Thursday, 6 January 2022

Reading the 80s - 1987

Jan Morris - Manhattan '45

Can you write travel books to the past? I'm not sure you can. Writing in 1987 Jan Morris obviously couldn't actually go back to '45 and have drinks at McSorley's and provide us with local colour that way, so this short history-slash-snapshot is lacking some of what makes her writing so enjoyable for me. Sometimes it comes alive anyway, and you get a feel for a real place and real people, and sometimes there would be a mention of something I'd seen previously (in Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff, largely) and my ears would perk up, but sometimes it wades into facts and figures in a way Morris usually avoids, and my interest drifted in those spots. 


Witchcraft - Nigel Williams

This is a dark and unnerving tale. Scriptwriter Jamie Mathieson stumbles across something in the British Library catalogue and believes he's becoming slowly possessed by the witchfinder who wrote it.  But is the ghost really there, or is Jamie losing control to something else? And why does the witchfinder's own account, which was written before his execution and is interlaced with the main text (although as far as we know Jamie doesn't see it) stand so at odds with the cruelty of his actions? 

The 1987 colour is strong in this one. The cars, the old British Library Reading Room in the museum, the politics, the language, the nutters who write physical letters, the unhappy marriages that people cling to (I was sitting on the sidelines muttering 'divorce people, you're not doing your kids any favours making them watch this'), the casual misogyny and racism, the tension between choosing academia and choosing to sell out and write screenplays. 

Ezekiel's account was surprisingly interesting too. I'm not sure about the dialect (Williams seems to be compromising between actual 17th century English and what a modern reader can follow without losing the will to live) but as a portrait of a time when people really did believe witches existed - truly and without question - and were hopeful Cromwell would free them and bitterly disappointed after, it's very well done. 

And - a creepy postscript - I didn't notice the greyscale face of Ezekiel floating above Jamie's on the cover until I'd finished, and had a look over my shoulder moment when for one irrational second, I thought it had just appeared. 

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