I confess in my time to having disgraced the game of golf with my feeble attempts to bash a white ball more than a hundred yards in a straight line. The addiction's obvious to me, at my level the majority of shots will dispirit and darken my soul but just once or twice per round there's a shot that makes you think that there's a glimmer of hope in keeping at the game after all. It's sporting crack, and just as ruinously expensive if you're capable of losing as many games as I. It's always good to know one of your favourite authors was a fellow sufferer, and if he never picked up a club in his life, The Clicking of Cuthbert demonstrates PG Wodehouse had the invaluable quality in a writer of being a convincing fibber.
It's near pointless describing what I love about Wodehouse, mostly because it's liable to be much the same as everyone else does. I could bore for hours on his genius at constructing literary farce with an incredible lightness of touch. I could say how it's the construction and maintenance of a perfectly realised little world with laws bordering on the inevitability of physics relating to how things will turn out, particularly when aunts are involved. An England that probably never existed, but along with early Waugh, seems the default image of the English inter-war years. And even his willingness to take a chance on writing for Mills & Boon. No matter the characters - Psmith, the inhabitants of Blanding or Jeeves and Wooster - you know roughly what you're going to get. A perfectly constructed story from a man whose style defines literary elegance.
Wodehouse's golf tales do benefit from a certain knowledge of the sport, but it's not absolutely essential, particularly when the golfing slang he uses here had changed so much over a century. Golf is merely the backdrop to the usual sort of story Wodehouse wants to tell, uniting couples against unlikely social odds in the titular story and The Rough Stuff, providing a solid chap with a triumph over a blackguard in Ordeal By Golf and an upstart getting his comeuppance in The Heel of Achilles. Only the last story, The Coming of Gowff, varies from Wodehouse's usual themes, telling a golf story in the style of the Arabian Nights.
It wouldn't do to fail to mention the Oldest Member here, who narrates all but that last story. He's undoubtedly a stereotype of the type of old member who'll happily bore fellow members over a snifter in the bar, but in Wodehouse's hands he's another well rounded comic gem, albeit not as likable as Wodehouse's better known characters thanks to his garrulous nature. Like listening to the Oldest Member then, it'll pass some hours but it's hardly essential and best left until you've exhausted Wodehouse's better known works.
Showing posts with label Mills and Boon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mills and Boon. Show all posts
Sunday, 7 August 2011
Monday, 7 April 2008
Dubliners. Because I don't just do lowbrow...
I think of myself as widely read - not well read, because I think of that as a near impossible feat, there'll always be authors and/or genres that elude even the most catholic reader, whether it be scary doorstops such as War and Peace and Ulysses, Jeffery Archer's potboilers, Eastern European literature, ghostwritten celebrity cash ins, science fiction or the much derided Mills & Boon romances. There just isn't the time (nor breadth of interest) to try everything. But there's plenty of 'classics' I haven't read, either through allergy to other works (Sense and Sensibility's just a tad too smug for me to contemplate any more Jane Austen) or just not getting round to them (the likes of D.H. Lawrence). James Joyce fell into the latter category for me, reading his earliest 'classic' would decide whether I'd got the interest to proceed to his more notionally imposing works.
Dubliners is a collection that's far stronger than the sum of some fairly insignificant parts. It's almost a trial run for Ulysses' panoramic portrait of a Dublin day, using snapshots to build up a picture of a lively city, drawing these snaps from all ages and social strata. It's the former that lens a structure to the collection, the protagonists moving from a child experiencing the concept of death for the first time that to the most famous of the tales here, The Dead, a man realising a truth about his wife late in life. The concept of death in both the first and last tales lends a symmetry to the collection, evoking the circle of life. Each tale hangs on an epiphany for the central character, built up to by the events of the story. Some epiphanies are more important than others, particularly the ones toward the back end of the collection where experience allows the character to grasp the consequences of their revelation more, the stories therefore being richer. The likes of Eveline cover ground already trodden a thousand times, but then it's largely the case that the lack of life experience means younger characters are less dramatically interesting, particularly when they know little outside Dublin's city boundaries.
The Dead is clearly the standout story here, the theme of the dead always being with us haunting the dinner party and main character. Despite being by far the longest tale in the book, it doesn't feel like the longest to get through. Of course, that might just be a consequence of it's position as the finale. Personally, my favourite was A Little Cloud, since I could certainly relate to the thwarted literary ambitions of the protagonist, although in my case those are due to cowardice (and yet I'm blogging - go figure! Maybe the cojones are there after all) and, aside from The Dead, the poignancy of A Painful Case and late comic interlude of A Mother, seemed most successfully realised. For me it's at its least successful when dealing with the then hot political issue of nationality, important in establishing a sense of place and time, but of less interest or importance today.
I'm a fairly fast reader but Dubliners took me a fair while to get through, it's a combination of Joyce's deliberately simple language and the stories increasingly having the weight to demand that they be reflected upon. My edition was cursed with an overlong introduction (informative but could've done with losing a good ten or twenty pages from fifty) and overenthusiastic footnotes (the contextual notes about period Dublin were handy but when it goes so far as to tell what the Wild West was, it's going a long way overboard. but then I'd rather have too much context than no context, particularly when the city's as much a character as any of the people in the stories. Worthwhile, but despite the simplicity of language and story, don't expect an easy read.
Dubliners is a collection that's far stronger than the sum of some fairly insignificant parts. It's almost a trial run for Ulysses' panoramic portrait of a Dublin day, using snapshots to build up a picture of a lively city, drawing these snaps from all ages and social strata. It's the former that lens a structure to the collection, the protagonists moving from a child experiencing the concept of death for the first time that to the most famous of the tales here, The Dead, a man realising a truth about his wife late in life. The concept of death in both the first and last tales lends a symmetry to the collection, evoking the circle of life. Each tale hangs on an epiphany for the central character, built up to by the events of the story. Some epiphanies are more important than others, particularly the ones toward the back end of the collection where experience allows the character to grasp the consequences of their revelation more, the stories therefore being richer. The likes of Eveline cover ground already trodden a thousand times, but then it's largely the case that the lack of life experience means younger characters are less dramatically interesting, particularly when they know little outside Dublin's city boundaries.
The Dead is clearly the standout story here, the theme of the dead always being with us haunting the dinner party and main character. Despite being by far the longest tale in the book, it doesn't feel like the longest to get through. Of course, that might just be a consequence of it's position as the finale. Personally, my favourite was A Little Cloud, since I could certainly relate to the thwarted literary ambitions of the protagonist, although in my case those are due to cowardice (and yet I'm blogging - go figure! Maybe the cojones are there after all) and, aside from The Dead, the poignancy of A Painful Case and late comic interlude of A Mother, seemed most successfully realised. For me it's at its least successful when dealing with the then hot political issue of nationality, important in establishing a sense of place and time, but of less interest or importance today.
I'm a fairly fast reader but Dubliners took me a fair while to get through, it's a combination of Joyce's deliberately simple language and the stories increasingly having the weight to demand that they be reflected upon. My edition was cursed with an overlong introduction (informative but could've done with losing a good ten or twenty pages from fifty) and overenthusiastic footnotes (the contextual notes about period Dublin were handy but when it goes so far as to tell what the Wild West was, it's going a long way overboard. but then I'd rather have too much context than no context, particularly when the city's as much a character as any of the people in the stories. Worthwhile, but despite the simplicity of language and story, don't expect an easy read.
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