Surprisingly, I found myself enjoying this chunk much more than I did the previous two.  I think this can largely be attributed to the fact that stuff has finally happened!  There were whales!  They chased the whales!  They caught the whales!  They killed the whales!  They butchered the whales!  All very exciting in a book in which, up till this point, the most action packed scene has been the one in which Queequeg got into bed with an unsuspecting Ishmael.  In fact, I’m coming to accept that this book is structured in a way that (for me) sort of reflects the struture of a four year whaling voyage: there’s a long of long, tedious, monotonous crusing around waiting for something to happen, interspersed with very brief, intense, exciting bursts of action.  Then we return to the monotony.

Speaking of monotony, I’m three quarters of the way through this book and still no Moby Dick.  When is the eponymous poxy white whale actually going to show up?  I think I’m more impatient about this than Ahab is now.  He can’t hide for much longer; there’s only 125 pages left!

Bizarrely, it’s been Melville’s meticulous marine biology (which I’m finding much more interesting than his meticulous rope describing) that have given me the greatest sense of history so far.  As their first whale caracass is being butchered, Ishmael describes the body of the whale and what each part does, with a chapter devoted to the impenetrable forehead which houses the precious sperm oil.  At this point, it finally dawned on me due to the gaping omission in Melville’s unrelentingly thorough description that he (and indeed his contemporaries) had no idea what this massive forehead was for.  A quick search of Wikipedia confirms that it wasn’t until the 1950′s that scientists discovered and properly described echolocation in toothed whales, and so Melville clearly thought that the sperm whale navigated using its tiny eyes and tiny ears, not knowing that the whale’s blunt forehead and the spermaceti contained within were provided one of the most complex and effective natural sonar systems in the world.  Even the concept of sonar would have been completely alien to him.  It feels a bit odd to know something about Melville’s specialist subject that he didn’t, but this, more than anything else for me, has rooted the novel back in the 1800′s where it belongs.

Onwards to the east to find the white whale in part four!

From reading the description and from the way that the book opens, I had expected The Country of the Pointed Firs to be a sort of American Cranford.  Consequently, I was expecting to love it as much as I did Elizabeth Gaskell’s lovely novella when I read it last year.  To say that I did not is a bit of an understatement: I didn’t dislike the book, I just thought it was ok.  That’s not to say that I thought The Country of the Pointed Firs was a bad book, but it was one that didn’t work for me.  It’s perhaps unfair of me to judge a book based on the merits of another, but the set up is so similar that I can’t help it.  In both books the narrator returns to a small, unremarkable town that holds a place in her heart, and then proceeds to introduce the reader to the town’s residents and all the quirks that come with small town life.  However, there the similarities end.

Although the concept is a lot like that of Cranford, the execution and the mood of the book are very different.  Cranford chronicles the little, but all important, incidents in the lives of the women who live there, whereas The Country of the Pointed Firs is more of a series of character studies: Jewett introduces the reader to characters and more often than not just lets them sit there.  Sometimes there will be an anecdote, occasionally there may be tea, but by and large nothing happens.  This is not in the way that nothing happens in Cranford, where the little, everyday things are made to seem important to the reader because they are important to the characters, infused with Elizabeth Gaskell’s warmth and humour, but in a way that emphasises the slow and sedate pace of life and the reserved nature of its people. Whereas Cranford had a real feel of community to it, The Country of the Pointed Firs portrayed a life that was typified by, if not loneliness, then at least isolation, broken by occasional moments of contact with others.  Most of the characters are widows, widowers, or people who simply never married. Some of them were intriguing (I particularly liked Mrs Todd and the widowed fisherman who sits alone in his cottage knitting) but I find myself failing to remember many of them.

The book starts out so promisingly:

When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person.  The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told.

I expected to be made to feel all these things as the narrator discovered them anew, but I didn’t.  Ultimately, how much any reader enjoys this book will boil down to how much they like the characters in it, because Jewett gives you nothing else to go on.  As for me, I found the book interesting as a reading experience (particularly given my woeful lack of experience of American fiction), but one that was interesting in an intellectual rather than emotional way.  I found myself unmoved.

If anyone would like my copy of this book, please leave me a message in the comments.  It came from BookMooch, so it’s a bit battered and has occasional marginal notes, but I’d like to see it go to a good home as it’s not one I’m likely to read again.

The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett.  Published by Norton, 1981, pp. 296.  Originally published in 1896.

In my post on part one of Moby Dick I commented that it didn’t seem to be particularly big on plot but that I hoped things might pick up a bit once the Pequod set sail.  All I can say is that it’s a good thing I didn’t hold my breath, as there’s still not a lot been happening.  My hopes were raised when the mysterious Ahab finally came up on deck and gave a rousing speech to the crew, promising gold and glory for the death of Moby Dick, the great white whale, but that has so far proven to be all talk and no action.  There’s been one brief, abortive whale hunt but apart from that, these chapters are what I’m coming to consider Melville’s usual mixture of reported anecdotes, digressions and essays and I’m starting to find all it a bit tedious.  Still, he says that ‘As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature.  Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life‘ and I still have faith that Melville will eventually deliver this.  He’s just going to do it in his own sweet time.

What I do like are the brief glimpses of character that Melville has provided; I find Ahab particularly fascinating. The way he keeps himself hidden below decks until the Pequod is in open waters was guaranteed to intrigue me, and he doesn’t disappoint when he finally appears.  With his peg leg made from whale ivory and his sudden temper he cuts a forbidding figure, but he is somehow also magnetic.  When he talks to the crew of Moby Dick and they respond with such fervour, they aren’t merely enthusiastic in reaction to Ahab’s promise of gold but to the charisma of the man himself.  Ahab’s character is compelling and repelling and I’m looking forward to reading more about him (particularly now that Queequeg seems to have faded into the background and Ishmael become less a character than a narrative voice).

Unfortunately, I do think that Melville has made one huge mistake with Ahab, and that was allowing him a chapter of inner monologue in ‘Sunset‘.  Apart from the fact that it really irritates me when authors decide to write a narrative in first person and then breaks out of it the first moment that it becomes inconvenient, I think it weakens the portrayal of the character to allow the reader into his head.  Part of Ahab’s mystique is that he is aloof and unknown, so to see him thinking to himself ‘I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!’ rather spoils the effect.  That it is followed by a similar insight into Starbuck’s thoughts and Stubb’s in turn, then a bizarre playscript style interaction between various unnamed sailors of different nationalities means that it isn’t even special; the reader doesn’t see only into Ahab’s thoughts but also those of other, less important characters, and I found this very off-putting.

Another area where I disagree with what Melville does is in the presentation of his various treatises.  I understand why he has Ishmael go into such minute detail about whales and whaling – it provides a reading audience who would probably be unfamiliar with the practice with the information needed to fully immerse themselves in the setting (although whether anyone needs to know exactly how thick the rope attached to a harpoon is in order to truly appreciate the novel is debatable).  The problem that I have with this approach is that, by providing the reader with such a level of knowledge, Melville ends up distancing the reader from the story as it happens.  The minutiae of whaling is provided by an older and wiser Ishmael, speaking with the benefit of hindsight and experience.  However, this happens at the expense of the Ishmael in the present tense of the narrative who is on his first whaling voyage, completely inexperienced and almost as ignorant as the reader was before they had reams of information thrust at them.  He is discovering all this for the first time too, presumably, but instead of allowing the reader to discover this information along with Ishmael, Melville has future Ishmael deliver it in dry lectures which are often devoid of any immediate connection to the plot.  I appreciate the need for a certain level of background information, but I’m not convinced about his method of conveying it.

Although I’m not a fan of Melville’s essay chapters on the whole, I was amused at times by his chapter entitled ‘Cetology’, where the tedium (he actually feels the need to define what a whale is; surely in the 19th century people would have known this?) was lightened by the occasional touch of humour.  I like his division of whales into ‘folio’, ‘octavo’ and ‘duodecimo’ as though they were books rather than living things.  I was also tickled by his description of the ‘Huzza Porpoise’, as he terms it:

This is the common porpoise found almost all over the globe.  The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them.  I call him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-0f-July crowd.

This cheery image is only slightly marred by his later observation that ‘A well-fed, plump huzza porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil‘.  I wish there had been more humour among the otherwise ponderous observations.

On a couple of occasions, the crew sing snatches of sea shanties and whaling songs.  As I dyed in the wool folkie, I actually know a fair few of these songs which are still sung today, so I thought I’d leave you with two of my favourite whaling songs to get you in the mood for the second half of the book.  It’s all downhill from here and there’s got to be some whaling action soon!

The novel opens shortly before the release of central character Shadow from prison, when he is summoned to the office to hear news of his wife Laura’s death in a car crash.  On the plane home, he is accosted by a strange man calling himself Mr Wednesday who claims to be a former god embroiled in a war with the new gods.  Little does Shadow know it, but he is soon to find himself playing a key role in this conflict, embroiled in a world of gods and legends fighting for survival in the improbable setting of the American Midwest.

On the one hand, I really like the idea of American Gods.  I like the thought of all the old gods and spirits emigrating from their native lands along with their believers and eventually finding themselves having to exist in 20th century small town America.  I love the little mythic episodes which litter the novel, detailing the story of a particular deity which isn’t relevant to the plot per se, but which helps to build up the whole picture of the world that Gaiman is creating.  I thoroughly enjoyed picking out all of the elements of folklore, myth and fairytale, even if I think this may have resulted in me working a lot of things out much sooner than I was probably supposed to.  I think that the idea that bizarre tourist attractions with no real significance are the modern day places of pilgrimage is completely inspired and it never failed to make me smile.  I like the idea of the gods being in conflict; it made the story feel like a myth that had been brought thoroughly up to date.  However, therein lies one of my problems with the book.

Why is there suddenly this conflict between the gods and material things?  The commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit idolatry’ would suggest that people have been worshipping things beside the approved deities for quite some time now, so it seems a little bit odd that this has been a non-issue until the 20th century.  The Norse gods who are the focus of this book have been quite firmly out of favour for at least a thousand years, so why are they at the forefront of the conflict?  Surely if anyone is fighting off the ‘new’ gods of materialism it should be some strange trinity of Jesus, Buddah and Mohammed, not those whose worship was already considered a bit archaic when Beowulf was written down?  I enjoyed the premise, but I didn’t really believe in it, if that makes sense.

Ultimately, I had the same criticism of American Gods that I did of Stardust when I read that back in 2010: I really like the ideas that Gaiman comes up with, but I’m not 100% convinced by what he does with them.  I found myself reading American Gods and interrupting myself by thinking ‘This would be so much better if it had been written by someone else’.  I think my ideal Neil Gaiman book is possibly written by Terry Pratchett (yes, I am aware of Good Omens; no, I haven’t read it yet).  That’s not to say that I think he’s a bad writer or even that I don’t enjoy his books, it’s simply that I don’t think I quite click with him.  I know it’s unfair to judge a book by what you hoped it would be, but I wanted American Gods to be more epic, more humorous, more sinister and, well, just more than what it turned out to be.

That said, there were sections of writing that I absolutely loved.  Samantha Black Crow’s bizarre creed was one of my favourite parts of the whole novel:

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen – I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

It’s clever, it’s witty, it’s completely insane yet somehow rings true and I wish the whole novel had been more along those lines.

This is sounding like a very negative review, but I did honestly enjoy the book, just not as much as expectations had led me to believe I would.  I’ll continue to read Neil Gaimain’s books for the wonderfully innovative ideas that he comes up with.  Who knows, maybe his writing will grow on me the more I read?

American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  Published by Headline Review, 2005, pp. 656.  Originally published in 2001.

I’m sure I’m not alone in assuming that Moby Dick was going to be some sort of Boys’ Own Adventure Story of whaling boats, deadly peril and adventure on the high seas (in much the same way that the uninitiated think that Robinson Crusoe is some sort of novelised,  jolly 18th century version of a Bear Grylls television show, in blissful ignorance of the tedious pot making, goat rearing, navel gazing and inexplicable bear hunting which actually comprise most of the novel).  However, a quarter of the way through the novel and, while the Pequod has finally put to sea, it’s only five pages ago that we’ve so much as set eyes on Captain Ahab, the central character in my imagined version of the story, and although there’s been frequent references to them, there’s been nary a whale to be seen.  I’m swiftly approaching the conclusion that Moby Dick is not a plotty book.

If it lacks some of the elements that I expected, it compensates for this by having a surprising number of things that I did not anticipate.  I had expected it to have a similar sort of style to English novels that I have read from around the same period, but in fact Robinson Crusoe seems a reasonably accurate comparison: in spite of its having been written 130 years earlier than Melville’s work, these two novels have far more in common than Moby Dick does with many other Victorian novels.  Like Crusoe, Moby Dick takes a story which you might expect to be all about plot and instead makes it discursive and rambling.  Melville doesn’t summarise something when he can explain it in full, and he doesn’t limit himself to just explaining something in full when he can also philosophise about that.  Nothing that Ishmael waxes lyrical about should be particularly relevant or important, but somehow everything is made to seem so.  I’m not saying it’s a narrative style that I’m particularly enjoying, but I can see what he’s doing and it’s interesting to watch.

Although we have yet to go to sea, whaling has been a constant presence throughout the first quarter, and, while it will (I assume) drive the action later in the book, we are first introduced to it as a theoretical, philosophical thing.  Ishmael provides a passionate defence of whaling, and Melville uses it to illustrate many of his religious points:

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of man into Eternity.  But what then?  Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.  Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.  Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.  Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.  In fact, take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.  And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

I found the rather long-winded sermon about Jonah interesting because it put me in mind of all the medieval associations with Jonah and the whale.  In the middle ages (I know this is broad, but it’s difficult to pin down beliefs like this) Christian scholarship liked to find foreshadowing of the coming of Christ and his death and resurrection hidden in earlier Bible stories.  The whale was a widely used representation not only of the devil but of hell, and so they saw Jonah as a type of Christ.  Both were taken from the world (either by crucifixion or being swallowed by a giant fish), both spent three days in hell and both emerged triumphant to proclaim the good news and spread God’s word.  While I think it’s going to be a bit of a stretch to see the whalers as Christ-figures, this does make me assume that the period spent whaling is going to be, effectively, time spent in hell, after which the sailors will either be saved by the grace of God or condemned to death and eternal damnation.  I think there’s an outside chance that Ishmael will be in the former category and the mysterious Ahab will be in the latter.  I may be making links which the author didn’t intend, but these associations lend a mythological and religious weight of significance to the story of which I’m sure Melville would have approved.

However, Moby Dick isn’t all gravitas and religious metaphors; for me, Melville saves himself by touches of surprising humour, many of which come from Queequeg, the tattooed heathen from distant lands whom Ishmael befriends.  He was another surprise (see how little I knew about this book?) but a welcome one.  The unlikely scenes of Queequeg and Ishmael sitting in bed together in their fur jackets and sharing puffs of his peace pipe are bizarre, but they made me warm to Ishmael in a way that none of his moralising and philosophising has done so far.  It’s good to have a more human element in among all of the lofty thinking, and Queequeg (or Quohog or Hedgehog as Captain Peleg mistakenly calls him) provides that.  I look forward to seeing what Melville does with him as the story develops.

Once I’ve started a book, I don’t abandon it, so Moby Dick would have been finished even if I hadn’t found the first quarter intriguing.   However, Moby Dick isn’t a book which has ever particularly called to me before, so even if I wouldn’t have given up on it, it would have remained unread on my shelves for much longer if it weren’t for The Blue Bookcase’s read along, so thanks very much for the encouragement!

Moby Dick by Herman Melville.  Published by The Readers’ Digest Association, 1996, pp. 495.  Originally published in 1851.

The novel is divided into two sections.  In the first, Daisy Fay lives with her Momma and Daddy in the largely deserted coastal town of Shell Beach, running a failing malt shop with with mysterious contents hidden in the freezer.   In the second, seven years after the book begins, Daisy leaves Shell Beach to compete in the Miss America Pageant.

The book is written in diary form and the distinctive and engaging voice of the narrator is apparent from the very first words of Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man:

Hello there…my name is Daisy Fay Harper and I was eleven years old yesterday.  My Grandmother Pettibone won the jackpot at the VFW bingo game and bought me a typewriter for my birthday.  She wants me to practise typing so when I grow up, I can be a secretary, but my cat, Felix, who is pregnant, threw up on it and ruined it, which is ok with me.  I don’t know what is the matter with Grandma.  I have told her a hundred times I want to be a tree surgeon or a blacksmith.

The most wonderful thing about this book is undoubtedly Daisy Fay herself.  Unlike a lot of young characters in literature I read, she is neither wise beyond her years nor imbued with an idealised amount of childlike innocence: Daisy is a perfectly believeable eleven year old.  She is bright and knows her own mind (although her opinions are sometimes rather impractical, as with her choice of career), but she is also quick to be swayed by others and is anxious to please.  She is independent, adventurous and optimistic; she’s the type of character who epitomises the word ‘spunky’.  The big gap between her warm, funny narration and her frequent lack of understanding of the things she describes, obvious to the adult reader, means that Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man is at once one of the most humorous and one of the most heart-wrenching books that I’ve read this year.

Her character shines through when she writes her own will, believing that she is likely to be killed:

This is my last will and testament and I am sorry it is so small, but as you know, most of my stuff burned up.  I leave my sweetheart pillow to my mother.  I leave my clothes to Michael, even though he will probably not want to wear that one pair of girls’ blue jeans.  If not, give them to Patsy Ruth Coggins.

I leave my cat, Felix, to my daddy.

And the last thing I have to say is that I am responsible for burning down the malt shop.  I did it by mistake, so don’t try and take the insurance money away from Daddy.

It wasn’t enough anyway.

It is not just Daisy Fay who leaps off the page; there is a whole host of characters who are bold, brash and entertaining but which manage to stay just the right side of believeable.  My favourite was Mrs Dot, self styled society lady who runs the debutante society in Shell Beach and is always dispensing little pearls of nonsensical wisdom.  Thanks to her I now know that:

Sincerity is as valuable as radium.

A lot of the events that take place are slightly ridiculous, such as Daisy’s daddy making her use an inexpertly stuffed fish to win a fishing competition or pretend that she has come back from the dead so that she can make money by preaching, but the story and the situation still feels remarkably real.  I think it’s because the novel is less about what happens and more about who it happens to; it is the characters who are most important and they are excellent.

The way in which Fannie Flagg opens the second section of the novel had my heart breaking for Daisy. When Daisy’s story picks up again she has aged convincingly although in a way that made me ache for her.  Still ultimately vulnerable and still desperate to please, she is less open than when the reader met her before.  Almost inevitably, she has grown a brittle shell around her and though she remains as bright and funny as before she has lost her innocence.

Skimming back through this book to review it, I was reminded of how much I loved it at the time.  Part of me wants to sit here and reread it right away, it’s just that good, but I think I’ll wait and instead not leave it too long before reading one of her other books.  Thankfully there are a few of them.

Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg.  Published by Vintage, 1993, pp. 320.  Originally published as Coming Attractions in 1981.

The novel is narrated by nonagenarian Jacob as he sits in his care home watching the circus set up from his window, sparking memories about his own time working for a travelling circus during the depression era.  While working as the show’s vet he quickly falls in love with Rosie, the circus elephant, and Marlena, the girl who rides her.  However, Marlena is married to short-tempered, brutal August who also happens to be Jacob’s boss.  In spite of the obvious dangers, Jacob cannot forget his feelings for Marlena, and soon August’s cruel treatment of both her and Rosie proves too much for Jacob to bear.

Water for Elephants may not be the finest piece of writing that I’ve encountered this year, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a highly enjoyable book.  It’s the sort of novel which prompts the reader to devour it with gusto, racing through the pages, carried along by the rapidly moving plot.  I think it’s very telling that, even though this book has over 400 pages in the edition that I read, I polished the whole thing off in less than a day.  I was totally absorbed in Jacob’s life in the circus and the dilemmas and hardships he faces.  This book is all about the plot and that story is exciting and great fun to read.

Far from running away to the circus being an idealised dream, Gruen presents life on a depression era circus train as a gruelling, dirty, unhygienic experience.  The animals are either half-starved or living on rotten meat; the only time the lions get anything fresh is when one of the horses dies and is fed to the hungry creatures.  I’ve read quite a few reviews of Water for Elephants which object to the book because of the animal cruelty it depicts, but I thought that this approach, so different from what I was expecting in a book set in the glittering world of the circus, made the story far more interesting and realistic to me.

On the negative side, this is yet another book which is written in the present tense for no apparent reason, something which I find incredibly off-putting unless it is very skillfully executed.  I don’t think it was in Water for Elephants.  Particularly after reading Human Croquet recently and admiring the way in which tenses were employed there, it made little sense to me that both the sections set in the nursing home in the present day and the parts set in the circus in the past were written in the present tense.  In fact, I didn’t think that the frame narrative of the older Jacob looking back on his younger days added anything to the book really.  Although the speed at which I inhaled the story prevented me from being too distracted by it, nonetheless I would have much preferred it if it had been written in the perfect tense.

In spite of my niggles about the writing style, this book is not one to read for the style but for the excellent story.  It is a good fun read and was the perfect novel for distracting my mind from wedding planning for a bit.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.  Published by Hodder, 2007, pp. 429.  Originally published in 2006.

Alexander’s Bridge tells the story of Bartley Alexander, an American engineer famed for building bridges.  He lives a perfect life in Boston with his loving, supportive wife Winifred.  However, his life starts to unravel when business takes him to London and he meets Hilda Burgoyne, an Irish actress with whom he had been in love when he was younger.  He begins to question how happy he really is and soon finds himself divided in two and under the terrible strain of leading a double life.

It seems that I picked a particularly interesting author for my reading in order experiment, as Cather later distanced herself from this first novel of hers, saying that it ‘does not deal with the kind of subject matter in which I now find myself most at home‘ (p. v) and that:

The difference in quality in the two books is an illustration of the fact that it is not always easy for the inexperienced writer to distinguish between his own material and that which he would like to make his own.  Everything is new to the young writer, and everything seems equally personal.  That which is outside his deepest experience, which he observes and studies, often seems more vital than that which he knows well, because he regards it with all the excitement of discovery. (p. v)

She continues: ‘The writer, at the beginning of his career, is often more interested in his discoveries about his art than in the homely truths which have been about him from his cradle.’ (p. vi)  Certainly, this book was not what I was expecting from what I have heard about Cather’s later and more famous works.  Alexander’s Bridge has quite an urban focus, which I hadn’t anticipated, and the way that it develops puts me in mind more of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence than what I had been awaiting from Cather.  The plot does feel a little strained at times, and this may well be because she is trying to mimic other literature than to write her own, although equally it may reflect the tensions between the characters, echoed in the bridges that Alexander builds.

However, I do not agree that this makes Alexander’s Bridge a book filled with ‘youthful vanities and gaudy extravagances’ (p. vii) as Cather terms these early works of a writer; although the plot is somewhat lacking there are moments in the writing of quiet introspection and deep beauty.  For all it feels as though she is writing someone else’s plot, she still does so from her own perspective and with her own perceptive vocabulary, allowing the emotions of her characters to shine through in a way that is instantly understandable.  Take, for instance, her description of Bartley Alexander’s thoughts as he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with his perfect life:

His existence was becoming a network of great and little details.  He had expected that success would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought him only power that was in itself another kind of restraint.  He had always meant to keep his personal liberty at all costs…  He happened to be a engaged in a work of public utility, but he was not willing to become a public man.  He found himself living exactly the kind of life he had determined to escape.  What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial honours and substantial comforts?  Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of the middle life which confronted him — of that he was afraid.  It was like being buried alive.  (pp. 49-50)

Moments like this one make the novel worth reading, despite the disappointing storyline.  It shows a thoughtfulness, an insight and an awareness of humanity which hopefully develops into something really special in her later works.  I can’t wait to continue on my journey through Cather.

Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather.  Published by Virago, 1990, pp. 176.  Originally published in 1912.

Fairy tales and folk stories were a huge part of my childhood and have continued to be so as I’ve become older.  I had them read to me by my parents; I read them to myself; I listened to storytellers weaving their own versions of the tales sat around campfires and in tents; I watched them performed on the stage in ballets, pantomimes and plays; and I heard them sung.  The ballad of Tam Lin was a story that I first encountered through the music of Steeleye Span (a nice video set to Steeleye Span singing Tam Lin can be found here for your entertainment), which made up a fair part of my parents’ record collection.  I was entranced by the music and the stories and I haven’t stopped loving folk music or folk tales ever since then.

In the ballad, Tam Lin is a young man who lives in the forest of Carterhaugh and takes either a possession or the virginity of any girl who passes through.  When Janet is caught by him plucking a rose there, she insists that she owns Carterhaugh as her father has given it to her.  When she returns home, as is the way in folk tales, she soon discovers she is pregnant, but will only say that the father is an elf and will not reveal who he is.  She goes back to Tam Lin who forbids her to terminate the pregnancy and tells her that he is in fact a human but was claimed by the Fairy Queen after he fell from his horse.  Every seven years the fairy court pays a tithe to hell and he fears that this year he will be part of the sacrifice and only Janet can save him.  That Halloween, Janet waits at the crossroads and watches as a procession of fairies ride past until finally Tam Lin comes by on a white horse.  Janet pulls him from his mount and must keep hold of him as the Fairy Queen transforms him into a succession of different creatures in order to attempt to make Janet let go.  Eventually, he is turned into a burning brand, upon which Janet plunges him into the well and he turns back into a man, she wraps him in her green mantle and he is hers.

The story is one that I’ve always found fascinating, not least because it features a woman rescuing her captured lover for a change, and so I was thrilled to learn that Pamela Dean had written a novel based on the ballad, also called Tam Lin. In Dean’s take on the story, Janet is an English student just starting out at Blackstock College.  There she not only has to deal with the usual teenage anxieties of studying, getting along with her roommates and discovering sex, but also more mysterious concerns.  What exactly is it about the strange and aloof Classics department that makes them stand apart from everyone else?  Who is the ghost that haunts their dorm room throwing old books out of the window, and why did she kill herself?  Who are the Classics boys who talk in verse and seem to have known each other forever and what makes them so different?

The more I think about this book, the more profoundly it irritates me.  This is a book which has 33 five star reviews out of 48 on Amazon and is about a topic I love (clearly I’ve missed something), so I started reading with high hopes, turning the pages in eager anticipation of spotting a clever, subtle reference to the ballad.  And I waited, and waited and waited.  With the exception of a rather painfully direct midnight Halloween procession on horseback from the Classics department part way through the book, it isn’t until the final fifty pages (a hundred if I’m feeling generous) that the story of the ballad really starts to play a part; in a book which is supposedly based on the ballad, I expected it to have a little more influence than that.  For that matter, I’m not sure why an author would spend so long creating a world which is totally different from that of the ballad only to insert large chunks of the original storyline exactly as they happen rather than subtly adapting it.  This would have been less of an issue had it not been for the fact that, by the time the book finally got to this point, I couldn’t bring myself to care as the story beforehand had been so lacklustre.

Without the prevailing influence of the ballad of Tam Lin, Dean’s Tam Lin is mostly just a story of university life.  We watch Janet study for exams, spend time in the library and go to classes all of which I unfortunately found rather dull.  The characters were so very pretentious that I couldn’t sympathise with any of them and the relationships between them all felt shallow and unreal.  There isn’t even any romance or desperation in Janet’s decision to pull Tom Lane (get it?) off his horse and save him (yes, it happens as obviously as that).  As these relationships are the driving force behind the book I didn’t find much to enjoy, I’m afraid.  In addition to the mundane university story, Dean has added a few of her own supernatural subplots, none of which tie in with the original ballad and none of which were explained to my satisfaction by the time the end of the novel rolled tediously round.  It was a huge disappointment.

Not only did the characters have unbelievable relationships, they also had unbelievable conversations with one another.  It seems that they hardly ever opened their mouths without uttering a line or five of a famous poem or making a clever literary, grammatical or historical pun and at times they speak more or less entirely in quotations from other works.  Picked at random, here’s a typical interchange between two characters:

“Will you talk sense for once!” said Janet, losing all patience.

“Sir,” said Robin, in an uncanny imitation of the Korean actor who had played Hamlet a year ago, “I cannot.  Cannot what, my lord?” he apostrophized himself sharply, as Rosencrantz had spoken to Hamlet.  “Make you a wholesome answer,” he said mournfully, as Hamlet.  “My wit’s diseased.”  He reverted to his own expression, and looked hopefully at Janet.

“Oh, go away!” said Janet.  “You’re enough to try the patience of a saint.  Leave me alone.  I’ll see you at supper. Don’t say it!” she added furiously, as Robin seemed about to add some of Hamlet’s observations about Polonius and the worms, which would, to a grasshopper mind like his, have been amply suggested by the word “supper”.

“I shan’t say it,” said Robin, getting up off the bed and bowing to her.  “Nobody is dead yet.”  He turned with considerable aplomb and shut the door with a dignified click that spoke volumes more than Thomas’s slam.

“We’re all mad here,” said Janet after a moment, and turned resolutely back to Pope.  (p. 329)

Not only does making your eighteen year old characters speak like this make any form of realism impossible, it’s also incredibly abrasive.  There were times when I wanted to strangle the next person to say “I cry you mercy” instead of just apologising.

Now, I’m all in favour of making clever literary allusions and judicious use of intertextuality: Chaucer and Shakespeare both did it to great effect, so it’s hard to argue that one.  Dean, however, is not a Chaucer or a Shakespeare.  They wrote works that are brilliant in their own right and the allusions and quotations to other texts serve to illuminate and expand upon the message of their own writing, whereas in this book the clever lines from other people are a substitute for the text doing anything clever itself.  In fact, there’s no space for any original intelligence, so full is this book of thoughts, ideas and words borrowed from other sources.  I felt that it uses other people’s brilliance to disguise its own lack thereof, and also as a way for the author to show of how many famous books she’s read.  It all came across as rather self-indulgent and didn’t sit well with me.

It’s going to come as no surprise that this book will be searching for a new home soon.  Why is it always the books with the prettiest cover art that are the most disappointing this year?

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean.  Published by Tor, 1992, pp. 468.  Originally published in 1990.

