"The Ode Less Travelled" by Stephen Fry

Having loaned this book to my mate Fred, I thought I had better re-read it.

With his usual verbal brilliance and Wildean asides, Fry dissects the techniques and forms of poetry from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, from Europe to Indonesia. He explains metre (iambs, trochees, dactyls and the less usual forms), stanzas, liners and feet (trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, Alexandrine etc) and techniques such as enjambment, caesuras, and trochaic substitutions etc. He explains rhymes which should be "natural, transparent, seamless, discreet and unforced", and slant rhymes, and their patterns such as cross rhyming and envelope rhyming.

Then he goes through the forms. Well! I knew the sonnet. I had heard of odes and ballads but I didn't really know what they were. He explains, and this is not an exhaustive list, the ballad, anglo-saxon styles, Dante's terza rima, rubai, Spenserian stanza, Heroic verse, Sapphic, Pindaric, Horatian, and lyric odes, anacreontics, villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, ballades (NOT the same as ballads!), rondeaus and rondea redoubles, haikus, tankas, luc bats, limericks, clerihews, and the variants of sonnets. Each of these Fry illustrates with a poem of his own, as well as judiciously picked 'real' poems (did you know that 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' by Dylan Thomas was a villanelle?), while exhorting you to READ ALOUD and do poetry exercises.

I felt so ignorant.

BUT

It made me want to read and write poetry. 

September 2016; 327 pages

"The Stars' Tennis Balls" by Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry brings the Count of Monte Cristo to the twentieth century.

Ned Maddstone, the son of a Tory MP, is Head of School at Harrow, a star cricket player, destined for Oxford. He meets and falls madly in love with Portia. On a school sailing trip he accepts a sealed envelope from a dying man. Before he can deliver it a schoolboy prank causes him to be arrested; following his arrest he is spirited away to an isolated existence on an island.

This is the story of Edmond Dantes (an anagram of Ned Maddstone) and the three conspirators who tore him away from his wedding feast (his one and only shag with Portia) and had him consigned to the Chateau D'If. The remainder of the story plays out exactly, from the mad Abbe (called Babe, another anagram) to the escape in Babe's coffin, to the appearance of the fabulously rich Simon Cotter (yes, you guessed it, an anagram of Monte Cristo) who engineers his revenge.

Like the original in every sense except literary merit. This is a shallow conceit. It has the usual public school boy Fry hero and the usual snobbery about class; in the teachings of Babe one can even hear Fry pontificating on QI. A pleasant enough read. It has the merit of being far shorter than the original which is, I suppose, essential for today's market, but this in itself gives it the demerit that it does not have the time to delve deeply into the evil that revenge undoubtedly represents.

A good game but a disappointment as a novel.

October 2011; 371 pages