Cakes and Ale and Pi

Cakes and Ale fell apart while I was reading it.  Literally, the book disintegrated during the weeks it occupied me on the bus.  I had to hold it together with a rubber band.

And that’s my review of Cakes and Ale.

Actually, it’s a pretty good book by Somerset Maughan, published in 1930 and thus continuing my series on English writers of the Late 19^th and Early 20^th Centuries.  These writers generally adopt class and manners as a theme, either mocking or accepting the English fascination with propriety and social order.  This one mocks. 

It’s about writers, specifically, one who has died but had reached the firmament on which sit Shakespeare, Fielding, etc.   As the establishment begins eulogizing, it turns out the guys did his best writing while living with a gregarious free spirited woman, with whom he cared not a whit for class distinctions or “acceptable” behavior. Which is not at all what the establishment wants to know.

Very well written, of course, and engaging characters.  If you can find it, and it doesn’t fall apart on you, read it.

Evidently there as some controversy at the publication, as some contemporary authors thought Maugham was satirizing them.  Ironically, in the book I’m reading now, by Ngaio March (published in 1941), there’s a controversial writer with a club foot who, I think, is based on Maugham.  Though it’s a fun-house-mirror version of Maugham on which he’s based.

Between Cakes and Ale and the Marsh book, though, came Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  It’s about a teenage boy who winds up crossing the Pacific on a lifeboat with a tiger.  It is very similar to what happens every day on the bus.

The boy, Pi, had become, at an early age, a Hindu-Catholic-Moslem.  This , of course, is ridiculous, as the Catholics, at least, would not allow it.  But lets say it happened.  It was still no excuse to write this book.

The story of his survival is equally ridiculous:  initially, his companions are a crippled zebra, an orangutan and a hyena, as well as the tiger.  Eventually, just the tiger.  He survive s storms, heat, sharks, a blind cutthroat   in another llifeboat, and a carnivorous island made of algae.  After 6 months, he lands in Mexico.  What is the one thing everyone wants him to talk about?  Yes – ther theory of story telling from the viewpoint of a Hindu-Catholic-Moslem.

I mean, there were some good parts, and one can certainly suspend disbelief when a story demands it.  It’s the ending that ruins it:   a teenage boy goes through all this, and in the end all he's interested in is debating the Japanese maritime investigators about whether or not life itself is a story?  Blech.

Next entry soon: I just found something in the Ngaio Marsh book I can’t wait to write about.  Have to finish the book first, though.