I have steamed through this fairly short, easy read. Based in Oxford but with a mention or two of Cambridge it is set in the University world of Mathematics. I did drown slightly in the mathematical ramblings but once I slowed down and reread the Pythagorean references it began to add to the story rather than cause me to loose interest. The main character is likable, a big plus factor for me, he has arrived to study at Oxford and is instantly drawn into a murder investigation. There are are some moments where I thought this is definitely written to be filmed, which it was, even though it was awarded a literary prize there are typically ‘film’ moments, spontaneous sex, and slightly out of pace events. The film has John Hurt as an Oxford mathematian and Elijah Wood plays the books main character, how close it is to the book remains something I will have to discover but looking at the trailer I think those pesky little film makers have given it the Da Vinci-Code treatment.

I have read 3 books by Matt Haig and this is the strangest, he is getting increasingly dark in content and disturbing in nature. The details of a fathers lost and obsession are painfully real but also recorded in such a deft way that I felt like a spy peering in on this man who by every breath was one small step closer to insanity.

As I haven’t, as yet, ventured back to On Chesil Beach, though I have scratched my way through the unchallenging pages of Judy Rumbold’s Reasons Not to Move to the Country, I decided to buy Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, sofaman remarked that it would be grim, possibly, but I felt compelled. It has been faithfully at my side since Saturday morning, but reading such quiet well clipped monotone perfection is not so easy when you go away for the weekend to a vintage race meeting. I took myself off for breakfast in the circuit canteen but the television was screaming out Spungpants Squarebob [or some similarly odd arrangement of random words], they turned it off for me, but then a friend arrived and we took up conversation, Plath didn’t get a look in. Eventually, breakfast over I retired to the car but the weather was so cold I couldn’t hold the book still. I gave up. Late last night I made a significant journey into the pages and very fine they are too, I am drawn into the weave of the words, her voice is personal but cold, magical and sad, I fear what I might find, Plath is letting me peak into her little box of secrets and I just can’t help myself.

On Chesil Beach is, sorry Ian, not doing it for me, I am still plodding on but the two main characters, or maybe the plot, just doesn’t furnish my reading room. I have taken a sabbatical and closed, for now, this ‘masterpiece’, this ‘exquisitely crafted’ ‘fierce pursuit of the truth’ in favour of Judy Rumbold’s Reasons not to move to the country, which I am assured is ‘the funniest book about the countryside since Cold Comfort Farm’, perhaps. Apparently ‘Rumbold is to mud what Dickens is to fog’, though I wish I had read that before I splashed out £7.99 as I distinctly dislike Charles Dickens and all his quaintly named marvels of the Victorian era. Fingers crossed Rumbold doesn’t cunjure from her imaginings equally titled East Anglian oddities, though in reality many of them there are. Within only a few pages she has already slagged off a familiar landscape and the percularities of estate agents creative writing, I doubt Ms Rumbold will grow to understand the need for some to live at the end of dirt tracks in crumbling hovels with inhospitable interiors. I sense she may have to find herself roughing it in the rolling hills of uncharted Suffolk, the back lanes of which are as the wrinkles on the faces of the well tanned locals that linger, ever hopeful, in the carparks of rural pubs, waiting for an early snifter to ease their days away. Her writing style is editorial, well clipped and as Ms Angry on Sunday as India Knight or Julie Birchall and is as addictive and disposable as the Sunday broadsheets, passing through my cerebral cortex like a shot of Tequila and a girls night out, thoroughly meaningless but momentarily pleasurable.

This week I treated myself to Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach and have had three attempts at starting it. Firstly in bed on Tuesday but the hour was late and my work ethic kicked it out of my hands and onto the floor, the story bearly leaving a ghostly image in my mind. I felt compelled to try again last night but I fell headlong into a deep sleep whilst pondering over ‘should I start at the beginning again or risk diving in at page 4?’. This morning the wind had blown so hard that the rail lines were down north of my jouneys start and I spent sometime huddled up on a waiting train, glued to a fine jet of excessively super-heated air and looking out on the horizonal trees, I decided time was in abundance and it was the moment to get started on the paperback. There are several dilemmas to encounter in the process of book reading but for me number one is time, time enough to reach deep into the writer’s mind and the plot, to engage and love and need to continue, in the case of On Chisel Beach this ceased to be a dilemma after completing page 2. The emerging concern being the jouney to my destination is so short and I was too engaged to want to put the book down, I considered what might happen should I remain on the train, miss my stop, phone in from London, oops sorry!, fell asleep. It wasn’t a choice, I am not that kind of person, well only in my head.
I was surprised by how the story almost instantly took my attention, whether that was a consequence of the false starts or that it is so naturally engrossing for me, I suspect, is yet to be discovered. The style is easy on the mind, the narrative crisp and the imagery in my head clear, his patterns of words comforting my memories of times past and previously lost. I began to think, time is an odd concept, things that are past are not lost forever they are just not currently in fashion.