'You Can Heal Your Life' by Louise L. Hay
You Can Heal Your Life was first published in 1984, and in the UK in 1988. It was an extension of an earlier self-published pamphlet called Heal Your Body. Hay’s philosophy is that we are each responsible for all of our experiences, and that our thoughts create our future. She takes this to rather an extreme IMO. But I still think there’s some value in this view if you don’t go overboard. Evidently, Hay was influenced by “New Thought”, as clearly were a number of other self-help authors that I read in the nineties (haven’t read many since then). Hay was a member of the Church of Religious Science – no idea what that is/was but it sounds suitably Californian.
The book is about the mental patterns that, Hay claims, cause disease (which she hyphenates as dis-ease). “We create every so-called “illness” in our body.” The most controversial thing, undoubtedly, is Hay’s claim that your own thoughts cause any disease you get, and that you equally can “think” yourself cured of any disease. More generally and usefully, Hay encourages readers to look at each of the problems in their lives and consider what kinds of thoughts they’re having that would create them.
A lot of it’s good. I do believe that we have choices about the thoughts we think, and it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me to accept that our subconscious mind might be affected by what we habitually think. Ideas that I have found useful include the notion that it’s counter-productive to criticise yourself, and the idea that it’s true if you believe it to be true: this can work both ways, in retaining negative beliefs that we’ve internalized ("Usually, what we believe is only someone else's opinion we have incorporated into our belief systems") and in implanting new, positive beliefs. I have found that there’s some value in positive affirmations, however cheesy they may appear.
I have found the ‘How to Change’ and ‘Daily Work’ chapters useful to refer back to (albeit that I don’t think I’m going to be singing affirmations any time soon). There’s some good stuff in the What Do We Do Now? Chapter about being willing to change. All the chapters in Part 2 ‘A Session with Louise’ contain exercises to work through, mainly in the form of questions to ask yourself; I didn’t bother working through these on this occasion but I think I did the first time I read the book.
Ideas I’m not so sure about, to put it mildly: the idea that we ‘decide’ to incarnate on this planet at a particular point in time and space in order to learn particular lessons. A less fringe idea, but one I also wasn’t totally sure about, is Hay's claim that any problem her clients come to her with can be reduced to needing to work on loving the self. I can imagine that as a client I might struggle a bit to get on board with that – though that’s not to say that she’s wrong. She repeats this idea a lot: “As I have said before, no matter what the problem, the main issue to work on is LOVING THE SELF.” “From the way I look at life, if there is any problem, then this [a lack of self-love] has to be true”. It’s rather difficult to reduce all of life’s problems to this. I dunno. Maybe. She seems to be acknowledging in the second statement that her conclusion that every problem is due to a lack of self-love is a fallout of the way she looks at life.
One chapter of the book, headed 'The List', is a list of conditions with what Hay claims are probable mental causes, plus new thought patterns that can be adopted to cure these conditions. This list apparently first appeared in Heal Your Body. This, and the preceding chapter 'The Body', seems the most “out there” section of the book – most of You Can Heal Your Life is focused on positive thinking to improve your life generally, rather than specifically on curing diseases; as such I assume it was a broadening of the scope of Heal Your Body. Such controversy as surrounded Louise Hay seems to have resulted from her message being interpreted as saying that sick people have brought it on themselves – victim-blaming, if you will – which I agree is a possible, but somewhat over-literal, interpretation. I’d see her approach as more about enabling people to take and feel some control over their circumstances. (Also, judging by her short bio at the end of the book, might her strategy have served to help her cope with what must have been the powerlessness of her early life and the abuse she suffered?)
If you don’t take 'The List' too seriously, it’s quite amusing. Baldness as due to a tense scalp? It also seems quite a claim that female baldness has increased since women entered the business world. Influenza due to a belief in statistics? If you suffer with the unpleasant-sounding Mucus Colon, it could be due to "wallowing in the gummed mire of the past". And here’s a tip to bear in mind during an attack of rabies: affirm “I am surrounded and indwelled with peace”. Worth a try, I guess.
To finish on a quote from Louise:
The anus is as beautiful as the ear.
That quote's not relevant to anything, but it always makes me snigger childishly.
'84K' by Claire North
The central character is a man called Theo Miller, who works at the Criminal Audit Office working out the cost of crimes. People who’ve committed crimes have to pay an indemnity. Something called the Company is in charge – well, the government is still notionally in charge, but it’s become inextricably bound up with the Company.
Theo Miller’s name is not really Theo Miller. I think his real name is mentioned once in the book, but I’ve forgotten what it was and have no hope of finding the page again. The real Theo Miller was a fellow student at Oxford, who was killed in a ridiculous shootout with one Phillip Arnslade, now the government minister for fiscal efficiency. Arnslade’s best friend Simon Fardell seems to be de facto CEO of the Company.
Theo encounters an old flame, Dani Cumali, who asks him to trace a Lucy Cumali, now possibly known as Lucy Rainbow Princess, through his job at the Ministry. Later, Dani tells him that Lucy is his daughter. Later again, Dani is murdered, apparently a hit job, ordered because of something that Dani discovered while working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Theo becomes focused on avenging Dani’s murder and finding Lucy. He travels to his hometown of Shawford, which has fallen into decay since its sponsor Budgetfood pulled out. A young woman who knew Dani meets him there and gives him a memory stick contain incriminating information. He is beaten up by various people (this is a recurring theme throughout the book).
Theo suspects Arnslade of ordering mass murder and ruining the country. He travels to Arnslade’s family home and rescues his mother Helen, who has been drugged and kept captive after Phillip discovered she was secretly filming him and Fardell talking about wrong stuff they were doing. They go on the run, and reach Newton Bridge, where they meet Bess, the “queen of the patties” and various other outlaws. They publish the contents of the memory stick online, and broadcast video of Helen reading out the names of the believed victims of state murder.
A recurring theme throughout the book is a woman, Neila, who lives on a narrowboat called Hector and travels the canals. She takes Theo onto her boat after discovering him lying injured by the canal. This incident is never later returned to and it’s impossible to know at what point in the action it happened. A significant annoyance with 84K was the difficulty of keeping track of the order things happened in. It jumps about a lot – which isn’t so much a problem if it’s jumping about between different characters’ perspectives, or from e.g. a character in the present day to the same character’s childhood, but this jumps about between events that are presumably not all that far apart in time and that all centre the Theo Miller character. By two-thirds of the way through the book I’d given up on trying to keep track. At the beginning I had expected the Neila and narrowboat thread to anchor the book and be a constant through all the other events, but it didn’t end up doing this. These selected notes from my reading give a flavour of my general confusion over the order of events.
- p.264 I have no idea whether this is before or after he’s met Neila.
- p.303 So annoying. Which city is burning FFS?
- p.305 What was Newton Bridge?
- p.306 Who is this man?
- p.309 She better not have dropped his gun in the water.
There are some interesting ideas, but the whole thing is depressingly awful (dystopia is admittedly not my favourite) and there isn’t much of a ray of hope even at the end. The ending was a big disappointment, for me at least, as I had hoped that it would end with Neila and Theo going off on the narrowboat together. And I was sick of Lucy by the end. It was impossible to care about whether Theo found her or not. Theo betrays Bess, Bea, Corn and everyone at Newton Bridge – people who helped him and took risks for him – just for a girl he’s never met. Not even a girl, but the idea of a girl, as he doesn’t even know whether she’s still alive.
The rear of the cover drips with adjectives: “extraordinary”, “breathtaking”, absorbing and timely”, “captivating”. Hmm. Go figure. Ruth and I shared one copy of the book and found ourselves pushing the book onto each other in faux-selfless fashion "No, it's YOUR turn to read 84K", etc...
