Jane Austen’s oeuvre ends on kind of a downer note. Persuasion is no fairy-tale in which a tousled and damp Colin Firth rides in to whisk away a raven-haired, sharp-tongued young woman to his sprawling estate, winning her with acidic wit and brooding, needy glances from across the –

What was I saying? Oh yeah, Persuasion. It’s the wish-fulfillment of the older woman who thought she missed her only chance at love, not the pink-and-ponies bridal fantasy of Pride and Prejudice. This means it’s less fun to read. If I wanted to listen to women in their thirties complain they aren’t married, I’d watch Sex and the City. Austen is widely considered to have invented the romance novel, but in the case of Persuasion, we’re talking more like chick lit. And even Bridget Jones gets to make out with Colin Firth.

In a lot of Austen literature, the heroine is described as plainer than her sisters, friends or desirable cousins. Filmmakers then proceed to cast these roles with Kiera Knightley and Gwenyth Paltrow. Not so the BBC, which took seriously the descriptions of Anne Elliot in the first chapter: “faded and thin,” and “haggard.” In fact nearly everyone in the miniseries looks like they’re riding the Green Line at rush hour. This does not make for a sweeping period romance, but it might be an okay documentary that reminds me how nice it is to live in the 21st century where I’m allowed to have my own money and a job.

What made reading the book worthwhile is this exchange at the end, between Anne and a male friend on the subject of whether it is women or men who love longest and deepest. It was not part of the original ending. It feels, a little, like the words of an author who didn’t live long enough to see a future she might like too.

“Well, Miss Elliot,” (lowering his voice,) “as I was saying we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman, would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you — all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

I don’t have a lot of peeves when it comes to novels, but I have one very strong one, and it concerns historical fiction. As Sir Walter Scott is considered to have invented the genre, I would probably feel qualified to blame him regardless of whether he committed the particular sin, but he did, and quite egregiously.

What I hate more than anything in historical fiction is when for no apparent reason, famous or mythological people wander in to the story simply because they are presumed to be alive at the time period in which the novel is set. Worse, when they appear early in the story and the reader does not know who they are until the author smugly reveals the secret in the third act. And the last straw is when the famous people are Robin Hood and his band of merry whoevers, all of whom possess superhuman abilities to shoot arrows, skulk silently through the forest, or get drunk and misquote Latin catechisms.

Other than that, though, I enjoyed Ivanhoe. I didn’t know a thing about the plot and assumed it was some sweeping epic chronicling battle after battle, but the story is actually quite small and personal, which is probably why it was one of the most popular books of its time. (The other reason is that all the bad guys are French.) There are some battle scenes, but they involve few players and lots of histrionics like a femme fatale burning to death in a castle turret, old men being tortured in dungeons, and knights dressing up like other knights.
One unexpected and distasteful aspect of this reading project has been the astounding amount of casual anti-Semitism, and so reading what is essentially a novel-length tract pleading for religious tolerance was pretty refreshing. Even Scott can’t stop himself from making many of his Jewish protoganists as Jewy as possible:

“O, Jacob!” he exclaimed—”O, all ye twelve Holy Fathers of our tribe! what a losing venture is this for one who hath duly kept every jot and tittle of the law of Moses—Fifty zecchins wrenched from me at one clutch, and by the talons of a tyrant!”

But the heroine Rebecca is not a stereotype, other than being a raven-haired exotic temptress (who isn’t?), and she is frequently the only character who behaves with the slightest bit of sense.

The actress who plays her in the 1997 miniseries does not do the character justice, at least not in the first hour or so, which was all we could take of it because it was seriously boring.

D.H. Lawrence’s novel is more famous for its sexual content than its quality of writing. Hey, fine by me.

So as not to overshadow this still-respectable work of literature, I will present my review of the 1993 BBC miniseries as a pictoral essay. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some signs that a book is going to suck:

1. Pages 1-6 are the usual title pages and fawning quotes from reviewers.
2. Page 7 is a dedication, followed by a quotation (in Greek).
3. Page 8 is an illustration.
4. Page 9 has two more quotations.
5. Page 10 is a list of maps found in the text, with page numbers.
6. Page 11 is a note “To My American Readers”
7. Pages 12-13 contain a glossary.
8. Page 14 is the Preface, which mentions that some of the characters in this work of fiction are actually the author’s friends.
9. Page 19, finally, is the first page of the first chapter, except they are not called chapters, they’re Fits.

This is from The Plague Dogs, by Richard Adams, author of Watership Down. I am about to completely spoil it.

