Bloor Cinema
Enter Sid Halley
07/03/10 19:21 Filed in: Reading
I'm not sure if you can plan a better Sunday evening:
a great home-cooked dinner, a strong rye-and-ginger,
Chantal Kreviazuk on the CD player and the Oscars on
deck in about an hour. Life can be really good, even
as I approach the frightening age of 45.
Chantal is belting out the tunes on her break-out disc, Under These Rocks and Stones, with it lyrical repetitions of "green apples" and "cotton candy" throughout the album. Her two early hits, "Wayne" and "Surrounded", are stirring happy memories of our recent encounter with Kreviazuk at the Fredericton Playhouse in a spectacular concert.
I can't say I've seen many (if any) of the movies that are up for Academy Awards tonight but I still love the show. A couple of years ago, Patti and I caught the broadcast with about 300 other people at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto, probably my favourite mode of Oscar watching! Tonight I'm looking forward to Steve Martin as host. Should be fun.
Meanwhile, I've moved on to Dick Francis' fourth novel, 1965's Odds Against. For Kicks was as good as advertised, featuring DF's first really cruel villain, but was a little heavy on the self-justification by protagonist Daniel Roke. Odds Against is significant because it first introduces Sid Halley, arguably Francis' most successful, most complex and most interesting hero. It also features one of the most memorable, horrifying scenes he wrote but I'll tell you more about that when I get to it. I'm still only about 70 pages in so there's lots more to come.
Halley is an ex-jockey, a champion, who had to give it up when he lost the use of one hand in a messy steeplechase accident. Scarred, both inside and out, Halley slowly works himself out of a deep depression to discover he's actually pretty good at the detection business. Maybe, just maybe, life is worth living after all, even if the life of a champion jockey is forever lost to him.
In Odds Against, Francis flexes his creative muscles while keeping the action galloping along. Halley proved so popular, meanwhile, that Francis brought him back in at least one later novel (Whip Hand), something he resisted doing with almost every other hero he created (for some reason, I think one other hero made a second appearance but I can't remember which: we'll figure it all out as I keep reading).
Chantal is belting out the tunes on her break-out disc, Under These Rocks and Stones, with it lyrical repetitions of "green apples" and "cotton candy" throughout the album. Her two early hits, "Wayne" and "Surrounded", are stirring happy memories of our recent encounter with Kreviazuk at the Fredericton Playhouse in a spectacular concert.
I can't say I've seen many (if any) of the movies that are up for Academy Awards tonight but I still love the show. A couple of years ago, Patti and I caught the broadcast with about 300 other people at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto, probably my favourite mode of Oscar watching! Tonight I'm looking forward to Steve Martin as host. Should be fun.
Meanwhile, I've moved on to Dick Francis' fourth novel, 1965's Odds Against. For Kicks was as good as advertised, featuring DF's first really cruel villain, but was a little heavy on the self-justification by protagonist Daniel Roke. Odds Against is significant because it first introduces Sid Halley, arguably Francis' most successful, most complex and most interesting hero. It also features one of the most memorable, horrifying scenes he wrote but I'll tell you more about that when I get to it. I'm still only about 70 pages in so there's lots more to come.
Halley is an ex-jockey, a champion, who had to give it up when he lost the use of one hand in a messy steeplechase accident. Scarred, both inside and out, Halley slowly works himself out of a deep depression to discover he's actually pretty good at the detection business. Maybe, just maybe, life is worth living after all, even if the life of a champion jockey is forever lost to him.
In Odds Against, Francis flexes his creative muscles while keeping the action galloping along. Halley proved so popular, meanwhile, that Francis brought him back in at least one later novel (Whip Hand), something he resisted doing with almost every other hero he created (for some reason, I think one other hero made a second appearance but I can't remember which: we'll figure it all out as I keep reading).