The last fifty are always the hardest

Finally, about a week later than I wanted to, I've finished that Bowen novel, The last september. It was a pretty easy read, and engrossing enough, so I'm sure exactly what my problem was. I'm planning to send it to my sister. She probably won't like the ending, but I think there may be enough socially satirical banter to edge it into her area of interest. She's massive into Downtown Abbey right now, and this is set only a scant few years later--albeit in Ireland, at a much smaller house where the lives of the servants don't figure into the narrative at all.

That's hardly surprising as the lives of the Irish-Irish (as opposed to the Anglo-Irish) hardly do either. In fact, one of the revelations of the novel was hearing characters belonging to the Protestant Ascendancy consistently describe themselves as "Irish" and explicitly contrast their experiences and customs to those of the "English". The presence of so many recently-arrived British soldiers and their dependents seems to bring these (to my eyes, quite minor) differences into sharp relief for the Anglo-Irish; in one particularly amusing passage, the lady of the house deplores the "disconcerting" English habit of "being seen socially before noon", which is a source of consternation for their sleepy local village.

After that, I was at a loss for what to start on next. A conversation with an expat about Turkish literature last Saturday got me somewhat keen on the Tanpınar that monshu bought me for Christmas, but the snippets I read haven't grabbed me and I kind of want to keep the focus on Irish for at least another month. Please I wasn't feeling up to anything particularly challenging today. So I started going through the half-read books on my nighttable and found that I still had about fifty pages left in Dalrymple's City of Djinns.

I polished this off sitting in the comfy chair under a Campbell tartan lap quilt while wearing a matching outfit of Black Watch plaid. Dalrymple's a charming and erudite writer, and overall the book is rather reminiscent of Mackintosh-Smith and his practice of "reverse archaeology". There's mercifully little of the usual travel-writing guff in it and his fascination with the Muslim Old City nets him some very interesting interviews. It all ties up a bit too neatly, too, so I suspect a bit of licence but nothing that I would begrudge.

When he got in, monshu suggested that I start going through the books by the bed until I found one that grabbed me, but after a little thought, I simply reached right for the new Edna O'Brien novel. That will buy me at least another week before I have to once again wrestle with my surfeit of choices.