strange and random happenstance

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: August 10th, 2010
Format: Paperback, 240 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Fanny's mother is known throughout the family as "The Bolter." Leaving your child behind to be raised by your siblings isn't that odd in a family that uses children instead of foxes in hunts, has their own distinct argot, and lives in such an old house that only one closet has the warmth to be bearable in cold weather. It is in this "Hons" closet that Fanny and her cousin Linda spend all their time dreaming of true love. Because love is what life is all about. As they grow up their thoughts turn less from the fantasy of marrying the Prince of Wales and more towards any decent chap that can be lured to Alconleigh for their debut ball. Linda, growing up at Alconleigh, has not had the luxury of the education that Fanny has had living most of her time with their Aunt Emily in London. Linda therefore is so desperate to fall in love that she mistakenly falls for the first man who comes along. The wrong man, Tony Kroesig. While Fanny happily settles down with an Oxford don and starts having babies, Linda's marriage to Tony becomes nothing more than a sham. They have one daughter, whom Linda can't stand, but she keeps up the pretense of happy families, until one day she throws off her Facist husband for a Communist Christian. But yet again Linda has misstepped, thinking that she is in love when really she is just in love with being away from Tony. Always wanting so desperately to be in love Linda mistakes any male attention for the real deal. Could she be turning into Fanny's mother, The Bolter? Or will her desperate search for love pay off in the oddest of ways?

I remember one winter day when I first picked up the Vintage omnibus of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. The selling point to me was the big silver sticker they had put on the cover for Masterpiece Theatre. I covet those PBS tie-in editions of yore with the beautiful artwork and here was a brand new one waiting for me to buy it. I have mentioned this before, but I am the book dork who must always read a book before watching the show, so I set to reading this before the miniseries was to air. This was a hard time in my life, I had just temporarily dropped out of college because of multiple deaths in the family and I took solace in this little escape. While I enjoyed the book, I was really looking forward to watching the miniseries more than anything. Of course, nothing goes to plan. My main problem was I was living with my family and we had only two tvs. This was to air on a Monday night, which meant one of the TVs was designated for my little brother watching Monday Night Wrestling, which meant I had to negotiate for the second TV with my mother. My mother agreed to watch it, so long as it was good. She lasted less then five minutes before she claimed boredom and changed the channel, to Two and a Half Men, to add insult to injury. I was so fed up with everyone else getting what they wanted when all I wanted to do was watch one episode of Masterpiece Theatre that I went into my room and cried. I had waited months and my mom had let me have five minutes. I had to wait more than four years to finally see the series... so logically enough, my memory of the book faded because of the incident and the emotion that followed.

Therefore a re-read was in order! I had remembered very little in the years that followed my initial reading, many of my memories were tied up in the aforementioned incident and in the second volume of the book, so I was pleasantly surprised by what I had forgotten and what I had remembered. The odd thing about this book is, truthfully, there really isn't a plot. Instead it is about the yearning and desire for love and how that can go unexpectedly right and horribly wrong. Of all the love stories told, the two that I enjoy the most were Jassy's and Linda's final love. Jassy, Linda's younger sister, has spent her entire life saving up money to run away, finally she does so in order to go to Hollywood and court an actor she has fallen for, who played a background artist in a pirate movie. The media sensation that follows is almost more entertaining than the end of the courtship, with her father viewing the reporters trying to sneak into his house as the first real and formidable enemies since he killed Germans with his entrenching tool in The Great War. While Linda's love of Fabrice is so unexpected when they meet at the train station as she is leaving her second husband, it is their banter and their easy natural conversation that makes you realize that it's not the money and it's not the looks, it's how you click that matters. Linda and I learned that love can be found in the most unexpected of places when you least expect it.

Yet, what I found most interesting about this book is how it was a mirror for the Mitfords themselves. The first time I read this book I knew about them in the vaguest of terms. Sisters, writers, one or two hung out with Hitler, whatever, it wasn't of concern to me, this was fiction. But as Nancy's sister Jessica points out in the introduction "we all know [Nancy's] got no imagination" because "there we were, larger than life, Mitfords renamed Radletts, reliving our childhoods as seen through Nancy's strange triangular green eyes." And this was a trait shared by all Nancy's books, just look to the controversy surrounding Wigs on the Green, therefore the more you know about the Mitfords the funnier her books are. Here Nancy revels in lampooning herself and her family. Her sisters Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah, and brother Tom are all fair game, from what they did to even how they spoke, Hons being the family argot for their honorable titles and here lovingly given to a closet. Let's look as to what happened in real life that was included in this book? Jessica running off to Spain with a communist, yes times two. Diana up and leaving her catholic husband for a fascist, yes, but in reverse. Nancy's affair with a Frenchman, thankfully showing she is willing to lampoon herself, also happens. But it's not just the big things, the life changing events that are mirrored, it's their love of animals, that weird language all their own, a million things that made up this family.

