The Curse of the Wendigo + Happy Halloween!

Today I’m over at The Book Smugglers with a review of Rick Yancey’s The Curse of the Wendigo, the excellent sequel to The Monstrumologist. Ana and Thea very kindly gave me a copy of the book as an All Hallows’ Read gift and invited me to join their Halloween Week celebrations. Thank you again, ladies!

I also received Edith Warthon’s Tales of Men and Ghosts from my lovely partner, and earlier today I released a gently used copy of The Woman in Black into the wild, where it will hopefully make some unknown booklover’s day.

Have you given or received any books for All Hallow’s Read? If not, it’s not too late to join in! And if you’re looking for recommendations or ideas, you can find some here.

To those of you who celebrate it, have a very Happy Halloween! My plans for the evening include watching The Wicker Man (original version) and The House of Long Shadows, eating a lot of candy, and later curling up with Wharton’s stories.

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The Sunday Salon – On Ambivalence

The question “So, did you like it?” is probably the most common way to begin a bookish discussion: it’s what most of us will immediately ask if someone tells us they’re reading or have just finished a book we’d like to know more about. While there’s nothing wrong with asking this question, I’ve noticed that in answering it we often sacrifice complexity for the sake of brevity or of clearer communication. Saying “Yes, I liked it” is simpler than “I loved the storytelling, but the writing was so-so”, and not necessarily any less true. We may like or even love books that we know are anything but perfect, yet “I loved this book” is often read as “I loved every single thing about it”, and “Yes, I liked it, but—” as a polite way of saying “No, don’t read it”.

My favourite discussions, however, are the ones that leave room for ambivalence, for contradictory emotions, for a deep appreciation for some aspects of a book that coexists with a rejection or at least a questioning of others. Very often, we love problematic works while knowing full well that they’re problematic, and to do so doesn’t mean we’re refusing to engage with or hiding away all the things we don’t like. We know they’re there, we want to acknowledge them and think about them, but they don’t have to take away from the things we do love.

For example, I love Wilkie Collins and his engagement with Victorian feminist issues, but I’m well aware that the revolutionary aspects of his writing go along with an evocation of several stereotypes of femininity. Some he chooses to subvert, others not so much. I loved The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey even though the way it dealt with female characters was straight out of classic horror (they were there to be eaten); I love many manic pixie dream girl stories even though they’re another drop in a cultural sea where women are portrayed as objects but seldom subjects of desire; I loved the BBC Sherlock series despite the horribly racist second episode; I loved the classic feminist texts I read for the Year of Feminist Classics earlier this year, even though very often the authors’ insight about gender was accompanied by blind spots about class or race that really stand out in retrospect.

These “buts” aren’t all socio-political, of course – a book may have a great plot but so-so writing; gorgeous writing but little else; engaging characters that steal our hearts but a meandering plot; or it may take too many freedoms with historical details, for example, while still being fun and captivating. We love flawed things, and to do so doesn’t mean we must excuse or explain away their flaws. The fact that we can love things not blindly but while fully engaging with their shortcomings is part of what The Magician’s Book is about, and is one of the reasons why it’s one of my favourite works of literary criticism.

The excellent discussion on the Bechdel test at Jenny’s blog recently was another reminder of this: several bloggers weighted in with thoughtful comments, and the main thing I took away from the conversation was that even though it’s only human to worry about what enjoying certain things may say about us, the truth is that it doesn’t necessarily say anything at all. Books and other media are often multifaceted, and the fact that they may fail on one level doesn’t mean there isn’t value on what they achieve on others.

This is why I worry about conversations about blogging (or any other kind of literary discussion, really) that seem to conflate the concepts of “critical” and “negative”. For example, I’ve often come across comments along the lines of, “I want to see critical engagement with books, and bloggers who enjoy everything they read don’t really do this”. The ideal balance between positive and negative reviews, if such a thing can be said to exist, is perhaps a topic for an entirely separate discussion. But what I’m not comfortable with here is the implication that to “critically engage” is to arrive at a negative assessment of some sort. You can deconstruct a book and marvel at its thoughtfulness and complexity while doing so; you can explore a book in-depth, find things you’re less than happy about, and still come away with an overall appreciation of it; and yes, you can critically engage with something and find it lacking in most aspects. This is certainly a possibility, but not the only critical possibility.

There are probably as many answers to the questions “what is the purpose of a book blog?” as there are bloggers and blog readers. People use blogs for different reasons, and sometimes all we want really is a simple and quick answer to the question “Did you like it? Would I like it too?”. This is as valid as anything else, but it’s useful to remember that there may be a lot of nuance behind the answer we’re after.

Do you ever find it difficult to communicate ambivalence in your reviews? Do you think the kind of discussions we most often have tend to reduce nuance and ambivalence to clear answers? Do you ever worry that when you discuss any misgivings you had about an overall good book all people are going to take away from it is “Don’t read it, it’s bad”? Do you have any other thoughts to share on this? If so, I would love to hear them.

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The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett

It was generally held knowledge among the people who lived on Withward Street that the eldest of the three Miss Lockwells had a peculiar habit of reading while walking.
So often was she observed engaged in this activity that, while the practice was unusual – and therefore not altogether admirable – people had become accustomed to it. On almost any fine day she might be seen striding past the brick houses that stood along the streets as upright as magistrates, a volume in her band and her attention absorbed by the pages before her. No one bothered to wave or call out in greeting as she passed; they had learned long ago there was no point in it when she had a book with her.

First of all, how great an opening is that? The Magicians and Mrs. Quent is a fantasy of manners set in a secondary world by the name of Altania. It tells the story of three characters: Ivy Lockwell, the bookworm of the passage above, has an interest in magic but as a woman is barred from its practice. The Lockwells have been in difficult circumstances since Mr Lockwell became disabled in a mysterious incident, and as a result Ivy accepts a job working for the elusive Mr Quent. The other two point of view characters are Dashton Rafferdy, a young man from a higher social sphere who becomes close to the Lockwells, particularly Ivy; and Eldyn Garritt, an old friend of Rafferdy’s, who against his will becomes involved with dangerous men and must change his life for his sake as well as for the sake of his sister.

A very long time ago, when I asked you all to help me review my backlog of books by asking me questions, Trisha and Heidenkind obliged with questions about The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (this should tell you something about how long an unfinished version of this post has been sitting on my drafts folder). Trisha asked, “I’ve been on a positive kick of homage-type books, so I am curious: Did you find the story a fitting homage/pastiche/etc or did the story just come off as unoriginal or stolen material?”

Before I answer the question, I should explain how the book is structured. The Magicians and Mrs. Quent is divided into three parts: the first, set in the city of Invarel, pays tribute to Pride and Prejudice in tone and plot. The second is told in epistolary format and has strong echoes of Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and The Turn of the Screw. Finally, part three brings all the plot strands together in a surprisingly Lovecraftian climax.

Galen Beckett (aka Mark Anthony¹) has said that part of the reason why he wrote this book was to answer the question, “what if there was a fantastical cause underlying the social constraints and limited choices confronting a heroine in a novel by Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë?” — which I think is a very interesting premise. He doesn’t handle it as well as Jo Walton does in Tooth and Claw, but then again not everybody can be Jo Walton.

To answer Trisha’s question, then, I don’t think The Magicians and Mrs. Quent is on the wrong side of the line dividing tribute from unoriginality, though some elements worked better than others. I quite enjoyed playing the I-know-how-this-story-goes game as I was reading. I suspect that rather than being lazy or easy, well done intertextuality and what I think of as skilled predictability actually take a lot of work. How do you make a story both familiar and new? This is one of the reasons why I love fairy tale retellings: I love stories that evoke other stories while still being their own thing; stories whose shape we can anticipate but don’t enjoy any less for that – quite the contrary. At its best, The Magicians of Mrs. Quent does exactly that, especially in part two. Strange though this might sound, knowing the shape of the story in front of me was part of what kept me turning the pages. I needed to know which bits I was right about and which bits were going to surprise me.

