A Handful of Dust

As much as I enjoyed Vile Bodies, I enjoyedhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust even more. Ever since I tore through the works of Agatha Christie as a kid, I've been fascinated by the British upper class of the first half of the 20th century.

A Handful of Dust tells the tale of Tony and Brenda Last. Tony is landed gentry who struggles mightily to keep up with his eroding estate, Hetton Abbey. Brenda is a young thing who is struggling herself with rural boredom and the raising of the couple's son, John. Add to the mix John Beaver, an avid social climber who has no particular purpose in life other than sponging off of his well-to-do friends.

After young John Last is killed in a riding accident, Brenda becomes more and more distant from Tony and establishes herself in a London apartment where she enjoys the whirl of the London social season and an affair with Beaver. This leads eventually to a planned divorce, but as Tony finds the stipulations untenable, he decides to embark on a Brazilian safari instead with unexpected and unforgettable results.

Waugh specialized in scathing attacks on this class of people, and this novel is a perfect example of the form. At times laugh out loud funny, it is an entertaining reminder that even with all the trappings of our material lives and our often banal personal triumphs and pitfalls, in the end we are all the same.

Life

So....it's been awhile! I started this blog as a personal reading diary, and although I haven't stopped reading, I did lose some enthusiasm for writing about reading. However, now I've got a great backlog to post about and I'm glad to resume. So far, all of the books I have covered have been fiction, but I thought I'd reenter the fray with an autobiography, Life by Keith Richards.

I've read dozens of music biographies and autobiographies from the sublime to the ridiculous, and I have to say that this is probably my favorite of the lot. Part of that is because of the breezy, conversational style it is written in, and part of it is because there is absolutely no one more qualified to write this type of book.

While the book basically follows a chronological timeline, Richards is quick to expand on topics and go sideways. He covers his relationships with the other band members, and it is easy to see that he still holds a great deal of contempt for Brian Jones and a great deal of love and respect for Charlie Watts. Bill Wyman is treated mostly as an afterthought (which, I suspect, sums up his 30 years in the band). Most interestingly, it is his relationship to Mick Jagger that feels like it causes him the most angst. While he acknowledges that they are like brothers, he admits they haven't hung out in over twenty years, coming together only to record or tour.

And then there are the drugs. I found it interesting that Richards is able to account for his iron constitution by writing that he was excellent at maintenance and knew how to never overdo it. This is probably why so many contemporaries are dead and Keef rolls on. Still, he admits he was addicted to heroin and describes his many attempts to quit. While never advocating drugs, he also writes without a glimmer of regret.

As a musician though, the best part of this for me was his overarching love for music and for the guitar. It is something that is almost impossible to put into words, and yet Richards achieves it. During all of the drugs, women, and tour debauchery, his love for the medium shows through, from the Chicago blues that first inspired him to his collaborations with Bobby Keyes, Gram Parsons, and his beloved crew of Jamaican players in Steertown.

As in most autobiographies, Richards rarely takes blame for anything. I'm sure that others could write forever about sitting around in recording studios waiting for him to turn up and about being on the wrong end of one of his red rages. Still, he comes across as an affable pirate soul who, more than anyone else in the history of rock and roll, was born to the roll. He IS the definition of rock and roll cool, but not because of the image. Rather, it is his genuine love and affection for the music after 50 plus years that attracts people to him.