This week’s Best Book is The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett!
Author: whatmeread
Day 270: The Secret Garden
Best Book of the Week!
The Secret Garden was one of my favorite books as a young girl. I recently had occasion to reread it and was surprised to find it just as entertaining as I remembered. I also noticed for the first time how beautifully written it is.
We might be inclined to sympathize with ten-year-old Mary Lennox at the beginning of the novel. After all, she has survived a cholera outbreak in India that killed her parents, and she was left alone when the remaining servants abandoned the house. But Mary is spoiled and bad-tempered. She goes to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, in Yorkshire, and she doesn’t like anything she sees. The food is horribly bland. The house is located on a desolate stretch of moor, and her uncle isn’t even there, so she is to be kept by servants. Well, she knows how to handle servants.
To her surprise, the English servants are not afraid of her temper; they expect her to do as she’s told. Largely left to her own devices, she explores the huge, rambling house and the gardens around it. Her young maid Martha tells her the story of a secret garden that used to belong to Uncle Archibald’s wife. His wife died, and he had the garden locked and the key buried.
Running around outside, Mary starts to improve her health and temper. She makes friends with a robin, and Martha’s mother sends her a jump rope. Soon she is rosy-cheeked and stops turning her nose up at the food.
Mary makes the acquaintance of the taciturn gardener, Ben Weatherstaff, and eventually finds the door and the key to the secret garden. The plants are dead, because it is early spring, but she wonders if the garden can’t be revived with a little help. She gives Martha some of her allowance to buy gardening tools, and Martha’s young brother Dickon delivers them. Dickon is a fascinating boy who roams the moors and makes friends with the animals, and with Mary. Soon, both Mary and Dickon are working every day in the secret garden.
Her nights have occasionally been disturbed by someone crying. One night she follows the noise and finds that a boy is living in the house, her cousin Colin. He is an invalid who has not been out of his bed for years, and he is even more spoiled than Mary. After putting him in his place, Mary begins to feel sorry for him. She reads him stories and tells him about the secret garden as if it were story, but he soon figures out that it is true. Eventually, she and Dickon take him out into the garden in a wheelchair.
This book is a tale about how living things can heal bodies and minds. As Mary’s health improves and she works in the garden, her temper improves. The magic of the garden brings Mary together with her friends and eventually reunites the Craven family.
Day 269: The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller has attempted a difficult task in The Song of Achilles–to make the story of Achilles, Patroclus, and the Trojan War more understandable to a modern audience. To some extent she succeeds, but in some cases I think she interjects too modern a sensibility into the ancient tale.
I have never been a big fan of Achilles. The image of him sulking in his tent because of pique while the Greeks get slaughtered is not a pleasant one. But for the benefit of those who are not familiar with The Iliad, if there are any, I will leave that part of the tale for them to discover.
The novel is narrated by Patroclus, who is exiled as a boy after accidentally killing another boy. In Miller’s novel this gives him a horror of killing and he never learns to fight–the first instance of that modern sensibility I mentioned. Not only is there no evidence in the Greek myths that Patroclus didn’t fight, there is evidence to the contrary.
In exile, Patroclus is brought up with Achilles, son of the goddess Thetis, and Miller makes the interesting choice of having the gods and goddesses be characters in the novel, just as they are in ancient stories. Patroclus and Achilles become close companions and eventually lovers.
Here again is where modern sensibilities come in, not because the two were lovers–they almost certainly were–but in the way she treats the relationship. I’m no Greek scholar, but I’m fairly sure that such relationships were rather common, and I’ve read somewhere that in some armies they were encouraged because the friends fought better for each other. Yet here, the two hide their relationship, and Thetis despises Patroclus from the first. In fact, in The Iliad, the relationship is implied but not commented upon, more as if it is accepted.
I don’t want to sound too particular, though, because almost despite myself I was drawn in and ultimately touched, not by Achilles as much as by Patroclus.
In a class discussion of The Iliad years ago, when the students were commenting on Achilles’ behavior, the instructor made it very clear that despite what we may think of him today, to the ancient Greeks he was indisputably a hero. So, modern sensibilities come in again, as Patroclus worries that the Greeks will begin hating Achilles because he refuses to fight, and they do.
To a great extent, most of the characters in the novel are one- or two-dimensional–Agamemnon is stupid and brutish, Odysseus is wily and clever, and so on. Only a few characters are more fully developed. But then, the narrator is Patroclus, and his life revolves around Achilles, who is unbearably proud and full of himself. Yes, I still don’t like Achilles. To Miller’s credit, I don’t think I’m supposed to. Despite my caveats, though, I enjoyed the novel and am looking forward to reading another book by Miller.
