things mean a lot

RIP the Fifth

2010-09-03T07:51:00.002+01:00

Part of me can hardly believe that the fifth annual RIP challenge is here, or that this is my fourth time participating already. It feels like it was only some two months ago that I was making my list for RIP IV, and preparing to discover the wonder that is Wilkie Collins for the first time. And only a mere six months before that – surely it can’t have been longer? – I was hurriedly putting together my list for RIP II (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Book of Lost Things were included) and preparing to leave to study abroad for a semester (kind of like now). Where does time go?

No, it has not escaped my notice that this is not the first time I begin a RIP post with a bout of nostalgia – and this is only one of the many ways in which Carl’s reading challenges are just like Christmas. Unfortunately, this year I won’t actually get to be around^* for much of RIP (which, for the newcomers, lasts from September 1st to Halloween), but I shouldn’t let that keep me from the joys of list-making, should I? I’ll hopefully be with you for the final weeks of the challenge, and until then I’ll certainly be thinking about joining this lovely bloggy celebration of all things creepy, Gothic, horrific, mysterious and perilous. Without further ado, here’s my list of potential choices for this year’s RIP:

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been saving this one because I don’t want to run out of unread Sarah Waters novels. But I’m only human, and I can’t resist for much longer.
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenager – Yes, as usual I’m one year behind everyone else.
Ghost Stories by Edith Wharton – I don’t know much about these, actually, but I love those Wordsworths Classics of the Supernatural editions, and somehow I have a feeling I’d like Wharton’s short fiction a lot.
Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen – I’ve only ever read one of Blixen’s short stories, “The Blank Page”, but I absolutely loved it. Time to read more.
East Lynne by Ellen Wood, Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and No Name by Wilkie Collins – If I could, I’d happily spend the whole of September and October reading nothing but Victorian sensation novels. I hope to get to at least one of these, but it will depend on what the library at my new location has.
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill – Another one I can hardly believe I haven’t read yet.
Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier and The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – because both authors are brilliant, and because I need to read more short stories.
Fledgling by Octavia Butler – I absolutely loved Kindred and can hardly wait to read more Butler.
The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie – …which will be my first Christie. I’ve been on a mystery kick this year, so it’s about time I make Dame Agatha’s acquaintance.
Love Lies Bleeding or The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Wilson – Another classic mystery author I think I might really enjoy.
Whatever I can find by Michael McDowell – I confess hadn’t even heard of McDowell until recently, when a reader of this blog and fellow lover of du Maurier, Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter e-mailed me urging me to read him. How can I resist a recommendation from a fan of those three writers? McDowell specialises in Southern Gothic family sagas, which definitely sounds right up my alley.

There. As always, if you’ve read any of these I’d love to hear your thoughts. Considering how busy I’ll be for all of September and part of October, I doubt I’ll have time for more than three or four books, but listing them is half the fun, right? I can’t wait to hear all about what everyone else will be reading.

In other news, I’m off to spend the weekend in one of my favourite cities in the world, Santiago de Compostela, where I’ll see The Arcade Fire, one of my favourite bands. I hope your weekend is as wonderful as mine promises to be, and I’ll see you next week!

*on which more soon.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

2010-09-02T08:32:00.002+01:00

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is mostly set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during WW2, and tells the story – or rather, a very personal story – of its occupation by the Italian and German armies. It’s the story of Dr. Iannis and his daughter Pelagia, a young woman much too smart and independent for her time and place; of Mandras, Pelagia’s betrothed, who joins the Greek resistance and is almost driven crazy by what he sees; of Drosoula, his mother, a woman whose widowhood has doomed to invisibility; of young Lemoni and the pine marten she find and tames along with Dr. Iannis and Pelagia; of Carlo, a gay Italian soldier who joined the army in the hopes of finding someone to love; and of course, of Captain Antonio Corelli (and his mandolin) – a sensitive, funny, intelligent, artistic, and vaguely embarrassing and apologetic Italian invader who the Greek characters grow to love despite their determination not to.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a fictional social history of a forgotten side of WW2, told in a style reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s a sweeping, passionate, and alternately hilarious and heartbreaking novel, and it’s and a novel that does the very things I love the most about historical fiction: it fills the gaps in history; it focuses on the individual human costs of the political bigger picture; it draws attention to the cobwebby corners of the past that seemed doomed to being forgotten; and most importantly of all, it humanises them in a way that a simple factual account never could. I had only the vaguest idea of what had happened in Greece during the Second World War before reading this book. And I had somehow never even heard of the massacre of Cephallonia, which cost over five thousand people their lives. I won’t tell you more than this about it, though, because as unfortunate as it is that it isn’t remembered more widely, perhaps it’s not a bad thing for readers to have it take them by surprise as they read this book—I know that after this I won’t forget it any time soon.

Captain Antonio Corelli, the character who gives the novel its title, doesn’t make his first appearance until a good two hundred pages into the book. So yes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin starts off slowly, but the back story is absolutely necessary. The fact that you get to know the characters so well is a big part of what gives the book its emotional power. Furthermore, the fact that we get a glimpse of pre-war life in Cephallonia allows the contrast between the then and the now to be all the more marked. Much like the characters, you barely realise there’s a war coming, and even after it does come, you sometimes forget it’s on at all. But then come the hunger, the unspeakable violence, the death, the grief, the misery, and the wounds that last a lifetime.

Having said that, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a book that crept up on me. I didn’t realise at first just how much I had grown to care. In the final a hundred and fifty pages I knew I was sufficiently emotionally invested in the story to cry; but then again, I’ll readily admit it doesn’t take that much for that to happen. It was only after I finished the book that I realised how much it had affected me and stayed with me. I dreamed about the characters for two nights straight. I found myself missing them terribly. I miss them all still.

One of my favourite storylines was Carlo’s, the Italian soldier I mentioned above. Carlo’s story deals with the invisibility of glbtq people, and with the absolutely crushing weight of a silence that, in that particular context, could only be broken at the cost of his life. His story captures the overwhelming loneliness of knowing there’s a crucial part of you that can never be known, let alone loved. Carlo falls in love twice, and army life allows him to be close to the men he loves—but he knows that if they had the smallest inkling of the truth nature of his feelings he’d be lost, in all senses of the world. This bit in particular absolutely broke my heart:

According to Dante my like is confined to the third ring of the Seventh Circle of Nether Hell, in the improbable company of usurers. He gives me a desert of naked spirits scourged by flakes of fire, he makes me run in circles, perpetually and in futility, looking for the ones whose bodies I’ve defiled. You see how it is; I have been driven to search everywhere just to find myself mentioned. I am mentioned almost nowhere, but where I find myself, I find myself condemned. And how remarkable it is, you doctors and priests, that Dante pitied us when God did not. Dante said, ‘It makes me heartsick only to think of them.’ And Dante was right, I have always run in circles, futilely, looking for the warmth of bodies, scorned by God who created me, and all my life has been a desert and a rain of flakes of flame.
Yes, I have read everything, looking for evidence that I exist, that I am a possibility. And do you know where I found myself? Do you know where I found out that I was, in another vanished world, beautiful and true? It was in the writings of a Greek.

Other than Carlo, my favourite character was Pelagia. First of all, I have to confess it took me a while to make sense of how the book dealt with the whole theme of gender: in one of the initial chapters I was taken aback by a joke about battered wives. There’s of course a world of difference between portraying a certain attitude or mindset and the kind of world in which it’s prevalent and endorsing it or dealing with it lightly, and the very last thing I want is for literature to sweep anything disagreeable under the rug. But at first it can be hard to tell, with a storyteller you don’t yet know and trust, how the narrative as a whole frames the characters’ stance on certain things.

Fortunately, as the novel progressed, Louis de Bernières completely earned my trust. Corelli lost part of my respect towards the end with a comment about “damaged goods” in reference to – I kid you not – women raped during the war. But that’s the character; not the book as a whole. Comments like these are not gratuitous, and while the narrator does not of course address them explicitly (not being George Eliot, I doubt he could get away with it), there’s ample room in the narrative for a consideration of their consequences. So all in all, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin dealt with gender very satisfyingly, and it took Pelagia and her plight – as I said, a smart and educated young woman in a world not really ready for it – absolutely seriously.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a love story, a very human account of the war in Greece, a plea against totalitarianism of any sort, and a book that effortlessly combines humour with gut-wrenching moments. I couldn’t have loved it more. This marks the ending of my unofficial quest to read five books from my tbr pile this summer that you picked for me. I owe you a big thank you: I loved Half of a Yellow Sun, Atonement, and this, and I had a lot of fun with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Eyre Affair. We’ll need to do this again soon; clearly you know me well, and thus letting you make my reading decisions for me every now and then is evidently a very good idea.

Favourite passages:

I know that the Duce has made it clear that the Greek campaign was a resounding Victory for Italy. But he was not there. He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it. He ought to know that the truth is that we were losing badly until the Germans invaded from Bulgaria. He will never acknowledge this because the ‘truth’ belongs to the victors. But I was there, and I know what was happening in my part of the war. For me that war was an experience that shaped the whole course of my thought, it was the deepest personal shock I have ever had, the worst and most intimate tragedy of my life. It destroyed my patriotism, it changed my ideals, it made me question the whole notion of duty, and it horrified me and made me sad.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I ad it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one three and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

It did not occur to him that he was a statistic, one more life warped and ruined by a war, a tarnished hero destined for the void. He was aware of nothing but a vanishment of paradise, an optimism that had turned to dust and ash, a joy that had once shone brighter than the summer sun, but now had disappeared and melted in the black light and frigid heat of massacre and cumulative remorse. He had struggled for a better world, and wrecked it.

Other opinions:
Giraffe Days

(I was surprised not to find more, but I guess everyone else read this pre-blogging? Let me know if I missed yours.)

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

2010-09-01T08:37:00.004+01:00

Year of Wonders is set in 1665-6 in the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, and is based on a real occurrence: historical records tell us when the Bubonic plague reached Eyam, its inhabitants voluntarily quarantined themselves to keep the disease from spreading to neighbouring towns. Brooks tells the story of the plague year from the point of view of eighteen-year-old Anna Frith. Anna is an ordinary woman who works at the rectory as a domestic servant, and despite her young age she is a widow and a mother of two. During the plague year, she suffers many loses; learns much about herself; and befriends the rector and especially his wife, Elinor Mompellion. The three take the care of the town into their hands, but most of the time they can do little but watch helplessly as the world as they’ve always known it changes beyond recognition.

Geraldine Brooks begins this story in media res, in the autumn of 1666, when Eyam’s population had already been more than halved by the plague. She then takes us back to 1665 and shows us how it all began. Normally this is a narrative technique I like, but I’m not completely sure it was effective in the case of Year of Wonders—on which more soon. Anyway, I liked how Geraldine Brooks used this set-up to comment on gender, class and power; I liked her examination of social tensions, fear, violence, and the many factors that will push people over the edge; and I liked how well she captured the fear, disbelief, despair, numbness and loneliness of the townspeople as the population continued to drop.

I also liked Anna a lot – especially the fact that Brooks picked a narrator with a certain degree of powerlessness who becomes more powerful as the story progresses, thanks to her role as a caretaker and to the knowledge and expertise she acquires. As the number of those afflicted by the plague increases, the traditional social order erodes, and Anna’s age, gender, widowhood and social stand cease to weight as heavily on whether or not she’s taken seriously. What matter is that she sits with the sick when nobody else will, and that though she can’t work miracles, she can bring them some relief. Of course, whether or not these changes are lasting is a whole other matter; and as the story of another character shows us, there’s danger in power and in the visibility it brings, especially when so many are desperately looking for something or someone to blame.

Most of all I liked the fact that Year of Wonders is a story about a world “on the brink of modernity”, as Brooks herself put it. Through the inhabitants of Eyam, she attempts to capture a paradigm shift; to portray the mindset of a group of people who were experimenting with new ways of thinking about the world. In Eyam different faiths, beliefs and forms of viewing the world coexist, though not always peacefully as it can be expected. There are some who see the plague as divine punishment for the townspeople’s sins; others as the result of a curse or the practice of witchcraft; others as a natural phenomenon to which God, if present at all, is indifferent; and others still, like Anna, as a natural phenomenon whose occurrence shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted in terms of faith. My one complaint is that Brooks didn’t take these ideas further – Year of Wonders is not a very long novel, but there was perhaps room for a little more depth when dealing with these issues.

I quite enjoyed this book for the most part, but unfortunately the final section lost me. First there’s the problem I mentioned earlier, with the in media res beginning: you know from the very start which characters survive and which ones don’t, and the death of a certain character in particular is foreshadowed so often that when it does happen, it no longer has the emotional impact it could have had – instead, the whole thing just feels overly dramatic, faintly ridiculous, and far too drawn out. (I kind of feel like a horribly callous person for saying this, but I really can’t help it.)

After that a lot of equally dramatic things happen in quick succession, and I’m afraid that my suspension of disbelief deserted me for good at this point. It’s not so much what happens in itself; it’s the fact that the final section feels so at odds with the emotional tone of the rest of the book. Though it deals with tragic events, Year of Wonders is for the most part a very restrained novel. Anna sounds like someone who was numbed by so much grief, and for some reason this felt more real to me than the histrionic tone of the final forty pages or so.

I could say that Anna’s initial moderation struck me as more true to the worldview of the time period than the final drama, but to be fair I have no reason at all to believe that seventeenth-century people were any less given to strong expressions of emotion than we are. Yet there was something about the ending – I cannot pinpoint what – that felt wrong to me. Perhaps it all comes down to the fact that in historical fiction, the perception of accuracy can matter as much as accuracy itself. At any rate, this was a very personal reaction, and I don’t expect that other readers will necessarily feel the same

As you can tell, I didn’t love Year of Wonders nearly as much as I loved March, though for the first half or so I was convinced that I was going to. Then again, this was Geraldine’s Brooks first novel, so it’s only natural that it’s not quite as polished or satisfying as her later work. I do like her writing a lot, as well the unusual points of view she picks and the themes she deals with, so I know I’m going to continue to read her.

Bits I liked:

At day’s end, when I leave the rectory for home, I prefer to walk through the orchard on the hill rather than go by the road and risk meeting people. After all we’ve been through together, it’s just not possible to pass with a polite, ‘Good night t’ye’. And yet I haven’t the strength for more. Sometimes, not often, the orchard can bring back better times to me. These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can’t say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth’s wing in the dark.

I open the door to my cottage this evening on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this one is always the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong. I mislike this, for I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place. But I, who always prided myself on grace, now allow myself a deliberate clumsiness. I let my feet land heavily. I clatter the hearth tools. And when I draw water, I let the bucket chain grind on the stone, just to hear ragged noise instead of the smothering silence.

Other blog reviews:
Linus’s Blanket, books i done read, Medieval Bookworm, Write Meg!, The Book Whisperer, Fizzy Thoughts, Coffee Stained Pages, Book-a-rama, The Written World, Serendipity, At Home With Books, Age 30+: A Lifetime of Books, Lakeside Musings

(Have I missed yours?)

Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley

2010-08-30T08:12:00.002+01:00

Don’t let the title fool you: Trent’s Last Case is in fact the first mystery featuring Philip Trent, E.C. Bentley’s gentleman of leisure turned crime reporter slash sleuth. Published in 1913, the book is a precursor to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and Trent was repeatedly mentioned by Dorothy L. Sayers as an influence on Lord Peter Wimsey - this being, of course, the reason why I read this book.

Trent’s Last Case opens with the murder of Sigsbee Manderson, an American businessman and millionaire. Mr Manderson is found dead outside his house in the early morning – he’s been shot through one eye in a way that excludes the possibility of suicide. Puzzlingly, he took care to dress carefully before going out in the middle of the night for unknown reasons, but forgot his denture on his nightstand.

Philip Trent is called in to investigate the murder by an old friend with a personal interest on the case: his niece is the now widowed Mrs Manderson, and he fears that, because her experience of widowhood has been akin to that of the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour”, suspicions will fall on her. Trent’s objectivity is supposed to be an advantage, but it doesn’t take him long to get personally involved himself: the more he gets to know Mrs Manderson, the more drawn to her he feels.

Much to my delight, there are indeed quite a few similarities between Trent’s Last Case and Dorothy L. Sayer’s mysteries. The premise – a woman being suspected of a murder because she was in an unhappy relationship with the murdered man, and our sleuth falling in love with her – is reminiscent of Strong Poison (or rather, the other way around), which is another love story slash mystery. The characterisation may not be quite as in-depth as Sayers’, but then again I’m saying this after spending only one book with these characters; to be fair, they are satisfyingly complex and human. Most interestingly of all, this is a story about personal relationships, marriage, respectability, and what hides behind the “polite fictions” of society, as Trent calls them. This is one of the things I most enjoy about classic mysteries (and their precursor, the sensation novel): they allow a glimpse behind the curtain of respectability at a time when this was still a rare thing.

Bentley’s portrait of Mrs Manderson was a pleasant surprise: not only is she allowed a voice, but her marital unhappiness and her refusal to be a trophy wife are taken absolutely seriously. But then, what did I expect of a writer Sayers enthusiastically endorsed? The following passage, though worded a little dramatically, does a great job of conveying the dullness and despair of the life of an intelligent woman trapped in a world where she’s not allowed to do more than look elegant and be a society lady:

Can you imagine what it must be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor; can you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you have to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all—where money is the only thing that counts and the first thing in everybody’s thoughts—where the men who make the millions are so jaded by the work, that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they have any leisure, and the men who don’t have to work are even duller than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for display and silly amusements and silly immoralities; do you know how awful that life is? Of course I know there are clever people, and people of taste in that set, but they’re swamped and spoiled, and it’s the same thing in the end; empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I’m exaggerating, and I did make friends and have some happy times; but that’s how I feel after it all. The seasons in New York and London—how I hated them! And our house-parties and cruises in the yacht and the rest—the same people, the same emptiness.

This brings me to yet another very interesting thing, which is Trent’s Last Case portrait of modernity. Much to my surprise, the other book this reminds me of was The Great Gatsby: both are acutely lonely stories set in social worlds where people are seen as disposable, and both deal with the ruthlessness of the modern world, particularly the world of money and business. As Trent is told at one point,

This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric.

It’s interesting to find this state of mind expressed so clearly before the Great War. I’m far from a Luddite myself, and looking back on the early twentieth century from a distance things don’t seem as bad as all that. But knowing what we know, we can’t really just dismiss those who were pessimistic and wary of unchecked progress.

Trent’s Last Case is also full of other fascinating period details, like the fact that cars, telephones, and the collection of fingerprints were all still novelties that required some explaining. I couldn’t help but smile at this passage:

‘I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor car is.’
Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr Cupples, who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor cars, readily confessed to ignorance.

As for the mystery itself, obviously I can’t tell you all that much, but I will say that it’s a good one. It’s a little convoluted and impossible for readers to guess on their own, but it’s satisfying all the same. The whodunit is supposedly solved halfway through the book, and it’s then that things get truly interesting. There are twists, turns, yet more twists, and always more to the truth that you suppose: you don’t get the full story until the very end. Best of all, Trent’s Last Case is very much a psychological mystery. More than the details of the crime, what keeps you reading is being eager to find out what motivated this or that person to do such and such – and that’s my favourite kind of crime story.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll add your link here.)

The Sunday Salon – Bookish Pet Peeves

2010-08-29T13:41:00.004+01:00

At the risk of sounding like the Scrooge of book blogging, I have to confess that there are a series of phrases, words and ideas prevalent in literary discourse of all kinds of which I’m really not a fan. They aggravate me, bring out the three-year-old in me, make me inwardly grumble “UR DOIN IT RONG”, and, in one case in particular, even make me consider getting contrary slogans tattooed on my forehead, just because I can.

But before I go any further, bear with me as I make a short aside: I keep a .txt file in my desktop where I scribble down ideas for future Sunday Salon posts as they come to me - which often seems to happen while I’m working. What this says about my levels of concentration is perhaps best left unexamined. Anyway, the words “bookish pet peeves” have been there for months now, and part of the reason why it took me so long to develop this into a full post is because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make it sound impersonal – which it absolutely is.

So let me start with a disclaimer: these things may annoy me, but that doesn’t mean that a person saying or doing them will ever annoy me, or that I’ll look down on them (it’d be absurd and hypocritical if I did, because as you shall see that I’ve been guilty of many of them myself). It’s possible that these turn up in book blogs, as they do anywhere else where books are discussed, but I’m really not talking about any blog or person in particular. I think we all have a bit of tendency to be easily annoyed in the abstract but much more understanding and forgiving when dealing with real human beings, which is just as it should be.

With that out of the way, here they go – my top sources of annoyance in literary discourse:

The word “message” when applied to literature – A book that can be neatly summarised in one sound bite or two is probably not a very good book at all. I have always believed that literature, even when not as its best, is about much more than just disguisedly conveying a particular message. As the great Ursula Le Guin so eloquently put it in The Language of the Night, Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality to it, can “really” be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast.

Besides, I dislike “message” because it has implications about authorial intent that “theme”, for example, does not. A “message” is something the author hides in the book for the reader to decipher – and therefore said author has absolute control over it. A “theme”, on the other head, is far from one-sided, and depends as much on the text as it does on an active reader. Most authors probably do try to communicate specific ideas through their writing, consciously or not, but I’m not at all a fan of the idea that they have absolute control or even the last word over how these should be read.

The expression “the graphic novel genre” – You saw this one coming, didn’t you? I confess I have a bit of a tendency to blurt out “medium” whenever I hear it, which probably makes me sound like an irritating know-it-all. But I just can’t help it; it’s stronger than I am. Also, “Comics/Graphic novels ARE NOT A GENRE” might have been what I had in mind earlier when I mentioned forehead tattoos. I’ve gone on at length before about why this gets to me so much, so instead of repeating myself I’ll just invite you to click the link.

(Seriously, though. They are so not a genre. And calling them one perpetuates so many erroneous ideas and misconceptions about them. Argh argh argh okay I’ll shut up now.)
For very similar reasons, the expression “the YA genre” – to me this is every bit as absurd as claiming that the whole of adult fiction is a single genre. There are YA romances, YA mysteries, YA fantasy novels; there's YA science fiction, YA realistic fiction, YA dystopia, and so on. Once again, my problem with calling YA a genre is that it makes it sound a lot more samey than it actually is. I notice that people tend to see YA as a lot more homogeneous than, say, children's literature, and I wonder how much the fact that it's often referred to as a genre has to do with that.
Using the words “novel” and “book” interchangeably – This leads to repeated references to “this novel” in reviews of non-fiction, short story collections, memoirs, etc., which kind of makes my head explode. It's also why I’m not completely comfortable with “graphic novel” as a replacement for “comic”, which results in the paradoxical term “non-fiction graphic novel” (though I do use it myself and fully acknowledge that “comic” has its own share of awkwardness).
Mistaking a single character’s thoughts/opinions/worldview for those of the author, or reading everything autobiographically – This seems to happen with alarming frequency, and in my experience even in literary circles right after students have been repeatedly beaten over the head with Roland Barthes (I’m not exactly a big fan of his, but not because I think he’s wrong in this regard). When it comes to ideological readings of a novel, it’s especially important to base them on what the novel as a whole suggests, rather than on any isolated character’s stance. The second can of course be one of the things that reveal the first, but it’s never the whole story. Possibly you’re thinking that this all goes without saying, but sadly in my experience it really does not.
The expression “this book transcends its genre” – Bonus points when applied to graphic novels, of course. To be honest, most of the time I’m not even sure what this means. I mentioned it in my fantasy reader’s FAQ a few months ago, so I won’t go on about it at length, but to put it briefly, it annoys me because it’s yet another way of putting a whole genre in the same bag. E.g.: “Fantasy is of course still bad; the only reason why Wicked by Gregory Maguire is good is because it ‘transcends’ it.” I was reminded of this recently when reading Savidge Reads’ excellent interview with mystery writer Sophie Hannah, who said:
‘Crime Fiction’ is a category that contains, as you say, writers like Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill, Barbara Vine, Karin Alvtegen, all of whom are great writers. I’m slightly uncomfortable with the idea of anyone’s crime novels being ‘more than’ crime fiction, because that suggests there’s a limit to what a crime novel can be, and I don’t believe there is.
Exactly. The same goes for every genre, really.
Using the term “simplistic” positively – this one just confuses me, and possibly my inadequate grasp of English is to blame here. To me, to call a book “simplistic” is one of the very worst things I can say about it: it means that it betrays the complexity of the world and of human nature by oversimplifying it; by not acknowledging nuances and portraying the world as black or white. So it really baffles me to read things like, “this was such a nice story, so sweet and simplistic”. Surely the writer means “simple”? Can the two words really be used interchangeably?
The word “hype” – the misfit indie music fan in me is to blame here. I realise that people use the same word to mean different things all the time, but thanks to all the time I’ve spent in online music communities, to me “hype” will always mean “something hispters feel they have to turn their noses at because it has become far too popular”. An example of its usage:

Person A:‘Have you heard the new Arcade Fire yet?’
Person B: ‘Yeah. It’s just hype.’
Person A: ‘Total hype.’
Person B: ‘Meh.’ *Takes a sip of iced latte*

The understanding being, of course, that the new Arcade Fire is completely devoid of any merit, but there will always be people who’ll claim to like it just because it’s cool to jump on the bandwagon. What those people don’t know, though, is that those who are truly cool will be the first to jump out of the bandwagon the second it begins to give any signs of getting crowded. I wonder if there’s ever a point when it becomes cool to jump back in?

More seriously now, I don’t like “hype” because it sounds dismissive – it seems to be a way of talking of people’s enthusiasm for something in terms of its collectively, as if that made it any less valid or sincere. Possibly this is one of the reasons why I so loved Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Street – it is, after all, a passionate defence of shared pleasures. And on a related note, I also really don’t like the idea that being enthusiastic about something (individually or collectively) is a sign of lack of critical thinking, as if you couldn’t think carefully about something and decided that yes, you do love it passionately and shamelessly.
One-size fits all book recommendations – This is possibly the trickiest item on this list, and it’s one I’m definitely guilty of myself. But the more I think about it, the more absurd it seems to me to universally recommend or un-recommend a book. People are so different, and what makes a reading experience precious is so often personal and unique. How can we ever really know if our enthusiasm or lack thereof will be shared?

Hearing people say they wish everyone would read this or that book doesn’t really bother me, but it does bother me to hear “I don’t recommend this book to anyone”, or “I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly enjoy this book” (the latter in particular often has a touch of righteousness to it that really rubs me the wrong way). This could be because I’d much rather waste my time on what was, to me, a bad book than to miss out on a good one because I trusted someone else when they warned me away from it.

I do know that the majority of us don’t mean any of these things literary even when we do say them, but they’re a short and easy way of expression the intensity of our like and dislike. I guess that as long as we don’t start thinking that they are or should be universal, there isn’t really a problem.

What about you? What are your own bookish pet peeves? And do you agree or disagree about any of the above?

Atonement by Ian McEwan

2010-08-27T08:34:00.002+01:00

Atonement is a story told in three parts: one set in a country house in the 1930’s, another during WW2, and the final one in contemporary times. It’s the story of how an introverted, imaginative girl’s mistake wrecked the lives of people she cared about, and of how those involved dealt with the incident over the course of their lives. This is a highly simplified synopsis, of course, but I’m afraid it’s all I can tell you, because Atonement is a highly spoilable book. Don’t get me wrong; the story’s brilliance doesn’t rely on a surprise or a twist, and I don’t think knowing what happened from the very beginning will ultimately make that much of a difference. But I know many readers prefer to go into a novel knowing as little as possible, and so for the sake of those who, like me, are latecomers to this particular party, I’ll stop here.

I loved Atonement from the very first page: I loved McEwan’s precise writing, his attention to detail, and his expert handling of multiple points of view (all of which reminded me a little of A.S. Byatt); I loved the world he was evoking, the slightly decayed country house, the family dynamics, the silences; I loved that the book immediately promised to be highly satisfying at a pure storytelling level, in addition to everything else. The three sections are different enough that they could almost be different novels, but in the end I loved them all equally, even if for different reasons.

One of my favourite things about the first part was how momentous it felt from the very beginning. This isn’t a result of the two instances of foreshadowing, but of the fact that the writing immediately makes what’s being described sound like the recollection of a turning point in the lives of all the characters. And so you wonder what could have happened that so deeply affected all those people; what made a seemingly ordinary day so worthy of being remembered. The intensity McEwan achieves here put me in mind of The Secret History, another book that had me on the edge of my seat wondering when it, whatever “it” was, was going to come. Both books achieve this sort of intense suspense without ever being heavy-handed, which I imagine is no easy task.

Once the nature of this particular “it” becomes clearly, which to me happened fairly early into the novel, it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. But before I go any further, I have to confess that at one point the whole premise gave me pause. I’m going to try to explain why in a way that is clear to those who have read the book but won’t spoil things for those who haven’t – apologies in advance in case I wind up sounding too vague and awkward. The story might have made me uncomfortable if it had been a matter of smoke without fire, so to speak, as I think there’s far too much assuming that these situations are usually smoke without fire in our culture, and this is something that bothers me immensely. As it turned out, though – a story about someone being wrongly blamed for something that did take place, and that misplacement of blame being deeply rooted in class assumptions – I could love it without the slightest reservation.

