Never-ending stories

As was made clear in my post about drowning in books, there really is no end to the number of books one could read (or collect if one has a somewhat addictive personality as I do).  I deliberately cut myself off from a lot of genres of fiction, since I just don't have time to follow them, particularly westerns and horror novels (neither have any appeal for me) and detective/mystery novels (where I worry about trying to compulsively work my way through the main ones, so it is better not to start).  I used to read a lot of SF, but only rarely do I pick any contemporary SF up, pretty much sticking to authors who were big in the 80s or early 90s, on the rare occasions I do dip back into the pool.

Now occasionally, I am able to resist the siren pull of a new author.  For instance, I just read that Michel Faber has decided to not publish any more novels, and of course I had to go see why this would be a big enough deal that several (mostly British) critics were upset.  I can sort of see why some might rave about The Crimson Petal and the White, but it doesn't sound like my sort of thing at all.  Now The Book of Strange New Things is closer -- a bit of slumming in SF territory by an author more interested in philosophy and religion than SF proper.  However, the more I heard about it, the more that it sounded like it was cribbing (perhaps inadvertently) from James Blish's A Case of Conscience, which I found very disappointing.  So I think I am better off passing on his work entirely.

But someone recently was telling me about a former Booker winner, Stanley Middleton, and how he had fallen out of fashion and was so unjustly forgotten.  So I poked around and found that the man wrote 44 (or even 45 novels), but that they pretty much all plowed the same territory of the English middle class strivers, particularly teachers who had come from the ranks of the lower middle class and still felt somewhat insecure. While I think there is something of Barbara Pym in this (returning to the same fairly narrow English milieu), this strikes me as obsessive in the extreme. Nonetheless, my interest was somewhat piqued.

I decided that when I get around to Pym, I might read a handful of Middleton's novels. It seems the best is Holiday, the one that won the Booker Prize, and then possibly Harris's Requiem. To be honest, I already peaked into these books while at the UT library and I saw almost the same incident -- the protagonists remembering how their father mocked them for listening to classical music -- towards the start of both novels, and my heart sank a bit. (I still recall how Bellow so obsessively returned to the same emotional hurts, and while Philip Roth has a somewhat broader range, he too draws from the same well a bit too often.) Plus, the dialogue that I happened to read in Harris's Requiem was pretty dire, even risible. So I think it might be a struggle to just get through two Middleton novels.

However, if I persist, and they end up better than expected, and I want a few more to alternate with Pym, then these seem the ones to work from. The Daysman is probably the third most appealing. After that, in no particular order:

• Against The Dark
• The Golden Evening
• A Place To Stand
• Married Past Redemption
• Necessary Ends
• Brief Hours
• Vacant Places
• Cold Gradations
• Ends and Means
• Valley Of Decision 

Now as so many interesting things fall in 3s (or rather we construct patterns of 3s from otherwise random occurrences), it just so happens there is potentially more interesting news for fans of Modernist literature.  The University of Ottawa Press has just published a lost Malcolm Lowry novel called In Ballast to the White Sea.  (The main manuscript was lost in a terrible cabin fire, and Lowry actually risked his life to reclaim the manuscript of Under the Volcano.  Then decades after his death, Lowry's first wife revealed that she had a copy of In Ballast, without any final revisions Lowry was making of course.)  A year or so before this, the University of Ottawa Press published a novella called Swinging the Maelstrom along with two complete versions of The Last Address (sort of the bones of Swinging the Maelstrom).  And they are well underway on a critical edition of the 1940 version of Under the Volcano (apparently quite different from the published version from 1947).  Lowry himself had always considered the three works to be a kind of modern version of Dante's Divine Comedy.  Under the Volcano is obviously the Inferno, while Swinging the Maelstrom is the Purgatario, and finally In Ballast is the Paradiso.  I don't think I am enough of a Lowry fan to read all of these (and particularly not two versions of Under the Volcano!), but I will make sure to read the critical edition of Swinging the Maelstrom some day.