Richard's Books

The Children’s Book. A. S. Byatt

Richard — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:47:00 +0000

The one over-riding response I had to The Children’s Book was that an excellent novel had been marred by bad execution. Though I finished reading it some time ago I still find myself trying to reconcile my enjoyment of its vividly written narrative sequences with my frustration at its lack of a good editor.

The Children’s Book is an historical novel. It deals with people and events over a period of twenty four years from 1895 to 1919. It evokes the past in terms of culture, ideology, manners and morals by describing the whole way of life of a group of writers and artists. Byatt is nostalgically exploring what I take to be her own family background and intellectual history but she is also casting a critical eye over characters and events from that period.

Her chosen strand of history is centred on the Arts and Crafts movement. The copious descriptions of the clothes her lady characters wear helps to provide the necessary period flavour here, but she also chooses a select group of real historical figures to populate the background of the novel and signal which aspects of the period she is interested in – William Morris, J. M. Barrie, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, the Pankhursts, to name but a few.

These real historical figures are never allowed to take centre stage, as they are in a novel like Pat Barker’s Regeneration. There Barker sticks closely to the biographical facts of the novel’s central characters while bringing a modern perspective to bear on the First World War, revealing things about the period and the people that they did not know themselves or preferred to suppress, and in so doing re-writing our own view of the past.

Byatt is interested in doing something different. She bases some of her fictional characters on real people. So Olive Wellwood is based on E. Nesbit, Herbert Methley on H. G. Wells and Benjamin Fludd on Eric Gill. She does not draw our attention to her act of historical appropriation. There are no notes making it clear who is ‘real’ and who is ‘made up’. Rather she relies on her reader’s familiarity with the period to tell them who her characters represent. An act designed not so much to flatter her readers as to privilege those who can benefit from such knowledge to expand their experience of the novel and the way they perceive its themes.

Avoiding the strictly biographical approach allows Byatt the freedom to access the character’s emotional and psychological experiences. She does this directly through her use of a free indirect style of narration and her skill in deploying this technique is not only one of the joys of this novel but central to its concerns. Unfortunately her narrator also clumsily modulates into the third person to address the reader directly and fill in the historical background.

Avoiding the biographical approach also allows Byatt to develop a clear sense of moral disapproval about the behaviour of her three central characters. This disapproval is not voiced by the narrator and the characters do not pass judgement on themselves. Rather Byatt draws on the techniques employed by fairy tales and children’s stories in which stock characters are described as acting in psychologically believable ways but the moral of the tale is left to be deduced from what they do and from what happens.

Olive, Fludd and Methley all in their own way exploit their role as artist to the detriment of those who depend on them. We are not told that Herbert Methley is exploiting women’s liberation for his own sexual gratification but his seduction and abandonment of Florence leaves us in no doubt what we are meant to think of his behaviour. Olive’s unarticulated despair at what she has done to Tom does not redeem the way she has exploited him for her own creative purposes.

It is one of this novel’s complex ironies that in appropriating historical figures for fictional purposes Byatt then questions Olive’s right to rewrite her son’s history for her own purposes, but in so doing Byatt is interrogating the relationship between story and history, fiction and fact.

Many of the characters in this novel tell stories or act out roles as a way to cope with what has happened to them. Much that cannot be articulated finds expression in such narratives. But though this novel privileges the psychological and emotional realism of stories over the artificiality of historical discourse in the end both narrative forms are found wanting. The Children’s Story is a dark novel. Writing and rewriting a life will always fall foul of baser instincts and passions and any narrative strategy will be found wanting when faced with the enormity and hideousness of war.

Obscure Penguin Authors No.6

Richard — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:53:23 +0000

Gilbert Phelps served in the RAF during the war and in 1945 joined the BBC as a talks producer where he stayed until 1961. He published nine novels between 1953 and 1975, The Winter People coming out in 1963. He also wrote critical works, including The Russian Novel in English Fiction, published in 1956.

The blurb on my copy of this Penguin paperback says he had a ‘considerable reputation’ as a novelist. What that actually meant during the 1960s I find it difficult to gauge. I suppose much of the blurb on today’s paperback fiction contains a large element of hyperbole which will perhaps mislead potential readers in fifty years time as to the author’s merit or current reputation.

It must though say something of Phelps’s actual standing that Penguin only chose to publish one of his novels and then only in 1968, five years after its first publication. High Table by Joanna Cannan (OPA No.2) wasn’t published until 1939 when its war theme made it more pertinent and I wondered if I would find something in the novel that would suggest the same reasoning applied to The Winter People.

David Parr, aged solicitor, reads the journal of Colonel John Parr VC, his great-uncle who, right up until his death, claimed he had discovered and lived with a lost tribe of Indians in the Bolivian high Andes. Their unique life cycle meant they had no memory of the past. For the Colonel this “threw into relief one of the greatest problems that harass our kind of existence – the problem of how to do our living. It is only too easy for us to live in the past: it is just as easy to waste our substance upon vain hopes and desires for the future. Weren’t they wise then to try and live entirely in the present?” He came to believe that their highly ritualistic and communal life style, purged of all hatred and evil, meant they were “the most wonderful of all the works of creation, made for beauty and harmony.” He finds in his life with them, and in his passionate and obsessive love for one of the Indian women, an opportunity for spiritual purification and renewal.

The problem for David Parr, the conventional solicitor who has never left the Exmoor of his birth, is that there was never any proof that the Winter People actually existed. Were they real or were they just the wild imaginings of a man suffering from altitude sickness and hunger. Was the beloved Indian woman nothing more than a feverish mental echo of a previous disastrous love affair tragically suppressed?

The journal offers no proof either way, but it is to David Parr’s credit that he finally comes to understand that ‘proof’ is not what ultimately matters. “I believe in his madness,” he says, but “I prefer it to the ‘normality’ of the Parr world. Blessed are the mad!” I believe….but does it really matter to you, reader, what I believe? Find your own core of belief – it is your real identity, it is your innermost soul.”

Something in the way this novel contrasted a primitive society with Western culture and found it wanting; its advocacy of an alternative lifestyle; the rejection of conventional attitudes; making love not war; would not all of this have spoken to the hippy movement of the late 1960s? It made me wonder about Gilbert Phelps, a Cambridge graduate and RAF officer, an employee of the BBC – just how conventional was he really?

One aspect of this novel that did strike me was its hybrid nature. The opening chapter which introduces David Parr reads like a Josephine Tey novel; the Colonel, intrepid explorer and anthropologist, discovering a lost tribe beyond the limits of civilization, comes straight out of a Rider Haggard novel; while the strange occurrences in the Indian village and the explanations for them would not be out of place in a John Wyndham novel. All which goes to confirm this is certainly one of the most unusual novels I have ever read.

Case Histories. Kate Atkinson

Richard — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:07:31 +0000

Ostensibly a crime novel Kate Atkinson’s private detective Jackson Brodie doesn’t really do a great deal but her voluble narrator dynamically weaves extensive and inter-connected patterns around the cast of characters all of whom are caught up in, and variously damaged by, dysfunctional families and relationships.

The narrator is omniscient and knows more than Jackson. He may tell Theo who killed his daughter Laura, and he may discover where the body of Olivia lies buried, but he never finds out that Michelle didn’t kill Keith and that Lily Rose is really Tanya, Michelle’s long lost daughter, and that Michelle is now called Caroline and though married to the local squire is in love with the local vicar. Jackson is therefore an unusual detective. Rather than being the outsider brought in to investigate the lives of the characters, he is displaced by the narrator, becoming himself just another memeber of the cast struggling to make sense of what happens.

As he jets off to France in search of a holiday home it is the narrator who ties up the plot’s loose ends, though intriguingly not everything is neatly rounded off. What does Theo do with the information Jackson has given him and does Caroline persuade the vicar to run away with her?

Kate Atkinson is a writer who enjoys turning stereotypes on their head and questioning stale assumptions. In a novel replete with mothers who cannot protect or love their children it is Theo, a fat, retired solicitor, his life on hold until his daughter’s killer is found, who displays the only real maternal instincts to be found in the novel.

Atkinson’s real triumph though is to show how sex, and sexuality, is a fundamental and natural part of her character’s lives. It is described and explored as any other of their attributes would be, without qualification, apology or any sense of judgement.

