Reading 2024 - Stalled and Stubbed Out

 I went into a reading hiatus after: (a) getting becalmed in the middle of An Awkward Age by Henry James (I will go back to it, but I don't really read James for dialogue and quite frankly if anyone thinks Ivy Compton Burnett was an innovator in her dialogue-heavy approach to novel writing, An Awkward Age suggests to me that in fact she pinched the idea, lock, stock and barrel from Henry James); (b) beginning A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene and then taking it out of the house to read in a train or a cafe and losing it and feeling cheated and bereft and unable to start any of the many other books around the house. 

Except for those that come under the heading 'detective fiction', of course. I could begin them with no trouble but for some reason I don't count reading detective fiction as real reading, even though I love reading detective fiction - or perhaps because I love reading detective fiction and therefore think it can't be worthwhile? 

Anyway, while I pined for A Burnt Out Case, I read detective fiction. Since about the age of 10, this is what I have done when discouraged. I started with Conan Doyle. Years later I discovered Margery Allingham. Dorothy L Sayers became another favourite. I don't read modern detective novels in which perversions are graphically described. I am reading for comfort and escape and horrible tales of flailing and other horrors just leave me disgusted. 

One author I love very much is Simenon, in his Maigret guise. The world he writes about - mostly Paris streets and bars and unglamorous dwellings - is so carefully observed and vivid and yet there is no showiness to his writing. In fact I realise as I write that what I especially like about the Maigret books is that I get a sense of quietness from them. While waiting for A Burnt Out Case to turn up again, I read La Première Enquête de Maigret and Maigret et le Corps sans Tête. In the course of reading them, I was baffled by a conversation with a friend I studied French with who said it was pretentious to read the books in French, whereas I thought it was fun to get the added bonus of new vocabulary - plus the copies I found in a secondhand bookshop were in French, so I had little choice. One day I might be brave enough to read Simenon's non-Maigret novels, but I gather they will not be as reassuring as time spent with the slightly melancholy detective.

In between the Maigrets, I read two Agatha Christies, The Clocks and Five Little Pigs. Christie's style is absolutely nothing to write home about, her characterisation is paper thin, and yet I am totally in awe of her. Despite the limitations of her writing, it is impossible not to recognise her wisdom. Here are two or three insightful lines from the two books I read:

"Extraordinarily tatty hotels always have grand names."

"When discouragement sets in, it's like dry rot."

"She had the enormous mental and moral advantage of a strict Victorian upbringing, denied to us in these days. She had done her duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call her, and that assurance encased her in an armour impregnable to the slings and darts of envy, discontent and regret. She had her memories and her small pleasures, made possible by stringent economies, and sufficient health and vigour to make it possible for her still to be interested in life."

I also read some books about a bird watcher and his wife who become semi-amateur detectives. I thought the premise ridiculous but they were written by Ann Cleeves, who is the creator of Vera and of Shetland, and she is another extraordinary writer, capable of making up good stories, untroubled by worrying whether she is creating "literature". 

All these books were concerned with the murder of innocent human beings so I've no idea why they cheered me up. I suppose there may be something in the theory that murder/mysteries give pleasure because the reader experiences an ordered world being disturbed and then order being restored.

Sadly as yet order has not been restored enough for me to find my lost copy of A Burnt Out Case.