england – Page 2

October 22, 2020

Book 256: Life After Life

“And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur–if a dish was to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances.”

Dates read: August 19-25, 2018

Rating: 8/10

I have a small scar right about a half inch above my left eye. When I was a kid, I was jumping on the bed and my mom told me to stop. I jumped off entirely, and the scar is where the corner of the open dresser drawer I didn’t keep track of went into my face. Just a tiny difference in my jump and I would have lost the eye. I wonder what would have changed in my life if I had. Or if I’d made any number of different choices before I went to college. Or while I was in college! If I’d gone to a different law school. If I’d taken a year off between undergrad and law school. If I’d gone to grad school for psychology instead. If, if, if. The fact is that there’s no point in torturing myself with hypotheticals for things that have gone “wrong”. Things are the way they are and all I can do is try to make the best choices I can from here.

What if, though, things could be changed? If you could go back, live again, make different choices? In Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, on a snowy night in England in 1910, Ursula Todd is born and immediately dies, choked by her umbilical cord, because neither the doctor or midwife made it on time. Then, on the same snowy night, she’s born again, but this time the doctor makes it and the cord is cut and she lives. Until she’s three, when she follows her older sister Pamela into the ocean and is swept away. Then she’s born again with the doctor there, and manages to survive the family trip to the seaside but perishes at age five when her big brother Maurice throws her toy onto the roof and she tries to scramble after it but falls. And so on and so forth. She doesn’t remember her previous lives, per se, but has strong feelings about crucial events that drive her to new actions in the face of them.

Where the book spends the bulk of its time is Ursula’s various World War II experiences. In a few she dies when a bomb falls on her apartment building. In a few she’s working on the rescue/cleanup squad. And in at least one, she’s living in Germany. The fates of her family members, too, change in each go-round. What happens to Teddy, her sensitive, thoughtful younger brother who becomes a pilot, has a major impact on how things go for the family. Some things, though, never change: her deeply practical and stalwart sister Pamela always marries and has children and spends the war at the family home, and belligerent brother Maurice is never much liked by his parents or siblings and always rises to positions of authority.

Anyone who’s ever wondered how things might have turned out if they had a chance to do it all over again (i.e. pretty much everyone) will find this an intriguing concept. And it allows Atkinson freedom to really explore the ways in which seemingly-small moments can resonate enormously in our lives, which she does with clear, assured prose that feels almost old-fashioned or “classic” in tone. Refreshingly, the most important choices are mostly unrelated to her romantic relationships with men! As a lady person, I’m used to books (and the world in general, honestly) treating marriage and childbearing as the central dramas of women’s lives. Who she loves, though, is much less important to Ursula’s story than her relationships with her siblings, particularly Pamela and Teddy, who are both wonderfully likable characters and the kind of siblings everyone wants to have.

What held back this novel from greatness for me was that with so many lives cataloged, I found myself sometimes more interested in how she would die this time than how that life actually played out, as well as a portion near the end that bugged a little bit because it made me question the underlying mechanics of it all. To be honest, though, these quibbles are a little on the nitpicky side and I wonder if they would have occurred to me if I’d read this book completely free from expectations. It’s a very good book, well-written and enjoyable. But when I read it after hearing about how good it was for years, I was expecting something mind-blowing and it didn’t get there, for me. Like I said, though, it’s still something I liked quite a bit and I’d recommend it to all readers!

One year ago, I was reading: The Line of Beauty

Two years ago, I was reading: Detroit, An American Autopsy

Three years ago, I was reading: White Fur

Four years ago, I was reading: The Executioner’s Song

Five years ago, I was reading: Through the Language Glass

July 2, 2020

Book 240: The Girl With All The Gifts

“In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants. So this is a quetion that gets to the very roots of the world, and Melanie asks it with some trepidation.”

Dates read: June 8-12, 2018

Rating: 8/10

My husband plays a lot of video games. When I tell people this, they often make a vaguely sympathetic face, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s an adult and he can get entertainment however he’d like. I like books and movies. He likes sports and video games. Neither one has more inherent merit than the other. Anyways, the point here is that since I’m around when he’s playing games, I often watch and while not all of it particularly interests me, some of the games tell really interesting, multilayered stories, like Mass Effect or The Last of Us. The latter, in particular, is a really engrossing experience centered in the bond that develops between a young woman and a parental figure during a post-zombie apocalypse scenario. It’s honestly a great piece of media and I see frequent requests on book recommendation sites looking for a book like it.

Zombie apocalypse stories are, at their heart, about the fear of social breakdown. A zombie doesn’t have the internal struggle to contain their own demons that a vampire or werewolf does. At least not traditionally. But M.R. Carey’s The Girl With All The Gifts isn’t a usual zombie story. I guess it’s technically a spoiler to say it’s about zombies at all, but it’s been out for long enough that most people are already familiar with the idea. It introduces us to Melanie, a girl undergoing a strange sort of schooling. Some of it is familiar: there’s a class, a rotating group of teachers (Ms. Justineau is Melanie’s particular favorite), lessons. But the children, when not in school, are locked in cells and collected for class by armed guards (like the harsh Sgt. Parks) who move them into special wheelchairs that restrict their movements at gunpoint. And the members of the class are sometimes wheeled into a medical lab, run by the ruthlessly efficient Dr. Caldwell, never to return.

That Melanie and her classmates are zombies (or “hungries”, as they’re called in the world of the book) is obvious fairly early on. But they aren’t the typical kind: more like the vampire or werewolf, they’re conscious, self-aware, capable of learning and some level of restraint. Obviously this isn’t normal zombie behavior, not even in this world, and the lives of the students are being studied in the desperate hope that finding what makes them different could help lead to a vaccine for the fungal infection underlying the transformation into brainless and violent automatons. All of that is interrupted when the base is attacked by the regular kind of zombies, along with renegade humans that roam the wilderness because they refused to quarantine themselves in cities like most people. Melanie, Justineau, Parks, Caldwell, and a young soldier escape the chaos and set off for the city, but the world outside has dangers they might not be fully prepared for.

The heart of the story is the bond that forms between Melanie and Helen Justineau over the course of the book. Justineau is fond of Melanie from her time in the classroom, and Melanie all but worships the only person she’s ever met who treats her with the slightest bit of kindness. As they’re forced into closer quarters and more dire circumstances, that connection deepens and they become fiercely protective of each other in their own ways. The ways that Caldwell and Parks change (or don’t, significantly) in their feelings about her in their turn reveals their true characters as well. There’s an interesting, compelling adventure story with some quality world-building, but the book is really based in the relationships between people, how they view others, how they cope with the tremendous strain of living in a world so completely decimated by the unexpected.

My criticisms are mostly fairly minor: I think the book is a bit too long, some of the exposition is a bit too clunky, I wanted more of the past life of the characters to fill them out even further. I did appreciate that while the suspense level gets pretty tense, the gore level is relatively minimal for a zombie book (I’m not a fan of gore but found that what was there felt un-gratuitous). That being said, I don’t know that I think this is a book that would be a match for everyone…if you’re not into post-apocalyptic narratives, really can’t deal with any gore at all, or want a super thriller, this probably won’t be your preferred reading experience. But if you’re willing to experiment a little with a book that might be outside your usual comfort zone and think a smart, character-driven take on zombies could be interesting, I’d definitely encourage you to read it. I liked it much more than I thought I would!

One year ago, I was reading: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Disgrace

Three years ago, I was reading: My Antonia

Four years ago, I was reading: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

May 14, 2020

Book 233: Far From The Madding Crowd

“She was the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.”

Dates read: May 11-16, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012 edition)

Most people will say that they appreciate a “strong female character”, but what exactly do we mean by that? What makes a woman strong? Often it seems like it gets interpreted as literal physical strength, a la Buffy Summers, or else a kind of “tough girls don’t cry” emotional repression. As a reaction to the stereotypical depiction of women as delicate flowers prone to wailing or running away when faced with challenges, or as objects to be rescued and therefore earned at the end, there is strength in presenting women as having physical and/or emotional toughness. The idea, though, that the way for women to be strong is to be more like men doesn’t feel like it encompasses enough about women’s strength.

As a woman, I think what I most gravitate towards when I’m looking for a “strong female character” is agency. The ability to make her own choices, knowing the consequences, and then continue to make them for better or worse in a way that feels like they’re actually real choices a person would make. There are a surprising number of these kinds of characters in the classics (though they have a not-unfair reputation for being dominated by men’s stories), and some of my favorite have been found in the work of Thomas Hardy. In his Far From The Madding Crowd, our central character is Bathsheba Everdene, who we watch grow from an inexperienced but capable young woman to owning and running her own farm and learning some brutally hard lessons about relationships, through her own effort and largely by her own hand. Bathsheba isn’t without flaws, and some of the choices she makes are bad ones, but you never lose the sense that she’s in control of her own destiny.

Bathsheba catches the eye of young farmer Gabriel Oak when she’s on her way to live with a cousin to help out on the farm, and he soon grows besotted with her beauty. He proposes, but through they’ve built a friendly acquaintance, she shoots him down because she doesn’t love him. She leaves when she inherits a farm of her own, and after financial disaster strikes and Gabriel loses his own toehold in the landed class, he winds up working for her as a shepherd. Unlike many owners (particularly female ones), she insists on being an active part of the operation of her land, and she and Gabriel become trusted allies to each other. When a silly joke with an older, eligible bachelor neighbor, Boldwood, leads to the other man’s obsession with her, Bathsheba resists making a marriage with him as well but is under tremendous pressure to accept his suit. And then Sergeant Troy happens…he’s young and hot and even though his heart belongs to his childhood sweetheart, he and Bathsheba have a whirlwind fling that ends in holy matrimony. Drama ensues.

If you can read Hardy without feeling a passionate longing to go spend some time out in the middle of nowhere for a while, you’re a stronger person than I am. He doesn’t gloss over the very real toil of rural life, but he presents it so persuasively as the most harmonious way to live that it makes you think about what it would be like to chuck it all and go buy a little piece of land and work it yourself. I would never do that, I know I’d hate it about 48 hours in, but Hardy was very concerned with growing industrialization and his preference to maintain traditional pastoral lifestyles is obvious. But his real strength lies in his complicated, multifaceted characters. While Gabriel Oak is a little on the idealized side, Bethsheba, Boldwood, and Troy are all painted in shades of grey that give them nuance and interest, and the drama derives from circumstances that mostly feel organic, giving real weight to their choices and interactions.

The more classics I’ve read in my late 20s and beyond, the more convinced I am that we do young readers a disservice by insisting on reading them in high school. While there’s nothing going on here at a conceptual level that a reasonably intelligent teenager couldn’t grasp, there’s also so much more that you can bring into the novel of your own experience once you have some under your belt that gives it so much more life. If I’d tried to read this at 16, I doubt I would have cared for it, but at 32 (which is how old I was when I read it) it’s got full layers of meaning that I really responded to. It’s lengthy, but it moves along pretty well, and I would definitely recommend giving it a read!

One year ago, I was reading: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: This!

Three years ago, I was reading: The Skies Belong to Us

Four years ago, I was reading: We Need to Talk About Kevin

April 23, 2020

Book 230: Game of Crowns

“In the game of chess, no piece is more useful than the queen. It can move vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, and-like all the pieces on the board- its sole purpose is to protect the king. And, in some cases, the future king.”

Dates read: May 1-3, 2018

Rating: 4/10

One of the first pop-culture events I have a very specific, clear memory of is the death of Princess Diana when I was 11. I remember stuff before that, of course (I have a very clear memory of the latchkey staff rolling TVs into the room for the OJ verdict, for instance) but Di’s death was the first time I had a real sense of the context of what I was seeing and hearing. I remember my mother’s genuine sadness, though her usual response to news about foreign royalty was to wonder why anyone would care. She also did not subscribe to the idea of the television being left on as background noise (a mindset I’ve inherited, much to my husband’s chagrin), so the fact that it wasn’t snapped off but was allowed to continue to play marked the significance of the thing.

Getting disproportionately emotionally invested in the death of a divorced British mother of two made us not at all unique. The whole world lost it a little for a minute there. Diana’s life and death continues to resonate around the British Royal Family, and it is through this prism that Christopher Andersen presents her mother-in-law, romantic rival, and would-have-been daughter-in-law in his book, Game of Crowns. Queen Elizabeth II, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Katherine, Duchess of Cambridge are all women who either are or could be queens of England, and all of them are touched by the legacy of the People’s Princess.

So it makes sense, in a way, that Andersen spends so much time talking about the ill-fated marriage between Charles and Diana. At least one third of the book is devoted to the story of their courtship, their terrible marriage, and their contentious divorce. On the other hand, though, the “War of the Waleses” is an already extensively documented phenomenon. There’s no real new reporting here: they barely knew each other when they got married, they both cheated (though Diana at least went into her marriage without an active side piece), they both orchestrated media to lash out against the other, and they were both active, engaged parents. Her death and the near-constitutional crisis that the response to it engendered had a real impact on the monarchy. And his reporting of William and Kate’s courtship isn’t really much better, in terms of doing more than just summarizing already-available information: lingerie on the catwalk, the break-up, the make-up, the wedding.

What is new is gossip, nearly all of it negative, about Charles and Camilla, with special venom reserved for the latter. He begins the book with a lengthy “what could happen” riff about the ascension of Charles to the throne when his mother dies, predicting that his vanity and hubris will lead to the abolition of the monarchy. While Diana’s leaks to the press are treated a part of her savvy media strategy, leaks from Charles and/or Camilla are portrayed as sneaky, underhanded, and devious. Camilla is depicted as scheming and manipulative, and set against Kate, who’s given a Diana-esque sheen of being both glamorous and naturally gifted at connection with strangers (without any actual supporting evidence). I checked out of the book entirely when Andersen breathlessly related that Camilla had “leaked” information about Kate’s low tally of “engagements”, the kind of meet-and-greets and ribbon-cuttings that make up royal work. The reality is that the Royal Family publishes engagements in the easily-publicly-accessible Court Circular, and a year-end tally is common practice for journalists covering the royal beat. Camilla wouldn’t have had to leak anything to anyone to “shame” Kate for lackluster numbers because that information would have been published anyways! A failure to understand something as basic as this shows the whole book to be without rooting in fact. It’s basically a very long, poorly fact-checked People article and I don’t recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: The Lowland (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Kingmaker’s Daughter

Three years ago, I was reading: The Leavers

Four years ago, I was reading: The Crack in Space

April 2, 2020

Book 227: The Kingmaker’s Daughter

“I am fifteen, I have been married and widowed, the daughter-in-law of a Queen of England and then the ward of a royal duke. I have been a pawn for one player after another; but now I am making my own decision and playing my own cards.”

Dates read: April 20-24, 2018

Rating: 7/10

That men and women continue to not be truly equal, in this day and age, is hard to understand. But it’s reality nonetheless. When I get frustrated about it, though, I remind myself that as far as we still have to go, it’s still much much better than where we’ve been. It was only just about 100 years ago that the right to vote in the United States was extended to women. For hundreds of years before that (and still to this day, in some places), women didn’t own property, we were property: bought and sold and traded by the men around us.

The usual way that women are bartered is the grand old institution of marriage. Before it was idealized by Disney movies as the end state of True Love (I mean, who cares what happens after, amirite?), it was more a business transaction than anything else. They might have had sweet gowns, but no one was more vulnerable to being the glue in a new family alliance than the daughters of medieval nobles. Philippa Gregory’s fourth novel in her Cousin’s War series, The Kingmaker’s Daughter, focuses on just this: the way the Earl of Warwick, one-time beloved mentor of York King Edward IV, uses his two daughters, Isabel and Anne, as pawns in his game of power. Though the girls knew every comfort their father’s considerable wealth could bring them, they were ultimately helpless to do anything but marry as they were told.

For Isabel, that meant wedding Edward’s younger brother George, the spoiled favorite always looking for a way to depose his brother. When an attempted rebellion in his favor was quelled, Warwick allied himself with the Lancasters, and married his younger daughter, Anne (whose perspective this book follows) to Edward of Westminster, the only child of the deposed Lancaster King Henry VI. The uprising in support of the old king and then the young prince ultimately failed as well, and Anne was taken in by her sister and brother-in-law while her husband was executed. While Isabel eventually died in childbirth (as was unfortunately common in those days), Anne married her other brother-in-law…the youngest of the York sons, Richard. Richard eventually becomes King Richard III, making Anne the queen of England, as her father had once dreamed…but this triumph was undermined when her son, her only child, died around age 10. Anne’s own death followed not long thereafter.

This is a solid, unspectacular entry in Gregory’s series. She’s helped by the fact that Anne’s life was kind of bonkers, with her father’s shifting alliances, her marriage into a family that she had known as sworn enemies her entire life, her lengthy confinement at her sister’s hand and the escape she had to plot to marry Richard, the fact that she and her sister declared her mother legally dead and imprisoned her so they could seize their inheritance, her struggles to conceive, brief happiness on the throne and then a fade-out, made all the more sad by her husband’s attention to his beautiful young niece, Princess Elizabeth York. Gregory doesn’t give Anne a particularly big or compelling personality (she’s kind of blandly plucky and determined), so it’s fortunate there’s a lot of plot to weave around her. Reading it just made me reflect on how trapped women of that era were in a lot of ways: Anne is constantly put into situations she doesn’t want to be in because the men in her life (her father, her first husband, her brother-in-law, her second husband) decide to do whatever is best for them, and she just kind of has to deal with or plot to undermine them as best she can.

There are some quibbles I had with the way Gregory told her story: I thought the witchy woo-woo stuff with the Woodvilles that I find irritating was a little overdone, though it does track that a woman like Anne would have believed in it. And like I mention above, Anne’s characterization isn’t especially strong despite her position at the center of the story. For the most part, though, the plot trots along briskly and it’s engaging and entertaining. If you’re this far into this series, you’ve probably figured out what you’re going to get from it, and this book neither delights or disappoints. Solid historical fluff read!

One year ago, I was reading: All the President’s Men (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Freedom

Three years ago, I was reading: Innocent Traitor

Four years ago, I was reading: A Great and Terrible Beauty

February 6, 2020

Book 219: Of Human Bondage

“He yearned above all things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.”

Dates read: March 25-30, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012 edition)

Sometimes I think about my younger self and I want to shake that girl by the shoulders. I took myself so seriously, took the world so seriously. I was so sure of things, and while I do sometimes miss that clarity of certainty, I think I’m happier now. I tend towards the “control freak” side of things, and the more steps I take towards letting go of that need to be in charge of everything, to know where it’s all heading, the more relief I feel and the better able I am to roll with the punches. I wish I could tell that girl that I was how to loosen up a little bit, how to think a little more broadly…but maybe all that can really teach those lessons is time.

Anyone who’s ever taken themselves too seriously will recognize a kindred soul in Philip Carey of W. Somerset Maughum’s Of Human Bondage. We meet him when he’s still a child and very recently orphaned, going from a relatively privileged life with his mother to a much sparser one with his aunt and uncle, the latter of whom is a pastor in a small town in the British countryside. Scared a bit by his distant uncle, he escapes into books and becomes a voracious reader. The next year, he’s sent to boarding school, where his disability (he has a clubfoot, which gives him a limp), combined with his shyness and senstitivity, makes for a generally unhappy experience. He becomes passionately religious and plans on a career in the clergy, but when his prayers for a cure for his foot are unanswered, he loses both his faith and his direction in life.

He goes to Germany briefly, comes back to England and tries being an accountant, which doesn’t take, then to France to study art, then back to England again, where he decides to settle down and study medicine, which was his father’s career. But all his indecision has driven down his available resources so he’ll need to live very modestly until he’s a doctor and can start earning a living…and then he meets Mildred. Despite Philip’s self-pity, he’s had a few relationships with women at this point, and is actually in a good one, when he meets the waitress his friend has a crush on. Philip becomes obsessed with her, despite her obvious disinterest in him and lack of social skills. His situation eventually becomes desperate, but with some kindness and a bit of luck, it resolves itself.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know I’m a die-hard never-DNF (did not finish). This has lead to my spending my time reading books that I hated or worse, bored me silly, and I very much understand why other people do put down books that aren’t working for them. But even though it does backfire on me sometimes, other times it pays off to stick with a book, and this was one of those instances. About halfway through it, I was sick of Philip and his moping and the garbage way he treated women and his refusal to understand that as wonderful as self-discovery is, there’s no money in it. The whole book is his story of growing up, and he was so grating that I wasn’t at all invested in him or rooting for him to succeed. But then he starts to mature, puts his head down and works hard, uses his own hard-earned life lessons and experiences to be a good doctor to the people he sees. And by the end of it, when he does find some measure of happiness and chooses to do the harder, better thing, I couldn’t have been happier for him if he were an actual person and a friend at that.

I’ve always been a character-over-plot type of reader, and this book is all the former…the only major outside event is the Boer War, which happens late in the book and while it does have an impact on Philip, it’s pretty far removed from the central themes of the coming-of-age story. In some ways, it suffers for its fixation on Philip…like I said above, he can be a hard character to really sympathize with, particularly early on. But the payoff in the back half is real, and seeing him grow as a person is really rewarding. This is a good book, a very good one even, but it may not be the right book for every reader. If you’re looking for a dynamic plot, or lack the patience for/interest in a long-term character study, this probably isn’t going to be something you enjoy. If you’ve read what I’ve written and are intrigued, though, I highly suggest you get ahold of it…it’ll be a rewarding experience!

One year ago, I was reading: The Buried Giant (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Sellout

Three years ago, I was reading: Flowertown

Four years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

December 12, 2019

Book 211: Henry and Cato

“Fear had entered his life, and would now be with him forever. How easy it was for the violent to win. Fear was irresistible, fear was king, he had never really known this before when he had lived free and without it.”

Dates read: February 24- March 2, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Figuring out what you want should be one of the easiest things in the world, but somehow it’s not. What we actually want is usually buried under a dizzying series of projections: we think we want things, but we actually want the security they represent. Or the status. Or both! We think we want love, but maybe we’re just afraid to be alone with ourselves. Or we just want that head rush that happens at beginning. The Buddhists think that want/desire is the cause of all suffering, and I think they’re probably right.

The two men at the center of Iris Murdoch’s Henry and Cato, the titular Henry Marshalson and Cato Forbes, are tied together by their failure to have any idea what it is they actually want. They’re also tied together by their shared past, growing up as friends in neighboring English country estates. Their lives have taken them wildly different directions, though: Henry has carved out a life for himself as the third party in a sort of three-part relationship with a married couple, working in academia in the United States, while Cato has had a sudden revelation and joined the church as a priest, ministering to the wayward youth of London. But the two men find themselves in the same place, in crisis, at about the same time.

Henry learns that his older brother, Sandy, his mother’s favorite, has died, leaving him as the heir to his family estate, and so returns to England full of plans to toss out the mother who never loved him and her hanger-on, Lucius Lamb (a useless poet) and sell the property. Instead, he finds himself embroiled in a love triangle between Stephanie, Sandy’s former mistress, and Colette, Cato’s little sister. Meanwhile, Cato has become obsessed with one of the delinquents who visits him, an attractive teenager called Beautiful Joe. Cato’s faith is waning, and he wants nothing more than to abandon the priesthood and run away with Joe. The two men meet up briefly in London to reconnect, and when Joe joins them and learns about Henry’s inheritance, events begin to spiral out of control.

There’s a LOT going on in this book: Henry’s complicated relationship with his mother, his resentment of his brother, his desire to possess his brother’s lover, his relationship to the ancestral home, Cato’s sudden religious awakening and subsequent disillusionment, Cato’s desire for Beautiful Joe although he’s previously believed himself heterosexual. Henry and Cato are set up as mirrors of each other: even just on a fundamental level, Henry had an older brother and his father has died, Cato’s got a younger sister and his mother has died. Both men rejecting what their parents wanted for them: while Henry left the country and pursued a living and was involved with a married couple, Cato renounced his father’s intellectualism and became religious, took vows of poverty and chastity. The theme of mirrored opposites even plays out in Henry’s two love interests: while Stephanie is lower-class, older, and slatternly, Colette is young, rich, and virginal.

I’d been tossing the idea of reading Iris Murdoch around since I saw Iris several years ago, and this was the first of her works I found discounted for the Kindle. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how I felt about the book: the characters were mostly well-drawn, the plot proceeded smoothly, the prose was capable, there were interesting ideas toyed with…but the whole was less than the sum of the parts, somehow. I didn’t really ever care what became of either Henry or Cato, both of whom I found frustrating (understandable, but frustrating). Without a connection to a character, I personally find it difficult to get invested in a book. So while there was enough good here to get me to check out some of her other works, and I didn’t hate the experience of reading it or anything, it wasn’t the kind of good that makes me recommend a book widely.

One year ago, I was reading: The Goldfinch (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Girl in the Tower

Three years ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Four years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

October 24, 2019

Book 204: Mansfield Park

“The meeting was generally felt to be a pleasant one, being composed in a good proportion of those who would talk and those who would listen; and the dinner itself was elegant and plentiful, according to the usual style of the Grants, and too much according to the usual habits of all to raise any emotion except in Mrs. Norris, who could never behold either the wide table or the number of dishes on it with patience, and who did always contrive to experience some evil from the passing of the servants behind her chair, and to bring away some fresh conviction of its being impossible among so many dishes but that some must be cold.”

Dates read: January 23-29, 2018

Rating: 8/10

It’s easy to romanticize the past. Before selfies! Before the internet! Before television! Before phones! Back when people wrote letters to each other to stay in touch! Don’t get me wrong, I love good quality stationery and the feeling of getting a note in the mail. But while we’re longing for the good old days, we forget that there was an awful lot of human history that was lived before penicillin, when a simple infection could legitimately kill you. Before effective corrective lenses so if you couldn’t see well you were just doomed to always be squinting and probably struggled to read. A lot of us have mothers who weren’t lost in childbirth that otherwise might have been. There’s a trade-off.

It’s never quite specified what exactly ails Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, but she’s physically weak and often sickly, and can’t walk very far before she needs to rest. Maybe asthma? Whatever it is, it’s likely something that could be treated easily if she’d lived in today’s world. Oh well. She is the way she is. And maybe it plays into her personality, for she’s as retiring emotionally as she is physically. It takes Fanny, a naturally shy creature, quite a while to adjust when her aunt, Lady Bertram, decides to relieve her sister (Mrs. Price) of one of her many children to help ease her financial burdens, and Fanny’s taken out of her familiar home and brought to the country estate of Mansfield Park to be raised alongside (but not quite the same as) her cousins, Frederick and Edmund and Maria and Julia.

Of the lively Bertram children, it is only Edmund that makes the effort to draw Fanny out of her shell, and so by the time she becomes a young woman of marriageable age, she’s of course quietly-but-devotedly in love with him. To the rest of the family, she’s sort of halfway one of their own. But things turn upside down when a new parson arrives, complete with his wife and her half-siblings: Henry and Mary Crawford. They’re Londoners, and have city attitudes that contrast sharply with Fanny and her country morals. Henry’s flirtations nearly break up one of the Bertram girls’ happy engagements, while Mary and Edmund begin to grow closer despite her concerns that his planned future, as a clergyman, won’t be lucrative enough to sustain her in the lifestyle she’d like to lead. And then Henry, to amuse himself, decides to try to make Fanny fall in love with him…only to find that he’s the one who grows besotted. Since this is Austen, it ends with a happily made marriage and everyone getting more or less what they deserve.

Those who like to read Jane Austen for her sparkling, witty female leads, like Eliza Bennett or Emma Woodhouse, will be disappointed here: Fanny Price is more like Elinor Dashwood, but with the fun quotient dialed down to almost zero. I’m glad I didn’t read this book until I was in my 30s, because I think if I’d read it when I was younger I would have found her so tiresome and boring I would have put the book down. That’s my most significant criticism of the book: Fanny can be hard to root for, even though we’re clearly supposed to. She’s definitely sympathetic, but she’s also kind of a stick-in-the-mud. She always always behaves appropriately and is horrified by transgressions of her strict moral code. At the end of the day, I found her good heart outweighed the irritation of her teacher’s pet persona, but I can imagine plenty of readers finding it hard to really like her and therefore really like the book.

But even though “bad kids” Henry and Mary are much more interesting than our protagonist, I still very much enjoyed reading this book. Jane Austen’s turns of phrase and lively wit are just as much a part of this book as they are her others, and it’s her quality of writing that I find enjoyable more than her characters anyways. It’s maybe a trifle overlong. If you haven’t read her work before, I wouldn’t recommend starting here, because it’s one of her slower books (start with Sense and Sensibility instead). But if you have read her and like her and wonder if you should read this, too, I do recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: Detroit (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: White Fur

Three years ago, I was reading: The Executioner’s Song

Four years ago, I was reading: Through The Language Glass

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