A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

A Room With A View begins in Florence: Lucy Honeychurch and her older cousin Charlotte Bartlett, who is chaperoning her on a tour of Europe, are staying at the Pension Bertolini. Much to their disappointment, the rooms with a view they were promised fail to materialise. However, an old gentleman by the name of Emerson hears their complaints and offers to exchange his and his son’s rooms, which do have view, for theirs. Miss Barlett’s is much vexed by the old man’s impertinence, and Lucy – well, Lucy is told that she, too, ought to feel vexed, but somehow she can’t help thinking that he’s merely being kind. This is the first of the many things Lucy knows an Edwardian young woman such as herself ought to be thinking and feeling, only she somehow doesn’t seem to be able to think or feel them. A Room With A View is the story of her progress from a life dominated by convention to one that is kinder, more genuine, freer: to a life where she’s allowed to simply be herself.

Oh, what a wonderful book this is. I think that between this and Howards End, I can safely add E.M. Forster to my list of favourite authors. Even if everything else of his were to disappoint me (which I very much doubt will happen), these two would be enough to qualify him to my personal Hall of Fame. There’s something about Forster’s sensibility that really speaks to me. I love him for his tenderness and his warmth, for his humanity, and most of all for his deep belief in empathy and in the value of interpersonal connections. His novels are all about reaching out, being genuinely kind, treating other people as human beings and never as anything less. Much to my delight, A Room With a View is “only connect” all over again.

I suppose this book could be described as a coming-of-age story: Lucy learns to be herself, and she does so by learning to let go of all the things that get in the way of authenticity – namely social conventions and the distances they impose. She learns that while in the Edwardian world social barriers may exist, “you jump over them just as you jump into a peasant's olive-yard in the Apennines, and he is glad to see you.” Forster demonstrates this with such irony, such subtlety, such lightness. Lucy is contrasted with characters for whom social conventions are insurmountable and Divinely Ordained, and what makes this so effective is the fact that we’re shown not only where she differs from them, but also where she resembles them. Lucy is not a rebel without a cause: she’s a rebel because she becomes slowly and painfully aware that to live the life that’s expected of her would make her deeply unhappy.

If I have one half-complaint about this wonderful novel, it’s the fact that Forster very nearly wanders into murky territory when he comes close to portraying Lucy’s desire for independence as a mere excuse she gives herself to mask her feelings for a certain young man. But I say “almost” because he never quite does it: yes, Lucy lies to others and to herself about her desire for freedom and about other things – and at the heart of this novel is her discovery that to do so won’t ever bring her any happiness. But her desire for independence and the love story we have here are absolutely not at odds: they’re two facets of the same thing. The inevitable marriage at the end (not a spoiler, as you can tell from the very start that this is one of those books that will end with a romantic reunion) doesn’t mean, in the context of the story, that’s she’s exchanging one form of dependence for another. It means that she’s entering a genuine partnership; that she’s doing exactly what she wants to do. She’s never robbed of her agency, but rather has it returned to her with a doubled awareness of its value, meaning and implications.

Between this and Howards End, I’m very impressed with how Forster deals with gender. How could I not love him after deliciously ironic passages such as this?

This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

In addition to my strong affinity with the sensibility behind A Room With a View, there’s the fact that this book was quite simply a joy to read. The first part, set in Florence, reminded me a tiny bit of The Enchanted April (random piece of literary trivia: E.M. Foster was a tutor do Elizabeth von Armin's children), with its wonderful descriptions of Italy. But I don’t want to give you a wrong impression, as this is different sort of book altogether: also delightful, yes, but in different ways.

There’s just so much to love here: there’s Lucy herself, who is difficult not to like; there the older Mr Emerson, with his hilarious knack for embarrassing honesty; there’s the witty dialogue; there’s Forster’s warmth, irony and sense of humour; there’s his lovely use of language (I actually preferred the writing in A Room With a View to Howards End); and there’s the book’s defiantly and stubbornly hopeful tone. This is a novel that will leave you smiling despite everything there is in the world to cry about.

Dear E.M. Forster fans: what should I read next? I’m tempted to pick up Maurice or Where Angels Fear to Tread and save A Passage to India for last. Thoughts?

Bits I particularly liked:

“My dear,” said the old man gently, “I think that you are repeating what you have heard older people say. You are pretending to be touchy; but you are not really. Stop being so tiresome, and tell me instead what part of the church you want to see. To take you to it will be a real pleasure.”
Now, this was abominably impertinent, and she ought to have been furious. But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one’s temper as it is difficult at other times to keep it. Lucy could not get cross. Mr. Emerson was an old man, and surely a girl might humour him. On the other hand, his son was a young man, and she felt that a girl ought to be offended with him, or at all events be offended before him. It was at him that she gazed before replying.

It was ordinary water, nor was there very much of it, and, as Freddy said, it reminded one of swimming in a salad. The three gentlemen rotated in the pool breast high, after the fashion of the nymphs in Gotterdammerung. But either because the rains had given a freshness or because the sun was shedding a most glorious heat, or because two of the gentlemen were young in years and the third young in spirit—for some reason or other a change came over them, and they forgot Italy and Botany and Fate. They began to play. Mr. Beebe and Freddy splashed each other. A little deferentially, they splashed George. He was quiet: they feared they had offended him. Then all the forces of youth burst out. He smiled, flung himself at them, splashed them, ducked them, kicked them, muddied them, and drove them out of the pool.

‘He daren’t let a woman decide. He’s the type who’s kept Europe back for a thousand years. Every moment of his life he’s forming you, telling you what’s charming or amusing or ladylike, telling you what a man thinks womanly; and you, you of all women, listen to his voice instead of to your own. So it was at the Rectory, when I met you both again; so it has been the whole of this afternoon. Therefore—not ‘therefore I kissed you,’ because the book made me do that, and I wish to goodness I had more self-control. I’m not ashamed. I don’t apologize. But it has frightened you, and you may not have noticed that I love you. Or would you have told me to go, and dealt with a tremendous thing so lightly? But therefore—therefore I settled to fight him.’

Other Opinions:
A Guy's Moleskine Notebook
Whimpulsive

(As always, let me know if I missed yours and I’ll be glad to add it.)

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The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany

Imagine lawns of ours just emerging from night, flashing early lights from their dewdrops when all the stars have gone; bordered with flowers that just begin to appear, their gentle colours all coming back after night; untroden by any feet except the tiniest and wildest; shut off from the wind and the world by trees in whose fronds is still darkness: picture these waiting for the birds to sing; there is almost a hint there of the glow of the laws of Elfland; but then it passes so quickly that we can never be sure.

Originally published in 1924, The King of Elfland’s Daughter is one of the grandfathers of modern fantasy. It tells the story of Alveric, the son of the Lord of Erl, who’s told by the parliament that his people desire to be ruled by magic. As a result, Alveric travels to Elfland to marry Lirazel, the King of Elfland’s daughter. But unlike what you might expect, this quest for the Elf Princess isn’t the whole story, but merely its beginning. Alveric and Lirazel come back fairly early in the book, and become the new rulers of the Kingdom of Erl. But like all the magical brides and bridegrooms of legend, Lirazel has trouble settling in. Dunsany writes with surprising sympathy about her longing for home, and portrays as much more than Alveric’s prize – and it’s only when the inevitable happens that the story truly begins.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter is only a little over two hundred pages long, but I read it over the course of two weeks. This is not a sign that I didn’t enjoy it, but it’s a sign of my firm belief that it’s quite possible to overdose on Lord Dunsany. Dunsany’s writing is quite distinctive, and it’s of a kind that has unfortunately become associated with all the stereotypes of fantasy. But as Ursula K. Le Guin puts it,

Dunsany mined a narrow vein, but it was all pure ore, and all his own. I have never seen any imitation of Dunsany that consisted of anything beyond a lot of elaborate made-up names, some vague descriptions of gorgeous cities and unmentionable dooms, and a great many sentences beginning with “And”.

It’s possible that my knowledge that Dunsany was the first to write like this has something to do with my positive response to his work, but there’s also the fact that there really is a lot more to what he does that sentences beginning with “And”. The syntax is easy enough to mimic or to parody, but what he gets right (which, whatever it is, runs much deeper) absolutely isn’t.

Part of what makes his formal, elevated, descriptive and somewhat meandering style so successful is the fact that it isn’t in the least gratuitous. On the contrary, it’s a fundamental part of what makes The King of Elfland’s Daughter what it is. Those who believe that fantasy is all about the plot and never about the writing itself are cordially invited to read this book. But what, you’re probably wondering, is The King of Elfland’s Daughter? It’s a story about the passing of time; about mortality; about what separates “the fields we know” from Elsewhere, from everything we don’t know. It’s a story about wonder and mystery and longing and the imagination, and about how they’re a fundamental part of what being human is all about.

Whenever I write about fantasy, I do so from a place that is largely dominated by my desire to bridge the gap – to bring it closer to realistic fiction, to show that what it does is really not so different from what other books do. This is because I believe that the gap is much too wide; far wider than it needs to be. But on the other hand, there is something about fantasy that is distinctive, and, to fans like myself, distinctively appealing. The reason why I’ve yet to be able to write about this successfully is because I’ve yet to be able to properly explain to myself just what this distinctive quality is. But after reading a book like The King of Elfland’s Daughter, I feel that I almost can.

Alveric’s desperate quest for Elfland, whose borders keep retreating, told me so much about what it means to be human. It told me about why we tell stories, why we have myths, why we dive into the deepest ocean abysses, why we have gone to the moon, why science exists, and history, and religion, and literature too. There’s something so human about his longing for something just out of reach. Alveric’s mad journey, one of the progenitors of the fantasy quest as we know it today, is at its core about a feeling we can recognise in so much of what we do.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter is clearly part of the same tradition as books such as Hope Mirless’ Lud-in-the-Mist, John Crowley’s Little Big, or Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. It’s not that they’re similar, necessarily; it’s just that they seem to define Elfland in somewhat similar terms. Depending on what you love about these books, I think you could fall in love with Lord Dunsany too. Just approach him patiently, carefully, and try your best to forget everything you know about stereotypical fantasy prose. Dunsany can get away with it – he’s the real thing.

Other Opinions:
Tyrion Frost’s Fantasy Blog

(Have I missed yours?)

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Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

The year is 1171, and in the town of Cambridge several children have gone missing. The first to disappear was a boy named Peter, who is rumoured to have been found crucified, while three others have yet to be found at all. The rumours about Peter were enough for the town to fall upon Chaim Leonis and his wife, members of one of the richest local Jewish families, and lynch them. The rest of the town’s Jewish population is being kept in the castle, out of fear (and a very much grounded fear at that) that they, too, will be killed.

Adelia Aguilar, an expert in forensic medicine, comes from Salerno with Simon of Naples and Mansur to investigate the disappearance of the children. Someone high up in the power hierarchy believes the Jews to be innocent, and it’s up to Adelia and her companion to find out who truly is behind the crimes – and what the criminal could gain from the town predictably turning against such an easy scapegoat. But a female doctor, a Jew and a Muslim make for a very strange travelling party, and before they can begin to investigate anything at all, they have to make use of subterfuges to be taken seriously. Not to mention to remain safe.

The fact that the protagonist of Mistress of the Art of Death is a foreigner gives Ariana Franklin the opportunity to explain several things about the social, political and religious customs of the Middle Ages in a way that feels absolutely natural to the reader – and this is an opportunity of which she makes very good use. The medieval setting was by far the thing that appealed to me the most about this book. I loved reading about the complex relationships between the three big monotheistic faiths, about medieval politics, about the motivations behind the Crusades (which weren’t as simple as I might have assumed), and so on.

I expected this to be a mystery largely based on political intrigue and on an exploration of the nature of prejudice, but unfortunately that turned out to be only a small part of the story. I say “unfortunately” because that’s what I wanted it to be about, not because there’s necessarily anything wrong with what the book actually is. But as I’m sure you know, expectations are tricky things. I’m going to say something that might be considered slightly spoiler-ish, though it’s revealed fairly early on (and no, it’s not the identity of the murderer or murderers). Please skip the next paragraph if you’d rather not know.

Mistress of the Art of Death deals largely with sexual violence. This is a topic that affects me, but it’s not one I shy away from. I want books about it to be written, read and discussed, as I believe that we have silenced survivors and swept the whole topic under the rug for long enough. However, perhaps because I wasn’t expecting to find it here, the abuse in this book bothered me more than it normally does. There was also the fact that I didn’t feel that anything new had been said about the nature, causes or consequences of sexual violence. While nothing about Mistress of the Art of Death is exactly graphic, the way the topic is dealt with felt a little pointless to me.

I like books with in-depth characterisation, and mysteries are of course no exception. Normally I’m interested in the motivations behind a criminal’s actions, but I don’t mind it if a book doesn’t go there as long as the characterisation of the investigator is rich enough to make up for it. That’s what Dorothy L. Sayers does, and I suspect that it’s what Ariana Franklin is going for as well. Adelia Aguilar is a well-rounded and interesting character, but I didn’t connect with her as much as I was hoping to. And one of the reasons why was the fact that she felt somewhat inconsistent to me.

Her response to the killer’s motivations is a perfect example of this – one moment she’ll say that it’s far too easy, almost a cop-out really, to dismiss people who commit horrible acts of violence as subhuman monsters, but the next she’ll turn around and do exactly that. All through the book I felt there was a divide between what Adelia professed to believe and her actions; between what readers were being told and what we were being shown. Of course, human beings are nothing if not inconsistent, but I’m not sure that this was done intentionally to illuminate her character.

The fact that Adelia is a woman in a man’s world provides several opportunities for commentary on the limitations of gender roles in the Middle Ages – and again, Franklin makes good use of them. I liked the fact that she draws attention to Adelia’s powerlessness and to the constraints that she has to struggle against as a woman. But I wasn’t completely happy with how this was done. I’m all for scoring points for feminism, but I prefer these themes to emerge organically from the story rather than to feel like they were purposely added to it – and sadly, that’s what Mistress of the Art of Death made me feel.

For example, the story includes a romance, which allows Franklin to show that Adelia lived in a world in which women had to choose between a private and a public existence; between a marriage and a profession. That’s a very real conflict, and yes, it’s infuriatingly unfair. I love many books that deal with that exact same theme, but those books tend to be a bit more…subtle, perhaps? In this case, I felt that the only goal of the romance was to illustrate that point. I felt this from the very onset, and as a result I couldn’t bring myself to believe in the love story at all.

Finally, there’s the fact that Franklin makes use of what is, for me, the most irritating writing trick in history: when Adelia discovers the identity of the killer, this is not immediately revealed to the reader. Granted, she reveals it only one chapter later, but there’s absolutely nothing that annoys me more than this, especially in a close third-person narration. We’re supposed to be inside Adelia’s mind; we’re seeing her world through her eyes; we feel what she feels; we know what she knows. Why is it, then, that this one bit of knowledge is kept from us? The answer is obvious, of course – to maintain the suspense. But that very obviousness is what makes this trick so artificial. It irrevocably distances me from the character and pulls me out of the story. It makes me angry, not curious, because it feels too fictional to ever be effective.

I probably sound like I hated Mistress of the Art of Death, but I assure you that this is not the case. I just didn’t like it nearly as much as I was hoping to, which seems to be the story of my reading life these days. I’m tempted to vow that from now on, I’ll expect every single thing I pick up to suck, so that the weight of expectations won’t ruin any more perfectly good books for me. I’ll end on a positive note: I loved Franklin’s afterword, where she explains the research that went into the book and tells us just which bits were or weren’t anachronistic. As she explains, we don’t know enough about the Middle Ages to write a book set then that is one hundred per cent historically accurate, but she made an effort to make good use of what we do know.

Other opinions, mostly by people who liked it more than I did:
The Written World, My Fluttering Heart, Dear Author, Bookshelves of Doom, Reactions to Reading, Lost in Books, A Garden Carried in the Pocket, Laughing Stars, Books & Other Thoughts, Pag247, You Can Never Have Too Many Books, Some Reads

(Yours?)

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Victorian London by Liza Picard

Ana, you’re probably thinking, have you not had enough of the Victorians by now? Well, no, but I expect you probably have had enough of hearing me go on about them. So instead I’m going to gush a bit about Liza Picard for a change, and try to explain why she’s one of my favourite social history authors. Her books are colourful, well-written, and incredibly engaging. I first discovered her because one of my professors used excerpts of several of her books on London in her class - Picard is not an academic, but her books are well-researched enough to make this an option, plus they’re humorous and a hundred times more exciting than your average history textbook.

What makes Picard so great is the fact that she has an incredibly eye for detail: she includes information that might not be particularly relevant if you consider the Big Picture, but is interesting enough to capture the interest of any reader. And anyway, it’s often the case that the details, rather than the big picture, are what make the past come to life. When I finished Victorian London I felt as close as I’ll probably ever feel to having taken a trip to the past.


(Flower sellers, 1877)
I think nothing will convey what I’m trying to say as well as a list of some of the things I learned about Victorian London while reading this book:

• More than I ever wanted to know about the Great Stink of 1858;
  
  
• Why lady’s magazines were dead set against gentlemen’s clubs;
  
  
• The role of dog turds in the treatment of animal hides (I kid you not);
  
  
• How uncomfortable those top hats men always wore really were, especially in the summer;
  
  
• That bakers would often knead bread with their feet;
  
  
• That an 83-year-old fisherwoman from Penzance walked all the way to London to see the Great Exhibition;
  
  
• All about the scandal surrounding the exhibition of male nudes at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham;
  
  
• The tragic consequences of belief that it was miasma (bad air), and not water, that caused cholera, and just how an old lady set in her ways proved differently and saved many lives;
  
  
• About the difficulties of climbing onto a hansom cab while wearing a crinoline;
  
  
• That the fashion for colourful petticoats came from the fact that ladies knew theirs were going to be spotted anyhow, and decided they might as well make them worth looking at - how unVictorian does that sound?

(Regent Circus, 1888)
…and I could go on. Liza Picard does something that I tend to dislike: she does not always make an effort to hide her own voice. She comments on the material she’s conveying; she makes jokes; she doesn’t always hide her modern sensibility. But the thing is, it absolutely works. Her jokes never feel forced; she absolutely respect the habits and values of time period she’s writing about; and her comments very often echo my own thoughts. This conversational tone adds to the storytelling quality of her histories – she makes me feel like I’m sitting around a cosy fire listening to an impossibly old grandmother telling me all about the past.

As you can probably tell by now, I highly recommend this book, as well as Dr Johnson’s London, which is the only other one of her histories I have read in its entirety. I must get my hands on Elizabeth’s London and Restoration London before too long.



(Chelsea Fair, 1890. I love this photo so much. Could it be any more perfectly Victorian?)
Interesting bits:

Or you might prefer the more direct application of heat to the bath itself, such as Defries’s Magic Heater, which for the expenditure of 2d-worth of gas would produce a hot bath in six minutes – and, one would imagine, a pool of molten metal and a violent explosion soon afterwards. Then there were those terrifying contraptions aptly called geysers since they were as unpredictable and uncontrollable as anything in nature, often resulting in blowing off your eyebrows. They assumed (1) a room free of draughts which would, and usually did, blow out the vital match which you held at the pilot light nuzzle; (2) presence of mind, at that point, to turn off the gas supply; (3) strong nerves; (4) an unquenchable desire for a hot bath, then, there, and not later or elsewhere; all to be co-ordinated while appropriately dressed for the bath you hoped to take.

The Victorian postal service can only strike us with awe, when nowadays we are lucky to get one delivery, on weekdays, at unpredictable times. There were ten collections a day from local sorting offices and pillow boxes, beginning at 9a.m. Delivery within the inner London area was promised within one and a half hours, and within a 12-mile radius of Charing Cross within three hours. Mid-Victorian Londoners could expect twelve deliveries, one every hour during the day.

(This is actually something I thought about while reading Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’s letters: sometimes they exchanged two or three in a single day. Victorian postmen really were underappreciated heroes.)

There was only one place where top hats, no matter how respectable, were agreed to be impossible: the opera. Here, men were a gibus, a hat with the same shape of a top hat but made of unblocked black cloth, with springs inside it, collapsible into a flat cowpat-shaped circle, which could be tucked under one arm. When the right moment came, a smart blow of the brim against the back of the stall activated the springs with a loud bang and hey presto! A top hat, almost.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll add your link here.)

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Red Bird by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver’s poems are often snapshots of very concrete moments: a morning walk, a bird hopping away, a very clear vision to which an emotion is attached. This is, of course, true of much poetry, but Oliver’s evocation of just the right detail to make the whole scene come to life makes this worthy of note.

To say that the poems in Red Bird evoke specific moments, however, is not saying much. And neither is saying that they’re often about nature, though it’s true that they are. What makes this collection stand out is the combination of all these things: the very vivid imagery, the nature scenes, the touches of darkness, the humour (see “Percy and Books”), and above all the sense of wonder and of love that permeates most of these poems.

I knew very little about Mary Oliver’s work before reading this collection — all I knew was that two very dear friends of mine loved her — and it surprised me to notice that much of Red Bird is about faith, directly or not. But as I’ve said before, I’m always interested in reading about what the experience of faith feels like for other people, and these poems gave me a glimpse of that. I found the intimacy, the vulnerability and the humanity of the speaker’s faith very moving. For example, in “Small Bodies” she addresses her God and says:

I know you know everything—
I rely on this.
Still, there are so many small bodies in the world,
for which I am afraid.

But for the most part, her faith manifests itself through a feeling that this non-believer can very easily relate to: a sense of Wordsworthian wonder, of gratefulness to be alive (as the birds tell her in “Invitation”, believe us, they say / it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world), of absolute love for the world. This is the same feeling I find in some of Gerald Manly Hopkins’ poetry, in Carl Sagan's science writing, in the brilliant final chapter of Terry Pratchett’s Nation – and it’s no cheap or easy thing, nor is it anywhere near as simple as it may seem. This feeling is all the more remarkable because it never slips into sugary territory; never denies or lessens the painfulness or messiness of life. It’s a love that is born out of acknowledging it, rather than out of sweeping it under the rug.

Some of the poems in Red Bird are actually quite dark: there’s some commentary on what humankind is doing to the planet (“Showing the Birds”, among others); there’s the strong anti-war sentiment of “Of the Empire”; there’s the grief and the bittersweet awareness of the transience of life of “There you were, and it was like spring”. All this to say that the prevalence of wonder and love do not at all make this an emotionally uniform collection.

A note on Oliver’s language: I won’t call it “deceptively simply” because it isn’t: it is, in fact, as simply as it can be. To make excuses for that would be to imply that complex language is a necessary requirement of poetry, or that simple language automatically means simplicity of content or lack of depth, which is absolutely not something I believe. I find that I read poetry much like I listen to music: it’s through repetition that I make it mine. So I’ll read a favourite poem and listen to a favourite song again and again, until I know their every detail and can call them my own. Mary Oliver’s simple language and her vivid, immediate evocation of a particular scene mean that you don’t need to read her poems repeatedly to make sense of them, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be gained by doing so.

I thought it was interesting that she comments on the simplicity of her language herself on a poem from a different collection, “Everything”. I leave you with a favourite from Red Bird, “I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life”:

Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.

Other Opinions:
Eleventh Stack
Just a (Reading) Fool

(Let me know if I missed yours.)

I wrote this post for the National Poetry Month Blog Tour – make sure you also visit Dar at Peeking Between the Pages and Jen at Jen’s Book Thoughts today for more poetry posts.

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The Sunday Salon - On Rediscovered Classics

Lately I’ve been having fun exploring the catalogues of publishers and imprints that specialise in bringing forgotten classics back into print. Persephone Books and the Bloomsbury Group need no introduction, as they’re both quite popular in the book blogging world. The same goes for the Virago Modern Classics, which also have some passionate enthusiasts. Thanks to the Spotlight on Small Presses series, I was recently introduced to the NYRB Classics, an American publisher which I noticed has quite a few titles in common with Virago. Then there are the elegant Capuchin Classics; Fidra Books and Girls Gone By, which specialise in children’s literature; and Dedalus European Classics and One World Classics, which publish English translations of classics originally published in other languages, many of which are not widely known outside their countries of origin. I’m sure there are others I’m either forgetting or simply haven’t heard of yet - if you know of any, please let me know!

I’m still a newcomer to the world of rediscovered classics, but already I begin to see what it is that people so like about them. With Persephone in particular, for example, five books were enough to make me understand why they inspire such devotion. There’s a very clear vision at work behind the selection of these books, and I’ve begun to take notice of what I think of as the Persephone sensibility. The Persephone sensibility is, among other things, noticeably feminist, and I love it for that. And then there’s the fact that these novels are often about domestic or otherwise marginalised experiences.

This ties in with gender, of course, as very often these experiences were marginalised exactly because they women’s experiences. But the vision at work here seems concerned with more than just gender – it seems concerned with untold stories of any sort; with the kinds of issues that tend to be silenced; with the many experiences that fell outside the boundaries of what “real literature” was understood to concern itself with. I’m talking about Persephone, but I think this also goes for Virago and the Bloomsbury Group. I’ve yet to read any books from the other publishers and imprints, but I wonder if I’ll notice anything when I finally do.

I love the fact that these classics are being rediscovered, for many reasons. I find that reading these neglected books expands my understanding of literature, of history, and of human beings in general. By legitimising experiences what fell by the wayside, by allowing past definitions of what was “worthy” of being written about to be widened, we can perhaps achieve a more inclusive and sympathetic vision of life, past and present.

The popularity of these rediscovered classics also prompts questions about the nature of canons and their formation. As much as people will sometimes get up in arms about any attempts to link politics and literature, it’s very hard to deny that the formation of a canon is a political process. My belief is that it’s also somewhat arbitrary – I won’t argue against the merits of the books that make the cut, but I will argue that plenty of worthwhile ones somehow don’t.

The expansion of the literary canon and of the range of experiences we recognise as of interest is a natural consequence of the passing of time and of changes in our sensibilities. As issues that used to be swept under the rug cease to be taboos, an incredible number of forbidden stories suddenly become permissible – and we realise that they’re actually just as interesting as the stories that did get told. Such is the case with women’s stories, with stories about glbtq people, with stories about other marginalised groups, and so on.

Finally, let’s no forget the fact that many of these books are a lot of fun to read. They’re still fresh, still relevant, still appealing – they have all the attributes that people normally attribute to classics, and which are often used to argue for their maintenance in school curricula, for example. This, before anyone asks, is something I do agree with. I love classics, but I want to define the term as widely and inclusively as possible.

Are you a fan of any of these publishers or imprints? If so, what do you love about them? Do you agree that the books share a common sensibility? And what do you think of the idea of the canon inevitably being expanded as our own sensibilities change?

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In case you haven’t had enough of my blabbing for the day, I wanted to point you towards Rebecca’s blog, Lost in Books. All through the month of April, Rebecca has been running a wonderful series on cultural diversity, for which she invited several bloggers to talk about their cultural backgrounds. Today’s guest post is by me, so if you’re curious about my relationship with Portuguese culture, do click over.

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“Of Love” by Mary Oliver

The following is one of my favourite poems from Mary Oliver’s Red Bird, a poetry collection I’ll be posting about on Monday for the National Poetry Month blog tour. I’ll save my comments for then, but meanwhile I leave you with the poem itself. I thought it’d make a nice change from all the gloomy poetry I’ve posted so far—not that I don’t love sad things.

“I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but not less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway beautiful people to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed. Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some—now carry my revelation with you—
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world—its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself—I imagine
this is how it began.”

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goellnitz/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway takes place in a single day in June, and famously begins with Clarissa Dalloway, who is hosting a party that evening, deciding that she will get the flowers herself. We follow her through the streets of London as she runs her errands and we accompany her inner-monologue – as well as that of several other characters, in and out of whose minds the narration jumps. Though the story covers only one day, there are also flashbacks to Clarissa’s youth, which cast light on her present life as well as on the lives of several of the other characters.

I think Virginia Woolf and I can really be friends now. I wish my first introduction to her fiction hadn’t been her short stories, as they made me dread her for years with no good reason at all. Woolf herself referred to her short stories as exercises in style, and I suspect that was part of the reason why I couldn’t connect with most of them: I felt that technique was their point (though you’re free to argue with me here, of course). In Mrs Dalloway, on the other hand, the style she was trying out has been perfected, and she uses it masterfully. She uses her narrative technique to communicate something – to build something which is as innovative as it is beautiful, personal, and perceptive.

I understand now why this novel is so widely beloved. I have always appreciated Woolf on a literary level: her historical significance, her inventiveness, her role as an early feminist, and so on. But I think that in a way, knowing all these things about her, being surrounded by professors and colleagues who revere her, got in the way of my establishing a personal connection with her writing. I couldn’t just sit alone in a room with her books without being haunted by the Spectres of Cultural Relevance. Does this make sense? What I mean to say is that I feel that personal connection I craved at last – this book spoke to me just like any of the books I love does. I felt completely at home in it; I didn’t struggle for one moment. And I suspect this changed how I see her forever. I have the Woolf in Winter hosts and participants to thank here, because reading about what her novels personally meant to each of you opened me up to her work like nothing had before.

Mrs Dalloway uses stream-of-consciousness better than any other novel I’d read before. This is because Woolf sprinkles her characters’ inner monologues with just enough sensory details to make what’s happening feel real to the reader. These little touches, often offered between parentheses, conjure the physical reality in which the characters are moving very vividly, and this is a needed addition to their stream of private thoughts. I could feel London as Clarissa, Peter Walsh, Reeza or Septimus moved through it. This gives Mrs Dalloway a cinematic quality – and yet not, of course, as this is a book about people’s inner lives and private experiences, which are things you cannot show from the outside. But the sensory details ground it and keep it from ever becoming impenetrable or chaotic.

The London we see here (or the several Londons) is remarkably full of life. There are many passages that illustrate this, but the imagery on this one spoke to me in particular:

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.)

This “divine vitality which Clarissa love[s]” is one of the things that makes Mrs Dalloway feel like one of those novels into which the whole of life seems to fit. Many of its themes are dark: this is a book about the passing of time and the impermanence of life; about shell shock, mental illness, the inadequacy of most societal responses to it, and the scars the Great War left on many lives; about repressed homosexuality; about regret, lost chances, moments that won’t ever come back. And yet that vitality permeates everything: that’s what I most loved about the novel as a whole as well as about Clarissa Dalloway herself. Clarissa wants to live – not because she’s unaware of life’s dark side, of everything she has lost and of everything there is to lose, but exactly because she knows it so well. This is an existential stance, certainly, and it’s one that very much resonates with me.

Much has been said about the fact that reading a modernist novel is an experience almost designed to make some readers feel excluded: these novels tend to assume foreknowledge, a certain type or level of education, and often also that their readers will be from a uniform cultural and ethnic background. I mean this more as a comment than as a judgement, and yes, I do realise that this has to do with their historical context. But the fact remains that some readers will inevitably feel pushed out of these narratives – for an example, I recommend reading Richard’s post on his less than pleasant experience with Orlando.

However, the thing about Mrs Dalloway, the thing that surprised me, is that it doesn’t feel that way at all. On the contrary: it’s a profoundly humane novel, and therefore much more inclusive almost be definition. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that her goal was to “…dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.” The caves do connect, and they do so beautifully.

You know how it can be difficult to truly dislike a person you know very well, no matter how much they exasperate you, simply because you’re too aware of their humanity? This has always been the case with me, at least. And I felt that in Mrs Dalloway, all the characters are easy to empathise with – regardless of their class or background, of their gender or nationality, of their private triumphs and defeats, of their petty and ugly moments, of their very kindness – simply because Woolf strips them too bare. They’re shown from the inside, and this humanises them all. It’s difficult, when we see them so naked, to think of them as “them”. They’re us, and we’re all real and flawed and fragile and alive.

Mrs Dalloway is, among other things, a novel about the validity and importance of individuality, of one’s own private experiences of the world no matter how distant they may be from the consensus. It’s a novel about the fact that each and every one of the human beings you walk past every day is every bit as real as you are. And though it might sound so, this is no small or trivial thing. To The Lighthouse next, I think. I also think it’s time for a re-read of Michael Cunningham’s brilliant The Hours, which I’m sure I’ll appreciate even more now.

Favourite passages:

But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.

“It is time,” said Rezia.
The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself--
“For God's sake don't come!” Septimus cried out. For he could not look upon the dead.

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, as we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,--her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death--that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry’s fault--all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

Other opinions: A Literary Odyssey, Still Life With Books, Notes From the North, third-storey window, Save Ophelia, Caravana de Recuerdos, Nonsuch Book, Regular Ruminations, Rebecca Reads, Moored at Sea, Dolce Bellezza, Lost in a Good Story, Just Add Books, Fizzy Thoughts, Book-a-Rama, Book Addiction, Rhinoa’s Ramblings, Stella Matutina, Vulpe Libris, A Striped Armchair, 1morechapter, A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook, Into the Wardrobe, Bibliographing, Incurable Logophilia, Kiss a Cloud, Another Cookie Crumbles, Shona’s Bookshelves, Lakeside Musings, Evening All Afternoon

(Yes, that’s a ridiculously long link list, but I suspect it’s not all. Please let me know if I missed yours.)

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A Fantasy Reader’s Frequently Asked Questions

(I apologise for using this blog to vent about “real life” conversations that frustrate me and to say what I wish I’d said in those conversations. But that has to be one of the most common uses of the internet, right? I also apologise for the slightly repetitive nature of this post. It seems that I periodically need to get these things off my chest.)

(Also – I know I know I know I know I know: I need to take my own advice.)

You mainly read for “escapism”, yes?
I can’t answer this question without first explaining that the traditional definition of “escapism” is one I have a bit of a problem with. If you take it to mean “go to happy rainbow unicorn land where you won’t have to think about your problems, or anyone else’s, or sad things, or anything but FLUFFY KITTENS for the duration of the book,” then no. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with happy things, with things that make us forget our problems, or with fluffy kittens, but personally I have to say I rarely if ever pick up a book with that specific intent.

If, however, by escapism you mean “to exit the confines of your own identity (and/or of your own time, place, culture, and life) and temporarily enter someone else’s”, then yes, yes, absolutely yes. This is, incidentally, something as easily achieved by a fantasy as by a classic or a piece of realistic fiction. I could go on about this point at great length, but my friend Jason has done so recently, and far better than I ever could. So I’ll point you towards his post (and the very interesting and thoughtful comments) instead.

But don’t you prefer books that allow you to “turn your brain off”?
Now here’s an expression that makes me cringe almost as badly as, say, “the graphic novel genre” - and if you know me well, you’ll know that’s saying a lot. First of all, I actually question the existence of completely “fluffy” (a term I loathe) or “mindless” books, as I believe reading to be too complex a mental process to ever not be enriching in some way or another. More than on the book itself, I think this depends on what the reader is willing to take away from the reading experience. This isn’t to say that some books, regardless of their genre, aren’t more complex or generally felt to be more meaningful and enriching than others – but again, this will largely depend on the reader rather than solely on the book. However, my fondness for fantasy (and for comics, children’s books or YA) has absolutely nothing to do with a preference for books that aren’t meaningful, that won’t challenge me, that won’t make me think. And I regret to say that this is an assumption I’ve come to really resent.

But you’re a bit on the dim side, aren’t you? It just takes less to challenge you or make you think.
You wouldn’t believe how often people actually say this – or imply it in ways they probably think are subtle, but even dim little me can see through. You’d think common politeness at the very least would stop them, but no. Anyway, quite possibly I am, yes. But I wish people wouldn’t make instant assumptions about my intelligence based on what I choose to read. I’m not exactly confident, and I suspect I could very easily fall into this trap and believe this of myself. Fortunately for me, some of the smartest people I have ever met are fans of fantasy, science fiction, comics, YA, or all of the above. Therefore, all I can do is roll my eyes.

(Then again, you could argue that unintelligent people such as me aren’t qualified to recognise intelligence in others, and that therefore all those fantasyYAcomics lovers I think highly of are just pseudo-intellectuals. You win, and I walk away in shame.)

Why do you hate the classics?
Another common misconception about fantasy fans is that we only ever read fantasy. I love many classics, and though I’m all for expanding the canon to include more non-realistic fiction (among many other things), I’m definitely not for chunking the books currently thought of as classics into a bonfire. I wish we’d stop trying so hard to determine what’s worthier, better, smarter, or more meaningful, as if these were qualities that can only be attributed to a very specific category of books.

Why do you hate literary fiction?
Again, I absolutely don’t, and many of my favourite books would be described as such. I do dislike the term, as it’s often used to imply that “literariness” is the exclusive propriety of the kind of books it’s usually applied to – but nevermind that for now.

I don’t hate classics, or literary fiction, or non-fiction – and I realise I don’t need to tell this to those of you who have been reading me for more than, say, one day. But you wouldn’t believe how often people assume that I do. In reality, fantasy is only about 30% of what I read, but it’s like saying I’ve enjoyed even one fantasy novel forever brands me as a “fantasy nerd”. Not that I particularly mind, as I’m proud to call myself one. But I do mind all the baggage that seems to come with the term.

You’re slipping into “reverse snobbery”!
First of all, what is “reverse” snobbery? I think snobbery is snobbery is snobbery, period. Secondly, no, I’m not. I don’t see how refusing to accept the inherent superiority of realistic fiction is the same thing as saying it’s inherently inferior. However, this is something I’ve seen fantasy fans do, so I can see where the assumption comes from. Yes, there are readers of fantasy (and readers of other genres, probably) who will accuse so-called Serious Literature and its readers of being tedious, pretentious, pompous and snobbish. I think this is a sign of how polarised these discussions have become, and I regret that it happens. But it’s not something that all, or even most, fantasy lovers do, because – surprise! – we’re actually as diverse in our tastes, personalities and approaches to literature as readers of realistic fiction.

Why do you insist on calling [insert book thought of as literary here] “fantasy”? Obviously it’s too good to be “fantasy”!
Why do you insist on putting quotation marks around the term fantasy? It’s not like it’ll bite unless it’s muzzled, is it? This is something that really aggravates me: very often, when people who have preconceived notions about a genre read a book that counters those notions, instead of thinking, “Oh, perhaps I was wrong after all” they’ll try very hard to distance said book from the genre they take such pleasure in maligning, as if by doing so they’ll save it—and themselves— from being soiled. Cue in, “Oh, His Dark Materials is excellent! But of course, it’s barely even fantasy”, or “Ursula Le Guin is of course a feminist writer. Isn’t it revolting how she keeps being labelled a ‘fantasy and sci-fi writer’?”. True quotes, my friends. It’s No true Scotsman at its best.

Also, by “people” I don’t just mean common readers, but also critics, marketing departments, and even authors themselves. How many fantasy books are repackaged with Serious and Respectable-Looking covers and put on the general fiction shelf? How many reviews beginning with, “I don’t normally like fantasy, but…” have you read? It’s like the critic is desperate to first and foremost save her or his reputation, and reassure their readers that their enjoyment of this one fantasy book does not in fact mean that their brain has turned to mush. (I realise that the same phrase can be used to denote surprise that a genre you though you didn’t like is actually not so bad, and in such cases I have absolutely nothing against it.)

I’ve often seen people say that fantastic elements alone are not enough to make something “fantasy” (yes, with quotation marks), and what I’d like to know is what, then, is enough – this is an honest question for anyone who happens to disagree. Is it bookshop or library placement? Cover design? The existence of that mythical beast, the nerdy fan? Is it the author’s prestige? Is it “literariness” or the lack thereof? And, more importantly, who gets to decide? Why do certain definitions (usually the least inclusive ones, the ones that perpetuate the ghettoisation of fantasy) get to be dominant? I’m not saying I have all the answers here, but I think these are questions well worth considering.

Do you want me to lend you this mediocre fantasy novel that my daughter read recently? It has a dragon on the cover, so you’re sure to love it!
Thank you, but no thank you. Yet another one of those common misconceptions about readers of fantasy (and possibly of science fiction, mystery or romance) is that we instantly love any fantasy book simply because it’s fantasy. What we love about the books we read is actually not that different from what readers of realistic fiction (which – can this get any more confusing? – we also are!) love about their books, nor is it any less diverse. So no, I don’t particularly want to read a book you think of as mediocre merely because it has a dragon on the cover.

Good writing doesn’t matter to you, does it?
Actually, it does. And I hate the assumption that when you read fantasy, you’re supposed to lower your standards when it comes to the writing. I don’t quite know where this idea comes from, as some of my favourite writers prose-wise (Margo Lanagan, Kij Johnson, Catherynne M. Valente, Ray Bradbury, John Crowley, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter) write or wrote fantasy. I’m not trying to say that every fantasy book out there is written in beautiful prose, but would anyone ever expect that of realistic fiction? We go back to the fact that genres are perceived as a lot more samey than they actually are.

I wish I had numbers that could back up an argument about the proportion of books with quality writing in genre fiction and in mainstream fiction, but a study like that would be very difficult to conduct because it would require an objective definition of “quality prose”. I know a lot of people are ready to argue that this can be objectively defined, but in fact these arguments exist even about classics and literary fiction. One reader’s lyrical writing is another’s purple prose.

So yes, I do care about good writing (or my personal definition of it, which you’re free to dismiss as not as sophisticated as your own), and I don’t think it’s fair to assume that fantasy readers generally don’t.

But don’t you fantasy fans mostly read for plot?
Nope. I do enjoy a good story, but I mostly read for characterisation. This is, of course, a personal preference. And as fantasy readers aren’t all, to steal a phrase from Terry Pratchett, a fourteen-year-old boy named Kevin, we all value different aspects of our reading and read for very different reasons.

Characterisation?! But doesn’t everyone know that characters in fantasy novels are nothing but stereotypes?
*sigh*

You’re probably just not as “discerning” as I am.
I wish someone would be so kind as to explain the meaning of this term to me as if I were three years old. Whenever I come across it, it seems to be used dismissively, which is something that really saddens me. I’ve been accused of having no standards, no taste and no discernment; but ironically I hear this as often about liking fantasy writers as I do about liking canonical ones (such as, say, D.H. Lawrence), which causes me to have a little bit of trouble taking it seriously at all.

It’s only human to define “good taste” in a way that includes our own taste, but the least we can do is try to make an effort not to deride everything that falls on the “wrong” side of our own personal line.

Don’t you get tired of reading about things that aren’t real?
Of all the misconception about fantasy, this is probably the one that baffles me the most. Surely it should go without saying that a book with fantasy elements won’t really be about said fantasy elements? I’ll let you in on a secret: fantasy novels are not about dragons, fairies, unicorns or elves. They’re very often about people. They’re about interpersonal relationships; about our relationship with the world we live in; about what we know and what we don’t; about the imagination; about storytelling; about growing up; about falling in love; about gender; about family, friendship, loss, grief, madness, power, war, peace, you name it. I read them exactly because they tell me just as much about being human as realistic fiction does – and no, not in a less complex or sophisticated way. (But then again, how would I know, right?)

Why can’t you respect the fact that I don’t like fantasy?
I absolutely do. Often when I tell people that fantasy is a lot more diverse than they seem to believe, they feel that I’m pressuring them to start reading it. Possibly I sound like I am because I let my enthusiasm for something I love carry me away, but I’m actually not, I promise. I do believe that the genre is diverse enough that there’s likely a fantasy book out there for every reader, and that dismissing it entirely about one bad experience is hasty; but then again, this is quite likely also the case with, say, thrillers or romance, and I’ve yet to try those genres. It’s not that I refuse to, but we all can be a little wary of venturing into brand-new territory, especially when we already have a thousand different reading interests to pursue. So who am I to judge? There’s something to be said for being adventurous and stepping out of our comfort zone more often, but I won’t look down on people who choose to stick to what they already know they like. Life is short, after all.

This is all very well, but it’s called a genre for a reason, no? The books that belong to the fantasy genre follow certain conventions, and how can any meaningful truths about Life, The Universe and Everything be expressed if the writer is limited by the shackles of genre conventions?
Ah, where to start. First of all, the conventions people usually have in mind when they think “fantasy conventions” are those of a very specific subgenre: epic or quest fantasy. I don’t actually read much epic fantasy – I have nothing against it, but it’s not my favourite subgenre, so I don’t feel that I’m qualified to talk about it at length.

But I’ll say I wish more people realised there’s a lot more to fantasy than just epic quests. Yes, those thick books and endless series are hard to miss when you wander to the fantasy section, but saying they’re all there is to fantasy is like saying that Nicholas Sparks, Jodi Picoult or Dan Brown are accurate representations of the majority of realistic fiction because their books are hard to miss. I have absolutely nothing against these authors or their readers, mind you, but the fact remains that they don’t accurately represent all realistic or mainstream fiction.

Also, I have a problem with the assumption that realistic fiction has no conventions, when in fact all fiction is based on conventions. Aristotle wrote about them a long, long time ago. Why is “experimental fiction” often so strange and discomforting? Why do we even have a term such as “experimental fiction”? It’s exactly because we recognise that there are books that break the conventions we’re used to.

But but but! Surely you can’t compare the conventions that govern all fiction to genre conventions! Those a lot more limiting!
I don’t actually think genre conventions are all that limiting. My favourite authors work both within and around them. They make them work for them; in favour of, not against, the story they want to tell. And while conventions may determine the general shape of a story (or not, and that can be used to create a certain tone or effect), they don’t at all determine its themes or its meaningfulness, however you define that. So no, I don’t think they’re limiting. For example, I’m using a loose version of the conventions of the Socratic dialogue in this post, and rather than limit me they’re allowing me to say exactly what I want to say.

It’s okay; we all have our “guilty pleasures”. *pat pat*
I can’t tell you how tired I am of expressions such as “guilty pleasure”, “fluff”, “indulgence”, or “brain candy.” It’s not the fact that fantasy represents this for some people that I mind; it’s the implication that this is all it can ever hope to be for everyone. Those of us who like fantasy surely do so because we acknowledge there’s a time and place for Serious Books and a time and place for fun and games, right? And surely we won’t deny that these are mutually exclusive categories? We can’t possibly actually take fantasy seriously, can we now?

It saddens me that even some fantasy fans accept this assumption without pausing to examine it – and as a result, they always sound mildly apologetic when talking about fantasy books they’ve enjoyed. It’s funny; the fact that I take fantasy seriously and read it as attentively and critically as I do so-called serious literature seems to shock people more than the fact that I read it to begin with. It’s like I’m some wayward child who’ll not only be naughty, but refuses to apologise or to acknowledge the fact that her parents Know Best when they tell her she misbehaved.

For the record, I hate this assumption both because it implies that fantasy can’t be serious and because it implies that Serious Literature can’t be fun.

Why do you think everyone is out to get you?
Actually, I don’t. I realise that most other readers are very open-minded and respectful, and that even in the most conservative corners of the literary establishment non-realistic or “genre” fiction has begun to receive some serious critical attention. I also know that most people who don’t read fantasy don’t actively dismiss it or look down on its readers. Somehow, though, I always seem to be cornered into these kinds of conversations. Clearly I’m doing something wrong. Help?

If your reading choices make you happy, why do you even care what anyone else thinks?
Because I’m tired of a lifetime of conversations where people subtly or not so subtly talk down to me and patronise me because not only do I admit to loving fantasy, but I refuse to look ashamed of myself for it. As I also love comics and YA (and take them seriously too), I have this happen to me thrice as frequently – which isn’t as fun as it might sound, believe me. I don’t like being patronised, and I doubt anyone does. I realise this doesn’t happen everywhere (again, possibly I’m moving entirely in the wrong circles), and I also realise that people are patronised and judged for many, many other reasons. But this is my experience, so it’s the only thing I feel qualified to talk about. I really wish we wouldn’t be so quick to judge and dismiss people because of what they read.

WHY ARE YOU SO ANGRY?!
I’m not; I promise! I’m just not apologetic or acquiescent, which for some reason everyone seems to expect me to be. If I don’t accept a narrative about the world in which the books I love are relegated to a place of intellectual inferiority and unimportance, I’m dismissed as angry. It gets frustrating, as you can probably tell.

Seriously now: why do you let this consume you?
I don’t know! Possibly because I’m young and impatient and need to grow a thicker skin. Also because I love talking about books, and the assumptions about the books I like (and, by extension, about me) under which many of me interlocutors seem to operate make these conversations very difficult and frustrating. It’s like I’m expected to at least have the decency to stay in the closet and laugh along when somebody makes a joke about all those brain-dead Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fans, or when somebody says, “Oh, that book was kind of dumb, but then again, it’s fantasy/a graphic novel/YA, so what did you expect?” And if I don’t, that’s it. I’m out. I’m Not Fit For Polite Society.

I realise that saying what I’ve said here for the nth time is pretty useless, as most people who feel this way aren’t likely to change their minds (or to be reading my blog to begin with). But perhaps I’ll encourage a reader or two to rethink their previously unexamined assumptions (we all have those, only about different things). And if so, it’ll have been worth it.

Do people ever make assumptions about you based on what you read (be it fantasy, mysteries, classics, award-winners, YA, you name it)? Does this frustrate you? Do you just shrug it off, or does it get to you? How do you deal with it?

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Scott Pilgrim Vols 1-5 by Bryan Lee O’Malley

Scott Pilgrim is twenty-three and unemployed. He plays bass in a band called Sex Bob-Omb, and lives in a flat so small he has to share a bed with his roommate Wallace. When the story opens, he’s dating Knives Chau, a highschool senior, and attracting the comments you might expect from his friends for dating someone so much younger. But all of this is to change when Ramona Flowers comes into his life. Scott falls for her immediately, and the attraction is mutual. But before they can be happy together, he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends, who come after him one at a time, video-game-final-boss-style.

Dear Scott Pilgrim, where have we gone wrong? I was supposed to love you. You were supposed to be my new crack comic book series, as enjoyable to binge on as Fables or Bone (though very different in tone or content, I know). Instead, what happened was this, and I can’t even quite define what “this” is. Just a general feeling of mehness and disappointment. Somehow I didn’t connect with you. You were silly, and I like silly, but most of the time it was all a bit too much for me. And since when to I find things too silly? I’m worried, very worried, that this might be a sign I’m Getting Old. Aaaaaargh!

Seriously now, it wasn’t that I disliked Scott Pilgrim. But I was fully convinced I was going to love it and didn’t. I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds this even more disappointing than actually hating a book you had no expectations at all about. Part of the problem was the humour. See, Scott Pilgrim is funny. It’s funny in a way I generally love: nerdy, very random, occasionally absurd, and full of references to other things. And yet, though my brain would register it was funny, I’d almost never actually laugh. I really can’t explain why this happened, but it did, again and again. The humour, however, was not the main problem. But I’ll get to that in a moment.


I liked the fact that the cultural references in Scott Pilgrim are very much my own. The sensibility behinds these books is that of my generation, and I suspect that Bryan Lee O’Malley grew up with many of the same things I grew up with. And Scott is nerdy! He wears a Zero shirt! There are references to bands and video games! (And also to animé, but I won’t mention those because I’m ignorant and they mostly went over my head.) And yet I never really felt at home in these books. It’s been a few weeks since I read them, and I think I’ve finally managed to put my finger on the reason why: it was the relationships between the characters that gave me trouble.

This is very much an idiosyncrasy of mine, and I expect that most other readers won’t experience the discomfort and the sense of disengagement I experience. The truth is that I’ve always felt, to steal a line from Oliver Sacks, a bit like an anthropologist on Mars. Even in my own life, I often have trouble making sense of how the majority of people relate to one another. This is a series in which certain questions I’d have asked are never asked, and in which the characters operate under assumptions that are very different from my own: that the exes of the person you’re dating will always be your enemies, that jealousy is unavoidable, that people will lie and play games with one another, that relationships will always involve certain feelings of entitlement, and so on. I know that these assumptions do govern many people’s lives and that I’m very much in the minority here. But I’ve always had trouble even grasping the concept of possessiveness, which is why most of the time I had trouble connecting with the characters.


(I did like the meta jokes.)
I want to clarify that I’m not saying I object to these things from an ethical standpoint, as in, “These books condone jealously and I think that’s bad! Oh noems!”. Not at all. And before anyone accuses me taking Scott Pilgrim too seriously, it’s also not that I’m disappointed because the books failed to make any revolutionary or life-changing points about relationships, or life, or the universe, or everything. It’s just that reading this series made me feel just like I usually feel when I socialise with most people my age: slightly puzzled and completely out of place.

The fact that these books are, for all their surreal elements, such an accurate portrayal of the lives of a group of twenty-somethings is actually one of their greatest strengths. The characterisation is excellent, and plus the cast is quite diverse. Also, the dialogue feels natural and was often (my brain fully acknowledges this) very funny. It’s interesting how reading Gasoline recently, my greatest disappointment of the year so far, made me appreciate Scott Pilgrim a lot more. There are books which are awful disappointments, and then there’s this. I did read all five volumes in only a couple of days, after all, and I didn’t for a moment have to force myself to go on. I just expected more – perhaps the fact that I connected so deeply with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Lost at Sea is a bit to blame here.

Honestly, this is a good series. My main problem with it was the fact that I’m me. Here are a few different opinions, from people who are saner and more well-adjusted than I am. You should listen to them:

The Book Zombie
A Book a Week (Vols 1 and 2, 3, 4, 5)
Books & Other Thoughts (Vols 1, 2, 3, and 4 and 5)
Bart’s Bookshelf (Vols 1-3)
Stuff as Dreams are Made On
Sophisticated Dorkiness (Vol 1)
The Written World (Vol 1)
Ready When You Are, C.B. (Vol 4)
Opinions of a Wolf

(Did I miss yours?)

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March by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks’ March tells the story of Mr March, he of Jo, Amy, Beth and Meg fame. It’s not so much a retelling of Little Women as it is a book that exists around it, in its gaps and silences. In Louisa May Alcott’s novel, we’re told that the girls’ father is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. March is his account of what he saw in the war and how this changed him – as well as an account, told through flashbacks, of his early years with Marmee, of how he lost his fortune, and of what lead to his decision to join the war.

Mr March is a passionate abolitionist, a pacifist, and a vegetarian. The harsh reality of war, death and despair that he sees every day eats away at his idealism, and every evening he struggles to present things positively when he writes to Marmee and the March girls. This is, of course, a nice way of saying that his letters are full of lies meant to spare their feelings. As each chapter opens with one of his letters, followed by an account of what actually happened, it’s difficult for readers to miss this. And this is the brilliant thing about March: it’s as much a book about honest communication and the things that constrain it as it is a book about the American Civil War, about slavery and racism, about different kinds of courage, and about idealism and reality.

