The Reading Diary

 The History of Writing is a brilliant survey of a vast subject. A few more chapters continued to amaze with paragraphs seeing whole languages come and go while all the time the relationship between the markings on the page and the sound made by speech became closer although it still hasn't and maybe never will align perfectly. Also, we are reminded that Greek came before Latin. Of course it did but if ancientness confers any greater respect then Latin is the junior partner.

But that can wait again. It's thrilling to read but, like a cheap film full of gratuitous shootings and car chases, cliff-hanging scenes and tawdry drama, I'm not learning a great deal from it, I'm only enjoying the thrill. I'm not going to come out of it fluent in Aramaic any more than anybody addicted to bad films is going to become James Bond, Wyatt Earp or an intergalactic superhero.

 

No, the deep impression made by Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait directed me almost straight to more Maggie O'Farrell to see if she's still such a good writer when not applying her very fine writing to the genre of historical fiction.

Perhaps one isn't quite as taken with the prose for its own sake of The Hand that First Held Mine that, one dare say, will bring together the two separate stories of the girl's adventures in 1960's Soho, including the legendary Colony Club, and some relationship dysfunction from more recent times but it's convincing in other ways and it keeps her in the very top echelon of that inadequate sample of contemporary fiction writers that I've read. They are so many. One can only try one's best.

Rather than bother the Portsmouth Library Service with bringing that and another one to my nearest, local library, I walked no more than half a mile more to fetch them from where they were and that's where I'll take them back to. The service they provide is sensational in our bleakly mercantile, business, profit-motivated, Rees-Mogg times but I like to help if I can. If I thought that getting them delivered to a library a few hundred yards nearer would help keep somebody in a job then I would but they might only be a volunteer anyway. 

 

I don't blame any of our writers these days for being 'bleak', if that is what they are. The optimism of The Beatles, the mini skirt, the transverse engine in Alex Issigonis's Mini, Concorde and the Moon landings in the 1960's are as effectively as far behind us by now as Dr. Johnson's C18th Toryism, which was well ahead of its time, and by the 1970's, there were darker sub-texts in Bowie, the Three-Day Week and the Sex Pistols.

But we must make the best of it as best we can. This is not an Age of Enlightenment. It can't be, not with Putin abroad, China apparently hard at work and Boris and Trump both hanging about hoping to make comebacks. It's not surprising if, like Hamlet, we have 'bad dreams' but it must be our job, those of us who can avoid living awful lives, to not do so. Or else we bring the overall average down.

I don't mean we should be (Boris) Johnsonian by continuing to 'party' while everyone less privileged is traumatized but we can keep reading books worth reading, appreciating things worth appreciating and hope that, if we ever do re-appear at the end of this long, dark tunnel, we carried something through it.