Forgotten Authors No 6 / Victoria Holt

Victoria Holt

Forgotten Authors

 No 6

 Victoria Holt

Christopher Fowley
Sunday 28 September 2008

Stay with me - this gets complicated. Victoria Holt's real name was Eleanor Hibbert (née Burford), born in Kensington, 1906.

After signing books as Elbur Ford (a contraction of her birth name), she used pseudonyms including Jean Plaidy (a name taken from a Cornish beach), Philippa Carr, Kathleen Kellow and others, and wrote around 200 historical novels. She sold staggering amounts, in the region of 100 million copies. Lately, there have been some excellent reissues of the Plaidy titles, so it's a good time to rediscover Britain's most popular historical novelist. She was feted for blending accurate period detail with strong plots and rich characterisation, so what happened to "The Queen of Romantic Suspense"?

Burford was first published in 1941 for an advance of £30. Soon she was writing about Catherine de Medici, Charles II, Katherine of Aragon, Marie Antoinette and Lucrezia Borgia. Her style had enough gusto to draw polite applause from the critics, but her public adored her. This wasn't enough; she chronicled criminal cases, then embarked upon great cycles of novels in chronological order, covering the Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Georgians and Victorians. She branched into gothic romance, mystery, non-fiction and children's books, and particularly enjoyed portraying feisty women of independence and integrity who fought for liberation.

Her viewpoints ring true; Hitler, she says in The English Are Like That, made the fatal mistake of frightening the English. Hamlet, she notes, is not incapable of action; he kills his man three times in the play. It's hard to find anyone with anything bad to say about her ideas, which makes her disappearance even stranger.

Perhaps her ubiquity rendered her disposable; popularity rarely guarantees posterity. Then there were those horrible pastel covers that reminded one of Quality Street chocolates. The truth is that popular historical fiction for women became unfashionable, just as surely as men stopped reading tales of kings and explorers. In came chick-lit and laddish stories that eschewed any mention of our past collective history. Hibbert died on a cruise between Greece and Egypt, in her 80s. "Never regret," she once said. "If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience."

INDEPENDENT

Philip Roth / Indignation / Review

 Review: Indignation by Philip Roth

12:05AM BST 20 Sep 2008

Tibor Fischer, an uncommitted Philip Roth reader, finds himself converted

'The car in which I had taken Olivia to dinner and then out to the cemetery - a historic vehicle, even a monument of sorts, in the history of fellatio's advent onto the Winesburg campus in the second half of the twentieth century - went careering off to the side.'

Yes, it's the new Philip Roth novel.

There is a part of me that wishes Roth would stop writing about sex, because he writes so much better about other things, and after Portnoy's Complaint, The Breast, Sabbath's Theater (and, well, most of his novels) does he have any fresh flesh left?

Venery; being Jewish; the campus; these are all the topoi you expect to find in a Philip Roth production, and they're all here.

Set in the late Forties and early Fifties, a whiff of The Catcher in the Rye drifts into Indignation. But above all is the shadow of the Grim Reaper, who is looming larger and larger in Roth's pages.

Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher from Newark, goes to the Mid-West college of Winesburg to escape his father's mania for his safety and well-being.

Marcus wants good grades, he is obsessed indeed with academic success, because he doesn't want to have to pull out chicken entrails for a living and because he fears the draft and ending up in a foxhole in Korea facing waves of bayonet-wielding Chinese.

With the death of Saul Bellow, the silence of Salinger, the diminution of Updike, Roth has smoothed his way to the front of American letters. He's the Don.

I have to say I've never been rendered agog by a Roth novel: Tom Wolfe's done that, Tom Robbins has done that, Charles Willeford has done that. While I've enjoyed several of Roth's novels, I've never had that urge, the evangelical urge which is the hallmark of a great book, to force the book onto others.

For example, Roth's much-praised novel The Plot Against America, an alternative history of the United States, was skilfully executed, but it was a book I failed to care about. Why write an alternative history of something when you can write the real history? I felt it was an accomplished but hollow exercise.

Indignation, however, is one of the strongest skeletoned of Roth's novels, and is a model of authorial misdirection and narrative muscle. Nearly every time you think you can see where the novel is going, Roth changes tack, almost as if the whole book were written to a blueprint of zig-zags.

Winesburg College is a small canvas to work with, but Roth cultivates it masterfully. The portrait of Messner's parents, his ultra-anxious father and kvelling mother, is superb.

