Day Off Week 17 2020

The great news for all of us is that I have finally finished Hilary Mantel's mammoth third volume in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy The Mirror and the Light. It's a bit too long I guess (over 800 pages - imagine writing a book over 800 pages long! :-)). Spoiler alert - he dies. it all comes a bit suddenly near the end. May be there should have been some hints but then I suppose she expects us to know how it ends.  I am sure you can quibble with things in the book but on the whole .... review to follow, perhaps. I also made a proper stab at Dominion by Tom Holland, which has been hanging around since Christmas. It turns out to be quite different to what I expected. The art project went a step further forward. Might finish it next session. We also watched the last Julian Fellowes' The English Game on Netflix I think. (We also just finished his Belgravia). It's more melodrama than drama but works quite well. The crisis is allowing me to get things done I might have taken longer over I guess so I suppose there's some good in it.
PS I spot a theme here - meddling with history: Hilary Mantel and Julian Fellowes making slight changes to keep us entertained, me mainly in order to circumnavigate my limited skills and Tom Holland from the best motives trying to give us straight history in a quite popular form but inevitably getting things wrong at certain points (mainly because he is wedded to current scholarly opinion).

Day off Week 16 2020

I did have a sort of day off again this week. The main thing was reading more of Mantel (nearing the 700s now) and enjoying and some of Defoe on the plague, which is remarkably like our own times in many ways. I also worked on an art project I have in mind. We watched the first two episodes of Quiz. We ended up watching the live one on my computer which had buffering issues so not ideal. I saw the third and final one later and can say that it was interesting but sitting on the fence as it did, it was a little frustrating. A funny day really.

Day off Week 15 2020

These strange days continue and I tried to keep yesterday as a day off which meant reading another chunk of Hilary Mantel. I am now beyond the first 500 pages. Spoiler alert Jane Seymour is dead and the search for a new wife is on. I have enjoyed the Tyndale thread and much else. It is interesting to note how in recent pages the whole idea of social distancing is there (because of fear of plague).  I also read a little more of the Calvin book and the newspaper, of course. There were one or two other things that needed to be done and I did a bit more tidying and clean, which we are doing a lot of in this lockdown. Then in the evening we watched the film Vice about Dick Cheney. The film comes with heavy bias but didn't seem overly unfair. US policy in the middle east has been a mess for aeons I fear.

Day off Week 11 2020

I had to wait in for an hour or two for a man to fix our oven but when he arrived he did not have the spare parts so the visit was short one. Meanwhile I got on with reading (Hilary Mantel) walking (over 12,000 steps), having a coffee, listening to music, a little light blogging and so on. I also spent a while trying to sort out my large CD collection (over 400 in all I guess). I downloaded one I had not downloaded before to be my album of the day.

World Book Day 2020

World Book Day today apparently. I thought I'd celebrate by up[loading a pic of the latest book I have been involved in and download a sample to my kindle of Hilary Mantel's long awaited third volume in the series on Thomas Cromwell. Beats dressing up.

Books recently read

My reading schedule is a bit higgledy piggledy but I have recently finished three unrelated books of various sizes. One was George Orwell's first novel Burmese Days which is a fine novel, despite what Orwell came to think, and an unsentimental insight into English attitudes in the 1920s as the British Raj began to wind down. The more Orwell I read the more I admire his skill. The other two books are non-fiction. Victorians Undone is a large roving thing by the journalist Kathryn Hughes. With chapters on Darwin's beard and George Eliot's hand it is an unusual approach to history but a fascinating read. Some will want to avoid the book because of some of the subject material it gets into and the very occasional lapse of judgement in the expressions used. Otherwise it is well written, informative and thought provoking. The third and final one to mention is a little SPCK hardback by Tudor historian John Guy. The first half is excellent but it is supplemented in the second half with discussions of More's impact down the years, including the fascinating story of how he was made saint and how first Robert Bolt and then Hilary Mantel got hold of the character and shaped him to their own purposes. Really worth a read.

Wolf Hall

A bit indulgent but to make sure I did both I went along to the Aldwych again last night, this time to see Wolf Hall. Bette organisation would have meant I saw them in the proper order. They are not really separate plays but a very long play over two nights. Wolf Hall begins with the dancing by the cast that you often see at The Globe (presumably based on some Shakespearean tradition) and ends rather abruptly with a reference to Jane Seymour. One could also characters like Mark and George being developed in Wolf Hall so that they made more sense in the second part. Anyway, having read both Hilary Mantel's novels it wasn't too much of a problem. This second one didn't get as many laughs and was slightly less sordid while including foul mouths that I do not recall from Bring up the bodies. The weather played a really big part in last night's production but I don't remember it being mentioned in the other one. I was impressed again both by Mantel's skill and that of Mike Poulton who has done the adaptation so well (call me Risely is completely erased I noticed this time). Ben Miles (above with Lydia Leonard; Nathaniel Parker is Henry VIII) reminds me of Roger Daltrey (did some wag say who?). London's a great place.

Footnote: Last Tuesday a respectable looking woman in her sixties with a French accent asked me for a pound to get home. I didn't give her anything as she did not seem genuine. Last night I saw her again. Again she was not drunk or high. I asked her what her real story was but she was reluctant to share. I wonder what the story is. As has been asked - all the lonely people, where do they all come from?

Bring up the bodies

Went to see Bring up the bodies at the Aldwych last night. I got a ticket that day for what they call the slips. The view is slightly restricted but it was no problem. I like the Tudor period since I was a  child and have enjoyed Hilary Mantel's two novels. This dramatic adaptation of the second of them is very well done. The subject matter is rather sordid at points but the interesting thing is the principal characters and how they act. Mantel seems to have got Henry VII well and probably Cromwell. As for Ann Boleyn one can see how a few changes to the script could make her much more  of a victim and even the Reformed Christian that some have argued she was.

Obviously the novel has more time to play with but because of the compression I got things that I hadn't got so clearly when reading. The play never misses a laugh either (although I found myself laughing at some things no-one else did). The biggest laugh was for an anachronism - when Stoke Newington was described as a pastoral idyl - I had to explain to the American next to me). The use of modern English makes it easier than watching Shakespeare. I'll have to get to see Wolf Hall soon (I think they must play alternate nights). Pity I will have done them in the wrong order. The Aldwych is a lovely theatre and I can go almost door to door from here by bus (though it takes a while).

Hilary Mantel Trilogy

I have now read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring up the bodies. I was attracted to the large volumes by their subject matter - Thomas Cromwell (a key figure in Henry VIII's reign) the Tudors being my best loved and known historical period - and their award winning success. They certainly are very well written and I think give an insight into the period not easily gained from ordinary history books. I am not a fan of historical fiction. When doing A level history many years ago Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Hibbert was her real name - she also wrote as Philippa Carr and Victoria Holt). The class was nearly all girls and they would always ask if Plaidy was worth reading. The teacher's cautious answer meant I never bothered. In fact, one of the Philippa Gregory Boleyn novels is the only venture into historical fiction I have made, I believe. Anyway, Mantel is clearly superior to either of those authors but still you have this problem - not knowing what is credible fact and what is patent fiction. I tend to look behind every sentence of a book wondering what prompted it and reading these books I was constantly wondering what prompted it - whim or research. So, given that these are such long books I am not altogether satisfied but I'm glad I've got through them. Given that there is one more book to come (The Mirror and the Light) I am rather tied in I guess but that is not until 2015 they say. Meanwhile, the thought of Mark Rylance and a presentation of the material as Shakespearean drama does appeal. See here.