This book is the Mitfords as seen through a slightly wobbly magnifying lens and I love the book for this more than any other reason. It brings these people to life in a way a thousand biographies never could, though granted I've only read a few. And Nancy continued these characters stories in Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred. But here's the rub, Don't Tell Alfred is often forgotten and pushed aside. Albeit it is set twenty years later, and was written eleven years after Love in a Cold Climate, I find it odd that it's so often omitted. The first two books in this trilogy are often released as an omnibus and have even been dramatized twice, once in 1980 with Judi Dench and again in 2001, which was the version I mentioned above. Yet where is Alfred? I could be cruel and say it's because it's a far inferior book, which is my personal truth, but I just find it odd that Nancy Mitford only wrote a handful of books in her life, only eight "fiction" books, and of those so many were purposefully pushed aside. As I mentioned before her book Wigs on the Green had a bit of a to-do, which resulted in it never being reprinted until recently, and not many people rhapsodize about The Blessing, which overly romanticizes the philandering ways of French men, but it is my belief that we can't just omit something because it doesn't reach the heights attained by it's predecessors. For someone who so ruthlessly portrayed the painful truths of her family it's odd to me that Nancy would willingly excise parts of her own history. But that is the beauty of being the one who writes down the history am I right? You can make of it what you will. Or in this case you can just go read one of the books written by her sisters for another opinion.   

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alconleigh, Diana Mitford, Hitler, Jessica Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate, Masterpiece Theater, Mitford March, Mitfords, Nancy Mitford, PBS, Sweet Reads, The Bolter, The Great War, The Pursuit of Love

Sometime last year I realized that two of my most favorite authors, Mary Robinette Kowal and Lauren Willig, were coming out with books this year set during The Great War. This couldn't be a coincidence I could just dismiss. Oh no. Both these authors have been a part of theme months in the past, so it only made sense to fashion a new theme month out of this random happenstance! And thus A Fall of Poppies was born! Taken from the time of year and the title of the short story collection Lauren was a part of I had the seed of inspiration. But what else could I do? Because while I am fascinated by World War I, I feel that often World War II overshadows it and takes the bulk of the narratives. I felt it was my duty to not only shine the spotlight on an event that forever changed the shape of history, but that in doing so affected every form of medium, from books to films to television to photography to poetry to art. The Great War, in all it's horror, gave inspiration to so many. And I'm not talking about how it inspired the Germans to start another World War and try to get it right this time.

While the easy way out would be to take a traditional look at World War I and the literature of the time; literature being the great medium it is, World War I has had a myriad of influences on speculative and alternative histories as well as British Comedies. This decision to choose non-traditional books, shows, and movies wasn't taken lightly or solely because Mary's book is an alternative history and would otherwise feel out of place, but in order to show how many different people handle one idea. From the more traditional to the more Steampunk. From the more TV movie of the week to the more comic. I was inspired to seek out sources that would be different and that had helped inform my own knowledge. So expect some Blackadder, expect some Young Indiana Jones, expect some Benedict Cumberbatch, expect the unexpected, and join me in looking back at the war that so changed the world it was never dreamed there could be another.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Fall of Poppies, Benedict Cumberbatch, Blackadder, British Comedy, Fall of Poppies, Ghost Talkers, Indiana Jones, Lauren Willig, Mary Robinette Kowal, Steampunk, The Great War, Theme Month, WWI, WWII

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
Publication Date: 1895
Format: Kindle, 203 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Never read "The King in Yellow." Your life will be forfeit, insanity will come to you and you will welcome it gladly. Ah, but to resist such a temptation, how is one to do that so easily?  The play will haunt you and the world will change. It doesn't seem possible in a world where war has raged for so many years that a man or a woman could fall not because of a bullet but because of the written word. But Carcosa will haunt you.

