Nicci French Blog

The Size of Whales

Philip Hoare's Leviathan is a beautiful book. I kept reading out interesting facts to helpless people around me. Here's one: in the 20th century whalers killed 360,000 Blue Whales, reducing the population to less than 1,000.

And here's a quote from an extraordinary chapter on growing  research into the mental capacities of whales:

    'The sperm whale, too, has an uncertain future, so slow to breed that it also [as well as the Yangtze River Dolphin] may eventually perish as a delayed effect of hunting. What man started, in the purposeful culls of the two great periods of whaling, his heirs may succeed in finishing off, almost by accident. Dr Whitehead and his fellow researchers may never know the truth about the whale; although in his most astonishing suggestion - all the more so for coming at the culmination of the most detailed scientific surveys, mathematical models and precise plottings, the result of a lifetime spent studying this one species - Whitehead proposes that we may yet discover that sperm whales, the oldest and possible most evolved of any cetacean [whale], have developed emotions, abstract concepts and, perhaps, even religion.'

Clearing Up after Mr Hyde

I just read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. What you forget, if you've only seen the movies, is that the fact that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person is a twist that is only revealed about two thirds of the way through. 

I followed it with Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly, which is the same story told from the point of view of one of Dr Jekyll's servants. It's the exact same story, but told from a different perspective and it works brilliantly. I'd be tempted to see Stephen Frears's film version except that it ludicrously stars Julia Roberts as the abused working-class Victorian chambermaid. 

Forty-Niners

This year I've read two large books by writers who delivered multi-part books their publishers and then died at the age of forty-nine. It makes me relieved to have reached fifty. This first was Roberto Bolano's 2666, the second was Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 

They have something else in common as well. Both are about violence against women (the original Swedish title of the Larsson book is actually 'The Man Who Hated Women') and (or do I mean 'but') both feature excruciatingly long and detailed descriptions of abuse of women. The relentless description of the murders in the great central section of the Bolano book is an extraordinary tour de force. There is the added point that these murders really occurred.

The violence in the Larsson book is of the sort that comes with the modern crime genre and that some people are starting to be repelled by. I'm puzzled by the fashion for dreaming up more and more baroque forms of violence, usually carried out against young women (and more often than not created by female crime writers). My problem with it isn't that it's 'too dark' but that it tips over into being silly.

What I most liked about Larsson's book was the author's clever idea of exploring what would happen if Pippi Longstocking grew up and became the heroine of a thriller. 

Walnut season

Nicci: This weekend we have been harvesting walnuts. We have an old, splendid tree in the garden and this has been its bumper year; even the squirrels can't keep up. There are many thousands of them, some free of their cases, other in tight green or split and browning skins. We gathered them up and heaved them, tub after tub, into the kitchen, where we have now spent many many hours, first splitting the skins and then scrubbing the nuts clean of the dark, slimy skeins of gunk which cling to them. It takes rather a long time - but I tell you, each one tastes a hundred times better than any walnut I've bought, because I grew and gathered and prepared them myself. 

What does one do with so many walnuts? Of course, we can eat them plain, first as wet walnuts then later as dry ones. We can make walnut and coffee cake. We can use them in salads and scatter them over pretty much any savoury dish. There will still be mountains of walnuts, little blond brains.  

A couple of years ago, we had a go at making pickled walnuts. You have to put the nuts - still green and unripe in their thick skins - in salty water and wait until a nasty brown foam overflows onto the floor, staining everything and smelling badly. Then you rinse them and do it again - and the water bubbles and darkens again. Then you basically put them in containers and pour in vinegar and all manner of spices and leave them for months before trying. They don't look very appetising: warty and black as boils. I'm not really sure they taste great either and a little goes a long way. We have many many jars left.

A friend told me that you can cut the unripe walnuts into quarters and pure pure alcohol over the top, leaving them to marinade for months until it's a beautiful, nutty liqueur that they are very fond of in Italy. So that's for next year. Meanwhile, any other ideas? Maybe walnut pesto. Walnut and banana loaf. Walnut carrot cake. Walnuts with stilton. Tomorrow: walnut with spiced pumpkin. Tonight: walnut dreams....

Muphry's Lore

I'm delighted to learn about Muphry's Law. This states that if you criticise someone's editing or proofreading, your own criticism will contain an error. (I learned this from one of my new favourite sites, Best of Wikipedia.)

This reminds me of how, many years ago, my father, Philip French, ran into trouble making a sort of meta-joke about Muphry's Law. He was reviewing the film, Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, which was the first film to be described as a 'prequel'. He commented that 'hopefully, only those disinterested in the proper use of language won't be offended by this usage'. He was, of course, deluged by letters demanding how dare he criticise other people's bad use of language when he himself etc., etc...