One of the things that makes Atonement work so well is the depth of McEwan’s characterisation – that intense suspense I was talking about earlier is achieved not only because you want to know what happens next, but because you grow to care about the characters, and hope against hope that things won’t turn out too horribly for them. I think McEwan was particularly successful when creating Briony, the aforementioned introverted, imaginative girl. She does a dreadful thing, and yet it’s hard to hate her because you see her from the inside. You know perfectly well that other people’s versions of what happened, and especially of what motivated her, are not quite right. It’s surely no coincidence that early in the novel we are treated to musings on fiction’s ability to achieve exactly this (on which more later). This kind of self-conscious, calculated storytelling is hard to pull off well, but McEwan (again like Byatt, or perhaps even Atwood) does it very well. Even when he delves deep into metafiction, the narrative is perfectly sustained.

What really made the book for me was exactly this metafictional aspect. This was something that surprised me: in part three McEwan very nearly pulls a John Fowles, which again is not easy to do well. But oh, he makes it work. Probably not for everyone (somehow I have the impression that this is a book that is very well-known but not necessarily universally loved, though I might be wrong here), but I, being the metafiction junkie^* that I am, was absolutely delighted. At its core, Atonement is a novel about novels. Yes, it’s also about guilt and penance and complex family dynamics and class and sexuality and growing up, and the hidden, ugly side of heroism, and the horrors of war. But most of all, I loved that it dealt so intelligently with the power of storytelling and with the deep ties between literature and empathy. We tell stories because they help us realise that everyone else is as real as we are – that there are countless other lives, other mindsets, other selves out there in the world.

Briony’s incomplete grasp of this at age thirteen is the real source of the tragedy. She sees herself as the star of a drama – her play being performed at last – and everyone else as her satellite. The consequences of this are of course disastrous – and what better way to atone for it than to bring yet more stories, with their endless potential to humanise even the most off-putting actions, into the world?

I couldn’t be happier with my first experience with McEwan – On Chesil Beach next?

Favourite passages:

A second thought always followed the first, one mystery always bred another: was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid as affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed being a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving with equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

Reviewed at:
The Literary Omnivore, Book Nut, Book Addiction, What Kate’s Reading, Care’s Online Bookclub, Bookie Mee, The Zen Leaf, Trish’s Reading Nook, Melody’s Reading Corner, Musings of a Bookish Kitty, Caribousmom, An Adventure in Reading

(As always, let me know if I missed yours.)

*Credit where credit is due: I’m pretty sure I stole this phrase from either Jenny or Fyrefly.

Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist by Jill Tweedie

2010-08-26T08:27:00.003+01:00

Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist is a collection of fictional letters from Martha, a stay-at-home mother of two, to Mary, her supposedly more “liberated” best friend. In the letters, Martha humorously recounts events from her daily life, makes wry and perceptive observations about gender issues, and talks about her struggle to balance her belief in gender equality with her very traditional lifestyle.

This is a book about what happens when idealism meets the constraints of daily reality. It’s also about something that shouldn’t happened, but in reality has: feminism’s occasional dismissal of the domestic; of traditionally feminine activities and lifestyles. Of course, the goal of the movement is not and has never been to replace a limited definition of what “proper” women should be with another, but the book so well works exactly because Tweedie is very much aware of this. She pokes fun at the failings and limitations of the practice of feminism without ever dismissing the theory.

Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist is written in a conversational style, but under the surface of Martha’s friendliness we find some serious sarcasm, constant denouncement of injustices and double standards, and plenty of acute observations. This is humour that comes from the inside, yes, but it’s not any less biting because of that. Tweedie’s writing is at times laugh out loud funny, and I loved it for that. But most of all I loved it for being so human – for her perpetual awareness that the world is not populated by monsters or saints, but by people doing the best they can.

Martha’s letters to Mary were first published in 1982, and it shows – in many ways, Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist is a very Britain in the 80’s sort of book. But this didn’t really bother me, because I’ve always believed that the idea that literature should strive for timelessness and universality is overrated. One of the reasons why I read is exactly to find out how the then and elsewhere differ from the here and now. There are plenty of references that timestamp this book, but personally I don’t see this has a bad thing – the clearly identifiable cultural and historical context actually add to its interest.

The tone of Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist reminded me at times of The Diary of a Provincial Lady – both are quiet domestic comedies with heroines who are far less conventional and much more prone to questioning the status-quo than it might seem at first glance. Fans of E.M. Delafield will likely enjoy this book.

Favourite bits:

Not that I think it’s done our Cause much good, some of the women who’ve made the Top Job. Men have managed to live under male monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Caligula, Peter the Great, Attila the Hun – without drawing any derogatory conclusions about their own sex, but let a woman add 2p to the cost of false teeth and all anti-feminist hell breaks loose. On the other hand, Josh voted for Mrs T and still thinks this makes him an honorary founder member of the Women’s Movement. Whenever I register an egalitarian complaint he says he voted for a woman Prime Minister, didn’t he, so how can anyone accuse him of being against women’s liberation?

So all day Tuesday I stayed in but I did, once, go to the loo. I have this weak bladder. When I got downstairs again, there was a card on the doormat. ‘Your repairman called but could not get an answer.’ Printed, it was, all ready for him to stuff, quick as a flash, through the letterbox and run off, chortling. Back on the phone to sleeping beauty, confined to barracks another whole day and the repairman finally cometh, regardeth the fridge and tutteth. Tut tut, he says. Nasty, that. Haven’t got the tools in the van for that. Oh yes? I say. Has this fridge broken down in ways no fridge has ever broken down before? Is this a First for Fridgedom? A breakthrough for Fridgekind? Has Dutch Elm disease struck again, is there dry rot in its private parts? The repairman’s eyes flicked from side to side, looking – I dare say – for the gents in white, and I wouldn’t have said no to a short interval in the funny farm myself.

Undeterred, she went on to say that she had tried telephoning me to tell me what time her train arrived but I had been out. Pause for implications to sink in. Daughter is Scarlet Woman, spends daylight hours togged out in Y-front frocks chatting up lounge lizards in sleazy Mayfair drinking clubs when should be suckling innocent babe and meeting clean-living Away Day Mother at Liverpool Street. However. She had then phoned Dear Joshua and got this charming girl who’d said Josh couldn’t meet her due to dining with Lord Dewberry that night. Wasn’t it nice, said Mother, that Joshua had such contacts, and nicer still that he’d forsworn them in order to welcome his Mother-in-Law and she only hoped I appreciated him as much as she did-
You’re always saying, Mary, that feminists should make friends with their mothers, but where do I begin? What possible way can I introduce mine to the Women’s Movement? Say to her, Mother, do you realise you are a member of an oppressed class? Mother, who’s squashed Father so flat all his life that he looks like a piece of lasagne with a moustache on one end? Mother, who wouldn’t recognise oppression if it leapt up and garrotted her? I read Nancy Friday’s book My Mother, My Self and all I could think was how lucky she was, having such an amenable mother.

Reviewed at:
Other Stories

Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

2010-08-24T10:38:00.004+01:00

I have been writing and reading about biology and evolution for a long time now, and I am frankly getting sick of how “science” is pinned to our she-butts like donkey tails and then glued in place with talk of hardheaded realism. I am tired of reading in books on evolutionary psychology or neo-Darwinism or gender biology about how women are really like all the old canards: that we have a lackadaisical sex drive compared to men and a relatively greater thirst for monogamy, and, outside the strictly sexual arena, a comparative lack of interest in achievement and renown, a preference for being rather than doing, a quiet, self-contained nature, a greater degree of “friendliness”, a deficient mathematical ability, and so on et cetera back to the bleary Cro-Magnon beginnings. I’m tired of hearing about how there are sound evolutionary explanations for such ascriptions of woman’s nature and how we must face them full square, chin up and smiling.
From the Introduction

Natalie Angier’s brilliant Woman: An Intimate Geography is both an informative, accessible and entertaining science book about the biology of the female body, and a fascinating cultural history of the concept (or concepts) of womanhood. Each of the book’s chapters deals with a particular detail of female anatomy – the egg, the X chromosome, the uterus, the clitoris, the breast, the ovaries, female hormones, etc. Furthermore, there are chapters on evolutionary psychology, on medicine’s penchant for hysterectomies, on women and testosterone, on breastfeeding, on female aggression, and so on.

What’s really interesting here is that Angier writes about both the biological facts of the female body (and she makes the science sound more approachable and appealing than any other writer I can think of) and about the history of the cultural biases that have clouded our past understanding of them. To make it even better, she does so from absolutely the right perspective – Natalie Angier is clearly someone who both knows and deeply appreciates science. Much to my relief, she knows it more than well enough to be able to tell when someone is Doing It Wrong, and as a result she asks all the right questions about faulty methods, erroneous conclusion and personal biases without ever falling into easy and tedious old diatribes against The Evils of Modern Science.

The tone of Woman: An Intimidate Geography is enthusiastic and celebratory, but never naïvely so. Yes, this is a book that will tell you everything you have always wanted to know about female anatomy and that will inspire a sense of appreciation and awe in the process. But at the same time, it’s also a book that successfully avoids any essentialist pitfalls. It’s a book about the wonders of the female body, but not a book about how wonderful and special women are simply by virtue of being biologically women. Likewise, it’s not a book that espouses any limited definition of femaleness based on mere anatomy. Angier is perfectly aware that reproduction does not define women; that hormones, periods or a uterus do not a woman make. Though the book is written from a cisgendered perspective (and it’s really, really a pity that it lacks a chapter on trans women), she takes care to use inclusive language and not to limit membership to the female gender do those who possess such and such working anatomical bits.

Woman is also an unapologetically feminist book, in the sense that it constantly questions the gender binary and the Great Divide that supposedly separates men and women. As science keeps showing us, and as Angier keeps reminding us, we are much more alike than different, both psychological and biologically. Angier clearly places women at the centre of this book – she presents them as biological beings in their own right and not as deviations from the male norm – but her clear awareness of gender as a social construct keeps her sarcastic rebuttals of the biological theories of female weakness and inferiority from ever turning into a war of the sexes.

Speaking of sarcasm, I absolutely loved Angier’s voice, her irony, her enthusiasm and her sense of humour. As I said above, she makes an effort to be welcoming and inclusive, but at the same time, when she has no patience for something she makes it absolutely clear. This is particularly obvious on the wonderful chapter on evolutionary psychology, where she rebuts all attempts to use pseudoscientific shenanigans to naturalise social injustices and power differences between men and women. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, but my chin dropped when I read that such attempts have extended as far as to the oh so wonderful practice of shaming women for their sexuality. Of course no man will want to stay with a woman who gives it up too easily, the theory goes – how would he even know the kids were his? It’s only natural, then, that we have developed all those sophisticated social mechanisms meant to let “easy” women know how worthless they really are. It’s a perfectly sensible evolutionary strategy – what else?

My absolute favourite, though, was the chapter on female aggression. Angier starts with a brief overview of what is currently known about testosterone and aggression, showing that the link is nowhere as clear as popular wisdom would have us believe. She then points out that while the expression of anger through violent behaviour is considered acceptable and natural in males, in females it has been recurrently linked with madness. Women, being as naturally prone to aggressive behaviour as men, have had to find other socially acceptable outlines for their feelings, namely verbal aggression. I loved this chapter because it dealt with something that really, really saddens me, and that unfortunately I come across often (coming from men and women alike): the idea that girls and women are “naturally” treacherous, backstabbing and deceitful, while men take the morally superior path and express their dislike of something or someone upfront. If – and I say if – there is any truth to this at all, there are social causes that are constantly overlooked. I’ve of course dealt with my share of deceitful women in my life, but I’ve also dealt with deceitful men, and with women who are absolutely incapable of guile. It seems so absurd to suggest that this behaviour is intrinsically tied to gender – and yet I hear it all the time.

As you can probably tell, I highly, highly recommend Woman. It’s both a book that celebrates the specificities of being biologically female and a book that defies the limited ways we have defined and continue to define what it means to be a woman or a man. And what could be better than that?

Interesting bits:

The ancients also saw no difference between men and women’s capacity for sexual pleasure and the necessity of mutual orgasm for conception. Galen proclaimed that a woman can not get pregnant unless she had an orgasm, and his view prevailed until the eighteenth century. This is a sweet thought, one of my favourite glaring errors of history, and a roundabout acknowledgement of the importance of the female climax to life as we know it. Unfortunately, the insistence that an expectant woman was a postorgasmic woman spelled tragedy for a number of our foresisters. Women who became pregnant after rape, for example, were accused of licentiousness and adultery, since their swollen bellies were evidence of their acquiescence and their pleasure, and they were routinely put to death.

Men whose gonads fail to produce enough testosterone sometimes suffer from gynocomastia. Without testosterone to keep breast growth in check, the men’s small amount of estrogen has the opportunity to lay down selective depots of fat hurriedly, demonstrating once again that the line between maleness and femaleness is thin—as thin as the fetus’s bipotential genital ridge, as thin as the milk ridge in all of us.

This study has been done many times. If you take a group of babies or young toddlers and dress them in nondescript, non sex-specific clothes—yellow is always a good colour—and make sure that their haircuts don’t give them away, and if you put them in a room with a lot of adults watching, the adults will not be able to sex the children accurately. The adults will try, based on the behaviours of each child, but they will be right no more often than they would be if they flipped a coin. This has been shown again and again, but still we don’t believe it. We think we can tell a boy from a girl by the child’s behaviour, specifically by its level of aggressiveness. If you show a person a videotape of a crying baby and tell her the baby is a boy, the observer will describe the baby as looking angry; if you tell the person the baby is a girl, she will say the child is scared or miserable.

We’re not supposed to talk about women’s rights anymore, for to do so is to commit the sin of “victimology”, to act the weak whiner, the neurasthenic corseted Victorian lady. The charge of victimology, like that of political correctness, instantly squelches all effort at precise protest, neutering a complaint before it has been uttered, for complain is what victimologists do. But if you don’t ask for a raise, you won’t get one, and if you don’t snarl about an injustice, it won’t go away. If women are prejudged as women to be lesser this or that, if a female guitarist is assumed to “suck” before she has taken out her instrument and played a single note, if women are still blamed for being bad mothers because they work outside the home, and if women are told there is an evolutionary reasons that they don’t really want sex, or if they do they should hide it, then we are not done with our women’s moil yet.

Reviewed at:
A Striped Armchair
Care’s Online Bookclub
Booked All Week

(Have I missed yours?)

Middlemarch by George Eliot

2010-08-23T08:43:00.007+01:00

George Eliot named her ambitious seventh novel after the fictional small down in which the story is set, and subtitled it “a study of provincial life”. Attempting to sum up Middlemarch might be an entirely futile exercise, but if I were to do it I’d say that this is, above all, a novel that establishes a complex web of relationships, political machinations, spheres of influence, and personal likes and dislikes, and then goes on to explore how these affect the lives of a particular group of characters.

Although it was published in 1874, Middlemarch is set half a century earlier, between 1829 and 1832, at a time of great political upheaval and social change – the time of the Reform Bills that would extend (male) suffrage, of the beginnings of the railway system, of great changes in the practice of medicine, etc. It’s important to remember that this is a work of what we would today call historical fiction, and that this fact is not irrelevant for an understanding of the novel. One of the themes of Middlemarch is exactly the often forgotten individual in the face of the defining moments of history –as the novel’s brilliant closing lines remind us, we owe much to people who have been forgotten. Change is not merely the result of the actions of those we call heroes and heroines, but also (and perhaps mostly) of unremembered lives. There isn’t much that history can tell us about what hasn’t been recorded, but fortunately literature can attempt to recreate those lost stories and therefore fill the gap. For an excellent post on this very topic, please make sure you read Jodie’s review of Wolf Hall and The Lacuna.

In general terms, Middlemarch is a novel about unhappy marriages, frustrated and fulfilled love, ethical dilemmas, small town life, gossip, misunderstandings, foolishness, kindness, malice, ambition, intellectual passion, science, religion, politics, people living above their means, the weight of social expectations, the oppressive side of gentility – in one word, it’s about life. Of course, that’s an abstract and cold way to put it, and the novel’s strength lies exactly in its combination of a bird’s eye view of life in a small Victorian town and of a focus on specific characters. On the one hand, we have general Victorian social commentary (which is both historically contextualised and very contemporary), and on the other hand we have complex, flawed, realistic human beings, doing what human beings have always done and continue to do. George Eliot does not isolate her characters from their circumstances, quite the contrary, but her extraordinary characterisation makes them recognizably and universally human. She also excels at writing extremely moving moments between people: Mr and Mrs Bulstrode when the truth finally surfaces between them, several scenes between Will and Dorothea – these all brought tears to my eyes. This is not a romantic book in the sense we traditionally attribute to the term, but it’s something I much prefer: a book about the depth of human connections and everything that constrains them.

I feel like I could talk about Middlemarch in general terms all day and still not cover the half of what it’s about, so instead I’ll to discuss some of its main storylines more specifically. First and foremost, there’s the story of Dorothea Brooke, who the prologue seems to suggest will be the protagonist of the novel. This is more or less true, through Dorothea is almost absent for hundreds of pages at a time. Still, the prologue tells us what this is going to be a story about what happens to women who are passionate, intense, earnest, genuine, intelligent and infinitely intellectually curious, and yet live in a world that disallows all these traits in females, and who are therefore not allowed to find any outlets for their passion and curiosity. There’s probably some room for debate when it comes to whether or not this is what happens to Dorothea in the end, but still, the portrait rings true.

These women, we are told, are “the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity”, and “their ardour alternates between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.” When we first meet Dorothea, she’s an earnest and trustful eighteen-year-old who longs for excellence and for knowledge; for a mind superior to her own who will patiently tutor her until she can achieve greatness for herself. She thinks she finds this in Mr Casaubon, a learned man much older than she is, to whom she anticipates she will submit with nothing but pleasure.

However, readers aren’t in the least surprised when they find her crying less than a month after her wedding, or when they watch her struggle as she loses her blind trust in Mr Casaubon’s judgement, as well as her respect for him. That her husband could be wrong or could act unjustly comes as a shock to Dorothea – and kudos to George Eliot for acknowledging how painful this realisation is, for not making her naivety incompatible with her great intelligence, and for not making the whole process of her loss of faith in Casaubon sound silly in the least.

Dorothea seems doomed to be unhappy, mostly because “there is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.” I could accuse her of marrying foolishly; I could say I wish she had listened to her friends and loved ones. But I can’t bring myself to, because I’m only too aware that she wouldn’t have been any happier if she had followed other people’s advice and let them decide for her. She desperately needed to follow her own path, and yet—and yet I cannot help but wish it hadn’t brought her quite as much pain.

What struck me the most about Dorothea was her earnestness, as well as the condescension with which she was often treated. Because she was a woman, and a young one at that, she was frequently dismissed and not taken seriously. No, this is not surprising for a Victorian novel, but still it’s a story worth telling – and despite the centuries that separate us it’s something I can relate to. I could also see something of myself in Dorothea’s earnestness, in her constant attempts to communicate seriously and genuinely, and in the acute loneliness that followed when people didn’t respond in kind. There’s something a little tragic about being the only person in the room who lacks social artfulness, who doesn’t play power games, and who’s trying to have honest, soulful conversations about topics that aren’t deemed fit for polite society. In addition to all this, I loved Dorothea for her generous spirit and for her unflinching kindness – for being the only person who would say, “I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbours think they are”.

But to speak of Dorothea’s story in isolation is to betray everything George Eliot set out to do in Middlemarch. So let me move on to Lydgate, a doctor trained in Paris who moves to Middlemarch and begins to feel “the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity.” There’s a lot that I could say about Lydgate – I could discuss his worth ethics, and how this is portrayed in the novel in relation to class; I could talk about his scientific dreams and ambitions and what ultimately hampers them; I could talk of his view of science, medicine and progress, and how these are received in Middlemarch; and so on. But what interested me the most was Lydgate’s relationship with Rosamond. Here we have an unflinching and very perceptive portrayal of both the social and the private, emotional consequences of an unequal partnership between a man and a woman.

This passage, which comes towards the end of the novel, absolutely broke my heart:

He could not promise to shield her from the dreaded wretchedness, for he could see no sure means of doing so. When he left her to go out again, he told himself that it was ten times harder for her than for him: he had a life away from home, and constant appeals to his activity on behalf of others. He wished to excuse everything in her if he could—but it was inevitable that in that excusing mood he should think of her as if she were an animal of another and feebler species. Nevertheless she had mastered him.

I worry that this might sound accusing out of context, but in the book it really isn’t, I don’t think – mostly because Eliot carefully contextualises what led to Rosamond becoming this “animal of another and feebler species”. Because she was not raised to ever seen herself as an adult, a responsible or capable human being, or an intellectual equal of men, she doesn’t behave as one, and the result is misery for her and her husband alike. The story does seem to be more sympathetic to Lydgate than Rosamond, and sometimes the narrator treats her with ambivalence. But the context it provides, and the careful analysis of what make her who she is, prevents any of her less appealing traits from being presented as inherently female.

Besides, there’s the presence of Dorothea in the novel, which doubly ensures that nothing about Rosamond’s personality is simply explained away as a result of her femaleness. In Dorothea and Rosamond’s stories I see the first stirrings of feminism – all through the novel there’s a sense of gratitude to women like Dorothea, to whom we owe so much of the freedom we have today. Its counterpart could easily be a reproach of women like Rosamond for not breaking free of those limited moulds of femininity, but I think the story does manage to avoid that.

Finally, there’s the subplot that involves Fred Vincy, Rosamond’s brother and the son of a local gentleman. Fred is in love with Mary Grant, and as her father Caleb Grant (one of my favourite characters, and about whom I could write a whole post) is a working man, she’s considered to be beneath him by most Middlemarchers.

As I’m sure you can guess, this subplot deals with class quite extensively – with prejudice, yes, but also with the relationship between class and work. Fred’s father pressures him to become a clergyman because this is one of the few professions considered fit for a gentleman. Mary, on the other hand, says that the only thing that is undignified is to do something for which you have no inclination at all, and at which you’ll be no good – and that she refuses to have a mediocre clergyman for a husband. Fred’s dilemma gives Eliot the opportunity to comment extensive on the limited notions of “respectability” and on how these affected people lives. She manages to poke fun at conventions, but at the same time she takes the emotional and social consequences of openly defying them absolutely seriously.

I know this post is already ridiculously long (is the fact that this is the longest novel I’ve reviewed to date a valid excuse?), but I can’t end it without mentioning the narrator’s voice: in the fashion of the Victorians, she (I do of course know the narrator is not the author, but I’m going to call it “she” anyway) is given to commenting on the story as she tells it. This is a much maligned technique, but it’s one that I don’t find anywhere nearly as limiting as it’s often accused of being. In the case of Middlemarch, her voice most definitely doesn’t close the narrative, and it gives her endless opportunities for irony. E.g.: “It commences well.” (Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced both in private life and on his handbills.). Her aside are also sometimes slightly aphoristic, but somehow she manages to make them work. Another example:

There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.

What I loved the most about the narrator’s voice was that although she can be biting and ironic, she’s never malicious – on the contrary, she’s always generous and humane. This ties in with why the asides don’t really reduce the story to a single interpretation or (dreaded words!) an overt “moral”. We’re not invited to judge the characters along with the narrator, but rather to consider them charitably and to acknowledge the many complexities of their humanity. I loved what A.S. Byatt had to say about this:

When I was younger it was fashionable to criticise Eliot for writing from a god's eye view, as though she were omniscient. Her authorial commenting voice appeared old-fashioned. It was felt she should have chosen a limited viewpoint, or written from inside her characters only. I came to see that this is nonsense. If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist. We were taught to laugh at collections of "the wit and wisdom of Eliot". But the truth is that she is wise - not only intelligent, but wise. Her voice deepens our response to her world.

I’m almost done here, I promise. Let me just say a few words on the experience of finally reading Middlemarch: I don’t know why I was intimidated for so long, really, as the only slightly daunting thing about this novel is really its length. But it doesn’t feel like a long book – or rather, it doesn’t feel like an unnecessarily long one. At the end of 900 pages, I felt slightly bereaved. I missed the characters dreadfully, and I desperately wanted more. And as I was reading I was never bored, never lost, never anything but fully immersed in the story. This is something worth remembering about the Victorians: whatever else they were, they were fond of plot and of telling a good story. And I’m sorry, my dear Modernists, but I don’t find that a bad thing.

Middlemarch is a novel of almost endless scope; an epic and bittersweet story about all the rights and wrongs that form a human life; and a story that tells even of triumphs with a tone of melancholy. I’ll leave you with its brilliant closing lines:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Other favourite passages:

“And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful.”

(This is said by Mary Grant – Harriet Vane would very much agree.)

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

For my part I am very sorry for him [Mr. Casaubon]. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon’s uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death—who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die—and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth—a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband’s character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot—the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend’s moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbour unhappy for her good.

What others had to say:
Trish’s Reading Nook, You Can Never Have Too Many Books, Athyrium filix-femina (The Lady Fern), Becky’s Book Reviews

As you probably know, a few months ago I invited my fellow book bloggers to read this book along with me and post their thoughts this week. It’s of course perfectly fine if you’re behind – I’ll be glad to add your link to this post no matter when you finish. I can’t wait to hear what everyone else has to say.

The Book Stop – Progress Report
Dolce Bellezza- Review
She Reads Novels - Review
A Victorian Tea Party at The Indextrious Reader, plus review and favourite passages.
Silly Little Mischief - Progress Report, Final Thoughts
A Good Stopping Point - Progress Report
Vishy's Blog - Review

(Leave me your link and I'll be glad to add it!)

The Sunday Salon - Literary Biographies: A Reading List

2010-08-22T11:50:00.004+01:00

I’ve never been much of a reader of biographies, but a couple of recent reading experiences have left me suspecting that I might be missing out. The biographies of Dorothy L. Sayers and Rosalind Franklin I read in the past few months were informative, wonderfully written and difficult to put down. And more importantly, they were both fascinating and very personal accounts of periods of history that are of great interest to me. That’s what made me realise I might be more interested in biographies than I ever suspected, really – they’re a way to get up close and personal with history; of understanding how individuals experienced Big Events and how abstract social questions touched the lives of real human beings. It’s one thing to read, for example, about the history of feminism in the abstract; it’s quite another to read the life story of a woman who was directly involved in it all and whose private life was shaped by her beliefs. (Note to self: get that Josephine Butler biography asap.)

Since I can’t currently acquired any new books, I did the next best thing, which is to make myself a reading list. I’m not exclusively interested in literary biographies, but many of the historical figures I’m curious to know more about were writers, so this seemed to me as good a place to start as any. If you’ve read any of these, I’d of course really love to hear your thoughts:

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee – This has to be the most frequently recommended literary biography out there, and I assume it’s with good reason. The sheer size of this book intimidates me slightly, but I’m sure it’s a fascinating portrait of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and I’d love to get to it before the end of the year.
D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage by Brenda Maddox – I love Lawrence and I loved Maddox’s biography of Rosalind Franklin, so I’m very curious about her take on his relationship with his wife Frieda von Richthofen. From her previous work, I can tell that she’ll bring a perspective and sensibility to this book that will greatly interest me. (Also, I’ve just noticed that she has a new book coming out called George Eliot in Love – I think I’m adding that to my wishlist too.)
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell — Part of me feels bad reading a third party account of the Mitford’s lives, when there are books of letters and memoirs out there I could pick up instead. But Lovell’s group biography does sound like a fascinating bird’s eye view of the lives of these six sisters, who were involved in some of the major political and literary events of the 20th century.
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin – I want to read this both because it’s about Mary Wollstonecraft and because it’s by Claire Tomalin. Tomalin’s name always seems to come up when I ask for recommendations of biographies, and as for Wollstonecraft, she’s of course an unavoidable name for anyone interested in the history of feminism.
The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell – I realise this will tell me as much about Gaskell as it will about Charlotte Brontë, but that’s actually part of why I want to read it. I’m also curious to see how the Victorians approached biography. However, I’ve yet to read a book on the lives of the Brontës, and would love to complement this with a contemporary perspective. Suggestions?
Learning Not To Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti by Kathleen Jones – How sad a title is that? But I suspect it’s very apt too. I love Rossetti’s poetry, and have been meaning to look for a biography of her for years. The fact that she lived as a woman in Pre-Raphaelite circles is in itself enough to make me want to read more about her life. Also, apparently Kathleen Jones “looks at her life alongside that of other nineteenth-century women writers, notably Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson”, which makes it sound even better.
Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion by Julia Briggs – Another excellent title, don’t you think? Edith Nesbit was an unconventional woman who lived in a time period I find fascinating, and who moved in Fabian and Bohemian circles. Add to this the fact that she inspired Olive Wellwood from A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and how could I not want to read this?
Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke – Tea Lady recommended this to my recently, when I first mentioned that I wanted to read more biographies. She said it was the best one she’d ever read, and as Truman Capote is one of my favourite authors I added it to my wishlist immediately.

Are you a fan of biographies, literary or otherwise? If so, what are your favourites? Anything you think I absolutely need to read? If not, do you find them tedious, are they just not your cup of tea, have you had any bad experiences with them ,or have you (like me until recently) just never considered reading them before?

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

2010-08-20T08:31:00.004+01:00

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story is one of those classics I had missed out on completely until my fellow book bloggers convinced me that my life was incomplete without it – and with good reason. “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a woman’s supposed descent into madness – the protagonist, an unreliable narrator who tells her tale through brief undated journal entries, is spending the summer at a rented house to undergo a rest cure for a “slight hysterical tendency”. At the advice of her husband John, who also happens to be her doctor, she spends most of her time confined in a bedroom upstairs. She’s told to avoid all kinds of stimulation, including writing, and as a result she’s forced to write her journal secretly. Eventually she becomes obsessed with the ugly pattern of the yellow wallpaper that covers the small bedroom, and in the end—well, I won’t tell you what happens then.

I was prompted to finally write about “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which I first read some months ago, by Pickygirl’s fabulous review of Sarah Waters’ Affinity. She very aptly compares the novel to Gilman’s short story, which reminded me that one of the first bloggers to recommend it to me was Claire, exactly after I read Affinity. At the time she also mentioned Marghanita Laski's The Victorian Chaise-Lounge, and if I were to pick a third comparison myself it would be The Awakening by Kate Chopin. All four are extraordinarily powerful stories that deal with how stifling women’s lives often were in the Victorian era.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes excellent use of the unreliable narrator. The protagonist is seemingly acquiescent and ready to accept her husband’s diagnosis, as well as his judgement as superior to her own. But reading between the lines, we get glimpses of the anger, frustration and despair that she was not allowed to voice:

You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
(...)
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?

What she craves is the very opposite of a “rest cure” – it’s stimulation and a temporary escape from an oppressive domestic existence, as well as being allowed to find solace in her writing. But her own ideas are dismissed because she’s “irrational” and “hysterical”. As a man, a husband and a doctor, John has full power over her, and even the best of intentions don’t change the fact that the result of his treatment is her devoicing and imprisonment. Furthermore, his pep talks about “strength”, “will” and “self-control” are not in the least encouraging – in fact, they amount to a form of victim-blaming.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in 1891, at a time when madness was the most common way to explain away female behaviour that didn’t fit the mould*, and it was used as a powerful tool of control - again, Affinity is a perfect example of this. (Note to self: read Mad, Bad and Sad soon.) In “Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”, an article from 1913, Gilman tells the story of her own domestic entrapment and of her experiences with the Victorian medical establishment. Being kept away from her writing and from other forms of stimulation, she says, was the worst possible advice she could have been given, and the only thing that saved her was going against it.

I was amazed that Gilman was able to pack so much in only 6000 words. This is a story I definitely won’t soon forget. A few of my favourite passages:

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

(I found these lines immensely saddening and unsettling, especially in the context of happens in the end.)

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.
(...)
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over

(I worry about spoiling the story for those of you who haven’t read it yet if I share more, so I’ll just say that I found the final image of the prison bars incredibly powerful and expressive.)

They read it too:
Bibliographing
Booklust
Fleur Fisher Reads
Stuck in a Book
The Reading Life
Notes From the North

(Have I missed yours?)

*Spoilerish note: The story seems to suggest at one point that the protagonist might have been suffering from postpartum depression, and I don’t mean to suggest that this is not deserving of medical attention– just not on the disempowering terms that are established here, of course.

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

2010-08-19T08:54:00.002+01:00

A Little Princess is the story of Sara Crewe, who at the beginning of the novel is a solemn eight-year-old on her way to Miss Minchin’s Boarding School in London. Sara is the only daughter of the widowed Captain Crewe, and during her early childhood in India she was given everything a little girl could possibly desire. Likewise, it’s Captain Crewe’s wish that Sara be well looked after at Miss Minchin’s Academy – she’s to have a private sitting room, a personal maid, and all the comforts that money can buy.

Everyone is ready to think of Sara as an arrogant and spoiled child, but instead she’s compassionate, considerate, not given to putting on airs, and very much aware that her father’s great fortune doesn’t make her better than anyone else. Sara also privately wonders if her good temper is the direct a result of her privileged life, and whether she’d be a very different sort of person if she’d been less fortunate and had gone through privations. As I’m sure you can guess, before the end of the story Sara has the opportunity to put these conjectures to the test. But I won’t tell you how things turn out, in case you (like me) missed this lovely classic growing up.

A Little Princess is a sort of Cinderella story with a twist – no, Sara doesn’t marry a prince, and hers is not exactly a rags to riches story, but the main elements are still there. This is the story of a sympathetic heroine submitted to trials, hardships and great injustices, all of which readers can tell all along will be temporary. But the reason why the story works so well is because, temporary or not, Sara’s misery feels absolutely real as she’s experiencing it. I suppose that the inevitable happy ending is predictable, just like Daddy Long-Legs or The Blue Castle are predictable, but honestly, who cares? These are all charming stories, comforting exactly because of their identifiable patterns, and moving even if we can see their emotional climaxes coming from miles away.

One of the things I appreciated the most about A Little Princess was the fact that it was written with such respect for the psychological realities of childhood. I’m thinking of a scene in particular, when Miss Minchin asks Sara if she ever had French lessons. Sara says no, and Miss Minchin takes this to mean she cannot speak the language. What Sara really means is that she never needed French lessons because her mother was French and she grew up speaking French, but she finds herself tongue-tied and unable to explain the difference in the face of Miss Minchin’s impatience. I remember this feeling very well from when I was little – feeling small, powerless and devoiced, and being unable to correct an adult’s erroneous assumption even as you knew they’d get angry at you and think you had deliberately mislead them when they found out.

A Little Princess is also an absolutely fascinating story to think about in terms of class dynamics. I was surprised that Sara was so clearly aware of the arbitrariness of class boundaries, and of the common humanity that we all share despite them. There are several examples of this – the most telling being Sara’s kindness to Becky, the scullery maid, whom she can’t help but see as just another little girl:

“If you please, Miss Minchin,” said Sara, suddenly, “mayn’t Becky stay?”
It was a bold thing to do. Miss Minchin was betrayed into something like a slight jump. Then she put her eyeglass up, and gazed at her show pupil disturbedly.
“Becky!” she exclaimed. “My dearest Sara!”
Sara advanced a step toward her.
“I want her because I know she will like to see the presents,” she explained. “She is a little girl, too, you know.”
Miss Minchin was scandalized. She glanced from one figure to the other.
“My dear Sara,” she said, “Becky is the scullery maid. Scullery maids—er—are not little girls.”
It really had not occurred to her to think of them in that light. Scullery maids were machines who carried coal scuttles and made fires.
“But Becky is,” said Sara. “And I know she would enjoy herself. Please let her stay—because it is my birthday.”
Miss Minchin replied with much dignity:
“As you ask it as a birthday favor—she may stay. Rebecca, thank Miss Sara for her great kindness.”

Sara may be a rich heiress, but she lacks the sense of entitlement that many privileged people have even today, let alone in the early twentieth century. Her sense of compassion makes her acknowledge the humanity of everyone she interacts with. However, things are rarely clear cut, both in literature and in life, and what makes A Little Princess so interesting to think about and discuss is the fact that it only takes this egalitarian idea so far.

Sara is undoubtedly kind, but her acts of kindness are more often than not little charities that maintain the status quo, rather than actions that actually challenge the social rules she seems to be dismissing. This is only natural, considering her age and powerlessness for most of the story, but even as it humanises the working class characters, A Little Princess seems to suggest that Sara possesses some sort of born nobility that makes her more worthy of privilege than anyone else – or rather, worthy of a more refined kind of privilege. The gap between her and Becky never closes, even when Sara’s circumstances change. A servant like Becky is to be treated kindly, yes, but she remains a servant, and happy to be so.

Sara’s intrinsic nobility is part of what saves her in the end: even at her most wretched she’s not “one of the populace”; she does not have “the face of a beggar”. She is, in some ways, insulated from the poverty to which she descends by this aura of nobleness, and her destiny is to be a princess who can “give buns and bread to the populace.” I found all these apparent contradictions absolutely fascinating, especially in the context of the early twentieth century and all the social changes the century was to see. It’s like Frances Hodgson Burnett was overtly challenging the notion that social injustice is in fact fair, and that people should just be content with their “station in life”, and yet she kept slipping back into it in several little ways.

As I was saying, the story does absolutely work – first because Sara’s distress is real enough, secondly because she’s difficult not to love, and finally because even if it’s suggested that she stands above the “populace” by birth and education, she does remain aware of the arbitrariness of it all. A Little Princess presents a strange mix of social ideas, but for that very reason it paints a very interesting portrait of the early twentieth century.

Lest all my picking apart give you the wrong impression (as nerdy as it sounds, this actually is my idea of bookish fun), let me say again that I really loved this book – much more so than The Secret Garden, though I did like that one well enough. But A Little Princess was even more charming, and the story enraptured me so much more. Also, I loved it because at its heart this is a story about one of my very favourite themes: the power of stories and the imagination. It’s a story about how they help make us more compassionate by stepping into the shoes of fictional others, how they save us, how they can be a refuge, and how they give us hope.

I’m now more curious than ever to read Frances Hogson Burnett’s books for adults that have been reprinted by Persephone, The Shuttle and The Making of a Marchioness. Have you read them? Which one do you think I should get to first?

Favourite bits:

“Things happen to people by accident,” she used to say. “A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just HAPPENED that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don't know”—looking quite serious—“How I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a HIDEOUS child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”

Anyone who has been at school with a teller of stories knows what the wonder means—how he or she is followed about and besought in a whisper to relate romances; how groups gather round and hang on the outskirts of the favored party in the hope of being allowed to join in and listen. Sara not only could tell stories, but she adored telling them. When she sat or stood in the midst of a circle and began to invent wonderful things, her green eyes grew big and shining, her cheeks flushed, and, without knowing that she was doing it, she began to act and made what she told lovely or alarming by the raising or dropping of her voice, the bend and sway of her slim body, and the dramatic movement of her hands. She forgot that she was talking to listening children; she saw and lived with the fairy folk, or the kings and queens and beautiful ladies, whose adventures she was narrating. Sometimes when she had finished her story, she was quite out of breath with excitement, and would lay her hand on her thin, little, quick-rising chest, and half laugh as if at herself.

“I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out, ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say, ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’ the moment they saw me. And set traps for me, and pretend they were dinner. It’s so different to be a sparrow. But nobody asked this rat if he wanted to be a rat when he was made. Nobody said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a sparrow?’”

“Oh, Sara!” she whispered joyfully. “It is like a story!”
“It IS a story,” said Sara. “EVERYTHING’S a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”

Other opinions:
Becky’s Book Reviews
You’ve GOTTA Read This

(Yours?)

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

2010-08-17T08:30:00.004+01:00

Tooth and Claw is the perfect blend of fantasy and the Victorian novel: the story is about a family of some social standing but limited fortune, and it begins with the death of Bon Agonin, the family patriarch. Bon Agonin passes away without leaving much of a dowry for his two unmarried daughters, Selendra and Haner. Unable to support themselves, the two sisters have to rely on their brothers, Penn and Avan, and to hope to somehow be able to secure respectable husbands who’ll overlook the matter of the lack of monetary encouragement. But much like Austen’s heroines, the two sisters would much rather marry for love.

To their distress, Selendra and Haner have to be separated shortly after their father’s death, as neither of their brothers can afford to take them both in. Selendra goes to live with Penn, a respectable parson, while Avan, unable to take a maiden to the city where he lives and works without risking tainting her name (and therefore her marriage prospects), has to ask their older sister Berend and her husband Daverak to take in Haner. However, things get even more complicated when Avan decides to sue Daverak for taking far more of Bon Agonin’s inheritance than what was his rightful share – and Selendra and Haner know that as long as the feud lasts, they have no hope of being allowed to see each other.

By the way, if you’re wondering what exactly makes this story fantasy, that would be the fact that all the characters are dragons. But don’t let that make you doubt their humanity or emotional complexity, or the intricacies of their social world. I suppose that more than anything else, Tooth and Claw is a fantasy of manners (a term I learned from Memory and absolutely love). It’s a social comedy, a Victorian romance, and an absolutely delightful story.

Tooth and Claw has been referred to as Pride and Prejudice with dragons, and with good reason. Perhaps this makes it sound cutesy or gimmicky, but trust me, it absolutely isn’t. It’s also not a parody of the Victorian novel – there are touches of humour, but they’re mostly subtle and Austenesque. What this is is a novel that takes the themes of actual Victorian novels – powerless women who must rely on marriage to avoid poverty, ambitious young men, money, love, the social world, class, social inequality, women who lose their reputation through no fault of their own, snobbery, inheritances, respectability and reputation, and so on – and pushes them to their farthest consequences.

In the prologue of Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton says she wanted to create a fantasy world in which all the social conventions of the Victorian world were literally true. A great example of this is the fact that dragon maidens change the colour of their scales to bright pink once they have been sexually awakened. There is no hiding the fact that one is a “fallen woman” – not without the aid of risky herbal brews, anyway. This means that in Tooth and Claw, the ridiculous idea that in women budding sexual feelings in general and virginity loss in particularly entail some sort of irrevocable change is actually real. Of course, one could argue that the social reality of this myth in the Victorian world (and even today, in some parts of the world more obviously than in others) was enough to make it real, in the sense that it affected the lives of countless women. It’s exactly this idea that Jo Walton explores here, with very interesting results.

Class is another one of the major themes of Tooth and Claw – the story focuses on an impoverished but still privileged family, but there are hints of the struggles of those who work to keep their world in order. Haner in particular takes an interest on the treatment of servants, who all have their wings bound (another social reality make literally true), and Selendra is called a radical at a party for daring to say that she sees people as human beings (or, as the case may be, dragons as dragon beings), regardless of their social stance. Lest these seem unrealistic attitudes for genteel young ladies, let me clarify that the two sisters are particularly sensitive to classism because their father made his fortune through trade, which automatically disqualifies him from respectability in the eyes of some. This is only an example of what Jo Walton does so well here – she explores the intricate power dynamics associated with class, the subtle differences in rank, and the endless tensions these originated even among the genteel.

Tooth and Claw couldn’t rightfully be called Pride and Prejudice with dragons if it weren’t also a love story. And it is – or rather, it’s several love stories. There are happy endings all around, and though they may be predictable they aren’t any less charming because of that. Even though you can tell from the very beginning that everyone is bound to get their heart’s desire in the end, this doesn’t make the character’s struggles until they get there any less real or emotionally resonant.

I’ve mentioned that there was some humour earlier – this can mostly be seen in the narrator’s tone, which is pokerfaced most of the time but includes occasional remarks such as,

It has been baldly stated in this narrative that Penn and Sher were friends at school and later at the Circle, and being gentle readers and not cruel and hungry readers who would visit a publisher’s offices with the intention of rending and eating an author who had displeased them, you have taken this matter on trust.

Not to mention chapter titles like, “The narrator is forced to confess to having lost count of both proposals and confessions.” As everything else about this novel, the one is perfect, and it adds a lot to the charm of the story.

Jo Walton also says in the prologue that Tooth and Claw is partially based on Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. If I were given to feeling embarrassed about gaps in my reading, it’d be my secret shame that I call myself a lover of all things Victorians and yet have never read any Trollope at all. Where do you think I should begin?

Interesting bits:

“Most maidens in your position would be only too glad to have any Exalted running after them, let alone one as handsome and amusing as Sher,” Felin said, deeply disappointed.
“There is so little power that we have, as females,” Selendra said. “Only to be able to choose to accept or reject a lover. We have to wait for them to ask, even then. You’re telling me to think about wealth and position and disregard what I feel.”

