Avatar – The Last Airbender: The Lost Adventures and The Promise Part 1 by Gene Luen Yang

Avatar comics! Yes, they exist, and if you’re me, this is very exciting news indeed. This is only my second time ever seeking out media tie-ins for a TV series I like (the first time was for Babylon 5, many years ago), which is probably a measure of how in love I am with the fictional universe of Avatar.

The Lost Adventures is an anthology of twenty-eight short stories by several contributors, including members of the creative team behind the original Nickelodeon series. As with any anthology, the tone and quality of the stories was diverse, but overall they were beautifully drawn and an absolute pleasure to read (for example, Aang looks a little weird in the cover image, I think, but I’m happy to report that this is not the case throughout the book).

All the stories in The Lost Adventures, except two bonus ones at the end, are set at the same time as the three seasons of Avatar. They give us brief glimpses of what the characters might have been up to between episodes, and also capture little moments of character interaction that never made it to the series, but which add another layer to the characterisation. In this sense, this collection contributes to making the universe of Avatar feel even more alive and endless and full of stories beyond what we were allowed to see. It makes us long for more, but that’s a wonderful feeling I associate with my very favourite fictional universes.


Sleepbending.
The structure of The Lost Adventures mirrors that of the original series: the stories in the first section, which overlaps with season one, are mostly comedic short vignettes. But as we move on to sections two and three, they grow longer and darker and more serious in tone. There are stories about Zuko and Mai’s first kiss, about Katara’s despair at the beginning of season three, about Ember Island, about Aang’s past, and about Team Avatar bonding at the Western Air Temple before their final confrontation with the Fire Lord. They’re mostly based on character moments, since any plot-oriented material made it to the actual series, but that’s exactly why I loved them so much. They showed me new sides of characters I already loved, and they gave me the opportunity to spend more time with them.

The Lost Adventures is a lot of fun, but Gene Luen Yang’s brand new The Promise Part 1 is by far the better book of the two. It’s the first instalment of a trilogy of direct sequels to the original TV series, which means that it’s set right after the final episode. This is incredibly exciting for any fans who upon finishing watching Avatar immediately cried “Noooooooooo, what happens next? I need more.”

Unfortunately, this also means I can’t provide a plot summary without spoiling the finale for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet. Suffice to say that The Promise picks up right where Avatar left us. Then there’s a gap between chapters one and two, and the rest of the story focuses on how the world is doing one year after the end of the war.



Fans of Gene Luen Yang’s previous books, like the brilliant American Born Chinese and The Eternal Smile, will already know what to expect from his writing. His books are both intelligent and fun; they combine seriousness with humour and never hesitate to address difficult questions. The Promise Part 1 is no exception. His writing is absolutely perfect for the world of Avatar – he gets the tone, the humour, and the complexity just right.


Appa! Team Avatar! D’awww.
I can’t stress enough how much I love the fact that this book even exists. How many stories out there actually deal with the inevitable complications that follow the big epic finale? One of the things I loved the most about Avatar was its willingness to deal with the political implications of the story it was telling, and that’s the case with this book too. We soon realise that the end of the war was not a magical wand that made everything okay again. Instead, the transition to peace and to a new political system is slow and tricky.

The process of decolonisation in particular, which is the focus of this story, is messy and fraught with complications. The Fire Nation begins to retreat from the territories it had occupied in the Earth Kingdom, only to realise that after a hundred years or so, people have created roots. And they’ll of course resist any attempt to be shipped back to a home they identify with in the abstract, but don’t truly feel is their own. It’s a difficult situation with no simple solutions, but a writer like Gene Luen Yang would never shy away from that.


Zuko! I love him so much.
These books made me so, so happy. In addition to everything else, I’m so grateful for the opportunity to spend more time with these characters. I would be lying if I said either The Lost Adventures or The Promise worked as introductions to the world of Avatar – they’re too full of spoilers for the series, and there’s too much that would make no sense without context. They’re most definitely written with already existing fans in mind – but for those, what an absolute treat.

Which is to say: please watch the series, and then come be ridiculously excited about these books with me.


All my favourite Avatar moments seem to involve group hugs.
They read it too: The Discriminating Fangirl, Memoirs of a Teenage Bibliophile.

(You?)

Also, there’s an audio interview with Gene Luen Yang at Authors are Rockstars, as well as a text one at the Dark Horse Comics website. I really love this bit:

I’m excited about exploring a recurrent theme in a new way. Many of my books deal with the coming together of cultures. That’s one of the reasons why A:TLA appeals to me. There are four distinct cultures in the Avatarverse: Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Air Nomad. And each culture has subcultures.

In Legend of Korra, the cultures end up meshing together, much as cultures do in New York. So how do we get from a world where harmony is maintained by the separation of cultures to one where they intermingle? And is it possible for one culture to live beside—or within—another without losing some of its distinctiveness? These questions are very interesting to me.

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%. I requested a copy of this book via NetGalley.

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The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone

Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine is a non-fiction comic about the media. The book’s structure owes much to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: a cartoon version of Gladstone herself addresses readers directly and guides them on a journey through the history of journalism (mostly US-focused, but still of interest to this European reader), culminating in a discussion of the many issues surrounding the media in the present day. This is a structure that I find really effective for graphic non-fiction, so it’s exciting to find another book that makes such good use of it.

The title The Influencing Machine is a reference to a syndrome identified among schizophrenic patients by Victor Tausk: all these patients believed they were being controlled by an external entity. Over the course of The Influencing Machine, Gladstone challenges the notion that the media are an external entity outside of our control. As she states in the introduction, “the media machine is a delusion”; what we’re dealing with is better describe as “a whole mess of mirrors”.

Of course, the fact that there’s no unified media conspiracy doesn’t mean that the media don’t manipulate or mislead people. It’s just that, first of all, we’re not helpless or passive consumers; secondly, the most common media biases are not what most of us would guess. We tend to be hyperaware of political bias, but Gladstone explains why she thinks that what we should really be worried about is commercial bias, bad news bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias, fairness bias, and narrative bias.


Gladstone also devotes a considerable amount of space to exploring the full implications of living in an increasingly participatory media culture. Although we have always filtered our media exposure, the Web makes it much easier for any of us to completely shape our media landscape. As attractive as the prospect may be, there are some dangers we need to be aware of. The term “incestuous amplification”, for example, refers to an unjustified sense of certainty developed in an “echo chamber” where there’s nothing but constant agreement and repetition of the same ideas. Being challenged and exposed to different ideas helps us all developed our worldview, and it’s a great way to prevent extremism or the demonisation of our opponents. The good news, however, is that a participatory culture also gives us the chance to “choose how much to simplify our worldview”. Media consumption is not passive, which means we’re not doomed to create echo chambers. We can decide to seek out alternative points of view at any time.

As I mentioned last week, I really liked Gladstone’s presentation of Daniel Hallin’s doughnut analogy, according to which journalism can operate in three spheres: there’s the sphere of consensus (the doughnut hole), the sphere of legitimate controversy (the actual doughnut), and the sphere of deviance (the air around the doughnut). Journalistic debate mostly takes place in the second sphere, but it’s useful to remember that since what we understand as unquestionable values and absolute truths changes over time, some of the topics that current fall in the unspeakable air around the doughnut will one day be brought into the sphere of legitimacy. The doughnut analogy also helps us realise how what we understand as political bias (or simply political engagement) changes over time. The idea that women should be able to vote currently falls in the sphere of consensus in many parts of the world, for example, but only a hundred years ago it was still being dragged from the sphere of deviance to the sphere of legitimate debate.


In addition to finding The Influencing Machine extremely interesting on a personal level, I thought there was much here that was incredibly useful to bloggers of any kind. I’m a small-potatoes blogger whose readership doesn’t even come close to that of any commercially viable traditional media outlet, but many of Gladstone’s ideas still resonated with my experiences as someone who creates content that is consumed by others, no matter on what scale. For example, she touches on the transition from a kind of journalism focused on the idea of objectivity to the current focus on transparency and disclosure (which is not without its pitfalls). Many of these ideas are relevant to debates that have raged in the blogging world in the past – as well as to the most recent instalment of the periodically reoccurring discussion about blog reviews, professional reviews, and the idea of objectivity. Similarly, the chapter titled “The Matrix in Me”, which focuses on how easy it is to be affected by unconscious biases and prejudices, will be of great interest to anyone whose writing is made public (as well as to any media consumer, of course).


