Missed opportunities

Subject: Missed opportunities.

Reading a book is like conversing with a friend,  reading, as I do with more than one book at a time is like going down to the pub to chat to a number of people you know, each different, each with a tale to tell. Of course it's not a conversation like a normal one but often as one absorbs the events the author has in mind to tell, it stops you in your tracks and prompts a response to write, when triggered by what the fictitious character had said or done.
My Blogs come about in just such a way, the stimulus of events or more likely my own opinion /prejudice depending on what I've read, seen or heard.  It's a willingness to be effected by events which you can't personally effect but which never the less you have an interest. 
Our lives are consumed with narrow and superficial things which deep down we feel important. We live, not in a vacuum but in the turbulence of other people's lives and the effect these lives have on all of us. 
I'm not speaking of the particular but in general since depending where you choose to live, life goes on in much the same fashion with amazing similarity. The neighbours and the people in the shops are all similar in which ever hemisphere you live since for all but the rich 5% we all have the same issues to contend with. And so it is with books and the characters we befriend within their covers. We identify with them as if they were real and the craftsmanship of a good author is the way he makes them real in our minds eye.

Paul Scott is my present Guru. I love his precise development of plot and character.I love his use of language to develop the symbolism of time and place. His books are set in India in the 30s and 40s, a time of transition as India split along ethnic and religious lines and gave an almighty push to the outside influence of the British. 

Written from the departing Raj's point of view but with an underlying scepticism for what the colonial structure stood for he develops  characters who are preserved  in aspic and produced by a social structure brought over from middle and upper middle class public schooling, 'back home'.  A home which became ever more alien as the years passed but which never the less prevented assimilation into the fabric of the local people.  Playing roles directed from Whitehall, like Puppets they swirled around unaware of a life outside the bubble which they had created for their own, deeply prejudiced survival.
Scott does a magnificent job of reigniting the sights and smells not only of the bazaar but the dust and atrophy of the Cantonment, its rules of military and civilian hierarchy the snobbery of the people, especially the women with too little to do, brought over from "good families" to breed the next generation of Major Generals.
Like all societies raised in far off lands, these administers who became colonial by dint of service created an unreal, symbolic affectation which although it had the colour of a strong vibrant community, by its need to create a sense of superiority it lost its sense of being integral to the actual landscape which was evolving outside its influence.

South Africa was effected in this way.  The natural progression of a black middle class to share the responsibility with the whites was smothered by an ineptness to see and respond to a changing world.