Title: Zastrozzi, A Romance
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Reader: Martin Geeson
Genre: Gothic Horror
Length: 5 hours and 16 minutes
Location: Recording hosted by Librivox. It is in the public domain.
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5
I have been listening to the Librivox recording of Percy Bysshe Shelley's gothic story, Zastrozzi, on and off for about four months. It isn't War and Peace and it isn't Les Miserables - it's a five hour novella that is neither as dense nor as intellectually demanding as the aforementioned pair. As a consequence, I never felt quite right about taking so long to finally set the novella aside. But there it is. The performance is excellent... but the story is painful. I came to dread seeing the title of Zastrozzi on my iPod screen, and from there arrived at my decision: I couldn't finish it, no matter how many reasons I had for doing so.
I wavered over finally putting aside this novella for four reasons:
1) It was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I loved his poetry when I was younger, and though I've fallen out of the habit of reading it (or any kind of poem - I regret the absence of that old, deliciously romantic (as in Romantic!) poetry in my life), his name on a work of literature will still make me pick it up.
2) It was Percy Bysshe Shelley juvenilia. I love the idea of an author's juvenilia; I'm in the process of reading all of Charlotte Bronte's adolescent fiction, written before her first published novel, The Professor.
3) It's Gothic literature. Though my relationship with that genre is of a bafflingly love-hate kind, I still count it as my favourite genre, in that I WILL read it, even if I end up hating the book and ranting about my hatred into the silence of the Internet.
And 4) the performance of the reader, Martin Geeson, riveted me. Geeson reads with such hearty enthusiasm, as if he were performing Shakespeare on some Elizabethan stage, and gives the recording a sense of irony that made Zastrozzi feel like the parody of gothic novel (might I venture, in the vein of Thomas Love Peacock? Who is one of the hundreds of authors on the top of my TBR list, x3). I really enjoyed Geeson's voice, and how it transformed Zastrozzi from straight Gothic in a satirical drama - as though the novella took itself with good humour, and mocked its excesses with clear sighted vision.
But in the end - alas! - I could not finish the story itself. It's excessive - such weeping and moaning and clashing of teeth! - and irredeemably solemn about its excess. For all its thrilling going-ons (kidnap! murder! death beds!), Zastrozzi is dull, full of repetitions, and silly (each character revolves around a single trait: vengeance, unrequited love, or grief ). I've read that readers can gain a sense of the brilliant poet Shelley was to become; however, I found that the bathos of Shelley's characters and situations, and the melodrama of his style, drowned any sense of Shelley's developed (or developing) brilliance. I sometimes felt as if I had missed a "Part One" somewhere - Zastrozzi leaps into his vengeance without explanation, and the scene is already so developed - enemies made and rivalries unfolding - that I felt lost and strange.
All in all, Martin Geeson's performance is deletable, and I anticipate finding any other recordings that he has done. But as for Shelley... I don't mean to read another word of his gothic Juvenilia.
:: eyes the sequel of Zastrozzi, as found at the Australian Gutenberg Project ::
Or at least, not at the moment.
Showing posts with label audiobooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label audiobooks. Show all posts
Friday, August 20, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
“Unhappy Man!”: Reviewing “Clarimonde”
Title: Clarimonde
Author: Theophile Gautier
Reader: Joy Chan
Genre: Gothic Horror
Length: 1 hour and 23 minutes
Location: Recording hosted by Librivox. It is in the public domain.
A young novice, poised upon the threshold of his ordination, glances up from his prayers, glimpses the face of the beautiful Clarimonde, and is hopelessly ensorcelled. He hungers after her, even as he vows himself to the priesthood, and as he leaves the ceremony, Clarimonde catches him by the hand and cries, “Unhappy man, unhappy man, what hast thou done?” For he is not alone in yearning; she has understood his hunger, and returns it.
The priest cannot escape the thought of Clarimonde. And so when he is given a chance to revoke his vows and become her lover, he seizes it.
Consequences be damned.
Final Verdict: 2 out of 5. This tale is simply and straightforwardly told: innocence faces temptation, and innocence prevails. There are vampires, holy water, and stakes. In a word, “Clarimonde” is early literary Gothic. No twists, no embellishments, just a good, old-fashioned clash of virtue versus the supernatural.
Listening to and reading early Gothic always requires some mental readjustments on my part—there’s no use in being irritated by the priest’s obsessive catalogue of Clarimonde’s charms—absorbed at a glance—because… well… it’s Gothic. Early Gothic. It’s supposed to be excessive and sound as if it takes itself seriously. (Does it?) That is what (can) be so charming about the genre.
"Clarimonde" is certainly excessive (and a bit more promiscuous than I was expecting. There was nothing explicit, but Clarimonde’s reputation suffers dreadfully in the mouths of her detractors). There isn’t a great deal of substance to the story, and the protagonist is—understandably—given to sanctimonious posturing and expressions of horror that story does not warrant. It makes for a light, amusing listen.
I enjoyed the reader, Joy Chan. Her voice is pleasant on the ear, and I loved the line of French that she narrated. But a grating burst of noise substituted for the dash in phrases such as, “the priest of — parish,” or “in the year 17—” It startled me rather badly the first time I heard it, and I never grew used to it.
Author: Theophile Gautier
Reader: Joy Chan
Genre: Gothic Horror
Length: 1 hour and 23 minutes
Location: Recording hosted by Librivox. It is in the public domain.
A young novice, poised upon the threshold of his ordination, glances up from his prayers, glimpses the face of the beautiful Clarimonde, and is hopelessly ensorcelled. He hungers after her, even as he vows himself to the priesthood, and as he leaves the ceremony, Clarimonde catches him by the hand and cries, “Unhappy man, unhappy man, what hast thou done?” For he is not alone in yearning; she has understood his hunger, and returns it.
The priest cannot escape the thought of Clarimonde. And so when he is given a chance to revoke his vows and become her lover, he seizes it.
Consequences be damned.
Final Verdict: 2 out of 5. This tale is simply and straightforwardly told: innocence faces temptation, and innocence prevails. There are vampires, holy water, and stakes. In a word, “Clarimonde” is early literary Gothic. No twists, no embellishments, just a good, old-fashioned clash of virtue versus the supernatural.
Listening to and reading early Gothic always requires some mental readjustments on my part—there’s no use in being irritated by the priest’s obsessive catalogue of Clarimonde’s charms—absorbed at a glance—because… well… it’s Gothic. Early Gothic. It’s supposed to be excessive and sound as if it takes itself seriously. (Does it?) That is what (can) be so charming about the genre.
"Clarimonde" is certainly excessive (and a bit more promiscuous than I was expecting. There was nothing explicit, but Clarimonde’s reputation suffers dreadfully in the mouths of her detractors). There isn’t a great deal of substance to the story, and the protagonist is—understandably—given to sanctimonious posturing and expressions of horror that story does not warrant. It makes for a light, amusing listen.
I enjoyed the reader, Joy Chan. Her voice is pleasant on the ear, and I loved the line of French that she narrated. But a grating burst of noise substituted for the dash in phrases such as, “the priest of — parish,” or “in the year 17—” It startled me rather badly the first time I heard it, and I never grew used to it.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Reviewing “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Reader: Ruby Dee
Length: 8 hours
Publisher: HarperAudio
ISBN: 0-06-077653-6
Final Verdict: 4 out of 5. Janie is my favourite part of this novel: she is an engaging protagonist and heroine, and I love how her story is not simply one of romance, but of a woman learning through experience to embrace her selfhood. But it was the pieces of this story that made it work so well for me—Janie, her lover Tea Cake, the “sitters-and-talkers” who sit gossiping under the shade of a storefront porch, the misguided love of Nanny and the hatreds of Janie’s first two husbands.
Summary contains details of the novel’s progression that could be construed as spoilers.
Janie Crawford is in love: in love with the idea of love, and thirsty to experience it. Her grandmother catches her kissing a boy across a gatepost; she is terrified by Janie’s budding maturity, and the inescapable loss of her innocence. She marries Janie off to a farmer named Logan Killicks, satisfied that his wealth and status—his land—will provide Janie with security against a world that does not love her.
But Janie is frustrated—she does not love her husband and he does not appreciate her as anything other than a wife, to be commanded (never asked) and scorned. She escapes him by eloping with Joe Starks, a charismatic man whose ambition elevates him to the seat of mayor of the budding town of Eatonville. But Janie soon learns that Joe loves her only as a possession and symbol of his status. She grows to hate him as her silencer.
It is not until Joe dies and Janie is left a widow that she meets Tea Cake, a man at least ten years her junior. She is charmed by his attentions. But as their relationship develops, Janie slowly begins to realize that the disillusionments of her youth are not all that life has to offer.
Tea Cake offers her not simply romance, but liberation.
“Bittersweet” is one word that suggests itself whenever I consider this novel, and just how to describe it. Their Eyes Were Watching God has its sweetness: Janie’s emerging sense of selfhood, Janie and Tea Cake’s romance, Janie telling off people who have nothing better to do than make things that were never their business their business, Janie—
It might be easier to sum up the parts I enjoyed in one word: Janie, OMG! Which is, admittedly, two words. Or four, if dissecting acronyms is your thing.
But this is also a heavy and sometimes disturbing novel, with a well-developed bitterness: men pondering the many and manifold ways of killing a wife they feel disgraces them; Mrs. Turner, who “[takes] black folk as a personal affront to herself” and is stomach-churningly vicious in her hatred; Jim Crow laws; wife-beating as an accepted practice. The casual manner in which Hurston describes these things makes listening to (or reading) the novel hard. But however difficult these passages may be, the fact that Hurston neither censors nor idealizes her story, its setting, and the time in which it takes place, gives the novel its power, in part.
But the other part of its power? That would be Janie, hands down. Sherley Anne Williams, in her foreword of the 1978 Illini Books edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God, compares Janie’s journey to self-fulfillment to that of her author’s, and concludes that, “… such definition [i.e. ‘a continuing relationship with a man’] is the essence of Janie’s romantic vision and its ultimate fulfillment provides the plot of the novel.” (pg. x) Janie comes into a sense of herself through romance. Love liberates her. But Hurston manages this very well.
