Morning Star Trilogy

The Morning Star Trilogy by Nick Bantock

In Which The Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine is Illuminated.

I first came across Griffin and Sabine while I was working at a bookstore in 2001, because it’s apparently a book that only comes into print every 5 years and the older staff were going crazy over the chance to buy it.  Once I read a friend’s copy, I could understand why: the books are beautiful.  Truly, truly beautiful.  The books are made up of a series of postcards and letters between Griffin, an artist living in London, and Sabine, an illustrator of postage stamps living in the (fictional) Sicmon Islands in the South Pacific.

And of course I didn’t buy it when I had the opportunity (because I’m a moron, y’see) and of course it has been out of print pretty much ever since.  So this review is not for the original Griffin and Sabine trilogy, but its sequel, The Morning Star trilogy, which comes in a rather pretty box set.  I’ve been holding off reading it because I hadn’t read the original books since 2001 and couldn’t quite remember what happened, but as I’ve been off sick from work *coughs pathetically* I decided to treat myself.

The first in the trilogy, The Gryphon, picks up several years after the end of The Golden Mean and begins with a cryptic postcard from Sabine to Matthew Sedon, an archaeologist working in Egypt.  She asks him to pick up a bundle of letters – the entire Griffin-Sabine correspondence from the previous books – which he shares with his girlfriend Isabella, living in Paris.  Both are perplexed by what it contains and suspect a hoax, until Griffin starts sending postcards to Isabella that show more knowledge of her waking visions than she has ever shared with anyone.  Soon, they are both caught up in the enigmatic world of Griffin, Sabine and their arch-enemy Frolatti.

To be honest, describing the plot much more than that makes it sound a bit silly and trite.  There’s all sorts of mysticism and references to legends that go over my head slightly, possibly because I’m still pretty sick* or because Nick Bantock is vastly cleverer than me, or because the references are silly and trite.  Let me know which you think it is once you have read it?  The plot might be a bit slight, but the format is just incredible.  The postcards, envelopes and stamps are all different and all beautiful, whilst the simple pleasure of pulling out a sheet of paper from an envelope and getting to read a handwritten (well, sorta) letter is incomparable.  This is basically The Jolly Postman for adults and if there was one book (or series of books) I wish I had written, it’s this one.  Just flat out gorgeous.  OK, maybe writing the Harry Potter series would have been pretty awesome too – think of the money! – but still, I’d pick the Griffin and Sabine books as my why didn’t I think of that winner.  I read this in bed whilst feeling completely awful and then fell asleep hugging it, because it’s so pretty.  *strokes the pretty*

*It’s just a cold, true, but one that’s seriously knocked me for six!

Going native

The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The second of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures, as narrated by his trusty sidekick Watson.  A young woman, Mary Morstan, has received a strange letter asking that she meet a person at 8pm in a specific place and not to involve the police.  Confused and wary, she asks Holmes and Watson to accompany her and ends up at the home of Mr Thaddeus Sholto (awesome name!), who reveals what really happened to her father who mysteriously disappeared ten years earlier and to the treasure he had a part in hiding.  Thaddeus takes them to see his brother, Bartholomew, who has unexpectedly been killed by a poison dart.  Holmes’ deductive reasoning uncovers the trail of the murderer and a story of betrayal stretching to India and back.

Rather than stopping halfway through the story to start telling a totally different, if related, one, The Sign of Four works as a slightly more coherent whole.  Watson’s attraction to Miss Morstan overshadows parts of the story slightly – the comic elements of his infatuation don’t really work that well.  The ending involves a long description of the finding and sharing of a treasure, which is almost painfully boring to read.  Following on from the previous novella‘s bizarre representation of Mormons, The Sign of Four is scathing in its description of Indians and I’m fairly sure at one point there is a suggestion that black people are essentially savages who can’t control their animal side the way sophisticated white people can, which is uncomfortable reading 120 years later.  Also, I’m not sure that Holmes sleeps at any point during the action of the book – he’s either chasing the murderer or getting high.  But never both, he wouldn’t want to interfere with his intellectual faculties…

It’s a shame that Doyle decided to end the tale with a fanciful exposition, which would have been tedious enough at the opening of a book but is almost worthless by the end.  I skipped over several paragraphs without meaning to and I’m still not 100% sure who originally owned the treasure, even though I’m fairly sure the book probably explained it.  The first half, which sets up the murder of Bartholomew and re-establishes Holmes’ extraordinary reasoning techniques, is brilliant.  I was sitting on a bench reading this at Shepreth Wildlife Park, while my friends stood on a platform to look at the tigers (my feet hurt) and I felt like I was transported to fin de siécle London, riding a wherry across the river in a hunt for a man with a wooden leg and his native accomplice.  When they came back down, I had to drag myself back to the present day and was slightly confused that it was daytime, sunny and I was near some sleepy tigers.  It’s rare for a book to be that effective within a few words, so despite the inconsistencies and apparent endorsement of cocaine as a remedy for boredom, I give it:

