Webb

More audiobooks: the good, the bad, and the funny

StuckinaBook All , , , 16 Comments

I don’t seem to be finishing many paper books at the moment, but I am tearing through audiobooks. If I continue at this rate, I might end up listening to as many books this year as physically reading them. Thanks Audible Plus! (Not a sponsor, but I’m open to offers.)

Here are three more that I’ve listened to recently…

Surprised by Joy (1955) by C.S. Lewis

I’ve actually got the book on my shelves, but I decided to listen instead. I thought it was about his encounter with Jesus and decision to become a Christian – and it is, but only at the end of what is really a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood. With emphasis on childhood. It takes us through his days at various different schools, and really delves into what makes these positive or negative experiences. Nobody has better expressed how awful P.E. is, and what a blessing it is not to have to do it anymore.

I really enjoyed this book, and Lewis’s gentle thoughtfulness. The only downside with the audiobook is that I think it would have been better in Lewis’s (presumably) Northern Irish accent. The fact that the narrator was English was particularly odd when Lewis was talking about feeling out of kilter in England, as an outsider.

Come Again (2020) by Robert Webb

One could hardly ask for a better narrator than Olivia Colman, and in Come Again she often juggles three or four distinct accents in conversation with each other. She is brilliant, but sadly the book isn’t. It’s about a middle-aged woman called Kate whose life has fallen apart in the wake of her husband’s death from a brain tumour that had been growing for decades – but with almost no symptoms. She wishes she could go back to when they met at university, and warn him. And one morning she wakes up to find out that her wish has come true – she is waking up on the day she met him, as a 19-year-old.

This part of the novel is brilliant. Kate is snarky, funny, and a complex emotional character. The book is often very poignant, as well as delightfully funny (though some tangents on Brexit and Donald Trump, while I wholeheartedly agree with Webb’s/Kate’s stance, don’t really cohere). The trouble is that it doesn’t work at all with the rest of the novel – which is about gangsters trying to track down a memory stick that exposes the secrets of a powerful man. The final quarter of the novel, particularly, is very weak – car chases, fights, and all sorts of nonsense that lets down all the emotionally sophisticated narrative that preceded it. If only an editor had spoken to Webb about not putting ALL his ideas in one novel.

The Adventures of Sally (1922) by P.G. Wodehouse

Oh, inject Wodehouse straight into my veins. What a delightful experience. The plot scarcely matters – it includes a surprise inheritance, various actresses, a theatre impresario, boxing, jaunts across the Atlantic, broken engagements, irritating brothers, love at first sight and all the other usual Wodehouse ingredients. Sally is funny, spirited, and with a lovely dryness. As usual, it is Wodehouse’s mastery of the humorous sentence that, time and again, makes this novel a hoot. I particular loved Ginger and his inability to translate his own brand of slang.

He glanced over his shoulder warily. “Has that blighter pipped?”

“Pipped?”

“Popped,” explained Ginger.

As before, anything you’d recommend from the Audible Plus catalogue? Do let me know! (I think I paid £3 for Webb’s book, but the other two were free.)

Very definitely Gone to Earth

StuckinaBook All , 91 Comments

I don’t give up on books very often, although I do it more now than I would have done before I started blogging.  I still feel a bit ungrateful towards the author, who has put months or years into writing a book, if I can’t be bothered to spend a week on it – but I’m coming round to the too-many-books-too-little-time argument.  (Giving up is distinct from putting it to one side and forgetting about it – it has to be a decisive action.)

When I do give up, it’s usually because I think the writing is too bad, or (occasionally) too confusing.  It’s rarely related to subject matter or character – although if I started a gory crime novel, I’m sure I’d stop reading that pretty smartish.

But I’ve never given up on a novel quite so quickly as I did on Tuesday morning.  Because I now have a 40 minute walk into work, I tend to read a book whilst I’m walking.  (Yes, I’m that guy.  Surprised?)   And I was a page and half – yes, 1.5pp. – into Mary Webb’s Gone To Earth before I concluded that I could not read any further.

I’ve read and re-read, and loved and re-loved, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, but I’ve not read any of the authors she was parodying.  Well, I’ve read some Lawrence and Hardy, and they’re on the peripheries of her satire, but I’ve steered clear of that peculiar vogue for rural novels which seized British literature in the early years of the 20th century.  Here is the opening of Gone To Earth, with my thoughts interpolated:

Small, feckless [oh, wasn’t that one of the cows in Cold Comfort Farm?] clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky [always cross out the adjectives first when editing, love] – shepherdless, futile, imponderable [oh… never mind.] – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears. [oh sweet mercy.]

[So, what have we established?  It was a cloudy day.  Right-o.]

It was cold in the Callow [oh, sorry, we’re not done with the weather – as you were] – a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill.  A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles. [Of course it did.  Purple is a very haunting, hinting colour.  Now, for the love of all that is pure, can we move on?]

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph [anyone else feel we’re wandering into heavy-handed metaphor territory?] – only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

[Is there an editor in the world who wouldn’t have rejected this novel by now?]

For as yet spring had no flight, no song, but went like a half-fledged bird, hopping tentatively through the undergrowth. [To summarise: it’s early March.] The bright springing mercury that carpeted the open spaces had only just hung out its pale flowers, and honeysuckle leaves were still tongues of fire.  [I think you’ve made your point, Mary.] Between the larch boles [oh good, more boles] and under the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb [can one wear a beautiful eye?], a brilliance of tint, that few women could have worn without self-consciousness.  Clear-eyed, lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight – a year-old fox, round-headed and velvet-footed.  Then it slid into the shadows.  [A sentence without adjectives or adverbs!  Mary, my dear, are you feeling quite yourself?] A shrill whistle came from the interior of the wood, and the fox bounded towards it.

“Where you bin? [oh, Heaven preserve us.]  You’m stray and lose yourself, certain sure!” [“certain sure?”  REALLY?] said a girl’s voice [or, indeed, ‘said a girl‘], chidingly motherly.  “And if you’m alost [oh no…], I’m alost; so come you whome. [no, ‘whome’ isn’t a typo.  In case you were wondering.  I wish it were.]  The sun’s undering [I wonder if Mary Webb had ever spoken to someone from the countryside?], and there’s bones for supper!” [YUM.]

[I finished off the dialogue spoken by the girl’s voice, but – truth be told – it was at that ‘You’m’ that I made my decision not to read on.  Isn’t this simply everything appalling you ever thought the rural novel might be?  Perhaps it gets better, perhaps I am doing Ms. Webb an injustice.  I, for one, certainly shan’t be finding out.]