Saturday Keith (his parents’ seventh son, named after the day of his birth) is a poet, but he’s feeling glum after some less-than-flattering reviews of his latest book. He’s quit his job at a shipping/exports company, and ends up getting set up as manager of a fancy pub/inn owned by the mother of one of his novelist-friends. As the manager of the Pelican, Keith gets to see bits of people and their lives; so do we, as readers. But it’s not just ordinary daily life and love and meetings that we see: a theft at the Pelican turns the book into a madcap chase. Linklater is clever and often funny; several bits, particularly toward the end, made me laugh. He’s good at dialogue and bits of conversation, and while his descriptive passages are sometimes over the top, they mostly manage to be amusing rather than annoying. This passage, in which the pub’s bartender (who has invented two blue cocktails, which a guest at the inn has just christened “Oxford” and “Cambridge”) mixes drinks, seems pretty representative of the book’s general style:
‘Anything that a lady like Miss Benbow suggests is all right, sir,’ said Holly politely; and deftly poured measures of this and measures of that, crystal clear, faintly yellow and richer orange, a glass delicately poised with the rising meniscus unbroken, a drop, two drops of wormwood, a fluid once of sweetness and an ounce of twice-distilled strength…gravely, intent on his task as an alchemist seeking the elixir, the aurum potabile, Holly poured his chosen liquors into a long silver shaker, added broken fragments of ice, screwed down the top, and, like a man with the palsy, shook. His hands were clenched on either butt, his muscles were taut, his face set like a mask. And all this time his audience watched him silently as if a conjuror were at work, and where paper flags had gone in the doves of peace might emerge. (39)
Also, this made me grin, because my boyfriend and I often squabble about how, um, contrary I am:
‘I like independence more than anything else. But a girl can be independent without contradicting everything she hears.’
‘Not if she’s honest. People talk such rubbish.’ (48)
Poet’s Pub is mentioned in passing by Susan Hill in Howards End is on the Landing as one of the first ten books Penguin published, and the title and summary were enough for me to want to read it. A copy was pulled up out of the Brooklyn Public Library Central Library’s storage area for me, looking a little dusty but charmingly ’60s-ish, and it made me think a bit of Danielle’s Lost in the Stacks posts over at A Work in Progress: there are so many out-of-print novels hiding in the library, some of them dated or not very good to begin with, but some of them worthy of rediscovery. I’m glad I picked this one up.
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