Back in January and February there was only one show that everyone was talking about and that was True Detective. I was quite literally indifferent to it. A cop show staring two actors I've never liked, one of which is woefully miscast in a certain movie franchise I quite like, I had better uses of my time, thank you very much. That was until I heard that it was not a run-of-the-mill procedural because of it's incorporation of elements from the supernatural horror genre and it's references to the works of Robert W. Chambers.

This intrigued me because it wasn't something I would expect to be mainstream and the literary tie-in, well, I couldn't pass that up now could I? While the show fell completely apart in the final two episodes to create one of the most forgettable series in recent memory, not to mention my ire because The Yellow King and Carcosa were nothing more then red herrings, my compulsive need to read anything related to adaptations made me pick up Chambers book, and that is where the real payoff lays.

Chambers doesn't squander his setups with a bad denouement worthy of a schlocky B-Movie, oh no. He is able to create this world of paranoia and unease that slowly infiltrates your subconscious and unsettles you in a way the best horror writing will. While I'm not a fan of short stories, because I feel they sometimes limit your ability as a storyteller to go for the bigger picture, the way in which Chambers has his stories obviously set in the same world and has the through line of the destructive play "The King in Yellow" and the symbol of "The Yellow Sign" he is able to create a cohesive whole while still creating these little jewel-like stories. Though the book falls prey then to inconsistency, because in a collection of short stories there will always be one or two that just don't quite work. It's like a literary law of nature.

The way in which Chambers uses elements of Poe and writers of the Victorian Gothic genre yet is able to presage the world to come that is at once eerily accurate yet also just unnervingly different enough makes me wonder why he isn't lauded more for his visionary writing. Lovecraft was strongly influenced by Chambers, even writing about Carcosa himself, as did August Derleth. So why hadn't I heard of Chambers before True Detective? He should be up there with Poe and Jackson and King!

Chambers taps into something that we search for whenever we read a ghost story or watch a horror movie, that "what if" that creates chills up our spines. The most unnerving aspect of The King in Yellow isn't the titular play but the world under siege that Chambers creates. While some of the stories take place during the Siege of Paris that happened some twenty years prior to this book's publication, it's how he extrapolates these events into the future and in his story set in 1920 the world's recovery from a World War is so spookily precise I feel that he knew The Great War was coming and he was some kind of prophet.

While "The Street of the Four Winds" tickled me in how he referred to a cat's fur as plumage, something I thought only I ever did, it was the story "The Mask" that I most connected to. Perhaps this is because, while many of his stories deal with art, here the artist has found a way to alchemically change anything into marble, and what artist wouldn't be intrigued by an amazing new ability as well as a way to cut corners? The fact that this ability then leads to success but also madness and destruction makes it not only a fable, but a supernatural story of the highest order, because did reading the book do this?

The idea underlying all the stories, but in particular this one, is can someone be driven mad by a piece of writing? Can something be so amazing and so horrifying that it literally drives you round the bend? The fact that most of the stories center on artists or those with artistic leanings, the "sensitive souls," makes Chambers's conceit more layered then most arguments for persuasion. Personally I don't believe that video games can make someone commit a crime or murder, that it's always there, deep down in them, but it's an interesting thought to muse on in the dead of night, to wonder, but what if?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: B-Movies, Carcosa, Derleth, Horror, Lovecraft, Plumage, Poe, Robert W. Chambers, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, The Great War, The King in Yellow, The Siege of Paris, The Yellow Sign, True Detective

"What do I love about the golden 20's? It is truly a glamorous and fun time especially needed after the horrors of the Great War (WWI). I adore Poirot mysteries so built this series with a blend of the two : frivolity, fashion and intrigue - a deadly combination." - Joanna Challis

Joanna Challis is a true kindred spirit to me and many others. She is a lover of old manor houses, endless castles, wild English Gardens, ruins, all things Gothic, and dusty bookstores. Joanna is a voracious reader who could never consume enough and turned to writing herself, penning her first unpublishable 800 page novel at 15. Luckily she continued to write and not only has a book that was a finalist for the Romance Writers of Australia's 2004 Romantic Book of the Year Award, but a few set in Cornwall... notably Murder on the Cliffs, about a young Daphne Du Maurier solving a murder mystery.

