Normal service will be resumed...
...in due course. I was concerned people would think I'd given up on this blog, or that Alice and I had had a falling out, so I begged her to let me explain the recent gap.
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| Anthony Burgess |
Alice has been absolutely furiously reading away, preparing to present an
enormous tome (600 odd pages!) to her Book Group. It's
Earthly Powers, by
Anthony Burgess - he's the one famous for
A Clockwork Orange. But Alice insists
that's not at all typical of his work, and people only know of it because of the
Kubrick film, and the shock-horror response it provoked. She says
Earthly Powers is a mature and important book. She's also a fan of his Shakespeare novel,
Nothing Like the Sun (which is very much shorter!)
Recently she's been reading the man's two volumes of autobiography
as well. She certainly doesn't do anything by halves once she gets going.
Sometimes I worry about her. She ought to be having a bit more, well, you know - fun and frivolity.
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| Socrates philosophising with Alcibiades and others |
If you recall, Alice studied Philosophy (as well as English) when she was younger. She got into it at school when she read a translation of
The Symposium because someone said it was "naughty". In fact it was a revelation of logic and seriousness. She discovered there the wonderful
Myth of the Three Sexes, and fell in love with
Socrates because he asked Awkward Questions. Like her. But here it was approved by Plato, rather than frowned upon by bewildered grownups.
I just wanted to know! [Alice] Mind you, Socrates came to a nasty end, condemned to death for corrupting the young. Yet he still kept philosophising, even while the
hemlock did its work.
At university, one of the lecturers apparently told Alice's class that in the
first year they would be inoculated with the philosophical disease, and
then spend three years being cured of it. What a bizarre
waste of brain power, I say. But Alice insists it was all very edifying
and good training for the mind.
Moreover, she came away knowing there were still
Three Important Questions in Life: God (or not); Free Will (or not); and the nature of Good and Evil (or shades of grey) in the world. And that, she says, is what
Earthly Powers is really all about. Which is one of the reasons this is the third or fourth time she's read it over the years.
Plus it's quite funny in places. (Alice doesn't laugh at very much, apart from
Fawlty Towers or
Eddie Izzard - oops, I mean, of course, that her sense of humour is very discerning - so the book must be humorous too, as well as covering these big themes.) It's also, she maintains, exceptionally well written. Let's hope her Book Group fellows enjoyed it too, assuming they all managed to get to the end...
Anyway, don't give up on us - we'll be back in a while.
