Skip to main content

Holiday Reading

What with the weather and all, this has been a holiday for sitting indoors, with a mellow and warming beverage to hand, an Albinoni Oboe concerto wafting richly past the lit fire and a book with still hundreds of pages to go resting lightly on the knee.
This year's reading began with two simply astonishing novels and one that was merely brilliant.
Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is the first Japanese novel I have ever read, and it is breathtaking. It is a big work in every sense, weighing in at just under 1,000 pages divided into three books, and full of big ideas: time, God, religion, fate, alternative universes, morality, sexuality, mythology, love, death, loneliness, sacrifice... I found it compelling and absorbing even if the translation meant the style is patchy in places. Murikami produces exquisitely drawn characters and makes a fantastic - in the true sense of the word - plot utterly convincing.
Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is also a big novel, telling the story of a boy whose mother is killed in a terrorist attack. It is centred on Fabritius' 17th Century painting which becomes a key element in the development of the plot as well as an icon of the book's powerful themes: death, love, morality, sexuality, art, loneliness, sacrifice, God, religion... and where have I seen a list like that before? It seems that the novelists and the film makers have largely taken over from the priests as purveyors of meaning in our culture. The book is a kind of coming of age piece, but as it progresses it becomes a fast moving adventure story centred on the decline, Damascus Road experience and redemption of the central character.
A S Byatt's The Children's Book is a novel I began earlier in the year but put aside. I am a long time admirer of Byatt's intelligence and erudition. She writes complex novels with multilayered plots and finely nuanced characters. Her treatment of universal themes (see the lists above) is provocative and mind expanding and her observation of the minute details of human life acute. This work is quite typical of her, but after the first couple of hundred pages, I  found it quite heavy going. The plot (unlike those of her great works, The Virgin in the Garden series and Possession) seems just a little too slender for the relentless weight of intellectual, moral and symbolic material laid on it.I  resumed it this holidays but, again, wasn't gripped by it and moved on.
I also read Anthony Beevor's The Battle for Spain. We will be returning to Spain in 2015, and just as it is impossible to understand contemporary Scotland without an awareness of the fraught history of the last few centuries, so there are undercurrents lying not far beneath the surface for many Spaniards, which it is necessary to know. I have read several of Beevor's other books, and this one has been well received in Spain, so it seemed a good way for me to open the subject of the Spanish Civil War. After a few bewildering chapters in which Beevor sketches the confusing array of political relationships in early 20th Century Spanish society, he settles into his usual genius for relating a many faceted process of social history in a coherent, well paced and gripping narrative. Absorbing, horrifying, and sad in equal measure.

I treat books in much the same way as I do my dinner: my eyes are generally too big for my belly. That is to say, I bought home a couple of unread books: Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, Beevor's The Second World War and David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God. But, look! It's still raining! Excellent.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months  I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it.  Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder.  One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...