Home again

The weather cooled this morning. Alarm set to 6 am after a late-ish last night supper with with Laci, Gabi and Linda in the garden of a newly re-opened restaurant situated in the fork of two roads. Back for watermelon and a little talk before bed. At night car alarms go off, police and ambulance chase each other down nearby main roads and I wake at 5.30 anyway. On TV Tottenham are playing Liverpool in 1995. John Barnes scores. This is not a dream. The alarm does go off at 6am. We rise, shower, breakfast and pack what's left to pack, then tidy the flat. At 7 am we cross the hall to share a coffee with Laci and Gabi. The advance copy of The Burning of the Books and Other Poems, we have discovered, has a double blank page in it between the contents page and the first poem. C and I fill it, she with a drawing and I with a poem. We give it to them. Then the airport shuttle service arrives and the farewells.

The bus heads first into the Castle District to pick up a young Japanese couple. We cross Erzsébet híd (Elizabeth Bridge) with my favourite view of the Danube, looking towards Parliament and Margit híd (Margaret Bridge), a view I always find heartbreakingly beautiful. The main road to the airport is blocked by a three-car crash, says the radio, so we take an alternative road, Üllöi út, lined with plain single-storey buildings and a tramline along which we see no tram moving. We arrive at the airport, Ferihegy 1. There I continue to read Adam LeBor's thriller, finishing it on the plane, which has a bumpy ascent and a bumpy descent through cloud in both cases. The luggage belt take twenty minutes to start moving. Taxi drives us through back lanes to Hitchin. I forget how beautiful, green, and gently undulating Hertfordshire is. We have lunch at C's mother's where we left the car. Her forgetfulness is quite marked now.

*

Impressions of Hungary in political terms? Worrying, brutal, the country swerving far right rather quickly. Adam's novel explores this rightward swing in terms of a conspiracy thriller. The thriller part is fine - I don't read thrillers on the whole - but the political landscape he draws holds me right through.

Political landscape is an important aspect of the book's, any book's, reality-sense. It's always the reality-sense which grabs me. I am not primarily a great fan of plot and character. I take them in my stride, but consider them chiefly as the necessary, and necessarily artificial, means of shaping the reality-sense, the sense that tells me life is strange yet parallel. Truth to tell I generally finish up not caring what happens to the central characters as such. It is the world I want to understand not them. But since the world necessarily involves the imagination and cannot be understood without it, fiction, and therefore plot and character, are necessary. Reality-sense is not detached from the quality of writing, of course. The two are indivorcible.

It was Pound who said that technique was the test of a man's sincerity. I don't think he meant slickness, or effectiveness in terms of rhetoric. I think he meant a proper tension in the way language passes through a writer's nerves.

Well, Hungary works through my nerves and at the moment it chiefly makes me twitch. It feels as though it is at an important and dangerous stage in its development.