Category Archives: Books and literature

Book review: Angela’s Ashes

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Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Recommended as a good fiction.

Angela’s Ashes is the chronicle of author Frank McCourt’s childhood, first in America, then in Ireland, or purports to be. The sadness, tragedy, ugliness, and despair are laid on so thickly as to become improbable in combination. Bad things happen to good people, but in McCourt’s world, the worst always happens. When the family moves, it is to the worst house on the lane, next to the only outhouse. When it rains, their house is the one that floods. When he develops conjunctivitis, it is permanent (he still has it years later). When other kids’ alcoholic fathers go to England during the war to earn money, his is the only one who drinks his pay away and loses the job. Nothing is ever halfway for McCourt. If there is a tragedy to tell, it will be the most tragic conceivable.

There are inconsistencies, such as time frames that make no sense, as well as improbabilities, like his grandmother making several walking round trips of over a mile, all in one night, months before her death. There is also the issue of whether McCourt could possibly recall such detail (as his lengthy story about the IRA refusing to helping his father out and why) during his very early years without any context. It would be as though you were four years old and heard your father talking about the New Deal, and you remembered everything about it even though you had no idea at the time what all the acronyms represented. Oddly, while McCourt goes into great detail about his early childhood, his timeline becomes increasingly compressed as he approaches adolescence. There is much less detail, and whole months are passed by just at a time when a person would be more likely to remember more — and to be experiencing more. It almost feels like he grew tired of the tale (and fabricating it) and was in a rush to get to the end. Or perhaps, having gone through a sleazy conception, rats, fleas, sewage, open sores, tuberculosis, vomited blood, corporeal punishment, prolonged hunger, his mother’s prostitution, etc., etc., etc. (no horror goes untouched), he simply ran out of material.

So, from early on, I viewed Angela’s Ashes as a work of fiction in which none of the characters is likeable. While many would say the father is the worst, as he is a hard-core alcoholic who cannot and will not support his family, I found him to be far more sympathetic a person than his mother as portrayed. When sober, the father often shows his sons small signs of affection and empathy, but Angela herself is nearly always cold, distant, and unsympathetic toward her children. She is always more focused on herself than on them. I’m not sure how many people could write about their own mothers as dispassionately as McCourt does. If she had one good quality, McCourt is careful not to present it.

As a child, McCourt seems relatively balanced, likeable, and ethical, wanting to do the right thing, but adolescence seems to turn him into a different person. He lies, he steals, he takes advantage of people — and the only guilt he seems to feel is that imposed by the Catholic Church. There is never a sense, even when he achieves adulthood, that he has any deep thoughts about who he is, what he is doing, and how he affects others. Even his agonizing over his belief that he is responsible for a consumptive girl’s descent into Hell because he had sex with her is tainted by the selfishness of his focus.

In the end, I must concur with an author acquaintance who said, “Angela’s Ashes? ’tis as phony as the photo on the cover.”

But it is certainly well written and compelling, if you happen to have a large grain of salt handy.

18 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Women in Love

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Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. Highly recommended.

Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence is a sequel, but knowledge of The Rainbow is not necessary to appreciate the second novel. The title is somewhat misleading, as it is really about women and men, men and women, and men and men — and it’s not always clear with what they are in love. It is the tale of two teachers, sisters Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, the son of the local mine owner, Gerald Crich, and school inspector Rupert Birkin.

Their complex relationships start to take shape the day of Gerald’s sister’s wedding, as Gudrun and Gerald and Ursula and Rupert are drawn together, often despite themselves. The Gudrun/Gerald relationship becomes a series of conflicts that are won only temporarily and that lead to more conflicts and then temporary reprieves of tenderness and sex. His emotional conflicts with Gudrun are mirrored in Gerald’s dealings with animals; he brutally forces his mare to stay at a railroad crossing despite her terror until blood is drawn and until the cars have passed. Later, when his sister’s rabbit resists being picked up so he can be sketched, Gerald punches him in the head so he will submit instantly. His blind will must triumph in all. The only time that he and Gudrun seem to find an equilibrium is when they balance each other by accepting but not gravitating toward each other. It becomes a tenuous relatonship at best and a dangerous one at worst. Gerald is incapable of love, as is his brooding mother.