This is only a brief sample of what The Influencing Machine covers: there are also discussions of the role a free press plays in a healthy democracy; of the power of media coverage to change what goes down in history; of how war reporting often exacerbates many of the challenges that are always present in journalism; and of they key role of free speech and of the dangers of scary recent legislation that promotes secrecy. In some ways The Influencing Machine can be read as a much-needed warning, but at the same time, it’s a very optimistic book. Gladstone knows more than enough about history to realise we’ve been here before – and as we read on, this becomes clear to us too:

Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage.
Also present was everything we admire—and require—from the media: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.
Same as it ever was.

Now and always, we have the power to become informed media consumers, and also the power to be conscious, deliberate media-shapers.


They read it too: The Literary Omnivore, 1330v, Guys Lit Wire

(You?)

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The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole

Photo of Mary Seacole from Wikimedia Commons

Mary Seacole was a Jamaican-born nurse who played an important role in the Crimean War. During her lifetime, Seacole was as well-known as her contemporary Florence Nightingale, but after her death she fell into obscurity for a long period of time. Her memoir, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, is notable for being among the earliest autobiographies by a woman of colour published in Britain.

Just the other day I was reading an excellent article at The Hairpin about a rediscovered book of suffragette poetry, and the article’s author says, “This, by the way, is *the* reason to get an e-reader — (…) the sheer bounty, the gems you’ve never heard of on Project Gutenberg, which are yours, for free, and which will break you with gratitude”. As you know, I’m a new e-reader owner, but I couldn’t agree with the sentiment more. Which is why I was incredibly excited when Aarti e-mailed me about The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands and suggested we read it together.

Our joint review (the first part of which you can read at Aarti’s blog) deviated quite a bit from the book itself to become a more general discussion of the constraints under which a woman of colour writing in the Victorian era operated; of racism and feminism and how people most likely had to pick their battles very carefully; of how the tone of the memoir surprised us and how we wondered about what Mrs Seacole was not telling us; of the way the perception of historical figures shifts over time; and of the search for meaning at times of catastrophe, among other things. This is why I love talking books with Aarti. I hope you enjoy reading our conversation as much as we enjoyed having it. Please make sure you start with the first section at Booklust.

Ana: We have gone on at length about what we expected to get out of this memoir and didn’t, but there are also interesting things we did find. So I thought I’d ask you what you liked about Mary Seacole’s narrative. What were some of the things that interested you the most?

Aarti: Well, Mary herself was pretty amazing. I was also interested in her way of going to a totally foreign place and opening up a hotel as her business, even though what she really enjoyed was nursing. I assume that nursing must not have made her much money at all, but it doesn’t seem like she was a very successful hotelier, either (especially now that I know what you detailed above).

I wonder if that was just what was easiest for her to do - because her brother had opened an inn - or if that was one of the few options available to her, as a black woman, or if she just really liked meeting so many different types of people every day. All of her stories and descriptions of hotel life were also super-interesting to me, and I wish she had put more of those anecdotes in the narrative. It was fun to learn just how highly prized eggs were, how difficult it was to get meat, how often things were stolen, how many favors the officers were willing to call in for Mary, etc. I really enjoyed those parts of the story, and I think Mary must have been a pretty indomitable woman to have kept that hotel open in the midst of war the way that she did. But perhaps she wasn’t very good with the financial operations, if she went home completely bankrupt. It’s so sad that she went and nursed so many men in the war, but didn’t get paid for any of it, and then came home destitute. It really says so much about her and her very strong belief that she should be useful and do something good for others.

What was your favorite story that she related?


