SUMMER VIEW OF THE GARDEN

The long period of warm, sunny days seems to have suspended the growth of the garden in a moment of summer bliss. In the last few days, a light, dry breeze has been coming from the north, cooling things down in the evening between the hot flushes. If there’s any fury to the colour purple, it’s in the blooming rows of lavenders around the rose bed on which scores of yellow brimstone butterflies are dancing all day. The radiant bed of reel cress flowers has bright specs of yellow summer flowers popping up through the cover of reds and oranges, and long stems of purple flowers droop from the top of the buddleia next to the reddening spiraea hedge. Of the shrubs blooming simultaneously, theirs is the most beautiful match, I think. It’s easy to keep the garden when it’s being fried every day. I collect so little garden refuse that it’s hardly enough to feed a rabbit with a healthy appetite.

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EVERYMAN

Usually, I prefer to make notes on the books I’ve enjoyed reading. Adverse comments are better left to the professionals, I think. However, as I’ve already mentioned the new novel by Philip Roth, I thought I should write a few lines about it.

Everyman begins with the funeral of the unnamed main character, an old serial husband who abandoned his Jewish faith as a teenager and never looked back. It turns out to be the most cheerful moment in the book. In the story of his life, which then follows, he makes a point of believing in nothing except his body. This makes his garrulous dying a rather tedious affair, I think. Long passages read like a medical record, which doesn’t achieve much, I think, besides giving Latin a bad name.

Regardless of its subject, Everyman is only for readers in exceedingly good health and comfortable circumstances, I’d say. P.G. Wodehouse, who is my yardstick in judging moral literature, was sometimes taunted for being widely read in hospitals and prisons. He modestly pointed out that it might be for the lack of competition of which Roth, to me, seems to be a most reliable source.