Sunday Summary: May in Review

Wow, it feels like ages since I've written anything on here! Everything's fine, I just haven't felt much like writing reviews lately; I've read plenty of books but not had all that much to say about them. But I might ramble a little about a few of them in this post, we'll see.

Some of the things I've done

My work shifts have been all over the place the last few months, although fingers crossed they'll be getting back to something like normality from now on. We've got a new girl just starting at work, doing Sundays and a couple of afternoons in the week, and my manager told me she reminded her of a younger version of me. Having met her, briefly, I sort of agree. In about a two-minute conversation we compared our to-read piles, favourite books, and I already promised to lend her one of my four copies of Anne of Green Gables. I think reading that book is a quick way to get to know me! Must find out what her equivalent book is. I'm sure she'll have one.

When I haven't been at work I've been writing; I've picked up the children's story I began for NaNoWriMo last year and am giving serious thought to submitting it to Mslexia magazine's First Children's Book competition in the autumn. I've nearly finished the first draft, but have discovered I'm already over the suggested word count for a children's book!

I had a week off a couple of weeks ago and spent a couple of days up in London, staying with my sister Jenny. While she was at work I did some exploring, and some book shopping - although only on the first day. I also went up to Camden Market, which is awesome, and as it was a lovely sunny day, I walked up the road to Primrose Hill, where I spent the afternoon sitting on the grass and reading. The Primrose Hill bookshop is one of my new favourites; it's small and cosy. While I was in there, the bookseller, Chrissie, was whizzing around the shop finding recommendations for one of her regulars who wanted some holiday reading.

By some fortuitous chance, an old friend, Anna, happened to be in London the same week, and had got in touch with Jenny suggesting meeting up for drinks. So we found a nice little pub next to the British Library, called the Rocket, and spent a lovely evening between there and Pizza Express reminiscing about our schooldays, making little confessions about being horrid teenagers (only a little horrid, as teenagers go, but I think we were all a little relieved to find the others had no memory of the wrongs we'd felt terrible for years for doing to each other.)

And the following day, as a belated birthday treat for Jenny, we went to Shoreditch to Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium for tea: a cafe where cats roam free and say hello to and play with all the visitors. The cats are very well looked after - the entry fee pays for their welfare, they get days off and all have their own members of staff, and there are all sorts of toys and climbing apparatus to keep them amused (although one of the kittens liked nothing better than a scruffy piece of string. Because cat.)

I'm back on the Island now, for the time being, and am enjoying the summer sunshine. It's a bank holiday weekend, and tomorrow I'm heading for the beach. We're nearly into June and it's been quite warm; let's see if I'm brave enough to go in  the sea yet. I've sorted through my to-read shelf and pulled my science fiction books to the front, because for some reason I've come to think of that genre as good beach reading. I've got sci-fi classics (Iain M. Banks, Bradbury, Asimov, H. G. Wells) shiny new or newish books (The Book of Strange New Things, The Peripheral, Speak) and some weird and probably dreadful old books I've found in second-hand bookshops, which I will not name and shame in case I slander unrecognised gems.


Some of the Books I've read:

Beside Myself by Ann Morgan, and When I Was Invisible by Dorothy Koomson

These were publishers' proof copies that my sister got from work, and it was interesting to read them one after the other, because they shared several themes. In Beside Myself, a set of twins swap places as a prank one day - but then one of them refuses to switch back. Towards the end, one of the characters asked something along the lines of "What does it matter? You're twins, you live the same life, what does it matter which name you are called?" But even from a very early age, different expectations are put on Ellie and Helen. One is a leader, one is a follower. One is perceived as a good girl, the other as a troublemaker. People respond to the twins' actions in different ways according to who is perceived to be doing them. It was a dark, troubling read.

Meanwhile, When I Was Invisible follows the lives of best friends Roni and Nika (Both Veronica/ka Harper) whose lives take very different directions after a shared ordeal leads to one betraying the other. Roni returns home after spending several years as a nun, while Nika is trying to rebuild her life after witnessing a terrible crime. Also a rather heavy read, but I found it much more satisfying than Beside Myself.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks

What I expected: A gender-flipped, feminist Dead Poet's Society. Progressive teacher shakes up the establishment but earns undying loyalty from her best students.
What I got: Miss Brodie shakes up the establishment, all right, but she is a manipulative, capricious and sharp-tongued woman who has affairs with other members of staff and sends some of her pupils down destructive paths. The narrative is curious, flitting between past and future and casually revealing what the girls' futures hold while they are still schoolgirls. Miss Brodie is rather more interesting and unsettling than the usual inspiring, unconventional schoolteacher figure, a deconstruction of the trope - except for the fact that she pre-dates many of the iconic examples!

Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery

Being the second book in my Anne of Green Gables omnibus, I used to read the two books back-to-back as a child, and Avonlea was just as much a favourite as its predecessor. Nowadays, though, I read it less often than Green Gables and Anne of the Island. It's a very episodic book, although the romance between Miss Lavendar Lewis and Stephen Irving towards the end foreshadows Anne and Gilbert's relationship (which for many readers - not this cynical old maid, though - is the main story of Anne.) It was lovely to reread after a few years, to meet Mr Harrison, to spend time seeing the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, to just spend the time with some old friends.

But the character of Paul Irving has come to irritate me no end, although with a feeling of guilt because he is in many ways a lot like Anne. Do different expectations for boys and girls influence what traits one can allow? But then Walter Blythe, in the later books, takes after his mother too, and he is one of my favourite characters. Walter has more depth of character, though, a melancholic temperament, inner turmoil, while Paul's ongoing struggle is with eating all his porridge. He's just so sickeningly good, and the "poetic" temperament Anne sees in him reminds me of nothing so much as Madeleine Bassett from Jeeves and Wooster as an eight-year-old boy.

Currently reading: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The original time-travel adventure. I'm only a few chapters in so far, but it reads surprisingly fresh and contemporary, with its succinct explanation of the Fourth Dimension, and the Time Traveller's theories of the future evolution of mankind into a gentle, physically frail and unambitious race living in a paradise - or so it seems at first! This is a book that shaped science fiction as we know it: without it there would be no Doctor Who, no Back to the Future, and everything else would be quite different too!

I'm not sure when I'll get back to blogging regularly; probably not until I've finished my first draft of my work in progress, but watch this space. I will be back!

Bout of Books 15: Saturday, Sunday, Wrap-Up

Apologies for the lack of any posting yesterday. I'd fully intended to write my last long-overdue post from last year on Friday to schedule for Saturday, but then Hamilton happened, and I was somewhat distracted. And yesterday I've been at work, which is getting nice and quiet again. While everyone else has been groaning about going back to school or work after their holidays, I've been thinking "hooray, it's the furthest point of the year from the pre-Christmas and post-Christmas madness!"

