More Than Somewhat

I like having a routine. In one of my first blogs, written just after I retired, I said how much I craved routine, and how having one was my comfort zone. Well, I certainly have a routine right now, and if I’m honest what I would actually like is a break from it. Heaven knows I am not one who embraces spontaneity, but how I crave doing something on the spur of the moment!

The days are blurring into one. Every morning we go for our regular three-and-a-half mile walk through the increasingly soggy country park. When we get home the muddy clothes go in the wash and I make myself breakfast (porridge with sunflower seeds and fruit or jam). Then I may do some housework, and once I week I go to Tesco to do a big shop. After lunch I read, and scroll through social media, then it’s time to make tea, wash up, watch TV, then go to bed. Some days (like today), I write.

Eastbrookend Country Park

It would be nice to be able to just get up one morning and take the car, or the train and go to the coast, or up to London (not today though, as it’s snowing), but that will have to wait. My escape from routine must be through the pages of a book, and in the last few months I have got back into reading after a couple of years in which I had started to lose the habit.

At present I have two books on the go, not something I usually do, but one of them is a book of short stories, so I dip into that as a contrast to the 700-page novel I am reading. That novel is The Vizard Mask, by Diana Norman. It was published in 1994 and has one of my favourite opening sentences; ‘Penitence Hurd and the Plague arrived in London on the same day.’

I read The Vizard Mask when the paperback came out in 1995, and have not thought of it for a quarter of a century, until it recently popped into my head for no reason. Remembering how much I had enjoyed it when I first read it, I searched for it on Amazon, quite prepared to find it not available, but there it was, with the Kindle edition priced at a very reasonable £2.90: other formats are a bit pricier.

Used copies of the hardback range from £38 to £139, while previously owned copies of the paperback are priced at £60, or an eye-watering £3,680 although that one is apparently ‘new.’ In purchasing my Kindle version, I naturally took great care to avoid accidentally clicking on the more expensive paperback copy.

The Kindle edition has a few glitches – ebooks seem to suffer them more than physical books in my experience – with some misplaced punctuation; commas and full-stops exchange places from time to time, but for a book that has been out of print for some time and subsequently digitised, that is probably to be expected.

The plague catches up with Penitence sooner rather than later, and there are plenty of parallels with the way in which the authorities deal with it and the way in which governments are handling coronavirus, although as yet no one has been boarded up in their own homes for forty days with a red cross daubed on their front doors, but give it time, eh?

My other reading matter was an absolute snip on the Kindle. The Damon Runyan Omnibus, comprising the trilogy of More than Somewhat, Furthermore, and Take it Easy, was just 99p. You may not know Runyan or his work, but chances are you’ll have heard of Guys and Dolls, the stage show and film that Runyan’s short stories inspired. By the by, Runyan was the first man to coin the term ‘Hooray Henry’, in his story Tight Shoes.

Damon Runyan

Runyan’s style is an eclectic mix of the highly formal and the informal, with some often bewildering slang thrown in. His tales – which recount the exploits of the gangsters, guys, and dolls of prohibition-era New York, especially round Broadway – are almost all phrased in the present tense, to wit:

Breach of Promise

One day a certain party by the name of Judge Goldfobber, who is a lawyer by trade, sends word to me that he wishes me to call on him at his office in lower Broadway, and while ordinarily I do not care for any part of lawyers, it happens that Judge Goldfobber is a friend of mine, so I go to see him. Of course Judge Goldfobber is not a judge, and never is a judge, and he is 100 to I in my line against ever being a judge, but he is called Judge because it pleases him, and everybody always wishes to please Judge Goldfobber, as he is one of the surest-footed lawyers in this town, and beats more tough beefs for different citizens than seems possible.

Now, if there is one thing about Runyan’s stories it is that they are peppered more than somewhat with colourful characters, but their exploits – even when not strictly legal – are always endearing and rarely, if ever, murderous even when they are loosing off slugs from their Roscoes someplace like Good Time Charley Bernstein's little speakeasy on West Forty-seventh Street. They are, however, a dish best served sparingly, as they comprise a very rich diet if one is inclined to partake of them more often than is good for one.

One book I won’t be reading again is the most recent Jack Reacher novel. A new Reacher novel is a highly anticipated annual event in the world of books, and Reacher’s 25^th outing, The Sentinel, was published in October 2020. Having read the preceding twenty-four books, naturally I read this one too, curious to see how Lee Child’s work would compare now that he has taken his brother Andrew on board as a collaborator.

So, how was it? Well, I’ve enjoyed all the previous Jack Reacher books, even number 24, Blue Moon, which my wife (who has also read them all apart from the latest) didn’t think was up to snuff, but The Sentinel, was Reacher-by-numbers. All the elements we’ve come to know and love in a Reacher novel were there, but it all seemed a bit half-hearted, as though the writer was going through the motions. Reacher 26, Better Off Dead, is due out in October 2021, and I expect that I will read it, but my hopes are not high.

One book that I sampled, but won’t be buying (a major bonus of the Kindle being the facility to download the opening chapter(s) of a book for free) is the highly acclaimed Ben Okri novel, The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1991. Val was recommended it on a writing course, and having read just the opening page, asked me my opinion. I got nearly to the end of the sample, which comprises the first thirteen (short) chapters before deciding enough was enough.

Ben Okri

The Famished Road runs to nearly six-hundred pages and is just the first book of a trilogy. It is written nicely enough, Okri’s style is easy on the eye, as it were, it flows well and is enjoyable enough for that, but the story – such as it is – does nothing for me, being merely a series of loosely connected incidents.  It is rather like someone recounting a series of their dreams, and we all know how interesting other people’s dreams can be. Maybe it pulled together over the remaining 1,300 pages of the trilogy, but I wasn’t sufficiently engaged to buy it to find out.