Reading and Raging (part 1) by Dennis Hamley

January and February are at present providing their annual mix of kaleidoscopic experiences in New Zealand and in this blog, spread over two months because it seemed to be getting out of hand, I'll be bringing some new observations on the topic of a piece I wrote last year: the great Christchurch Earthquake fiasco. But I'm also giving an account of the books I'm reading while we are away. Some of them have chimed in with so many concerns I have at the moment. Perhaps this may make the blog bitty and haphazard.  I hope not: it's meant to hang together.

Sorting out a reading programme is important when you go away. You enter a temporary world offering finite, specific, self-contained experience and it seems to me that the reading experience can have boundaries to match it.  Sometimes this works perfectly. We remember some books because of where we read them almost as much as for what's in them. However, sometimes an elephant enters the room and turns it into something completely different. This week's episode will end with just such tumultuous entry.

One of my aims this time was to read a good number of AE books, not only for future review but for sheer pleasure spiced with admiration. So, in between the guilty pleasures which make long haul flights bearable of revisiting PD James, Ruth Rendell and Donna Leon's wonderfully stroppy Venetian detective Brunetti, I've read Jan's latest Nelson, The Dreadful Havoc,and also Other People's Blood, a searing, disturbing work getting right into the desperate ironies at the heart of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

I've (at last) read Catherine's absorbing and fascinating Curiosity Cabinet and am also, again at last, well into The Amber Heart, marvelling at its scope, its humanity and its celebration of a coherent society long gone.

Bill's Death Ship and The Figurehead gave me huge pleasure. The Figurehead is a consummately plotted mystery, an evocation of a place and a society also long gone and a gallery of characters presented with extraordinary resonance.

 And here's one I finished earlier, actually on the plane coming here. Reb's Red Champagne is a wonderful 'journey as image' novel: I've already said on Amazon why I think it's 5-star.

And there will be several more AEs sampled before we're home.

Another resolve I made was at last to re-read AS Byatt's Possession. I wrote about this novel last month, saying how important it was to Spirit of the Place and how in 1995 the TES reviewer said Spirit read like 'a starter pack for Possession.' I didn't know if that was praise or put-down. I opted for put-down. By the time Spirit was published in 1995 I'd read Possession about four times, marvelling each time. She had created two Victorian poets, Christabel la Motte (with  resemblances to Christine Rossetti, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and Roland Ash (a bit of Tennyson, a bit of Arthur Hugh Clough and a lot of Browning). And she'd given them felt lives, a whole anthology of verse, a beautifully rendered forbidden relationship with unknown consequences - a superb recreation of Victorian art and society and a deserved dig at modern Academia. Oh, how I wanted to create my own poet whose verisimilitude could come somewhere near those. And how I wanted to provide a present day which could look coolly at far-off times and make them reach over into our worlds. (But if I'd known that round about this time Tom Stoppard was doing the same thing in Arcadia I might have thought twice about it!) In the fulness of time I'll put a detailed review of Possession on Eclectic Electric

However, even though I was thinking about the book again, I hadn't read it for nearly twenty years. Had my understandings changed in that time? Was it really as good as I thought? Here was an ideal holiday task. Completing it was a revelation. Possession was even subtler, even more complex, even more moving than I remembered. A virtuoso novel if ever there was one. The TES comment wasn't a put-down after all. It was a level of praise I couldn't have hoped for as well as being a very shrewd remark which got to the heart of what I was attempting. If by some amazing chance the reviewer reads this, then I hope she will accept my grateful thanks.

At that moment, the elephant entered the room. A book already in the house, borrowed from the local library. It was thick, meaty and demanded to be read. This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein.

I think it's very hard to live through this particular juncture in time without feeling that 'we are here as on a darkling plain/ swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight' in a world where 'the best lack all conviction while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity.' I suppose we're all under a cloud of possible impending disaster, feeling impotent rage because there doesn't seem anything we can do about it.

There have been straws in the wind which might just alter this impotence. From Harrys' Last Stand through Owen Jones's The Establishment and how they got away with it and Thomas Piketty's book on economics (I haven't read it but it doesn't stop me from agreeing with it) and several more, there seems a stirring in the undergrowth as if worms are turning and, as far as worms can, biting back. Nancy Klein's book goes several steps further than any of them, even giving the worms some teeth..

And that's where Christchurch comes in, with its unique demonstration in miniature of the world we are heading for if not already in. Things have moved sinisterly on since last year. And, in an indirect but very real way, all the books I've mentioned above comment on it, unwittingly and obliquely, but tellingly none the less.

To be continued in my next.