Portrait of Mary Seacole discovered in 2003 and added to the National Portrait Gallery. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Ana: My favourite of her stories was probably the one about her first time performing an autopsy, to try to stop a cholera epidemic. I thought I’d include those two paragraphs here, actually, since they give readers a taste of what Mary Seacole’s narrative voice is like:

And, meanwhile, I sat before the flickering fire, with my last patient in my lap—a poor, little, brown-faced orphan infant, scarce a year old, was dying in my arms, and I was powerless to save it. It may seem strange, but it is a fact, that I thought more of that little child than I did of the men who were struggling for their lives, and prayed very earnestly and solemnly to God to spare it. But it did not please Him to grant my prayer, and towards morning the wee spirit left this sinful world for the home above it had so lately left, and what was mortal of the little infant lay dead in my arms. Then it was that I began to think—how the idea first arose in my mind I can hardly say—that, if it were possible to take this little child and examine it, I should learn more of the terrible disease which was sparing neither young nor old, and should know better how to do battle with it. I was not afraid to use my baby patient thus. I knew its fled spirit would not reproach me, for I had done all I could for it in life—had shed tears over it, and prayed for it.

It was cold grey dawn, and the rain had ceased, when I followed the man who had taken the dead child away to bury it, and bribed him to carry it by an unfrequented path down to the river-side, and accompany me to the thick retired bush on the opposite bank. Having persuaded him thus much, it was not difficult, with the help of silver arguments to convince him that it would be for the general benefit and his own, if I could learn from this poor little thing the secret inner workings of our common foe; and ultimately he stayed by me, and aided me in my first and last post mortem examination. It seems a strange deed to accomplish, and I am sure I could not wield the scalpel or the substitute I then used now, but at that time the excitement had strung my mind up to a high pitch of courage and determination; and perhaps the daily, almost hourly, scenes of death had made me somewhat callous. I need not linger on this scene, nor give the readers the results of my operation; although novel to me, and decidedly useful, they were what every medical man well knows.

In this short description, I saw a glimpse of the Mary Seacole I wish I had found in the rest of the memoir. Her tone is a little apologetic, and she’s clearly aware that the mere idea of performing an autopsy on a child could shock many of her readers. Of course, even today a graphic description of something like that is off-putting to most of us, but she seems to be hinting at something else here—at the then predominant idea that autopsies were a violation of the deceased’s body; at a controversial element surrounding them that is now gone. What is interesting to me, though, is that I think I can sense some genuine scientific excitement behind her words. She’s cautious, she’s clearly sad that the child died, and she doesn’t exactly like that she has to do this. But she’s also curious, in an intellectual way, to find out all she can about how to stop the epidemic from killing more people.

This little glimpse made me understand her passion for nursing better than anything else in the memoir. It made me think that there was an element of intellectual curiosity to it that she didn’t generally emphasise. I wonder if some of that comes down to, once again, gender roles and what was expected of a Victorian woman - she does say she fears her words make her sound callous. The caring element of nursing was far more socially acceptable, but there’s no telling whether that really was what drove the women who took up the profession. Judging by what I know of Florence Nightingale, for example, that doesn’t seem to have been the case with her. And judging by this, I have to wonder about Mary Seacole. I wish there had been more passages like this in the memoir — I wish she had been in a position where being candid about her experiences wasn’t fraught with complications and fears about how she would be perceived.

Aarti: You’re right- that’s an excellent passage to choose as a glimpse into what motivated Seacole because it’s much more clinical in nature than self-congratulatory, like much of the nature. And because of that clinical description, you learn a lot about Mary herself- that she approached her job more pragmatically than you might imagine, maybe?

You bring up an interesting point about what was allowed to drive women vs. what really did drive them. I think even now, many women veer away from the sciences and math-heavy fields because they seem dominated by men and women are generally considered to have a more creative, not logical, mindset. But there is so much creativity and opportunity available in science, and I can see how the idea of learning more for the sake of science and the extension of your own knowledge could make be very heady, particularly to someone who understood the miracle of the human body and its ability to heal itself.

On a more personal note, I think that as people, we really struggle with the “why” of loss so much, particularly in light of epidemics and wars that kill so many people, indiscriminately. There was a great interview on NPR’s Radiolab recently with the author of a graphic novel called The Green River Killer in which they try to understand why a man became a serial killer. And the author makes this amazing statement of: “My point is, sometimes when we ask the why in the face of profound evil, you kind of wonder if what we’re doing is daring God to show himself. And I think even now when we ask the ‘why,’ we are looking for order to restore itself and give us hope that all of this isn’t meaningless.”

And I bring this up because I actually think that much of what drives people to become healers is this “why,” and the belief that there must be a reason and a lesson and a greater good served by supreme suffering. I can’t help but wonder if Mary Seacole, who seems to have been pretty religious, was really shaped more by the belief that she must do the best she can in the face of suffering because that’s one way for her to really see meaning in all the horrible things going on around her, surrounded as she is either by colonialism or war. Granted, it doesn’t sound that way at all based on her description of the scene above, which is much more pragmatic than spiritual, but I don’t know if she would have been driven to the Crimea to search for more scientific knowledge, particularly when she had no money and no real support for her endeavor, and when she had so much suffering so close at hand, if that was the only thing motivating her. But if you say that’s what drove Florence Nightingale to the Crimea, then maybe it isn’t too far a stretch to think the same motivated Mary Seacole.

Ana: Oh no, I didn’t mean that was what drove Florence Nightingale necessarily - I don’t know enough about her to have a solid opinion on that. I just meant that what I’ve read about her suggests she was first and foremost a strategist, and yet the prevailing popular culture image of her is that of the ministering angel. She had an interest in mathematics, particularly in statistics; she was brilliant at looking at data and seeing the bigger picture, and thanks to that she was able to pioneer many important and life-saving sanitary reforms. And yet when people talk about her, they don’t generally emphasise that; they portray her as nurturing and caring, as “The Lady with the Lamp”. So I wonder if something similar might have been going on with how Mary Seacole portrays herself.

Aarti: Oh, I see! Yes, I suppose we could easily veer into objectification here. But I don’t think that in the case of Florence Nightingale, referring to her as “the lady with the lamp” and only talking about her as a ministering angel is necessarily because she’s female. This happens countless times throughout history- the nuances, rough edges, personalities and strong opinions of people we hold up to be heroes or villains are completely smoothed over so that what is presented to the world is a black-and-white, almost flavorless sound bite of a descriptor. This is very likely what happened to Florence Nightingale (as well as Gandhi, MLK, Rosa Parks, Abraham Lincoln, Henry VIII, Richard III and so many others). Mary Seacole is different in that she is the one in control of our perception of her, not the press or history, so we are seeing what she chooses us to see, which for the majority of the book is a fairly one-dimensional person.

Ana: I agree with you, but I think there might be gender-specific aspects to how they were simplified (in both cases, in ways that were more gender-role appropriate), and that there’s a possibility that this was the case even if with Mary Seacole it was done by her own hand. But anyway, I definitely think there could be something to what you’re saying about searching for meaning in a more spiritual sense and trying to do something in the face of illness and suffering. And I say “could” because neither of us can of course be sure of what drove Mary Seacole - but imagining what might be hiding between the gaps of the text is a huge part of the fun of reading a book like this. Your reading makes sense to me in light of what we know about her convictions and background. I think the drive to find meaning goes beyond religion, even - for example, I’m a non-believer, but I too have the same tendency to try and make sense of things (on a personal level, at least), to use narrative to create meaning and impose order on chaos. We write the story of our lives through our actions, and perhaps Mary Seacole’s journey was her way of changing a senseless story of death and suffering.

Well, we have moved far beyond The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands in this conversation, but then again part of the fun of talking about books is that they’re such perfect starting points for wider discussions. I didn’t love Mary Seacole's memoir, but I’m glad to have read it anyway, particularly because it led to this conversation with you. Do you have any final comments?

