Contrasting reading

    

                                                                                          

   I have two very different books on the go just now, one a novel, the other a biography, both - as far as I can judge at this stage - written by natural storytellers.

     I'm a quarter of the way through Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and I'm marvelling at his depiction of 1838 India and the opium trade, the language he uses, a richly descriptive mixture of dialect, naval terms, argot and borrowings (that description doesn't do it justice) and the way in which he is building his tale. It's quite compelling stuff which reads as though Ghosh had great fun writing it, and that can't be said about every book!
     From fiction to fact, and I have The Real Mrs Miniver: The Life of Jan Struther written by her granddaughter, Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Its subject is shown as so much more complex than her famous character might lead us to believe, and I'm reading on with a great deal of enjoyment but also apprehension for her as these lines from the Prologue will explain:
"During the height of Mrs. Miniver's fame and success during the war, Jan toured America as an unofficial ambassadress for Britain, giving hundreds of lectures about Anglo-American relations to enchanted audiences. The public wanted to believe that she was the embodiment of her fictional creation, a sensible, calm, devoted wife and mother. She felt it was her wartime duty not to disappoint them. No one guessed - no one could possibly have guessed - that she was in fact living two parallel lives."
Oh, no!