Archive for the Category ◊ Book Reviews ◊

Author:
• Friday, February 23rd, 2024

Deborah Moggach was born in 1948 in the UK’s Lake District and brought up in Bushey, Hertfordshire. She is one of four daughters of writers Charlotte and Richard Hough Moggach. Deborah Moggach studied English at Bristol University and worked at the Oxford University Press. In the second half of the nineteen seventies she lived in Karachi, Pakistan for two years, during which she wrote articles for Pakistani newspapers as well as her first novel,You Must Be Sisters. She also worked as a waitress, taught riding and trained as a teacher before getting married.

Moggach is a prolific and acclaimed writer. She has received three awards, has been Chair of the Society of Authors, worked for PEN’s Executive Committee and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In February 2005, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by her Alma Mater, the University of Bristol, and an OBE for services to literature and drama.

She has adapted several of her novels for television dramas and written film scripts. She has two adult children and three grandchildren. She lives between London and her cottage on the coast in Kent. Her daughter, Lottie Moggach, is also a writer.

Tulip Fever, published in 1999 and released as a film in 2017, is a historical fiction set in the seventeenth-century Golden Age of Amsterdam. The old widower, Cornelis van Sandvoort, who has lost his first wife and two sons, is a prosperous pepper merchant betrothed for the second time to the very young, beautiful, penniless Sophia.

He lives comfortably but longs for an heir to complete his blissful life with his much-loved wife, who has no loving feelings for him apart from being grateful that he saved her family from destitution. “When they were first betrothed, Sophia was a lively, happy girl, but over the months, she has grown more withdrawn”.

While waiting for his heir to arrive, with God’s will, he summons a recommended upcoming young painter called Jan van Loos to immortalise his portrait next to his good-looking wife in their sitting room. Sparks fly between Van Loos and Sophia, which grow into an irresistible desire for each other or, more like, infatuation and lust.

Sophia is a bored housewife and Van Loos is a philanderer, excited about a new conquest, which is a contrast to the deep love and understanding between the Sandvoort’s servant, Maria and her lover, the local fishmonger, Willem, both of whom plan to marry and have several children.

The novel’s title, Tulip Fever, is misleading since the story concentrates mainly on a mundane love triangle drama of a young, beautiful wife married to an older man and cuckolding him with a younger one. It only scantily touches on the tulip mania of the time. Moreover, it ends on a moral, religious retribution to underline the consequences of sin versus virtue and how to achieve redemption.

In her story, the author misses the opportunity to develop the historically well-known, most significant market bubble crash caused by the lack of predictability or stability in the tulip bulb market. Consequently, the market was unsustainable and crashed, ruining the country’s economy and pushing several people to suicide.

Despite Jan Van Loos and Sophia’s careful, cunning plan, all their savings are lost, not because of the seventeenth-century economic impact of a wild, free-market financial bubble bursting – a well-known historical event, and not because of the tulip mania’s speculative frenzy escalating the price of tulip bulbs to exorbitant levels with a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb selling for a price exceeding the cost of a large mansion. Instead, Sophia and Van Loos’s plan collapses because Van Loos’ most trusted dimwit servant, Gerrit, eats the Semper Augustus tulip bulb mistaking it for a regular cooking onion.

The novel is divided into short chapters following the main protagonists’ deeds, thoughts and standpoints. Nonetheless, it fails to depict the characters in depth, leaving the reader without empathy for them because they appear one-dimensional. The “passion” between Jan Van Loos and Sophia seems thrown in hastily without prior preparation, making the love scenes feel unconvincing and shallow. The author’s use of unrefined words describing the sex scenes, like “dampness between the legs”, “joystick”, and “lover’s seed”, do not enhance sensuality nor romanticism but are childish at best.

Tulip Fever interweaves fiction with historical facts and has vivid period details of seventeenth- century Amsterdam with its culture, buzzing streets, and famous painters commissioned to paint portraits of wealthy families, as was the trend at the time. The novel is an easy read with twists and turns. Interestingly, since the Dutch first imported tulip bulbs from the Turks in the fifteenth century during the Ottoman Empire, the tulip has remained the Netherlands’ national icon and their most-loved flower.

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Author:
• Friday, January 26th, 2024

Sally Page worked in advertising in London after studying history at university. She also attended evening school to learn floristry, opened her own flower shop, and published a series of non-fiction books about floral life, illustrated with her own photographs. Due to her interest in writing, Sally Page founded her fountain pen company, Plooms.co.uk. Sally presently lives in Dorset, England and has two adult daughters; the younger of the two, Libby Page, is also an author.

The Keeper Of Stories, published in 2022, is Sally Page’s first novel, which has become a bestseller, selling over half a million copies. It has been shortlisted for British Book of the Year and has been the Sunday Times Bestseller.

The protagonist is fifty-year-old Janice, a sought-after house cleaner in Cambridge who collects stories. “She can’t recall what started her collection. Maybe it was a life glimpse as she rode the bus…or something in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they always had done, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out and she gathers them to her. She knows she is a receptive vessel.”

Being a cleaner is a source for collecting stories; Janice has several clients, the unpleasant married couple, to whom Janice refers by their repeated catchwords. They become Mrs YeahYeahYeah (what she says when on the phone) and Mr NoNoNotNow (that is what he barks at her when she tries to clean his office). Their endearing small fox terrier, Decius, uses foul language. He has an expressive face and can transmit his thoughts directly to Janice without restraint or shame.

Janice also cleans for the ever-grieving widow, Fiona and her twelve-year-old son, Adam, as well as the widower and kind-hearted world-famous tenor, Geordie Bowman. Moreover, occasionally, she cleans for Arthur Leader, a man in his eighties “who likes order and routine”. She also works for a home-bound, sweet old lady called Carrie-Louise.

Mr NoNoNotNow sends Janice to clean his ninety-two-year-old mother’s house. Janice calls the mother, Mrs B. The two women’s relationship will start badly to transform into a wonderful, harmonious, caring one. Mrs B, despite her advanced age, is an astute, well-educated woman, sharp, sarcastic and dry-witted; she is a former British spy. She can see right through her housemaid; she senses that Janice is a carrier of stories and even secretly carries her own and keeps to herself, which Mrs B will reap out of Janice when she is ready to disclose it. By the novel’s end, Janice feels confident enough to entrust Mrs B with her own hidden secret story.

In order to coax and enthrall Janice and demonstrate to her that she is an equally good story-teller, Mrs B narrates, in installments like a Scheherazade, the story of Becky Sharp, a cynical social climber from the novel Vanity Fair by the nineteenth-century English novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray. Janice enjoys Mrs B’s storytelling, and at the end of the book, her boyfriend, Euan, asks her, “Are you still going to be collecting other people’s stories?” She answers: “I don’t think I could stop. And I wouldn’t want to. I think it’s in people’s stories that you discover the best of what we can be”.

The Keeper Of Stories is an engaging, character-driven novel. It starts with Janice having low self-esteem, thinking she is “just a cleaner” to become more confident and sure of herself by fighting back. “She decides to stop telling herself she is just a cleaner. There is nothing wrong with being a cleaner but she can be a friend too”.

The author succeeds in transmitting her empathy towards her protagonist. The reader feels for Janice’s loveless marriage, hardship, guilt, torment, humour and happiness. It is endearing how she is portrayed as a young girl, again falling in love and having a romance with her boyfriend, Euan, the bus driver and, according to Janice, a geography teacher lookalike.

The Keeper Of Stories is an entertaining, slow-paced, easy-to-read novel with intriguing chapter titles. It concerns relationships, bereavement, new beginnings, love and sympathy, battling through life, and social class conflict. It is also about difficult childhoods and often misplaced guilt combined with fear. The storyline is rich in auxiliary plots. It is a warm-hearted story, humour-filled, leading to a satisfying evolution of the protagonist, who flourishes once she gains reassurance after underestimating herself and realising she is not just an invisible cleaner but a person who matters.