That’s my first three months in the job dealt with – probation period passed.
It felt a bit like this:
I came across this statue in the Palais de Justice in Brussels yesterday. I interpret it’s Christian imagery thus, Mary, the bronze statue, is craddling the dead body of her son, the smurf and, um, innit:
Mother and Smurf, Palais de Justice, Brussels
Also, this little Flemmish boy tries a high risk new strategy to get his dad to give him extra pocket money.
I loved it.
Blood on the cobbles.
A serial murderer is at work in Victorian London, with the action centreing on the foggy streets of Limehouse, the music hall people and the British Museum’s Reading Room. A well paced yarn, with seemingly no on-purpose coded ‘deeper meaning’ to extract; what happens is also what it’s about. Ackroyd seems to be a big fan of the locations and the period and rifs on the book’s themes with vim. I enjoyed it and my brain didn’t hurt too much on the journey – well done, that author.
I start work at Hill & Knowlton in Soho Square on 19th November.
Though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone to read.
Imagine that an author has set his latest novel in a particularly gritty part of Glasgow. To make the text as realistic as possible, the dialogue, of which there is a lot, is presented in the vernacular, exactly as it would be spoken, including the sentence structure and rhythm, colourful slang and local nouns for highly obscure objects. To make the human scenery more interesting, he has made good and sure that all of the local gangs, nationalities, races, religions, traders and officials get a good look in. When finished, the author hands the book to me, raised as I was at the other end of the British Isles, and says, “I think you may find some aspects of the book challenging but the plot is terrific!”
It took me more than a month to read the 300 pages of Kim, a tale of the British in India in the 19th century. I am not sure that I would have started if I had known how little of it I was going to understand. I couldn’t work out if I was too stupid to read a book like this (maybe reader bewilderment was always intended?) or whether the book is so of its time that it is now as good as unreadable.
The plot was of interest (a quick-witted son of soon-to-die white parents serving in India is raised as a native and because of his unique understanding of the locals is recruited to become an agent by British Intelligence) and the prose painted a picture of that particular time and place that I imagine is unrivalled in fiction. That the plot serves the scenery, on balance, more than the other way round, and yet the book works, is unusual.
Usually, long scene-setting descriptions that don’t obviously move the narrative along drive me up the wall. In Kim, I was still driven up the wall but recognised that the narrative was indivisible from the scenery. This book could easily have been ‘the beginning of’ book that initiated a series of Great Game adventures starring our young, not least to say slippery, British Intelligence officer, Kim. Kipling didn’t write a series and now no one else could. There is no way anyone would be able to effectively create that time and place again with the same realism.
On Kipling and racism: using only this book as evidence, he has an odd form of it. Instead of saying brown types are inferior to whites, he thinks different races have different specialisations – things in which they are masters and the envy of others. It’s racism but not of the form I anticipated.
650 pages of drivel.
Right, so there’s this bear, he’s capable of speech, he’s blue, and he lives on a magic island, and that. Why did I read this thing? Because it was on my bookshelf, see also. Mallory (G.) – ref. Everest, that’s why.
Bluebear travels and has lots of not particularly well-imagined adventures with magical friends/foes. At no point is any reason given as to why Bluebear must travel so each (tedious) adventure has to work on its own merits. I seem to remember that Alice had some purpose in traveling through Wonderland (to get out?), which lent a book of ‘nonsense’ internal logic and thereby momentum (is that a paradox?). What’s more, the encounters she had with the permanent inhabitants of Wonderland were well done.
I wouldn’t even give this to a kiddly-widdly to read (ages 5 – 10) , as it contains too many long words and is, as stated, 650 interminable pages long (boring, boring, boring).
And another thing, whatever pleasure there might have been in trying to imagine what the creatures described in the text looked like, was robbed by the author and his need to draw them as well as describe them. What an idiot.
Acting, dialogue and plot (no car chases, explosions or gratuitous booby shots) = Cool.
Remember Kyle’s mom, Sheila Broflosvski? Is the fictional character Sarah Palin based on her?
Reasons why I do not like Sarah Palin:
1. She has a nasty squeaky voice
2. She shoots animals dead, apparently to affirm that she is a real American frontiers-person, living in a log cabin ‘n all, even though she actually lives in a nice house and can afford to go to Waitrose if she wanted to
3. Anyone who puts themselves forward as a candidate for a beauty pageant is clearly wrong in the head
4. All the religious stuff
5. The supercilious yet ingratiating, animated but dead-eyed way she called Obama a terrorist
6. The hockey mom imagery – I’ve seen mums at football matches and I definitely wouldn’t want any of them to be Vice President of the US of A
7. If she lived round here she would drive a BMW X5, live in Henley and be rude to everyone
8. She spends all her time dieing her hair, selecting German-looking fashion specs and practicing her rictus grin, rather than running Alaska.
McCain seems like a nice old boy though.