Shiny new not-my-books

On Tuesday, the Central Library reopened here in Cambridge after being closed for four long years.  On Wednesday I trotted down there after work with my old library card in my pocket and a sturdy bag.  *excited*  Turns out that I’ve not used my card in so long (coughfouryearscough) that my account closed, so I have a new card and a new PIN (don’t remember having an old PIN, but there you go) and a new shiny lovely pile of books!  I restrained myself so I only got the latest Tamora Pierce, Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard and two Sherlock Holmes short stories.  As my lovely boyfriend has been distracted by the football lately, I should have had plenty of time to myself to get stuck in.  Sadly, I had to review some films for radio yesterday and so have been somewhat busy with that!

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A shell-shocked Dr Watson returns from Afghanistan, released from service after receiving an injury.  He is looking for somewhere to live and a friend introduces him to Sherlock Holmes, who has lodgings he can’t afford by himself.  With everything worked out nicely, Watson focuses on getting better and Holmes continues to beat corpses with a stick, to see how long after death bruises will continue to appear.  As you do.  When the London police force find a dead body, surrounded by blood but with no apparent wounds on him, they call in Holmes – much to Watson’s amazement.  After the discovery of a second dead body, in similar circumstances to the first, Holmes announces that he can describe the physical attributes of the murderer and even knows his name, despite the foremost detectives on the case knowing nothing at all.  At which point the story skips abruptly to Utah, some 20 years earlier.  Eventually these disparate threads are revealed to be elements of the same story, a tale of love, betrayal and revenge.  And thus Sherlock Holmes is proved correct.  Unsurprisingly.

This is the first Sherlock Holmes book I’ve read since they Robert Downey Junior was cast in the eponymous film, so I got to imagine him in the role.  Yummy.

As this is the first incarnation of Sherlock, he doesn’t have the full complement of idiosyncrasies that he displays in the later stories and novels; Watson is likewise incomplete and yet to fully take on the mantle of “sidekick”.  It obviously takes inspiration from Murders in the rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe, even dismissing the detective-hero of the novel as “a very inferior fellow” at one point.  Overall, an interesting starting point for the characters and will definitely interest anyone who likes early crime fiction (I designed my own module based around the concept in my third year at uni) but I think that Poe and Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone are better starting points in the genre.

A series of inspired follies

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Probably best known today as the Audrey Hepburn musical My Fair Lady, Pygmalion is a twist on the archetypal rags-to-riches story.  Eliza Doolittle, an impoverished flower seller, meets linguist Professor Higgins and requests that he teach her to “talk more genteel” so she can upgrade to a flower lady in a shop.  Higgins takes her on, in part due to a bet with his friend and fellow linguist Pickering, and attempts to mould Eliza into a woman with the dulcet tones and mannerisms of a proper lady.

The title is a classical reference to the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with the statue he created.  The subtitle of the book is “A Romance in Five Acts“.  Put these together with the now-classic romcom set up – let’s face it, it’s practically the same plot as Pretty Woman but with fewer hookers and a bit more talking – and you’d think you were dealing with a fluffy happy story about people falling in love.  You’d be wrong, but the misunderstanding is forgivable.  The question of “what is to be done with Liza” comes up over and over again in the first half of the play, dismissed by the major players who all have their own reasons for continuing the experiment.  Eliza wants to be able to promote herself in the world, her father doesn’t want to take responsibility for her keep, and Higgins and Pickering are excited by the prospect of putting their principles into practice.

Previously to this, the only Shaw I’d come across was Mrs Warren’s Profession in Plays Unpleasant, written before he started sugarcoating his more controversial ideas.  Higgins’ misogyny and unwillingness to accept Liza as anything other than a “squashed cabbage leaf” are pretty unpleasant but the comedy value aspects, such as Eliza’s posh accent/gutter vocabulary combo, mask the worst excesses and make the nastier elements a little less unpalatable.  And even when she finally comes to the realisation that “I sold flowers, I didn’t sell myself.  Now you’ve made a lady of me, I’m not fit to sell anything else”, it’s not as shocking as the moment in MWP when her daughter discovers where their money was earnt.  Both moments essentially address the same issue – society’s reaction to a woman selling her own body – but in Pygmalion it is an aspect of a frothy confection whereas MWP deals with the subject directly.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the play.  Despite the fact that I’ve never seen the famous film version all the way through, I still had Audrey Hepburn’s voice in my head as I read it – particularly the ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow exclamations she makes with an annoying frequency (and which are no less irritating in print than they were in the film).  It’s  tough to get a proper handle on something that should be viewed on a stage sometimes, but this is a pretty good example of a play that can be read for pleasure.  It provides surface enjoyment easily but rewards closer inspection as well: