Taken By Surprise

Finished Such Is Life today. Fascinating novel in every way. No plot to speak of, yet was held by a kind of narrative momentum. The high facetiousness of the narrative voice should have grated - as it occasionally does, even in Dickens - yet it turned out to be strangely sympathetic - I suppose because it was very much a part of how the protagonist deals with an unsympathetic, often harsh, world. The extremities of the dialogue in terms of rendering accents and dialects, making it almost, though never completely, unreadable, yet sort of exciting and amusing to make sense of; and, counter-intuitively, expressing a deeply democratic attitude to the use of language.

Strangest of all for me was being taken completely by surprise when moments of real sadness surfaced, especially in the second half of the novel. The chapter dealing with the stories of three children being lost - one found alive, one dead, and one never found at all, was stunning, partly because of its entire lack of any kind of sentimentality. Behind the wonderful comedy of the novel - I laughed out loud more than once - lay a deep sense of human (and animal) suffering.