However, I’m not sure if the Lovecraftian turn of events in section three worked quite as well. I don’t want to give everything away, but when the Ashen were introduced into the story I couldn’t help but start singing Awake Ye Scary Great Old One in my head, and I kind of kept doing it all through the rest of the book. The thing is, I actually like the psychological reality this kind of story expresses – that’s why I’m a Lovecraft fan despite his somewhat preposterous writing. I like how well they capture the feeling of insignificance many people experience when facing the scope of the universe and the infinity of time. The Magicians and Mrs. Quent captures that well, but the Ashen were too much like creatures from the Dungeon Dimension minus the humour of Discworld. Something about the tone reminded me of a parody gone wrong, which I’m pretty sure is not what was supposed to happen. Perhaps the problem was the fact that the tone of the first two sections felt so at odds with this one, which prevented me from taking it seriously. However, I’m sure many other readers will feel differently.

Heidenkind asked, “I have The Magicians and Mrs. Quent on my TBR shelf, so I think you should review that. Question: it looks loooooong; does it read fast or not?”
You need to be patient in part one, as the build-up is slow. There’s a lot of jumping around between characters at first, and it takes a while for the seemingly unconnected plot strands to come together. But once the story picks up I was very much hooked, so I would say the initial investment is worth it. The first 150 pages or so are slow going, but the rest flies by.

As you can probably tell by now, I enjoyed The Magicians and Mrs. Quent for the most part; but if there was one thing that kept me from being completely satisfied, it was the fact that the characterisation was a little bit thin around the edges when it came to anyone but the three main characters. Eldyn’s sister Sashie was like Nora from A Doll’s House minus the ending. Her brother sees her, treats her, and portrays her to the reader as a doll. I kept waiting for the moment when we’d see her as a real human being, but sadly it never came. However, this is the first book in a series, so I should probably reserve judgement.

Ivy’s sisters Rose and Lily also seemed pretty one-dimensional to me. Rose in particular had me rolling my eyes with alarming frequency, as she comes across as a cartoonish mystic – ‘simple’ but attuned to Hidden Powers. But like I said, the characterisation is fine when it comes to the three protagonists, and that was enough to keep this character-oriented reader mostly happy.

I didn’t love The Magicians and Mrs. Quent as much as Memory, Shanra or Meghan did, even though I agree with them 99% of the time, but obviously that doesn’t mean others won’t. I did think it was a fun read and I want to know what happens next, so I’ll eventually be getting my hands on The House on Durrow Street.

They read it too: Stella Matutina, Libri Touches, Medieval Bookworm, The Book Smugglers (Thea), The Book Smugglers (Ana), Fyrefly’s Book Blog, Steph Su Reads, Jenny’s Books

(You?)

¹If anyone has any idea about the marketing reasons behind Anthony’s female pseudonym and the pretence that this is a debut novel, I would love to hear them.

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Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Eighteen-year-old Saba has never been separated from her twin brother Lugh. Growing up in remote Silverlake, she’s never had much contact with anyone besides her family. But one day, a group of riders dressed in black come to Silverlake, take Lugh away, and change Saba’s life forever. She knows it’s up to her to get her brother back, as well as to make sure that their younger sister Emmi remains safe. And so her journey begins.

It’s been a little while since I finished Blood Red Road, so I asked my friend Kelly if she would help jolt my memory with a few questions about the novel. She was kind enough to agree, so here are her questions and my answers:

1. What lead you to pick up this book? Did it meet your expectations?
First of all, the premise really appealed to me, as did the setting. Blood Red Road sounded like it would have the kind of post-apocalyptic western feel that I have enjoyed in other books, and it didn’t disappoint in that regard. Secondly, I was seeing Moira Young at the Edinburgh Book Festival, so it seemed only right to read her book beforehand.

As for whether or not it met my expectations, yes and no. Blood Red Roads is a good book, but unfortunately I felt like I’d seen much of it before. The voice in particular strongly reminded me of Todd from Chaos Walking, which put me off quite a bit. Part of me feels terrible saying this, as it’s not entirely fair criticism. When I saw Moira Young doing a joint session with Patrick Ness in Edinburgh, she said she heard this comparison all the time, but she had yet to read Chaos Walking exactly because she was working on her series when it came out. So it’s not a matter of Moira Young’s work not being original – it’s just that readers can’t help the fact that the first of these series they come across will feel fresh, while the second will suffer by comparison.

2. What did you think of the main character, Saba?
I really loved Saba. As I was saying, her voice is a little too much like Todd’s, but her personality very much isn’t. Saba is irritable, impatient, impulsive, stubborn, not always fair, and yet still completely human and sympathetic. She’s tough and independent, but her independence doesn’t come from a refusal to accept help or rely on others. She’s difficult to get to know, but not unwilling to form close relationships. And she’s portrayed as strong in a way that defies traditional femininity, but, unlike what tends to happen with characters of this sort, is not contrasted with notions of “weakness” that I find extremely problematic.

3. What did you think of the Dystopian world that Moira Young has created? Is it believable?
First of all, I would probably call it post-apocalyptic rather than dystopian: see this very handy flowchart ;) But to answer the question, I absolutely loved the worldbuilding – it was one of my favourite things about the book. Blood Red Road is, among many other things, a quest/adventure novel, and as often happens in this type of story the protagonist leaves her familiar surroundings and discovers a wide world full of possibilities and dangers at the same time as the reader. Saba spends most of the novel worried sick about her brother Lugh, but you can tell she’s nevertheless experiencing the thrill of discovery. She wants to know more about this brave new world, and, as a result, so do you.

One of the things Moira Young said in Edinburgh was that she left the causes of the disaster that left the world of Blood Red Road in its current state vague on purpose – she felt that the effect would be more powerful if readers were allowed to fill in the gaps with their imagination, and I completely agree. But at the same time, she also said that her environmental concerns often find their way into her writing, and this clearly shows in Blood Red Road. For example, Silverlake has been suffering from a terrible draught for years, and as a result the lake now exists in name only. I found all the little hints of a civilisation driven to disaster by their abuse of natural resources subtle but very powerful.

4. The book had lots of secondary characters, which ones stood out for you? What were your thoughts on them?
First of all, I loved Emmi, Saba’s younger sister. Emmi is very different from Saba, but in her own way she’s just as resourceful and competent. The two of them have a very complicated relationship – as Saba herself confesses, she has resented Emmi her whole life because their mother died giving birth to her. Moira Young’s portrayal of their relationship – hostile at times, fiercely tender at others – was brilliant.

I also really liked the Free Hawks, a group of young women who live on the fringes of society and who befriend Saba and Emmi. And Saba’s pet crow was pretty awesome.

Finally, there’s Jack, Saba’s friend and love interest. Jack is a good character – he’s not the romanticised abusive jerk that plagues a certain type of YA these days, although at first I worried he would be. But all the same, the romance was my least favourite aspect of Blood Red Road, and I think the reason why was the combative language Young uses to describe it. The whole I-love-you-and-I-hate-you-I-want-you-and-I-don’t thing makes sense considering Saba’s personality and her difficulties with close relationships, but it still bothered me because it feeds into a wider cultural narrative according to which this is the way women act, period. They say no when they mean yes, and men are expected to press forward. They struggle with their own passion and eventually “give in” to men. I think the problem was not so much this book – let me repeat that Jack is not a jerk, and he does respect Saba – but the wider context in which it exists.

