Deborah Lawrenson

Landscape with olive tree

2012-03-06T04:10:00.001-08:00

I was drawn to this painting of the local landscape while walking around Vaison la Romaine. The blue mountain in the distance is particularly emblematic of northern Provence, and I like the way the path takes the eye up and through the fields into the distance. It's reminiscent of Raoul Dufy's expansive blue and green views around Nice. Truth to tell, no one could really miss this picture as it's actually a mural on an unpromising piece of wall that has been completely transformed by this piece of art for all.

It's even better when you can see more and appreciate the perspective. Look how the drainpipes and wires are assimilated - it seems to me a really joyous piece of work because it lightens a grungy corner and reminds us of the setting - unseen here - that opens up only few streets away.

According to the notice on the door, the cafe Les Terrasses de Ninou has views over the Roman bridge and the medieval city high on the rocky cliff above and it definitely seems an invitation worth pursuing, even if only to ask after the artist. The room or apartment above is A Louer - to rent - and if you're anything like me, that gives pause for thought: what would it be like to take it and live there for a while in a small town where such creativity is all around? Who might you meet and what experiences could you have...?

The Lantern giveaway!

2012-03-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

A gorgeous deluxe paperback edition of The Lantern has been published this week by Harper in the US – the same size and interior design as the hardback, the same lovely deckled edge to the pages, but with the new lavender field jacket.

There’s some excellent news too: it’s the March Book Pick at Costco, which means it’s available there at a very competitive price as well as through bookstores.

To mark the event I’m offering two signed copies as a giveaway. I’ll send anywhere in the world so you have a chance of winning wherever you are. All you have to do is go over to my Author page on Facebook, “like” the page and say hello in the comments under the picture of the cover. Or you can follow the blog here and leave a greeting. In a week’s time I’ll pick two names out of a hat. Easy!

If you need further persuading, here’s an excerpt from Kathy Blumenstock’s review in the Washington Post:

“The Lantern…offers a vivid escape to an intriguing place… The split-screen tales unfolding in alternating voices than span half a century eventually converge, with disturbing and surprising answers to questions that haunt both narrators… Lawrenson embellishes her merging stories with description of the rich scents surrounding the hamlet: rosemary, ripe figs, and a breath of lavender so fresh that readers might close their eyes and inhale, expecting a faint whiff of the purple-flowering plant.”

A shady spot for reading

2012-02-24T02:11:00.002-08:00

Under a fragrant fig tree in a garden in Provence...this is where you'll find me and my books during the summer. I wrote a post about it here last August: Reading under the fig tree.

I'm re-visiting now to join in the Follow Friday blog hop. I'm been working very hard on my new book so it's been a long while since I took part in one of these but they are terrific for finding new blogs to read and follow, and for spreading the word about your own (though I apologise, I'm hopeless at trying to get buttons and official links installed). This is hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read, and if you follow the links to their blogs, all will be explained. To take part, you post an answer to this question:

Where do you most like to read? Describe your spot or post a picture.

The Italian cover

2012-02-22T07:55:00.000-08:00

I am thrilled with the jacket for the Italian translation of The Lantern, to be published in July by Piemme. It's a beautiful piece of artwork that captures the haunting romanticism of the book. There's a change of title too, to The House of Wind and Shadow, which is quite intriguing.

As soon as I saw the design it reminded me of Lynne Ciacco's work, especially City Lupins, pictured below.

I wrote a couple of blog posts last year about Lynne and her work, which I admire greatly for the sheer variety of experimental styles and the atmosphere and thoughtful playfulness she achieves. You can link to them here:

The art of entanglement
The art of translation

On character...

2012-02-20T05:37:00.002-08:00

My blog friend Elizabeth set me thinking when she made a comment on the post about the Roman Empress Sabine. While most of the other reactions voiced admiration for Sabine, she was alone in saying that she came across to her as manipulative. And as I know that Elizabeth is a woman of great sensitivity, I found this both astute and thought-provoking as it leads to the question of character: both how we each judge the characters of others in life, and how we read and write them.

I described Sabine as a strong, independent-minded woman from her face as captured so beautifully in stone and from the little I’d found out about her. And while most of us would consider those worthy character traits, it’s also true that you can have too much of a good thing. Elizabeth is quite right: Sabine could very well have been manipulative. The refusal to have any children by her husband probably bears that out; “strong woman” does not automatically equate to “good woman” or “woman who always behaves well”. As with any virtue, pushed too far strength can become unlikeable – a harridan of a boss, a difficult member of the family, for example.

Largely, how we react to people and characters in fiction is to do with our own internal scale, experience with similar characters and perception of our own strengths and weaknesses. This was brought home yet again to me when I did a little talk for a book group the other week. Some readers engage with one character in a novel, others see the book very differently. Different aspects appeal to different readers. It always happens.

The most forthright discussions I ever have are when a reader tells me she or he hated a character - and by extension, the novel – because the way they behaved was so terrible, or annoying or cruel, while I had put all the wrong emphasis on which was the “good” character which the “bad”. And I have to explain that the very complexity they dislike is the point of book: the writer is trying to use characters to reflect the complexities of life. It's possible for a sympathetic character to do something wrong without that incident making them a bad person through and through. Unpleasant characters can have redeeming features. Often our reaction to these specific events strikes a chord with a personal memory.

So I went back to find out some more about Sabine. She married Hadrian in 100 AD. According to some records she was only 13 which was on the young side even for the ancient Romans, and she was the great-niece of Hadrian’s guardian, the Emperor Trajan.

Now Hadrian gets a good press as Emperor. In addition to his military interests, he was passionate about architecture and construction. He ruled over a vast empire that was stable, with a strong economy, and he travelled to many of its outposts. To the people, he was an admired and popular figure.

But behind closed doors there’s another side to Hadrian. His marriage to Sabine was purely political, a disastrous union on the personal level. Young Sabine was his closest unmarried female relative, thus increasing the family’s powerbase, but there was never any love between them. The relationship was so antagonistic that he said he would have divorced her if he were not Emperor.

But what was the cause of this hostility and unhappiness on both sides? Well, a little more research reveals historians of the time freely admitting Hadrian’s “Hellenistic” tendencies – a love of all things Greek. For Hadrian, this extended to homosexuality and a particular attraction to young boys.

Hadrian’s page boy Antinous became “the slave of his unlawful pleasure” and “a loathsome instrument of his master’s lust”. When this youth was found drowned in the Nile while the court was in Egypt, his death sent Hadrian into a torment of grief. He made Antinous a deity, as it was the highest accolade he could bestow.

Yet against all this must be weighed the acceptance that Hadrian was no monster by the standards of the times. There’s no place for revisionism here: Hadrian was a great admirer of all things Greek, and among the intellectuals of ancient Greece the love between a man and a boy was considered the purest form of love. We can contrast his actions and the acceptance of them with the mores of the world now, but we cannot condemn him absolutely on our terms.

However, if we consider Sabine’s position now, what we can say is that her attitude to Hadrian might have made her a woman ahead of her time. But there again, the historians were men who gave a man’s account excusing Hadrian’s proclivities. They don’t record the effect on the woman he married, or the feelings of any of the women expected to understand and excuse the Hellenic ideal. Or indeed, the boys who caught his eye. All we can do is imagine from our own perspective.

You wonder, too, lost in admiration at the artistry involved, how much of this was in the mind of the sculptor when he created the statue of the Empress Sabine, and what an achievement it was to capture a tantalising essence of the woman that can still intrigue after two thousand years.

PS. The bust pictured isn’t Sabine. I found her in a junk shop years ago and reckon she started out as a garden ornament. But she fits into an alcove and I like her presence.

Elizabeth Young’s blog is here.

The Empress Sabine

2012-02-18T06:20:00.001-08:00

Further to the previous post about Roman remains in Provence, I couldn’t resist giving you an update on the identity of the intriguing statue of a woman in Vaison la Romaine. She is the Empress Sabine, wife of the Emperor Hadrian who ruled from AD 117 to 138. And she was indeed a strong and independent-minded woman.

The photo above shows another statue of her, from the Villa Adriana in Tivoli, Italy. She was born in AD 83 and married Hadrian while she was still a teenager. That must have been pretty normal in those times, but what wasn’t quite as normal was that she took steps never to have children with her husband because she feared their offspring would “harm the human race”! She had an affair, too, with the historian Suetonius.

And Hadrian was known as one of the good emperors…though he did enjoy stomping around in military uniform and spending a great deal of time with his armies. Most Britons know him as the man who built Hadrian’s Wall across the north of England to mark the northernmost boundary of the Roman empire.

There’s also a neat little coincidence in that Sabine is the name of a character in The Lantern – and it’s not a particularly common name either. How about that?!

This comes with thanks to Sacha for solving the mystery – her blog Un Jour…Une Photo is full of visual treats which you can find here. And if you are interested in reading more about Vaison and its Gallo-Roman past there’s a great link here.

Vaison la Romaine

2012-02-15T04:38:00.000-08:00

‘What kind of treasure?’ we all wanted to know.

‘No one can say for certain. Most people say it’s a cache of gold coins. But it might be jewellery, or Roman swords and cups. The Romans were here, you know.’

From The Lantern

You can’t travel far in Provence without being reminded that the ancient Romans were here – and that it still bears the name given to the region by Julius Caesar, simply The Province. The mythological beauty of the countryside is underscored constantly by the loving preservation of classical ruins and the way other ancient buildings live on alongside the present. Some are still used, like the theatre at Orange, while others have simply melted into other walls.

A clear cold day in winter is my favourite time to visit such places, and here is Vaison la Romaine in the Haut-Vaucluse. There are no crowds and it’s possible to stand and gaze at the broken columns without having to filter out the present. What was it like to walk through those narrow roadways two thousand years ago?

What comes through most strongly for me is the sense of calm, though with big questions hovering that I may or may not want to think about. The passing of time, for one. The way what we are seeing in these weathered stones is ‘all passion spent’ for those who erected them – but survival of their spirit and vision.

The face of this statue of a woman – I should find out who she is, shouldn’t I – is striking. At first I thought she looked sad, but after a while it seemed her expression points to a woman who is contemplative, with strong opinions and character and a drive to understand the world around her. She looks like a book lover to me.

A Romantic Novelist

2012-02-10T09:17:00.000-08:00

Some wonderfully heartening - and most unexpected - news announced this morning: The Lantern has been shortlisted in the Epic Romantic Novel category for the Romantic Novelists' Association's 2012 Awards. It's up against some very strong competition so I've not a crumb of expectation of this going any further, but just as it is, this is just the spur to the confidence I needed.

The RNA is much respected across the whole publishing industry here in the UK, and they are also renowned for the lovely parties they host! This time we'll all be hoisting a glass at One Whitehall Place in London for the annoucement of the category winners next month and I know it'll be a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, I'm back at my desk, cracking on. One laptop for writing, one for the internet. This is the way it works best for me, writing on the old one using Windows Vista. I get so furious with the Windows 7 on the new one as I can never find the edit icons I want! I've tried and failed to write on it - my temper won't hold long enough for any attempt at romantic lyricism. So the faithful old keyboard it is, some handwritten pages and a good old-fashioned thesaurus and I'm away.

You can read more about the Romantic Novelists' Association here in these links to The Bookseller and the RNA site:

The Bookseller
Romantic Novelists' Association

Oh, and if you thought for a moment that I was most uncreatively tidy, then here's a wider view of my study!

On lavender sugar

2012-02-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

As snow has fallen here in the south-east of England, I’ve been deep in the lavender fields of Provence as I work away at my novella. The first draft is nearly there but I’ve been breaking the days of intense concentration with walks out into the countryside beyond my window. The other day there was a granular quality to the snow, and so studded with tiny bits of leaf matter it was like stepping into lavender sugar.

The moment made me think of how perfect lavender biscuits can be with a cup of tea. Here’s a very simple recipe, though if you find the taste of lavender too strong you could use sugar that has been stored in a sealed jar with sprays of lavender rather than the chopped flowers.

65 g caster sugar

175g butter

4 tablespoons icing sugar

1 handful finely chopped lavender, fresh or dried

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

160g plain flour

35g cornflour

Pinch of salt

Cream together the butter, caster sugar and icing sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the lavender and lemon zest. Combine the flour, cornflour and salt before adding to the butter and sugar mixture. Blend well until you have a smooth dough. Roll the dough into a ball, cover with cling film and refrigerate for an hour. Heat the oven to 170 C / Gas mark 3. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough out to about half an inch in thickness. Cut into shapes and place on baking trays. Bake for about 20 minutes or until biscuits just begin to brown at the edges.

If that’s whetted your appetite, here’s a delicious-sounding recipe for lavender and mint shortbread cookies from Woody Creek Lavender Farm in the USA:

Lavender and Mint shortbread cookies

It sounds an idyllic place. “Our family lives simply and happily on our 27-acre farm east of Ceresco, Nebraska,’ writes Shawni Vincent Cook. ‘We have never felt so at home, so content and fulfilled as we do right now. I am rustling up the genes that have been calmly waiting their turn to dominate my life…given by both my grandmothers – they had no problem sewing an outfit at the last minute, canning an entire garden with a smile, or renovating a room in the house like it was just an average day.”

What is it about lavender farms that haunt the imagination, the very thought of which gives a sense of ease and contentment? I think it’s the way the senses seem to conjure up the fragrance at the very mention of the word.

Winter wonderland

2012-02-03T03:16:00.000-08:00

It really is snowing in Provence now - I'd heard whispers of it when I wrote my last post - and it's bitterly cold too, as it is across Europe. I couldn't resist putting these pictures up, taken some years ago and not by me. Even under a thick blanket of snow, there are enchantments - though you wouldn't want to stand too close to those icicles hanging off the roof of the bergerie...

The strange calm of snow

2012-02-01T06:29:00.000-08:00

Snow took hold of the skeletal structures of the garden, coating seed heads and stalks. Soon the alliums and globe artichoke were extravagantly plumed in winter's coat. Life slowed into strange calm as disarray and decay was covered over, thickly smothered, hour by hour.

