What I've been reading ... a few minutes in the library

I’ve just started Fred Pearce’s, ‘The Last Generation’. Climate change, dramatic, horrific, abrupt and cataclysmic, is Pearce’s focus. He’s a respected journalist, someone who has been chronicling the environment and what we’re doing to it for about 20 years. Frightening stuff.

George Monbiot wrote ‘Heat’ intending, firstly, to frighten us and then suggest a carbon diet that would be palatable to our modern, industrial society. What he offers would have a palliative effect and there’s even a chance that we might even be able to make things some better. Monbiot is a terrific writer and his argument is balanced which makes it all the scarier. I’ve got an alternative thought about flying, which he rightly condemns and for which he can find no alternative – I think our world desperately needs continued face-to-face contact, even at some cost to the environment, if we’re to avoid another potential disaster: blowing each other up. More about this one later.

Meantime, I’ve been reading a new translation of the ‘Quixote’, by Edith Grossman. It’s hugely compelling, as would be expected from one of the great books in our Western canon. Obviously we’ve come a long way since Cervantes wrote the book, not as human beings, for there are no characters one half as human and attractive as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and Sancho, but as writers, tellers of tales, we have learned to entertain, matching our product, in this day of the internet and television, to an audience that demands instant gratification; you have to be in a mood, willing to contemplate the world, not just be impacted by it, to read a work like this with any profit. This time through – always before I’ve simply picked at the work – the themes that stand out most for me are the notion of battling hopelessly, with scant or no chance of success and a prevailing sense of sadness. ‘Quixote’ is a tragedy; it is farce only insofar as Don Quixote crafts his life into a mockery of mankind’s foibles.

And now for something completely different: Carl Hiassen’s ‘Nature Girl’. He is an engaging, broad, comic writer. The plots are predictable and only the bad guys – always exceedingly ugly – get done in. The heroes and the heroines are all quirky with slightly tainted pasts but they are all decent, attractive folk. Hiassen’s writing has an offended, environmental undertone – he is worried about what has been done to Florida. Rightly so! ‘Nature Girl’ is pablum with a conscience, a sit-com you read. There is no conflict between his values and those things an adult might pray about on going to bed at night.

And then there was William Boyd’s ‘A Good Man in Africa’: a modern picaresque novel set in a fictional West African country where the very flawed hero’s most important and enduring relationship is with a rapidly rotting corpse. It’s funny in a slightly nauseous way. Somehow I think Boyd got started with this one and then lost his way but the irony of the ending is enough to provide me a good week’s worth of that value.