When – after departing on a much-desired seaside break – you discover, too late, that you’ve left your smartphone charging at home nearly a hundred miles away (at the opposite corner of even a small country like Wales) you can find yourself confronted with unpleasant choices.
Going back is out of the question, so the options are (a) do you sulk, beat yourself up, in frustration growl at your innocent partner, or (b) make the best of a bad job and just go with the flow? After all, I’d taken three books to read, so what’s the problem?
But if one title was to refresh your memory for completing a review on your smartphone, and the second proves to be a quicker read than expected, while the third happens to be an even briefer novella, you can soon start believing that being phoneless as well as bookless is a torture just one step down from Winston Smith’s mask of caged rats…
‘Mary Ann Evans’ by François D’Albert Durade (1850), National Portrait Gallery.
Jane Austen and George Eliot: The Lady and The Radical by Edward Whitley. Biteback Publishing, 2025.
“[T]here is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humour, and passion.” — Mary Ann Evans: ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.’
The title of this book instantly reminded me of essays I used to be set in school which began, “Compare and contrast . . .” for its wording instantly set up similarities and oppositions: the works of two prominent nineteenth-century female writers whose social standings and politics nevertheless seem to have been fundamentally at odds.
But yet while Austen and Eliot might appear like chalk and cheese Whitley’s fascinating thesis is that there is more to link the pair than at first appears, that the conduit between their output was facilitated by a fan of Austen who introduced her work to the woman who became George Eliot – and that he did it via correspondence with the novelist who called herself Currer Bell.
And what I find revealing is the fact that both Austen and Eliot wrote humorous yet critical pieces about the challenges facing female authors. One was ‘Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters,’ and the other was ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’; both address reader expectations and literary realities but in their own respective styles.
René Magritte (image credit: Wolleh Lothar / Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo).
Mr Hire’s Engagement by Georges Simenon. Les Fiançailles de M. Hire (1933) translated by Anna Moschovakis (2007). Penguin Classics, 2014.
Monsieur Hire lives in a tiny flat in an early 20th-century block which fronts an enclosed courtyard. He keeps himself to himself so is initially unaware that a prostitute has been brutally murdered in the neighbourhood. But, using a pretext, the suspicious concierge spots a bloodied towel through his front door. Rattled, she alerts the police, who mount a 24-hour surveillance operation.
Like the proverbial fly on the wall we watch Monsieur Hire as he goes about his work preparing mail order packages in a basement in the 16th arrondissement, travelling to and from the impoverished satellite town of Villejuif by tram and métro, and also in his leisure time as he spends time in cafés and bars, attends a football match, goes bowling, and visits a brothel.
But mostly we watch him alone in his cold one-room flat, feeding his stove, eating simple meals, being a voyeur. And when he becomes a police suspect we discover that his background as the son of Jewish immigrants is just the first step in a case being built against him.
In case you thought – after the second of two reviews and at least two discussion posts – that I had said all I needed to say about Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park, prepare to be disappointed, for before I move on to Emma I intend examining further aspects in a post (an essay really) … and this is it!
Those earlier posts discussed the possible location of the Northamptonshire mansion; the slave trade; when the main action took place; and Austen’s choice of personal names. This time I want to talk about the principal personages and also about some ways to look at how Austen might have structured her novel.
I don’t pretend, nor can I guarantee, that I’ll never talk about Mansfield Park after this, but I do think you may breathe a sigh of relief that very soon I’ll have said as much as I currently want to say about it, even if you judged it too much by half . . . or more.
‘The Griffin’: engraving by Martin Schongauer (d 1491).
Awkward Magic by Elisabeth Beresford, illustrated by Judith Valpy. US title: The Magic World (1965). Target Books, 1973 (1964).
Before ever she sent out the Wombles of Wimbledon Common into the world to work their eco-inspired charm Elisabeth Beresford published Awkward Magic, the first of what was to become a sequence of eight books with ‘magic’ in the title.
But first we find ourselves in 1960s Brighton, the seaside town and resort where Beresford grew up and went to school, and are introduced to young Joe who’s about to start his school summer holidays. On his way home he interrupts two older boys throwing stones at what appears to be a bedraggled dog. It’s soon made clear this isn’t a pooch but a griffin, that fantastical creature out of Mesopotamian and medieval myth, a composite beast with the rear parts of a lion and the fore parts of an eagle.
