Halfway between Charmouth and Lyme Regis the tumbled rocks from the crumbling cliffs above bring to a close the beach that you follow eyes down searching from Charmouth they mark the point beyond which you will be cut off by a rising tide and face a choice between pressing on to Lyme Regis or struggling back over the hump of sticky Liassic blue-grey clay and braving falling rocks to regain the beach.
Though we did not know it as such back then this is the so-called Jurassic Coast one of them at least because the rocks curve up through the country like a spine with scoliosis to emerge again in Yorkshire with its counterclaim to tourists seeking fossils and imagining a dinosaur-infested past.
But Charmouth was made famous for fossils by Mary Anning, a glorious amateur who walked this beach every day especially after winter storms threw down hidden treasures from the cliffs. Mary found the first complete Ichthyosaur and too, found fame clawing it from begrudging academics of the day.
But back to the rocks midway along the route from tiny Charmouth to bustling Lyme Regis once graced by royalty. These rocks entrap in sheltered pockets miraculous casts of eons dead shells the gold of iron pyrites fools gold gleaming in the dross of sand and tiny pebbles
Find them if you can before the next storm crashes into the rocks and sweeps the treasure out to sea.
It was my mother on childhood holidays eschewing the search for larger, showier fossils despite the joy of splitting rocks thwacking them just so with her specially purchased geologist’s hammer she settled down to search among the rocks and finding the tiny, perfect overlooked treasures.
The last time I went there seeking out this secret trove hoping against hope that I remembered still where X marked the spot this secret trove which most people pass by in their search for bigger things I was summoned away for half-an-hour whilst a scene for “Ammonite” about the life of Mary Anning was filmed a few feet from my treasure seeking and when, months later I watched the finished film I recognised my absent self just out of shot.
I have been on that beach my whole life just out of shot in my mind’s eye a treasured memory of times past fossilised in fools gold.
This was supposed to be an A to Z Roadtrip Review of LADY IN READ WRITES and I will get to that but on looking around her blog, I found this intriguing way of reviewing books and once I had sussed out that this was a regular challenge, I got back to the source of the Six Degrees of Separation Bookish Meme – here! And I had to take up Lady in Reads’ challenge and think of six linked books myself – so late it is, but here goes…
Now I haven’t read Hydra, by Adriane Howell, so I have had to go and look at the review on Amazon to find out what it is about and here is some of what it says – “Anja is a young, ambitious antiquarian, passionate for the clean and balanced lines of mid-century furniture. She is intent on classifying objects based on emotional response and when her career goes awry, Anja finds herself adrift. Like a close friend, she confesses her intimacies and rage to us with candour, tenderness, and humour. […] Hydra is a novel of dark suspense and mental disquiet, struck through with black humour., Adriane Howell beguilingly explores notions of moral culpability, revenge, memory, and narrative – all through the female lens of freedom and constraint. […] From the treacherous auction houses of Melbourne to the sun-struck islands of Greece, Hydra took me places I never expected to go.”
So a Greek island named after a tiny water creature named for the many-headed monster of Greek myth and the setting for a dark psychological drama…
This led me to This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson Link:- A psychological drama about a man who probably was bi-polar.
This Thing of Darkness tells the story of the friendship between Captain Fitzroy (after whom the weather area is named) and the illustrious Charles Darwin and their voyage of discovery on HMS Beagle. Fitzroy had hoped that the trainee Parson and amateur naturalist appointed to the voyage, would scotch the ideas gaining traction from geology, that the story of the Earth was not as written in the bible but rather that written in the fossil record. Alas, Darwin formulated the bones of his Theory of Natural Selection after their voyage to the Galapagos Islands but it is thought that it was partly out of respect for his friend Fitzroy, that he held off publishing his theory until forced to by the possibility of rival scientists publishing ahead of him. In the course of the voyage of the Beagle, it becomes clear that Fitzroy was probably suffering from what we today would diagnose as Bi-polar disorder.
This led me to Ammonite by Nicola Griffith The link:- Fossils
Four out of my six linked books are or contain elements of science-fiction and those four are some of my favourite books ever – not that I only read that genre only, any more than Nicola Griffith only writes sci-fi, but Ammonite was, brilliantly, her first novel. set on a planet where a virus kills all men and the indigenous women have found a way to reproduce without the opposite sex. The titular ammonite plays a very small part, but a link is a link…
This led me to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin Link:- A planet of humankind with a unique form of sexuality…
Ursuala le Guin is perhaps the pre-eminent female writer of science-fiction and it is hard to imagine that her sex was not a factor in writing The Left Hand of Darkness. In a universe where a long vanished race have applied pan-spermia to many planets, seeding each with variations on the human theme – this planet has a people who only come into their sexual phase at a certain time of the month. Ursula le Guin explores the implications of such a thought experiment, no monogamous birth couples, no rape, sex as a cloistered activity etc. There is much more to the book, friendship, diplomacy, political intrigue, but the sexuality was the link both to and from…
This led me to Orlando by Virginia Woolf Link:- A sex changing nobleman whose lives span 300 years.
I have not read Orlando myself, but have heard it dramatised and so it is on my Tsundoku list… It is a satirical fiction dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s lover, and author – Vita Sackville-West and who had a mutual fascination with the more literary author that was Virgina – the latter has made the literary grade whilst the work of Vita has sunk into comparative obscurity. However she was the inspiration for Orlando and so has achieved a form of immortality…
This led me to the breakthrough work of one of my favourite authors – Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five Link:- a hero who has become, in the author’s words – unstuck in time.
Kurt Vonnegut – an American of German origin, joined up to fight the Germans in World War 2, was captured by the Germans, locked up with his work party on the outskirts of Dreden on the night of the fire-bombing of Dresden in which he nearly lost his life to being bombed by his Allies. This had a profound effect on Vonnegut and although this was not his first book, when Slaughtrehouse Five was finally birthed, it was Vonnegut’s breakthrough masterpiece. Vonnegut projects his PTSD onto his character Billy Pilgrim who flashes back and forth on his time-line…
This lead to The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell Link:- A nested series of stories going from the past to the future and back
This highly successful book and the probably more widely viewed film that was made of it, shows how what can work in a novel may need to be changed in a movie. The Cloud Atlas starts in the 18th century, tells half a story – moves on in time, tells half of another story and carries on into a post-apocalyptic future which is somehow linked to each of the stories. I then concludes each story working backwards in time. The movie, and we tend to think, mistakenly, of flashbacks (and flashes forward) to be a movie invention, and The Cloud Atlas darts unforgivingly between the various strands of the story and I found, that even having read the book previously, it has taken several viewings to grasp all the connections which were amplified by the visual rendering of the book. Which is best? Read then watch and weigh in for yourselves…
Which brings us full circle, because The Cloud Atlas (book) begins on a beach like the setting for Hydra and the movie ends on another beach in another galaxy far, far away and like all the books mentioned, they all take the reader on a journey which cannot leave the reader unmoved or unchanged…
