The Dark is Rising

Oh my god, what a joy to just sit and read this.  Pure pleasure.  I loved this book when I was 11 and just as much, if not more, at 46. I'm so glad that Philip Pullman's Belle Sauvage reminded me of this book and I'm sorry Philip Pullman, this is  better.   

The story is based around Anglo-Saxon and Celtic legends via a fight between good and evil forces all centred around a boy who turns 11 on the winter solstice in 1973. To make it even better it all takes place around my home walking patch the Thames Valley.  Yes, it's all a bit dated but for me it's as scary as The Hobbit  and makes  Harry Potter seem like Tom and Jerry. Unfortunately,  this book, like Philip Pullman's, just didn't have a good movie made from it so they have both suffered from marketing problems.  The cany JK Rowling retained director's rights over the movies so her unique vision has held the world bewitched for years. 

  It is an extremely descriptive book which describes the eternal battle of  dark and light.  It's based in a multi dimensional world and Will is the collector of 6 signs of nature to be held against the powers of the dark . The book takes place at the end of December into January, a time full of magic and melancholy.  And for anyone who finds this time of year a bit spooky, weird, depressing and exciting all at the same time...with the addition of  severe weather events, this book is perfect. 

    Susan Cooper writes like a dream. Her style is amazing and so many writer's of today must have started with the images formed by this book. In fact her writing style  is where this book excels for me. It's only as a walker that I realise that all the things I see now are so perfectly described in some novels.  This book describes the part of the world where I'm from with a  perfect dose of Christmas magic.

I have just looked at the artwork in the twitter feed for this book, which has been set up over the christmas period.  It's great.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/thedarkisreading?src=hash

La Belle Sauvage. Book of Dust Part 1

Time to resurrect my reading blog.  It's been a long time and this one seems like a good choice to kick it back into action!  I read the last installment of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' Trilogy 17 years ago so this has been a bit of a wait.

This was a beautiful hardback book with wonderful cover and stars/dust all over it and I was so excited about reading it, but to be honest it never really instantly grabbed me as much as the previous books.  I think it was just much slower and much darker and in places a bit dull.  But over the last 24 hours I have totally immersed myself in the last half and I really loved it.  Even though it was weird and has left lots of things unexplained it was a great read, like a mad Greek adventure moved from the Mediterranean to the River Thames . 

This book takes place 10 years before the original trilogy and explains how the heroine, Lyra, got saved and placed in sanctuary in Jordan College, Oxford. Obviously my first joy is that I recognise most of the places in this parallel universe of Oxford.  It's a watery world and The Trout pub, the peacocks, Godstow Priory, Wolvercote,  The Duke's Cut on the canal and the side streets of Jericho all feature.  Malcolm, the 11 year old hero of the story who saves Lyra, lives in the Trout and has a boring existence until he finds Lyra hidden in the priory and he gets involved with espionage against the evil magisterium. Malcolm is just a normal run of the mill lad and his side kick Alice is just a grumpy teenager with attitude but by the end of the book they have survived some immense and horrific  adventures.  That's what I love about Philip Pullman, the heroic  kids are just all so normal yet they all end up being so brave and doing amazing things. He really makes me feel positive about what all kids could do if given the chance!  The only thing that did grate though is that as the story progresses and the kids paddle down the river saving baby Lyra, Alice loses her feisty edge and becomes more of a mother figure to Lyra and more in awe of Malcolm's bravery and strength. (Lyra's nappy changing and feeding could have been shared between the two of them!!) I think old Pullman is a classic sexist underneath it all!

I loved the great flood and the way Malcolm's canal boat just gets taken down the river as Brytain begins to sink under water.  The weird little Islands and odd buildings he comes across are very strange.  The fairie scenes, water giant scene and odd ghost like places are straight out of Greek myths. They also reminded me of weird sections in the life of Pi and the last book by Susan Cooper in The Dark is Rising Trilogy.  But the adventure section was all a bit rushed for me and to be honest a bit flat...coz it was just one mad hurried adventure after another fleeing from the horrible, twisted villain and OH MY GOD what a great villain.  

People in this parallel universe have animals who are attached to them, they are called their daemons and these daemons represent their souls.  The animals change form constantly until the child hits puberty and then takes on one fixed animal.  Reading about people's daemons is a highlight of these books. I love them and the villain's daemon was awful.  A complete terror and what she does is gross too.  I loved the complex nature of the villain because he looked pretty normal and was very friendly and charismatic but his animal daemon was absolutely hideous...a really interesting mix for a character!! He was quite a complex and  disturbing character to be honest and I'm looking forward to learning more about the history of this twisted and dark man in future books!  Infact this book poses more questions than answers them.  It is definitely not a stand alone book and hopefully the next installment will throw a bit of light on lots of loose ends. in fact there were far too many unanswered questions for me, which was pretty irritating.

