As with a few previous weeks of the Banquet of Books reading challenge, Week 7 has been an 'up and down' week. There's been a healthy mixture of confusion, lightheartedness and really good meaty texts to sink my teeth into. I can't say I've enjoyed everything I've read, but I've appreciated it all. Keep reading to find out what I've been up to this week!
***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE TEXTS*
It could be argued that Hardy's lack of a consistent voice damages the cohesion of the volume - this can be explained by the fact that the poems, presented chronologically for the most part, span three decades of work - or, more convincingly, that it allows the poet to incorporate a wide range of themes and styles, producing an incredibly innovative collection. This ambiguity continues within individual poems themselves; in Amabel, Hardy's focus seems to be on the degradation of the titular woman's beauty - he 'sighed/That love like ours had died', and notes that 'her gown,/Once rose, now earthen brown.../was like the knell/Of Amabel' - yet an attitude of resignation is adopted in the final stanza which muddies the waters with regard to the extent of the narrator's love, as they decide to 'leave her to her fate'.
The poet is never content with linear explanations, permanently questioning conventions, as in Hap, whose narrator evaluates the mechanisms of sorrow, realising his atheism through his reasoning that if 'a Powerfuller than I/Had willed and meted me the tears I shed', then he would be contented, yet he knows that the 'purblind Doomsters' of fate and chance are to blame for '[unblooming] the best hope ever sown' rather than a transcendent omnipotent being. So, too, does Her Dilemma transform a simple white lie into a fierce rebuke of humans' conditioned desire to be loved; the female speaker has little respect for religion, noting its 'wasted carvings' and the 'dull monotones' of the church's clock, yet still worries for 'her soul' after lying to a dying man that she loves him. At a Bridal again offers a scathing questioning of fate; its narrator sees his beloved wed another man and, 'grieved that lives so matched should mis-compose', believes that if he asked nature why he was not destined to be with the woman, she will answer 'that she does not care'.
Yet, despite all of Hardy's relentless challenges to destiny (which, in all cases, is personified - perhaps reflecting how Hardy is looking for somebody to blame when really there is nobody), it was two of the more simplistic ones that I liked the most. The narrator of Neutral Tones reflects on the love lost as his relationship has flickered out like a dying flame, as Hardy throws pathetic fallacy kindling onto a chilly fire that spits out recollections that 'the smile on your mouth was the deadest thing,/Alive enough to have strength to die' and 'keen lessons that love deceives... have shaped to me your face and the god-curst Sun'. Meanwhile, the titular narrator of She at His Funeral mourns a love that must stay hidden; Hardy questions the notions of class relations and respectability - whilst the mourning woman must stay a 'stranger' due to her 'unchanged... gown of garish dye', she is his 'sweetheart', the one who knows him best of all and whose 'regret consumes like fire', as opposed to the 'sable-sad' mourners whose respect for the traditions of the funeral creates the assumption that they knew him better. Overall, I'm not too enamoured with Thomas Hardy's often dreary subject matter, but concede that he manages to employ a constant atmosphere of curiosity to sew together a volume of inconsistently -themed and -structured poetry; for me, not a particular fan of poetry, therefore, it just tips over past the 'average' line - probably not something I would return to unless I had to, but an enjoyable experience all the same.
As for the cause of the house's 'outrageous behaviour': the author is almost nonchalant in her revelation that Sethe's dead daughter's spirit haunts it. Grandma Baby Suggs, portrayed as unable to 'get interested in leaving life or living it', even reckons that 'not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead negro's grief' and implores her daughter to 'be thankful' that only one of her children is 'raising hell from the other side'. In a novel all about the bonds we make, the baby (later personified as Beloved, after the single-word inscription on her headstone) represents the broken bond trying to re-assert itself within Sethe's life. The reader is offered several hints that Sethe risks repeating her mistake by letting her mother-daughter bond with the now eighteen-year-old Denver fray; the sample I read ended in Denver's fraught confession that '"I can't live here. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I can't live here."' Much like Denver's brothers, she finds this solitary, scared life just too hard to handle. Unlike them, she tells her mother about it - although it may be susceptible to fractures, the mother-daughter relationship between Sethe and Denver is portrayed as intuitive and nurturing. Yet, due to Morrison's effective and concise character sketches, it's instantly understandable that Denver feels conflicted: change.
Throughout the opening chapters, Morrison presents a constant progression of change within the characters' relationships: pre-the beginning of the narrative, five members of the family lived in the house, but Sethe's two sons 'fled at once - the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time'. The male players out of the way, Morrison can focus on the engagingly written female characters who dominate the story, though the family relationships remain just as turbulent - from Denver's perspective, she witnesses the loss of her two brothers and her grandmother, and becomes wary of Sethe's overly friendly old acquaintance Paul D, who has reemerged into her life, all the while resisting the influence of the baby on these already fraught relationships. Stuck between despising her life where '"nobody speaks to us"' and trusting Paul D, much like the liminal space 'between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead' where Baby Suggs resided, Denver is at a crossroads. No wonder she's able to identify the spiteful ghost as '"rebuked. Lonely and rebuked."' Does Sethe risk losing Denver too, albeit in a less material way than in the case of her other daughter?
