The Longest Crawl (2006) Bloomsbury.
It´s a pub crawl from the Scillies to the Shetlands in one month: the Turk´s Head to the Baltasound Hotel.
First sentence: I grew restless this evening, and walked through the lanes by starlight for a drink in the next village with my friend Bob.
After a dull start it got better. At first I did not like the personality that came through the early pages but he gradually got my respect. Apart from a ´longeur´about licensing law, he kept me with him all the rest of the way. The three-way division of places to drink, alehouse, tavern and inn, was well explained. Marchant found interesting economic and literary influences in connection with pubs, and he had an obviously sincere appreciation of the beverages consumed in them. His knowledge of music I took on board without knowing most of the references. The pub quiz is now a feature of pubs countrywide which doesn´t surprise me, but it does bring all kinds of characters into the limelight. In the Cotswolds he went to church along with tanned elderly couples recently holidayed in 'Gozo, or wherever'.
The place name awoke a memory which turned out to be of Gizo. And not many people have memories of Gizo. It is antipodean whereas Gozo is mediterranean.
I have never been to Gozo near Malta, but as one of an official party of recruiters for colleges and government offices in Honiara, Solomon Islands, I have certainly been to Gizo, to visit the secondary school there, where the girls were topless. I went back there recruiting the next year.
Ian Marchant is a stand-up comic , musician, marijuana-smoking, beer-drinking writer with an ex-wife and a girl-friend, what else?
Well, a good writer certainly; eight out of ten!
The Zahir by Paulo Coelho (A Novel of Obsession) Harper-Collins, 2006
First sentence: Her name is Esther; she is a war correspondent who has just returned from Iraq because of the imminent invasion of that country; she is thirty years old, married, without children. Second sentence: He is an unidentified male, between twenty-three and twenty-five years old, with dark, Mongolian features.
The obsession is probably to get back to his wife - who left him for their own growth and change. Kazakstan is the place he goes to do this. I had to pause here to get Sacha Baron Cohen out of my mind before going on.
Zahir, or a zahir, is an object or person one cannot stop thinking about and it gets in the way of other kinds of living.
Set in Paris mainly. An open marriage with love and attachment to a wife at the same time is a little hard to take, but an important function of reading is to imagine other experience. All kinds of relationships are possible but is the author telling his wife something in these pages? The book is dedicated to her.
Epilepsy as a source of visions and voices comes into the story through Mikhail, a character who believes in the Tenga of the Steppes - a 'oneness with nature' but not a religion.
I was hoping for a revelation of belief, or faith in these pages. There was certainly enjoyment there, but not for cynics. A little bit too pretentious - or do I mean disappointing? Seven out of ten is a good score.
The non-fiction of The Longest Crawl is the kind of book you would want to read straight after this one by Coelho!
It turns out that both of these books are not really old (2006) - but they are non-new!
'War and Peace', Books, 1,2,3 from a more distant past will feature here in the near future.
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