A note from Mrs. C. Marsden
Book Club 4.6.15
We were blessed with a gloriously sunny day for our first book club of the summer term, and took the opportunity to meet outside by the sports field. We enjoyed the light shade of the pavilion, and used our annotated readings as gentle fans during the brief pauses in what was a 45 minutes of tumbling, bursting, excited and exciting literary comment and enquiry.
Book club is always fun like this!
William Shakespeare was in our view this week: All The World’s A Stage is one of Shakespeare’s most often quoted speeches. It is from the play, As You Like It, a comedy, and is spoken by melancholy Jacques, a malcontent and cynical character.
The humour of the piece was not not lost on the book clubbers, who vied cheerfully with each other to note the author’s teasing and mocking of each of the ‘seven ages’ of man, sometimes sharper than others. The ‘lover’, or third age, struck some of us as receiving a particularly cruel put down: ‘Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow’! No empathy here for the pain of unrequited young love! The ‘soldier’, for all his ‘honor’ and fearlessness ‘in the cannon’s mouth’, is accorded only a ‘bubble reputation’; transient, insubstantial, destined to burst. These darker inflections of tone, balanced so beautifully in the flow of the piece, gave us pause for reflection on the elements of truth within the caricatures of the seven ages.
We enjoyed some light relief in learning the meanings of archaic words, like ‘capon’, and ‘pantaloon’, and ‘saws’. “Capon’ reminded year 6 members of the group of their recent visit to a farm, where they learned the differences between a steer, a heifer, a bullock, and a bull.
Coming to the final line; ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything ’ we felt the chill of the author’s prediction of man’s ultimate oblivion!
A dystopian vision presented itself in an excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood. The children were experts at finding the signals of threat within text, the unfamiliar and the dissonant on the backdrop of a familiar neighbourhood. ‘The facades [of the houses ] are gracious and in good repair’, but there is an ‘absence of people’, ‘there are no children’, ‘this is the center, where nothing moves’. The war is mentioned, but seems distant, and we searched for the dangers hinted at on this beautiful but almost empty street.
The word ‘Guardian’ provoked some thought. Most of us recognized it to mean a protector, but Mr Howard wondered about an alternative sense; the Guardian’s role may be not to protect an individual, but to protect a system or social order. Perhaps towards the individual, the Guardian behaves more like a Guard, restricting liberty? In this sense, the presence of the Guardian who is mowing a lawn on this ‘model town’ like street, seems sinister.
The loss of freedom suffered by the author would be consistent with this interpretation. Everyone in the group was struck by the beauty of the last line in this piece, which conveys loss and longing, with waning hope: ‘Such freedom now seems almost weightless’.