I could be accused of many things, but being a profilic blogger is definitely not one of them. I could also be accused of finding many excuses for this, but I guess the most straightforward one, and its not even an excuse, really, is that if I don't think I have a lot to say, I just won't say it. And anyway, its my blog, so who are you to complain if I don't update this so regularly...
Leaving all confrontations aside (apologies, but this is now an early Monday morning, and I'm due to be in work in a couple of hours, so my crankiness is hopefully forgivable) I should really go about explaining the title of this post. While it may appear to be something from a bad acid trip, it was actually the product of a rather unusual conversation I had a few weeks ago. As with most evening conversations (mine, anyway) this one was being conducted over some very nice red wine, and as a result, I think there could have been some lack of clear thinking on the part of one of the participants. The end result ended up being whether or not there were any penguins in the animated movie Madagascar, a sweet, but somewhat stilted, movie about a bunch of New York City zoo animals wanting to go live life on the wild side. Anyone who has seen the movie and is not drunk enough to confuse it with Ice Age (either one) will remember the mafiosi penguins in the movie, but anyway! I just remembered this slightly odd comment, delivered with great equanimity, and decided it would make a good title...
Anyway, the reading continues - I'm still reading three books at a time. I'm convinced that at some point its going to hit a deeply hidden switch and reveal the secrets of the universe, but no luck as of now...
While I won't write about all three, I'll talk about just one - I've got a copy of E.L.Doctorow's The March on my side table. Set around the march of Sherman's army through the US deep South during the US Civil War, the book is all about the horrors of war, as seen through the eyes of people, both ordinary and extraordinary. There are former plantation owners' wives, Union army doctors, former slaves, cavalry officers, English journalists, and also General Sherman himself.
I haven't finished the book yet, but I have to admit, Doctorow has disappointed me this time. Not because of his style of writing, but because of the content. His sentence structure, and even the plot, is fairly tight, and I'm guessing he's got a good editor. But somehow, if the book was to be about the horrors of war, and how human life continues in spite of it, I failed to see it.
Perhaps this has to do with the number of characters he's got in his story. Its very difficult to weave more than four narratives together, and you almost feel cheated because just as the story starts developing and getting interesting with one person, its like someone hit "Cut" & then "Paste" on some editing keyboard to put another story in place. End result - not much engagement with any character.
The other book I faced a similar problem with was The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh. In fact, I think he was being harassed by his editor for the last 100 pages, because suddenly, everyone starts dying. After spending something like 400 pages building up this huge panorama, he pulls out a dart board and starts knocking each one out of the picture. And its all reasonably sudden, in many cases only a page or two.
Perhaps modern authors have a Tolstoy hangup. I can see the egotistical issues of writing the next War & Peace, but the key difference is that most Russian realists were writing huge books to pass those horrible Russian winters, when there wasn't really much else to do; ditto for the readers of the time, who were probably quite happy to pick up Turgenev's latest best seller in four encyclopaedic volumes...
Anyway...I promised to tell you about the doctor. I'm going to South Africa in a couple of weeks for work, and needed to go get all my jabs and medications sorted out. While the clinic was a nice private one (no hideous NHS facilities, thank you!) the doctor didn't seem too inclined to examine me. His exact comments included "Why you're here for this, I'm not sure. You're only 25, and most of these are for fat, middle aged business men", and "We'll do a blood test, but don't be disappointed if it doesn't show up anything exciting"
However, as an expert of tropical & infectious disease, he was quite excited to learn that I was off to Africa. I had the distinct impression that he'd have been a lot happier some 85 or 100 years ago, treating intrepid English travellers & colonisers, who were off doing the work of God in the heathen lands (Note - this last sentence is purely sarcastic. Besides, as someone who formally qualifies as heathen myself, I can take as many pot shots as I like at the practice)
Having finally bored of his litany of what all to do or not, I confronted him and asked him what exactly his bread & butter was in London, since its hardly a tropical climate. Smooth rejoinder, "I get a lot of HIV patients", to be followed by dire warnings of ignoring fevers that could be malaria "I know of businessmen who went to bed thinking that they had a cold, and they never woke up...)
That's beginning to sound like a long post already...and since I should really get up and get ready for work (this post is an early morning one since I couldn't sleep) I will end this here.
Until next time, dear reader...
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