Saturday and Sunday's reading:

 

I've begun my reread of Pride and Prejudice. It's been a long time since I've read that. It could even be my least-read Jane Austen book because I know it so well from all the million and one adaptations and stories inspired by it, the quintessential rom-com. So coming back to it, I'm reminded anew why it is one of the best-loved books of all time. Despite being written 200 years ago, it's very modern in characterisation and in Jane Austen's sharp and spiky observations. I would not like to get on her wrong side!

But I'm also cheating on Pride and Prejudice with another rom-com, which I unpacked at work yesterday: Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged, which could and probably already has been described as "the Muslim Bridget Jones." I idly thumbed through that book and by the time I'd read about the titular heroine shouting at a racist about terrorists not wearing vintage shoes, I felt as though Sofia was standing right there with me. I could see her, I could hear her voice, and I wanted to know her better. It's a really refreshing read after the darkness of the two thrillers I've read this week, laugh-out-loud funny, and it's the first read of 2016 that I'm going to be pushing at everyone to read. On Thursday I had a customer come to me for "recommendations of romantic comedies," which I had trouble with because it's not really a genre I read very often. If only he'd come in just a few days later! So, mysterious stranger, if by some unlikely chance you're reading this: READ SOFIA KHAN! 

And on that note, I will go and continue doing likewise.

Wrap-Up (Monday 11th January)

I didn't quite manage to read the four books I'd aimed for, partly because of engrossing myself in Hamilton on Friday, and then last night I got caught up in "just one more episode" of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 instead of finishing my book. I followed a couple of new blogs, and said hello to a few of my old favourites, but overall, once I got back to work on Wednesday, I didn't spend so much time interacting with other bloggers or doing challenges or twitter chats as I would have liked. Something to work on for the next readathon, I think. On the plus side, I've written more blog posts in the past ten days than I did for the whole final quarter of 2015.

The final stats:

Books finished: Disclaimer, Silence is Goldfish, Career of Evil

Other books begun: Pride and Prejudice, Sofia Khan is Not Obliged

Total pages read: 1460 (averaging 208 and a half per day.)

Best reading day: Tuesday with 433 pages.

Worst reading day: Friday with 92 pages

Favourite book: Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, even though I haven't finished it yet. Look out for a fangirling review later this week.

Least favourite book: Disclaimer. 

Mini-reviews: It, The Last Englishman, Flowers for Algernon

It - Stephen King

2014 was the Year of Stephen King for me: although I had read his books before, it wasn't until last year that I recognised what a wonderful storyteller he is: not the mere writer of horror stories his reputation suggests - King writes about people, makes you care about them, and then, once you've grown attached, he makes you fear not just whichever monster they face, but fear for his characters. And as such, It really isn't "a horror story about an evil clown" at all. Yes, it is gruesome and unsettling at times, but the novel did not frighten me half as much as the idea of it did - and the clown does not appear nearly as often as I'd been led to believe. I still don't think I'd be up to watching the 1990 TV film adaptation though. I really. Don't. Like. Clowns. (I learned that a young Seth Green - Oz in Buffy - played the younger version of Richie Tozier. YES. Perfect.)

Just as someone once described Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, (a very different book, with similar themes) what happens in It really isn't what it's about. Yes, there is a shape-shifting monster whose favourite disguise is as a murderous clown called Pennywise, but really the book is about the perils unique to childhood, it is about a hostile place, the power of people to ignore what is going on under their noses, it is about the strength in friendship to overcome monsters visible and unseen. At over 1500 pages, It was nearly double the runner-up for longest book read last year, but not a word was wasted, not a page dragged. King has a rich prose, taking his time in building up the town of Derry, inducting the reader into the Losers' Club with Bill, Ben, Richie, Beverly, Eddie, Mike and Stan, and weaving together past and present as our characters' forgotten memories of the summer of '58 slowly return to them as required in the battle against It.

Key quotes: "That's what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter."

"If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it."

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome – Roland Chambers.

To most people, the name Arthur Ransome is synonymous with quaint English adventure stories for children, full of decent English children in a time when they were allowed to run free, sail, camp, climb mountains and play at being adventurers, explorers and pirates with no supervision from anyone older than the age of twelve or thirteen. All as jolly and wholesome as anyone can wish for! But before he came to write the Swallows and Amazons books, Ransome lived a very different life as a journalist, witnessing first-hand the Russian revolution and cosying up to many of the biggest names of the Bolshevik movement so well that ultimately, his every motive and movement came under question. In The Last Englishman, Roland Chambers attempts to unravel the mystery of Arthur Ransome, only to find the writer to be a slippery fish indeed!

I have to confess myself very ignorant about such a momentous period in history, and as such I found this biography heavy-going at times, but also fascinating, leaving me wanting to read and understand more about early twentieth-century Russia. As a biographer, Chambers draws Ransome as a curious, enigmatic figure, but shows little admiration for him as a man, showing him to be a far more difficult, sometimes naive or irresponsible, and curmudgeonly figure than his character “Captain Flint” – Nancy and Peggy Blackett’s Uncle Jim – the retired adventurer who might be closer to how Ransome would prefer to be remembered.


Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

One of the science fiction classics of the 20th century, Flowers for Algernon is presented as the journal of Charlie Gordon, a young man with learning disabilities, who is eager to be the test subject for an experimental IQ-increasing drug trial. His journals (misspelled at first) chart his progress from "simpleton," working as a janitor in a bakery, to a genius who puts the world's leading scientists to shame. As well as his increasing intellect, Charlie's progress reports portray his emotional development and his new understanding of the world and the people within it. This is a bittersweet experience, when he comes to recognise the cruelty of his "friends'" jokes at his expense, and that intelligence brings as much trouble as it solves.

Flowers for Algernon is an important novel, as important now as at the time when it was written, raising discussions of personhood, and the treatment of the mentally disabled. It asks how far identity comes from one's perception of the world, and raises the question of the ethics of pushing the boundaries of nature through science: is it a miracle or an abomination best left alone?

Key quote: "Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn."

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.

The Moonstone Readalong, part one: Betteredge and Clack

"When I came here from London with that horrible Diamond," [said Mr Franklin] "I don't believe there was a happier house in England than this. Look at the household now! Scattered, disunited - the very air of the place poisoned with mystery and suspicion."

The Moonstone of the title is a huge, beautiful diamond stolen from India by a British officer and smuggled back to England. On his deathbed he leaves the diamond to his estranged granddaughter Rachel Verinder, but is it a genuine gift and symbol of his repentence, or a curse? This diamond carries a lot of superstition, and its rightful owners want it back, at whatever cost. Then the Moonstone disappears...

