Conclusions

I'm feeling quite pleased with myself for finishing all the books I intended to finish before fasting month. (Starts tomorrow!) Indeed, I got a little extra in by way of reading Leon Garfield's The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris, still being on a bit of a roll from his Apprentices. Adelaide was the first of his novels I read and, possibly for that reason, remains my favourite. I remember being utterly flummoxed by how good the first pages were - how beautifully written and how funny - and thinking that what was classified as fiction for children might just have quite a bit to offer. This time round I see no reason to moderate my judgement in any respect.

I also emerged from another re-read, of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, with a sense of added appreciation, although I think he begins to run a little bit out of steam in the last hundred pages. Or perhaps it's just the ambition of the venture and the size of the numbers involved that sort of overwhelms. But the last chapter pulls everything together. Bryson's amusing yet melancholy sense of mankind's instinct for simple destruction therein makes for salutary reading.

And I found echoes of that in The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin is a wonderful companion and extraordinarily enlightened for his time concerning judgements on matters of race, religion and nationality, but his casual attitude towards killing the creatures he observes (and observes with a degree of attention that suggests a deep sense of love) is bracing to say the least. At one point he biffs a fox over the head with a geological hammer in order to take it back to some museum to have it put on display having marvelled at the fact the beast was observing the human activity below it so closely it was unaware of the great naturalist's approach. Somewhat disturbing.

The icing on the cake of all this was reading the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin in sequence and getting a sense how individual favourites (so many!) fitted into the overall development of the poet. It's striking how each of the major books seems to improve on its predecessor, culminating in High Windows. I see a move from the abstract to the concrete as being the crucial factor in this development, though that oversimplifies a deceptively straightforward writer. Oddly though I can't say I share critics' almost uniformly high regard for the uncollected Aubade. Yes, on its own it's a fine piece, but coming to it at the end of the volume I couldn't heretically wonder if the fear of death bit hadn't become a bit overdone. I preferred the verse written for Charles Causley's birthday (which set me to thinking that a sequenced reading of Causley's own Collected might not be a bad idea post-Ramadhan.)