The Walker and Harry Potter
My Beloved is away on a work trip again. Of course I spent the first night of his absence reading and reading and reading until the words stopped making sense.
It was after two when I reached the last page of Jane R Goodall's The Walker, one of the Woemen's Weekly's 'Great Reads' and winner of the 2004 Ned Kelly award for best crime novel 2004. With recommendations like that, is it any wonder I couldn't put it down?
The book was set in London in the late sixties and early seventies and told mostly from the points of view of young female characters. Two of them are dealing with the world of work at a time when job opportunities for women were changing. There's a lot of discussion about the difficulty men have with coping as women as colleagues rather than subordinates or sex objects. At various stages more make-up and eyelash fluttering are suggested as career enhancing stratiegies!! One character initially regrets choosing to wear a short skirt when she's called into her male supervisor's office for a dressing down. She follows her usual tactic of placing her notepad over her legs until she reconsiders and uses the vision of her slim knees as an aid to persuade her boss to adopt her point of view. It made me think about how such similar things still go on except with a lot more subtelty. I remember how a decade ago the attitude of my avuncular supervisors changed for the worse when I replaced my bob with an incredibly stylish but short haircut. One of the older women took me aside and said she thought I was very brave whereas I thought I looked FABULOUS.
Goodall describes the interior monologues of all the female characters really well as they plan what to wear and budget their clothing allowances. She uses a lot of period fashion details that ring true (even if I don't know for sure because I wasn't there). One character wears a purple minidress with white piping that sounds like one of the dresses I found in my grandmother's wardrobe when she went into a nursing home. And until I read this bookd I'd never heard that the opposite of a 'mini' was a 'maxi' or 'maxiskirt'. For a scary thriller about a serial killer this was a really enjoyable read.
On the second night my Beloved was away, I hired the latest Harry Potter on DVD. This was Goblet of Fire one which is probably my least favourite of the books because of the artificiality of mapping the annual rites of the boarding school novel onto the three tasks of the Triwizard tournament. (Why are the students from other schools there all year when they only need to be there for a month? Why is it the girl who stuffs up most in the tasks? Why does Herminone have to fall into that trap of looking really nice once they put her into a frock?) What struck me about this movie was that, unlike the previous three, the students aren't wearing robes but what look like private school uniforms with even the girls wearing ties. They look heaps more sensible but this isn't in the book!!!
It was after two when I reached the last page of Jane R Goodall's The Walker, one of the Woemen's Weekly's 'Great Reads' and winner of the 2004 Ned Kelly award for best crime novel 2004. With recommendations like that, is it any wonder I couldn't put it down?
The book was set in London in the late sixties and early seventies and told mostly from the points of view of young female characters. Two of them are dealing with the world of work at a time when job opportunities for women were changing. There's a lot of discussion about the difficulty men have with coping as women as colleagues rather than subordinates or sex objects. At various stages more make-up and eyelash fluttering are suggested as career enhancing stratiegies!! One character initially regrets choosing to wear a short skirt when she's called into her male supervisor's office for a dressing down. She follows her usual tactic of placing her notepad over her legs until she reconsiders and uses the vision of her slim knees as an aid to persuade her boss to adopt her point of view. It made me think about how such similar things still go on except with a lot more subtelty. I remember how a decade ago the attitude of my avuncular supervisors changed for the worse when I replaced my bob with an incredibly stylish but short haircut. One of the older women took me aside and said she thought I was very brave whereas I thought I looked FABULOUS.
Goodall describes the interior monologues of all the female characters really well as they plan what to wear and budget their clothing allowances. She uses a lot of period fashion details that ring true (even if I don't know for sure because I wasn't there). One character wears a purple minidress with white piping that sounds like one of the dresses I found in my grandmother's wardrobe when she went into a nursing home. And until I read this bookd I'd never heard that the opposite of a 'mini' was a 'maxi' or 'maxiskirt'. For a scary thriller about a serial killer this was a really enjoyable read.
On the second night my Beloved was away, I hired the latest Harry Potter on DVD. This was Goblet of Fire one which is probably my least favourite of the books because of the artificiality of mapping the annual rites of the boarding school novel onto the three tasks of the Triwizard tournament. (Why are the students from other schools there all year when they only need to be there for a month? Why is it the girl who stuffs up most in the tasks? Why does Herminone have to fall into that trap of looking really nice once they put her into a frock?) What struck me about this movie was that, unlike the previous three, the students aren't wearing robes but what look like private school uniforms with even the girls wearing ties. They look heaps more sensible but this isn't in the book!!!
posted by Mary Bennet | 2:10 pm
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