Making a change

Monday, February 26th., Trinity Hall Farm, Hockliffe. 

The latter half of "The Queen's Necklace" is one of the finest examples of Dumas's skill, supreme skill, in handling a purely artificial intrigue. The complexity of it is only equalled by its perfect clarity, its diversity only by its unity and coherence. I have also been reading Gaboriau's "Lecoq" and its sequel (which is not a sequel, but he solution of the problem) for the Academy. It struck me as among the best of all detective stories. And the plot has a touch of Dumas at his most melodramatic and 'plotty'.

Only persons of imagination can enter into my feelings at the moment. I have spent two thirds of my life in a squalid industrial town and the rest in a city. I think I knew every creosoted block in Fleet Street, every bookstall in Shoreditch, and every hosiers in Piccadilly. I certainly did know the order of the stations on the Inner Circle. Also the various frowns of publishers, the strange, hysteric, silly atmosphere of theatrical first-nights, the stars of the Empire and the Alhambra (by sight), and the vicious odours of a thousand and one restaurants. And now I am here 'in the country'. Not many people can stamp the top of their notepaper "Watling Street, England".

Down in the village early this morning I entered, not without a certain self-consciousness, the village shop. I had read about 'the village shop' in novels; I had even ventured to describe it in fiction of my own; and I was equally surprised and delighted to find that the village shop of fiction was also the village shop of fact. It was the mere truth that one could buy everything in this diminutive emporium, that the multifarious odours assailed the nostrils, and that the proprietor, who had never seen me before, instantly knew me and all about me. Soon I was in a fair way to knowing something about the proprietor.

As I left the shop a flamboyant person of, I should say, travelling stock asked me if I wanted to buy a pony. I didn't.

A lamenting woman

Tuesday, March 12th., Chiltern Court, London.

A woman, an experienced and abandoned reader, lamented to me the other day that the domestic novel was disappearing. I could not agree. At any rate I, who do indeed glance at novels now and then in my spare time, have observed no sign of it. The great majority of novels have been and will be chiefly domestic in matter. Of course I am well aware what the lamenting lady meant. She meant that the old-fashioned domestic novel was disappearing. Naturally it is. The old-fashioned everything is disappearing and has been disappearing steadily for thousands of years. I expect to disappear myself at some time in the future.

And the most recent novel of Jim Crace, "The Melody", is domestic in nature though perhaps it would not be recognised as such by my recent interlocutor. There is not much to it. A formerly famous singer (Alfred Busi), widower, declining, living in a large old house where he was born and has lived all his life, is attacked (twice). He is further demoralised by the experience but is recued from collapse by the intervention of a young woman neighbour and a man who proves to be the narrator, though we never discover his identity. That is it in a nutshell. The novel has a dreamlike quality, is sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and I began to wonder if the whole thing was a nicely crafted joke. I enjoyed the book, but was not satisfied by it. Further reflection has led me to think it is an allegory of sorts but this may be me as reader grappling for an intent which the writer did not have. In any case I was able to persuade myself that this was a commentary on the decline of the West (Europe in particular), its failure to recognise the reasonable aspirations of those living precariously elsewhere, its suppression of the natural world, and its smug self-importance characterised by cultural 'superiority'. Crace writes well, as ever, and I particularly appreciated his delicate handling of Alfred's sexual uncertainties; in fact the novel is good as a general critique of ageing. Certainly worth reading.

At bedtime I am re-reading "The Count of Monte Cristo", in an English translation by Robin Buss. A very good translation of the complete novel. Buss introduces some modern idioms but only where these are useful substitutes for archaisms, not for their own sake. The story swings along at a fine pace - just the thing for night-time reading. Dantes has just escaped from his 14 year imprisonment and I am looking forward to rejoining his adventure later.