Browsing the Bookshelves

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

I loved this book but I'm having difficulty capturing in words why I liked it as much as I did. It's gloriously written in vivid, engaging style; it's utterly believable with a range of eccentric, warm characters; and simple but very effective story to tell. But that could be said of numerous novels which are nowhere near as good as this. There is something absolutely complete and very satisfying about I Capture The Castle. It won't challenge your beliefs, it wont stimulate deep thoughts, it probably won't even extend your knowledge about anything in particular, but it doesn't need to. It has a quality all of its own which somehow infuses the book in a way that makes it both a purely pleasurable read and very rewarding at the same time. Think Josephine Tey does literary fiction. It is very English, very specific and very, very good. Highly recommended.

The Hound in the Left Hand Corner by Giles Waterfield

I enjoyed this book from start to finish. On the surface it's the story behind a particular Gainsborough painting and the mystery behind the hound in the left hand corner of the painting which does look quite right. On another level it is a spoof very loosely based on Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream - all frame by the Gainsborough which portrays an 18th century Lady St John dressed as Puck! There are multiple layers of deception both within the painting and the plot. The action takes place over the course of a single day, giving the book a very satisifying roundness. It's a light and easy read but full of black humour, wry and witty asides and ascerbic commentary on one particular aspect of the musuem world. At times, even, there are elements of slapstick humour - waiters and cheese come to mind. The characterisation is superb; a little stereotypical, but I'm sure that's intentional: for such a short book, the reader gets to know a remarkable number of characters very well and very quickly. Highly recommended.  After all, how can you resist a book with such a beguiling title>

A Passage to India by E M Forster

An elegant evocation of British India and the racial tensions which divide the colonizer from the colonised. Miss Quested, a young English woman in India for the first time, suggests that she may have been attacked by an ingratiating India during an outing laid on to please her. Amid the outpouring of racial distrust which her accusation sparks, the voices of reason and sense, and even her own doubts as to what actually happened, are completely lost. An Englishman becomes an outcast from his own for speaking in defence of an India and a kindly woman is rejected by her family for of speaking her truth rather than that of the British Raj. The events that follow, demonstrate Forster's view of the impossibility of friendships across racial divides; of unifying India as a single nation and of the duration of the British Raj.

Forster brings his own perspective to 'the India question; and is deeply critical of the British position. But this is not a one sided novel: it exposes uncomfortable truthes regarding India as much as it does uncomfortable truthes of Empire and Oppression.

Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes

There’s no denying that Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me is an absorbing, even compelling, account of one man’s descent from jealousy into obsession and ultimately to insanity.  Graham, happily and then unsatisfying married, falls for Ann, for whom he leaves his wife and daughter. With Ann, a sometime bit part actress seems to offer him the solace and companionship which Graham has just discovered that he’s been lacking all these years. By then, through the offices of his bitter ex-wife, he happens to see a film featuring, albeit briefly, Ann.  He becomes obsessed with her past, convulsively gathering evidence of her former liaisons and boyfriends and even passing acquaintances. But he can’t leave it there: and what he imagines his wife did before she met him becomes worse that what she actually did. Sad, funny and disturbing, Barnes’ prose is as always, well-measured and quite elegant. Yet there is something just a little unsatisfying about this novel. Never quite convinced that Graham’s descent is totally self-driven, the reader is left wondering about the machinations of his friends and his ex-wife particularly: the questions surrounding their role are never quite resolved and yet too closely drawn to remain provocatively ambiguous.  Barnes has done a lot better.

The Battle of Dorking by George Chesney

George Chesney’s startling account of an imagined invasion and conquest of Britain by the Germans in the 1870s was born in the shock reaction to the very real, very swift and unexpected German victories in the War of Surprises of 1870.   Filled with regret for a nation destroyed and embittered by the passiveness with which the nation ignored all the warning signed, failing to take what with hindsight seem like obvious measure of self-preservation, a unknown soldier reminisces for history grandchildren upon his experience of the Battle of Dorking.  At once level, this short story is just a shocking and gripping account of a fiction overthrow of the country. But Chesney’s tale rewards a deeper reading as well, revealing much about contemporary attitudes to empire and fears for the future.  The nameless soldier encapsulates, in his regret, concerns over the squandering of energy and enterprise swallowed in the maintenance and expansion of Empire which so dominated England in the later years of the 19^th century. And he exposes a perceived fragility in the security of the nation: that England falls so easily to the Germans is ascribed not only to a lack of preparedness but also to an arrogance born of a belief in the natural superiority of English civilisation and culture and, particularly, to the brittle basis on which British economic prosperity was based. It is in these arguments that the reader cannot fail to miss potential parallels with today’s circumstances: a national prosperity based not on manufacturing or labour but upon trade, credit, services and other business which could so easily be diverted elsewhere.

This short story, just short of 50 pages, is therefore not only a sad and foreboding tale of glories lost, but also a telling and disturbing assessment of a nation reaching the end of line of credit in stability and security.  It is certainly a quick and easy read but it is at the same time both thought-provoking and memorable.