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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Action and connections


A Noise Abatement Society flourishing in this part of Catalonia is as likely as thriving vegetarianism in Argentina.

Our Dawn Chorus today was not the usual heady mixture of doves, dogs and damn children but we were woken by the rough music of the pneumatic drill!

It would appear that our local council has decided to do something about the chaotic parking during the summer and has started to put metal posts on the edge of the pavements to stop cars parking there. I have a feeling this will merely concentrate the attempts to park on our driveways! We shall see.

“Howards End” was a revelation. I think that I must have read the other Forster novels at too early an age because I cannot remember reading “A Passage to India” or “Room with a view” with the same sort of amazed enthusiasm. Even the wonderful collection of short stories, “The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories” (in Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by David Gentleman) pales when placed beside the sheer pleasure that I got from reading “Howards End.”

I read it as I would a detective story – which I suppose it is to some extent – turning over the pages with gathering speed as the story gathered pace.

I could have said the story “such as it is” because, in spite of the fact that very serious things happen in it, the real delight is in the ordinary made extraordinary. Minor comments, minor accidents, minor observations all carry a charge which is out of all proportion to the seeming triviality of the occasion. One is reminded, again and again of Jane Austen, but a Jane Austen who takes more risks. Yes, we are presented with the comfortable middle class with a smattering of servants who play bit parts and one major character who strives after gentility and intellectuality but is hampered by his lack of money.

This is the novel from which the phrase “only connect” comes (and I thought it came from “Two Cheers for Democracy”) and the context makes it clear what store Forster set by the phrase.

The characters in the book are fascinating evoking memories of “To the Lighthouse” and of course Jane Austen in “Sense and Sensibility”. The novel was published in 1910 so the wars that are in the memory of the characters are presumably the Franco-Prussian wars. The belief in stocks and shares and the value of living on the interest from one’s “secure” investments is very much a pre-war world and there is an innocence about life where the real fear was the encroachment of London on a way of life rather than the shattering reality of an unthinkable conflict which was only four short years later.

The novel has twists and turns where the long arm of Dickensian coincidence is invited to twitch the narrative along from time to time; but I found myself wishing for the sort of Smollett-like coincidence where loose ends at the beginning are firmly tied knots by the end. This novel is not like that and, though you do have to stretch your imagination to believe in some motivations and the happenstance of some events, its pace drags you along as the characters play out their little lives in front of you.

The style of writing is anecdotal (who is the narrator of this story?) and epigrammatic, but without the arch showiness of something like “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” where the very cleverness is rather exhausting. Forster writes to explain and there is an urgency in his explanations that is belied in the gentleness in which they are garbed.

In days gone by I used to be much more meticulous in marking those passages that I thought significant in some way or other; these days there has to be something of real moment to make my search for a pen. I did mark two passages. I particularly like the description, “The air was white, and when they alighted it tasted like cold pennies.” There is an uncanny accuracy about this that means I can evoke an experience to match. I also was taken by one character’s description of a landscape which prompted her to say, “It isn’t size that counts so much as the way things are arranged.”

I realize reading through that last quotation again that it covers more than landscape!

I feel positively invigorated by reading “Howards End” and, at the risk of being sneered at by those who have read the novel long ago, I urge people to try it.

My “Summer watch” has been something of a disaster with it losing time. I took it back today and it was exchanged without demure. When I got it home and baptized it in the pool I noticed that one of the screws securing the front plate was missing. I am sure (this is not an expensive watch!) the screws are far more decorative than useful but the small, yet gaping water filled hole looked as though the watch was doomed.

Back I went to the shop and with Toni clearly intimating that the replacement watch that I had been given was a repaired one and not a new replacement. They have given me a third watch and that hopefully will get me through the summer.

I do have one or two (ahem!) other watches to replace any further faulty timepieces. But then what civilized gentleman does not have enough watches to be able to wear a different watch for each day of the week.

For some weeks.

Another festivity in Terrassa, so the car now has merely to be pointed in the right direction and it gets us there!

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