Alan Bradley, left; Bill Bryson, right.
It would have made a great story. If only the facts would cooperate.
Last night I finished listening to Bill Bryson’s book about Australia, In a Sunburned Country. I listened with joy to his elegantly turned phrases, self-deprecatory humor, and characterizations of the people and landscape. His dismay at the treatment of aborigines provoked me to care, too. At times Bryson’s tone veers to the suburbs of crass, and he inserts a few liberal rants, but overall I liked it very much.
As it happens, I also finished Alan Bradley’s latest Flavia de Luce mystery, Speaking from Among the Bones
What? Bill Bryson in Alan Bradley’s family section? Crazy! I skipped out of bed to explore this connection. Alas, Bill Bryson, the author, is married to a Cynthia. Bill’s father, William, is married to an Agnes Mary. I can’t detect anything other than coincidence in the names.
My favorite excerpt from Bryson’s book is his description of how he sleeps:
I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside—tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air—decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling.
And I snore, hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam-valve-exhalations. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that bring to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown.. Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within five hundred feet has stopped and all children under the age of eight are clutching their mothers’ hems.
Flavia’s humor is dry, more inclined to make me smile in appreciation than to laugh out loud. And tucked in unexpected places the whiz kid chemist wonders about life.
How odd, I thought: Here were these four great grievers, Father, Dogger, the vicar, and Cynthia Richardson, each locked in his or her own past, unwilling to share a morsel of their anguish, not even with one another.
Was sorrow, in the end, a private thing? A closed container? Something that, like a bucket of water, could be borne only on a single pair of shoulders?
Edit: I received a gracious and funny email from Mr. Bradley confirming that his Bill Bryson is not the American author Bill Bryson.
As a child I was appalled that Charlotte died. And I turned my back on the book for decades. I now admire the way E.B. White acknowledges Wilbur’s loss while maintaining his joy. The last paragraph:
Jan Karon concludes the ninth title in the Mitford books. There was a diaspora, a scattering, and each book reattaches one section. I wasn’t sure if Jan Karon would withhold the last piece of the puzzle out or snap it into place. At the end there is an unexpected knock at the door.
Ralph Moody’s endings are velcroed on my mind, twenty years after I read these books aloud to my boys. The family has come through a crisis; the response of the characters ends the books.
Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise does not end happily. So powerful, so unexpected, so taut is the final paragraph. It doesn’t have to be happy. But it is fitting.
The books ends on the far side of a catastrophe with Atticus on watch being as decent and dependable as every father should be.
Someone said about this one, they “were waiting for the shoe to drop.” It ends with a thirteen year old boy confronting adults and then covering up their past. I didn’t like the boy put in the position of a judge and keeping secrets from his father.
The ending seemed very abrupt. It sideswiped me. I couldn’t get over it. This? Is over, like this? It’s hard to explain without explaining.
I never liked that the the Count sails into the horizon at the end. More abruptness.
for a quick fix. On this double celebration week, I was astonished to discover what “good” means.
:
; dear Mr. Harding in Anthony Trollope’s 
; Father Tim in 
and 
; Brother Cadfael in Ellis Peter’s 
; the priest in Jon Hassler’s 
.
? I had decided to cull out Barbara Tuchman’s sparkling book of essays, 
, from my library, a decision that still gnaws. Before I let it go, I transferred notes to my journal. In an essay entitled Mankind’s Better Moments Tuchman notes some astonishing accomplishments:
. More on that, later. But it was true: drinking the language was drinking a Caramel Macchiato. I had to read sections more than once to tease out the meaning, but that was offset by laugh out loud lines and the satisfaction of fitting words.
A Living Pencil 