While she now lives in Australia, her heart resides on the cliffs of Cornwall, much as Daphne's always did. I am beyond excited to have someone with such similar loves (check out her favorite things) on my blog for my Golden Summer, and I hope you'll give a hearty welcome to Joanna Challis!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Australia, Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier, Fashion, Golden Age of Detection, Golden Summer, Gothic, Joanna Challis, Murder on the Cliffs, Poirot, The Great War

"As for why I love the period –which is the same thing really as why I set my books in it: I had read all of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh's books while I was in my teens!

What novelists enjoy is putting their characters in jeopardy and then seeing how they get out of it (or don't!). The 1914-1918 Great War put everybody in jeopardy; it changed the lives of everybody in Britain; not just because of the huge casualties but because new ideas emerged - about a woman's place, about class, about foreigners. It offered exciting new possibilities in technology, in travel and in entertainment: cinema, jazz, recorded music. What followed in the 1920's was a fast-moving time of revolutions, economic disasters and a devil may care attitude among the elite.

There were too few men to provide husbands, too few who wanted to be servants in big houses. Heirs had been killed, once grand families were hiding the fact that they were nearly destitute.

In Golden Age fiction, which I have loved practically since I could read it, there are stock characters: the spinster, the brash incomer with new money, the injured war veteran, the outsider –usually a nattily dressed European. Mistrust of strangers, bequests, inheritances, false identities, lost letters and unsuitable marriage were very real issues but wonderful for a fiction writer.

What I like is that these situations and these characters, who were actually created by the aftermath of the war, appear in novels set in the 20's in quite traditional privileged surroundings: an Oxford College, a country house, a cathedral close, an exclusive school; apparently un-changed, closed societies and perfect places for tensions and a dramatic tale to unfold and to create atmosphere.

One of my books, The Return of Captain Emmett, concerns a young officer trying to settle back into peacetime but finding himself confronted with the death of a friend, the past and its violent mysteries. The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton is set in a struggling country house where the men who worked on the estate have almost all been killed in the war and a child has disappeared. In my next book, At Break of Day, (comes out in autumn) one character is a wealthy Englishman who has long lived in New York, escaping a potential scandal back home. In 1915 he is called up to serve his birth country and, returning to England, his secrets start to unravel." -  Elizabeth Speller

Elizabeth Speller is the author of three novels (one forthcoming this fall, which I am excited to read even though it doesn't star Laurence Bartram) and four non-fiction books, one of which is a memoir. She is also a poet and recently won the Bridport poetry competition and was short-listed for the Forward Prize in 2009, which led to her sensitive handling of poets in her book The Return of Captain John Emmett. Elizabeth Speller had the envious opportunity to read Classics at Cambridge as a mature student where she received a post-graduate degree in Ancient History. She has had numerous jobs, one of which, making a survey of inscriptions in a large village churchyard, I am sure helped with the creation of Laurence Bartram, and most definitely contributed to his own fictitious book on churches.

Elizabeth is currently the Chair of the Criticos Prize (for an outstanding book in English about, or inspired by, Greece) and holds a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Warwick. She divides her time between Glouchestershire and Greece, working in a restored shepherd's hut in an old apple orchard on the edge of a Cotswold valley and in a small cottage on the Ionian island of Paxos. The Return of Captain John Emmett is an astounding mystery that will rivet you to your seat and was actually chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Book Club pick in 2011, though I would hope you are more swayed by me then Richard and Judy... This book was followed up with the labyrinthine The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, which I am hoping fervently will not be the last we see of Laurence Bartram. I am honored to have Elizabeth Speller as the first of many authors participating in my Golden Summer, a place rightfully reserved for her and Laurence!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Agatha Christie, At Break of Day, Cambridge, Dorothy L. Sayers, Elizabeth Speller, Golden Summer, Greece, Laurence Bartram, The Great War, The Return of Captain John Emmett, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: August 10th, 2010
Format: Paperback, 240 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Fanny's mother is known throughout the family as "The Bolter." Leaving your child behind to be raised by your siblings isn't that odd in a family that uses children instead of foxes in hunts, has their own distinct argot, and lives in such an old house that only one closet has the warmth to be bearable. It is in this "Hons" closet that Fanny and her cousin Linda spend all their time dreaming of true love. Because love is what life is all about. As they grow up their thoughts turn less from the fantasy of marrying the Prince of Wales and more towards any decent chap that can be lured to Alconleigh for their debut ball. Linda, growing up at Alconleigh has not had the luxury of an education that Fanny has living with their Aunt Emily. Linda therefore is so desperate to fall in love that she mistakenly falls for the first man who comes along. The wrong man.

