KEV67

I am still plodding through Churchill. He was a strange mixture. I got to my favourite citation: we found a big crowd, male and female, young and old, but all seemingly very poor. One might have expected them to be resentful against the authorities responsible for their protection; but, as Churchill got out of the car, they literally mobbed him. 'Good old Winnie,' they cried. 'We thought you'd come and see us. We can take it. Give it 'em back.' Churchill broke down, and as I was struggling to get him through the crowd, I heard an old woman say 'You see, he really cares: he's crying.'

My friend was telling me about him in the pub. Apparently, Ian Rankin finished a book he started, but died before he completed. My friend's wife gave him this book as a Christmas present because he likes Inspector Rebus books. My friend reckons McAvennie might have been a better writer, only he is a lot less politically correct. His detective operates in 70s Glasgow.

Had a cynical thought about introductions. Sometimes when you have finished reading a classic book, say The Outsider, you wonder what was so great about that. You cannot brag to acquaintances about reading it unless they ask you what is was about and why it was good. That is what the introduction is for. The problem is some of those introductions are pretty long. The Outsider being only 130 pages long, the introduction is manageable. The introduction to my copy of Ulysses was about 50 pages long. It was more comprehensible than most the book, but I doubt I would be able to remember much of it.

I started reading The City and the City. At present it does not seem like science fiction, because there is no scientific explanation for what is going on, but it does not seem like fantasy either. Perhaps the scientific explanation comes later. The only other book it reminds me a bit of is Neuromancer, because of the parallel worlds. Neuromancer was a cyberpunk book, so not very like The City and The City. Edit: it is very well written. It is sort of genre-busting, but I am also confused. Edit: yes, very good. For a while I wondered whether it was actually science fiction because most the technology was contemporaneous. Only the Breach appear to have more advanced technology. It reminded me a bit of 1984 in that the population was required to disbelieve what they knew to be true. I suppose it was a sort of dystopia and part detective fiction. I am not sure the plot entirely holds up. Why all the bother for a few old artefacts?

I have not read On Chesil Beach, but I have read several of his others. I quite liked Solar and The Innocent. I thought they were very well researched. I was not sure about Amsterdam. I thought it was too slight to win the Booker. I am not sure I really liked Atonement. I think I read Saturday, but I cannot remember much about it.

My only real aims this year are to read Clarissa (which is humungous), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (i e. a Shakespeare comedy). I want to continue studying Latin. Otherwise, I just want to continue reading my classic, entertaining, and non-fiction TBR list.

In The Critic magazine I have just been reading an article about the Modernists: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, a few others, perhaps Proust. It is 100 years since Ulysses was published. I have read two Woolf novels, which bored and underwhelmed me. I read Ulysses, some bits of which I did enjoy, but most of which I either did not understand or which bored or irritated me. I have not read the other two. I suspect the Modernists are mostly read by students, and that the movement failed. In literature, the Modernists were succeeded by the Postmodernists. I think the term is too wide, so it is easier to understand what it means in individual fields, and by example. If I understand rightly, Slaughter House Five is postmodern, and so are some of Umberto Eco's novels, such as The Island of the Day Before. Both those books dick around with the expected narrative structure. In Slaughter House Five, the protagonist time travels from present to past, and is held captive by extra-terrestrials, so parts are realistic and other bits are totally impossible. He might be mad, but it doesn't say. In The Island of The Day Before, the protagonist in the story is writing a story himself. Quite a lot of the book is about the story, but at least as much is about the story the protagonist is writing. I found the book infuriating because it left the stories unresolved. This makes me wonder if Quentin Tarantino is a Postmodern film maker. He likes to do stories within stories, unexplained timeshifts, change historical realities. He breaks rules in other ways, for example introducing bunches of new characters half way through the story. He can be annoying too, because he will not edit down.

Continuing on the nursing theme, ever since my father had to be nursed through a terminal condition, mostly by his wife, I have wondered about books that mention in passing that a person was had to be nursed. Especially so in Victorian books, because they have a reputation for being so uptight about nakedness. In Great Expectations, Biddy was taken on to nurse Pip's sister after she had been assaulted by Orlick. Herbert Pocket's fiancé was a young woman who was initially nursing her dying father. That must have been the whole deal: holding the willy while he wees, holding him up while he shits in the chamberpot, absolutely horrific. Even the younger Cathy in Wuthering Heights, I cannot remember if she ever consummates her marriage to Linton-Heathcliffe as he was always sick, but she nursed him. Somebody has to do it, and I expect it was usually women. Women generally look after babies, whose toileting, cleaning and feeding requirements are more manageable than adults'. I suppose girls got used to it more, helping their mothers with their younger siblings. In Framley Parsonage, Mary Robarts says to her sister-in-law that Mr Crawley, the curate is just a man. I wondered whether she volunteered to care for Mrs Crawley, just because she could not bear the thought of him having to do these intimate things for his wife, as well as worrying whether he would do them properly.

