Book Reviews: Going Solo

This is another autobiography by Roald Dahl.   This one is about his time in the air force after leaving school.   It's obviously a story about courage, but it's also one about exotic adventures in a far-off land, but mostly it's just about a young man trying to find his way in the world.   It's also about how much surviving a battle is down to chance.   Very harrowing.   The number of near death experiences in this is...quite an eye-opener.   I enjoyed this one much more than Boy.   Again though, some thing that comes through very strongly is the strong relationship between Roald Dahl and his mother.   The ending, where Roald Dahl is shipped home due to injuries and is reunited with his mother moved me to tears.   Perhaps my favorite bit though, is the description of the people he met on the way out to Africa.   It reminds me so much of my life in an expat community.

“What I remember so clearly about the voyage is the extraordinary behaviour of my fellow passengers.   I had never before encountered that peculiar breed of Englishman who spends his whole life working in distant corners of British territory.   Please do not forget that in the 1930s the British Empire was still very much the British Empire, and the men and women who kept it going were a race of people that most of you have never encountered and now you never will.   I consider myself very lucky to have caught a glimpse of this rare species while it still roamed the forests and foot-hills of the Earth, for today, it is totally extinct.   More English than the English, more Scottish than the Scots, they were the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet.   For one thing, they spoke a language of their own.   If they worked in East Africa, their sentences were sprinkled with Swahili words, and if they lived in India then all manner of dialects were intermingled.   As well as this, there was a whole vocabulary of much-used words that seemed to be universal among all these people.   An evening drink, for example, was always a sundowner.   A drink at any other time was a chota peg.   One’s wife was the memsahib.   To have a look at something was to have a shufti.   And from that one, interestingly enough, RAF/Middle East slang for a reconnaissance plane in the last war was a shufti kite.   Something of poor quality was shenzi.   Supper was tiffin and so on and so forth.   The empire builders’ jargon would have filled a dictionary.   All in all, it was rather wonderful for me, a conventional young lad from the suburbs, to be thrust suddenly into the middle of this pack of sinewy sunburnt gophers and their bright bony little wives, and what I liked best of all about them was their eccentricities.  

It would seem that when  the British live for years in a foul and sweaty climate among foreign people they maintain their sanity by allowing themselves to go slightly dotty.   They cultivate bizarre habits that would never be tolerated back home, whereas in far-away Africa or in Ceylon or in India or in the federated Malay states they could do as they liked.   On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain, and for me it was like watching a kind of non-stop pantomime throughout the entire voyage.”

 

Show Reviews: War Horse

I've seen this play twice in the past year: once in London and once in Edinburgh.   It's based on a Michael Morpurgo book about a horse called Joey.   Joey is raised and trained by a boy called Albert who is heartbroken when his father sells Joey to the army.   Albert joins up and goes to France to try and look for Joey.   Both the horse and the boy see horrible things, but eventually, miraculously, find each other again, though both are in bad shape.   Unlike a lot of other Micahel Morpurgo stories, this one has a happy ending.   What makes the play so special is that the horses in it are portrayed by the most incredible, complex, lifelike and beautiful puppets.   They take three people to operate them, and it's so well done that you forget that you're watching puppets at all.   I really enjoyed the singing in it as well.   It was bittersweet and beautiful.   It was interesting being able to compare the two performances too.   I thought I was going to enjoy the London show a lot more than the Edinburgh one because the London theatre was so much more intimate and I was much closer to the stage, which was also bigger, but actually it travelled surprisingly well.  Recommended.

Books

As I mentioned in a previous post, I like to re-read childhood favorites every now and then.   In fact I usually pick one up whenever I go home.   Lately I've been revisiting the Laura Ingalls wilder books about her childhood as a pioneer girl.   It's fascinating reading them as an adult because you pick up on so much stuff you missed as a child.   This one was probably my favorite of the series when I was little.   It's full of sunshine and summer and wild flowers and running around barefoot.   What struck me most about this one this time around was just how independent these people were.   They did everything for themselves, from making their own clothes to building their own houses.   And how precarious life was for them, and how brave they were to chose that life.   The family almost loses everything after losing their crops to locusts two years in a row.   Their whole lives were a real life adventure and I have to say I am a tiny bit jealous.   So all in all, a lovely read for children and an eye-opening read for adults.  

Next up, Burning Bright, by Tracy Chevalier.   I would count myself as a Tracy Chevalier fan; I very much enjoyed Girl With a Pearl Earring, and rather enjoyed The Virgin Blue and The Lady and the Unicorn as well.   I was very eager to read this one, as it's about William Blake, who I really like.   But I have to say I don't think this one was her best.   I was quite disappointed to find that William Blake's character had relatively little screen time, and that it concentrated far more on the lives of Jem and Maggie, two children growing up in London.   For me William Blake's character just didn't make much of an impact.   There just wasn't enough poetry and mystery and fire attached to him.   He was really just a plesant father figure for the two children.   What I usually enjoy about Tracy Chevalier's writing are her unique and very evocative descriptions, but with this book she changed her writing style entirely (perhaps because it was set in England?).   In a blind taste test I wouldn't even have been able to tell it was of hers.   All in all, an alright read, but not as good as I have come to expect from Ms. Chevalier.

And finally, We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka.   This one was brilliant!   I raced through it!   I've read her previous two novels, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian and Two Caravans and loved them both, so I was eager to get stuck into this one, and it didn't disappoint!   Marina Lewycka's strong points are her amazingly larger than life characters and her ability to capture people's idiosyncrasies and style of speaking perfectly.   Her writing of English dialogue spoken by foreigners is both very funny and astoundingly convincing.   In a bit of a departure from her previous two novels, this one does not follow the lives of Ukranians, but of Jews and Palestinians.   Through the lives of her characters she tells the story of the founding of Israel and the hardships the Palestinians have suffered.   It's an emotional rollercoaster.   Just like her first novel, WWII is a major theme.   And just like her first novel, one of the main characters is a very feisty elderly person who you can't help falling in love with.   There is also a similarity with her first novel of a bad situation escalating into a huge mess there just seems to be no way out of, and in the end, against all odds, all the characters just decide to get along and make things work.   The only criticism I would offer is her glue theme.   The main character writes for a builders' magazine about adhesives, and the author tries to include glue metaphors throughout.   I'm just not very convinced they work.   They seem a bit forced.   But overall, fantastic book, just like her other two.   And just like her previous two novels, this one is hilarious!   Highly recommended!