Thursday, April 25, 2013

Swings And Roundabouts

I've moved onto the second in Anthony Price's sequence of novels centred around David Audley, though I was slightly hesitant to do so. I enjoyed The Labyrinth Makers, but not quite as much as I thought I would do, and not quite as much as I'd enjoyed his stuff thirty years or so ago. Then I thought of his thrillers as sophisticated entertainments, with some penetrating insights into human behaviour. Now I'm reading seemingly sophisticated entertainments, their moments of interest rubbing shoulders with material that verges on the crass on occasion - especially when it comes to any kind of romantic interest.

One of the unlooked for pleasures of growing older has been to experience quite new and unexpected ways of responding to writing, music, art. Sometimes you gain - Tolstoy has grown ever more astonishing - and sometimes something has been lost, a kind of innocence, I suppose.

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