Aarti: Much the same! I didn’t love this memoir, either, but I got so much more from our discussion of it than I ever would have if I had read the book on my own. I’m glad we really dug deep and touched on some sensitive topics here! I look forward to another read with you :-)

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You can download The Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands for free at Project Gutenberg. As for me, I really look forward to one day reading Jane Robison’s (author of the excellent Bluestockings) biography of Mary Seacole, and seeing the extent to which it confirms or challenges the speculations and impressions Aarti and I formed through this memoir.

They read it too: Juxtabook

(Have you read this book too? Let me know and I’ll be happy to add your link.)

Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

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The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson

The Morning Gift has an opening not dissimilar to that of The Secret Countess: we are given a glimpse of our heroine’s untroubled life among the cultural elite of Vienna before the war permanently changes everything. Only this time it’s WW2, and our heroine is twenty year-old Ruth Berger. When the Nazis march into Vienna, Ruth’s father is arrested by the Gestapo, and only released under the condition that he leave Austria within one week. The Bergers send Ruth to London with a student visa, and then prepare to leave themselves. But unbeknownst to her family, Ruth is denied permission to leave Austria, and ends up being left behind entirely on her own.

When Professor Quinton Somerville, a scientist who has worked with Ruth’s father, arrives in Vienna for a ceremony that is supposed to honour his colleague, he follows the strands to find Ruth alone at the Bergers’ home. The two realise that the only way for Ruth to leave Vienna safely and join her family in England is for them to get married. This marriage of convenience will be dissolved as soon as Ruth receives British citizenship – but when she becomes a student at the London university where Quin teaches, the two remain in contact, and soon it becomes obvious that they’re developing feelings for each other. Yet there are of course complicating factors, namely the fact that Ruth is supposed to be nearly engaged to Heini, a brilliant Hungarian pianist who’s meant to be joining the Bergers in London any day now.

What a lovely book The Morning Gift is. I can see why long time Eva Ibbotson fans like Claire and Fiona call it their favourite. Ruth’s story is charming and delightful and ultimately hopeful, but also very dark, as a story set at the eve of WW2 could hardly fail to be. In addition to the darkness, The Morning Gift seemed to me franker than the other Ibbotson novels I’ve read to date. It deals with sexuality more directly, for example – it acknowledges Ruth’s desire for Quin and the extreme vulnerability involved in sexual and emotional intimacy in a way I hadn’t found in her writing before.

Ruth and Quin’s romance was lovely and extremely satisfying. I praised Ibbotson’s handling of love stories in The Secret Countess, but she does it even better here. The pace is slower, the obstacles are more mature, and the reader is given plenty of time to see Quin and Ruth’s connection grow. The Morning Gift isn’t so much about them falling in love – they are in love for most of the novel – as it is about growing intimacy and trust and doubt. I’m always happy to find love stories that explore this aspect of relationships (if you have recommendations for more of them, by the way, I’m all ears).

As is customary in Eva Ibbotson’s novels, the love story is accompanied by a cast of colourful and memorable secondary characters with their own plotlines: there’s the Jewish refuge community at Belize Park, adjusting to the loss of their world and to a new impoverish way of life; there are Ruth’s university friends, who have troubles of their own; there’s Quin’s formidable Aunt Frances; there are Miss Maud and Miss Violet, the two elderly ladies who run a teashop in Belize Park. All are portrayed with Eva Ibbotson’s usual tenderness and warmth.

One of the things I’ve been doing as I read through Eva Ibbotson’s back catalogue is trying to make sense of her attitude towards class. I do this not to decide whether or not to disown her based on what I find out (I read and enjoy plenty of authors who are invested in ideologies I find problematic, after all), but because I’m genuinely interested in learning more about the worldview (or wordviews, as these things are not static) behind her large body of work.

When I reviewed The Secret Countess, Alex told me that she found Ibbotson’s classist attachment to the idea of intrinsic nobility too offputting to be able to enjoy her writing, and Jodie wondered if there might be something to how she portrayed characters with new money versus characters with old money. I kept their thoughts in mind as I read The Morning Gift, and what I found only complicates the picture further: first of all, the closest this story has to a villain is the insufferable Verena Plackett, who comes for an old genteel family and thus has the “right” sort of background – but her arrogance and snobbery are her downfall. Verena and her mother counter Ibbotson’s tendency to make her villains nouveau riche.

