I've only read three
books since my last blog, and I didn't actually read any of them with
my eyeballs, I listened to them with my ears, so opinions might be
different, as audiobook performance can influence book enjoyment,
especially with Life of Pi,
which was bloody fantastic and needs no review, since everyone but me
read it in 2002. The audiobook reader was Indian-Canadian, making
Life of Pi on audio
slightly better than the printed thing. I tried reading the paper
book towards the middle because I was enjoying it so much I wanted to
free my listening from the medium of my car, but I cannot do an
Indian accent in my head, so I went back to the the audiobook.
Flapping amazing. My only complaint is that the fictionalized
author's note, the part in the movie where Yann Martel travels from
Toronto to Pondicherry looking for inspiration and he meets Pi's
uncle who says something like, "You're a Canadian who has
travelled to India, but I know an Indian in Canada whose story will
make you believe in God," was absent from the audiobook. My
other comment is that dying on a raft so slowly that one ends up
immigrating to Canada instead is much more upsetting in stark prose
than in an American movie, and what of the two narratives? What of
the end? What happened? Why parallel stories? Why the blind
Frenchman?! The carnivorous island?! How?! Why?!!
In
the public domain, The Palace in the Garden
by Mary Louisa Molesworth is a minor children's book, enjoyable in
every way, but I have no trouble understanding why it's been lost to
history. Think The Secret Garden with
less wonder or Mrs. Nesbits' without the magic. The Palace
in the Garden has charm and
voice and a really obvious mystery spearheaded by three upper-class
Victorian orphans who live with their stern, old grandfather in his
silent London house, but who doesn't? As the book opens, Gussie,
Tib, and Gerald are summoned to grandfather's big, oaken study to be
told that he is sending them to his country estate that they've never
heard of: Rosebuds. It sounds romantic, doesn't it?, and they are
meant never to talk to anyone in the neighborhood while they are
there. The children go back to the nursery full of excitement and
immediately sort out half the mystery: Rosebuds is written in
grandfather's old book of fairy tales, which he wrote his name in as
a boy, and another name, Regina, is crossed out under it. Tib's
proper name is Mercedes Regina, so a person who's read Victorian
novels can guess that someone named Regina has been cut out of the
family and they're probably living near Rosebuds, but the fun is in
the journey.
Rosebuds
is all an English country house it should be, with a cheerful
housekeeper and a big enough yard to do all sorts of playing, and a
wood at the bottom of the garden near the stone wall, that has a
secret door, Gerald finds the secret key, which leads into a secret
conservatory, that connects to a secret house, with a secret room
with a portrait of an old-fashioned lady who looks exactly like Tib.
The kids' playing about was probably the best part of a solid story:
"Let's play that I'm the princess and you're a baron and you
lock me in the dungeon." "Why do I have to be the baron?"
Aunt Jane's Hero
is a little bit nuts. The trouble with a good Christian novel, with
good Christian characters who strive earnestly to do what's best in
the eyes of an ever-loving and -providing God, is that, because God
provides, none of the narrative tension lasts for more than a few
chapters. Horace is worldly, then he becomes a better Christian.
Horace thinks Maggie doesn't love him, but she does. Horace takes
sick, but then he gets better. Maggie's sister Annie is too worldly,
but she learns to be a better Christian. Maggie wants a child, and
they have one. God provides. As well as God, Horace and Maggie
experience the benificient influence of providence in Aunt Jane
herself, a pious but pleasant elderly widow in the Protestant
tradition, she is Horace's late mother's dearest friend and his
advisor on things spiritual. Maggie meets Horace at Aunt Jane's
knitting bee and asks him how he knows Aunt Jane, and Horace says,
"Why, she's my Aunt Jane too!" Maggie says, "She's
not actually my aunt, I just call her that because she is such a dear
friend of my family." Horace says, "She's not my aunt
either, so we must be cousins!" They joke about all evening but
Horace is still too much of the world to realize what a catch Maggie
is. Then the Civil War happens, mostly offscreen, and Horace loses a
leg at Bull Run. After months in a field hospital and a wooden leg
attached with some sort of elaborate leather strapping, Horace visits
Aunt Jane again and falls madly in love with Maggie. He's prepared
to love her forever in silence, but she loves him too so he need not
be silent any longer. Horace doesn't believe he can afford to marry
and set up a household on his meager lawyer's salary, but Aunt Jane
convinces him that they can live in an unfashionable neighborhood, so
Horace marries Maggie and they settle into the kind of genteel
poverty that only employs one maid. For a few chapters Aunt
Jane's Hero becomes a manual of
domestic economy. Maggie scrimps and saves keeps the household
budget down and Mrs. Prentiss emphasizes, chapter after chapter, the
majesty of domestic economy as opposed to boarding. (If you want a
novel of household management with humor and details, read Trials
and Confessions of a Housekeeper
by T.S. Arthur, the real pseudonym of an editor for Godey's
Lady Book.) Something besides a
quiet married life needs to happen to a keep Aunt Jane's
Hero going, so Horace comes down
with typhoid fever, contracted from the Irish to whom Maggie
charitably bestows soup. Maggie and Horace spend all their free time
trying to convert the Irish. They lure Irish children to Bible Study
with cookies. It's all very Protestant and sneaky, and Aunt Jane
encourages them at it. Some trials and resolutions later,
Aunt Jane says, "What if I told you I was going to Europe?"
and means that she is going somewhere better than Europe: the loving
embrace of our heavenly Father. Aunt Jane dies peacefully,
explaining that, while she's looking forward to seeing her late
husband and son, she is more excited to meet Jesus. Maggie has the
long-awaited child around the time Aunt Jane dies, and Aunt Jane
leaves Horace and Maggie enough money to afford a slightly larger
house and a horse, the longest unresolved issue in Aunt Jane's
Hero: Because Horace has a wooden leg, he cannot go on walks to
cure his dyspepsia like other men, and the doctor recommends he ride,
but he cannot afford a horse. Now he can. God provides. Like The
Palace in the Garden, there is
nothing wrong with Aunt Jane's Hero.
It's simple, plodding, predictable, and sweet. Apparently Elizabeth
Prentiss is enjoying a renaissance in Christian fiction circles, and
it's well deserved. If anyone needs comfort from a Protestant God,
Aunt Jane's Hero is
written just for that. And Aunt Jane's Hero is
ideal for anyone who needs to write an essay on "The Cult of
Domesticity and the Early Victorian Novel."
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