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Book review: The Black Arrow

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The Black Arrow. By Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1963. 256 pages.

With the War of the Roses as its backdrop, The Black Arrow blends the romance of young love and the excitement of its hero’s initiation into war and politics. The theme of loyalty runs throughout — loyalty to parents, guardians, leaders, followers, lovers, and oneself.

England’s loyalties are divided between Lancaster and York, although the distinction makes little difference to the country’s more practical citizens. “It is the ruin of this kind land,” a woman said. “If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots.” When the naive young hero, Richard Shelton, reassures her that men “cannot better die than for their natural lord,” another man points out, “No natural lord of mine . . . I followed the Walsinghams . . . And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did it; call ye that natural?”

Despite young Dick’s idealism, which makes him faithful to his guardian and to the men with whom he has served, despite many disturbing rumors, it soon becomes apparent that most men are loyal primarily to their self-interests, whether they seek power like Richard Crookback or favor and riches like Dick’s guardian, Sir Daniel Brackley. Even the mysterious “Jon Amend-All” of the black arrow, whose objective is to revenge himself and his friends on Brackley, is found collecting rents from Brackley’s cottagers, acknowledging that they will suffer the hardship of having to pay twice. The man behind “Jon Amend-All” is no beneficent Robin Hood, but as cold and crafty a political operative as Brackley himself.

Brackley’s loyalties are soon explained. “I lie in Kettley till I have sure tidings of the war, and then ride to join me with the conqueror . . . Tosspot and Shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o’ one side, waiting.” As Clipsby says, “For, indeed, he is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York.”

Fleeing from one danger into another, Dick finally understands that he cannot trust Brackley simply because he is Dick’s guardian, or even Ellis Duckworth as his savior and protector. The only person upon whom he can rely is the girl he loves, who, ironically, was intended to be his wife in one of Brackley’s financial maneuvers. The black arrow flies from Tunstall Forest to Kettley, then through wetlands back through Tunstall to the Moat House and on to Shoreby, with treachery and the threat of war hanging over all.

With every adventure, Dick’s loyalty turns more inward on himself and his heart’s desire. He is loyal to York because Ellis Duckworth is and Daniel Brackley isn’t. When he finds himself rapidly in and out of Richard Crookback’s favor, he is “neither glad nor sorry.” Danger and treachery transform Dick into a more mature man who recognizes that loyalty is neither won nor lost so easily or quickly. In one of the novel’s strangest and weakest scenes, he proves his loyalty to his bride-to-be by rejecting the advances of her best friend, peculiar as they are.

The series of events that makes Dick a man is his theft of the Good Hope, its subsequent destruction, and the death of the captain’s man, Tom. “Dick’s heart smote him at what he heard. Until that moment he had not perhaps thought twice of the poor skipper who had been ruined by the loss of the Good Hope; so careless, in those days, were men who wore arms of the goods and interests of their inferiors . . .” Dick achieves his aims, but at the cost of many lives and the prosperity of the innocent Arblaster, who mourns “my man Tom” until the end of his days.

As a protagonist, Dick is refreshingly and painfully human, at least outside battle. While brave, he lacks the ability to pick up on clues that are obvious to his less-sheltered acquaintances, including those about the true nature of Jack Matcham. He suffers remorse for what he has done and begins to ask others like Ellis Duckworth to reconsider their course. He has the mercy that Richard Crookback and Brackley lack.

Whatever its historical flaws (some of which Stevenson points out in footnotes), The Black Arrow is beautifully written, with well-drawn characters, a plot that rarely stalls, realistically bloody battle scenes, and dialogue that is often poetic without being jarring. While not Stevenson’s greatest effort, The Black Arrow is exciting and fun for anyone of any age who loves a solid historical drama.

3 February 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Cranford

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Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited by Elizabeth Porges Watson. New introduction and notes by Charlotte Mitchell. ISBN 0-19-283209-3. Recommended.

Not a novel, not an anthology of short stories, Cranford is perhaps best described as a cohesive series of vignettes. Recounted by a young woman of about 30 from the city of Drumble [Manchester], these stories depict family, friendship, and love lost and found in a village dominated by poor but genteel spinsters and widows. “. . . all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.” Small, rural, and elitist in its way, Cranford is a place out of time, where faded fashions and proprieties still matter.

Gaskell begins Cranford with a series of descriptive statements. Some are accurate, while others prove to be ironic. For example, “Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.” While discovering Cranford and the Amazons who possess it, we also learn the dry perspective and voice of the narrator, who clearly loves the village while gently highlighting the foibles of its female inhabitants. “But I will answer for it, the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in wear in England, was seen in Cranford — and seen without a smile.”

