Only connect | 5 April 2012

Most of the time life is messy. But sometimes — just occasionally — it all comes together.

I’d been reading Howards End. One of the classics I’d never got round to. Hadn’t even seen the film starring Emma Thompson, on account of it being a film starring Emma Thompson. By two-thirds of the way through I was still undecided; novels from over a century ago can be hard work, largely because of the wordiness. (Many of Dickens’s champions admitted that in the recent Charles-fest.) You know there must be something there — books don’t become classics for nothing — but it can take a bit, often a big bit, of finding. Fiction led by its characters rather than its plot often has this problem. You invest so many pages in getting to know those characters that the question of whether or not you like the book can’t be decided until near the end, when the people you’ve befriended (or befoed) tie up their stories.