I’m still dragging around even though I’m in bed before 9 most nights. When my monkey brain races into hypochondria, the fragment of rational brain I have left remembers that September featured a upward spike in workload accompanied by an equally charming upward spike in conflict, a less than restful trip to Nova Scotia, a couple of trips to the world’s friendliest dental office, and general misery in the world.
Given that my brain was thus diverted I’ve trundled my way through a relatively small number of books.
Droughtlanders‘ (a YA fantasy novel) use of Cirque de Soleil as a model for one social group was amusing but the woodeness of the negative characters less so. Mostly positive review here. An author profile here.
The Communist’s Daughter was disappointing and I haven’t quite figured out why. One of Bock’s goals was to write something similar to Robinson’s Gilead, an extraordinary novel, a book he calls a “cathedral”. Writing from the inside out, from a single character’s perspective, especially when the character isn’t particularly likeable, is a difficult art. And Norman Bethune was not a likeable man. Somehow between the reader and the fictional Bethune’s self-excusing voice there’s not enough of a gap, not enough possibilities of alternate voices, to make the book work. Reviews here, here, and here.
The Bullet Trick was an amusing enough mystery (reviews here) though I may have gotten more mileage from the occasional Scotticisms and its portrait of seedy Glasgow. For contrast, there was the cozy, reworked Christie found in Still Life set in the autmnal Eastern Townships.
Let’s see what else.
Consolation I enjoyed, though I suspect I’m one of the few people who would identify it as a profoundly regional novel in the same way that much of Atwood and some of Ondaatje are regional. (It’s a mytho-myopic peculiarity of Canadian literary criticism that books from the West or from the Atlantic provinces are typed as “regional” but books from Ontario are “Canadian”.) Interviews here and here.
And I’m still working on Kirkton. The slower pace demanded by 17th-century prose is nicely balanced by nuggets of Scottish turns of phrase. I think I’ve found the passage I need for the much-delayed-much-prolonged editing project but I need to make my way through the rest of it just to make sure. My favourite bit so far
In fine, the eagerness of their longing was so great, some would never cut their hair, some would never drink wine, some would never wear linen, tlll they might see the desire of their eyes, the king.
Weell: when time was ripe, there was a sort of parliament conveened in England . . . .
Not sure which I admire most: the “I’ll tell you a story” rhythm in the list of of things the Scottish Royalists would not do until Charles II came back or the precise puncturing of all that foolishness by “weell”.