The story is told by several narrators, each telling only the part of the story to which they personally witnessed, in order, allegedly, to get a rounded and accurate account of the mystery surrounding the diamond's disappearance. However, the narrators have their own biases and prejudices, and are not entirely reliable; the evidence they present varies from the conclusion they want you to draw.

Take Betteredge, for example. Gabriel Betteredge is the head of the servants in the Verinders' house, and he absolutely adores his mistress and their family. In his eyes, neither Lady Verinder nor her daughter Rachel can do any wrong. He is an old-fashioned sort of fellow, chivalrously condescending, but sweet enough to get away with all kinds of patronising attitudes without more than a raised eyebrow from the reader. His bible is Robinson Crusoe; it is astonishing what comfort and wisdom he can find in that book whenever his peace of mind is disturbed.

Betteredge's loyalty to "his" family puts him rather at odds with the detective, Sergeant Cuff, who seems too eager to actually solve the mystery of the moonstone, inconveniently following all the clues, even those which might incriminate members of the family. It amused me to see Betteredge growing more and more exasperated with Cuff as he continued in his investigations. Betteredge might not like the sergeant at all, but I thought he was a great character; a predecessor to Sherlock Holmes, and a bit of an eccentric, coming to blows with the gardener over their differing opinions about the rose garden. Cuff also made me think of Lt. Columbo; less bumbling but just as irritating to the people around him, with his inconvenient questions - and his thoughtful whistling as the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place.

By the end of the first part of the novel, a lot of the answers seem clear, yet there is still a lot of the book still to go. After Betteredge's section, we relocate with Rachel and Lady Verinder to London, and we meet a new narrator: Miss Clack. This dreadful woman is exactly what you would expect with a name like that: a finicky, pious, interfering old maid who has taken on a mission to convert the entire country with a ready supply of religious tracts. Though rather a caricature, I couldn't help but think she must have been based on some real-life lady or ladies Wilkie must have met on his travels. I'm sure she means well, but she is so heavy-handed, bludgeoning everyone with her evangelism, seeing them only as souls in desperate need of her spiritual wisdom, rather than people who could do with a bit more earthly compassion from time to time. As a result, her effect on people that she met was both sad and funny; it became somewhat of a running joke that just a few words from her would provoke a horrified and profane reaction from each hearer. Her desperate attempts to reach her family by hiding her books and pamphlets ("Satan in the Hair Brush," "Satan under the Tea Table," and "Satan among the Sofa Cushions") in every nook and cranny made me chortle, as did her "Preparation by Little Notes" - if Rachel would not read the pamphlets, perhaps she might benefit from reading some choice passages copied out in letter format? Miss Clack's determination to get her message to its intended recipient reminded me of the barrage of owls carrying Harry Potter's first letter from Hogwarts. Poor dear; tact is utterly alien to her, and despite being hilariously awful, you can't help feeling sorry for her as her efforts alienate everyone she cares for, leaving her all alone.

Since we left Yorkshire for London, the mystery of the moonstone seems to have taken a back seat. Since Sergeant Cuff has been sent on his way, no one seems that concerned about tracking the gem's whereabouts. It is not forgotten, but seems to be treated as an unpleasantness that is in the past and not to be mentioned; that if no one speaks of the mystery, perhaps it will go away of its own accord.

Somehow, I think that's not going to happen.

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.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

It is unusual, but not unheard-of for me to watch a film before having read the book it was based upon, but unfortunately I ran out of reading time before Les Miserables hit the UK cinemas, and I was impatient to see this epic musical. I hope my readers will excuse the inevitable comparisons with the later, and therefore obviously inferior, version of the tale. (I say this with some flippancy, assuming the unbreakable truth that "the book is always better." Certainly Victor Hugo's novel has the higher claim of being "the real thing," but does it follow that it is necessarily is the best?)

Well, it is certainly the most thorough! At 1200 pages, Les Miserables has the luxury of being able to spend plenty of focus time on each of the important characters and events, which, though important appear but briefly in the musical adaptation. Hugo also had a disconcerting habit of leaving the story to discourse freely and at length upon any subject that even slightly tied in with the novel's setting, giving chapters upon chapters of historical context for a single scene, and passing judgement upon it all. It verges upon the ridiculous, and I do not think I am alone from thinking that Les Miserables could benefit from a ruthless editor without having to lose its nickname of "The Brick." The most heinous examples are the forty-one pages of the Battle of Waterloo, twenty-five detailing life inside a convent (and an additional twelve pages have been cut from my translation to appear as an appendix) and fifteen all about the sewers of Paris. Don't get me wrong, all these make interesting reading - who, after all, can fail to be entranced by fifteen pages about poo? - but I'd rather read these digressions when Jean Valjean's fate is not in question.

Each member of Les Amis de l'ABC (ABC Society in this translation) the student revolutionary group, has a name, character and history: the fearless leader Enjolras, shy poet Jean Prouvaire, philosopher Combeferre, charismatic Courfeyrac, and cynical drunkard Grantaire. And then, not of them but with them, is young Gavroche, the kinder French cousin to the Artful Dodger. Maybe ten or eleven years old, this young urchin is a scoundrel with a heart of gold, the terror of the respectable folk, but generous to the unfortunate. He provides some delicious heartwarming and comic moments in this heavy tome - "I'm on my way to fetch the doctor for my wife, who's in labour!" But he will break your heart, too. If I can guarantee nothing else, I guarantee that.

Fantine, who appears so briefly if beautifully in the musical, has an entire history as Hugo chronicles her fall from innocence to despair: her friends and lover who deserted her as a sick idea of a joke, her sink from poverty to utter destitution and desperation. I wonder whether Les Miserables may have caused a stir when it was first published, for Hugo's insistance that a woman can be pure and virtuous of heart even when driven to prostitution. After all, didn't even Oliver Twist's Nancy cause outrage in Victorian Britain for being allowed to redeem herself? But Hugo's central message seems to be that good and evil are equally spread across the entire human race, and that desperate circumstances can lead to desperate acts. Justice is not merely the keeping of the law and punishment of crime, but compassion and forgiveness.

Of course the failure to grasp this truth is where Inspector Javert falls down. The policeman is an unambiguously unsympathetic character in his first introduction, a fact which may surprise fans of the film and show. "The Asturian peasants believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face and you have Javert." As far as Javert is concerned, the law must be upheld at all costs, as it is absolutely infallible, and law-breakers are utterly irredeemable. Once a criminal, always a criminal, and incapable of doing anything good. Hugo unequivocally condemns Javert's idea of righteousness untempered with mercy. My first impression was of a grotesque, a caricature, far from the tormented individual of the musical. But Javert is not without his strengths - he has a snarky sense of humour, for one, applies his rigid standards to himself as well as to others, and shows a great deal of courage. And we come to feel his anguish as Jean Valjean brings his worldview crashing down around him. Were it not for that first introduction, Javert could be seen as a tragic figure with a fatal flaw.

