The books I didn't finish in 2012

I discovered this morning that I'd read - and finished - 57 books in 2012.  That was a surprise...I thought it was only around forty.  But on top of this were the books I started and didn't finish.  There were probably a lot of these, but the ones I made quite a deal of headway with before abandoning them are the following:

Moby Dick again.  Enjoyed a good deal of what I read, but got bogged down when Melville started using the pseudo-Shakespearian style, and then listing all the information about whales that he could find.  Ahab seemed a false character too, which didn't help.  (I actually got further with this book the first time I tried to read it.)

Started Lilith (by George MacDonald) but didn't get far into it: very obscure as to what it’s saying amidst the fantasy.

Read about half of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino.  Interesting, but it seems almost like a collection of short stories strung together with a separate narrative, and not really going anywhere much.  It was one of those books someone raved over somewhere. 

Read a chunk of a biography called Kiri (te Kanawa) – only read the bits that related to London Opera Centre, and some of what followed. 

Began Little Dorrit and got quite a way through, but bogged down a bit; it’s very slow, and the characters aren’t as great as in many of Dickens’ other books.  Thought I might finish it, but it's not calling out very loudly to me. 

Read around half of Frank Baum, Creator of Oz by Katherine M Rogers.  Interesting and detailed, but for some reason it didn't grab me enough to finish it.

Read about half of Funeral in Berlin, by Len Deighton.  Good, but it all seemed a bit dated, somehow, and not enticing enough to keep on reading when I’ve got plenty of other books on my plate.

Read about half of  The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare by Robert Winder.  An attempt to write about Shakespeare and his crew coming together to write the last, missing, historical play, but the writing isn’t strong enough, and it’s all a bit overdone, and longwinded. Sorry, Mr Winder. 

Moby Dickens

Reading back to when I was last writing about Moby Dick I found there were three previous references to it on this blog. I decided I'd give Moby Dick one last go, as it's being broadcast, chapter by chapter, on a site called Moby Dick Big Read. Various readers, including New Zealand's Witi Ihimaera, are reading a chapter at a time, so there's quite a variety of accents and dialects coming through.  Today's chapter, number 15, is read by a laconic-sounding bloke called Peter Burgess, who doesn't distinguish in any way the different characters in the story (in this particular chapter only Ishmael the narrator, and the lady who runs the inn where chowder is the only thing on the menu). Tilda Swinton reads the opening chapter, so we have that famous opening line, Call me Ishmael, read by a female voice. Her accent, of course, is clean, clear Brit.  

Anyway, by this means Moby Dick might still get 'read' through before the end of this year, which will be something of an achievement. My aim to read some Dickens this year became a bit of a fizzer, for a patch, because Little Dorrit turned out to be a little boring, which surprised me. I think it's that the long-winded love relationship between Dorrit and Clennam is rather tedious. And Dorrit's self-centred father, while a brilliant portrait in its own way, presents a character who we can barely sympathise with. Anyway, I got about half way through before giving up.  

I decided I couldn't let the rest of the year go by without giving Dickens some more reading room, so I embarked upon one of his shorter novels, A Tale of Two Cities. My best memory of this book, when I read it as a youngish man, was that I couldn't put it down over the last hundred or more pages. And certainly it has suspense that I don't think any other Dickens has. Even my re-reading of it over the last month brought back that feeling of what's going to happen next? I knew that at the end Carton gave up his life for Darnay; it wasn't that aspect that was suspenseful, but the escape of the family, along with Mr Lorry, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher. This section has an unusually breathless feel about it, all the better for being taken at a cracking pace. (Why didn't Hitchcock film this story instead of one or two of the other historical films he made?)

Tale of Two Cities is probably unusual in two other ways, when compared to most of Dickens' books.  Firstly, there's the lack of comic characters, and secondly there's the reasonably well-constructed plot.  Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher verge on being comic creations (though Cruncher's tiresome tirades at his praying wife aren't in the least bit amusing), but neither of them can compete with the pantheon of real comics who appear elsewhere in the Dickens' canon. This story is strikingly serious. Yes, I know, most of Dickens' later works are more serious in tone - Two Cities comes between Little Dorrit and Great Expectations - but there are still comic characters in them; here, such characters don't even get a look in.

A still from the 1935 film version of Dickens' book.  

The characters in this book are still Dickensian, but they're Dickensian with some element missing. If they'd appeared in a different book, they would perhaps have had more room to expand. Here they seem to be so subject to the exigencies of the plot, that they have to get on and be their basic selves without any humorous element. The main female character, Lucie, is of course the same as most of Dickens' young female characters: totally bland and almost lifeless.  Dickens can tell us as much as he likes about how faithful and true and loving and perfect in every way she is, but we never actually believe it because she's never alive. The man who becomes her husband, isn't much better: he has a short scene early in the piece when he confronts his wicked uncle, but beyond that he does little of note. Sydney Carton, the erstwhile hero, lazes around most of the book being a man without any ambition in life, and suddenly finds himself late in the book doing something honourable. Though why he decides to come to Paris isn't ever quite explained. Lucie's father is somewhat improbable: he's spent twenty years in prison and has lost his mind (and loses it occasionally after being freed) but he then manages to go back to his old life as a doctor in the midst of the French Revolution, safe as houses from being touched by the revolutionaries and clear as a bell in his mind. 