March sneaked up on me: it took me about two thirds of the book to realise how much I was actually loving it. What happens after those first two thirds is that we get to the point in the story where Marmee gets a telegram saying Mr March has been wounded. She rushes to Washington to see him, and while he remains unconscious she picks up the narration. It was at this point that I realised how deliberate every single thing about the book had been; how brilliantly Geraldine Brooks had used the limitations of a first person narration.

For example, throughout Mr March’s narration I was troubled by his assumption that Marmee’s temper was unladylike; that for a wife and mother to ever feel anger simply wouldn’t do; that it was his job to manage her and make her control herself. I know this is well within character for a nineteenth-century man, but this is a contemporary novel, and I know that Brooks is a feminist. So I wondered if aspect of the story would eventually be examined, and if so, how – which it was, of course. It all begins with the following outburst from Marmee:

‘You stifle me! You crush me! You preach emancipation, and yet you enslave me, in the most fundamental way. Am I not to have the freedom to express myself, in my own home? In the face of such insult? You call your girls your “little women”; well, I am your belittled woman, and I am tired of it. Tired of suppressing my true feelings, tired of schooling my heart to order, as of I were some errant pupil and you the schoolmaster. I will not be degraded in this way.’

…and it continues when we get to Marmee’s own narration. Her version of events casts light on what they weren’t telling each other; on how both struggled to behave according to the roles of Husband and Wife they had been assigned. The story takes note of the fact that both March and Marmee had been silenced, though in different ways. March is yet another book that analyses the impact of the public on the private (can you tell I love those?); the way social expectations influence how people behave even in an intimate and loving relationship.

The thing that impressed me the most, though, was the fact that March is a novel that closely examines and questions gender roles and convention while remaining completely faithful to the sensibilities of its nineteenth-century narrators. The characters don’t do or say anything anachronistic – it’s exactly what they remain silent about that speaks volumes. The way Geraldine Brooks managed to achieve this absolutely impressed me.

But this is only one of the novel’s many themes. Like I said, March is also about different forms of courage, about guilt, about idealism and about pride. I haven’t read many stories that examine the fact that even well-meaning, highly idealistic people can do more harm than good by believing in their own indispensability. Sometimes feeling wretched because you can’t do more to help is nothing but a form of pride. Sometimes you have to accept it’s not up to you to change the world. And sometimes, the best you can do to help a cause is to let those it directly concerns handle it. The passage I share at the very end of this post illustrates this point perfectly.

Finally, I found Geraldine Brooks’ afterword about her research for this book extremely interesting. She based Mr March on Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s father, and some of March’s letters in the novel cite Alcott’s own letters. Also, there are appearances by Emerson and Thoreau, and she has them say things they are known to have said, though in different contexts. I love the fact that she took such care to truly capture the voices of her characters.

Favourite passages:

Who is the brave man—he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination. The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads. And yet I do not think it is heroic to march into fields of fire, whipped on one’s way by fear of being called craven. Sometimes, true courage requires inaction; that one sit at home while war rages, if by doing so one satisfied the quiet voice of honorable conscience.

And now, a year has passed since I undertook to go to war, and I wake every day, sweating, in the solitude of the seed store at Oak landing, to a condition of uncertainty. More than months, more than miles, now stand between me and that passionate orator perched on his tree-stump pulpit. One day, I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I was that day; that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what it was that he meant to do.

It was folly to let him go. Unfair of him to ask it of me. And yet one is not permitted to say such a thing; it is just one more in a long list of things a woman must not say. A sacrifice such as his is called noble by the world. But the world will not help me put back together what war has broken apart.

“We have had enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people to manage its own destiny.”
She had raised her voice and her eyes glared. I looked away, astonished by the vehemence of her rejection. “Go home, Mr. March,” she said. Then her voice softened. “If you sincerely want to help us, go back to Concord and work with your own people. Write sermons that will prepare your neighbors for a world where black and white may one day stand as equals.”

Other opinions:
Medieval Bookworm
The Biblio Blogazine
Reading Reflections
Laughing Stars
Book-a-rama
Chain Reader

(Did I miss yours?)

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A Short History of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James

(In case you’re wondering: yes, that lovely cover is indeed by Charles Vess.) A Short History of Fantasy is exactly what it sounds like: a concise history of the genre from its ancient origins to the present day. The book is divided in eleven chapters covering specific time periods, with the exception of authors so influential that they are given chapters of their own: there’s one on Tolkien and Lewis, and one covering the more recent impact of Philip Pulman, Terry Pratchett, and J.K. Rowling. Also, though the focus is mostly on fantasy literature, media like TV, cinema or comics are occasionally also covered.

A Short History of Fantasy is more historical than analytical, but then again, that’s what it’s meant to be. Mendlesohn and James write about fantasy’s many subgenres and their evolution with appreciation and respect – which isn’t to say, of course, that they do so uncritically. It’s perhaps silly to even point out that a book about fantasy treats its subject matter with seriousness, but I’m going to be silly and point it out anyway because this is still something that mildly surprises me.

As much as I enjoy books that make a case for fantasy literature (namely Ursula Le Guin’s or Michael Chabon’s excellent essays), I begin to see the merits of simply not bothering to do so – of assuming that your audience takes fantasy seriously, and that if it doesn’t, it’s not your business to change their minds. There’s something to be said about writing from the centre because you refuse to be placed in the margins. But if a post I’m currently drafting ever sees the light of day, you’ll see how much I still need to take my own advice.

Anyway. Saying that the focus of this book is mostly historical doesn’t mean there’s no critical analysis whatsoever, of course. There is, and though I may not agree with all of it (for example, that His Dark Materials is “uncomfortably misogynistic” – which isn’t the same as saying that gender roles in the trilogy are a hundred per centre perfect, of course), the criticism was all intelligent, informative, thought-provoking, and a pleasure to read.

A Short History of Fantasy is, obviously enough, a short book, but I still found it pretty comprehensive. It does what it set out to do and it does it perfectly. I think the only author I love who got no mention at all was Martin Millar. I won’t lie; this is a book that will mostly appeal to those who already have an interest in fantasy. If that’s you, and if you don’t mind coming out of it with a gigantic reading list, then I absolutely recommend it.

Here’s a list of the books I added to my wishlist:

• Joan Aiken’s short stories
  
• Mistress Masham’s Repose by T.H. White
  
• Gloriana by Michael Moorcock
  
• Red Shift by Alan Garner
  
• The Midnight Folk by John Masefield
  
• The Box of Delights by John Masefield (Reminder.)
  
• The Green Child by Herbert E. Read
  
• The Ship That Flew by Hilda Lewis
  
• The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge (Reminder.)
  
• The Wonderful O by James Thurber (Also a reminder, as last year I read and adored The Thirteen Clocks)
  
• The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope
  
• A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley
  
• The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban
  
• The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy by Penelope Lively
  
• Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner
  
• Tea With the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy (Reminder, as I think I’ve seen Neil Gaiman praise this one before.)
  
• The Warrior Who Carried Life by Geoff Ryman
  
• The Fires of Bride by Ellen Galford
  
• Fire’s Astonishment by Geraldine McCaughrean
  
• The Rainbow Abyss and The Magicians of Night by Barbara Hambly
  
• Was… by Geoff Ryman (Reminder.)
  
• The Course of Heart by M. John Harrison
  
• A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
  
• The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley
  
• Galvenston by Sean Stewart
  
• The Water of Possibility by Hiromi Goto
  
• Fly By Night by Frances Harfinge
  
• The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce
  
• The Death of a Ghost by Charles Butler

Phew! As you can see, this is a very dangerous book. Have you read any of these? What did you think?

(Also, have you posted about this book? Let me know and I’ll add your link here.)

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