Hero Jean Valjean is portrayed as an almost messianic figure in the movie adaptation, but here in the novel, his goodness is at times swayed by flaws of character or judgement, particularly when concerning his adopted daughter Cosette. I was rather surprised by the lack of jealousy in the movie at his discovery of Cosette's having a suitor - or, rather, that he does not let his jealousy get the better of him. Somehow, I felt that it would be a critical part of the story, and so it is in the novel - a believable,  understandable, if not admirable trait. I could not help feeling that his withdrawal from Cosette's life after her marriage, doubtlessly intended by the author to be an act of selflessness, was actually rather a petulant and self-martyring act that helped no one and hurt a lot of people.

In Cosette we see her loving, sweet-natured mother Fantine once more, but with her fortunes reversed, rescued by Jean Valjean out of squalor, raised in humble but respectable circumstances by a foster-father who adores her, and ending up both happily married and wealthy. Her story is as happy as her mother's was wretched.

Ah, but the love story. I expressed confidence that Marius' and Cosette's romance had to be better depicted than the film's rushed version. Alas, I was mistaken. Yes, their courtship has more time devoted to it than the movie's two glances and one love song - but sadly more time and page space does not  necessarily mean more substance. Victor Hugo was doubtlessly a believer in love at first sight, but I found such a concept ridiculous. Instead of Marius dripping all over the stage singing, "Black! My world if she's not there!" immediately after seeing this pretty girl for a few seconds, he follows her regularly to the park - never speaking, mind you, only watching her like everyone's favourite romantic stalker - and then spends months putting his life on hold in favour of moping. And when they do finally start holding secret trysts, instead of, y'know, getting to know each other, they just seem to spend the whole time telling each other how in love they are with each other and how pretty the butterflies are when you're in love. (Of course, it is possible that there is nothing to tell, for neither of them seem to have any personality.)

So, in short, is Les Miserables worth reading? My answer is yes, absolutely - once. It gives so much depth and life to the story that is somewhat rushed in the musical, and making the characters much more rounded (even Marius, if not pretty little Cosette.) It is a huge book, not just in size, but in scope - Hugo included everything, and for the most part this is a great achievement. Between the book, the movie (which I have now seen twice) and the soundtrack (which I have been playing on repeat for the past three weeks) Les Miserables has proven to be one of those stories which takes over my head for a little while.

But I think in this case there is no shame in cheating, if you feel the need: skip the discourse chapters, or even read an abridgement. I don't know whether I will read Les Miserables from cover-to-cover again, at least for a good long time, but I will hold on to the book. I can't part with it after the times we've had, and I feel quite sure it will be one I'll want to refer to again and again.

Note: I read the 1976 translation by Norman Denny.

Top Ten Tuesday: Frustrating Characters

This is the first Top Ten Tuesday post I've written for a while, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to rant about those characters who make me want to dive into a book for the sole reason of giving them a good shaking.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish.

I had planned to include pictures in this post, but could not find a way of doing so without wanting to punch the computer screen.

In no particular order:

1. Dolores Umbridge, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. There are villains you love to hate, and then there are villains so unpleasant that they make the book in which they feature less enjoyable to read. The Umbridge Woman, as she is often called, is the latter. I always feel a sense of relief as I come towards the end of the fifth volume in an otherwise fantastically enjoyable series.

2. Angel Clare, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Don't let his name fool you; Angel Clare is a nasty piece of work indeed, causing more hatred in my heart than the actual villain of the piece. Minutes after confessing and being forgiven for his pre-marital indiscretions, Angel abandons his bride for not being the pure maiden he believed her to be - never mind that this was probably not through her choice! Such audacious hypocrisy makes me wish Tess had dealt him the same fate she did Alec D'urberville.

3. Mary Lou Trelawney, The Chalet School series. Mary Lou starts out all right, a spirited, gobby little girl, but by the age of fifteen or so, from the way others talked about her, you'd think that she excreted rainbows! In book after book, a new girl with Issues comes to the school, and the task falls to Mary Lou to solve everything. She talks to the staff the same way she speaks to her classmates, but "it's not cheek, it's just Mary Lou." And yet with every honour or award, she is always surprised. "What? Me? No, surely not!" In one notable book, this happens twice in as many chapters. Sickening.

4. Cersei Lannister, A Song of Ice and Fire - particularly in A Feast For Crows. About as unlike Mary Lou as you can get, Cersei schemes and manipulates her way into power over the seven kingdoms of Westeros - but when she gets onto the throne in all but name, she is utterly clueless. This is understandable: being a woman in a highly sexist society, she was never expected to get into power, and therefore never trained for the role. Instead she spends all her time in her obsession to bring about the destruction of somebody she has got into her head is a danger to her. It is clear that she will bring about her own downfall in her desperation to prevent it.

5. Mr Brocklehurst, Jane Eyre. There are a lot of characters in this book that I would like to punch, but the cruel schoolmaster at Lowood heads the list, singling out children for punishment for imagined sins, such as having red, curly hair.

6. Thorin Oakenshield, The Hobbit. For the most part of the book, Thorin is a surly but respectable exiled Dwarven King. But when the gold-fever strikes him, he turns into a callous, avaricious jerk. He redeems himself, in the end, but while he is under the dragonish influence of the gold, he needs a stern talking-to with violence. It'll be interesting to see how the film copes with the most un-heroic traits of this majestic figure.

7. Aunt Elizabeth, Emily of New Moon. Always stern and with no understanding of raising children, Aunt Elizabeth raises Emily out of duty rather than love, and it is a rather austere childhood. But what pushes Aunt Elizabeth onto this list is her utter disapproval of Emily's writing, actually forbidding her to write stories for a number of years. Can any writer imagine something worse?

8. Aunt Norris, Mansfield Park. (What is it about maiden or widowed aunts in classic fiction?) Aunt Norris gives Fanny Price no illusions about her role in the Bertram family: she is a charity case, and the lowest of the low. As if shy, rather insipid Fanny needed any more lessons in humility!

9. On a similar note, Miss Minchin in A Little Princess. A pre-teen schoolgirl in her care becomes an orphan on her birthday, and her only thought is, "Who's going to pay the bills?" The way she treats young Sara Crewe is an absolute disgrace, using a girl who had been trusted into her care as the lowest servant, without the pay, food or decent lodgings that the regular staff would have been entitled to, forcing her to work on an empty stomach and sleep in a drafty attic. At least this one got her comeuppance in the end!

