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Book review: The Remains of the Day

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The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Highly recommended.

It’s difficult to believe how much Kazuo Ishiguro packed into The Remains of the Day, a short (by today’s standards), highly praised novel — a lifetime of work and relationships, the realization of inescapable regret, and the hope it is not too late to join the rest of humanity.

Stevens is a butler for an English house that is no longer great, nor is it owned by the family for which it is named. His postwar employer is, instead, an American named Farraday; as a stranger will point out to him later, “An American? Well, they’re the only ones can afford it now.” Farraday “affords” Darlington Hall by shutting much of the house down and using a reduced staff, which Stevens can understand, as the staff that would be available would not be up to his own high standards.

When he receives a sad, lonely letter from Darlington’s former housekeeper, Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn), and later is told by Farraday that he can borrow his employer’s car for a vacation on the road, he weighs the opportunity and decides to take it for “professional reasons” — to see if he can lure back the highly qualified Miss Kenton to her former position.

During the brief journey, he spends much of his time contemplating what “dignity” in his profession means — and whether he lived up to it. After a plethora of recollections about the late Lord Darlington during the prewar years and after his meeting with Miss Kenton, Stevens comes to two great understandings: he did not serve a great man as he thought he had, and, in doing so, he had missed a chance for love and fulfillment. His devotion to Lord Darlington has betrayed him, personally and professionally. “I can’t even say I made my own mistakes,” he laments. “Really — one has to say — what dignity is there in that?”

This revelation does not come quickly or easily to either Stevens or the reader. Each anecdote that Stevens recalls to illustrate a point he wishes to make to himself — the definition of dignity, how he upheld dignity by serving his employer while his own father lay dying — subtly reveals how much he has shut himself down emotionally in order to serve. With each story, it becomes clearer that Lord Darlington is an easily manipulated man, out of his league in world politics but insistent on playing the role of peacemaker — even when it is no longer appropriate or wise.

When his friendship with a woman leads him to fire two Jewish maids, it foreshadows his attempts to influence the British government into appeasing Hitler and the Nazis at any cost. He goes so far as to say that the U.K. should perhaps follow Germany’s lead. “Germany and Italy have set their houses in order by acting . . . See what strong leadership can do if it’s allowed to act. None of this universal suffrage nonsense.” Stevens unwittingly proves Lord Darlington’s point for him — he trusts Lord Darlington’s judgment as blindly as any German trusted Hitler’s, believing that “people like him” are too ignorant to make the decisions that must be made and following the great man contentedly — and thus making a bad decision.

When it comes to Miss Kenton, here too his perception is kept in check by his need for professionalism and dignity. His repeated emphasis on their “professional” relationship and his desire to reconnect with her as a “professional” only highlight the extent to which he will go to suppress his real feelings — and the very real possibilities that existed.

In life and love, Stevens realises he has been avoiding both. In the end, however, there is hope. After sending Miss Kenton home, back to her husband, Stevens turns to “bantering”; that is, engaging with people without resorting to pre-programmed professional phrases –in short, truly interacting with his fellow humans. “After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in — particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.” Indeed it does.

One doesn’t have to be a butler in service to others to use the remains of his or her own day to look back and appraise where one went wrong and where there is still room for hope. The Remains of the Day is an incredible journey toward understanding, written in a concise, spare manner that fits perfectly with the character of Stevens. Few writers have the gift of saying so much in so little space. More should learn it.

18 November 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages

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In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages by Hella Haasse. Highly recommended.

This historical novel has its own interesting history. It was written by a Dutch author virtually unknown in the United States, then an English translation was begun by a postal employee who spoke no Dutch. After his death, it was lost for decades in a closet. The final English translation was completed more than 40 years after the novel was written by a Chicago editor who also spoke no Dutch — but who did have the opportunity to get the author’s approval.

In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages is the fictionalized account of the life of medieval poet and statesman Charles d’Orléans, son of Louis d’Orléans and Valentine Visconti, nephew of Charles VI, known as the Mad King or the Well Beloved. The plot is historically accurate and linear, beginning with the time of Charles’ birth (although not focusing on it) and using that occasion to fill in the historical and character blanks for the novice to French medieval history. Unlike other reviewers, I found the first 100+ pages a fascinating setting of the stage, during which the author succinctly conveys the familial, personal, and political relationships of France’s houses, primarily Burgundy and Orléans.

Although it is clear from the outset that Philippe the Bold of Burgundy is the nemesis of a united France and Louis Orléans (his nephew, brother to Charles VI, and father of Charles d’Orléans) is his less selfishly motivated, more trustworthy counterpart, the novel does not fall into the trap of black-and-white villains and heroes. Burgundy and his successors are not evil personified; they are men who know how to look out for their own power. Louis and Charles d’Orléans, both flawed in their occasional lack of will and indecisiveness, in their own way look after themselves, but also attempt to keep France’s greater interests in mind. The most poignant moment early on is a conversation between Louis and his insane brother during one of his rare moments of lucidity — and the ensuing reversion of power to Burgundy.

Charles is born into not only all the internal conflicts within France and the ongoing battles with England, but into a war he must wage lifelong with himself — the conflict between his poet’s soul and his inherited role as a statesman and leader of the House of Orléans. A scholar at heart, he must lead his house against Burgundy and his men against the English at Agincourt, where he is captured. Held prisoner for 25 years in England, Charles uses the time to become one of the leading poets of the Middle Ages, yearning for ideals of love, peace, and beauty — the very things that have escaped him all of his predestined life. He will not find them upon his return to France, as he is once more swallowed by leviathan internal and external conflicts and the need for his skills as a negotiator/arbiter. He is, as he says in one poem, “all rusted over with nonchaloir [nonchalance].” Finally, he promises he will “not disavow the deepest desires of [his] heart” and “no longer give [himself] up to the sin of unhappiness” — a promise his position, his role, and the demands of political reality never allow him to fulfill.

The novel features an array of complex characters and their relationships and interactions, a compelling plot, a fascinating time in the history of England and France, and a spectacular background portrayed in brilliant colours as in a tapestry. Best of all, the novel is meticulously researched and as historically accurate as any fiction can be. Partway through the book, I realised that this novel could, if handled correctly, make a near-perfect epic movie.

In a Dark Wood Wandering has inspired me to look into the life and poetry of Charles d’Orléans, the history of Louis d’Orléans and Charles VI, incidental characters such as François Villon and Agnes Sorel, and so much more. For the history buff, the medieval tinkerer, or the person who likes a thoughtful tale, I highly recommend In a Dark Wood Wandering. Let’s all be grateful that it was rediscovered at last.

7 October 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Age of Innocence

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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Highly recommended.

A classic novel made famous by a recent movie, The Age of Innocence is the story of a society man, Newland Archer, caught between two very different women. On the one hand is May Welland, the virginal Diana of New York society, whose seeming frankness and innocence discourage and oppress him: “Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile.” All this is “supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”

Her counterpart is her cousin Countess Ellen Olenska, vaguely exotic, vaguely dangerous, forbidden — primarily because she is not the “artificial product” of society, but a genuine, sensual woman whose independent way of thinking is enough to tacitly and then overtly banish her from the very company that Newland’s life is built around. She is “different,” as Archer will later discuss with one of his children. No one else would say, “Why not make one’s own fashions?” thus giving a voice to what Archer himself deep down believes but can’t put into practice.

Ironically, it is May who first forces him and Ellen together, against his will, in her efforts to be kind to her cousin, who has just returned from Europe. As he sees more of “poor Ellen,” estranged from her emotionally abusive husband and seemingly vulnerable to the wiles of the wealthy outsider scoundrel Julius Beaufort, he finds himself returning again and again to her until he realises he is in love with her — long after the reader has reached that conclusion. He resolves the dilemma by rushing his marriage to May, which makes it that much worse. Thus ensues a delicate balance between the life he has chosen with May, with whom he now realises he has no emotional bond, and the life he would choose if he were more sure of himself, more sure that being true to oneself is more important than being true to one’s system.

Nearly every character is memorable — from the massive Mrs. Manson Mingott, May and Ellen’s grandmother who is old enough and skilled enough to intuit all and manipulate all; to the womanizing Lawrence Lefferts, whose behavior is acceptable because he knows how to play the game, how things are “done”; to the frigid bastions of society, the van der Luydens; to May’s mother, who cannot be exposed in any way to “unpleasantness”; to Archer’s virginal sister Janey, who lives life vicariously through gossip and guesswork.

Many scenes and locations are equally vivid: Beaufort’s lavish house and party; the contrast of the van der Luydens’ dinner party; Archer and May’s conventional and stifling honeymoon, more sporty than romantic or passionate; Archer’s pursuit of May in Florida and his following Ellen to the Blenkers’ and then to Boston; a revealing ride with Ellen in May’s brougham; Mrs. Mingott’s house in the middle of “nowhere,” where she rules like a queen and where the politics are only slightly less complicated than those of Elizabeth I’s court — all unforgettable places and scenes.

In less intelligent or skilled hands, the plot could have become mere melodrama, but Wharton knows how her society worked, who inhabited it, what it forgave, and what it could not pardon. Affairs are pardonable; treachery, real or perceived, to the framework of what holds these people together is not. In the end, May saves Archer from himself — and dooms him to her kind of life by doing so. When he gives up all his dreams, he looks into May’s “blue eyes, wet with tears.” She knows what he does not and remains cold as the moon that the goddess Diana rules.

It could be said that May and Ellen represent two sides of Newland Archer — both are people he is afraid to become. If he is like May, he experiences death of the mind, death of the soul, death of the emotions, becoming what he is expected to be to keep the foundations that society is built upon steady, strong, and standing. (It is no coincidence that a theme in Wharton’s The House of Mirth is the vulnerability of that house to the influx of modern ways.) If he becomes like Ellen, he will lose everything that he has built his own foundations on. In the end, he is neither, nor is he himself. His tragedy is not that much less than that of The House of Mirth‘s Lily Bart, both victims of a society they need but cannot survive.

28 April 2001
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: 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: 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