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Breakfast of Champions

The harp tends to figure large within Cornwell's Saxon tales. I guess it was a 'wonderment' instrument capable of producing rare sophisticated music in the 9th century.

I do like this line and the cause/effect innuendo.

“We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.”

Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom

Snow covered the airfield.

It had come from the north, in the mist, driven by the night wind, smelling of the sea. There it would stay all Winter, threadbare on the grey earth, an icy, sharp dust; not thawing and freezing, but static like a year without seasons. The changing mist, like the smoke of war, would hang over it, swallow up now a hangar, now the radar hut, now the machines; release them piece by piece, drained of colour, black carrion on a white desert.

It was a scene of no depth, no recession and no shadows. The land was one with the sky; figures and buildings locked in the cold like bodies in an icefloe.

Beyond the airfield there was nothing; no house, no hill, no road; not even a fence, a tree; only the sky pressing on the dunes, the running fog that lifted on the muddy Baltic shore. Somewhere inland were the mountains.

I read some reviews that slaughter this book and author, but me I love the poignant bleak, sensual scene that John le Carré' projects with this opener. The power of description that is full-blown but not over-egged (IMO). 

This the kind of cinematic opening that I love. A widescreen camera-pan introduction and we drink in the scene. Penned in 1965 and considered redundant and far too pompous by today's standards. Classical music versus Hip-Hop I suppose; but I guess my taste is in the past and this book is dear to my heart. I first read it my youth and a mountain of modern pulp has since passed between my ears, yet I've never forgotten the image of that airfield.

Snow covered the airfield.

It had come from the north
in the mist
driven by the night wind
smelling of the sea.

Considered poetic and elaborate compared to the reviewer suggested re-write; 'The airfield was covered by a dusting of fine snow.'

Cryogenic Chicken McNuggets® ...

pot shot

Jerry Hall

of a new era

A Syrup of Fig

Tube Alloys

love and loathing

Sighting