pumpkinstrokemarrow

But somehow I found the novel irritating. I started off by being irritated by the flipping between Arthur and George, allocated more or less alternate pages at the start. Something that I find equally irritating in films. I like my stories to move forward rather than to jump all over the place. Then I was irritated by the inclusion of lots of letters. Some of them rather unpleasant letters which did not need to be included quite so fulsomely to make the point. And the tendency to point up the scatalogical and messy aspects of life. What with one thing and another I end up skipping, maybe reading one paragraph in three, something that does not happen very often in my reading life.

It turns out that the novel is a fictional account of a real life miscarriage of justice. So perhaps we have another illustration of the old truth that life is not nearly so much fun or so interesting as art. There is also the point, made several times before, that I disapprove of fictional accounts of real events, the confusion of fact and fiction. Indeed, one of the points of this novel is that there quite enough different ways of telling what seem to be the facts without adding fiction.

The opportunity which yielded 'Arthur & George' also yielded the director's cut of 'King Arthur' for the rather greater sum of £3.99. Leaving aside the marketing nonsense that the director's cut is something better than what was seen fit to release to the film going public at large, this film had been warmly recommended by an ex-naval member of TB fraternity. So we gave it a go, consuming it in two sittings. Given the considerable difficulty of making films about knights in armour - hundred year old stately homes a mere trifle by comparison - I thought they did rather well, including a neat solution to the problem of how flash knights in armour turn up in dark ages Britain at about the time the Romans are calling it a day. Quite hard to distinguish the human knights from the Intel variety although Hadrian's Wall was a bit obvious. Maybe the Intel chaps got a bit full of themselves as some of the battle scenes are a bit long. But, interestingly, the tone was much closer to the savagery of the Nibelungenlied than the chivalry of Arthur. At least the Arthur from Roger Lancelyn Green on which I was brought up.

But maybe memory defective again. Wikipedia has just told me that Roger Lancelyn Green was big mates with JRR Tolkien and C S Lewis and so would certainly have known all about the Niebelungenlied. They took their old English studies seriously in those days.