The Girl From Away trilogy, Claire Mowat

There are some people who are, as Anne Shirley would put it, true "kindred spirits." These are the people you can travel with, go for coffee or even lunch with, and completely ignore each other while you are both engrossed in books. Most people would probably think this weird and unsociable, but my closest friends understand completely. I've known my best friend, Judith, for as long as I can remember, and like me she is a complete bookworm. We've been on holiday and on day trips up and down the country, but our favourite finds when shopping are the bookshops, from big chain stores to teeny-tiny second-hand shops. So when she recently went on holiday to Canada, it is only natural that the souvenirs she brought back for me included books. The Girl From Away trilogy was a tatty old ex-library book with stamps, old-fashioned ticket pocket and the opening times of the local swimming pool still visible in light pencil. I love a book that's picked up some history along the way, and especially one that has crossed the Atlantic.

The Girl From Away

The Girl From Away introduces Andrea, a teenage Toronto girl who pays an unwilling visit to Anderson's Arm, a small fishing community in Newfoundland, while having to come to terms with her mother's remarriage. Andrea spends the Christmas holidays with her aunt Pearl and cousins - her uncle Cyril is away working on an oil tanker, and though they remain cheerful, Pearl and her children are clearly anxious about him. The Girl From Away is a lovely portrait of a small community, where everybody knows everyone else and pulls together in a crisis. The setting came vividly to life, and felt identifiably Canadian. The three-in-one edition of the book was published in 2002, but I recognised the stories as being originally written earlier, in the 1990s. There were details that felt old-fashioned, but yet not so much so that they were strange to me. Most noticable was the personal cassette player that was Andrea's birthday present, and the story itself was reminiscent of the books I read when I was a child.

The French Isles

Book two of the trilogy sees Andrea back with her cousins, aunt and uncle - now safely home. A trip to collect Uncle Cyril's fishing boat finds Cyril, Andrea and the Cousins at St Pierre and Miquelon, islands which are located near Newfoundland but are actually French. Not French Canadian; owned by France. Andrea takes a job working at a bed-and-breakfast hotel, and befriends the owner's son, Philippe. After the drama which led Andrea and her family to St Pierre, the story is fairly gentle and uneventful, with a little hint of a youthful romance. It does help if you have a working knowledge of the French language, as there is a lot of dialogue which is left untranslated.

Last Summer in Louisbourg

Andrea is now fifteen and is vacationing in Cape Breton for the summer job to die for! She is childminding at the Fortress of Louisbourg, a job which involves dressing up in period costume and doing a fair bit of historical re-enactment. While working, she is offered a bit part in a film which is shot on location.  Again, Mowat sets the scene beautifully, and I envied Andrea her summer job. It was amusing to see how quickly the novelty of working on a movie set wore off, however, and Andrea came across as rather a sulky teenager, anxious that her costume makes her look silly, and objecting when extra filming spoiled her day's plans. I was a bit disappointed not to see the Newfoundland family this time around, or to hear anything else of Philippe, but there were some great new characters introduced: landlady Jackie and Andrea's verbose roommate Justine, as well as the cast and crew of the film, and Andrea discovers a family secret.

The Girl From Away trilogy is a lovely, easy holiday read ideal for girls aged about 9-12 years old.

South Riding, Winifred Holtby

I wouldn’t have heard of Winifred Holtby’s South Riding if it hadn’t been for the new 3-part BBC adaptation masterminded by Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House fame and due to start airing in the UK tonight. A largely forgotten work, it has been compared with George Eliot’s Middlemarch, being a portrait of an entire community at a difficult time – in this case, the 1930s, between two world wars and an era of depression. South Riding has been hailed by novelist Sarah Waters as “a twentieth century classic,” so I have chosen it for Sarah’s Back to  the Classics challenge.

Although there is a large cast of central, viewpoint characters, the main protagonist is Miss Sarah Burton, who is newly appointed as headmistress of a girls’ high school in the South Riding, Yorkshire. At thirty nine, Sarah was much younger than her competition for the job, and a very modern woman. She is full of idealism and a love for life, and full of ambition to encourage her girls to realise their potential, not to be held back by their sex or poverty.

Holtby also shows us the details of the local government trying to do their best at a time of financial crisis, covering themes and issues that are all too familiar to a modern reader, and it’s sad to see how little has changed. The slums of the South Riding may be gone, but there is much that resonates – the trap and stigma of unemployment and poverty – Mr Holly, for example, is described as being two shillings a week better off when on the dole than when working as most of his wages go towards his travel. His daughter, Lydia, is an excellent student and a scholarship girl at the high school, but she can’t afford to go to college and fulfil her potential, and her responsibility to her younger siblings keeps her out of school.

"A twentieth-century classic"
- Sarah Waters

South Riding, like Middlemarch, shows everyone’s point of view in turn, good and bad. My first impression of Councillor Huggins was the tired old stereotype of religious hypocrisy, preaching fire and brimstone from the pulpit and in his spare time ogling pretty ladies in their swimming costumes on the beach. But we get to know him as a compassionate man, with a good heart and an agonising awareness of his own weaknesses. It’s painful to watch him trying and trying to make amends and digging himself deeper into trouble. Then, there is sad, tormented farmer and landowner Robert Carne, who is as good as widowed with a mad wife who doesn’t recognise him. He is on the verge of financial ruin and fears that his teenage daughter Midge will go the same way as his wife. Midge, herself, is a bratty, spoilt kid, but underlying is loneliness and a desperate longing to be popular.

With such a large cast of viewpoint characters, it’s inevitable that some get only a little page space, but this does not mean that they’re not fleshed-out properly. Holtby brings her characters to life in a chapter or two, then they pop up a bit later in the background with an update on a situation you can quite believe has been carrying on away from the readers’ eyes.

The casting of the BBC adaptation features several familiar actors, faces who seem to pop up everywhere, such as Anna Maxwell Martin, (Bleak House) David Morrissey (Blackpool) and Penelope Wilton (Doctor Who’s Harriet Jones Former Prime Minister (Yes We Know Who You Are) and Downton Abbey.) All are actors I admire and enjoy watching, and this as much as anything else persuaded me that South Riding is a book and series that might be worth a look at.

There is of course a little bit of romance – name me a book without it! – or at least the hope of romance between Sarah and Carne. This came as no surprise: Sarah is the heroine after all, and Carne is a brooding, tortured soul – as well as being played by the rather handsome David Morrissey. Their relationship was clearly meant to be a Pride and Prejudice- style hatred which reveals itself to be a disguise for attraction. Yet in the book, Sarah’s first realisation of being in love seemed to come from the blue, prompted by a few grumpy encounters in which I, at least, noticed no signs of attraction. No doubt on the screen their scenes will be slow-paced to allow for many long, smouldering looks, supported by appropriate music. But we’ll see.

 

For UK viewers, the first episode of South Riding is on BBC1 at 9PM tonight.
In the USA, PBS have scheduled part 1 for May 1st this year.

If you enjoy this, you may like:
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
TV: Cranford (or the book by Elizabeth Gaskell)
TV: Lark Rise to Candleford (or the book by Flora Thompson)

Middlemarch, George Eliot

I'm not fussy when it comes to books and I read a variety of genres for different reasons: romance when I'm feeling squishy and in need of cheering up, fantasy for escape, crime and adventure stories for the excitement, kids' and teen fiction for nostalgia's sake, to recapture the innocence (or not) of days gone by. But most importantly of all, I read about people. Sometimes that's all I want in a story. The other day I found it very difficult to find a film in the DVD shop that was just about people - not romance, not the sort of adventures that don't tend to happen in real life, just a story about ordinary people doing ordinary things.

Middlemarch is very much a character-based story, focusing on various residents of a small English town at a time of social and political change. Although the country may be a very different place in twenty first century, where people travel further afield as a matter of course, and technology is the world's defining feature, Middlemarch's characters could quite well be living among us. Eliot deftly brings her characters to life and allows us to see everyone's motivations and thought processes, so that even as we recognise their foolish or self-deluding motivations, we have, if not always sympathy, an in-depth understanding of even the most unpleasant characters seen from both outside and within.

First, there's Dorothea Brooke, a very modern woman for the nineteenth century: good-hearted and intelligent, if rather naive, with a scientific mind. She chooses to marry an older man, Mr Casaubon, in the hopes of assisting his great works as an equal. Mr Casaubon, in theory, is keen on the idea of a beautiful young wife who understands his life's work, but both he and Dorothea are doomed to disappointment and frustration. When it comes down to it, Mr Casaubon finds that his wife's beauty draws unwanted attention from younger men, provoking his jealousy. Her understanding of his work is a nuisance to him, because she might have her own ideas about it, which don't suit him.

Then we have Fred Vincy, university-leaver who is full of good intentions, but ultimately doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. In Vincy I was reminded of Richard in Dickens' Bleak House, trying out one profession after another, but I was also reminded of many of my contemporaries - as well as myself - trying to find our place in the world. And we meet Dr Lydgate, who is new to Middlemarch and whose unfamiliarity, high ideals and new methods are met with distrust from his patients. Lydgate's marriage to the spoilt Rosamund is strained by their spending what they cannot afford, and even more by the persistant lack of communication between husband and wife, who each go their merry way without thought for the other. All too familiar are the consequences of such a relationship.

A contemptible character is a money-lender named Bulstrode, a self-righteous, self-justifying hypocrite whose attempts to keep an unsavoury past buried become increasing desperate throughout the novel. Not that we have any modern examples of such corruption in people who hold positions of power over others(!)

I decided to read Middlemarch after watching the first part of a BBC adaptation several years ago, as I generally prefer to read books before watching film or TV adaptations. Although it took me about three years to get around to starting, and many months to finish Middlemarch, reading just a few chapters between lighter works, this isn't through lack of enjoyment so much as a wish to savour the novel, and it has always been easy to pick up where I've left off the last time. Now I've finished, I'm going to feel quite at a loss without it on my desk, where it has lived since the summer.

Anne of Avonlea, L. M. Montgomery

At sixteen and a half, Anne Shirley has finished her own schooling at Queen's Academy, and is preparing to return to Avonlea school, this time as its teacher. Though much changed from the talkative eleven-year-old adopted by Matthew and Marilla, Anne is still full of dreams and ideals, and always on the lookout for "kindred spirits." There are several newcomers to Avonlea, from the prosaic, grouchy Mr Harrison who moves in next door with his parrot, to poetic Paul Irving, kindred spirit and Anne's favourite pupil - if teachers had favourites, which of course they don't. And Marilla, who a few years ago no one would have foreseen raising one child, has taken in two more, six-year-old twins Davy and Dora Keith. As reflected in the title, the setting of the story spreads from the grounds of Green Gables, the school and surrounding woodland, to the whole village, and we get to know more of its inhabitants. As well as the next generation of Avonlea schoolchildren, we get to see more of the elder residents of the village when Anne, Gilbert and some of their other friends set up the Village Improvement Society, and through this we get to better know assorted friends-and-relations: Andrewses, Sloanes, Pyes and more. I've read this book more times than I can remember, and still can't work out who's who in Avonlea, but it's clear that Mrs Montgomery knew them all.

While just as episodic as Green Gables, the stories told in Avonlea are slightly more grown-up in theme and perhaps overall a little more sedate. Anne at sixteen to eighteen years of age seems a good deal older than I am at twenty five! Yet she is not yet cured of landing herself in embarrassing situations, such as falling through the roof of a neighbour's duck-house, and smothering her nose in red dye instead of freckle lotion before a surprise visit from a distinguished authoress. More childish amusement comes from the Keith twins, or rather Davy who always "wants to know" - Dora might as well be a porcelain doll for all the personality she is given. Paul Irving, too, is clearly intended to be a kindred spirit, though I find him a rather soppy character for a ten-year-old boy, despite Anne's and the author's protests that he is as manly as all the other boys in his class. Clearly Paul is supposed to be a reflection of Anne, with his make-believe and quirky little thoughts, but I couldn't believe in him. To me he seemed like a prototype of Walter Blythe from the later books, but Walter is more fleshed-out and his struggles make him come alive. Paul's difficulty in eating a whole dish of porridge doesn't quite work as a character flaw.

Still, Paul's presence in Avonlea brings about the last section of the novel, where it stops being so anecdotal and has an ongoing story. Anne befriends a charming old maid named Miss Lavendar Lewis, who lives alone in a quaint, fairy-like house with a young maid who she calls Charlotta the Fourth. Miss Lavendar seems to epitomise all that a child would think good about being grown-up and independent: having the freedom to do what you want, when you want, stay up all night and eat nothing but cake if you so desire! But Miss Lavendar has a history of romance with Paul Irving's father - who is now a widower. In the Anne books there are a lot of stories where Anne plays matchmaker or meddles in other people's relationships for better or worse, and in most cases I find these stories leave me cold. But the romance of Miss Lavendar and Stephen Irving is the first and the best, as we've spent plenty of time getting to know and love these characters and to wish them happiness. And although Anne is oblivious, or as good as, there are hints and suggestions of romance in her own not-too-distant future.