NORTHANGER ABBEY By Val McDermid

Hey folks! Now I know what you're thinking - 'Didn't Jane Austen write Northanger Abbey?' And you are right. Miss Austen did in fact write the original novel named Northanger Abbey. McDermid wrote this as part of 'The Austen Project' which, although researching it a little, I seem unable to really pinpoint what this project is. As with most books, I found this while doing some shelving at work and decided to see whether or not this fancy orange book was deserving of its title.

If I'm honest, I had no trouble reading the book and I finished it relatively easily yet, things didn't quite seem to fit together as they should. The blurb on the back of the book is very misleading. I genuinely thought I was in for a good vampire novel with some dark romances and a bit of drama on the side. That was the impression I got from the blurb and to be honest, I couldn't have been further from the truth. It was only when I found the actual blurb tucked away on the inside cover that I actually got the hang of what was happening.

Basically, Cat lives in a small isolated village in Dorset. She has been home schooled, thinks little about the future and longs to see something outside of the Piddle Valley. (Yes, she lives in the Piddle Valley, lol). When she gets invited to spend a month at the Edinburgh Fringe with their neighbours, she thinks this is the break from reality and her chance to see the real world she has been waiting for.

Cat seemed a little too naive, even for someone who has lived a sheltered life, and I just found her character to be a little too unbelievable for my liking. Her relationships with other characters seemed predictable and almost as if the writer had to force them fit how she wanted them to.

The other odd thing was that Northanger Abbey itself only appears in the books once you get about two thirds of the way through and even then there is nothing special about it, it is merely a location for the story to take place. There's nothing particularly special about it at all.

Of course there is a very clichéd happy ending and everyone gets what he or she wants apart from the father who is portrayed as the villain.

I'm not really going to recommend it. Its not a book you're going to find me raving about, but hey, if you find yourself with nothing else to read on a rainy day, its not going to be the worst thing you could pick up.

TALKING IN BED (Poem) By Philip Larkin

Talking in bed isn't the love poem that you would initially expect it to be, it is a poem that; although it is about love and relationships, it is about the love and relationships between older people who have been married a long time. They are not newly weds, and they are not young people. This is a poem, more about enduring love rather than falling into it.

Right from the beginning, Larkin hints that this is not a poem about the younger generation. The attitude of the persona does not suggests the same enthusiasm and energy that you would expect in a young couple in a romantic relationship. In the second line of the first stanza, Larkin describes how the notion of the two people 'lying together there goes back so far'. This is the first concrete evidence for the 'older couple'.

In the second stanza, he talks about how inside the room there is nothing but silence, but the lack of communication isn't written as to make it appear awkward, which would suggest that these people do still love each other very much, but they have reached the stage where they see very little need to speak to each other, they all ready know each other too well. another idea is that this suggests that Talking in bed is a poem about falling out of love, ending something that was once passionate and alive. I don't think that this is the reason the couple are not talking. I think if this were the case, Larkin would have made this silence sound harsh and awkward. Also we have seen in many of Larkin's other poems, that silence is precious to him and he thinks highly of it.

It is interesting that before we are even half way through the poem, Larkin leads us out of the room with the couple and into the outside world, with the 'winds incomplete unrest' and the 'dark towns' that 'heap up on the horizon'. This contrast between sweet silence and 'incomplete unrest' shows us just how peaceful and beautiful the relationship is between the couple who are lying together, side by side in bed. Also when the persona describes how nothing outside cares for the people inside, this shows us that they are definitely happy together, because in their silent bedroom, they have something that the outside work lacks; care for one another.

Linking back to the idea of this being a poem about falling out of love, there is a small amount of evidence in the fourth stanza to support this. the persona describes 'It becomes still more difficult to find / words at once true and kind'. This could hint at a deteriorating relationship, but it could also merely be a case of them not being able to find anything to say that hasn't already been said. But it is the last two lines together that really makes the biggest and hardest suggestions about relationships.

'Words at once true and kind / or not untrue and not unkind'. At the beginning of a relationship  it is really easy to find things to say that are both 100% true and 100% kind. You are just getting to know each other,  and may not know the full story. Likelihood is that you'll know the majority of the other person's life story, but even husband and wife keep things from each other. I feel what Larkin is trying to say here, is that the older we get, the more we find our about are spouse and the harder it gets to find things that are both 100% true and kind. Its just never going to happen.