Fairest

Hooray, hooray, hooray! Gail Carson Levine has written a new book. This one is a take on the Snow White myth, and exists in the same world and time as her other wonderful story, Ella Enchanted. A young girl accompanies a duchess to the King’s wedding and gets caught up in a whole web of intrigue. She does end up nearly getting murdered by the queen, there is a magic mirror, and she goes and lives with the – well, gnomes, rather than dwarves, but it’s fairly close. And there is a poisoned apple.

This would have to be the first book I’ve read which is a musical. It’s really clever. Basically Ayortha is a place filled with very musical people, who spend a lot of time singing, even when they speak. There are a lot of clever little songs throughout this story, and while Ms Snow White isn’t pretty, she has a beautiful voice which she can project. This causes her trouble; she wants to be pretty, so she dabbles in spells, and the queen makes her use her voice to deceive others. Kind of like “Singing in the Rain”, actually.

Levine has a kindly humour and the ability to create a rich and detailed world. There’s centaurs and ogres, gnomes and fairies, but they’ve all got very specific characteristics which make them so real. There is of course a handsome prince and a happy ending, because after all, it is a fairy tale. This is a really nice happy little story.

The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett invented the hard-boiled detective genre, and he was actually a private investigator himself. But funnily enough the people and events in this story aren’t nearly as believable as say Raymond Chandler’s versions, and the writing, while good in parts, isn’t as lyrical or as literary.

Someone gets murdered. Nick, who has given up detecting, gets drawn into it because he knows some of the people involved. His curious wife gets involved, too. The people are the strangest bunch you can imagine, rich and crazy, a mother in a bigamous marriage beating her twenty-something daughter, the eighteen year old son obsessed with abnormal psychology. But it’s the weirdness of the detective having a wife and getting shot and beaten up in front of her that stands out for me.

There’s some funny and clever lines, and good descriptions; Hammett really relishes the dark and seamy side of things. And they’re always drinking as they are in these old fashioned novels. But the plot’s hard to follow, and you don’t really care about it, either, because all the characters are pretty unpleasant.

Hammett also wrote The Maltese Falcon and I think that was a better book. Better than both of these are Raymond Chandler’s books, though, because they’re not just clever, they’re works of art.

A Spy in the House of Love

I can’t really tell if this book by Anaïs Nin is good or bad, so I’ll forget all that and just say I liked it. It’s a novella, about a hundred pages, and it’s about a woman who goes from man to man, always guilty, always hiding, always suspicious, waiting to be found out (hence the title). She accidentally phones a lie detector (are we supposed to know what that means?) who becomes curious about her and follows her around for a few day and finally they meet and talk about things.

Right from the first line it has a real 1950’s feel about it – she doesn’t even describe the setting but you can see it all, or at least what I know of it from watching movies. Just the formation of each sentence really feels like that time. There’s some really beautiful turns of phrase, and some really clunky didactic paragraphs, and some interesting characters and more than a few stereotypical characters. It starts off well, ends off weirdly, has some interesting stuff in between.

As to what it’s trying to say – I’m not so sure. Was it shocking, would it have been a shocking book in 1954, to read about a woman having a string of casual affairs while she’s married? It’s certainly not explicit, and it’s not touting free love as a model lifestyle. At the end, the lie detector suggests that Sabina’s problem is not that she loves too much, but that she has never loved enough – has never loved anyone really because she’s never allowed herself to know anyone properly, as ugly, as sick, as boring, as who the person really is. She hasn’t really engaged with anyone, and Nin doesn’t entirely engage with the reader, either, but that’s all right – it’s a pretty good read anyway.

The Right Attitude to Rain

This is the third book in the Isabel Dalhousie series by Alexander McCall Smith. He’s written heaps and heaps of books, but this is the only series that I follow of his. It’s really original, because the plot doesn’t matter at all, it’s mostly just Isabel musing about various things – philosophy, namely, because she’s the editor of a journal of applied ethics.

I didn’t even know this book was coming along, and I didn’t know if it’d be good, but man, it really was. Hooray that the beautiful Jamie loves her back! I really didn’t think that would happen. And it doesn’t stop Isabel from thinking about all the bizarre and human things she thinks about, like the ethics of emailing, like the fox that lives in her garden and the particular words in Scotch that are so beautiful. Like her favourite poem which is, hooray, my favourite poem, too! (Auden’s Lullaby)

This kind of book wouldn’t appeal to everyone. I love it, because it’s so human. It’s so ordinary, it’s just like reading thoughts but expressed more clearly than most of our tangled ideas. And McCall Smith uses a very unique writing technique - he uses almost always third person limited perspective, but very very occasionally will jump into one of the other character's heads. Which seems "wrong" but turns out to be very powerful. Oh, I hope this isn't the end! I really, really hope that another book follows this one.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

This classic by Victor Hugo is incredibly rich in detail and in characterisation. It’s a really good story, too. He does an interesting job of mocking the present by using the past, which is clever, and while he occasionally goes off onto great tangents about architecture, the story moves along most of the time at a pretty good pace.

His characters are fascinating – the bell-ringer, the gypsy-girl, the poet, the military man, the saint, the archdeacon, the little boy who eats the cake that the saint’s supposed to eat. I was glad there was a chapter devoted to what actually happened to the cake! The most important character is the cathedral itself, and Hugo gives plenty of detail about its structure and its history, as well as giving it a vital role in the plot, as saviour and as instigator, too, of some terrible things – after all, it was from the cathedral that the archdeacon saw Esmeralda, which sealed his fate, hers, Quasimodo’s as well.

He’s a really powerful writer, moving easily between satirical humour and pathos, using his detailed language to build a wonderful portrait of a particular time and place. He’s peopled an entire city, created a Paris which is really recognisable. This is why it’s such a classic, because no matter when it’s read, a place comes instantly alive.

Selected Modern English Essays

Considering not a single one of these folk were born in the 20th century, it’s not exactly modern, but I’m sure they were in 1925. I picked up this small volume at a bookstall and I’ve been reading through them occasionally. It must look as though I don’t read all that much, considering how few posts per month there are, but actually I read every day; a lot of rereads, about which I won’t post, or junk, or books I don’t finish because they’re crap (like the Paul Bowles book I started on the weekend; it’s sadly a Graham Greene rip-off, and I can’t see why they bother republishing it). And things like this that I don’t read all in one go.

There’s an impressive author list involved; Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, Samuel Butler, and there’s even a woman, Alice Meynell. The writing quality is fairly good, although the subject matter is occasionally boring or incredibly dated. Chesterton comments on the difference between the French and the English. Edward Thomas, in a find, writes about his memories of a little cottage belonging to his aunt. There’s more than one reference to the war, of course. And Sir Walter Raleigh writes about why Don Quixote is so good, which is kind of apposite to some things I’ve been thinking and discussing recently.

Essays now I think would be very different. These are all very English. They’re mostly very formal, earnest. No one is particularly angry. I think it’s all right now to be angry, and to be whatever culture you like, and to be not quite serious. But in another way it’s nice that they feel the importance of London fog enough to write about it, or the ways of a country clergyman. They saw what was going before it went and that is a good thing.

Rose by any other name

This is Maureen McCarthy's first novel after a fair hiatus, and it's a good try, but doesn't quite get there, I don't think. She's written some good YA stories, with protagonists a little more gritty and less citified than say Melina Marchetta's versions, and with the action set outside the ordinary school life.

This story covers a short road trip Rose makes with her mother to see her dying grandmother. On the way Rose finds herself thinking about all the things that have happened in the last year - her father leaving, her affair with her best friend's father, and the dissolution of this friendship, the most important in her life. And she's only eighteen.

Doesn't quite work. The horrible seduction is done well, actually, with Rose's complete lack of awareness of how wrong it is for this man to have done that to her. The thing with the new boy and the best friend doesn't quite seem to be real, and the family collapse at the same time as her sister gets a part in a leading soap . . . it just seems all too much.

It's written in the first person, which does give the reader some insight into how little Rose seems to understand of her situation. She writes well, but there's nothing brilliant or exciting about it all. You don't love any of these people. It's readable, quite good, but it could've been a lot better.

Candide

You never know with classics whether they’re going to be good or deadly dull, which is why I’ve never read Voltaire before. But it’s good stuff. Entertaining, very funny, extremely readable and thought-provoking, too. The humour lies in the juxtaposition between style and substance, form and content; it’s written almost like a fairy-tale or fable, but it’s talking about very shocking things. Rape, murder, the fallible church, and all the ways in which people can die or be hurt, either by nature or by man.

It’s considered a key text for the Enlightenment, because of the way it illustrates the main theories of the day. There’s rationalism, there’s Rousseau’s noble savage, there’s optimism, there’s dualism, there’s all the major philosophies of that time – in fact it’s like a mini Sophie’s World. Voltaire doesn’t only mock them, but he provides real pathos in the voices of those who are attempting to live through such suffering while being told that the suffering is good. I really love the old woman who cries that it’s insane the way we refuse to put down the burden which torments us, when it’s so easy to lay it down forever – the burden of living.

Voltaire also makes clear that it’s not only suffering– earthquakes, wars, the Spanish Inquisition – but it’s also our own participation in creating suffering that we’re unable to avoid. Candide, the innocent boy who wants to believe in a good world and in man’s goodness, ends up causing all sorts of havoc, including murder, without any intention of doing such things at all. The currency of good intentions is worthless.

The little fable, which is a journey, which is a riddle, ends with a riddle. Candide’s last line – “we must also cultivate our garden” – could be (and I’m sure has been) explained a thousand different ways. I like to think that there’s some sense of hopefulness; that perhaps the only way to find any meaning at all is in creating it oneself.