moosifer jones's lair & grouch – online home & blog of Mags L Halliday

A series of interconnected stories of life and sex in the city, predating Bushnell by a decade.

Slaves of New York
Tama Janowitz
(Picador, 1987)

I tried to read this short story collection before, but put it down as the first one seemed to be trying too hard. All “look at me, talking about dicks!”. Whatever. On a second attempt, I realized this was a set of stories about dreams and realities in New York. The recurring characters are, for the most part, now recognizable as hipsters: urban artists, bands who never quite break through, etc.

Jewelry designer Eleanor recurs the most. She’s a small-town Pollyanna, desperate to believe she and her boyfriend are on the cusp of success. She’s just so…wet. Though the description of her work at the end made me think of this stuff by Margaux Lange (hattip to Kelly Hale). Are we meant to read her as deluded? Or does the upbeat end of her story mean she is really going somewhere?

Janowitz’s jagged, brusque prose sometimes seems like her characters: pushing so hard to be edgy that it becomes all style and no substance. It’s a style that suits short stories, but can make them disengaging. The collection’s seems laid out to reinforce that.

A boy born at the moment India became independent again, Saleem Sinai, acts as a symbol of his country’s character: at times magical, venal, banal and violent.

Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
(Jonathan Cape, 1981 – I read the Picador paperback)

Salman Rushdie’s Booker winner got a hard time recently, as Fresh Meat‘s Vod laid into it. Clearly not a fan of magical realism. I loved the stories within stories and the fantastical elements, such as Saleem being able to telepathically link together all of the children born at the moment of independence.

I do think the novel loses its way somewhat – like the amnesiac Saleem – in the forests of the 70s. That may be a side-effect of making a single person carry the narrative symbolism of an entire country’s history. Or it may be because the earlier historical sections are granted more context whereas the sections set during the Emergency are so contemporaneous to publication that Rushdie – through Saleem – doesn’t think it necessary. Or in part it could be that my own knowledge of 1940s history is more rounded than that of the 1970s: I was previously unaware of the Bangladesh Liberation War, for example.

Overall, a book I wish I’d read sooner, when its magical tricks were fresh and new to me.

In which Scarlett O’Hara attempts to win back Rhett Butler. Because Scarlett learning her lesson at the end of Gone With the Wind by being denied her soulmate is just too gloomy.

Scarlett
Alexandra Ripley
(Pan Books, 1991)

Perhaps the most annoying element of this brick of a book is the “so it is” portrayal of the Irish. The romanticisation of the Deep South in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 original can be excused as nostalgia for a long-vanished age. I’m not sure even that justifies its reactionary views, but at least Mitchell packed in the action, and had a stunning set piece at its mid-point.

Scarlett lacks such a background, and crosses the Atlantic in search of an equivalent. Scarlett herself promptly forgot the lesson she learnt in the fog in Atlanta, and goes after Rhett just as she went after Ashley. The portrayal of Ireland in the 1870s is just a bundle of laughable clichés, covering every possible stereotype of the Irish. And it shows a political naivety by treating the fight for an independent Ireland – a fight that was still killing people in 1991 when she wrote this book – as equivalent to Mitchell’s romanticised Deep South.

I liked it as a bodice-ripper, but it left an uncomfortable impression.

I have a backlog of books to review, never forgetting the epic ‘to be read’ bookcase (aka where GJ plays librarian). So in an effort to clear it, I’m experimenting with reviewing each book in under 200 words, excluding the key book info.

The reviews will also post at 8.30am. Not because I’m free to post then, I’m not. Just for consistency.

I am, of course, looking forward to the next series of Sherlock. Bizarrely, I’ve not seen the current big screen adaptations. I think I might be so far down the rabbit hole of non-canonical Holmes that I’ll never return.

The West End Horror
Nicholas Meyer
(Coronet, 1977 edition)

Meyer is considered one of the better non-ACD Holmes writers, in part because The Seven Percent Solution brings makes explicit Holmes’s drug addiction. And in part because he nails Watson’s voice.

The West End Horror is a check list of late Victorian theatre. George Bernard Shaw hires Holmes to solve a murder in the West End. Then a chorus girl at the D’Oyley Cart is killed, bringing in Gilbert & Sullivan. Oh, and there’s Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Ellen Terry as well.

The overall plot is enjoyable, with some horrifying scenes played out with just the right sense of Watson holding back whilst trying to be as honest as possible. But that checklist is the problem – whereas the use of Freud in The Seven Percent Solution is integral to the plot, this reads like name-checking. Of course, the London theatrical world was – and is – small. A murder investigation will connect to some of the most famous people of that time. But it feels more fannish than previously, as if the desire to have Holmes meet X is greater than the desire to write a good Holmes story.

Still, it’s an enjoyable one, and worth getting for any Holmes fan.

Another photo update. Here’s the latest compare/contrast for the garden. Mid-March (left) to late-July (right).

The seeds in the narrow bed didn’t grow, so donated veg seedlings went in and I now have a courgette slowly obscuring the path. I had a session the weekend after I took the right-hand photo, so the path is a lot clearer. Grass has been colonizing the cracks in it, and I’m encouraging it as it softens the edges for tiny feet.

The bikeshed is done, but totally obscured by the kerria.

Some detail…

These red rudbeckia from Thompson & Morgan were repeatedly flattened by ring collar doves, but eventually grew strong enough to survive.

These snapdragons were six plants for £2 from B&Q, marked down as they were flagging.

Back in May the foxgloves went mental in the main bed.