strange and random happenstance

The End of Temperance Dare by Wendy Webb
Published by: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: June 6th, 2017
Format: Paperback, 336 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Despite a looming sense of dread she's carried for months everything seems to be falling into place for Eleanor Harper but in the most unexpected of ways. She loses her job as a crime reporter at the same time the position for director of the prestigious Cliffside Manor artists retreat becomes available. Eleanor has been drawn to the old tuberculosis hospital ever since she went there twenty years earlier as a cub reporter covering the sudden deaths of the hospital's founder, Chester Dare, and one of his daughters, Milly, in a tragic car accident. His remaining daughter, Penelope, has run the retreat ever since and she feels it's time to hand the reigns to the next generation. While Eleanor isn't the most qualified Miss Penny felt a connection to her all those years ago because they both agreed that the accident was no accident. Miss Penny never blamed Eleanor, who as an inexperienced reporter was unable to shed light on the deaths, but admired her tenacity and has followed her journalistic career with interest. When Eleanor arrives at the Manor through the mists she feels like she's home. Miss Penny welcomes her with open arms and inducts her into the running of the retreat, which is mainly handled by an extensive staff. In a week they are to get the current group of artists for a month-long residency and Eleanor will shadow Miss Penny until she's confident enough that she can handle the responsibilities herself. At least that's what Eleanor thought the plan was to be, Miss Penny had other ideas, as that afternoon she commits suicide and leaves everything in Eleanor's inexperienced hands. Eleanor is baffled by the predicament she has landed in but she views it only right to mourn but continue on in Miss Penny's memory. Therefore a week later the five artists arrive. Things do not go to plan. Miss Penny brought everyone here with a purpose... is she acting from beyond the grave? But more importantly, is she acting alone or are other supernatural elements at work?

Here's the problem I have with Gothic stories that involve haunted houses, there needs to be enough wiggle room that the "haunting" could all be chalked up to psychological issues. You need that suspension of disbelief. You have to be convinced or dissuaded through the story, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is a masterclass in this conceit. A Tuberculosis hospital is a whole lot of heck no from me. The reason for this is that TB hospitals were, as it says in this book, a “waiting room for death.” All hauntings derive from a death, here we have a plurality of death, so in my mind there is no question as to whether or not Cliffside Manor is haunted. It is SO haunted. This is a place where ghost hunters go, not artistic types. I have NO DOUBT that ghosts exist. What exactly they are I'm not sure, but I have seen many ghosts in my life, some benign, some very much the opposite. I would NEVER go willingly to a place like Cliffside Manor, it would be too much. Add to that the fact this retreat is made for artists like me... I really don't get how places at the retreat are so sought after. Yes, there is a wide range of susceptibility when it comes to seeing the supernatural, but the truth is the more sensitive you are to the world around you, the more open you are, the more likely you are to have such an experience. Therefore people who are artistic are more likely to pick up on these vibes, much like how artists are the ones who can hear the call of Cthulhu in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. So how are these artists not being like, don't go there, it's haunted. Word of mouth would spread like wildfire, but instead they have people clamoring for vacancies. This makes no sense to me, which makes me feel like the entire setup is unbelievable and therefore I don't buy into the story.

What's more it's hard to buy into a story where you're not quite certain if you're dealing with an unreliable narrator or not. My problem in this instance was that I couldn't tell if the red herrings I was following were meant to be red herrings or were just bad editing. To be clear, I reached the correct conclusion, I just don't know if I was meant to reach that conclusion in the first few chapters. What alerted my spider senses was Eleanor arriving at Cliffside Manor on a Thursday and the guests being scheduled to arrive the next Friday, but within minutes it was "arriving in one week." I don't know who taught Eleanor or Webb about the days of the week but that's longer than a week. Yes, you could brush it off as just common vernacular, it's about a week, but the way Webb writes I disagree. She is very precise, very matter of fact, you can tell she was a journalist herself in the very way everything is as it should be and nothing is out of place. If a book could be neat as a pin, this would be that book, and if I'm honest, I'd rather choose sloppy and lyrical than this. Which makes this first error glaring. IF this was a hint as to Eleanor's reliability as a narrator, I have to give Webb kudos. It was subtle and just enough to bait the reader. If, on the other hand, this was just a typo, in fact the most common of typos if I'm to be honest, because writers as a whole don't look at calendars despite the fact you can look up ANY calendar year online, well, then it's bad luck that a transcription or writing or editing error gave away something that's rather important. But then again, I feel like the whole unreliable narrator is played out. It's a way to delay the reveal while having the answer in front of you the whole time, and to me, that's kind of smug storytelling, though not nearly as bad as an author like Josephine Tey who purposefully left clues out so that the reader couldn't solve her riddles.

The truth is, The End of Temperance Dare relies too heavily on overplayed tropes. The obviously haunted local, the unreliable narrator, the love triangle (more on that in a minute), and the sexualization of children as a sign of evil. Think of all the movies and all the books over the years that have had innocent children possessed by evil spirits say licentious things and you know where I'm coming from. The Exorcist anyone? The problem I have with this trope is that instead of just being unsettling it verges on the edge of child exploitation, which is one of the MANY reasons I have never read Anne Rice again after Interview with the Vampire because of how she handles Claudia. Here it's taken further with the evil spirit of Temperance who is eleven in human years being obsessed with the Doctor as her future husband and later while controlling her sisters body not only is a loose woman, but stalks the photographer Richard, who is one of the members of the retreat we meet. It's hinted at that she was born a demon and she had impure thoughts and behaviors from the day she was born, yet Webb is never explicit enough with these revelations. Instead she leaves it all up to the reader's imagination, and I just don't like that because it's a cop out. She shows us these disturbing images and behaviors and then never fully goes to the root of the evil, therefore making the villain a sexually precocious child. That just freaks me out too much. And not in the good way. Instead I felt ill and the denouement and happily ever after left a bitter taste in my mouth because evil was left to be evil and the motives behind that evil were just to have her way with everyone especially these two men?

These two men who then form the other two corners of a love triangle wit Eleanor/Temperance. Because instead of Eleanor being involved in a healthy relationship she finds herself drawn into flirtations with the retreat's doctor, Nat, and one of the guests, Richard. This triangle felt so forced. Here is a professional woman trying to make a good impression at her new job and instead she is behaving like a lovestruck teenager... or should I say sexually precocious child? So the reason I hated this element of the narrative isn't that I just hate love triangles, because I do, I really really do, it's because the relationships don't feel like they organically develop. Which, I guess you could say, they didn't. But in order to achieve that happily ever after we bafflingly reach there has to be a kernel of truth amongst all the supernatural manipulations for the ending to be at least mildly believable. But in the end, looking at the whole story of Temperance Dare, I can't help think that it was a looong setup for very little reward. Sure, all the pieces fit into place, but mechanically. You have no emotions invested in the characters. It's too by the book. A paint by numbers narrative which would just horrify Henry, who was the resident painter at the retreat who worked in oils yet had no proper venting in his room for painting oils indoors. And then a happy ending where everyone gets what they want? That's not believable, that's contrived. I haven't read any of Webb's other books, but I hope there's a little more spark and a lot less plodding out of plot points. I can't take another book like this one, it was too predictable and plebeian.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anne Rice, Artists' Retreat, Ghosts, Going Gothic, Interview with the Vampire, Josephine Tey, Possession, Shirley Jackson, The End of Temperance Dare, The Exorcist, The Haunting of Hill House, Trope, Wendy Webb

Possession by A.S. Byatt
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: 1990
Format: Paperback, 555 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Roland Michell is an academic with very limited options. He's toiling away researching the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash while living off his girlfriend, who he doesn't much care for, in a cat pee soaked apartment, when everything changes. Roland finds an unknown letter that Ash wrote to a female that might just be Roland's lucky break. He traces the correspondence to a Christabel LaMotte, who was an almost unknown female poet at the same time as Ash, and who is the darling of feminist academia. Roland approaches the preeminent scholar on LaMotte, Maud Bailey, directly, circumventing his own department in some odd impulse to keep his discovery to himself. What the two of them find is rather interesting and will change the presumed histories of the two poets drastically. Everyone has always assumed that Ash was happily married, though sadly childless, and that LaMotte was a lesbian living with the painter Blanche Glover. But their letters to each other prove that this is anything but the case. Slowly unravelling the past while trying to keep the present at bay, Roland and Maud are gripped by a fever to find the truth of what really happened to two people over a hundred years ago.

Most people who know me now are shocked to discover that I wasn't always a reader. I didn't read much, I didn't like school and was a bad student, and I mainly watched movies. Somewhere along the way that completely reversed itself. This has had the effect that I always feel like I'm playing catchup. I'm always trying to read what others consider "standard" or "classic" books. In fact I only heard about A.S. Byatt because of the movie version of Possession. While I have said before that I have this inbuilt need to read the book before seeing the movie, in the early days of my discovering authors, a movie adaptation would help to introduce me to authors I might never have found on my own. Hence me and Possession. I too have the copy with The Beguiling of Merlin by Burne-Jones on the cover but with that lovely "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture" sticker firmly planted above Merlin's head.

I had no expectations going into this book the first time, but I was sorely disappointed. I've never been the biggest fan of poetry, and that is a bit of an issue when reading a book about poets. To paraphrase Possessions own words, poetry is a love of words where prose is a love of story, of narration. I have always loved stories, if the words are well chosen, then it adds something more, but I do not rhapsodize or wax nostalgic over the rhythm and flow of words. The epic poems of Ash and LaMotte were just sections to be read hastily for clues before the plot resumed. All this and more meant I just didn't connect and was left dissatisfied. I remember finishing the book on a warm Sunday in May and feeling this need to do something to alleviate this want in me. I met my friend Sara and we went to a movie, but all the while I was thinking about how Possession had let me down. I had that itch under my skin when you've spent so much time on something and it just doesn't work out in the end. It's a dissatisfaction on such a huge scale that it's almost like having a panic attack. Later that summer after seeing the disastrous movie adaptation with my most hated of actors, Aaron Eckhart, I knew the book could have been far worse, in the way that I knew I would come back one day to this book and try to find the connection that I had felt wanting the first time.

Possession the second time around was a far better read. I understood more what Byatt was trying to do and more of her literary allusions weren't over my head. But more importantly, I feel like I now possess the language to say why it was the book left me cold in the first place. I can now identify and name that itch under my skin and relieve it through critique. Possession starts with a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne's preface to his book The House of Seven Gables asking for clemency for his book's adherence to the standards and tropes of the Romance genre. He begs the reader to allow latitude in his predictability and lack of realism. By using this quote Byatt is also asking us to forgive her using the same tropes of the Romance genre, with a capital "R". There are two problems inherent in this "confession". Firstly, as an artist I was taught that you never make excuses or apologize for your work. As far as the viewer, or reader in Byatt's case, is concerned, this is the best freakin' thing that has ever been done and you need to sell it as such. If you start out with an apology you are basically telling someone that there is a flaw in the work and it is human nature to search out that flaw.

This is a flawed book, it is by no means perfect. The predictability of the story with the absurd ending that you could see a mile off was my second and ultimately main problem with Possession. Going back to the Hawthorne quote I wonder if Byatt chose this quote not to give a historic literary connection between her and Hawthorne, but to apologize for her work, by writing the quote Hawthorne himself has thankfully already apologized for the abysmal The House of Seven Gables. As I've said before, no excuses, no apology, even if you really need to make one, giving one makes you look weak. You can't justify your work being subpar by saying it's the genre that made me do it. Was it the genre that made the book have unlikable passionless characters whose connection and attraction is initially based on the mind but devolves into a physical passion that still has this weird cold and unfeeling vibe? No, that was you who did that. That was your writing, not the genre. As for the rapidity of time making things obsolete... well, that's no one's fault. This book feels dated, more so then when I read it twelve years ago, and it's not just the lack of computers and the prevalence of copy machines, but the very change in the nature and meaning of language. Glory Holes have a far far different universal connotation now... I'm hoping Byatt was aware of this then lesser used definition when she was writing the book in the eighties...

But for everything that this book does wrong, it does get things right. I love the Victorian time period, and in specific I love seances. I like both the idea that they could possibly be real, but also the intricacies of chicanery that the false mediums created in order to fool their marks. I even went to a photography exhibition years ago at the MET that was supposed proof from the time of the veracity of spirits... let's put it this way, they had the original Cottingley Fairies, so, that's the level of truth in these photographs. But what interested me in Possession was that it was posited that these seances are in some way a replacement for storytelling. The beginning of the beloved television show The Storyteller was right in that "people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, [and] foretold the future with stories." Stories were a faith. Mythology and folktales are part of us. But in Victorian England, so much advancement in such a little time was stripping away the foundations of faith. Such searching and questioning changed the world. People needed a new way to search for the meaning of life, and for some that came in the form of seances. They needed to know that life had meaning and they were searching for it beyond the vale. Ash and LaMotte are both curious and questioning individuals, it makes sense that they, as artists, would not only embrace the old ways but also the new. These two ways, through language and planchette, unite the very human needs across the generations to quench the thirst for knowledge, a thirst that is then taken up in the "present" by Roland and Maud and unifies the book not only in it's own narratives but to our own lives.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A. S. Byatt, Apology, Christabel LaMotte, Merlin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poet, Possession, Pre-Raphaelite, Randolph Henry Ash, Seances, Spiritualism, Sweet Reads, The House of Seven Gables, Victorian

What with the classic the movie has become it's understandable that a lot of people often forget that The Exorcist was a novel first by William Peter Blatty. In fact, so many of the classic horror films of the seventies were books first, but today I'm only interested in this one. While I initially said at the beginning of this month that I was only going to talk about shows that started out in book form, this is another one that stretches the boundaries of that definition in that it's a continuation of the story first set on page by Blatty. While I know many people out there, including many of my friends, are still hesitant to embrace this show it had one thing initially that had me interested, Ben Daniels, whom if you don't love him from season two of The Paradise I literally don't know what's to be done with you. Alan Ruck was just a wonderful surprise. At first you don't realize that this is actually connected to the original story, instead it's just a family suffering from a possession and the old wise priest and the young inexperienced priest are called in to help. But then things get complicated, there's a plot against the Pope by demonic forces and humans aligned with the demons, and if you don't love that poster announcing the Pope coming to Chicago like he's Elvis, again, what is to be done with you? But if you wait for the payoff as to who Genna Davis is, yes, she's not JUST a hardworking suburban housewife, well, it's so worth it. In fact, despite everyone thinking this show was going to be cancelled, it seems there were enough people like me singing it's praises in a properly sanctified church to get it a second season pickup. Might I suggest that an exorcist see you this Halloween season? 

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adaptation, Alan Ruck, And the Emmy Goes To, Ben Daniels, Chicago, Demons, Elvis, Genna Davis, Possession, The Exorcist, The Paradise, The Pope, William Peter Blatty

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Published by: Penguin
Publication Date: 1962
Format: Hardcover, 235 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

None of the villagers go to Hill House. No one will hear you scream, in the dark, in the night. Dr. Montague views the house as the ideal location for his research of supernatural phenomena. The house's history coupled with the right participants should yield him the results he's looking for. Yet he only heard back from a few people selected as the perfect candidates for his summer long program, for sensitivity combined with previous supernatural encounters. In the end he gets the shy and awkward Eleanor who has spent much of her life caring for her recently deceased mother. She doesn't even remember the incident for which Dr. Montague recruited her she just views Hill House as her first real adventure and a way to get out from under the stifling life she's living on a cot at her sister's. Theo was chosen because of her apparent psychic abilities. Then there's Luke. Luke is the heir to Hill House. He doesn't have abilities or haunting experiences, he just needs to get out of his troubling patterns and his grandmother thinks locking him away at Hill House as a guarantee against Dr. Montague's lease is a lovely idea.

After each of the participants successfully battle their way past the suspicious caretaker, Mr. Dudley, and get explained the rigorous rules as regards the meals and cleaning up by his wife the group settles in. It does not take long for weird knocks to happen at doors in the night as well as severe temperature drops. The doors don't like to remain open, if this is Mrs. Dudley, or the house, they can't figure it out even with the aid of large doorstops. Very shortly they instigate a rule that no one is to wander alone, especially at night. Yet what is actually happening, if they where to write it down as per Dr. Montague's research guidelines, they wouldn't or couldn't be able to put it into words. Strange writings, noises, voices, drafts, and above all four very different personalities clashing, not counting the possible personalities of the house's former occupants. Is any of this real? Or are they hallucinating? Or should they all leave the house as fast as they can and never look back?

The Haunting of Hill House is the standard to which modern ghost stories are held. Even Stephen King has been known on more than one occasion to extol the virtues of this book. When I first read this book I couldn't help wondering why. But as more time passed I realized The Haunting of Hill House had left an impression on me and that I had perhaps judged it based on what I thought it should be versus what it was. Going back to the book I was once again drawn into Jackson's writing. She is able to depict places and characters so well that you feel you are inhabiting them. I also was able to pinpoint my dissatisfaction from my first reading. It's the ending. While I'm fine with open ended ambiguity it's that it was rushed. The book has a very languorous pace from Eleanor's daydreaming drive to Hill House through the daily routine the four occupants adapt, living like they are on holiday. And then Doctor Montague's wife arrives. This is when the story falls apart and just rushes headlong like Nell through the halls of the house until she goes straight into a tree. While this could have been Jackson's plan, having Mrs. Montague be the final push to Nell's death, instead it just feels like Jackson used Mrs. Montague to end the story in an abrupt if timely fashion.

Another reason I was initially dissatisfied was that there really isn't a plot per se. The book goes for impressions over tangibility. Any time anything vaguely spooky happens it's just glossed over or made light of when day breaks. The big scene where Theo and Nell are running from something, that's it, they ran, cut to the next morning where it will never be mentioned again. Yet over time this lack of substance works it's way into you building suspense and paranoia. This book is a slow burn, you might not feel the effects for a long time. Jackson is literally playing with our minds and the more you're willing to go back to the text the more the story works. A cumulative horror that becomes a compulsion that gripes you every fall. Because of all the things that Jackson doesn't say and doesn't spell out this allows The Haunting of Hill House to be interpreted a thousand different ways. Even the ending can be debated. As Nell slams her car into the tree so that she can forever stay at Hill House we aren't even certain of her death. All that we know is she longed for death, either because she was already suicidal or because she was driven there by supernatural means. Nell is the key here, because it's through her we are told the story and this might just be the biggest corker of an unreliable narrator ever.

Nell is interesting, but you can't really get a read on her. You know what it's like to be inside her mind, but it quickly becomes clear that this won't help you figure out what's happening, you just have to give in and let go. Her mind jumps and contradicts and doesn't make any kind of sense. Yet she is a sympathetic character. You're not sure if she's crazy but you become complicit in Nell's actions during the drive to Hill House. As she travels to her destination she sees glimpses of houses in different towns and wonders, what would her life be like there? What would happen if she decided this town was her final destination and it was her new home? Who hasn't while out walking or driving looked at a house or through an illuminated window at night and wondered what would their life be like if that was their house. Who would they be in a different setting? And that's how we become one with Nell. Whatever happens from that moment forward, whatever fantasy she spins about her and Theodora, whatever she see or hears, we are fully invested. We give in and let go with her and love the ride aboard the crazy train.

In fact, this analysis of Nell leads into the idea that Nell is in fact the haunting... but as I've said before you can interpret this book so many different ways that I find saying Nell is the haunting is wrong. I don't think the encounters the four occupants of Hill House come up against are manifestations of Nell. I think the house is it's own entity. It isn't just a building, it's a home, with personality, and once you have personality it is one quick step to being a person, a character in your own right. Therefore I fully believe that the house is haunted and it's not Nell. Well, it's not Nell at first. Because I think Nell is sensitive and is tuned into the house and as time goes on they are becoming one, which would be why she'd kill herself to never leave it. This is very obvious once Mrs. Montague arrives. Before this time the banging on the doors and the noises were unnatural phenomena that the house was creating, but once the good doctor's wife arrives Nell is the one banging on the doors. I think this is because the house is now using her for what it had to do by itself before. Nell has become an extension of the house and therefore helps with the haunting. It's no wonder she doesn't want to leave when this is the only place she's ever felt welcome.

In fact going back to this book I've realized that there's only one real problem with the different interpretations, and that's the lesbianism. I'm not against this at all and think that Nell and Theodora would make a lovely couple and they balance each other so well, what I see as problematic is Jackson's vehement denials that The Haunting of Hill House has anything to do with sex and in particular lesbianism. She didn't see sex as entering into her story at all. But so much of her story goes against what she later stated. Theodora is obviously a woman of the world while Nell is the virginal character who just doesn't understand, an innocent nature that the house can corrupt. Yet there's a connection between them long before there's a connection between Nell and the house. Also the fact that Jackson never comes out and says that Theodora's partner whom she left behind is male or female, though female is strongly implied, then why write this? Why have this omission if you didn't want the book to be read this way? If she was so against this interpretation just a few clarifications could have solved it. But then she wanted to leave her readers mystified and perhaps, despite her denials, this was just another mystery she enjoyed dangling in front of her audience. She was a master manipulator after all.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Eleanor, Ghosts, Going Gothic, Haunting, Lesbian, Possession, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Supernatural, The Haunting of Hill House

Possession by A.S. Byatt
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: 1990
Format: Paperback, 555 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

"What can you say about Possession? It was a phenomenon when I was in my teens. The lush prose, the poetry, the meticulously detailed academic mystery as two scholars dig down into the past of two—previously unconnected—Victorian poets. All I can say is, don’t watch the movie. Read the book.

I didn’t consciously think of Possession when I started writing That Summer, but it was there with me anyway, there in the unpicking of a historical mystery and there in the cultural context. Possession is about poetry and That Summer about paintings, but when one is talking about the Preraphaelites, it’s very hard to extricate the one from the other: Dante Gabriel Rossetti nearly dropped his art to become a poet, while his sister Christina’s poetry is, for me, the epitome of that cultural moment.

The cover of my old copy of Possession boasts a painting by Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin. I suggested to my publisher that we name my book The Beguiling of Imogen, but they were not amused.

It does kind of have a ring to it, though, doesn’t it?" - Lauren Willig

Roland Michell is an academic with very limited options. He's toiling away researching the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash while living off his girlfriend, who he doesn't much care for, in a cat pee soaked apartment, when everything changes. Roland finds an unknown letter that Ash wrote to a female that might just be Roland's lucky break. He traces the correspondence to a Christabel LaMotte, who was an almost unknown female poet at the same time as Ash, and who is the darling of feminist academia. Roland approaches the preeminent scholar on LaMotte, Maud Bailey, directly, circumventing his own department in some odd impulse to keep his discovery to himself. What the two of them find is rather interesting and will change the presumed histories of the two poets drastically. Everyone has always assumed that Ash was happily married, though sadly childless, and that LaMotte was a lesbian living with the painter Blanche Glover. But their letters to each other prove that this is anything but the case. Slowly unravelling the past while trying to keep the present at bay, Roland and Maud are gripped by a fever to find the truth of what really happened to two people over a hundred years ago.

Most people who know me now are shocked to discover that I wasn't always a reader. I didn't read much, I didn't like school and was a bad student, and I mainly watched movies. Somewhere along the way that completely reversed itself. This has had the effect that I always feel like I'm playing catchup. I'm always trying to read what others consider "standard" or "classic" books. In fact I only heard about A.S. Byatt because of the movie version of Possession. While I have said before that I have this inbuilt need to read the book before seeing the movie, in the early days of my discovering authors, a movie adaptation would help to introduce me to authors I might never have found on my own. Hence me and Possession. I too have the copy with The Beguiling of Merlin by Burne-Jones on the cover but with that lovely "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture" sticker firmly planted above Merlin's head.

I had no expectations going into this book the first time, but I was sorely disappointed. I've never been the biggest fan of poetry, and that is a bit of an issue when reading a book about poets. To paraphrase Possessions own words, poetry is a love of words where prose is a love of story, of narration. I have always loved stories, if the words are well chosen, then it adds something more, but I do not rhapsodize or wax nostalgic over the rhythm and flow of words. The epic poems of Ash and LaMotte where just sections to be read hastily for clues before the plot resumed. All this and more meant I just didn't connect and was left dissatisfied. I remember finishing the book on a warm Sunday in May and feeling this need to do something to alleviate this want in me. I met my friend Sara and we went to a movie, but all the while I was thinking about how Possession had let me down. I had that itch under my skin when you've spent so much time on something and it just doesn't work out in the end. It's a dissatisfaction on such a huge scale that it's almost like having a panic attack. Later that summer after seeing the disastrous movie adaptation with my most hated of actors, Aaron Eckhart, I knew the book could have been far worse, in the way that I knew I would come back one day to this book and try to find the connection that I had felt wanting the first time.

Possession the second time around was a far better read. I understood more what Byatt was trying to do and more of her literary allusions weren't over my head. But more importantly, I feel like I now possess the language to say why it was the book left me cold in the first place. I can now identify and name that itch under my skin and relieve it through critique. Possession starts with a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne's preface to his book The House of Seven Gables asking for clemency for his book's adherence to the standards and tropes of the Romance genre. He begs the reader to allow latitude in his predictability and lack of realism. By using this quote Byatt is also asking us to forgive her using the same tropes of the Romance genre, with a capital "R". There are two problems inherent in this "confession". Firstly, as an artist I was taught that you never make excuses or apologize for your work. As far as the viewer, or reader in Byatt's case, is concerned, this is the best freakin' thing that has ever been done and you need to sell it as such. If you start out with an apology you are basically telling someone that there is a flaw in the work and it is human nature to search out that flaw.

This is a flawed book, it is by no means perfect. The predictability of the story with the absurd ending that you could see a mile off was my second and main problem with Possession. Going back to the Hawthorne quote I wonder if Byatt chose this quote not to give a historic literary connection between her and Hawthorne, but to apologize for her work, by writing the quote Hawthorne himself has thankfully already apologized for the abysmal The House of Seven Gables. As I've said before, no excuses, no apology, even if you really need to make one, giving one makes you look weak. You can't justify your work being subpar by saying it's the genre that made me do it. Was it the genre that made the book have unlikable passionless characters was connection and attraction is initially based on the mind but devolves into a physical passion that still has this weird cold and unfeeling vibe? No, that was you who did that. That was your writing, not the genre. As for the rapidity of time making things obsolete... well, that's no one's fault. This book feels dated, more so then when I read it twelve years ago, and it's not just the lack of computers and the prevalence of copy machines, but the very change in the nature and meaning of language. Glory Holes have a far far different universal connotation now... I'm hoping Byatt was aware of this then lesser used definition when she was writing the book in the eighties...

But for everything that this book does wrong, it does get things right. I love the Victorian time period, and in specific I love seances. I like both the idea that they could possibly be real, but also the intricacies of chicanery that the false mediums created in order to fool their marks. I even went to a photography exhibition years ago at the MET that was supposed proof from the time of the veracity of spirits... let's but it this way, they had the original Cottingley Fairies, so, that's the level of truth in these photographs. But what interested me in Possession was that it was posited that these seances are in some way a replacement for storytelling. The beginning of the beloved television show The Storyteller was right in that "people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, [and] foretold the future with stories." Stories were a faith. Mythology and folktales are part of us. But in Victorian England, so much advancement in such a little time was stripping away the foundations of faith. Such searching and questioning changed the world. People needed a new way to search for the meaning of life, and for some that came in the form of seances. They needed to know that life had meaning and they were searching for it beyond the vale. Ash and LaMotte are both curious and questioning individuals, it makes sense that they, as artists, would not only embrace the old ways but also the new. These two ways, through language and planchette, unite the very human needs across the generations to quench the thirst for knowledge, a thirst that is then taken up in the "present" by Roland and Maud and unifies the book not only in it's own narratives but to our own lives.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A. S. Byatt, Apology, Christabel LaMotte, Lauren Willig, Merlin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poet, Possession, Pre-Raphaelite, Randolph Henry Ash, Seances, Spiritualism, That Summer, The House of Seven Gables, Victorian

The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig
Published by: NAL Trade
Publication Date: August 6th, 2013
Format: Paperback, 480 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Lauren Willig’s Pink Carnation novels have been hailed as “sheer fun”* and “charming.”** Now she takes readers on an adventure filled with hidden treasure and a devilishly handsome English colonel....

Colonel William Reid has returned home from India to retire near his children, who are safely stowed at an academy in Bath. Upon his return to the Isles, however, he finds that one of his daughters has vanished, along with one of her classmates.

Because she served as second-in-command to the Pink Carnation, one of England’s most intrepid spies, it would be impossible for Gwendolyn Meadows to give up the intrigue of Paris for a quiet life in the English countryside—especially when she’s just overheard news of an alliance forming between Napoleon and an Ottoman Sultan. But, when the Pink Carnation’s little sister goes missing from her English boarding school, Gwen reluctantly returns home to investigate the girl’s disappearance.

Thrown together by circumstance, Gwen and William must cooperate to track down the young ladies before others with nefarious intent get their hands on them. But Gwen’s partnership with quick-tongued, roguish William may prove to be even more of an adventure for her than finding the lost girls…"

While there's a part of me that's really really sad this isn't in hardcover and now my other hardcovers will feel lonely, there's another part that realizes, my favorite book in the series, Mischief of the Mistletoe, while hardcover, wasn't the same size as the others so therefore, size or binding doesn't matter. And truly, it doesn't, this book is so awesome you'll just devour it in whatever format it comes in.

Heirs and Graces by Rhys Bowen
Published by: Berkley
Publication Date: August 6th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"As thirty-fifth in line for the throne, Lady Georgiana Rannoch may not be the most sophisticated young woman, but she knows her table manners. It’s forks on the left, knives on the right—not in His Majesty’s back…

Here I am thinking the education I received at my posh Swiss finishing school would never come in handy. And while it hasn’t landed me a job, or a husband, it has convinced Her Majesty the Queen and the Dowager Duchess to enlist my help. I have been entrusted with grooming Jack Altringham—the Duke’s newly discovered heir fresh from the Outback of Australia—for high society.

The upside is I am to live in luxury at one of England’s most gorgeous stately homes. But upon arrival at Kingsdowne Place, my dearest Darcy has been sent to fetch Jack, leaving me stuck in a manor full of miscreants…none of whom are too pleased with the discovery of my new ward.

And no sooner has the lad been retrieved than the Duke announces he wants to choose his own heir. With the house in a hubbub over the news, Jack’s hunting knife somehow finds its way into the Duke’s back. Eyes fall, backs turn, and fingers point to the young heir. As if the rascal wasn’t enough of a handful, now he’s suspected of murder. Jack may be wild, but I’d bet the crown jewels it wasn’t he who killed the Duke…"

New Rhys Bowen? Yes please.

Possession by Kat Richardson
Published by: Roc Hardcover
Publication Date: August 6th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Harper Blaine was your average small-time PI until she died—for two minutes. Now Harper is a Greywalker, treading the thin line between the living world and the paranormal realm. And she’s discovering that her new abilities are landing her all sorts of “strange” cases.

When a comatose woman suddenly wakes up and starts painting scenes she’s never witnessed, with a skill she’s never had, medical science has no explanation. As more bizarre phenomena manifest, including mysterious writing appearing on the patient’s skin and strange voices issuing from her mouth, even her doctors start to wonder whether the woman may be possessed.

Frustrated, frightened, and at the end of her rope, the patient’s sister reluctantly turns to Harper Blaine to discover who—or what—is occupying her sister’s body. As Harper digs into this case of apparent possession, she discovers other patients struck with the same mystifying afflictions and a disturbing connection to one of the most gruesome episodes in Washington’s history...."

Oh, new Greywalker Novel... makes me remember I forgot to pick up the last one, oops.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Greywalker, Heirs and Graces, Her Royal Spyness, Kat Richardson, Lauren Willig, Miss Gwen, Pink Carnation, Possession, Rhys Bowen, The Passion of the Purple Plumeria