A Confession

Bob accuses me of mostly reading mysteries. That's true. I did most of my "great literature" reading when I was young. I prefer mysteries to literature for a lot of reasons, but I have to admit that one of them is that they're easy to read. And they don't require much thought. I especially like the ones that are amusing and quick-paced.  Either I've become a lazy reader through an excessive combination of mystery and magazine reading plus Internet scanning or I always was a lazy reader so naturally, I gravitated to those forms. I also like memoirs, essays and poems, but it's ironic that novels are usually my last choice since I've always wanted to be a novelist.

I did read In The Eye of the Sun by the Anglo-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, but that was only because my friend Christina lent it to me. And I re-read Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary because I was word-starved in the dead of night and there it was on the shelf. Joyce Cary wrote two sets of trilogies, which he referred to as "triptychs." Herself Surprised is the first volume of his first trilogy. To Be A Pilgrim is the second volume and The Horse's Mouth the third. That one was made into the 1958 film starring Alec Guinness about a crazed but brilliant artist. The Horse's Mouth is the only one of the trilogy that I didn't own so the following day I had to have it. I hunted down a tattered copy in our neighborhood bookstore and started to read.

Chapter 1 begins:

I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent, symbol of nature and love.

How could you not like that as an opening?  I'd forgotten how good the story is, but it does need to be read slowly -- not raced through like a suspense novel -- and this I found hard to do. I skimmed through the pages, reading non-sequentially. It's true, Cary's writing is a bit dated and tedious at times, but my impatience does him a disservice. I haven't the will to go back and read it properly, though.  Maybe I'll dip in and out of the rich comic prose until I've constructed some sort of story, collage-like, out of its random pieces.