No Truce With The Furies

The blog's been quiet for sometime now, so I thought I'd update on my progress. I finished CCR just before New Year, and have got some good reading under my belt thus far in '09. No real highlights to report, but The Reader was provocative and well-constructed, the extremely odd Explorers of the New Century sated my appetite for adventure stories (very Rum Doodle-esque, but with a bizarre twist about 2/3 way through) and Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs was a total and unabashed joy (I have the next two volumes in and am eagerly anticipating them). Last weekend, in Reykjavik, I read the appropriate book from the Waking Up In... series, and whilst I feel much more informed about the Icelandic music scene now than I'd ever have wished to be, it was enjoyable and ticked the "appropriate holiday reading" box nicely.

I have now started The Kindly Ones, and am just one chapter in, but really very taken by it. I was at first unconvinced by Powell's need for a childhood sequence, but I now think the first 75 pages of this volume have been the best of the series so far. Yes, it's obviously apeing the Combray section of Swann's Way, with the main events taking place over the dinner table when the protagonist has been ushered away, but it's done so darn well and besides Jenkins is much less of an annoying wimp than Proust's narrator. Powell's serving staff are every bit the glorious comic creations that Francoise was, and it's great to see that Jenkins' parents' generation (Conyers and Trelawney in this case) were every bit as susceptible to those random-bumpings-into as their offspring. Is Powell self-parodying here? Most of all, the conceit of Uncle Giles being the harbinger of events in Sarajevo, and Conyers reaction, is a great success.

The rest of the book may get annoying, but for now I'm one very happy Powellanaut.

NB. Title for this entry is taken from RS Thomas' last poetry collection, which, in case you were wondering, is extremely worthwhile.