New year etc part two!!!

So what do you think of the new look? I thought I'd go for a new style, and I quite like it. Odds are I'll change it again at some point, but for the time being I quite like this.

I guess the story of the Bronte sister's is pretty well known, but I would definitely reccomend this particular biography of the sisters. It's way more rounded than the average 'walk around the table with the girls' biog - huge chunks of this are devoted to Patrick, the Bronte's father. Its interesting to read about this and gauge the effect of his opinions on the life of the sisters. There's also a comprehensive account of the fall of Branwell, not to mention the life of Branwell. There's a historical conundrum for you, what did we loose by Branwells descent into addiction and early death? Nine times out of ten, people think about Anne and Emily's early deaths and say oh what masterpeices were unwritten, but what about Branwell? If ever there was a wasted life it was Branwell Brontes. You read what's available of the juvenilia (these are the tiny books the Brontes wrote as children, when they created their own kingdoms, and wrote the histories of said countries) and you read the few bits of poetry that was left behind and you think, why did this man not convert such precocious talent into the books his sisters were able to write? On a personal level, I think Branwell was unable to come to terms with the extent of the talent he must have known that he had. He must never have been able to produce work that measured up to the internal sense of what it should be, and he must have discarded or even destroyed a great deal of it. And given the unchallenged nature of male/female stereotypes at the time, it must have been incredibly galling for him to have to cope with his sisters success. How could he have born to have published something, that was then critisised as 'not being up to the standard of Acton or Ellis' (the sister's published their earliest works under the psuedonym Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell, rather than Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte.) As the son of the family, so much must have been vested in his potential for success by Patrick (his wife had died when the children were very young.) And then, Branwell slipped away into a haze of opiate addiction and alcoholism. As the girls did, he went out as a tutor, where he appears to have had an affair with his employer's wife (frankly, never a good idea, now as then!) , but rather than use this doomed affair as a spur to his creative faculty, Branwell appears to have fallen in to despair, and consequent addiction.
Genetically it would appear that the family weren't strong - of the four of them, two die from consumption (which we now call tuberculosis), Branwell dies of - well, frankly, it appears that he drank/drugged himself to death, and Charlotte dies of the complications of her pregnancy. You could not say that this was a strong robust family. After all, there were plenty of survivors in Haworth, the apalling public health situation didn't kill off the entire population. Charlotte is the longest survivor of the children, for many years it was just her and her Dad. Amazingly, did you know Patrick had his cateracts operated on? What a brave old man he must have been! His reputation was greatly besmirched by Mrs Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, written after her death. She appears to have encountered him in (presumably) a wild mood, because she describes an overbearing tyrant prone to firing off guns in the air in the morning. Juliet Barker spends a fair bit of time on his early life and his experiences with Luddite gangs that roamed the area. I can absolutely understand why Patrick would choose to keep a loaded pistol ready in the night, and discharge it in the morning! I would think it next to impossible to 'unload' a pistol of that age, and I wouldn't particularly want my young children to perhaps play with it - what that woman can have been thinking off, it seems an entirely reasonable thing to do to me. You take your loaded pistol and fire it to clear the chamber and protect your family - as I fully expect Mrs Gaskell would have done had she been in the same position. Anyway it's a very cool book, packed with loads of information. But it leaves you with this overwhelming sadness, that despite all of their gifts, they couldn't overcome the disadvantages of the life they had been born to. Of all of them, Charlotte got the closest to doing so - her visits to London, her mixing with the literary elite of the day. But she still went home to Haworth, and she ended up marrying her father's curate, and dying of childbirth. So she fell victim to the biggest killer of her day.
Well I didn't exactly mean to write so much about this particular book. I meant to say that I picked the book I was going to write about, and I have. I'm re-reading Ian Rankin's Black and Blue, possibly the best of his Rebus series. I first came across Rebus when I was living in Glasgow, in the late lamented John Smith's Bookshop in Byars Road next to the underground station. It must have been a holiday, because I was strict with myself when I was at uni, and didn't buy any fiction whilst term was on. I loved it so much I bought the whole family a Rankin book for Christmas that year I remember, and they loved them too, and we've been buying each other Ian Rankin books ever since. I got the latest one as a total bargain in the new year, (yep, I've read it, more of that in due course) and when I told my sister I'd got it she screeched 'Don't tell me anything about it, I've got it for Xmas and I haven't read it yet, don't tell me...!!!' and I knew exactly what she meant. Got no idea whether she's read it yet.
But.. Black and Blue. It sort of revolves around the Bible John killings in Glasgow in the 60s. I was kind of trying to figure out what it is that makes Rebus so popular, I mean hugely popular. I think he's an everyman figure, there's a real sense of reality around him. You absolutely share his life when you read one of the books, and the life he lives is terribly real. He's failed at so much in his life - his marriage didn't work, when he was living with his doctor friend it failed to work out - there's a real blow by blow account as you go through the books of the things that Rebus fails at. And maybe it's those failures that make him human, the constant battle with the drink - but you never get the sense that he's an absolute alcoholic. He's a functioning alcoholic, still able to function in the world, but separated from the successes of the world by his work and the drink. I sort of understand this, because of the work that I've done, and there are times when it hammers down at you, the pain of all these people needing help. And god knows, I've never had to go look at a dead body. So I can understand his need to forget, and the forgetting that comes with drink.
The other thing that particularly stands out about the Rebus books is their sense of period. The time. They are perfect evocations of Edinburgh, I can almost smell the city when I read a Rebus. You somehow recognise the bars Rebus haunts, if your Scottish or have ever lived in Scotland, and you're living in England or anywhere, then these books will take you home. The language - I hear it as I read, and it takes me back. To read about the weather being dreich, (excuse my spelling, it's not in front of me as I write this) or the haar coming in, is like - well, it's taking me back ten years to living in Scotland, which I totally loved in a way that I don't love living in Bristol. When Rebus nips in to the corner shop, for his morning rolls, pint of milk and bottle of Irn Bru, it lives. Rankin is an incredibly gifted writer who hits on the small things that speak to the heart of what Scotland is. Yes he writes about the underworld, but it's an underworld that exists in every city. The fact that city is Edinburgh is irrelevant, almost. I can see the trays of rolls and crates of milk outside the corner shop on the street that I lived on. Rolls don't seem very much in the scheme of things, but Rankin manages to remember that dry dusty surface, the taste of the rolls is actually there in the words. So it's no wonder that he sells the way that he does, or that he's so highly rated among our current crop of crime writers, because he manages to move outside of mere crime writing into some other category entirely. So yes, you could say that I like these books!
And I shall write more about Black and Blue as I go.