Night Owl

Audio books

I've almost started to take my fantastic eyesight for granted. A few months ago I had laser eye surgery with Ultralase. It's been one of the best things I've ever done for myself. I had different astigmatisms in each eye, but this was easily correctable. I've been totally liberated from glasses. Swimming is one of the most positive advantages of the treatment. Being able to see clearly in the pool is a great feeling, and in the spa or sauna too. Not steaming up in temperature extremes, or when you open the oven door, are other examples of little things that now make me smile.

However, in spite of great eyesight, I have recently been converted to the pleasures of audio books. These are downloadable complete books that you can transfer to a mobile listening device, such as an iPod Shuffle.

The best listen so far has been Ian McKewan reading his own 'On Chesil Beach'. This was hypnotic and addictive, and I was sorry when it was finished. Perfect for a long train journey. It's an intense and intimate story ideally suited to audio. I am on the look out for similar things.

Night Owl Book Review: 'A Week in Winter' by Barth Landor

The opening of this book appears to ask little of its reader at first, but this is a clever kind of deception, because when you reach the end, you may have tears in your eyes.

The subtle, understated prose is a pleasure to read and the style economic, almost minimalist. But this is certainly a case in which less is more. The book is, as the title suggests, structured around the events of one week. Yet it is in fact the working week, Monday to Friday, which provides the time-scale. This simple structure is vital to the impact of the story as a whole, as it successfully offsets the complex deliberations and vacillations of the protagonist. Within these few pages, (only 143 of them), a timeless tragedy unfolds. In fact it is a double tragedy, the one indivisible from the other: one is finite, irredeemable, the other a contagion within our civilized world - and it is this latter condition that motivates this extraordinarily powerful book.

The main drama takes place within the mind of the narrator. Clark is a weary worker in a remote American consulate in Eastern Europe, disillusioned by his job, his career. He is deeply disappointed by those around him; his hopes for friendship with his colleagues long since faded:‘Once I thought such a fine profession would perfectly suit me; now I find myself disagreeably altered by it. It changes the way I relate to my world, causing me to distort the significance of success.’ He has become an outsider; he sees his name, literally separated from those of his colleagues, on a tick-off sheet, the context of which he cannot discern. He consoles himself by reading great literature. Gradually, his meditations and deliberations draw us in closer and we start to travel with him, with every twist and turn of his conscience as events unfold. We see him managing his young son in the temporary absence of his wife, telling him unlikely tales in order to win his obedience or avoid the directness of his questions and see him struggle with his weakness and exhaustion and with what is contained in each ordinary day - for it takes little to drag him down.

Every nuance of the preparations being made for an important visitor to the consulate irritates him – he cannot partake in all the fuss. He seems paranoid, projecting all his insecurity onto others. Why has he been given the most menial of jobs? But then he makes a connection with someone who is herself an outsider, a persecuted soul, and he finally resolves to follow his instincts against the probable wishes of his superiors by helping her. A chink of light enters his heart and his humanity is re-awakened; for a time he even notices that his co-workers are engaged in tasks as menial as his own and he feels some alliance with them. But then come small but significant moments of personal revelation and lucidity which coalesce gradually into a resolve which never the less vacillates until the moment of action.What he discovers as a result of his decision is an atrocity which cancels any doubt that he is doing the right thing. Yet events occur beyond his control and the agonies of the whole week pour into one moment. Clark is left with one final chance to stand up to his superiors.

I particularly enjoyed the descriptive details which unselfconsciously reveal Clark’s feelings and the way he relates to his world. Owl's pellet from this novel is: the office manager ‘unsurpassed in the art of looking indispensable,’ and of whom Clark wonders ‘whether it really is his enterprises, large and small, which give birth to his purposeful manner, and not the manner itself breeding the enterprises.’ I think many of us encounter this in our daily lives. But the value of this book is far greater than the sum of its contents, for we are taken on a journey of monumental importance to our age which lifts off the page.I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a remarkable debut that will attract readers across the globe.

Night Owl Concert Review: Elizabeth Watts and Phillip Thomas

Music in the Round Autumn Series 2008

Elizabeth Watts and Phillip Thomas

I knew Liz Watts from the time I was studying for my Masters degree at Sheffield University. Then, it was a commonly held belief that Liz would go on to great things. I watched her perform in the Cardiff Singer of the World 2007 Competition, for which she went on to win the Rosenblatt Song Prize, and have read about her in the local press and heard her on the radio. So, this was an opportunity not to be missed - to catch her giving a recital in my home city of Sheffield.

She started the evening with Mozart, and I immediately recalled the experience of hearing her rich tonal qualities, supported by an immaculate technique, emanating from practice rooms all those years ago. She has evidently been nurturing and maintaining her voice well, as there is little sign of strain. Her lower register is more secure and expressive now, and the top of her range as competent as ever it was - with the addition of an increased finesse that must have developed through all the experience she has gained as a result of her recent successes. One of her vocal characteristics is her ability to maintain an even tonal quality across her registers - something that suggests a rigorous application of technique through training.