From The Lantern

Winters can often be harsh in Provence, for all the luminous skies. When the snows come they can be heavy. In our village they still talk of a winter in the 1930s when the paths up to the village from the outlying hamlets were impassable for several weeks. The school was half-empty and so cold that the violet ink froze solid in the wells set in the wooden desks.

The isolating effect of snow in these hilltop villages is captured by artist Rahim Najfar in this painting, Bonnieux sous la Neige. The beautiful desolation of the winter sky holds pale reflections of spring colours. The exposed trees at the summit are clogged full of snow and wind. And you can almost feel the frozen stillness of the orchard trees lower down, the quiet closing down of life.

Rahim Najfar is an Iranian-born artist works in the picturesque village of Bonnieux, above. I’ve already blogged (here) about the masterly way understands the sizzling colours of summer in Provence. His studio and exhibition space in Place Carnot burst with big powerful landscapes, some completely abstract and always engaging of the senses. Some have Persian-influenced borders which seem to tell his journey here, from his birthplace in Teheran, an academic career as professor of art and drawing at the universities of Farabi and Teheran, to teaching at Aix-Marseille, and becoming an artist who has lived for many years in Provence and exhibited widely abroad.

But this painting is the exception: the winter scene that tells a more subtle story of life year-round in Provence, the contrasts and the cold.

For Rahim Najfar’s website, click here.

New editions, new covers

2012-01-25T10:35:00.000-08:00

The summer I was fifteen I went up towards the mountains to Valensole for the lavender harvest. It was Marthe’s idea, she who persuaded our parents to let me go to see for myself how the ridged uplands had been transformed into purple carpets where the scent was born.

from The Lantern

Two new covers for The Lantern - one for the paperback edition in the US, and one for the Dutch translation - both of which will be available in a matter of weeks. It's always fascinating for authors to see the covers chosen by publishers. Occasionally distressing too, though thankfully that's absolutely not the case with either of these! What is interesting here are the different aspects of the novel the publishers have chosen to emphasize, reflecting not only the book but the current feel and fashion of each home market.

The US version (shown above) is completely changed from the hardback cover, and highlights the book's sensuous involvement with lavender and the sense of place in the French countryside. In the Netherlands, there's greater play on the gothic, personal element.

Everyone wants answers and tidy conclusions, but in life they don’t always materialize. You settle for the best outcome you can manage, and accept that you can’t explain everything. The subconscious mind sometimes makes surreal connections, like the ones in dreams. Tricks of the light were all around. Look how the sun slanted as the sun set in the west, carving blood red clefts in the hills that then turned to black rivulets.

from The Lantern

The Dutch is the first to be published of the many foreign editions for which the rights have been sold. In the coming months, I can't wait to see the different cover designs for the Brazilian, the Italian, the Polish, the Hungarian and many other territories. What fun! What do you think?

Winter sharpness

2012-01-21T01:44:00.000-08:00

The faҫade and courtyard of our house face due south. On a sharp sunny day the trees etch complex outlines over the stone and render, lifting up all the imperfections that are so much part of the charm here. One day we might restore right back to the stones – or we might not. It’s a very different view from the courtyard in summer, when the catalpa tree next to the house is in full canopy, and the leaves of the fig, olive and walnut also provide dappled shade.

But I find this winter version energizing: there’s something about the cold and dazzling winter light that sharpens the brain cells too. I’ve been writing all week with the notes made during this sunny time, and they seem to have had a clearing effect on the work in progress as I strive for equal crispness of thought and prose.

This is why I love to write in autumn and winter, barrelling into a first draft so that I get to the stage of playing around with the words just at the time when the warmer weather makes me want to be outside and anywhere but sitting at a desk.

Winter in Provence

2012-01-16T08:35:00.000-08:00

Last week in Provence the colours of the landscape were mistily beguiling, from first light to wintry sunset. During the day the skies were a cloudless blue with that sharp cold edge that makes everything look crystal clear. The trip wasn't intended as a holiday, as there were plenty of matters to be attended to, but as soon as the plane flew out over the sea at Marseille to make the approach to landing that's what it felt like. The Mediterranean was a mirror-smooth pool of that fabled inky blue and the rocky inlets of the islands in the bay bristled with small yachts.

The sun was out on the drive north, and so it stayed for six days. When you emerge from the general gloom of an English winter, the sun matters. Even just walking around the garden in Provence noticing the changes and pulling out weeds was a spirit-raiser. There's a real sense of the seasons turning here and hot as it gets in summer, it also blows icy in winter on these last southerly ripples of the Alps. I really enjoy the changes, and the small details like the clusters of nuts on the ground close to the almond tree:

The trees are dormant now, but it won't be long before the almond starts to push out its first green shoots and buds, and it looks like this:

But meanwhile, how did this rose manage to appear in January?

Lavande de Nuit

2012-01-09T05:46:00.000-08:00

I've had several enquiries through my website recently asking whether the Lavande de Nuit scent I wrote about in The Lantern is available to buy anywhere. I've had to write back and say that regretfully Lavande de Nuit scent exists only in my imagination, and that I can only offer the key perfume inspirations.

Obviously there are lots of lavender scents, but my favourite is from L'Occitane de Provence. It's rich and sweet, and authentically redolent of the region. Then there is a perfume called L'Eau d'Hiver in the Frederic Malle range: this has the white scents of almond, heliotrope and spring flowers. The woodsmoke and vanilla comes from Serge Lutens' Un Bois Vanille. It is possible to mix either of these with the lavender (spraying in layers on the skin) - quite fun to experiment with the quantities of each, but if you do, go easy as the last two are both strong and distinct and easily overpower anything in their way!

The closest complex lavender perfume to Lavande de Nuit I've yet found is Absinthe Verte which is one of several scents in a range called A Taste of Heaven by Kilian. It's an unfolding blend of lavender and vanilla and thyme, with oak moss and a hint of patchouli and spices. Very lovely, very very expensive. But I happen to know there are samples at Saks 5th Ave in New York!

And then there's that fabulous old-timer, Jicky by Guerlain. Launched in 1889, it mixes lavender with a zesty sprinkle of citrus which dries into an alluring creme brulee note, but then after a while the vanilla hunkers down into smoky leather with a sexy animal note of civet. Dangerous stuff and a true inspiration for the fictional Lavande de Nuit!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T04:24:00.000-08:00

An exuberant burst of wild flowers to wish you Happy New Year - pure as fresh snow, new as the year. May all your hopes and dreams come true or, perhaps more realistically for most of us, may patience and hard work bring just rewards.

Funnily enough, I'd been saving this photo for a time when it seemed right to look forward to Spring. It was growing on scrub in the garden in Provence, and all last year I tried to find out what exactly it was. No mention in my wild flower books. Nothing to match it on the internet. I was going to ask if anyone knew, but then - a few moments ago - I thought I'd just try again, and lo and behold Google images came up with a match. You may well know this lovely flower already; if not, I can now tell you that it's Star of Bethlehem. I'd heard of the plant, but never realised this was it.

It's officially classed as a weed, but even the entry in the Plant and Pest Digital Library (link here) admits it is pretty and suggests tolerance rather than destruction. We could all take something from that, not least in how we view bald classifications that consign us to think in empty black and white terms like good and bad, the expected and the unexpected, and even success and failure. In creative endeavour, the rewards so often come in the process rather than the end result judged by others.

A Spotless Rose

2011-12-24T02:04:00.000-08:00

Like many people around the world, I'll be listening later to the Carols and Readings from King's College, Cambridge which are so much part of Christmas Eve. Here's my very favourite carol, A Spotless Rose composed by Herbert Howells in 1919.

I always find this breathtakingly beautiful. The echoes of the English Renaissance drift into a perfect marriage of words and music. If you are lucky enough to hear it live, especially in one of the Cambridge college chapels, the sound swells up into the high stone vaults and seems to swirl around like so many leaves in the wind. I first heard it at school in Sussex, where the choirmaster had been a choral scholar at King's and had brought all his passion and expertise to the music there. Then, when I went to Cambridge as a student, this was the song I always longed to hear by candlelight at Trinity.

A very Happy Christmas to you all!

The missing partridge and other matters

2011-12-19T08:30:00.000-08:00

“We are literally living the twelve days of Christmas. Last night was the seventh carol service, six grown-ups parties in a row, we have had five flute concerts, four children’s parties, three work events, two elderly parents staying and only missing the Partridge because I haven’t made it to Waitrose yet.”

So reads the email this morning from the friend who has been making me laugh ever since we were sixteen. All the mad rushing around and suddenly it really does seem like Christmas.

Here’s this scene set for a family party at home yesterday that marks the point for us when the festive season truly starts. As befits a Georgian house (built circa 1750) the dining room is cosy and lit only by candles. It may be an affectation, but when we renovated the house and took out neon strip lighting (nice) we very deliberately decided not to have any electric lighting in here. In all the years since, we’ve never regretted it and our dinners and winter lunches with friends and family have always taken place in a warm convivial glow against the dusky red walls.

The tree has been dressed, most of the shopping is in, presents are wrapped, and now it’s just a question of keeping up with the entries on the calendar.

All writing stopped with the end of the school term and the really important concerns of life like the promised iPhone for the Teenager and the logistics of the Rhianna concert at the O2 in London. Still, as all Two Regular Readers of this sadly neglected blog may know, there was a word count in operation before Christmas, and the results are in. I was aiming for 50,000 words, and managed 48,000 of the first draft of the new novel before deciding to hive off a section and make that into a separate novella. That now stands at 12,000 words, so all in all I’m feeling pretty pleased. Or I would be if I weren’t convinced that at least 30,000 were rubbish. They may well be, in which case I will simply have to try harder in the New Year.

For those who are curious about the setting and subject matter, I can reveal that I am back in the lavender fields of Provence during the Second World War. Those pictures of the workers haunted me (you can see them here) and life couldn’t really have been as apparently simple there as Bénédicte claimed in The Lantern, could it?

Anyway, I raise a glass to you all and wish you a happy and calm week before Christmas!

The village in Kent

2011-12-04T09:13:00.000-08:00

Phew! What a weekend. The village Christmas fair opened on Friday morning, became a night market with live entertainments on Friday night and then went on all day on Saturday. It was a triumph of organisation by many of our lovely friends and neighbours and a real community event to raise money for the village's 14th century church and a local cancer drop-in charity.

All the fantastic array of stalls had a local connection, and the idea was that we could all do plenty of our Christmas shopping while supporting home-grown businesses - everything from aromatherapy products to jewellery, pottery and paintings, to fabulous hampers and Christmas trees, decorations, baby clothes (there have been a lot of new babies in our vibrant little community), bags and vintage clothes, handmade chocolate and amazing cakes.

I was offering signed copies of The Lantern as my contribution and it was a great chance to chat to new as well as familiar faces. Rob played the piano and premiered a lovely new song with vocals from Grace Butler. Steve J gave us his Elvis, though there was quite a bit of competition from John. There were winter morris dancers, a sweet school choir and a ukelele band - it really was a great party atmosphere.

Not the greatest photos, I'm afraid - camera hand rather wobbly after all the signing, and the glasses of wine - but they give a small snapshot of the event. Note the backdrop up on the stage from the last panto - the village square as scenery designed and painted by Graham and Fred who worked so tremendously hard for days to get everything set up.

It was a terrific event, that ended in champagne at Graham's birthday party across the road, where there were a great many tired but happy faces. Huge thanks especially to Liz and Sophie, Claudia, Deirdre and Graham, Karen, John, Fred, Ivan, Derek and Gwen, who were right in the thick of it.

The falling leaves

2011-11-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

Nearly the end of November, and no writing update yet this month! It’s always the way: just when it all seems to be going so well, life has a way of pulling you up short. I made it to about 45,000 words, then had a fortnight dominated by a couple of nasty migraines that each lasted for days on end and made further progress impossible.

It was during that time of feeling disengaged that I realised that part of the draft would work much more powerfully as a separate story, perhaps a short novel. The more I thought about it the more convinced I was, although I was hesitant to suggest it to my literary agents in New York and London. To my amazement they understood my reasoning and got behind the idea immediately. With still-searing head I found myself writing publishing proposals, and then waiting on reactions.

When I did get back to my desk, it was to make tentative attempts at the new novella, leaving this autumn’s work in limbo for a while. But the stories are connected, and the idea is that the three books will form a very loose trilogy with The Lantern.

So I’m only now easing myself back into my writing routine, and building in plenty of relaxing walks which really do help focus the mind. I took my camera out the other day – a nice uphill metaphor here I think!

A golden isle

2011-10-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

From the port at La Tour Fondue, the crossing was only fifteen minutes, the final transition between sky and land and sea, and from imagination to reality...

The answer to last week's teaser is the tiny island of Porquerolles, off the south coast of France about mid-way between Marseille and St Tropez. A rocky south coast is lined with rocky calanques made up of cliffs and fjord-like inlets, while white sand beaches face north across the narrow strait to the mainland at Hyères and Le Lavandou.

One the three tiny specks of land that make up Les Iles D'Or - the golden islands - Porquerolles is most wonderfully atmospheric, one of those islands where cars are not allowed and almost everyone cycles or walks. Or they sail. Everywhere you look out to sea or back to the mainland there are white sails cutting across the blue. In summer there's an almost tropical feel about it, with palm trees waving amidst the pines.

Its history is a curious mixture of the military and the romantic. It was once a strategic defence and all over the island are the remains of forts and it was first used by the army as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War: it was bought in 1912 by a man who had made his fortune in silver mining in Mexico and wanted to give it to his new wife as a wedding present, or so the story goes.

I'm deep into an imaginary world here, with a forgotten garden, wartime secrets and connections that are too strange to be called coincidence...

Head in the clouds

2011-10-22T03:08:00.000-07:00

No, not here in real life (I wish!): only in my imagination at my desk, in one of the settings of the new novel. But I'm looking up to say hello with a little teaser...does anyone recognise where in the world this is?

For those of you who like to know how books progress, I'm now 36,000 words into the first draft, about which I am feeling quite proud, as it's currently school half-term - two whole weeks for us! - and it's been a busy time. We're mid-way through, and we've had friends to stay, an evening at the theatre in London, cinema and shopping trips and lunches with friends, as well as a few commitments for me with The Lantern.

