exchemist
Veteran Member
No I hated it and didn't finish it. (Private Eye hated it too and called it "The Bogus", I remember
) I honestly can't remember what it was that annoyed me, as it was so long ago now. Maybe today I might even like it.I don't read novels nearly as much now as I should. I think my attention span has been damaged by the internet. But the Essex Serpent was able to galvanise me.
The last serious novel that I read before that was Waugh's "Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold", a semi-autobiographical novel about a man having a nervous breakdown, partly as a result of a toxic combination of excess alcohol and inappropriate use of medical drugs. It has its typically funny moments, like all Waugh's writing, but is fairly bleak most of the time. Waugh has a way of distancing himself, and observing the hapless writhings of his protagonists, in situations that are by turns amusing and ghastly, with a detachment that can verge on the sadistic. I sometimes think my father, who is still just about going at 94 after 2 strokes and the death of his wife, has modelled himself on Waugh. He's always looking for the absurd in life, to compensate for its many vicissitudes. I suppose I've inherited that a bit, too.