Being a somewhat jaded and embittered reader (… I’m trying to change that, but bad habits die hard), “good old romance” tends to make me froth a bit at the mouth with RAGE. (The side effect of reading too many badly done romances. Alas, my squandered childhood.) But Janie and Tea Cake’s romance was one that I could really get behind. Their relationship develops naturally. They respect one another. They yearn to be near one another, but are not so wound up in each other that a moment’s separation results in pages of weeping and whining and gnashing of teeth. New Moon, I am sending horrible looks in your direction.
But I suspect that the biggest reason I enjoyed the romance of Their Eyes was because the novel is not simply about romance. It is about womanhood and it is about race, but it is not just about those things; it is also about an individual woman—Janie learning about herself and growing into personhood. [NOT REALLY A SPOILER BUT STILL] She is able to live even after Tea Cake’s death (which really isn’t a spoiler, because chapter one shouts this from the rooftops) [/END NOT REALLY A SPOILER BUT STILL]. Janie’s journey is one of self-fulfillment through love, rather than self- fulfillment equals love. She is more of a person because she loved—but she is very much a person, rather than an object of romance.
I enjoyed Ruby Dee’s narration, and was captured by the first track—Dee voices the women who gossip behind Janie’s back upon her return to Eatonville so very well. Dee tends to repeat character voices after a while; Janie and Tea Cake were the most distinct characters throughout. And Dee can be somewhat enthusiastic; I was always fiddling with the volume, either to keep from having my ears blown out or in an attempt to hear what was being said. But then again, this could be due to the (decrepit) condition of my earbuds.
MUST BUY NEW ONES STAT.
Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Reader: Ruby Dee
Length: 8 hours
Publisher: HarperAudio
ISBN: 0-06-077653-6
Final Verdict: 4 out of 5. Janie is my favourite part of this novel: she is an engaging protagonist and heroine, and I love how her story is not simply one of romance, but of a woman learning through experience to embrace her selfhood. But it was the pieces of this story that made it work so well for me—Janie, her lover Tea Cake, the “sitters-and-talkers” who sit gossiping under the shade of a storefront porch, the misguided love of Nanny and the hatreds of Janie’s first two husbands.
Summary contains details of the novel’s progression that could be construed as spoilers.
Janie Crawford is in love: in love with the idea of love, and thirsty to experience it. Her grandmother catches her kissing a boy across a gatepost; she is terrified by Janie’s budding maturity, and the inescapable loss of her innocence. She marries Janie off to a farmer named Logan Killicks, satisfied that his wealth and status—his land—will provide Janie with security against a world that does not love her.
But Janie is frustrated—she does not love her husband and he does not appreciate her as anything other than a wife, to be commanded (never asked) and scorned. She escapes him by eloping with Joe Starks, a charismatic man whose ambition elevates him to the seat of mayor of the budding town of Eatonville. But Janie soon learns that Joe loves her only as a possession and symbol of his status. She grows to hate him as her silencer.
It is not until Joe dies and Janie is left a widow that she meets Tea Cake, a man at least ten years her junior. She is charmed by his attentions. But as their relationship develops, Janie slowly begins to realize that the disillusionments of her youth are not all that life has to offer.
Tea Cake offers her not simply romance, but liberation.
--
“Bittersweet” is one word that suggests itself whenever I consider this novel, and just how to describe it. Their Eyes Were Watching God has its sweetness: Janie’s emerging sense of selfhood, Janie and Tea Cake’s romance, Janie telling off people who have nothing better to do than make things that were never their business their business, Janie—
It might be easier to sum up the parts I enjoyed in one word: Janie, OMG! Which is, admittedly, two words. Or four, if dissecting acronyms is your thing.
But this is also a heavy and sometimes disturbing novel, with a well-developed bitterness: men pondering the many and manifold ways of killing a wife they feel disgraces them; Mrs. Turner, who “[takes] black folk as a personal affront to herself” and is stomach-churningly vicious in her hatred; Jim Crow laws; wife-beating as an accepted practice. The casual manner in which Hurston describes these things makes listening to (or reading) the novel hard. But however difficult these passages may be, the fact that Hurston neither censors nor idealizes her story, its setting, and the time in which it takes place, gives the novel its power, in part.
But the other part of its power? That would be Janie, hands down. Sherley Anne Williams, in her foreword of the 1978 Illini Books edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God, compares Janie’s journey to self-fulfillment to that of her author’s, and concludes that, “… such definition [i.e. ‘a continuing relationship with a man’] is the essence of Janie’s romantic vision and its ultimate fulfillment provides the plot of the novel.” (pg. x) Janie comes into a sense of herself through romance. Love liberates her. But Hurston manages this very well.
Being a somewhat jaded and embittered reader (… I’m trying to change that, but bad habits die hard), “good old romance” tends to make me froth a bit at the mouth with RAGE. (The side effect of reading too many badly done romances. Alas, my squandered childhood.) But Janie and Tea Cake’s romance was one that I could really get behind. Their relationship develops naturally. They respect one another. They yearn to be near one another, but are not so wound up in each other that a moment’s separation results in pages of weeping and whining and gnashing of teeth. New Moon, I am sending horrible looks in your direction.
But I suspect that the biggest reason I enjoyed the romance of Their Eyes was because the novel is not simply about romance. It is about womanhood and it is about race, but it is not just about those things; it is also about an individual woman—Janie learning about herself and growing into personhood. [NOT REALLY A SPOILER BUT STILL] She is able to live even after Tea Cake’s death (which really isn’t a spoiler, because chapter one shouts this from the rooftops) [/END NOT REALLY A SPOILER BUT STILL]. Janie’s journey is one of self-fulfillment through love, rather than self- fulfillment equals love. She is more of a person because she loved—but she is very much a person, rather than an object of romance.
I enjoyed Ruby Dee’s narration, and was captured by the first track—Dee voices the women who gossip behind Janie’s back upon her return to Eatonville so very well. Dee tends to repeat character voices after a while; Janie and Tea Cake were the most distinct characters throughout. And Dee can be somewhat enthusiastic; I was always fiddling with the volume, either to keep from having my ears blown out or in an attempt to hear what was being said. But then again, this could be due to the (decrepit) condition of my earbuds.
MUST BUY NEW ONES STAT.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Strangled by the Red String: Reviewing “Fallen”
Title: Fallen
Author: Lauren Kate
Reader: Justine Eyre
Publisher: Listening Library
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5. Contrary to the “Guide to the Final Verdict” sidebar, I was not so much ENRAGED by Fallen as disappointed. I found it to be frustratingly bland and insubstantial, and its primary conflict—Luce’s longing to kiss the inaccessible Daniel Grigori—uninteresting. The suspense of the story is not so much relieved by the ending as put on hold—true, there are three more books to anticipate, but the ending left me neither satisfied nor interested in continuing the series. The novel introduces heavy topics—student deaths, familial estrangement, to name two—but does little with them. The romance overwhelms every aspect of the story, and it reduces its heavier issues to the backdrop of a love story that is justified by fate and peopled by characters it is a difficult to care about.
The following review contains spoilers for true natures and tragic back stories.
Lucinda Price is haunted by shadows that no one else can see. She has suffered the rounds of psychologists and medication, but nothing can drive the shadows away. And when, through their agency, Luce is implicated in the death of a fellow student, Luce cannot confess to them—and so in silence, she is exiled to reform school.
It is here, at Sword and Cross, that she meets Daniel Grigori, a handsome boy who takes an immediate dislike to her. Luce is simultaneously bewildered and intrigued by his aversion, and as the weeks pass, her attraction grows—she cannot escape him, either in life or in her thoughts. And neither, it appears, can he escape her.
Luce feels that she recognizes Daniel. But she cannot place him, and Daniel denies any prior connection—though as his dislike melts, and he surrenders to her persistence, he displays an uncanny familiarity with the things she loves—things she has told no one at her reform school about. Too many people at Sword and Cross, Luce starts to realize, are more familiar with her than she is with herself. And too many object to her attraction to Daniel—as if its doom is fated.
What is Daniel’s secret? And who is she? Obsessed with questions, Luce begins a desperate search for answers. A search that, as the true faces of things begin to reveal themselves to her, could end in her death.
The thing that most disappointed me about Fallen is that I have read this story before, under different titles and by different authors. I have seen Lucinda Price, called Luce, before: her name was Bella Swan. I have seen the boy with whom she is besotted, Daniel Grigori: his name was Edward Cullen.
Literature, true, could be called the vast recycling bin of ideas. Stories are always being retold; characters are always being re-imagined. I live for the retellings, the re-imaginings: they’re like a great, never-ending conversation. But when a story treads the well-worn path of its predecessors so closely that it cannot be distinguished from them, that’s when my disappointment kicks in.
Fallen is Twilight, set in the heat of Georgia, [SPOILERS] overrun by fallen angels instead of glittering vampires. This isn’t necessarily bad, but neither is it especially stimulating. Daniel Grigori’s angelic nature has no real affect on his character. He is the hot and brooding and utterly unattainable—except, not—kind of boy whose presence is a staple of YA romance. Little distinguishes him from his Byronic brethren; he simply has wings instead of fangs/leather pants/inherited wealth/tragic past/etc. [/END SPOILERS]
This same reality applies to Luce, the designated heroine. Luce—according to herself—“… spent three years on a full academic scholarship at the best college prep school in the country”. She maintained a 4.0 GPA, “know[s] Latin and French, and in middle school… won the science fair three years in a row.” She “… do[es] the Sunday crossword puzzle, sometimes in under an hour,” and someday, she’s going to be a psychiatrist, “who actually listens to her patients and helps people.”
Unfortunately, the person Luce is describing bears little resemblance to the character we have been following for the past fifteen chapters. Ever since she set foot in Sword and Cross and discovered that there are cute guys in reform school and wow, exile doesn’t look so hopeless after all, Luce has been preoccupied. There’s a hottie with green eyes inviting her to his room. A golden-skinned Adonis flipping her off. Reform school is going to be a feast—which guy should she choose?
Again, Luce’s preoccupation isn’t necessarily bad. The unfortunate thing is that she is meant to be more. She’s meant to be seen as highly intelligent and highly motivated. But within the context of this story, she is not. She does not act like a conscientious and driven student, who thinks about other things besides her crushes. Her prowess is in the mouths of her teacher and admirers, not in her actions. TV Tropes calls this Informed Ability.
