Escaping

It feels odd, but pleasantly so, to be enjoying such a protracted holiday so soon after starting the new school year. Even though it’s only Monday we feel as if we’ve been here for at least a week. Last night we dined at Ali Baba’s on Jalan Ampang and came home to a late night Midsomer Murder – a combination that sums up the mundane magic of our small lives here. We’ll be moving on later this evening to Melaka where we’re hoping to find Mak much further along the road to recovery from her stroke than the last time we saw her in late November.

We traveled fairly light here, so packing to move on won’t take too long. I bought Loeb and Sale’s Batman – The Long Halloween at the Kinokuniya’s at KLCC on Saturday night and I’ve just finished it, so it will be staying here. This was my comic treat for the holiday and it slipped down easily, but I can’t say I was terribly impressed. Much as I enjoyed the art work and the simple pleasure of a fast-moving storyline, the moody dark knight stuff doesn’t do much for me. Also there’s a lot of playing around with characters from the Gotham City mythos and I’m just not familiar enough with all that to pick up on the finer points. Mind you, I’ll be reading (or perhaps ‘experiencing’) it again when we come to stay in June. Sometimes it’s easier to get lost in these worlds the second time around.

My main reading has been Zadie Smith’s White Teeth which definitely qualifies as a good read. Ms Smith is one of those writers who obviously is dripping with talent and capable of creating with some ease a gloriously comic universe that almost connects with the real world. Is it a problem though that at some level the connection fails? I don’t think so. She seems to me a Wodehousian in this respect – nobody really talks like her characters, nobody attends a school quite like Glenard Oak or wastes their time in an Irish pool joint like O’Connell’s, run by Asians with no pool table in sight, but we’d like to think they do and it’s close enough to some kind of multicultural reality to make us feel that something significant is being said. Above all she’s got tremendous energy and the sheer verve of the book as performance keeps you reading.

Subsidiary reading has come in the shape of Peter Singer’s Writings on an Ethical Life. Almost everything in it makes me uncomfortable. Surely a sign of a book worth reading slowly? The trouble is that if read slowly enough it’s going to be very difficult to avoid a number of conclusions. The remorseless clarity of Singer’s arguments offer no escape. No wonder he’s so unpopular.