Mrs Hubbard
and I buy our books through the same Amazon account so we can read all
the books in the single account on either of our iPads; an exclusive library of
our own making. You might be reading this and thinking what a good idea,
although in truth it's pointless. We both like different fiction, so what it
tends to mean is Mrs Hubbard reads through, at times irritatingly reads out,
over a cup of tea, the one star Amazon reviews of the literary fiction I've just
bought, then laughing, tells me how I've wasted our money. Which brings me to UK writer Rachel
Joyce's wonderful novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, that one star critics found to be,
apparently, depressing; showing for most of them what they were in fact reviewing, was just themselves.
Confession
first: I can’t review this yet. I’ve only started reading it this morning, but I
know I’m going to love this novel. It's
a great concept: retired Harold Fry after an ordinary life, receives a letter
from a dying friend in a hospice and as he goes to post a letter in return, he
can't, and instead keeps walking, post box to post box, the length of England
to her. Already in the first chapter Joyce has in crisp, succinct words created
for me two clearly drawn characters, Harold and his wife, Maureen, writ with a
humour and tangibility which will see them easily through the narrative. So
this novel awaits, an enjoyment of anticipation, a philosophical read. I’ve decided to make these
irregular literary ramblings a regular on my blog, so a review will no doubt be
forthcoming. Note I won’t trap myself inside a timetable, ramblings will be
‘happenings’, following the ebb and flow of my reading around the half-life of
the day job, and another pointer is whenever you see a book or film review on
this blog, I've liked it, very much. It's not that I'm undiscerning, it's because
my father had the first of his open heart surgeries when he was younger than I
am now, a reminder that life is short, therefore I don't intend to spend what
free time I have, reviewing something I didn't enjoy. In the absence of a fee,
that would be pointless.
So to a
book, Mr CK Stead's Risk, I did read this month, and most unsociably
in the two days Mrs Hubbard and I were away for a weekend and I was supposed to
be sociable in the company of friends. I've written on Mr Stead in my previous ramble, he’s one of my favourites, and Risk didn’t disappoint. Good story telling, clever allusions, and –
spoilers coming - I have
a new fictional hero: Tom Roland. If I was to stab at Tom’s gestation it would
be when researching his earlier novel, My
Name Was Judas, Mr Stead happened upon the Book of Job. First Tom is that
combination that will guarantee a life of dissatisfaction and social
proscription – poet by night, banker by day. He works his corporate half-life,
while plugging away at his love of words in the early hours of the morning; unpublished
for almost all his life, until he’s blown up on a bus in the London bombings,
two days after finally receiving notification of his first placement of a poem
in a major arts magazine. Though as if that’s not enough, turning expectation
back on itself, the bomb doesn’t kill Tom; Mr Stead cruelly keeps him on a life
support of words long enough to realise his dream of leaving the day job, then
in a vividly written scene, kills him again with a heart attack.
I
have no idea why such a character would resonate with me :)
Writing
the above I’m growing conscious of a theme unwinding in this post. There’s a
lot of death in Risk, from the Trade
Towers falling, to the friends and acquaintances protagonist Sam Nola loses
along the way, one of whom he gets back at the end, leaving the reader in medias res pondering the unknown
possibilities of an emotional ménage à trois. And I won’t spoil
it for the reader more than that, but will say it’s not insignificant that the
protagonist didn’t make mention in this ramble until now: if there’s two
characters Stead didn’t quite get right for me it was the new-found French daughter,
Letty, who didn’t breath palpably somehow, and I felt always at an emotional
distance from Sam, in a manner I’m still confused by. My thinking continues on
that count, as on the resurrected character of the ending: what was the meaning
of that temporary defeat, or cheat, of death? There's a motif running here: an
old girlfriend thought dead coming back to Sam, an unknown daughter finding her
way back to him, and Tom bridging the themes of coming back from death, then
dying again.
Death.
Given Dad’s brushes with death, I’m pleased to report after two heart
surgeries, angioplasty, and an assortment of medical procedures, he’s still
going, into his eighties, a happy fact he puts down to garlic, liquefied, taken
daily. Though Mum and Dad, they're going about the business of 'preparation'
for that event we spend so much of our lives not thinking about; their old dog
died last week, and for the first time, ever, they're not going to replace her:
'it would be unfair' mum poignantly said in her email, 'to have a dog that will
outlive us'. Oh, there’s that word again, fair (at least Mum knows how to use it correctly). While on the matter of poignant musings on that final process,
the absence born of endings, I’ll say it loud, dying, thanks to a tweet – it’s
an Internet thing Mum - by Rachel McAlpine, I happened upon possibly the most sadly
joyous, beautiful blog I've read. Author Diana Neutze, in a manner few
of us have had to confront, has been confronting mortality for forty years of
living with multiple
sclerosis, as well
as her son’s death, and she is putting into poetry her thoughts, fear and quiet
raging into the night of her loss, and love of life, ‘surrounded by trees and
birdsong,’ on her blog. You need to read it, because after redrafting and
redrafting this piece, I can’t find a combination of words that doesn’t confine
it to something much less than it is. I’ll be making a regular visit to an
exquisitely human mind that reaches out from Diana's words and touches her
reader; including this crusty Libertarian, and Mrs Hubbard: Diana’s blog is
here – Living with Multiple Sclerosis.
Rambling
on, I started with the Mr Stead’s cruelly treated unpublished poet, so will end
with an unpublished novelist. My two favourite lines spun in the early hours of
several mornings this week have been (and they’re still keepers, I think):
…
The weather in South Canterbury had been miserable all week, and there was a
low hung grey sky embalming the farm in shadow.
And:
The
tyres scrabbling across the gravel scared a murmuration
of starlings from the macrocarpa hedge, their shiny bodies erupting and
whirling toward the dairy shed.
In the first I can’t decide whether to go with ‘low
hung’, or ‘low slung’ (feel free to leave a preference in comments) - and I’m
aware I’ve now moved on from death to embalming. The second sentence occurred,
I suspect, for no other reason than we all surely have a duty to put
‘murmuration’ down on paper, virtual or otherwise, somehow in our lives. It’s
too good a word not to.
Finally, albeit my book buying budget is seriously
distressed, I can at least temporarily avoid the scrutiny of Mrs Hubbard’s critical
eye by making my next book purchases outside of Amazon: at some stage over the
next month or two I hope to purchase:
Helen Heath’s poetry collection: Graft.
And, with great expectations, John Sinclair’s debut
novel: The Phoenix Song, once this novel goes to ebook format on mebooks. (Stop
press; looking up mebooks url for the previous link, I note the novel is
already available in ebook format – I shall be picking that up after I’ve
finished The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold
Fry.)
All the while, I still continue to read Hitch-22,
in the background, though I’m still not over that non-fiction pickle I’m in. I have no idea when the next ramble will be, unfortunately between now
and March there’s so much to do in the day job, it will steal my nights also; I'll
kill off that little pleasure centre of Language and Literature for the
interim, as the half-life becomes the whole-life, and I live with the bit that died in the umpteenth iteration of the Income Tax Act, 2007. If you’re interested in
following my rambles, which means the politics and philosophy in here may well
be anathema to you, just look down the right hand menu for heading ‘Book
Reviews and Bookish Posts’.
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