10. Romeo Montague, Romeo and Juliet. I can't be havin' with any of these drippy love-at-first-sight so-called love interests and it's hard work picking out just one, but we might as well go to the original. I love Shakespeare's plays, especially the tragedies, but Romeo and Juliet is the exception. When we first meet Romeo, he's moping about the love of his life, Rosaline, as if his life will never be complete without her. Then he meets Juliet, and BOOM, he's found another new love of his life. We all know how well that goes. I'd be curious to see how things might have turned out for them had they, y'know, not killed themselves. The greatest romance of all time - or two empty-headed teenagers whose brains have been replaced with hormones?

The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien

Despite my well-known adoration of The Lord of the Rings, I had only read its prequel The Hobbit once, in my teens. In the run-up to the Fellowship of the Ring, I tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first few pages. It wasn't until afterwards, when I was obsessed with all things Middle-Earth, that I got around to reading it. Although I enjoyed it well enough, it didn't make as much of an impression as LotR, or even The Silmarillion. I'd grown attached to all the characters and the majesty of LotR, and The Hobbit, with all its interchangeable dwarves, and its there-and-back-again narrative just didn't impress me in the same way.

That was about ten years ago. Now, watching the trailer and some of Peter Jackson's behind-the-scenes vlogs, I'm getting as excited for the Hobbit films as I was for LotR. And I realise I'd forgotten a lot of the Hobbit's plot; whole characters and settings I barely remembered. Time to reread it, I decided, and once decided it was just a few steps to my bookcase.

The Hobbit certainly is very different in tone and style to The Lord of the Rings, and I think it has to be accepted as its own entity rather than viewed as LotR: The Prequel. Though there is plenty of danger throughout, it is a far more fun and whimsical adventure story, narrated in a manner that is at times reminiscent of the Chronicles of Narnia, with Tolkien himself interjecting and commenting on the story he is telling. There are even talking birds and dragons, singing goblins, and elves who sing about "tra-la-la-lally, down in the valley," rather than endless ballads about their ancestors.

It was recently announced that The Hobbit will be adapted not into one, not two but three films. Considering that it is less than 300 pages in my edition, and 19 chapters long, I wondered just how that could possibly work. Even with material taken from Tolkien's other writings to connect the events with Lord of the Rings, wouldn't the story feel "like butter scraped over too much bread?" But despite its brevity, a lot actually happens in this slender volume. Bilbo and the Dwarves run into trolls, goblins, Gollum, giant spiders, Elves, men, a were-bear and, of course, the dragon Smaug, before fighting in an epic battle. Compared with the chapters of getting from one place to the next in LotR, Tolkien writes concisely and sparingly, passing weeks of walking in a sentence and covering each incident in a single chapter. I could quite easily see how a few sentences from the book could be expanded into, say, twenty minutes of screen time, and I'm excited to see how they do this. Instead of being afraid that Jackson will add things in that "didn't really happen," I'm rather intrigued by what material they can get out of Tolkien's original text due to the sheer amount of story and character Tolkien packs into each line.

Bilbo and the dwarves meet characters along the way, who are introduced and then bidden farewell at the end of their chapter. Even all of the dwarves are not given full personalities: Thorin is proud and haughty, Balin gentler and kinder to Bilbo, Fili and Kili young and cheerful - but what can you tell me about Dori, Nori and Ori? Beorn, Bard, the Elvenking - none of these have a lot of page time, and yet their characters are firmly established.

The Hobbit starts of reading like a fairytale, beginning with Bilbo Baggins being chosen right out of the blue by a wizard he hasn't seen since his childhood, to "go on an adventure" - handpicked to do the dirty work on a quest for some dwarves he's never met in his life, and probably end up as a dragon's Sunday roast for his efforts. Oh, and he has to provide cake and breakfast all round. Any self-respecting hobbit would tell  Gandalf exactly where he could put his quest, but unfortunately for Bilbo (and fortunately to us the readers) he is descended on his mother's side from the Tooks, a family of hobbits with the most disgraceful habit of having adventures, and somehow he agrees to be the party's "burglar." Or perhaps he just doesn't isn't given a chance to refuse. One rather wonders what led Gandalf, in all of Middle-Earth, to the home of this rather pompous, comfortable little hobbit, and whether the wizard saw great qualities in Bilbo, or whether it was Gandalf's confidence in Mr Baggins that caused him to grow as a character. He starts off as a scared, homesick little chap, and gradually grows in courage, cunning and confidence with each brush with death, ceasing to rely on the dwarves to look after him, and instead saving their lives on more than one occasion. He even defies them to attempt to make peace with the men of Laketown when Thorin's pride and greed would make them enemies.

For an apparently simple, black-and-white fairytale with good guys and bad guys, I was impressed with how  morally dubious Tolkien makes the otherwise good guys. We have a king with more wealth between him and thirteen friends than most countries own, called upon to help a neighbouring town that has been utterly devastated by a natural disaster (namely a dragon) - and he refuses. No! he says, This is my treasure and what claim do you have on it? Er, Thorin, what about simple decency? No? (He repents in the end, and it is implied that Smaug has left some sort of curse on the treasure that possesses the unwary with an overpowering greed - some version of the malevolent power that the One Ring holds over its bearers, perhaps?)

As I type this, I'm watching my Fellowship of the Ring DVD, and I was struck by how the two stories in the Ring saga show contrasting views of the people of Middle-Earth. Where the Elves in Lord of the Rings are depicted as wise, beautiful, too-good-to-be-true people, The Hobbit, follows a group of dwarves, who are the rivals. In this book, the Elves are more like the wild tricksy fair folk of ancient legend. Meanwhile, while before I was disappointed that The Hobbit didn't show the same characters or peoples as LotR, today I found myself missing the dwarf history in the film. Yes, this time around I have been won over by The Hobbit, and am really impatient for the first installment of the movie.  Why can't it be December already? Yes, it's a controversial move to split the story into three parts - I wasn't entirely convinced at first that even two was a good idea, but if anyone can do it, I trust Mr Jackson. After all, I'm convinced he is part hobbit himself.

In which I reread Lord of the Rings and get far too emotionally involved. Again.

I recently rediscovered my wonderful Lord of the Rings soundtrack CDs... and when I heard that music, I couldn't do anything but watch the films again. Which, of course, got me longing to reread the book. (Which, in turn, made me want to see the films. Again.) I really like to savour Lord of the Rings. Back in the early 2000s, when the films were new, I would reread the books annually, but since then my to-read list has grown too long for this to be practical. Still, Lord of the Rings is one of my top three books of all time, and one that changed my life. I like to really savour that book, and I allowed myself to read just one chapter per night, before going to bed. (Sweet dreams!)

