Diana Wynne Jones:
Year of the Griffin
24 October 2001
So since I was buying Diana Wynne Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm anyway, I decided to pick up the sequel too. Year of the Griffin is more of a same-universe-story than a sequel, to my mind; I suspect someone who hadn't read Dark Lord would be able to manage the story just fine, though there's plenty of references to the previous book. Eight years after the events of Dark Lord, several students from various parts of the world meet and become friends at the University. But all is not well in the school, and many of the students have histories that will soon raise their heads....
I don't think this is quite as good a book as Dark Lord of Derkholm, but in some ways I like it better. I have a definite weakness for good college-days books, and while this isn't quite up there with Caroline Stevemer's A College of Magics, it's still got the joys of cameraderie and discussing every topic under the sun at the restaurant where you escape the cafeteria's cooking for a day. It does fall to some annoying tropes (too much love at first sight, for one thing -- folks, what everyone calls "love at first sight" is better described as "sexual attraction at first sight", sigh), but it deals with the cliches in an entertaining way, so I wasn't overly bothered. I found the handling of Corkoran, the incompetent university administrator, to be rather unsatisfying -- Jones made efforts to show why he was hidebound and incompetent, but it didn't quite ring true to me. Overall, though, a very fun read.
Louisa May Alcott:
Jo's Boys
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Diana Wynne Jones:
Dark Lord of Derkholm
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Ralph Henry Barbour:
An Orchard Princess
23 October 2001
Something old, something new.... Since I'd read Little Men recently, Jo's Boys seemed to follow naturally. I find Jo's Boys to be a little more coherent of a story overall than Little Men; yes, it's got that good 19th-century schmaltziness, and Alcott cannot avoid preaching, but hey, it's entertaining.
Recently an appeal went around various mailing lists I'm on, to buy some books from Adventures in Crime and Space because various event cancellations due to 11 September aftermath have hurt their cash flow. As if we needed an excuse to buy books.... Among the titles I picked up was Diana Wynne Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm. Jones is a variable author to me -- some of her books I love love love, and some, well, I'm not that crazy about.
This one's definitely in the love love love category. When the quiet wizard Derk is appointed to be the year's Dark Lord for the otherworldly tour groups to "kill", problems ensue. Jones's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland makes even more sense now.... Jones is great at doing magic with real consequences and limitations, and pointing out the flaws in the mindless fantasy world image. The elves and dragons and griffins aren't just cliches, and the story itself is delightfully twisted.
And to top it all off.... Most of Jones's books that I've read have among their underlying messages, "You are responsible for the consequences of your actions, even the consequences that you didn't intend, and YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER." This one does the first two without the third, which I find highly refreshing. (I really hate it when one of her characters is berating another for actions that caused unintended consequences and the other character had no way of knowing about the possible results. Pointing out the consequences, indeed. Having the responsible person make amends, sure. But browbeating them for it?)
Something old again: While in the library looking for something else, I ran across The Orchard Princess, by Ralph Henry Barbour, and picked it up out of pure curiosity. (Barbour is a name in my family tree, so one never knows -- the author could be my Nth cousin M times removed.) It's a fluffy little love story, published in 1905. The language is often evocative; there are some beautiful descriptive passages. The story itself, however, hasn't aged that well over a hundred years. I can decidedly emphasize with Miles Fallon's sudden passion for an unknown beautiful woman, and his awkward attempts to get to know her better -- been there, done that. But I'm irritated by how the gender roles lead to Miles acting like a frigging JERK. Miss Lynde tells him to go away and stop bothering her while she's WORKING, and he instead stays nearby and keeps flirting with her, and she's won over in the end -- argh! This is the kind of image that builds the whole "no means yes" meme. As Elizabeth Bennett pointed out a hundred years before that, if "no" means "yes", then how is one supposed to say "no" and be believed? So while I found it a charming fluffy little story, it left an off taste in my mouth. (Yes, I give it some slack for being written in 1905. Nonetheless, if Jane Austen could get the concept in the early 1800s....)
Louisa May Alcott:
Little Men
15 October 2001
There are some books that have a limited window of appeal -- if you read them for the first time after a certain age, it won't work for you, or at least not as well as it would've when you were younger. I've mentioned Jacques's Redwall as one such for me, and I've heard other folks talk about various "children's classics" that didn't work for them when read for the first time at twenty or thirty or sixty.
Louisa May Alcott's Little Men feels like a book that I wouldn't especially love if I read it for the first time now -- but I read it as a kid, and so it's still one of the books that I plan to hang on to forever and ever. I will certainly admit that it has flaws. Like most of Alcott's work, the chapters are very self-contained -- not unusual for the time (hmm, I wonder if it ever was serialized when it was first published?), but most of the problems have to be "resolved" in the particular chapter, which doesn't always work. Some of the characters are utter and complete cardboard, or worse yet inconsistent -- Bess is happy to play maid in one chapter and always treated as a queen in another; Dick seems to alternate between pitiable cripple and apparently healthy eight-year-old twit; and Dolly is just a non-entity. (I find it telling that Alcott unloaded a lot of the duller characters in Jo's Boys.) The death of one character's father is utterly schmaltzy, and would be pointless to the admittedly rare reader who's reading this without having read Little Women; who cares about the virtues of a man who we barely even see on stage in the book?
And still, I come back to this book again and again. It's the characters, I think -- the non-cardboard characters ;-). It's Jo, and Demi and Daisy, and certainly Dan, and Nat and Tommy, and Nan. And it's the whole wistful thinking thing -- I'd have loved to go to a school like Plumfield, and get a balanced training in all aspects of life. Plus, as I gradually learn more about the various social movements of the late 19th century, which Alcott's family was very much involved in, some of the throwaway bits become more interesting, and even the moralizing is actually kind of cool, because I can see what issues and attitudes were important to Alcott.
Dorothy Dunnett:
The Ringed Castle
12 October 2001
Lymond goes to Russia and builds up an army there, while Philippa deals with the court of Queen Mary in England. Intrigue, passion, dramatic adventure, tragedy, and all the good stuff.
I don't know what my deal is with Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond books, but so far, with every single one, it takes me about two hundred pages and several days to get into the story, and then suddenly I hit critical mass and finish the remaining 300+ pages in less than 48 hours. You'd think that by now the four previous books would be enough impetus to push me along, but no.
Admittedly, The Ringed Castle isn't interesting me as much as the previous books did -- Russian 101 just turned me off of the country or something, I don't know. But it's got the great Lymond angst moments, and the fascinating descriptions of exotic lands, and people giving Lymond the kicks in the rear that, in my opinion, he so well deserves. (Yeah, I don't quite get why people fall in love with Lymond. Philippa Somerville, on the other hand, I will gladly marry, even if that involves getting major surgery or moving to the Netherlands.)
Jane Austen:
Mansfield Park
9 October 2001
This weekend, we rented Patricia Rozema's adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Now, I've enjoyed the other Austen movies I've seen. Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslett -- granted, Margaret had traits that were not in the original movie, but overall it was fairly true to the book. The recent Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle was a very good adaptation overall, and I was also favorably impressed with Persuasion. Yeah, I'd heard that this version of Mansfield Park took some liberties with the original book, but hey, this is the one Austen book that's probably hardest to put on screen for a modern audience and make interesting.
Then I watched the movie.
Deep hurting. Deep hurting.
Changing Fanny Price from a shy, retiring girl to a mouthy boisterous tomboy -- now the movie isn't even about the same main character. The whole scene with the drawings of the treatment of slaves -- I don't mind a film director grabbing the faint references to the slave trade in the novel and making a thematic thread from them, but this just did not work. The IDEA of Mary Crawford making that speech at the end to the whole family -- if Rozema had reset the movie in 1906 it might have worked, but as it was, no. The whole handling of Henry Crawford's interest in Fanny Price -- I'm in too much pain to go on.
As a movie judged on its own merits, it might be decent. As an Austen adaptation, it sucks boulders through a capillary tube.
So to clear my mind of the pain, I reread the book. Ahh. The subtle sense of humor, the occasional foreshadowing that you don't even realize is foreshadowing until you've read it a few times, the whole clash of principles -- lovely.