Meanwhile, Ursula finds herself in a different kind of battle, with Rupert and his self-contemptous philosophies about relationships, death, and the will. His vision of love, if he even believes it exists, is of two planets circling one another in perfect equilibrium. He did not find that with his former lover Hermione, who does not satisfy his physical desires and who does not calibrate with his spiritual needs. At the end of the novel, he reinforces what he has said all along — his love will always have a missing component and be incomplete without it. As a side note, Rupert seems to be Lawrence’s own mouthpiece, reflecting many of his own views.

As with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the setting for Women in Love becomes a character — the grimy village, the sordid town, and the sullen miners and their wives provide a backdrop of inevitable modernization and dehumanization that counterbalances the individual stories. As mining is mechanized to death, so is the human soul. The will either accepts the inevitable crush of the modern world or fights it to the death. The weakest part of Women in Love may be when the setting changes, that is, when the couples decide to leave all that England has become and to take their relationships and their futures to the Alps, where they find art truly does imitate life with its mechanism. The novel seems to lose a little of its footing at this point, giving in to its tendency to become an intellectual exercise in the arts rather than a human story in a regimented world.

Women in Love starts out slowly, as a lengthy series of vignettes and conversations that seem unlikely or unrealistic, but develops a crescendo as the battles begin. In the end, despite dramatic events and drastic changes, the conundrums remain, and even Ursula’s persistence and will cannot eliminate them now, let alone forever. Women in Love is about destruction and regeneration in an endless cycle and the human under the surface that we are not entirely aware of and cannot express.

29 March 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Sons and Lovers

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Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

Sons and Lovers is said to be the most autobiographical of D. H. Lawrence’s novels; according to the introduction by Benjamin DeMott, some critics have found it too flatly so. Like the protagonist Paul Morel, Lawrence was born to a coal miner and a woman who has married beneath her class. His older brother died young, DeMott notes. Many other details coincide as well.

Unlike some of Lawrence’s other works, such as Women in Love, in which Lawrence explores lofty themes in a philosophical and grim tone, Sons and Lovers is as down to earth as Paul’s rough, violent, yet congenial father Walter.

Despite his many apparent and iterated flaws, Walter Morel is shown as a whole person with a gentle, content, industrious side — when he’s sober. His “smallness” is a function of where he is and who he is expected to be rather than who he could be. He’s so tied to his mining lot in life it doesn’t occur to him his gifted sons could aspire to more. That they achieve more is a source of both pride and derision for Walter Morel. Although Walter is a background character, he, “an outsider,” forges the bond between Gertrude Morel and her sons William and Paul.

Gertrude Morel is not the first woman to live her life through her children. Her hold over her sons, however, dooms their relationships with other women to failure, leaving them deeply unsatisfied and unhappy. Her motivations may be questionable, but she is sometimes right. William’s fiancée Lily would have cost him dearly, emotionally and financially, had he lived to marry her, and Mrs. Morel sees her own mistake of a marriage in his future. Although she makes her beliefs known, she seems willing to let William make his decision and suffer the consequences.

Having learned from the experience with William, Mrs. Morel takes a different approach with Paul, who seems to be her last, best hope for justifying her own life. Her relationship with Paul becomes overtly sexual. When they go out together, they behave like lovers on a date. “He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat.” When Paul tells his mother that he doesn’t love Miriam, she “kissed him in a long, fervent kiss. ‘My boy!’ she said, in a voice trembling with passionate love. Without knowing, he gently stroked her face.”

It would be too easy to attribute all this to an Oedipal complex, but it is more complicated, as life is. Paul serves as Mrs. Morel’s alter ego, pseudo-lover, and breadwinner. Everything she did not or cannot have must be Paul’s. She is savvy enough to know who is a threat to her hold and who is not. She recognises in Miriam a woman much like herself — intelligent, thwarted, let down by men, hungry for a kindred spirit or soul mate. Paul, too, is aware of this and hates Miriam for it — and for the fact he does, indeed, love her, making him unfaithful to the woman to whom he owes his fidelity. There are spiritual overtones as well, as the religious Miriam tries to sacrifice herself for Paul, whom she sees as a “Walter Scott hero.” This sacrifice repels Paul ever further.

