Book Review

I'm feeling kind of odd this evening. Family affairs are complicated, and while some of my feelings are telling me to contact people I love by any means possible, I still can't escape the strong idea that it's only by not trying to have contact that I retain the option of contact at all. And so there is guilt and conflict while I battle it out.

So I will move on to a more cheerful subject: a book recommendation.

Terry Pratchett is a favourite author, and I am in full agreement with a recent review that said he is one of the best writers alive - only too popular for critics generally to admit it. Maybe the critics get hung up on his early work, which has nothing like the depth. Anyway, his most recent book, "Nation", is a sideways step that has no connection to his usual work. It's - on the surface - a children's book, and not so wild and witty. But as with most really good writing, I can't help seeing parallels to my own life as I read it.

It's set in a version of the South Seas, in a version of Victorian times. The main characters are adolescents, a local boy and a travelling girl, both solitary survivors of a catastrophe of weather. The theme is how they manage when everything they knew has been swept away. Does this sound familiar yet?

It gets better. Both are thinkers and questioners, with conflicting urges between trying to put things back the way they were as far as is possible, and the knowledge that the old ways, for all their familiarity, didn't work and aren't appropriate. And the boy has his ancestors shouting inside his head, commanding that reverence be paid to the old rituals, threatening disaster of physical and moral varieties if he lets the old ways die. Now that the world has changed, can he have the strength to change with it, or will phantom authority fill the gap where the authority of convention used to be?

The message it gives to me is that even when a person is outside of a world they've known, they bring more of it with them than they can be aware of, and it takes constantly opening eyes to see what is real, what is valuable, and what is merely a groove in their thought processes. And that you can sincerely grieve for loss without needing to reconstruct a version of what is gone.

Besides that, there is also the intriguing clash between cultures in which two people genuinely do not understand things which seem so obvious to the other. I have the T-shirt, as the saying goes ...

One quote will do, I think, not about either main character:

"He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty which dismissed all opposition."