A recent reading pleasure

I've missed blogging about reading, as I read. I find that blogging is best for me when it's really fresh - if I don't blog about a book within 2-3 days of reading it, it's not going to happen. That means that this blog isn't representative of everything I read - just what I've read immediately before I blog.

And so to a recent moment of reading pleasure, in Life After Joe by Harper Fox which I enjoyed for all kinds of reasons, but most especially for the declaration scene near the end. Matthew, one of the heroes, has managed to get himself illicitly on a helicopter out to an oilrig to find the other hero, Aaron West. Love this moment of arrival:

"Take it easy with him, Jens. He's had a rough trip out, even by my standards."

I raised my eyes from the concrete. There was an almost infinite stretch of it beneath my feet, and it was not moving. Almost infinite- in the far distance, between gigantic scaffolds and towers made of girders and chains, I could see an edge. Beyond it, darkness...Here the gale arrived in flying wedges, each one accompanied by a blast of horizontal rain...

..."Hang on. There he is. West! Over here!"

He was in front of me. He strode through the flow of men heading in the other direction , and I saw how they parted for him... He was alluring, welcoming or forbidding just as he chose, and out here...out here, plainly it suited him to be a sheer granite cliff. I saw in an instant why he never had any trouble from his coworkers. And he was, as always, devastating. He made the ghastly waterproofs look tailored. His short black crop was plastered down with rain.

I love the coincidence of setting and character in this moment. Aaron's been hiding something from Matthew and it's later in this scene he will reveal it. And this is part of the reveal, the start of it. Matthew knows Aaron works on the rigs, but this is the first time he's seen him in his working guise, and he's different here.

I also love the strangeness of the place Matthew finds himself in, this harsh all-male platform in the North Sea. A forbidden place he shouldn't be in where unexpected things happen. After the declaration, when they're in Aaron's bed Matthew notices:

Outside, wild, white drifts of snow had started to fall driven by the wind. It hadn't occurred to me that it snowed out at sea, in lonely wastes of water with no-one to watch.

It's all quite unexpectedly lovely. As are Fox's loving but unsentimental descriptions of Newcastle, where most of the book takes place.

I read this book on Thursday/Friday, then immediately read Driftwood which is set in an equally lovely and unsentimental Cornwall. I highly recommend both books.