My personal
reading has its own ebbs and flows -- some days I only want to read to
escape, other times its heavy on the non-fiction, sometimes its nothing
but biography. As it turns out, my recent reading list has been
strongly Anglo-centric. All three of the latest books that I have read
were written by English authors with English settings.
Enigma by Robert Harris
When a law librarian colleague needed some brain
candy to read during a trip to England she picked up this paperback.
Upon her return she suggested I might enjoy it. It turned out to be a
quick, enjoyable read. The protagonist is a rather weedy mathematician
who at the beginning of the novel is recovering from a nervous
breakdown brought on by a combination of amphetamines and the stress of
cracking the Nazi military codes. As with any good mystery things and
people are not as they seem and there are a fair share of twists and
turns along the way. There is a love interest, technology (quaint by
today's standards) and war-time English atmosphere. The bulk of the
story takes place at Bletchley Park, the headquarters for
British efforts to master the German's Enigma code. When the Nazis alter their
standard operating procedures the team of cryptographers race to save
three convoys that are sailing towards a wolf-pack. After finishing it I learned that the novel was made into a film of the same name in 2001. I missed it
when it came out and I doubt I'll be seeing it any time
soon because Netflix doesn't carry it.
Leopards and Lilies by Alfred Duggan
One of the dangers of wandering through the stacks of Gleeson (the main
library on the USF campus) is that a book title might catch your eye
and you end up with another book on your bedside table. I had never
heard of Alfred Duggan before reading this book but he turns out to
have been a best-selling purveyor of historical fiction in the 50's and
60's. This particular novel tells the story of a not entirely
sympathetic protagonist who tries to stay on the winning side of
English politics in the era of King John. It has all the grime and
squalor you would expect of the era along with castle sieges, plots
both political and ecclesiastical and a rigid class stratification that
remains a part of England to this day. The noblewoman telling the story
was married and a mother at 14, widowed soon after, and both a
cat's-paw and an instigator in ongoing court intrigues. This is the
sort of story that you can read and enjoy in a couple of evenings and
learn a little history in the process.
The Book of Dave by Will Self
This is the sort of book some readers will find totally unreadable
for many different reasons. First, there is the fact that it jumps from
the present to a dystopian future seemingly at random, then there is the impenetrable
dialect used in the future setting (a combination of cockney and
post-apocalyptic slang), but hardest to take is the unremitting anger
and bitterness of the the protagonist, Dave Rudman. Dave is a London
cab driver living in present-day England and making a general mess of
his life. His decline is both physical and mental; brought on to a
large extent by his divorce and loss of contact with his only son. At
his lowest emotional ebb he decides to distill all his anger and
frustration into the Book of Dave and then ensures that his rantings
will be preserved in a form that will outlive most contemporary paper
and digital works. The future is set in an England that has been
reduced to an archipelago of smaller islands by rising global oceans. The
inhabitants of this future England have discovered Dave's toxic screed
and have elevated it to the level of scripture. Some of the story is
silly (the priests of the future wear rear-view mirrors affixed to
their foreheads and view the world as if they were driving a cab) while
some of it is chilling (the treatment of children and women in a deeply
misogynistic future.) In the end Dave is redeemed in the present but
his kinder/gentler second work does not survive to the future and there
is no reformation for the followers of the Book of Dave.
