Cranes Flying South was written in 1899 and its Russian author, Nikolay Nikolaevich Karazin was a military officer and painter (specialising in war and exotic places) as well as writer. At one point (1948) a translation of it was published by Puffin books and there was a pile of these in the English stock cupboard when I started my first teaching job in 1968. So I read it and “did” it with a couple of classes without, as far as I remember, resounding success. But it’s a novel I’ve thought about on and off over the years because it taught me a few things about bird migration. What would I think of it now?

You can still buy it via Amazon courtesy of  Kessinger’s Legacy Reprints which is presumably a series. The book I bought is actually a facsimile of a 1931 Junior Literary Guild New York edition translated from the Russian by M Pokroysky and illustrated by Vera Bock. It came from the US and took a while to arrive.

Two crane chicks, one male, one female, hatch in the Great Oshtashkovo Marshes in western Russia. The male narrates the story. As soon as they have fully functioning wings it’s time for their colony to migrate south to Africa so this account of their journey is actually yet another quest story.  Of course there are obstacles and difficulties to beset them en route. The storm over the eastern Mediterranean which leads to some of them landing on a passenger boat taking pilgrims to Jerusalem is quite nicely done, for example. Inevitably some birds fail to make it to the ultimate destination. It is a classic case of the survival of the fittest.

The bird’s eye descriptions of the places they pass over or through are some of the best things in the book: Ukraine, Kiev, Rivers Dnieper and Danube, Black Sea, Marmora Sea and Turkey. Cyprus is the plan but because of the storm instead they fly into Egypt from Beirut and then south into the Sudan, noting war in Khartoum as they go. If I were teaching this novel now I’d have the students construct an annotated map to show the route these birds take.

I’d also be asking them to think about anthropomorphism and make a chart in two columns listing things that cranes do in real life and what they don’t. Birds don’t, for example, blush, help each other out, have children, worship God or hold philosophical discussions. On the other hand cranes do organise themselves into flight triangles, have leaders and eat fruit and legumes from the farmed fields they land in – which is why human beings tend to be less than friendly.

When the birds arrive in Africa the narrator casually refers to blacks, natives and savages which jars for a 21^st century reader. I think it’s partly because this is a book of its time. A hundred and twenty five years ago such language was, regrettably, the norm especially in America. Second, it may be a translation issue. I have no way of telling which words Karazin actually used and how nuanced his language might have been compared with the options available to the translator.

So this book is a bit of an antique curiosity but worth reading for its colourful descriptions and sense of what an enormous feat that long annual migration to warmer climes is. Amazon and other sites which have copies have lots of comments from people who remember the book from school with affection.  I had long assumed that it was very niche. In fact such memories show that it must been quite a common English department acquisition in the 1950s and 60s.  I wonder how popular it was, or even is, in Russia?

Next week on Susan’s bookshelves: Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee.

I’d spent a night at my younger son’s house in Brighton – as I often do – because I’d reviewed a show in nearby Shoreham the previous evening. After a hearty cooked breakfast (thanks, Felix) I collected my belongings and walked out of the front door en route to my car. By then – it was a Saturday –  he and his eight year old daughter were outside in the sunshine, cleaning his van. As they wiped and sloshed, they were listening to a story on his phone. I stopped to say goodbye to them and immediately got caught up in the funniest thing I’ve heard for ages: a stroppy but musically inclined dog is very cross and amazed to discover that there’s a musical called Cats but that there isn’t one for, or about, dogs. So he assembles his canine friends (much bottom sniffing) and together they trace the composer and force him to write them one, along with much more gentle sending up of show business.  “What on earth is it?” I asked my son. “It’s The World’s Worst Pets by David Walliams and that’s him doing all the voices too” he said.

