Tag: melodrama

Review 2439: Classics Club Spin Result! The Prophet’s Mantle

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I picked this book out of my collected works of E. Nesbit for the Classics Club as one of her first novels for adults. In fact, it is her first novel. So, I wasn’t aware until I looked for a hardcopy that it was publicized under the name of Fabian Bland. In fact, I was confused, because some editions showed both names, so I thought they were two different people. I don’t agree with the custom some publishers use of listing works under the most well-known name just to make more money, but I have had to revise my listings of this work because of this error and listed both so as not to confuse.

In the prologue to this novel, Count Michael Litvinoff prevents Armand Percival from drowning himself after gambling away all his money. Litvinoff takes Percival as his secretary to Russia. But Litvinoff is the author of a pamphlet that the Russian authorities deem dangerous, so the two have to flee. On the trip, it is reported that the secretary is killed by their Cossack pursuers.

It takes a while to see the connection between this story and the body of the novel, which begins with two brothers, Richard and Roland Ferrier. Their father leaves his mill to both of them, hoping to keep them friends, as they are rivals for the same girl, Clare Stanley. If they can’t run it together, the business will fold.

However, Richard believes a rumor in the village that Roland is responsible for the disappearance of Alice Hatfield, the assumption being that she left because she was pregnant. When Roland learns this, the two become unreconciled and the mill is closed. It’s clear from the beginning that Roland knows nothing about Alice, though.

In London, we again meet Count Litvinoff, a Nihilist (although Nesbit doesn’t seem to understand what one is, and although there is a lot of discussion about revolutionary principles, no one actually states what the characters believe) who has published several books and has been speaking around town. Clare Stanley is in town, and she is trying to attract the count, but after she hears a talk by another Russian, Mr. Petrovich, she begins to be interested in the cause. It soon becomes clear that it is Litvinoff, not Roland, who is responsible for Alice’s plight.

It’s not long before several plots are going. Who will win Clare? What will happen to Alice? Who is the mysterious Petrovich? Is Litvinoff a hero or a villain? Will Richard and Roland make it up? And what about the poor mill workers?

Despite its revolutionary theme and good intentions, I fear the mill workers get the short shrift. This novel goes in too many directions to really do a satisfactory job in 159 (small print) pages. I guessed all its secrets almost immediately, and only Litvinoff has anything approaching a rounded character. The novel is supposed to have a stunning romantic ending, but I wasn’t interested enough in the characters to care much. I think Nesbit’s young revolutionary fervor (she was a Fabianist) gets in the way of this being effective fiction.

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Day 1239: Michael O’Halloran

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Cover for Michael O'HalloranSome of Gene Stratton-Porter’s more well-known novels have been favorites since I was a girl and favorites of my mother before me. I’m speaking particularly of A Girl of the Limberlost, Laddie, A True Blue Story, and to a lesser extent, Freckles. In most of her novels (Laddie is an exception), she features disadvantaged young people who improve their lives through honest hard work, perseverance, and a love of nature. (Laddie wins his girl through honest hard work, perseverance, and a love of nature.) Stratton-Porter has a tendency toward melodrama that I think wasn’t unusual for popular fiction of the time, and most of the time you just go with the flow. So, I was pleased to find Michael O’Halloran, a novel from 1915 that I had never read, in a used bookstore.

Michael, or Mickey, is a young newsboy. He has been living on his own since his mother went away ill. At the beginning of the novel, he takes on another youngster, a crippled girl named Peaches, whose grandmother has just died. Both children fear the state orphanage.

Mickey attracts the attention of Douglas Bruce, a lawyer, when he has a fight with another newsboy who tries to cheat him. Bruce is struck by his insistence that things be “square,” that is, honest. He wants to be Mickey’s “big brother” and help him make his way, but Mickey is too independent. He is also familiar with another man who has a “little brother,” Mr. Minturn. Mickey and a respectable woman witnessed a nanny battering the head of Mr. Minturn’s daughter against concrete and then coaching her two brothers in a lie when the little girl became unresponsive. After she died, Mickey and the woman tried to tell Mrs. Minturn about it, but she called them liars. Then they tried Mr. Minturn, but he did nothing.

It was at that point that the novel lost me. Bruce and his fianceé, Lesley Winton, already had a project to try to reconcile the Minturns to each other. After that story and their daughter’s death, I didn’t want to read about them, and I could see where the plot was leading me. Also, Stratton-Porter can have a tendency toward sappiness, especially when she depicts children. Mickey’s story was already quite saccharine. I was willing to put up with that until the Minturns turned up. With regret, I decided not to finish this novel.

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Day 1048: Hide and Seek

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Cover for Hide and SeekHide and Seek is Wilkie Collins’s third novel. It acknowledges inspiration from Charles Dickens and shows his influence in plot and characterization. It is getting closer to the works he is most famous for but is certainly not his best.

The novel begins in the household of Valentine Blyth, an artist. Valentine is a breezy, accepting person with an invalid wife. The one thing he fears to lose is his adopted daughter, Madonna, whose parentage is unknown. He is afraid that someone will come and take her away sometime.

Valentine himself took Madonna from the circus. She had been taken in at birth by Mrs. Peckover, a clown’s wife. Her mother died having her, refusing to speak of her people and leaving behind only a bracelet made from two people’s hair. Madonna later became a deaf/mute after an circus accident, and Valentine saved her from harsh treatment by the circus master.

Valentine has befriended a careless young man named Zach, with whom Madonna is in love. Zach in his turn befriends a rough man named Mat, who has just returned from adventures in the Americas. Here Collins’s geography breaks down a bit, for Mat speaks mostly of adventures in South America and claims to have been scalped in the Amazon, when scalping and some of the other things he mentions are definitely North American. It is through the identity of Mat that the plot thickens.

In this novel, Collins’s characters tend to be one-dimensional, and his plot is often easy to predict. Several times I was ready to quit because I felt the novel dragging. This was probably because, although most of the characters are likable, I wasn’t particularly interested in them. I think Collins is at his best in mystery plots (although this one has its mysteries), and his characterization eventually becomes much richer.

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