A Certain Slant of Light

I finished reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which I enjoyed very much ( Spoilers )

In short (and without spoilers), despite having some reservations in the middle I both enjoyed and admired this book: it took the things that I had reservations about and explored them so thoughtfully and with such emotional subtlety that it totally won me over.

Also I just love books where research rather than murder is the impetus for a mystery plot, although they’re hard to find. Other examples include Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time, Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass, and Barbara Michaels’ Houses of Stone - I feel like I’m forgetting another book that I’ve read in this vein, but it’s just gone.

Over on evelyn_b’s journal someone recommended Lucy Sussex’s The Scarlet Rider as another example of this genre (what would you call it? Literary/historical research mysteries?), so clearly I should look that up too.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, which might also be called “the book where Philip Marlowe never gets paid.” People keep offering him money, practically shoving it in his hands to make him take it, and he refuses and refuses and refuses, because… Well, it’s not quite clear why he does, which is part of what makes him so interesting to me. The books are in the first person, but nonetheless Marlowe is an incredibly opaque character. It’s not clear why he refuses the money or why he goes to such lengths to help out Terry Lennox.

It’s not even clear why he’s a detective. He doesn’t seem to get much joy out of it. Is it just inertia? This is the job he knows so he keeps doing it? There’s a nub of nobility left in his character, but given his absolute cynicism about the rest of the world, it’s hard to see how he hangs onto there. Maybe he knows he would collapse into existential despair if he couldn’t even believe in himself.

Or maybe it’s just sheer ornery cussedness. There’s a definite pattern where Marlowe makes his life harder because he’s decided he doesn’t like somebody’s face and refuses to cooperate.

I also finished Enid Bagnold’s A Diary without Dates, about her work in a hospital during World War I - well, sort of; there is at least as much nature description as there is description of hospital work. It all feels very dreamlike, and in the end that made it feel rather insubstantial to me, although very poetic.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started A. S. Byatt’s Possession! I’ve actually been getting through it at a fairly decent clip so far, probably because I read the first few chapters before, months ago. I think Roland and his girlfriend Val are both quite tired of each other, without either one wanting to be the one who initiates the break-up. They go on living together out of a painful combination of poverty and inertia and exhaustion. What’s the point of breaking up if there’s nothing better out there?

...I am placing my bets on Roland falling for Maud, his new clandestine research partner. But Roland won’t be the one to initiate the break-up; Val will leave him for one of the men she does typing for, a small apologetic angry smile on her lips as she tells him that she’s going and implies it’s all his fault.

What I Plan to Read Next

I am still waiting for the library to get the new American Girl book, No Ordinary Sound. It’s been out for like four months now! Why doesn’t the library have it?

Maybe the library is waiting for the second book to be released in order to buy them together. Never Stop Singing is coming out in late June, so hopefully that means the library will have both books soon?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Lisa See’s China Dolls, which I didn’t much like, sadly. Many of See’s books (possibly all of See’s books? It might not be a major theme in Peony in Love) feature loving but difficult relationships between women: May and Pearl in Shanghai Girls, Lily and Snow Flower in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. She’s clearly going for this dynamic again in China Dolls, but unfortunately the balance is tipped so far in the direction of “difficult” that it’s hard to see why they bother with each other.

Also, the book relied far too heavily on the fact that one of the narrators wasn’t telling the readers the truth, which is a device I find irritating unless there’s a really good excuse for it. The narrator is telling the story to her interrogators and therefore not telling it straight? Fine. The narrator is suffering from partial amnesia but telling us the truth as she knows it? Fine. The narrator is leaving out huge gaps of information because it’s convenient for the author? UGH.

It also means that the big reveal near the end falls completely flat, because there’s been this big betrayal and the character who made it trots out all these reasons for it. But we haven’t heard any of these reasons in her sections of narration, so it feels like she’s making it up to manipulate the others. We’re not supposed to think she’s lying to her friends and is actually a psychopath who gets her rocks off by pitting people against each other, but that’s the reading that makes the most sense.

What I’m Reading Now

Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which might be summarized “Maybe interwar Britain really was as gay as Jo Walton portrayed it in Farthing? I thought that making literally every single male character except the heroine’s father either gay or bisexual (and probably the father was just hiding his true proclivities from his daughter) had to be overstating things. AND YET.”

I’m much more interested in interwar Britain than Evelyn Waugh himself, but the book is good on both counts - although so far Byrne hasn’t convinced me of her thesis that Waugh wasn’t a snob; so far her main defense seems to be that he was, like, a hipster snob, being snobbish ironically. Okay then.

I’m also reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which is a mystery about literary and historical research. Why is this not an entire genre? I for once would read the hell out of it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been thinking about doing a Harry Potter reread. I read the first three books about five billion times when they first came out, but I haven’t reread any of it for years, because I found the later books progressively more disappointing. But now I feel a hankering to give it another go.