Around this time, I discovered markreads.net, in which Mark Oshiro reads and reviews popular novels and series, one chapter at a time, completely unspoiled - and Lord of the Rings was one of these. His catchphrase is You are not prepared, and it's a joyful experience to read his thoughts on each chapter, predictions for the future, reactions to plot twists and character developments - reading along with him is like discovering the story for the first time, all over again.

Perhaps it was because I was reading Mark's LotR reviews after each chapter, but on this reading I really felt as though I were in the story with the hobbits. I'd feel Frodo's fear and heartbreak about leaving the Shire to go on this deadly mission. As the hobbits climbed up the stairs of Cirith Ungol, I kid you not, I felt horrible vertigo. It surprised me, again, just how much this book got under my skin. I'd read this book many times in the past eleven years, and yet, I thought, I'd never read it properly till now. (I'm sure I think that every time.) I spent my days wishing for the evening, so I could read the next chapter - though there was nothing stopping me reading on but myself. And when at last I reached the end, there was a terrible sad emptiness. I didn't want to leave Middle-Earth.

I am always surprised by how much this story drags me in. I think to myself, I love this story, but I've grown out of obsessing over it like I did when I was 17. No. No I haven't. Lord of the Rings consumes me like no other book I've ever read, or am ever likely to again. Because it's not just a fantasy about wizards and orcs and magical jewelery and quests. It's a story about ordinary people who become extraordinary, not due to wizardly powers or magic trinkets, but through their inner qualities: courage, friendship, love, and the determination to keep going when everything seems hopeless.

So I must say farewell to Middle-Earth, for a little while, but I shall return before the year is out, to read The Hobbit before the film adaptation hits cinemas, nine years (!) after Return of the King. I can hardly wait.

Movie Monday: Anne of Green Gables (1934 film)

Marilla, walking home one late April evening from an Aid meeting, realised that the winter was over and gone with the thrill of delight that spring never fails to bring to the oldest and saddest as well as to the youngest and merriest.

As in 1880 Prince Edward Island, so in 2012 on the Isle of Wight, spring begins to show itself. As the days grow longer, the sun becomes more visible and I find raspberry cordial for sale in Marks and Spencer, I realise it is time to be reacquainted with Anne of Green Gables. After a stressful week at work, my DVD and book came off the shelves almost of their own accord, and I took refuge with my oldest, most faithful literary friend.

Browsing Youtube, I found to my gratitude that someone had uploaded a much older Anne of Green Gables film, back from 1934. This is the film starring the actress who loved the character so much that she changed her stage name to Anne Shirley. Of course I had to watch it!

Being quite a short film, I felt that it was more "scenes from Anne of Green Gables" than a smoothly-run story,   though, at least to start with, it is pretty faithful. About the first half of the film is straight from the book, the dialogue lifted right off the pages. Mrs Lynde becomes Mrs Rachel Barry, and Diana's mother, which shocks the mind a bit when your mind knows the context inside out, knows the next word is "Lynde" and instead you hear "Barry." But it is a prudent choice for a film with a small cast and makes sense - or would do, if there were any reason to include Diana at all. In this film, Anne and Diana's friendship, which is much the heart of the book as the turbulent relationship between Anne and Gilbert, or Anne and the Cuthbert siblings, exists only to draw attention to how it is neglected. It would be less conspicuous if Diana were omitted entirely, as so many other characters are.

Anne Shirley (the actress) is sweet as Anne, and entirely convincing - part of the time. When Anne is caught up in her vivid imaginings and dreamworlds, "pretty nearly perfectly happy," she is as Anneish as anyone other than the Anne in my head could be (let's face it, as Anneish as anyone other than I could, if I had red hair, a Canadian accent and a pretty nose.) However, Anne Shirley (the character) spans a huge emotional range, from ecstatic joy to "the depths of despair," from intelligent, dreamy tranquility to a fiery temper, and Anne Shirley (the actress) only convinced me in the happy end of this scale. She was Anne, but not the whole Anne, the starry-eyed dreamer, but not the neglected, unloved orphan child. Anne was aged up to fourteen when Marilla and Matthew adopted her, but this didn't work for me. Much of Anne's appeal comes from the incongruity of having such a little girl with such a big vocabulary, and where I could expect an eleven-year-old or even thirteen-year-old Anne to break slates over Gilbert Blythe's head, or need to ask how to say her prayers, it did not quite ring true in this self-assured fourteen-year-old Anne.

But the most unconvincing part of this Anne was when Mrs Lynde - sorry, Barry - observed that "They didn't pick you for your looks" and called her "skinny and ugly."

Well, just look at her!

Matthew was quite adorable, all doleful-looking in dungarees and big puppy-dog eyes, shy but stubborn in his own way, and full of heart and a little more awareness of a sense of humour than Book-Matthew. He needs it - because by contrast, Marilla lacks the subtleties of the real Marilla, and comes across as usually, but inconsistantly angry, instead of merely repressed and strict. I felt that the filmmakers had looked at the words of the Marilla of the book, but failed to see the depths of a very complex character, taking all her words at face value and portraying the character thus. If this was all there was to Marilla, I didn't see that Anne would be much better off at Green Gables than at Mrs Blewitt's.

After the slate-breaking incident, however, the film goes off at a tangent, bending and rewriting the story to fit around the relationship with Gilbert and only the relationship with Gilbert, a Gilbert who, though kind of cute, is not Anne's match, a bit yokelly and telling her she reads too much.

Still, it's not a bad film, especially when you consider how old a film it is - older than The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind - with a tiny cast and running at less than an hour and a half. Curiously, I recognised some little moments in this film that were not in the book which must have influenced the makers of the later TV serial - notably when Anne attempts to "wrap Gilbert around her little finger," and get him to pay attention to her. Considering that Anne hated Gilbert at this point in the TV serial, it jarred with me as out of character (I ranted a bit about that in my review in 2009) but made a bit more sense if you include the earlier film in the Green Gables canon.

I missed many of the beloved scenes - the hair-dying, the raspberry cordial escapade, the story club - but the filmmakers had to pick and choose which story they were going to tell, and they went with the romance. And I'll admit it, I succumbed to the warm fuzzies, despite the omissions and changes to the plot.

It is Anne of Green Gables, after all.*

*which is more than I can say for the later installments of the Kevin Sullivan series. I refuse to recognise anything past Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

My best friend, Judith, is only two months older than me, but when we were at school, she was in the year above me. This proved very useful when it came to discovering literature. Many a book I read and loved came second-hand through her talking about what she was studying in English. This was certainly the case for my first Sherlock Holmes stories. I must have been either ten or eleven, and after her raving about Holmes, I just had to find out what all the fuss was about. Even at eleven, I didn't like missing out on a good story. I vividly remember that I read four stories, one of which was "The Speckled Band," which captivated me, appealing to my slightly ghoulish imagination. This must have been one of my first really grown-up stories, and it was like nothing I'd ever read before.

I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles a few times, but aside from that, Sherlock Holmes lay at the back of my mind for many years. I watched a few stories on TV, acquired much of the knowledge through the osmosis of popular culture, but didn't read much until about eighteen months ago, when BBC started airing Sherlock for the first time. The series sent me right back to the original stories: A Study in Scarlet, and The Sign of Four. After an unusually long wait for a second series of a TV show, Sherlock returned to the screens once more on New Year's Day this year, and I returned to the next volume of the series: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.


After two novels, the third installment is a collection of short stories. This makes the book easy to dip in and out of, and you need little knowledge of what has come before, but can read the stories in any order - there may be a throwaway reference to "the case of..." but nothing that has any bearing on the tale. In fact, the stories aren't even compiled in chronological order - some are set after Watson's marriage, others before. They are narrated by Dr Watson, as written up long after the event. Though far from simple stories, they are told simply, often to the same formula: The problem is presented, Dr Watson, the client and the reader are all baffled, but not Sherlock Holmes, oh no! He ponders a lot, asks strange questions, goes out, solves the mystery then comes back and then tells us how he did it. My favourite stories in the collection are those which have a little less talking and a little more action, those stories in which Watson gets to go "on location" with Holmes.

Some of the tales are rather silly, such as "The Blue Carbuncle" - a valuable jewel which nearly ends up in the Christmas dinner. Two stories require suspension of disbelief as dodgy characters fool those closest to them with disguised identities, and then there is "The Red-Headed League." A fun, entertaining and cunning tale, but how gullible was Holmes's client, duped into joining this fictitious club, just for gingers?

Adventures also contains some of the most wonderful and memorable cases. We meet The Woman, Irene Adler, the one woman Sherlock acknowledges. There is the gruesome tale of the "Engineer's Thumb," and the "Copper Beeches" mystery, first dismissed by Holmes as his "zero point" for interest, but which turns out to be one of the most intriguing and exciting of all. And of course, "The Speckled Band," my old friend, the original locked-door mystery.

Yes, reading these stories, sometimes I found myself rolling my eyes at some of these cliched tropes - but let's not forget that they were not cliched. These are the original twisty page-turning detective stories, those that helped to invent the genre. I won't say Conan Doyle was the inventor - check out Poe's Auguste Dupin stories that came before - but for twists and thrills and cleverness, I think nothing has topped the Sherlock Holmes series in over a century. Maybe Agatha Christie put up a fair fight.

Persuasion, Jane Austen

There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

I discovered the works of Jane Austen when I was in my late teens: first Northanger Abbey when I was in the sixth form, followed quickly by the rest through the first year or so at university. Persuasion was my least favourite at first, although I've come to appreciate it more now I'm older. The last of Austen's novels, not published until after her death, Persuasion is a more grown-up tale than her usual social and romantic satires. The cast is older than Austen's usual 17- to 22-year-old heroines; Anne Eliot is twenty-seven and considered by all an old maid. She has experienced life, been disappointed in her dreams and is now making the best of things.

As a young woman, Anne Eliot experienced a whirlwind romance with Frederick Wentworth, an officer in the navy. Advised by a trusted friend that the marriage would be imprudent, Anne broke the engagement, Wentworth's heart and her own. Wentworth went to sea where he made a name and a fortune for himself, while Anne stayed at home with her intolerably snobbish family, putting all the effort in keeping the household running smoothly, and receiving none of the credit. Eight years later, despite Anne's attempt to stop her father and sister from living beyond their means, the Eliots are forced to let out their home, and the new tenants are Captain Wentworth's sister and brother-in-law. Both parties put off their reunion as long as they can, but the inevitable meeting is confirmation for Anne that the passing years have not cooled her love for Captain Wentworth. But what of his feelings? Is this a second chance for the couple to receive their happily-ever-after?

Of course. This is Jane Austen after all. Yet this time the ending doesn't have the usual feel of being a foregone conclusion, and my best friend actually didn't expect it to end well on her first reading. The obstacles between the young lovers are more internal than usual. The first time around, it was the friends' and family's objections that came between Anne and Frederick, which we have seen before in Austen with the Tilneys, the Ferrars, Lady Catherine de Bourgh... you get the picture. The outright snobbery of "NO COMMONER LIKE YOU WILL MARRY MY OFFSPRING," is relatively easily resolved compared with the well-intentioned, "I'm not so sure this is a good idea," of Emma's amateur matchmaking, and here, Lady Russell, Anne's mentor and substitute mother-figure. The difference here is that Lady Russell was successful in her persuasion, and the lovers have to deal with the consequences of this: eight years of anger and hurt on Wentworth's side, and eight years of doubt and regret on Anne's. Most of the scenes containing the former lovers feature very little interaction between them, and yet the tension is palpable. There is a sort of claustrophobia in Anne's acute awareness of Wentworth's every word, every action, and that he, too, is watching her just as closely. The resolution, when at last it comes, is all the sweeter for the book-long wait, and the eight years that preceded the first chapter.

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. I have loved none but you." 

I loudly declare myself to be immune to "the mushy stuff," but Persuasion is a romance that makes me feel swoony, a true, deep and constant love that goes above and beyond most of the stories that are labelled as romance. Persuasion used to be my least favourite Austen novel, but now I suspect it is the best.

The Annotated Alice - Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner

I've always had a faint, guilty suspicion that I don't like Alice in Wonderland quite as much as I ought. Even as a little girl I felt that that, as a story, it didn't quite work, didn't flow right, that there must be some deeper layers of meaning just out of my reach - not that I would have phrased it like that in those days. If asked, I'd probably have shrugged and muttered something about it being "a bit weird" or even "boring." I liked the Disney film well enough, although it wasn't my favourite, but the book didn't seem like a children's book. Whatever the reason, somehow I didn't quite get it. Coming back to the book as an adult last year (in preparation for watching Tim Burton's Johnny Depp in Wonderland) and reading it with my book-clevers, I didn't like not understanding.

By this point, I'd twigged that Wonderland was a dream story with cards thrown in, and that Through The Looking Glass was either a metaphor or a novelisation of a chess game - again, in a dream. But even so, I often had the feeling that Lewis Carroll was cross-referencing other works, Victorian culture and in-jokes, but  I didn't know what and couldn't quite work it out for myself. And I couldn't be havin' with that. Enter The Annotated Alice, a work which strives to unlock some of the mysteries under the surface of what cannot be denied is a very surreal story.