5. What was your favourite scene or part of this book?
It’s been too long since I finished it for me to be able to pick a favourite scene, so I’ll go with a favourite aspect: I loved the delicate balance Moira Young achieved with Saba’s characterisation. She was prime excepto-girl material, yet she never became one. She’s not portrayed as strong in comparison with the “weakness” of other women, but alongside other competent women who express their femininity in a myriad different ways. And as I was discussing with Jodie recently, the same goes for the men. Toughness and cooperation are never portrayed as polar opposites, nor are they gendered. Saba and her friends are competent on their own, but they know they can achieve more if they work together. Moira Young never feels the need to put down some characters to elevate others, and her characterisation is all the stronger for that.

6. Will you be reading on in the trilogy?
Yes, I will, though I probably won’t pre-order the next book and read it frantically once it comes out like I did with Chaos Walking. To anyone who worries when they see the word “trilogy”: fear not, there are no cliffhanger endings here. And although a few questions remain unanswered at the end, Blood Red Road can be read as a satisfying stand-alone novel.

They read it too: The Written World, Rhapsody in Books, Presenting Lenore, Good Books and Good Wine, Bookshelves of Doom, One Librarian’s Book Reviews

(Have I missed yours?)

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‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (& Persephone Secret Santa)

‘Salem’s Lot tells the story of Ben Mears, a writer who returns to the small town in Maine where he lived between the ages of 9 and 13, Jerusalem’s Lot. The town has haunted his dreams for the past twenty years – particularly the Marsten House, an abandoned mansion with a horrific past. Ben’s return to ‘Salem’s Lot coincides with the reoccupation of the Marsten House: two strangers from Europe, Mr Starker and Mr Barlow, intend to restore it and to open an upmarket antique furniture shop. But soon after their arrival, strange things begin to happen – things which might not mean much on their own, but which put together suggest a very disturbing possibility.

‘Salem’s Lot is, as King himself puts it, a tribute to and a reworking of Dracula — the constant nods to Stoker are sure to make fans of classic horror smile. It says a lot about King’s storytelling skills that I enjoyed this novel as much as I did even though I have more or less reached a point of cultural saturation with vampires. But ‘Salem’s Lot is as much a small town novel as it is a vampire novel, and that was the aspect of it that interested me the most. It’s a story about secrets, silences, and intertwined lives in a dying community; a story in which the supernatural is not so much a new threat as it as a catalyser that causes previously existing hostile undercurrents to surface.

My edition of the novel includes an introduction in which King explains that he intended to turn the optimism of Dracula on its head: he points out that Stoker’s story is one in which we know all along that progress will triumph against darkness, even if at some cost. But in the present day (or the present day in the early 1970’s; it’s interesting to think that this novel is nearly 40 years old), our faith in progress has let us down – or has it?

King writes:

When I sat down to write my version of the story in 1972 - a version whose life-force was drawn more from the nervous jokey Jewish-American mythos of William Gaines and Al Feldstein than from Romanian folk-tales - I saw a different world, one where all of the gadgets Stoker must have regarded with such hopeful wonder had begun to seem sinister and downright dangerous. Mine was the world that has begun to choke on its own effluent, that had hooked itself through the bag on diminishing energy resources, and had to deal not only with nuclear weapons but nuclear proliferation (big-time terrorism was, thankfully, at the time still over the horizon). I saw myself and my society at the other end of the technological rainbow, and set out to write a book that would reflect that glum idea.

However, he goes on to say that his characters surprised him; that in the end ‘Salem’s Lot turned out to be far less cynical than he had anticipated. I’m glad this was the case, as I enjoyed the tenuous hopefulness that emerges at the end more than I think I’d have enjoyed the completely pessimistic novel he envisioned. But nevertheless, it’s easy to see that a sense of overwhelming darkness, of powerlessness, of being surrounded by forces beyond our control was his point of departure.

As I was saying, ‘Salem’s Lot is very much a small town story: Barlow and Starker’s arrival brings out the worst in the community, and many of the horrible things that happen are only exacerbations of what was already there. King certainly doesn’t shy away from showing us his characters at their very worst. ‘Salem’s Lot has a very large cast of characters, and as a result most are drawn in broad strokes. This approach is very much intentional, as King is going for small town types rather than individuals, but I think I’d have been happier if a wider, less stereotypical spectrum of human behaviour had been portrayed.

There were also times when I wished King had been kinder to his characters, if only because the authors I love the most usually are. By this I don’t mean that characters must always be likeable or sympathetic, or that only happy endings are allowed; I only mean that ‘Salem’s Lot was a bit of an exercise in revelling in the darkest side of humanity, and while there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, I prefer it when it’s done with a bit more warmth. However, this was fortunately not true of every character. Ben Mears and his fellow impromptu vampire hunters are fully fleshed out – they’re flawed, human, and portrayed with the kind of warmth I tend to prefer.

My main source of annoyance with ‘Salem’s Lot were the occasional rants against “rational” men and women who refuse to see the truth because they blindly worship science. I hesitate to say this because in some ways I liked that the novel acknowledged and addressed the character’s difficulties in accepting a supernatural explanation for what’s happening. This makes perfect sense in a 1970’s setting, and I know I would have been equally annoyed if everyone have been like, “Vampires? Oh, okay.” Still, I wasn’t completely happy with how their objections were framed because there were too many echoes of the anti-science feeling I see all the time in the real world – it’s easy to see their points extending beyond this fictional scenario. But of course, how others readers react to this will likely depend on their particular pet peeves and general worldview.

Pet peeve aside, ‘Salem’s Lot was a hugely enjoyable read. I loved the Maine setting; the descriptions of autumn and of the coming darkness of the winter months; the way the sense of menace slowly builds up; King’s obvious joy in telling his story and the way it kept me up into the small hours of the night. Unbelievably enough this was my first King novel, but I know I’ll be reading him again. My next will probably be The Stand, but if you have any other suggestions I would love to hear them.

They read it too: Boarding in my Forties, somewhere i have never travelled, Reading Rants!

(You?)

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On an unrelated note, I wanted to help spread the word about one of my favourite bloggy events of the year: Persephone Secret Santa is back, and this year it’s very fittingly hosted by the two unofficial Persephone Ambassadors of the blogging world, Verity and Claire.

My circumstances this year will require me to have a very frugal Christmas, but as I had an absolutely wonderful experience the past two years I still wanted to encourage you all to join. Don’t worry if you’ve never read a Persephone before – could there be a better excuse to start than this? Please head over to Claire or Verity’s blog for all the details and sign up information.

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The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Ah, my dear Lothaire, how shall I begin? How shall I make you in any way realize that what happened to me a few days ago can really have had such a fatal effect on my life? If you were here you could see for yourself; but, as it is, you will certainly take me for a crazy fellow who sees ghosts.

Hoffmann’s 1816 short story “The Sandman” begins with a series of letters between the protagonist, Nathaniel, his close friend Lothaire, and Clara, Nathaniel’s betrothed. Nathaniel tells his friend (though the letter is accidentally read by his fiancée) about how the tale of the Sandman terrified him in his youth. According to folklore, the Sandman is a being that sprinkles sand over children’s eyes to make them go to sleep. As his nurse puts it,

‘He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.’

Nathaniel came to associate this terrifying being with his father’s friend Coppelius, and his fear only increases when this man becomes associated with his father’s death. At the time the letters are written, Nathaniel is away at university, and he has come to believe that a barometer seller by the name of Giuseppe Coppola who came to his room is really his father’s old friend returned.

“The Sandman” juxtaposes psychological horror with supernatural elements, and part of its appeal is exactly that the reader is never sure if Nathaniel is simply losing his mind or if he’s really being haunted, like his father before him might have been. Because what happens exactly remains unclear, the story can be read in many ways (Freud famously interpreted it as being about castration anxiety, and as much as I’m not a fan of psychoanalytical analyses you can see how easily he’d have a field day here). This kind of ambiguity is something we have come to expect from a good Gothic story, but it’s interesting to consider that Hoffmann was not repeating a trope but establishing it.

“The Sandman” is also very clearly a story in the Romantic tradition. This is visible in Nathaniel’s discussions with Clara and Lothaire, with pit a rational and ordered worldview against a belief in dark powers, a frenzied imagination, and a willingness to question the nature of reality; in Hoffmann’s portrayal of the themes of love and madness; and most of all in Hoffmann’s imagery. Hoffmann uses images not usually explored outside of folklore and fairy tales and places them in everyday settings, which somehow magnifies their strangeness. Again, this is something we have come to expect from the Gothic and the fantastic, but here is one of the places where it began. The very eeriness of this story made it groundbreaking, and nearly two-hundred years later it retains the power to chill readers.

Illustration by Paul Gavarni
[Spoiler warning for this paragraph] One of the strangest elements in what is already a very strange story is Olympia, the automaton Nathaniel mistakes for a flesh and blood woman and falls in love with. That this mistake is possible tells us plenty about the extent to which women were expected to be empty vessels, but what struck me the most about it was how creepy the idea of a clockwork machine that can nearly pass for a human being remains.

The image I opened this post with is a still from a 1991 stop-motion animation based on the story. I think I have found one of my Halloween films for this year.

You can read “The Sandman” online here. I read this story for the Classic Circuit’s Gothic Literature tour, which focuses on pre-Victorian Gothic classics. Visit the Classic Circuit’s site for the full tour schedule.


They read it too: Beauty is a Sleeping Cat, Reading While Female, Desperate Reader

(You?)

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Two Women of London by Emma Tennant

A man lies dead in the gardens of Rudyard and Nightingale Crescents.
The gravel path, which was raked only this morning by residents and members of the garden committee, is disarranged at the point where it curves round to run alongside Ladbroke Grove, to the east; the hair of the dead man, brown-grey and thin, lies across it like a weed.

As the title indicates, Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde is a reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous Victorian Gothic novel. Emma Tennant sets the story around Notting Hill Gate in the late 1980’s: the women who inhabit this area have lived in fear of the attacks of a local rapist for a very long time. One day, a man who appears to be the attacker is found dead death, and one Mrs Hyde, who lives in a poor area just behind Nightingale Crescents, is suspected of his murder.

Tennant uses a framing device and a narrative technique similar to those used by Stevenson in the original to reconstruct events from multiple points of view. The narrators – the women from Nightingale Crescent – tell us what they remember from around the time of the crimes, and help the editor arrive at the troubling truth about Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde.

As I’m sure you have gathered by now, Two Women of London is a feminist retelling of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Using an approach somewhat reminiscent of Angela Carter, Emma Tennant tells a story that is less straightforward than my brief synopsis might have made you think. She writes about forms of violence that disproportionately affect women, yes, but also about how, as she says in this interview, “the frequently intolerable pressures for one woman today—single parenthood, need to compete in the marketplace, a Manichean split between ambition and ‘caring’—can lead to disintegration and murder.” The themes, then, are the same as Stevenson’s, but applied to the position of women in a supposedly post-feminist society rather than that of men in the late nineteenth-century.

Two Women of London also takes a swipe at gender essentialism. To cite Tennant again, her story draws attention to the fact that “of course every single woman has had those very violent feelings, just like every man.” Yet female anger is often pathologised and excluded from what we perceive as legitimate behaviour – Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde take this to the extreme and embody two different versions of femininity that exist side by side in popular consciousness and are perceived as mutually exclusive. One is the “naturally” kind and caring angelic woman; the other the woman that by virtue of her violence or gracelessness is no longer thought of as a “proper” woman.

Another interesting thing about Tennant’s writing is how self-aware and intertextual it is. Her characters explicitly discuss the political issues the story engages with, for example, and the literary allusions go beyond the obvious one. Ms Eliza Jekyll hires a woman to clean her house about once a week; in a nod to readings of Jane Eyre that see Bertha Mason as Jane’s repressed alter ego, the name of this woman is Grace Poole. Her writing is full of little details like these that make it all the more enjoyable.

As I read Two Women of London I experienced the unique excitement of finding a new author you know you could really love. This has less to do with how much I enjoyed this novel (I liked it well enough, but at 128 pages it couldn’t delve as deep as I might have liked) than with Emma Tennant’s style and sensibility, both of which really appealled to me. Much of her work has gone out of print, but Two Women of London was recently reprinted by Faber Finds along with Faustine — which as you might guess is a feminist retelling of Doctor Faustus. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

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

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The Sunday Salon – Meeting Maureen Johnson

The very awesome Maureen Johnson came to town last Friday, and I had the pleasure of meeting her. Initially she was going to do an actual event, but when that imploded for unknown reasons she let us know via Twitter when she’d be going to Waterstone’s to sign their stock, so we could have an impromptu ninja-style gathering.



A group of about fifteen people (which included fellow book bloggers Darren and Raimy-rawr) was there when she arrived, and for the following half an hour or so we stood around shuffling awkward and talking. Maureen Johnson said that this was by far the most awkward event (or non-event) she’d ever done, and she even took our picture for posterity – here we are, posing awkwardly at her request:


Posing awkwardly for the picture Maureen Johnson took.
However, if there’s such a thing as good awkward this was certainly it. People were obviously very happy to see her, and she was exactly the same as she is on twitter – hilarious and eccentric and approachable and fun to be around. Several books were signed, a unicorn she thrust into my hands was used to redecorate a display of John Green’s Paper Towns, awkward pauses were had, and Halloween books and Christmas preparations were discussed.

Redecorating.
I wanted to thank Maureen Johnson for being a constant source of humour, intelligence, insight, and reasonableness whenever someone’s wrong on the internet, but you know how those things always slip your mind at the time. Someone thanked her for #YASaves, though, which was very apt.


Getting my book signed.

To those of you going to her Proper Event in London next Saturday, please enjoy it for the rest of us, and make sure you tell us all about it!

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The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey

The year is 1888. Twelve-year-old Will Henry lost his parents in a fire, and has been taken in by Doctor Warthrop, his father’s former employer, who has made him his assistant. But Doctor Warthrop is no regular doctor – he’s a monstrumologist, which is to say, someone who studies “life forms generally malevolent to humans and not recognised by science as actual organisms, specifically those considered products of myth and folklore”. He’s also someone who hunts these creatures should they pose a threat. This is exactly what happens when late one night someone knocks on Doctor Warthrop’s door with something they found on a graveyard on the outskirts of their quiet New England town – something whose presence there has horrifying implications.

The Monstrumologist (called The Terror Beneath in the UK edition, and with a cover so ugly and so guilty of misrepresenting the book’s tone that I refuse to post it) has often been described as Dickens meets Lovecraft, which seems to me pretty apt. Yancey pays homage to both the nineteenth century novel and classic horror. He follows many of the conventions of both (there’s the use of a framing device to explain the book’s existence, for example), but the result is still something that feels fresh and new. The language of The Monstrumologist is ornate and old-fashioned, and the tone is consciously and often humorously grandiloquent. I’ve seen children’s and YA literature be criticised for doing this in the past, but as Angie so brilliantly said not every book out there needs to be written with reluctant readers in mind and made to appeal to the lowest common denominator. There are young readers out there who revel in language every bit as much as adults do, and who are therefore likely to love a book like this.

