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. Blythe’s brief diary-homilies are more immediate and more diffuse in topics, though both bemoan aspects of modernity — Blythe regrets ‘today’s scriptural illiteracy’ and mobile phones, while Hill rails against e-books and excessive internet use. One of Blythe’s chapters, ‘The Bookshelf Cull’, could have fitted seamlessly into Hill’s book, apart from ‘And might I not need four different editions of Emma?’ Yes he might.
Hill doesn’t much value the single fine edition she has. ‘I am bored by Jane Austen. There, I’ve said it.’ She is nicely opinionated throughout. As a publisher (she published a book of Blythe’s essays) as well as an author, she expands on fonts, formats, dust-jackets. She likes listings and ratings and orders of greatness, turning literary appreciation into a cultivated parlour game. She is whimsical and intimate, scattering rhetorical questions and colloquial half-sentences. Unable to choose between Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse for inclusion among her definitive 40 best books, she appeals to her reader: ‘You choose for me, please.’
Both of them were devoted friends of the poet Charles Causley, and write about him in a complementary way. Both fell under the spell of Benjamin Britten and his Aldeburgh world. Blythe leads us outside to do some gardening, to admire his white cat, to meet his neighbours, and the bishop, to tell a Polish taxi-driver about Blake seeing angels, to visit Vikram Seth at Bemerton. George Herbert, in whose house Vikram lives, is central to Blythe’s sensibility, as is John Clare. Both books make one realise how subtly what we have read determines our natures. As Hill puts it, ‘I am my literary DNA.’ Blythe’s diary format admits, as hers does not, vivid domestic vignettes; he wrote on Ash Wednesday, ‘Defrosting the fridge, I discover an icy foot of something that turns out to be a trout. So a correct liturgical supper.’ But these two beguiling books are uncannily alike. Have they read each other’s yet?
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