The blog "A Penguin a week": Karyn, a PhD student in Perth and a collector of vintage Penguins, reads and writes about them. She is particularly fond of Golden Age Mysteries (Michael Innesis a favorite) and forgotten writers of light humor and fiction ( Gabriel Chevallier (?) and Angela Thirkell).
When I dream of withdrawing from the world, my imagined retreat looks something like this. In fact, were I a believer, my vision of the afterlife would look something like this.
I was amused by this quote she gives from Innes, describing the works of his detective novelist hero:
The supernatural has no known rules, and nowadays we are comfortable only with rules. If we are to play our stereotyped games or make our engines work or keep fit we must follow the rules. Mr Eliot's later books are successful because everything is subject to rules which the reader knows. There is generally a puzzle which the reader can solve by means of the rules - and that implies that in the little universe of the book the reader is master. The books - though the reader is hardly aware of it - cater for the need of security. Real life is horribly insecure because God is capable of keeping a vital rule or two up his sleeve and giving us unpleasant surprises as a result.
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7 comments:
Excuse me -- "when I dream of withdrawing from the world"? How about "When I dream of completing a process that's already well underway"?
That illustration tells me why I'll never go 100% Kindle. I'm not totally over the urge to make a display of my possessions. The books of a favorite author lined up an a shelf, so you can tip your hat to them as you walk past -- that will never get old.
Clicking through, that passage actually seems to be the detective hero, Appleby, commenting on the murder victim, or potential victim, in the Innesnovel Stop Press -- which sounds wonderful, quite meta for a Golden Age book. Though probably a breeze on that level for the writer who was also J.I.M. Steward, author of elaborate, Anthony Powell-esque literary novels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._I._M._Stewart
"Famous writer, Richard Eliot, has written numerous detective novels, featuring 'The Spider', a daring, clever criminal in earlier books, and an equally canny private investigator in later ones. But when he comes to life - first to burgle an odd neighbour, then to harass the Eliot family, and finally to attend his own 'birthday party' - Inspector John Appleby is sent to investigate."
http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Press-Inspector-Appleby-Mystery/dp/1842327569
A Staircase in Surrey..... Probably the first and last time that YOU recommended to ME that I check out a roman fleuve by a British author about a lot of people who go to Oxford....
OP everywhere in the known universe....
The passage comes from another character speaking to Appleby and justifying her belief in all things supernatural. But it also seemed to offer an insight into the unusual approach Michael Innes takes to writing mystery fiction, and particularly the lack of an Ellery Queen-style puzzle with a unique solution. Stop Press is good, but I think Hamlet, revenge! was better.
I'm reading through all these old Penguins randomly, and I end up reading a lot of Golden Age mysteries because there are so many green Penguins on the shelves with intriguing titles and author's names with which I am unfamiliar. Lately I have been choosing Michael Innes fairly regularly, because of his book The Last Tresilians (written as J.I.M. Stewart and partially set in Oxford). I'm always hoping to come across another as interesting and well written.
And thank you for the mention.
The Staircase in Surrey Quintet, mentioned above, is set entirely at Oxford. I think it was Stewart's attempt at an Anthony Powell or Simon Raven-scaled epic; a high-British bid to out-Proust Proust.
Do you make it a point of honor to read each book all the way through? I don't think I would be able to read books randomly. My reading is mostly by association: each book suggests the next. I need to have reason, however slender, for picking up the next one. Without that I can dither for hours trying to decide.
When I started the blog I made that committment to myself: having chosen a book I read it to the end, and I write some kind of review of it. Erewhon, by Samuel Butler, is the only book so far that I wished I could return to the shelf.
I've seen Stewart compared to C.P. Snow without ever understanding the basis of the comparison. The Staircase in Surrey explains it.
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