Yancey’s literary allusions go beyond his choice of tone – the creatures Will Henry and Doctor Warthrop have to face are Anthropophagi, mentioned in Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, and Shakespeare. I was particularly interested in the fact that although The Monstrumologist deals with monsters, there’s absolutely nothing supernatural about it. The story simply takes place in a universe where these creatures are part of nature, and the characters have to deal with the philosophical implications of this fact. These are, not coincidentally, not very different from the implications of many of the real discoveries about the natural world and humankind’s place in it that were made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

There are references to Darwin and Galton in The Monstrumologist, and the story engages with many of the dominant intellectual debates of the period. What does the possibility that we humans can be preyed upon by other species imply? How do we deal with not being outside or above nature? Yancey evokes some of the same sense of cosmic terror that draws me to Lovecraft, even though my own reactions to the facts that concerned him are entirely different. But unlike what happens in Lovecraft, this sense of our own smallness is not bursting all over the place. It’s far more deliberate and controlled – Yancey is a historical novelist, after all, and he’s in complete charge of his themes.

Another thing that impressed me was how easily The Monstrumologist evoked a visceral sense of fear in me. Yancey perfectly captures the sheer panic behind the idea of being a prey, and he does so without conjuring a scenario which crosses the line into silliness. As a reader, I’m not very easily frightened: supernatural fiction interests me but doesn’t scare me, and thriller-type horror books are often more disturbing than scary. But The Monstrumologist made me shudder like I hadn’t in a very long time.

Another thing I should probably mention is that the book is very gory and graphic. The results of the attacks of the Anthropophagi are described in detail – mostly clinically and detachedly, in a way that communicates Will Henry’s anatomical curiosity as well as his shock and horror, but still very explicitly. This is not something I have a problem with, but other readers might want to keep it in mind.

If there’s one thing I wish it’s that The Monstrumologist had female characters doing things other than being eaten or used as monster bait, but I hear that the other books in the series redress this. If you’re thinking “Oh no, not another series!” and hesitating to commit, fear not – you can read The Monstrumologist as a stand-alone and be completely satisfied. However, I doubt you’ll want to. I know I’ll be picking up The Curse of the Wendigo very soon.

Interesting bits:

If the doctor had known what horrors awaited us not only at the cemetery that night, but in the days to come, would he still have insisted upon my company? Would he still have demanded that a mere child dive so deep into the well of human suffering and sacrifice—a literal sea of blood? And if the answer to that question is yes, then there are more terrifying monstrosities in the world than Anthropophagi. Monstrosities who, with a smile and a comforting pat on the head, are willing to sacrifice a child upon the altar of their own overweening ambition and pride.

As the town constable he had witnessed more than his fair share of man’s inhumanity to man, from petty thievery to maliciously battery. None of it had prepared him, however, for this naked confrontation with gross injustice, this horrific reminder that despite all the honours with which we shower ourselves, we are, ultimately, fodder, mere meat for the inferior, soulless things of which I dreamt the night before, no less than us the creator’s children.

They read it too: Regular Ruminations, The Book Smugglers, Booklust, Good Books and Good Wine, A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy, Bird Brain(ed) Blog

(You?)

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One Dog and His Boy by Eva Ibbotson

Eva Ibbotson is without doubt one of my favourite author discoveries of the year. Over the past few months her books have brought me more joy and comfort than any others (well, except perhaps Naomi Novik’s), and I have to force myself to enjoy her back catalogue slowly, instead of looting the library for any Ibbotson books I can find and reading them all in a single week. (I will now be daydreaming about doing just this for the next fifteen minutes.)

Over at Lady Business, I chat with Jodie (one of my absolute favourite people to talk books with) about why I’d happily move into an Eva Ibbotson novel if I could, about what makes her books such perfect comfort reads, about possible positive and negative aspects of her slightly old-fashioned sensibility, and about the delightful characters in her posthumous novel One Dog and His Boy, canine and human. Bonus: there are adorable pictures of one of my dogs (if I may say so myself). If you’d like to read our chat and be tempted into joining the Eva Ibbotson fan club, just click over!

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Henry Dunbar by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Henry Dunbar opens with a story that takes place some thirty years before the actual action of the novel: the title character, the heir of the banking house of Dunbar, Dunbar and Balderby, is involved in a forgery. In an attempt to find his way out of gambling debts, Henry Dunbar convinces his loyal servant Joseph Wilmot to help him forge some bills. When the two are discovered, Henry Dunbar’s guilt is hushed by his father and uncle, the owners of the bank, who send him off to India to avoid any scandal. Mr Wilmot, however, loses his job and has to live with the stigma of criminality for the rest of his life. Thirty years later, Henry Dunbar is due to return to England after his father and uncle’s passing to claim his inheritance. And Joseph Wilmot has not forgotten that he was used, betrayed, and cast aside.

This is all you need to know about the plot going in: everything that happens in Henry Dunbar is determined by these events, but I won’t tell you any more. Henry Dunbar is a suspenseful novel, but not because there are any secrets, twists or surprises. Within a few chapters you’ll likely guess what’s going to happen, even though the text never outright says it. Still, the suspense is very much there, and it’s entirely of the will-he-get-away-with-it kind – think The Secret History. For most of the novel, Mary Elizabeth Braddon only shows us the title character from the outside, and it’s amazing how skilfully she nevertheless gets across his inner turmoil, all through silences, gestures, actions, or their absence. And it’s equally amazing how not having the text confirm something that you do know to be true keeps you turning the pages.

Like most Victorian sensation fiction, Henry Dunbar is concerned with criminal going-ons in “respectable” middle- and upper-class circles. It’s also concerned with what Anne-Marie Beller calls “the performativity of class” in her excellent introduction: Braddon carefully puts together an argument against essentialism of any kind, against an ideology fixed aptitudes, against the very idea of neat little boxes into which people will easily fit, all of which were crucial for the Victorian class system.

And even more importantly, at the centre of is novel is a critique of the biases of the penal system (and of capital punishment in particular), which is as pertinent today as when it was written in 1864. To quote from the introduction again, Henry Dunbar deals with the “prevailing double standards in perceptions of criminality and the very practical ways in which these assumptions influence the judicial process”. If this is a contentious topic today, imagine at the time. The novel was met with outraged reviews, some of which are included in the Victorian Secrets edition for our reading pleasure.

Gender is not as central to Henry Dunbar as it was to the two Mary Elizabeth Braddon novels I’d read before, but the story is nevertheless concerned with disenfranchised women; with women who transgress the boundaries of gender acceptability. Once again, Braddon has written a heroine who takes matters into her own hand, and who in many ways subverts traditional gender roles and Victorian social norms and yet is not shunned for it.

Another reason to love Henry Dunbar is Braddon’s customary incisive writing. Who said the Victorians had no sense of humour? Here’s an example:

In short, everybody felt that the Abbey wedding was destined to be more or less a failure. It seemed very hard that the chief partner in the firm of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby could not, with all his wealth, buy a little glimmer of sunshine to light up his daughter’s wedding. It grew so dark and foggy towards eleven o’clock, that a dozen or so of wax-candles were hastily stuck about the neighbourhood of the altar, in order that the bride and bridegroom might be able, each of them, to see the person that he or she was taking for better or worse.
Yes, the dismal weather made everything dismal in unison with itself. A wet wedding is like a wet pic-nic. The most heroic nature gives way before its utter desolation; the wit of the party forgets his best anecdote; the funny man breaks down in the climactic verse of his great buffo song; there is no brightness in the eyes of the beauty; there is neither sparkle nor flavour in the champagne, though the grapes thereof have been grown in the vineyards of Widow Cliquot herself.
(…)
I think the Lisford beadle, who was a sound Tory of the old school, almost wondered that the heavens themselves should be audacious enough to wet the uncovered head of the lord of Jocelyn’s Rock.

As I have discussed before, sensation novels (particularly Wilkie Collins’, though I love them all the same) often have endings that seem deliberately designed to keep up the appearance of Victorian respectability; endings which are concessions towards a much greater degree of conformity than what is suggested by the questions raised throughout the course of the novel. These endings are understandable but frustrating, and often I have to force myself shrug them aside. There is some of that in Henry Dunbar, but for the most part Mary Elizabeth Braddon surprised me with how far she was willing to go. The ending is unexpectedly daring – no wonder her writing was so passionately dismissed.

Henry Dunbar is a page-turner and an excellent October read: dark, suspenseful, subversive, subtly humorous, and full of social commentary that remains relevant 150 years later.

You can download it as a free e-book from Project Gutenberg.

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The Sunday Salon – All Hallow’s Read

Photo Credit

As many of you will no doubt already know, All Hallow’s Read is a tradition started by Neil Gaiman last year, and it consists of simply giving someone a scary book for Halloween. As the website's FAQ explains, the books are not meant to replace Trick or Treating, but to complement it. Also, the recipients don't necessarily have to be children, though they certainly can be. Neil Gaiman did a very cool video explaining the whole thing recently, which you can see below:


I thought I'd highlight some of the best scary or atmospheric books I've posted about over the years, in case anyone is looking for ideas of recommendations:

• The Halloween Tree and From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury (and also Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I read pre-blogging): I have yet to come across any books that surpass these as the perfect Halloween read.
  
  
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: Some readers find this book terrifying; others (like myself) subtly creepy. But whatever the case, Sarah Waters has written a perfect haunted house story, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson or Henry James.
  
  
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: This classic short story is one of the best examples of psychological horror I can think of.
  
  
• The Victorian Chaise-longue by Marghanita Laski: This novella can be read as horror in the exact same sense as the Gilman story. Both do an excellent job of conveying what being a trapped, powerless Victorian woman who is completely at the mercy of others feels like. The result is as gripping as it is suffocating. (And on that note, you could also read Sarah Waters' brilliant Affinity.)
  
  
• Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James: Subtle, cosy, and very English. Ghost stories don't get much better than this.
  
  
• John Bellairs' Lewis Barnavelt series: How scary you actually find these will depend on your sensibility. But even less susceptible readers are bound to enjoy at least the charmingly old-fashioned Gothic atmosphere, as well as Bellairs' wonderful sense of fun.
  
  
• The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier: du Maurier is a master of suspense, and this is one of my favourite short story collections. The story “The Birds” may actually surpass the Hitchcock film in creepiness.
  
  
• The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers: Byron, Keats and the Shelleys plus vampire-like creatures from Greek mythology could have led to disaster, but for me it worked. Powers writes extremely convoluted plots, but if you go along for the ride there's plenty to enjoy here.
  
  
• Lola: A Ghost Story by J. Torres and Ernest Or: A quiet, gentle ghost story inspired by Filipino folklore.
  
  
• Bayou by Jeremy Love: I didn't think of this book as horror initially, but once Jenny pointed it out I saw it. This story, about a girl trying to save her father from a lynching in the segregated South, is horrific in all the ways history is often horrific.
  
  
• From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell: Alan Moore's take on Jack the Ripper is not for the squeamish, but if you can deal with the graphic violence there's plenty to love here, namely all the historical detail.
  
  
• Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Again, more atmospheric and suspenseful than actually scary, but nevertheless a perfect Halloween read.
  
  
• Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu: Le Fanu's take on Victorian sensation is as close as it gets to actual horror. This build up is slow, but once the story gets going it's an absolute page-turner.
  
  
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: The perfect ambiguous ending.
  
  
• Come Closer by Sara Gran: One of the strangest and most unsettling books I have ever read. This is one of those stories that can be read as either supernatural or as psychological horror, and readers are likely to go with whichever option disturbs them the most.
  
  
• Half-Minute Horrors edited by Susan Rich: I could have sworn I reviewed this last year, but apparently I never got around to it. Half-Minute Horrors is a collection of short-short horror stories, and it includes authors such as Lemony Snicket, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, M.T. Anderson, Melissa Marr, Holly Black, Gregory Maguire and Joyce Carol Oates. Perfect to read aloud on a stormy night.
  

There's also the RIP Challenge, which I sadly didn't get to join this year: the RIP review site is a wonderful source of further recommendations. There's also a recommendations section on the All Hallow’s Read website.

Unfortunately I can't afford to do a proper All Hallow’s Read giveaway this year, but I'm still hoping to be able to take part: my plan is to carefully search all charity shops near me for gently used copies of appropriately scary books. Then, inspired by the Guardian Book Swap, I plan to leave them in public places with a little note inside explaining all about All Hallow’s Read. I know finding something like that would absolutely make my day, so hopefully the same will happen to other book lovers out there.

Are you planning to celebrate All Hallow’s Read? If so, how? And what are some of your favourite scary books?

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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Ada Lovelace: image from Wikimedia Commons

Ada Lovelace was an early nineteenth-century researcher who created the first algorithm meant to be processed by a machine; for this reason, she’s often referred to as the world’s first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace Day is an annual celebration of women in science and technology. Nearly two centuries after Ada Lovelace, these are still male-dominated fields - and the increasing popularity of essentialist explanations for this disparity doesn’t leave me very optimistic regarding the likelihood of changes in the near future. Although I’m a humanities person myself, this is a topic I care about a lot, for reasons that the simple fact that we need an Ada Lovelace Day makes obvious.

I confess that I forgot about this year’s celebrations until Jason (who wrote a beautiful post about Williamina Fleming) reminded me this morning, and as such I didn’t put together a post in advance or read a suitable book. But I really didn’t want to ignore the date, so thought I’d use Ada Lovelace Day as an opportunity to point you to past posts on the topic of women in science, both on my blog and elsewhere:

• In 2010 I put together a reading list for Ada Lovelace Day. The post also includes an introduction about why I think this matters to begin with.
  
  
• Unfortunately, all this time later I’ve yet to get to most books on the list, but one I did have the opportunity to read was Brenda Maddox’s biography of Rosalind Franklin, which was every bit as excellent as I was hoping.
  
  
• Other books by or about women scientists I have enjoyed over the years include Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (a classic for a reason), The Canon and Woman – An Intimate Geography by the always excellent Natalie Angier, Sexual Science by Cynthia Eagle Russett (which is about gender bias in Victorian science), The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron, and Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine (I will never, ever tire of pushing this book on anyone who’ll listen).
  
  
• If you need further convincing about Natalie Angier’s awesomeness, here’s what Clare at The Literary Omnivore had to say about Woman.
  
  
• There’s an excellent review of The Fossil Hunter by Shelley Emling at Vulpe Libris. The book is about Mary Anning, the Victorian palaeontologist, and it sounds exactly like the kind of thing I love.
  
  
• Colleen at Chasing Ray wrote an in-depth post about The Marie Curie Complex by Julie de Jardins – another book that sounds right up my alley.
  
  
• Just last month Eva at a Striped Armchair reviewed Sex on Six Legs by Marlene Zuk, which sounds like a lot of fun!
  
  
• Fyrefly (who is herself a scientist) reviewed Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories by Marty Crump, which is all about icky-awesome natural history. What’s not to love?
  
  
• Several bloggers reviewed The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot last year, but Meghan’s post was one of my favourites. I can’t believe I still haven’t read this book myself.
  
  
• Bookish Blatter celebrated last year’s Ada Lovelace Day with a review of Janice Borzendowski’s biography of Marie Curie.
  
  
• Sakura at Chasing Bawa wrote one of my favourite Ada Lovelace Day posts last year: she told us about her own experience as a woman interested in science and highlighted some of her inspirations.
  