I wanted to be fair. I thought the beginning of Fallen was promising, and was ready to like Luce, before she decided that being flipped off was some primitive form of a pick-up line. Before she laid eyes on Adonis, called Daniel, Luce showed promise as an individual. She was haunted by an ugly past—sensational, yes, [SPOILERS] but here was the thing. She’d burned a boy to death and didn’t remember doing it. Her parents were afraid of her and she wasn’t comfortable with the girl she saw in the mirror. [/END SPOILERS] Already, there were consequences and self-doubt.
But neither was there a story. I had hoped that the romance stated on the back cover would form only a part of Luce’s struggle to come to terms with the girl (the monster?) she saw in the mirror. Her world was in disarray, and I wanted to see her put it to rights by her own effort, in a setting that was hostile to her.
But Fallen isn’t about Luce, not really. It’s about how she obsesses over Daniel, [SPOILERS]and finally discovers that her attraction to him is fated. Her love is the work of destiny and Daniel’s love for her. Not hers for him. His love damned her, and she gives way to her damnation again and again, century after century, as easily as a sandcastle.[/END SPOILERS] Luce has very little do with her own life. And this, ironically enough, is a plot point, but it isn’t explored. Luce comes to terms with her destiny in the space of a chapter and a half.
Justine Eyre’s narration keeps the story bearable. I fell into the rhythm of her voice quickly enough; she distinguishes characters without going overboard in her portrayal, and mixes in a light southern accent for several of the characters.
I personally would not recommend this story. It isn’t terrible; I simply didn’t enjoy it, and found it too derivative for my tastes. The audiobook makes for an entertaining, casual listen, and it helped my commute (and the hours I spent waiting for my classes to begin) pass more quickly.
Credit for the title goes to TV Tropes and its article “Strangled by the Red String”.
Author: Lauren Kate
Reader: Justine Eyre
Publisher: Listening Library
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5. Contrary to the “Guide to the Final Verdict” sidebar, I was not so much ENRAGED by Fallen as disappointed. I found it to be frustratingly bland and insubstantial, and its primary conflict—Luce’s longing to kiss the inaccessible Daniel Grigori—uninteresting. The suspense of the story is not so much relieved by the ending as put on hold—true, there are three more books to anticipate, but the ending left me neither satisfied nor interested in continuing the series. The novel introduces heavy topics—student deaths, familial estrangement, to name two—but does little with them. The romance overwhelms every aspect of the story, and it reduces its heavier issues to the backdrop of a love story that is justified by fate and peopled by characters it is a difficult to care about.
The following review contains spoilers for true natures and tragic back stories.
Lucinda Price is haunted by shadows that no one else can see. She has suffered the rounds of psychologists and medication, but nothing can drive the shadows away. And when, through their agency, Luce is implicated in the death of a fellow student, Luce cannot confess to them—and so in silence, she is exiled to reform school.
It is here, at Sword and Cross, that she meets Daniel Grigori, a handsome boy who takes an immediate dislike to her. Luce is simultaneously bewildered and intrigued by his aversion, and as the weeks pass, her attraction grows—she cannot escape him, either in life or in her thoughts. And neither, it appears, can he escape her.
Luce feels that she recognizes Daniel. But she cannot place him, and Daniel denies any prior connection—though as his dislike melts, and he surrenders to her persistence, he displays an uncanny familiarity with the things she loves—things she has told no one at her reform school about. Too many people at Sword and Cross, Luce starts to realize, are more familiar with her than she is with herself. And too many object to her attraction to Daniel—as if its doom is fated.
What is Daniel’s secret? And who is she? Obsessed with questions, Luce begins a desperate search for answers. A search that, as the true faces of things begin to reveal themselves to her, could end in her death.
--
The thing that most disappointed me about Fallen is that I have read this story before, under different titles and by different authors. I have seen Lucinda Price, called Luce, before: her name was Bella Swan. I have seen the boy with whom she is besotted, Daniel Grigori: his name was Edward Cullen.
Literature, true, could be called the vast recycling bin of ideas. Stories are always being retold; characters are always being re-imagined. I live for the retellings, the re-imaginings: they’re like a great, never-ending conversation. But when a story treads the well-worn path of its predecessors so closely that it cannot be distinguished from them, that’s when my disappointment kicks in.
Fallen is Twilight, set in the heat of Georgia, [SPOILERS] overrun by fallen angels instead of glittering vampires. This isn’t necessarily bad, but neither is it especially stimulating. Daniel Grigori’s angelic nature has no real affect on his character. He is the hot and brooding and utterly unattainable—except, not—kind of boy whose presence is a staple of YA romance. Little distinguishes him from his Byronic brethren; he simply has wings instead of fangs/leather pants/inherited wealth/tragic past/etc. [/END SPOILERS]
This same reality applies to Luce, the designated heroine. Luce—according to herself—“… spent three years on a full academic scholarship at the best college prep school in the country”. She maintained a 4.0 GPA, “know[s] Latin and French, and in middle school… won the science fair three years in a row.” She “… do[es] the Sunday crossword puzzle, sometimes in under an hour,” and someday, she’s going to be a psychiatrist, “who actually listens to her patients and helps people.”
Unfortunately, the person Luce is describing bears little resemblance to the character we have been following for the past fifteen chapters. Ever since she set foot in Sword and Cross and discovered that there are cute guys in reform school and wow, exile doesn’t look so hopeless after all, Luce has been preoccupied. There’s a hottie with green eyes inviting her to his room. A golden-skinned Adonis flipping her off. Reform school is going to be a feast—which guy should she choose?
Again, Luce’s preoccupation isn’t necessarily bad. The unfortunate thing is that she is meant to be more. She’s meant to be seen as highly intelligent and highly motivated. But within the context of this story, she is not. She does not act like a conscientious and driven student, who thinks about other things besides her crushes. Her prowess is in the mouths of her teacher and admirers, not in her actions. TV Tropes calls this Informed Ability.
I wanted to be fair. I thought the beginning of Fallen was promising, and was ready to like Luce, before she decided that being flipped off was some primitive form of a pick-up line. Before she laid eyes on Adonis, called Daniel, Luce showed promise as an individual. She was haunted by an ugly past—sensational, yes, [SPOILERS] but here was the thing. She’d burned a boy to death and didn’t remember doing it. Her parents were afraid of her and she wasn’t comfortable with the girl she saw in the mirror. [/END SPOILERS] Already, there were consequences and self-doubt.
But neither was there a story. I had hoped that the romance stated on the back cover would form only a part of Luce’s struggle to come to terms with the girl (the monster?) she saw in the mirror. Her world was in disarray, and I wanted to see her put it to rights by her own effort, in a setting that was hostile to her.
But Fallen isn’t about Luce, not really. It’s about how she obsesses over Daniel, [SPOILERS]and finally discovers that her attraction to him is fated. Her love is the work of destiny and Daniel’s love for her. Not hers for him. His love damned her, and she gives way to her damnation again and again, century after century, as easily as a sandcastle.[/END SPOILERS] Luce has very little do with her own life. And this, ironically enough, is a plot point, but it isn’t explored. Luce comes to terms with her destiny in the space of a chapter and a half.
Justine Eyre’s narration keeps the story bearable. I fell into the rhythm of her voice quickly enough; she distinguishes characters without going overboard in her portrayal, and mixes in a light southern accent for several of the characters.
I personally would not recommend this story. It isn’t terrible; I simply didn’t enjoy it, and found it too derivative for my tastes. The audiobook makes for an entertaining, casual listen, and it helped my commute (and the hours I spent waiting for my classes to begin) pass more quickly.
Credit for the title goes to TV Tropes and its article “Strangled by the Red String”.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
“The Infamy of Her Sex”: Reviewing “Lady Audley’s Secret”
Title: Lady Audley’s Secret
Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Reader: Elizabeth Klett
Location: Recording hosted by Librivox. It is in the public domain.
Final Verdict: 3 out of 5. The novel is engaging, and at times its suspense is mouth-watering, but it has a tendency to be a bit obvious, and the author has a tendency to obsesses and digress at great and oftentimes irrelevant length.
Beware—spoilers ahead. It was rather difficult to decide what constituted a spoiler and what did not, as the novel itself wears its veil of mystery so lightly, and indulges so gleefully in its own inopportune revelations, that it sometimes did not seem to fit the mystery genre at all.
Lord Audley has remarried, and his wife, Lucy Graham, is the epitome of grace and beauty. Lord Audely’s nephew, Robert, is charmed by “my Lady”, and hopes that his recently widowed friend, George Talboys, might take some comfort in her presence. But the lady refuses to meet them, and George, too grief-stricken to appreciate his friend’s idea of comfort, plans to sail for Australia, and leave the memory of his dead wife behind. Robert convinces George to wile away the time before his departure on the pleasant grounds of Lord Audley’s country manor. George agrees—and hours later, vanishes.
Robert at first believes that his friend has simply boarded an earlier ship—but his inquiries leave him baffled. George’s things remain in his room, and no man matching George’s description boarded any Australia-bound vessel. Indeed, no one can even say that Robert’s friend left the grounds. He was last seen at the house—inquiring after Lady Audley.
As Robert continues his investigation, clues, in the shape of subtle words and Lady Audley’s more subtle smiles, begins to form a picture of a mystery far deeper than any Robert could have fathomed. George Talboys did not leave the country the day he disappeared. And Lady Audley knows more about it than she pretends. If Robert means to find his friend, he must first discover the truth about the woman lurking behind the name of Lady Audley.
Despite appearances, Lady Audley’s Secret is less concerned with the “who” of the “whodunit” as much as with the “why”. I never felt wholly “in” on the mystery of George Talboy’s disappearance for two reasons.
[SPOILERS] Firstly, the novel had a tendency to be obvious and reveal its own mysteries before those mysteries were even introduced. The novel’s title and first chapter bluntly indicate Lady Audley’s guilt. Indeed, she confesses to her motivations before she even commits her crimes. After George vanishes and Robert launches his investigation, Braddon seems to give up on hiding the identity of her criminal—she switches to Lady Audley’s point of view and implicates her with the revelation of her true nature in a single scene. [/END SPOILERS]
Secondly, Robert Audley, amateur detective, learns more about the mystery than he ever reveals. I had the feeling, while listening to Secret, that Robert and I were conducting our own private investigations—Robert with painstaking delicacy, careful to make no accusations or upset the Victorian fragility of his society until forced; and I with ham-handed bluntness. (From chapter one, I assumed Secret would end with a twist, and so pointed to the most innocent-looking character, cried, “Guilty!”, and then spent the remainder of the novel thumbing my nose at red herrings and waiting to be validated.)
