Books do furnish a life

Ronald Blythe writes from his old Suffolk farmhouse, and Susan Hill writes from her old Gloucestershire farmhouse. The view from the windows, the weather, the changing light and the rhythm of the seasons, are evoked by both of them with a similar lyric precision and grace. Reading about their extraordinarily pleasing surroundings and rich interior lives may cause the word ‘complacency’ — well, not exactly to spring, but maybe to sidle, into the mind. But that’s before you remember that nice things are nicer than nasty things, and should be fostered and celebrated. Their lives are no less ‘real’ than the dreadful lives of zillions of their fellow humans, for whom they are probably praying.

For Blythe, as well as being one of our best-loved rural chroniclers, is a lay reader in the Church of England. (An internet site describes him as an ‘East Anglican’, a happy if unintended conflation.) He tells here about taking services and preaching sermons, which he is obviously good at, and The Bookman’s Tale is the sixth compilation from his regular column in the Church Times.

Susan Hill, too, is ‘steeped in Anglic- anism’, and cannot imagine ‘not to have spiritual reading’. Her book is shaped round a decision to spend a whole year slowly reading and ‘repossessing’ the books from her own crammed and unordered shelves, slotted in and piled up all over the house from the kitchen with its Aga, up the elm-wood stairs to the top landing, where we find her, at the end, sitting on the floor ‘in a shaft of sunlight’, immersed in the book she had been searching for.

Association and reminiscence make Hill’s book a personal history. It’s a bit like Margaret Drabble’s more substantial The Pattern in the Carpet, with books instead of jigsaws.