vendredi 24 mars 2017

Revelations



New, staggering, incredible, sensational, enlightening ! A think tank of her majesty’s Education Ministry, is telling us that disruptive children in a classroom can lower the general level of the other kids and their ability to learn.
I’m so glad I was informed ! Throughout my 40-year teaching career, I must admit that I never knew that.  What a relief to realise that a group of highly paid cabinet-level “professionals”, should be there to inform the rest of us, and yank us out of our ignorance ! What would we do without them ?
Thank you, thank you, thank you !

samedi 4 mars 2017

Book review : Ruth Rendell's The Girl next door



Ruth Rendell’s The Girl next door.

Ruth Rendell enjoys such a solid reputation that one hesitates to write a critical review of her novels. Yet, for The Girl next Door at least, I dare shout that the queen is naked.

There are many good things in that story. The plot is promising, but then loses its strength through a very long crossing of the desert. After a while, we don’t really care whose hands were found in a biscuit box.  The Girl next door is supposed to be a crime/detective story, yet detectives appear in less than twenty pages out of 350 !

Ruth Rendell is very good at snippets and cameos : astute and vivid observations of human oddities. These short passages are indeed a delight.

However, the reader soon gets lost in a labyrinth of irrelevant and uninteresting episodes. We start with four children (makes you wonder where the dog is) who play in a tunnel. None of them are described properly, be it through their physical appearances or their clothes. Sixty years later, they all have had wives, husbands, children and grandchildren, and we, the readers, are supposed to remember who’s who in this teeming lot. Some names appear, then disappear only to reappear some thirty pages later, and we think : “Who the hell is that ?”

I want to end on a positive note. Within the plot, we find an interesting subplot concerning three characters : Alan, Rosemary and Daphne. Alan marries Rosemary, while being secretly in love with Daphne. Finally, at the ripe old age of 70, he leaves Rosemary and goes to live with Daphne. Throughout her married life, Rosemary has acted as a very boring wife, interested only in sewing and dress making. However, we come to realise that Alan is, in fact, even more boring than Rosemary. When he finds out that Daphne, at the age of 12, was engaged in a strictly manual-oral sexual relationship with a 40-year old man (no risk of pregnancy) he is deeply shocked. But when Daphne specifies that she thoroughly enjoyed it, and would actively seek the company of that man, Alan can’t stand it anymore. He leaves Daphne and wants to go back to Rosemary who, meanwhile, has found her feet and learned to enjoy life. Predictably, she throws him out. End result : loneliness in a studio flat for boring old Alan.

That entertaining sub story could have been the plot of a fully-fledged novel. Too bad it was lost in the endless digressions of an otherwise weakish detective story.