And Joe soon discovers what he’s let himself in for when he takes what seems to be a mistreated dog to the boarding house where, while his father’s in the army, he’s looked after by kind landlady Mrs Chatter: for this curious animal has wings; it talks at length, and with a great deal of sarcasm; and it’s pursuing its ancient function, which is to seek out treasure and guard it.
I’ve already gabbled on about my bookish consumption for June in a recent ‘Bookwise’ post, consisting of – as I noted – four crime thrillers, an Austen classic, a collection of fantasy short stories and a short horror story. And then, on the cusp of June becoming July, I completed a French novella to review for the Paris in July reading event.
However, I saw that Emma @ WordsAndPeace.com (who, together with Annabel of Annabookbel.net, is now hosting 20 Books of Summer) set a questionnaire (here) inviting participants to reflect on their first month of summer reading.
As I’m a sucker for a good questionnaire, and I’ve had quite a good literary June, I quite fancied answering her five queries. And if you like the look of them you too might like to join in – in fact, you may already have done so!
Ring Roads by Patrick Modiano. Les Boulevards de ceinture (1972) translated by Caroline Hillier (1974), revised by Frank Wynne (2015). Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015 (1974).
What are boulevards de ceinture, the ‘ring roads’ of the title? They are of course routes designed to bypass an urban centre, but they’re not new. The Paris Boulevard Périphérique, for example, was begun in the late nineteenth century and followed the line of the defensive ring put around the capital earlier by the military.
Either way the significance for this novel is not necessarily because in his late teens the narrator and his older companion, like other flâneurs, occasionally wandered Paris streets at night out to the routes that skirted central Paris.
No, it’s more because the narrator determinedly skirts around the questions that he should ask his father – why his father was absent in his childhood, and what his father had been doing in the decade after their brief time together after the narrator had obtained his baccalauréat. Now, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, is it too late to get answers?
Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri. La gita a Tindari (2000) translated by Stephen Sartarelli. Inspector Montalbano, No 5. Picador, 2006 (2005).
‘You’ve certainly got a lovely imagination,’ Mimì commented after thinking over the inspector’s reconstruction of events. ‘When you retire you could start writing novels.’ ‘I would definitely write mysteries. But it’s not worth the trouble.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ ‘Because certain critics and professors, or would-be critics and professors, consider mystery novels a minor genre. And, in fact, in histories of literature they’re never even mentioned.’
A young man shot in the head – a missing elderly couple – the threat of a colleague being transferred elsewhere – a summons to see a local mafioso boss – a superior for whom the protagonist has no respect, and an on-off relationship with his girlfriend: these are the kinds of matters that regularly turn up on Commissario Montalbano’s desk or impinge on his personal life, at first sight all seemingly unrelated.
Or maybe they’re not unrelated. Pluck one string on a harp and others start to vibrate in sympathy, nudge one upstanding domino tile and others soon topple. An apartment block, a coach trip to the north of Sicily, a visit to an isolated villa, a burnt-out farmhouse, a clandestine visit to an isolated hideaway – these disparate keynotes eventually coalesce to create concordance from discord.
And through it all treads Camilleri’s commissario, regarded as a loose cannon by his bosses but who nevertheless combines a strong social conscience with a capacity for discerning links between apparently random facts and occurrences. Yet some cases will tax all his powers of deduction as well as leading him into imminent personal danger.
Oh my gosh, we’re nearly halfway through the year already! How has that come about? At least Armageddon hasn’t arrived — yet — so I’ve managed to dispatch another truckload big box of books enjoyed over the past six months to the Red Cross shop, in order that more pre-owned books can be owned all over again. And hopefully enjoyed.
And what have the last four reading weeks consisted of? Well, regretfully none of my multi-paged doorstopper tomes have yet been tackled but I have enthusiastically joined in with Reading the Meow (Lovecraft’s The Cats of Ulthar, plus Aiken’s A Necklace of Raindrops and its two cat-related stories), and with National Crime Reading Month (Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, Jónasson’s The Darkness, Aiken’s Trouble with Product X and, with a review imminent, Camilleri’s Excursion to Tindari).
I also participated in Reading Austen 2025: I finally walked through the gates of Mansfield Park for the second time, and had a closer look at ‘Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters’. Meanwhile, Goodreads tells me that I’ve so far completed a grand total of thirty-seven books in 2025, with a roughly 50:50 female to male split.
James Andrews‘ insipid watercolour portrait of Jane Austen (1869) based on Cassandra’s.
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Penguin Popular Classics, 1994 (1814).
“‘I do not write for such dull elves’ as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.” – Austen, paraphrasing a quote from Walter Scott’s poem ‘Marmion’ on the occasion of the publication of her third novel.
What is Jane Austen’s third published novel about? “Mansfield Park is, among other things, a novel about the condition of England, and addresses itself to the questions raised by the royal behaviour and the kind of society it encouraged,” writes Austen’s biographer, Claire Tomalin. An online commentator declares instead that “it is about parental neglect and the effects of abuse, and [Fanny Price’s] position as a semi-outsider.”
Charles Jennings believes it’s “unequivocally a Bildungsroman, a dark comedy of manners, and an investigation into human frailty and, to top it off, a critique of youthful insincerity.” But, given that Mansfield Park (according to Cassandra) was composed – or rather, revised and given its final form – between February 1811 and June 1813, what are we to make of this passing comment in Jane’s letter dated 29th January 1813, written to her sister Cassandra?
“Now I will try to write of something else; — it shall be a complete change of subject — Ordination.”
Is she merely changing the subject in the letter, and simply referring to ordination as the ritual by which a man becomes a priest? If particularly the latter, does it actually apply to the main theme of her new novel or is it related only to a plot point? Is there I’m fact more to this phrase than meets the eye? Scholars often discourse on the significance of this word ‘ordination’ as it could provide the most helpful answer to the question, ‘What is Mansfield Park really about?’ This dull elf of a reader, the current reviewer, will try to apply a bit of the ingenuity to this puzzle that Austen demanded.
Stencil cover art by Bernie Reid for 2007 Everyman / Daily Telegraph edition of ‘Pride and Prejudice’.
As I figuratively wander the house and grounds of Mansfield Park I naturally give due consideration to the individuals who people it, who visit it, and who depart it. I also quietly – though not so quietly, now that I’m admitting to it – draw up lists, and construct family trees, and prepare sociograms, all to try to understand their interactions.
Normally all these annotations and diagrams remain in a notebook, since they’re only an aid to my reading and likely appreciation; and of course we all find our own way to negotiate the intricacies of the plots that an author lays out in their novel.
Nevertheless, before what seems certain be a lengthy review, I’d like to draw out just a few of the observations made in the course of rereading Mansfield Park, in the hopes that they may aid other readers encountering certain persons during their own perambulations round the park and mansion, circa 1807-9.
Trouble with Product X by Joan Aiken. Introduction by Lizza Aiken. The Murder Room / 0rion Paperbacks, 2022 (1966).
This romantic thriller’s North American title, Beware of the Bouquet, refers to a new perfume, Product X, which has tentatively been given the name Avalon by an advertising agency.
A commercial is being filmed on the North Cornwall coast, to be ready for whenever the scent is finally launched; the April weather is perfect, the location – island, castle, beach – is perfect, and so are the Pre-Raphaelite looks of the star.
With everything so ideal in place what could possibly go wrong? Well, for Martha Gilroy – whose project this is – everything of course, otherwise this wouldn’t be a thriller. But is the choice of a brand name with such strong Arthurian associations any indication of the tragedies to come?
‘The Cats of Ulthar‘ by H P Lovecraft. First published in Tryout, November 1920, and then in Weird Tales, Volume 7 No 2, February 1926.¹
It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see.
In the city of Ulthar, as in ancient Egypt, the cat is sacred and may not be harmed; and the reason for this grew out of a strange incident concerning a cruel couple who lived in adjacent woods and a band of travellers who held cats in high esteem.
Among the travellers was a young boy called Menes who looked after a black kitten, but when the creature suddenly disappeared without warning the lad called down a terrible curse, after which all the cats in Ulthar went missing.
