Trilogy

The March prompt (#LBB15) for Love Blippin’ Books, to help mark Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, was simply. ‘Women Writers.’

In order of reading I selected Patricia Highsmith’s ‘A Dog’s Ransom,’ Gwyneth Jones’s ‘Divine Endurance’ and Jacquetta Hawkes’ ‘A Land’. 

I’m about three quarters of the way through reading Highsmith’s novels. Her repertoire goes a lot deeper than the famous ‘Strangers on a Train’ or ‘The Talented Mr Ripley.’  ‘A Dog’s Ransom’ (1972) is set in New York City and for the first few chapters plays with the expectation of police procedurals of that city, like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, but then subverts them. A crime is committed, but in a few chapters we know who the criminal is and after a couple more chapters, so do all the other protagonists. The focus of the book shifts to the psychological impact of the book’s opening incident on a cross-section of characters, and as is often the case with Highsmith, pushes at the things that ordinary people might be prepared to do in certain circumstances.

The next book saw an abrupt shift in time and space, to a post-apocalyptic South-East Asia, for an exploration of gender and technology. I’d first read Gwyneth Jones’s ‘Divine Endurance’ in 1985, but I soon found I remembered nothing of it so it felt like a fresh read. It has a reputation for being a difficult read, with a large cast of characters and places that can be difficult to keep track of  - although like all good science fiction, there is a map :-) and the bonus of a cat on the cover!  As such it’s probably not a book best suited to ‘commuter reading’ which is mostly what I do.  The thematic issues felt very contemporary, and as an ‘ideas’ book it is very stimulating. Without wanting to give too much away, the two characters on the cover are both synthetic beings, but nearly everyone else in the story is very human. Having finished the book I found Jones had written a long piece about the writing of it several years later, and that certainly helped me decode certain bits, but it was a rewarding read without that. I read several of Jones’ books 30-40 years ago, when she was just getting established as a writer, but this re-read has encouraged me to look out for some of her more recent work. In the SF field she is often compared to Ursula Le Guin, who is my favourite writer, but she is nowhere near as well known or celebrated. 

Finally, into the world of science fact with Jacquetta Hawkes’s ‘The Land’ (1951) which is a concise, poetic synthesis of what geological and archaeological sciences tell us about the story of Britain. Seventy years later I think I’d position this as a pioneering piece of nature writing - the science may have moved on, the but ideas that Hawkes explores about the formation of ‘place’ and the relationships between land and culture are still very current and essential.  There was one neat piece of synchronicity when I found myself reading a passage about the formation of the Cheshire Plain, with its pools, mires and salt deposits, while traveling across it on the train across to Wales. Hawkes is something of a forgotten figure, but her archive is based just down the road from me at my former employer and I’m sure there could be many interesting projects to be found exploring that. I hope that if she were around in today’s mediascape she would be a well known public intellectual, perhaps a Mary Beard or Alice Roberts of her time. And then maybe archive would be based in a building carrying her name alongside that of her second husband, rather than just being the J.B. Priestley Library that it is. 

So, a rather eclectic past/present/future triology for this month’s theme. Let’s see where next month takes me… Thanks as always to @squatbetty for founding LBB and for this month’s prompt.