Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6600f0f78dfc05e4 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Tobias Hill. He read English at Sussex University and spent two years teaching in Japan. He is the author of the collections of poetry Year of the Dog (1995), Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996), influenced by his experiences living in Japan, Zoo (1998), which coincided with his tenure as Poet in Residence at London Zoo as part of the Poetry Places scheme administered by the Poetry Society, and Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (2006). In 2004, he was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. He is also the author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, Skin (1997), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. Adaptations of his poetry and short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He has also worked as rock critic for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in London and as the poetry editor of the Richmond Review . His fiction includes the novels Underground , published in 1999, a dark story set on the London Underground system; and The Love of Stones (2001), spanning six centuries in the tale of a long-lost jewel once owned by Elizabeth I. The book has been published in seven languages and in 11 countries and is being developed as a film by Granada Films. His third novel, The Cryptographer , the story of a mysterious and charming quadrillionaire, who is the creator of the world's first great electric currency, was published in 2003. His latest novels are The Hidden (2009) and What Was Promised (2014). He has also written a book for children, The Lion Who Ate Everything (2008), illustrated by Michael Foreman. Tobias Hill lives in London and is Royal Society of Literature Fellow at Sussex University. Critical perspective. Tobias Hill is a poet with a darkly romantic imagination, which has also infused his several remarkable and rather haunting novels, including The Cryptographer (2003) and The Hidden (2009). A.S. Byatt has commended the ‘elegant sureness’ of Hill’s style, while Adam Mars-Jones praised his ‘ability not merely to generate period detail but to inflect it, to make it his own’. As a London-based writer, Hill’s most characteristic mode has been called the urban-pastoral, observing Nature and its creatures alive in the city, while he also excels at sensory impressions, luminous details and delicate colourings. And throughout his poetry and prose there are sensuous vignettes of women: ’On your skin / is the smell / of sweet abalone, / sweat, and ark shell, and bluefin’ (‘Sushi’). Hill is also a writer with international perspectives. Many of the settings in his poems and novels take place throughout Europe or America, while his experiences of living and working in Japan greatly informed sequences in his first two poetry volumes, Year of the Dog (1995) and Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996). Hill was Poet in Residence at Regent’s Park Zoo during 1998, inspiring poems interspersed throughout his collection Zoo (1998). In them, we see and hear the animals: the ‘bored cough’ of a jaguar; the lions ‘sullen as limestone’; and the apes ‘howling for a yellow moon / in their cages of rain’ (‘Gibbons in a Northern Spring’). Then there are the visitors, some mysterious such as the man feeding wolves, one with ‘dollybird eyes’, in ‘Dr Crippen in Love’. This is often a nocturnal London, as in ‘Drunk Autumn Midnight below Victoria Embankment’, which concludes with an image of ‘the watermark of London sky / green as old money all over the river’. Hill’s historical imaginings and travelogues are present in poems set in the Greek islands and Corinth, where ‘The air is soured by wine / and the ground darkened with oil’ (‘The Pilot in Winter’). After publishing Skin (1997), a volume of stories which won the PEN/ Macmillan Silver Pen award, Hill’s first novel was Underground (1999). As its title suggests, this psychological thriller is set in and around the London Underground system, depicting its everyday rush-hour bustle alongside a dark gothic side of ill-lit tunnels, the weird beauty of mould-covered abandoned stations – and a series of murders taking place during rush hour. Its protagonist is Casimir, a Polish immigrant worker troubled by family memories, who becomes involved with a young homeless woman as well as the search for the killer. The Love of Stones (2001) is an historical novel covering centuries and continents, but is equally rich in plot twists and poetic imagery. The moves between past and present are propelled by characters’ shared obsession with ill-fated fabulous jewellery: ‘it connects us, a thick, deep