On Books: Including Being Disappointed With Dickens And The Book Genre That Brexit Will Kill Part Two

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Haven't done a post with regard to the books I've read for a while so here we go.

Let's deal with The Lemon Tree Café by Cathy Bramley first. Regular readers to the blog know I like to randomly pick books from the library outside of my comfort zone. This piece of chick lit potboliery definitely comes into that category.

I wish to say I was pleasantly surprised. But no. Really was a waste of my reading time. Though let's be clear here as a fifty four year old man I was definitely not in the target audience.

Because as regular readers will know I make every effort not to spoil the plots of the books I chat about it's impossible to explain fully why I didn't like The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. A spoiler was incidentally one of the reasons as I already knew what happens to one of the characters. It is difficult for a reader to hide him or herself from some part of a classic novel before reading it no matter how hard they try.

The other reason I can mention here is the fact that the chief villain, Mr Quilp, is of restricted height. Now I know what you're going to say. Why not just call him a dwarf? (My blog my rules) and also there are many able bodied villains in Dickens novels? Why get put out over this.

The answer to the second point is that Mr Quilp is a greedy landlord and moneylender. Assaults his wife and desires (when she is an adult) to have the character of Nell as his second wife. There are no redeeming features to him whatsoever. And to make that even more clear as a contrast to the pure and innocent Nell Dickens makes him physically different as well. This was clearly deliberate in a Victorian society where the only good "dwarfs" are those miners who help Snow White.

Dickens was playing to his audience.

You may remember some time back I chatted about the sort of book where a Briton, frustrated in one way or another about the way his/her life is going, decides to move to a country in the European Union (normally one with sunlight), starts growing [insert Mediterranean produce here], and slowly through misunderstandings with the locals and about their customs grows to love the new home.

Whilst a lot of this type of genre was smug twaddle I'd mentioned that this would die because of Brexit as even if you voted Remain it would be too depressing to read something that would be for most people unobtainable.

What did not occur to me until starting to read Lucy Wadham's excellent 2009 book The Secret Life Of France is there is another type of British immigrant to the EU. The sort of person who emigrated not out of a love of growing lemons but of a significant other.

Being British but having married and living in France she is the perfect guide to life there. The real skill of the book is to effortlessly discuss an aspect of French life, say health, on a national basis and combine it with her own experiences.

I read this in a day. It's that good.

The point is post Brexit whilst I'm sure there will be some Britons able to emigrate to an EU country and marry abroad these will surely drop. Then of those people able to move to the European Union how many of those would be able to write a book about their life in a new country as Ms Wadham has done?

This type of book will wither and probably die. Which is a tragedy. Because the British people will lose people like Ms Wadham giving us a guide to and an understanding of our European neighbours. And so Brexit amongst it's many other damaging consequences might lead to Britain just not understanding the people around us. Which will be a tragedy and potentially dangerous.

So treasure Ms Wadham's book and (if well written) books like it.

We won't see their like for a while.

Until the next time.