Mrs. Morel rightly perceives that Clara Dawes is not a threat to her — she is fascinating, attractive, enigmatic, and sensual, but she lacks the ability to be more to Paul than a diversion from Miriam, Mom, and himself. Knowing that nothing of importance will come of this affair, Mrs. Morel even encourages it. It cannot divert Paul from her, and it fails as a result.

In the end, the only intimacy Paul is capable of is with his mother. She has come between him and his own consciousness — and he has allowed her. Everything is filtered through her. How she has achieved this is not always clear, as she uses more than rhetoric and conscious effort to mold Paul. When he wishes her dead, there is hope that then he would begin to live. “Mother!” he whimpered. “Mother!” Then: “He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her.” With the past buried, there may be a future for him. Only Lawrence knew as he wrote this most human of his novels.

25 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Flat Rock Journal

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Flat Rock Journal by Ken Carey. Not recommended.

After reading two pages of glowing reviews (and even a comment about Carey being a successor to Thoreau), I was expecting a well-written, thoughtful book centered on nature, the forest, and the life within. Instead, Flat Rock Journal struck me as more of a tribute to one man’s ego.

The book got off on a bad foot for me when Chicago-born Carey buys a clunker car to begin his quest for nature and life in the forest. It struck me that, 100 years ago, this would not have been an option at all and that it seems a strange way to get around when there are alternatives, such as cycling and walking, that bring one closer to the earth. Next, he runs into the woman who will become his wife on the Berkeley campus with whom he makes love on some bleachers. He sees this as a spiritual moment and her as a strong woman with no fears, while in reality it comes across as young people doing what comes naturally to young people. One also wonders why these children of nature did not find some grass under a tree.

Carey and his wife move to an old farmhouse in the Ozarks, where they have few conveniences (although, of course, they can’t seem to get by without a truck and eventually a gas-powered refrigerator). Carey’s day in the forest gives the reader little real feel for life, but does provide insights into his perspectives, which are at best centered around himself rather than the world around him. He says that a day in the forest helps him to rid himself of assumptions, the baggage of the world, what have you. He then describes clouds, storms, lizards, rock formations, birds, trees — everything in sight — in purely anthropmorphic terms as though he can’t grasp that this is part of those unnecessary, irrelevant assumptions.

He talks about the copperheads that live around the long-abandoned house he buys as “intruders” without seeming to understand that it is his family that is intruding on them. He kills them, albeit regretfully, as a danger to his young children, not seeming to understand that this is how humans have always justified killing so-called “pest animals.” When he can no longer take killing them, he pollutes the atmosphere and uses nonrewable resources by driving them elsewhere so they are not underfoot. He is surprised when they return; he doesn’t even seem to know the basic biology of territoriality that man and his fellow animals all have at heart. When he pets them in his lap and they relax, he thinks this is a sign of friendliness (whereas someone a little more in tune with the mind of reptiles — and I put myself in this category — understands how much reptiles like a comfortably warm spot, like a lap). This kind of anthropormophising is a grave injustice to nature, and anthropomorphising is a large part of what we do that disrespects nature and leads to environmental trouble and imbalance.

Carey also has a fair amount of contempt for urbanites who don’t understand the country and nature, and who exploit “cheap country resources” to lead lives that of excessive consumption. He has a blind side to his own consumption and to his own lack of understanding. He does not absorb nature or sit back and appreciate it; he consistently forces his own predispositions onto it.

He believes environmentalists are wrong to assume that man and nature cannot coexist, and that man has the unique capacity to improve the earth, although he doesn’t really explain how. (I would have liked at least one example of a building, structure, or anything that is manmade that “improves” nature, but one is not forthcoming.) He and his wife produce a large family, which, while well within their rights, is unnecessary in this country of low child mortality and long life spans, and surely even Carey can acknowledge that it is a combination of excessive consumption and overpopulation that will be the downfall of nature. He can happily live on many acres in a forest, but doesn’t seem to think that, if all 280 million Americans tried to follow the same lifestyle, basic as it is, there would be no wild left — all would be farms, gardens, and watering systems simply to accommodate the volume of people.

