It took me 10 years to read this beast of a book – but it was worth it

First published in 1941, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is not quite War and Peace. But it comes closeBack when I was a dilatory student of English literature, I chose my authors for the shortness of their canon. OK, Thomas Hardy was in there, but I’d already read a couple of his for my A-level. Otherwise, I found the intellectual allure of brevity irresistible. No Dickens for me. Arthur Hugh Clough and Christina Rossetti were more my thing. Never mind the quality, feel the slimness of their volumes.The guilt weighs heavy. My penance since then has been to read some of the weightiest tomes ever written, sheer length offering effective cover for a literary dilettante. In this endeavour I tackled War and Peace and found much to enjoy. But in a novel north of 550,000 words, to have found nothing to enjoy would have been to my discredit, or Tolstoy’s, or the pair of us. Continue reading...