Bookish Pleasures

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Phoenix Book Sale

One of the consequences of living in France is that I suffer from acute book browsing deprivation.  There are a couple of bookshops with English language sections in Bordeaux but I don’t go there that often, besides I don’t know what the buyer in one of the shops reads but it definitely isn’t to my taste.  There is a charming little librarie in Cadillac which sells tea along with toys and books and has a tiny selection of surprisingly varied and good English books, I’ll go in and yearn but as they’re 12 euros each they’re a treat for special occasions only.  Otherwise I largely have to rely on book sites on the internet.  They’re wonderful, I rely on them, but you have to know what you’re looking for, you don’t get to browse, to pick up books at random, to see something that you’d never have thought of…

Unsurprisingly the bi-annual Phoenix book sale – about 15,000 second-hand books for a euro each – has the same effect on me as truffles do on a pig.  To be honest I don’t need to buy any more books, there are enough in the to-read bookcase to last for a year and that’s not counting what’s crammed on other book shelves.  But try telling a pig in a truffle wood that it’s had its ration for the autumn…  Anyway all the proceeds go to helping abandoned animals so you could say that by adding to the piles of unread literature in the house I was just doing my bit for charity.

I got there a bit late so the initial rush was over which meant more space just to look and see what might catch my fancy.  Rather a lot as it happens –

Not all of them are for me, my youngest daughter has just discovered Mary Stewart and I don’t think she has The Ivy Tree.  I read about The Magicians by Lev Grossman on a blog and thought it sounded her cup of tea so that was lucky find.  So was Ernest Shackleton’s account of his journey to the South Pole which is the sort of book I’d never think of looking for on the net.  Child 44 and Even Steven are for my husband, he also seized Tim Pears’ Disputed Land with an ‘Is this for me?’  No actually, it’s for me, but I’ll allow him to borrow it.  He is really pleased with Ernest Shackleton’s South, his account of his journey to the South Pole though.

I’d vaguely registered that if I ever saw Perfume from Provence by Lady Fortescue I’d buy it but there’s no way I can claim that I need the prettily illustrated Dear Cassandra, Jane Austen’s letters to her sister – but I’ve got it.  I met Rosin McAuley last year, she’s absolutely charming, I’d read two of her books and was delighted to come across Singing Bird.   I have to confess that I’d never heard of R K Narayan, but it looks delightful and there were a couple of Scandi crimes by new authors, a Paula Gosling I’m sure I haven’t read and the third volume of M M Kaye’s autobiography in a pristine hardback, Pure by Andrew Miller and Fire and Woodsmoke by Claude Michelet which describes itself as ‘a powerful saga of one family in the heart of rural France.’  Irresistable!

I’m always riveted by what other people buy.  There was one woman with an armful of misery lit, all with pictures of miserable children and one word titles like ‘Beaten’, ‘Abused’ or ‘Forsaken’, another whom I heard saying to her friend, ‘I’m done, I’ve been round everything and I’ve chosen myself a book’.  She came to a book sale with a choice of 15,000 with the intention of chosing one book?

Unnatural I call it.

Under An English Heaven

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Bombers, Phoenix Book Sale, Robert Radcliffe, World War II

Books that have World War II bombers on the cover really aren’t my sort of thing, so when my husband handed me Under An English Heaven by Robert Radcliffe, one of the books I’d bought for him at the Phoenix Book Sale *,  and said I must read it, I made polite noises and put it to one side.  I might well have continued making weak excuses every time he asked me if I’d got around to reading it yet if I hadn’t been tidying the piles of books in our bedroom and picked it up.  Among the quotes from reviews at the bottom of the cover was ‘Enthralling – Kate Atkinson’.  She’s one of my favourite authors, someone whose books I buy without even bothering to see what they’re about or read the reviews, so on the basis that if she’d enjoyed it I ought to at least give it a go, I did.  The husband then sat around for the next two days as I buried myself in the book, looking smug and saying, ‘I knew you’d enjoy it…’

The basic plot isn’t so very different from many other war books.  The time is the summer of 1943, the place Bedenham in Suffolk where a base has been built for an American squadron of the huge Flying Fortress B17 bombers that go deep into Germany on bombing raids.  John Hooper, a pilot who can’t bring himself to face up to why he survived a crash and all his crew didn’t, is assigned to a new crew whose pilot was killed on their first mission.  His official mission is to meld his new crew into an efficient fighting machine, his personal mission is to make sure they survive their tour of duty – a statistical improbability.  There’s a street-wise evacuee with secrets of his own who can’t stay away from the base, the family he lodges with – the husband, the local blacksmith, still can’t come to terms with his own war 25 years before, the village schoolmistress who made a wartime marriage and has had no news of a husband she barely knew for over 18 months, her parents in law who live in ‘the Big House’ in the village and don’t really think she’s good enough for their son…

Most books set in wartime have the war as the focus, they’re about missions, battles, being bombed and the characters often act as a means of telling the war story; what makes Under An English Heaven so different is that this book is all about people, the war is almost reduced to a background for the characters – it’s there of course, it brings them together, it puts them in acute danger at times but there’s no grand overview, we see events through their eyes – usually how it affects them and not in terms of the big picture.  The bomber crew fly the missions they’re told to, they don’t speculate about what they’re bombing; one of them is caught in London during an air raid and he wonders if their bombs fall on civilians, but that’s it, he, and the rest of the crew are far more concerned about the next mission and if they’re going to survive it.  The villagers get on with life, try to make do, a teenage girl dreams of beiing old enough to join the ATS so that she can get away from the boredom of rural life.