Day 268: Still Midnight
When I first started reading this crime novel, I had the feeling it would end badly. However, although it is very complex, it ties up loose ends in a satisfying way.
Alex Morrow is a bitter Glasgow cop who feels she has to compete with her male colleagues, especially with Bannerman, who is favored by her boss. It is her turn to take the next big case, but when an elderly Ugandan man is abducted from his home, the boss gives the case to Bannerman.
We follow the inept, amateurish kidnappers, who have smashed their way into the house demanding a person who has never lived there or been inside. On the other hand, we watch Morrow’s attempts to work on the case without letting Bannerman take the credit for all her breakthroughs.
I have long been a fan of Denise Mina, who has written several gritty series providing us fascinating glimpses of a grim urban Scotland.
Day 267: Black & White
I had an ambivalent reaction to Dani Shapiro’s Black & White. By coincidence, while I was reading it, I read an article about adult survivors of child abuse that helped me focus on what was bothering me about the themes and conclusion of this novel. I’ll talk about that later.
Clara Brodeur has not seen her mother since she left home at the age of 18. She is a seemingly ordinary housewife with a nine-year-old daughter, but she has a secret. Her mother is Ruth Dunne, a world-famous photographer who made Clara’s childhood miserable by documenting it with evocative, nude photos.
Clara’s life is interrupted by a phone call from her older sister Robin telling her that their mother is dying, and she can’t cope anymore. Despite herself, Clara finds herself in New York City, where she is forced to face her feelings about her mother.
The strength of this novel is its finely observed descriptions, especially of Clara’s memories of the photo shoots–both from the point of view of a young child and then overlaid with adult awareness. Shapiro accomplishes the difficult task of explaining only with words both how striking Ruth’s photos must be and why they are disturbing. Clara feels that she has had her life stripped bare for the entire world and her relationship with her mother destroyed because of Ruth’s obsessions.
Of course, the novel evokes questions about art and its importance, whether the creation of an object of art justifies Ruth’s treatment of Clara, the impact of abuse upon the family, and so on. Perhaps I should warn now about spoilers, although I will try not to reveal too much.
Emily Yoffe’s article in Slate deals with how there is often a societal pressure put upon adult survivors of child abuse to reconcile with their abusers and bring them back into their lives as the abusers get older. She points out the possible destructiveness of this expectation as well as the possibility of more harm to the original victim, or as she puts it better, “the potential psychological cost of reconnecting.”
One of my problems with this book is that it buys wholeheartedly into this assumption that reconciling with and forgiving one’s abuser is automatically healing for the abused, with a much too indulgent and simple-minded conclusion. Robin has been telling Clara “it’s not about you,” and suddenly she realizes that is true. But it is about Clara. Moreover, when Clara asks why her mother didn’t stop, her husband answers “Because she couldn’t.” I’m sure that is true, and Ruth’s form of abuse is admittedly different than sexual or physical abuse, but if you ask a sex offender why he or she doesn’t stop, you’re going to get the same answer.
Shapiro’s novel provides too facile an answer to her heroine’s problems and then wraps everything up in a pretty package. Not a satisfying or particularly realistic ending to a novel of promise.
Day 266: Found Wanting
I usually enjoy Robert Goddard’s convoluted thrillers, but this one seems a bit far-fetched.
Richard Eusden is a proper civil servant who has been estranged from his best friend Marty Hewitson for some years because of the latter’s drug habit and unreliability. Richard is on his way to work one morning when he gets a call from his ex-wife, Gemma, who has agreed to pick up an attaché case from Marty’s aunt and bring it to him in Denmark. Gemma wants Richard to go in her place. She tells Richard that Marty is dying of cancer.
Richard reluctantly agrees, only to find a stranger at the rendezvous instead of Marty. The stranger says Marty has been kidnapped and tells him his friend will die unless he hands over the case.
Richard chases the case and Marty through Germany, Denmark, and Finland, and ends up discovering a dark sectret that involves the Romanov’s last fortune, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and the Tsarevich.
The novel has so many briefly drawn characters that I could not keep track of them. I also didn’t really buy that Richard would go through all of this for a man he had already established couldn’t be trusted. But ultimately my judgment is that this is silly stuff.
Special Post! Best Book of the Week!
This week’s Best Book is River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh!
Day 265: Here Was a Man: A Novel of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I
I don’t think I’ve read anything by Norah Lofts before, but even though she was a prolific historical novelist, I would rate this effort as mediocre.
Here Was a Man attempts to draw most of Raleigh’s life in a short space and does so by a series of vignettes illustrating important events. Although I am not completely familiar with his career, I know that Lofts has chosen to portray a couple of apocryphal events, in particular the cloak in the mud story, which I believe has no basis in fact. The other serious lack of the novel is any depth of characterization.
The novel begins with Raleigh as a teenager, listening to sailors’ tales and dreaming of traveling the seas. He is also full of ambition for worldly success, an ambition that sometimes works to his disadvantage.
We are told many times about Raleigh’s sense of adventure, but we don’t really feel it. In fact, he seems to spend more time in prison than on his adventures. It is curious, too, that although he has many enemies at court, at least in this novel he has done nothing to earn their enmity. I would doubt that was really the case.
Raleigh is probably a character who could support an interesting and exciting novel, but this is not it. To be fair, it looks like it may have been one of Lofts’ first works.
Day 264: The Ballad of Tom Dooley
Sharyn McCrumb has written several series of light mysteries, some better than others. I have usually enjoyed her “ballad” series–atmospheric, sometimes ghostly mysteries set in Appalachia and each named after a traditional folk ballad. The Ballad of Tom Dooley, despite a background of historical research (because this folk ballad is based on a true case), is not her best, however.
According to McCrumb’s notes at the end of the novel, she got interested in the story after researching it for an article and decided that the prevailing theories of the crime are not satisfying. So, she reconstructed her theory of the crime in this book. As such, it is not so much a mystery as an explication.
Most people vaguely know the story, that Tom Dooley (actually Dula) met Laura Foster “on the mountain/stabbed her with [his] knife.” Another defendant, Ann Melton, was let go. But McCrumb says most people in Wilkes County, where the crime occurred, will tell you Ann did it. To McCrumb, knowing that Ann was Tom’s long-time married lover, Tom being guilty didn’t make sense.
The novel is narrated by two characters who were actually involved in the incident: Pauline Foster, who was Ann Melton’s cousin and servant girl; and Zebulon Vance, the ex-governor and senator of pre-Civil War North Carolina who defended Tom. Pauline is an interesting character–McCrumb depicts her as a sociopath who manipulates the others and wants revenge for Ann’s slights.
The biggest fault in the novel is the narration of Zebulon Vance. At first, I thought McCrumb’s intent was to depict him as a maundering old bore, possibly even senile, as his section is so repetitive and adds so little to the narrative. It is mostly about himself and has little to do with the story. But then I read that Vance’s career was one reason McCrumb wanted to do the story. Instead of adding to it, it detracts from and drags against the impetus of the plot.
The fact is that none of the characters are likable people, and the crime isn’t particularly interesting. From the author of some haunting stories, this novel is a disappointment. If McCrumb wanted to write about Vance, she may have done better to write a biography.
Day 263: A Great Deliverance
Although Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series seems to be floundering with the past few books, the first dozen or so were really good. A Great Deliverance is the first one in the series.
Father Hart comes to Scotland Yard to ask for help. Roberta Teys, the daughter of a farmer, has been found in the barn next to the bodies of her father and the family dog, both of whom have been attacked with an ax. Father Hart begs for someone to investigate the apparently open-and-shut case, as Roberta has confessed to the crime and now refuses to speak. Father Hart says he believes the girl, who seems to be mentally handicapped, is innocent. Barely registering in the background, someone is killing men on the subway.
Inspector Thomas Lynley is given the Teys case, and he has just been assigned Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers as his partner. Havers is a belligerent, untidy working-class woman who is being given a final chance, since she has failed to work well with other supervisors. She believes that the immaculate Lynley, the eighth Earl of Asherton, is nothing but an upper-class fashion plate, playboy, and womanizer.
Lynley is dealing with his own problems, because the woman he loves is about to marry his best friend, Simon St. James. He also bears guilt because St. James is crippled from an auto accident in which Lynley was driving. Lynley is actually relieved to be called away from the wedding reception to deal with the murder investigation.
Lynley thinks the roots of this murder may be in the past. Roberta’s mother disappeared when she was a child. Was she actually murdered? Roberta’s older sister also ran away from home. What happened to her?
This novel and the first books of this series perfectly meet my taste for mystery novels that are on the dark side. I find Lynley and Havers to be engaging, with fully developed personalities. The novels are complex and the plots exciting. I have not tired of the incidental characters, as I often do. I am just sorry that the more recent novels have taken some turns I do not find appealing or interesting, since for so many years, I could rely on an Elizabeth George mystery to be a great read.
What? Me Read? 