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Hetty Dorval – Ethel Wilson

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Somehow I’d forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts.  So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year… and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)

Hetty Dorval isn’t really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn’t its narrator – that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby – but she is perhaps its leading figure.  Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty’s beauty and lack of convention:

We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important.  Mrs. Dorval did not ‘make conversation’.  I discovered that she never did.  It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face.  This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.  Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was.  I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure.  Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.
Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman – but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call.  And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.

The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:

But this is not a story of me […] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared.  It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell.  I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance.  Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill.  Take your choice.  But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself.  And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.
It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events.  Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator’s evolving eyes.  The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment – as Hetty’s past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable.  Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral.  That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a ‘conservative’ viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one – or so it seems to me.

Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality – rather, she is depicting one woman’s sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up.  Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply – but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women.  Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic – but somehow it doesn’t feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.

The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions – largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording.  It’s always great to see ‘behind the scenes’, and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.” – Teresa, Shelf Love


“This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains.” – Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Short intro… enjoy!

1.) The blog post – don’t forget to be checking out Kim’s advent calendar of bloggers’ best books of 2013!  That link takes you to Kim’s blog Reading Matters so you can scroll through the choices; to see mine, which appeared on day one, click here.

2.) The book – another reprint publisher which got in touch recently was Turnpike Books, who sent A.E. Coppard’s short stories Weep Not My Wanton, which I’m excited to read as soon as I possibly can.

3.) The link – these are probably faked, at least some of them, but funny notes written by kids are always going to be funny, yes?

The Sculptor’s Daughter – Tove Jansson

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Somehow a new Tove Jansson edition has come from Sort Of Books without me noticing (or them telling me, come to that!) – and I have now, of course, got it.  It’s her memoir/short story collection The Sculptor’s Daughter – word of warning, many (most?) of these stories appeared in the very brilliant collection A Winter Book, but there are some that don’t seem to have been translated into English elsewhere.

It’s a beautiful edition – it doesn’t match the other Tove Jansson books Sort Of have published, with their blue covers, but it’s got a lovely feel and quality to it.  News it, I am told, that more Jansson stories are going to be translated, and a biography will also appear.  Lovely!

So, not a review, just a so-you-know.  Something for a Christmas stocking?

Time Will Darken It – William Maxwell

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William Maxwell is an exceptionally good writer; I think that would be difficult to dispute.  Famously he was an editor of the New Yorker (editing, amongst many things, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories – leading to the miracle of wonderfulness that is their collected letters), and it is those skills which he carries over into his fiction writing.  A close eye to detail, an observing nature, and a delicate precision in his prose that makes reading his novels a lengthy exercise in perception and patience.

All of which means that I have to be in the right mood to read Maxwell.  When I am, nothing is more glorious.  I can luxuriate in his sentences and his precise (that word again) cataloguing of human emotion.  If I’m not in the right mood, it wearies me – it requires proper attention, and sometimes I am not a good enough reader to give it.  This, incidentally, is how I feel about many of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, too – and, like A Game of Hide and Seek (for instance), I started, shelved, continued, shelved, repeat as needed, and eventually finished Time Will Darken It (1948).  It took the best part of four months, but it was worth doing it like this – had I rushed it, I would have resented it.  As it is, I think it was wonderful.  (Thank you, Barbara, for giving it to me back in 2009!)

The focus of the novel is on Austin King and his family in Draperville, as his cousin’s family come to visit, and the aftermath they leave behind them.  There are broken hearts, accidents, threats, arguments – but these make up a patchwork which portrays a community, rather than being of utmost importance themselves.  And the highlight of this community is Austin King himself.  He is a very Maxwellian character – patient, kind, uncertain, and never entirely able.  He lives in the shadow of his great (late) father, having taken on his partnership in a law firm; he lives his wife Martha who seems cold and distant, but is really (as Maxwell scrapes away the layers) confused and unhappy.  And then he lives with his boisterous cousin Mr Potter, his chatty wife, caddish son, and besotted daughter.

One part of King’s life which is largely satisfactory is his relationship with his daughter Abbey, or Ab.  Many Maxwellian characters are good fathers, and even though I am not a father of any variety, I love reading his portraits of these relationships – which always remind me of Maxwell’s lovely relationship with his own daughters, as shown through his letters.  He is always a sensitive writer, but perhaps most of all when it comes to Ab.

The world (including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances.  They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours a day.  At what moment, from what hiding place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling.  And when it does, the result is not always disastrous.  Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives.  Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure.  You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their forehead after a fall.
There are some many characters and events that I can’t begin to list them all, so I’ll just quote one incident I thought rather lovely.  Here Miss Ewing – Austin’s aging legal secretary – is talking to him about his father:

“I’ll never forget how good your father was to me when I first came to work here.  I was just a girl and I didn’t know anything about law or office work.  He used to get impatient and lose his temper and shout at other people, but with me he was always so considerate.  He was more like a friend than an employer.”

Austin nodded sympathetically.  What she said was not strictly true and Miss Ewing must know that it was not true.  His father had often lost his temper at Miss Ewing.  Her high-handed manner with people that she considered unimportant, and her old-mad ways had annoyed Judge King so that he had, a number of times, been on the point of firing her.  He couldn’t fire her because she was indispensable to the firm, and what they had between them was more like marriage than like friendship.  But there is always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.
Maxwell often does this, and does it so well – a specific event will lead into generalised maxim, but one with such heart and such insight that all my wariness of generalisations is washed away.

The only times this approach doesn’t work very well (in my opinion) is when Maxwell gets too homiletic for too long.  There is the odd chapter which might as well be the third act of an Ibsen play, and sometimes he forgets to give us enough of the specifics before he gets onto the reflections.  But they are small flaws in a novel which is extraordinarily insightful and complex.  No character’s action or reaction is careless or implausible – sometimes they are extreme, but only where extremity is believable.  He is truly an astonishing writer – I just wish I were always as capable and adept a reader.

Oh, and the cartoon… a while ago I said I’d start doing pun covers, as a bit of silliness, and promptly forgot all about it.  Well… they’re back!

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read; beautiful, maddening and thought provoking” – Rachel, Book Snob


“The greatness of Maxwell’s writing is that he looks deep inside each character, and he looks with humanity, without judgement, indeed with what I can only call love.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog


“I liked the way the town and its characters came to life, as a sepia-tinted photograph does. There is an old-fashioned, autumnal feel to this novel.” – Sarah, Semi-fictional

Who wrote Shakespeare?

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I’ve been busy reading about Shakespeare at the moment, for a project at the Bodleian (discussion about which, incidentally, inspired my recent short story ‘Jane Austen wrote the works of William Shakespeare‘) and have grown irresistibly attracted to the anti-Stratfordian theories.  That is, the theories that someone other than William-Shakespeare-from-Stratford wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.

Now, when I say that I have grown irresistibly attracted to them, I do not mean that I believe any of them.  Far from it.  I simply love reading about them – from Francis Bacon to the Earl of Oxford to (yes) Queen Elizabeth I – and the curious bendings of logic and likelihood which are necessary for their promulgation.  I’ve only been reading online so far (let me say, comments on Amazon reviews on Contested Will are hilarious, albeit admirably polite for the most part).  Here is a wonderful excerpt from Bill Bryson’s concise, amusing, and brilliant book Shakespeare, which I’ve just re-read (and reviewed many a year ago here):

In short it is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants with the necessary time, talent, and motive for anonymity to write the plays of William Shakespeare.  But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest that they actually did so.  These people must have been incredibly gifted – to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterwards.  The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death and left a stock of work sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later.  Now that is genius.
Enough said, one would have thought – but apparently not.  My favourite thing I’ve seen online (and refuted in Bryson’s book) is the idea that none of the surviving documents link the playwright with the Stratfordian… I’m far from an expert, but I’d have thought that the compilers of the First Folio appearing in the Stratfordian’s will was something of a link.

Anyway, I intend to seek out Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro, not least because the title is so amazing.  But if you know of any others which might amuse me, do let me know…

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford

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Of all the books to speed-read, The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford was a poor choice.  I had to, because it was for book group and I started it only a day before the meeting, but I should have lingered, and savoured every paragraph, to get the full stylistic experience.

Most of the books I like, as I’ve mentioned before, I like primarily for style and character, rather than what happens.  The exception is Agatha Christie.  But it could hardly be more the case than in the present instance – there is a certain amount of things happening, but they are largely incidental to the way it is told.  Oh, and it’s not at all about war, as I had imagined it was.

You might be familiar with its (fairly) famous opening line: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’  Apparently Ford wanted to call the novel The Saddest Story, but the publishers thought it would be inappropriate given the onset of World War One, and so it became The Good Soldier – the ‘good soldier’ in question is Captain Edward Ashburnham, although it quickly becomes clear to the reader that the narrator’s (John Dowell) opinion of him is flawed, and a bit changeable.

Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was—the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you.
Indeed he hasn’t, because at other times his opinion of Edward is very low.  I shall come on to that…

What isn’t so clear is what the ‘saddest story’ is – or, indeed, why Dowell claims to have ‘heard’ it, rather than acknowledging that he is telling it, and has been a principle figure in it.  The leading cast, as it were, are Dowell and his wife Florence, Captain Ashburnham and his wife Leonora, and… no, that will do for now.  Dowell starts off telling us all about his ‘poor wife’ Florence, who has died, and narrates the various experiences the two couples have gone through – and it becomes clearer and clearer that Florence is far from the poor invalid Dowell initially conveys, and all manner of other marital strife affects all four people in these marriages.

What makes The Good Soldier masterful is the way in which Ford portrays a voice – and it reminded me a little of John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure; a narrator who is not so much unreliable as unsteady, whose shifting thoughts and reflections pull the tone of the novel back and forth.  The Good Soldier is all told at one remove, as something that has happened – indeed, a flaw (perhaps) of the novel is this sense of detachment, as though it never really ‘gets going’ – but Dowell’s opinions are far from settled.  Depictions of the characters evolve; he is trapped in each changing increment of his opinions, even with the distance of time.

And, as I said at the beginning, it’s all about style in The Good Soldier. I’d been put off reading it for years, mostly because it was the main text analysed in some incomprehensible book I read called ‘Modernism and the Fragmented Self’, or something like that, and because I’d heard it compared to the multi-claused horror that is Henry James.  Well, neither terror was warranted – Ford’s writing has depth and rhythm, but certainly isn’t alienating or unreadable. At times it is deceptively conversational, and perhaps its most significant characteristic is how calm and undramatic Dowell’s tone always is.  Here’s an example, picked almost at random, but which demonstrates that many clauses need not mean unreadable:

I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening—and on so many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that white room, festooned with papier-maché fruits and flowers; the tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the palm-tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter’s feet; the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came in every evening—their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals—those things I shall not easily forget.
I expect that one day I will re-read The Good Soldier, more slowly and thoughtfully.  For now, I am impressed, and pleased that the choice of someone at book group finally made me read this.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“If you only ever read one more novel again in the course of your life, let it be this one.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog


“That is what makes this book great – the characterization, the elegant prose and, most of all, the wonderfully clever structure.” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“I feel it’s a rare and perfect thing that I am far from done with.” – Hayley, Desperate Reader

Pink Sugar by O. Douglas

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One of the shameful things about this year is realising how many books my dear friend Clare has given me over the years which I have yet to read.  Her name has appeared a few times already in my Reading Presently project (as the bestower of Four Hedges, Cullum, and possibly How The Heather Looks) and is likely to appear at least a couple of times more – but, for today, she is the provider of Pink Sugar (1924) by O. Douglas, the pseudonym of John Buchan’s sister Anna.  I’ll call her O. Douglas in this review, to make things simple.  It’s the only Greyladies edition I’ve read so far, although I’m thrilled that they have reprinted a couple of Richmal Crompton books, including the wonderful Matty and the Dearingroydes.  And, guess what, Pink Sugar is rather fab too.

Kirsty Gilmour is 30 and has made a home for herself in the Borders (so the blurb says for me), taking in an old aunt who fusses and worries, but is rather lovely, and three children Barbara, Specky, and Bad Bill. The novel opens in conversation between Kirsty and her livelier friend Blance Cunningham – Blanche was quite a witty character, and I was sad that she almost immediately departed the scene (she also said wise things like “People who knit are never dull”) but we are not at a loss for characters after her departure.

Kirsty is rather gosh-isn’t-the-world-wonderful at times, thankfully offset with some quick-wittedness; like Lyn I sympathised more with the minister’s unhappy sister Rebecca, and found the characterful novelist Merren Strang more amusing – but Pink Sugar needs someone like Kirsty at its heart, because it is neither an unhappy novel nor a caustic one.  It is emphatically gentle and life-affirming, where a cup of tea and a dose of self-knowledge are the inevitable accompaniments to evening.

The children veer a little towards Enid Blyton territory, but that’s no bad thing (especially compared to modern literature, where happy children seem such a rarity), and there is a wildly unconvincing love plot thrown in to tie things up, but Douglas’s good writing and refusal to bathe too deeply in sentiment made me able to love relaxing and reading this.

One aspect of the style I couldn’t get on board with was Douglas’s frequent recourse to Scottish dialect, for the maids, cook, etc.  It was so impenetrable that I ended up skipping forward a few pages every time it appeared, so fingers crossed that I didn’t miss anything of moment there…

And in case you’re wondering what ‘pink sugar’ has got to do with anything, as I was for quite a long while, thankfully it is explained by Kirsty in the narrative.  Excuse the rather long quotation, but I couldn’t find a neater way to cut it off…:

“I was allowed to ride on a merry-go-round and gaze at all the wonders – fat women, giants, and dwarfs.  But what I wanted most of all I wasn’t allowed to have.  At the stalls they were selling large pink sugar hearts, and I never wanted anything so much in my life, but when I begged for one I was told they weren’t wholesome and I couldn’t have one.  I didn’t want to eat it – as a matter of fact I was allowed to buy sweets called Market Mixtures, and there were fragments of the pink hearts among the curly-doddies and round white bools, and delicious they tasted.  I wanted to keep it and adore it because of its pinkness and sweetness.  Ever since that day when I was taken home begrimed with weeping for a ‘heart’, I have had a weakness for pink sugar.  And good gracious!” she turned to her companion, swept away by one of the sudden and short-lived rages which sometimes seized her, “surely we want every crumb of pink sugar that we can get in this world.  I do hate people who sneer at sentiment.  What is sentiment after all?  It’s only a word, for all that is decent and kind and loving in these warped little lives of ours…”
So ‘pink sugar’ is essentially akin to seeing the joy in life – and is, perhaps, a codified reference to any reader or critic who would sneer at Pink Sugar itself, as a novel.  Admittedly, it isn’t Great Literature, nor is it trying to be, but I think Douglas is doing herself an injustice with this sort of self-defence.  Pink Sugar isn’t a lightweight romance with no thought given to the style or characterisation.  It doesn’t stand on sentiment alone.



Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“The strength of the book is the atmosphere of village life.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading


“Pink Sugar is a lovely, sweet, frothy concoction of a novel” – Christine, The Book Trunk


“I am so very happy to have made the acquaintance of O. Douglas.” – Nan, Letters From a Hill Farm

Michael Walmer (Publisher)

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Many bloggers are lucky enough to receive review copies from publishers; it’s something I’ve found interesting to track through my 6.5 years as a blogger.  At first, only a few publishers thought it was a good idea – then it became quite widespread and we were inundated – then the recession hit, and publishers wisely held back a bit.  I still get offered a fair few, but don’t accept very many (and all the unsolicited ones doubtless go to one of the five other addresses in Oxford I’ve lived at since starting my blog).  Since I don’t have an e-reader, that cuts out a fair few review books too, now that people often want to send them that way.

But sometimes I get really excited about a review book offer – and that’s when they come from a reprint publisher.  It’s no secret that I prefer books from the early 20th century, and I love it when review titles come from Persephone (a little pile waiting to be read, sorry), Bloomsbury, Hesperus, Penguin etc. which are reprints of hard-to-find authors or titles.

Even more exciting is when I hear about a new reprint publisher – and so I was very happy to get an email from Michael Walmer – both the name of the man and the one-man publishing house, I think – and I quote the beginning of his blurb from his website:

Michael Walmer has set about publishing a list where the main ingredient is quality. Authors will be sourced from all over the world, with a love of erudition, be it elegant or rough-edged, simple or complex, poetic or blunt, or all of these!, as the enlivening and guiding principle.
It’s early days, and the list is obviously quite short at the moment, but what a list it is!  He has certainly gone for witty writers, and his authors currently include Saki, Ada Leverson, Ronald Firbank, and Max Beerbohm.  Also on the list is Mary Webb, but I shan’t hold that against him.  A few reprint series have specialised in interwar novelists, but I think this late-Victorian/Edwardian period has been hitherto a bit neglected, and I think Walmer has chosen a fruitful area.

I was spoiled for choice, but opted for a review copy of Stella Benson’s first novel I Pose. When I reviewed her novel Living Alone, I said that I wanted to read something equally witty and surreal, but without the fantasy hoo-ha.  Well, I’m about halfway through I Pose and it seems to be the very book I’d hoped for – I’m absolutely loving it, and it was pretty scarce before Walmer brought it back into print.  Hurrah!  (I will, of course, review it properly in due course.)

The books are print on demand, but much, much better quality than you’d usually expect from POD titles – and they have properly designed, individual covers, so often (sadly) lacking from PODs.  Do go and check out the website for more info about the authors and titles available, and how to order – let me know what takes your fancy!

The Fault in Our Stars – John Green

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When I’m not reading book blogs (or, y’know, engagingly actively with the outside world, whatever that is), you’ll probably find me watching vloggers on YouTube.  I don’t watch any of the book vloggers any more, as they rarely talked about any books I’d be interested in (other than the one I’m going to write about today), but I do watch a lot of funny people, generally just talking about things that have happened to them, or opinions they hold.  One of these channels is called the vlogbrothers, where brothers John and Hank Green each make weekly videos addressing each other, but also addressing all their audience (whom – which? – they call ‘nerdfighers’, which is a little too high schooly for my liking, but I’ll let it pass).

Anyway, John Green is not only a YouTube star, but a bestselling author.  He’s written a few books, but it is his most recent, The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which caught my attention, and which my friend, ex-housemate, and self-proclaimed nerdfighter Liz lent to me.

Now, The Fault in Our Stars is teenage fiction.  I’m afraid I hate the term ‘YA’ (‘young adult’) because it is always used to refer to teenagers who are not young adults.  I am a young adult, being about a decade into adulthood.  The demographic of most fiction encompasses my age group.  Teenage fiction is for younger-than-adults, or old-children, but not for young adults.  Vent over.  Anyway, I haven’t really read any teenage fiction since I was a teenager, and I didn’t really read much of it after I was about 14.  I know a lot of grown-up readers (including bloggers) engage with it a great deal, and that’s fine with me, albeit a little confusing.  (People often say something along the lines that it “deals with issues that adult novels wouldn’t cover”, which simply isn’t true, since adult novels cover pretty much everything between them.)

I could turn this post over to a discussion for and against teenage fiction (and feel free to chime in on that, should you so wish) but instead I want to talk about The Fault in Our Stars specifically.  It was immediately obvious to me that it was teenage fiction, and I’m not sure why – partly, of course, because the protagonist Hazel (a girl with terminal cancer) is a teenager, but also the style.  Its simplicity, maybe?  Pass.  A few pages in, and I could cope with that, though, and didn’t remain at my initial psychological distance from the book.  Indeed, I embraced it, and was swept along.

Hazel is 16 and she is dying of cancer – more precisely, she has Stage 4 thyroid cancer with metastasis forming in her lungs. Green had spent some time working as a student chaplain in a children’s hospital, years before he wrote this novel, and you can tell that he is familiar not only with the goings-on of support groups and medical procedures, but the dynamic of teenagers living with cancer.  Somehow it is not an outsiders’ book – although Green has not had cancer, and I have not had cancer, I didn’t feel like their was a barrier between Hazel’s experience and my understanding of it.

Green presents a girl who is sarcastic, witty, secretly a bit sappy, and rocketing along a path of self-discovery, finding her place in the world – she is like every teenage girl in the West, then.  Except she has cancer.  It is an intelligent portrait because, although cancer is (obviously) the overriding focus of her life and those of her family, it doesn’t seem to be the starting point of Green’s creation of the character – instead, it is something that happened to a character he created, even if it happened before the novel began.

The main thrust of the plot, indeed, is more typical of teenagers’ novels – and adults’ novels – that is, love. Hazel meets Augustus (Gus) Waters, a heartthrob teenage ex-basketball player – who is in remission from osteosarcoma (to which he lost a leg).  He is suave, funny, handsome, muscular, sweet etc. etc.  I.e. he’s not as realistic as Hazel, in my book; he reminded me a bit of Todd from Sweet Valley High, if that oh-so-literary reference means anything to you.  Their relationship is cotton-candy sweet, of the variety which comes with passionate kisses being applauded in public.  Yes, that ‘public’ is Anne Frank’s house, but it works in context… just.

A more nuanced subplot is the shared love Hazel and Gus have for a novel called An Imperial Affliction by Peter von Houten (which doesn’t exist in real life, but Green’s novel seems to have spawned dozens of fake cover art attempts – just Google Image Search it.)  Of course, the author is not all he seems… but it’s a nice, interesting story – and goodness knows I’m a sucker for a character who loves books and reading, in any novel.

Ultimately, this is a book aimed at teenagers, and I believe they are the readers who will most benefit from it.  Hopefully it will inspire a love of reading in people who watch the vlogbrothers channel and, acting in the same way as Point Horror and Sweet Valley High for me, lead them eventually onto adult novels and older literature.  But it is not simply a gateway to later reading; for its intended age group, and for anybody being indulgent for an evening, it’s a fantastic and well-crafted novel.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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Believe it or not, I’m reading a proof copy here… oops.  I started The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey more or less as soon as the proof copy arrived from Headline, back in 1884 or whenever it was that it was sent (erm, 2011?) but wasn’t in the right head space to be reading it, and popped it back on the shelf, knowing I’d go back to it.

Well, with a repeat of A Century of Books lined up for 2014, I’m enjoying delving into 21st-century literature in my post-thesis binge.  Indeed, I finished reading this shortly after I submitted my thesis, and before I flew to America, so it’s taken a little while to review.  And it’s every bit as good as everyone was saying it was, back when it first came out.

 It’s your standard fantastic creation story… a lonely woman who longs for a child accidentally creates one, and then begins to lose control over her creation.  The story is remarkably similar to Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child – and even more similar, overtly so, to the Russian fairytale ‘The Snow Maiden’.  With my interest in novels of this ilk, it’s as though it were written for me.  But, as with any updating of fairytale, what is important is the way in which the tale is told.  Ivey does it beautifully.

Mabel and Jack have moved to the middle of snowy nowhere in Alaska, 1920, and live quietly, working hard to keep their farm going.  Both characters are quite shy and keep their emotions to themselves, but it’s clear at the same time that these silent emotions run deep – so deep that any hint of them is unbearably painful.  And yet, shy as they are, they somehow make friends with their jolly neighbours Esther and George.

“I suppose I’m the black sheep.  No one else in my family would think of living on a farm, or moving to Alaska.  My father was a literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” 

“And you left all that to come here?  What in God’s name were you thinking?”  Esther shoved Mabel playfully on the arm.  “He talked you into it, didn’t he?  That’s how it often is.  These men drag their poor women along, taking them to the Far North for adventure, when all they want is a hot bath and a housekeeper.”

“No.  No.  It’s not like that.”  All eyes were on her, even Jack’s.  She hesitated, but then went on.  “I wanted to come here.  Jack did, too, but when we did, it was at my urging.  I don’t know why, precisely.  I believe we were in need of a change.  We needed to do things for ourselves.  Does that make any sense?  To break your own ground and know it’s yours free and clear.  Nothing taken for granted.  Alaska seemed like the place for a fresh start.” 

Esther grinned.  “You didn’t fare too badly with this one, did you, Jack?  Don’t let word get out.  There aren’t many like her.”

Though she didn’t look up, Mabel knew Jack was watching her and that her cheeks were flushed.  She so rarely spoke so much in mixed company.  Maybe she had said too much.
These sections actually reminded me a bit of Betty Macdonald’s The Egg and I, although that is a comedy; the same hardships and marital tensions come about because of giving everything to a working farm.

It swiftly becomes clear that the thing missing the in the lives of Mabel and Jack is not simply money or an assistant, but a child – and, of course, one materialises.  A child made out of snow turns – it seems – into a real child, called Faina.  She is quiet and undemonstrative; Ivey cleverly changes the way dialogue is spoken in any scene in which Faina appears, so that it isn’t announced by speech marks but blended into the narrative.  In the same way, Faina seems to blend into the natural world, never quite leaving it to be their child, always disappearing into the snow.  She willingly wears the beautiful coat Mabel makes, but she is still wild – like Clarissa in The Love-Child, she cannot really be contained.

And then there is the question, unearthed by Jack, as to who Faina really is.  Is she a miracle, crafted from snow?  Or is she all too human, abandoned and homeless on the snowy mountainside?  Well, obviously I’m not going to tell you.  Nor am I going to tell you about the other complication that arrives, which again mirrors the plot of The Love-Child (and which, I realise, probably means that Edith Olivier probably read ‘The Snow Maiden’.)

Eowyn Ivey has met with a lot of success with this novel, and deservedly so.  The Snow Child is written with a beautiful simplicity – or a simple beauty, if you like – with emotions always playing out near the surface; there isn’t much introspection, or a web or words trying to weave a complex portrait of an emotional state, but rather Mabel and Jack’s urgent feelings are clear to the reader (even while they are hidden from others.)  What I mean to say is, sometimes the deepest and most complicated situations require only simple words; sometimes the simplest words can convey the deepest sorrow and be more moving than any over-wrought passage.  I know I’m not alone in being very affected by The Snow Child – my friend from OUP admitted that it made him cry, and I’ve got to say I liked him even more after that confession – and it is a novel which requires some sort of emotional stability in its reader, or it would be too heartbreaking from the outset.  But, oh, it’s worth it.

As I wrote earlier, this novel could have been crafted for me and my interests – and it got a mention in my thesis – and I was surprised, but pleased, to see how widely it was admired and loved.  Rightly so.  Eowyn Ivey is a significant new talent, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from her.