Personal Blogs

If Charles Dickens was alive today, I could quite happily throttle him.

I appreciate that Dickens was a prime mover in the reformation of English society, championing the downtrodden masses (and yet was a bit of a cad as regards his family); and that he was also a fine exponent of the written word, but by heck Hard Times is a hard read. I keep attempting it, and after one or two pages the lure of Dorothy L. Sayers proves too strong and I find myself re-reading the adventures of Lord Peter Wimsey.

I can't understand why I find Dickens so hard. My taste in literature is quite catholic: Whodunits of the golden age; James Lee Burke's evocative crime novels of modern Louisiana with his elegant prose verging on the poetic; Rudyard Kipling with his tales of the raj, and of the brutal and licentious soldiery, and even of the native population, and all told with an affection and a lack of condescension that belies his modern critics and their accusations of unfeeling Empiricism; the correspondence between Eloise and Abelard, and the radical musings of Julian of Norwich (though for a medieval woman in her thirties, becoming an anchoress could cynically be seen as a clever career choice - three square a day and a roof over your head) ; P. G. Wodehouse and his farcical tales of the bright young things dragging the air of the belle epoch far past its sell-by date and yet remaining timeless and hilarious; the distinctly not-glamorous espionage novels of Eric Ambler, Len Deighton and John Le Carre and yes, Gary Oldman did a very workmanlike job in the film but it does not compare with the old television adaptation,).

And yet Dickens sends me to sleep faster than chloral hydrate.

Still, must.....keep....trying.