But mystery may not be the point of Lady Audley’s Secret. Wikipedia calls the book a “sensation novel”, and Secret is indeed sensational. There is blackmail and attempted murders, locked drawers and stolen letters. Sensation is wound up to a pitch worthy of a Gothic novel, and the suspense is ever-mounting, making the novel engrossingly suspenseful without being much of a mystery. [SPOILERS] At the heart of the novel lies one woman’s motivation for murder, but her motive is larger than the entire plot, because it embraces ideas of women’s disenfranchisement and dependence during the Victorian period. Crime, Braddon suggests, may have been a woman’s sole source of power. [/END SPOILERS]
Secret revolves around this idea: that society renders women so powerless that it is only by underhanded scheming that they can take control of their lives. Robert Audley muses at length upon the underhanded wiles of women as he conducts his investigations, for he is met at every turn by their secrets and lies, and for most of the novel, he distrusts and condemns them. But it as if Braddon is determined to argue with him. The story veers into long digressions that reproach Robert’s misgivings just as often as Robert himself makes his criticisms. It is as if Braddon is debating the subject of women with him—Robert holds that women are needlessly troublesome, and she argues that they act from “awful necessity”. The affect is a little bewildering.
Also bewildering is Braddon’s tendency to switch points of view at random. In the first few chapters, she switches from Lucy Graham to George Talboys to Robert Audley. She remains with Robert for most of Secret except when she writes from the POV of Lucy Graham/Lady Audley and Lucy’s maid, Phoebe. The amount of time spent in each POV is uneven, and it was this fact, I suspect, that I found jarring.
[SPOILERS] But I loved that Braddon allowed me to view the story from Lady Audley’s point of view. For one, the lady was simply more interesting than the often self-righteous Robert. And once Robert makes it clear to her that he is onto her crime, their ensuing battle unfolds deliciously.
Robert and Lucy are both powerful opponents, and seeing their battle from both sides blurs the distinction between right and wrong. Who is to say that Robert is right to ruin Lady Audley? And who is to say that the lady’s actions were not justified?
There was one aspect of the novel that irritated me enough to rate it lower than I might have otherwise done. The author exhibits a rather unfortunate tendency to obsess over Lady Audley’s beauty, and the effect was painful by chapter four. Lady Audley’s “fascination” is well established in the first chapter; the repetition is needless. It is as if Braddon was trying too hard to misdirect the reader, or was utterly dazzled by the irony of a charming woman committing murder. Lady Audley is, true, narcissistic in the extreme, but that seems little excuse for the author to fixate upon her “little jeweled hand” and butter-bright burls at the rate that she does. [/END SPOILERS]
Elizabeth Klett is fast becoming one of my favourite narrators on Librivox. Her voice, and her recordings, are always clear and crisp. I rarely had to bother with the volume—Elizabeth’s Klett’s narration remains even throughout. While there is not a wide variety among her repertoire of character voices, characters are always distinguished from one another and the narration. My favourite voice was Alicia’s. Her personality comes through clearly; she almost sounds as though she is smirking or on the verge of laughing with all the delightful sarcasm of her character. Robert Audley’s voice holds a wellspring of irony in it as well, and his narration also numbers among my favourites.
I highly recommend this audiobook. It’s an enjoyable listen, and at times so engrossing that I found it hard to put down when I was no longer washing dishes/cooking dinner/commuting, and probably should have been studying math and German. Indeed, I began to fabricate reasons to engage in some household spring (summer?) cleaning just so I could keep listening!
• Find the audiobook, again, here at Librivox!
• The Gutenberg Project hosts the text of the novel.
• Wikipedia offers an interesting article, analysis, and an even more fascinating bibliography for your perusal.
Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Reader: Elizabeth Klett
Location: Recording hosted by Librivox. It is in the public domain.
Final Verdict: 3 out of 5. The novel is engaging, and at times its suspense is mouth-watering, but it has a tendency to be a bit obvious, and the author has a tendency to obsesses and digress at great and oftentimes irrelevant length.
Beware—spoilers ahead. It was rather difficult to decide what constituted a spoiler and what did not, as the novel itself wears its veil of mystery so lightly, and indulges so gleefully in its own inopportune revelations, that it sometimes did not seem to fit the mystery genre at all.
Lord Audley has remarried, and his wife, Lucy Graham, is the epitome of grace and beauty. Lord Audely’s nephew, Robert, is charmed by “my Lady”, and hopes that his recently widowed friend, George Talboys, might take some comfort in her presence. But the lady refuses to meet them, and George, too grief-stricken to appreciate his friend’s idea of comfort, plans to sail for Australia, and leave the memory of his dead wife behind. Robert convinces George to wile away the time before his departure on the pleasant grounds of Lord Audley’s country manor. George agrees—and hours later, vanishes.
Robert at first believes that his friend has simply boarded an earlier ship—but his inquiries leave him baffled. George’s things remain in his room, and no man matching George’s description boarded any Australia-bound vessel. Indeed, no one can even say that Robert’s friend left the grounds. He was last seen at the house—inquiring after Lady Audley.
