Literature

I have just had the fleetingest of fleeting visits to Cambridge. It was very nice but also a bit wierd; I'm worried that returning in August is going to be excessively strange. I had a good time catching up with people and a hard time tracking things down in the UL, and got rather less done than I had hoped, but one of the things I did manage to do was to get my hair cut. Italian hair styles are rather bold and often seem to involve orange, so I decided to respect the language barrier and go to see Julian on King Street. I like Julian; he's a tad eccentric, and I find that relaxing. I went via Waterstones because Julian is always running late and I wanted something to read as I waited, so this evening I have indulged myself with good literature. First I read Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym, which is very funny. People compare her to Jane Austen, but she seems a bit more like E. F. Benson to me, another of my favourite writers, in that Austen is essentially quite nice at heart while Benson and Pym can be wickedly bitchy. I do sometimes find Pym's books oddly threatening; all those nice women who index the work of self-obsessed men and minister in other ways to their egos. But they do help me to understand the world of Anglicanism better -- at least that rarified branch you come across in academic or otherwise refined circles. I was brought up to treat vicars rather like teenagers; you respect and help them because they are having a rough time, but you don't let them get away with things -- in particular, they mustn't be allowed to expect to tell one what to do. In Pym's world vicars are like little demi-gods and have armies of WI women fussing about their needs. Let's all pause and think how nice it is to be alive now rather than fifty years ago, especially for women (though perhaps less so for vicars).

Then I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is very good and readable. I rather like that very rhetorical one-side-of-a-monologue style, like in the last Iain Pears book, or in narrative poems by Browning. The problem is that both these books were pacy and very readable, so that in the last six hours (not counting breaks to get on and off trains, watch an episode of Shameless, eat dinner, talk to my parents etc) I have consumed 13 pounds ninety eight pence worth of printed paper. (Though they were on 3 for 2 so I suppose really just nine pounds thirty something.) I will never be rich at this rate. Now I have Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, which should slow me down a bit. It's a two pound fifty little hardback from G. David, the home of shabby Trollopes.

In reference to that, here is a Pet Shop Boys song named after another Trollope novel, Can You Forgive Her? I remember reading it as a sixth-former, I think because of the song, and expecting to find the heroine, called Alice I think, unsympathetic and indeed unforgiveable, because I was expecting her to Give Up All For Love, something of which I disapproved strongly in my stern idealistic youth. But instead the ideal fiance whom she throws over is in fact also the man she loves, and she takes up with the unsuitable man even though she can see all his faults simply because she wants to get involved in politics and has no other way of doing so in that era, making her immensely forgiveable -- what she wants is a career, the poor soul. The PSB song introduced me to the idea that one didn't have to like rock, which blew my mind, because back then everyone seemed to listen to nothing else, though maybe I was just spending too much time with geeks -- I used to hang out at the local boys' school's after-hours computer club. (Fade to nostalgia...)