  
• Finally, I leave you with one of my all-time favourite xkcd strips - featuring Zombie Marie Curie!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone!

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The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller

Until John Emmett rose from the dead into his life, Laurence had almost convinced himself the war was history but now he saw that its aftershock rumbled on and on, and that peace had nothing to do with signatures and seals on a paper.

Although I’m only posting it now, this was the first review I wrote post-dissertation. The past few months rusted my review-writing muscles a little bit, so I decided to ease my way back in by using a review questionnaire created by Dewey, a much loved and missed book blogger who passed away in 2008. Dewey’s blog is sadly no longer available, but the questionnaire was backed up by Joanne at The Book Zombie so that bloggers could carry on using it.

Plot summary: The Return of Captain John Emmett is a historical mystery set in 1920 Britain and dealing with the repercussions of the Great War. Laurence Bartram, our sleuth, survived the war unharmed, but he lost his wife and baby son while he was away. He thinks he has put the war behind him, but one day he’s contacted by Mary Emmett, the sister of his old school friend John Emmett, who wants someone to help her make sense of why her brother took his own life. Laurence’s investigations put him in contact with a world of long-term personal and social consequences and unhealed wounds – including perhaps his own.

What did you like most about the book?
First of all, I liked the setting. You only need to say “1920’s London” for my ears to perk up, and Speller is great with the period detail. I also liked the way the novel dealt with themes such as shell shock or post traumatic stress disorder, issues of class in the military, psychiatric care, the subversive aspects of wartime poetry, and early twentieth-century notions of bravery and cowardice.

We expect a book written today, even if it’s a work of historical fiction, to be sympathetic to characters that show signs of fear in a war context almost by default, considering what we know now about how people react to highly traumatic situations. But the most satisfying explorations of the theme are the ones that remain sympathetic while also acknowledging the complications that existed then – what was at stake for those involved in terms of reputation, social standing, psychological repercussions for their fellow officers or soldiers and families, and so on.

The Return of Captain John Emmett does all of the above considerably well. As I write this, I keep thinking of my ongoing discussions with Jodie about how the second season of Downton Abbey will handle the same themes. It will be fun to compare the two narratives over the next few weeks.

What did you like least?
I can’t quite put my finger on why although I enjoyed this novel I didn’t love it quite as much as I was hoping to. There was nothing much wrong with it, but it lacked that extra edge somehow. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t quite connect with Laurence Bartram was the reason, but I’ll get into that when I answer the next question.

What did you think of the main character?
Laurence Bartram struck me as a bit of a Nondescript Officer with a Traumatic Past. By the end of the book I didn’t really feel like I’d gotten to know him, even though I know I was supposed to. Much of the emotional power of The Return of Captain John Emmett comes from the fact that as Laurence investigates what happened to his old friend, something in him breaks loose and he’s forced to confront the fact that what he went through had an emotional cost. I suppose that if I’d felt more invested in Laurence’s storyline, I’d have found the ending quite moving, but the truth is that I didn’t. Whatever the reason, his story never really resonated with me. Still, I did like the main mystery a lot, and that alone kept me reading happily.

Any other particularly interesting characters?
I really liked the two main female characters, Eleanor and Mary Emmett. Eleanor is a former nurse that Laurence meets over the course of his investigations, and who knows more than she’s initially letting on; Mary is of course John Emmett’s sister. Both are smart, competent women, and both feel the consequences of the war in very personal ways. I don’t want to give the whole plot away, but suffice to say that they were both affected in more ways than are initially apparent, and take on the role of caretakers of wounded men.

Even more interesting was the fact that Elizabeth Speller used these characters to explore the way the war created silences and divisions between the sexes that had to do with what men and women were expected to be able to handle, and which of course forbid any real intimacy. The men didn’t really talk about what they had seen or endured, and the women were taught not to ask, which only created further distance. But as Mary eventually tells Laurence, “We’re women, not children”. The silence needed to be broken if any healing was to take place.

Share a quote from the book:
‘None of us were brave, ever,’ said Byers. ‘Bravery’s when you’ve got a choice.’

What did you think of the ending?
The solution to the mystery, or rather the way Laurence discovers it, stretches believability, but I thought the motivations behind everything that was happening were very interesting, and I liked the thematic implications. As I was saying before, the ending to Laurence’s personal story left me a little cold, but I think others readers may very well feel differently.

Which of your readers are most likely to enjoy this book? Why?
Any fans of Maisie Dobbs — this is quite similar, only more sober in tone (and to me personally much more satisfying). Anyone who likes historical mysteries will likely enjoy this, especially readers who prefer their mysteries with a bit of social commentary on the side.

The Return of Captain John Emmett reads like a stand-alone, but there’s a second novel starring Laurence Bartram called The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton. So if you’re looking for a new series of 1920’s mystery, especially one darker and with more depth than Daisy Dalrymple or Dandy Gilver, this would be a good bet.

They read it too: She Reads Novels, A Work in Progress, Whimpulsive, Fleur Fish Reads, A Garden Carried in the Pocket

(Have I missed yours?)

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The Truth about Girls and Boys by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett

The Truth about Girls and Boys – Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children is a recent addition to the growing body of literature devoted to challenging the cultural dominance of gender essentialism and to exposing the many methodological flaws and unproven assumptions hiding behind the cloak of scientific jargon in essentialist discourses. As Rivers and Barnett say in the introduction,

“From the media, you’d think that there is a scientific consensus that boys and girls are profoundly different from birth, and that these differences have huge consequences for aptitude and performance in such areas as math and verbal abilities, for how the sexes communicate, for the careers for which they should aim, and for the kind of classrooms they should attend.”

Throughout the book, Rivers and Barnett particularly address parents and educators and challenge essentialist myths in areas such as brain differences, mathematical and verbal ability, toy preferences, aggression, caring, and learning styles, while also drawing attention to how these myths are often used as political ammunition. They scrutinise the work of several advocates of essentialism and expose bogus citations, distorted or unfounded conclusions, results that were clearly cherry picked, sweeping generalisations based on tiny samples, and all the other classic tricks of pseudoscience.

Sadly, these questionable practices don’t seem to prevent this sloppy research from getting constant media attention. But Rivers and Barnett also show us that peer-reviewed scholarly journals tell a very different story: they show that the similarities between the genders far outnumber the differences, that there are far more differences within groups of men and women than between them, and that we still know very little about the relationship between brain differences and immutable traits or patterns of behaviour. In short, there are no clear or simple answers, and we should be wary of anyone who claims otherwise.

The Truth about Girls and Boys is very clearly a Debunking Gender Essentialism 101 sort of book, but this is by no means a bad thing. The fact that the authors are a team of a neuroscientist (Barnett) and a journalist (Rivers) is visible in the book’s simple, direct and accessible prose. And since much of what the The Truth about Girls and Boys deals with has to do with the intersection between science (or what is perceived as science) and the popular media, their backgrounds are only appropriate. The fact that so many people, many of them informed and educated, believe the scientific consensus about gender differences to be the opposite of what it actually is signals a huge disconnect between scientific research and popular culture. Perhaps we need more partnerships of this kind if this problem is to be overcome.

Having said this, The Truth about Girls and Boys seemed to repeat the same points a little too much at times, and to cross the line between accessibility and overexplaining. But then again, the problem could easily have been me – I’ve just finished writing a dissertation that touches on this subject, which means that over the last five months or so I’ve read countless articles and books that make use of many of the same arguments presented here. My threshold for finding things repetitive is probably considerably lower than that of the general reader at this point.

Another thing I noticed was the language Barnett and Rivers use – at first it seemed a little too simple, but then I came across a passage that gave me pause:

Even scarier, recent evidence finds that college-educated individuals, even if they have had courses in neuroscience, are strongly influenced by irrelevant neuroscience language. If such people are unconvinced by your argument, all you have to do to change their minds is to toss some neuroscience jargon into your pitch. No wonder teachers and school administrators are swayed by best-selling books filled with such jargon.

