Saturday, August 15, 2009

Saturday Snipper: Unbearable Lightness ...

I spent an hour on Wednesday evening trying to find some quotes to use in a piece I was drafting on sense of place and crime fiction for Dorte's DJ Krimiblog (posted today). Below is a passage that I didn't use, but liked a lot. It's from The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce that I reviewed a couple of week ago.

We pulled out of Borth and continued gliding silently, hardly picking up speed, towards Ynyslas and Dovey Junction. The morning sun had just cleared the horizon above the flat watery world and threw a horizontal beam that made us squint and duck the dust particles that appeared from nowhere like swarms of gnats. The light had the colour of lemonade - not the stuff from the sweetshop, but the homemade drink, chilled and left on the sideboard in a glass pitcher and craved by children in the Famous Five books with the desperation of cocaine addicts. It filled the carriage with warm pale honey and gilded the golf course and beach and sea, and turned the marram grass on the dunes to golden stubble along the chin of the sky.

I don't know about you, but I'm on that train, dodging dust, squinting out at the estuary landscape and the sea beyond. Great stuff.

1 comment:

Alex Moore said...

absolutely...and that lemonade slant of light: i can see it even as it flavors the paragraph...