Were Menes and his fellow travellers responsible for the unexplained overnight absence of the feline population? Apparently not, for very soon afterwards the cats reappear, sleek and well fed, in fact so satiated that they need no feeding for the next day or so. What is it they could have fed on?
A Necklace of Raindrops and other stories by Joan Aiken, illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski. Jonathan Cape, 1973 (1968).
Eight magical modern fairytales by a doyenne of storytelling make up this enchanting collection, graced by the stunning silhouette drawings and colour plates by Jan Pieńkowski, his first but not his last collaboration with the author.
Asked to compose stories for young American readers utilising words from a given list of only two hundred, Joan Aiken came up with A Necklace of Raindrops which, when published with illustrations by the Polish-born Jan Pieńkowski, soon became an instant modern classic.
Despite using such an apparently limited vocabulary Aiken capitalised on the knack traditional fairytales employ of repeating episodes and snatches of verse with additions or variations, which has always been perfect for capturing the audience’s attention, particularly young listeners. Here then, in the nicest possible way, are new tales for old.
The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson. Dimma (2015) translated by Victoria Cribb. Hidden Iceland, No 1. Penguin Books, 2018.
Three women, each with a tragic history, each ill-used by circumstances, by society, by culture, by men. One an unmarried mother, a second a Russian asylum seeker, a third a widowed police detective, all linked by their being present in a land of ice, and snow, and darkness.
The original Icelandic title for this Nordic noir is Dimma, which does indeed translate as ‘darkness’ in Old and Modern Icelandic (in Swedish it means ‘fog’); but it also happens that it was added to the list of approved female Icelandic names as late as 2014.
All of which firmly indicates the tone of this fiction, simultaneously a police procedural, a standalone mystery and a contemporary fiction laced with some social history. And it’s all down to how the author interlaces the stories of these three women. But they aren’t the only females whose lives are impacted – and not for the better – by recent and past events.
I know I’m not the only reader who accumulates books which, time out of mind, remain unread. I know this because whenever I’ve blogged elsewhere about this (and it’s a familiar cry from me which must’ve become quite tedious by now, sorry) many of you have described suffering from a similar affliction.
But I also know a significant number of you have no truck with this regrettable habit of tsundoku. For you if it’s one in, it’s also one out; or you are frequent borrowers of library books to appease your hunger for literature; or you only buy books you know you will read and then treasure.
However, I’m not really about to repeat my favourite litany; instead I’m going to talk about something other than bookhoarding, and that happens to be about confessing to a trait that I rarely if ever admit to – mainly because it’s an uncommon experience for me. I’m referring to the acknowledgement, the admission, the disclosure known as DNF.
The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler. Penguin Books, 1973 (1943).
A novel about shapeshifting and enchantresses, a character whose surname includes the word ‘king’, and a title which evokes the Arthurian legends, actually has as its scenario Los Angeles, its bay area, and the San Bernardino mountains during the first half of the 1940s.
The narrator is private detective Philip Marlowe, whose own name of course recalls the Elizabethan tragedian Christopher Marlowe, but whose very first iteration as private eye was named Mallory, perhaps a nod to Thomas Malory, the 15th-century writer who popularised the Arthurian tales for English readers.
Yet Chicago-born Chandler, who was brought up in England (he became naturalised in his late teens before returning to the US), wears any erudition lightly on his sleeve. In any case this fix-up crime fiction was cobbled together from earlier pulp magazine short stories – ‘Bay City Blues’, ‘The Lady in the Lake’, and ‘No Crime in the Mountains’ – and featured the tec who was to become Marlowe by yet another name: John Dalmas.
This month’s Bookwise chronicles my virtual visits to times and places, some of which have only passing resemblance to times and places that our collective experience have told us exist or have existed. This – in both senses of the word – novel experience has been courtesy of Wyrd & Wonder, an annual long-established month-long excuse to enjoy all things fantastical created by a consortium of bloggers.
I’ve revisited some of those worlds in a Diana Wynne Jones 1996 collection of short stories, Minor Arcana, which included a novella I hadn’t yet read, a curious early piece set in an embryonic Dalemark which she explored more thoroughly in a later quartet. Then, during an enjoyably long weekend in Oxford, I started revisiting Lyra Silvertongue’s world via a re-read of Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth (2019), a fantasy thriller in his Book of Dust trilogy which takes the reader from Brytain to the Ottoman Empire.