This passage makes it clear that the authors’ decision to avoid jargon was very deliberate, and it caused me to wonder if my initial reaction had to do with the fact that I too have been trained to privilege technical language and to perceive it as more authoritative. The fact is, Barnett and Rivers’ use of everyday language doesn’t detract of what they’re saying in the least, so it would be unfair and a little ironic to dismiss this book on that account.

The number of books devoted to debunking gender essentialism seems to be growing, which makes me very happy – it’s about time to challenge the ever-growing flood of Men are from Mars Women are from Venus publications. The Truth about Girls and Boys may not be the best of the lot – Cordelia Fine, who is both a rigorous scientist and an incredibly engaging writer, has set the bar pretty high – but it is nevertheless a useful, readable and very informative introductory book. Besides, the fact that it’s specifically aimed at educators makes it unique. I hope it finds a wide audience, and that it encourages decision-makers in education to take a closer look at the story the media are telling us.

A few interesting bits:

The reemerging “difference” ideology is perhaps most pernicious when it comes cloaked in the academic terms of scientific or scholarly research, making it all sound deeply embedded in objective reality. But it is not. To make the breathtaking leap from a mixed and often speculative body of lab studies to the conclusion that men are equipped by their brains to make better pilots, engineers, and mathematicians and women to make better nurses, child-tenders, and caretakers is beyond absurd. It certainly goes against the grain of what makes and females are actually doing in today’s world. It also flies in the face of a great deal of solid behavioural research.

In the early 1900s, urgent polemics appeared in newspapers, books, and magazines, warning that young men were spending too much time in school with female teachers and that the constant interaction with women was robbing them of their manhood. They were becoming too “bookish”. In Congress, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana railed against overeducation. He urged young men to “avoid books and in fact avoid all artificial learning, for the forefathers put America on the right path by learning completely from natural experience.

(This passage amused me because of the ironic parallels with the situation today – and of course, in both cases female educators are held responsible.)

Other points of view:
The Feminist Librarian
Bookshelf Bombshells

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I requested a copy of this book from Columbia University Press via NetGalley

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The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Marriage Plot follows three characters, all recent graduates from Brown University, from graduation day in 1982 until a little over a year later. Madeleine Hanna is an English major who wrote her senior thesis on the marriage plot, beginning with Jane Austen and moving on to novels such as Middlemarch, which follow their heroines after the marriage ceremony takes place instead of ending at that point. Madeleine falls in love with Leonard Bankhead, a brilliant biology and philosophy major she meets in her semiotics seminar. The third point of view character is Mitchell Grammaticus, a religious studies major who spends his gap year travelling around Europe and India and obsessing about Madeleine, whom he irrationally believes he is destined to marry.

There are emotional ties between these three characters, but I would perhaps hesitate to call this a love triangle due to my dislike of much of what the term evokes. The Marriage Plot very deliberately alludes to stories in which the onus is on the heroine to decide between two suitors, but it lacks – or rather, turns around – most of the things that put me off about love triangles. In 1980’s America, among the educated elite, the social context is of course very different than in a Victorian novel. Madeleine is not exactly torn between Leonard and Mitchell; she mostly makes romantic choices that are determined by timing and circumstances and that exist side by side with other major decisions in her life. Her hyperawareness is another difference: how many other heroines would spend three weeks of broken-heartedness reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse so obsessively that her roommates feel compelled to confiscate it?

Having said this, The Marriage Plot is unapologetically concerned with romantic relationships. This book was a delight to read for many reasons, and one of them was that it directly engages with certain points I have been considering about how love stories are framed and conceived of in a feminist context. Being aware of the problems with narratives that present romantic decisions as the only relevant decisions in a woman’s life does not mean we now have to despise female characters that devote a lot of their time and energy to the matter of love. Madeleine is smart, capable, intellectually curious, multifaceted – and yes, very much in love.

Eugenides’ novel, then, deals with romantic relationships and the role they play in people’s lives, with the cultural resonance of our preoccupation with love, and with how we feel about the way we prioritise it (or not). Madeleine’s favourite novels normalise the impulse to prioritise it, the theory she studies makes her question it, and for part of the novel she feels stuck in between these two frameworks. There is of course nothing intrinsically wrong with tipping the balance in either direction, but Madeleine realises that the personal decisions she makes can be politically or theoretically charged - and yet this doesn’t mean that these beliefs have to hold her life hostage. Throughout the novel she deals with going against the grain of what’s expected of her and finding ways of juggling different interests while still maintaining personal coherence.

I’m mostly focusing on Madeleine, who was my favourite character, but this is not to say that Leonard and Mitchell’s stories weren’t equally interesting. Mitchell’s section contains one of the best portrayals of the thought process of a young man who is called out for sexist behaviour that I have ever encountered. And Leonard’s narrative seemed to me a compassionate and non-sensationalised description of what living with mental illness feels like. Leonard’s bipolar disorder, for which he has to take lithium, puts him in a position of dependency that complicates his relationship with Madeleine. There are hints of Salinger (as well as many allusions to his work, because this is the kind of novel this is) in how Eugenides describes his character’s struggles and vulnerabilities, and the result is often quite moving.

What I loved the most about The Marriage Plot’s myriad literary and theoretical allusions was the fact that they were not there merely for their own sake, or to allow the author to show us how knowledgeable he is: the novels Madeleine reads tell us something about what her story is going to be about; the character’s intellectual interests reveal who they are and inform their life decision. The Marriage Plot examines the intersection between literature, theory and life: what do all these abstractions mean to people on a personal level?

In this way, The Marriage Plot challenges the idea that a novel of ideas – deconstructionism, semiotics, religion, philosophy, feminism, Victorianism, you name it – a love story, and a good old-fashioned coming-of-age/intellectual growth narrative need to be at odds with each other. Which brings me to the wonderful and gloriously metafictional ending: The Marriage Plot’s conclusion draws attention to the fact that a love story’s beginning or ending does not need to prove a point. Madeleine is not weakened by her romantic choices; she does not need to leave them behind to become a liberated, complete human being. And yet she does what feels right for her at that particular moment in time, as many of us have and will. Her ultimate choice is validated in a way that doesn’t demean any of the alternatives - and I say, three cheers for that.

The Marriage Plot is humane, subtly humorous, sometimes touching, and always extremely engaging. As Raych so brilliantly put it, Eugenides somehow manages to take “things that are MAD TEDIOUS, like people’s scholarly inclinations and the way they intersect with and inform said people’s life-paths and [make] them fascinating”. This may not be an instant addition to my list of all-time favourites in the same way his two previous novels were, but it’s a hugely enjoyable and satisfying story.

Favourite passages:

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. After getting out of Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something—anything, The House of Mirth, Daniel Deronda—to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

It wasn’t only that this writing seemed beautiful to Madeleine. It wasn’t only that these opening sentences of Barthes’ made immediate sense. It wasn’t only the relief of recognising that here, finally, was a book she might write her final paper on. What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her hair tied back, her glasses smudged, and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude.

The thing about the Victorians, Madeleine was learning, was that they were a lot less Victorian than you thought. Frances Power Cobbe had lived openly with another woman, referring to her as her “wife”. In 1868, Cobbe had published an article in Fraser’s Magazine entitled “Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors. Is this Classification Sound?” Women were restricted from owning and inheriting property in early Victorian Britain. They were restricted from participating in politics. And it was under these conditions, while they were classified literally among idiots, that Madeleine’s favourite women writers had written their books.

They read it too: books i done read, Literary Musings

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