Many strange dreams recently. One about following a car which I knew to have bombs in though the occupants calmly stopped when asked, drove the vehicle to a safe place where they left it and stood around waiting. Maybe it’s not that strange then. We have made a conscious effort to have a quiet weekend which has left us with cabin fever thought the children seem as tired as ever. Number One Son is asleep already having keeled over into his cheesy crumpets and daughter is quietly humming along to Moonlight Shadow prior to being settled. The rest of the world seems far away. We’re all very lucky really.
I am racing through Atonement despite having the impression that a well-defined denouement is not the likely outcome of such a well-written, deftly crafted story. Maybe I’m wrong. I gave an audible gasp at some of the details in it last night. While the writing is of the highest order, beyond criticism from non-literary types such as me, it also seems effortless in such a way that it seems that the author is simply choosing his own path through a wider landscape of place and action that exists in his mind. It could go any way and though I am sure he had the ending crafted before he started the first paragraph, the delightful idea that nothing is yet decided even with only about a sixth of the book to go, is something that makes me shake with delight. I have read that this book has been compared with various writings of Virginia Woolf, though I cannot see it myself. Of course one book from a notoriously difficult and varied author is not enough to allow those comparisons. Not sure I have the words to review Mrs Dalloway in any meaningful way though some of the passages were off the scale in their descriptive power, a sort of more defined Ulysses though no less wide-ranging and gloriously candid.
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