I'm setting myself a very realistic target of 50,000 words by the start of the Christmas holidays, which will give me lots of wiggle room to re-write and improve as I go along. I'll let you know in a while if you're right about the location I'm revisiting and trying to bring alive on the page and screen...

Work in progress

2011-10-09T02:53:00.000-07:00

Hello from the depths of my study, amid teetering piles of research material and pages of notes! Hope you’re all well and enjoying the start of autumn. I’ve been working hard as I intended: at 25,000 words into the first draft, it’s “so far, so good” with the new book, even if there’s a long way to go yet.

I always think of this stage as the word equivalent of painting a big colourful picture. You need to fill the canvas completely with broad brushstrokes to block in the main features. It’s an undercoat – little more than a guide for the more detailed work that will form the top layer that you’ll gradually build up. This really is one of the fun parts, because it’s all about experimenting and it doesn’t have to be perfect.

The allowing of it to be imperfect is key to the whole process, for me at least. It completely eliminates writer’s block, as putting words down fast kick starts the imagination. How many of the current 25,000 words make it into the finished book? I’ve no idea. They are the building blocks. The good parts will survive to the next stage, and the parts that make me cringe will be cut or rewritten.

It’s a good time to write key dialogue and conversation scenes, though, because they have to sound spontaneous and new all the way through to the finished book, and sometimes I’ll hardly change these from this first enthusiastic charge into the heart of the book.

It’s not a good time to read any reviews of previous books. I think I’m very open to criticism and have a strong sense of how I might take feedback and improve. With the new book, for example, I’m trying hard to inject some rocket fuel under the plot right from the start, and to rein back on superfluous description.

But there comes a point when writers have to be true to themselves and what they are trying to achieve – which is not necessarily what a proportion of Amazon reviewers were expecting, and failed to find. I don’t want to abandon characteristics of my writing that many other readers have written to me personally to say they’ve loved.

And whenever I feel daunted, I make myself smile and remind myself that this is fun. I never forget that I might otherwise be commuting to a job I hate, or be a square peg in a round hole of any number of work situations, and that I’m very lucky to have the chance to do this in the first place.

Autumn "Au Revoir"

2011-09-18T03:18:00.000-07:00

The vine canopy is starting to drop russet leaves over the summer dining table. Clouds hang in the valley before the sun warms the morning. Autumn is definitely in the air, even if it’s still summer at midday in Provence.

It’s the time of new beginnings, work-wise, as nature dies back. Like many, I feel energised at this time of year, full of ambitious new plans and determined to bring them to fruition. This is when I always start my books, fired up with a full notebook of research and ideas that may or may not work but have to be tried.

This post is by way of an “Au Revoir” for a while, or at least fair notice that I won’t be blogging as regularly during the coming months while I give my full attention to the first draft of a new novel that has been bubbling under all year. And to do it, I have to disappear to my study and block out everything else.

All writers write in different ways, and mine is in concentrated isolation. Sometimes it’s hard enough to fit in real life, let alone any other writing which can only be a distraction. I don’t like to mess around. Writing a first draft is like digging the foundations of a house: it’s hard and precise work, and a great deal rests on it. If the structure is wrong now, the building will never be quite right and ever harder to put right later.

If anyone asks me now what qualities I think writers need to have, I would have to say: persistence, determination and sheer stubbornness to succeed. You also have to love what you do, playing around with words and the use of language to create something new.

For me, there’s no better time to do that than when the skies become heavier, and the colours fade beyond the window where my desk stands. If it’s raining, so much the better. Then there’s nowhere I’d rather be than making bright pictures in my head and trying to find the words to pin them down.

I hasten to assure you, all my lovely blog pals I’ve made this year, I’m not abandoning my blog completely, and that I will still be touring around reading yours when I need a break. I have so enjoyed all your comments, and appreciated your support, for which huge thanks, and am delighted that we found each other. But this one will revert to its original function, which was an add-on to my website to use for any news updates.

Please do come and find me on my official Facebook page, though – the “Like” link at the side here will take you there. That’s much easier to keep going, and we have some lovely little chats about books, Provence and life in general.

Back soon – but for now, cheerio!

Figs falling

2011-09-13T03:35:00.000-07:00

“It was one of those days so intensely alive and aromatic you could hear as well as smell the fig tree in the courtyard. Wasps hummed in the leaves as the fruit ripened and split; globes of warm dark purple were dropping, ripping open as they landed with sodden gasps.

The pulse that pumped out the sweet, heady scent was quickening as I bent down to pick the fallen figs, then pulled them apart to find insects were already drunk on their scarlet hearts.”

from The Lantern

I defy anyone to look at a fallen fig like this: its heart shape and juice spilled like blood across the stone and not think Gothic thoughts... There's something very sensuous about figs, with their blatant sexual connotations, and the sweet, blowsy scent as they grow on the branch. Others lie on the grass under the tree, newly split open on impact and ripe for destruction by thirsty insects.

Those are the doomed windfalls, but here are some picked from the tree. I simply love their colours, the delicate darkness of the purple skin and pistachio greens.

And here's how we ate them. I prepared a bed of good fresh lettuce dressed with a vinaigrette of Dijon mustard, honey, red wine vinegar and olive oil. Then cut rounds of bread and topped with goat's cheese, and put on a tray in a fairly hot oven to bake with some slivers of jambon cru (Parma ham) and the halved figs, each spread with a little clear honey. Everything cooks together for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese looks done. Delicious!

Baroque fruit in Avignon

2011-09-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

I was wandering around Avignon a few weeks ago, on a day of coshing heat. After a lovely shady lunch opposite the northern end of the Palais des Papes, I set off through the great cobbled square, looked up and really noticed for the first time the frieze on the Hôtel des Monnaies: festoons of ripe fruit and vegetables amid the coats of arms of the Borgia family.

It is so typically Provençal – even in the stones of the most ostentatious buildings, are celebrations of the pure joy of living here in the sunshine and the natural produce of the region. Grapes and pears and courgettes are carved with acorns and the pumpkins of the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ now stealing up on us.

The Hôtel des Monnaies, a mansion built in 1619 in the Baroque style, is now used as a conservatoire of music. It was dedicated to Pope Paul V, one of the more restrained Borghese family Popes, though there’s still a sense that those overblown fruits were alluding to the culture of excess in the papal palace across the way during previous centuries.

If you’ve read The Lantern, you’ll know important the landscape and the fruits of the land are to the story, and what they represent. Among all the blog reviews I’ve had the pleasure of reading over the past few months, are some that have really engaged with this aspect of the novel. A lovely one that came out this week, on Reading the Past by Sarah Johnson, from which I quote this paragraph:

“Reflecting the bounty of the land, the language is ripe and sensual (tomatoes are "as ribbed and plump as harem cushions"). The regional specialties, like vin de noix – sweet walnut liqueur – sound mouth-wateringly delicious. Armchair travelers will revel in Lawrenson’s lush descriptions of the lavender harvest, an event in which Bénédicte participates in order to share the experience with her blind sister, Marthe, who grows up to be a renowned parfumeuse. The cycle of life is evoked in full, from birth and growth through death and decay – as it affects local crops, the structure of Les Genévriers, and the affairs of its human inhabitants.”

Click here to read the whole review.

Throughout August and into this month, The Lantern has been on an internet blog tour run by TLC. There are all sorts of views and reviews, which you can access by clicking here to the blog list.

Mirabelles and decadence

2011-09-04T03:20:00.000-07:00

…mirabelles, the tart orange plums like incandescent bulbs strung in forest green leaves…

From The Lantern

Late summer in Provence, and the garden orchards are full of plums. The mirabelles - smaller than they look in these - have a very distinct sweet-sour taste. When you cook with them they suck in more sugar than you ever intended and still never lose their tartness. You can pluck them off the tree and eat, and the first three are delicious and unusual, but somehow you don't want another - not right away, anyway.

They are beginning to wrinkle on the branch, testament both to glorious plenty, and their status as an acquired taste. Actually, mirabelles are fantastic with cheese, but we've had a brake on too much cheese and red wine this year, as it's just too easy to carry on eating and drinking long past reason!

The plums we grab in passing, and then go back for more, are the greengages. These are both crisp and sweet, and rarely blemished or invaded by insects. What bliss, when you feel a bit peckish, to wander down to the terrace with the old fruit trees and pick a few handfuls - all organic, of course, as the gardening chez nous so far consists only of cutting back when we can't see out.

Earlier in the summer are the superb wild plums: pink outside, peach inside. Like the greengages, they are beautifully crisp but sweet. I can't understand why our local friends dismiss them with a flap of the hand as 'les sauvages', wild fruit one step up from weeds. These are the ones I like best, especially the fruit from the trees no bigger than saplings that grow from a pile of stones.

The second year we were here, before the land was cleared to drain a boggy area, I was picking the plums here with an old friend, filling a huge bowl together as we pushed our way deeper into a messy clump of trees, when we found the remains of an old wooden cart that must once have been used on the farm.

Wherever you are here, there's evidence of what has gone before. For so many years, poor farming families and their tenants lived in places like this. Life was hard, but rich in natural produce. Now, many of these properties are owned by wealthy incomers, who are used to buying their food from supermarkets - food often sourced from vast distances - and it seems decadent to be able to reach out and take a plum straight from the bough. And know that what is really decadent is the sea of plenty that will have to be left for the birds and the squirrel-like loir and the insects, whereas in years gone by it would all have been carefully preserved to last through the coming harsh winter.

Circle of life: The professor, the painter, the musician and me

2011-08-31T04:29:00.000-07:00

Yet another of life’s mysterious circles. My life always seems to abound in connections and coincidences, and here is the latest. My New York publishers (rather rashly) sent a review copy of The Lantern to the eminent author, art historian and literary critic Mary Ann Caws, who is currently Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of City University in New York.

Well, not only did she like it, but I am honoured and delighted that she wrote the following review which generously highlights points of comparison between her work as a translator and summer life in Provence, and Eve’s story in the novel. She also asked me a few questions, and posted the interview on her blog, New York, Provence, Poetry (click here).

It turns out that she too knows the artist Julian Merrow-Smith, whose marvellous, luminous paintings have often adorned these pages, and his wife Ruth Phillips, the ‘cellist and writer. So, as I never need much excuse to include a Merrow-Smith picture and direct you to his Shifting Light daily painting blog (click here), the illustrations on this post are from his recent archive: High Lavender and Lavender Field in the Drôme.

Here is Mary Ann’s review:

"I have just finished an advance copy of Deborah Lawrenson's The Lantern, about the Luberon and Cassis, near me in my summers and both etched in my mind and writings -- and the too-good-to-be-trueness of a relationship -- and essentially about the haunting of a place and a self by a memory, or several. Living my summers, as I do, in a It Had To Be Fixed house, that is, my cabanon that has seen 300 years of life, and death, and horses and peasants and, now, us, every page spoke to me of much. The descriptions are, each one, themselves a haunting -- the smell of lavender and of almond biscuits, the taste of the various winds in their howling and their gentleness, the sight of the squirrel-like loirs or dormice scuttling about and dislodging the tiles on the roof.

The narrator, one of the heroines, if you see it like that, is a translator (me too), and so her sense of words is terribly acute-- perhaps that explains the haunting quality of not just the lavender scent so permeating throughout,but of the exactness of the language bringing it all into presence. It is particularly moving for me on two accounts: because I live there in my summers, and know every inch of that sight and smell. The second is that my great friends, the cellist Ruth Phillips (daughter of another friend, Tom Phillips, painter, translator, knower of many things) and her husband, the painter Julian Merrow-Smith, have both produced recently two volumes equally baked in Provence, the Provence to which I am so passionately committed, and they are present in my reading and seeing of anything about this countryside and mindscape. Julian's paintings, one done each day and many appearing in his Postcard from Provence, and Ruth's Cherries from Chauvet's Orchard (both published by the Red Ochre Press at the Hameau des Cougieux in Bedoin -- a village exactly 7 kilometers from my cabanon) are with me now in New York, preserving what I most love about the Vaucluse. Keeping its scent and its sight: although The Lantern turns about a blind woman, who becomes the "nose" of a perfume establishment which has the whiff of present-day L'Occitane...I can smell her creation, "Lavande de Nuit" now, even here. It will last the winter."

Mary Ann Caws (born 1933) is an American author, art historian and literary critic.

She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell. She has also written on André Breton, Robert Desnos, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Motherwell, and Edmond Jabès. She served as the senior editor for the HarperCollins World Reader, and edited anthologies on Manifestos - Isms, Surrealism, Twentieth Century French Literature. Among others, she has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char.
Among the positions she has held are President, Association for Study of Dada and Surrealism, 1971-75 and President, Modern Language Association of America, 1983, Academy of Literary Studies, 1984-5, and the American Comparative Literature Association, 1989-91.
In October 2004, she published her autobiography, To the Boathouse: a Memoir (University Alabama Press), and in November 2008, a cookbook memoir: "Provencal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in

France

" (Pegasus Books).

The author's view

2011-08-27T02:03:00.000-07:00

It has been an amazing few weeks since The Lantern was published in the US and Canada. Reviews have flooded in, including some wonderful write-ups in the Washington Post (here), USA Today (here) and the Chicago Tribune (here). I can’t tell you how thrilling it has been to receive the links in my email inbox.

There have also been a plethora of opinions and lovely reviews online, the links to some of my personal favourites I will include at the end of this post. What is endlessly fascinating is how readers react so differently to the same book. For some it’s too slow, while others enjoy the dreamy pace. Some think it lacks true Gothic elements and has no twist to offer at the end; others are chilled by the quiet near-realism of the ending. Some think there’s too little plot; others see the weave as an intriguing story that drew them in. A few think I’ve simply stolen Daphne du Maurier’s most famous work.

The truth is that we all read according to our own interests, experience and preconceptions. In the months I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve tried to match pictures to words and to show the background of the book without really suggesting how to interpret the story. What lies beneath, in other words. So, for what it’s worth, here’s my view of The Lantern.