He seems to think that depression is something that one shrugs off with the proper attitude and that too much of depression is blamed on “childhood” or “somebody else.” This reveals only his profound ignorance of clinical depression as well as issues of child physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

His pseudospiritual ramblings are more annoying than enlightening. They are not the type of beliefs that can be universally felt, but are based on his own approach to his own readings, thoughts, and feelings. They are frequently contradictory to both common sense and a sense of wonder.

I was looking forward to a book that would make me feel like I was part of the forest, part of the Ozarks, part of the world. I have read the works of many environmental and nature writers who put their egos in the back seat and channel the beauty of the woods around them with minimal interjections of self, and those are the works that transport me, move me, and help me renew my own touch with my world and with all that inhabits it. This is not it.

Despite the glowing blurbs, which make me wonder if reviewers put any thought into their reviews, this book is not worth the time when there are so many more thoughtful, eloquent writers out there. It is apparently out of print. I can understand why.

29 July 2000
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: My Ántonia

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My Ántonia by Willa Cather. Recommended.

Willa Cather is known as the chronicler of the American prairie and frontier, having written such novels as O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. My Ántonia is also set in the prairie midwest, Nebraska, where the Jim Burden finds himself living with his paternal grandparents after the death of his parents in Virginia and where Ántonia Shimerda and her family find themselves in search of a better life than that offered by their native Bohemia. The tale, or series of tales, are told by lawyer Jim Burden as his remembrances of Ántonia. Tellingly, when he hands over his manuscript to a journalist who also knew Ántonia, he adds the “My” in front of her name, which “seemed to satisfy him.”

My Ántonia is an episodic novel, and Ántonia herself is often absent from the story. In many ways, she did not seem to me to be a clearly defined, real character or even a part of the novel named for her, but more of a symbol of the westward expansion and growth of America.

Ántonia — daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother — seems to be an everywoman. She is sensual and maternal, intelligent and hard working, naïve and shrewd. While narrator Jim Burden finds her attractive and desirable, their relationship never extends beyond friendship. This is an interesting point, since the framing narrator does not find much to praise in the woman Jim Burden marries, whom he describes in oddly masculine terms: “handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.” She may be Mrs. Burden but she is not my Ántonia.

Ántonia’s family, the Shimerdas, are a reminder that, despite snobbery on the part of long-settled families, there is no American who didn’t originate elsewhere. One character says, “So it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.” Americy, poor and wealthy, rural and urban, is a society built not around a common history, past, or ethnic background, but around the land. For Ántonia’s father, Mr. Shimerda, the bleak land of winter cannot replace the richness of the camaraderie of his Bohemian friends at home. Even the Bohemians in the new country cannot compensate for the loss — they are, after all, now Americans. Fittingly, Mr. Shimerda rests at a crossroads, where man marks where the four directions meet.

Small-town America is no less provincial than its European prototype. In Blackhawk, Ántonia and the other “country girls” bring what the new country needs to grow as Jefferson envisioned: youth, enthusiasm, and unfettered sensuality that threatens the newly settled middle class.

As in other Cather novels, most notably The Song of the Lark, no matter how fond characters may be of their rural roots, opportunity in America lies elsewhere — for Jim Burden, as a lawyer working for a western railway and living in New York, far removed from Blackhawk and his life on his grandparents’ farm. Ántonia, however, after a disastrous sojourn in Denver, finds herself back in the country, doing what many American women had done before and have done since — raising the future generations the new country needs.

While Jim contributes to industrial growth, Ántonia is Earth Mother, producing the future. There may be a feminist dig here; Cather and her characters are well aware that, for now, the nature of opportunities for men and women are worlds apart, as is the nature of what they can accomplish. Indeed, the topic troubles Burden as he watches the activities of the country girls. In the end, he marries the woman the framing narrator does not like while Ántonia the sensualist seems spiritually free in her earthy existence.