I am currently reading The Children’s Book by A S Byatt in which something of the same approach to sex is attempted but it is to Ms Byatt’s detriment that she always remains the detective looking in on her characters and analysing their sex lives, rather than allowing her characters simply to be who and what they are as Kate Atkinson does.

Dr Who

Richard — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:17:31 +0000

I normally wouldn’t dream of blogging Dr Who but Saturday’s episode so betrayed what Dr Who has been about over the years that I feel compelled to give voice to my profound sadness at how quickly after Russell T’s departure all respect for the programme’s traditions seems to have been abandoned.

Dr Who at the head of an army!

The Cybermen insulted – tell me want I want to know and then we’ll blow you up!

Surely the Dr and his travelling companion sort things out using intellect, imagination and inspiration?

None of those attributes was on display in Saturday’s episode and Ms Pond’s role was reduced to nothing more than a love struck damsel in distress.

Unreal.

Obscure Penguin Authors. No. 5

Richard — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 19:35:00 +0000

George Andrzeyevski. Ashes and Diamonds

Penguin obviously anglicized the author’s name when they translated this 1957 Polish novel, which meant searching for him on the internet failed to produce a result until I finally answered the prompt “Did I mean “Jerzy Andrzejewski?” in the affirmative.

He was a member of the Polish Communist Party until 1956 and was then active in opposition politics finally becoming a strong supporter of the Solidarity movement. Apparently he was a prolific writer of novels, plays, and short stories, which gained him an international reputation during the 1950’s and 60s. Two of his novels, Ashes and Diamonds and Holy Week were made into films, though from what I can discover not many of his books were translated into English.

Knowing nothing about the status of writers in Communist Poland during the 1950s, but assuming they were subject to some government censorship, I sat down to read this novel expecting it to contain a hefty dose of communist propaganda.

The story is set in Poland at the end of the Second World War just after the Russian army has freed the country from German occupation. It describes a nation divided between those who want to see the establishment of a Communist state and those who are prepared to fight the Russians in the hope of establishing a free Poland.

There is a rather impressive, and presumably ideologically sound, description of a group of workers from the local cement factory who are attending the funeral of one of their comrades.

“These were nearly all workmen, heavy, bony, poorly dressed. Their simple faces, grey despite sunburn and hard-working, resembled one another in the mass so much that it was as if life itself had endowed them through the years with the same strength and resistance. Standing side by side, they formed one compact, large mass.”

This though was the only time I consciously felt myself in the presence of pure propaganda. Generally the novel seemed to be delicately trying to balance what was expected of it with what it could get away with.

The characters often simply represented a political point of view and acted in a stereotypical way, getting their reward or comeuppance depending on which side they were on. So the bourgeois magistrate who did not believe in socialism and the assassin of a Communist Party member had ‘justice’ meted out to them at the end, one facing imprisonment and the other shot in the back as he tries to escape.

Yet the novel also provided a wide ranging discussion about where the individual stands when two politically opposed sides both claim to be in the right. What ultimately justified or condemned the actions of the characters was not which side they were on but how they acted in any given circumstances. It was those who demonstrated solidarity with a nation or an ideology, those who kept faith with their countrymen and their comrades, who justified their place in the new Poland. While this view of things may have been subversive of Communist ideology it is unfortunate that in the hands of Andrzeyevski it becomes merely platitudinous.

Ashes and Diamonds acknowledges its debt to Dostoevsky’s Devils even to the extent of reusing one strand of its plot almost completely unchanged. If Devils is not an anti-socialist novel it is deeply concerned with the way European socialist ideas were being exploited in Dostoyevesky’s Russia and it is tempting to see Andrzeyevski’s linking of the two novels as an ironic comment on the political situation of his own time. Dostoevsky’s solution is not that much different from Andrzeyevski’s in that he also appeals to more fundamental values which he believes will outlast any current political ideology. Yet it has to be said that in Dostoevsky’s case he makes of such an appeal something far more convincing and even universal than Andrzeyevski does.

I enjoyed reading Ashes and Diamonds. The novels it most put in mind of were those of Graham Greene. However it struck me as very much rooted in its historical context and nothing about it made me think I should want to read another one by Andrzeyevski.

As for Obscure Penguin Author No 6 I do not have a candidate at the moment, my recent attempts to find a Penguin author I both haven’t heard of and want to read having proved somewhat fruitless. I am though keen to continue the experiment and continue to hope something turns up soon.

The Pickwick Papers. Charles Dickens

Richard — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:34:16 +0000

In 1836 Dickens published Sketches By Boz and one of the immediate consequences of its success was an offer from Chapman and Hall who asked Dickens to provide the text for a series of illustrations by Robert Seymour about a group of friends who would go out hunting, fishing and shooting and getting themselves into difficulties through their want of dexterity, all to be published in monthly numbers. It was understood that Dickens was to play second fiddle to Seymour who initiated the idea but Seymour’s sudden death and Dickens’s subsequent high jacking of the enterprise resulted in The Pickwick Papers as we know them today and the rest is history.

Whether Chapman and Hall made the right decision choosing Dickens for the task will always remain a matter of speculation though there is nothing in his novels to suggest that Dickens was that keen on field sports. If Seymour hadn’t died I can’t imagine Dickens putting up with the arrangement for very long.

Of all his novels Pickwick reveals its origins most clearly. Published in monthly parts the first numbers show little if any foresight and planning, each one being a series of sketches designed to be complete within its self. Not until the introduction of Sam Weller, some five numbers in, and his entering service with Mr Pickwick, do the action and themes begin to take on some coherence but it is really only because the characters remain constant throughout the various and disparate escapades that some semblance of an harmonious whole is achieved.

The main attraction of The Pickwick Papers is the deepening relationship between Mr Pickwick and Sam but it is a relationship that is never more than stated. There is no attempt at development, nor any psychological depth to their characters. In fact all the people in Pickwick are only representative of behaviour that Dickens admired or disapproved of, such as Sam’s veneration for Mr Pickwick or Mr Jingle’s charming duplicity. (Indeed Mr Jingle starts out as the villain of the piece, seducing and eloping with Mr Wardle’s sister and then allowing himself to be bought off for £150, but he then turns into an object of sympathy when later on Dickens places him in the Fleet prison and uses him to illustrate the debilitating effect of such confinement.) While it is possible to see a suggestion of Cervantes in Pickwick’s innocent abroad aided and protected by his faithful servant, Pickwick never really becomes more than a butt for fun and a repository for sentiment, remaining always the man who skates on thin ice and falls out of carriages.

The real surprise for me with The Pickwick Papers was just how many of Dickens’s preoccupations were already in place – attacks on lawyers and doctors, nonconformity and bureaucracy; deflating pomposity, exposing duplicity and thwarting avarice; putting his characters in the debtor’s prison; championing Christmas and goodwill to all men; a fascination with love, courtship, marriage, spinsters, aunts, old bachelors and domestic squabbles; expounding his belief that charity begins at home and assuming that the female sex was somehow other and less than their male counterparts; all this is as redolent in The Pickwick Papers as it is in all his other novels and stories.

In The Pickwick Papers Dickens is pre-eminently the popular entertainer but it nonetheless shows that from the outset of his career it came naturally to him to take stock situations and characters and transform them by exaggeration and invention into superb comic creations. Dickens always made everything visually vivid. What he wrote may at times have been unconvincing but it is always remembered.

While the ‘cockney’ dialect of Sam Weller and his father became intensely annoying – I never again want to read about a character who says ‘wery’ at every possible opportunity - what kept me reading was the vibrancy and dynamic power of Dickens’s writing. The sheer confidence of the narrative voice in its ability to carry the reader with it I found both compelling and thrilling and the achievement was made all the more impressive for me when I realized afterwards that what I had been reading was really not that intrinsically interesting.

The Ipcress File. Len Deighton

Richard — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:41:19 +0000

The film with Michael Caine has long been a favourite of mine so it seemed inevitable that at some stage I would sit down with this book and start reading it.

The Ipcress File offers an alternative take on Ian Fleming and John Le Carre. Len Deighton describes a seedier, more humdrum world of espionage than the one inhabited by James Bond or George Smiley. Deighton’s hero-narrator is much more working class than his counterparts. He is the archetypal cheeky, insubordinate but lovable ex-army corporal kept down in his place by his more privileged superiors who nonetheless respect his diligence, ability and fundamental loyalty to Queen and country. Though employed in military intelligence he is nonetheless caught up in a system bureaucratically obsessed with filing reports and claiming expenses while much of the cloak and dagger stuff seems to go on between rival departments rather than with enemy agents.