There is a good bit of Latin in the penultimate chapter: 'Qui facit per alium, facit per se', which roughly translates to 'He who does a thing by another's agency does it himself.' The Jupiter newspaper, which I suppose is a fictional version of The Times, was railing about political and clerical corruption. I do not know how much Anthony Trollope really knew about political shenanigans of his age. I expect he knew quite a bit. *Spoiler* Before the happy ending, Mary Robarts proves herself worthy by nursing Mrs Crawley, the impoverished curate's wife. She has typhus, which is deadly. She takes care of her for several weeks until she is better. Nursing a patient like that means exposing yourself to a deadly illness. It also means helping the patient go to the toilet, getting rid of the waste, and cleaning the patient. This is quite something to do for another person. Then Mary Robarts marries a lord and becomes aristocracy. I gather most aristocratic mothers did not even breastfeed their babies. They would hire wet nurses to feed them.

I have just been reading his Wikipedia page. He wrote about 115 books and had about eighteen pseudonyms. He started off writing soft porn novels as Alan Marshall for Midwood Books.

I am reading The Comedy Is Finished by Donald E. Westlake, who I had never heard of before. It has a lurid cover like all Hard Case Crime books. They are a bit of a lucky dip, but this one is turning out better than I was anticipating. It is set in the 70s in Los Angeles. An ageing comedian, a bit like Bob Hope, has been kidnapped by a radical, left wing group. There was a bit in the beginning where one of the female kidnappers is in the habit of walking around with no clothes. Yeah, I thought, I wonder if that would make it to the film adaption, and how come I never meet any? Then I started to doubt whether the book would translate to film very easily anyway. The comic spends a lot of time reflecting on his life, and who would really care about him if he died. Then the kidnappers: some of them are sensitive, some of them are cruel. Then there seems to be an interesting little subplot about the medicines that he has been prescribed by his doctors. I bet these are opioids. I gather a lot of Americans are still addicted to opioid pain-killers and sleeping tablets, but this book was written over fifty years ago. It is not quite Dostoevsky but it is not bad.

I must have heard the term first about forty years ago. Tom Paulin was always using the term on Late Review on BBC2 in the 90s. I even looked the term up on Wikipedia and I was none the wiser.

I saw Titane at the cinema. It was a French film by a female director, Julia Ducournau. There are quite a few of them these days. It was rather David Cronenbergesque. It was very violent, and very arty. I am rather squeamish and found it unpleasant. However, I heard Mark Kermode, the film critic, say it was superb.

I think I found a plot hole in the Jack Reacher I am reading. It is a plot hole in the subplot, not the major plot. It does not invalidate the whole story, but I will dock it a star on Goodreads. Plot holes in detective fiction are probably the most serious. Saying that, some plots are so complicated, I never guess who did it, so I doubt I would have detected the plot hole. I never guessed who the guilty person was when an Agatha Christie was on the telly.

Not enjoying it especially, but it struck me as a good book if you wanted to have a go at reading it in French. It is not very long. The chapters are short. The language is not very difficult. I thought The Stranger/The Outsider by Albert Camus was another good option if you wanted to read something in French. It is not very long and the language is straightforward. I expect people would be dead impressed if you told them you had read Albert Camus in the original French.

I saw an interesting YouTube video about this (which I will post later). Margaret Atwood did not like her books described as science fiction, because to her that meant robots and spaceships. Some sci-fi readers think she was being a bit snobby. A Handmaid's Tale hardly seemed any science fiction to me, but then neither does a lot of so-called science fiction. For some unspecified reason female fertility has crashed, but otherwise it is an alternative reality. 1984 was similar. The only bit of technology that was not already in existence when it was written was two way surveillance. Both these books seem more like literary fiction than science fiction to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAvH9j7Tjbg

Spoilers so don't read on if you have not already read it. It's odd, I feel such relief now Marc Robarts has confessed everything to his wife. I don't know how this story arc will end. I wonder whether he will give his curate a pay rise. So Dr Thorne is going to marry Miss Dunstable. He is 55 and she is 42, and neither have been married before. I wonder how they will take to married life. The other curate, the one who does not like to receive help although he is poor. I think I read he gets £125 a year. It is not a lot. I think the average for a vicar was about £300, maybe a bit more. I think the a average for a curate was about half that, but it could take many years before a curate was promoted to vicar (beneficed I think the term is). Nevertheless, most working class people earned by a lot less than £125 a year. I am often perplexed by Victorian economics.

Not the most original idea for discussion in the history of literary criticism. Nevertheless, a YouTube video by conservative social scientist, Jordan Peterson, on the subject of women preferring bad, or at least disagreeable, men over nice guys (who don't stand a chance) got me thinking. Branwell Brontë was a bad lad. Emily Brontë wrote Heathcliff as bad. Nearly everyone was bad in Wuthering Heights. John Sutherland, who wrote: Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in Nineteenth Century Literature, wrote a chapter in which he explained why he thought Rochester bumped off a certain person who had been causing him stress and unhappiness. When Jane asked the landlord of the pub near Thornfield about it, the explanation sounded rehearsed, and since the pub landlord was financially dependent on Rochester, he is not going to accuse him of anything. Other than that, Rochester was obviously bad in matters of sexual morality (I hope that is not a spoiler). Anne Brontë wrote the Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It described a lot of bad, male behaviour by Arthur Huntingdon, mostly in the form of debauchery rather than evil. It is so vividly described I wondered where Anne witnessed it. Branwell could not have been that bad. However, it was the behaviour of Gilbert Markham that shocked me the most. He was a good guy, but he did something shocking. There were mitigating circumstances, and what he did does not compare with what Heathcliff, Rochester or Huntingdon did, but for some reason it made more of an impression on me. It definitely lowered him in my estimation, although I can imagine doing something similar myself in the circumstances.I thought it was a good bit of writing because I thought both Markham and his victim behaved very realistically,

I find it very odd that politicians in the Houses of Parliament had so much power over appointments in the church. Mind you, I also find it odd that the clergy was considered so important. Back in the early nineteenth century the clergy was one of very few gentlemanly professions. There was the clergy, the law (although whether that included solicitors or only barristers, I am not sure), medicine (although there were surgeons, physicians and apothecaries and I am not sure whether they were all fit professions for a gentleman). Then there was the army and navy, but you had to enlist young for the navy. There must have been other jobs. Could you be a merchant, or is that trade? Could you work in banking and finance?

I have got myself a copy and am looking forward to reading it.

I am sure many productive people do not do much chilling. Regarding Shakespeare, he did not write too many plots. He mostly re-wrote existing stories (maybe I am wrong there). On the other hand, I have never tried to write in iambic pentameter, but it sounds difficult.

I have started reading this. Francoise Sagan wrote it when she was eighteen. If the 17-year-old in the book was based on herself, I am impressed by how much she matured in one year.

How brainy do you have to be to write a good book? I have often wondered. Can you make up by steady application what you lack in spontaneous creativity? I posted about Umberto Eco earlier. He was definitely very clever. In Focault's Pendulum he had two or three characters discuss the history of Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians and the Knights Templar for about 700 pages . They hardly drew breath. I was frustrated waiting for the action to start. I am looking at a poster of We Need to Talk About Kevin. by Lionel Shriver. When I read that book, I thought this woman is having deeper thoughts than I have ever had during my entire life. Motives and memories are explored at great length. I am reading a biography of Winston Churchill, who did a bit of writing himself, although non-fiction. Despite his school results and officer entry exam results not being outstanding, he was a pretty clever guy with an incredible memory. He wrote a four volume history on the first Duke of Marlborough. He was not a minister at the time, but he was an MP and he was pretty busy with other stuff. I am reading a Jack Reacher. Lee Child can think up some ingenious plots. My favourite booktuber has just had a book published (or accepted for publishing). I do not know how she managed to write a book while holding down a job, reading as many books as she did, and generating so many YouTube videos. She talks quick and she reads quick. I suspect she is pretty clever. J.R.R. Tolkein was a professor of English at Oxford. He must be the king of world building. In Silmarillion he wrote something like an Old Testament for the Lord of the Rings, and he invented at least one new language and parts of others. Still, maybe not every successful author needs to be as clever.

Apologies.

I enjoy buying books, but when I buy them I intend to read them. I may as well leave my anti-library in the bookshop where I have not paid any money for them. Umberto Eco was definitely a clever fellow. Reading Focault's Pendulum convinced me of that, although I found it exasperating. Not as exasperating as The Island of the Day Before, after which I stopped reading him. The Name of the Rose was good. I am reminded of the bit in The Great Gatsby in which Gatsby shows his bookshelf full of great books which he has not read. I took it as a criticism: that he was trying to pretend he was more learned and cultured than he was. Not that I am accusing you of any of that.