Yet More Fredy

Despite the general busyness of work I've been getting on with Fredy Neptune and am now well into the fourth section of the novel/poem, The Police Revolution. We're in Germany, Nazism is on the rise and people are doing terrible things to each other. It's depressing & bracing in roughly equal measures. No, that last phrase is there as a cliché. It's depressing. But there's an awful sense of this is probably what it was like then, and this is what it will be like anywhere the ethical climate gets poisoned enough to let us be depressingly human in our cruelty and negligence. Back in KL I also started reading English Passengers in tandem with Fredy Neptune and this is serving to reinforce my literary bout of depression. English Passengers is highly entertaining as a read and the sections dealing with the experience of the Tasmanian aborigines are outstandingly well done but the fact that you know these poor souls are going to be wiped out means you read with that dark cloud hovering over everything. And this happened so casually so inevitably so unjustly just yesterday! It would seem a good idea for me to get though these texts as soon as possible and fall into something a touch more cheerful. Having said that, I'm due to reread Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things as I'm going to be talking to one of my classes about it and Miss Roy knows more than a few things about the dark places in the human soul. Puzzle: given that literature attempts to deal with life at some sort of truthful level, and given the awful truth about our species, can there be such a thing as a genuinely cheerful sunnily cloudless book? I suppose Wodehouse comes as close as anyone has ever got, hence that peculiar sense of walking in a kind of earthly paradise you can get with Jeeves & Gally & Psmith et al.