The first two I tried were Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (my edition is a comfy paperback published in 2008 by Key Porter Books) and Richard Adams' Watership Down (my copy is borrowed from the library but it is now on my 'must own myself' list). I had heard of, and long wanted to read, Ishiguro's, but I shamefacedly admit to knowing nothing at all about the existence of Watership Down until it was referenced on Flight of the Conchords last season (and the reference had absolutely nothing to do with the novel, really, so I was still in the dark).
A poety friend recommended we both read The Remains of the Day by the end of this month and I agreed, not knowing that I wouldn't be able to put it down, that it would call a halt to all my writing and reviewing projects until I had read it through. What a beautifully sad novel! The careful, often poetic, restraint of the narrative voice; the need to read between the lines, as it were, to feel the tragedy of it all; the irony and the pathos that never quite tip the scales of this reader's patience. I loved it.
The narrative, centring around the first person narrator Stevens (lingering butler from an extinct era) as it does, is so brilliantly paced and delivered. The distillation of the narrator's emotions through his journal-like jottings (who is he writing for/to?) was so effective, and affecting. It's the kind of novel that just sticks in the imagination, inhabiting.
The second novel picked from the list, Watership Down , was just as engrossing both in terms of subject and atmosphere (disappearing lifestyles in a sparkling, but changing, England). I have to say, though, that the first few chapters were hard going for this reader. I couldn't stop asking myself where it was going, and why I was reading a novel about bunnies. However, after the first twenty pages or so I became completely wrapped up in the world of Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig et al.
When their warren is threatened by Man and the visionary warning of Fiver is ignored by the Chief Rabbit, Hazel and Fiver, along with a handful of other male rabbits (bucks), decide to set out in search of a safer life, a more democratic/free style of warren government, and (eventually, inevitably) some does. It sounds so very simple, but the story unfolds in such a way that it grabs you and pulls you in until you are reading on the edge of your seat, gobbling up the pages to find out what happens to these noble bunnies. Politics, the environment, religion, philosophy. It's all in there (even though -- or perhaps because -- it is a 'children's classic'). What a great read!
An excerpt from Watership Down:
We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable, flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile . . . We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers.
* The one that was sent my way was a slight variation of this.
2 scribble(s) in the margin:
Thanks for reminding me that Watership Down is still on my tbr pile, and it's been there way too long. I pledge to read it this spring.
Hope you enjoy it! Aren't TBR piles great? The knowledge that a (possibly) good book awaits is almost (almost!) as fun as reading it.
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