Now, I have to point out that The Annotated Alice is not for everyone. I know many who love the story uncomplicated by analysis or explanation, and that to look below the surface would spoil the magic. I have full sympathy for that! My brain, though, is cursed with an ardent curiosity and "wanting to know," probably as a result of my years of literary studies. I refused to study the Children's Literature module at university because insider information hinted that the class had the potential destroy books that have been part of me from childhood, going for shock over believable interpretations. And the notes for The Annotated Alice are not entirely free from fanciful speculation - did Carroll really intend the word "little" to be a pun on "Liddell"? (the real Alice's surname.) I'm inclined to believe he chose it because he meant "small" when he wanted to say something that meant "small." The annotator overuses the words "possibly," and "maybe" and "Carroll could be referring to..." Some of these links are tenuous to say the least, although there are lots of interesting snatches of information that make sense of the odd line here or there.

However, Martin Gardner, the annotator, also explains mathematical, political and scientific references that I wouldn't have otherwise understood, and draws attention to the patterns within the story. Reading Alice more closely, I came to realise just how the stories work with dream-logic. "She woke up to find it had all been a dream," is one of the big no-nos of storytelling these days, but Alice is the exception in being a very realistic portrayal of how dreams work - with things changing from one thing to another and this not seeming strange at all. Through the Looking Glass is much  more sophisticated than Wonderland, with its logic conforming very closely to chess rules - kings moving one step at a time, knights being a little wobbly, queens rushing about all the time, and at the same time portraying a back-to-front world as it might well work the other side of a mirror. The cake must be passed around before it can be cut, the White Queen screams in pain until she jabs herself with a pin, and then is quite calm because "I've done all the screaming already [...] What would be the good of having it all over again?"


My other edition of the Alice books isn't illustrated, but The Annotated Alice contains the original drawings by John Tenniel, and Gardner points out the little details in these pictures which show how closely the author and illustrator worked together. Note the illustration of the shop Alice visits: it is based upon a real shop on St Aldate's, Oxford (which I visited earlier this week) but Tenniel has been careful to reverse the image, if you see the position of the window and door, this really is the Looking Glass version of the shop. (The counter, too, is the other way round in the real shop.)

I don't expect The Annotated Alice will by my usual reading copy, but I'm glad to have read it, and it really did make more sense of the books by drawing my attention to details I'd never noticed before. Chances are that most people have figured out a lot without help from annotations. Other people, as I've said before, are quite happy with the book as a dreamlike nonsense fantasy without needing the details spelled out for them. I wouldn't recommend this book for everyone, but if the mysteries of Alice are frustratingly elusive, it's worth looking into.

Villette, Charlotte Bronte

I first encountered Charlotte Bronte as a pre-teen, when for some reason or other I watched the Lowood scenes in rehearsal at the local theatre. Being at the time fascinated with boarding school stories, the play encouraged me to try out the novel, but it was only on my fourth attempt when I was about fourteen that I actually read past Jane's childhood and onto the end. This novel has been described as an essential part of any girl's journey to womanhood, but little is known about Charlotte Bronte's other works. As part of the Bronte Sisters challenge, I decided to read Villette, a novel I knew little about other than it was supposed to be Charlotte's best work.

The novel follows the fortunes of Lucy Snowe, a young woman with no money and no family. What Lucy does have by the bucketload is resilience, strength of character, and courage, possibly to the point of recklessness. A Victorian young lady leaves England for the fictional city of Villette, unaccompanied, with no knowledge of French and no job, friends or relations when she gets there (as far as she knows.) Is she insane? Nevertheless, she quickly finds herself a position at a private school, first teaching the younger girls, then becoming English teacher for the whole school.

Lucy is a fascinating, but not always likable protagonist. It took me a good part of the book to be able to establish what her character is; she is quiet but forceful, often compared to a shadow. She is secretive even from the reader, more than once knowing more than she lets on until she decides to make a revelation. Lucy takes no nonsense and very sure of her own rightness. Her attitudes can come across as arrogant and judgemental, and she is particularly anti-Catholic which adds to her isolation as the only Protestant in the school.

Despite it being quite a challenging read, I got through Villette quickly. It is full of complex characters: the vain, coquettish Ginevra Fanshawe - who, despite all her faults, one can't quite bring oneself to dislike - sweet, precocious Polly and the devious, underhanded headmistress Madame Beck. There are two potential love interests in Lucy's life. Dr John, AKA Graham Bretton, son of Lucy's godmother, is the more conventional romantic hero: handsome, charming, friendly and generally decent. His relationship with his mother is heartwarming and amusing, full of good-natured banter. The other is M. Paul Emmanuel, a far more complex character: quick-tempered, passionate, opinionated and frequently rude, but he is full of compassion for the poor, the lowly, the underdog. He and Lucy clash frequently, but she is his equal and won't let him walk over her. He is a good character, yet I found his rudeness quite shocking, especially when I tried to imagine his modern-day equivalent. If he sees Lucy talking to another man, or dressing prettily - read, in a pale pink dress, rather than grey - he calls her all sorts of names, flirt, coquette, vain - Lucy Snowe, one of the most puritanical characters in literature! Imagine how well that would go down in real life, today. It would be considered abusive rather than eccentric foreign outspokenness, surely?

The book is quite hard-going, not least because there are large portions of untranslated French dialogue. I studied the language until I was 18, so I could follow most of it, but it might be better to read a Penguin or Oxford World Classics edition, as these tend to have footnotes or endnotes. It is a somewhat melancholy book, a tale of loneliness, disappointment and hope, and Victorian repression. Charlotte Bronte vividly describes the workings of a mind under attack from depression, of the physical pain from emotional turmoil, and the scenes in which Lucy ventures out at night after being drugged with opiates take on a surreal, fairylike tone, in which which her senses are intensified until everything seems brighter and more real than day-to-day life. Quite apart from subplot about a local ghost story that seems to fit better into an Ann Radcliffe romance, the narration is filled with the borderline-gothic atmosphere that is characteristic of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Take this scene in which Lucy reflects upon a former unrequited love:

"Was this feeling dead? I do not know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought the tomb unquiet, and dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through coffin-chinks."

Read for the Bronte Sisters challenge

Villette's ending is ambiguous and comes upon the reader suddenly and hard. Once more, Lucy Snowe conceals the full story from the reader, leaving it open to interpretation whether it she has her happy-ever-after or not. I've a pretty good idea which is the true ending, but either way, it seems quite a let-down to have followed this character from childhood, through 650 pages of hardship, happiness, despair and hard-earned reward, only to have this ending withheld, and wrapped up in a handful of sentences. Yet, it seems a remarkably modern conclusion, and not actually out of place in this clever, thoughtful piece of literature. If Jane Eyre has been helping girls to come of age, Villette is its sadder, wiser and more mature sister.