Whirlwind and Whimper Wednesday
Mar. 6th, 2019 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Henry Williamson is a frustrating writer. I guess you knew that already and are probably tired of hearing about it. NEVERTHELESS, here I am to talk about it some more. The Gale of the World has some of his best writing, when it comes to heartbreaking failed family relationships and heartbreaking fish fungus outbreaks, and some of his boldest, most ranting rancid lyricism. It's also chock full of Nazi apologism, and Phil being sad because people keep jumping to mean conclusions about him based on his Nazi apologism. It includes an entire chapter in which Phil gets a copy of Hereward Birkin's new book The Alternative, which is an exact copy of a book by the same name by HW's friend Oswald Mosley, so that Phil can write what is presumably the same review of it in fictional 1947 as HW wrote in real 1947 and the reader can watch. There is YET ANOTHER bright-eyed teenager who throws herself at Phil under the approving eye of her mother. She started out planning to study the Great War at Oxford, the better to understand her idol Phil, but now she thinks she would be better served by moving into Phil's cottage and doing all his typing for free. Because he's a master! Of writing! Then her incestuous father comes back and ruins everything. Life is terrible if you're not a bird, and even the birds destroy one another.
I was expecting this to take me more than a week to finish because I got very tired of Phil early on, but then somehow it didn't, and I am now done with A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight forever. What can I say? When it was good it was very, very good, and when it was bad it was horrid. In the end the melting polar ice caps bring an apocalyptic storm to the moors (heralded by thousands of flying ants descending onto a cricket match, in a handful of paragraphs more memorable than the storm itself). Phil and his little dog get struck by lighting trying to help some hobby pilots land. The little dog dies but Phil lives; his notes for a long novel sequence are destroyed but it doesn't matter, because the storm has broken a dam inside him and he can finally, FINALLY begin to write the truth with love in his heart for all men and women, seeing them as the sun sees, without judgment. THE END.
I also finished Elsie Disnmore, which I was somehow expecting to have more of a climax. Is it in the next book that Elsie converts her father by almost dying? This one is full of horrifying Horaceisms, but eventually settles into a warm pool of syrup when I was expecting a final crisis. Horace Dinsmore is the devil in human form and should not be allowed to talk to children unsupervised, let alone make up a lot of dietary restrictions for them and forbid them to sit on the floor because it looks sloppy. He's just nuts. Where did he get his ideas about total obedience? (Oh, right, he tells us: England, where they know better than to let children eat jam on toast before the age of 10). Poor Elsie fits right into the canon of isolated outsiders in children's lit, whether the rest of them like it or not.
What I'm Reading Now
Moving right along in 99 Novels - not chronologically for now but based on what I already have on my shelves— The Unlimited Dream Company (by J. G. Ballard) has to be read to be believed. I've already recommended it to two people, and I'm only on Page 21.
I'm also enjoying An Experiement in Criticism by C.S. Lewis, which might just as well be called A Treasury of C.S. Lewisisms.
What I Plan to Read Next
Here's where I need some advice. Should I stick to the 99 Novels theme with A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (acquired by accident of the the library's adopt-a-book shelf), read a SciFi Dudebro Classic (Neuromancer by William Gibson), or read Faust, a tale in RHYME by my gifted new friend from the past, J.W. Goethe?
Henry Williamson is a frustrating writer. I guess you knew that already and are probably tired of hearing about it. NEVERTHELESS, here I am to talk about it some more. The Gale of the World has some of his best writing, when it comes to heartbreaking failed family relationships and heartbreaking fish fungus outbreaks, and some of his boldest, most ranting rancid lyricism. It's also chock full of Nazi apologism, and Phil being sad because people keep jumping to mean conclusions about him based on his Nazi apologism. It includes an entire chapter in which Phil gets a copy of Hereward Birkin's new book The Alternative, which is an exact copy of a book by the same name by HW's friend Oswald Mosley, so that Phil can write what is presumably the same review of it in fictional 1947 as HW wrote in real 1947 and the reader can watch. There is YET ANOTHER bright-eyed teenager who throws herself at Phil under the approving eye of her mother. She started out planning to study the Great War at Oxford, the better to understand her idol Phil, but now she thinks she would be better served by moving into Phil's cottage and doing all his typing for free. Because he's a master! Of writing! Then her incestuous father comes back and ruins everything. Life is terrible if you're not a bird, and even the birds destroy one another.
I was expecting this to take me more than a week to finish because I got very tired of Phil early on, but then somehow it didn't, and I am now done with A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight forever. What can I say? When it was good it was very, very good, and when it was bad it was horrid. In the end the melting polar ice caps bring an apocalyptic storm to the moors (heralded by thousands of flying ants descending onto a cricket match, in a handful of paragraphs more memorable than the storm itself). Phil and his little dog get struck by lighting trying to help some hobby pilots land. The little dog dies but Phil lives; his notes for a long novel sequence are destroyed but it doesn't matter, because the storm has broken a dam inside him and he can finally, FINALLY begin to write the truth with love in his heart for all men and women, seeing them as the sun sees, without judgment. THE END.
I also finished Elsie Disnmore, which I was somehow expecting to have more of a climax. Is it in the next book that Elsie converts her father by almost dying? This one is full of horrifying Horaceisms, but eventually settles into a warm pool of syrup when I was expecting a final crisis. Horace Dinsmore is the devil in human form and should not be allowed to talk to children unsupervised, let alone make up a lot of dietary restrictions for them and forbid them to sit on the floor because it looks sloppy. He's just nuts. Where did he get his ideas about total obedience? (Oh, right, he tells us: England, where they know better than to let children eat jam on toast before the age of 10). Poor Elsie fits right into the canon of isolated outsiders in children's lit, whether the rest of them like it or not.
What I'm Reading Now
Disowned by my father— I had never been close to him and often fantasized that my real father was one of the early American astronauts, and that I had been conceived by semen ripened in outer space, a messianic figure born into my mother's womb from a pregnant universe— I began an erratic and increasingly steep slalom. Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography (I spent many excited weekends dialling deserted offices all over London and dictating extraordinary sexual fantasies into their answering machines, to be typed out for amazed executives by their unsuspecting secretaries)— yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique idenitity out of this defective jigsaw.
Moving right along in 99 Novels - not chronologically for now but based on what I already have on my shelves— The Unlimited Dream Company (by J. G. Ballard) has to be read to be believed. I've already recommended it to two people, and I'm only on Page 21.
I'm also enjoying An Experiement in Criticism by C.S. Lewis, which might just as well be called A Treasury of C.S. Lewisisms.
What I Plan to Read Next
Here's where I need some advice. Should I stick to the 99 Novels theme with A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (acquired by accident of the the library's adopt-a-book shelf), read a SciFi Dudebro Classic (Neuromancer by William Gibson), or read Faust, a tale in RHYME by my gifted new friend from the past, J.W. Goethe?