Sometimes the writing is excellent matching that of Le Carre, if not Ian Fleming.

The wine and Jean had conspired to produce in me a gentle euphoria. The sunlight fell in dusty bars across the table-cloth and lit her face as she grinned. Outside, the driver of a wet fish van was arguing violently with a sad traffic warden. The traffic had welded itself into a river of metal, and from a taxi a few yards up the road two men paid off their cab and continued their journey on foot. The glass of the cab permitted only a momentary glimpse, then the traffic moved together; closing like the shutter of a camera. One of the two men had the build of Jay, the other Dalby’s style in shoes. I was suddenly very wide awake.

Metaphorical, succinct and dynamic the vivid imagery here really brings home the significance of what has been seen and the plot is dramatically opened out by just this one paragraph.

What’s more Deighton manages to hint at some interesting themes.

In a world where you cannot trust anyone or know whose side they are on it is fitting the hero-narrator is a tad uncertain about his own identity.

“Now my name isn’t Harry, but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever had been.”

Also in a world full of deceit it is humorously ironic that he manages to deceive himself. Attracted to every lady he encounters he fails to notice that they are not the least bit interested in him and when his boss, wanting to keep tabs on him, assigns him a beautiful young assistant, it never occurs to him she might be untrustworthy.

One of the real strengths of the novel is that it is he who his narrating the events. The fact that he does not and cannot know the full picture gives this novel a real sense of unease and menace.

Yet it has to be said that these good points were far outweighed by the bad. The themes were never really worked out in the plot and I found the writing invariably unfocused and the plotting baggy and loose. The over long and tedious chapter eighteen in which we are unaccountably moved to a Pacific island to witness the testing of an atomic bomb was the point at which I began to think much of this novel was pointless and tedious, an opinion that the ending of the novel never really challenged.

So, having a great respect for the film, it was with a sense of keen disappointment that I came away from the book. While I shall probably watch the film again I shall never read another Len Deighton novel.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Chris Van Allsburg

Richard — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:15:30 +0000

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick consists of fourteen full-page illustrations, each with a title and a caption. They are deliberately drawn so it is almost impossible to look at them without imagining a story.

I have never lost a sense of anticipation when confronted with illustrations in a book. They are always potential objects of fascination. I think at their best they are an inexhaustible invitation to deduction, speculation and fantasy about what the reality they hint at may be like.

Meant as an aid to stimulating children’s creative writing the illustrations in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick are, without a doubt, powerfully evocative. I keep returning to The Seven Chairs – the fifth one ended up in France. Just what are those two seemingly unemotional clerics thinking?

My only reservation about this book is that the emphasis of the illustrations strongly tends towards stimulating the ‘fantastic’. Is that all the imagination yearns for? What an illustration evokes depends on a two way exchange between the viewer and the illustration and I would like to believe that the potential viewers of this book are more various than the content implies.

Obscure Penguin Authors. No. 4

Richard — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:27:03 +0000

I have failed to find out anything about Sylvia Thompson. With these early Penguins any biographical information, or hints of what the novel was about, were invariably to be found on the dustjacket, which my copy lacks. Hounds of Spring was first published in 1926 by The Bodley Head, and Penguin issued it in 1936, the only one of Sylvia Thompson’s novels to be accorded this distinction. Her novels do not seem to have been republished by Virago or Persephone.

The book is dedicated “To The Mind of H. G. Wells and to Peter Luling.” Then there is a Foreword by Sylvia Thompson in which she worries that she might be seen as a bit presumptuous to have written an historical novel about the very recent past.

“It is possibly presumptuous to try to deal, however indirectly and romantically, with the essential tendencies of a decade, 1914-1924. … It is possibly … a breach of the laws of historical perspective to hover round a decade so lately wrought, and not yet cool from the furnace of the present …”

But she goes on to try and disarm any such criticism with the argument that history is a continuous structure and things can be traced back uninterruptedly. The past and the present are inseparable and seperately unmeaning.

Next there is the Contents page. Part 1 is called ‘Pre-War’ and Part 2 is called ‘The “Great” War.’ The first Obscure Penguin Author I read was High Table by Joanna Cannan and that was a ’war’ novel and was well worth the read. So, encouraged by that thought, I started reading Hounds of Spring.

On page 22 I found this -

“You know, darling,” he pursued – and his vivid look was so near hers that she could see how the green and brown specks alternated in the irises of his eyes – “you know that everything lovely that I’ve seen and felt since we’ve loved each other has only been more so – more terribly lovely – because of you – ” He kissed her forehead gently, as though she were asleep. … The murmur of his words was near and strange, like sounds in a dream – his tones seemed to fall on her senses like the petals from a flower. She stirred against his shoulder and half-smiled, her eyelids closed.”

At which point I stopped reading. Well, I suppose she did give me fair warning - “…to deal, however indirectly and romantically, with the essential tendencies of a decade.” Obscure Penguin Author No. 5 coming up soon.

Death and the Author

Richard — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:38:47 +0000

On Monday 8^th July, despite uncertain weather conditions, Shelley, his friend Edward Williams and Charles Vivian, an eighteen year old boy who acted as crew, set out to sail Shelley’s boat the Don Juan from Livorno to Lerici.

It seems that they sailed into one of the sudden squalls for which this part of the coast was notorious. With no deck, and sails which were difficult to bring down in a hurry, a sudden gust was all that was needed to swamp it. A passing felucca which regularly undertook the journey from Livorno to Genoa had seen the little boat struck by the wind. Shouts for them to bring down the sails were disregarded and at their next glance the Don Juan had been engulfed.

Later when the shell of the Don Juan was located, raised and brought back to shore Captain Daniel Roberts who designed and built the craft, carried out an investigation of the wrecks condition and informed Mary Shelley that in his opinion, and every other sailor’s opinion, the Don Juan had been run down. Suspicion fell on the crew of the felucca. It is possible the Don Juan was considered fair prey. They could have deliberately rammed the boat in an attempt to steal the crew’s possession knowing that the incident was unlikely to be investigated too closely.

It was not until Friday 12^th that Mary Shelley became aware that Shelley was missing when a letter arrived from Leigh Hunt asking if the sailors had returned safely and it was not until a week later on Friday 19^th that Trelawney told Mary that the bodies had been found.

Three bodies had been washed up at Livorno after many days in the sea. Trelawney was able to identify Shelley only by the copy of Keat’s poems which was still in the pocket of his jacket. The bodies had then been hastily buried in quicklime graves on the shore to conform with the quarantine regulations.

Mary wanted Shelley to be buried next to their little son William in the Protestant cemetery at Rome but too prostrate with grief to organize anything Trelawney took control of the situation. He ordered an iron rack on which to burn the bodies. Williams, identifiable only by a handkerchief and a boot, was burnt on 15^th August. The following day, Hunt and Byron drove down to the shore in a carriage to observe Shelley’s last rites, in the company of officials and a fascinated group of young fishermen. What was left of the corpse, now putrid and stained blue by the lime, was dug up and placed on the iron grid. As the flames consumed Shelley’s remains they burnt with exceptional luminosity, a result of heating quicklime to incandescence.

After the cremation Trelawney arranged for the ashes to be gathered. They were finally buried in the Protestant Cemetery, as Mary Shelley had wanted, but Trelawney, dissatisfied with the placing of the grave, had them dug up the following year and buried yet again in what he thought a more suitable position, this time next to the old city wall of Rome.

No precious relic was brought back from the funeral pyre for Mary. This was an age when fragments of the dead were invested with the value of talismans. Byron’s choice, the skull, fell to pieces in the flames. Trelawney burned his hands in seizing a fragment of jawbone; Hunt took another. One of these fragments is now kept in the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.

Shelley’s heart, or the part of the remains which seemed like a heart, had failed to burn, while exuding a viscous liquid. Trelawney snatched it out; Hunt requested and received this rather special relic of his friend. When Mary asked if she might have it Hunt refused to surrender it. They quarrelled bitterly but it took a reproachful letter from Jane Williams to Hunt to compel him to give it up. After Mary Shelley’s death, what she had always believed to be Shelley’s heart, was rediscovered. Wrapped in silk between the pages of Adonis, it had lain inside her travelling desk for almost thirty years. Apparently it was finally buried with the body of Sir Percy Florence Shelley, their son.

What happened to Charles Vivian’s body is not related.

taken from Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour