My Weekly Book

You really would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after having been tricked so neatly by Archbishop Cranmer into risking life and limb in the service of a king who despises him, Matthew Shardlake would have had the good sense to stick to his resolution made at the end of Sovereign never to get involved with court politics again.

Yesterday I bought and read, within the space of about an hour, a little copy of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van. It’s an amazing tale, and if I didn’t know for an absolute fact that it is true (I remember seeing newspaper reports) then I would have had trouble deciding whether it was fact or fiction.

The task of summing up my reaction to the whole of the ‘His Dark Materials‘ trilogy is somewhat daunting, and I am coming to the conclusion that one read is simply not enough.

Having finished Ursula le Guin’s The Other Wind I would say that my overwhelming impression is interest in the insight it gives into the creative process.

I think I’ve put my finger on what it is about Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife that left me feeling a just a little bit underwhelmed. All the reviews I’ve dug up say it either suffers from or succeeds in spite of something they call ‘middle book syndrome’ and I think that is spot on.

This was a truly inspirational find. I’d not really come across Graham Swift before, but will certainly seek out more of his work. It’s an odd mixture of fictional autobiography, murder mystery, local history and natural history in a part of the world that we are tangentially familiar with. It raises questions about the nature of history and of the authorial voice – the whole story is an attempt by one man to explain and perhaps justify pivotal events from his own past.