Another quiet week here: marking, reading, preparing lectures for the next semester and screaming inside as the world burns. Plus ça change really. The oddest bit was going to a recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue at the local grand theatre – very talented comics (all-male, somehow) doing very funny jokes that could have appeared in an episode broadcast in 1976. Which I suppose is half the charm, and clearly what the audience wanted. Silly wordplay, funny noises, familiar catchphrases, incongruous juxtapositions and the odd innuendo to make the audience groan. They didn't like the very mild Prince Andrew joke though… Samantha failed to appear though, which was very disappointing. She had a very good excuse though.
Other than that, not a lot. I went fencing as a charitable gesture: I stand there and let the young folk use me as target practice. Tectonic plates react faster than me these days, but it's still good fun.
I only managed a couple of books this week: Jennifer Donnelly's A Gathering Light and John Christopher's The World in Winter. I have no memory of buying A Gathering Light and historical fiction isn't usually my thing, but I enjoyed it. It's a bildungsroman - the story of a rural New York peasant girl's intellectual awakening, tied to a real-life murder of the early 20th-century. The community and its poverty is beautifully drawn, but I did find the central characters' perfection a bit much to bear. Matty suffers from maternal loss and paternal ignorance; she has a black friend and an inspiring teacher. There's an alcoholic, a groper and a racist in the cast and an unsuitable boy, and she eventually rises above the challenges they all set. It's essentially Anne of Green Gables without the psychological complexity, but it is a good read. I see from the reviews that it was marketed as a teen/young adult novel, which didn't strike me at all. The protagonist is a teenage girl but apart from the rather simplistic ending, it didn't strike me as one aimed primarily at teens at all.
The World in Winter is more problematic. The set-up of this 1962 eco-dystopia is fine: climate change (hot to cold in this case) renders Europe uninhabitable, causing Britain's residents to seek succour in the former African colonies. It could have been a fascinating examination of colonialist attitudes as the white former rulers adapt to being supplicants to those they previously considered inferior. Sadly, the novel's whole point is that whatever suffering must be endured, white people should look after their own. The hero casually applies slyly racist nicknames to people who later help him; he double-crosses them even when they're entirely sincere, solely to re-establish a minimal white population in Britain. The mass murder of the white population down to sustainable levels is presented as little more than a regrettable necessity and apartheid South Africa is the only congenial place (and one about to wiped out by the ungrateful African nations and their renegade white mercenary forces). The plotting and the evocation of a devastated, inhospitable Britain populated with gangsters and cannibals is brilliantly presented, but all in the service of a racist ideology. Without doubt one of the nastiest novels I've read in a long time – the Brexiteers will love it. To take the taste away, I've started Pynchon's hippy crime thriller, Inherent Vice – another one that's been sitting neglected on my shelf since it came out. It's good fun so far, but I'm not sure where it's going, if anywhere.
2 comments:
The author of the World in Winter must have felt prescient given the winter of 1962-3 was one of the coldest on record (as my parents who were married that December never tire of telling me).
Re Pynchon - he does not really tend to go anywhere, does he?
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