27th October 2010
Seven of us at the Fox and Badger (missing Will and Richard) for a discussion about the Siege of Krishnapur. After a good half hour of collective drowning of sorrows with regards to the impact of the economic position/government cuts etc on our work and lives, we had a rough consensus about Krishnapur. Put simply, Steve and Neil both thought it was really good, Ras and Chris thought it was good as did both Marks (though neither had quite finished it) whilst I thought it was reasonably good. One of the impacts of this (along with Mark Th's early departure to rescue stranded offspring) was there was perhaps less discussion about the book than on some other occasions. Overall:
General view that the writing style was easy and clear and he managed to write in the style of the period whilst also not making the book feel dated
Also a general view that the book was struggling at around a third of the way through i.e. the amount of description up to the start of the siege was a bit too long but once the siege description started it became more engrossing
Interesting how the author, for almost everyone, managed to create a strong image of the heat and climate, but somehow failed to enable people to generate a clear picture in their minds of the physical environment and other elements of the setting within which the story was developing. Some of this was perhaps because he didn't give important information - for example, no-one had any idea about how many people there were in the compound either at the start or as time went by.
A discussion about the pace of change in society and how things like social and behavioural norms (e.g. place of women and the British belief that they ruled the world) have changed in the comparatively short period of time since the book was set. This led into a conversation about how the pace of change in the last forty years or so has been quite astounding and whether it continues to crank up at that rate. Differing views on whether there are 'spurts' of societal change because of key innovations (industrial revolution circa 1800, the car early C20th, television in 50s/60s linked to pop music culture and then computers/internet in the last fifteen years - and thus a question about whether we might slow down for a while until the next major development (though in hindsight it's interesting to note that the gaps between the inventions that really influenced change appear to have been becoming shorter).
So, the scores were quite high (with three scores still to come), which was interesting because whilst people liked it, with the possible exception of Steve it wasn't getting the rave review comments that other high scoring books got. Its high position is really because of consensus, with no-one giving it a low score to pull the average down. Rob's current displacement activity is to re-produce the scoring table taking out the highest and lowest scores for every book (a method generally viewed as being more statistically reliable). This resulted in some significant shifts and the current top three of Queens Gambit, Engleby and Krishnapur (in that order), being replaced by Engleby, Equal Music and Kite Runner with Engleby and Equal Music quite some way ahead of anything else. Other big movers (spirit of Fluff lives on) are Fascination, Line of Beauty and Closed Circle in an upwards direction, whilst the big droppers were Case Histories, Jesus Christ and Shadow of the Wind. Krishnapur dropped to ninth. Halidon stayed firmly rooted to the bottom but with Never Never dropping below 10 Bonks (10 Days in the Hills to you) to next to last. However, we'll continue to use the full scores for the rankings.
7.51