Title:

Author: Neal Stephenson

Published: Arrow, 2004, pp. 927.  Originally published 2003

Genre: Alternative history

Blurb: A novel of history, adventure, science, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death and alchemy that sweeps across continents and decades, upending kings, armies, religious beliefs and all expectations.  Bringing a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life — in an historical epic populated by Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, William of Orange, Benjamin Franklin and King Louis XIV — Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most remarkable and original writers of our time.

When, where and why: I picked this book up from a little stand of second hand books in the basement of the Treasurer’s House, a National Trust property in York.  I visited it shortly after I had finished my MA so it’s been on my shelves for a little over a year now, making it book 33/50 for my Books Off the Shelf Challenge.  I had accidentally bought the second book in this trilogy earlier in the year without realising it was book two, so I snapped this one up when I saw it.

What I thought: If, from reading the blurb from the back of this book, you think it sounds a bit diverse and complicated you would be absolutely correct.  Quicksilver is a mammoth work which covers so many areas that it can get out of hand.  In fact, reading Quicksilver, I was reminded of that nursery rhyme:

There was a little girl and she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead

When she was good, she was very, very good

And when she was bad, she was horrid.

When this book is bad, it is tedious, confusing, dull and frustrating, but when it’s good it’s fantastic.  I actually started it way back in February (which explains my excessively low book count for this month) but set it aside because I couldn’t take it any more: I found it opaque and thought it had too many storylines which seemed completely unconnected with too many characters that I didn’t particularly like.  I only picked it up again in order to finish it so that I could get rid of the terrible thing.  However, evidently the break was exactly what I needed, as this time around I found it fascinating and everything clicked into place, and now I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the Baroque Cycle.

The book was still confusing and was by no means an easy read.  It is written in several different forms: regular prose, playscript style and in letters where the real message is hidden in italics among the main body of the missive.  The narrative skips about from one character to another, in between countries and passing over chunks of time, so Stephenson keeps you on your toes constantly.  But this time I enjoyed the challenge rather than being frustrated by it.  I think part of the reason that it feels so difficult is that it’s such a large book that it can be easy to find it overwhelming.  I noticed that the novel is in fact divided into three books, and I think that when I approach The Confusion, the rather appropriately named second volume of the Baroque Cycle, I will take a break to read something palate cleansing in between the composite books so that I don’t become fatigued and disillusioned as I did with Quicksilver.  This seems a far more sensible way to tackle these massive, dense books and I would recommend this approach to anyone else.

Although there were lulls in between the good bits, when Stephenson gets it right his writing is perfectly pitched, wry, deadly accurate and very quoteable:

Daniel felt about the place [the Royal Society] as a Frenchman felt about the French language, which was to say that it all made sense once you understood it, and if you didn’t understand it, then to hell with you.  (p. 784)

It is full of encoded stereotypes, contemporary and modern, and biting satire.  He has an impressive way with words, and hopefully I’ll be able to appreciate this a bit more in future volumes now that I’ve learnt to stop fretting about the plot(s).

I’ve been a bit nervous about reading alternative history in the past, primarily because my historical knowledge of any given period isn’t sufficiently complete for me to be able to distinguish exactly what is history and what is the author’s own deliberate departure from it.  In order to verify everything that went on in Quicksilver I would have to research for years, and I have a huge respect for the effort that Neal Stephenson has obviously put into crafting his slightly off-kilter seventeenth century, but at any rate the events of the book were so bizarre (I seem to recall chasing ostriches in Vienna, although that was in February’s section so I may well be wrong) that I decided to throw caution to the winds and just to go with it.  I think that is the best attitude to have when reading this book, as its wonder doesn’t rest on what is accurate and what isn’t but on the world full of intrigue, real or not, that Stephenson has created.

Quicksilver is hard work to read, but ultimately I found it to be worth the effort.  The story is very tangled, but cleverly so, and the rewards for the reader who is prepared to sit and unpick the knots are great.  I’m very glad that my compulsive book finishing forced me to give this book a second chance.

Where this book stays: I was expecting to be able to clear a good two and a half inches of book off my shelves when I finished Quicksilver and sent it on to pastures new.  Unfortunately it seems I’m going to have to keep it now.  Ah well, the best laid plans of mice and men, as they say.

Tea talk: Quicksilver was most definitely a book that needed to be washed down with lots of tea.  On this occasion I chose Chun Mee green tea from Char, my favourite tea shop.  Chun Mee apparently means ‘beautiful eyebrows’ because of the shape into which the leaves are rolled.  I can’t say I noticed much of the plum aftertaste that the website mentions, but It was certainly a pleasant tea.