Random literary thoughts while hanging about in JFK Airport
- Now that I've seen this, I have firmly concluded that the fad for vampire/zombie mashups has not only jumped the shark, but jumped a slavering undead shark simultaneously sucking blood and chewing on brains. While shedding little putrid shark bits everywhere.
- As my sidebar indicates, I've been rereading Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, for reasons that shall be disclosed at a future date. (You may insert an insinuating eyebrow wriggle here.) Despite its formidable reputation, this is a good novel, although the second half, which has most of the thesis-y material, requires some heavy lifting. Mrs. Ward is very good on disappointment--desires unfulfilled, aspirations balked, dreams dissipated; she also convincingly represents the psychological struggles of people desperately trying to hang on to their orthodoxies. Unusually in a controversial novel, nearly all of the characters (with the exception, perhaps, of the stand-in for T. H. Green) have ambiguities and shadings. More conventionally, the novel reveals its more orthodox heritage from the controversial genre in its bookishness: the great changes all come through talking texts (although, again, Mrs. Ward largely avoids the pseudo-dialogism I discussed a couple of posts ago, and most of the characters' positions are intellectually incomplete). If I were going to teach the novel, I think I would do so right after Middlemarch, with which it is rather subtly but consistently arguing (and not just because both novels feature characters suspiciously similar to Mark Pattison, although Casaubon's descent from Pattison is more dubious than Langham's and Wendover's).
- I'm not at all a fan of the espionage genre--have nothing against it, it just has never interested me much--but after being intrigued by the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy trailers, I decided to read the original. On the face of it, this is a deeply uncinematic novel, since nearly everything of interest happens in George Smiley's head while he reads files. (It's not a novel written to be adapted...) However, given the famous TV adaptation, which I was too young to watch at the time (although, oddly enough, I remember hearing about it--perhaps my parents watched it?), the thing can clearly be accomplished. I know that Le Carre and various others have proposed real-life models for Smiley, but his methods and affect really reminded me of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown (well, Father Brown if he were not Catholic, not a priest, and married to an enthusiastically adulterous wife). I was most struck, though, by the air of sheer glumness and decay overhanging the whole thing--the sense that post-imperial Britain feels shunted aside.