I didn't give up reading fiction entirely for the duration of my studies but it would be true to say that of all my interests reading fiction was the one that suffered most from my lack of time to enjoy it, especially over the past couple of years, and especially when the situation was complicated by the problems I had with my vision.
But now I can both see again and no longer need to feel guilt if I open a book that is unrelated to what I'm studying, I'm venturing back into fiction. I did of course join the Saturday Slaughters crime fiction book club at the library, but there were only two meetings before the summer break and then I had to miss the first one of the new session as it was the day after graduation and a) I hadn't been able to get hold of the book and b) our son was over from Toronto and you know it would have sounded a bit off to say 'lovely to have you here, but I'm off to listen to a bunch of people who are mainly still strangers to me discuss a book I haven't actually read'. Or is that just me?
Anyway we went instead to Geri's Ice Cream Parlour
where the OH had his usual chocolate mint concoction and Son No 1 had a peach based thing, and because it was almost the end of the season and Geri had no coconut ice cream in stock I couldn't have the Raspberry Ruffle, so I went for my default Hot Fudge instead. Although the marshmallows on that are generally only pink and white; I think the neon ones here are also a function of end of season-ness.
But I digress.
I wasn't sure where to start with my first forays back into fiction, as I couldn't really work up any enthusiasm for trailing round the library looking for books from the poster - although I will return to that in due course. Meanwhile I thought a good place to start might be with historical fiction, which I used to love and so I decided to look at the books on the Long List for the Historia Fiction Prize. Helped by the fact that I vaguely know the editor of the magazine.
Well, like all such lists when I went to the library half of the books they didn't have, and of the ones they did have most were out. I did however manage to get hold of four. Two hits, a miss and an undecided seems like quite a good result to me.
Let's do the miss first (because that's always the most fun after all). Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry. Should be right up my street since the central character is a psychiatrist in mid 19 century Boston and a large part of the book is taken up with his attempts to find better ways to treat psychiatric patients. However there is a central puzzle relating to one of the patients, a man the narrator encountered once before on an American Naval Vessel and who had been previously lauded as a hero for saving the officers and some of the crew set adrift in the South Atlantic alter a mutiny on board the ship on which he was serving at the time. If you haven't spotted the answer to the puxzzle before page 50 you must be reading the book while asleep, and it's written in such a slow and overwrought style that I totally lost patience with it. None of the characters are likeable and their interactions, while presumably meant to be deep and meaningful and coded in a 19 century way are actually just incomprehensible. The best thing about the book was its description of Nantucket Island and that took up about three pages. Feel free to read the book and disagree, I must be missing something since it did after all end up on a list of the twelve best historical novels of the year.
The one I'm undecided about is Lancelot by Giles Kristian. I must be undecided as I am still reading it, rather than having returned it to the library. But really why do historical novels in general have to be so long - and correspondingly heavy? The style here is much more straightforward and readable than Lowry's and the story, which begins with Lancelot and his family being harried from their small kingdom in France, is interesting enough. It also gives Lancelot and Guinevere a back story as they both spend a lot of their adolescence together on Mount St Michael before Guinevere is taken away to marry Arthur. It's not compulsive reading but it's not heavy going and the conversations and character relationships are much easier to grasp than the ones written in Lowry's faux elliptical and obfuscatory prose.
The first hit was Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield. This is the story of a mysterious child who is rescued from drowning somewhere along a rural stretch of the Thames near Oxford; of the three people who claim her as their own and of the stories they tell to justify their claims. Another 19th century setting, very well done, authentic but with the research very lightly placed. The prose is lyrical and beautiful but not pretentious or showy - a difficult trick it seems, from the number of people who fail to pull it off. Highly recommended.
The other hit was Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee. As this was the third of a series and I chose to read the first two first I'll make the series to date the subject of a separate post in due course, just mentioning here that it's an excellent example of the historically set detective story.
