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Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

*contains spoilers* ‘The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial.’ David B. Morris. I have to say from the outset that I wrote more notes during the reading of this book than I have while reading any other text – which, given its wordcount relative to the likes of War and Peace , Don Quixote , Middlemarch , etc., speaks for itself. That so much can potentially be plumbed from so few words reflects, I think, both the philosophical depths of the content and its relevance to the experiences of those within our time. In fact, it is so densely packed with suggestion that questions and ideas kept irrepressibly springing forth. However, that may also have a lot to do with my own philosophical ponderings at the time of reading. This blog post will only pertain to a few, choice threads which specifically resonated with me; but, be assured, there is so much more that ...
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

*contains spoilers* It is tempting to say that if The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain’s Iliad , then his follow up, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , is his Odyssey . The earlier text, Tom Sawyer , published in 1876, concerns the fun but also frequently violent exploits of its titular character alongside his friends in and around the town of St Petersburg, Missouri (based on the town of Hannibal, in which Mark Twain – or Samuel Langhorne Clemens – spent his own boyhood years) between the years of 1830-40. This would make the American South in which the adventures were specifically situated, and indeed in which the book was written and published, pre-civil war (1861-5) and pre-Emancipation Proclamation (issued by Abraham Lincoln on 1 st January 1863). Whilst the former point on the context of the narrative is also very much true of Huckleberry Finn , taking place ‘forty to fifty years ago’ according to the frontispiece to the 1884 edition published in London by Chatto and Wi...
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The Chouans by Honoré de Balzac

*contains spoilers* The Chouans , the first of Honoré de Balzac’s many contributions to his panoramic narrative world, latterly titled La Comédie Humaine , should have been the text with which I began my likely long adventure through this author’s works. On a whim of sorts, I read Cousin Bette (1847), unaware of its place in the corpus; and then, once cognisant of the galactic extent of La Comédie Humaine , and as a way for me to gain a surer footing going forwards, I moved on to Père Goriot (1835), which appears towards the front end of the narrative arc. One constraint that exists at the outset for those readers who cannot speak nor indeed read French is that of accessibility to the words on the page in one’s given language. Considering the wealth of material to-hand, examples of translators either willing or able to step forwards to build those bridges over the last two centuries, and thus allow readers of other languages entry into the afterlife of the original texts (Walter Benj...
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The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

*contains spoilers* ‘NATURAL things affect us, by the laws of that connexion, which providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our minds. Painting affects in the same manner, but with the superadded pleasure of imitation; […] as to words; they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural things, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of these, and sometimes a much greater than any of them’. Edmund Burke from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The disparity between one’s experience and the words one uses in attempting to apprehend it in writing is a gulf that has proven a perennially yawning one. What number of words, if one had the time or the inclination, could so fully and accurately express an experience as it was? Or eve...
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The Secret History by Donna Tartt

*contains spoilers* History and fiction; story and narrative. In the telling of any tale, as events are given shape in the mind’s recollection, as they’re articulated in the utterances of one’s speech and writing – and even related in silences between – the lines separating history and fiction, story and narrative, become distorted. This is especially so with Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History , which, amongst a plethora of thematic focuses (such as: social morality in context and in isolation; the value and distinctions of [and between] the academic disciplines; how place and time have the capacity to shape us into something we believe to be unlike our ‘self’), confronts the ineffability of experience. Indeed, even under the highly-disciplined hand of the author, our narrator, Richard Papen, who communicates as if he were writing a book, sometimes questions the manner in which he’s portraying the key characters of his tale: ‘Reading back over this, I feel that in some respec...
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Le Morte D'Arthur (Volume 2) by Sir Thomas Malory

*contains spoilers* As I stated in my blog about Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (Volume 1), the complete text, consisting of all twenty-one Books, was published in its entirety for the first time in 1484 by William Caxton. Penguin Classics, however, are good (great, in fact) enough supply an updated version in two still lengthy but much more digestible and separate volumes. You can of course read the text in its more complete and original form in Malory: Complete Works (published by Oxford Standard Authors), but if you’re getting into the medieval tales of knight errantry for the first time, I’d suggest the Penguin editions as a reliable toe-dipper. It’s at this point, in Le Morte D’Arthur (Volume 2) , when Malory begins to address the issue concerning the title of the work: the actual death of King Arthur. But before everything begins to unravel, and before the knights of the Table Round descend into nihilistic and violent chaos, we are first reminded of what made this rather...
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Emma by Jane Austen

*contains spoilers* One of the first things that occurred to me on picking up Jane Austen’s revered masterpiece, Emma , was that I’d not yet read it! Honestly, Billy… But I made up for this piece of sacrilegious neglect on my part by diving eagerly into this text. Emma is considered one of Austen’s best completed works, ranging up there with her two most famous pieces, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility , though I think it is possibly the best of hers I’ve read so far! In her own estimation, Austen declared Emma to be a character “whom no one but myself will much like”, which is to some extent quite true. On reaching the halfway point in the novel, which itself comes about halfway through Volume II of III, I discussed Emma’s character thus far with a friend: “She’s really fucking annoying”, he said, and I didn’t completely disagree. And here’s why: Emma Woodhouse is spoilt. She’s constantly fussed over by her father (who himself regularly complains and requires attention a...
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