Sunday, 8 February 2009

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This buggered knee thing is slowly improving: I have a spectacularly bruised ankle from all the transferred swelling, but it's much better. The fact that I could actually spend most of the weekend with my feet up has materially helped. The sofa-bound state, particularly in company with the 4am hacking-cough wakes in the earlier part of the week, has also meant that I've been able to really catch up on my reading. Highlights include:

  • Lee Child's Jack Reacher thrillers. I am seriously enjoying these: they're clipped, laconic and slightly brutal, very much in the Dalshiel Hammet or Raymond Chandler vein, as well as having notable pace and grip. Jack Reacher, the hero, is an ex military policeman, loner and supremely competent investigator and bruiser, to the extent where it's a completely unrealistic but very real pleasure to watch him take down bad guys. I also really enjoy the sheer difference of setting and plot from novel to novel - I must have read seven or eight of them now, and they've all been different. The body count's usually a bit wholesale for my taste, but hasn't yet alienated me from the character.
  • Geraldine McCaughrean, Peter Pan in Scarlet. This is the "official" sequel to Barrie's Peter Pan, commissioned by the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, to whom Barrie gave the rights to the book and play. McCaughrean is a prolific children's author; I've only previously read her Fire's Astonishment, a dense, haunting and poignant retelling of the Laidley Worm story. Her luminous, challenging, poetic prose is sensitive to Barrie's mood and tone, but not weighed down by it; she manages to create her own vivid story which returns to Neverland for a more nuanced and conscious exploration of the child/adult tensions which motivate Peter Pan and his world. It's in some ways an overflowing and slightly hallucinatory read, but I loved it, and felt that it did full justice to the original.
  • Hope Mirrlees, Lud-In-The-Mist. This was written in the 1920s, and Mirrlees apparently hung around on the fringes of the Virginia Woolf crowd; I hunted down a copy because Neil Gaiman recommends it, and I can see echoes of it in Stardust. It's an amazing work of fantasy, with closer stylistic ties, I think, to William Morris than to anyone else I can think of - it's paced with astonishing restraint, but never actually feels slow. I think it's a work of social satire as much as anything else, being concerned with the effects of the world of Faerie on a prosperous merchant town whose characters are drawn with empathetic wit and a sharp eye for their very human weaknesses. There are no heroes here; the main character may achieve heroic deeds, but the novel is largely concerned with his failings and pomposities, and takes the unheard-of step for modern fantasy of declining to actually describe the quest itself. It's also an interesting novel because its thrust and impetus comes from parents concerned about their children, not youths gaining maturity. Above all it's about the imagination, its powers and pitfalls and dangerous fascinations. I thoroughly recommend it.

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