British "Humour" Mini-reviews

So as I mentioned briefly, on my honeymoon I delved into Wodehouse and Stella Gibbons for the first time. It was delightful to read two authors who actually caused me to laugh out loud repeatedly.

Bertie Wooster Sees It Through: For those who don't know, the Wooster and Jeeves novels are narrated by Bertie Wooster, a layabout, cocktail-loving member of the landed gentry, who gets into repeated scrapes and has to rely on the brilliance and rationality of his "man" Jeeves to extricate himself. Wodehouse pulls off a delightful feat by combining a stupid narrator with a brilliant narration. While the plot at times is slow--plots are really incidental to this series-- there was always another punchline to keep me reading. You have to like upper crusty British LOLs to like Wodehouse, but I know my audience does, egalitarian though we may be. I'm thrilled to have Wodehouse to return to when I next need a literary chuckle.

Cold Comfort Farm: This satire of the British "rural melodrama" (Bronte, Hardy, Lawrence, and a slew of popular novels in between) wasn't as funny a read initially but the laughs lingered longer. It's the tale of Flora Poste, a "tidy" young woman from London who decides to organize her batty, sinister-seeming relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex. They are a cliche-ridden bunch of eccentrics ripe for being tidied a la Flora's heroine Jane Austen. To describe their lives Gibbons brilliantly adds new words and phrases to the language to evoke their "dialect," from "mollocking" (fornication) to "scranleting" (some sort of ploughing) to the heavy flowering plant Sukebind, whose blooming seems to lead to the aforesaid mollocking. And of course the phrase "something nasty in the woodshed" repeated in the book by mad old Aunt Ada Doom until meaningless, has entered the vernacular. It's quite brilliant in retrospect, and we're currently halfway through the lovely, very true-to-the-book '95 adaptation with Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen, EBC local god Rufus Sewell, and Kate Beckinsale.

1995 was quite the year for adaptations! And British writers are quite the set for sending up their own literary and social traditions, bless them.

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Emma--Book and BBC

Emma by Jane Austen


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I re-read Emma for the third time alongside my soon to-be-cara sposo, Mr. VL, who is reading it for the first time. I have to say, now that I'm no longer a naive adolescent girl myself, I have even more appreciation for the way Austen captures the mindset of that particular epoch in one's development.

But this isn't a rapturous enough way to start--I'd always enjoyed the book, and admired its cleverness and wit, but this time I truly fell in love with it. It's as well-structured as Pride and Prejudice, with characters serving as symmetrical foils and doubles for each other, and it's a meditation on human folly, on our tendency to see others through the tinted glass of our own desires, proclivities and fears. Emma of course, is the worst example, guessing everything wrong down to her own heart's feelings, oblivious to everyone's real motives under the screen of the motives she would like them to have. But this tendency is true of every character, down to Emma's father, Mr. Woodhouse, who assumes all others have the same need for gruel and blazing fires in the summertime as he does. Even Mr. Knightley, who supposedly has perfect judgment and composure, chooses interesting moments to scold Emma--often related to his own masked feelings for her. In Austen's world we're all stumbling around in the blindfolds of our own perspective, our own human imperfection. There's an undertone of melancholy here, too, lurking in the corners of this comédie humaine. I actually burst into tears during a certain climactic scene in which someone is told she has borne something as no woman in England could--(of course it was 2 a.m. and I had the flu, but the emotions were genuine.)

I think it's a first-rate work of genius. Sometimes, dear readers, I'm inclined to say that there are two categories of fiction: 1-fiction 2-Austen. Jane Austen does everything your writing teachers and editors say don't do: she uses the passive voice, lots of linking verbs, adverbs, and general adjectives like "handsome" and "elegant" and "tasteful" and almost no physical or tangible descriptions of anyone or anything. And yet her world comes more alive than most contemporary writers who describe things with metaphors like the full belly of her grief scraping across her soul. Not that there's anything wrong with imagery. It's just that Jane does it all with such a light touch. Sigh.

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Now, for my thoughts on the BBC production.It's definitely growing on me--as other have noted, this production improves a lot after the first smirk and eye-roll filled hour and a half. I like that it brings out those darker, lonelier, more cramped edges of Highbury life. I find Johnny Lee Miller's Mr. Knightley absolutely charmant, and Garai's manic mannerisms have calmed down a bit. I think she gets certain aspects of the character, almost the opposite elements from the Paltrow portrayal--but neither actress can combine the naivete with the goodwill with the headstrong wit with the vulnerability lurking beneath it all--except, I maintain, Alicia Silverstone :)

Needless to say, I cannot wait til the conclusion, and I may have to re-watch the ballroom scene which is lovely--again, conventional Janeite wisdom has already come to this consensus, but I will add my voice to the chorus.

What do you all think so far? Is the miniseries improving for you also?

Wives and Daughters, Book and BBC

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book is like finding an undiscovered treasure. It's a slow simmering concoction of 19th-century social observation, and has none of the gritty class and labor issues Gaskell was so passionate about in books like North and South and Mary Barton. But it also lacks those stories' high-Victorian melodrama and shows an artist truly reaching the height of her powers. Don't let the basic contours of the story fool you; as the excellent, excellent Penguin Classic introduction points out, there's a ton of profound struggle beneath W+D's surface, including a playful take on fairy tales, a hero who is based on Darwin and a Darwinian theme, and a serious interrogation of the gender roles its plot seems to support. The male heroes--Roger and Mr. Gibson--are supposed to be rational men of science, but they are both frequently undone by their own prejudices and irrationalities when it comes to the fairer sex. Molly and Cynthia each in their own way end up being far wiser, less sentimental and less easily alarmed then the men around them.

Simple as she is, Molly Gibson is a heroine for the ages--honest and faithful with a hot temper that keeps her from being a Mary Sue. Her stepmother Mrs. Clare Kirpatrick-Gibson is a stepmother par excellence, so busy trying to prove that she is NOT the archetypical wicked stepmum that she doesn't notice how miserable her clumsy machinations make her clan. Her creation definitely owes a debt to the redoubtable Mrs. Bennet, but she's an awful all her own. And Cynthia K, stepsister and friend, is an excellent ingenue, a careless flirt for whom Gaskell, and we, nonetheless retain some sympathy for.

The primary tragedy of the book is its unfinished ending, which leaves one quite breathless with unsatisfied anticipation.

As for the obligatory Davies-penned BBC miniseries, it's one of the greats, without a doubt. Definitely rent it if you haven't, and even Davies' typically unsultry conclusion can't stop you from loving every minute. The cast is a veritable hotbed of "Six Degrees of Austen Adaptations" British character actors. It includes Mr. Meagles from Little Dorrit as well as a number of Cranford's spinsters!

fanpop.com- Molly and Dr. G survey the rolling hills near Hollinford and Hamley Hall.

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Wives and Daughters--Book and BBC

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book is like finding an undiscovered treasure. It's a slow simmering concoction of 19th-century social observation, and has none of the gritty class and labor issues Gaskell was so passionate about in books like North and South and Mary Barton. But it also lacks those stories' high-Victorian melodrama and shows an artist truly reaching the height of her powers. Don't let the basic contours of the story fool you; as the excellent, excellent Penguin Classic introduction points out, there's a ton of profound struggle beneath W+D's surface, including a playful take on fairy tales, a hero who is based on Darwin and a Darwinian theme, and a serious interrogation of the gender roles its plot seems to support. The male heroes--Roger and Mr. Gibson--are supposed to be rational men of science, but they are both frequently undone by their own prejudices and irrationalities when it comes to the fairer sex. Molly and Cynthia each in their own way end up being far wiser, less sentimental and less easily alarmed then the men around them.

Simple as she is, Molly Gibson is a heroine for the ages--honest and faithful with a hot temper that keeps her from being a Mary Sue. Her stepmother Mrs. Clare Kirpatrick-Gibson is a stepmother par excellence, so busy trying to prove that she is NOT the archetypical wicked stepmum that she doesn't notice how miserable her clumsy machinations make her clan. Her creation definitely owes a debt to the redoubtable Mrs. Bennet, but she's an awful all her own. And Cynthia K, stepsister and friend, is an excellent ingenue, a careless flirt for whom Gaskell, and we, nonetheless retain some sympathy for.

The primary tragedy of the book is its unfinished ending, which leaves one quite breathless with unsatisfied anticipation.

As for the obligatory Davies-penned BBC miniseries, it's one of the greats, without a doubt. Definitely rent it if you haven't, and even Davies' typically unsultry conclusion can't stop you from loving every minute. The cast is a veritable hotbed of "Six Degrees of Austen Adaptations" British character actors. It includes Mr. Meagles from Little Dorrit as well as a number of Cranford's spinsters!

fanpop.com- Molly and Dr. G survey the rolling hills near Hollinford and Hamley Hall.

View all my reviews >>

Little Dorrit

I'd better write this review quickly lest I start to forget all 800-plus pages of this late-period Dickens extravaganza. So here goes.

Little Dorrit's primary concern is the theme of imprisonment and freedom, and particularly the psychological toll that the former takes on people. Dickens plumbed his personal experience with the jailing of his father (for debt) to write the novel. Little Dorrit herself is the "Child of the Marshalsea" because she is born within the walls of that infamous debtor's prison.

But what's amazing, and I think most redeeming, about this book is that Dickens also sees wealth as a prison: he comes out swinging against the awful practice of locking up debtors, but is no kinder to the "nobs" who chase wealth and enact ritualistic homages to Society and Money.

These are Amy "Little" Dorrits thoughts when her family, newly-wealthy, spends a season traveling and fete-ing on the contintent:

It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come into the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the prison. They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again to-morrow or next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did what they said they would do, or went where they said they would go: in all this again, very like the prison debtors. They paid high for poor accommodation, and disparaged a place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea custom.

This is the most brilliant aspect of the book: the parallel halves in which the characters in prison and abroad exhibit the same patterns, characteristics, and follies. In fact, Dickens points out that the family is allowed to show love and tenderness towards each other more in prison than when they have to keep up appearances for genteel society.

Beyond the Dorrits, the interlocking strands of the multilayered plot include a number of separate savage satires: the office of Circumlocution and the Barnacle family that presides over it is just a brilliant skewering of bureaucracy. Henry Gowan is the obligatory laconic young man--the Felix Carbury/Rawdon Crawley type. Flora Finching is a wonderful character, her endless breathless flirtation a send-up of "romantic" notions as exhibited by middle-aged matrons. Mr. F's aunt is the pitch-perfect character who has little other purpose but to make the reader chuckle. And of course, there's Mr. Merdle, the Melmotte-like financier who everyone lauds and behaves obsequiously towards, and who ends up swindling them all and leaving them bankrupt. It's positively uncanny how relevant it all is in the Madoff era. It's as though we've learned nothing over time.

All this being said, I thought Dorrit's denoument, and the unraveling of the various mysteries and cliffhangers, was flat, anti-climactic, and at times even confusing. It's never good when the publisher decides to put a two-page addendum at the end of the book explaining the events of the final few chapters. Furthermore, the chief villain of the book, Blandois/Rigaud, is a rather laughable caricature of a continental rogue while Amy Dorrit's sweetness tends towards the saccharine. Dickens was much better at writing in-between characters than heroes or villains, which is why books like Great Expectations and David Copperfield whose heroes ARE in- between characters themselves, are so much better than the rest. Still, for the reasons stated above, it remains a very worthy read. So in conclusion, Copperfield pwns Dorrit pwns Hard Times.

A Coda: As for the upcoming mini-series, I am so thoroughly excited for it I can't contain myself. The cast looks parfait.

Cranford--The Book.

I read the very brief, and very amusing, Cranford on a series of bus and subway rides throughout Manhattan. This was very incongruous, of course, because the book details a "lost way of life" in a tiny English country town, which is populated primarily by spinsters and widows. (!!)

The book has little in the way of plot per se, being rather episodic in nature, and it's only really appealing to those of us who adore Victorian culture; but within that context it's a definite must-read. Gaskell is a good clear writer with a really strong sense of justice and right and wrong. She's a proto-feminist in many senses, although she adheres to gender stereotypes, she idealizes the place as a sort of utopia of feminine values, among which she includes a good deal of kindness and community. She also uses a wry irony throughout the novella that is almost Austen-like.

In a lot of ways, it reminded me of a "girl's book" for middle aged women. It had the serial nature of classics like Little Women, A Little Princess or the Anne of Green Gables series, and was full of "scrapes" and mishaps and comings and goings, but also had an underarching group of mysteries and Gaskell, like the authors of the above, hits you with an emotional wallop every once in a while in between the hilarious episodes.

Definitely a fun read (and now I've read three Gaskell novels. Holy crap. My overindulgence in Victorian literature continues to trollop[e] any modernist/po-mo progress I make). Now on to watch the BBC adaptation online!

Daniel Deronda--reviewed and re-Jewed.

I love me a sexy Hebrew.

Greetings readership. It's been a long time, as they say, and there's much to catch up on that will never truly be caught up upon, because time is ephemeral and stuff. (Again, what I've been doing.)

To prove my mettle, I return to you with a full-on discussion of Daniel Deronda, a very wonderful and complex work by George Eliot that helped me get through the December blahs. And of course being an egalitarian bookworm chick, I followed up my dense reading with a dense viewing of the obligatory Andrew-Davies penned BBC miniseries, which wickedly sexed up the villain to such an extent that he may qualify as the worst. husband. ever., even for a BBC miniseries. Which as we all know is saying a lot.

As all the critics like to remind us, Deronda is a novel with two parts, the connecting thread of which is our eponymous hero, Daniel. Said critics also agree pretty unanimously that the "Jewish" half, wherein the gentleman/prince Daniel, like Moses, discovers his true identity and redeems his people, is not nearly as well-written or brilliant as the half which narrates the bitter redemption of beautiful, selfish, Gwendolyn Harleth and her journey among the aristocracy. Write what you know, as they say. While Eliot is able to perfectly illuminate the miserable lot of women by using real characters (Gwendolyn might be the most psychologically astute portrait of shallowness in literary history), when she gets to the Jooz, she's so busy trying to portray them as exotic and wise and sinless and mystical that she forgets to make them people.

I was almost more enamored of her stereotypical depiction of the somewhat "common" Cohen family and their silver shop than by the exalted Mordecai and Mirah. This conundrum, not coincidentally, really reminded me of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Stowe and Eliot were correspondents), with its pure, sinless oppressed blacks, and its solution of sending them to Liberia, just as the sainted Deronda and Mirah go off to Palestine. All this is complicated stuff-- there's more than a lot of unintended racism in both novels, which use the innocent "other" to throw into relief the corruption and decay of their societies. However, Stowe and Eliot are also responding to the bigotry of their peers and may have felt they didnt have room for nuance.

It's tempting to say that the moral of Eliot's literary failing is that art shouldn't be sacrificed for politics. However, we can't deny that public reaction to these novels was much stronger than it would have been to op-ed pieces because people were moved by them.

Anyway I'm glad I tackled this book. George Eliot may be the most formidably intelligent of the 19th century novelists, and the novel has enough redemptive literary qualities that one can enjoy it both as a work of art and a relic of its time-- (AND a retort to the Trollopes and Dickens' of the world who put nasty Jewish characters in their book.)

But on to the BBC version... it was just so gorgeously well-done. Nice work, Andrew Davies. Hugh Dancy is a very pretty man, and he captured sensitive Daniel Deronda perfectly while Romola Garai was also an excellently spoiled Gwen. I really enjoyed seeing six degrees of Austen adaptations. Amanda Root (aka Anne Elliot--Persuasion) was a simpering Mrs. Davilow. And of course the actor who played Henleigh Grandcourt (Mr Rushworth---Mansfield Park) was perfectly sinister. And lastly, slimy Lush was played by David Bamber (Mr. Collins--Pride and Prejudice) to creepy, obsequious perfection. Another fun factoid-- Jodhi May, who played Mirah, was bitchy, plain Cousin Grace Stepney in The House of Mirth.

North and South--Book and BBC

Have made me give up American Pastoral, and work, and breathing, for a few days.

But how worth it it's been! What a fantastic story.
I'm in literary love.

...

I love it when a wonderful book and a wonderful movie adaptation are each wonderful in a different way. Although the Gaskell book exposed social ills, Victorian-style, and featured more romantic chemistry and less caricatures than a Dickens novels, the movie successfully managed to amp up the drama on both counts by taking us into the mill and casting the unconventionally gorgeous Daniela Denby-Ashe and the properly smouldering and rough-shod Richard Armitage.

I haven't been that absorbed in a book in ages; the edgy love story wasn't all that pushed me through it either. Margaret Hale is an incredible character; flawed but fiesty, kindly inclined but young and naive. Gaskell's style is properly Victorian without being difficult. I love her straightforwardness. She's like an Eliot for the working classes.

I also found the novel to be incredibly proto-feminist in the way that it advocates a union between female and male to bring about social change. Gaskell has presented us with a strong woman whose kindness influences a formerly male-run institution to move forward in a compassionate way, and to me that's not a cop-out, it's incredibly insightful for its time. And actually for ours. Because feminism isn't just about women being badasses and assuming power, it's also about formerly patriarchal institutions gaining a bit of gentleness. You know who understands that? Elizabeth Gaskell, that's who!

Hillary Clinton, are you listening?