As Robert continues his investigation, clues, in the shape of subtle words and Lady Audley’s more subtle smiles, begins to form a picture of a mystery far deeper than any Robert could have fathomed. George Talboys did not leave the country the day he disappeared. And Lady Audley knows more about it than she pretends. If Robert means to find his friend, he must first discover the truth about the woman lurking behind the name of Lady Audley.
--
Despite appearances, Lady Audley’s Secret is less concerned with the “who” of the “whodunit” as much as with the “why”. I never felt wholly “in” on the mystery of George Talboy’s disappearance for two reasons.
[SPOILERS] Firstly, the novel had a tendency to be obvious and reveal its own mysteries before those mysteries were even introduced. The novel’s title and first chapter bluntly indicate Lady Audley’s guilt. Indeed, she confesses to her motivations before she even commits her crimes. After George vanishes and Robert launches his investigation, Braddon seems to give up on hiding the identity of her criminal—she switches to Lady Audley’s point of view and implicates her with the revelation of her true nature in a single scene. [/END SPOILERS]
Secondly, Robert Audley, amateur detective, learns more about the mystery than he ever reveals. I had the feeling, while listening to Secret, that Robert and I were conducting our own private investigations—Robert with painstaking delicacy, careful to make no accusations or upset the Victorian fragility of his society until forced; and I with ham-handed bluntness. (From chapter one, I assumed Secret would end with a twist, and so pointed to the most innocent-looking character, cried, “Guilty!”, and then spent the remainder of the novel thumbing my nose at red herrings and waiting to be validated.)
But mystery may not be the point of Lady Audley’s Secret. Wikipedia calls the book a “sensation novel”, and Secret is indeed sensational. There is blackmail and attempted murders, locked drawers and stolen letters. Sensation is wound up to a pitch worthy of a Gothic novel, and the suspense is ever-mounting, making the novel engrossingly suspenseful without being much of a mystery. [SPOILERS] At the heart of the novel lies one woman’s motivation for murder, but her motive is larger than the entire plot, because it embraces ideas of women’s disenfranchisement and dependence during the Victorian period. Crime, Braddon suggests, may have been a woman’s sole source of power. [/END SPOILERS]
Secret revolves around this idea: that society renders women so powerless that it is only by underhanded scheming that they can take control of their lives. Robert Audley muses at length upon the underhanded wiles of women as he conducts his investigations, for he is met at every turn by their secrets and lies, and for most of the novel, he distrusts and condemns them. But it as if Braddon is determined to argue with him. The story veers into long digressions that reproach Robert’s misgivings just as often as Robert himself makes his criticisms. It is as if Braddon is debating the subject of women with him—Robert holds that women are needlessly troublesome, and she argues that they act from “awful necessity”. The affect is a little bewildering.
Also bewildering is Braddon’s tendency to switch points of view at random. In the first few chapters, she switches from Lucy Graham to George Talboys to Robert Audley. She remains with Robert for most of Secret except when she writes from the POV of Lucy Graham/Lady Audley and Lucy’s maid, Phoebe. The amount of time spent in each POV is uneven, and it was this fact, I suspect, that I found jarring.
[SPOILERS] But I loved that Braddon allowed me to view the story from Lady Audley’s point of view. For one, the lady was simply more interesting than the often self-righteous Robert. And once Robert makes it clear to her that he is onto her crime, their ensuing battle unfolds deliciously.
Robert and Lucy are both powerful opponents, and seeing their battle from both sides blurs the distinction between right and wrong. Who is to say that Robert is right to ruin Lady Audley? And who is to say that the lady’s actions were not justified?
There was one aspect of the novel that irritated me enough to rate it lower than I might have otherwise done. The author exhibits a rather unfortunate tendency to obsess over Lady Audley’s beauty, and the effect was painful by chapter four. Lady Audley’s “fascination” is well established in the first chapter; the repetition is needless. It is as if Braddon was trying too hard to misdirect the reader, or was utterly dazzled by the irony of a charming woman committing murder. Lady Audley is, true, narcissistic in the extreme, but that seems little excuse for the author to fixate upon her “little jeweled hand” and butter-bright burls at the rate that she does. [/END SPOILERS]
Elizabeth Klett is fast becoming one of my favourite narrators on Librivox. Her voice, and her recordings, are always clear and crisp. I rarely had to bother with the volume—Elizabeth’s Klett’s narration remains even throughout. While there is not a wide variety among her repertoire of character voices, characters are always distinguished from one another and the narration. My favourite voice was Alicia’s. Her personality comes through clearly; she almost sounds as though she is smirking or on the verge of laughing with all the delightful sarcasm of her character. Robert Audley’s voice holds a wellspring of irony in it as well, and his narration also numbers among my favourites.
I highly recommend this audiobook. It’s an enjoyable listen, and at times so engrossing that I found it hard to put down when I was no longer washing dishes/cooking dinner/commuting, and probably should have been studying math and German. Indeed, I began to fabricate reasons to engage in some household spring (summer?) cleaning just so I could keep listening!
• Find the audiobook, again, here at Librivox!
• The Gutenberg Project hosts the text of the novel.
• Wikipedia offers an interesting article, analysis, and an even more fascinating bibliography for your perusal.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)