This will hurt me...

Oh dear. Sandy Bay Road, Sandy Bay. August 2012. Wordless Wednesday.

Guess what happens next? Little Howrah Beach, Howrah. December 2011. Theme Thursday already and it seems that I've lost most of my X-mas break to the flu. This was not supposed to be the FUTURE (this time last week). Inevitably, the FUTURE disappoints. The FUTURE rarely delivers. The FUTURE is usually much like the present, only we are more tired, have more aches and pains and more irritable. The FUTURE, to put it bluntly, ain't what it used to be.

Mindless violence. King Street, Sandy Bay. November 2011. Just the two books this week, but what books they were! The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark ventures into a genre that I am more familiar with in film than print: the Western. A brief plot synopsis might lead you to think that this novel is little more than a cliché: two drifters are drawn into a lynch mob to find and the rustlers presumed to be the killers of a local man. It is in fact much more than that. Written in 1940, the novel is a somber, unsympathetic examination of the ease with which men slip into violence and resist the urge to ‘justice’. It explores starkly ‘masculinity’ and the tendency of the fear of exposure in terms of physical cowardice to trump moral courage when it comes to groups of men. It is a fantastic collection of set pieces that affords Van Tilburg Clark the opportunity to explore these themes and remain able to keep the pace cracking along and tense narrative to the (inevitable) ugly conc...