasure of the reading experience.

I’ve only read Ms Dunant’s historical output and at some point must go back to her earlier thriller writing and see what that is like.  Has anyone read any of those books?  And, if so, what would you recommend?