Short stories, poems, novels, the back of a cereal box. It didn't matter what it was, I used to devour them over and over again. I even used to spend my Saturdays at the library, not for the internet but for the numerous books they had at hand. I don't quite know what happened, some say I got lazy, some say it was the fact that we no longer needed dial up so I had the freedom of going onto the internet whenever I liked. I think it's because the literature that seemed the most popular seemed completely awful. No, it didn't just seem completely awful, it was completely awful. Up until a couple of years ago the last books I had read for pleasure were the Harry Potter series and even though they had a fantastic story line even I can admit they weren't the best written books.
I love watching television and films and this whole blog is proof of that, but I also loved having stories play out in my head. I enjoyed inferring meanings from writing and building up my own version of the characters from the information given. I missed just sitting back in a quiet room reading a book for a few hours, I got more satisfaction out of it than staring at a glaring screen under my duvet. Fortunately I have an Amazon account, unfortunately I don't know when to stop buying so I now have a lot more books than I had six months ago and I'm almost finished with them. Up until a few months ago I would have said my favourite book was The Great Gatsby and why wouldn't it be? It's set in my favourite era and although the novel is short and the story line isn't too complex there is so much to it. It has some of the most beautiful writing I've ever seen in a novel and so vivid, I still haven't watched the film because it feels like I have already watched it all.I never thought The Great Gatsby would be displaced in my heart but then Any Human Heart by William Boyd came along. Any Human Heart is a compilation of fictional journals and an early quote from it has stuck with me:
I could probably just end this post here. No I can't, I could probably talk about a potato for a few hours so there's no chance of a short post by me. The compilation belong to an aspiring writer, Logan Mountstuart, from his teen years in the early 1920s up until his death. I already mentioned that The Great Gatsby is set in my favourite era so this novel was perfect for me. I was able to watch Mountstuart as he navigated his adult life in London and beyond, enjoying the perks of it all. With him being a writer with some degree of success he was able to travel and interact with the American presence in Europe with the likes of Ernest Hemingway making an appearance.
"Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary - it is the respective proportion of those two categories that make like interesting or humdrum"
Not only did he live through the roaring 1920s but he was alive and active during the Second World War, the War where Britain lost it's innocence and you see his struggles throughout this era. The events that occur may have happened to a fictional being but that doesn't make it any less real. Boyd didn't just use this era to gain a semblance of superficial empathy on the readers part, he made me truly believe anguish throughout this time period as well as the after effects. At times when reading the novel I completely forgot that it was supposedly a work of fiction, I could feel Mountstuart's loneliness, hunger and his yearning for home.
These are events that the majority of the public do not experience so it's easy to think of this as a piece of fiction, the general public alive today would be unable to relate to him. Any Human Heart doesn't just track him during the most culturally significant time periods in his lifetime, but also the ordinary. The reader get's to join him on his journey through love, loss and loneliness which are feelings that we've all felt at some point in our lives. We also get to travel the World within the 500+ pages of the novel and get to see, feel, touch and taste everything Mountstuart does. I got the chills with him when he was during his tenure in Switzerland and felt the heat in Nigeria. I was engrossed in the book at this point and had forgotten about my fan heater, so that could possibly be the reasoning why.The point is that I wasn't just passively reading this novel because I'd set myself a challenge to complete it, it may be the chronicle of a man who seems to have not made a mark in the present but I was still utterly engrossed. His life was both ordinary and extraordinary so I'm glad to have been able to join him in his journey through life and I look forward to reading it again. I'm a little mad at myself because I almost abandoned it before actually reading it in favour of the mini-series but I'm happy I didn't, although I probably will watch that eventually. And then re-read the novel. Many, many times.
Live Long and Blog!
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