A book that transformed pain into pleasure
All right, here’s my confession for this week: I’m a little bit ageist. It’s shocking, but it’s true. While I respect their experience and the fact that they might know more about things than I, I have limited patience for slow walking, slow technological skills, slow everything, that, yes, yes, will one day be my lot too.
Remember how last week I spoke about books I could travel with? This is a continuation of that, and this time it has to do with old people. Well, old-ish people at any rate, and the moral of the story is how your young, arrogant columnist had to bite her tongue as she realised two of her most favourite characters in a book recently read, happened to be well over the age she considered capable.
To be honest, this isn’t a book I would normally pick up. The cover was too cheerful, the author’s name written in a font I’m now calling: “Men! Romance! Light hearted shenanigans!”
But I was at an airport, my flight was over two hours late, and I really had nothing else to do. Which is not a great way to begin talking about a book you really liked, but I just wanted to give you context. Also, context: a book read at a time of desperation, when you have nothing else to read or do, will usually seem better than a book you’d read at home, in your armchair. It’s like junk food when you’re hungry.
After that longest-introduction-in-the-world, let me get straight down to it. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is a really good book. It’s easy reading, but it’s not light, it’s not something you can skim through at the airport (so I read it at home, in my armchair), and its characters are charming: Major Pettigrew, a widower with a brash young son, and the woman he meets, Mrs Ali, a widow, who runs the local shop and has a very religious young nephew. See? Doesn’t it sound excellent already? And it’s funny: all of Major Pettigrew’s dry little asides to himself are for us! For the reader!
What I also found so endearing about it, was the slow moving, but completely believable romance between the two. It’s not all flights of passion but when they do get a chance to fall in love, over cups of tea and Kipling, it puts all the recent “young” romances I’ve read to shame.
In a world that’s always moving so fast, it was refreshing to read a nice “slow” book, with characters that were gently moving and a world that didn’t spin at a hundred miles a minute.
The columnist is an author
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