My Ántonia is the story of America — written by those like Jim Burden, but also written by Norwegians, Swedes, Bohemians — and Africans, as Cather works in the story of the blind piano and his “instrument,” a double entendre for his piano and his sensuality. To understand America and her story, you must understand Jim, Ántonia, Ántonia’s grasping brother and mother — fand Mr. Shimerda, too. Each is the evolution of the new land born of the old.

24 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The English Patient

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The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Recommended.

In this poetic novel by poet Michael Ondaatje, the author explores the past and present (the closing days of World War II) lives of young Canadian nurse Hana, her English patient, her family friend and accomplished thief David Caravaggio, and Indian sapper Kirpal Singh (nicknamed Kip).

Hana, who has lost her father and her lover during the war, has been desensitised and traumatized — only 19, she has held cigarettes to the lips of armless boys and moved patients only to find that they are already being consumed by worms. When the Italian villa-turned-hospital where she works is abandoned toward the end of the conflict, she insists on remaining behind with the one patient who cannot be moved — an enigmatic English patient whose skin is burned black from a plane crash in North Africa and who does not seem to remember who he is. The only clue he carries is The Histories of Herodotus, which he uses as a commonplace book.

Caravaggio, thief turned intelligence agent, has lost the practical use of his hands when he is caught stealing by the Italians and loses his thumbs as a physically and emotionally brutal punishment. A morphine addict, Caravaggio cannot rest until he knows all the secrets — those of Hana’s heart but especially those of the mysterious Englishman.

Like the others, Kip belongs nowhere to no one. Estranged from his family by his nontraditional beliefs and pursuits, he is also a man without a country — an Indian sapper in an English army that does not welcome foreigners, especially Indians. A loner by nature and by circumstances, Kip finds respite if not meaning in Hana’s arms.

For a professed amnesiac, the English patient remembers great detail, from his post-accident discovery in the desert by Bedouins and their subsequent treatment of his injuries to his earlier life as a member of a 1930s group of explorers seeking to answer such riddles as how Cambyses and his army could attempt to cross a desert — unless there were a Zerzura to be found. Of equal or greater importance to his exploration reminiscences are his memories of his hot affair with a fellow explorer’s wife that burns itself out in tragedy.

The long passages in which the English patient slowly unravels (but never admits to) the mystery of his identity and past are intriguing, spellbinding, revealing, and poetic. Those with any curiosity will find themselves wanting to read more about not only 1930s European expeditions into the desert, but about the desert itself — where dozens of different types of winds inspire the Bedouins to don them with dozens of beautiful names descriptive of their moods.

On the other hand, Caravaggio, who feels safest revealing nothing, pieces together his own knowledge with the clues dropped by the English patient to come up with a plausible theory about his identity, actions, and movements during the war — but not his motivations. Even as his name and his past are gradually unveiled, his character remains elusive — perhaps explaining why Hana is in love with the living remains of a dead man.

Hana and Kip, and their relationship, are the least interesting elements of the novel. Hana’s character functions as the center around which the others meet. As a sapper, Kip’s duty of disarming bombs becomes virtually his sole focus in life. When he learns of the ultimate bomb, the ultimate weapon that even he cannot disarm, and who it is used against, he in his ignorance confronts the English patient — a moment of irony. The villa, an island surrounded by a sea of turmoil and change, is not so remote that the “death of civilisation” cannot reach it.

The best of The English Patient reminded me at times of Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War) in tone and evocations. While not a great novel, it is certainly an interesting, thought-provoking, and worthwhile diversion.

21 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. Highly recommended.

The most well-drawn character in this novel is not Lady Chatterley (Connie, an INFP personality type), her lover Mellors, her husband Clifford, Clifford’s nurse, or any human. It is Clifford’s hometown Tevershall and the surrounding coal district. His home Wragby stands where the great Nottingham Forest of legend once dominated the landscape. Now it is coal — mines, colliers, colliers’ shanties, colliers’ towns, and, most of all, money and ennui. It is dead, as seen through the eyes of Mellors and Connie — dead, lifeless, and grim, slowly sucking away at what is left of humanity and of human tenderness. The only idyllic place is the remnant of the Forest where Mellors is gamekeeper, and even it reeks of the smell of coal and of money and of the folly of money. The colliers and those who command them, the Cliffords, are soulless, dead, and, tellingly, impotent in the most important ways.

D. H. Lawrence has a unique voice and tells this tale in a unique way, albeit heavy-handedly in places. His characters’ sermon-like conversations are sometimes hard to swallow as realistic. But the frustrations and the spiritlessness of the people are real enough and save the novel from becoming too much of an intellectual exercise or a diatribe. I found myself wishing for the more subtle touch of a Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, another novel in which a human story is told against a larger setting, or even of a Tolstoy, but this is more of a story-in-a-box — a limited box. Recommended if you can suspend belief a bit; if you are looking for a good story rather than a great one; and if you are looking not for puerile pleasure in Lawrence’s liberal smattering of “naughty” words, but for a place to begin start asking the questions. There are no answers here, but there is the foundation for a beginning.

3 July 2000
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Mists of Avalon

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The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Recommended.

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is a retelling of Arthurian legend through the eyes of the women surrounding Arthur. This sounds simple enough, but before this one is over, you’ll need a scorecard to remember who is kin to whom and how. Once you figure that out, you’ll want to learn more about the effects of inbreeding, since there is plenty of it here.

Viviane is Lady of the Lake and of Avalon, a mystical island that only those with the Sight can find in the Mists; to those not gifted, it is merely an island with a Christian church and monastery. Taliesen is the Merlin of Britain, the messenger of the [Druid] gods. Viviane’s half-sister and Taliesen’s daughter, Igraine, is married off to Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and in due course gives birth to a daughter, Morgaine. She also is foster mother to her younger sister (half-sister) Morgause, a teenage girl who has the combined gift of great ambition and little conscience and who will play a key role later. The young Igraine resents deeply how Viviane manipulates her, first into marriage with the much-older Gorlois. Later, Viviane’s prediction, which Igraine also resents, that Igraine will fall for Uther Pendragon, comes true. Uther becomes High King after the death of Ambrosius, Gorlois rebels against him, and Igraine conceives Uther’s son, Gwydion, or Arthur, the night before Gorlois’ death. Arthur, as we know, is fated to become The Once and Future King in the Matter of Britain.

The story is not so much about Arthur or Morgaine as about the struggle between paganism and the rise of Christianity, with Arthur as Christian king and Morgaine as pagan priestess. Arthur is installed in a pagan ceremony that leaves Morgaine pregnant with his only son, Mordred — who in this rendering never plays quite the key role assigned him in other Arthurian tales. The plot points pretty much follow the tradition — Arthur marries Guinevere, who has an affair with Lancelot, who ends up married to Elaine. Meanwhile, Viviane is killed, leaving a void in the office of the Lady of the Lake — an office that will be filled, more or less, by another daughter of Taliesen.

Bradley’s sympathies toward the pagans (the feminine) are evident as Morgaine takes over Viviane’s mission of trying to turn Arthur and Britain away from Christianity (the masculine) and back toward the Goddess. As the tale progresses, however, Morgaine becomes an increasingly ruthless and unsympathetic figure, while Arthur appears to be doing what is expedient for Britain; he even manages to make peace with and convert several Saxon kings. Morgaine is too single-minded and fanatical to listen to the counsel of the Druid who becomes Merlin after Taliesen’s death, Kevin, and eventually punishes him for his “betrayal” of the Goddess.

In the end, Arthur may die, but his legacy was already set, as many had already told Morgaine. She leaves her own legacy — a trail of the murders and the deaths of nearly everyone important to her, including two of her lovers and Lancelot’s daughter. Only at the very end does she realise she has lost; Christianity has won. Perhaps this was the way the Goddess wished it, after all, although the price she pays to learn this is very high indeed. She also learns that she has always had the love of a great man, the man who was son, brother, and lover to her — Arthur, King of the Britons.

The Mists of Avalon is a worthy addition to the Arthurian cycle, especially since it takes into account what must have been a very real struggle between the old pagans of Britain and the new Christianity of Rome. The plot is intricate and imaginative, the characters are well drawn (if erratic), there are a few moments of subtlety and beautifully written prose, and there is enough fantasy to make one wonder if there really is a supernatural intervention throughout. Even the lost continent of Atlantis is worked into the tale. Highly recommended for Arthurians and fans of science fiction/fantasy. But don’t forget that scorecard.

6 January 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: American Gothic Stories

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American Gothic Stories ed. and with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates. Highly recommended.

In this 1996 anthology, noted American author Joyce Carol Oates collects American tales of horror and/or the supernatural, from an excerpt from Wieland, or the Transformation (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown, to “Subsoil” (1994) by Nicholson Baker, so that the 50 stories here represent nearly 200 years of the darker side of the American psyche.

The stories, arranged in chronological order, show some clear trends. In early stories, by Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Edgar Allan Poe, religion plays a prominent role. Interestingly, God and his creation are seen as at odds with one another. For example, in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” the forest and the darkness are where Satan meets humanity. “The Tartarus of Maids,” an industrial creation of Herman Melville’s, is set in a remote rural location, contrasted to another Melville story (not included here), “The Paradise of Bachelors,” set in a London gentlemen’s club. Perhaps this conviction that nature is a place of mystery, evil, and fear, explains the early (and current) American drive to conquer it.

Another theme is denial of responsibility for one’s own terrible actions. When called to account for committing some of the most heinous crimes possible, Wieland’s defense is inarguable: He has proved his faith in God by doing that which God desired of him. (Unlike Wieland, the reader will recognise that the “shrill voice” expressing God’s bloody will from behind a “fiery stream” is more likely that of the fallen angel Lucifer.)

A second example is the famous Poe story, “The Black Cat,” in which the narrator, noted from infancy for his “docility and humanity,” becomes a cold-blooded maimer and killer of that which he loves most. To what does he attribute his violence and subsequent fall in fortunes? Not to himself, but to the “Fiend Intemperance,” saying, “for what disease is like Alcohol!” While Poe, a self-medicating alcoholic and bipolar sufferer, seems to have had an early understanding that alcoholism is not a moral deficiency but a disease, his narrator’s choice of scapegoat does not explain the obvious: Most alcoholics do not maim and murder.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman also beats the medical establishment in recognising a pathological condition rather than a purely emotional one: Postpartum depression. Gilman gets her digs in at the predominantly male medical profession — the narrator’s own husband, who makes every misstep conceivable in his attempts to “help” her, is a physician. Feminism and the gothic meet.

As the collection progresses in time, the stores become less religious and psychotic in tone, and some, such as “Snow” by John Crowley and “The Girl Who Loved Animals” by Bruce McAllister, are more science fiction than gothic. “Exchange Value” by Charles Johnson translates the tradition of psychological horror into inner-city terms. “Replacements” by Lisa Tuttle is telling commentary on the battle of the sexes; a literal vampire is preferable as an object of affection, attention, and obsession to the emotional vampire the human male of the story represents.

Other highlights include “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury, which combines gothic sensibilities with science fiction; the unforgettable “Cat in Glass” by Nancy Etchemendy, in which the narrator’s implausible reality is the only one that makes sense; and “In the Icebound Hothouse” by William Goyen, where erotic elements predominate.

A personal favourite, “The Lovely House” by Shirley Jackson, succeeds in evoking the surrealism of that most tangible and ordinary of places — a home.

In some cases, I wish Oates selected more obscure works of equal quality by the same author; for example, I wonder if there are any H. P. Lovecraft short-story alternatives to the oft-anthologised “The Outsider.” Still, it is innovative of Oates to include “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever, who is not traditionally seen as a gothic writer — although “The Swimmer” might have been an even better choice.

With the exception of a handful of selections (most notably Oates’ own “The Temple,” which is unoriginal and uninteresting), this is a rich, diverse collection. In the end, it does leave one wondering, What exactly is gothic? As helpful as some of the information Oates provides in the introduction may be, she offers few if any insights into the nature or history of the American gothic or the authors whose works are found here.

