Sandlands by Rosy Thornton

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Rosy Thornton had sent me a review copy of her latest book which this time is a collection of sixteen short stories rather than a novel.  I have previously reviewed two of her novels and I will put links to these reviews at the bottom of this post.  I have spent the last week reading Rosy's wonderful stories and I've enjoyed them immensely.  I had to limit myself to two stories a day but I could have read more as it didn't seem as if I was reading totally separate stories as similar themes and characters run through them all.

Rosy's wonderful writing draws you into each story with her poetic descriptions of the land and her sometimes amusing and sometimes poignant observations of people and places, of nature and nurture and the performing of simple everyday tasks.  The linking of these stories is in the history of place and of the people within that place.  Of several generations each affecting the other often in the same family through ancient houses, letters and old photos, of things that have gone before.

The stories are set in the county of Suffolk on the salt and sand marshes where fogs and floods are always present or threatened. There are many themes running through each story mostly of past and present merging, of early beginnings, superstitions, old traditions, the fragility of life in both human and animal world, of birth and death.  There is also always the threat from the closeness of the sea, fear of innundation, threats from those beyond the seas like maurauding Danes in the early centuries of the county's history and Dorniers in the skies during the second world war. Also running through the stories are strong, practical women, women coping with motherhood, pending motherhood, the loss of a child or spouse, widowhood and loneliness.   There are the academic men in their ivory towers like Mr Napish in High House, the narrator of Silver Studded Blues in his museum and Dr Whybrow in his Martello Tower in Whispers.
 
Another theme through many of Rosy's stories is flight.  World War Two planes overhead, old wartime airfields, later sites of protest against nuclear warheads, now wartime museums; seeds of rare wildflowers cast into the wind, the silver studded blue butterflies rising in a mass from the heather on Blaxhall Common, the sand blowing into houses in coastal villages and most notably of birds. A barn owl guarding letters in an old Oxo tin hidden in a tree, the sad, plaintive call of curlews as night falls across the marshes, oyster catchers feeding along the estuary and rooks nesting in the horse chestnut trees at the edge of Willett's farm, the nightingales who sing to the son of an Italian prisoner of war as he walks to visit the farm where his father worked on the land during his capture.

A lot of the stories are based in one village, Blaxhall and its church with its female rector who is on maternity leave, its bell ringers, its pub The Ship a centre for both the characters of the village, a group of aged folk singers plus the people who visit, whilst working on archaeological digs or researching ancestors. The meeting of the old ways and the new, pagan practises, Christianity, folklore and mystery.

I have enjoyed reading these stories very much and I'm sure I will return to them later this year to read them again just for Rosy's descriptions of the landscape she loves and writes about so well.

Sandlands by Rosy Thornton published by Sandstone Press 2016, P/Bk 260pages, ISBN 9 781910 985045 £8.99 

Here are links to my other reviews of Rosy Thornton's books

A Tapestry of Love
Ninepins

A Quick Book Review

I haven't had a lot of time for reading, or indeed blogging, lately as I've been working fairly long hours at Royal Mail in the lead up to Christmas but one book that I've really enjoyed reading is 'Keeping the World Away' by Margaret Forster. I couldn't resist taking this book out of the library as its whole story, from begining to end, is based around one of my favourite paintings by my favourite artist.

The painting is from a series painted by Gwen John, during the years of 1907-1909, of her attic room in the Rue du Cherche Midi entitled ‘A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris’. The painting I have seen most often is the one owned by the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. This one shows the corner with a table in the window, a wicker chair against which leans a parasol. A coat or wrap drapes over the chair and on the table are primroses in a small pot. There are other versions of the painting showing the same corner of the room with the window open showing the buildings opposite, an open book on the table and the blue coat but no parasol.

The whole premise of the book is that one of this series of paintings, one with primroses on the table, is lost and explores its passage through time owned by one woman after another from the time Gwen John gave it as a present to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt to the present day. The first part of the book covers Gwen's childhood in Haverfordwest and Tenby through to her studying, with her brother Augustus, at the Slade School in London, her departure for Paris, her love affair with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and her subsequent and gradual withdrawal into an interior world. Each of the women who find themselves owning the painting are the kind of women who are different in some way from the expected norm of their age. Independent, unconventional, happy to be alone, striving against unsurmountable odds or unhappy with their lot in life. Each of them, like the artist herself, wanted to 'keep the world away'. The painting is lost in missing luggage on its way back from Paris, found by the person who recieves the valaise by mistake, it is then stolen, bought from a market stall, sold as a means of escape, given as a gift and then sold again. The painting travels from Paris to Hampstead to Cornwall, back to Hampstead, to the Scottish highlands and finally back to Paris where its fate is finally resolved. Although I found some of the women's characters less sympathetic than others and there was a strange moment when e-mails were referred to in a time I thought was supposed to be the 1970s - I may have been wrong on this - I was quite entranced by the book and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.