RECENT BOOK BUYS / WHAT I'M READING (PART II)

 

I finished reading Watership Down at the end of November last year and thought that, seeing as the Christmas tree and decorations were going up on December 1st, that it'd be the perfect opportunity to read a classic novel that I'd never read before that's also incredibly festive. John Masefield's The Box of Delights was the perfect choice.

I'd bought it a month earlier along with Worzel Gummidge while holidaying in Cromer, intending it to be my new Christmas read, alongside A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - my favourite novel of all time - which I read every Christmas: one chapter an evening, starting on December 20th and finishing on Christmas Eve.

For me, the 1984 BBC adaptation of The Box of Delights is compulsory Christmas viewing, but I'd never actually read the novel it was based on*1, and was interested to see if it explained any of the bonkers elements of the story - such as ice skating mice, pirate rats, a talking metal head, cars that turn into aeroplanes and clergymen that turn into wolves - as the TV adaptation never really explains what the hell they are. Or where they came from. Or what their plan is, for that matter.

Unfortunately, the book explains nothing.

If anything it ups the bizarre elements. For instance, at one point, while they're waiting for the bad guys to clear off, the miniturised children have tea with a mouse who lives in a little house high up in a tree, before Kay has a compulsion to blow Herne the Hunter's horn and accidentally awakens a load of fairies who were 'frozen' in time. Confused? Yeah. So was I, and I've read the thing. Even worse, these elements add nothing to the actual story. In the book there's more of Kay going to the completely useless Tatchester police only to be told that he's imagining everything and he should go home, forget about it and everything will work out alright in the end. Extraneous stuff that needed excising for the TV series to be successful. Reading the book actually exposes how little plot there is - with much of the wafer-thin story taken up with Abner Brown kidnapping the local clergy one at a time over the course of the novel, and Kay travelling back and forth to the local police station to report the latest vanishing member of his family and friends, interspersed with an occasional side adventure with the box.

The book was fun, and I'm glad I read it. But I have to admit I prefer the sleeker, less repetitious TV adaptation.

But the classic novel isn't all that I'm buying, or reading. I'm getting very interested in (you could even say go so far as to say "obsessed about") British social culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Not just these two decades, but of Britain during the Second World War. And, more recently, of Germany and German life during the rule of the Third Reich. It's true that I've always been interested in British history, but my reading of these periods of British (and German) history are starting to become extensive (i.e I'm spending way too much on books again!). The bookshelves in my house are starting to groan under the weight of factual books on Britain during the years of austerity, during the winter of discontent, and of the bleak, dark era under Thatcher's rule.

For the past 17 years British historian, columnist and occasional presenter, Dominic Sandbrook, has been documenting the social shifts and political upheavals of the British people from the late 1950s, through to the beginning of the 1980s, in a series of remarkable books. These books begin in 1956 with the sparking of the Suez Crisis, but I began buying them a little later in the series: Book 3, to be precise with State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974, followed by Books 4 and 5; Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain: 1974-1979 and Who Dares Wins: Britain 1979-1982. These, along with other non-fiction history and film books (I either bought or got for Christmas), are sitting on my shelves waiting to be read: including The Making of Alien by J.W. Rinzler, Star Trek The Motion Picture: Inside the Art & Visual Effects by Jeff Bond & Gene Kozicki, and The Second World War by Antony Beever.

After The Box of Delights, I read four books in rapid succession: A Christmas Carol, and the first three novels in the Chronicles of Narnia series. These are actually re-reads, as I first read all 7 Narnia books back in the late 1990s. But after moving a couple of times, the books got lost somewhere, so I decided to pick up new copies in the shape of the Harper Collins box set. Reading them in chronological rather than published order - The Magician's Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy - took me up to the end of the year.

I paused for Christmas, with the possibility that I would be receiving one or two as presents. Which I did. One of which - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer (the behemoth) - I started a day or so after Boxing Day.

And I'm still reading it now (and will be for a while yet, judging by the size of the book and the smallness of the print). But along side this, so far this year I've also read two more Terrance Dicks novelisations from the two beautiful hardbacks released last year - The Day of the Daleks and Genesis of the Daleks.

I've recently been engaged in a couple of re-reads (The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy & Anthony Shaffer and Ritual by David Pinner) for a Folk Horror audio project I'm currently working on.

*1  Or The Midnight Folk come to think of it. I really must rectify this as well - although fingers crossed it isn't as bonkers as The Box of Delights and it has a bit more of a plot too!