The Blog of All Books: Books Bought Nov 9th

20) A Dead Man in Deptford - Anthony Burgess (pb)

Where? Hodges Figgis

Why?

This first crossed my radar about a month ago after reading Elizabeth Bear's Stratford Man duology about Christopher Marlow and William Shakespeare. I was trawling through Bear's lj for her posts about the books as part of my prefectly normal post-awesome book comedown.

Bear has a great post comparing literary sex scenes involving Chistopher Marolow (there are more than you migh think) that sort of forms a little lesson on how to (and how not to) write sex. I say 'sort of' because the take away is that you cannot write as well as Burgess and you just have to live with that fact.

Anyway I picked up a copy of Deptford in the library and read it in October while I was sick. I spend three glorious, if also exhausted, sneezing and slightly befuddled, days revelling in Burgess' delightful prose. Here's another snippet

The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. Hew saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the major-domo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle.

Ah what I wouldn't sell to the devil to write like that.

Anyway all of this is by way of saying that I needed to own a copy of this. Also the Vintage cover is pretty sweet