octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

A mixed bag for me. There was one very short poem that really caught my attention ("Intestate") and I particularly liked the final section, "My Life With Arthropods", in which the poems' subject matter ranged from fleas to slaters, crab-lice to crane flies. The middle section, however, on a range of ancestor's wills, didn't - with the exception of "Intestate" - do much for me; I found it a little repetitive. For me family history bows to natural history I suppose.

I thought this was just astonishingly good. Not so much in the plot or setting, but in the characterisation. Kitty Fane is one of the most finely observed characters I've read in a long while - I remember a few weeks back, reading Maugham's Cakes and Ale, the introduction of which raved about the character of Rosie, and I didn't see it. Kitty leaves her for dead, in my opinion, and the less flattering but still acute sketches of Walter and Charlie are almost equally as good.

I don't currently own a copy of this book - have borrowed it from the library - but I'm going to hunt one down as soon as possible. It's a little master class of its own for character.

The problem with reading an introduction to a book (especially if that book has a reputation for being a classic) in advance of the book itself is that it colours the experience you're about to get. After Rosie was extolled in the intro as a significant fictional character, I expected a little... more. Don't get me wrong; I liked her, and I liked this book, but it was a very moderate liking on all counts. I'm just not quite sure what all the fuss was about.

I feel a bit bad only giving this two stars as, with one glaring exception, I have fond experiences of Narnia. But the sad fact is, every time I read this book - and I've read it several times, as a child and as an adult - I'm struck anew by just how dull I find it. I know! I'm sorry. It doesn't leave me in an active rage, as The Last Battle does, it's just... forgettable. Every time I think about reading Narnia, I always seem to forget about The Silver Chair, because when push comes to shove I just don't care that much about it. It could disappear from Narnian canon tomorrow and while I wouldn't rejoice I wouldn't miss it either. I probably wouldn't remember it enough to miss it, to be honest.

And I'm not saying that it doesn't have its good points. I certainly enjoy Jill more than Eustace, for instance. And I always found the giant interlude entertaining.

But the fact remains, even as a kid, I had mixed feelings. Puddleglum and his "I'm going to believe in Narnia whether it exists or not!" scene... it's meant to be triumphant and hopeful and I get that. Child-me was affected by it - but there was always an undercurrent that made even child-me uncomfortable and suspicious. Wishful thinking, the blind refusal to engage with reality... it's not actually a virtue. And when seeded into dullness... eh. Just eh.

I stumbled through this in my quest to read the Henries, and really quite liked it. I'm afraid I didn't care the tiniest bit for Pistol and company - apparently they're supposed to be funny but the only time I found him entertaining was when he was getting a leek shoved down his throat. But mostly, I read this for Agincourt and was not disappointed. It's easy to visualise great battles these days, we've got computers to help us with Helm's Deep and so on. But I was interested to see just how Shakespeare was going to recreate Agincourt on a stage, with no special effects really, and only a handful of actors. And yet it's still amazingly well done; scenes shaped by limitation and yet rising (far) above them. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..." I suppose when you've got words like that you don't need cannons.

The book to which this is a sequel, The Solitaire Mystery, is one of my favourites. This, sad to say, is not. There are some interesting bits here - I particularly love the idea of a woman who looks exactly like the subject of two Goya paintings - but they are buried very deep down. Maya starts to gather momentum about 200 pages in, when the protagonist goes to visit the Prado, but it's a slog to get that far. The Fijian "summit" meeting is just plain dull. (Pompous and pontificating may be a better description.) I remember reading Sophie's World and being amazed at the ingenious ways in which Gaarder wrote about philosophy. He does not have the same gift for writing about science, and this book, though it gets an extra point for intelligence, is woefully self-indulgent and flabby about the edges.

There's one fantastic image in this that I really love - a river flowing backwards from the sea, filled with mussels the size of a man's fist. That one's going to stick with me for a while.

This book has an interesting structure. It's almost as much linked short stories as novel, but brief stories, almost sketches in some cases. I liked the structure a lot, but with the exception of the story/chapter about Pig Twenty, I found it difficult to connect emotionally with the characters. It's made me want to learn more about the mythological figure of Angus, though.

I really enjoyed this. Henry's wives have always been more interesting to me than Henry himself, and Anne of Cleves is my favourite wife, so it was good to see a book so focused on her. What bumped this up to four stars for me, though, was the truly excellent treatment given to Katherine Howard, who I've frequently dismissed (with justification, it must be said) as a total airhead. But Gregory has given her a voice so compelling, so realistically shallow and good-natured and ignorant, that it was a positive pleasure to read about her, poor girl. Just fantastic characterisation.

If, when I'm done with them, the Henry plays don't all blur together into one giant Henry amoeba, I'll remember this one as the one full of vicious idiots. I've tried, I have, to like someone - anyone! - in this, but these power-hungry fools are as greedy as they are short-sighted. It's like a very slow train-wreck, but does that stop them? No, it does not. I wondered, halfway through, and irritated almost enough to throw the play down, if that was Shakespeare's intent: to fill the audience with disgust at all this backbiting. My opinion of the play promptly went up, but I was never sure if that was actually the case. Because I've certainly misread at least one of his intents, which was to negatively portray Falstaff as a miserable coward. Which he seemed to be, and good for him - I wouldn't want to die for or with any of these people either. Rather than contempt, however, he has my congratulations for his good common sense, which I don't think the Bard meant for me to feel so I could have read him wrong on the disgust as well.

That being said, the passages between Talbot and his son - poor brave idiots that they are - are extraordinarily good, and the play's worth reading for them alone. And I did enjoy the irony of getting rid of Joan of Arc (although her characterisation was monstrously prejudiced) only to replace her with Margaret, another problem-causing French woman. But I can't be too sorry, because the English all pretty much deserve it.

I think this is my favourite of the Shakespeare plays I've read so far. It's certainly a lot more focused than some of the other histories, and I really appreciate that - for once! - the truly incompetent, selfish, grasping arse that is the king is booted from his throne by his nobles, and has to walk through a crowd of jeering commoners, all of whom he's done his best to grind into poverty for what seems largely to be reasons of pure self-aggrandisement.

I felt satisfied that Richard II got his, is what I'm saying. Granted, my knowledge of English history is sketchy at best so his successor could be worse for all I know, but for the moment I'm basking in justice done.

I think what I like best about this is the characterisation of Richard. I've read arguments that after he gets deposed he becomes more sympathetic, and my library copy has a pencil note in the margins of the deposition scene (written by someone else, I'm not a vandal!), that when Richard is being urged to read a list of his sins says "Actually feel quite sorry for him - for a moment". Well that moment is more than I give him, because the genius of his characterisation is that while it can be interpreted as him becoming more sympathetic, it can also be said (and this is my argument) that he's just as monstrously self-centred as ever. Sure, the tenor of his me-me-me changes from a crippling sense of entitlement to a hysterical desire to be as pitiful as possible, but in the end the subject is always the same. I mean, he's telling his wife to leave him and spend the rest of her life telling old people "the lamentable tale of me" which says it all, really. Whether as king or as the most unfortunate wretch to ever exist he's got to be the centre of people's attention - as if poor Isabel didn't have better things to do once this millstone was removed from her neck. There's no concern for anyone else, ever. No empathy at all - you'd think someone with even the tiniest capacity for reflection would wonder, even if only for a microsecond, if the commoners had a genuine beef when he experiences them cheering Henry and chucking rubbish at him.

I have never seen such a sustained lack of self-awareness in fiction. It is both astonishing and fascinating.