‘Burning Bright’ by Tracey Chevalier

Lambert, 1792 is the backdrop for the story of kids growing up in the street of London. Nothing sensational, no innovations in form – just a simple, good story with down-to-earth characters who could  easily be your neighbours today. It is in this simplicity that resides its strength. I confess that sometimes I get a bit tired of modern novelists cleverness and sophistication. Nothink against it,  but it is just refreshing to have an ‘Aristotelian’ novel from time to time, with beginning middle and end, even when there flasbacks and open endings.

The cherry at the top of the cake is to have William Blake as a ’supporting’ character – actually this book, in the right hands, would  make a quite interesting film.

Good story, nice reading 

‘Revelation’ by C.J. Samsom

Thrilling, fascinating, bloody…

Of course, if you don’t like the genre, this can easily be discarded as ‘low brow’ literature because, at the end of the day,  it is nothing more than a whodunnit. But what an entertaining one! And if you like English history, as I do, then you can be sure you will not put it down till the very end.

It is the fouth book in the Shadlake series and, since Monsieur Poirot, I don’t think we have had a more likeable sleuth. Perhaps even more than Christie’s creation, because Brother Shadlake is a sort of  ’normal’ bloke.  He is not meant to be a detective at all, but one of the barristers of the prestigious Lincon’s Inn Court at the time of Henry VIII who, as any people circulating in the fringes of the power at the time, sees himself entangled in its threads of treason, falsehood, religious fanaticism  and  power struggle.

Running to the bookshop to buy the previous three!!

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Dylan Thomas

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

‘The Uncommon Reader’ by Alan Bennett

If there is any pleasure in being a frequent customer of the British Rail is the number of hours you can devote to reading. I’ve been coming and going between Plymouth and Leicester and it has given me the opportunity to catch up with some reading. The Uncommon Reader is a very short book that fitted perfectly in one leg of the journey and made it extremely pleasant . What a funny delightful story, full of irony and criticism hidden behind its supposed lighteness. Highly enjoyable!

‘Lord of the Flies’ by William Golding

Northop Frye in The Educated Imagination uses the metaphor of a person cast away in a desert island to explain the three levels in which the mind operates,  how it interacts with the world and how these levels are expressed in different ‘languages’.

I’ve been studying understanding of human imagination for my MEd dissertation and Frye’s metaphor of the desert island made me remember stories such as Cast Away with Tom Hanks, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Lord of the Flies. So back to the book I went but this time reading it in a completely different tone and I realised how absolutely terrifying the story is. It is the stuff of nightmares because it is not about the loss of innocence but its intrinsic absence. No horror stories and gore can compare to the terror that this story brings because you simply realise that the desert island may actually be just round the corner…

‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is just my second Ishiguro’s novel. After a memorable books, such as Remains of the Day, it is hard for any writer to live up to the expectations to their readers. Never Let Me Go is a novel that puzzles from the title to the the last page. It starts in a way that even makes you question if the meaning of a common word is really the one you have always known and taken for granted.

The story is quite surreal but it does not really matter because what is behind the plot is much more and this is exactly the writer’s story-telling skills and his ability to make us connect with the characters. It’s unsettling, disturbing and hauntly humane.

‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak

My good intentions of leaving novels for the period of the dissertation have not lasted long.  Having to travel to London twice in the last two months, I simply needed a book. I was attracted by the title and the good reviews it received but I’m sincerely disappointed.

The idea is simply brilliant – it’s quite original and the setting in Nazi German, even being a bit trodden is always engaging, the characters have a lot of potential to be developed but simply I felt that the story never took off. There are moments that you think that author will finally spread his wings and  take you there but is it is just a false alam and it falls flat again. Pity! Really nice idea which in the hands of a more gifted writer would have been a really good book.

To Marguerite [or to ...]

Matthew Arnold

YES: in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown.

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

 

But when the moon their hollow lights,

And they are swept by balms of spring,

And in their glens, on starry nights,

The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour;

 

O then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent!

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain–

O might our marges meet again!

 

Who order’d that their longing’s fire

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?

Who renders vain their deep desire?–

A God, a God their severence ruled;

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

And death shall have no dominion

Dylan Thomas

 

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

 

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan’t crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

 

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

Tears, Idle Tears

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

To J