"Sweet Dreams", Michael Frayn

This is a curious little book by the playwright of "Noises Off", exploring the idea of how a heaven for the restless post-industrial age might function, beyond the concepts of virgins, endless food and drink, gold and jewels, etc.

Partly satire, partly I think a genuine attempt to answer the question of what would actually constitute a heaven of perfect happiness (a little sadness, but just enough to bring a pleasant nostalgia; the joys simultaneously of inaccessible love and of placid domestic bliss; the possessions you desired desperately as a child, and had forgotten; the ability to tell the perfect anecdote, to create, to be both your own familiar self and yet also attractive). ( Read more... )

Chick nor Child (Ch1)

I'm frankly not sure if Raoul is coming across as a complete idiot for not working out what Perrette is talking about, or if the reader is going to be equally mystified by it — the intention was supposed to be that the reader gets it and Raoul perhaps understandably doesn't :-(

---

Chick nor Child

Raoul has an encounter with Philippe's past, and Perrette faces the future: side-stories from The Sons of Éléonore".

Ch1 — Strange Meeting

The local diligence was slow, ancient and crowded, the old man next to him smelled strongly of garlic, and the good-looking motherly woman and her daughter sitting together opposite kept exchanging whispered confidences and giggling in a way that made Raoul acutely uncomfortable.

He had, of course, no business to be in the common stagecoach in the first place. His trunks for the Naval Academy at Brest had been strapped up and sent off already, and his brother Count Philippe had been expecting— indeed eager— to drive into the station with him this morning, in one of the family’s own well-appointed, well-sprung vehicles, so that they could make their final goodbyes there on the platform. But Raoul was fifteen now and almost a man, and he had stood upon his dignity and insisted that he could undertake this journey all by himself... and the Count had laughed, embraced him, and let him go.

( Read more... )