John Williams

Following the post of 19th August, I have now finished the three volume set of novels by John Williams, which came nicely packaged as three matching paperbacks from Vintage via Amazon. And matching sizes with all three being just about 300 pages.

Easy and interesting reads all, making up the well known part of the Williams oeuvre. There was also a first novel and two books of poems, which last presumably accounts for the space given to poems, poetry and poets in Augustus.

Butcher's Crossing (1960). A tale of buffalo hunters in Kansas and Colorado in the 1870's. A tale of what turned out to be the pointless slaughter of thousands of buffaloes - which all seemed rather awful until I remembered how many animals we kill every day for meat now, albeit with the killing hidden away in rural factories. Also a coming-of-age story of the boy from Massachusetts who wanted to see the wild west.

Stoner (1965). A tale of a low-born university teacher in Missouri. A teacher who stopped in the one place from before the first world war until after the second. A decent teacher of English literature stuck in a bad marriage and with a department head who loathed him. A English teacher who seemed to know a lot about Latin, which may be a link to the next novel. Or was it more a displaced boast of the author to make up for the fancy education which did not get himself? One also wonders what his family and colleagues made of this one; it would be understandable if his wife was not too thrilled.

Augustus (1972). An epistolary novel about the Emperor Augustus.

For me, most of the interest lay in the settings rather than the people, but I was irritated by a sense of sloppy detailing. Important bits of both of the first two novels did not ring true, in the first case failures of fact, the second failures of behaviour. Failures of fact, like the difficulty of feeding oxen and horses through the winter in snow covered high pasture without stores of hay or grain. Failure of behaviour, like the childish behaviour of a highly educated and popular department head. Writers of costume dramas are supposed to get the details of the costume right and writers about their own milieux, in this case a mid-western university, are supposed to get that right too. Oddly, I did not get this sense in the last of the three. Perhaps it is all so long ago that one does not have a strong sense of what should be to be affronted - but I am now reading it again to see. Certainly all the funny names are much easier to follow second time around.