The novel concerns two dogs who escape from an animal research lab in northern England. The purpose of the lab is to torture animals for no obvious medical reason. The researchers themselves do not seem to especially remember the ostensible purpose of each experiment, and so frequently have conversations like this:

“Oh, but what about the guinea-pigs, chief?” said Mr. Powell, returning his note-pad to the ready.

“The ones receiving tobacco tar condensates, you mean?” said Dr. Boycott.

Adams uses this transparent rhetorical device constantly. “Those dogfish–the ones you wanted for experiments on how they’re able to change their coloration to match their backgrounds, remember?” Who the hell talks like this? He wants to pack in so many crimes against animals in a single conversation that he barely leaves room for the sadistic sniveling:

“The first one’s that humane trap for grey squirrels that Ag. and Fish. sent us for trial.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s not turning out all that humane, really,” said Mr. Powell, with a giggle of embarrassment.

But the real zinger for the bad guys is this casual gem:

“Do we ever use anaethestics?”

“Good God, no,” said Dr. Boycott. “D’you know what they cost?”

Get it?? Dr. Boycott?? And the name of the research facility gets abbreviated to A.R.S.E. This guy just kills me.

Like in Watership Down, there are animals and they talk to each other. The device doesn’t work as well with dogs. It’s interesting to imagine docile rabbits as militaristic, savage beings with superstitions and societies. Dogs are already understood to be social and to exhibit complex behaviors. Communicative dogs, though, start to fall into an uncanny valley where they remain too dog-like to be believably alien but become too human-like to be believably normal dogs. An author needs to make his or her talking animals recognizably animals, as in We3, or just go all the way into the animal’s world, as in Watership Down or Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Speaking of which, the latter is a way better novel about animal research.

Just when I thought I’d seen it all — illustrations, chapters in rhyme, characters musing “for no reason” about the Holocaust — we come to the last chapter (which ought to be “Fit 11″ but is instead, ominously, “Envoy”). Two characters (who are among the real people mentioned in the preface) are having an idle conversation during a day of boating:

“Well-intentioned amateurs like that chap Richard Adams — fond of the country — reasonably good observer — knows next to nothing about rabbits –”

Following which they happen upon the two dogs in the sea, nearly drowned but desperately paddling out to an imaginary island where humans are nice to animals. The men effect a last-minute rescue, bring them to shore where the fox terrier’s (thought-deceased) owner is waiting to greet them. Our heroes force back paratroopers sent to shoot the dogs. The government that sponsored the lab is humiliated. The giggling Mr. Powell has a change of heart and liberates a monkey. One of the paratroopers opines, “These experimental animals are just sentient objects.” A sleazy tabloid reporter finally finds a story that he cares about. The owner adopts both animals and they live happily ever after. And I, the reader, have never been so disgusted with a book that made me sob so pathetically in relief.

“His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.”

Next to Ivanhoe, there was no other book on my 2004 list I was less excited to read than Tom Jones. It’s one of the first English novels. It’s long. It rambles. But it’s also really, really funny, and sweet, and nasty, in a good way.

The novel is a ruthless critique of hypocrisy and deceit in the upper classes, which may lead a modern reader (like me) to see Fielding as an early champion of the ideal 20th century classless society. In fact, he agreed with his contemporaries that social stratification reflected the intentions of the Creator. This led him to hold the educated wealthy to a higher ethical standard in a kind of moral noblesse oblige. The poor, in effect, did not know any better, making them unfit for satire — though in life Fielding campaigned relentlessly to reform the British judicial system in their favor.

“What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.”

One exception to this moral rectitude is his liberal treatment of sex and love, not all that surprising for a guy who married his maid when she was six months pregnant and eventually died of cirrhosis. Characters in Tom Jones have unmarried sex all the time, although naturally this is okay for the hero and unthinkable for the heroine. The 1997 BBC miniseries (and, I understand, the 1963 movie) are duly respectful of this tradition and feature quite a lot of male and female nudity flouncing about in straw beds and strategically hiding behind furniture when caught.

“There is perhaps no surer mark of folly than to attempt to correct natural infirmities of those we love.”

The miniseries is a lot of fun — I really liked the device of having “Henry Fielding” as a character who wanders in and out of scenes quoting either from the prose or from the prefaces to each book (which have titles like “A Wonderful Long Chapter Concerning the Marvellous” and “Containing Five Pages of Paper“). Also, as mentioned, there’s lots of nudity (one Amazon reviewer calls it “very repulsive to people of high moral standards,” although they may have just been quoting from a 250-year-old review of the book).

The best thing about the miniseries, though, is that it has Brian Blessed.

Never before has an actor reached such great heights of hysterical over-acting. This guy literally chews the scenery, in one case shoving armfuls of strawberries into his face while bellowing “RARRGH!!” When Brian Blessed walks into a scene bearing a tray full of anything, that is an indication to immediately start giggling, because there is a one-hundred-percent certainty that the tray and everything on it will in short order end up hurled against the wall, onto the floor, or into his gaping maw. It is fucking awesome.

He is also in the otherwise forgettable 1983 television adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I liked the book, but hey, Sherlock Holmes stories are pretty hard not to like.

So I finished Robinson Crusoe the other day, which was the last book on my 2005 classics list. I realize this wasn’t my original order, but I got a little desperate after Tom Jones and buying a house and all, so I skipped ahead and knocked off a bunch of the easy ones before going back to Ivanhoe and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, both of which turned out to be easy anyway.

Obviously I haven’t quite caught up on my write-ups. I will. But I wanted credit for finishing in time, so here I am, bragging.

Meanwhile I’ve been giving some thought to my 2006 personal-enrichment program. Part of the program is that I’m going to take Calculus I, for credit, because I’ve never taken any college math and that’s kind of embarrassing in a computer programmer. The other is that since I actually really enjoyed this reading list, I’ll do another.

At first I thought I’d try something different, like works in translation or works from 1900 on, but then I decided I still had a lot of classics in English to read (and I seriously slighted the Americans in the first round). Here’s my 2006 list, same rules applying (with a bonus book to make it a baker’s dozen, because I am daring like that) presented in no particular order except that Tristram Shandy is first in order to finish it in time before the Michael Winterbottom film adaptation is released in the US, which looks awesome and features Gillian Anderson, making it a movie of great interest to nearly everyone I know.

Sterne, Laurence - Tristram Shandy
Trollope, Anthony - The Way We Live Now
Stevenson, Robert Lewis - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Butler, Samuel - The Way of all Flesh
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Lewis, Sinclair - It Can’t Happen Here
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Collins, Wilkie - The Woman in White
Forster, E.M. - A Passage to India
Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway
Cather, Willa - My Antonia
Sinclair, Upton - The Jungle
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

How awesomely cool it must be to have people making adaptations of your work over a century later in some futuristic technology of which you couldn’t possible conceive? I mean, how cool that would be if you could know about it, which you couldn’t, because you’d be dead. But it does make me wonder why anyone would bother writing non-fiction at all, because unless it’s The Origin of Species, no one will care about it after a few years. At best they’ll just make dreary documentaries about you instead of feature-length films starring attractive famous people.

When I was reading Middlemarch I remarked on how progressive it was, especially in its treatment of women and religion. Sure, it was written by a woman and so I would expect it to be generally sympathetic towards them. It’s especially sympathetic towards the women who are independent-minded, who aren’t in pursuit of marriage and child production. Sometimes their pursuits are selfish but more often they’re noble. This is a book with a cast of dozens, so sure, there are also female characters who are portrayed positively and do exhibit traditional values, but they tend to fade easily into the background. It’s the honest and independent, or weak and scheming, who draw our attention for better or worse.

The novel is forward-thinking but much more conservative than its author’s life would lead one to expect. At age 22, Marian Evans decided that Christianity was based on “mingled truth and fiction” and she refused to go to church. Eventually she moved to London by herself and began socializing and working with radicals. According to one biographer, “Her social position as a single working woman in London in the early 1850s was extremely unusual. [...] She was now in a society composed entirely of men, and though it was intellectually stimulating to associate with them freely, she was risking her reputation in doing so.” A society composed entirely of men. That sounds totally hot.

Eventually she entered into a relationship with a man in an open marriage. They lived together for decades, during which she wrote her novels under a pseudonym largely because she was already notorious as a political writer. Her non-husband died after many happy years together and and as a result she was “plunged into loneliness, filling her journal with verses from Tennyson’s great poem of mourning, In Memoriam (1850), as Queen Victoria had also done after the death of Prince Albert.” Eventually she resolved the loneliness by marrying a dumb guy twenty years her junior. And then she died. Hell yeah.

The miniseries is really good too, and features Colin Firth’s brother.

Coming out of January already having read two of the books on my list, I was feeling pretty damn cocky. Enough that I added a second challenge, which was to also watch film adaptations of all of the books, trailing behind my reading list as fast as my Netflix queue could keep up.

