The reading programme, which is of course no such thing, goes into the low key mode of returning to Elizabeth Bishop's genial letters while we await the arrival of the new Arundhati Roy novel, which I await with some trepidation although it is an essential item to at least try.
Twenty years ago, The God of Small Things was a major event. I was enormously confident of its Booker Prize potential and, having previously insisted that some hapless clerk in Ladbrokes find me a price about The Remains of the Day, I decided it was the next literary dead cert with which to unload cash from the bookmakers. The only thing that prevented me was that it seemed such an obvious prizewinner that I thought the judges might perversely award it to something else so another good thing got away.
But twenty years is a long time and more than enough for both Arundhati and I to have changed, not necessarily in the same direction, and so I don't know what to expect but it is not an option to not pick it up as soon as it arrives and find out.
Meanwhile, I have been enjoying Hereward by Victor Head (Alan Sutton Publishing), an illuminating account of the last Saxon resistance to William the Conqueror post 1066, where we are re-acquainted with all those warlords, Harold Hardrada and Tostig, a re-evaluation of St. Edward the Confessor and Harold, whose side I always thought we were supposed to be on.
For all that we know so little about Hereward the Wake, who was named after a steam train I used to watch as a small boy in Nottingham going under the bridge near our house, all grime, muck and smoke but heroic, it is surprising what a picture can be reconstructed from the writings of those who wrote things down in the C11th, including Florence of Worcester.
Quiz question for future use, What was unusual about Florence of Worcester and Julian of Norwich. Florence was a bloke and Julian was a lady.
But Hereward, a boisterous boy who has his own 'lost years', probably abroad learning the craft of slashing and slaying, did all his resisting and marauding in the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire, determined to offer a last bastion against Norman culture, the enrichment of the English language and, presumably, all that fancy cuisine.
What a guy. A serendipitous find in a Cirencester charity shop, these interludes in the real reading list are by no means any less rewarding than the proper business.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
