'I would meet you upon this honestly': My Week in Books 2

This week I've been somewhat slower in my reading than last week, what with celebrating my birthday on Monday with Teachers whisky, and taking full advantage of post-lecture free wine at my English department last night; but nonetheless, I've been reading a few books, of somewhat different content from one another. Here's my analysis:


Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (1882)

Not one of Hardy's 'great' novels, not among the so-called 'Big Five' or even what we might call the 'Medium Five', this book is still a pleasing romance. I mean 'romance' not only in the sense of pink-covered, Barbara Cartlandesque books, but also in the sense of a pleasing diversion - and indeed, this novel is not as hard-hitting with its delineations of Victorian society as, say, Jude or Tess, which came later. The merging of science with literature is something I have a particular fondness for, and although this is by no means 'science fiction', the ways in which astronomy (the 'tower' of the title refers to an astronomical observatory, where a married woman and a young star-gazer meet and fall in love) bleeds into the prose of Hardy's writing more than makes up for the early occasional stilted dialogue between the star-crossed pair.

T. S. Eliot, Poems (1920)

This is not such an easy read as Eliot's previous volume, reviewed last week, and when your French is as rusty as mine it's hard to follow the four offerings of the twelve poems contained herein which are written in French. But the poems are still of the kind that make you want to go back and reread them immediately, if only to try to make head or tail of what they're all about. 'Gerontion', the lead poem here, contains some of Eliot's most resonant lines, and there are also a few lines elsewhere which helped to get Eliot charged with anti-Semitism (though After Strange Gods, a book Eliot wrote in the thirties, did the real damage there), so it remains for some a controversial book. I'll reread The Waste Land for next week.

Gavin Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart (2009)

In the wake of Christopher Ricks' 2004 book Dylan's Visions of Sin, other literary critics have rightly risen to the challenge of attempting to write a work of literary criticism that takes - as it central focus - the lyrics of a great songwriter. In Hopps' case it is Morrissey, for me as for many others the greatest songwriter in the whole of popular music. This book is a deftly written exploration of the themes of Morrissey's lyrics that approaches pageturnability - no mean feat in literary criticism, I know. Unlike many other writers on Morrissey's work, Hopps displays a conscious lack of egotism and instead lets Morrissey's persona and words speak for themselves, and he makes some surprising but on the whole convincing comparisons - between the lyrics and, for instance, the writings of Oscar Wilde and George Eliot's Middlemarch. Some may blanch at this marriage of literature and lyric, but when we recall that Morrissey treats Wilde almost like his 'religion', like 'carrying your rosary around with you' (quoted by Hopps on p. 74), and that the opening lines of 'How Soon Is Now?' allude to Middlemarch, suddenly Hopps' connections seem far from contrived. This is not to say that Hopps merely presents: he is a thoughtful and imaginative reader, but this does not mean he spills over into over-analysis or far-fetched readings. Indeed, when he suggests that 'The Boy with the Thorn in His Side' may have been inspired by Wilde's fairy tale 'The Nightingale and the Rose', that is precisely what he does, suggests it: he resists any lapidary interpretations, unlike many other monolithists of Morrissey's work. All in all, this is a lively and very interesting book, and one I'd recommend to all Morrissey fans, or to people who like to see literary criticism stretched at the seams a little.

Right, that's it for this week; next week I'll be reviewing a few supernatural titles, as I return my academic hat to my silly head, and plunge myself back into the thesis good and proper. Until then, dear readers, have a good week, and don't put all your feet in one sock.