rope of desire’. But with this comes the danger of death: diamonds, we read, ‘wear death invisibly, weightlessly, as if their owners were as transparent and insubstantial as air’. Its contemporary heroine Katherine is researching a 15th-century brooch with Royal connections but also searching for love. These become linked, as ‘the feel of obsession’ is realized as being ‘like a reservoir of love gone sour’. Hill’s most recent poetry collection is Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (2006). Reviewing it in The Guardian (26 August 2006), Sarah Crown aptly called it ‘a book-length love song to the fabulousness and ragged beauty of his native London’, abounding as it does in memorable impressions of peoples, sights and even pungent smells. We encounter, for instance, ‘the smells / of pizza ovens, Peking duck and piss, / the air half-edible and wholly foul’. Within a 12-poem sequence ‘A Year in London’ we register the city’s ‘flowers thriving there’, and how starlings ‘jostling and scuffling the snow from trees’, mimic console games and mobile phones. In ‘To a Boy on the Underground’, the strange intimacy of a tube journey is ‘coiling out / into sharp shadows, sunlight cutting in / between ramrod Victorian blocks’. There are ‘hanging gardens’ and carnivals, and myriad snapshots of light-filled scenes, ‘falling / through the trees’ or the ‘auras of the streetlights’. In ‘May’, the ‘wash of glitter-ball spun light’ on the dance floor of a club sees ‘star-crossed lovers meet / and dance, and slow-dance underneath the stars’. Hill’s vision of London as both a city of romantic possibilities and urban realities is beautifully realized in The Cryptographer (2003). Among the novelists Hill admires are Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, and one can perceive their benign influence in The Cryptographer’ s oblique romance and its convincing creation of a futuristic society’s details. This is London in 2021, in a world energized by Softmark, a new form of electronic currency. Its inventor is John Law, the world’s first ‘quadrillionaire’, whose complex tax affairs are being looked into by shapely Revenue investigator Anna. Despite this circumstance, they find themselves being drawn together, and Law’s personal and financial secrets are gradually revealed. Perhaps the most memorable scene in the book – somewhat reminiscent of The Great Gatsby - is the lavish Midwinter Ball given at Law’s house, with its many ‘rooms full of laughter, and idle revelation, the courtyards of secluded lovers’. Hill’s ability to summon up original images for love and money is remarkable. They are seen as interlinked, despite the reticence of feelings between Law and Anna; ‘Money is trust, Anna, that’s all’. A global financial crisis ensues; Law disappears and Anna must find him, leading to a final liaison. Doomed romance is also a prominent element of The Hidden (2009), though the action takes place amidst an archaeological dig – and violent political conflicts - in Greece. As the title implies, this is again a tale revolving around the revelation of secrets, both ancient and modern, about its characters. Oxford graduate Ben Mercer is escaping from a failed marriage and becomes drawn into the intrigues of his co-workers, who turn out to be a group of anarchists hiding a kidnapped general in remote caves. Ben’s affair with Natsuko is accompanied by his growing realization of what they are all involved in. What is so clever about the plot is its enmeshing of past and present horrors. Ancient Sparta is initially ‘all secrets and no answers’, but its barbaric history and worship of ‘monstrous gods’ is pieced together. The group is convinced that ‘We’re the real Spartans now’. Ben must choose whether to follow group orders or escape with his lover. Interspersed throughout are numerous descriptive passages, as in ‘The flickerbook shadows of trees. Goat bells. The smell of thyme. Snowdrops floating in the clouds’. Tobias Hill’s delicacy of touch, allied to dark imaginings, gives his poetry and novels a unique hallmark: in them we find uneasy romance, the travails and pressures of history on his characters, and a range of sensory pleasures. Romancing the stones. This is a book of five chapters, 400-odd pages and three precious stones. While Tobias Hill's first novel, Underground , united the clamour of contemporary London with a childhood in rural Poland, The Love of Stones brings together a modern-day search for a triplet of rubies known as the Three Brethren with a historical narrative that traces the jewel's passage across two continents and six centuries. At first, it's hard going. So keen is Hill to establish the Brethen's credentials that he overloads the opening section