On a subtle level The Lantern is a novel about reading and stories and words. Is it too descriptive, using too many varied adjectives? Maybe, but the narrator Eve is a translator: words, and the precise choice of them, matter to her. The control of language, for her, means stability and rational understanding of her surroundings and situation when it seems she might otherwise be losing control.

Eve is a shy bookworm, whose comfort zone is reading. But her new life cut off from family and friends, coupled with mounting uncertainty about Dom, only sends her to books that exacerbate her dread, until she is not sure whether she is imagining the worst because she is influenced by the stories she is reading, or whether she is more accepting than she should be because she is seeing real life through the gauze of literature.

It is also a novel about spirits and ghosts and the histories held all around us, both in the obvious sense of the atmosphere of the run-down old house, and the ghosts of Eve and Dom’s own past that will not settle. Is Les Genévriers haunted, or are these psychological manifestations? And, just as there are always echoes of the past life of old houses, there are always echoes of earlier stories in literature.

In The Lantern, there is a clear line that stretches back through Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre, the classic English gothic novel of the house, the man and the first wife…

Why set the novel in Provence? Remember Mr Rochester’s request of Jane (which she refuses) that they live together as man and wife in the South of France even though they cannot be legally married because his wife is still alive. Beyond Jane Eyre is the Bluebeard legend: the old French tale of a new young wife whose husband refuses to tell her what became of his previous wives, but she realises that the answer lies behind a locked door of his castle.

Bénédicte, as an elderly woman alone on the hill, becomes the subject of speculation and stories heard and embellished by trespassing village children. Behind the brightness of the Provençal countryside are dark tales told by farmers and shepherds, retold in books by the writer Jean Giono and read by both Bénédicte and Eve. Then there are the partial, apparently interrupted stories told by Rachel, and discovered by Eve.

The Lantern is also about isolation. Eve and Dom insulate themselves from the modern world in their own dream cocoon. Bénédicte lives on alone at Les Genévriers, the young girl who has become an isolated old woman whom others call crazy. Marthe is isolated by her blindness. In such circumstances, small details become large.

At times when the characters seem detached from the reality, their state of mind or interpretation of a situation is mirrored in their descriptions of the landscape. In a very obvious example, Eve and Dom travel to Davos for a skiing trip, but Dom will not admit what is troubling him - while all around is the cold, hard white dazzle of a frozen world.

Both the novel’s past and present voices are first-person narrators; both are courageous, loyal and self-contained in their different situations. (Perhaps on some psychic level, there is a mutual recognition of this.) Although they do admit to fear and anger, for the most part their emotions are buried, but surface in the way they see what is around them, in their descriptions of nature, the house and the landscape. To Eve, in the first flush of love, the property seems to expand around them, with the infinite possibilities of blue horizon beyond. Later, the walnuts fall from the tree “like fat brown tears”.

This detachment and displacement is echoed in loss of one sense and the subsequent need to compensate by using others more acutely. The idea of writing a “sensory novel” (which luxuriates in descriptions of all five senses) grew from this. How do you capture music, or fragrance, or texture, or taste in words? The challenge was to try to write visual descriptions might be vivid if heard by a blind person, or scent descriptions that might come alive through the sight of words on a page.

Here are just a very few of the blog reviews that have put a wide smile on my face. I’ve posted others on the book’s Facebook page (here). If you’ve enjoyed the book, do consider “Liking” and joining us – apart from anything else, interaction is much easier over there.

Nomadreader (click here)
The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog (click here)
Cornflower Books (click here)
The Lost Entwife (click here)
Rundpinne (click here)
Devourer of Books - Audio (click here)
Amusing Reviews (click here)

Dog days of August

2011-08-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

The days start by casting lemon-bright sunshine through the wooden shutters. The sky is cloudless. By ten o'clock, the heat is rising and all freshness has gone. This is the "canicule", the heavy heat of late summer when all you want to do is plunge into this:

Or find a shady spot where the warm pines release their scent...

...to drift away with a good book - this is Seek My Face by John Updike (so far, so very good)...

All this gentle activity is interspersed with some lovely food, with the emphasis on fresh fruit picked from the trees and vegetables from a local market. Some ice-cold wine...then, after dusk, a wander off to one of the many village fetes - not fetes in the British sense, but three-day parties in the main square under plane trees strung up with lights, and dancing to a live band.

Last weekend, the party was at Viens. The same band, to our certain knowledge, returns year after year. The line-up has changed since those days in the 1980s when a high point was their rendition of George Michael's "Car'less Whis-perr" ("Gill-ti feet 'ave go' no rhyt-hem") and songs from the perennial French love affair with the Rolling Stones. There are dancing girls too, in extraordinary - and occasionally risque - costumes. The whole village turns out, young and old. The children jig around, while their grandparents swoop around to the tango and passo doble and show they've still got the moves.

Wild flower meadows

2011-08-19T05:34:00.000-07:00

…wild flowers in meadows, the wind’s plainsong in the trees…

Most years, by the third week of August, the grass of a hillside garden in the Luberon would be an expanse of close-cropped straw, dried and baked in the sun. But this year, June and July were suprisingly stormy and a great deal wetter than normal, with the result that our garden has become a series of wildflower meadows. And as the idea is to relax and go with the flow in summer, we have left them to bloom.

Butterflies are flitting around from one flower to the next, and bees are busy on their rounds too. Sitting under a shady tree is to be surrounded by humming and buzzing and constant movement.

Just as Dom predicted: comfrey and meadow clary, autumn squill, watercolor blue chicory in scrubby clumps and scabious.

Here is the vibrant blue meadow clary. A sturdy form of pale blue chicory is everywhere, as is the wild geranium and cow parsley. I do love the old-fashioned names of wild flowers. Who named them, the jack-go-to bed-at-noon, the march pennywort, the ladies mantle and the enchanter's nightshade? They all seem to hold the history of country language and folk tales.

…the butterflies on meadow flowers and the scrubby spikiness of the land underfoot as we chased them…

Vote for The Lantern!

2011-08-17T03:33:00.000-07:00

The TV Book Club summer read series is coming to a close, and there has been a vote running for the favourite book of the season. Now, I don't really like to ask (though my UK publishers have strongly suggested that I do...) but if you've read and enjoyed The Lantern, and you felt it was appropriate, and you felt so inclined, then I'd be very grateful for your vote on the following link (here). It's very straightforward, no joining of a site or anything, and you will have the chance of winning book tokens worth £100 thanks to Specsavers. But you will need to be quick as the vote closes in the next few days.

Here again are the edited highlights from the TV Book Club discussion. We all thought that the panel's verdict was overwhelmingly positive, apart from Rory McGrath's objection to too many descriptive terms - fair comment, actually, which would have alerted those who like their prose plain that this might not be the novel for them - and a few so-so quips from Jo Brand. And the lovely book group in Winkwell seemed unanimously to enjoy it, even the men who thought they might not.

Alors, mes amis, over to you...

The courtyard door

2011-08-14T04:04:00.000-07:00

The photograph of the courtyard door on my post ‘Rooms we didn’t know were there’, prompted visual artist Ruby Elizabeth Littlejohn to comment: “The weathered colours and textures are incredibly beautiful.” Indeed they are.

I can see exactly why these images would appeal to her. Her art blog Forest Dream Weaver is full of natural delights which she transforms into inspirational wall hangings and paintings. What is especially appealing is the way she shows us the way she takes scenes and shapes, textures and colours from nature and weaves them into her own unique vision.

If you haven’t discovered her yet, I suggest you clickety-click (here) for a sample of her work and how it evolves, and (here) for just the most exquisite representation of rowan blossom you are ever likely to see, from fine detail to its place in the landscape.

As for the art-in-nature on this old courtyard door, this is one of those times when you hold back from re-painting because the old is so delightful. The knobbly iron nails have their own quiet integrity. The weathered sea-green paint has grown moss stains. Dried remains of venerable ivy have the air of fossils and the grain of the wood is so split and sun-blasted that it seems almost as if the wood is gradually resuming its origins as a tree.

The Lantern - out now!

2011-08-11T03:35:00.000-07:00

Very exciting times here, as The Lantern goes on sale in the USA and

Canada

. What you will see (I hope!) is its subtly mysterious cover and, with any luck, be reminded it was a book that might prove interesting. From my point of view, it is a thrilling moment tinged with some concern that it won’t repay my publishers’ faith in it, but mostly joyous amazement that I finally made it across the Atlantic with my sixth novel to be published.

And also a great deal of gratitude for what has gone on behind the scenes: first of all to my magnificent literary agent Stephanie Cabot, whom I first met in London when she was head of the august William Morris Agency. My great friend Felicia – who knew her – told me in no uncertain terms to stop flailing about and go for the top. I’m so pleased I dared, and have been for a long time now. What was even better was that Stephanie never even saw the letter I’d sent with my book, The Art of Falling, telling her that we had a connection – she called me in for a meeting because she liked the book.

Stephanie is now back in New York at The Gernert Company, where Rebecca Gardner, Will Roberts and Anna Worrell have also worked tirelessly in my behalf.

I was so, so lucky that The Lantern found its perfect editor at HarperCollins, in Jennifer Barth. Despite having been published before, I was not prepared for the infinite care and understanding that Jennifer gave my words, and the way we would work together with such productive empathy. I simply can’t praise her highly enough.

Also at HarperCollins, Jason Sack, Mark Ferguson and Olga Gardner Galvin have done a fantastic job. Many, many thanks too to Kathy Schneider, Tina Andreadis, Leah Wasielewski, Tiffany Woo, and the magnificent library team led by Virginia Stanley and Kayleigh George.

When I went to New York for BEA this May, I was introduced to the whirlwind that is Katherine Beitner, the publicist for the book, who not only kept me up to date with everything going on around us, and made sure everything went like clockwork, but kept me laughing and relaxed thoughout. I knew she was good – very good – but I had no idea she was going to get reviews of The Lantern in the Wall Street Journal and Oprah’s magazine, in Redbook magazine, and, astonishingly, in the past few days: USA Today (click here) and now as the lead book review in this week’s People magazine! (Not available online, sadly.) Katherine, I salute you - what a star!

So there you are, so many more people that I haven’t mentioned by name, including the all-important Harper sales teams, who are behind one small book. Whoever would have thought all this would happen, when I sat down at my desk nearly three years ago to start writing a quiet but disturbing story about a shy, bookish young woman who finds herself living in France with a gorgeous but strangely secretive older man…? Certainly not me.

So it’s over to the readers now. I so hope you find things to enjoy in it, and that you’ll let me know if you do.

Rooms we didn't know were there

2011-08-08T03:32:00.000-07:00

A lopsided stone arch at the end of the main house, which would once have let carts into the courtyard…

From The Lantern

Come with me, I want to show you something. Here’s the entrance arch to “Les Genévriers”, slightly askew but remarkably solid, but we won’t go through there just now. We’re walking behind the main farmhouse, heading down the alleyway which was once a centuries-old path up the hill from the town far below.

…the alleyway between the big house and the row of workers’ cottages.

In the building on the right is the place where a dream first came true, in the most literal sense. I’m a big dreamer, in every way – a daydreamer and a cineaste by night. One scene that recurs quite often for me, in various dream guises, is that of walking through a house where I live and finding rooms I never suspected were there.

Perhaps you have that one too. I don’t think it’s all that unusual. I read once it was supposed to signify personal development and the subconscious acknowledgement of more potential if certain areas of the mind could only be unlocked. In my dreams, it’s always a fascinating and welcome discovery, anyway.

When we bought our property in France, it was the rambling nature of the buildings that appealed immediately. As described fairly faithfully in The Lantern, it is more than a simple house: it is an old hamlet. We had seen it twice before we signed the purchase documents, once inside and out with the vendor’s agent and a second time inspecting the outside only, rather less officially.

There was certainly an element of reckless folie de grandeur about our purchase of the place, but we had fallen under its spell and there was no going back. We’d half-joked for years that top of our material wish-list would be a ruined hamlet in the Luberon, and suddenly – totally unexpectedly - here it was, and what’s more, in what we considered the ideal location. If we hadn’t gone for it, we would have regretted our lack of courage for evermore.

Arriving that first July, ready for adventure, we quickly realized that the main farmhouse was well-nigh uninhabitable. There were ominous cracks right across the floor of the top storey and the remaining bedrooms were cramped and full of dead lizards and insects. So the first summer – and for a few years afterwards - we slept in the building across the alleyway. This long edifice was once a line of farm workers’ cottages but already converted into two apartments. At the end was another small locked house (with no key) that we had never seen inside.

The woodworm-y entrance door to the downstairs apartment leads into a little sitting room. A large high-ceilinged bedroom is a few steps below, and there is a bathroom with wonderful views and its own outside terrace.

We’d been sleeping in the bedroom for several nights before I thought to investigate what I thought must be another cupboard, tucked away down another short flight of stairs, that I’d never even noticed when the estate agent showed us round.

The wooden door was truly small, but on the other side was a fair sized room. It was damp and full of cobwebs, but thrilling nevertheless. If you’ve ever lived in a city, you know that rooms just don’t get missed off property details. But here it was – the room we never knew was there.

…the doors that opened into new rooms that hadn’t seemed to exist.

As it turned out, it was only the first such discovery, as we hacked down the overgrown garden and rampant ivy and the buildings seemed to expand organically around us. The garden door that led not to a tool store but a vaulted wine cave stretching under the courtyard, still with its old – empty! – barrels, was even more exciting. The locked house at the end of the alleyway eventually yielded to force and gave up its terrible stench of drains and ancient lintels and shallow stone wash basin.

When I look back now, that time does take on a dream quality, more so because it did feel as if we were doing something more than slightly crazy. But along the way we have gained far more than extra rooms. We’ve found that a dream really can come true – maybe more than one.

Taste of the sun

2011-08-06T05:34:00.000-07:00

Saturday is market day in Apt. It’s hot and the streets are thronged. The locals keep to the southern end of town where the fruit and vegetable stall on the edge of the big car park gives the best value. The further north towards the Hotel de Ville you go, battling all the tourists of August, the steeper the prices and the prettier the displays.

Provence is the land of tomatoes and olives and garlic and olive oil, and if it’s possible to combine these health-giving ingredients in any way, you will find the result here. You can buy them mashed into unappealing-looking but delicious pulps, or preserved pure, like these delicious sun-dried tomatoes with whole cloves of garlic that are lightly pickled, crunchy and slightly sweet.

Black olive paste - tapenade - is the staple to eat on tiny crispy toasts as an accompaniment to the first drink of the evening. Or there’s anchoïade, a purée of preserved anchovies, olive oil and garlic, to eat with crispy raw vegetables. There’s a stall about halfway down the Rue des Marchands that offers the best you will ever taste.

I’m trying to relax and eat well in the sun this weekend. What do you mean, “try!?” you’re asking. Well, I get very nervous before big events, and next Tuesday is one of the biggest of my writing life: The Lantern is published in the USA and Canada. It’s been going pretty well in Britain, and over the past few weeks the Italian and the Croatian rights have been sold to add to the other foreign territory sales. But this is the big one, the first time I’ve been published in America.

The thousands of free ARCs sent out by HarperCollins to introduce a new author into the book marketplace have produced some lovely reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and some not so good. Some readers don’t know what to make of it: too descriptive; too frustrating to have dual timeframes. Not the easy, genre Gothic read they were expecting. Fair enough. I’m very at ease with the idea that no book will work for everyone: that’s the magic of reading. I don’t enjoy every book I open and neither does anyone else.

But Oprah’s organisation likes it (yes, the legendary Oprah!) - here – and yesterday it reached the dizzy heights of a mention in the Short List in the Wall Street Journal - here. So cross your fingers for me, and hope there aren’t too many rotten tomatoes next week…

Reading under the fig tree

2011-08-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

This is the life…a very comfortable seat in the shade of the fig tree in the courtyard, a pile of lovely books, some wild plums from the hillside and nectarines from the market for when you can’t be bothered to move.

The sun beats down, releasing a heavenly scent from the fig tree: sweet and rich and slightly musky. A cooling breeze ripples the leaves, and all is quiet. Above, the fruit is still green, late this year after the cold weather and rains of early summer.

When a change of scene is required, there’s another lovely place to sit and read under the shade of a vine canopy over the dining table that looks out over the garden with the blue Luberon hills beyond.

For those who are curious about which books are in the piles of eclectic summer reading at hand, these include:

Mary Ann in Autumn by the incomparable Armistead Maupin - I loved this, as I’m a long-time fan of his Tales of the City novels. Once you get to known the lovable characters in this series, you always want to know more about how life is treating them, and this book hits the mark in every way.

A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan – really enjoyed this, especially the way the short stories joined to make a whole, while each chapter stands alone and answers some of the questions posed by earlier teasers. As someone who is endlessly interested in the tricks and possibilities of time in literature, I thought this was a rollicking good read and very well executed.

Shelley’s Boat by Julian Roach – I’ve long been fascinated by Shelley and Byron and the Italian adventure that ended in tragedy for so many of the entourage. This is a lovely lyrical mixture of romance and inexorable disaster in the weeks preceding Shelley’s death by drowning in the summer of 1822.

Rosé en Marché by Jamie Ivey – my favourite of Jamie Ivey’s fun books about

France

and wine. In this one he takes us behind the scenes of all the famous Luberon markets as he and his wife Tanya become wine merchants, selling their selection of bottles on stalls throughout the region, and trying to make a life and a living in Provence.

Une Maison dans le Luberon by Adrienne Borrelly with photographs by Eric d’Hérouville – full of interiors and exteriors of exquisite style, the latest in my collection of gorgeous picture books, for inspiration and lazy day-dreaming.

Bliss...

Tonight's scorpion...

2011-07-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

Found ten minutes ago by daughter on the wall outside bedroom door. Not the sharpest of photos - there were what might be diplomatically termed "urgent family discussions" about whether the taking of a photo was really the priority here, whether the flash was going to work, and who was going to jump in which direction if the scorpion decided to make a break for it...

Scorpion!

2011-07-29T10:01:00.000-07:00

Fat scorpions lurked malevolently as I began to clear the stew of wind-blown twigs and sodden tangles of ivy, rotted petals and grit.

From The Lantern

The first time I saw a scorpion in the house, I was chilled to the bone. A scorpion, surely the most dangerous stinging insect there is! How could this be, in a country so close to England? I’d been brought up on terrible tales of the scorpions in the Middle East where my parents lived when I was born, of the gardener who put his foot into a shoe without looking and was stung so badly he died of the poison in the scorpion’s tail.

When I told the first person I saw – the electrician – of this terrible discovery, he smiled and shrugged in the way the French do. “C’est normal,’ he said. There were always scorpions in old houses where there were lots of stone walls, he explained, but there was not much harm in them. The sting from these Provençal breeds was not much worse than a wasp’s.

That isn’t as comforting as it might seem, as there are some pretty heavy duty wasps around here in summer: as August wears on, great hornets imbued with the same dark threat as military helicopters appear. But we’ve learned to live with the scorpions, and developed our own way of dealing with them. Nature has her ways too.

One hot night a few summers ago, I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed when I noticed that a battle was raging under the basin between a scorpion and a spider. The scorpion was a reasonable size, about an inch and a half long (about average: the other night we found a fat three-incher, but there are also tiny ones of less than an inch; the one photographed here on an outside wall was about two inches long). The spider was rather smaller, and it seemed only a matter of time before it lost the fight. But on and on went the two adversaries.

I stayed watching for over an hour, unable to leave without knowing the outcome. In the end, the spider triumphed by patiently continuing to spin sticky web while avoiding the scorpion’s nipping pincers. Very good to know, and I am always most respectful of spiders now.

The blocked-up doorway

2011-07-25T07:16:00.000-07:00

One afternoon, idly looking down over the lower terraces at the stone walls, my eyes fastened on a wooden beam in the wall attached to the first stone arch. Moments passed before it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a lintel, and that there had once been a door underneath it. It was there, very faintly, in outline. Another room, possibly, blocked up with stones.

from The Lantern

When I’m writing a novel, I really enjoy describing what is really there. The story comes from the imagination, but what will make it vivid and plausible is being rooted in a real landscape and setting. So, although these words are supposedly written by Eve in The Lantern, they are my experience of being at “Les Genévriers”, our property as it features in the novel.

And it’s also possible to present a photograph of the place itself, just as I first noticed it a couple of years ago, and as it remains today. What was it used for, once upon a time? No doubt, it would have been something quite prosaic: for storing farm equipment, or just possibly for sheltering animals. The chamber cannot have been very big – at the most, only a few yards square – but why, and when, was it blocked up?

We took out the top row of stones to see if it was possible to re-open the entrance, but it seems not. There is another layer of stones, and rubble behind it. This is where those of us with over-active imaginations start to guess at all sorts of explanations. Of course, I couldn’t resist writing it into my story, and I hope those you you who read the book will be interested to see what might have formed other pictures in the mind, as it really exists.

Lavender country

2011-07-21T04:10:00.000-07:00

The summer I was fifteen I went up towards the mountains for the lavender harvest. It was Marthe’s idea, she who persuaded our parents to let me go to see for myself how the ridged uplands had been transformed into purple carpets where the scent was born.

from The Lantern

The lavender harvest will begin in the next few weeks, so the end of July is the perfect time to see fields of purple. As the hills rise into mountains, the checkerboards of colour are grow more dense against the green and pale stone. The warmer the day, the more heavily the air is perfumed.

Ask anyone about lavender, and the chances are they won’t be able to give you a description of its aroma. But more often than not, they can give you some visual reference. Lavender is color, waving fields of purple, rich blues and faded mauve. It is the essence of blue and of the warm winds of summer, opulent against the yellow of the cornfield, mysteriously shadowed under the olives that are sometimes planted as its companion.

These fields are in Sault, in the great lavender-producing area of the north-west of Provence. This small town, built on a rocky outcrop overlooking the narrow plateau where the crops grow, seems almost entirely dedicated to its industry. Even the shutters and doors of many of the buildings are painted mauve:

Local produce in the butcher's shop includes pork with lavender honey:

There are lavender biscuits, and lavender teas...

And just look at the sumptuous purple of this tablecloth:

And shops entirely devoted to lavender and sunshine...

Voyage into the past

2011-07-18T03:01:00.000-07:00

I always think of this beautiful piece of Art Nouveau designed by Victor Horta as a piece of my past. Many years ago I often stopped to look at it as I walked by, and I still think it is arresting, and a symbol of the city where it stands. Does anyone recognise this small but exquisite corner?

It’s in Brussels, where I lived with my family, at two different times, for quite a few years while I was growing up. It was where I learned to speak French, aged six, a lucky chance which has enriched my life. It’s also the city where I spent my late teenage years, for a while at an international school, and then returning every holiday from boarding school in England.

And last weekend I was in Brussels, at a celebration party for one of my nearest and dearest, Josine. A wonderful time was had by all, and the next morning we made our way to the rail station and the journey home via the Grand’ Place. The square of seventeenth century guild houses has been re-gilded – appropriately for the occasion! – and gleams newly minted.

On the corner of “L’Etoile”, The House of the Star, is Horta’s 1899 memorial to Charles Buls, pictured here in a wider view. Buls was a politician and a man of culture, a progressive of his time in that he fought to preserve and restore the dilapidated old buildings of the Grand’ Place, successfully fighting any ideas of redeveloping the site. If that were not sufficient to honour him, Buls was also a prolific author and travel writer.

Brussels is Victor Horta’s city, too. His name is synonymous with Art Nouveau, with its distinctive flowing elegant lines. One of the city’s subtle delights is the way this style is incorporated into doorways and windows and gates, in the most unexpected places. I can’t think of anywhere that echoes that style and era better.

So, layers of the past then: both the past of the place and my own. It’s always thought-provoking when you return somewhere you know well but haven’t seen for a few years, especially when you then add the memories of a friendship of more than thirty years.

Perhaps I’m too nostalgic but I’m always fascinated by the then and now, and how the two interweave. If I had known then what I know now - how my life would turn out, I mean – I would never have been so worried, quite so determined to push so hard. But then, of course, perhaps it all might have turned out differently…

A Marvellous garden

2011-07-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head ;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine ;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach ;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

The Garden, written in the seventeenth century by Andrew Marvell is one of my favourite poems. I’m sure you can see why this verse sprang to mind when I opened the door to the bedroom terrace where the vines have overreached themselves…

Until I came to Provence, I thought Marvell’s overblown opulence here (“Stumbling on melons”, for goodness’ sake!) was pure amusement with a touch of bathos, as indeed it was probably intended. But now I’m not sure sure he didn’t have somewhere just like our garden in mind, where the excess does feel slightly mad, lightly crazy.

Like the old poet, I too love to sit in a green shade and think and simply be, comforted by the knowledge I have no pressing engagements or people to see. While I was at university, while I still hardly knew my own character – the real one, as opposed to the extravert carapace I’d spent years building as protective cover – I wrote a dissertation on Marvell and the conflict between private and public life.

Such is the power of poetry: it connects with the emotions rather than everyday logic. I must have felt this strongly myself, though it had yet to filter up through my subconscious. Though, obviously, my life was nothing like his public life as a politician, administrator, philosopher balanced with a private life of poetry, unpublished during his lifetime: it was more a recognition of his admission that the introvert can go out and achieve as much as the extravert but then needs time alone to settle the nerves and re-arm inner resources.

Marvell’s The Garden opens with some wonderful and intricate punning that cleverly captures the kind of frenetic activities that lead to the desire for seclusion:

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays ;
And their uncessant labours see
Crowned from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow-vergèd shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid ;
While all the flowers and trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.

I love the way “vainly” means both “in vain” and “with vanity”; “amaze” has all the force of “amazement” but with a strong sense of being stunned, hit with force, and also of confusion: “a-mazed”, perhaps, trapped in a maze with no way out. The great honours are symbolised by trees, such as the bay (or laurel), but he would rather have the tree itself.

In the garden, the calmed mind finds its own happiness: Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade.

You can read the whole poem by clicking here. And if you’re curious about Andrew Marvell now, there’s plenty more information about him on the same Luminarium site.

Signs of high summer

2011-07-10T03:25:00.000-07:00

The sun is beating down, the narrow streets in town are getting more crowded, and the locals are muttering darkly in supermarket queues about the seasonal influx of foreigners, and worse - Parisians. British and American voices can be heard in passing at every market in Provence. On the roads, we remember just in time what masters of the unexpected Belgian drivers can be.

And on walls and in shop windows everywhere, posters have appeared advertising the summer's entertainments. There are village parties open to all, starting with boules tournaments, progressing to two nights of dancing under the stars and ending with vide greniers, the "attic clear-out" sales on the streets and village squares that provide such rich pickings of shabby chic artefacts.

There are serious concerts in superb settings such as the hilltop castles at Gordes and Lacoste, recitals in churches, and village bands in the squares under the trees. Then there are the food evenings, involving vins et fromages (wines and cheeses) and soupe au pistou (a soup with tomatoes, garlic and basil) accompanied by musical entertainments. Truly, there is something for everyone.

PS. For some reason Blogger won't upload any of my recent photos, and trying to do so is sending me mad this morning! But I'm so aware that my blogging has been patchy to say the least of late, so I'm determined to post something, even if it is with last year's pictures. I may revisit later and attempt a reconciliation with Blogger...

It's working! I'm going in to try for another!

Hurray! And when there's no more space for posters on walls and in windows, they're pinned to headless men who walk around town...

The sound of the south

2011-07-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

You know summer has really arrived in Provence when the cicadas start whirring and chirruping. Their distinctive sound pulses, and as more and more join in the chorus the effect is like waves of mechanical toys fidgeting in the grass.

Although they don’t seem an especially pretty creature to me, the cicadas are immortalised everywhere in ceramic form, perhaps as the very symbol of sunny days. The first photo was taken at a brocante sale in St-Remy-de-Provence, and these examples are chunky yet rather well detailed. I’m not quite sure what you’d do with them – perhaps they are for the serious enthusiast and collector only.