Robert Radcliffe is obviously knowlegeable about his subject but he wears it very lightly, there aren’t pages of technical descriptions of machinery – there’s a diagram of the bomber on one of the first pages so you can check the details for yourself if you feel like it, instead he concentrates on what it felt like to fly in one of those bombers.  (Not comfortable, freezing cold and frequently terrifying.)  His writing is so vivid that you can feel the dread of the crew as they’re woken at 5 am and told to attend a briefing for their next mission, mortality rates were horrifyingly high so you can understand the constant fear they lived under, likewise you feel the lift to the spirits when the word goes round that the chippy in the village is opening for one night only.  The owner has been saving fat and potatoes for weeks so everyone, villages and staff at the base, can have a treat.   The letter from one of the crew to his parents about his first taste of fish and chips was wonderful.

It’s a marvellously uplifting book and as Kate Atkinson so rightly said, enthralling.  In fact the only quibble I’ve got with it is that the final chapter, set in the 1980’s, is just too pat.  But never mind, this is a book which can easily overcome one fault.  The last major scene of the book in which the crew fly their final mission is almost unbearably tense.  Good books paint a picture that you can see in your mind’s eye, better ones make you enter into their worlds, and with very few you feel that you can remember everything that happened because you lived it, you were there.

This is one of those books.

*  The next Pheonix Book Sale, for any of you who are within reach of Bergerac, is on Saturday May 5th, 10 am – 3 pm in  the Salle Municipale in Campsegret, on the RN21 between Bergerac and Perigaux.   15,000 second hand books in English for 1€ each.

Books, books…

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Phoenix Book Sale

When we moved to France in 1993 my main worry about living in a foreign country was not, as perhaps it should have been, the fact that I couldn’t speak French but what I was going to do about a decent supply of books.  In London I was a six-books-a-week from the library girl as well as going into every charity shop I passed and haunting bookshops and I could see that book deprivation was going to be a serious problem

True, there was an English language bookshop in Bordeaux but it was for special occasions only as, not surprisingly, the books were marked up and in any case I read too much to be able to afford to buy all my books new.  The Good Book Guide sent a catalogue (which you had to subscribe to at quite a hefty price) every two months which had a well thought out, varied but limited selection of books and postage had to be paid on top. Otherwise I always asked for books for birthdays and Christmas  – my mother who was very glamorous was always wondering if I wouldn’t prefer a handbag or something nice to wear – and stocked up at charity shops whenever I went back to England.  I’d practically give myself a hernia lugging a previously empty suitcase stuffed to the brim with paperbacks back on the train.  It was fortunate that I’ve always enjoyed rereading books because I had to do a lot of it.

The internet transformed things of course, it became so easy to get books from Amazon France, The Book Depository and Awesome Books (which is probably single handedly responsible for the bookcase in my bedroom beginning to bow in the middle) and you get parcels in the post too.

But the  internet can’t replace physically browsing amongst books, picking up an author you’ve never heard of before, dipping in for a page or so and seeing if you fancy going on, re-discovering a writer you’d half forgotten about and having the person next to you turn around and say about the book you’re looking at, ‘That’s wonderful,’ or ‘I have to warn you it’s so violent it made me feel ill,’ as happened this morning at the Phoenix Association Euro Book Sale. (here)

A few of the books...

The Phoenix Association is a Dordogne based charity which helps to rehome dogs, cats and  horses.   Several years ago one of its members had the brilliant idea of a fundraiser with a second book sale of mainly English books, the twice yearly Phoenix book sale is now the largest of its  kind in France and regularly raises over 10,000 euros.  For a book junkie like myself it’s paradise,  there’s a salle de fetes packed to the gills with boxes of all sorts of books, fiction and non-fiction, and overspill tables all around the outside with the books that people coming to the sale have brought with them to donate.  And all the books cost a euro.

What’s not to like about all of that?

There’s no point going with a list of what to buy, there’s too much to look through and everything is donated so there’s no fixed stock, but that’s the joy of it.  You never know what you’re going to find.  The trick is to wander along picking up everything that looks interesting – and at a euro a book you can afford to – and if you’re lucky you’ll chance on something that you really want but hadn’t realised you did.  This morning I managed to replace my copy of 84 Charing Cross Road which went on walkabout a long time ago.  I havered over a pristine hardback of Michael Jenkins’ A House In Flanders which I wrote about last week and managed to restrain myself; no matter how beautiful it was we’ve got so many books we don’t need duplicates.  I told Christine who was taking my money that it was a must read, the next time I looked her place was empty so I do hope she snaffled it.

My youngest daughter and I staggered out eventually when our carrier bags got too full to hold any more – in my defence half of my 32 books were for my husband, all her 29 were for herself.  Though she has said I can borrow some.

Just a bit to read and something for dinner.

And I won a bottle of wine in the tombola.  What an ending to a really good morning.

Dinner’s going to be nice too.