There were seven songs in the Mozart group, some familiar, some less so. The more familiar being the 'Als Luise' and 'Abendempfindung' with one composed in Italian in between - 'Ridente la Calma' . In fact, with the addition of the French 'Dans un Bois Solitaire' Liz was opening her recital almost exactly as Elizabeth Schwarzkopf did at the start of her Carnegie Hall recital of 1956. Sandwiching the Italian in between is a treat for the voice at the beginning of a recital - the open vowels allow the voice some help in warming up. Technically Liz was faultless, I only felt a slight lack of variation of tone, and a slight over-forcing in the middle range in pursuit of volume.

Moving on to Liszt, I was rapt, particularly by the dream quality of 'Oh! Quand je dors'. Now Liz was really evoking something special and this repertoire suits her particularly well. The 'theme' of the evening was developing nicely too. Romantic, metaphysical, pastoral and nostaligic with an even scattering of flowers, particularly violets and lilacs and rowing boats! This satisfied our unconscious.

Liz's professional development was evident in her command of the Rachmaninov in Russian to include a Pushkin setting 'Ne poj, krasavica, pri mne'. Liz introduced this song with reference to her own nostalgia for Sheffield! Flattery will get her a return invitation, I hope.

Moving on chronologically to Hahn, and entertaining us with a reminder of the connection of 'A Chloris' with the 'Hamlet' cigar adverts, we were again treated to lilacs and a setting of Hugo's 'Reverie' - excellent for a contrast in pace. But for me the real treat came with the final Robert Louis Stevenson settings. I thought it a good homecoming that she finished in English and for me these settings were very evocative as I remember reading the poems as a child, some over and over. The word painting in 'The Swing' was extremely effective, carried off brilliantly by Phillip Thomas in the accompaniment. I hadn't heard these pieces before and will now seek them out.

The little bit of witty banter between Liz and Phillip was both engaging and reassuring, in that Liz is still very much the infectiously warm and eager young woman I knew before her rise to fame. Liz has made such a secure start to her singing career that there is great capacity for development in her expressive and interpretive abilities and I wish her every success and happiness in her forthcoming career.

Night Owl's Pellet for today is from Jeanette Winterson

With the onset of recession, the arts will be even more under-funded. In one respect, however, artists come into their own in difficult social times and great things can result. Those arts which are produced in private or cost little or nothing may be the ones to have a boom - and I hope this will be the case with poetry and other forms of creative writing. Today I came across the August column on Jeanette Winterson's Website, which is a very open admission of hard times emotionally for Jeanette, but which also contains some very uplifting words...so today's 'Pellet' is a quote from Jeanette:

'When people say that art is a luxury it is because they have never known its healing power.'

Night Owl Book Review: 'Black Swan Green' by David Mitchell

Today, I finished David Mitchell's 'Black Swan Green'.

Narrated by a 13-year-old boy, the story takes place over 13 months of his life, and is set in the England of 1982.

This novel resonated all the more for me for two reasons: I have a 13-year- old son, and I was not living in England in 1982. For these reasons, the story has given me wonderful insights. On the one hand, I valued getting a teenage angle on the Falklands War (I was 14 in 1982) and on the other, I relished the opportunity to see through the eyes of a young boy of this age. I don’t think I have ever read anything with this kind of voice before. I rarely read books twice, but I can see myself wanting to go through this experience again.

What I have retained most, on first reading, is the poignancy and immediacy of the young boy's experiences - the adjacency of revelation, pain and joy. Especially effective is the way Mitchell has the boy narrator (cast as a fledgling poet) quoting his own poetic lines, in a way that makes them spontaneous and relevant to the moment, but also timeless. This gifted child is put to the test by his peers in rites of passage & initiation, but is also tested and mentored by the mysterious Madame Crommelynck – a character of archetypal quality – in a section of the book which is strangely otherworldly. In fact, Mitchell evidently enjoys using such episodes which act as subtle, unconscious psychological explorations. Take the house in the woods - at first we can’t work out whether the narrator is dreaming or not. But the narrative is so good, it can be read and enjoyed effortlessly without concerning yourself, if you prefer, with what these episodes might really be conveying about the character – they’ll affect you whether you realise it or not. The time-frame is fairly short, and densely packed with engaging detail and dialogue which keeps you hooked. Yet, essentially, I think that this is a story about the survival, nurturing and awakening of a poet. And this is why we want our protagonist to win through – because the world needs its poets – something that society so easily forgets. I couldn't recommend this book highly enough. I was pleased that the story included a positive relationship between the boy and his older sister too. I only had a couple of minor complaints: At times, in the early stages of the novel, I felt a little like I was reading the Beano and also, I felt that some of the 1982 references were surplus to requirements and were there as an easy hook for the age group of reader that the author obviously had in mind.

Night Owl's 'Pellets' from this book:

'The world's a headmaster who works on your faults.'

'Woods in winter're brittle places/Your mind flits from twig to twig.'

'Over the English Channel, the sticky afternoon was as turquoise as Head and Shoulders shampoo.'

What a Hoot

I find myself with a blog.

Night Owl will perch on her branch and watch the strange world we live in, and twitter and hoot from the safety of the tree top at night.

To find out what 'Night Owl' is all about, see 'Owl Pellets'.