A quiet long weekend in Wales was good for catching up on some reading.
51. The Ginger Tree - Oswald Wynd
This is one I have been meaning to read for ages (it was published in the late 1970s, and made into a TV series in the late 1980s, which I never saw but I believe some of my friends appeared in it as extras), so had to buy when I saw it in Daunt Books the other week. It is a novel written in letter and diary entry format, covering the first few decades of the 20th century in China and Japan, and tying in the life of one woman with all the historical events of those years.
It starts in 1903, with a naive, nicely-brought-up young Scottish woman on a boat to China to marry a man she hardly knows, who is a British military attache in Beijing. She is plunged into diplomatic circles at a time of huge geopolitical upheaval - Chinese and Russian imperial systems on their last legs, Japan rising, colonial powers jockeying for position etc - and social change. While her (cold and distant) husband is away, she has a brief affair with a Japanese officer, and ends up in Tokyo, pregnant with an illegitimate child and a very long way from Edinburgh Presbyterian life... Against all odds, she makes a life for herself as an independent woman in Japan, and finds new principles to live by, until finally the second world war forces her to leave.
The author is Scottish, but was born and grew up in Tokyo in the early years of the 20th century, before his family returned to Scotland. As an officer during the war, he ended up as a prisoner of war in Japan. He was deeply familiar with Japanese culture and language, but obviously had mixed feelings about the country due to his wartime experience.
I was drawn to this book by my own long history with that part of the world, and my background knowledge certainly helped understand the historical context to everything that was going on (but also meant I could see certain plot elements coming, e.g. the Tokyo earthquake of 1923); nonetheless, I think it would also be a good read for anyone with a liking for historical novels featuring women developing hidden strengths.
52. Under the Tump - Oliver Balch
Non-fiction. Journalist moves back from Latin America with his young family and looks for somewhere to put down roots with a sense of community, but not just full of people just like him (i.e. basically what some would call the liberal metropolitan elite, I guess - educated, well-travelled, liberal-minded etc). He picks a village near Hay-on-Wye, called Clyro, best known from the writings of the Rev Kilvert, a Victorian-era clergyman and nature enthusiast who spent several years in Clyro, and whose collected diaries are still in print.
The book is a mish-mash of writing about Kilvert's experiences of the area and how it has changed (or not), plus portraits of the current inhabitants of the area (mixture of farmers who have been there for generations, and more recent hippyish or bookish incomers), and local politics in Hay, which is caught between needing all the incomers and tourists (attracted by the bookshops and Hay Festival), but not wanting them to change the character of the place, which for locals is still the market town it always was.
I found it fascinating as I have known the area for years and, for example, bought a pair of socks in the Fair Trade shop in Hay the day before I read a chapter all about the shop and its owners. It could also be worth reading for anyone more generally interested in the rural/urban divide and how farming areas and small towns and villages are adapting to 21st century life, and how people with very different values and attitudes to life and to place can live together.
53. The Reading Party - Fenella Gentleman
Young woman fancies handsome, slightly younger American man, but he is off limits, as she is the first female fellow of an Oxford college (this is set in 1976/77), and he is a student. They are thrown together for a college-organised reading week at a house on the Cornish coast, together with a crusty old don with a tragic secret, and a chocolate-box assortment of other students. Female fellow struggles to keep her hands off him during blustery walks and games of sardines, and ends up mooning around like a lovesick teenager.
I was expecting a bit more depth to this, but it is basically a romance novel with some snippets of mildly interesting social history about women in education, Cornwall, Oxford college life etc as background colour. The central romance seemed rather wooden and unrealistic to me, too (the main attractions of the romantic object seemed to be his preppy style and curly hair), and some of the bits of contemporary colour just seemed shoehorned in to remind you that this was the 1970s (Angela Rippon's high-kicking Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, Virginia Wade winning Wimbledon, union struggles etc).