Half Way Through 1321 Pages

 I began reading 'Miss MacIntosh, My Darling' shortly before my diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer and events overtook that particular project. I returned to the book a few weeks ago and am reading steadily on at a chapter per day, savouring the writing carefully. At its best the prose has an incantatory and almost hallucinogenic property. This is entirely appropriate for the opium dream in which the narrator's mother exists:

"He might well have been, he must admit, among my mother's irresponsible hallucinations, only another of the the luminous and metamorphic dead she entertained, a bearded Russian bishop or an iridescent lighthouse keeper, perhaps the Antarctic Queen Maud Mountains with her snow-capped mountain peaks and white umbrellas and lace capes and great snow owls with horn-rimmed spectacles and human faces, perhaps Queen Charlotte Islands in a storm or a moon-face duchess with rustling silken skirts an many brown-eyed lap-dogs barking, many music boxes tinkling old-fashioned waltzes, many astral voices, bird cries, insect whirrings, perhaps the headless horseman fording a brook, the flowers turning into serpents."