Fiction and myth.

In October, while Pat was in England, I weakened and bought an iPad 2 - the wifi-only model which is a bit  cheaper than the 3G model and can, in any case, access the internet when I'm out and about via the iPhone's hotspot. Although I'm still consuming paperbacks  - Andrea De Carlo's Mare delle verità is the most recent - I am increasingly reading virtual publications on the iPad. Pat has the digital version of the Guardian on her iPad - I make do with their website which has most of the content for free - whilst I've taken out a subscription to the digital version of the Corriere della Sera because, like the Times, its online content is locked behind a paywall.
   As well as saving me from buying yet more bookshelves - and the Library in any case has run out of room - I can download out-of-copyight books for free from Project Gutenberg. Most of the books I've downloaded are digital versions of books I already possess - handy if you're looking for a half-remembered quote as ebooks are searchable. But some are those classics which I've always meant to read but had never got round to doing. I started with Moby Dick - and the text came as something of a shock. I guess the book falls into that small group of novels which have outgrown their original fictional category and become myths: their basic themes becoming part of our general consciousness, familiar to those those who have never read the story, who indeed  may be unaware of the book's existence. Robinson Crusoe is the prime example - I guess many people think it began life as a pantomime rather than as an occasionally tedious hymn to protestant individualism. Back in the nineties Radio Rentals had a television advertisement featuring Heathcliff and Cathy. It showed a disgruntled viewer banging on the top of his set in a futile attempt to stop the interference which was ruining the film of Wuthering Heights he was attempting to watch. As he pounded the set Cathy turned to Heathcliff and said, "Not tonight, darling, I've got a terrible headache."  The ad clearly relied on viewers being aware of who Cathy and Heathcliff are; as a pair of fictional lovers their fame is second only to that of  Romeo and Juliet. But not on viewers having read the novel. Those of us who have, immediately spotted two glaring inconsistencies: the couple are in their thirties, but Cathy died in childbirth at the age of nineteen; more significantly Cathy and Heathcliff's love was never physically consummated. It wasn't just "not tonight" but "not any night at all".
   Like everyone else I've always known about Moby Dick: it's the story of one-legged Captain Ahab obsessively pursuing the whale who'd bitten off the missing limb. I imagined I was in for a tightly written psychological study combined with high drama on the high seas. How wrong can one get: the book is deliberately funny and - far from being tightly written -  has the bagginess of an eighteenth century novel: the author spending chapters indulging himself with a fanciful catalogue of the hierarchy of seamen serving on whalers or providing a quirky taxonomy of whales. So not at all the book I was expecting. Next up will be War and Peace: I hope my expectations will be similarly confounded.

Click here for the main site.