Have you ever damned with faint praise? Said that fools rush in where angels fear to tread? Acknowledged that a little learning is a dangerous thing, or that to err is human, but to forgive, divine? You may not know it, but you were quoting Pope.
And there, to quote a different English poet, is the rub. Pope’s major works—the verse essays on “Criticism” and “Man,” the mock-satires The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad—are all classics in Mark Twain’s sense: things everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read. Perhaps that’s even too generous to his current reputation. John Mullan, a specialist in eighteenth century English literature at University College London, says The Dunciad “has a good claim to be the greatest unread poem in the language.”
It seemed elegant. Start at the water, end at the water. Forever brag to British friends about having traipsed across their shrunken empire. The only problem: I was currently dealing with a severe bout of runner’s knee and some foot problems caused by too-small climbing shoes.
“How far is it?” I asked.
Lately, as a small treat to myself, I’ve been taking the Thameslink – the London Shinkansen – from south London up to Brent Cross West so I can eat at Reindeer Café, one of my favourite Cantonese restaurants in the city. Reindeer Café is what restaurant writers euphemistically call an ‘institution’ – like Rules or a pie and mash shop – which usually means that they love it but haven’t been in ages. It is a place simultaneously left alone by time and well-used by the people who go there regularly, a dai pai dong-style café tucked away in the recesses of the Cricklewood branch of Wing Yip, an East Asian supermarket complex whose towering green bamboo pagodas and swooping quadratic function curves are instantly recognisable to anyone who grew up in that arc of north London criss-crossed by the North Circular. Most of those people will have fond stories about Reindeer Café; probably involving being driven there past a blur of warehouses, Ikeas and Holiday Inns, following their mother’s trolley around the aisles of Wing Yip and then getting an assortment of roast meats on rice, or a huge nest of seafood crispy noodles, Reindeer’s own version of a sizzler plate, to share as a treat. It’s one of those restaurants I unreservedly adore and almost never visit, mainly because it’s such a pain to get to. Like everything in the area, Reindeer Café has only ever been accessible by car – sure, you could get the train to Cricklewood and walk up the A5, or get off at Hendon and hike down, navigate a crossing of Staples Corner, sail around the Cape, squeeze through a car dealership and somehow end up in the Wing Yip car park, but even I have to draw the line somewhere.
Like Kit’s relationship, this is also a “deconstructed” book, both philosophically in its scratching at hidden contradictions and tensions, and literally, its assembled parts shimmering as a whole. So much is condensed into its brief length, not least of which is a probing interrogation of novels and why we write them. Near the book’s close, the narrator remarks that the “politics of novels” are not a mere “ethical device” for recognising our shared qualities or eliciting sympathy for those unlike us. Instead, as De Kretser accomplishes in Theory & Practice, they allow witness of life’s “messy, human truth”, told without shame.