Reading Around

Perhaps it was not quite accurate to claim we’d hardly bought anything, the other day. The girls got some books at Kinokuniya, in Suria KLCC, Noi bought a Malay novel and I shelled out for Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta – treating myself to a graphic novel has become a feature of our KL jaunts – and John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts? I noticed Carey’s book when we were in England in December and was attracted then on the strength of the fact that Carey has written two of my favourite books of literary criticism (the ones on Donne and Thackery – the one on Dickens being a bit of a disappointment, I’ve always felt) and writes with great clarity, wit and insight, and the subject is something close to my heart. I didn’t buy it then because I had quite enough on my plate, which I still have, I suppose, but the temptation (I suppose pure curiosity to find out what exactly Carey had to say) proved too great. As it is I’ve been racing ahead with What Good Are The Arts?, moving steadily through V For Vendetta, and the rest of my planned reading has been side-lined, as a result.

In addition to the books I also bought a couple of CDs whilst I was at Tower Records (and Noi & the kids were in the supermarket.) A bit of Copeland ( a CD with the Billy the Kid suite and Third Symphony) and some John Williams playing Bach (the lute suites on guitar.) In my teenage years I would have regarded buying so much at one go as extravagance indeed. It says something of the nature of my (relative) affluence that I now take such spending as almost a basic right. I’m not sure this is entirely a good thing: as a teenager I pretty much wrung as much as I could in terms of close listening and reading of the liner notes, if there were any, to any lp I bought, in order to get my money’s worth. Now it’s unusual for a CD to get from me anything like that level of attention, respect, I suppose. The loss is mine.

In terms of the side-lined reading, Robert Louis Stevenson has been the main victim. I brought along a paperback comprising The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston. I got through the first but have laid poor Weir to one side. I suppose Jekyll & Hyde is one of those stories that everyone knows but people rarely read. It’s not exactly an accessible text, despite the gripping, resonant core of the story. The apparatus of multiple narrators might sound terribly modern but I think it comes across more than a little ponderously. It doesn’t help that there’s precious little real differentiation of narrative voice. But I found a kind of fascination in terms of how Stevenson did treat the story and how this lined up with the tale as told in movies and as part of a kind of popular mythology. Two things jumped out at me. First, that it’s clear in the original that Jekyll is so much drawn to the pleasures of life he can remember leading as Hyde that he is tempted to go back to that life when it’s clear he has escaped it. Usually the story is rendered such that Jekyll cannot prevent the metamorphosis to Hyde in a purely chemical manner. Stevenson is painfully honest in this regard. Second that, in contrast to the point I’ve just made, the text is incredibly evasive when it comes to describing any of the actual evil done by Hyde. The bit about him running the girl down is extraordinarily unconvincing. Only the beating and murder of Sir Danvers Carew has any real power, and even that’s a pretty mild affair. Is it simply the case that Stevenson could rest assured the majority of his readers were well enough acquainted with the vicious reality of the underbelly of respectable society to simply not require any further elucidation? Or was that respectability so powerful as to drive to self-censorship even a writer with a direct, live connection to the dark side of consciousness?