Tell me a story

I still can’t manage sustained typing but it’s good to get back to the blog.  Going back to work has meant less time for reading but I’m still working through the disparate selection I picked up from the library last week. I registered my unexpected liking for the widely disparaged Island on Twitter, since when I’ve been tackling my first Andrew O’Hagan, followed by Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I admit I chose this in the spirit of ‘ought to’ rather than ‘want to’   but can happily confess that the writing had me captivated right from the start and I’ve been happy to wallow in it ever since. Until maybe today. Despite the intensity of the prose and the utter veracity of the narrator’s family circumstances – past and present – I’m starting to want to feel that something is going to happen. I’m also starting to suspect that it won’t, in the sense of events moving forward rather than drifting through memory and emotion. So far I would say I love the language, but in a novel I am looking for more than poetry.

I may be proved wrong and should be reserving judgement, but I’m reminded of an agent who describes herself as ‘looking for storytellers’. I think perhaps I am too.