Category Archive: Classic Books
Atticus Unsympatheticus
Is it a sin to kill a Finch?
Harper Lee died a few days ago. Atticus Finch died a while ago, mortally wounded by the publication of Go Set a Watchman. That is, the holier than thou Gregory-Peck-type Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, died. The real Atticus Finch, or the draft Atticus Finch, depending on which way you look at it, lives on in infamy. He’s A Bad Man because he’s racist. Lordy lordy. Our whiter than white Atticus was nought but a whited sepulchre. A product of his time and place. Either a man with shades of grey in his past, a hypocrite, an even better lawyer and…
Continue Reading →1984
"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."
(by George Orwell) [films by Michael Anderson (1956) and Michael Radford (1984)] “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Thus does George Orwell dare start his last book with the dreaded weather line (cf. Bulwer Lytton), yet it works brilliantly. All of this Miltonian tract works brilliantly. It does because George was a certified seer, a genius. As Anthony Burgess wrote of 1984: “a mere novel, an artefact meant primarily for diversion, has been scaring the pants off us all. It is possible to say that the ghastly future Orwell foretold has not come about simply because…
Continue Reading →The House of the Seven Gables
(by Nathaniel Hawthorne) As ghastly, creaky, redundant and tedious as the accursed House of the Seven Gables itself, this classic Hawthorne is still worth reading for the atmospheric, overboiled thrills and Hawthorne’s unfailing psychological perceptions. Old Clifford, a crazed cross between Boo Radley and Dr Manette, is released from prison at just the juncture when his sister, the frowning and gaunt (she is an old SPINSTER) Hepzibah sets up shop after much deliberation and the delightful, fresh (she is a young MAIDEN) Phoebe arrives unheralded. These three share the House of the Seven Gables, ancient and gloomy home of the Pyncheons, built on stolen land, with…
Continue Reading →Giant
(by Edna Ferber) I’m going to the ACCC. I bought this novel expecting an “epic inter-generational family saga, sweeping across the vast Texan plains” as advertised. Instead I got a primer on the great state of Texas. The reader, personified by our delicate naïve Eastern bride Leslie asks the questions and her big bold Texian husband Bick, lord of the immense Reata ranch acreage answers: “‘Oh Jordan, I wish we could live up here in the mountains. I wish we could stay up here and Uncle Bawley could run Reata. Couldn’t he? Couldn’t he?’ ‘Get this, If you can understand anything that isn’t Virginia…
Continue Reading →Memento Mori
(Giovanni Martinelli c. 1635)
(by Muriel Spark) Don’t let the question of who is making the famous “Remember you must die” phone calls distract you, o gentle reader, from the more important reflections on memory, sanity, guilt, narcissism and avarice raised in this searing novelette. Although under threat, a phalanx of elderly people simply up the ante and behave even more badly than they did in their (adulterous, manipulative, black-mailing) youth. There are amusing characters – a bellicose poet who gets into fisticuffs with a crippled but no less fearsome critic over the reputation of a dead poet – a would-be Margaret Mead of the geriatric who studies the elderly;…
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