Sweet And Sour

Something to add to yesterday's comments on Orwell: if you needed one word to describe Orwell's fiction I reckon 'sour' would be the one. Strange that this doesn't apply to his essays which are generally a lot more cheerful than the novels, and, come to think of it, the extended reportage, e.g., Wigan Pier. Of course he's always got an eye for bleak places, but he seemed to feel a need in his fiction to allow his characters no way out of the bleakness. In real life he saw things were not quite so simple.

Anyway, I felt a real need to move onto something a lot less despondent than small town Burma of 1926 and its third rate representatives of the Raj, and I found it in Stephen King's Doctor Sleep of all places. I was keen to read this since finding out that the story of Danny Torrance from The Shining was to be continued, wondering if King was going to be able to revive the glory days of his early work. Not that the later stuff isn't well done and eminently readable, but by virtue of being the later work it obviously lacks the extraordinary freshness that our favourite horror writer brought to the genre. I'm just over halfway through Doctor Sleep (in a day) and it doesn't have the genuinely disturbing quality of its mighty predecessor in terms of the supernatural elements, but it is compelling, not least because the writer pulls off the same trick with regard to his characters that he so often manages. For some reason you come to actually care about them so it's not just a question of enjoying finding out what happens next but being worried about it and what might happen to the sweet folks involved.

Odd word to use I know, 'sweet', but somehow that's what they are. When I first read The Shining I was desperately worried that something dreadful was going to happen to Danny and felt a huge sense of relief at the end when the worse that could happen didn't. And now I'm feeling the same way, a sort of protectiveness, except it's not just about him. Isn't it odd, King deals with subject material that's a hundred times uglier than anything in Orwell (excepting 1984 & Animal Farm, of course) and you come out of a reading feeling more hopeful about our world and where it's going, somehow?