Far more often, you see “Les Cigalles” in rough and colourful form as decoration on those “essentially Provençal” items without which no market would be complete in July and August: the perfume diffusers, as here, or gift-wrapped soaps, or jars of herbs.

I was wondering whether I could download the sound of these constant background companions that let you know you are in the south, but decided against it. It occurs to me, though, that with the advent of e-readers, it probably won’t be long until there is a soundtrack embedded in every e-book. And then images, too, no doubt, so that all the wonders of technology that we can use on our blogs will be brought to creating fabulously involving texts. It’s quite a thought, isn’t it?

Or are the words better left to speak for themselves on the page, allowing the reader to create the images? Just as they say about radio: the pictures are so much better than the television.

But I’m going to take a risk here, and post some more sound. In general, I’m much happier talking on the radio, as I did earlier this week on BBC Radio Kent, because I’m not having to deal with my self-consciousness in front of a camera. But here’s a tiny part of an afternoon of promo filming I did a couple of weeks ago, at home in England, so relatively relaxed (only relatively, mind…!). It’s a reading of the Prologue to The Lantern.

La Provence

2011-07-03T04:11:00.000-07:00

When the local newspapers weren’t full of financial worries, layoffs at fruit packing plants and the crystallized fruit factories, and falling prices for the farmers, they were reporting a series of local girls who had gone missing.

We heard the talk and saw the headlines, but we managed not to register any of it. We took refuge in our foreign status, bound up in our own little world, where nothing could touch us.

From The Lantern

The idea of the blissful isolation – or ignorance – experienced by foreigners in a country not their own is neatly summed up in this picture of our local newspaper, La Provence. It is one of the “gifts from the house”: found objects we have kept and made part of the place again. I’ve cropped the picture so that you can’t tell, but it’s framed in pine and hangs in the kitchen.

The artist has taken the front page and used it as the canvas for a rather good painting of Lourmarin on the southern slopes of the Luberon ridge. It seems to have been intended as a wedding present, and we assume that Lourmarin was either where the wedding took place (or did it?) or where the couple lived. The date on the masthead is November 2000.

This picture was found in the bergerie, the guest cottage across the track, sealed in behind a fabric bed headboard that we dismantled before we gave the room a new coat of paint. It seems odd that it was sealed in – was the present unwanted? Did one of the newly-weds hate it? Or had it never been given, but left by the artist, who decided not to hand it over, after all? Such are the delicious questions that arise when you find strange objects unexpectedly – tiny glimpses into other lives to which you will never know the answers.

So there it is, the out-of-date newspaper on which any news has been over-painted with an idyllic scene. It seems to stand for that feeling you have on holiday when you can gave yourself space to be rather than continuously worrying about day-to-day responsibilities, which includes knowing what all those media reports say.

Open window: TV film and extract

2011-06-29T07:08:00.000-07:00

In the past few days, The TV Book Club has uploaded some edited highlights of the transmission to YouTube - and a lovely job they have made too. (Apart from some less than flattering camera angles of the author...I resolve never again to look down while being filmed...nor eat again, obviously.) The whole programme is repeated on Channel 4 on Saturday at 1.20pm.

By lucky coincidence, the opening shots show the book posed on the edge of the fountain at Saignon, mentioned in the previous post. So here it is, only a couple of minutes long, and there is a flavour of the panel's discussion too. Though not the part where Rory McGrath said rather grumpily that there were "too many adjectives"! The others mostly disagreed with him, though Jo Brand looks as if she's on the point of saying something rude. It's a very short edit of the programme. There was a book group discussion too, and those fine people unanimously enjoyed the book, even the men who were sure they wouldn't when they were told what they'd be reading.

And if that has whetted your appetite, the UK publishers Orion have the opening twenty pages or so available to read on their site here.

Statues in place

2011-06-28T01:52:00.000-07:00

Well, these statues did appear on the TV Book Club film, though you had to be eagle-eyed to spot them! But the village did feature quite prominently, and I'm wondering whether any of you who know Provence well recognised where we were...

No more teasing: it was in Saignon, the hill-top village above the town of Apt. It is a very pretty place, and Ceres and the Water Carrier perch atop the fountain in the square, just outside the Auberge du Presbytere.

My gaze rested on the fountain in the square where we sat: black-green with lichen and moss, the water spewing from the mouth of a gargoyle, water as cool and dark as the Styx.

From The Lantern

The covenant of the ARC

2011-06-26T04:54:00.000-07:00

So here it is, the summer hat, the draw and my scrawled note of the names in the order they came out of it! I'm delighted to announce that the winners of the ARC of The Lantern in America are as follows:

Lisa of Lesapea Musings

Catherine Stock

Carol Apple

BookBelle

Bunched Undies

Julia Munroe Martin

I will be in touch with each of you to arrange receipt of your books from HarperCollins.

In the meantime, I would just like to write a few words of immense gratitude to all of you who entered, as well as those who couldn't because you don't live in the USA. Since I started blogging at the very end of last year, I've been bowled over by all of you in the book blogging community, your generosity and support, all the wise words, and the great writing on your blogs, too numerous to mention individually. What did writers do to connect before the world wide web? Just sit at their desks in isolation and wish they were part of a literary salon?

It's been an amazing discovery - you are amazing. Thank you.

Stone statues

2011-06-25T02:17:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t told Dom about the incident on the path. I didn’t want him questioning my rationality. Privately though, I’d been thinking a lot about the objects we’d chosen to surround ourselves with: the chipped plates and bowls; the second hand mirrors and scratched paintings; the crazed broken statues. The way they spoke of a history that didn’t belong to us, even in their inanimate state; the way they blurred the distinction between the living and the dead.

From The Lantern

At Les Genévriers, the imaginary version of our property, the garden is enhanced by old stone statues, lichen-encrusted and decrepit. No such artefacts are there in real life – such is the fun of literary invention! But, as always, the life of the novel is inspired by reality, and here are two of the figures that provided the images for those scenes: Ceres and the Water-Carrier.

Actually, I’m not going to tell you exactly where they are. But if you watch The TV Book Club, starting tomorrow on More 4 at 7.30pm (repeated on Saturday, July 2 at 1.20pm on Channel 4) I’m pretty sure that they will be in shot…

Publication day!

2011-06-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

This must be the best moment of all - going into your local bookshop and seeing your book on the shelves. It's the culmination of several years' work, including the editing process and the months waiting for the right publishing slot for the book. I wrote the first words of this novel in November 2008, and the first draft was finished by spring 2010. That gives just some idea of the timescale involved.

So the day you first see it in the shops is very special indeed. This was in my local Waterstone's in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where manager Mike Cooper and his team are immensely supportive of any local authors, and have always done a fabulous job with my books. So cheers, Mike - and thanks again! Here he is with Rachel who helped me sign all their stock this morning. Sorry, you won't get a copy that isn't signed from here!

The other real buzz is seeing your book surrounded by other books by authors (real authors!) you admire - take a look at the company The Lantern is keeping! There's The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Isabel Allende, Jo Nesbo, Kristin Hannah...

And as I was walking down Mount Pleasant, I passed the British Bookshops store and was absolutely amazed and thrilled to see this window display (note proximity to the very wonderful Kate Atkinson)... To borrow from the phrase-making Wimbledon commentators on the BBC, what a dream of a day!

A huge, huge thank you to everyone at Orion who has brought The Lantern to this stage: Kate Mills, Susan Lamb, Malcolm Edwards, Jon Wood, Lisa Milton, Juliet Ewers, Sophie Mitchell, Jade Chandler, Louisa Gibbs, Andrew Taylor, Gaby Young, Anthony Keates, Jo Carpenter, Hannah Lewis and Lucie Stericker. And to my superb literary agent in London, Araminta Whitley, who found this book such a fantastic home.

Brocante...

2011-06-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

The Lantern’s first Publication Day is tomorrow, and as I feel even more nervous than usual – there’s a lot more riding on the book this time – I’m too wired to write much. So these pictures from a brocante in St Rémy de Provence earlier this year can stand as a visual metaphor.

First there’s the Medusa-like fountain plaque, looking terrified rather than terrifying, and then there’s this vintage suitcase, which combines the idea of getting ready to go, with being open to allow a glimpse into its contents: delicate lace offered up for scrutiny by discerning buyers…

US bloggers: win an ARC

2011-06-19T04:28:00.000-07:00

The Orion edition of The Lantern will be in UK bookshops this week, in readiness for the first transmission of The TV Book Club programme which goes out on More 4 on Sunday, June 26 in the evening. And just so some of my American blogging friends have a chance to read it sooner rather than later, the US publishers HarperCollins are offering the chance to win an Advance Reader's Edition here.

There are six copies of this beautifully-presented special edition available, and all you have to do to leave your name in a comment on this post, with a link so you can be contacted, and consider clicking the book's facebook "Like" gadget on this blog, though that's not mandatory purely because I don't like lots of interblogging rules!

This time next week I'll put all the names into a summer hat, and ask someone else to do a ceremonial draw. First six names out will receive the books. Sound fair? The US publication date is August 9, when The Lantern comes out as a Harper hardback, as well as an e-book and audio book.

Bearing fruit...mulberries

2011-06-17T03:45:00.000-07:00

Mulberries dropped from a soaring tree by the sheepfold into an obscene river of plenty.

From The Lantern

The mulberries were just ripening when we were at house two weeks ago for filming, but the gravel and grass underneath the big tree were already spotted with dark pink-purple fruit. By now, they will be a veritable carpet.

They are easier to pick from the weeping mulberry in the garden, though even here the sheer abundance is overwhelming. Longer and thinner than a blackberry, these mulberries have a delicate taste and density, almost like rose petal-infused sugar water.

It’s not that common to find them this side of the great Rhône river. It’s on the other side, in the south-west of France, that the silk industry traditionally cultivated mulberry trees to feed the leaves to silkworms. So we can only guess at the reasons for the presence of these trees around the buildings on our property - another small mystery, along with so many others to set the imagination alight...

Red letter day: The TV Book Club

2011-06-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

At last it can be told! Red letter day was yesterday when this year’s summer reading selection for The TV Book Club on Channel 4 was announced – and The Lantern has made the cut!

If I say I am thrilled beyond words, I know you’ll understand the magnitude of this for me. It’s what every writer dreams of, but never expects will happen to them. The call came through back in April that The Lantern was on the long-list, and I really thought that was as good as it was going to get, and was delighted at that encouraging endorsement before it was published.

I was in Provence at the time, sitting on a pile of rubble. The building site at the house was reaching a zenith of mess and confusion. ‘So,’ said Susan Lamb down the line from Orion, ‘if you get it they’ll want to come and film you at the house, take some long lingering shots of the gorgeous setting. That’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm, yes… Of course!’ I replied. It didn’t seem worth worrying anyone unnecessarily at this stage.

For the rest of the month the builders cracked on. The chaos of stones and equipment grew. No further word about the TV Book Club, and as the days went by I just assumed my book had been passed over. Then, a couple of days before I was due to go to New York, the news came through – The Lantern was in!

I went wobbly for a few hours when I realised that not only would we have to turn on a sixpence on our return to England to get down to Provence in time for the filming schedule, but there was the small matter of the scenic quality of our property in question…

Frantic communications between New York and a tiny hamlet in France ensued, followed by intense activity. But the sight that greeted us when we finally arrived there brought a tear to the eye. Everyone, our masons and especially our very good friend William and his family, had pulled together to clear and clean the place up so it was ready for its close-up.

Unbelievably, the only element that let us down in this complex scenario was the normally sunny Provençal weather! On the day of filming, it poured with rain. Then it poured some more. Then we had thunderstorms. Zoe and James from Cactus TV could not have been lovelier or more professional, and we all made the best of it. At one point I stood out in the courtyard under a broken umbrella explaining that perhaps these darker interludes were appropriate to the novel - after all, there are gothic elements in it, as the idyllic summer in the South of France fades into winter.

And tragically, the clothes I had chosen so carefully to take pounds off my silhouette as I sauntered blissfully through the property and garden were destined to remain in the wardrobe, just as the blue hills of the Luberon remained stubbornly cloud-bound… Imagination is called for, that’s all I can say. And I’d like you to know, I’d have looked half the size if only I’d been wearing that exceptionally flattering slip of a maxi dress….

The TV Book Club starts on Sunday, June 26 on More 4, repeated on Channel 4 on Saturday, July 2. The first episode is a general look at the books up for discussion, and here’s the full list:

Week One: The Lantern, Deborah Lawrenson (Orion)

Week Two: Moonlight Mile, Dennis Lehane (Abacus)

Week Three: A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (Corsair)

Week Four: Night Road, Kristin Hannah (Pan)

Week Five: The Book Of Human Skin, Michelle Lovric (Bloomsbury)

Week Six: The Hidden Child, Camilla Läckberg (HarperCollins)

Week Seven: The Radleys, Matt Haig (Canongate)

Week Eight: Grace Williams Says It Loud, Emma Henderson (Sceptre)

As you can see, I’m in some impressive company. I think all the books are very appealing – including a couple already on my TBR list. I’m up on June 26/ July 2, and the episode will be widely available to view online as well. The details are on the Channel 4 website here.

Cherries from Chauvet's Orchard

2011-06-10T07:31:00.000-07:00

We climbed out and drank in the view. Lines of crimson vines swirled out like a pleated skirt from where we stood on chocolate ploughed earth. To the right a cherry orchard seemed to have been dipped in beetroot juice and there was a custard-coloured lake of wheat to the left. The scene was punctuated in the middle distance by a butternut squash tinted field and three trees in quince green. The slopes of Mont Ventoux rose up behind, a turban of pink clouds wound around its peak.

From Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard

As soon as I opened this book by Ruth Phillips, I knew it was special. I’ve read it twice now, since mentioning it in my “Cross-Channel reading” post, and I will undoubtedly read it again. In this extract, Ruth and her husband, the artist Julian Merrow-Smith see for the first time, in autumn, the hamlet where they will settle in Provence. And we see it with them, such is the vibrancy of the description. The term “painting in words” might be overused, but it is precisely what Ruth Phillips achieves.

Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard is a passionate memoir of a painter who followed a dream, a wife who has her own artistic profession as a concert ’cellist yet becomes in addition, by default, his studio assistant, and their life together in an intense landscape of colour and light, nature – and love.

Each chapter is given the title of one of Julian’s Postcards from Provence, the daily paintings that have made his name – and what delights those titles are! Instantly, they give a delicious flavour of what is to come: Pale Blue Iris; Two Pomegranates; Still Life with Summer Fruits…

In October 2008, the thousandth of these small oil paintings that glow with inner life was sold. That milestone was passed while Ruth was away, in northern

France

playing The Marriage of Figaro by night. Her idea was to write to everyone who had bought one of the pictures, and ask them if they would like to tell her a little about themselves, where they lived and what the paintings meant to them.

From these responses grew the structure of this book, though it is far more a portrait of her and Julian than it is about the buyers. They provide a very short introduction about themselves which gives Ruth the lead to explore the background to each work - how and where it was painted - in vivid personal scenes, shot through with colour and observation, sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching, often painfully honest and intimate. This is no wide-eyed idyll. It is lyrical yet moving as she pulls no punches when writing about its darker corners: the days when the painter won’t paint, their struggle to have a baby.

Ruth Reading by Julian Merrow-Smith

This, for me, is what makes this such a rewarding read: it’s a book to lose yourself in, to feel as if you come to understand the personalities involved as well as the setting. Ruth Phillips is a gifted writer, alive to every nuance of tone and texture. I adored the richly-layered descriptive passages in which so much more than the superficial is encoded.

Julian presented the food. A fillet of sea bass with perfect griddle marks and a scattering of fennel picked from a nearby hedgerow. There were caramelized carrots, baby la ratte potatoes and a garnish of roasted tomatoes that had made a brief appearance in a painting that afternoon.

A perfect paragraph. It encapsulates so much unstated back-story: that Julian is an enthusiastic and excellent cook, that they gather wild food, the slow sweetening of natural produce, the conjunction of real life and Still Life in the immortalised tomatoes.

But you have to read it in context, because this vignette takes place amid a foul-mouthed onslaught by the French country neighbours from hell, in which Julian demonstrates that the classic British stiff upper lip is a potent psychological defence.

I highly recommend this engaging, lush, intensely visual yet thoughtful read. It will transport you to sunny uplands, lifting your heart along the way, though never losing sight of the realities of the hard road to fulfilment in any artistic or personal endeavour.

In February 2005 Julian Merrow-Smith started Postcard from Provence, a daily painting project at Shifting Light here. Each day he paints a small still life or landscape inspired by the countryside outside his studio, its fruits and everyday artefacts. All artwork on this post is his.

Wild cherries

2011-06-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

When the wild cherries had dried on the trees, too small to pick, too hard for the birds but chewy and delicious and left as treats for us children, we knew it must be close to the fourteenth of July.

from The Lantern

The unexpectedly foul weather in Provence last week lifted for long enough for me to run out into the garden to the wild cherry trees on the old orchard terrace. The cherries on these are tiny scarlet globules that taste of sour cherry candy, tart yet sweet on the tongue. The boughs were weighed down by fruit, all dancing in the wind.

When the sun came out, it was hot – but torrential rain lashed down only about an hour after these pictures were taken, accompanied by another epic thunderstorm. So much rain fell that day that fields of the region’s famous orange-fleshed Cavaillon melons were decimated and the crops lost. It just goes to show that it’s not only in the past that farming was a precarious livelihood, even in this place of glorious plenty where sunshine is usually taken for granted.

Again, I’m sorry this is such a short post and for my absence from comments on all my favourite blogs. I travelled back to England yesterday in readiness for the UK publication of The Lantern. The publication date has been moved forward – for reasons I still can’t reveal! - and it should be available in the shops in the week beginning June 20.

Meanwhile, the house here in Kent is like the Marie Celeste, abandoned in a state of chaos as we’ve run in and run out again in between travels over the last three weeks or so. For the next few days, this writer’s life will be occupied by the more prosaic mountains of dirty washing, domestic admin, and fixing all the things in this house that have broken down and have had to stay that way - as well as the inevitable fretting as to how my novel, in which so much time and work has been invested, will be received when it finally appears…

The catalpa tree blossoms

2011-06-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

Unseasonal cloud and rain in Provence...but the beauty of the catalpa tree in the courtyard is undiminished. It blossoms in June with a profusion of orchid-like flowers, delicately veined with rose-red. The new canopy of leaves is a bright acid green while the trademark pods, so reminiscent of vanilla, hang beneath.

This is going to be a very short post, and it comes with a heartfelt apology to all my lovely blogger friends who have been so very supportive. It was been a crazy busy fortnight for me, from which I'm only now beginning to unwind. I have been logging on when I can to snatch reads of your blogs, but commenting has eluded me. Partly this has been due to lack of time, but when I have tried to leave comments, the blogger-google connect system has just made them vanish as soon as I pressed "post". Where I have succeeded, it's on those blogs that give a Name/URL option, but the Google Connect one has just blocked me out.

So to all of you, sorry! I haven't abandoned you - far from it. I look forward to catching up properly over the next few weeks, and let's hope normal mail service is resumed soon on Blogger.

The cover revealed...

2011-06-01T02:21:00.000-07:00

Exciting times here, which I am bursting to write about, but I just can’t – not yet anyway. But I can finally unveil the cover of The Lantern which has been under wraps for a while as changes have been made on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather unusually, the two different publishers – Orion in the UK and HarperCollins in the

– have opted for the same image with minor differences in presentation.

I really love it. This is a cover that is absolutely appropriate for the book, with the figure of a woman who could stand for more than one character and the brocante style in the intricate lace of ironwork which might be a gate, or a balcony, or even the fretwork of a large ornate lantern such as we light in the garden at night. Then there’s the flare of yellow, like candlelight. The American version is darker in every sense, more mossy and sombre with that slightly sinister green.

Another lovely blurb has been added on the back, this time from Paula McLain, whose wonderful novel The Paris Wife, about Hemingway and his first wife Hadley in Jazz Age Paris in the 1920s amid the fast-living set that included Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, has been such a huge and well-deserved success.

“Deborah Lawrenson is a master of mood and shadow as she spins this absorbing tale of intense passion and growing dread. Her Provence is sumptuous and forbidding and utterly real. Prepare to be riveted.”

—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

And finally, there’s now a Facebook page for The Lantern which I shall do my best to keep updated. To see it, click here. All “Likes” gratefully appreciated!

New York: books and jazz

2011-05-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve been far away from Provence this past week, and from the blog world for that matter – having the most wonderful time in New York. Book-related matters dominated with the huge Book Expo

America

book fair.

The hotel was a few minutes away from Saks and the Rockefeller Center. The Stars and Stripes fluttered from every flagpole in readiness for Memorial Day weekend; sailors in pristine whites roamed around like modern day Sinatra’s and Kelly’s in On The Town. I hadn’t expected the trademark New York wit to be in such full flow all around, or the sky-high levels of friendliness to match the soaring towers.

The first night there was a party at The Park down by the water in Chelsea, given by HarperCollins where I was introduced, among others, to some of the loveliest lady librarians anyone could hope to meet. Then it was off - in another shiny black limo, natch – to dinner with my fabulous literary agent Stephanie Cabot, and to toast the night, exactly a year ago, that this dream scenario began with the sale of the manuscript.

The next day I was signing galley copies of The Lantern at BEA, trying to master the art of talking and writing at the same time while meeting booksellers, avid readers and many more lovely librarians. It was exciting and frenetic – like being in the centre of a whirlpool. We had to close the line because we ran out of books but these early copies have been so beautifully produced it’s not surprising they were in demand. Also, something of a collector’s item as the cover is being changed for the main edition, as it is in the

It’s only fitting that I pay tribute here to my American editor, Jennifer Barth. It has been an absolute joy to work with her, and she has taken such infinite care with this book. Huge thanks too to everyone at HC that I’ve been working with – many of whom I met in person for the first time on this trip – especially Mark Ferguson, Jason Sack and the scintillating Katherine Beitner, publicist extraordinare. At The Gernert Company, the literary agency, I met David Gernert and the team working with Stephanie for my book: Rebecca Gardner, Will Roberts and Anna Worrell.

That evening, after emerging shell-shocked from the BEA signing at the vast Javits Center, I went down to East Village where the very funny and laconic British author Helen Smith was reading excerpts from her work as part of a Guerrilla Lit performance with other writers at Bar on A. She kicked off with the opening of her novel Alison Wonderland, a new edition of which is published in August, and had us all hooked right from the start. Have a look at the video of her on her blog, linked here, reading her short story Aubergine. I challenge you not to laugh out loud!

Another night, I met up with my friend from university days, the musician and jazz vocalist Alexandra Frederick. Alex took us from live jazz in Greenwich Village and dinner, to the amazing piano cabaret of Mr “Chicken Delicious” the artist formerly known as Hunter Blue at Mimi’s Piano Bar and Restaurant. I simply can’t resist reliving and sharing some memorable moments there…

Then, when Alex was invited to play and sing, she obliged with a short set that culminated in a superb rendition of Billy Joel’s New York State of Mind. It was just perfect.

The art of translation

2011-05-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

Alibaud is another softly beautiful and clever composition by artist Lynne Ciacco, that keys into that same mood captured in her City Lupins featured a few posts ago. It dovetails a photo of allium flowers by Owen Phillips, a picture of Lynne’s daughter and the written text of a Rimbaud poem, Sensation, in the poet’s own hand.

Like the first picture, it’s dream-like - an exploration of the subconscious perhaps - and evokes a powerful sense of time passing. If you look carefully, there’s a similar tracery of branches and stems in delicate white that adds another layer of detachment from the face behind, as if the girl is already out of reach. The effect is reminiscent of sentimental Victorian cards, romantic and nostalgic.

Although it’s correct to transpose the word “sensation” from French into English, it would perhaps be more helpful here to think of it with the emphasis on “feeling”. There are many translations available. The American poet Joshua Mehigan really seems to capture the sensuous lyrical simplicity of the original.

Blue summer evenings, pricked by stalks of wheat,

I’ll walk the paths, crush short grass where I tread:

Dreaming, I’ll feel its coolness on my feet.

And I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

Click here for the whole poem in French with Mehigan’s translation and a biographical note about Arthur Rimbaud in the online literary magazine failbetter.com.

And for those who enjoy the nuances of translation, here’s another version, this time by A.Z. Foreman, a formidable linguist whose Poems Found in Translation blog (click here) is a wonderful site to get lost in. You can even listen to him read the poem in French, and hear how he brings out Rimbaud’s languorous rhythm and interior rhymes.

Through evenings blue with summer, pricked by wheat,
I’ll roam the roads and crush the grass I tread,
Will dream and feel its coolness underfoot,
Will let the breezes bathe my naked head.

I’m aware we’ve travelled away from Lynne Ciacco’s art, but actually these ramblings do illustrate something I feel very strongly: that different forms of creativity are all interconnected. I could, of course, be wrong. Some people don’t feel that at all. Not all artists like other people coming along and offering their impressions. As the French painter and pioneer of pointillisme Georges Seurat said:

“They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it.”

Lynne Ciacco lives and works in Atlantic Canada. She has a fine art degree (BFA) from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver and works in diverse media, from acrylics to pastel and watercolours, as well as textiles. This is another example of her digital art using textured layers and blending modes. You can find her website here and her art blog here.

More lavender...bygone days

2011-05-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

In the lavender fields…

Men with pitchforks were throwing the stalks and flowers up like hay. Another stood on top of the shaggy load, shouting. Then, when it seemed not another petal could possibly cling on, and the mauve tassles were dripping in every direction, the order was given to sway off to the corner where the alembic had been pulled in by a donkey.

More lavender, and a glimpse further into the past. In the crossroads village of Coustellet, best known for its Sunday morning market, stands the Musée de la Lavande, the lavender museum, where these evocative old photographs from the 1920s and 30s hang on the walls.

It was back-breaking work, on an arid landscape and under an unforgiving sun at harvest time at the end of July. There were no mechanical aids for the cutting and gathering of the stems, just a hand scythe and a cloth bag worn over the shoulder. The women would have worn clothes like this:

I was given a bag, a small sickle and a starting place. Although he asked my name and nodded, he did not introduce himself. For several days afterwards, until I got to know some of the other girls and exchange information, he would remain simply the man in the waistcoat.

‘Watch out for the bees, and the vipers,’ he said.

‘Vipers?’

‘They hide under the flowers.’

I put on my apron and pulled my cotton scarf up over my head. My eyes were already hurting from the relentless sun.

Nervously, I began. It was tiring work but I was keen to prove myself. The bag grew heavier and bumped against my legs. The scent was heavenly, all around in heavy fumes, so intense that after a while it seemed to pulse.

from The Lantern

Musée de la Lavande: Route de Gordes (D2), 84220 Coustellet

For their website click here.

The lavender distillery

2011-05-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

Small lavender fields are woven into the landscape all the through the hills around the town of Apt. These are not the huge commercial concerns of Sault and Valensole, but smallholdings tended in the traditional way. When the sheaves of mauve flowers are picked in July, the distilling begins, sometimes in the field itself, and a heavenly scent is carried on warm evening breezes.

Last summer I discovered the Distillerie Les Coulets, near the village of Rustrel. As you arrive down a narrow country track, time stands still, and you enter the world of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. Although Pagnol’s enduring stories were set further south towards the coast at Marseille, the same rural idyll really does seem to linger in every stone and corner.

An old still, once used to extract the essence from the lavender flowers, stands proudly outside the farm. This is a tiny, family-run business: Christian Borde & Fils. The lavender is grown in the surrounding fields and brought to an unassuming barn for the magic of scent distillation to begin.

The water in the still was bubbling merrily. At the table, one of the much older women known to us simply, namelessly, as Madame, was thrashing the head of a sheath against a box to break off and collect the flowers. Then with one deft sifting motion she showered the ground with any remaining remnants of stalk and leaf and an even more intense cloud of lavender scent exploded into the warm air.

From The Lantern

The alembic still is heated. Then, when steam has risen through the lavender flowers it is pushed up through the pipe that comes out of the top, and then down through the cooling cylinder full of cold water that coils round and round. At the end of the process, the liquid contains the essence of the flower, its oil and scent.

