Wednesday had a bad night
What I read
I already mentioned some of my thoughts evoked by Luster, though I realise that there is more to the book than the issues there. Though also there is the feeling that it falls into 'fiction written by young person who has done MFA/creative writing degree', and okay, I daresay in these dreadful days once they emerge with their shiny diplomas they actually have to join the gig economy and that maybe maps to holding horses outside the theatre/going to be a governess/working in the blacking factory in terms of providing a somewhat less ivory-tower perspective? But it still seems to me to have stylistic effects. This, as we used to say in the dear old seventies, is absolutely My Garbage and heaven forfend I should Lay My Trip on young writers of today.
Then read Mick Herron, Dead Lions (Slough House #2) (2013), v good.
Georgette Heyer, Black Sheep (1966), which I assume I must have read before, given the date at which it came out and that I have a copy on my shelves, but it did not seem terribly familiar. Not dreadful, but not top-rate. (I was hoping that the fortune-hunter would actually marry the designing widow and it would be like Moll Flanders and they would go off and be a con-couple together, but that would actually have required him to be less of a jerk than he was set up to be.)
SI Martin, Incomparable World (1996, recently reissued in new edition) - historical novel about a group of Black Loyalist soldiers in London after the American War of Independence and having to eke out a precarious and fairly criminal living. It's good, if grim, though I had a few anachronism niggles - pound notes? surely not. (At least, not at that social level.)
On the go
Making great headway with Mary Shelley - things are a bit less awful because her horrible father-in-law has finally popped his clogs, but she is still suffering financial difficulty, social precarity, health issues, and the ongoing problems with her social circle. Fair amount of toxicity amoung her supposed friends/family - backbiting and tattle-taleing, not to mention the demands for money. It would be enough to make anyone depressed. Though one can't help thinking that things got better once PBS was dead and not dragging her around foreign parts while he chased other women and she had babies who died. There are passages that suggest that she actually had PTSD from those years - over editing his works, a return visit to Italy, etc.
Up next
Probably the next Mick Herron.
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