Cross-Channel reading

Travelling and reading: two great passions that often give pleasure together. Yesterday I travelled through France on the high-speed train from Avignon to Paris, and then on north through the Eurotunnel with a good book: almost flying in both dimensions, as the TGV train seems to float above the ground at up to 300 miles an hour, and the narrative drive is so true and exhilarating in Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog.

This is the fourth of her semi-detective Jackson Brodie books, and each one has become more daring, more convoluted and gloriously coincidental, yet always with a strong internal logic. The writing is sly and allusive, offering glinting shards of insight into characters in few words.

Tilly the ageing actress, still wounded by her old friend’s success, has just one of the novel’s interweaving perspectives. Her faltering work in a northern TV drama is poignantly drawn, as is her failing memory, and denial of a creeping kleptomaniac tendency: 

"Recently she’d noticed all these objects suddenly appearing in her bag – key rings, pencil sharpeners, knives and forks, coasters. She had no idea how they got there. Yesterday she had found a cup and a saucer! The emphasis on cutlery and cups suggested she was trying to put together a complete place-setting."

    

Haven’t finished it yet, but I know it will be this good all the way through. Like Jackson Brodie, you can rely on Kate Atkinson. Neither will let you down.

My arrival back in Kent offered a fine symmetry to the day. All the way through France I’d been, in literary terms, immersed in a very British landscape of Yorkshire tea rooms, ruined abbeys and maddening shopping centres. But waiting for me at home here was another book, this time set in Provence.

Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard is a memoir by Ruth Phillips. Ruth is a professional ‘cellist, and the wife of the painter Julian Merrow-Smith, whose work I’ve featured before here. The book was a pre-publication review copy with a plain cover, but something about it was so right – the feel, the design and typeface - that I just dumped my bags by the front door and started reading immediately. (I think quite a few of you will understand…)

I sat down on the stairs, and was instantly pulled right back to the south of France. Because Ruth Phillips can write. I mean, she can really write; there’s a quality about her words you can recognise instantly. Here’s the Introduction:

"On February 16, 2005, Julian Merrow-Smith painted an oyster. It was 12 by 14 centimetres, about the size of a postcard. A year and 362 small paintings later, an article about the painter and his project appeared in the New York Times."

See what I mean? And a few pages in, she describes the village near Mont Ventoux where they settled in Provence and he established a studio.

"Crillon was a dreamy place perched high above vineyards, olive groves and cherry orchards, with a honey-coloured stone arch, cobbled streets, a well and a church spire. (…) Out of season, vineyards turned to rows of gnarled fists. Woodsmoke and the smell of stewing boar filled the air."

It may be the combination of her musicality and visual sense further developed by living with a painter and acting as his de facto studio assistant, that has distilled this lovely prose. Either way, the effect is quite magical, and I will return to it with a full review at a later date.

So how’s that for a good reading day? Two books: one not finished, one barely started, yet satisfaction all round. And both authors, one renowned, one still to be published, providing the very definition of travelling hopefully. 

The main picture is Monsieur Chauvet’s Orchard by Julian Merrow-Smith.

Oranges and lemons

          

           “In the kitchen, sunlight filtered through the movement in the leaves of the courtyard trees outside the window, rendering the white plaster walls inside diaphanous and transitory like fluttering muslin. A bright Christmassy scent of freshly peeled oranges was all around. I couldn’t think where it came from as we had only apples in the fruit bowl.”

                       

                                               From The Lantern



Julian Merrow-Smith is a classically-trained painter, and it shows in every brushstroke. In his small oil Citron de Nice, the lemon seems to glow from within while the light around is sombre. It has a timeless quality, like a beautiful detail from an Old Master.

Likewise, this clementine is so richly evoked that you can almost smell the zesty aroma released by the fruit as its peel is pulled away, and juice trembles on the membrane. Look at that pith, fluffed and exposed, and you can taste its distinctive bitterness. What a gift to be able to engage so many senses with paint on a flat surface!

I wrote about Julian in one of my very first posts on this blog, when I was getting about three visitors a day, and two of these almost certainly accidental. So for those who missed it first time round, here is the link to his Still Life with Figs.

Extraordinarily, he paints a picture of this calibre a day - normally from his studio near Crillon-le-Brave but sometimes from his wider travels. These encompass landscapes and, occasionally, portraits as well as still lives; they are then auctioned online.

So successful have these proved that 140 from the collection have been published as a treat of a book, Postcard from Provence, the dream-like countryside of southern France seen through the eyes of a contemporary yet very traditional artist. It is available here from Amazon, or from the painter’s website here, which also has details of the daily auction.