Cramped Solitude

For the first time for many years I have used a train to make a social weekend trip to the West Country. In this case it was the 'further' West, the area that normally would have involved both the M4 and the M5. I exchanged the driving seat, with its relative space but limited freedom of immediate physical action, with the (now) strangely high-backed armchair of what is once again called the Great Western Railway. It is strange to see how the prices of transport have artificially skewed the demographic: the majority of travellers are under 30; nearly all are alone (on any journey of 100 miles +,  a group of three or more would almost certainly save money by using a car rather than the train, even to include maybe hiring a car.)  The recent booms in rail travel - perhaps related to the growth of the student population - have fed through to rolling stock design. Most of the young singletons are coralled into  rows of airline style seats. There is little visibility to the front, back or sideways, as the 'four across' table configuration is all but obsolete. So few tables are there, that when two passengers request a table seat facing forward, they can, rather ludicrously, be placed side by side in an otherwise near-empty carriage.
There is, though, an unarguable advantage to travelling by rail, the one that prevails despite the inflated ticket prices and strange interior layout.  This is the difference: you retain the use of your eyes, hands and to a large degree your mind, so you can read, write and think whilst someone else takes charge of the menial but important business of checking the way ahead is clear.

No Name Lane (great title, great book)

A sprawling time-slipping serial killer mystery where, in a remote Durham village, young girls are being abducted and killed by a fanatical Christian, and moonstruck lovers of the 1930s have turned into bitter old ladies of the 1990s. Very enjoyable, though my only criticism is that the killer's 'religious' motivation has been offered by other writers, eg in James Oswald's Prayer for the Dead, which I also read recently (and on the whole enjoyed less.)
This book is clever and enjoyable. Both its timescales are in fact historical. The present day is actually 1993, which allows the author to indulge his enjoyment of sexist male group scenes, and also enables the power of the tabloid press to be a major plot motivator. Compared to Linskey's David Blake trilogy, which I admired enormously, this is much more ambitious, with two main characters, each with their own world of supporting characters around them. These are the ambitious, driven journalist, Tom, and the diffident, guilt-wracked detective Ian. By the end of the book their character arcs have developed so that, with extra knowledge, the readers' sympathies are reversed. <br>There are numerous points of view, sometimes changing within the same scene, but the author's very straightforward, people-centred style ensures things always stay clear, and the momentum keeps moving along. It was slightly disappointing, for a Penguin book, that the editors had not paid  more attention to detail in the punctuation. At several points quote marks are missing. But that doesn't matter. On the whole this is exciting, suspenseful and great fun - you'll read it quickly.

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

This late novel is harsher and more modern than its better-known predecessors. Prince Nekhlyudov is a moral hero - formerly dissolute, now abruptly brought face to face with the consequences of his past, and with the means, as a wealthy aristocrat, to feel the responsibility to make reparations. He encounters one of his former 'conquests', a maid reduced to prostitution and then convicted of a crime deserving of deportation to Siberia.  The story, in three distinct parts, takes us from wealthy metropolitan salons - the milieu that in Anna Karenina was mainly accepted as natural - to the crushing poverty of the peasant villages, and finally to the elaborate and arbitary cruelty of the Tsarist Gulag. Published less than 20 years before the Revolution, this is a world where telegrams and electric lights, trains and rubber coats, mix with penal processions of convicts, like modern accessories within a medieval scene. There are beautiful descriptions of weather and landscapes, and the accurate and keen observation of people that we expect from Tolstoy. The dialogue is natural and deeply-felt. There is some emotional interiority in Nekhlyudov but it is superbly balanced with action and with the long term suspense of the situation, as he awaits the decision as to whether his remorseful offer of 'rescue' will ever be accepted. It's a tremendous story of moral anxiety, degradation and regret, but it does finish on a note of spiritual hope. Even though this is late Tolstoy, it's actually easier to read than his earlier epics. And I particularly recommend it to anyone who likes Graham Greene.

3096 Days by Natascha Kampusch

3096 Days by Natascha Kampusch is a riveting read and rich in psychological material for any writer or creative person.
I picked up this book knowing very little about the story. The early pages are a little too discursive, as her family background is set up. However once the kidnapper strikes then my attention was riveted. The writing is calm, measured, seldom fraught, despite the author having gone through experiences beyond anything most of us could imagine- an indeterminate spell in solitary confinement, her only human contact with an unstable psychopath. Somehow Natascha managed him (as well as managing her own pain and indignity in passages that reminded me of Viktor Frankl's Holocaust memoir, Man's Search for Meaning)and so against the odds, she survived. Of course her dependence on her kidnapper was complete and not just a physical dependence, but also emotional. But who wouldn't become emotionally dependent on the one person in their life from the age of ten? After her 18th birthday she decided this was going to end. So she took an opportunity to escape, by no means the first she had been offered. Previously she had never dared - and one of the main reasons for that is that breaking the spell of her captivity would inevitably mean the death of either her or her captor. It's suggested at one point that his ultimate suicide on the railway came about as a result of a conversation with her. As with Frankl, you finish this book full of admiration for the author's psychological self-awareness, her 'groundedness'. <br>I was left wondering how many Prikopils there are in Austria. Certainly establishment complacency and police inertia seem to hide a very dark underbelly. She recounts how, after her release, one of the many crank emails she received was from a man who wanted her to come and live as his domestic slave...
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Effort and Faith

Faith is difficult. Why should it be true, in the face of so much contradictory evidence,  that an overarching good lies around and above us, and that the end of our earthly lives is far from the end of our spirit? Continuing to believe needs hard work and patience, often sustained by the mere bleakness of the compared alternative.
The world is distracting, the people around us offer little encouragement, and often offer vocal discouragement.
But on a pilgrimage we enjoy isolation (within gregarious group living with those sharing our mission), the sights of natural beauty, and the shared challenges of  cold wind, rain, sore feet. At the end of our trail - in my case, on the Northern Cross pilgrimage to Holy Island - we cross the icy  wet sands and emerge onto an island with a fairytale castle and a nestling little white village of pubs and churches.
Faith has never been easy. But the effort of pilgrimage, its simulacrum of the cycle of life and death, makes it a little more attainable.

Little book. Big subject

The biggest subject of all in fact - What happens when we die. The Great Divorce, a book I happened upon recently, is nothing to do with marriage, but the title is an allusion to Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. The author boards a bus that takes him, and a group of selfish, shortsighted, argumentative passengers, out of a grey drab city, so like the real life of late wartime, to a beautiful landscape where it is always dawn, but grass and water are solid, whereas the passengers  own bodies becoming transparent, ghostly. Here big healthy transfigured people, more physical than ever they were on earth, point out it is time to choose- Heaven, unfamiliar and daunting but ultimately more rewarding, or Hell in the endless city below. Some stay, some wait for the bus to take them back. A beautiful story that comes from the same time as a Matter of Life and Death (late in World War 2 when so many had been killed) and envisions the 'beyond' in something like the same way. There are hints at some of the imagery that would come out, later, in Narnia. A gripping read. If you only read one of Lewis's religious books, make it this one.

There is also a family connection. Lewis was a fellow of Magdalen College. For most of the war another fellow's sister in law Barbara had been living near Oxford with her two little girls - and Barbara typed out this book. She was well practiced because she had written several novels herself. And Barbara was my grandmother...