I based the choice of adaptation on whether they were reportedly:

1. Very good
2. Very bad
3. Starring the cast of The Lord of the Rings

Great Expectations (1998) qualified strongly as #2. It was utterly incoherent. How bad could an Ethan Hawke movie be? I had wondered. Now I know.

Jane Eyre (1997) wasn’t so great either, which was similarly disappointing because I like Samantha Morton. She isn’t bald or mute in Jane Eyre but she is pretty spacey and weird, much like her Princess Leia hairdo. The adaptation was worth watching if only because it threw into relief the aspects of the book that were interesting to a modern reader. In the novel she has a frank wit that makes men notice her. She’s comfortable in her unattractiveness and gets creeped out when she’s objectified as a beauty. She rejects being the mistress of a man she loves but can’t marry, but then she suggests being the unmarried (platonic) companion of another man who would marry her but doesn’t love her. When she finally does marry the man she loves, it’s after he’s become blind and disfigured and she’s independently wealthy. Most of those interesting rough spots are missing from the movie. And the girl who plays the little French chick totally sucks, holy crap.

So far, The Portrait of a Lady is pretty dull. The movie isn’t available on Netflix. It features Aragorn.

I got Reading Lolita in Tehran for Christmas and it was a great book, but it made me feel like kind of a jerk. There are people literally dying to read works of literature that most of us have, at best, fond memories of bullshitting our way through class pretending to have read. In addition to all the other books I’ll read this year, I decided to pile on some classics of English literature that I hadn’t read before or seen movie adaptations of. After some research and consultation, I came up with this list:

1. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
2. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
3. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
4. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
5. George Eliot, Middlemarch
6. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
7. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
8. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
9. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
10. Jane Austen, Persuasion
11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
12. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

I’m going to read all twelve in 2005, although not necessarily one per month.

What’s been more interesting than the project is the vehemence of some responses from friends. There’s still a lot of hostility floating around these books that I suppose is tied up with their exaulted position in the literary canon and some hazy memories of dreadfully dull English classes. I’m hoping that I’ll find it a different experience to read them without a grade at stake, but in all likelihood my friends will be right, and this will turn out to be really boring.

After I finished the novel, I was relieved to discover that nearly everyone, including Henry James, thinks the first third of the book is entirely too long and slow. And this is by the standard of other 19th century novels. Events do happen, and rapidly once they’re underway, and it’s no surprise that the 1996 film version compresses the first 300 pages into 20 minutes and the remainder of the book is covered more or less faithfully.

By the end of the book I thought I understood Isabel Archer’s character thoroughly, but I’ve been surprised to find readers who view her as an innocent and a hero. Certainly, there’s a lot for a 21st century female reader to admire: Isabel states that she may never marry, that she wants to spend her youth travelling and experiencing the world. I suppose these readers view her ultimate marriage to Gilbert Osmond as simply a fateful mistake borne out of her trusting nature. Instead I saw it as an inevitable consequence of her pride and her stubborn desire to subvert the wishes of the people who care about her.

Isabel does get to travel the world, but it’s an experience so uninspiring that it’s completely elided in the novel (the movie depicts it, bizarrely, in the style of a silent film). I read this episode as illustrating two points. In the 19th century, even a wealthy and unattached woman did not have much opportunity to actually do anything engaging — she can be at best merely a spectator. As Isabel’s “friend” Madame Merle remarks, “a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl.” Beyond that, Isabel’s fault is that simply moving about in the world does not satisfy her. From the moment the book opens, she is flattered or proposed to by an astonishing number of men, and her response upon returning from this empty journey is to rush to the one person for whom none of her friends are advocating. She is self-centered and willful at heart, but charming and intelligent on the surface.

The movie makes some questionable changes to the story’s chronology. Readers are uncertain about Osmond’s motives until well after the marriage; in the film, well, he’s played by John Malkovich with the sneer factor cranked way up. While I’m on the subject of casting, I was disappointed to find Martin Donovan to be both sickly and mustached. Christian Bale is about 15 years old. Aragorn does get to make out with Nicole Kidman but his lack of scraggly beard and her 19th century beehive hairdo do not flatter either one of them.

I was a little baffled by Kidman’s Isabel jumping into bed with her dying cousin and making out with him, and then shortly after his funeral getting it on with Aragorn. The film also changes the ending from definitively tragic to ambiguous and hopeful. I was predictably enraged, but overall it’s not bad.

Next: Roman Polanski. The movie Tess does not star anyone from The Lord of Rings, and while it features both “Peter Firth” and “John Collin,” Colin Firth is disappointingly absent. I’ve already finished the novel and am plowing through Middlemarch.