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Olde England

Written on: May 31st, 2009 by: in News

A posting on this blog from last week sent me on a curious reading jag, which is something, I think, that often happens with all readers! Something someone mentions on the news, a casual comment overheard in line at the bank, a gauzy recollection of some pleasant childhood moment- any of these and more can create the urge to discover and explore more, and what better place than the library: we’re no slaves to fashion, and we are required to honor the written word for more than its current market value, so the wisdom of ages scratches at our doors at night, waiting for some patron to come along to release it.

In my case, a light-hearted quiz about “what kind of book are you” gave the answer Watership Down, which was, as I noted, a long-time favorite of mine. Checking the catalog for more work by Richard Adams pointed me to a biography that I was unaware of, which I quickly checked out- so far it has proved to be a fun read- a rambling, disjointed kaleidoscope of childhood memories from deepest rural England with no particular narrative direction or cohesion: much like childhood itself.

I don’t know if this kind of biography is a particular genre in itself, but I read a bunch of ’em in high school with differing degrees of enthusiasm, and am planning to go back to look at some of those to see how I feel about them now- another great thing about books is that something you hate at 18 you can love at 40 (that’s for you, Philip Larkin)- I always liked them to some extent for the strangeness and timelessness that is present in the best of them- the details of ancient customs still preserved and alive, the indifference to modernity or the shock at its arrival, and always, the sense of culture and landscape as indistinguishable.

Works about the rural life also typically deal with the British class system- since a great many of the books are written by or about the lives of the privileged, and are almost always haunted by the specter of the World Wars which created a domestic revolution in cultural attitudes, and decimated the privileged and underprivileged alike- in fact the classic model of rural aristocracy didn’t long survive the First World War, and many of these books are a document of a lifestyle at its high point or in its final decline.

Anyway, here’s a list of some of the best of these. Feel free to add your own:

• Laurie Lee “Cider with Rosie“
• Flora Thompson “Lark Rise to Candleford“
• Robert Graves “Goodbye to all that“
• the infinitely wonderful “My family and other animals” (although this is not set in England at all. And we don’t have the book…)
• L.P. Harley’s “The Go-Between“, although this is darker stuff
• A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad“