Letters to Alice!

Our book today is 1984 novel Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, and the blurbs it garnered at the time (including an unsigned but adulatory little column the book review section of a newspaper in Gottingen, of all places) are s true today as they were back then: whatever else it might be, this is a first-rate book about books and reading.

That 'whatever else it might be' alludes to the fact that this is an epistolary novel comprised of exchanges between young college-age Alice and her middle-aged novelist Aunt Fay, so there's quite a bit of bleed-through from Weldon's own life, and as usual with this resolutely third-rate author, the reader is constantly forced to wonder how much of that bleed-through is intentional and how much of what they paid good money to buy and read is just more or less spontaneous riffing. Despite the shelf of novels to her credit, Weldon has never to my knowledge chosen to work at her craft. The result has been a body of fiction suffering from what we might call the Munro Syndrome: lots of stuff happens, 'the end' is stamped a few times onto the bolt of cloth as it spews out of the machine, and absolutely nothing memorable whatsoever is produced.

Letters to Alice is an exception and a delightful book – but even here, the lively writing takes frequent detours into being insipid or torturous, before returning to its better nature.

The plot, such as it is, can be easily guessed: Alice has gone off to school to study Jane Austen (among many predictable other names), and Aunt Fay has many, many opinions to share – about Austen, for instance:

It is idle to complain that Jane Austen lacked a crusading zeal. With hindsight, it is easy to look at the world she lived in, and say she should have. What she didn't seems to me more valuable. She struggled to perceive and describe the flow of believes that typified her time, and more, to suggest for the first time that the personal, the emotional, is in fact the moral – nowadays, of course, for good or bad, we argue that it is political.

 

But also about lots of other things, from the whole of the Western canon to the quiet little curse of the writer's life:

Writing is an odd activity – other people have occupations, jobs; the writer's life is work, and the work is the life, and there can be no holidays from it. If the pen is not working, the mind is thinking, and even as you sit and watch [TV] the unconscious ponders on. Even in sleep you are not safe: dreams pertain to life, and life to dreams, and both to work. There can be no time off, no real diversions, because wherever you go, you take yourself; and no pure experience, either, unsullied by contemplation, or by the writer's habit of standing back and observing what is going on – which writers will vehemently deny they do, because it sounds passionless and calculated, but is not.

 

But even so, problems crowd around the edges. Divorce that last passage from the spirited truths it's conveying and you'll see the biggest of those problems: Weldon simply cannot write good English prose, not for more than an isolated line at a time. This lack is of course no bar to fantastic literary success – but it's awfully inconvenient if an author is shooting for more. Weldon's ambitions to be taken seriously as a novelist have always been evident, and the number one obstacle to those ambitions is that she's never had much talent as a writer. It's funny how that works.

There's talent aplenty in Letters to Alice, however – here the joys and odd disappointments of reading, the thrill of book-hunting, and the pleasures of simply chatting with a fellow reader are all on triumphant display. I myself dearly love a good bookish snail-mail correspondence (some of you will have shared one with me and may attest that I'm fairly good at it), full of titles and authors and the give-and-take that happens when two lifelong readers butt heads. There's quite a bit of that here, mainly embodied on both sides by Aunt Fay, who does all the talking and most of the summarizing of other people's letters. She also gets in some choice wisecracks (one of Weldon's most reliable gifts):

Your mother reads books on tennis, I know: I doubt she's read a novel since an overdose of Georgette Heyer made her marry your father. Books can be dangerous.

 

Books can indeed be dangerous, and they – and their authors – can disappoint. But this one doesn't – you'll love it.

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet!

Our book today is The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet by Colleen McCullough, the latest and highest-profile exhibit to date in the upsurge of Jane Austen pastiche novels currently flooding bookstores. It's also the strangest of these, in some ways, since McCullough, the author of The Thorn Birds and a shelf of novels set in ancient Rome, is to my knowledge the most commercially successful novelist to try her hand at this particular sub-genre. McCullough has legions of her own fans, and yet here she is indulging herself in writing about one of the minor supporting characters in Pride and Prejudice, the stay-at-home Bennet daughter Mary.

I guess once an author's proven herself to her publishers the way McCullough has, she gets as much latitude as she wants, and maybe I'd appreciate the whole thing more if the book itself weren't so relentlessly awful. But the whole time I was reading it (well, 'whole time' as in roughly 70 minutes ... but you know what I mean ...), I was bothered by something else entirely than the lack of any noticeable proficiency with language, character, dialogue, plotting, or drama.

No, the thing that bothered me more than the fact that The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet stinks as a book is the fact that it stinks as pastiche.

Pastiche, in which a writer uses the setting and characters previously established by somebody else ("fan fiction" is the current term, and Fanfiction.net is the sprawling uber-site for it all - if you knew my TV-show and comic book tastes, not to mention my fiction style, really well, you could find me in several places on that great, endless site) is the most miserable, scrounging, least respected of all the literary sub-genres. To the uninitiated, it seems to wear its unoriginality on its sleeve: I mean, the writers don't even make up their own characters!




This is a grossly unfair opinion, of course - half of the greatest works of the Western canon are pastiches (all the ancient Greek plays, Virgil, Ovid, nine-tenths of Shakespeare, etc) - but it's certainly true that a huge percentage of pastiches are really, really bad. The reason is obvious: the fact that the setting and characters don't need to be invented is an open door to narrative laziness. The best pastiches actually work very hard to overcome this inertia, and it's that scrappy energy that makes them so much fun to read (and fortunately for the idle browser at Fanfiction.net, that energy can be spotted immediately - usually in the first paragraph, if it's there at all). I argue that when you're reading a really good pastiche, when you're experiencing the particular thrill that comes from a writer successfully capturing 'your' characters in new adventures, you're experiencing something in common with Athenian audiences in the 4th century b.c., listening to 'new' words the playwright has put in the mouth of Europa, or Hercules, or Orestes.

There are lots of examples, from lots of different venues - the Star Trek novel Strangers from the Sky, for instance, or the great, hilarious episode of "Buffy the Vampire-Slayer" where our heroes meet the actual, honest-to-gosh Dracula (except for the episode's ending, of course, but that's a posting for another time!), or the enormously entertaining Sherlock Holmes movie "The Seven-Percent Solution." When it's done right, pastiche offers rewards found nowhere else in fiction.



And there's one basic rule of pastiche that comes before any others: don't violate the heart of your original.

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet violates the heart of Pride and Prejudice. It violates the heart, the soul, the kidneys, the spleen, and every other organ it can get its hands on. But the most central violation is the worst by far, because as all readers of Jane Austen's great novel (perhaps the greatest novel ever written? Certainly in the top five) know, the heart of the story is that Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are, despite everything, perfect for each other, that they have managed, as very lucky lonely people sometimes actually do, to find each other amidst the noise and frivolity of the world around them. If you violate this living, breathing heart of Pride and Prejudice, your pastiche will not only stink but annoy the hell out of Steve. So you can just imagine what I felt reading these thoughts from Darcy, early in the book:

Darcy got up, frowning, to stand for a moment with his eyes riveted sightlessly on the leatherbound rows of his parliamentary Hansards. The old besom was dead at last. It is a vile thing, he thought, to marry beneath one’s station, no matter how great the love or how tormenting the urge to consummate that love. And it has not been worth the pain. My beautiful, queenly Elizabeth is as pinched a spinster as her sister Mary. I have one sickly, womanish boy and four wretched girls. One in the eye for me, Mrs. Bennet! May the devil take you and all your glorious daughters, the price has been too high.

Naturally, Austen's tricky, complex characterization of Darcy - not the easiest man to like or love - presents the temptation for thoughtless extrapolators to misunderstand him. But dammit, McCullough's a professional novelist! If she can't be trusted to understand what Austen's doing well enough to avoid writing a travesty of a paragraph like the one above, what business does she have writing a pastiche on these characters at all? If her workings of these beloved characters were, for want of a better word, accurate, I could forgive her even for the sodden wretchedness of her prose - and that's forgiving a lot, as the book's almost show-stopping first paragraph makes clear:

The long, late night threw a gilt mantle over the skeletons of shrub and trees scattered through the Shelby Manor gardens; a few wisps of smoke, smudged at their edges, drifted from the embers of a fire kindled to burn the last of the fallen leaves, and somewhere a stay-behind bird was chattering, the tuneless nocturne of late autumn. Watching the sunset from her usual seat in the bay window, Mary felt a twisting of her heart at its blue-gold glory, soon to be a memory banked inside the echoing spaces of her mind. How much longer? Oh, how much longer?

But she doesn't redeem this kind of claptrap with anything sharp or very interesting (her creation of a bookish, sickly son for the imperious Darcy - the whole book is set a decade after Pride and Prejudice - has flickerings of originality, but they never amount to anything), and repeatedly resorts to the same sin that so mars her ancient Rome novels: stuffing the results of her period-research into the narrative, often in hilariously awkward, guidebooky ways:

“You say [a potential suitor says] they [the Gypsies, of course] like their life. But you do not like yours.”

“That will change in May,” said Mary, nibbling a macaroon. “This is very good. I must ask Mrs. MacLeod for her cook’s recipe.”

“That’s a relief!” cried Mr. Wilde, forgetting that it was not polite for new acquaintances to contract words.

Well, he might have forgotten, but you didn't, did you, old girl? And you just couldn't bear to write that scene without making sure we all know you know, like waving the appropriate index card in our faces. Like I said, it's almost impossible to believe we're talking about somebody here who's written a dozen novels. And while we're talking about things impossible to believe, listen to this little peroration, half Encyclopedia Britannica and half ranting monologue by Doctor Doom:

Fitz [believe it or not, that's how we're referring to Darcy] stretched his long legs out and crossed them at the ankles, staring into the ruby depths of his glass with a bitter face. “You were too confined to Pemberley to have known that family when it was together, Ned, that’s the trouble. You didn’t travel with me in those days. My concern over Mary Bennet has nothing to do with expediency – it’s simply prudence. My reputation is my all. Though the Darcys are related to every king who ever sat upon England’s throne, they have escaped the taint of more stupid men – men who snatched at huge honours, great commissions. Now, finally, after a thousand years of waiting, it lies in my power to advance the Darcy name in an absolutely unimpeachable way – as the elected head of England’s parliament. A duke? An earl marshal of the battlefield? A royal marriage broker? Pah! Mere nothings! England has never sunk so low as under the Hanoverians – petty German princelings with names longer than their ancestry! – but her parliament has risen in exact step with the diminution of her sovereigns. A prime minister in this day and age, Ned, is genuinely pre-eminent. A hundred years ago it was still an empty title passed around the House of Lord like a port decanter, whereas today it is beginning to be based in the House of Commons. Existing at the whim of the electors, rather than embedded in an unelected oligarchy. As prime minister, I will deal with Europe in the aftermath of Bonaparte. His Russian campaign may have finished him, but he has left the Continent in a shambles. I must mend it, and be the greatest statesman of all time. Nothing must be allowed to stand in my way.”

Yeesh.

No, The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet is the type of pastiche that only annoys, and it'll only further convince those who need no convincing that the whole sub-genre of fan fiction is beyond the pale. I urge those people not to judge by this very poor book! McCullough should have known better than to try it (we can only hope she cuts some original cloth next time around), and, to be fair, the great galloping herds of Austeniana out there aren't much better (truly good Austen pastiches have hardly yet been written - I have my ideas, but hey, I can't write everything). If you're at all tempted to, gawd help us, buy this book, spend your money on the gorgeous leatherbound hardcover volume of the complete Jane Austen, available at your local Barnes & Noble - it's money much better spent.

The Rules of Gentility

Our book today is “The Rules of Gentility” by Janet Mullany, and we must immediately report that it’s unlikely to show up on Bella Abzug’s reading list up in Heaven. That’s all in all a good thing for Miss Mullany, we think: Bella was a formidable enemy to have when she was alive - we doubt she’s lost any topspin arguing with God about the fact that He made Eve second.

“The Rules of Gentility” is set in the Regency period, alas. Despite the protestations of our esteemed belle dame sans merci My Lady Disdain, we here at Stevereads have never understood the magnetic appeal the Regency period seems to exert on so many writers. It was a squalid time, full of body odor and disconcertingly large hair-lice and sugar-blackened teeth, so what’s the allure? Is it the psychological undertone of liberation, the father figure of the king being offstage? Is it the very, very temporary absence of the shadow of some awful war or other? We’d ask My Lady Disdain ourselves, but she’s currently skiing in Stade with a ‘spare’ prince of Spain, so we’re on our own,

No clues forthcoming in “The Rules of Gentility,” which is the story of young heiress Philomena Wellesley-Clegg, who’s on the town in London with shopping in mind, for bonnets, shoes, and perhaps a husband:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” goes the novel’s rather dire choice of opening, “that a single woman of fortune and passable good looks amuses herself in London with fashion, philanthropic works, and flirtation, until a suitable gentleman makes an offer. I consider the pursuit of the bonnets and of a husband fairly alike - I do not want to acquire an item that will wear out, or bore me after a brief acquaintance, and we must suit each other very well.”

Philomena has several prospects - for the husband, that is, and she immediately gives the reader a quick synopsis of each, the main purpose of which is to start the guessing-game going on which she’ll eventually marry (My Lady Disdain, were she not spelunking in Cuba with Ian McKellan and, um, FRIENDS, would no doubt warn us here that list or no list, there are almost always dark horse complications to this kind of handicapping - and she ought to know! The entire time she was married to her second husband, she thought his younger brother was gay - until he revealed that he was merely patient and became her third husband!)

Mullany is a spirited writer who’s not at all without talent - even readers who’ve never picked up a romance novel before will keep turning the pages right to the end. This is a happy little book, perfect for a guilty pleasure or a long plane ride, although we here at Stevereads must point out the obvious: that time would be infinitely better spent reading the novels of Jane Austen. Still, we know what world we live in, so we won’t preach. For a few paragraphs.

“The Rules of Gentility” is a fun, enjoyable little read, but oh, the price you pay for the pleasure. Mullany has read her Austen, or listened to a chunk of it while on the Stairmaster. She knows enough about the outside TYPE of a Regency to throw in a bit where her fabulous heiress is confronted with the working class, on whom she takes instant pity and is met with the requisite defiant independence:

“I sit beside her on the bed and take her hand ... ‘Kate, you are so brave. But I should like to offer you a job where you could make forty pounds a year.’
Kate laughs. ‘I make that in a quarter year, or less, miss, and with that greedy Mrs. Bright taking most of the money.’
‘You would have safety, security, and a respectable profession.’
‘Miss, I had a respectable profession. I made a few shillings a week, working sixteen hours a day in a basement where the walls streamed water. That’s how you ladies get your pretty gowns. And then I was ill, and my job gone. I’m fortunate that Mrs. Bright took me in.’
What can I say to this? That I am sorry? Even I can see that would be an insult ... ‘I should like to train you as my maid.’
There is silence, or at least silence of a sort as the creaking from upstairs accelerates and next door, loud groans replace the sound of a switch upon flesh.
‘I don’t think so, miss.’ She shakes her head, takes my hand, and gives it a kind squeeze.”

Ah, the brave, proud, and above all complacent poor! Where would Regency novels (or My Lady Disdain’s five villas) be without them? They KNOW there’s a party going on everywhere else in Regency London, but they’re too busy with their sweating walls to throw bricks at all the brightly-lit windows and risk hitting so fair a creature as Philomena. They must be COAXED, CAJOLED out of their poverty, if one is to make anything of them!

And who has time for that, when there’s the aforementioned husband to find? Readers who stick with “The Rules of Gentility” for any length of time will be reminded very forcefully of “Sex and the City,” but maybe the forlornly loyal Austen fans among them will hope for an ending with even a nod toward wry detachment, even the hint of a knowing smile. Alas, for them the wait will have been in vain, however pleasant the journey. In the end, Carrie Bradshaw carries the day:

“His lips brush against my hair, and it is the most natural thing in the world for us to kiss. “And I love you too,” he whispers. ‘You may put your hands in my pockets as much as you like, and you can buy bonnets to your heart’s content.’
What woman alive could refuse such a proposal?
Not I.”

Every Jane Austen fanatic could of course name at least one woman then alive who could have refused such a proposal, which raises another question about Regency novels: why on Gawd’s green Earth would any writer with an ounce of sense in her head actively INVITE comparison with the author of ‘Pride and Prejudice’? The brand name ‘Jane Austen’ has become in recent years a booming cottage industry full of writers doing just that, without seeming to care that they can only come off poorly in comparison to one of the greatest novelists of all time. Or is it that they know what we here at Stevereads would hate to admit, that the times have changed, lessened, sufficiently so they might WIN such a comparison?

My Lady Disdain could no doubt enlighten us, but alas, she’s boogie-boarding in Cabo with Johnny Lang and won’t be back until he’s won a Grammy. Until then, with books like “The Rules of Gentility,” we’re, as noted, on our own.