The two strongest characters are Monsieur and Madame Defarge. Defarge is a man of few words, but his bulk and strength is palpable throughout the book; Madame Defarge says even less, but is terrifying. She's the one who wears the pantaloons, the one who runs the pub, the one who secretly signals to the innumerable revolutionaries (who all go by the name of Jacques) when there's a spy in their midst, and the one who comes close to bringing ruin on Darnay and his family. Dickens achieves the impossible in Madame Defarge's final scene, in which she struggles against Miss Pross who's guarding the door that may be hiding Lucie and her child. He has both of them speaking their native tongue (except of course that we read Madame Defarge's words in a slightly unusual English), neither of them understanding the other's words, but both aware of the other's intent. The achievement is that this scene is both comic and horrific at the same time; Dickens plays with the language barrier and with what each speaks while at the same time keeping us on tenterhooks as to how Miss Pross will prevent Madame from discovering that Lucie and Co have already escaped. It's one of the best scenes in the book.  

If the plot has any failing, it's that it's spread over rather a long period. It begins a number of years before the French revolution and gradually works its way towards that awful event in a series of leaps of time. However, this is a minor matter, really, given how everything in the book is racing towards those last wonderful hundred or so pages.   

Two Cities has a great deal in common with Barnaby Rudge, which is the other Dickens book that I did actually finish this year. Both are focused around a period in history that wasn't contemporary with Dickens' own day, and both are exceedingly violent. I'm not sure which is worse in this regard - perhaps Barnaby. The difference with Two Cities, I think, is that the violence is in the fibre of the book from early on, and when it explodes with its full force, it's all the more sickening for it. There's no doubt that Dickens could describe violent scenes with considerable skill; some of his strongest writing occurs in both these books in the scenes of mob rule. By contrast, both books offer too many pages of purple prose: in Barnaby these occur whenever Barnaby himself appears; in Two Cities they occur whenever Lucie appears. It's a Dickens failing; you just have to start skimming when these appear.

So what next for Mr Dickens?  Can I get through something else before the end of 2012?  It would be good to try one of the books I haven't actually read...

Odd phrases, J S Bach, Moby Dick and Miss Pettigrew

Just a little catchup on the HitTail side of things....the following four phrases are the ones most used to get to my site this last week or so.  And what an odd collection they are!

brownlee finland
mother armwrestling
esther muir plastered
steve jobs graduation quotes

Gerry Brownlee is the man in question in the first phrase: he's a politician here in New Zealand, and recently made a bit of a gaffe in regard to some comments given in Parliament about the country of Finland. Supposedly the Finns got very up in arms about the comments.  Quite honestly, it seems unlikely.  Do most of them even know where New Zealand is?

Mothers and armwrestling seem to be a bit of an odd combination, although there are some You Tube videos showing mothers armwrestling with their teenage sons.    Last time armwrestling turned up on HitTail in relation to my site it was to do with a man armwrestling his wife.   Not sure how the mother got in on it. 

Esther Muir was an actress who had a role in the Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races.  Like most women who wind up in Groucho's arms in these movies, she suffers considerable embarrassment at the hands of his brothers.  

I don't need to explain the last phrase.  Do I?

Yesterday I came across a site called Grooveshark.  It's a place where you can stream endless amounts of music, or buy it, if you wish.  Since it's Easter Weekend, I had a thought that I'd make an effort to hear Bach's St Matthew Passion.  I know a little of it, but not the whole wide mountain range of it.  Anyway, it's all available on Grooveshark, in several versions.  Curiously, the tracks from these versions are mixed up to glory, so playing them in the order they appear means you're hearing a random version of the Passion. This isn't an entirely bad thing, and some tracks get repeated straight away with a different choir and orchestra, or turn up further down the list.  I've just left the whole caboodle running for the last couple of days, when I've been here, and gradually Bach's music is making more of an impression on my brain than it has before.  

On another front, I'm starting to struggle with Moby Dick, the novel by Herman Melville.  I was enjoying it at first, when he was still writing an actual story, but he gets bogged down in side-paths, which, though they may be interesting in themselves, just feel like they're holding up the real meat of the book.  Ishmael ceases to be a character in the story, almost, and becomes just a narrator of events in which he often has no part.  It's taken a long time for Captain Ahab to appear, and when he does you rather wish he hadn't.  Keeping him mysteriously below decks on a permanent basis might have worked better.  He insists on speaking in a pseudo-Shakespearean mode, as though he wasn't living in the same century as the other characters.  Not only that, Melville starts giving 'stage directions', and these have a Shakespearean feel to them too, which makes the whole thing stop being a story and begin to be almost a piece of postmodern literature (and I'm not saying that in a complementary way). 

I'll persevere a little longer, in the hope that something actually happens. 

Last night we watched a film called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.  It was superbly designed: the colour coordination between costumes and scenery in particular was just wonderful.  It was pretty well acted too, given that most of it was a load of old twaddle.  I'm not really sure what it was meant to be about: surely not the idea that a young person can have a change of heart and settle down to a straightforward marriage after having had three affairs on the go at once and being in general a total twat. The change of heart wasn't convincing, because it was supposed to take place during one set of 24 hours, and be initiated by a woman who didn't appear to have all that much nous to begin with. Nevertheless Amy Adams did her utter energetic best as the ditzy girl; Frances McDormand did her best to turn from being a lifeless frump to someone who could let her warmth hang out and make other people feel all cosy; Ciarán Hinds played a bloke who designed women's lingerie but decided to go back to designing men's sox (don't ask me why) - somehow he fell in love with the McDormand character without anything much having clicked between them.  The inimitable Shirley Henderson (known for her role as Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter series, though she's had some marvellous parts in other films) played Ciarán's ex-fiancée, and was positively statuesque in spite of her limited height. She stole the show with her stylish playing, I felt, but her character was underdeveloped, and in the end had nowhere to go and dropped out of the movie. 

The sort of movie where you always hoped things would actually get up and go. Nope, they didn't.