In Too Deep

Silence is hard to find. Even harder to hear.

Top Girl

By a stroke of good fortune I followed my reading of Simenon's Little Restaurant story with Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight. One led perfectly into the other. Funnily enough, when I'd read the opening pages of Rhys's novel back in December I'd found it more than a little opaque in terms of the fractured consciousness of its narrator. This time round it seemed so easy to read I really wondered how I'd felt so blocked initially.

The extraordinary thing about Rhys is the complete artistic control she possesses when dealing with material about the most extreme states. Good Morning, Midnight lacks the ambition and range of Wide Sargasso Sea but, my goodness, it lacks nothing of the sheer power of Rhys's final novel and, just possibly, its sly humour gives it a dimension that WSS for all its dazzling brilliance falls short of.

I'm still not sure of the ending of Midnight, though. I can think of at least three interpretations, but they contradict each other. Not that that's a bad thing - especially if it invites a rereading.

Top Notch

I wasn't all that sure about acquiring A Christmas Maigret and Other Stories back in December, from Waterstones on Deansgate in Manchester. If Fifi hadn't needed to make up the Buy One and Get One Half Price deal they were offering to save a bob or two on her book I wouldn't have bothered. Of course, any Simenon is worth getting hold of, but I knew I wouldn't read the stories until well after Christmas and thought they might fall more than a bit flat, out of season, as it were. But I needn't have worried: they made an excellent January read.

The Maigret story itself was typically solid stuff, a bit plodding but in a good way - very comfortable reading. But unexpectedly it was the two stories that didn't feature the great Inspector that really stood as a reminder of just how brilliant a writer Simenon can be. The second story, Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook, was very much in the Maigret vein, being based on the perspective of the Parisian Police, and was genuinely gripping in its evocation of the police switchboard and an unfolding mystery being played out on its lights on Christmas Eve. Very clever and, as always with Simenon, very human; indeed, very humane.

Then came The Little Restaurant near Place des Ternes - A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups. I thought this was going to be a bit of filler for the volume. It turned out to be one of the best short stories I've ever read. Possibly now my favourite 'Christmas story' ever. It took me two readings to really 'get it', but the second of these was just pure appreciation of its mastery. Simenon adopts the perspective of a down-at-heel, lonely, hard-faced prostitute and is so entirely convincing inhabiting her frame of reference that it's spooky. And the fact that she's the source of a kind of ultimate goodness in the tale is carried off without the slightest sense of sentimentality. Astonishing. If this isn't great writing I don't know what is.

Worth Watching

Doing a bit of Keats on Friday his phrase watcher of the skies plunged me into a brief reverie involving early Genesis, the classic 1972 line-up, performing their Watcher of the Skies, bat-wings around Gabe's head and all the accoutrements. Today I went searching to see if any performance from that glorious era had survived on the ocean of being and, to my not inconsiderable delight, discovered an extraordinarily well-filmed and well-performed live version from 1973.

On the small screen the theatrics look a bit cheesy, I suppose, but I can tell you that the real thing packed one heck of a wallop. Enough to come back vividly to mind in a Lit lesson almost 50 years later.

At The End Of The Day

At the end of a very long day, at the end of a very long week, I'm reminded of the importance of a place that, thankfully, isn't so far. It's good, indeed, to be home.

Ups And Downs

The worst thing about going to the gym: that inevitable realisation after seven minutes on the trainer: Oh dear, or words to that effect, I'm really, really struggling and I've got another forty-three minutes in which to keep struggling.

The great thing about going to the gym: that moment on the way back that you accidentally cross the path of a colleague and you know they must be thinking: Woah, it's Connor on the way back from the gym again - he's the MAN!

Just saying.

Beyond Us

Attended a talk related to mental health issues this morning. Some good points made with an appealing explanation of the notion of us occupying an insecure position on a shifting continuum of mental health. But I was struck by a paradoxical aspect of that model. Whilst it's straightforward enough to identify the negative pole of the continuum it's not so easy to give a convincing account of what might be seen as optimal mental health. The version we were given was essentially, and understandably, functional in nature - the idea that the mentally healthy individual can function socially with success.

Now it's easy to see the logic of this, and in some ways the model is useful. But isn't it missing something, a sense that there may be possibilities beyond simply functioning, fitting in, as it were? Yet getting a clear picture of what that optimal state might be is, almost by definition, beyond us since it's so hard to recognise what we ourselves don't possess.

Could it be that the state we're thinking about is such that it escapes definition, yet we somehow know it when we see it in somebody else - if we're lucky enough to meet someone who's truly, deeply sane?

Mistaken Identity

Was feeling quite cheerful this morning in my usual vacuous fashion when I received an email which I think was intended to be vaguely inspirational. The attachment told me that on this Monday morning I was to be reminded that I was powerful beyond measure and capable of pretty much anything I wanted. This seemed so unlikely I had a strong sense it had been sent to the wrong man. Felt quite depressed for a while afterwards, but then had a cup of tea and ate a banana and equilibrium was restored.

A Different Lens

Read Pico Iyer's This Could Be Home today. Odd little book. Basically about the Raffles Hotel, where he was the first Writer-in-Residence, but also saying interesting things about Singapore in general. The hotel doesn't really represent the island I know, but I enjoyed the book for its insights even though I couldn't relate to what he sees as the peculiarly representative nature of the writer's place of residency. Most of all I enjoyed the sense of the city being celebrated: I was reminded of its many excellent qualities which are so easily forgotten when navigating one's way through the necessity of earning a living here.
 
He sees something special in the brand of multiculturalism embraced in this Far Place, and I think he's absolutely right. It was refreshing to be so forcibly reminded of something so obvious, yet easy to overlook. And he also says interesting things about Maugham, enough to make me consider reading something by a writer I have somehow contrived to sturdily neglect for so long. 

On Screen

At the turning of the year I've found myself viewing rather more stuff on the small screen than usual. On the way back from the UK I watched two movies - one on each leg of the journey - on the nifty small screens provided by Qatar Airways. Both featured excellent acting: All Is True, an account of Shakespeare's later years, post his retirement as playwright, saw Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench in fine form, plus a gorgeous cameo of Ian McKellen; and then The Post offered Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in equally impressive, if rather more contemporary, performances in a gripping re-enactment of the Washington Post's publication of the Pentagon Papers. To be honest, it's a shame to just pick out the big names since pretty much everyone around them was darn good.

But the performance that has blown the top of my head off in terms of its absolute perfection at every level is that of Thandie Newton in Series 4 of Line of Duty. Some stellar reviews of the show caught my attention last year and I vaguely wondered what all the fuss was about, assuming I probably would never have the wherewithal to actually watch any episodes. Then I realised that the fourth series was available on the BBC link we get on Starhub, so I ran the first episode with the Missus watching alongside and we found ourselves hooked, and savagely. Compelling stuff and Ms Newton, as the bent DCI, is just phenomenal, managing to be simultaneously deeply horrid and just as deeply sympathetic. She conveys the stress engulfing her character with such nuance and subtlety you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by it all on her behalf.

Anyway, we've got one final episode to watch and I can't wait. Though I must admit, the twists and turns are such that I suspect I'll be uncomfortably dizzied by whatever's in store.