I was relieved to finish it and felt in the mood for a pleasurable palate-cleanser. Which leads me on to:
'The Notorious Lord' and 'One Night of Scandal' by Nicola Cornick
These are the first and second books in Nicola Cornick’s 'Bluestocking Brides' trilogy. I read and reviewed the last one, The Rake’s Mistress, here, not having realized it was the last part of a trilogy when I bought it. All three books are set in the early nineteenth century amid the threat of French invasion. The first two are set in the fictional ‘Midwinter’ villages of coastal Suffolk; the third is set partly in London and then back in Midwinter.
'The Notorious Lord'
The men’s attempt to discover the identity of a spy believed to be passing intelligence to the French forms a thread that runs through all three books. Justin Kestrel, the Duke, has been commissioned by the Foreign Office to uncover the spy. Evidence suggests that the Midwinter spy may be a woman, whose sex has helped her evade capture thus far. Given this, Lady Sally Saltire’s reading group, of which Rachel is a member, falls under their suspicion. Someone fires a shot at Cory as he is walking home one night; Cory fires back and injures his attacker. He and Richard Kestrel put in an appearance at the ladies’ reading group the following day – but two of the ladies have their arms bandaged. Who can it be?
The story of The Notorious Lord centres on Cory and Rachel and their growing attraction to each other. They are both likeable young people with no obvious irritating qualities – a romance novel where both parties are quite likeable and reasonable people is pretty unusual so I quite appreciated this one. Rachel eventually realizes that she does like Cory as more than simply a friend, but doesn’t see how she can marry him when they want such different lifestyles: Cory is an explorer who is always off travelling in search of finds; Rachel, after a lifetime spent travelling abroad with her parents, wants nothing more than a quiet settled family life at home in England. Rachel is quite an appealing young woman and her reservations about marriage to Cory seem reasonable enough. After the usual declaration-of-passion-followed-by-declaration-that-it-can-never-work, the story ends with them both deciding that they can probably each compromise a bit for the other.
In all three books in the trilogy there’s an illicit night of passion between the two protagonists prior to marriage. Cory and Rachel’s occurs as a result of their both being stranded alone at her parents' house in a torrential rainstorm – both have gone down to the excavation site, worried about the site being flooded and the Odells’ work lost – and Rachel falls into a flooded barrow and is rescued by Cory. They make their way back to the house, get out of their wet clothes, and the inevitable happens.
By the end of the book, things aren’t much further on vis a vis identifying the French spy, beyond its being established that it’s not Rachel. But then this is only part 1 of 3.
Postscript: Lady Odell’s pregnancy? We already know that Sir Arthur Odell is in his fifties. Lavinia Odell is presented as a middle-aged woman, but presumably she must be a number of years younger than her husband – though presumably in her 40s given that she has a 20-something daughter. The pregnancy is clearly a device to explain the nomadic Odells’ otherwise surprising decision to stay on at Midwinter Royal. But still.
Postpostscript: The titles of these books are a bit random, and I’m guessing probably just assigned by the publisher. Cory is an affable chap and there’s nothing to suggest he’s particularly notorious. In a similar vein, Rebecca Raleigh is at no point Lucas Kestrel's mistress. Which leads us on to the middle book:
'One Night of Scandal'
Book 2 of the trilogy. It kicks off in September 1803, only three months after the start of the action in The Notorious Lord.
In the meantime, she keeps running into Richard Kestrel, the second of the Kestrel brothers of nearby Kestrel Court. Richard and Deborah had fallen out some time previously when he asked her to be his mistress. When Deborah puts a vaguely-worded ad in the Suffolk Chronicle for a gentleman’s “assistance”, Richard, predictably, responds to it, having guessed it was her and having, highly presumptuously, got the innkeeper to bin the other applications. Stuff happens, involving the two having spirited conversations and, intermittently, passionately kissing.
