The Moonstone Readalong - Part Two: some decidedly odd goings-on.

Contains spoilers, do not read until you've finished The Moonstone.

In the first half of this month's #readwilkie readalong, we spent a lot of time with old-fashioned steward Gabriel Betteredge and formidable spinster Miss Clack. The narratives in the second half of The Moonstone are, for the most part, shorter than the first, and there are more narrators, the most significant being Franklin Blake and Ezra Jennings.

We've already met Franklin in Betteredge's narrative; a young relative of the family who had been abroad for a long time, but whose return brought the fateful Moonstone into the house. And here is revealed a twist just as shocking to Franklin as it is to us: all the evidence points to himself as the thief! Though he has no memory of that night, he accepts on the word of Rachel Verinder that she saw him take the stone from where she had kept it. The reason for her suspicious behaviour is revealed: Rachel is in love with her cousin (hey, this is the Victorian era, after all) and is covering for him. It emerges that after an argument with the Doctor, Mr Candy, on the subject of medicine at Rachel's birthday dinner-party, Candy arranged to have Franklin drugged with opium. Perhaps it's a sign of how times and attitudes have changed (and we know that Wilkie used opium) but what would nowadays be considered a shocking act of medical malpractice is brushed off as a practical joke, a minor annoyance.

And then comes the craziest part of the story. Franklin and Mr Candy's assistant, Ezra Jennings, hatch a ridiculous plot to attempt to discover the location of the Moonstone by recreating that evening as precisely as possible. Because surely if you give a man opium a second time he will retrace his exact steps and actions as the last time he was under the influence of the drug, no? They are very reluctantly assisted by Betteredge, who is hilariously snarky and passive-aggressive in his part.

"When we took up the carpet last year, Mr Jennings, we found a surprising quantity of pins. Am I responsible for putting back the pins?"

"As to Mr Franklin's bedroom (if that is to be put back to what it was before), I want to know who is responsible for keeping it in a perpetual state of litter, no matter how often it may be set right - his trousers here, his towels there, and his French novels everywhere. I say, who is responsible for untidying the tidiness of Mr Franklin's room, him or me?"

"Speaking as a servant, I am deeply indebted to you. Speaking as a man, I consider you to be a person whose head is full of maggots, and I take up my testimony against your experiment as a delusion and a snare. Don't be afraid, on that account, of my feelings as a man getting in the way of my duty as a servant! You shall be obeyed. The maggots notwithstanding, sir, you shall be obeyed. If it ends in your setting the house on fire, Damme if I send for the engines, unless you ring the bell and order them first!"

New narrator Ezra Jennings is a character to be pitied, a good man, but an outsider, shunned and feared due to his mixed race and odd appearance. He is not self-indulgent, but makes it clear he's had a sad and lonely life; he speaks of a lady he's never stopped loving, but could never marry, he is dying of an unspecified disease, and addicted to opium, which he started taking for the pain. If your heart doesn't ache for this man, it must be made of stone!

I wasn't very surprised by the revelation of the ultimate thief; Mr Godfrey Ablewhite had not escaped suspicion, and in fact seemed to be the obvious thief back when no one really seemed to care what had happened to the Moonstone. I never trusted him from the start. This whiter-than-white gentleman, patron to all these ladies' charities and sponsor of innumerable good causes, seemed more than a bit smarmy to me, right from his first introduction. Poor Miss Clack, she idolised him so. What a blow it must be for her to learn of his hypocrisy and double life.

The Moonstone keeps you guessing right to the last couple of dozen pages, a story of thrills and twists. But did its ending live up to it? I'd been a little uncertain of where the story would end up, but in the end I'd had no need to worry. I was pleased that the Moonstone ended up returning to its rightful place - by which I do not mean in the possession of a spoiled rich English girl! The epilogue takes the story full circle to see the stone returned to the sacred statue in India, whence it had been stolen amid bloodshed by the evil Colonel Herncastle. Thank you Wilkie!

And thank you to Ellie for organising this readalong. The Moonstone was my first Wilkie novel, though I once owned a copy of The Woman in White, which I lent to a friend before reading, and never saw again. I'm very glad I decided at the last minute to join in, it's been great fun.

Sunday Summary: Adventures in Space and Time

I didn't write a Sunday Summary last week as I was busy with my Moonstone midway post. Most of my last two weeks' reading has been from Wilkie, although I took a couple of days out last week to read Yahtzee Croshaw's Mogworld. My friend Judi lent me Mogworld with the strict instructions not to look at the back blurb, so I had no idea what to expect from it. The only clue I had was that she lent it to me in response to me giving her a copy of Redshirts. Like Redshirts, Mogworld follows a group of supporting characters in someone else's epic adventure: in this case a fantastical world which bears an uncanny resemblance to a role-playing game. (My first thought was Dungeons and Dragons, but their world later turned out to be something else entirely.) Protagonist - not hero - Jim died at the beginning of the book, but a meddling necromancer brought him back as a zombie. All he wants is to die again and stay dead, but the plot has other plans for him. Mogworld was a light-hearted, easy read, not as brilliant as Terry Pratchett, but with a similar sort of eccentric British humour. I got through this in two days.

I finished The Moonstone earlier this week. Although none of the narrators in the second half managed to be as entertaining as Gabriel Betteredge and Drusilla Clack, Betteredge made another few appearances, acting hilariously passive-aggressive when coerced into a mad scheme of which he didn't approve. New character Ezra Jennings is a mysterious, rather tragic figure, a doctor's assistant who is terminally ill and addicted to opium, probably the most interesting character after Betteredge and Clack. The story kept me guessing throughout, up to a very satisfying conclusion. (I will write more about this later on this week.)

My current read is The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian, a book I picked up on impulse from the returns shelf in the library. It's a sort of psychological ghost story, an extended metaphor about how a past trauma can continue to haunt a person's everyday life. Some parts of the book are written in the second person, and this, combined with detailed, detached descriptions of an airplane crash-landing from the point of view of the pilot, was utterly terrifying, giving an immediacy to the disaster that any other narrative choice would be unlikely to capture. The story follows the pilot, Chip, and his family, as they move to a new home and try to put the tragedy behind them. Unfortunately, their new home is reminiscent in many ways of The Shining's Overlook Hotel, and the only new neighbours to reach out to the family are a group of sinister "herbalist" women who seem to have their own reasons for wanting Chip and his family in their circle.

After bidding farewell to Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy last week, I made a start on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Before I actually resigned myself to becoming a Trekkie, this series was more what I expected from Star Trek. I think I was first shown a clip of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in school; I can remember which classroom I was in, round about year 8, and I cannot for the life of me remember why it was shown. Even then, I think there was something appealing about the show. I'm liking The Next Generation a lot, though I'm not in love with it like I am the original series and its crew. I don't think I want to fall in love with it. It would feel disloyal.

Also in the world of ancient science-fiction-ish TV, Doctor Who celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this week. On Thursday, the BBC showed a moving documentary-drama called An Adventure in Space and Time, all about how Doctor Who came into being in 1963. Then, last night, was the eagerly-anticipated 50th anniversary special. The episode was simultaneously broadcast all over the world, with special cinema showings and many fish-finger-and-custard parties. (A disturbing number of my friends posted pictures of this, erm, delicacy on Facebook.)

I watched the episode with my dad at home, wearing my Tardis T-shirt and Doctor Who (ish) scarf. "The Day of the Doctor" started by going right back to the beginning, using the original 1963 opening credits and starting off in the very same school where Susan Foreman, the Doctor's granddaughter, once attended as a precocious pupil.

The main theme of the episode came as no real surprise. I had been predicting its subject for as long as I'd been aware that there would be fiftieth anniversary celebrations. And about a week ago, the BBC posted a prequel mini-episode which took away all doubt. The first thing I knew about this video was what was intended to be a major surprise, announced by the official Doctor Who Twitter account with no spoiler warnings, before I even knew there was a spoiler to avoid. I was (and am) very cross to find out about that, and thought that the story deserved to be part of the episode itself, rather than a web exclusive. Though it didn't tell me more than I'd already suspected about the anniversary episode, I'd rather have gone into the story with no more than my own theories.

Although the story showed the Doctor messing with his own timeline and rewriting certain parts of the series' narrative, it was done with illusion rather than my pet hate, the reset button, so I'll let it pass. Matt Smith and David Tennant were a lot of fun to watch together - I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed the Tenth Doctor's adventures (when he wasn't being angsty.) And John Hurt as the other version of the Doctor, the one who his later incarnations never speak of, was a wonderful addition to the canon (even if not numbered) tormented by his choices, bewildered by his later "childish" incarnations, but lovely, hardly the villain. It's always fun watching the past and present regenerations reacting, and this episode showed all of them collaborating. Yes. ALL of them. There were a couple of nice, unexpected cameos, though I would have liked to have seen more guest appearances rather than re-use of old footage. Really, I wanted many of the people who had vehemently denied being part of the episode to have been lying, although if that were the case, it could have been quite gimmicky, sacrificing storytelling. But the storytelling was well done here.

Doctor Who was a great way to mark the beginning of a week's holiday. The last few years I've taken the final week permitted before Christmas, as a means of recharging my batteries before the craziness that is December in retail. I plan to get a lot of reading done, perhaps watch some classic Doctor Who and more Star Trek: TNG, and to get back into my NaNoWriMo project, which has come to a halt at exactly 10 000 words. 40 000 in a week is not going to happen, but if I can get back into the story, I'll be pleased. On Friday I'm going to stay with my sister in London, where I intend to get some Christmas shopping done, and also catch up with one of my best friends who lives nearby.