While Fanny happily settles down with an Oxford don and starts having babies, Linda's marriage to Tony Kroesig is a sham. They have one daughter whom Linda can't stand, but she keeps up the pretense of happy families, until one day she throws off her Facist husband for Communist Christian. Yet again Linda has misstepped, thinking that she is in love once more, when really she is just in love with being away from Tony. Always wanting so desperately to be in love, Linda mistakes any male attention for the real deal. Could she be turning into Fanny's mother, The Bolter? Or will her desperate search for love pay off in the most oddest of ways?

I remember one winter day when I first picked up the Vintage omnibus of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. The selling point to me was the big silver sticker they had put on the cover for Masterpiece Theatre. I covet those PBS tie-in editions of yore and here was a brand new one waiting for me to buy it. I have mentioned this before, but I am the book dork who must always read a book before watching the show, so I set to reading this before the miniseries was to air. This was a hard time in my life, I had just temporarily dropped out of college because of multiple deaths in the family and I took solace in this little escape. While I enjoyed the book, I was really looking forward to watching the miniseries more than anything. Of course, nothing goes to plan.

My main problem was I was living with my family and we had only two tvs. This was to air on a Monday night, which meant one of the tvs was designated for my little brother watching Monday night wrestling, which meant I had to negotiate for the second tv with my mother. My mother agreed to watch it, so long as it was good. She lasted less then five minutes before she claimed boredom and changed the channel. I was so fed up with everyone else getting what they wanted when all I wanted to do was watch one episode of Masterpiece Theatre that I went into my room and cried. I had waited months and my mom had let me have five minutes, a trait that more or less continues to this day. I had to wait more than four years to finally see the series... so, logically enough, my memory of the book has faded because of the incident that followed.

Therefore when finally getting around to planning Mitford March for my blog, I was excited for the re-read. I remembered very little in the years that followed my initial reading, many of my memories where tied up in the aforementioned incident and in the second volume of the book, more on that later, so I was pleasantly surprised by what I had forgotten and what I had remembered. The odd thing about this book is, truthfully, there really isn't a plot. Instead it is about the yearning and desire for love and how that can go unexpectedly right and horribly wrong. Of all the love stories told, the two that I enjoy the most is Jassy's and Linda's final love. Jassy, Linda's younger sister, has spent her entire life saving up money to run away, finally she does so in order to go to Hollywood and court an actor she has fallen for, who played a background artist in a pirate movie. The media sensation that follows is almost more entertaining then the end of the courtship, with her father viewing the reporters trying to sneak into his house as the first real and formidable enemies since he killed Germans with his entrenching tool in The Great War. While Linda's love of Fabrice is so unexpected when they meet at the train station as she is leaving her second husband, it is their banter and their easy natural conversation that makes you realize that it's not the money and it's not the looks, it's how you click that matters. Linda and I learned that love can be found in the most unexpected of places.

Yet, what I found most interesting about this book is how it was a mirror for the Mitfords themselves. The first time I read this book I knew about them in the vaguest of terms. Sisters, writers, one or two hung out with Hitler, whatever, it wasn't of concern to me, this was fiction. But as Nancy's sister Jessica points out in the introduction "we all know [Nancy's] got no imagination" because "there we were, larger than life, Mitfords renamed Radletts, reliving our childhoods as seen through Nancy's strange triangular green eyes." And the more you know about the Mitfords the funnier the book is. Nancy lampooning herself and her family. Jessica running off to Spain with a communist is both Linda and her little brother's fate. Up and leaving your husband, just like Diana did. Nancy's affair with a Frenchman. The families love of animals, their weird language all their own. This book is the Mitfords as seen through a slightly wobbly magnifying lens, and I love the book for this more then any other reason!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alconleigh, Diana Mitford, Hitler, Jessica Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate, Masterpiece Theater, Mitford March, Mitfords, Nancy Mitford, PBS, The Bolter, The Great War, The Pursuit of Love

