Book repair

[igenlode]

I managed a fairly crude repair on my copy of D.K Broster's "The Vision Splendid" by pasting a tube of brown paper (a rectangle cut from a brown paper bag to three times the width of the spine, folded in three, with the upper flap glued down over the lower one) inside the loose back, which was hanging on a few threads of bookcloth. This then gives the spine something to grip onto, once I'd pasted the inside of it and tried to 'mould' it down onto the curved back of the pages. Unfortunately there simply isn't any way to apply pressure to a rounded back while drying, let alone a hollow back like this one, let alone to split edges...

It seems to have worked reasonably well; at least, I no longer have to worry so much about destroying the binding simply by reading it, and the spine has hollowed out and throws up the individual sections nicely despite being attached with stiff paste and paper. (Ideally I'd have wrapped a bit of muslin around it to provide a better hinge, but since the boards and endpapers are still sound, I didn't have access to that area.)

It's a 1930s reprint -- I'm amazed the book made it into two different publishers twenty years apart, because it's far from being the author's most successful or popular work! -- so about ninety years old. I can't honestly imagine that it has been read to death during the course of its lifetime, either ;-p
(This copy has my mother's maiden name on the flyleaf, so either she took it to university with her or it was a cherished possession at a time when she still owned relatively few books. I suspect it was a rarity that, as a Broster fan, she was excited to track down...)

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Meanwhile I have been persevering -- or rather procrastinating -- with La machine à assassiner. It is not quite as bad as I had remembered (perhaps thanks to the fact that I now *know* the plot, and am not impatiently trying to extract it from a seeming mass of irrelevant verbiage!), but I feel that it's pretty symptomatic that I have currently reached page 148 of 200, that is to say three-quarters of the way through, and we have only just learned -- via a brief summary account -- what Gabriel and Christine have actually been up to in all the time since he kidnapped her dramatically at the start of the book and set everyone looking for them. And we have heard as yet nothing at all about the Marquis de Coulteray, who was the focus of the other main strand of the first volume, and who, I happen to know with hindsight, is the solution to the whole murder mystery (and the one who set Bénédict up as the main suspect in the first place).

That means that three-quarters of the book has effectively been taken up by Leroux indulging himself in writing about the stupidities of the Press, the police, and the general public :-(
I think that was what I found chiefly disappointing the first time through; the fact that, having created all these characters and got us involved in caring about their fate, he then basically drops them entirely -- with the exception of Jacques, who gets to do a bit of detective work à la Raoul -- and proceeds to introduce a whole load of fresh characters whom we don't particularly care about, and who are chiefly stupid and/or gullible. I suspect with hindsight that the author was enjoying himself too much showing off how he could ventriloquize all these people, and using his favourite technique of simulating realism by quoting fictional newspaper stories, etc.

The reason why the TV adaptation is so much better is that it cuts all that (unfunny) stuff and follows the Gabriel/Christine plotline more or less as it takes place chronologically, instead of only in glimpsed snippets reported by third parties in retrospect; we get to *see* the traumatic process of his convincing Christine of his innocence, instead of Christine simply reporting it in passing and long after the event, and the running-time is focused entirely on the main plot as introduced in the first half.

To be fair, I think they also invented quite a lot of events/dialogue to flesh out this section -- and one major change is that their version of Gabriel is able to speak, which makes explanations much easier to show on screen. Although it's quite a nice touch that everyone Gabriel encounters in the book seems to ascribe his muteness and the immobility of his features (and even his reluctance to consume food in public) to some kind of WW1 facial injury; it's a reminder that there were actually a lot of people going around with artificial faces in this period thanks to trench warfare and early plastic surgery...