Rosemary Sutcliffe. Blood Feud (1976)

     Rosemary Sutcliffe. Blood Feud (1976) Sutcliffe has made a name for herself as writer of juvenile historical fiction, but the only concession to the target age group is the absence of “adult content.” Otherwise, the history is accurate, which means bloody and brutal. She does soften the brutality a bit, and uses the usual tropes of male bonding etc, but her stories ring true.
     Jensyn Englishman is recalling how he came to be a physician in Constantinople. He was bought as thrall by Thormod, a Viking. He helps his master fight off would-be assassins, is freed, and they become blood-brothers. They set out on a journey to Constantinople (as it would become) in pursuit of two brothers who have killed Thormod’s father after he has mistakenly killed theirs. They join the army led by Emperor Basil against the Bulgars, and then become members of the newly-formed Varangian Guard. More fighting leads to Thormod’s death at the hands of Anders, the younger brother, which makes the blood feud personal for Jensyn. But he has been wounded, and is turned out to fend for himself. Earlier, he had saved a girl, Alexia, from one of Basil’s cheetahs that had escaped from its handlers during a hunt. He also rescued a nearly-born fawn by performing a Caesarian section on the dying mother, Alexia’s pet. He goes to the farm to ask for a job (he was a good cattleman as youngster), and eventually meets Alexia’s father, a physician. That leads to his becoming a healer. When Anders arrives seeking help, Jensyn tries to heal him, but fails: a wound given Anders by Thormod much earlier has festered within him for years, and finally kills him. (The symbolism is plain to an adult reader, but may slip by a younger one.) The blood feud is finished. Jensyn can rest easy; the shadow of the blood feud no longer darkens his life, and he can marry Alexia and inherit her father’s practice.
     Character and plot are simple, as you can see, so what makes Sutcliffe’s book compelling? It’s in part the language: she uses archaic Anglo-Saxon words, and makes up a few of her own in the Anglo-Saxon manner. The sentences are simple, and often have a subtle rhythm that recalls Anglo-Saxon verse. But it’s also the virtues valued by the characters. They have simple notions of honour, loyalty, courage, and fate, which makes their actions easily understood. There’s enough detail in the physical action to satisfy the young male reader without encouraging the thirst for gore. Drinking, rough jokes, work, and pride in good workmanship round out the image of the ideal man that informs the story. Wrapped in this well-told tale of friendship, courage, and loyalty is the notion that physical courage and fighting skill aren’t enough to make a man a man: honour, understood as the virtues that inform his choices, completes him. *** (2011)

Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey (Book and movie)

     Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey (1960 text) I decided to read this after noticing that TVO would be showing the BBC/A&E version, and read a couple of chapters before we saw that well-done production. This is only the second of Austen’s novels that I’ve read. Though I’ve read Pride and Prejudice four or five times, I’ve never felt the urge to read the other ones. Don’t know why, perhaps I thought none would measure up to that masterwork.
     Northanger Abbey is intended both as parody of Gothic romances and as a warning against taking them seriously. Catherine Morland, a naive country-bred girl, visits Bath in the company of her neighbours and god-parents, the Allens. The usual romantic contre-temps ensue, complicated by the presence of money-hunters. A couple of people believe that Catherine is the heir to the Allen fortune, of which they have an exaggerated estimate, as they do of her own family’s wealth. Henry Tilney, a second son educated as a clergyman, loves Catherine as she is, but at first resists, because his father, General Tilney, wants him to marry her for her money. When truth and clarity replace misconceptions and obscurity, the happiness of Catherine and Henry is assured. The tying-up of a few other loose ends brings happiness to Henry’s sister Isabel, too.

Cover of a reprint. The cover art of Austen paperbacks is worth a study.

      The book is well done, but not to the same standard as Pride and Prejudice. The characterisation is adequate, the satire of the superficial society that “takes the waters” at Bath is nicely done, but somewhat perfunctory. Catherine, influenced by her reading of gothic romances and the atmosphere of Northanger Abbey (a partly ruined pile, filled with maze-like passages) suspects General Tilney of wife abuse (correctly) and of murder or immurement (incorrectly). Henry’s response when he discovers her suspicions does not ring true: he is altogether far too nice a chap. But I am judging by the rules of realistic fiction, which this is not. Austen began the book as satire, but she ends it as romance. Romances can get away with wish fulfillment versions of character and plot.
     The movie was, I think, better than Austen’s book. The romance was firmly placed in Catherine’s imagination, the characters were sharpened and augmented, the General’s tyranny over his children makes Henry’s mixed response to Catherine’s awful suspicions believable, and most of all Catherine’s naivete, her anxiety to please, her difficulty in resolving conflicting social demands, and her underlying good sense, kindness, and loyalty make her an appealing heroine who fully deserves the kind and loving husband that Henry will be. In this, the film makers took their cues from Austen’s other works, and gave us a movie of the book she might have produced if she had decided it was worth the work of revision.

