Lavinia

What if a society were deeply aware of the sacred? How then would they live? How would they make decisions, how would they tend their households, how would they wield power?

It is difficult for us to imagine, for our society has almost wholly obliterated the recognition of the numinous, or the spiritual, from everyday life. Even those of us who work very hard to recognise the holiness of life often have to research and work on our own rituals and awareness, and must consciously remind ourselves over and over again to approach life as a sacred experience if our approach is not to fade away. It is not a common understanding of the nature of being; instead, it is something that a few of us struggle to do, largely without shared rites or rituals, and largely alone.

Yet this is a blip in human history. Most societies never separated the numinous from the everyday; they were one and the same, and life wasn't possible without the acknowledgement of the sacred. But without reading an anthropological text, it is difficult for us to get a feel for what such an approach to life feels like.

As an Anglo-Australian, this is a particular problem. As I understand it, the indigenous societies that modern Australia has swallowed up understood for the most part how to switch between the now and spiritual time, seeing life as a great confluence of daily and mythic existence. It is one of the great shames of modern Australia that we have not learned from the elders how to approach the land, the people and indeed all existence with a sacramental awareness; instead, we are more likely to learn about it from European sources.

As indeed, here. In her recent novel Lavinia, Ursula Le Guin has captured such a society. The story is set among the highly religious ancient Latins, well before the founding of Rome, and is the shadow side of The Aeneid: Lavinia is Aeneas's third wife, mentioned only briefly in Vergil's great poem and never given voice – until now.

Le Guin has imagined a full life for Lavinia, before, during and after her marriage to Aeneas. She is the daughter of the king of the Latins, and as such manages the king's household, both practically and in religious observances. She doesn't just go through the motions, however; Le Guin has depicted a highly pious creature who understands that she must do the right thing no matter its cost. Of marriageable age, she consults her family oracle, and while in the sacred place learns that she must marry a foreigner; other omens show that she will found a great city, although in doing so, she brings war to her people.

As a woman who understands that the pious person has no choice but to do what is right, she holds out against a host of suitors and her mother's demands until Aeneas the Trojan arrives.

Le Guin writes convincingly about a woman who knows the meaning of awe. Lavinia lives in constant awareness of the holiness of everyday life. All aspects of life are ordained with rites and rituals, observances to the powers which make life possible. Lavinia tends the hearth, the sacred fire; gathers salt from the father river Tiber; keeps the storehouses according to religious ritual; and understands that everything – from trees to field boundaries, from salt to spelt, from war to peace, from agriculture to every domestic act, are part of the great and sacred web of life.

Le Guin writes masterfully, too, of Lavinia's mountaintop experiences in the woods. Rituals at the site of the family oracle are both precise and mundane: prayers, a sacrifice, silence, and sleep. Much of the strength lies in what Le Guin chooses to leave out. There is awe; that is enough.

The reader is drawn into these experiences so that one emerges thinking, Why don't we give thanks for our store cupboards? Why don't we give thanks every time we are warmed by fire or given a cup of water or wine? Why don't we notice the spirits of the trees, the boundaries of woods and fields, the presence of our forefathers – and what sort of society would we be if we held all acts to be holy?

***

Like all Le Guin's books, Lavinia is not necessarily easy to finish. It doesn't charge towards a great heroic denouement, but this is deliberate. Many years ago the author put together a brilliant collection of essays in which she explained that she was trying to write as a woman, despite having learned to read and write in a man's world, particularly in the academy.

How, Le Guin wondered, does one write of the daily grinding of meal, the kids playing in the river, the sun coming up, the sun going down; how does one write without a hero dominating the narrative arc; how, perhaps, does one even dispense with the narrative arc altogether? It is a challenge she has set herself over decades; and in Lavinia, despite largely following the last six books of The Aeneid, she has shown herself up to the challenge.

Lavinia is a woman's narrative. It is not a story about getting married, although that is part of it. Nor does it end with any of the standard items: death, or babies, or a return home, although they are also part of it. Instead, Le Guin has charted a woman's life through the domestic tasks and religious observances that shape a woman's life. Large events still happen, of course, but they are seen through a woman's eyes: the competing of suitors, and how the silent king's daughter perceives their striving; the coming of war, and how a king's daughter observes the action from a high tower and tends the wounded. Yet the cleaning out of the store cupboards at the appointed time with the right prayers is as important to her as anything else, for without the blessings of the household powers, found in cupboards, meal, salt, and fire, all life would grind to a halt.

For readers who have grown up with the classic heroic narrative and its surging towards a great denouement, such an approach can make Le Guin's books difficult to finish. What, after all, is the point of reading a few more pages of how life goes on? And yet this is how life is for many of us: no great rush towards glory, just a steady keeping on keeping on. Le Guin writes beautifully of that keeping on as Lavinia matures from an intelligent young woman in full bloom, through the wisdom and power of middle age, into the dreaming of late old age. She finishes on a breathtaking vision of past and future woven together.

Lavinia is a stunning book, thought provoking, gracious, and graceful. I highly recommend it.

Composing a Life

I was sitting at one end of the kitchen table reading Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson, which investigates how women trace threads of meaning through their frequently interrupted lives. In one of those weird art-meets-life moments, I was halfway through the chapter which looks at how a woman is always mummy when the kids are sick, no matter her employment, and must drop what she is doing to attend, when my two year old, sitting at the other end of the table, announced that she had inserted a bead up her nose.

You can tell this is my third child, because instead of screaming and calling emergency services, I calmly inserted a bookmark, put my book down, and sent for my fabulous neighbour, a retired nurse. We then spent 45 minutes on my kitchen floor with a torch, a rolled up towel to prop my kid's head back, white pepper to induce sneezing, a lubricated straw to create suction, and – don't try this at home – a 100 year old crochet hook to flick the bead out the last millimetre. Then my lovely neighbour went back across the road, cheerful as ever; I threw together dinner; and life went on. So much for reading.

But after the kids were in bed, I went back to the book (in fact, I retrieved it from the shelf above the bin where my husband had placed it in superstitious horror when I had recounted to him the synchronicity of the book and the bead); and I finished it.

Composing a Life should be most thought-provoking. It addresses how women find meaning in the midst of lives constantly interrupted and redirected by the demands of relationship change, career shifts and children. Bateson's premise is that, for all the apparent discontinuities – a move for a spouse's employment, long term leave to raise children, a time of rediscovery and retraining – there are threads of continuity that can be traced through all the elements of one's life, and it is in these threads that we find meaning.

She argues, too, that this way of understanding our lives, which has historically been a woman's skill as it is women who usually adapt or put things on hold when family circumstances change, is helpful for men, too, now that the single career trajectory is all but extinct.

The premise is good, but the rest of the book is a disappointment. Bateson has crafted her book around the stories of five women; herself, and four friends. They are all professionals, and the book has an incredible aura of privilege. Bateson is not writing about ordinary people's lives here. These extraordinary women profiled are all upper middle class with enviable careers, yet Bateson writes as if their levels of achievement are unremarkable. One is a college president; one is a high-achieving medico; one is a brilliant engineer and technofreak with business nous; one is a writer and pioneering academic; and one is a working artist.

The author explicitly protests (too much?) that they are not superwomen, but if they are not, then I don't know who is. None of them has just a job. Instead, each of them has a profession which is their consuming passion; Bateson herself apparently thinks nothing of working a ten or twelve hour day even with a young child at home. These women are also all wealthy, whether by birth or by professional remuneration; if nothing else, most of them maintain, or have maintained, two residences. For example, when Bateson needs to write she moves to a separate apartment for several months, away from the distractions of husband and daughter. It is very hard to relate this existence to my world!

Of these lives, Bateson writes that they (we) can't have it all. Yet these women maintain significant relationships, successful careers, solid incomes, incredible social freedoms and all but one have children. It may not be French champagne and caviar every evening, but it is certainly far more than most people in this world. This seeming unawareness of their quality of life grates, especially in a book which spends a great deal of time investigating one woman's work with the homeless.

We may not be able to have it all (hah!); but we can, according to Bateson, have more. She argues that just as more sex rarely exhausts one's sexual drive, but instead leads to even more sex, so too more work which is creative and satisfying leads not to exhaustion, but to even more productivity. That, apparently, is how her subjects have all done so much. Sex and hard work.

At some level, this has been my experience, too. I had sex; I got pregnant; and I am certainly far more productive now that I have three children than I was before: I get through mountains of housework, and also find myself pouring energy into volunteer work, writing and all sorts of other activities.

But that's not what Bateson means, of course. She's writing out of a position of far more than full time work. For her sake, I'm glad she and her friends feel so spritely after 70, 80 and 90 hour weeks on top of family commitments; but the people I know who work such hours in their beloved and chosen professions aren't like this at all. They're just plain tired. For that matter, I grew up with a mother who worked like Bateson, and she was so exhausted that life was a train wreck. Bateson does acknowledge that there is a cost to all this endeavour, but she never really details what this might be. One of Bateson's subjects left her three sons, the youngest still at high school, in one city so she could pursue a professional opportunity in another. I don't judge the decision, but I do wonder what the cost was, exactly, for that family. For myself, the cost of having a driven mother seemed to be that we screamed at each other for about a decade. Then she died. She had multiple sclerosis, which is one of those weird diseases not uncommon among highly stressed professionals. Was this the price she, and we, had to pay for her professional endeavours? I really don't know.

There are other problems with the book, not least that the author uses it to let off steam about a difficult workplace situation which is so clearly about personalities that it is largely irrelevant. However, it is enough to say that all of these problems with the book are a great pity, because what Bateson says should be thought-provoking. We do need models of meaning-making that are far more encompassing of life in its richness and variety than a career trajectory. Yet Composing a Life fails to live up to its promise. Bateson ultimately identifies each person with their professional skills rather than their personal qualities, in the end tracing only how 'a writer' or 'a dancer' continues to be so when the writing or dancing are put on the back burner by life's other demands.

It would have been a far more interesting book had Bateson widened her scope so that, on the one hand, she investigated a range of individuals across the social spectrum; and on the other, she separated meaning making from the professional calling which is the hallmark of the upper middle class.

As for my own meaning making, well, the bead episode was a reminder that most of the time I am a mother; sometimes, I write. And for now, that is enough for me.

The Taste of River Water

I have just savoured the most moving book of poems, The Taste of River Water, by Cate Kennedy. Kennedy writes with gentle and accessible voice about the most mundane events: a joyride, a locust plague, a country woman coming second in a photography competition. Each poem feels like a story, a glimpse of another life seen through kind eyes.

Kennedy has a remarkable ability to notice the small things: the humility of a mother listening to her adult children talk, the largely invisible acts of grace which dot family life, the effect of a painting on a young girl. She uses no poetic mumbo-jumbo, no fancy frills, just clear plain words telling the story, usually in blank verse.

The risk of blank verse is that it can, at times, read like little more than a thoughtful paragraph broken up into a poem shape; and one or two of her poems do seem to fall into that trap. Usually, however, she manages more than that, much more, so that words and rhythm work together to great effect. I particularly loved 'Binaries', which highlights the resonances between binary notation and a knitting pattern – and a mother who shakes her head at her clever kids who understand the former.

Kennedy occasionally uses a more formal structure. In her poem 'Love and work', which addresses the inevitability of grief, the words are complemented by the structure of the poem. The metre and rhyme scheme work together to convey a sense of inevitability and inescapability even as the words remind us just how unavoidable the work of grief is. It is a masterful use of form.

I usually flick back and forth through books of poetry, reading here and there, then filling in the gaps; but Section II of this book deserves reading in order. Although each poem may be read alone, together the poems tell the story of a journey – from the loss of a baby, the desolation of grief, the difficulty of conception, and the experience of birth. Kennedy's plain language keeps this story unsentimental as she charts the ravages of grief, brittleness between marriage partners, and the stillness of joy. Small phrases are echoed between the poems, weaving the section into a quietly magnificent whole.

What really makes Kennedy's poems luminescent, however, more than her observance of small things or her careful crafting of language, is her recognition of the sacred in the everyday. A lost ring becomes a blessing; an apparently empty room holds an unexpected gift; laying a brick path becomes an exercise in daily forgiveness, and the reader is reminded that thankfulness, forgiveness and grace are woven into the smallest of things. I read a poem a day, to draw out the pleasure of this slender book, and found myself moved, stirred, and ultimately restored. The Taste of River Water is a gift to all who read it; and this reader, for one, is filled with gratitude.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Imagine a little island off the coast of Nagasaki crowded with warehouses, and inhabited by a dozen Dutchmen and their Japanese spies. It is connected to the mainland by a tiny bridge, which for the most part only the Japanese can use; the Europeans need special permission. On the other side, the sea gate is open for just a short time each year.

The island was Dejima. For the hundreds of years that Japan was almost entirely closed to the world – entering or leaving was a capital crime – Dejima was the solitary trading port. The Dutch had an exclusive license to trade, and they maintained a base on Dejima of staff and warehouses, trading with Japan and providing a small window to Europe. With the exception of licensed traders, translators and scholars, no one else was allowed onto or off the island.

This is the fascinating world in which David Mitchell's latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, is set. Jacob is an honest clerk, come to weed out the corruption that is rife on Dejima while working for a boss who is not as straightforward as he seems. At first glance, the story appears to be about Jacob's time on Dejima and his relationships there: with the lovely Orito, the Japanese midwife studying Western anatomy at the hospital; with a translator, Ogawa; and with his fellow employees of the Dutch East India Company.

However, as the book gathers pace we spend time with Orito and Ogawa on the mainland, where Orito is required to work as midwife to the sisters of a sinister shrine; with Penhaligon, the captain of a British man-of-war sent to capture or destroy this window into Japanese trade; and with Shiroyama, the magistrate in Nagasaki caught out by historical events. Ultimately, the novel turns out to be far larger, accompanying a cast of characters as they grapple with culture, duty, vocation and faith in different ways, and as they make and interpret their moral choices.

On Dejima, Jacob's home, all activity was observed and reported; spies were everywhere. All interactions were limited and observed; accidental meetings were rare. Dutch-Japanese conversation was filtered through none-too-skilled translators who were forbidden to study abroad; they learned the language piecemeal from whatever the Dutchmen living on Dejima were prepared to teach them. The Dutch, on the other hand, were forbidden from learning Japanese. These limitations on the story – limitations of coincidence, conversation and time unobserved – are terrific hurdles to a novelist; nevertheless, Mitchell manages to weave a riveting story out of short meetings, awkward conversations, and layers of meanings in every utterance.

Mitchell uses several techniques to convey the stiltedness of life on Dejima. For one, all conversations are rendered in a deliberately awkward way: almost every phrase is split in two, thus '"The Doctor's disbelief," [Doctor] Marinus peers at the label on the Rhenish "is a natural reaction to vainglorious piffle."' I found this technique hard going, at times, almost squinting to skip the central bit of each phrase; but it gives a sense of conversations translated, clarified and filtered between the participants. Too, the book is written in the present tense. This is always an awkward tense for fiction; it's certainly more difficult for the reader, pushing one away rather than drawing one in. Like the conversational style, however, it reflects the awkwardness of every situation on Dejima, and is therefore perhaps a deliberate mechanism to enhance that feeling.

The novel is split into three sections. Within each section, Mitchell uses what he calls different narrative hats. In the first, apart from a brief story about Orito, we see the world through Jacob's eyes; in the second, Orito and Ogawa tell the story; and in the third, we hear from Jacob, Penhaligon and Shiroyama. This gives a fascinating shift of perspectives from west to east and back again. The increasing number of narrative voices in each section also gives the story impetus, moving from the slow transition of Jacob onto the island to the whirling narrative at the end.

Readers of Mitchell's other books will already be familiar with his extraordinary ability to portray wildly varying characters, and he succeeds again here. The different voices think and speak in ways that feel true. Orito speaks in platitudes and with very few pronouns, as was proper for a Japanese woman. The translators are fascinating in their Japanese rendering of Dutch phrases, interpreted to please all masters; and Jacob, the lonely, homesick and honest clerk staying just this side of priggishness, is sympathetically drawn.

However, for all this cleverness I think these narrative devices make this book less enjoyable than some of Mitchell's others. The shifts between voices made me feel mildly abandoned, at times, as the story moved to another character; and the sheer number of voices felt less chorus and more cacophony. For example, we have a lone chapter told through the eyes of a slave, which, while interesting, adds nothing much to the thrust of the narrative. Too, the use of the present tense and the breaking up of the conversations, while stylistically admirable, ultimately intrude into the telling of a rollicking tale. The book feels one rewrite short of Mitchell's usual mastery, with some breathtakingly clunky phrasing that really grates.

Yet it also contains some absolutely wonderful pieces of writing, such as Magistrate Shiroyama's meditation as he waits to carry out a judgment with devastating consequences:

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on white-washed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells...' , a prose poem which continues for a page and a half and ends in a 'puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Overall, Mitchell inhabits and conveys east and west in a captivating way; and gives the reader a powerful sense of another time and place through the eyes of characters from widely differing backgrounds while raising important questions about how people make moral decisions. I may have reservations about the stylistic devices, but every book by Mitchell is good. Thousand Autumns is thought provoking, deeply absorbing, and ultimately very moving.

How Little Lori Visited Times Square

Some books are ridiculous, unnecessary and perfect. Little Lori wants to visit Times Square. He hops on every form of public transport: bus, train, taxi, helicopter, horse and cart and more; and ends up in all manner of places: South Ferry, Queens, Staten Island, Central Park, and finally Macy's. Yet sadly, by the end of the day, he still hasn't managed to visit Times Square.

After such a long and frustrating journey, Little Lori sits on the sidewalk and howls with disappointment. Then a large talking turtle appears and they................................ have............................ a.................................... conversation; the turtle offers to give Little Lori a ride to Times Square.

The text is spare and amusing; the illustrations delightful. Little Lori's great tantrum outside Macy's is beautifully depicted, page after page of a raging, sobbing, snuffling child while the turtle slowly speaks. I could go into a long over-interpretive ramble about how the story touches on the mysteries of the city to a child; the thrilling adventure of travelling alone; the thwarted longings of most children; the need to slow down to get where you're going...

Instead, I will say only that this is a story for children and adults alike. My two, five and seven year olds all love it; I love it; and we borrow it from the library time and again just to see grandpa guffaw as he reads it aloud. If you like New York, or Maurice Sendak, or jokes for adults, or stories for kids, or public transport, or interesting billboards, you will like this book; our family loves all these things; thus How Little Lori Visited Times Square is considered to be, quite simply, perfect.

The Summer Book

Some places have a special quality, where time stands still and entire worlds are encapsulated in the smallest thing. My friend's block, a few fields tucked into the forest and looking out across a valley into trees, is one such place. An island in the Gulf of Finland is, perhaps, another.

I have just emerged from the most beautiful novel, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. It charts the relationship between Grandmother and her young granddaughter, Sophia, in the months they spend together every year on a small island in the aforementioned gulf. Nothing much happens – they catch fish, swim, nap, talk about death, tell stories, listen to the wind, and watch the boats go by – and yet in these little things we glimpse the universe.

Small details are beautifully observed: the sounds you can hear in a tent at night; the pounding of an old woman's heart after a walk; the way potatoes grow on a sea-wracked island; and Grandmother and Sophia are complex fully drawn characters.

The two are very similar. Both are strong, independent, wilful, abrupt; both are wise and loving, compassionate and kind. The author draws out the similarities and resonances between the very young and the very old: Grandmother is old enough to play and be childlike, even childish, at times: she can be petulant, disobedient and fickle; while Sophia is engaged in the very important work of growing up, facing her fears and powerful emotions with wisdom and maturity.

Sophia is that rare thing in fiction, the perfectly drawn child. While often delightful, she is a complete human being with the full complement of emotions, expressed with the rawness of the young. She swings from thoughtfulness to selfishness in an instant, and is often terribly rude. Jansson perfectly captures the vagaries and intensities of a child's moods, where anger, fear and hatred are powerful forces that threaten to overwhelm her at times; she has to use all her wisdom, and the cunning of her grandmother, to meet them head on. A while ago I wrote about a book about a real child, Dibs, and the way he used story to understand his fears and put them into place. In The Summer Book Sophia, too, uses story to grapple with her fears, and it is very moving.

Like Sophia, Grandmother can be thoughtless, even selfish, at times; but with the experience of age she can see what she is doing, pause, reflect, and – when she can be bothered, of course – find a way to heal the hurt. The relationship between Sophia and Grandmother is necessarily intense, even as they maintain their fierce independence and seek solitude on their little island.

The scarcity of novels which focus on the very young and the very old, let alone the female, would make The Summer Book precious in any event; but given how beautifully, how perfectly, and with what great good humour, it is done, this book is essential reading. Sophia and Grandmother are drawn with vim and vigour, wit and wisdom; the result is austere, gentle and wise, an entire world overflowing from a tiny island in the sea.

The Boggart, and The Boggart and the Monster

Susan Cooper is perhaps best known for The Dark is Rising Sequence, a beautiful series of novels which draw heavily on Arthurian mythology and the Celtic landscape – and which are so terrifying that I was an older teenager before I was brave enough to read them all!

However, she has also written a number of terrific books for younger children, and it is to two of these that I turn now. In The Boggart, Cooper draws from the myth of the shape-shifting, mostly invisible, mischievous spirit that belongs to a house. Old Devon MacDevon dies, leaving his tumbledown Castle Keep – located on an island in a Scottish loch – inhabited only by the boggart. His Canadian relatives, the Volniks, inherit. They have full lives in Canada and cannot move to rural Scotland; instead they visit and arrange for the sale of the castle; when they leave, they inadvertently take the boggart with them.

The boggart is miserable in Canada. Unnoticed, lonely, and suffering terribly from culture shock, he does everything he can to get the family's attention: he smashes things; he eats all the ice cream; he wreaks havoc with traffic lights; he gets into the controls of the theatre where Mr Volnik works and produces the most magical theatre lighting ever seen. With the help of a Scottish friend, the Volnik children, Emily and Jessup, eventually work out what is going on and find a way to send the boggart home.

In the sequel, The Boggart and the Monster, Emily and Jessup return to holiday at Castle Keep with family friend and new owner, Mr Maconochie. While on a trip from Castle Keep to Loch Ness, to which the boggart has invited himself, they realise that the Loch Ness monster needs their help. A lazy boggart who has spent so long in one particular shape that she can't remember how to change, Nessie is about to be discovered by a scientific crew. With the assistance of Castle Keep's boggart and the children, however, she manages to shape-shift and find a safe new home.

The stories are charming. The boggart is a trickster, and the games he gets up to are highly amusing – especially as so few know of his existence. People are flummoxed when the cup they thought was half-full is suddenly empty; objects disappear; strange noises wake them in the night. He turns into a seal and taunts the seals of the loch; he turns into a gull and soars into the sky. The imagery of flying is particularly exhilarating.

However, the real gift lies in the sense of place and belonging that runs through the stories like a golden thread. Emily and Jessup are Canadian, of mixed ancestry; but they feel right at home in Scotland. At some level, they belong there, or at least big parts of them do. In one scene, a seal hauls itself up from the loch to gaze into Emily's eyes; and in that infinite moment there is deep communication and belonging.

Meanwhile the boggart is miserable in Canada, and his longing for home fills the air with an aching sadness that affects even those unaware of his presence.

On the boggart's return home (and we are moving across novels now), he has to grieve the loss of Devon MacDevon, his companion for many decades; and establish himself with a new owner who doesn't know of his existence. Cooper writes of the boggart's grieving beautifully. In one scene, in wordless sorrow, the boggart keens the funeral lament, and mimics the sounds of the funeral march with its rolling carts and tramping feet, that accompanied the death of an earlier MacDevon. As a creature of pure spirit and pure emotion, with very few words, at moments of high gratitude he may lay a small cool invisible hand on a human's cheek just for an instant.

Like a young child, the boggart slips between extremes of sorrow and joy; and so the text is, for the child reader, emotionally manageable. Cooper balances strong feelings with humour and playfulness, and the result is a brace of stories which are by turns sad, entrancing and hilarious.

Personally, I resonate with the theme of belonging to and longing for a landscape. I am a Cornishwoman whose people have lived in Australia for 160 years. I visited Cornwall for the first time last year, and felt a powerful resonance; I felt, for the first time in my life, deeply at home. The light, the landscape, the architecture, the way people chatted in the shops: I belonged in a deep and immediate way. And yet, like the Volniks, my home and my more recent family history is in another place that is also called home.

Now when my longing for Cornwall threatens to overwhelm me, like a child I go back to Cooper's books – The Dark is Rising Sequence, The Boggart books – and immerse myself in the Celtic landscape of grey stone buildings and dark waters and the ever-present calling of the gulls, and wonder about that distant place that is both stranger and friend, intimately familiar and deeply known, which landscape is knit into my bones.

(For an earlier post on the relationship between stories and my interior landscape, written before I visited Cornwall, click here.)