I walked to my car, still chuckling, and wanting more. As soon as I got home to London I ordered the book which was published in 2022. It’s a set of surreally wacky short stories of which the one I sampled in Brighton is just one. We also meet,  among other creatures,  a pet gold fish which grows huge and is really a shark or piranha, a constrictor snake which manages to win a prize at a dog show and a lovely two-dad family who find an ingenious way of showing their child that a grizzly bear is not an ideal pet. Then there’s a story about a budgerigar in which all the characters are named after Dickens characters and another in which an abused magician’s rabbit, Houdini, shows he’s much more than a prop. And word-play jokes abound. The abusive conjurer is called the Great Fiasco

Visually, these stories are quite something too because Walliams, his designer and his illustrator (Adam Stower) play about with silly, unlikely or dramatic fonts. And the illustrations which frequent every page are a delight too. On balance though – and I don’t say this very often – I think the recorded version is even more fun than the written one because Walliams is such an accomplished actor. I’ve seen several stage dramatisations of Walliams’s work: Mr Stink and The Midnight Gang, for instance, but had never read/listened to him before.

At least three people I have mentioned this discovery too have told me that they’ve heard that Walliams is a second rate writer and not really very good for children. What? As always, I suspect that such critics haven’t actually read any of his books. Second, I’m passionately in favour of children reading anything – anything at all – which they enjoy because that’s what will develop them into Real Readers just as Enid Blyton did for me.

Third, he writes beautifully anyway so what’s the fuss about?  It’s witty, intelligent stuff which makes children (and their parents and grandparents) laugh and that can’t possibly be bad. I reckon that, like all good writers,  he does a lot to extend verbal fluency subliminally too with phrases such as “shattered the illusion” and “specialises in extortion”.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Cranes Flying South by N.Karazin.

A dear, pretty well-read friend, a generation older than me used to scoff at me in the 1970s, when we worked together, for reading what he called “predictable fiction”. I’d just discovered Mazo de la Roche at the behest of my new mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law and was working my way through the Jalna series from the library – yes, I was very young. Anyway my friend was always teasing me and extolling the virtues of Iris Murdoch because, he said, you could never tell what her interesting characters might do next. In the end I read two or three of her classics and thought they were all right but, frankly, implausible and not likely to become part of my regular reading fare.

Then, recently, a contemporary friend mentioned Murdoch (1919-1999) and asked if I’d read any lately because she hadn’t.  That conversation sparked my curiosity and I bought in paperback The Sea, The Sea.  It won the Booker Prize in 1978 and I’d never read it. It was her 19^th novel and, always highly regarded by the literati, Murdoch had been shortlisted for the Booker four times before.

Charles Arrowby, the narrator, has bought a run down property without electricity in a south coast village just a few yards from rocks leading to the sea. He is in retreat from his life as a famous actor and theatre director and from relationships with women which have never worked out conventionally. Love and loss are uppermost in his mind. He swims regularly although the sea is pretty dangerous by his house. The clue is in the title and, whatever my old friend said about unpredictabilty it’s pretty obvious from the start that the sea isn’t always going to be benign in this novel.

Arrowby’s narrative is presented as a diary and he writes at length and with much density about the people in his life, mostly from the world of theatre.  Apart from Clement, a woman he loved deeply, now deceased, one by one they turn up to visit him –  several times in most cases –  as this long novel (538 pages) inches forward. Cue for interesting, if unlikely, group dynamics.

Meanwhile, Arrowby meets an elderly woman in the street and recognises her as Hartley, the love of his teenage years who unaccountably abandoned him decades before. She’s living in a bungalow up a road with a husband who Arrowby convinces himself is abusive. So he determines that she must be rescued. To this end he pesters her relentlessly and cunningly, at one point kidnaps her. Separately he befriends her adopted son, Titus. It is, in effect the study of an obsessed mind in breakdown. He describes minutely, for example, every garment everyone wears and the continual accounts of what he has cooked and eaten are telling.

Every Murdoch novel I’ve ever read has left me exasperated at the overwrought phoneyness of it all and this one was no exception. And yet … there is an intelligence in the writing and something alluring in these strange characters (actually Hartley’s husband Ben is about the most “normal”) which kept me turning those 538 pages. Murdoch was, after all, a philosopher by training and her writing is a lot more than simple story telling.

I’m not sure it would win the Booker Prize now. Some modern judges from different fields in life would find it turgid and of course it’s pretty dated. As a piece of literary history, however, it’s worth investigating.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The World’s Worst Pets by David Walliams