Bon Argonin’s gold, not that which he had passed on to his three younger children, but that which he had used three hundred years before to purchase the estate of Argonin and the title of Dignified, had been made in ways those dignified, illustrious, exalted, august and eminent personages we have chosen to make lords among us lump together and dismiss in a word as “trade”. True, Bon had shaken off these associations as soon as he could. He had used them to climb and achieve position in the world and, once he had achieved the position he desired, had dabbled in them no more. He had purchased his establishment, married his ill-drowried but indubitably gently born bride, and proceeded thenceforth to amass wealth and improve his estate through honest farming. All the same, through the succeeding centuries the stench of trade had clung around him a little. Much though he might speak of his youth on the Telstie estate with his widowed mother, and of his estate of Argonin, never mentioning the intervening period, there remained something of the city about him. The cities, as hardly needs to be mentioned, are anathema to all right-thinking dragons, except only for Irieth, and Irieth only when the Noble Assembly is sitting, or in the months of Budding and Flowering in those years, very rare of late, when the Noble Assembly shall hold no session.

Reviewed at:
Fyrefly's Book Blog
Stella Matutina
The Literary Omnivore
You Can Never Have Too Many Books

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Curse of the Wolf Girl by Martin Millar

2010-08-16T07:59:00.005+01:00

Curse of the Wolf Girl is a direct sequel to Martin Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl, which means that it picks up right where the first book left off. A brief recap, in which I’ll try to keep spoilers for the first book at a minimum: Kalix McRinnalch, a seventeen-year-old werewolf living in London, is still banished from her Scottish clan. Her brother Markus is the new Thane, and things have become considerable more peaceful for the McRinnalch werewolves. But there are still some who resent Kalix for killing the previous Thane and who desperately want to see her punished her for it.

Kalix and her friend Vex, a young fire elemental, are living with Moonglow and Daniel, two human university students, and attending remedial college. Kalix’ cousins Butix and Delix are still living in Camden Town and playing in a band; Dominil is still trying to manage said band; and the Fire Elemental Queen Malveria and Kalix’ older sister Thrix are still obsessed with fashion. To make things even more interesting, Thrix might be about to fall in love, and the Avenaris Guild, a league of werewolf hunters, has a new plan to get rid of the McRinnalch werewolves. These two facts, by the way, are not exactly unrelated.

I imagine that the above was slightly confusing for anyone who hasn’t read Lonely Werewolf Girl, and that’s not even half of it. But don’t worry – you do need to read the books in order, but if you do, the plot isn’t confusing in the least, regardless of the large cast of characters and number of subplots. And the plot isn’t the point of Curse of the Wolf Girl anyway, nor is the fact that most of its characters are werewolves or fire elementals or sorcerers or faeries. Once again, what makes this book stand out is Martin Millar’s absolutely wonderful sense of humour, the excellent characterisation, and the complex and realistic relationships between the characters.

Curse of the Wolf Girl’s relationship with Lonely Werewolf Girl could perhaps be described as “more of the same”, but I mean this in the best possible way. What we have here is very much not an unnecessary sequel. It’s true that the ending of the first book, while somewhat open, didn’t necessarily demand a continuation, but I couldn’t be more thrilled that there is one. When I say “more of the same,” what I mean is that this book has the same strengths that made the previous one so wonderful. The ending, by the way, once again leaves the door open for a further book, to which I say: hooray, hooray, hooray. I’d happily read a thousand books featuring these characters in a row.That’s how much I love them.

It’s interesting how some of the characters in these books come close to becoming comedic types, but they never quite do. There’s always more to them than meets the eye; there’s always something that humanises them and keeps them from becoming one-dimensional. I’m thinking of Malveria, for example, who is perhaps my favourite character. She’s a bit of a fashion victim; she’s a Queen who neglects her realm because she’s too caught up in the affairs of werewolves and humans; she’s a sarcastic and slightly scheming person (but not necessarily unkind); and she’s an exasperated aunt to the teenager Vex. And just when you think you’ve got her pinned, she turns around and does something that surprises you, something that illuminates a previously hidden side of her personality.

The same goes for Dominil, the twenty-something Oxford graduate who’s almost even more of a loner than Kalix herself. The more I get to know her, the more I like her. And then, of course, there’s Kalix herself, who remains as much of a lonely werewolf girl as ever – but who might be, bit by bit, beginning to learn to let other people in. It’s a slow and difficult process, as the slightest misunderstanding or perceived rejection causes her to clam up again. But that’s what makes it so authentic. Kalix’s trust issues really resonated with me, as did her cycle of anxiety, depression, and further anxiety about feeling anxious. I suspect that anyone who has ever suffered from social anxiety or from panic attacks will find that the way this process is described in Curse of the Wolf Girl rings absolutely true.

I mentioned Martin Millar’s fantastic sense of humour earlier, but by now you might be feeling faintly puzzled and thinking that a story about loneliness, anxiety, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships doesn’t sound particularly funny. But that’s the brilliant thing, really: Martin Millar’s humour isn’t so much dark as it is of a kind that perfectly balances comedy with serious and even moving moments. What makes it work is the fact that his tone is just right. He tells a particular kind of straight-faced joke that I imagine to be difficult to pull off, but he’s absolutely brilliant at it. And as I said back when I reviewed Lonely Werewolf Girl, I’m afraid I have no way of conveying how hilarious a phrase like ‘Nefarious niece!’ can be in the context of this book. You’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that the book made me laugh out loud repeatedly.

Curse of the Wolf Girl is a story about teenagers and adults learning to navigate the complex social world we all live in, to connect with one another, to trust, and to give making the best of their lives an honest shot, even if they get hurt sometimes. The result is sweet, occasionally sad, and absolutely hilarious. This is unlike any other urban fantasy series you’re likely to have read, and it’s definitely one of my favourite series out there. I can’t wait for Martin Millar’s next book.

They read it too:
Jenny’s Books
Beyond Books
Wands and Worlds
Alone and Unobserved

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From the Archives: The Watermelon King by Daniel Wallace

2010-08-15T17:22:00.003+01:00

One of my favourite bloggers, Trisha at Eclectic/Eccentric, is currently on vacation, and she asked several of her fellow book bloggers to contribute with guest posts to her blog while she's away. My own contribution was a review from my archives: The Watermelon King was my favourite read of 2007, my first year as a blogger, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to bring this wonderful book to the attention of those of you who didn't know me yet back then.

The Watermelon King is set in same fictional small town as Big Fish (yes, the book the Tim Burton movie was based on). The two also have in common a focus on storytelling and a touch of magic realism, but for reasons I can't give away, The Watermelon King is a much darker story, and it had an even bigger emotional impact on me. To read my full thoughts on the book, please click over to Trisha's blog.

Ruby Holler by Sharon Creech

2010-08-13T08:40:00.002+01:00

Here’s yet another entry in my unofficial Ana’s Quest to Read All the Carnegie Medal Winners Series: Ruby Holler is the story of Dallas and Florida, a pair of thirteen-year-old orphan twins who have spent most of their lives at an orphanage by the name of Boxton Creek Home. When they’re not at the orphanage, they’re with adoptive families who are abusive at worst and neglectful at best, and who inevitably return the “trouble twins”, claiming that on second thought they’ve changed their minds about adopting them. Unsurprisingly, Florida and Dallas are reluctant to trust adults, and they’ve become convinced that they’re actually as terrible and unlovable as everyone around them seems to think.

Enter Tiller and Sairy, an old couple who live at a beautiful old farm house in a valley named Ruby Holler. Initially they don’t mean to adopt the twins, but they need companions for the separate dream trips they’re thinking of taking, and so they hire them for the summer. But Florida and Dallas aren’t keen to be separated, and they swear that before this can happen they’ll take the night train and disappear forever. But as they get attached to Ruby Holler and begin to feel at ease with Tiller and Sairy, they keep postponing their escape for just one more day…

Ruby Holler is one of those books that turned out to be completely different than I had imagined, but not at all in a bad way. I’d heard it was a charming children’s novel with a touch of magic realism, and so for some reason I immediately assumed that Ruby Holler was the name of the small town where the story was set. What I expected was a children’s version of Daniel Wallace’s wonderful novels, where his fictional Southern towns are as important and as central to the story as any character. The main reason why I’m telling you this is so that I can entice you to read Daniel Wallace, about whose brilliance I’ve been silent for far too long (more on that later this week). The other reason is because I don’t want the words “magic realism” to give you the wrong impression like they did me. The magical elements in Ruby Holler are very subtle, and they really aren’t the crux of the story. And now that I’ve warned you, let me finally move on to what the book actually is.

Ruby Holler may not be about an enchanting small town, but it is indeed charming. It’s not, however, one of my favourite Carnegie winner so far. I was going to say that as good as it is, it’s not as quite as momentous as the other winner I’ve read to date, but you know what, that would probably be unfair of me. It’s a different sort of book, that’s all. The tone is light and humorous, but it does deal with serious things – namely the slow and painful process through which two young people who have been hurt again and again learn to trust adults once more. Watching Florida and Dallas let their guard down so that they could resume being ordinary children was quite moving. Sharon Creech tells this story very well indeed, and I imagine that a tone that so perfectly balances lightness and pain is not at all easy to achieve. As Philip Pullman put it:

There are no false notes, no striving for effect, no clever jokes that miss half the audience, no patronising facetiousness. Creech takes her material seriously, and presents it without affectation. That happens more rarely than it should; it takes practice to bring it off, as well as talent, but when it does, it means that the tone resonates sympathetically with the subject. The whole book is in tune.

Ruby Holler is one of those books that gain emotional resonance and depth as the story progresses. There are no big surprises – you can tell from the very beginning how things will turn out – and the humour never really disappears. But Sharon Creech gives us glimpses of the secret aspirations of even the most unimportant of secondary characters, and while these don’t make the story advance, they’re fundamental because they people it with real, complex human beings, whose feelings you have no choice but to take as seriously as those of the protagonists. These glimpses contrast with the dream world Dallas and Florida inhabit at Ruby Holler, where they almost make themselves believe that any problem can be solved by hopping on the night train. And even more interestingly, they give hints of the complexities of the adult world the twins are about to enter.

This is not a novel that changed my life, but I loved it because at its core it’s a story about the triumph of kindness. It’s an uplifting book, but not in a simplified or sugary way that dismisses the pain and darkness of the world. It acknowledges that these exist, but it shows that sometimes human beings actually do decide to make each other’s lives easier rather than more difficult. And sometimes that’s enough.

Reviewed at:
Inkweaver Reviews

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Lola: A Ghost Story by J. Torres and Ernest Or

2010-08-11T08:32:00.003+01:00

Lola: A Ghost Story is a Filipino graphic novel about a Canadian-raised boy, Jesse, who returns to his family’s homeland when his maternal grandmother passes away. Jesse’s memories and feelings about his Lola (the Tagalog word for “Grandmother”) are complex: it’s not, he tells us, that he dislikes her. But the strange stories she used to tell have always scared him, as does an odd memory of being a baby and having Lola try to drown him. Because of all this, Jesse secretly dreads returning to her house.

But most troubling of all is the fact that Jesse is beginning to sense some truth in the family myths surrounding Lola. He grew up with strange stories about how Lola had prophetic visions and could see beings from another world, and now he’s beginning to experience some of the same things himself. His younger cousins tells him that she envies him, as she always wished to be the heir of Lola’s gift herself – but Jesse is not convinced.

Lola: A Ghost Story is a quiet and gentle book that mixes ghosts, an immigrant tale, a coming-of-age story, and Filipino folklore. The lovely sepia artwork only adds to this graphic novel’s mild, nostalgic feel. I suppose the supernatural elements qualify it as horror, but in the same sense that films like The Orphanage or The Others are horror: they’re not really frightening per se; they’re more about using fantastic and metaphorical elements to explore memory, our relationship with the past, and the effects of grief and loss.

One of my favourite things about Lola was that it allowed me a glimpse into Filipino culture and traditional folklore. Lola’s old house in the countryside is peopled by kapres, manananggals and tiyanaks. But fascinating though they seem to me, hearing stories about these beings and about Lola’s encounters with them makes Jesse extremely uncomfortable. It’s easy to see his discomfort as a symbol of his increasing distance from his cultural heritage – Jesse himself, after all, didn’t grow up in the Philippines surrounded by these stories, and as he tells us at the beginning of the book, the older he gets, the less his visits to the country his parents still call home appeal to him. But his ability to see the supernatural world which Lola always partially inhabited is still there – it’s part of who he is, and it won’t go away no matter how much he assimilates into a different culture.

Lola: A Ghost Story is a short book, and I should probably warn you that it’s the comics’ equivalent of a short story or novelette, rather than a full novel. This doesn’t detract from its quality, but it does affect the extent to which these themes can be explored. Also, the book has a very ambiguous ending that will probably not satisfy every reader. It can either be ready very negatively or as a further symbol of Jesse’s struggle to accept and cease to fear his cultural heritage. The optimistic in me leans towards the second option, but I actually like the fact that you can’t tell for sure.

Reviewed at:
Comics Worth Reading

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Many thanks to everyone who entered my Fire & Hemlock giveaway last week. I can’t tell you how much I wish I could get you all a copy of the book. But I can’t, so the decision fell to random.org, and the winner is Iris at Iris on Books. Congratulations, Iris! Just e-mail me your address and I’ll send the book your way as soon as possible.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

2010-08-10T09:08:00.003+01:00

Kindred opens in California in 1976, with a couple of struggling writers, Dana and Kevin, moving into a new apartment in Los Angeles. Dana is in the middle of reshelving her books when she begins to feel dizzy. When she regains consciousness, she’s in an unknown place, and there’s a river in front of her in which a red-haired child seems to be drowning. Dana saves the child, but to her astonishment the only thanks she gets is having the boy’s mother attack her and his father point a gun at her. The latter happens mere instances before she begins to feel dizzy again, and she wakes up, wet and covered in mud, in the comfort and safety of her home.

The river episode is only the first of Dana’s many trips to the past. Through a mechanism that’s never really explained (though this vagueness does not at all detract from the strength of this novel), Dana keeps being transported to a slave plantation in antebellum Maryland. Sometimes she goes alone, sometimes with her husband Kevin, and what amounts to a few minutes’ absence in California can correspond to days, months or even years stranded in the past. Dana always arrives when Rufus Weylin, the child she saved, is in trouble. She soon discovers that he’s an ancestor of hers, and that her job seems to be to keep him alive until he can start what was to become her family. But the circumstances in which this happens, and which will demand her complicity, are not what Dana had imagined. Also, the relationship of co-dependency she is to develop with Rufus is far more complex than anything she could have read in a history book.

One of the most interesting things about Kindred is that it’s not so much a story about changing the past (a common theme in time travel narratives) as it is a story about having the past change you. In one of their trips to the Maryland plantation, Dana and Kevin remain there for months, and Dana realises with alarm that they can adjust to a way of life to which slavery is central – almost too easily for comfort. As she says, “I never realised how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.” And as she gets to know the other slaves of the Weylin, she learns that “slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”

The main theme of Kindred is perhaps how power differences affect personal relationships, and how in a system like slavery, power or powerlessness cannot be kept separate from friendship, love, or even the most well-meaning acts of kindness. And power does of course imply connivance – when Dana brings Kevin, her white husband, along with her, the gender- and race-based power imbalances that exist between them even in the modern world are exacerbated, and they can’t keep this from affecting their relationship to some extent. A power gap that wide poisons everything – how can you truly trust someone who has that much power over you, and who is inevitably implicated in a system that makes him profit from the exploitation of other human beings? And what to make of the troubling parallels between Dana and Kevin’s 1970’s dynamics and Dana’s relationship with Rufus Weylin?

Octavia Butler raises more questions than she gives answers, but that’s only to be expected when dealing with themes as complex as race, gender and power relations. She draws attention to the fact that not being on equal ground with someone can cause even the most well-meaning people to fail to see one another’s common humanity. Kindred explores the dehumanising effects of social injustice, privilege and powerlessness with tremendous intelligence and insight.

And speaking of dehumanisation, much of this novel’s strength comes from Butler’s ability to create fully human characters in a system that thrives on this very dehumanisation. This is true of slaves and slaveholders alike. Dana’s time in the past means that slavery ceases to be abstract for her (and for readers as well), and that means acknowledging both that she’s capable of caring about someone who routinely does monstrous things, and that there’s more to the “Mammy” and “Uncle Tom” types that she was taught to sneer at than she ever had imagined. The people she meets are real, have complex emotions, and make difficult ethical choices for reasons that can vary from simple survival to attempting to ensure the safety of those they care about. As Robert Crossley puts it in his introduction:

One of the exciting features of Kindred is that so much of the novel is attentive not to the exceptional situation of an isolated modern black woman in a white household under slavery, but to her complex social and psychological relationships with the community of black slaves she joins. Despite the severe stress under which they live, the slaves constitute a rich human society.

Kindred is both a riveting story and an intelligent and complex book, with plenty going on under the surface in terms of historical reflection, social commentary, and symbolism. The foremost example is Dana’s mutilated arm (the novel opens with the line “I lost an arm on my last trip home”, so rest assured that this is not a spoiler) – an external sign of how she was permanently changed by what she witnessed, and of how her present safety came at the expense of many, many losses.

Favourite passages:

‘I could survive here, though, if I had to. I mean if…’
‘Kevin, no ifs. Please.’
‘No.’ But he’d be in another kind of danger. A place like this would endanger her in a way that I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him. No large part, I knew. But if he survived here, it would be because he managed to tolerate the life here. He wouldn’t have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it. Free speech and press hadn’t down too well in the antebellum South. Kevin wouldn’t do too well either. The place, the time, would kill him or mark him somehow. I didn’t like either possibility.

Time passed. Kevin and I became more and more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatise. Not that I wanted us to have trouble, but it seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history—adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder. For me, the work could be hard, but was usually more boring than physically wearing. And Kevin complained of boredom, and of having to be sociable with a steady stream of pretentious guests who visited the Weylin house. But for drop-ins from another century, I thought we had had a remarkably easy time. And I was perverse enough to be bothered by the ease.

His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

They read it too:
Bookfoolery and Babble, Libri Touches, Linus’s Blanket, Rhapsody In Books, Regular Ruminations, Kay’s Bookshelf, Age 30+: A Lifetime of Books, A Good Stopping Point

(Have I missed yours?)

Rosalind Franklin – The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox

2010-08-09T09:16:00.002+01:00

Rosalind Franklin – The Dark Lady of DNA is the story of the life of the woman whose work was pivotal for the discovery of the structure of DNA – but as Brenda Maddox is careful to point out, this was only one among Franklin’s many achievements. Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920 to an Anglo-Jewish family and went to Cambridge at a time where women were not awarded degrees. She then went on to work on the structure of coals, spent a little over two years working on DNA at King’s College in London, and later lead a research group that worked on viruses at Birkbeck College. By the time she died, at only 37, she had made significant headway in three independent field of research.

Despite everything I knew about the injustice of how Franklin was portrayed after her death, and despite my knowledge that women tend to be condescended to, this still surprised me. I had never realised that she was such a good scientist in her own right, and that she did so much more than “help” Watson and Crick with their work. She wasn’t “just” a competent lab technician – but sadly, even with all my questioning this was more or less what I’d come to believe.

A little bit of context for those who might not be familiar with Franklin: James Watson and Francis Crick are the two scientists credited with the discovery that the structure of DNA is a double helix. In 1962, they were awarded a Noble Prize for this discovery, along with Maurice Wilkins from King’s College. Wilkins was included because it was more or less acknowledge that the work of the research group he led had paved the way for Crick and Watson’s final intuitive leap. However, Rosalind Franklin, Wilkins’ colleague at King’s College, was barely even acknowledged. But as Watson and Crick were later to admit, her X-Ray photographs of DNA were crucial for their discovery. Moreover, Watson and Crick had illicit access to her data –a fact she must have suspected, but was never told to the end of her life. To add insult to injury, James Watson’s bestselling account of the discovery, The Double Helix, portrays her as “Rosy”, a cartoonish witch ready to “strike men in her red hot anger” and who greedily hoarded data she couldn’t possibly make sense of. What choice did Watson have, then, but to take said data by force?

Brenda Maddox’s compassionate and fair biography tells more than a straightforward story of bullying, harassment and gender discrimination – but then again, life is rarely as straightforward as that. Rosalind Franklin’s twenty-seven months at King’s College were indeed miserable, and gender was certainly one of the main reasons why it was so easy for her colleagues to dismiss her, condescend to her, or refuse to take her seriously. And yet later in life she became good friends with Watson and Crick, who were only too happy to exchange ideas with her on her work on viruses. To the end of her life, she wasn’t aware of the extent to which she’d been wronged.

Her friendship with Watson and Crick does not of course erase or even lessen the injustice that was done, but it’s a good example of how complex and insidious sexism really is, in science as in everything else. Franklin’s story isn’t really about whether or not Watson and Crick intended to take advantage of her work because she was a woman (intention is almost always made far too much of in these cases anyway); the fact is that they could do it and get away with it, because Franklin was powerless inside King’s College. And they had no qualms whatsoever about taking advantage of this power gap.

Another thing Brenda Maddox is careful to clarify is that the injustice here isn’t that Rosalind Franklin was left out of the Nobel. As she explains, the prize is never attributed posthumously, and never to groups of more than three researches. We can speculate that she wouldn’t have received it instead of Wilkins even if she had been alive, but that will never be more than just that – speculation. But even with these perfectly valid reasons for Franklin not having won the Nobel, a vague sense of wrongness prevails. This certainly has to do with The Double Helix, which came out after Franklin’s premature death and forever tainted her reputation. Attempts to make amends were made – Franklin had a building in King’s College named after her, which is unusual for a researcher who was only there for a little over two years, and Watson has been known to make half defensive half apologetic statements about Franklin in talks all over the world. And yet, as I said at the beginning of this post, most people think of her as a competent lab technician who could never have unveiled the structure of DNA on her own. The extremely intelligent woman Brenda Maddox portrays in this book was incredibly close to making that final intuitive leap, and would have certainly gotten there earlier if she had been working in a less hostile environment.

There’s more to Rosalind Franklin – The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox than just the story of a scientist who was wronged, however. The story of the DNA discovery itself is quite exciting, and it made me understand why The Double Helix must be such a good read (even if it contains lines such as, “Cleary Rosy had to go or be put in her place”, “Certainly a bad way to go out into the foulness of a heavy, foggy November night was to be told by a woman to refrain from venturing an opinion about a subject for which you were not trained” or “the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab”).

Maddox’s biography is also an excellent portrait of a young Jewish woman coming of age as WW2 approached, of wartime Cambridge, of post-war Paris (where Franklin lived the happiest years of her life), of the ethics of science (or, as the case may be, the lack thereof), and of the personal side of great discoveries. Furthermore, it provides insight into the intellectual atmosphere in different universities in the years following the war, which was fascinating to read about.

Maddox is careful to include several excerpts of letters and to allow Rosalind Franklin to speak for herself as much as possible – something I really, really appreciate in biographies. A highly recommended book for anyone interested in the history of science, in early and mid-twentieth century Britain, and in gender issues.

Interesting bits:

Since Watson’s book, Rosalind Franklin has become a feminist icon, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology, the woman whose gifts were sacrificed to the male. Yet this mythologising, intending to be reparative, has done her no favours. There was far more to her complex, fruitful, vigorous life than her twenty-seven unhappy months at King’s College London. She achieved an international reputation in three different fields of scientific research while at the same time nourishing a passion for travel, a gift for friendship, a love of clothes and good food and a strong political conscience.

(I love the following passage – an excerpt from a letter Rosalind wrote to her father arguing against his assertion that her secular/scientific worldview made her cold and uncaring. It’s a perfect response to an accusation I’ve heard often myself, and a great expression of my own humanist credo: )

“You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by my scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training would have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is bases on fact, experience and experiment. (…) I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort), but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e., belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world (…). I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.”

Of all the sciences, moreover, physics was, and it has remained, the most male-dominated. The science historian Margaret Wertheim in 1995 dubbed it ‘the priesthood of science’. In her interpretation, the persistent cultural and psychological barriers to the entry of women into physics are a legacy of ancient religious tradition: the physicist or mathematician was a kind of priest, a conduit to God the divine mathematician. Physics departments in the egalitarian United States were scarcely more welcome to women than they were in Europe. Harvard University’s physics department in the 1950’s maintained a policy against the hiring of women as instructors – a ban that endured for a further two decades. (No woman professor gained tenure in physics until 1992.) Princeton was worse. In the 1950’s, not only were women forbidden to teach physics, they were not allowed into the physics building.

Why did Watson create Rosy the Witch? A plausible hypothesis holds that the character was a rationalisation of Watson’s guilt – a creature so hostile and uncooperative that there was no alternative to taking what you need by stealth. (…) From the feminine point of view, he wicked Rosy is a variant of an older myth, ‘She asked for it’, that tracks back to Eve: the woman is guiltier than the male. Unwittingly, Nannie Griffiths drew on this ancient lie when blaming young Rosalind for complaining that Colin had hit her with a cricket bat: “Well, dear, you shouldn’t have been teasing him.”
What cannot be denied is that ‘Rosy’ was essentially a villainess, for the plot of what Wilkins sometimes called “Jim’s novel”. Extraneous details, such as a later friendship or early death, would have spoiled the narrative.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll add your link here.)

Empress of the World by Sara Ryan

2010-08-06T09:22:00.004+01:00

Nicola (named after Nikola Tesla – geekdoom runs in the family) is fifteen, and she’s spending the summer at the Siegel Institute Summer Program for Gifted Youth. Nic’s goal is to take an archaeology class to try and figure out if that’s what she really wants to do. She goes achieve that, but unexpectedly she also ends up making friends. As Nic tells us, she’s had theatre friends and band friends before, but never really just friends-friends. One of the friends Nic makes is Battle, a beautiful girl from North Carolina with a complicated family background. And before she quite knows what’s happening, Nic realises she’s in love with her.

First of all, I really liked the fact that Empress of the World has a geeky vibe to it. This is a story about smart kids at a gifted program, and it’s full of references to things like Weetzie Bat, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madaleine L'Engle and Lord of the Rings. But no matter how smart, bookish or sophisticated Sara Ryan’s teenagers are, they still have a lot to figure out, they can be bratty and immature, and they often struggle with their emotions. They kind of reminded me of John Green’s characters, in the sense that they’re smart and realistic teenagers – and to me that’s as high a compliment as they come.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that I liked the characters for the most part, I didn’t enjoy Empress of the World anywhere nearly as much as I enjoy John Green’s books. And I have to tell you, Internet, I’ve had it with this whole Not Much Caring For Books I Expected to Love thing. It makes me so sad. When is it going to end? And is it the books, or is it my expectations? I can never quite tell.

In the case of Empress of the World, the problem was mostly that it was too short and therefore didn’t really make much of an impression on me. Even the characterisation was ultimately harmed by the book’s brevity. I do give the unapologetic girl-girl romance two very enthusiastic thumbs up, but sadly that was the only thing that made the story stand out. Had Battle and Nic not been both girls, I’d have found Empress of the World completely unremarkable. And as much as I think that the world desperately needs more non-heterosexual love stories, I don’t think that this should be the main thing a book has going for it. In fact, in an ideal world, in which these stories weren’t routinely erased, the sexual orientation of the characters would certainly not be enough to make me notice or enjoy a story. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want the lack of more glbtq stories to make me settle for less, because that would be a very sad thing.

To be fair, the problem could very well be me – Jodie at Book Gazing did love this book, and I know she has excellent taste. I read the whole thing in an hour and a half, and perhaps rushing through it was part of the problem. I noticed that Jodie said in her review she read it twice, and maybe I’d have seen the book with new eyes if I had done the same. But as it was, in the end I just didn’t care that much. I felt that the story lacked the wisdom, complexity and all-age appeal of books like Looking for Alaska or The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.

Nic and Battle’s relationship was perhaps a case of opposites attracting, as the two could hardly be more different. Nic is open and straightforward, whereas Battle is afraid of intimacy and avoids open communication. This makes for interesting dynamics, but unfortunately I couldn’t feel their relationship as much as I would have liked. I think that what Ryan was going for here was a subtle depiction of those moments that mean the world to the people involved, even if they don’t seem like much from the outside. When Battle first tells Nic about her brother, for example, I could see that the scene was meant to be meaningful – but sadly the book didn’t really get that feeling across. And when I compare it to similar moments in, say, Looking for Alaska (yes, again) or What I Was by Meg Rosoff, I can’t help but feel let down.

One thing I found interesting was the fact that Nic very much rejects the term “lesbian”. On the one hand this could be seen as disappointing, and as an attempt to dissociate herself from who she is. But on the other hand, I completely understand her discomfort with people’s constant attempts to brand or define her. We’re far too concerned with neatly labelling things anyway, and for one summer at least Nic is able to create a space where she can merely exist and experience things, without having to worry about establishing a clearly defined sexual identity.

Despite my lukewarm reaction, Empress of the World is far from a bad book. I didn’t find it amazing, and I’m not sure how well I’ll remember it in a few months, but I’m glad to have read it and I’m glad it exists. I’ll leave you with a passage that made me smile – I actually remember the first time it dawned on me that much of what I was expected to learn, accept and Not Question had in fact been made up by people who, regardless of their Authority Status, didn’t necessarily know what they were talking about:

“I remember now,” Battle says. “It bugged me too. The way they divided things into categories was so arbitrary—like the book would say that such-and-such design was a fertility motif, and how do they know?”
“Exactly! That’s my exact problem with it. It makes me think—this is going to sound stupid—but do you ever have the feeling that everybody’s making everything up, all the time? Like when a teacher tells you something is the absolute truth, and then you learn it was just completely his opinion?”
Battle nods vigorously. “It’s not just school. People ask my dad for advice, because he’s a minister. I know he just says whatever comes into his head. But they think he’s this grand authority.”

