I have chosen a Way – dear Friend – I must hold to it. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott – with a Narrower Wisdom – who chooses not the Gulp of outside Air and the chilly river-journey deathwards – but who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web – to ply an industrious shuttle – to make – something – to close the Shutters and the Peephole too – you will say, you are no threat to That. You will argue – rationally. There are things we have not said to each other beyond the – One - you so starkly – Defined. I know in my Intrinsic Self – the Threat is there.
Roland Michell is a scholar in 1980s London, studying the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. He finds some drafts of a letter between the leaves of a book from Ash’s own library, which leads him to investigate a possible connection with another Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte – which leads him to a LaMotte scholar, Maud Bailey. The story is about the four of them – Roland and Maud tracing the connection between Randolph and Christabel – and where it all took them. It’s also about language, and poetry, and solitude, and relation, and academia, and stuff. Oh yeah, and feminism.
It took a very long time to get going, this book, and the “action” was intermittent even then – but there is action and there is insight, and poetry, and there is even feminism. I did like it, I did want to get to the end of it, I did gain something valuable from it, I have even found myself influenced by it in several directions – I just don’t think I would want to read it again! It had – too many words. The library fine will be enormous.
An Amazon link.
As hinted above, mine came from the library.
“The street veered sideways and vanished. Beneath her now was only an expanse of roofs, criss-crossed with brilliantly lit roads. Suddenly it all slipped sideways, the strings of light grew blurred and vanished.
