The English in wartime

So tonight I watched the last ever episode of Foyle's War on Masterpiece Theatre. I am very sad that it is over, as it was an excellent show. I'm very fond of Michael Kitchen, not to mention the other regular characters on the show. Unlike some mysteries, it always had a good mix of humour.

Anyway, it gave me a desire to read some good English World War II novels, of which I have not read many (the only ones I can think of involved children during WWII, and thus rather disconnected). I would be partial to ones about the normal life during WWII, rather than any fighting. However, I have just resolved not to read anything but the books I already own, so maybe it'll be a while before I read any.

It also got me thinking about how wars seem to bring out in the English even more than normal that peculiar quality that is Englishness. It's like that story (probably not true), of how after Churchill announced the war (or some similar statement) the power went out all over England, because everybody went to make a pot of tea at the same time. Anyway, I'd like to write an English WWII novel, but it would involve a lot of research--I figure reading some novels about it might be a good start. Who is to say whether this will ever happen.

I have today been introduced to the idea of a verse novel. I find it fascinating, and would like to read one.

A little bit of poetry

I sometimes think I like reading about books better than I like reading the books themselves. Among book blogs, I have for quite a while been particularly partial to Stuck in a Book, and yesterday discovered Oxford reader, which I am liking.

Yesterday I picked up again after two years C.S. Lewis's Narrative Poems, which I bought at a lovely little antique shop on Vashon Island 4th of July two years ago. The place didn't have a lot of books, but it had a fabulous collection of all the Inklings' work. Tolkien, Lewis, Charles Williams. So I went for the Narrative Poems, which I like very much and shall endeavour to finish this time. I got through Dymer (which was terribly confusing, though very lovely--I don't know if it would have been less confusing had I not read it in chunks two years apart), and Launcelot. I am now on The Nameless Isle, which I think I like best so far of these, at least in style. Though I was rather taken with the style of Dymer. But I can't help loving that rolling Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, with the profusion of alliteration. What could be better than this?

Then came a turn of luck.
On the tenth evening too soon the light
Over working seas went beneath the sky line,
Darkness came dripping and the deafening storm
Upon wild waters, wet days and long,
Carried us, and caverned clouds immeasurable
Harried and hunted like a hare that ship
Too many days. Men were weary.

Try reading it out loud. That may not be the best example, but it's pretty good.

Here's the beginning of Dymer:

You stranger, long before your glance can light
Upon these words, time will have washed away
The moment when I first took pen to write
With all my road before me--yet to-day,
Here if at all, we meet; the unfashioned clay
Ready to both our hands; both hushed to see
That which is nowhere yet come forth and be.

An Accidental Novel

So, I'm writing this novel. I call it my accidental novel, because it was accidentally begun, the main character was accidentally introduced, his sister accidentally died and left her son to him, there is a fair amount of accidental foreshadowing, and a lot of other accidental bits of plot that I didn't plan. Of course, I haven't planned any of this novel. It is a prime example of a story that takes over and begins to write itself.

I always thought that the novel I wrote last November was pretty unplanned, but I realize now that I had a pretty good idea how it was going to turn out. This one not so much. It's harder to write the less planned one, because I have to stop and figure out where I'm going next, but I think it's turning out much better. I think the plot is more successful, and since I didn't set out with a goal of where I wanted to go I can't be disappointed. And with the last novel, I had set out to have a lot of coincidences and incidents of small worldness, but this one has more of that by far.

My working title is Jude, or sometimes Hey, Jude. Jude, Prince of Tempest is tempting, but a little bit too obvious in its allusion to Hamlet. That's what the whole novel is, by the way. An allusion to Hamlet, and the title character is very heavily inspired by the portrayal of Hamlet by Shawn Law that I saw two weeks ago (and again, twice, last weekend).

We'll see how it turns out. The goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of this month, and to finish it by August 13th, exactly a month after I began. We'll see whether that happens. I have no idea how long it will turn out to be.

Our true intent is all for your delight.

