Birthday Post

Currently Reading: Almost finished Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald’s third novel. Winner of the Booker in the year I was born, although of course I wasn’t aware of that at the time. At Christmas of the same year, a copy of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s Diary of a Century was given as a gift. I know this because the copy I came across and acquired from a charity shop yesterday contained an inscription to that effect. As ever when you find something like this, you’re left wondering who these people were and what the book that’s now yours might have meant to them.

It took me a few weeks to get around to writing my previous post on The Bookshop. I’m really struggling to make this blog the kind of reading diary I want it to be. My post on Geoff Dyer’s Working the Room has become rather longer than expected. And I still haven’t gone back to the piece on China, which I read as long ago as last September. We’re leaving for India tomorrow, so I expect all of this is going to have to wait a few weeks until we get back. Assuming it doesn’t get swamped with work.

So, what else have I read for pleasure recently? Nicola Barker’s earliest short stories, collected as Love Your Enemies. I was following her work for a while, but then stopped after Behindlings. I do agree with her that the British public’s treatment of David Blaine’s stunt was appalling, but I don’t need an entire novel to tell me that. And I was put off Darkmans by a review which compared it (unfavourably) to Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Her fiction does seem to have ballooned somewhat since her earliest novels and stories, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Behindlings might have been a long novel, but was also a fantastic piece of literary fiction, evoking the circumscribed lives of the inhabitants of the kind of England which I rarely encounter in our literary fiction with a beautiful skewed poetry.

What else? Poetry by Phillip Larkin and Coleridge. Larkin might be the minor poet that some of his detractors take him to be, but he still wrote a handful of beautiful poems. He loses me a bit in those poems where he attacks matrimony. Not just because I’m happily married (although I am), but because that’s where he comes closest to misanthropy and misogyny, which is otherwise contained in his more successful (and memorable) poems. Coleridge, I should have read when I was 15. That yearning after the absolute.

And Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke. My first Albert Campion, for all that the supposed hero at the centre of the series is rather absent from this one. A commentator on another blog I follow recently made the point about the genre conventions of crime fiction, that they aren’t really as restrictive as some people think, because you can just pay lip service to the conventions and then go off on whatever tangent you like. I wonder though if they aren’t more restrictive for those writers who are attempting to write a more realistic fiction. This might possibly help to explain my growing boredom with Ian Rankin’s work for instance.

Margery Allingham, I think I always pigeonholed with Agatha Christie and the like. The sort of crime fiction I think of as getting adapted into films for Sunday evening viewing. And in fact, I’m sure I can remember watching one with my Mum. Tiger in the Smoke is far stranger than I expected, somehow straddling the lines between realism and outright fantasy. An utterly bonkers plot is placed with a foggy post war London evoked with considerable fidelity to time and place. The plot, such as it is, is just an excuse to relax and enjoy the scenes, the characters, the dialogue. It’s a confident performance, a phrase I’ve chosen deliberately. She seems to share with Dickens that sense of a theatrical London. As well as a taste for rather flamboyant names for her characters. I mean, a villain called Jack Havoc? I ask you! As her narrative voice acknowledges in a brief aside, ‘…technicolor was inadequate for that fantasy.’ Quite.