I have just emerged from 998 pages of Dicken's England - Bleak House! I have discovered Dickens also uses the exclamation mark, but a little more judiciously than Jane Austen. He is fond of it in describing beautiful mornings and gardens. Actually these descriptions are quite lovely. Although it took me a full five hundred pages to get into this novel, in the end I was rather swept away by the tragedy. The Lady Dedlock story was terribly sad and I could certainly see it's cinematic potential. It was a little like the Cohen brothers with the evil petty conspirators such as Bucket and Guppy. It was terribly frightening when Esther went off with Bucket in pursuit of her mother. I do admire that Dickens attempts to write about his whole world. Of course his depiction of women in a little narrow. He does have a fondness for the good orphan and little tolerance for the woman with a cause - poor Mrs Jellaby. Still, Charlie the rights of women and Africans will eventually prevail. It is at least as noble as housework!!
The Women in Black by Madeline St John was my holiday treat, a wisp of a thing really. I bought it at Book City in Shepparton. It was strange seeing how little there was to buy there really and it showed me how much more rich it is having access to the city and its literary riches. The novel reminded me of buying my green coat, that first ridiculous adult purchase. The layby that went forever. It was almost like a sketch of a novel or a screenplay. The characters were diverse and I liked the fragile connections between them. I'm not sure if the lightness of it all was a strength or a weakness. The snippy disingenuous tearoom conversations reminded me of my workplace.
Linda Olson's Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs was deeply melancholy book about loneliness and grief and locking oneself in. Beautiful descriptions of place both in Sweden, London, Japan and New Zealand. Sweden in winter is seen in “a muted twilight where people walked in ankle-deep snow, lifting their feet like wading birds.” In contrast, summer nights in London are “warm, like velvety tepid water.” I also admired Linda's understated descriptions of relationships such as Veronika and her lover's mother and Veronika and her father. These relationships are fragile but still valued. And of course it was a reminder of the transformative power of love! I found this book quite inspirational to my own writing.
April's disappointment was PD James The Private Patient. I felt so excited to stumble across this in my school library as I was 57th on the waiting list for it at my local library! Sometimes I love the certainty of PD James pronouncements on the world and her terribly English sentences. This time I found her irritating. She was quite as sexist as Dickens without the excuse of the nineteenth century to fall back on. Rhoda, a successful journalist with a disfiguring scar left from an attack by her violent father, is by far the most interesting character and she is killed off in chapter two and, of course, the villian of the piece is the repressed spinster.
