Bibliothèque des Refusés: Five For Friday #10: Occupations and Pastimes

As in life, so in that truer fictional world found in books—some have to toil for a living, others get to do as they please. This is reflected in five books chosen pretty much at random (except for the Saramago—let's face it, I was never going to not include a book with an archivistic slant).

1. Public Servant

All the Names (José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

The public archives, the Registry, in Saramago’s tale, has a distinct air of Borges or Calvino about it. There is something about the atmosphere that suggests the idiosyncratic purposes of The Library of Babel, or that the Central Registry should contain ‘Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered.’

The mechanical, hierarchical world of the Registry does not immediately lend itself to associations with such fantasy. The effect is partly achieved by the mix of vagueness (despite his job being concerned with Births, Marriages, and Deaths, Senhor José’s own surnames are not given, except to say that they are ordinary) and specificity (the smell of the Registry being half rose and half chrysanthemum). It is also achieved by the complex disruption of this authoritative place of control: Senhor José not only maintains a secret archives of celebrities, he overturns his world a second time in pursuit of an ‘ordinary’ person whose details he chances upon (on an index card).

2. Skating

White Boots (Noel Streatfeild)

Noel Streatfeild was a writer whose work I read many times in my youth, and who was quite an influence, in subtle ways.

White Boots was published in 1951, fifteen years after her very famous Ballet Shoes. It tells the story of rich Lalla, being pushed to be the greatest figure skater in the world, and poor Harriet, taking up skating as part of her recovery from illness. Harriet is a very likeable, serious character, deeper and more realistic than Lalla. What also makes it interesting is the way in which their characters begin to be revealed, not just through their relationships with each other, but through the way they skate.

An added ‘occupational’ attraction is that of Harriet’s paternal uncle, a market gardener, who helps out his impoverished artist brother by letting him have whatever vegetables have not sold, resulting in some very random meals. Two polytunnels later, I know how that feels…

3. Mudlarking

Elsetime (Eve McDonnell)

There are two main professions in this time-slip adventure: jeweller and mudlark. Glory is learning her trade as a jeweller and looks forward to the day that she can have own emporium, a dream she is determined to achieve. Needle scours the banks of the Thames for treasures that he can use or sell, along with trying to solve the mystery of how his father disappeared, and how to get him back.

Mudlarking, for anyone who has not come across it before, is scavenging along riverbanks for interesting items. It used to be a way of making a living, albeit a meagre one, and probably marginally less unsavoury than pure-finders who collected dog faeces for tanneries. The nineteenth century journalist, Henry Mayhew, included an interview with a teenaged mudlark in his descriptions of London.

In Elsetime, Needle has a second job of sorts, as curator of the history of everyday life around the Thames. He has a form of synaesthesia that means he can ‘see’ the stories attached to the items that he finds; his ‘memory’ of the events associated with his finds acts like a museum guide.

(You can read my review of Elsetime here.)

4. Sailing

Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)

Anyone who watched, and remembers, Thelma and Louise may remember the scene where the truck-driver insults the eponymous characters, who take out guns and start shooting his truck. One says to the other, Where’d you learn to shoot like that? and the other says, T.V. I feel a bit like for a couple of hours after reading Swallows and Amazons—with such descriptions, I feel I could take on sailing a small boat around the Lake District, come what may.

Arthur Ransome’s tale recounts the adventures of the resilient and enterprising Walker and Blackett families and their surprisingly sang-froid parents. They acquire a common ‘enemy’, the Blackett’s grumpy uncle, and run a contest to see who can capture the other group’s dinghy. It is a very straightforward—that is, entirely unlikely—adventure story, but very vividly and realistically told. There’s even a parrot.

5. Chemistry

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Alan Bradley)

Flavia is the youngest daughter of the impoverished upper-class de Luce family. Her mother died while climbing the Himalayas when Flavia was a baby, and her father has never ceased mourning his loss. Although he retreats to his philately with the same dedication as his daughters Ophelia and Daphne show to romance and literature respectively, the very present absence of the late Harriet de Luce does not dim the joyfulness of the stories. They are told from Flavia’s perspective.

Flavia is fascinated by, and almost unfeasibly knowledgeable about, chemistry. She has had the great good fortune to find that an ancestor was similarly inclined, meaning that Flavia has access to a very well-equipped laboratory at her family’s dilapidated ancestral home, Buckshaw. Her delight in finding chemical ways to murder her sisters—with whom, as she sadly notes occasionally, she used to be friends—would be more worrying in an eleven-year-old who was less robust, articulate, and open than Flavia.

As is the lot of amateur detectives in fiction, she encounters murders at a rate that must mean the environs of Buckshaw would rival South L.A., or possibly even Cabot Cove, for their homicide statistics. Flavia has regular opportunities to put her encyclopaedic knowledge of chemistry to practical uses.

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Right—off now to engage in the important pre-weekend pastime of testing that raspberry tincture I made a couple of months ago…