Nathan Hobby’s blog

First this blog degenerated into Nathan’s reading journal, and then no posts at all. I’m sorry. It’s all been happening at my other blog, because a lot of my thinking and attention has been tied up with faith and theology.

I started rereading Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, because it was once a favourite book, but I didn’t finish it and I can’t explain why. Then I didn’t finish Richard Ford’s Men and Women either, and I can’t explain that either.

I read two chapters of G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assissi, but I didn’t like that at all. It’s something his tone - I get this in a number of books written in the first half of the twentieth century - that is so condescending, as if the reader wants to be lectured. He spends those chapters explaining what sort of biography he mustn’t write. It was written for the ‘layperson’ and I got the impression he wanted to give the layperson a good piece of his mind. I just wanted to know about St Francis, thanks. (And I don’t even like your detective stories.)

And now I picked up the Arabian Nights in this old companion volume that is just beautiful. If you flip it around, it’s got Aesop’s Fables on the other side. And the binding page is this sixties wallpaper style. The Arabian Nights are enchanting me. What sheer and beautiful craziness! A doctor lets his head get cut off and then talks back to the king after his head’s cut off to get his revenge. There’s fish which start talking when they get cooked and there’s all these interwoven repeating variations on themes, like the delay of death due to the telling of a story.

And Sinbad borrows from the Odyssey to tell the story of his escape from a Cyclops. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that.

I’ve stared reading Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. I can’t remember why I stopped reading it four years ago. I knew then that it was brilliant, but for some reason I didn’t have the energy.

His prose is exquisite; it’s amazing that such a brilliant writer has written about Western Australia, has walked these same streets as me. He evokes childhood with this preciseness of sensation and experience.

I feel sad thinking about Stow. He wrote four or five brilliant novels before he was thirty and then only a handful since. I wonder what happened. Why did he stop? Did he discover there were more important things to do? Or did his muse flee him?

A family legend has it that his grandmother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time. I must find out precise details from my Granny. I feel honoured to have a connection to him.

I’ve just finished re-reading part two of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Having got of prison early in exchange for enlisting, Robbie’s in the midst of wartorn France, with death and atrocities all around him. He’s retreating to the coast and trying to focus on Cecilia waiting for him across the channel.

It’s a strange juxtaposition after the single atrocity in the midst of the civilisation of the manor in the first section; McEwan never takes us quite where we expect.  

Towards the end of the section is the key to the connection:

But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no-one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there wasn’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts… You killed no-one today? But how many did you leave to die?(261)

The tide of blood in war, the constant atrocities, drown out that one atrocity, that one event that changed everyone’s lives back at the manor. When we learn, later on, that it’s Briony writing this, the juxtaposition of her crime and the war might make us think her innocent by comparison. Or at least dilute the magnitude of what she did. (Of course, she can’t forgive herself that easily but she’d like to.) 

I found this part less compelling, less insightful than the first part, but then the first part is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.

Spoiler alert

Few books make me feel so deeply as Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I’ve just finished re-reading the first part, and I’m devastated again.

As the party waits for Robbie to return and be arrested, we watch it through Briony’s eyes and it’s so very frustrating because I long to know about Cecilia’s rage at her note being shown around to everyone and her passion for Robbie. I long to know what Robbie is thinking. Such a heartbreaking scene: him coming out of the mist at dawn having found the lost boys, expecting a hero’s welcome, and instead this stony faced line of people waiting with angry hatred for him.

And in feeling so angry at Briony, we forget the worst sin committed here: Paul Marshall’s rape of Lola and then the cowardly warmongering snob’s silence as an innocent man is arrested for the crime. What an evil human being! This novel affects me so much that I hate him as I read, I hate the way he’s got between Cecilia and Robbie, the way he’s destroyed Robbie and Lola’s lives.

McEwan casts this villian so well by giving Marshall plausible pomposity and this delicious detail of him being the gleeful inventor of that disgusting counterfeit – compound chocolate – and his desire for war so that the demand for his chocolate increases.

McEwan is a writer who has such superb control and pacing. He knows how to create narrative hunger in the reader, and yet once he’s done this, he also knows the precise speed at which to release details to us to keep us enthralled and desperate for more.

Some people I respect a lot find the first part slow and boring. I wonder if this is because their experience of the world is too different to McEwan’s. For me, McEwan so precisely gets to the experience of being alive when he talks of his characters’ motivations and thoughts that I don’t mind if a perfectly ordinary day occurs. However, I also am always aware that some menacing event that’s about to change everyone’s lives is hanging in the air.

I wonder if my problem’s with the translation. I won’t ever know, because I never intend to learn Spanish.I like the themes of lost books, secret libraries and adolescence.  I love this mysterious figure of an obscure failed novelist named Julian Carax, whom a handful of fans obsessively seek. The book  feels like it belongs to the same family as some of my favourite books - Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, Nicholas Christopher’s A Trip to the Stars.