Like Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Cranford is focused on gender roles and the different lives of women and men. The sexes share many characteristics; Captain Brown and Peter Jenkyns display the thoughtful, neighborly solicitude associated with women (with Peter going so far as to don a woman’s dress), while Miss Jenkyns (the woman Peter impersonates) exhibits a manly will and resolution. It is the opportunities they have and the way in which they live that separates the sexes. Captain Brown, Peter, and Signor Brunoni have traveled and seen some of the world, and have even influenced it, while Miss Jenkyns, Miss Matty, Miss Price, the narrator, and their friends are constrained by their gender, gentility, and social code to hearth and home. Here, they perform their small household tasks, including ensuring that their maidservants are not disturbed or distracted by “followers,” or interested young men. The social code that prevents any of them from working in “trade” also determines the hours that can be spent outside the home. “Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls . . . ‘from twelve to three are our calling-hours.'”

In such a small, interconnected village, everything that happens is noteworthy, and every decision is important if the occasionally cruel social order is to be maintained. “The whole town knew and kindly regarded Miss Betty Barker’s Alderney,” whose fall into a lime-pit warrants Captain Brown’s advice, “Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers . . .,” so the narrator can ask the reader incredulously, “Do you ever seen cows dressed in grey flannel in London?” Miss Matty’s decision not to marry against her family’s wishes keeps the peace at great personal cost, and her wistful decision to allow Martha to have a follower recompenses her later when the outside world intrudes into her realm with its ugly realities — one of the many signs that Cranford must and will change. When Lady Glenmire renounces her title and takes the name of Mrs. Hoggins upon her remarriage, Cranford reels with shock and dismay, and it takes Peter Jenkyns, and his broader perspective from India, to reconcile the village and its de facto leader, Mrs. Jamieson, with the new ways.

The narrator, who divides her time between her father in the progressive world of Drumble and the slowly and reluctantly changing Cranford, finds herself under the village’s influence. As an observer, she describes the complex set of rules that govern Cranford society and the social slights they necessitate, not without a sense of regret. She is aware of the absurdity of Cranford society’s beliefs and behavior combined with expediency, such as the occasion of Miss Betty Barker’s party for the Cranford elite. “‘Oh, gentility!’ thought I, ‘can you endure this last shock?'” when “all sorts of good things for supper” appear. “. . . we thought it better to submit graciously, even at the cost of our gentility — which never ate suppers in general — but which, like most non-supper-eaters, was particularly hungry on all special occasions.” More seriously, she pities Miss Matty and her lost love and life, and like her other well-meaning friends determines that she shall be happy.

With the arrival of Signor Brunoni and the ensuing panic over the perceived crime wave that seems to hit Cranford, the narrator loses some of her wryness and seems to become nearly as frightened by the rumors of strangers and robberies as her elderly friends. It is the new outsider, Lady Glenmire, who “never had heard of any actual robberies; except that two little boys had stolen some apples from Farmer Benson’s orchard and that some eggs had been missed on a market-day off Widow Hayward’s stall.” Even while caught up in the panic, however, “I could not help being amused at Jenny’s position . . ..” When she speaks of Jenny’s ghost, the narrator says, “. . . for there was no knowing how near the ghostly head and ears might be . . ..”

Through the narrator, who seems to represent Gaskell’s own perspective, Cranford pokes gentle fun at a time and place that had already become a fairy tale-like setting, where goodness outdoes pettiness, justice prevails over setbacks and hardships, and even the prodigal son (or prince) can return to set things right. In Cranford, Gaskell reminds the reader of a recent past that is both amusing and moving, a time to look upon fondly but without regret for the changes that Peter and the marriage of Lady Glenmire/Mrs. Hoggins bring about. The one constant in life is change, and inCranford change is at least as much for the better as for the worse.

29 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text

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The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with notes and a preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Highly recommended.

The west was conquered and the midwest cultivated, so in The Great Gatsby set in the 1920s we turn our attention back east, where to midwestern narrator Nick Carraway and his neighbor Jay Gatsby the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ East Egg dock seems to represent the fertile promise of America, and the dreams and the money that are supposed to make them reality. Some dreams, like the dream of recapturing a romantic past that never really was, become nightmares.

Although he witnesses and participates in deception, including both sides of the Buchanans’ infidelity, Nick wants to appear to be a reliable narrator, which he emphasizes when he says up front, “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me.” Later, Nick identifies himself with “the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him, too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Nick’s authorial viewpoint sets the tone for his story and his observations of the brutish Tom Buchanan; his shallow and unsatisfied wife, Daisy; his class-climbing mistress, Myrtle Wilson; and the mysterious Jay Gatsby, the hero of the different unbelievable fictions he tells (when Nick asks him what part of the middle-west he is from, Gatsby responds enigmatically, “San Francisco.”) A confused Nick hears solemnity in Gatsby’s voice and sees sincerity in his look, despite the obvious prevarication.

The most influential literal voice is that of Daisy Buchanan. Lacking the romantic substance for which Gatsby has idealized her as the symbol of his youth — his real youth — Daisy becomes a siren with a siren call. Nick writes, “The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.” Her friend, Jordan Baker, tells Nick, “. . . and yet there’s something in that voice of hers. . . .” Later, Nick mentions that the “exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain,” and “I think that voice held him [Gatsby] most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed — that voice was a death song.” Nick says of Daisy, “Unlike Gatsby and Tom, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs . . .” By contrast, Myrtle is earthy, with “an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continuously smoldering.” Tom, whose affairs we are told have included a hotel chambermaid, seems mostly unsusceptible to Daisy’s voice, while even Nick notes its influence and Gatsby is destroyed by it and by his desire for the real past that every story he tells effectually effaces.

A compact novel concentrated on only a few months in the lives of a few characters, The Great Gatsby is rich with symbolism. During his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby almost stops time literally by knocking Nick’s clock down, but instinctively he catches it before it falls. “We all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor,” Nick writes. Gatsby even apologizes as though he had broken the clock and as though it were a significant loss that his countless money can’t replace. As the reunion continues, Nick says of Gatsby, “. . . in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.”

Throughout, time is a consistent theme; it is part of what Gatsby futilely endeavors to recapture. He can reinvent a past in which he was “educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years,” but he and his means cannot recreate the real past. As Nick observes, “Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” He adds later, “Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”

The Great Gatsby reminds me of The Count of Monte Cristo. Both Gatsby and the count start life as ordinary men and, through circumstances and the determination to achieve a much-desired goal, transform themselves into extraordinary men, ciphers to all but the most observant of their fellows. One seeks to revenge a past wrong; the other ignores the present and tries to reinvent the past as though there had never been a Tom Buchanan and as though Daisy had never loved him. Both efforts take time and unlimited patience and money, but only one is successful. The count revenges his past so he can live better in the future, but Gatsby fails because he does not understand, or want to understand, that the past is written and that the future begins with the present.

Somewhat lacking in heart — the only character who displays genuine emotion is Tom Wilson, Myrtle’s despised husband — The Great Gatsby captures the jaded excesses of the post-World War I era and the American faith in time, money, and effort as the sources and creators of success. The novel also shows the greater power of circumstance and fate. I’ve read The Great Gatsby only once, but to appreciate its structure, symbolism, and richness would take several re-readings. Read once for pleasure, then read again to explore Fitzgerald’s craft.

21 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Highly recommended.

“It was 7 minutes after midnight.” Every detail matters in the solution of the mystery of the neighbor’s murdered dog, which is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. That’s partly because the detective on the case is Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy with autism, a penchant for numbers, a genius for math, and a determination to solve the mystery and write a book.

Clues abound, but Christopher’s strictly literal view of the world prevents him from seeing or understanding them, even as he records them. In his mind, metaphors are “lies,” and phrases like “raining cats and dogs” and “you’ll catch your death from cold” are incomprehensible nonsense. As the story behind Wellington’s death unfolds, Haddon masterfully gives the reader the clues that escape Christopher while allowing him to pursue the more logical details he does understand and to get help with the more subtle ones.

Along the way, Christopher offers insight into the autistic mind and people’s reaction to it. While he cannot read emotions or pick up on verbal cues and body language (unless they are explained to him; for example, he knows that a raised voice may indicate anger), his mind processes details the average person would miss. While we might see cows and some flowers in a field, he knows how many cows, he can draw each of their individual patterns, and he can name the species of flowers.

Just as Christopher doesn’t understand why everyone won’t or can’t notice these important details, the people he encounters, while quickly picking up that he is different, can’t figure out how and adjust themselves. His working-class father tries to, but his understanding of his son seems limited to an intellectual rather than an emotional one. He knows that Christopher hates to be touched and is wise enough to develop a hand signal that signifies love in lieu of a hug, but he doesn’t understand at an emotional level the pain that touch causes his son. Not surprisingly, he can become frustrated when Christopher can’t behave in the normal way. If Christopher’s perception is limited by autism, his father’s is limited to what he knows and can see. He cannot feel what it’s like to be Christopher any more than Christopher can figure out that his father’s quiet, slow speech indicated tightly controlled anger.

As Christopher works on the mystery and his book, he learns how to do things he may not have thought possible; for example, he survives the ordeal of going to a crowded train station and traveling alone. More significantly, he learns how to twist and withhold the truth when necessary. When his father makes him promise not to do something, Christopher rationally determines what he can and cannot do within the very literal sense of the promise, thereby breaking it in spirit. As he pursues his investigation, he seems to grasp that he is on questionable ground according to his own standards, even as he senses that the mystery is important enough to justify his rationalizations. By the end, he can say with pride and with some truth, “I can do anything.”

Haddon uses a simple technique to convey the linear, mathematical nature of Christopher’s mind and thought process; as the story builds, Christopher begins many if not most of his sentences with “and.” “And I bent down . . . And I walked after him . . . And someone said . . . And I said . . . And the man . . . And then I heard . . .” The use of “and” not only sounds genuine, but it is also additive — that is, mathematical. For someone who squares numbers in his head to stay calm, “and” is one way to manage the sensory and emotional overload he encounters in his quest to determine the killer.

Only someone who is autistic can say whether Haddon has captured the thought process and emotions accurately. Even if The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is not a complete insight into the autistic mind, it is a valuable one, and a reminder that not everyone sees the world we see in exactly the same way we do.

7 October 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story

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Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story by Elizabeth Gaskell. Introduction and notes by Pam Morris. Highly recommended.

With its fairy-tale beginning (“In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house . . .”), the subtitle of Wives and Daughters is gently ironic. While the basic plot is standard — boy and girl meet and overcome many obstacles, including themselves — Gaskell’s tale is as much about the rapidly changing Victorian world as about Molly Gibson and her provincial village of Hollingford.

Set before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters consciously brings together England’s aristocratic past, represented by Squire Hamley and the upstart earl and countess of Cumnor Towers, and the future, represented by Molly Gibson and Squire Hamley’s sons, especially Roger. The elder son, Osborne, puts his own interests and more modern sensibilities above those of his father, while Roger envisions a future of science, exploration, and expansionism. To Mrs. Gibson, who marries to avoid having to work and dependence on the aristocracy, Osborne offers her daughter an entrée into at least the landed gentry, whereas Roger is merely a second son demeaning himself by dabbling in the sciences. Although renowned in London for his travels and discoveries, Roger becomes worthy of her notice only when he is taken into the inner circle of Lord Hollingford and the Towers as a result of his personal achievements.

While the visible action takes place within the small circle of Hollingford, Cumnor Towers, and Hamley Hall, Gaskell encompasses the widening world of rural England. Cynthia attends school in France while the Hamleys are off to Cambridge. The Hamley home is filled with relics from India, while Lady Harriet advises the Miss Brownings on how to obtain the best-priced Indian tea. Cynthia returns from her jaunts to London fashionably dressed and with hints of admirers, while Roger comes back from Africa browned, bearded, and mature in aspect and mien. Even villagers like Miss Hornblower feel the pull of the larger world and the new technology. As Mr. Gibson tells Molly, ” . . . if these newfangled railways spread, as they say they will, we shall all be spinning about the world; ‘sitting on tea-kettles,’ as Phoebe Browning calls it.”

The spheres of the sexes are vastly different. Clare Kirkpatrick thinks “how pleasant it would be to have a husband once more; some one who would work while she sat at her elegant ease in a prettily-furnished drawing-room.” Even as Mr. Gibson thwarts the advances of Molly’s first suitor, he tries to keep his “little goosey” unprepared for anything but life under the protection of a man, either father or husband. He advises her governess, “Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself.” As men of science, he and Roger believe themselves to be dispassionate and rational, yet Molly senses their obvious mistakes before they do and that they are more deeply affected than they appear to be. Gaskell’s characters, however, do not follow stereotypes. Lord Cumnor, a garrulous gossip, and Squire Hamley, an openly emotional man, are “womanly” in their ways, while Lady Cumnor and her daughter, Lady Harriet, are models of independence and detachment. Rather than assert her own independence and risk upsetting her excitable, patriarchal husband, Mrs. Hamley wastes away, ironically depriving her husband of her management of his emotions and their expression.

Molly is raised to suppress her feelings. As Mrs. Gibson’s values clash with those of Mr. Gibson and Molly, he is able to ride off and immerse himself in his work, while Molly can only swallow her emotions or, as a last resort, hide them in solitude. There is hope, however, that Molly can avoid the life for which Mr. Gibson is preparing her, that of an obedient wife. Her life as companion to Mrs. Hamley shows her impressionable mind the folly of pride and the lasting harm it causes as it separates Mr. Hamley and his elder son. Her natural curiosity and intelligence, consciously discouraged by Mr. Gibson, are encouraged by Roger Hamley, who bridges the ancient Hamley past and the future of science and discovery. This future will be built on achievements, not family name, which makes young Osborne’s parentage significant only to traditionalists like the squire and Mrs. Gibson. Their vision of the possibilities never extends beyond their own desires and concerns.

In Wives and Daughters, Gaskell addresses myriad issues important to her and her contemporaries — medicine, science, marriage, the family, gender roles, monetary wealth and land wealth, rural mores, the perception of English heritage and strength and French decadence, exploration, and change. Her characters are so richly drawn that the reader begins to anticipate Mrs. Gibson’s “infinite nothings” and Mr. Gibson’s searing irony. Gaskell imbues some of them with an enticing air of unsolved mystery. What are Mr. Gibson’s origins? Who was Jeanie, his first love, and why did he not marry her? How does that and his other early relationships influence his behavior toward Molly? Why, at age 28, does Lady Harriet refuse a good match and seemingly scorn romance? Gaskell does not judge her characters — even Mrs. Gibson has redeeming qualities — nor does she reveal all their secrets. Wives and Daughters is an enlightening, captivating, and, despite its unfinished state, satisfying look at Victorian life and society, the influence of which is still felt.

30 September 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide

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The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams. Highly recommended.

If finding out your house is about to be bulldozed to make way for a highway bypass is unnerving and life changing, imagine finding out the same is about to happen to your planet. Thus begin the adventures of human Arthur Dent in The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams.

Of course Adams is not the first writer to use science fiction to satirize the foibles of the human race and its institutions and culture (including science fiction), but he does does so with a rare combination of sophistication, style, and humor. His description of why the bypass is being built and why Arthur doesn’t know about it alone starts the series off on a scathing note. In the universe of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the book within a book), people sometimes survive government and corporate bureaucracy and personal greed and thoughtlessness, but more often destruction and waste seem to result.

Throughout his post-Earth adventures with Ford Prefect, the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, fellow human Trillian (Tricia McMillan), and Marvin the perpetually downcast robot who takes lows to new highs, Arthur is the proverbial Everyman, whose struggles to make tea (and thus achieve some sense of ordinariness) in his new life result in near-destruction. At one point, he happily serves as “Sandwich Maker” on a pre-technological world that views this skill with awe.

Adams is perhaps strongest in his numerous asides in which he talks about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the publication for which Ford Prefect researches and writes, and the Encyclopedia Galactica; the nature of improbability; the humorously and seemingly invariable and inevitable tragic histories of various planets and races; and various theories surrounding such things as time, space, and infinity, almost always with a slyly serious wink about the absurdity of it all. These digressions allow his imagination and his intellect to soar and in many cases are more interesting than the story itself. This may go back to how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins—that people want to move between Points A and B very fast, and that people at Point C in between (Everyman Arthur Dent) “often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.” There seem to be no Points A and B in Arthur’s new universe; there are infinite points and lines and continuums, most of them absurd in one way or another.

With the exception of Trillian, Arthur’s fellow travelers are well drawn. The most amusing is, sadly, Marvin, whose programmed depression is annoying and whose perception is accurate.

There are ingenious ideas scattered throughout the six stories, including the irony of a lorry driver who hates the perpetual rain that follows him no matter where he goes because, unbeknownst to him, he is a Rain God.

The problem is that many of these ideas, like life events, crop up randomly, play themselves out, and then seem to fall flat in the end. Undoubtedly, this is part of the universe as Adams sees it; it is made up of absurdity upon absurdity, which may not have neat Point A to Point B progressions. Some of this lack of cohesion also may be the result of transforming material written for episodic radio into book form; a certain sense and continuity may have been lost as the author diverts his tale to Points E, M, and T.

The first two books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, are the best in the series. Life, the Universe and Everything is, almost as the title promises, too contorted and meandering. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which takes place on Earth, lacks an engaging focal point, which makes it seem long and tedious at times. “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” appears to be a throwaway story reflecting the author’s views. Mostly Harmless, written at what Adams admitted was a bad time in his life, lacks the élan of the earliest books; it is more downbeat in attitude than its predecessors and borders on determined and grim. Marvin is long gone as comic relief; the weakest character, Tricia/Trillian, now moves to the forefront but without further development; and even Ford Prefect has sobered up, quite out of character. It as though Adams wanted his characters, most notably Random, to reflect his anger and depression and his universe to end without possibility of resurrection—in the same way that Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes.

Underneath the satire, the humor, and the bitterness, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide is imaginative and thought provoking, revealing a rare story-telling and writing gift that is brilliant both on the surface and in the depths.

Saturday, 28 July 2007.
© 2007 by Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten with an introduction by Margaret Smith. Highly recommended.

The elaborate Victorian prose style of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall does not obscure a story that is recognizably modern—that of an idealistic young woman who wants to save her brutish, alcoholic husband from himself.

Reviled for its “morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal,” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall continues the theme Brontë began in Agnes Grey—that nurture’s role in shaping in a person’s character and future is more important than parents and other authority figures realize or take responsibility for. As Helen says of Arthur, she wants “to do my utmost to . . . make him what he would have been if he had not, from the beginning, had a bad, selfish, miserly father . . . and a foolish mother who indulged him to the top of his bent . . . doing her utmost to encourage those germs of folly and vice it was her duty to suppress.”

Helen’s background is also revealing. Raised by her uncle and aunt, she exemplifies the modern concept of the adult child of an alcoholic—self-righteous and controlling. Knowing that Arthur is flawed, she marries him with the objective of changing him and saving him for God. It can be speculated that Arthur, intrigued by Helen’s youth, beauty, passion, and apparent demureness, envisions making her a more worldly woman. Neither knows the other beyond the surface, and each seems to want to transform the other into his or her own image. This is not the basis for a happy or durable union, as Helen learns.

Failing to control the father, Helen turns her attentions to her son. Quite rightly, she is horrified when Arthur makes his son a pawn in their marital battle, teaching him the manly Victorian arts of sport and predation, love of drinking and carousing, camaraderie without friendship, and disrespect for and the subjugation of women. Even Brontë seemed to be aware that Helen’s approach is also disturbing in its own way, for the child-rearing debate between Helen and her new neighbors is the basis for an entire chapter before we learn her history. While many of Brontë’s contemporaries would have agreed with the vicar’s argument that experience builds character, Helen slowly reveals how experience of the wrong kind without a moderating influence can destroy character.

The structure of the novel is undoubtedly awkward; it is unlikely that anyone would share such intimate details and thoughts as well as another person’s entire personal journal with even the dearest friend without a compelling reason. Gilbert, who is introduced, perhaps symbolically, as a hunter of predators (hawks), disappears from the story as he reads Helen’s tale. This diminishes him, relegating him to Helen’s redemption and reward. On occasion, for example, in “Domestic Scenes,” Brontë’s tense changes and irregularities make Helen’s journal lose its currency and distract the reader with lapses into a novel-like tone.

The structure does, however, allow the reader (and Gilbert) to meet the reclusive, protective, guarded, almost-grim Helen before we find out about the life that has shaped her and her inflexible opinions. The revelation of her character, and the strength she has to flout convention when her conscience and sense of duty require it, helps to complete Gilbert’s growth from sarcastic village wit to the kind of mature man more worthy of her.

Brontë’s stated purpose was “to tell the truth, for the truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it . . . Let it not be imagined, however, that I consider myself competent to reform the errors and abuses of society, but only that I would fain contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim . . . .” Helen’s story, like that of Agnes, reveals the uglier aspects of Victorian family life, usually idealized, that resulted when women had few rights, men abused theirs, parents did not take responsibility for instilling healthy values (such as respect for life) in their children, and divorce was out of the reach of most. Beyond the impressive gates and parks, within the stately estates, behind the closed doors, lurked family and social problems that could not be hidden or denied away. Helen’s story was disturbing not because of her depiction of Arthur’s demeaning, childish, and amoral behavior, but because she exposes the falseness of the idyllic family life her society held dear and because she is willing to abandon what society considers her duty to her marriage to perform her real duty to herself and her son.

Anne Brontë’s work has been compared unfavorably to that of her sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Yet its psychological insights, including the very coarseness and brutality of which contemporary critics complained, make up for Brontë’s lack of literary finesse. Her portrayal of Arthur, the fun-loving, amoral, pettish, selfish hedonist, and his boorish social circle resonates today. Despite his country gentleman status and his debt-supported wealth, Arthur is recognizable in all times and classes. Helen, too, is familiar as the long-suffering wife who finally takes action when her child is threatened.

Although much has changed since Brontë’s time, her characterizations and insights on family life hold true today, making The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a classic in its own right.

Sunday, 15 July 2007.
© 2007 by Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: The Lost World

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The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle with an introduction by Michael Crichton and Diane Johnson and notes by Julia Houston. Recommended.

By Arthur Conan Doyle’s day, advances in scientific method and technology had broadened our knowledge and shrunk our world. The popularity of novels such as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne lay in part in the mystery of the unknown and inaccessible places in which they were set and their effect on a human imagination that probably felt crowded and claustrophobic. The Lost World continues the tradition with a wry nod to the reality that events recounted by narrator/journalist E. D. Malone were no longer possible or even imaginable.

The reader is privy to the humor long before the narrator, who is sent to seek adventure by the woman he loves. “It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won, for they would be reflected upon me,” Gladys tells Malone.

Malone seeks adventure to impress his ladylove, while Professors Challenger and Summerlee aim to distinguish themselves in the crowded field of zoology, and Lord John Roxton desires to set himself apart from his fellow big-game hunters. In his world, anyone can hang a rhino head on the wall, but how many have the chance to take a dinosaur?

They are extraordinary men, like those of The Mysterious Island. Intentionally or not, Conan Doyle pays homage to Verne when Malone writes, “I have as companions three remarkable men, men of great brain-power and of unshaken courage” and “Man was always the master.” In the post-Darwin age, Verne and Conan Doyle were ready to demonstrate that nature was at the service of resourceful man.

The humor in The Lost World, such as the resemblance of the ape-men king to Professor Challenger and their subsequent treatment of him, is balanced by scenes such as the narrator’s vivid description of a pit into which he falls. “This bottom was littered with great gobbets of flesh, most of which was in the last state of putridity.” The addition of, “The atmosphere was poisonous and horrible” is gratuitous for the imaginative reader, whose mind pictures “these lumps of decay.

The Lost World is strongest when it is focused on the characters, the plateau, and the dinosaurs, especially the pterodactyls, and weakest when attention is turned to the plateau’s anthropomorphic life. While Challenger believes it to be a watershed in evolutionary history, the battle that determines supremacy is anticlimactic compared to the descriptions of the swamp of the pterodactyls, the glade of the iguanodons, and Malone’s death trap.

The amount of time spent on the plateau is short, but seems tediously prolonged by some of Conan Doyle’s plot choices. The ending is predictable, as it was meant to be, and only the surprise prepared by Challenger for the Zoological Institute adds interest to it. While Verne wisely destroyed his creation, thus making it possible, Conan Doyle leaves his plateau intact, with conflicting hints from the narrator that it is impossible to find and that it will someday be exploited by hunters, adventurers, and other men.

When man finds undisturbed nature, he is bound to ruin its very character. Within a week of their arrival, the four adventurers and their technology have altered a longstanding balance of power. A paradise that never was is no more.

As with Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s strength is in creating characters with a handful of memorable traits — the pompously arrogant Challenger, the acerbic Summerlee, the courageous and bluff Lord John, and the young Malone, whose naivete and powers of observation make him a suitable stand-in for the reader.

Despite its weaknesses of plot and its Eurocentricity apparently bolstered by Darwin’s work (the Europeans are clearly the fittest, with Indians and Africans serving as subject races and “half-breeds” as a treacherous one), The Lost World is still a good adventure story, even if dated. Suspend your modern sensibilities and beliefs and enjoy the possibilities of an impossible tale.

2 June 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Custom of the Country

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The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton with an introduction by Diane Johnson and notes by Benjamin Dreyer. Highly recommended.

In The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton creates one of the most unlikable, even despicable, characters I know of in American fiction. Undine Spragg is not a murderer, sociopath, or monster, but an ambitious young woman determined to climb New York’s social ladder to the very top. The ambitions in themselves are not inherently bad, and other characters clearly share them. It is Undine’s utter lack of regard for anyone else, from her aging parents to her neglected son, that makes her contemptible. What makes her chilling is the odd combination of ingenuousness and its opposite; with rare exceptions she is oblivious to the rights, aspirations, and feelings of others if they do not pertain to her own objectives.

In Wharton’s world, choosing the right man was as important to a society woman’s future as selecting the right college, graduate school, or first job is today for a professional woman. For Undine and her friends, divorce carries no more significance than as a means to get out of the wrong job. As she tells her fiancé’s shocked traditional New York family, “I guess Mabel’ll get a divorce pretty soon . . . They like each other well enough. But he’s been a disappointment to her . . . Mabel realizes she’ll never really get anywhere till she gets rid of him.” This dinner conversation foreshadows the rest of the novel.

Wharton reveals Undine’s competitive nature through her childhood rivalry with Indiana Frusk, and her unsatisfied, reaching one through her travels with her parents. Undine will never be happy because there will always be someone with something she doesn’t have, whether it is greater wealth, fame, or a title or position.

By marrying Undine, Ralph hopes to save her from “Van Degenism,” which helps to set up the irony after irony found throughout The Custom of the Country. Ralph doesn’t know that Undine not only desires “Van Degenism,” but she wants to define it. A would-be poet, Ralph cannot seem to separate surface beauty from inner ugliness. “When she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?” Raymond de Chelles, who reminds Undine of Ralph, first sees her on an evening when, as even the cynical Charles Bowen thinks, ” . . . she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes.”

More than greed, selfishness, or hedonism, Undine’s defining characteristic, lack of empathy, shapes her actions. “It never occurred to her that other people’s lives went on when they were our of her range of vision.” What dooms her relationships with Ralph and Raymond is not money, attention, socializing, or any of Undine’s numerous desires and complaints, nor is it simply the gulf between their values and her own. The failure lies in her inability to grasp that anything of importance exists outside her own system and their inability to see this in her until far too late. Because her parents cannot deny her anything, “. . . her sense of the rightfulness of her own cause had been measured by making people do as she pleased.”

Undine wants everything, but especially that which she does not have. Her counterpart, Elmer Moffatt, exhibits this “new money” behavior through collecting objects. “To have things had always seemed to her the first essential of existence,” while Moffatt says, “I mean to have the best, you know; not just to get ahead of the other fellows, but because I know it when I see it.” Raymond’s tapestries have no more deeper emotional value to Moffatt than last year’s dresses do to Undine; all are markers of money and success.

Ironically, Undine is little more than an attractive object to the people around her. As Madame de Trézac tells her, ” . . . they’re delighted to bring you out at their big dinners, with the Sèvres and the plate.”  Later, when she visits dealers with Moffatt, she saw that “the actual touching of rare textures — bronze or marble, or velvets flushed with the bloom of age — gave him a sensations like her own beauty had once roused in him.” To Moffatt, who knows and understands her insatiable hungers, she may be at least in part an object for his collection. He tells her, “You’re not the beauty you were . . . but you’re a lot more fetching.” The “oddly qualified phrase” could be used of Raymond’s tapestries and many of the other old valuables that Moffatt has acquired.

For Wharton, Undine and Moffatt represent those aspects of contemporary American society that she most disliked. As Charles Bowen says, ” . . . in this country, the passion for making money has preceded the knowing how to spend it . . .” Undine, like the Wall Street of Peter Van Degen and Elmer Moffatt, is voracious, self-centered, reaching, and without conscience or moral center (choosing to sell an ill-gotten string of pearls for the money rather than to return it). Unlike Mrs. Marvell, with her hospital committee activities, Undine does not contribute to society; she was born to take. Symbolic and symptomatic of the new America that Wharton left, Undine remains ignorant and without taste.

Wharton’s last paragraph is brilliant, for it cleverly shows how even an Undine who has achieved wealth, position, fame, and power can still find something to desire — something that she has put out of her own reach through her actions. ” . . . . she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for.” Undine is a young woman; Wharton hints at the potential she still has to leave yet more misery in her wake as she yearns for yet more of what she believes she deserves. She is like a living Tantalus, but one whose every attempt to grasp destroys.

6 May 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Under the Greenwood Tree

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Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy and edited and with an introduction and notes by Simon Gatrell. Highly recommended.

In Under the Greenwood Tree, Thomas Hardy combines many of the elements that would define his career as a novelist — colorful common folk and their equally colorful language, an ironic narrator, an unflinching perspective on changing times, and the marvelous “Wessex” countryside. All that is missing is a plot, the lack of which contributes to the uncharacteristic happy ending.

Under the Greenwood Tree addresses two related matters: the fate of the Mellstock choir and of the charming new schoolmistress. Although the members of the choir acknowledge that their way is becoming an anachronism, they see that it is not only the inevitability of change that is pushing them aside. Both Farmer Shiner and the vicar show a strong interest in schoolmistress Fancy Day, who happens to have musical ability. By eliminating the choir and installing Miss Day at Farmer Shiner’s behest, the vicar believes he will achieve two objectives: modernizing a parish that has no desire to be modernized and impressing a woman who does wish to be wooed.

At the same time, the sight of Fancy at the window with her hair undone in the wee hours of Christmas morning is enough to win the heart of young choir member Dick Dewy, who devotes his energy to attracting Fanny’s notice and attention. While he is more educated than his father and the other members of the choir, he seems to represent honest labor, sincerity, and singlemindedness, while his rivals the vicar and the farmer, represent culture and money, respectively. Fancy is educated and cultured, while her father is revealed to have some money. The question is not about her choice but about whether it is the right one — a question that cannot be answered by the end of the novel.

Fancy’s response to the vicar shows some ambivalence about her commitment. At times, the parish’s long-standing couples reveal their own sense of fate about their spouses and marriages. Mrs. Penny tells the tranter’s Christmas gathering, ” . . . and lo and behold the coming man came: Penny asked me if I’d go snacks with him and afore I knew what I was about a’most, the thing was done.” Later she tells Fancy to reassure herself with the thought, “’tis to be, and here goes!” She adds that “‘Twill carry a body through it all from wedding to churching if you only let it out with spirit enough.” When Dick’s father says to his wife, “You be a well-enough woman, Ann,” then, “Mrs. Dewy put her mouth in the form of a smile and put it back again without smiling.” An impressive subtext underlies these couples’ anecdotes, exchanges, and expressions, with the narrator’s — and reader’s — knowledge that they were once in the same position as Dick and Fancy.

In his introduction, Simon Gatrell writes that “the heart of the novel is the right way to do things.” Eliminating the tradition of the choir to impress a woman may not be the right way, but the members concede the vicar’s right to do so. Their attempt, not altogether unsuccessful, to negotiate the timing of the change both affirms his right and preserves their dignity. It also allows the vicar to “win” without forcing the choir to “lose.” As Reuben Dewy says, “Everybody must be managed” — including both vicar and choir, and both Dick and Fancy.

Under the Greenwood Tree is organized by seasons (“Part the First — Winter,” “Part the Second — Spring,” and so on), which reflects the cycle of life that Hardy portrays. Dick is not the first man to fall in love with a pretty face. (“A very good pink face, as far as that do go. Still, only a face, when all is said and done,” according to the choir’s erudite Mr. Spinks.) Fanny is not the first woman to be tempted by appeals to her vanity and her social and cultural refinement. The elder Dewys, the Pennys, and the other mature couples seem to regard Dick and Fancy with a wryness born of their own distant courting experience and their ensuing lives together. Even Fancy, who wants to be stylish and modern, gives in and honors the old cycle when, after some resistance, she agrees to follow the traditions, saying, “Respectable people don’t nowadays. . . . Still, since poor mother did, I will.” No one knows what their future will be, but Mrs. Penny observes, “Well, ‘tis humps and hollers with the best of us, but still and for all that Dick and Fancy stand as fair a chance of having a bit of sunsheen as any married people in the land.” Had Hardy written Under the Greenwood Tree in the same spirit as Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure, perhaps Mrs. Penny’s prediction would have proven tragically wrong.

Under the Greenwood Tree was written by a Thomas Hardy who had not reached maturity as a writer, but he reveals the insights and the verbal beauty that would mark his place among the great Victorian writers. Phrases such as, “. . . if Fancy’s lips had been real cherries, probably Dick’s would have appeared deeply stained,” “. . . your mother’s charms was more in the manner than the material,” and “I’ve walked the path once in my life and know the country, neighbors; and Dick’s a lost man!” remind the reader that Hardy’s true love as a writer would be poetry, not prose. Like his other novels, Under the Greenwood Tree reveals the poetry, comic, ironic, or tragic, in everyday life.

29 March 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf