Broken Bonds at Port Eliot

At the Port Eliot Festival I read the first scene of the first draft of my novel. The unmoved sea of faces in the audience told me how it needs to bring the taste of breakage. The breakdown of trust is so damaging in many different areas of life. Its web reaches out and grabs the most unexpected bystander.
If we look now from a 2010 perspective, all the cuts about which we rightly moan have their origin in the down fall of the banks. Their collapse triggered the drying up of credit which in turn sent the economy into decline. But what was the real reason? The breakdown of trust?
I also read a completely different reflection on the festival. Can they connect?

Tulip Fever - Deborah Moggach

At the heart of this book is painting, portraiture. The writing seems to emanate from this heart with description that is often breathtaking and always illuminating.
The present tense delivery moves from one point of view to another, as each tiny section of the picture is composed and executed.
The plot is neat; at times it is exasperating, but soothed always by the prose which draws the reader on.

The Little Stranger

I listened to Sarah Waters talk about this her latest book at the London Book Fair in 2009. I had enjoyed The Night Watch and looked forward to her exploration of yet more recent history; The Night Watch is set in WWII and The Little Stranger during the post war Labour Government.
The Little Stranger is written in the first person from the point of view of a middle aged bachelor GP. Its first sentence tells you that it is going to be about a country house, Hundreds Hall; its first paragraph adds the setting of the turbulence of the class system in the aftermath of war.
It has the remembered pace of my childhood: cars that start only with care, doctors with bags, council houses, sensible shoes and heavy clothing. Waters honours the different vocabulary of only sixty or so years ago.
It is a story in which everything changes. Hundreds Hall starts, albeit in memory, as breathtakingly grand and finishes in complete decay. Mrs Ayres begins young and beautiful and ends taking her own life. A similar decay affects Caroline and Roderick, the heirs to the house. What is the cause of the decay? Mr Attlee and the Labour Government, or something sinister? Waters said it was a ghost story. What then is so clever is that whilst this offers the simplest explanation of the strange occurrences, all the time the reader finds herself aligned with the less fanciful explanations offered by the narrator and others. So much so that there remains a hint that the narrator is in some way responsible. The final paragraph possibly supports this.
It is a book written with the weight and texture of a good tweed coat. We spend time with people and places, yet the plot is always near to draw us on.
I look forward to her next one.

FSA watches Goldman Sachs case after link to city trader

The Observer article suggests that the authorities are pursuing the 'architects' of the exotic financial instruments that helped to cause the credit crunch. I would suggest that the architects merely designed the tools for others to use. Isn't it the case of the bulldozer equally useful in clearing brown field sites and removing settlements in ethnic cleansing?

Avarice: true villain behind global slump

Now, this is scary, to read in The Guardian the argument on which much of Broken Bonds is based that forget bonuses and deficits, the root cause of the banking crisis is greed. The article points to those looking for a comfortable retirement, amen to that! The point throughout, though, is that investors will always seek the best possible returns and a banking industry geared to serve this market will seek to produce it. The answer is radical and is about fair shares for all. The question is how might that be achieved.

In the run up to a General Election it will be interesting to see whether any of the major parties follow this as a vote catching issue. The point is that we are not talking about bad people. It was easy to point the finger as massive bonuses and crazy senior executive salaries, it was easy to get steamed up about tax havens, but this stuff is too close to home. It's about you and me.

Ordinary Thunderstorms

I met William Boyd at the London Book Fair and had been looking forward to reading this book in spite of some reviews which cast a little doubt over its quality. I think that what he achieves in this book is significant. There is the tension that you would expect from what is I suppose a thriller. It comes very early on and I worried a little that it might lose strength. However, the energy is maintained by the introduction of deep characters and the slow emergence of the 'real' plot. There is revealing description of low life London. It is a book that takes you out of a safe place into one outside normal society.

Middlemarch

Don't be silly; a blog could not possibly do justice to this masterpiece. You'll be blogging Shakespeare next, and any way how come you haven't read it before?
You see it in Felix Holt, but here it is more subtle: the way the plot doesn't work in a linear fashion, but rather is a web of influences and linkages. It would probably be true to say that this book couldn't be written now since editors would stamp hard on the authorial comments. Yet they, with the thoughts of so many of the characters, serve to offer a deep insight into 19th century rural life. I want to tell my lecturer in rural history that this is a first class primary source. It has everything: reaction to the Reform Act, agricultural reform, absent clergy and the absolute domination of money