With this essential oil, the Distillerie les Coulets makes different strengths of lavender preparations, from the pure essence which must be diluted – with almond oil, perhaps – before it comes into contact with the skin, to soothing massage oils that Madame Borde makes up and labels in her workshop, which is barely larger than a garden shed.

It’s a truly charming enterprise, and the resultant natural oils have a deep and sweet, almost honeyed aroma, a world away from synthetic mass-produced fragrances.

Secrets of terracotta tiles

2011-05-17T02:38:00.000-07:00

Baked red tiles on the ground floor – tomettes – stamped with incident, finger and animal prints, like fossils, told a possible tale of the playful farm dog who would not obey and came running across the earthy work while it was still wet.

From The Lantern

Throughout the ground floor of the main house, in traditional Provençal style, terracotta tiles have been used. As a floor-covering, they are practical and hard-wearing – and each tile is slightly different which gives that sense of charming imperfection that is so redolent of relaxed country-living, wherever that may be.

In the kitchen there are stains on some of the squares that might have been there for generations. When I first got to grips with the scale of the cleaning operation – and mindful that Rob, rather typically, had invited the first wave of summer visitors on the basis that things always worked out somehow - I rubbed and scrubbed and sanded, but the evidence of bygone carelessness remained indelible.

After a while I began to relax into it, to accept that the place would never be completely, surgically clean; that was impossible. Everyone was in and out of the house constantly, traipsing from pool through garden and courtyard to the fridge and back, that it was a losing battle. And the tiles in the kitchen have even more mottled variations of colour, so are eminently forgiving. So I learned to live with the dust, and think of it as a light dusting of magic.

All the time, though, I continued to wonder about the previous lives of the house, and to wonder what messages I could read. Some of the tiles seem to tell their own stories, and a few hold an obvious clue.

This particular tomette is in the downstairs hallway. How many years ago did the dog scamper over the still-pliant tile? Did someone place the tile here deliberately, as a welcoming talisman? It might even be a kind of commemoration of a well-loved animal who once skittered around the property, a hunting dog rather than a pet, in these parts.

Fernand nodded sagely. All these tiles were hand-made, he said, some were perhaps a hundred years old. “Chaque tuile a son secret…cherchez-le!” he said. Each tile has its secret – look for it!

The art of entanglement

2011-05-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

City Lupins by Lynne Ciacco

In this intriguing picture by artist Lynne Ciacco, a tangle of lupin flowers and branches obscures the house behind. Nature is taking over, perhaps even barring the way. The muted colours give a melancholy atmosphere, and the green in the foreground ceases to denote leaves, and hints at creeping damp on the outside walls.

Shadows beneath the tracery are not immediately apparent, but they are there, and once noticed, they seem to grow. Even the blue sky is overrun, as the house bleeds into it, blocking out the light. It makes for a rather eerie and intense disorder – or is that just how I choose to read it?

It reminds me very much of the scene that greeted us when we first arrived at our property here. It was July and a relentless sun had supercharged weeds and wildflowers in the courtyard. The grass on the terraces was thigh-high. In the five months since we had first seen it in winter (below), the place seemed to have changed and slumped further into decay, its bare bones reclaimed by a surging wildness.

Inside, the smell of mouse was overpowering. Drifts of dry leaves had found the corners of every room. Dead insects crunched under our feet. Scorpions scuttled up walls. We camped on stone floors, took note of the many large structural cracks in the buildings, and hoped for the best.

That first daunting summer, in between restoring order outside, sweeping and scrubbing, and meeting builders, I re-read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and wondered…what if I had come here knowing less about the countryside I was in and the man I was with? Who had lived here before us, and did anything of them remain? That’s when I started writing…

Lynne Ciacco lives and works in Atlantic Canada. She has a fine art degree (BFA) from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver and works in diverse media, from acrylics to pastel and watercolours, as well as textiles. City Lupins is an example of her digital art using textured layers and blending modes. You can find her website here and her art blog here.

Champagne and chocolates

2011-05-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

This post is for my blogger friends Isabelle, Muriel, Jennifer O, Kenya and Emily.

Blogging is all about making connections, and sometimes it may seem as if I lose sight of that, so intent am I on creating my own little world here. All of these five have given me awards in the past few weeks, and received not a word in return on these pages - though I hasten to add, I did thank them elsewhere.

This blog began very simply: it was a way of updating my website without involving my site manager, Judy. She made the link to the blog and I was going to post odd bits of news about my new novel – “Here’s the cover design!”, “Three weeks to publication!”, that kind of thing.

But it very quickly became something else. When I thought about the book blogs I enjoyed reading, they weren’t just about one book, or one person. The best are generous and outgoing; they feature the work of other writers, art, style, and life in general. So I looked and learned, and began to see how I could pull all those elements together.

Over the months since I started blogging last December, I’ve gradually built up an archive of posts that are relevant to my writing. Usually, I give the reference in a short extract from my book, but sometimes I just write about perfume, or a place, or other books that chime with an aspect of The Lantern.

So, yes, my blog is a marketing tool for the book, but I hope it’s a site that has broad appeal too. I’ve deliberately kept it very clean of all the add-ons (the stats, awards, link badges and other bits of fun most bloggers have) because I’m hoping it will work on two levels: one, to introduce potential readers to the setting in Provence and, with any luck, entice them to consider reading the book; and two, to stand retrospective reading as a source of visual background information after The Lantern is published, should anyone be interested to come and find it.

Excuses and explanations over, back to the business of the Kreative Blogger Award. Here’s where you can find my friends and their fine blogs, if you don’t already know them:

Isabelle is an actress with a wicked turn of phrase and some wonderful insider tales at As the Actress said to the Bishop. Click here.

Muriel is MuMuGB, a French wife, yummy mummy and enthusiastic - though occasionally bemused - inhabitant of London at 40blogSpot. Click here.

Jennifer O is a serious literature-lover, whose opinions are always a joy to read at Literary Endeavors. Click here.

Kenya is another actress, also a novelist and scriptwriter, who doesn’t sleep much. She’s based in Los Angeles and blogs at Sleep Deprivation and Me: A Love Story. Click here.

Emily’s blog The French Hutch is full of gorgeous pictures and general joie de vivre. Click here.

I’m going to pass on the Kreativ Blogger Award to the following five bloggers I really enjoy reading. There’s something rather special about each one of them, whether verbally, visually, or a combination of the two to give a certain je ne sais quoi… Cheers!

Joanny at Live Dream Love. Click here.

Cathy Kozak at While the Dervish Dances… Click here.

Sarah at Snippets…of Thyme. Click here.

Olga at Artful Nuance. Click here.

Charley Appenzellar at 365 Things That I Love about

France. Click here.

Strange Invisible Perfume

2011-05-09T08:45:00.000-07:00

By August we were sleeping with all the windows thrown open. That was why, when I became aware of the scent, I assumed it had come from outside.

It was a voluptuous scent: vanilla with rose and the heart of ripe melons, held up by something sterner, a leather maybe, with a hint of wood smoke. The first time it stole into my consciousness I was half-wakeful in the early hours, in the act of coming around from one dream before settling into another.

Gradually it faded, and I must have gone back to sleep. In the morning I examined every possible source but nothing came close to replicating that fragrance.

I decided it must all have been a highly charged dream. (…)

After an absence of about a week it returned, and continued to do so, though with no discernable pattern to its reappearance, and with slight variations on the ingredients of the scent. At times it carried essence of vanilla, sometimes a robust note of chocolate and cherries. It might linger only for a few minutes, but strongly, or less distinctly for up to an hour. Some nights it was carried off by a whisper of wind in the courtyard trees, an ethereal smoky lavender.

From The Lantern

As a perfume lover, I had a lot of fun writing fragrance into this novel. A scent is at the heart of the story in The Lantern, with its roots in the herbs and flowers that grow wild on the hillside, and the lavender fields beyond. Aroma releases memories and opens a powerful sensory path between the past and the present.

The perfume in my book is a mysterious concoction that comes and goes with no obvious source. So I was more than intrigued, earlier this year, when I discovered Strange Invisible Perfumes, thanks to a post on the lovely A Rose Beyond the Thames blog here.

Using a strictly botanical library of scents, perfumer Alexandra Balahoutis creates enchanting fragrances with no synthetic approximations of essences that cannot be extracted, like gardenia and violet. She runs an authentic botanical perfumery based in California, using only organic, wild-crafted, biodynamic, and hydro-distilled essences, and states:

"The art of perfumery begins with the art of distilling essences.
The perfumer then arranges these distillates into gorgeous, olfactory narratives. Making perfume without real essences is like writing a book without real words.”

Looking closer into her library of perfumes, I found two that are very much in the spirit of the imaginary one that I mixed, using only words on the page, for my novel. There’s Essence of Ix – a “brambly, stirring, floral” with white sage, roses, blackcurrant, Californian lavender, wild honey, and French oak. It’s a limited edition pure perfume, very expensive, and sounds most alluring.

Then there’s Moon Garden – a dream of tuberose, jasmine, resins, and night-blooming flowers that release pulses of exquisite scent in warm summer darkness.

I love the way their creator speaks of the art of perfumery as a narrative. But a good perfume does develop and unfold on the skin, allowing each ingredient of the blend its time to warm and blossom before fading to give another precedence. It’s a story, but not in words.

For more details, and many more evocative combinations, click here to visit the Strange Invisible Perfumes website.

The Marquis de Sade's castle

2011-05-06T03:18:00.000-07:00

Now that high tourist season was over, the streets were quiet. We discovered anew the enchanted villages of the great valley: Bonnieux, topped with a church not a castle, opposite the bleak ruined fortress of Lacoste; Menerbes, ship-like on its low outcrop at the foot of the range; Roussillon, perched on the edge of surging cliffs of red ochre amid green pines; Gordes, majestic in its autumn emptiness, incomparable views framed to artistic perfection by its own limestone ridges planted with candles of cypress.

From The Lantern

These villages, built on high rocky outcrops, are some of the most lovely in Provence. From a distance, the most forbidding is Lacoste, with its bleak ruined castle that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade. These days it is owned by the veteran fashion designer Pierre Cardin and is the centerpiece of a summer music festival. World-wide opera stars sing here within its ruined walls on warm summer nights, and tickets are much prized.

But it has a gruesome past. Before the cruel and excessive Marquis arrived, the castle was already a notorious haunt, as the scene of the rape, torture and murder of three hundred members of the heretical sect of the Vaudois in the sixteenth century. The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was a politician, philosopher and sexual libertine. He was forced to flee his castle in Lacoste in 1777 – that year there was trouble with everyone: local women, male servants, the police – and the place was eventually destroyed by an angry mob. The Marquis spent thirty-two years in prison, some of those in a mental asylum, and sealed his notoriety in his own books Justine and One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, written in his cell.

Nowadays it’s still a steep climb on the narrow cobbled streets up to the castle, but Lacoste is a sleepy place. An art school flourishes here, and galleries of modern work, including the Espace Cardin, stand higgledy-piggeldy with cracked stone houses with lushly overflowing gardens, cafés and restaurants, including the Restaurant Sade. (“Bet they can whip up a good lunch there!” – Rob)

There are lovely views from all around, especially across a valley to the east where the village of Bonnieux flaunts its proud Catholic tradition with a church at its highest point, in answer to the stark ruins of Lacoste’s pinnacle of amorality.

A Secret Kept

2011-05-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

“He remembered waiting for the tide. Waiting for hours for the Gois causeway to appear beneath the slowly receding waves. And there it was at last, cobbles glistening with seawater, a four-kilometre amphibian road dotted with high rescue poles with little platforms for unfortunate drivers and pedestrians stranded by the upcoming flood.”

From A Secret Kept

The Gois causeway to the Ile de Noirmoutier, off the west coast of

France

, is a powerful symbol in Tatiana de Rosnay’s compelling new novel A Secret Kept. It is the old link to the island, and also a family’s link to the past – a past that, like the causeway which is daily submerged, cuts them off and must be approached with caution.

Antoine Rey is a successful but troubled architect, from the buttoned-up higher echelons of Parisian society. His much-loved wife has left him for another man, and his teenage children are wrapped up in their own worlds. In an attempt to recapture happier times, Antoine takes his younger sister Mélanie to Noirmoutier as a birthday surprise. Their childhood summers were spent on the island, though neither has been back for decades.

At the heart of the story is their mother Clarisse, who died when Antoine and Mélanie were young children. Clarisse, like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, haunts this story, remembered but never appearing in the book, a constant but unknown and unsettling figure. When, surrounded by the beauty of the island, Melanie experiences a disturbing resurgence of a long-ago memory, it leads to near-disaster, and in the following days the life of everyone concerned begins to unravel.

As old memories surface and new facts are discovered in the present day, Clarisse becomes as mysterious to her children as she is to the reader. For this is a novel about communication: a family’s inability to communicate through the generations, and the legacy that leaves.

UK Edition

It’s a beguiling and lyrical book, with the perfect pace of a thriller, though its strength doesn’t lie so much in the unveiling of the secret that has been locked away, but in the investigation of the mysteries of human relations and families. All the relationships are tested, as each character proves hard to read by another, even the brother and sister, who have always been close. The mid-life crisis of Antoine Rey is realistic, honest and painful as he confronts the past and dares to look beneath the surface for the first time.

What I loved most about reading this novel, though, was to do with language. The author is a French citizen, who lives in Paris, but is half-English with Russian blood; until this one and her previous, hugely successful, novel Sarah’s Key, she wrote in French. But even now that she has now changed to English, she retains a French sensibility and writes in many ways as a French writer would. It’s a subtlety I find fascinating. This is no meticulously researched facsimile of French people at home in France – this is simply the real deal, the real France of a certain milieu.

It feels at times like a foreign novel, from the phrasing, to the attitudes of the characters, to its very structure and themes. Indeed, de Rosnay is currently the third bestselling author throughout Europe, after Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson. If you want authentic insight into how the French think and behave, this is the novel for you – with not a word or shade of meaning lost in translation.