Secondly, there’s Quin’s Aunt Frances, who I thought was the most interesting of the secondary characters. The reader first meets her at Bowmont, the Somerville estate in Northumberland, when she’s peering out of the window with a spyglass and ordering the daytrippers who made their way to the estate’s beach to be promptly expelled. Aunt Frances is interesting because although she’s portrayed very sympathetically, the narrative acknowledges that she’s often wrong. Furthermore, her allegiance to problematic class attitudes is often just for show – a point that’s humorously illustrated through a plotline that involves a mongrel puppy Aunt Frances declares to reject, but secretly loves. There’s a very clear discrepancy between what she says and what she actually does; a discrepancy the text clearly wants readers to notice.

However, there’s also a degree of romantic attachment to the idea of aristocratic families with estates and inheritances and long histories in The Morning Gift. The idea of Bowmont falling into the hands of The National Trust, for example, is portrayed as a tragedy. I completely understand this from a personal and emotional perspective – it’s natural for people to have feelings about parting from a beautiful home; about a family’s long history in connection to a building coming to an end. That this is a problem that only exists within a context of extreme social and economic privilege does not making it wrong, or unworthy of being included in a story. I only find this kind of thing offputting when it becomes prescriptive – when people’s understandable emotional attachment to their lineage and to spaces they have a historical as well as a personal connection with is understood as signalling that their privilege is part of the “natural” order of things. I don’t think The Morning Gift does this, but there could very well be elements that support a different reading than mine.

At one point, Ruth and Quin have a difficult conversation about his father desperately wanting an heir for Bowmont:

“You chose to sneer when I said I killed her. Yet it is not untrue. My father knew that she was not supposed to have children. She’d been very ill—they met in Switzerland when he was there in the Diplomatic Service. She was in a sanatorium recovering from TB. He wanted a child because of Bowmont. He wanted am heir and he didn’t mind what it cost. An heir for Bowmont.”
(…)
“And what of her? Do you think she was so feeble? Do you think she didn’t want it? She was brave—look at her face. She wanted a child. Not for Bowmont, not for your father. She wanted one because a child is a marvellous thing to have. Why do you patronise women so? Why can’t they risk their lives as men do? They have a right, as much as any man.”
“To jump into the sea for a half-grown mongrel?” he jeered.
“Yes. For anything they choose.”

I suspect there’s more to this story than either Quin or Ruth acknowledge – there is after all a long history of women being compelled into life-threatening pregnancies for the sake of lineage, and I hate to see it dismissed or explained away. But Ruth raises interesting questions about how the melodramatic life narrative Quin is so attached to robs his mother of any agency. Ultimately neither of them can know what really happened, but it’s dangerous to automatically assume that either version must be the right one.

All this to say: I love Eva Ibbotson’s novels because they’re all about people being able to do better – about even someone like Aunt Frances changing, growing, letting go of prejudices, and behaving humanely to others when the moment of truth arrives.

Another reason why I loved The Morning Gift was the fact that it unapologetically features a nearly universally beloved heroine, a girl who is beautiful, smart, good at pretty much everything, and quick to connect with anyone she meets. Readers often seem to be suspicious of, if not outright hostile to, characters like Ruth Berger, but I for one found such an unabashed celebration of a young woman’s competence refreshing.

Finally, how could I resist a novel that features such wonderful moments of humour, like the one where Miss Maud and Miss Violet apologetically express their willingness to adapt to the immigrant community that now frequents their teashop?

But in the flat above the Willow Tea Rooms, a light still burned.
“I suppose we could serve some of those cakes of theirs,” said Miss Maud as the two ladies, in flannel dressing gowns, sat over their cocoa.
“Oh, Maud! Not… strudels? I’m sure Father would not have wished us to serve anything like that.” Three years younger than her sister, Violet was less skeletally thin and, at forty-three, her fair still retained traces of brown.
“No, not strudels, I agree. That would be going too far. But there’s one they all talk about. It begins with a G. Sounds like guggle… Guglhupf or something.”
Violet put down her cup. “But it in from the Continental Bakery, you mean?”
“Certainly not. There is no question of anything being bought in. But I did just glance at the recipe when I was in the library,” said Miss Maud, blushing like someone admitting to a peep at a pornographic magazine. “You need a mould, but it isn’t difficult.”

Other bits I liked:

“Marianne didn’t like radishes. His wife. He never grew them when she was alive. When she died, he said, ‘Now I must grow radishes or she will remain under the ground.’ He meant that he dead must be allowed to move about freely inside us, they mustn’t be encapsulated, made finite by their prejudices.” She paused, moving her hair out of her eyes in a gesture with which he was utterly familiar. “He grows a lot of radishes and I don’t like them very much, as it happens, but I eat them. All of us eat them.”

But what it was was something she could not put into words. That she was devastated by the loss of a place which had nothing to do with her, which she would never see again. That she had been storing Bowmont in her mind: its cliffs and flowers, its scents and golden strands… There would be a lot of waiting in her life with Heini: sitting in stuffy green rooms, accompanying him in crowded trains. Like the coifed girls in medieval cloisters who wove mysterious trees and crystal rivers into their tapestries, she had spun for herself a dream of Bowmont: of paths where she could wander, of a faded blue door in a high wall. And the dream meant Bowmont as it was—as Quin’s demesne, as a place where an irascible old woman bullied flowers out of the ground.

They read it too: The Captive Reader, Nineseveneight, Life Must be Filled Up, The Bookworm Chronicle

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The Prestige by Christopher Priest

The Prestige opens in the present day, when a young reporter named Andrew Westley travels to meet Kate Angier, a reclusive woman he first met as a child. Both Andrew and Kate feel that something important happened during that first meeting of theirs long ago, but neither of them really knows how to explain this impression. There’s also the fact that Andrew feels that he has, or once had, a twin brother – a brother whose absence has haunted him all through his life.

After this short present-day section, The Prestige moves to the year 1901, and through a series of journal entries it tells the story of Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, Andrew and Kate’s ancestors. Angier and Borden are two stage magicians engaged in a rivalry that spans decades. The reasons why the conflict between the two escalates to such an extent only become clear as the story progresses. Similarly, the secrets as the heart of their key illusions are slowly revealed.

The Prestige is many things: Victorian pastiche, a mystery, and also a science fiction novel, complete with a cameo by Nikola Tesla. The ways in which Priest’s novel is science fiction are not at all obvious at first, but they become clearer as the narrative advances. Litlove noted in her review that their sudden introduction was jarring, and many of the commenters agreed. This might very well have also been the case with me if I’d been caught unaware, but because I remembered this discussion, my reading experience was improved – one more reason to be grateful for social reading.

It took me until the section with the journal entries to truly get into The Prestige, but once that happened I was well and truly hooked. I love this kind of smoke and mirrors story; a story in which the puzzle pieces are hidden in plain sight in the language itself; a story in which the reader and the writer both know what the secret is, but the answer is nevertheless not openly acknowledged. This creates a different kind of suspense, where it’s less about finding something out and more about the implications of said thing, or the consequences of it being known by others. In this sense, The Prestige reminded me a bit of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Henry Dunbar (and of Victorian Sensation in general, a genre to which it is clearly indebted).

Part of the appeal of The Prestige is the fact that its atmosphere is eerie, unsettling, and clearly based on a kind of aesthetics I seldom fail to respond to. It’s also a very layered story, which explores the consequences of shaping your whole life around a single idea or goal, and makes good use of all the metaphorical resonance surrounding the idea of the double.

Having said this, I feel more of a cold intellectual appreciation for The Prestige than I do any genuine fan love. But that may very well be down to the mood I was in when I read it. This is a very skilful novel, with a particularly memorable final scene, and it makes me want to read more of Priest’s work.

I have not seen the film. Should I?

They read it too: The Boston Bibliophile, Tales from the Reading Room, books i done read, somewhere i have never travelled, Farm Lane Books, Lovely Treez Reads

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Affiliates disclosure: if you buy a book through one of my affiliates links I will get 5%.

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