I’ve just been to Bruges for a couple of days, in perfect autumn weather. We had a tour of the Half Moon Brewery, visited a model railway café and had some fantastic Flemish beef stew. Plus, of course, sampling a few of the 1500 varieties of Belgian beers. Its such a good trip from Britain because its only 1 hour and 20 minutes from the Eurotunnel terminal at Calais yet presents you with somewhere totally different from anywhere in England.
Amazon have started an ebook daily deal for the Kindle, the books usually being discounted to 99p. Its worth checking every day, but for anyone like me with an already full reading schedule its easy to be tempted away from your reading plans by some of the books on offer. This week I was tempted by The Land of Later on by Anthony Weller which turned out to be a very enjoyable read. I’m not sure its worth its current price of £5.19 but for 99p it was a bargain and filled in the gaps on my Bruges trip when it wasn’t so easy to concentrate on anything heavier.
The concept is simple. Kip, a New York jazz pianist suffers from progressive multiple sclerosis and after the death of his long-term partner Lucy from leukaemia, decided to commit suicide. Far from finding the oblivion he seeks he finds himself in an in-between land where the newly died wait to be reincarnated. They can in fact choose to remain in the Land of Later On, but the ability to travel around a replica universe through time and space eventually palls and the pull back to earth and to get on with life becomes irresistible.
The Land of Later On comprises all periods. As a result of this layering of era upon era, languages and dialects shift confusingly. For the visitor who seeks out Marco Polo’s Venice, a fluency in Italian will be of little avail. A theatergoer who ventures to 1602 London for a performance of Hamlet will find the Elizabethan accent so strong that speeches are not recognizable.
If you eventually decide to go back to earth to be reincarnated . . .
. . . you’ll return as your essential self, but the parents you get, and your circumstances, have a terrifying effect on how things turn out. No one’s uniqueness or talent can override the cards dealt at rebirth; it isn’t as if humanity has been enriched with a second Shakespeare, a revamped Verdi, another Buster Keaton. They all chose to go back, clutching their genius like a suitcase, and that decision didn’t get them or us anywhere
Kip decides to stay in his new home while he searches for Lucy. He meets up with poet Walt Whitman who acts as Kip’s guide in his new location and together they travel to all the places that Lucy had expressed an interest in. Alas, the ability to move forward and back in time makes this a frustrating business for not only do you have to connect with friends geographically but also you have to meet them when they are in the same time-zone.
It all sounds a bit trite, but Anthony Weller writes well about the devastation brought by long-term illness and the gut-wrenching longing to re-connect with a partner who was lost a few years ago. Its all rather moving really and is also well written. If Amazon cut the price again I’d recommend it highly.
