The Writing Life Too

Wish I'd Written That

I woke this morning to the sounds of rain and wind lashing the roof and windows and the world is a burnished silver. I've only got the final pages of Matt Haig's The Possession of Mr. Cave to read and I've been musing about the book and Haig's themes. Like The Dead Father's Club, this book is about grief and a ghost has a role in this story and the shaky line that separates madness and delusion, concern and obsession is being portrayed. And as I read along, I kept finding words, phrases, and paragraphs that I was just plain envious of. Now, I love to pause while reading to admire beautiful prose as long as the writer doesn't get carried away.  When a writer goes overboard it feels like I'm on a museum tour, or that the author has decorated the house of his novel with frescoed ceilings and way too many trappings and I'm tiptoeing along since I don't want to topple rare 16h century statuary. So no, don't give me overdone, but give me beauty along the way.

In a scene Terrence Cave follows his daughter into a raucous nightclub: "It was like walking into a panic attack. No, that makes it sound too cosy. It was like walking into someone else's panic attack, someone I didn't know and didn't want to. Someone closing their eyes on a railway platform at a quarter past midnight, debating whether to end it all under the next freight train that passes through."

He muses about grief: "My experience of grief has never been that of intense sadness, as people often claim to feel. Sadness slows things down, presses you into the sofa and drags out the day. Grief doesn't do that. Grief throws you out of a plane. Grief is terror, in its most undiluted form. The moment in the fall when you realize the parachute is not on your back. You pull the cord, but there is nothing. You keep pulling and pulling, and you know it is no good, but you can't stop because that would mean accepting the rather appalling fact of the ground, a fact that is moving at an impossible speed towards you, and that will smash you to pieces. And you want to stay whole, unbroken. But there you are, falling, and there is nothing you can do except keep believing in that parachute."