Last week I complained about nothing happening in Angel Pavement by J.B. Priestley. It was a premature complaint and the final hundred or so pages were full of incident. I have finished the novel and it has left me, I think, disappointed. It’s full of period detail, which is interesting. Priestley admitted, though, that he got almost everything wrong about the business of Twigg and Dersingham, the company for whom the main characters work. The office life he described, however, was still recognisable to someone who started work in an office 50 years after the period in which the novel was set.
Finishing Angel Pavement has given me more time to read Antonia Fraser’s Gunpowder Plot, which I left before I’d reached the halfway point. It’s the summer of 1605 and the plotters are putting their plans, such as they were, into action. I say ‘such as they were’ since Fraser insists that they didn’t really have any plans beyond blowing up parliament and making James I’s daughter the puppet ruler. They didn’t even seem to have any idea about whose puppet she would be.
I’ve finally read a story by Eudora Welty that I enjoyed. It’s Moon Lake, a story about two girls and the Boy Scout lifeguard at a girls’ summer camp. Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s a coming of age story, of which I’m not normally fond, but I was predisposed to enjoy it by the appearance of the lifeguard, who features as a sickly boy in an earlier story in the collection. It was reassuring to know that he grew out of his illness. This single story doesn’t redeem the whole collection in my eyes, but it does make the prospect of the remaining 300 pages a little less terrifying.
We’re almost into December, which means it’s time to start thinking about books for next year’s Reading the Classics Challenge. I have some ideas, but I’ve misplaced one of the books I was intending to include. That’s what comes of having too many books.
Books read in challenge: 10
Books read in year: 44
April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.
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