I loved the old 70’s TV series about Monkey and wondered how close it was to the original story, so I decided to buy a translation of the Chinese story and find out. The translation does change things a bit but in this case it was to remove some of the verse that did not translate well and retain more of the storyline, which was fine by me. There is much in the book that was brought to the small screen quite well I thought, baring in mind it was many years ago that I saw it, but I understand the TV series stopped before the story was concluded. It is an interesting read and was far easier to understand than the last translation of a historical piece of foreign literature I read, Don Quixote.
‘Monkey depicts the adventures of Prince Tripitaka, a young Buddhist priest on a dangerous pilgrimage to India to retrieve sacred scriptures accompanied by his three unruly disciples: the greedy pig creature Pipsy, the river monster Sandy – and Monkey. Hatched from a stone egg and given the secrets of heaven and earth, the irrepressible trickster Monkey can ride on the clouds, become invisible and transform into other shapes – skills that prove very useful when the four travellers come up against the dragons, bandits, demons and evil wizards that threaten to prevent them in their quest. Wu Ch’êng-ên wrote Monkey in the mid-sixteenth century, adding his own distinctive style to an ancient Chinese legend, and in so doing created a dazzling combination of nonsense with profundity, slapstick comedy with spiritual wisdom.
Very little is known about Wu Ch-eng-en (c. 1505-80) although he is believed to have held the post of District Magistrate for a time. He had a reputation as a good poet but only a few rather commonplace verses of his survive in an anthology of Ming poetry and in a local gazetteer. Arthur Waley CBE, FBS, was a distinguished authority on Chinese language and literature. He was born in 1889 and graduated from the Universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen. He died in 1966. His many publications include 170 Chinese Poems, Japanese Poetry, The Tale of Genji (6 vols), The Way and its Power, The Real Tripitaka and Yuam Mei.’
I was lent this book by a friend and I like the premise. I enjoy a post-apocalyptic story. It is the second part to Last Light which apparently explains the crisis that leads the world to ruin, but having said that I don’t think it was necessary to have read that book to enjoy this one. There are some areas where disbelief is stretched but perhaps that is more to do with my resistance to the premise that the world is balanced on such a fine edge, perhaps this is explained more in the first book, overall though I thoroughly enjoyed it.
,Ten years after a massive oil crisis, the world lies devastated.
The towns and cities of Britain are skeletal ghosts of their former selves. Very few humans have managed to survive the horrors that followed the disintegration of their former society at breakneck speed.
But sitting quietly amidst the ravaged landscape are the few pockets of resistance; beacon communities that have managed to fashion a new way of living.
Jenny Sutherland leads one of these groups. Based on a series of decaying offshore oil-rigs – away from the carnage and the ruins – she has helped a few hundred people rebuild a semblance of normality in this otherwise dead world.
But as Jenny’s people begin to explore their surroundings after a decade in the wilderness of a post-apocalyptic society, they start to realize that not every survivor shares the same vision of a better future. Worse still, there are people out there who would try to take everything that they have struggled so hard to create. For a new war is coming, and the stakes for the future are higher than anyone could have imagined…,