Reviewed at:
Book Gazing (Do make sure you read Jodie’s thoughts, as she really connected with the book and explores it in much more depth than I did.)
Villa Negativa
Dreaming Out Loud
A Book Blog of One's Own
Bookshelves of Doom

(Have I missed yours?)

“What the Cat Told Me” by Diana Wynne Jones (and a giveaway)

2010-08-05T08:22:00.002+01:00

Before I discovered book blogs, I had the habit of raiding random message boards of all sorts for book recommendations. And I remember that in one of them there was a thread about favourite short stories, and someone mentioned “What the Cat Told Me” by Diana Wynne Jones. Even if we discount the fact that this is DWJ we’re talking about(I loved her then, but probably not quite as much as I do now), the title alone made me want to read it. Things being told by cats! Who wouln’t want to know what a cat would have to tell?

A few years later I bought the DWJ-edited anthology Fantasy Stories, and it actually took me a while to realise it included this particular story. Oh joyous moment! I read it in a single gulp (sadly, the rest of the book remains neglected to this day), and I thought I’d revisit that lovely reading experience for Diana Wynne Jones Week.

“What the Cat Told Me” begins with the words, “I am a cat.” Our narrator then adds,

I am a cat like anything. Keep stroking me. I came in here because I knew you were good at stroking. But put your knees together so I can sit properly, front paws under. That’s better. Now keep stroking, don’t forget to rub my ears, and I will purr and tell.

Isn’t there something delightfully feline about that? I can imagine a similar sort of inner monologue going through my cats’ heads as they try to get me to sit in the position that is the most comfortable to them.

But back to the story: I don’t want to say too much, as spoiling the plot of a short story is far too easy, but “What the Cat Told Me” is a cat-narrated tale about a young man apprenticed to a cruel old magician - and about his cat, of course. There are also secrets, curses, spells, a touch of romance, and a mostly happy ending to wrap it all up. If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it should – the traditional fairy tale elements are obvious, but as usual Diana Wynne Jones manages to make them fresh.

Another thing that makes this story stand out is the tone of the narrator. She’s very different from, say, Kij Johnson’s fantastical cats, who retain a mystery and a wildness that clearly marks them as members of another species. This cat is clearly much more anthropomorphised than that - she’s more of a representation of our idea of catness than an actually cat. But there are reasons within the story that justify why this is so, and she’s just as compelling in her own way. She’s a Story Cat, which is exactly what a tale like this needed.

Because this is a short story, the characterisation isn’t quite as rich as in DWJ’s novels (not that this is necessarily the case with short stories, of course, but it’s harder for one to be several things at once than it is for a novel, I suspect). But Diana Wynne Jones more than makes up for that by adding depth to the world, which to me is the clear mark of a great fantasy writer. As Fiona put it in her recent review of Eight Days of Luke, “What I do love about her books is that I always feel that they never end and that they just carry on after the pages stop. She always leaves you satisfied with the end, but she doesn’t let the characters or the world die, just because that part of the story is over.” This is also true of her short stories – the glimpse she gives you of this magical world is more than enough for you to imagine that it has a life of its own.

Most of all, I loved “What the Cat Told Me” for allowing me to enjoy the pure pleasure of storytelling. And this is no small thing. You can find this story in the collection Unexpected Magic (Fantasy Stories sadly seems to be out of print).

I thought I’d wrap up my participation in Diana Wynne Jones Week with a giveaway of another title that is TRAGICALLY out of print – a fact I was seriously shocked to learn earlier this week. If you’ve known me for more than a few months, you’re likely to have heard me rave about Fire and Hemlock at one point or another. Fire and Hemlock is a retelling of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer - in a way - and it’s also a story about growing up and love and family and creativity and not trying to own and control the people you care about. It’s one of my absolute favourite novels, and I’d love to give one of you a used copy of it. If you’d like to be entered, just leave me a comment telling me why you would like to read it. I’ll announce the winner at the end of the week.

Many, many thanks to Jenny for hosting this lovely celebration of Diana Wynne Jones’ work.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/higgystfc/1074590008/

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

2010-08-03T08:59:00.003+01:00

The year is 1985, the place London, and the world not quite the world as we know it. Thursday Next, literary detective and veteran of the Crimea War (which has been raging for well over a century) is working on the disappearance of the manuscript of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. The man behind the theft is an academic turned dangerous criminal, Acheron Hades, who once upon a time taught Thursday at university. She comes close to catching him, but things take a wrong turn and her life is only saved because a copy of Jane Eyre in her front pocket stops the bullet intended for her heart.

After she comes out of the hospital, Thursday follows a tip of an unknown woman in a colourful car and accepts a job as a LiteraTec in Swindon, her hometown. There Thursday has to confront her past – which translates as seeing her ex-fiancée again and eventually coming to terms with her brother’s death. And it is also there that the story begins to live up to its title and indeed becomes The Eyre Affair, with Thursday being transported into the manuscript of Charlotte Brönte’s novel, both to save the beloved story from destruction and to solve the case once and for all.

This is a poor plot summary that leaves out plenty of important bits, but in my defence summing up a Jasper Fforde story is no easy task. The story is more complex than I gave it credit for – and to perfectly honest, also a bit messier. But before I go any further, let me tell you a little more about the alternative world that Thursday inhabits: this is a world where dodos have been brought back from extinction thanks to cloning and are popular pets (Thursday has one named Pickwick); a world where the boundaries between reality and fiction are malleable at best; a world in which a device called a Prose Portal allows people to enter works of fiction; a world in which the interests of the giant Goliath Corporation have pretty much trumped democracy; a world in which Wales is an independent nation behind a sort of Iron Curtain; and finally a world in which artistic and literary matters are the subject of debates so heated that they can lead to imprisonment or to terrorist acts.

The Eyre Affair is a sort of Inkheart for adults, or a Hichhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with references to general classics instead of science fiction. It took me some to get into the story, but this was because Fforde catapults readers into a mad world and leaves them to figure out the rules for themselves as they go along. I did feel a little lost at first, but ultimately this was part of the fun. I enjoyed the slow revelation of the differences between Thursday’s alternative reality and our own, which include “Wait, what?” moments such as this:

“I was in ‘78 recently,” he announced. “I brought you this.”
He handed me a single by The Beatles. I didn’t recognise the title.
“Didn’t they split in ’70?”
“Not always. How are things?”

Or even more interestingly:

“It’s just… I’ve read this book [Jane Eyre] a lot. When I was younger. I know it very well.”
“And you like the ending?”
I thought for a moment. The rather flawed climax of the book was a cause of considerable bitterness within Brontë circles. It was generally agreed that if Jane had returned to Thornfield Hall and married Rorchester, the book might have been a lot better than it was.
“No one likes the ending, Tamworth. But there’s more than enough in it regardless of that.”

Can you imagine a version of Jane Eyre in which Jane actually goes off with St. John Rivers? Argh – I’m shuddering at the mere thought.

The last third of The Eyre Affair, in which Jane Eyre is heavily featured, was by far my favourite. Still, overall I think I liked the concept of this story (or, to be accurate, the several concepts) better than the actual execution. I love the idea of readers going into literary works – both for the fun of it and for all the metafictional and even philosophical implications. Talk about active reading and allowing a story to change before your eyes. I also liked the Douglas Adams-esque humour, but not as much as I like actual Douglas Adams humour. Fforde’s jokes didn’t always work for me, both because at times I found them forced, and because I suspect I missed some of his references. The Eyre Affair has more literary allusions per page than any other book I’ve read before, so the humour is probably more rewarding for those who are better read than I am. Still, my hat’s off to him for his sheer cleverness and inventiveness.

I had fun with The Eyre Affair, but it’s not a new addition to my list of favourites, and I’m not sure how much of it will actually stay with me. However, this isn’t really a complaint, as I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a book being “merely” fun. Plus I don’t want to start a whole thing about The Point of Literature, both because it’s silly to even suggest there’s only one and because Michael Chabon has said everything I’d want to say much better than I ever could. I did spend some pleasant hours in Thursday Next’s company, and that is enough for me to consider reading The Eyre Affair a good investment of my time.

I’ve been told that the Thursday Next series gets better as it progresses, and I actually already own the second book, Lost in a Good Book. However, I’ve also been told is draws heavily from Great Expectations, so I wanted to ask you if you think I should read that before I get to it. If I don’t, will it spoil Dicken’s story for me? In the case of The Eyre Affair, Fforde is careful to provide context for readers who may not be familiar with Jane Eyre, but he does inevitably spoil the book’s ending.

One more bit I liked:

“Malin and Sole look after all crimes regarding Shakespeare.”
He shut the door.
“They keep an eye on forgery, illegal dealing and overtly free thespian interpretations. The actor in with them was Graham Huxtable. He was putting on a felonious one-man performance of Twelfth Night. Persistent offender. He’ll be fined and bound over. His Malvolio is truly frightful.”

Reviewed at:
Bibliofreak Blog, Jenny’s Books, Rebecca Reads, Necromancy Never Pays, Sam’s Book Blog, If You Can Read This, Regular Ruminations, Andrea’s Book Nook, An Adventure in Reading, The Zen Leaf, Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity, Bart's Bookshelf

(Have I missed yours?)

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

2010-08-02T08:29:00.004+01:00

Diana Wynne Jones week is here at last! Please make sure you drop by Jenny’s blog often this week, as she’s having a week-long celebration of one of my absolute favourite authors. If you love DWJ too you’ll surely want to join in; if not, well, here’s a perfect opportunity to discover her. In honour of DWJ Week, I finally read Hexwood, which had been left unread on my shelf for an embarrassing length of time. If on the one hand I always meant to read it, on the other hand I was slightly intimidated by all the people who warned me it was even more confusing than Fire and Hemlock. Fire and Hemlock, by the way, is in my opinion Diana Wynne Jones’ masterpiece, and it’s one of my top five all-time favourite novels – but it does take some thinking to figure out just what’s going on with that ending. Hexwood is the same, only the whole way through. It takes an immensely talented author to make this not a bad or a frustrating thing, but Diana Wynne Jones manages just fine.

Do I dare even attempt a plot summary? The plot is quite complex, and I worry that if I try I’ll make it sound messy and impenetrable, which it isn’t. So if it does sound that way to you, please be aware that it’s completely me fault; not the book’s. Here goes (spoilers free): Hexwood is the name of both a farm estate and a small forest by a village in England. One of the village’s inhabitants, a girl called Ann Stavely, is home sick with a fever, and she watches some mysterious comings and goings at Hexwood farm through her bedroom’s window. A lot of people seem to arrive in Hexwood, only they never really come out again.

Once she feels better, Ann decides to go into Hexwood and investigate what’s going on. And that’s when she realises that things are even more serious than she imagined. Hexwood works a bit like human memory, and it doesn’t seem to have much use for chronology. So when Ann goes in, she can’t really be sure when she’ll come out again, or if her current journey into Hexwood is actually taking place after the one before that. Also, the people she finds there – a mysterious man named Mordion, a boy called Hume, and a robot, Bam – are different ages and have different memories of her every time she meets them.

This is really only the beginning of a plot involving Reigners from outer space, a sort of virtual reality machine called the Bannus, and a castle with knights on a sort of Arthurian quest and with court intrigue aplenty. Also, none of what I told you so far is necessarily what it initially seems to be. Don’t worry, though; the story does make sense in the end. Yes, the plot is convoluted, but then again I don’t really read Diana Wynne Jones for her plots. I read her for her brilliant characterisation, her excellent dialogue, the emotional resonance her stories are guaranteed to have, and most of all for the wonderful DWJ-ness of it all.

I think one of the reasons why I got on with Hexwood so much better than expected is because from the very beginning I absolutely trusted the storyteller – and that trust paid. Also, I suspect that Hexwood is very much a mythology and fantasy lovers’ sort of book, as it toys with the tropes of the genre quite a bit (but then again, this is true of many of Diana Wynne Jones’ books). There are Arthurian references, nods to Beowulf, enchanted primordial woods, and a mythological feel to the whole thing. Clearly DWJ was having a lot of fun writing this. I’m not sure if this makes the book inaccessible to general readers, but it does make it extra rewarding for lovers of fantasy. I felt that I knew the metalanguage of the story, if this makes sense, and that made everything even more fun.

In addition to being a mixture of fantasy and science fiction, Hexwood is also a bit of a mystery. My eagerness to find out just exactly what was going on kept me turning the pages, and made the book very hard to put down. I suppose it’s good not to be too eager, as DWJ does take her time clarifying everything, but all that wondering and feeling lost did pay in the end. I enjoyed Hexwood more for the ride than for the revelations or “A-ha!” moments, but there was still an immensely satisfying one that made the story I thought I was reading turn into something complexly different before my eyes. As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’m embarrassingly twist-dim, so I suspect that this would all seem very obvious and predictable to cleverer readers. But to me it wasn’t, and I did very much enjoy going, “Wow. I did not see that coming at all.”

Hexwood is not my new favourite Diana Wynne Jones novel, and I probably wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to her work. But if you trust her as a storyteller, if you don’t mind a challenging plot, and if you approach it with the right frame of mind, there’s a whole lot of fun to be had here.

They read it too:
Bird Brain(ed) Blog
The Bookling
Books Love Me
Teabag Central
(Yours?)

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

2010-08-01T20:35:00.004+01:00

I bet you were wondering why I hadn't read John Green and David Levithan's Will Grayson, Will Grayson (one of my most anticipated releases of 2010), Internet. Well, the answer is that I actually did read it right after it came out (or as soon as The Book Depository got it to me - there might have been a few days of agonising wait involved, where all my friends went on about how good it was and I checked the mailbox in frustration each day). But I was fortunate enough to co-review with Renay at subverting the text, and the fact that we're both a little bit fond of using lots and lots of words made getting this post written a time-consuming process. (Also, it's possible that I'm as slow at updating Google Docs as I am at e-mail. But let's not get into that.)

But it was so worth it! Renay is crazy smart and hilarious and awesome times a thousand, so if you're not reading her blog yet, you really should be. About the book, the short of it is that I liked it (we both did), though not quite as much as John Green's solo books or Levithan's books with Rachel Cohn. I won't spoil the long of it, in which we try to move beyond our likes and dislikes and discuss what the book is doing - to read it, just follow the link at the beginning of the post.

A quick note and a question

2010-07-31T10:26:00.005+01:00

Remember how the possibility of having an European book bloggers convention was mentioned a while ago? Well, the fabulous Jodie at Book Gazing has taken up the reigns, and she set up a survey to try and find out the time and place that would be most convenient to people. Make sure you fill it out, and if you want to volunteer to help organise things, that would also be very much appreciated.

Also - what are your favourite novellas? This question has nothing to do with the fact that I feel that I haven't been getting any reading done lately (Middlemarch, much as I'm loving it, is partially to blame here) and that things will only get worse as September approaches. Nope. Nothing at all. It's not like I'd try to trick myself into feeling that my reading was productive by reading short books. Never.