Full disclosure: I love the novel Oliver Twist but I can’t say I love the title character. He cries far to easily for my taste and he’s altogether too sweet for words. Dickens wanted to show Oliver’s basic gentle nature couldn’t be corrupted by the environment he lived in but basically his protagonist is a Casper Milquetoast. When people are kind to him, he laps it up and soaks them with tears of joy. When they are unkind, he leaves and cries on himself. A very soggy kid, needing someone to rescue and rehydrate him. Occasionally, Oliver will stand up to a bully but on someone else’s behalf, like his dead mother. In this book it’s a lot easier to like the bad guys. They have all the best lines in this book. No one has ever developed supporting characters as thoroughly and lovingly as Charles Dickens and the villains in Oliver Twist are either strong and bad (like scary Bill Sikes) or weak and bad. You know who the fun ones are, right? Of course there’s Fagin. A fence and corrupter of children, Fagin sees himself as the ultimate pragmatist. People do have a habit of buying things that…
Veteran’s Day is coming up and I can’t help thinking about a poem called “Ode of Remembrance” by Laurence Binyon. It reads (in part) They went with songs to the battle, they were young.Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,They fell with their faces to the foe. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morning,We will remember them. Those verses and this holiday were to memorialize the veterans of the first World War, the war that was supposed to end all the others. Well, we know what happened after that. Despite the enormous cost, wars continued to flourish, large and small, and although no one publicly prefers sending soldiers into battle, the soldiers keep being sent. Taylor Caldwell explores the reasons and pressures that lead in to war in her book, The Balance Wheel. It’s an old-fashioned novel in many ways but some of its themes are contemporary. As the balance wheel among four adult brothers, Charles Wittmann is a very busy man. Most of his time and energy…
Readers love a seldom-read story or an under-praised author. To appreciate a less-known work or author is the a mark of a book connoisseur and readers delight in being seen as connoisseurs. Without knowing it, my sister and I trained to be gourmet readers when we grew reading the work of an under-appreciated writer. You may or may not have heard of Shirley Jackson but do you know about her books Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons? When Ms. Jackson’s work is recalled (which isn’t often enough) she is remembered for disturbing tales such as The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived at the Castle and the short story, “The Lottery”. These are artful, unsettling, well-constructed narratives that leave the reader with the impression they would not want to meet Ms. Jackson in a dark alley. The titles Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons may sound like more “tales of terror” but these are something different. These stories would be called domestic humor. Now domestic humor has never enjoyed a great reputation. The same critics that sneered over the pulp paper tales of crime and science fiction in the 1940’s ignored the later stories about raising…
So intones Judith Starkadder, at the beginning of Stella Gibbon’s comic masterpiece Cold Comfort Farm. To Judith Starkadder this statement is a curse and a warning but it’s more of an opening salvo in the war of English novel types. On one side are the moor, mud and fen school of Novels where the clouds are always lowering, the males are always glowering and life is eternally soiled. Opposing this school of brooding romantics is the pragmatic, organized and cheerful Flora Poste, a Jane Austen heroine in 1920’s regalia. Can an intelligent girl with a will of her own “tidy up” the morbid and moribund Starkadders? Can she overcome their devotion to sukebind and jumping into the well? And can she break Aunt Ada Doom’s preoccupation about seeing “Something narsty in the woodshed”? Since this book satirizes many novels that aren’t widely read these days, I worried some readers might not get the joke. However my spouse (who mixes up D. H.Lawrence with T. E. Lawrence) got it immediately so read away. It’s a hilarious satire of English literature but never mind that. You’ll love the gloomy Starkadders who live in Cold Comfort Farm and the ridiculous, pedantic Mr….
If you ever run across a group of serious readers, those people who see books as magic carpets and TARDIS boxes that guide us to understanding, you will always find they accord certain books special significance. “This book,” they’ll say, “was my world at one time. This is the book I picked up, read and re-read for weeks. This book dominated my imagination. It changed the way I looked at life, at least for awhile. I’m a different person now for reading it then and reading some of it now takes back to when it was new.” For me, one of those books is The World According to Garp by John Irving. Garp’s first wave of popularity had already crested when I first picked it up. It was one of the first “adult” novels I read as an adult. As a precocious reader I had consumed many adult volumes before then (YA lit was a thing of the future) but I approached those stories from the perspective of a child with parents and authority figures to tried to regulate my reading. I doubt if any of them would have recommended The World According to Garp . Luckily, I didn’t have to…