But I'm glad I've spent the beginning of my Christmas holidays enjoying this book.  I loved that I knew most of the places. Greek myths taking part on the Thames as it rushes through the Chilterns will always be high on my list of enjoyable things to think about. I'll be on the look out for fairies and Old Father Thames the next time I am out walking!! 

The Essex Serpent

Wow, I've been held in a trance!  I have read this book in less than two days and I have loved every minute of not being able to sleep or do anything much else, but enjoy this.   It helped that I ordered it from Bicester library and got a beautiful hardback copy. I always knew I wanted to read a massive hardback version of this book as I just love the cover. 

Weirdly , I have not been able to enjoy reading for almost a year now and I'm so glad that the spell was well and truely broken this weekend. 

This book was my perfect mix: science, religion, witchcraft,  the idea of freedom, poverty, love, friendship, magical  realism and the amazing natural world all mixed up into a story set in Essex and London in 1893. I can't really describe it apart from I thought it was really beautiful and rather strange. Unsettling and totally brilliant. 

I really felt that Sarah Perry was writing in that era. There were no anachronistic moments but even so there were so many relevant topics to today.  ( How to treat your children when they are different to other children, how to care for  veterans from  the war in Afghanistan, dealing with unscrupulous landlords and the definitions of the undeserving poor.)    In fact in some ways this book was a bit too heavy on the 'worthy ideas front' but I still loved it and the characters were brilliant.  I can still see the village of Aldchester in Essex and the Blackwater river as it hit the North Sea.  The natural world in this book is another character and I just loved the passages about light, water, clouds, moss, fossils and trees!   The love story is heart-wrenchingly romantic and the sections on religion and science were just beautiful.  The weirdness didn't bother me either.  I kinda liked the illness/ madness  which took over one of the characters.  Her blue tinged world was straight out of a gothic romance. I'm  glad I read it quickly.  This book was like a drug to me and I enjoyed every minute. I don't know if I would have enjoyed it so much if I had read it slowly. Parts of the plot might have irritated me but like this it was one big joy and I recommend this book highly!  Warning...it is addictive and wonderfully strange.   Think I might read bits of it again! 

Any Human Heart

Totally enjoyed this and I'm kinda sad to have finished it. I really have felt that I have spent the last month travelling  with Logan Mountsturt through his life and diaries  from 1923 ( when he was 17) to 1991 and his death.  I loved his early life stories, which he wrote about retrospectively, and the mad games he played in his school with his  2 best mates. It all seemed lots of fun, but highly competitive and crazy. Logan's 2 mates were his family really and it's sad to see how the relationships with his friends change  over his lifetime. THey all had a full life of promise ahead of them, but like real life Logan did not always take the life chances available to him. WHilst at other times his life took crazy turns and great leaps. All in all  Logan's life was the life of a survivor.  A life with lots of sadness, great happiness, and peopled with just a few people who he truely, truely loved and trusted. THat's what upset me about this book, how few people truely were loved by Logan. 

I had a love / hate/ infuriationwith Logan through this book. Getting inside the head of a rather pompous, lazy and privileged teenage boy/ middle aged man is not a place I travel to often but I kinda enjoyed it.  Duringthe Second World War things did tragically fall apart for Logan and seeing him slowly build a life back for himself was an emotional read.  His diaries are just so honest and William Boyd sure writes beautifully in his voice.  PArts of his diary made me howl with laughter and at other times I was in floods of tears. I also liked the quirky famous people popping up in this book, ( he met Picasso, Hemmingway Ian Fleming, Virigina Wolf...but these characters were always just sidelines and always highly obnoxious according to Logan!) 

 Logan sure did travel, see the world and witness a lot. He was born in Uruguay, studied at Oxford, worked in France, , went to the Spanish civil war and was nearly blown up, wrote a novel, spied on Edward Vlll and Wallis Simpson. ( They were amazingly foul characters!), ended up in solitary confinement in Switzerland for 2 years because of pissing them off.  Returned home to some tragic news in London, went to live in New York, became addicted to drink, drugs and extra marital sex, ran away to Nigeria and got involved in the Biafrian War of independence whilst finding peace as a Uni lecturer. Retired, came back to the UK as a poverty stricken pensioner, who was living off dog food. started selling German Left Wing newspapers to students and inadvertently ended up almost smuggling nitroglycerine for some German Anarchists and then finally luckily( phewwww!) ended up in some sort of semi-peaceful existence in France.  All a great read! 

  Logan lives an interesting life but more by mistake than by anything else.  I'm sure if I had met him I don't think I would have warmed to him at all or ever even given his life story any consideration but underneath Logan's annoying persona there were absolute pearls of wisdom written by him in this book. The thing about Logan was he had a strong spirit and he survived.  Many of his friends didn't. 

 His was a life, underneath it all, an ordinary life.  A life full of promise, adventures, great happiness, regret and deep sadness.  ULtimately a life like any of us.

 A highly recommended read!