Wednesday reading

[adrian_turtle]

This week, I finished The Long Price Quartet, by Daniel Abraham. I'm not sure, but I think I was completely finished with Betrayal in Winter before this week, and only read An Autumn War and The Price of Spring this week (immediately going back to reread the beginning of A Shadow in Summer, for the sake of arguing with it, as one does.) The series does so many things right. I like how it shows characters actually maturing--not just growing out of childhood, or even out of fumbling young-adulthood, but through many stages of adulthood. I like how seriously it takes genocide, and how vengeance/forgiveness/moving on are all shown as so very difficult. I hope I'm mistaken in reading a pro-bullying message into the end.

I am also reading Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu, which is just stunningly good. The fairy-tale parts are right. And the other parts are right, with parents who mean well and Just Don't Get It. Like making good choices now that you're in 6th grade doesn't mean going off to rescue your best friend from a snow witch. (Really, the responsible choice in that situation is to stop and put boots on, not to just sit there and do homework.)

On audiobook, I'm listening to Lower Corte, by Guy Gavriel Kay. I read it a long time ago, and I'm not sure if I'm perceiving it differently because my feminist standards have changed or because I notice different things at the pace of an audiobook.

On Friday, Sovay was coughing pathetically and expressing unhappiness about the need to go out into the dismal cold rain and deal with tax paperwork. As soon as she was out the door, I went looking for that book by Nevil Shute where the NHS is obviously the villain because England has such bad weather. (As compared to a fundamentally decent place like Australia, where the sun shines all the time, there's lots of poor immigrants providing free labor, there's plenty to eat with no rationing, and nobody who matters has to worry about taxes.) I looked at several, and it's remarkable how Shute draws me in, considering I don't actually like his characters very much.

I realized The Breaking Wave (also known as Requiem for a Wren was not the book I was looking for, about halfway through. (Though it's largely about how Australia is so much better than England, and is set shortly after WW2.) That's the one about the disabled pilot who goes looking for his brother's fiancee, after the brother was killed near D-Day. It's about people who take it for granted that a respectable person simply does not confide in those they love. Such people really annoy me, in fiction as in real life. But what bothered me more was the idea of war as a positive experience for young people. Not: unpleasant necessity. Not even: we remember it fondly because we were young and together, even though it was horrible. Rather: it was so exciting anybody who experienced it once will want more of it.

I have a shelf full of Shute (--now on a shelf, rather than in a box! I finally decided we are staying in this apartment, with all its flaws, and started nesting in earnest.) I went on to read The Far Country (I don't know the other title.) I'm less than halfway through, but the NHS has already been established as a great evil. So has the UK generally, because rain and cold and food shortages and equality. How dare a country tax the rich to provide health care! The little old ladies starving to death because they're too proud to accept charity from the government. (Accepting money from the government because of what one's husband did decades ago occupying India is respectable. Accepting money from the government because the government is offering to help just anybody is NOT.) It would all be very much funnier if the NHS and the underlying idea that it's good for poor people to get medical care and enough to eat were not under active attack.

Comments

[oursin]

because they're too proud to accept charity from the government

I think that should read, 'to sit in a doctor's waiting room/be in a hospital bed in a public ward alongside Dreadful Common People'.

[adrian_turtle]

Oh yes, many little old ladies died of that in real life and in other books. (Little old gentlemen, too. Sometimes their children, who had less choice in the matter. Is there a name for the disorder?) But in this book, the little old lady does not die for lack of medical care--the NHS doctor says she has keeled over from simple hunger, and appears to have eaten nothing for weeks.

Her family had thought her comfortably established with a pension, from her husband's work. But the British withdrew from India and stopped paying the pensions of civil service widows--how disgraceful!

It is shown as clearly admirable that she would refuse to even talk to a relief officer who could offer help buying food or paying for heat. And contemptible that the NHS hospital is full of seriously ill riffraff and has no room for a respectable woman who just needs somebody to feed her meat and butter and milk with brandy in it. (Yes, yes, those scoundrels at the NHS say a person can be perfectly healthy eating fish and vegetables and milk without brandy. Hah!)

[oursin]

I really find it beyond the bounds of plausibility that someone who has been the Memsahib of somebody in the ICS (i.e. a burra wallah) is just going to sit down quietly and starve when she could be giving the authorities seven kinds of hell.

Also, I find it improbable that she wouldn't still be getting the pension, though (from my dimly recollected days working in an archive of relevance) the paying body might I think have changed as at 1947. Maybe she didn't send in her change of address card...

[legionseagle]

I have real difficulties deciding if In the Wet or The Far Country is the worst of Shute. They've both got the anti-NHS thing going, but the racism is worse in In the Wet

[adrian_turtle]

I don't much like the racism in The Far Country, either, though I agree it's less egregious than In The Wet. The Australian plantation owner who helps a couple of deserving poor out of the goodness of his heart provides plenty of ethnic insults along with the money. Which Shute clearly regards as different from charity, because the owner is giving it to a good worker, not to just anyone. (To my mind, it looks a great deal like charity, because it's going to that worker rather than any of his equally hard-working colleagues, just because that worker has a particular need for it. And part of what makes that worker deserving of charity is his willingness to stand there and smile while being insulted for being/speaking Italian. Ick.)

At the same time, anti-Italian bigotry doesn't bother me as badly as anti-black bigotry. Not now. In the 1950s, I think it was more of an active issue. I repeat: Ick.

[legionseagle]

I do like Shute - Trustee from the Toolroom is one of my favourite books ever - but I can't reread the boosting Australia ones at all. And he has some of the world's most spatchcocked women (though I do rather like the one in the rather weird one where the pilot of a plane flying to North America via Greenland starts having flashbacks to his past life as a thrall to some of Erik the Red's settlers.)