Last week’s question was: What does a WRH do when her son announces he’d like to have a beach party? (or something to that effect).  The reply:  Goes batshit crazy.

This week’s question:  What does a WRH do when she has only 30 pages left in the book she has been reading for months on end and she can’t decide if she’s happy to be done with it or sad to wave adieu? 

The reply:  She paints a wall.  Seriously.  I just did.  I painted a wall.  It’s 10:30 at night, I have forty million trillion gazillion things to do that are NOT wall-painting.  And yet.  I painted a wall.

Terry Darlington’s Narrow Dog to Carcassonne is either an irreverent romp through the waterways of Europe, narrated with wit and intelligence.

OR

Terry Darlington’s Narrow Dog to Carcassonne is the Bataan Death March, with a few Cirque de Soleil pitstops along the way.

In order for you to decide (because, hell, I think it’s pretty clear that I cannot be relied upon to make a choice), here are some excerpts:

“We held our ropes and waited and nothing happened but after a while the fields and hills below had been pushed away.  Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.  It was a blank experience, like the Channel Tunnel, like having a tooth out under gas, like Shakin’ Stevens.  Far away the gate opened and we sailed out two hundred feet higher, on to the top of a hill, the body of the cockroach tower behind us.  Beneath the boat the water lay still dead.”*

I’m not so much of a scrub that I can’t appreciate that there is poetry and metaphor in here…but I am so much of a scrub that I don’t know what to do with it.

“When we woke, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne had swept its stone quay and turned its pansies to the sun and picked up its litter and checked that its free electricity was pure sine wave, clean enough for our laptops, strong enough for our fan heater and kettle.”

This is epic and deadly personification.  I think he probably had to apply for a permit to use it.

“A walk by the river.  Jim’s first countryside, his first chance of a burn-up since we came back from England.  The path between the trees was bordered by new grass, with constellations of buttercups. Bird’s-eyes looked at us and we were children again.  Once when I was ill, said Monica, I went for a walk and the bird’s-eyes were out and I said to myself everything was fine when I was a little girl and it will be fine again.”

I think maybe my problem is that I had assumed, seeing as how the name on the cover of the book says “TERRY DARLINGTON” that “TERRY DARLINGTON” had written the book when, in fact, and quite clearly, James Joyce was a major contributor.  

“Notre-Dame strained on its stone ropes, longing to throw itself into the Seine and sail away.  The sun beat on its sides and tourists washed around like surf.” 

I’ll give him this.  This is quite beautiful and I actually understand it, as opposed to the other three passages- which, come to think of it, explains why I might be struggling with how to characterize this book.  I’m just not smart enough to understand chunks of it.  I couldn’t tell you the difference between a sine wave and a hunk of Limburger cheese if my life depended on it;  though context indicates that “bird’s eyes” are some sort of planty flowery item, I really don’t know. 

Further proof that he’s a good writer and I am an ungrateful wretch and should stick with what I know, namely In Touch magazine (which, by the way, used to be under 2 bucks and is now well over.  What gives???!!!)…

“I poured another glass of Chiroubles and picked up a lamb chop.  To get the taste of Chiroubles say the name twice slowly and roll your eyes and think of blackberries and rain, and if you are a bloke the taste of the mouth of the girl you kissed by the privet hedge when you were sixteen and you hoped her mother wasn’t watching through the window.”

Kind of makes me wish I were a bloke.  Or, at least, that I had a bottle of Chiroubles right here in front of me.

So, gentle reader.  At the end of this long ramble of my own, it has become clear to me that I do, truth be told, really like this book a great deal.  Terry Darlington is someone I’d like to meet and share some Chiroubles with, though it would be important for his wife Monica to be there because it seems like she might be able to translate for her husband when he whips out that personification permit and goes hogwild. 




*If paint fumes weren’t getting to my head, I might sacrifice a moment or two to actually look at the site I have linked here to determine who or what in tarnation Shakin’ Stevens is.  If I’m revealing some appalling degree of cultural illiteracy, I’m forlorn, but I can’t spare the time for someone who thinks that the apostrophe might have been better advised than the letter “G” which so clearly belongs at the end of his name.