with details and historical statistics that date the jewel back to the beginning of the 15th century. Alongside the data, we are presented with pseudo-documentary descriptions of the Brethren and comprehensive biographies of great jewel traders who may or may not have any bearing on the story to come. Written in Hill's carefully considered prose, this initial downloading of information gives you the impression that you are reading a work of non- fiction, and you wonder why the author chose to set his stone so deeply. But when the improvised histories and the threat of a dull, dynastic epic subside to tolerable levels, a very readable story emerges. Alternating with the third-person account of the jewel's provenance is the present-day first-person narrative of Katherine Sterne, which follows in meticulous detail her life-or-death endeavour to recover the Brethren. As the treasure trail leads her to Turkey, London and Tokyo, her painstaking observations relate just about everything she does or sees, which allows Hill to impress with moments of poetry. He is adept at rendering cities, especially their cheap hotels and tawdriness, which he plays off against the pristine jewel to good effect. But it's the urban-pastoral landscape of Tokyo that seems to most attract him: in a wonderful set piece he delivers Sterne to a capsule hotel where she spends the night in a sleeping space "quarter life-pod, three quarters coffin". Interiors are equally well rendered in the interweaving historical sections as they creep towards the 19th century. Hill takes us from the seedy glamour of back-street traders and the smoke and wet sawdust of inns to the murkiness of small jewellery workshops: "congealed in the cold, a tin of olive oil and diamond dust. A dish of jeweller's rouge and a polishing cloth." These and similar passages read like embedded poems: London is "the stink of oystershells. Rain and light. Halls of smog". Yet at other times, especially in Sterne's narration, Hill opts for a steady, often cumbersome accretion of detail when a single metaphor may have sufficed. Here, his devotion to verisimilitude is surprising for a published poet. Worst of all, Hill can impede the dramatic intensity of a scene with an occasional portentous phrase (the Brethren is "an eye opening in a dead head"). In the 19th-century sections, the book picks up the factually based story of the Levy brothers, Jewish jewellers from Iraq, who came to London to set up shop with the Brethren sewn into the lining of their clothes. They eventually designed Queen Victoria's crown, and were forced into poverty when their stones were taken and they were not paid. Their fate exemplifies the moral of the story: everyone who has possessed the stones has soon lost them. Whether a signifier of imperialism, money, power or greed, the Brethren defies ownership. Throughout the book, Hill relays the suspense of every meeting involving these ill-fated stones, and the filmic moment of disclosure - the box opening - is just as thrilling each time. But this paradoxically rambling and clean-cut novel would have benefited from fewer characters and less striving. For every successful character (such as Frau von Gott, the eccentric German collector and Sterne's mother figure), there is a superfluous one: the Dickensian sewer child, Martha, is a grubby-faced stereotype, a "please mister" delinquent whose dealings with the jewel seem little more than a closing device. The Love of Stones. The elegant and attractive cover might lead you to expect an historical novel. Not quite. A thriller with three strands, each coming together from a different point in history, it tells a gripping story that follows the trail of an ancient jewel through time and the wrecked lives of people who owned it, stole it or desired it. Compulsive – and at the end I felt like something that I had grasped firmly just slipped through my fingers. In twenty five years every cell in my body barring the substance of my bones has lived and died and been replaced. I'm not the person I was. Whereas the stones of the jewel are unchanged. The great jewels are thousands of years old. They pass through the hands of people and often the hands leave no trace, but they are there all the same. They leave impressions, invisible, like atoms of hydrogen drawn to a surface of diamond. They lead you back. I watch the ice crystallise on the porthole glass and wonder how far I can go. Her rubies are far above price. The 'stones' in Tobias Hill's magnificently managed second novel are jewels. His heroine, Katharine Sterne, is knowledgeable about many and obsessed with one, whose trail she follows; the Three Brethren is an arrangement of three balas rubies (whose matching perfection gives the jewel its name) and three pearls round a central diamond. The opening of the book describes the jewel's commissioning - as a shoulder knot - in the early fifteenth century by Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy. Although unusual among great jewels, according to Hill, in not carrying a curse, the Three Brethren can't be said to have brought luck with them, either. The duke was wearing his shoulder knot when he was treacherously killed on the Bridge of Montereau by the Dauphin of France. Elizabeth I is wearing the jewels in the 'Ermine' portrait reproduced on the book's cover. It would take a specialist to know just where Hill shades history into fiction, but certainly the Three Brethren become real to the reader in their progress through human lives. The author has steeped himself in the geology, physics and culture of covetable minerals. Being a poet, he savours the precise vocabulary of cuts (skew, skill, bezel, quoin) and the suggestiveness of the science; it's impossible, for instance, to touch a diamond, since it is a property of the stone to attract hydrogen from its surroundings, sheathing itself in another element. The shoulder knot is composite, and so is the structure of the novel. Besides the history of the Three Brethren passed on by Katharine, and her search for information about where they might be now, there is also the story of two Iraqi brothers, Daniel and Salman Levy, who arrive in London in 1833 and set up business as jewellers. Hill's ability not merely to generate period detail but to inflect it, to make it his own, is remarkable: not the bare fact of gaslight but 'above him the lamp sighed like a woman turning in her sleep'; not just the props of an Antiques Roadshow desktop but 'he stopped writing, reached for the sand, and let it skitter across the page'. Just how the two narratives converge is one of the secrets of the book. Hill sets up echoes of phrasing to keep curiosity sharp, though when the formula 'done and dusted' is put into the mouths of both a nineteenth-century court jeweller and a modern Japanese businessman taught English by Americans, the effect is jarring. With The Name of the Rose and Perfume, a new sort of international bestseller emerged which combined esoteric and populist ingredients to produce robust hybrids: hermetic fables with a thriller dynamic. Hill's attempt to join those ranks with his tale of jewels, royalty, quests and betrayals is aided by his sinuous plotting and his superb conjurations of place (not just Iraq but modern Turkey and Japan). By having Katharine describe her obsession as 'a kind of love that no longer requires people', he covers himself against the likelihood that his readership may find her emotionally lacking. Details of her background are few but precise, details of her appearance few and vague, released with a distracting slowness. She's not old (belatedly revealed as 25), not dark - her blue eyes regarded as unlucky in Turkey - and not small, which turns out to mean tall rather than wide. We may, as she says, recognise ourselves in our ancestors by their making of jewels and weapons - embodiments of love and death - but Hill has a little trouble with those two subjects, or at least with their thriller derivatives, sex and violence. One distinctly uneasy chime between the narratives is that in each, an attraction is consummated only after the woman has suffered injury, before she has healed, and with penetrative brusqueness. Something about these scenes feels like duty to the thriller formula, carried out with a cold conscientiousness. Peter Høeg in Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, another stylish recent blockbuster, was forever putting his heroine in danger and having her fight free of it. Katharine has a less traumatic time, but her escapes aren't always convincing. Having smashed an assailant's temple with a lucky blow of her elbow on a Russian train, she simply carries him out into the gangway, though he has been described as 'big' and 'heavy' and is now unconscious, if not dead. In scenes like these, sophistication finds itself unable to renegotiate a genre requirement - the physical victory of the underdog. Still, Tobias Hill successfully finesses the ending, where wish-fulfilment demands that Katharine should hold in her hand the jewel for which she has given up so much, while sophistication prefers a dilution of triumph. What is confounding about The Love of Stones is not the occasional failure but an almost continuous success. It may be that the book, like Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, is as close to the apotheosis of a yarn as to a literary masterpiece, but it deserves the many readers it will win.