Curently reading....

      I am actually reading two novels at once, quite an unusual thing for me to do.  In the past I have occasionally suspended reading one novel to read another, say at Christmas when I might lay the current novel aside to read something more seasonal.  In the past this has included the Christmas books by Dickens, or Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', or as last year the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James.
    The novels in this simultaneous read are 'Lord Jim' by Joseph Conrad and 'Serotonin' by Michel Houellebecq.  And what a difference a hundred years or so makes - from richness and complexity to something much more spare and lean, a observation both general and particular.  But then Houellebecq is a much more polemical, if not downright feral novelist.  Conrad, in comparison, a gentleman.  Really, I can't think of such an illassorted pair.  Amid so many glaring differences, yesterday evening (after I had published this little post) I realised that one of the subtle differences between these two novelists is that Houellebecq is writing in an age of consumerism and Conrad not.  It is enough for a contemporary novelist in attempting to define a character merely throw in a few brands for the reader to have some idea as to the taste, social position and wealth of the person described. (I think it may have Ian Fleming who started this trend.)

     I only started reading Conrad late last year with 'The Secret Agent' and was quite bowled over. I was reminded of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Conrad's contemporary Ford Madox Brown.  He is a great and subtle stylist. 

     I have to confess to being a little disappointed (so far) with 'Serotonin' though.  It lacks the venom, the sheer spite, of say 'Atomised' or 'Platform', or even the elegiac quality of 'The Map and the Territory' and 'Submission'.  Perhaps things will improve.