2001. Director: Jon Jones. Screenplay by Andrew Davies.

With Geraldine James, Michael Judd, Julia Dearden

       In any case, both book and movie have the authentic Austen touch. She shows us that marriage is a complex relationship of social demands and personal needs, and that a happy marriage is one that can meet the social demands because it satisfies the personal needs. This may be the reason Austen still makes sense today, when we have shifted the balance from the social to the personal. Book: **½, movie ***. (2011)

B. Foss & J. Anderson. Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid (2000)

B. Foss & J. Anderson. Quiet Harmony: The Art of Mary Hiester Reid (2000) Catalogue and essays to accompany an exhibition. Mary Reid was married to George Agnew Reid, six years her junior. They met at art school in Pennsylvania (where she was born), and moved to Toronto after their marriage. Mary was an accomplished artist, but she kept herself in the background. In fact, the two first hits on-line for George Agnew Reid's bios don’t even mention her. Janet Anderson in her essay claims that Mary negotiated a difficult line between housewife and professional artist, by accepting conventional ideas about “woman’s sphere”, and making her art conform to those conventions, at least in subject matter. I suspect that George more or less subtly dominated her. He married a mutual friend and collaborator within a year or so of Mary’s death (she also is not mentioned in those bios).
    

  In any case, although Mary enjoyed both critical and commercial success in her lifetime, especially as “painter of flowers”, her popularity declined steeply after her death, and she was until this exhibition forgotten. Her art was much influenced by contemporary aesthetic conventions; it reminds me most of the “atmospheric impressionism” of Central Europe, itself a development of both French impressionism and earlier classicism. She is a superb colourist. Her A Harmony in Grey and Yellow is an astonishing exploration of these colours, offset with rosy pinks, subtle greens, and pale blues, using an arrangement of flowers as the ostensible subject. The soft and diffused lighting accentuates the subtlety and range of colours. Other titles also suggest a compulsion to explore colour. I think she was a true artist, who wanted to work out how to use paint to enhance one’s power to see the world around us. 

    The few photographs of her show a guarded expression. Mary looks as if she did not want anyone to know her true feelings and attitudes. One taken at about age 50 does show a slightly melancholy and perhaps irritated set of the mouth. One must be careful what one reads in posed portraits, but the hints of suppressed anger are all the more significant for being almost perfectly concealed. She was 31 when she married George, who was 25. She was headed for spinsterhood, and perhaps discovering what must have appeared as a kindred spirit in art school gave her expectations of happiness that were not fully realised. Even George’s portrait of her shows a woman who is keeping herself hidden from the viewer’s gaze. This concealment is doubly significant considering that it was her husband that painted the portrait.
      George on the other hand got what he presumably wanted: a wife who would understand his artistic temperament, and would be willing to support him in his work. I’ve looked at images of his paintings. Arranged chronologically, they show a competent workman who adapts easily to the latest fashions in draftsmanship and colour. Contrast Signing the Mortgage from 1890 with Dawn from 1925. The former is very “Victorian” in its classicist use of light, its placement of figures, its modelling, and above all in its telling of a sentimental story. Dawn, painted 35 years later, is an art nouveau pastiche in its use of dark foreground trees backlit by the rising sun, and a discreet nude semi-hidden in the shadows. It follows the new style of illustrating magazines and advertising, and decorating the home. The paintings are so different that one could be forgiven for thinking they were done by different men. I don’t get a sense of George from his pictures; I do get a sense of a man who was willing to paint all kinds of things, as long as they would sell. He was a decorator; in fact he was associated with what we would now call an interior decoration consultant. He had great skill, but lacked vision.
      As it is, I don’t see in George’s work what I see in Mary’s: an attempt to make sense of paint and light and colour. Not that George is a piker. His work is extremely skilful. And that is the highest praise I can give him. C W Jefferys (in a previously unpublished essay) claimed that Mary’s work was a perfect harmony of self and subject, the best form of self-expression, which he takes to be the essence of art. After looking a George’s work, I think I see what he means.
      Mary committed almost nothing to paper: she is one of the least documented people of that time, especially considering that her social and professional status both imply a legacy of notes, minutes of meetings, letters, a diary, and so on. Where are they? This reticence encourages the speculation that she deliberately concealed her true self, that she wore the conventional housewife as a disguise. All we have are her paintings, which range from mildly interesting (Nightfall at Wychwood Park) to exceedingly competent (the chrysanthemum paintings, many of the landscapes) to stunning (A Harmony of Grey and Yellow, Morning Sunshine). She liked green, often the bright sunlit green that Varley also favoured, and like Varley, she used a range of oranges, reds and browns to contrast with the green.
      She also, like so many Canadian artists, expresses an odd stillness, as if the landscape, or the few figures she painted, were holding their breath, waiting for something ecstatic or terrible. Perhaps this stillness is another mode of disguise. The conventional subjects are painted in a way that suggests feelings, attitudes, and interests that she chose not to state explicitly in her work, but did hint at in her titles. Unlike George, whose lack of personal content I think results from his journeyman stance, Mary had something to say, but would not say it for fear of offending the carefully constructed middle-class roles she and her husband needed in order to make a living as artists. As long as potential buyers saw them as respectable providers of decorative and uplifting genre paintings, they were safe. What amazes (and delights) me is that a sense of Mary’s genius comes through her work despite her efforts to present herself as a woman who knew and accepted her role. Janet Anderson believes this role was imposed, and limited Mary, ignoring the evidence that an equally bourgeois role was imposed on George. Women and men generally accept the roles they perceive as proper for themselves, however much they may chafe against the specific strictures of their times. Mary, unlike her husband, transcended those strictures in her art. This may be why Jefferys saw her art as expressing her self. That he identified this self as a pure and womanly one merely shows that he too was a creature of his time. I don’t know whether he saw similar qualities of self-expression in George’s work. I don’t.
      All in all, an interesting read, with very good reproductions of Mary’s work. We bought this book some time ago, well after the exhibition, which we did not see. It was Marie’s choice. Good one. *** (2010)

    Update 2021-09-09: The Toronto Star has a review of  Molly Peacock's The Flower Diary, an imaginative recreation of Hiester Reid's life. Find it here.

Pamela Aidan Duty and Desire (2004)

      Pamela Aidan Duty and Desire (2004) Part 2 of the trilogy tells the story of Darcy during the gap between his leaving Meryton and his meeting Elizabeth Bennett at Lady de Burgh’s house. It’s essentially in two parts: his coming to terms with his sister Georgiana’s new maturity (which includes rather too much of a religious streak for his liking), and his near-entrapment by Lady Sylvanie, the half-sister of a gambling addict who wants the marriage to take place so he can get that part of her inheritance that will become his when she marries.
     The rebuilding of Darcy and Georgiana’s relationship is nicely done, if some-what too good to be true: the inevitable tiffs and misunderstandings don’t ring quite true, with both siblings being too much paragons of patience and other virtues. Also, Darcy’s objections to Georgiana’s decision to fulfill her religious duty by visiting the poorer tenants in person isn’t well explained: it’s ascribed to his pride of family, but I think it’s really a side effect of his realisation that being true to his faith requires that he forgive Wickham, a thought that grates on him, so he avoids it.
Darcy’s sense of duty is strong, after all; his mistaking of where his duty lies is merely evidence that he’s prone to human error like the rest of us. We also see him carrying out his duties to his estate, including his tenants and servants. His behaviour and demeanour give good grounds for Mrs Reynolds’ opinion that he is the best master that anyone would want.
     The sojourn in Oxfordshire at Lord Sayre’s (an old school mate) nearly does for Darcy. We see that like any man he’s susceptible to the pheromones of a woman who desires him. The plot is gothic, with hints of the supernatural, ancient charms and spells, and revenge driving the story, in which Darcy was cast as a pawn, but becomes the spoiler. This part of the book could stand alone, with a little fleshing out of the back story, which may be a reason that several readers think Duty and Desire the weakest of the three books. I think it’s well enough done, especially as in both parts of the book we see Darcy struggling to reconcile himself to his duty, in the latter case, his duty to family, which requires that he get a wife and produce heirs. Darcy’s man Fletcher plays a major role, rather like that of Bunter to Lord Peter Wimsey. Aidan has some trouble getting the relationship right, I think; it’s difficult for us to conceive of a master-servant relationship in which familiarity coexists with a huge (and sometimes harshly enforced) difference of status.
     By the end of the book, it’s not yet clear whether Darcy has understood that a duty that destroys his sense self is no duty at all. Nor is it clear that he has come to see that Elizabeth’s character matters more than her unfortunate relatives. We know only that she is always on his mind, and when he fingers the little bundle of embroidery thread that he kept instead of returning to her, we see that he cannot help himself. Desire keeps insinuating itself into what he conceives as his duty. **½ (2010)

Ruth Rendell. A New Lease of Death (Sins of the Fathers) (1969)

     Ruth Rendell. A New Lease of Death (1969) (AKA as Sins of the Fathers, and dated 1967 on Fantastic Fiction's website.) Wexford plays a peripheral role in this book, which focusses on a clergyman, Henry Archery, whose son Charles wants to marry Tess Kershaw, the daughter of a murderer, Herbert Arthur Painter, who axed his employer because he wanted £200. Archery thinks heredity will make her a villain, which displays not only uncharity, but also ignorance. Wexford is convinced Painter did it. Archery’s (and Charles’) digging finds no proof otherwise, but does unearth the fact that Irene, Tess’s mother, had had a brief (and serious) love affair with a local poet who died young, and married Painter when she discovered she was pregnant with the poet’s child. So, truly, Tess’s Daddy was no murderer.
     This is an awkward novel. Rendell is intrigued by her main character, a 40-something man of probity, honour, and respectability, who finds himself overtaken by a sudden passion for a beautiful woman whom he first sees at the hotel, and who turns out to be the wife of the prime alternative suspect (who is a sleaze ball, but not a murderer). I felt that this subplot was on the verge of becoming the main plot; and perhaps it was, in the first draft of the book. The interplay of class, respectability, love (both youthful and middle aged, both extra-marital and married) is well done, but it is not done enough.
     The book feels off balance; most of the narrative focusses on Archery, with Wexford brought in only to clarify plot points and add spoiler facts to Archery’s store of knowledge. By making Archery the main investigator, Rendell makes us want to know more about him. The truth, when Archery finds it, does him no good, that’s his punishment; but it heals rifts in Tess’s family and blesses Tess and Charles’s love. **½ (2010)

Carola Dunn The Winter Garden Mystery (1995)

     Carola Dunn The Winter Garden Mystery (1995) A lightweight crime romance. Daisy Dalrymple finds the body of Grace the parlourmaid in the winter garden of Occles hall, which she is writing up for Town and Country magazine. When the police arrest the girl’s suitor in order to avoid crossing the harridan who rules over the manor and the village, Daisy’s hackles rise. She insists on giving the police additional information, and when this proves fruitless, she calls Alec Fletcher, who of course solves the crime: it seems daddy done it, because he lost his temper when Grace tells him she’ll be leaving with a “cinema man”. Nice period colour, pleasant main characters, and a slow but steady advance of the relationship between Daisy and Alec make this a pleasant read. Fluff, but good fluff. **½ (2010)

Donna Andrews. Cockatiels at Seven (2008)

     Donna Andrews. Cockatiels at Seven (2008) An amiable bit of fluff: Recently married faculty wife Meg Lanslow is introduced as a blacksmith, but after the first chapter, no more is said about that. Her semi-estranged friend Karen brings her toddler Timmy for Meg to babysit, then disappears. Intermixed with the cutesy story of how Meg copes with a two-year-old we read of her search for her friend, her discovery of an embezzling scheme, and a dead body. As one might expect, the least likely person is the perpetrator: just once, I’d like to see a logically developed story in which the most likely person done it. Meg’s husband Michael turns out to a natural father, so we may expect scenes of family bliss in future episodes of the series. Oh, didn’t I tell you? It’s a series, all right. It’s also funny, if the award the author received is to be believed. OK, I’m being a bit cruel: there are some funny bits, and the overall tone is sunny and fair, with humid heat to deaden things down a bit. Not a bad read, but not a good one either. ** (2010)