One English teacher wrote that he was using the passage with his class as an example of bad grammar. My father wrote back saying that he should continue to use it, but as an example of misunderstood irony. 

Life Sentences

In his recent TLS review of Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark, James Campbell recounted yet another example of Spark's bad behaviour and then commented: 

     'It is wearying to read this, in chapter after chapter, without asking yourself why you're not immersed in The Ballad of Peckham Rye instead.'

    I think it's worse than that. I remember many years ago Q Magazine compiled a list of people who everyone knows one thing about. (That Sarah Miles drank her own urine; that Kingsley Amis lived with his ex-wife and her new husband and so on.) Likewise, William Golding raped a fifteen-year-old girl; Iris Murdoch slept with lots of men and women; Philip Larkin kept a stash of porn at his office and wrote a racist poem for a friends (that's two things); T.S. Eliot had his first wife confined to an asylum. 

My own biography of Patrick Hamilton detailed his alcoholism and disabling depression. Interesting? I thought so. A help to understanding Hangover Square or Slaves of Solitude? I don't think so.

One Man and Eighty-One Women

Earlier in the week we gave a talk at a lunch given by the Suffolk East Federation of Women's Institutes. We had fun, and at least I did better than Tony Blair in similar circumstances.

Short Stories

We've got a couple of short stories in a new anthology, The Book Lover's Appreciation Society. Some of the proceeds go to Breast Cancer Scare. And it's got an introduction by Geri Halliwell. 'This book is like a cosy box of chocolats,' she writes. 'Each story has its individuality and comfort.' Not much comfort in our two.

One of them is about a school reunion. I'm actually going to a school reunion tonight. I hope it goes better than the one in  our story.

Nicci French Live

We're appearing at the Henley Literary Festival on Sunday at 12.30. Could be fun. By the way, what's the finest novel set in Henley?

A finger points.....

Nicci:

A couple of days ago, a report came out which seemed to demonstrate that children whose mothers went out to work ate less healthy food, watched more television, did less exercise and were more likely to be overweight or obese. It wasn't a value-laden report, but a statistical one; the authors were certainly not saying that women should stay at home with their children; I assumed they chose to look at mothers working in particular, not men, and not parents in general, because the great change in working patterns has happened to women, not men. Never the less, a familiar feeling of anxiety settled on me when I read the report, even though my children are pretty much grown up now, and so the reports findings are no longer directly relevant to me and so do not have the power to send me into a hand-wringing wretchedness. It felt as though a finger was being pointed - that same old tut-tutting finger that has been pointing at working mothers for as long as I can remember. 

When my four children were small, I was a full-time working mother. I was also, for a short time, a single mother. Twice, because of my particular job and contract, I had to return to work absurdly quickly and I felt as though I had been ripped away from my babies, it hurt so very much. For many years, I felt I lived a double life ruled by love and guilt. I would bake cakes in the early hours of the morning, to prove to myself i was a proper mother. I would hurtle around London on my bike, trying to get to the parents' evenings, the school concerts, the sports days. I made excuses at work that kept the children out of it - somehow it's OK to take time off to go to the dentist or wait in for the plumber, but not to look after a sick child.  At home, I often tried to catch up with work, and at work, I would be worrying about things at home, or simply feeling that I was in the wrong place. I had to work - I didn't really feel I had much choice - but also, in spite of my intense feelings of missing and regret, I wanted to work (just not so hard, not for such long hours, not so that i felt I was being torn in two). I was one of the very lucky ones though - Sean worked from home and so he could do some of the caring I wasn't able to. Sometimes, under my great gratitude, I felt the surge of primitive jealousy and resentment. That was my job; mine. 

 

Later, as they grew older, turned into teenagers, I still worked, but did it from home - that was so much less painful. I could somehow be a full time worker and a full time mother, like a magic trick, like a con artist, like a demented insomniac, like Elizabeth Gaskell who wrote in the kitchen with the soup on the hob  and a child under her chair. Most of us don't have that luxury. I can see it's a problem when two parents work full time at demanding jobs - what happens to the children? Who helps them with homework and hears about their day and puts salad on their plates? But surely we should be more flexible and accommodating, not just to parents but to all workers. Most of us work too hard and more and more of us don't work at all.People should be allowed to work until well over 65, if they want. Women and men should be able to job share. Fathers and mothers should be able to share maternity [sic] leave. And mothers wouldn't feel so very guilty, whether they work or whether they don't.