The last novel I read for May was Frances Spurrier’s alternative history fantasy The Winchester Codex, but I also began another revisit to Regency Northamptonshire. This last I hope will eventually culminate sometime in June in a new-ish assessment of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), part of #ReadingAusten2025 (a project from @Brona’sBooks) for which I also considered her parody The History of England. But not all reads were treading old ground: Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees took me to a 20th-century Provençal forest which never existed but which should have, and may yet do so.
The Winchester Codex by Frances Spurrier, illustrated by Charlie Spurrier. Matador Books / Troubadour Publishing, 2024.
‘But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep …’ — from Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.
This is about a bound volume of manuscripts composed in the ninth century in Alfred the Great’s capital and illuminated by the monks of Caldey Island. It’s also about a charity walk around some of the coast of Wales in the second decade of the 21st century by a quartet of miscellaneous individuals.
In addition, it’s about the hazards of being on the cusp of legal adulthood, and about fear and loathing regarding difference, to which we can add neglect, superstition, and greed. But it’s also about stewardship, and interconnectedness, and about love.
Oh, and did I mention it’s a quest? A schoolgirl from Newport, South Wales joins a knight who has somehow survived the centuries, his horse who – chameleon-like – can change colour, and a dragon who likes nothing better than herblore and tending his garden. As Dorothy might’ve said to Toto, “We’re not in our world any more.”
The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust, Volume 2) by Philip Pullman, illustrated by Christopher Wormell. Penguin and David Fickling Books, 2019.
‘What can you tell me about something called the secret commonwealth?’ ‘That is the name for the world I deal with, the world of hidden things and hidden relationships. It is the reason that nothing is only itself.’ — Chapter 20, ‘The Furnace-Man’.
Unlike my previous review of Pullman’s fantasy thriller – ‘Intellect and imagination‘ – my extended discussion here (following a second read of The Secret Commonwealth) will introduce a few key spoilers, so look away now if you (a) haven’t read it yet, or (b) have absolutely no intention of reading it.
It’s set in not so much an alternative as more a parallel world much like our earth – except that there are subtle differences in history, technologies and the certain existence of an immanent spirit world, one term for which is “the secret commonwealth”. And everybody has a dæmon, an animal spirit as it were, which serves as animus/anima, confidante, alter ego or even soul as the occasion seems to demand.
But otherwise this world is very like our current one in that there are multinationals and institutions and individuals motivated solely by power and influence and the acquisition of wealth – whatever the consequences are to those who are weaker – and superstition and poverty and a refugee crisis created and exploited by those at the top of the pile. And yet the spark of hope is kept alive by a number of individuals making their painful way across the Europe of this world towards an unknown region of Central Asia.
As I wrap up my re-read of a fantasy thriller I’ve been thinking about the various subgenres that are generally lumped in under the Crime fiction category.¹ As it happens, next month is designated National Crime Reading Month in the UK and Ireland, which I find a pleasing synchronicity.
An annual initiative “spearheaded and developed by the Crime Writers’ Association,” it runs throughout June, and this year the CWA is running it in collaboration with The Reading Agency, the purpose being to promote crime reading right across the genre.
“‘Crime’ [this website says here] isn’t just the police procedural or traditional mystery many people think of. It covers everything from psychological suspense to spy thrillers, historical to sci-fi, cosy to noir, encompassing some of the world’s best-known characters and authors.” Being a slightly nerdy kind of person I wondered what else the genre’s range could include.
Cassandra Austen‘s sitter, her sister Jane, 1775–1817.
‘The History of England […] by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian‘ (1791) by Jane Austen, in Catharine and Other Writings, World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1993.
‘The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men are all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.’ — Catherine Morland, in ‘Northanger Abbey’.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in around 1798-9, was revised in 1816 – when the protagonist’s name was changed from Susan to Catherine Morland – but wasn’t published till after the author’s death in 1817.
Despite the novel’s somewhat chequered history, however, the fictional Miss Morland’s assessment of conventional histories as ‘tiresome’ and dominated by quarrelsome men was also that of the teenage Jane who, tongue in cheek, had in 1791 previously offered The History of England to her family for their amusement, for this parody was itself largely ‘invention’.
But what invention! Here’s her account of the English monarchs “from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st,” told – in an epithet now reminiscent of her second published novel – by “a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian” who certainly knew what she was talking about. And the original manuscript was illustrated with an equally ironic intent by her elder sister Cassandra, to whom she dedicated the opus parvum.
“Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.”
— John Ruskin.
On our recent city break we came across The Story Museum on Pembroke Street, in (it says here) the heart of Oxford. It aims to “highlight the human need for stories” and to celebrate how we can benefit from them: “Our vision is to enrich lives, especially young lives, through stories. Our mission is to achieve this by collecting great stories and sharing them in great ways at our most unusual museum.”
The museum being a registered charity we weren’t surprised to see a bookcase of old tomes where the titles had been artfully replaced by the names of the many funding bodies that had sponsored and continued to sponsor it.
In a way, though, Oxford itself is its own story museum, its streets and open spaces and blue plaques virtual pages writ large, as it were, with the narratives and the authors that drew inspiration from it and where readers can, if they wish, inhabit the stories in person.
In preparation for revisiting Fanny Price, the Bertrams and the Crawfords over the next few weeks, I want to take a little walk in the grounds and enjoy the prospects afforded by Mansfield Park – both the fictional place and the work of fiction.
I also want to reconsider the personality of the timorous wee beastie that is the heroine and her relationships with more colourful characters, the crucial thread concerning theatrical plays and play-acting in the novel, plus matters of religion and slavery as touched on in the pages of Mansfield Park.
But all that really needs to wait until after my reread. I first visited the mansion in my post ‘Guilt and misery‘, and for the second time in ‘A particular charm‘ as depicted by Joan Aiken in Mansfield Revisited: A Jane Austen Entertainment. What will I make of it this third time? Here’s a brief look at the prospectus for the property.
Minor Arcana by Diana Wynne Jones. Vista, 1998 (1996).
I am still not sure how I came to be locked up here, but things are coming clearer. I shall find out in the end. — ‘The True State of Affairs’.
Almost exactly half of this collection is taken up by The True State of Affairs, and so I will devote the lion’s share of this review to a exploration of it; the other six pieces, all included in other collections (notably the author’s Unexpected Magic,Mixed Magics and Hidden Turnings) will get brief notices, especially as I’ve discussed two of them elsewhere.
But first, a word about the title. Minor Arcana is evidently a reference to the ordinary cards in the Tarot pack: when used in divination they offer advice on day-to-day matters, as opposed to the twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana which address more universal matters. In Latin arcanum (plural arcana) means something hidden or concealed, sharing its root with arcere (meaning to close up or enclose, to contain) and with arca, cognate with ‘ark’, meaning a box, a chest, or somewhere for safe-keeping or safeguarding.
Here then is a selection of stories about mysteries and secrets, things hidden from view or even people locked up. As readers we may well be called on to ponder obscure questions, wonder at mysteries and perhaps unlock some boxes to reveal what secrets might lie within.
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. L’Homme qui plantait des arbres translated by Barbara Bray (1995), wood engravings by Harry Brockway (1995). Foreword by Richard Mabey (2015), afterword The Story of Elzéard Bouffier by Aline Giono (1980). Vintage Classics, 2022 (1953).
Fact or fiction, faux biography or fable? Jean Giono’s piece ‘The Most Extraordinary Character I Ever Met’ – originally written for (but then rejected by) Reader’s Digest in 1953 – has fascinated, befuddled and fooled a great many readers; yet it has for seven decades been inspirational for those who recognise its simple but important message.
Who was the extraordinary Elzéard Bouffier? Giono tells us he was a lone shepherd who, from before the 1914 war to just after World War II, made it his duty to singlehandedly plant hundreds, even thousands of hectares of trees to restore the desolate Provençal uplands, until dying peacefully in a hospice in 1947.
But, as the fact-checkers of Reader’s Digest established, there never was a Elzéard Bouffier and no hitherto unknown vast forest in the French département of Var. So was the publication right to denounce Giono as a fraud and dismiss the notion of Bouffier as an emergent ecologist?
Calmgrove Books 