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
Published by: W.W. Norton and Company
Publication Date: 2005
Format: Paperback, 311 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
Mary Roach is taking a look into proof of an afterlife. Many numerous people have had experiences, but is there any scientific way to give these experiences the seal of approval? The idea of what happens to, for want of a better word, your soul, has captured imaginations for centuries. The hope that there is something more beyond this world we are currently living in is the basis of many belief systems. Can one prove that they have truly been reincarnated and does a cultural predisposition for this belief lead to more cases? Does the soul have a location in our body and when it leaves does the weight of the body change on an infinitesimal scale? Mediums in every form are discussed, as are the various revolting methods in which they fooled their public. Even more modern methods of telecommunicating with the dead are explored, from telegrams to computers, tape recorders to telephones. Mary Roach explores all the possibilities, and though this is a book that no answer can be found, at least not yet, there is a chance, Mary has to concede, that she believes that something exists, she's not sure what, but it's more than a denial, and that's something.

More than most people, at least I assume that spending lots of spare time reading about Spiritualism and how your soul was weighed in Ancient Egypt isn't par for the course for most people, going into this book I had a lot of foreknowledge, as well as my own personal thoughts of the afterlife. Firstly I'll state my own beliefs, in that, yes, I do believe in ghosts, because I've seen some and been scared shitless. As for the whole heaven, I think heaven is reincarnation, in that life is the most wonderful thing out there so heaven would be getting to live again. Also the fact that I have an unnatural fear of dust storms and I have no other explanation as to why they scar the shit out of me. Purgatory, yep, totally believe in it and think that it's like in Beetlejuice. I do agree with Mary's statement that your knowledge or beliefs are formed from those around you, and my Dad was a big teller of ghost stories, but being raised Catholic he had the heaven and hell dogma, whereas mine came from my own thoughts and conclusions.

So yeah, I have all my own baggage, on top of the fact that the whole Spiritualism craze is just fascinating to me and I have spent tons of time reading about Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini and the Cottingley Fairies. Therefore, going in, I was expecting some new insight, some revelation, something more than an occasional laugh out loud moment. I will concede, there where laugh out loud moments, one in particular about a sheep, but that's just me and my love of sheep jokes. The truth might lie in the fact that I'm not a non-fiction reader and I think one of my problems is that I need some sort of narrative framework. I need this to be somehow bookended so that I don't feel like I'm reading little sound bites that only vaguely fit into the overall theme. I was hoping for, at the very least, some more background, some more depth. Roach sometimes assumes that people will know what she's talking about when there really needs to be some prior knowledge or facts given, she seems more interested in getting to the joke or the oddity or rapidly ending the chapter than shedding light. This makes the book jumpy to me. Why not some more cultural significance and history as to the search for the soul and how this played into our cultures instead of little stories about a few people she interviewed or researched. She seemed to have narrowed her focus too much so that the bigger picture was lost.

As I have said, people have always wondered about the afterlife, and she does hit the big bold headlines, past lives, Spiritualism, mediums, phone calls from the dead, yet she never seems to discuss the why. Why are people so obsessed with this. Why are we so determined to prove that there is more than this. A psychological grounding to the rise of Spiritualism should be conveyed in depth in my mind instead of a throw away line about The Great War's death toll leading to people looking for life beyond the veil. Instead she focuses on the gory details of ectoplasm, which I think might have scared me for life. There is just so much more that I was hoping to experience and instead, this was like a primer for someone who knew nothing about the various theories and research on the afterlife and just wanted to have fun facts or anecdotes for dinner parties. Perhaps I should have realized that the books popularity is because of it's accessibly versus a weightier discussion of the afterlife.

What really annoyed me though is that where Roach deigns to have a narrative, the book flows and comes together, and moves away from it's fact jumping nature that gives you names and humorous stories so fast that you don't care what is being said and you start to gloss over the names. Her discussion of actually going to Medium School was wonderful and way too short. In fact, the school itself could have acted as a framework for the other ideas and theories to flow through. All in all, it was an interesting book that just wasn't my cup of tea because I wanted something more, and also, sometimes Roach's attitude was too much for me when she showed a lack of respect. There's humor and than there's being rude and blowing someone off. I think Mary Roach didn't like Alison DuBois one little bit, and that stuck in my craw.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alison DuBois, Arthur Conan Doyle, Beetlejuice, Cottingley Fairies, Egypt, Harry Houdini, Mary Roach, Medium, Spiritualism, Spook, The Great War, The Soul, WWI