This is Beetroot
Reading 
23 June 2004, 00:31
omg three four reviews behind! This is untenable!
The Concubine’s Children by Denise Chong
Two reviews to follow!
The Sweet-Shop Owner by Graham Swift
It was on the coffee table. I’ve read his Last Orders.
I’m desperate to read lately. I read on the bus, and read walking home from the bus stop. The door at work sticks, and so does the door at home. After working late I have to use brute force to get out, meanwhile hot tears are starting and I’m in danger of missing my bus. When I get home it’s just slightly hard to get in. Hopefully I won’t slip into another dimension.
June 20
The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams
Ahem, not his best. Unnecessary, but not completely distasteful. Dialogue by Ian Fleming.
Adams somewhat bumptiously relies on stereotypes in this more or less contemporarily-set story: he makes his dark, foreign female lead (however fluent her English) tack Ja? and German phrases onto the ends of her sentences, and slips in this and that racially insensitive reference. Just not PC enough. Hence Swing reads a bit like a James Bond yarn.
I was really put off by the punning dialogue, which is in the same vein (but not as timeless) as that of a Heinlein romp. The dialogue just seemed upsettingly bad, and the language and story of quite a low level compared to his other works. Sigh.
I’m also left with the impression of a Midsomer Murders show, without the sexily understated gumshoes but somehow with the hokey theme music.
What Adams does quite well (if inadvertently) is to point out the sexism of viewing women as ornamental commodities, rather than as fully human and fallible creatures possessed of a sometimes dangerous agency. His hero makes this mistake, taking his lover’s beauty at face value and trivializing her life experiences such that he overlooks some very important factors in her makeup. These, however, are frustratingly left unexplained—perhaps because Adams trivializes her experiences too? Either that, or her course of action is completely implausible, rather than just somewhat implausible. Certainly a cautionary tale for people hooking up online!
(What I said before: This one was also a movie. He’s setting up a character similar to Pete McCormack’s Shelby (see below), but there’s a feeling of Robertson Davies about it—it’s probably Oxford.)
Well, the feeling was actually Jung (but the Shelbyesque hero is an incredibly self-assured geek).
Adams makes a successful, if not original, case for the place of the body and the erotic in Western culture and religion, but it’s all too broadly painted, as if he just didn’t write enough based on the initial storyboards. He does the same with the suspense element in the book; he’s alluding to and hinting at the mystery over and over.
There is some subtlety in the way he never directly refers to the facts of the mystery. This is of course Adams’ gift of euphemism in action, but this is spoiled by the constant foreshadowing. The relentless buildup (and the steeling myself against the coming Big Deal) ruined the suspense and decreased the emotional impact of the climax. To borrow a phrase from Maia (which he actually does once or twice, like an annoying Marion Zimmer Bradley!) and pun insipidly by imitation: it just doesn’t get the bull through the gate.
It’s also a dead giveaway that Adams profoundly disagrees with the hero’s moral choices. He’s failed in his characterization and in his attempt to create a compelling case. If you want some real ambivalence, go see Heavenly Creatures or Bitter Moon. If you don’t want ambivalence, read Beloved by Toni Morrison.
June 11
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali
I rushed through description and action in Brick Lane to get to the dialogue. I found it inexplicably delightful and fulfilling of a certain hunger.
(Partyway through:) I’ve just slunk through the half-literate epistolary portion of the book, not far off from the feeling of The Colour Purple by Alice Walker.
Last book read:
Shelby, by Pete McCormack
Totally weird; enjoyably odd, refreshingly candid about Vancouver weather, i.e. rain, as a backdrop for this local fiction. The ambivalently geeky, possibly autobiographical Adrian Molesque protagonist receives flashes of reincarnation-like identification with people past and distant. McCormack wipes the floor with Douglas Coupland.
I’m reading again.
Check out a few of my favourite books.
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