I have always been very long sighted. I like to think I inherited the genes not of
the prehistoric hunter, but of the hunter’s lookout, squinting into the horizon
for a lone mammoth or a woolly rhino.
Ever since school I’ve been a lookout.
I looked out of the window in history and in physics, I looked out of
the window in maths. I loved staring out
beyond the rugby fields to the trees on the hillside, or the clouds steaming
across the sky. When I walk in the
mountains, I find I want to look into the blue remembered distance and leave
all that banal map reading stuff to the people with proper kit, state of the
art compasses and good eyes.
I’ve noticed that I like music for its texture rather than a
melody, and have often wondered whether this is somehow connected to my long
sight. I think in big pictures, huge
vistas, I’m not a great one for detail.
It makes me wonder whether my physiology has affected the
books I prefer to read. I tend to go for
atmosphere, mood, emotion rather than plot.
Maybe it’s because I’m long sighted, or very right brained. Perhaps I was dropped on my head when I was a
baby.
I can’t tell you much about the plot of Crime and Punishment, but I recall damp stairwells, gloomy
tenements. A decade ago I read several
John Banville novels, one after another. If you were to ask me what they were
about, I’d shrug and pull a face. But
their mood is still with me, a part of me still dwells in them.
Alan Garner’s The Owl
Service I recollect for a sense of the uncanny, of stark landscape, the
dark mystery of the woods. I love Holes, not for its convoluted and
slightly unlikely plot, but for the heat and endless desert.
But more than any other children’s novel, it’s the Gormenghast trilogy, dense and sometimes
a bit of a trudge, almost unreadable in parts, which still haunts me years
after I first read it. The incidents
have long gone, what remains is like a dream.
Just as I prefer not to experience too much detail, so I can rarely
remember any.
And yet I know that the universe each of these books creates
is just because of a writer’s
attention to the detail I say I resist.
A writer who crafts a book with enough care will ensure word builds upon
word, layer upon layer, building a universe from the soil to the stars,
magically transforming word into image, and image into memory.
6 comments:
Lovely post!
Interesting point about long-sightedness, Andrew!
Yes, the powerful "feel" of a book really does last. Maybe that's why people forget the unsatisfactory scenes and aspects of a book much loved on a first reading? And why they feel a slight sense of shock when they pick the book up and re-read it later? (That, and probably a poor memory in my case!)
You mention the Gormenghast trilogy. This is a book I've started several times, taken on holiday even, but within a few pages it always seems to be one that demands such an intense and lengthy commitment that I put off "the full read" for a time I'm less busy. It often reappears as a January resolution.
We're all so different, aren't we? I need that story, those characters, to keep me hooked; I like my settings & atmosphere delivered strongly but economically. And in much the same way, it's melody first and foremost that grabs me in a piece of music.
But this post almost makes me wish it were otherwise.
Nice post. This has given me something to think about this evening, Andrew, as I stare into the sunset! Very nice.
I agree! I remember the feel of a book rather than the details of plot. A lovely post, thank you.
Penny, I struggle to think of a time when you might be 'less busy' than on holiday! Are you sure you have got the idea of holidays? :-)
I agree too! Great post, Andrew, thankyou. It's years since I read 'Gormenghast', but I can still see beams of sunlight slanting down on to a silent, red-painted staircase somewhere in that labyrithine place.
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