I've just seen four plays in twenty-four hours. Three of them Shakespeare. All of them outside. I think that is quite the achievement, and I would go see three more tomorrow were I not just a little bit theatred out. This is all part of the Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival, which features a whole lot of plays performed outdoors in Volunteer Park.

Last night I saw "The Tempest", which had a friend of mine in it, and was quite excellent, and very funny. I liked that it didn't attempt to do anything novel with the setting, so they could concentrate better on the characters and the story. And it was truly a blank stage, which was neat.

This afternoon/evening I saw "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Wind in the Willows", and "Hamlet".

A "Midsummer Night's Dream" had a vaguely Vegas setting, so Titania had a big feathery headdress and at one point one of the fairies had a big white feathery tail. And Puck had a stripey purple waistcoat, shiny purple tailcoat, and a very nice hat. They had a very interesting set, which consisted of two vaguely bridge shaped blocks and a semicircle block, which were moved around in interesting ways. There was a pug! You could see their backstage, and we kept looking at the pug and wondering what it was doing there, and finally realized when it came on stage. They had music, and it gave the whole thing a goodly air of creepy circus, which was apt with the fairies. However, I thought Puck was the only fairy who really seemed unhuman, which bothered me.

"The Wind in the Willows" was entertaining. I've never read the book, so I can't judge on that front, but I very much liked Rat and Mole, and although it was a little theatrical for my tastes, it was still lots of fun.

"Hamlet" was excellent. Largely due to Hamlet himself. Watching him become increasingly mad was fascinating, and the way you couldn't always tell whether he was really insane or just putting it on, and how he was sometimes completely lucid and sane, and then would suddenly snap and start giggling madly and hopping up and down and jumping back and forth and all. He was always moving around, and for a while he was wandering around barefoot and disheveled, and he kept walking through the audience in a distracted manner. They made very good use of his costume changes: they were always subtle, but very effective.

The other character I particularly liked watching was Gertrude. Hamlet had a scene with her which is apparently only in one version of the play and isn't so often done, which was lovely to watch. I found her much more sympathetic than I would usually think of her.

Ophelia's madness was fascinating. She was in a nightgown, and wearing Polonius's vaguely cassock like thing, and throwing rocks around and calling them rosemary and rue.

Horatio was played by a woman, as a woman. I don't know that this really worked very well, and I always think of Horatio as being more subtle than was played. Rosencrantz was also a woman, which wasn't quite so jarring, but Guildenstern was double-cast as Laertes, which was jarring.

The ghost was well done. He was played by Claudius, and there were various of the actors stationed off to the sides of the audience, echoing some of his words, which created a rather ghostly effect.

Fortinbras was cut entirely (which I didn't notice until the last scene); I think the aim was to focus on Hamlet and his madness.

Next weekend I'm planning to see "Twelfth Night", and maybe "Romeo and Juliet".

Virginia Woolf, tricoteuses, plague

So, I went to Vashon Island to visit my grandparents and watch the fireworks for 4th of July, and naturally, went and bought more books. I have acquired The Letters of Virginia Woolf, volume 2--1912 - 1922, and a book on fairies and similar creatures which is a reprint of a 19th century book. I can't remember the title or author and am too lazy to look it up, but it's got fairies by country, which is pretty interesting. I read the Introduction to the Letters on the bus home from Vashon, and started reading some of the letters today. They are extremely pleasant to read. I should really get around to reading the rest of Mrs. Dalloway. I like how very frank she is about things that are usually skirted over in the time (or now). Things like sex--she counts the number of books she has read since she lost her virginity, which is just amusing. Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading more.

While on Vashon, I finished reading Kathryn Davis's Versailles. It paints (and this is very much the best word for it) a very representative portrait of the place, and if, like a portrait, it doesn't give you all the details just by looking at it, maybe those details aren't so important anyway. The chapters go back and forth between ones narrated by Marie Antoinette herself, ones that outline the architecture of Versaille, and ones that are little playlets featuring the characters. It's a lovely book, and like always, I find myself morbidly fascinated by all the mentions of the French Revolution--the tricoteuses, tiny toy guillotines. I suppose lovely isn't quite the right word.

I am now in the middle of Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis. I've previously read To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is utterly fabulous, and while this one isn't quite as enchanting it is nevertheless drawing me in very well, and managing to be almost equally fascinating in the different storylines in 2054 and 1320.

On children's books: John Bellairs

When I was younger, I absolutely loved John Bellairs' books, which were about a boy named Lewis whose parents died in a car crash (they always kill the parents), and who goes to live with his eccentric uncle in a big old house. The only bit I remember now besides this is that their neighbour was a woman who loved purple so much she had purple toilet paper, and that they were witches, and that Lewis had a friend who was a girl who always wore a beanie with pins from cereal boxes and such like on it. For ages now, I've been remembering these books, and remembering that I loved them, but without any idea of who the author was or what they were called.

So I went to the library today, and on a tour through the children's book section, I found them. The first one is called The House with a Clock in Its Walls. So, I'm reading it. And compared to some children's books I've later revisited, it is still really very good. I mean, it's obviously a kid's book, and the dialogue is a bit iffy, but the story is great and the writing is quirky enough for this not to matter too much. In some of the amusing phrasing, it reminds me a lot of Harry Potter.

I suppose I'll post again once I've finished it.

Man can do nothing without the make believe of a beginning.

It does seem a little silly to start blogging about one's favourite books with George Eliot, whose writing I don't enjoy very much. I've read about half of Daniel Deronda, and would like to finish it, and I rather admire George Eliot for writing the thickest prose I've ever come across, but it's not something I jump up and down about. There are, however, a couple of great quotes from her that I tend to use liberally. At least one of them I don't think I use with the meaning she intended it to have, but it's brilliantly apt if I use my own meaning.

So, I already have a livejournal, which I do post in with some semblance of regularity. But livejournal somehow is not Blogging, and there is something appealing about Blogging. At any rate, here lies literary squee, philosophical rambles, and probably my amusing forays into language (Example: in the French translation of Harry Potter, lemon drops seem to have become 'lemon Eskimos'. I haven't the faintest idea why, unless it is some strange idiom).

I have finished four books in the last two days, which seems highly creditable. These being Tam Lin (Pamela Dean, and about a fourth reread), The Summer Book (Tove Jansson, who is also creator of the Moomins--did you know they started out as an anti-Fascist political cartoon?), North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell), and Prince Caspian (C.S. Lewis).

Tam Lin, is, as always fabulous. Probably at some point I will post at length about it. The Summer Book was short and sweet, and in an interesting manner not at all my feeling of summer. It does convey summer very well, but it doesn't convey my summer at all, and it's interesting to find one that feels so different. The book is a sort of rambling series of vignettes about a six-year-old called Sophia and her dying Grandmother, who live on an island in Finland. I was rather amused to find the foreward was written by Kathryn Davis, who wrote that book called Versailles that I keep meaning to finish and that I just discovered I have two copies of.

North and South was lovely. I was not at all expecting it to end in quite the way it did. I don't mean in terms of plot, but it always rather interests me to see how people choose to wrap up a book. Whether in a long happily-ever-after sort of paragraph, or a vaguely pretentious sounding philosophical statement (my usual ending of choice), or a bit of rather amusing but apt dialogue. And I was surprised to find North and South going the way of the dialogue. It doesn't strike me as something that usual appears in Victorian literature. Anyway, I am quite confirmed in my fondness for Elizabeth Gaskell, who even when writing about grey dreary Milton, still seems to make everything terribly charming.

Once again, I find myself not particularly entranced by Narnia. I listened to Prince Caspian on tape in one go while sewing, and kept being completely astonished by how fast it went by. Yes, it's a short book, but most books that short take more time to do everything. I can just imagine what Tolkien would have done with it, and seem to remember that he never much liked Narnia. He had the same sort of complaint I do. After the vast mythology behind Lord of the Rings, Narnia comes off as flat. I think I would have liked it better had I read it when I was eight or nine.