Richard and Deborah are less likeable than Cory and Rachel of The Notorious Lord. Richard is an arrogant and seemingly somewhat embittered man; Deborah is ditsy and irritatingly oblivious to (or careless of) the reputational trouble her behaviour could land her in. The 'night of scandal' of the title is a night that Richard and Deborah spend at a hunting lodge on the Kestrel estate. (And I realise romance novels tend to expect heroines to be “an untried innocent in the ways of love” but as DS has been married it’s not quite plausible that she is one such.)
Richard and Deborah’s bantering/bickering with each other is frankly tedious; their conversation on the beach where Richard tells her the detail around his naval discharge, and Deborah tells him about her marriage to Neil, was the first readable bit. The background conversations are more interesting: those between Deb and her companion Mrs Aintree, Deb and her sister Olivia, Richard and Ross, Richard and Justin, Ross and Olivia Marney. The Marneys are a more appealing couple than Richard and Deborah and the lotion mix up towards the end of the book, which results in them clearing the air and reconciling, is genuinely amusing.
Spy-related events in this book involve: Richard gives Deborah, as a gift, a book of seventeenth-century poetry. At Lady Sally’s reading group, where the same volume is being discussed, Deborah’s copy is accidentally switched for someone else’s. The switched copy is found to contain a sheet of paper with a coded message written on it. Richard initially angrily questions Deborah, but swiftly concludes that she is telling the truth when she says she has never seen it before (the cattier reader might be mildly surprised that Deborah is able to find the way out of her own house, never mind operate as an undercover agent). Examining the piece of paper later, the Kestrel brothers conclude that the spy is using a pictorial code. Later, at the Custom House auction in Woodbridge, Deborah accidentally bids for some engraved glasses, resulting in the long-suffering Ross Marney having to purchase them, to the annoyance of Sir John Norton, another local gentleman who was also bidding on them and seems particularly keen to acquire them. The glasses are engraved with the same symbols as were on the piece of paper in Deborah’s book. Shortly afterwards, Marney Hall is ransacked and the engraved glass vases are stolen. The book's absurd climax features the spies knocking Richard and Deborah over the head and tying them up, which gives Richard an opportunity to propose to Deborah.
Richard Kestrel’s history is quite interesting; he is a darker character than either Cory Newlyn or his younger brother Lucas, the heroes of the other two books in the trilogy. Richard’s father had him down for the priesthood; Richard didn’t like that idea and joined the Navy instead. He was injured and discharged from active naval service. During Richard’s invalided-out period his father had his naval commission cancelled and Richard fell into a dissolute life of drinking and women, until his elder brother Justin inherited the dukedom and threatened to cut Richard off unless he started leading a productive life. This led to Richard getting his naval commission back and taking up work for the Admiralty. This story thread led me to ponder more generally the limited work options open to younger brothers of the gentleman class: not having estates to manage, some light research suggests that the only career options open to them were to join either the armed forces or the priesthood, as by some sleight of hand these were not counted as regular employment. If you either didn’t fancy them or managed to mess them up, it’s not clear what you would have done – did you officially lose your status as a gentleman?
For a trilogy of romance novels these are remarkably engaging little books, probably because in addition to the standard romance stuff there’s the spy storyline that straddles all three, and quite a number of the characters appear in more than one of the trilogy. All three end with an Epilogue involving a conversation between the Duke of Kestrel and Lady Sally Saltire, old flames who have kept up a flirtatious friendship since the death of Sally’s husband. At the end of The Notorious Lord, Sally bets the Duke that Richard Kestrel and Deborah Stratton will be married within three months. This does happen, and at the close of One Night of Scandal Sally collects on her debt by asking Justin to attend a ball in honour of a watercolour calendar she is auctioning – which he was intending to do anyway. They enter another wager, that Justin’s other brother Lucas will be next to fall in love – which leads in to the action of The Rake’s Mistress. In the Epilogue to the final book, the two finally stop playing around and declare their feelings for each other.
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