A Duck Yesterday
If any month should have a blogging pause it should be August. Last year September had an entry for every day though that was not my idea being instead a case of keeping up with the Brooms. This last month has included the annual deWeyden family holiday and a lot of reading. As you can see from the side bar, there is now a Flickr account where you can find some photos of that trip along with others.
Books completed and started include the following :-
Writing Home by Alan Bennett, which has a sense of rightness about it, that just makes all the artifice and corporate rubbish of my world just fade away. AB is a sort of fifth columnist within the standard National Trust/Women’s institute world that is suggested by so much of his writing. Every so often you come across something that requires a sidelong glance to see if he might just be going out every night in black leathers on his Harley Davidson instead of his raincoat and sit-up-and-beg. That may be a true syllepsis, it may not but I though I’d just get it in to impress anyone who can’t be bothered to go and look it up.
This was followed by my trying-to-be-cool book, which was Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I got fed up with it very quickly, when I realised that the policeman who had been following the main character (it was so good I have already forgotten all the names) reminded me at best of the pine-apple faced policeman who tailed Deckard round in Blade Runner and at worst of Inspector Gadget. It was jettisoned though not quite far enough to be left where we stayed on holiday.
Next up was Diana by R.F. Delderfield, which you may think is a woman’s book. I lump this with The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams, partly because I read both of them within a few months in 1984 and partly because of the un-worldly atmosphere of love and deceit that they both have. Diana is the tail of an Orphan boy who, driven by the love of the daughter of the lord of the manor, raises himself from assistant in his Uncle’s furniture store to Newspaper editor and Special Operations agent during WW2. It is so much more than that though, a dream of first love kept alive by separation and distance. If you don’t end up blubbing at the end like when Bobby shouts “Daddy! My Daddy!” at the end of The Railway Children, then you are heartless and need help. I know it sounds like Catherine Cookson but it does have some Die Hard moments for those of you raised on Clive Cussler.
Being one of those books which leaves you flapping on the shores of industrial-strength reality after being immersed in the sensuous, fictional oceans of what love and life really should be if there was any justice (obligatory florid prose for this month), Diana had to be followed by something similar, though I chose a book I had not read before. This is The Citadel by A.J. Cronin, and being set in a similar time to Diana has been a gentle slope back to the here and now. I think I must have seen the entire TV version with Ben Cross because the plot is very familiar – blowing up the sewers seems to have stuck in my mind for some reason. More tomorrow.