One quibble: I would like to have seen each story’s year of publication included at its end, as is the case with many anthologies. Although the authors’ birth and death dates are part of the contents page, some dates are mentioned in the introduction, and there is a permissions page with copyright dates, there is neither a comprehensive nor an elegant way for the interested reader to place each tale in its historical context — a serious deficiency in an otherwise excellent collection.

13 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Wide Sargasso Sea

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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Highly recommended.

Jean Rhys, troubled by the one-dimensional Bertha Mason in Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre, or perhaps seeing an opportunity to take the depiction of Creoles out of the hands of English writers, decided to “write her a life.” The result is Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre (Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea) finally steps out of the realm of caricature and becomes both human being and symbol. In the Norton Critical Edition edited by Judith L. Raiskin, several commentators expound on their views of what that symbolism means from a Caribbean, British, and feminist perspective.

First, I have noticed that several reviewers mistakenly assume Antoinette is of mixed race (the modern assumption about what Creole means). In the context of the time, however, Creole meant a person of English or European descent living in the Caribbean. Rhys makes this even clearer with terms such as “white Creole” and “white cockroach.” This is an important distinction because it, combined with her French ancestry and poverty, sets Antoinette apart from the wealthy English and from the former slaves on the islands who are of African descent. That theme of having no home, no society, nowhere to go, and, essentially, being nonexistent, is integral to the storyline — and fits in perfectly with Bertha’s role in Jane Eyre.

Another important point is that Antoinette’s mother (as well as her nurse) is from Martinique, a French island at a time when the French and the British were in bitter conflict. This makes Antoinette even more alienated from the societies in which she dwells but of which she is not a part. It’s interesting to note that some of the academic commentators mistakenly attribute her mother’s birthplace and the origins of the nurse Christophine (one calls her a Haitian, no doubt because of that island’s strong associations with obeah) and even get Christophine’s name wrong.

Although there are parallels between Antoinette and Jane, between Antoinette and the Black child Tia, and even between Antoinette and her carefully unnamed husband (Rochester), this is a brilliant novel that does not depend on the reader’s knowledge of Jane Eyre; like Antoinette herself, it stands alone. There are also many cycles throughout the book, including Antoinette’s repeated dream. Antoinette’s lack of identity is reinforced by Rochester’s invocation of a principle of obeah; he calls her Bertha, a name that is not hers (this also emphasizes the predominance of an English identity over that evoked by the French name Antoinette). There are the clear dichotomies between Rochester and his England, where he is a disenfranchised second son, and Antoinette and her Caribbean, where she belongs neither to the wealthy whites or the freed slaves.

Wide Sargasso Sea invokes the Bible several times. Rochester’s father and older brother betray him to Antoinette’s stepfather Mason for 30,000 pounds, alluding to the 30 pieces of silver that Judas Iscariot takes from the Romans for betraying Christ. There are numerous references to a rooster or cock crowing at key moments, as the cock did after Peter had denied Christ three times. The Christian allusions are intermixed with the presence of obeah throughout — just as the Christian faith and obeah beliefs from Africa became intermingled in the Caribbean.

Reality and dream are equally inseparable. “Is England like a dream? . . . She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.” The unnamed husband (Rochester) retorts, “Well, that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.” Their erotic life is no less a dream. “I watched her die many times . . . Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. . . . It was at night that I felt danger and would try to forget it and push it away.”

Rhys, saddled with the pre-determined ending of Jane Eyre, manipulates its foreshadowing and symbolism brilliantly. Rochester says, “I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place.” Obeah woman Christophine responds, “You choose what you give, eh?” In a return to the beginning, Antoinette, determined mad by an equally mad Rochester, burns down Thornfield Hall, just as her own childhood home was burnt by the freed slaves who held her and her mother in such contempt (“white cockroach”).

There are seemingly endless layers of meaning within the slight 112 pages of Wide Sargasso Sea, about ethnic and national identities, about imperialistic and patriarchical repression, about madness, and about the relative relationship between reality and dream. Ultimately, Antoinette reclaims her identity and reality through a dream — and with her death. The more times you read this rich novel about a poor woman, the more you will discover.

8 December 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf