P 540

I’ve always taken books with me on holiday, but in recent years I’m just as likely as not to bring them home untouched having not read a single word or picked them up for the entire duration.

That, I suppose, is not unusual.

After all, holidays can be busy old things with all the getting around to be done, all those places to go, things to see, and there are so many distractions, too, and other things to pick up and read as you go on your way, that the shiny new and unbroken paperback can lie in your bag or in the drawer by your bed for the entire duration, unnoticed and unloved, and not having the job asked of it fulfilled.

So, taking a 740 page novel along with me during my recent week away was indeed travelling a little bit hopefully, especially as at the very last minute I also threw into my bag the book that I was currently half way through.

That book was a slim volume of essays by Clive James called “Flying Visits” which I’d been working my way slowly through during the previous few evenings and was really enjoying, but I still didn’t expect to have any more words of it consumed by the time I got home either.

Still, the weather was still a touch on the balmy side, and the room we were given in the B&B had a lovely window overlooking the bay and two armchairs sensibly positioned to make the most of both it and the available sunshine. Meanwhile, the distracting temptations of the television were severely restricted by a desire to miss out on the gushing preamble to the festival of hoops and so the Clive James was swiftly despatched and the veritable housebrick of that 740 page paperback was cracked open.

And devoured.

I haven’t enjoyed a book – or more specifically a novel – quite so much in years. In fact I found Stephen King’s time travel romance “11.22.63” so incredibly readable that I wolfed it down in less than four days (despite not really wanting it to end) and still managing to do all of the other “holiday stuff” around it, and so I ended up shuffling around the “book aisle” of a nearby supermarket looking for something else to hit that same spot for the final couple of days.

In the end, after much deliberation amongst the limited choice available, I chose a Terry Pratchett paperback, by the way, but I haven’t finished that yet.

I’m constantly forgetting that he spins a good yarn does Mr King, and his books are incredibly well written in such a way that you really, really want to know what happens next, in that “unputdownable” way so popular amongst the reviewers in the literary supplements. His thought-provoking doorstops of books are always thoroughly enjoyable, and they do serve as absolute master-classes in the art of creative writing, although I  do find myself suspecting that, given one or two of the asides of his protagonist, who teaches English by the way, my own stylistic shortcomings would come up very short in Mr King’s estimations in the highly unlikely event that he ever got to read them.

Anyway, I’m not going to spoil the book for you, other than to tell you that I thought it was a thoroughly good read, both life-affirming and heartbreaking at the same time, and it puts a very interesting new perspective upon the events in Dallas in November 1963 and asks some very pertinent questions about life, death, fate and the small moments that history turns upon.

Finally, I don’t think it’s a massive “spoiler” to share with you this short paragraph from page 540 which somehow resonated so much with me that I felt the need to write it down. As you can see, in terms of its philosophy, it’s very “me”, but I hope that it triggers something in you, too.

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly blended mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

(Stephen King, “11.22.63” p540 – UK paperback edition)