Bernard Malamud's depiction of working-class and poor Jews is perhaps more engaging than Roth's, but you could certainly accuse Malamud of occasionally slapping on some romantic poverty and pushing the dignity of hard graft.

This isn't the case with Roth: his description of depressed post-war New Jersey is as warm and appealing as a butcher's slab. While Messner's relations with his fellow students (another much-written-about subject) - the irritating room-mates, the frat boys, the nutty fellatrix - are as good as character studies get.

'I inwardly sang out the most beautiful word in the English language: In-dig-na-tion!' Messner tells us during a sticky interview with the Dean of Winesburg.

One wonders why Messner finds the word so beautiful since his frequent encounters with the emotion are so hard for him to contend with. What is his indignation about? The sanctimonious Dean, the strictures of 1950s college life, the indignities of existence?

My one (minor) disappointment with the book is the last chapter, where the narration changes from first person to third and the fate of Marcus Messner (something most readers will have guessed) is spelt out.

If I had to choose one word to sum up Indignation I'd go for classy. If I were allowed two: very classy.

TELEGRAPH

Nicholas Evans faces lengthy dialysis to avoid kidney failure after eating deadly mushrooms

Nicholas Evans

Horse Whisperer author Nicholas Evans faces lengthy dialysis to avoid kidney failure after eating deadly mushrooms

By OLINKA KOSTER FOR MAILONLINE
UPDATED: 09:19 BST, 3 September 2008

The best-selling author of The Horse Whisperer faces a 'long haul' of kidney dialysis after eating highly-toxic mushrooms.

Nicholas Evans, whose book was turned into a film starring Robert Redford, picked them while walking in woodland with his family.

The millionaire author was taken to hospital where he was given dialysis to combat the effects of the rare Cortinarius Speciosissimus mushrooms, which can cause kidney failure.

Author Nicholas Evans and wife Charlotte are seriously ill in hospital after eating 'destroying angel' mushrooms they picked on a woodland walk

His wife Charlotte, her brother Sir Alastair Gordon Cumming and his wife Louisa, were also admitted to hospital.

In a 1979 case of poisoning by the mushroom, two people were so badly affected that they needed kidney transplants.

Last night Mr Evans's spokesman said the full extent of the harm to the 58-year-old writer and his family remains unclear. They are still being treated in hospital.

'Dialysis is the kind of treatment given at the earliest to get toxins out of the body. The medical staff got them on dialysis very quickly,' the spokesman said.

'Particularly with this sort of mushroom poisoning, very often people don't realise for quite some time that anything is wrong.

'It's been the best part of 30 years since there was a poisoning case involving this particular mushroom.

'The specialists at the hospital have done brilliantly, contacting people all over the world who have experience of this.

'A friend who visited them at the weekend said they were all four walking about and were cheerful and positive.

Hit novel The Horse Whisperer, also a film with Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas

'They are in good heart, but realise there's going to be a long haul of dialysis before they can see if there are long-term effects on their kidney function.'

Mr Evans and his 50-year-old wife, who live near Totnes, Devon, became ill ten days ago while staying at her brother's 12,000-acre Altyre estate in Moray, North-West Scotland.

They had picked the mushrooms in woodland and cooked and ate them later on.

The next day they all became ill and are now in the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

It was established that among the mushrooms they had eaten were Cortinarius Speciosissimus, the toxins of which attack the kidneys in particular. Samples have been sent for analysis.

A family friend said: 'They have picked mushrooms in the woods before and thought these were safe ones.

'They are normally very careful about picking them. The big worry is that others could make the same mistake with the same disastrous consequences.'

Mr Evans was struggling with £65,000 of debt when Robert Redford bought the film rights to The Horse Whisperer for £3million in 1995.

The adaptation, starring Redford and Kristin Scott-Thomas, was released three years later and was a box office success. The book itself has sold 15million copies worldwide.

Mr Evans has previously overcome skin cancer. He has four children including a six-year-old son, Finlay, with Charlotte, his second wife. Mrs Evans is a songwriter who wrote a hit record for pop group the Sugababes.

Mary Gibby, director of science at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, said: 'One of the known results of poisoning from this particular species is kidney failure.

'If treatment is not received early enough, that can obviously result in death.

'It has become more common for people to go foraging in recent years and if they are not sure what mushrooms have got, they need to get them identified.

'The basic rule is if in doubt, don't eat it.'

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