That's better

I'm glad we upped the pace. Casanova's Chinese restaurant was good, in many ways I think the best of the lot (I feel I have said this before), but wouldn't have worked so well if I hadn't read it in such close proximity to the previous book.


In fact, quite a few things become very obvious by reading in close tracking to one another. The structure of the books become a lot clearer, with the dominant characters of the books really assert themselves when you aren't desperately trying to remember who they are. Moreland, the key man in CCR, is easier than most because he appears from nowhere (I had to check in Spurling) and gets a flashback at the beginning before we reconnect with time from ALM (in the intervening period our narrator has got married - we get no description of this passage at all).


It's an altogether bleaker book than the previous ones, ending depressingly and with a nice little twist. I reread the end of ALM and the contrast between them is striking. Because it tracks back at the beginning (brief cameo reappearance of Deacon), we get a much greater sense of a narrative arc, rather than the often fragmented and episodic nature of previous books. This one isn't perfect, but there is a real sense of a story in itself.


It also yielded my favourite line of the saga so far, more for the barb than the writing (Quiggin on Erridge):


He appears to have treated POUM, FAI, CNT, and UGT, as if they were all the same left-wing extension of the Labour Party. ... If you can't tell the difference between a Trotskyite-Communist, an Anarcho-Syndicalist, and a properly paid-up party member, you had better keen away from the barricades.