After the return of a new series of The South Bank Show on Sky Arts, beginning with a summary of the joint, literally, careers of Sly'n'Robbie, it heralds a long overdue reggae revival at this address. It's not that it ever went away and The Pioneers, The Liquidator and Girlie, Girlie have been on the playlist recently with Gregory Isaacs still revered above all else but there's nothing like a new purchase to re-kindle an old passion. Lee Perry's Arkology will be worth having if only for this and we will see how three discs of mostly dub versions sound so long after the discovery of that esoteric art form.
I've looked up the chords on the interweb and reckon I could play Dreadocks in Moonlight after a fashion but not even the contributors to such websites claim to be able to decipher all the words.
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Sebastian Faulks' Where the Heart Used to Beat ended as movingly and impressively as was expected, the only problem with it being a suspicion that his facility to do such things makes one feel somehow his puppet or plaything, or that something ostensibly quite so mainstream and accessible can be quite so good. So, it isn't necessary for something to be ground-breaking, difficult or contrary to be any good. I'm glad we've established that.
After that, in this ongoing reading diary, I realized that 40 years ago, as an ardent sixth-form student of literature, I had bought compendium volumes of novels by D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell but not read them all. They are not books to read in the bath because if you happen to drop them they wouldn't half make a splash and then hurt you but it would be a shame to have kept them for so long only to ruin them. It's not practical to take them on the train, either.
But The Clergyman's Daughter was worth looking up, having waited so long in its spinsterly way on the shelf to be read. In three parts, one is lured by the first part into thinking it is just going to be about the trials and tribulations on the young lady in her role, trying to make ends meet in one little outpost of the Church of England. But then, at the start of part two, she's lost her memory, doesn't even know who she is, and goes hop-picking in Kent, homeless, destitute and reduced to the very basics of human existence. Her rehabilitation is via a teaching position in a desperate 'private school', run for profit, not education, where her worthy ideas are not appreciated by the proprietor. Orwell smuggles in three different critiques of the state of the nation as it was then, much of which is of course just as relevant today, while telling this story of a paragon of virtue. Perhaps it's not a great novel and it possibly belongs somewhere in between the fiction, like Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the famous polemical ones, and The Road to Wigan Pier. By some standards, Orwell might not be the greatest novelist but it was a tremendous read and I'd rather have him above many more highly regarded names.
From which I moved on to Flaubert's Parrot, yet another classic title that I've not read before although I am quite up-to-date with recent Julian Barnes. In contrast to the Orwell volume, this is a book that does fit neatly into an iside jacket pocket, which is a shame because I'm likely to have finished it before I go anywhere wearing a jacket when I'll want to read a book on the way.
