pumpkinstrokemarrow

And then we have The Sugar explaining to anyone who cares to listen that government could do its business with half the half million people or so it needs now if it was run on business like lines. He then goes on to suggest that second best would be if government got better at doing business with people like himself, who are masters of screwing a profitable deal out of pratty civil servants. It does not seem to occur to him that he and his kind might possibly stop screwing quite so hard.

But it occurs to me that one of the reasons that we have a large chunk of our young adults preferring to exist on rather measly benefits rather than getting jobs, is that the sort of jobs on offer from him and his kind are just too awful. Mind numbingly boring and with never ending pressure from unpleasant lance corporal types to flip more burgers an hour or whatever. At least the civil service used to believe in providing proper jobs with decent conditions.

Nearer home, my success in picking up cheap books has been dented by two failures. Tempted by 'The Fox in the Attic' by Richard Hughes, the chap who brought us 'A High Wind in Jamaica', a book of which I had heard of but never read. Couldn't get on with it at all and gave up after about 30 pages. Sort of thing which might be turned into an episodic costume drama on telly. Might cope rather better with it in that context.

And then there was 'Memoirs of Hecate County' by Edmund Wilson, someone else of whom I had heard but never read. Got about half way through the three hundred pages before giving up, finding his detailed description of the sex life of the narrator of one of the (six) stories rather unpleasant. In other respects the book rather reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby', set at about the same time and in about the same milieux. I note in passing that this particular copy was not to be introduced into the British Empire of the U.S.A, so not sure how it fell into my hands.

Rather better was 'My Life as a Fake' by Peter Carey, tying in well with the various other forays into fake and copy land this year (see, for example, March 24th). Not an author with whom I get on very well, but this book was essentially a thriller, mainly set in Malaysia & Indonesia and with poetic trimmings. Pots of local colour. It thrills well enough and one turns the pages - but I would not endorse the puff : '... a manic, endearing and penetrating ode to fakery ...'. The fakery in question is merely something to hang the book on; scarcely centre stage. But I did rather like the portrait of a minor poet called Slater; a chap who showed promise when young but who traded the craft of being a poet for that of being a performer. A performer who dissipated his creative energies by sweeping up admiring females by the bucket load. A man who was mostly terribly selfish but who was also sensitive to what others were at or up to and was sometimes very kind.

All three to be recycled to the Tooting branch of Wetherspoon's library.