billybookblog

*contains spoilers* In a daze on the Malvern Hills is where we meet our narrator, Will, who dreams a vision of Heaven, Hell, and Middle Earth in between, as represented by a tower, a dungeon and a green field full of toiling human folk, respectively. What follows is a journey of theological allegory and social commentary on the conflict between the demands of Heaven and the impulses of Man, which, of course, can come to no good at all. Written in the fourteenth century, circa 1370-90 (there are three texts, A, B and C – the edition I read was a recent translation of the supposedly more poetic Text B, by A.V.C Schmidt), ‘Piers Plowman’ absorbs and questions the suppositions of some of the most profound texts on the nature of being and doing, including Cato’s ‘Distichs’, St Augustine’s ‘On the Trinity’ (after two millennia, someone must now be able to work out what this “Trinity” guff all means, surely…), Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’, and Jacobus a Voragine’s ‘Golden Legend’, amongst ...

*contains spoilers* Henry James, whilst he lambasted this great work rather unfairly as “great trash”, went on to concede that for the first time the author’s novelist, Wilkie Collins, had brought the sensational mystery right “at our own doors”, making room for at least some understanding for the huge anticipation that awaited each instalment in the All Year Round magazine – not unlike the kind that Collins’s good friend and fellow All Year Round contributor, Charles Dickens, could expect. In fact, Walter Hartright’s opening narrative voice followed on immediately from Dickens’s own ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, which, incidentally, I often cite as my favourite book if I’m ever pushed that far in immediate conversation. But enough of Dickens – let us instead discuss Collins’s incredible novel, ‘The Woman In White’, which throughout kept me enthralled in a page-turning daze because of its hugely complex and yet gratifying story. I could go on and on about the story, which ducks and weaves th...