The List

Laminated by my mother, stuck to the kitchen cupboard at the Flap. She's the red stars on the left, I'm the silver on the right!

A quick word of warning about Shantaram

"This is the most amazing book! I completely loved it!" raved my friends. It topped the bestseller lists, for quite a while. I was suspicious. My mum hadn't mentioned it, and she's quite a good literature barometer. I asked around to see if I could borrow it; it was already lent, there was a waiting list. It must be good! I thought. (Or maybe I thought, well, perhaps it is at least okay?)

It is not okay.


(Shantaram in a pile of holiday detritus where it firmly belongs.)

I am a literary snob. But you, Gregory David Roberts, are not a good writer. You may be a wonderful heroin addict, afghan fighter, criminal in the Bombay underworld, but your spiritual sap and horrendously tenuously linked words are just awful. One particularly memorable passage included one character introducing what was obviously a poignant memory for you about Indians filling up your showers by climbing up to the top of your house with buckets of water by having one character say to the other "Oh, I bumped into Prabu in town earlier [note to reader, these characters move in completely different circles and would probably not *bump into each other for a quick chat*] and he asked me to ask you about the water?" "Oh, the water?" you say. And launch into anecdote. Awful.

Winter time == blogging at home

So... it's been a long time. How the hell are you? I'm great. Got a tan, flown on a plane, read some books by the pool. I think I can be forgiven for the lack of blogging. But the last few mornings I've woken to find a bit of a chill in the air, the leaves are on the turn and we spotted a mouse near the back of the piano trying to hibernate... well, hello winter.

So, reading wise, a lot of stuff has happened. For one, I finished Henry James' 'Portrait of a Lady.' James tells the story of a highly spirited (the liberal's way of describing a headstrong woman in the nineteenth century) and principled American woman called Isabel Archer. She takes a bit of a tour around Europe, refuses a few suitors, inherits a fortune, and then ends up marrying someone rubbish.



It was all going so well until the marriage, for both Isabel Archer and Henry James. Up until this point, his characters are beautifully fleshed out and quirky, Mrs Touchett (Isabel's aunt) being my favourite as her odd manner was strangely familiar to me. The portrait of Isabel, as well, was wonderfully painted.

And then she fell in love. With what? Well, we're never really given a proper view of Gilbert Osmond, the antihero. We're told he is charming, and yet their early conversations don't have a great deal of spark, then they take a walk in a garden and suddenly she's telling her aunt that they're getting married.

Wait... they are getting married? It is at this point that Isabel Archer decides to completely alter her life course and this, for me, just completely broke open the narrative. There seemed to be no reflection, just a smattering of loved up pictures. Then Henry James skips forward a couple of years so that she can reflect on the bad choice she has made, which seems superfluous to me as a reader, because I still can't quite understand why she really made the choice in the first place.

What I do find interesting about the novel is more about the way a 'highly spirited' woman like Isabel viewed her marriage and her position in society (I'm getting all Greer-esque!). The marriage is really viewed as a high spiritual bond, that both Gilbert and Isabel are forced to abide by even though neither can stand it. This almost puts the modern reader at odds with Isabel's dilemma, as it can't really be reconciled with our current views.

The novel ends with Isabel returning to Gilbert after deciding to go against his wishes, pushing away a kiss from the eminently more eligible Caspar Goodwood and running off in a manner not unlike Charity jumping back into the pool in one of the endings of the eponymous musical, although I hesitate to say that for the fear that Henry James would turn in his grave at the thought of Isabel Archer being compared to a character being currently played on the West End by Tamsin Outhwaite.