Sunday Summary: Accidental book-buying

Hi. Somehow it's been a week since I last posted, to my shame. I've got three reviews (two film and one book) in note form, but none of them have quite made it into coherent sentences. As a teaser, here are the six-word versions.

Thor: The Dark World: Funny, epic, Loki is the best.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: Cringey in places, not all bad.
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell: Sweet, nerdy, much sadder than expected.


Books I have acquired

This week has been the week of accidental book-buying. Some were deliberate. I went shopping in Portsmouth with Judi on my day off, with the intention of buying some Christmas presents, looking in the outlet shops in Gunwharf Quays and stocking up on DVDs in HMV (because, after a lot of hard work from the Isle of Wight HMV staff and loyalty from the customers heroically snatching the store back from the brink of closure earlier this year, the landlord sold them out in favour of yet another convenience store, leaving the entire population of the Isle of Wight with nothing but new releases and a random selection of older, bargain DVDs in a few other supermarkets and high street shops.) I also went into the city centre, where I bought a book called The Fictional Man by Al Ewing. I had a book token left over from my birthday, and remembered being tempted by this novel the last time I'd been in that shop. Clearly it was meant to be!

After reading Ellie's rave review of Attachments, a madness seemed to come over me, sending me straight into town to search high and low for something by Rainbow Rowell, a name that I have seen all over the book blogs the past few months. I couldn't find Attachments, and Fangirl hasn't yet been published in the UK, but I came home with a copy of Eleanor and Park and a vague bewilderment about how I had come to buy it. It's the power of book blogging, people! Don't underestimate it.

On returning an almost-overdue Slaughterhouse 5 to the library, I saw Something Borrowed by Paul Magrs, sequel to the hilarious gothic-fiction-lover's dream, Never the Bride, which I read on my summer holiday earlier this year, and I simply had to borrow it, because you know you can never find a book in the library when you're after it specifically. (That, or you see ALL THE BOOKS you want to be reading RIGHT NOW. There is no in between.)

This week saw the publication of the new novel by Cecelia Ahern, an author I like to indulge in as Christmas approaches. For some reason, nearly all the chick-lit I can bear to read seems to be by Irish authors. Not that Ahern writes simply about shoes, sex and shopping; they are very feminine books but there is a magical twist and a breadth of subject matter that takes her writing out of her genre pigeonhole. The new book is called How To Fall In Love, but it is apparently more about falling in love with one's own life, rather than with another person (although I'm sure there'll be some of that, too.)

Finally, after seeing that both Ellie and Judi were reading Hyperbole and a Half, the book based on the popular blog by Allie Brosh, I found myself coming home with a copy of my own, even though Judi had offered to lend me hers. Once more, I had a vague sense of confusion. I hadn't actually set out to buy it, but, whoops, there it was, and money was changing hands, and I had another shiny new book to call my own. Hyperbole and a Half is half autobiographical anecdotes, half musings on life, covering issues such as motivation versus laziness, how to be an adult (or not), and the conflict between being a nice person on the outside and a real jerk inside, mixed in with comic stories about Brosh's dogs and childhood ("The God Of Cake" being my favourite) illustrated with childish but distinctive and expressive pictures. It also contains the frankest, most accurate description of depression I have yet discovered, heartbreaking and identifiable and yet still brilliantly funny. The book had me nodding in agreement all the way through. Check out the blog here.

Books I have read:

I finally finished reading The Honey Queen, (another example of Irish chick-lit) and thought it was fair; I enjoyed spending time with the characters within, although the unsympathetic ones were two-dimensional, but ultimately I felt the story was too gentle to really excite me. It was nice, but unremarkable, taking far more time than it ought.

I'm also enjoying the #readwilkie readalong of The Moonstone. I'm about a quarter of the way through now, still in the section narrated by the adorable, chivalrously condescending Gabriel Betteredge. Rachel, the daughter of the house, has been left a diamond with a lot of baggage by an estranged relative, but whether this jewel was intended as a gift or a curse is dubious, to say the least. Now, of course, the diamond has vanished, and a detective has been called in: the dour Sergeant Cuff, who though not credited as much by the narrator Betteredge, shows himself to be a shrewd observer. The newest servant, Roseanna, draws suspicion on herself, acting sneaky and mysterious, and with a criminal past, she is the obvious culprit - and therefore can be ruled out. Rachel herself is acting very suspicious about the whole affair, though the idea that any of the members of the family for whom he works could have any hand in the jewel's disappearance seems to be unthinkable to Betteredge. I also feel somewhat suspicious of Mr Franklin Blake, an old friend of the family, and the one who brought the jewel to the house in the first place. He seems charming enough, and there looks like there is a sort of love triangle between him, Rachel and Roseanna, but I don't quite trust him.

Sunday Summary: Wilkie, NaNoWriMo and light reading.

It's been a busy old week this week, and though I got off to a good start on Sunday and Monday by making a nest and ignoring the world in favour of books, blankets and biscuits, one week on I am only half-way through Cathy Kelly's latest book, The Honey Queen. I decided to read this one as a bit of fluff after the short but heavy-going Slaughterhouse 5. Slaughterhouse 5 was an interesting read, but one which I think I would actually enjoy more if I were studying it, reading and rereading and taking notes. Though quite simply written, there is so much beneath the surface about humanity, war, death and time, that I don't think you can really appreciate the full impact on a first read.

It's a funny thing, but I often find "light" reading to be harder work than more "literary" or bulky novels. Although I am enjoying The Honey Queen, which reads rather like a miniature soap opera, focusing on the lives of various inhabitants of a small Irish town, it seems to be taking a long time to read. I have read just over 200 pages in a week. Is it because there are a lot of characters to keep track of, or because it is a character-based rather than plot-driven narrative? Is it because my inner critic finds more to say about the writing style, or perhaps it's just not all that exciting? I don't know. It's certainly not badly written, although I do find that what Ms Kelly tells us about some of her main characters doesn't seem to tally with what she shows us. And it is a very warm, cosy community to lose myself in. But something about this book makes reading it a much more drawn-out process than logic dictates it should be.

November marked the beginning of NaNoWriMo (National novel-writing month) which I decided to participate in out of a feeling of desperation. All my life, my writing has been the thing that has most defined me, but lately I haven't written very much aside from this blog. I'm terrified that I've lost the knack or the drive or the ability, and so I'm using NaNoWriMo to re-teach myself the art of Making Things Up And Writing Them Down. I got off to a good start on Friday, but yesterday I went out for a family meal after work, and I only managed a couple of hundred words scribbled in a notebook on my lunch break. But I don't mind too much if I don't reach the target of fifty thousand words this year, as long as I keep going and create a story.

Also, on a whim, I signed up to Ellie's "Read Wilkie" readalong of The Moonstone, which I am enjoying very much, though I have not got very far into it. It's a nice, laid-back readalong, so one I should be able to fit in alongside NaNoWriMo and any other books I have on the go at any one time. This afternoon, I'm meeting an old school friend for coffee, then afterwards I'm going to see the sequel to Thor at the cinema.

Have a good week, everyone!

Readalong: The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins

November. The beginning of the busiest time of year for anyone who works in retail. The clocks have gone back, it is dark when you leave work, but the Christmas lights have not yet gone on to cheer you up. And for many of a literary bent, it is also National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, a project I attempt most years as a desperate bid to hold on to the part of me that neither my employers, the approaching winter, nor the people I deal with every day have claimed as their own, and try to get fifty thousand words of continuous fiction onto paper in a month. So it would be absolutely ridiculous to sign up for a bloggers' readalong on top of all that, right?

Ellie, not to be confused with that Ellie, or the other Ellie, is hosting a month-long readalong of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, which is generally considered the first example of detective fiction. After reading other bloggers excitedly blogging and tweeting about this readalong, I trundled along to the library after lunch, and lo and behold, there were two copies sitting there in the classics section. Surely, it was meant to be! 

And the prize for the least-exciting edition of this book goes
to the Everyman's Library edition. But it's what's inside that counts.

This is to be a very laid-back readalong, allowing an entire month to read the novel, updating once at the midway point around the 16th November, and once more at the end of the month. There will also be an ongoing twitter discussion of the book at #readwilkie.

Collins writes in his preface that this is a novel designed to "trace the influence of character on circumstance," promising a character-driven plot full of interesting, proactive people who do more than simply allow things to happen to them.

I'm only a couple of chapters in so far, but I am already enjoying the narration of Gabriel Betteridge, an elderly steward to a well-to-do family involved many years ago in a mystery surrounding a missing, allegedly cursed, Indian diamond. Betteridge is a warm, good-humoured narrator, constantly rambling off on tangents which flesh out the facts of the plot with depth of character and background, while being brought back on-topic by his daughter.

"In answer to an improvement on this notion, devised by myself, namely, that she should tell the story instead of me, out of her own diary, Penelope observes, with a fierce look and a red face, that her journal is for her own private eye, and that no living creature shall ever know what is in it but herself. When I inquire what this means, Penelope says, "Fiddlesticks!" I say, Sweethearts.