The author's use of setting and scale is another curiosity. Clearly, the anthropomorphised house is central to the novel's theme of loneliness, imprisoning its protagonists in a too-tight embrace. All of the action so far is set in the house, relaying one close-knit family's experiences, yet Sethe's mind constantly travels to other places - she thinks about the farm on which she grew up as a child, its 'shameless beauty' that 'made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too', even the 'town full of disgust' on the other side of the door. This allows the author to convey the idea of trapping a roaming spirit within the confines of a single dwelling, to link the restlessness of the mother and her deceased child. So, too, does the initial semblance of loneliness about the household betray its falseness as the plot unfolds: there is a sense of shared ideals within the black community (Baby Suggs disseminating the adage '"if a negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up"'), Baby Suggs feels so intimately connected to her children that she 'claimed she felt each one go the very day and hour', and Sethe and Denver's bond is, I suspect, impenetrable.
To provide narrative colour, Morrison deals in imagery - the house's blood-red pools of light are a perfect example of how the baby's influence spills over into the family's everyday life, whilst Paul D attributes his appearance to '"devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad"' - yet can easily whip aside this blanket of symbolism in order to shock the reader: the boys of Sethe's childhood were 'all in their twenties, minus women, fucking cows, dreaming of rape', whilst the spiteful baby 'picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye'. Morrison's masterful melding of the explicit/implicit also conceals a gradually emerging underlying suspense; we learn quite quickly that the baby's throat was cut, and that Sethe remembers 'pulsating... baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil'. Like guilt?
The early pages of this book are spent creating an emotional battleground, lining up the pieces ready for the player - the spiteful baby ghost - to have her fun. Beloved is a book borne of urgency, coloured by fear and soaked in nostalgia. It is a story of love and relationships which guts the traditional structure of that genre and fills the carcass with spite, loneliness and indecision. A desparate attempt to connect isolation to community, to identify the slave experience with maternal guilt, to recognise love and hatred in their multifarious forms, to reconcile inextricable paradoxes. I think it's brilliant, and I can't wait to read on.
The world in which she lives is highly ordered - everyone has their place, their responsibilities, enforced by the 'patrolling sentries' whose lanterns create 'a flickering monster'. The Colonel, 'the most secret person in the big house', who takes charge when Baldovina's master is away, is so feared that 'everything was measured against fear of [the master's] absence'. In the money-strapped cook, Juan Izquierdo, Lima presents a character who always finds himself bound to return to the established order - he 'began the week with the arrogance of a mulatto from Oriente Province... towards the end of the week, a decline would set in, with endless requests for small amounts'. Whilst not entirely oppressive, the circumstances clearly deny Baldovina many of her freedoms. On the other end of the spectrum, the most powerful character is the Colonel, who comes and goes as he pleases whilst drawing up plans 'for invasions against countries found in neither time nor space... somewhere between eternity and nothingness'. Here is a character who asserts his power just because he can.
In terms of noteworthy quirks within the prose, there is little so far to comment on besides an exceptionally meta lambasting of 'those literal-minded, portly people who read a book overnight as soon as they buy it' and a simile zoomorphising José Cemí's welts as 'animals... that could leap from the bed and crawl across her own shoulders'. Lima's frequent references to other civilisations, much like Sethe's wandering thoughts in Beloved, convey the sense of entrapment engendered by this overly regimented community, allowing the story to tentatively reach out into the wider world beyond its setting. Baldovina 'looked like a sixteenth-century flagellant', the Colonel has 'the same devotion that might have been shown a Coptic priest or an Assyrian huntsman-king' and the Galician servant Zoar picks up the child 'like St. Christopher'. Even the boy's welts exhibit 'hellish redness', and are 'the king's evil... like the red blotches of a royal Poinciana tree'.
Lima's seminal novel gets off to a slow start, balancing brilliant descriptions of welts with pointless references to ancient cultures which add little. Reading it in translation, and only the beginning at that, undoubtedly diminishes its impact, yet I still can't envisage myself enjoying the rest of this book, unless it picks up the pace considerably. I can sympathise with Baldovina's plight, and the mysterious Colonel intrigues me, but the absence of an engaging plot makes this a relatively hard sell.
The trouble with a dystopia is that it all too often seems utopian - at least in the beginning. What could possibly be wrong with 'a sterile, faultless sky'? Wouldn't we all like to be 'unclouded by the insanity of thoughts'? Hmm... enter Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.An epistolary work presented as a series of letters (although the recipient is unclear), complete with examples and extracts purporting to be 'merely a copy, word for word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper', We rapidly establishes its narrator as a denizen of a futuristic, all-conquering, all-powerful society. The trick is nonchalance - within the creepy anaphoric mantra '"Long live the United State! Long live the Numbers! Long live the Well-Doer!!!'" the narrator's vastly different lexicon, and its ominous capitalisation, is casually evinced. References to the Green Wall and the Two Hundred Years' War quickly create a sense of time and scale which allows Zamyatin to dive into the heart of the plot after speedily setting up the narrative's playground. That the narrator clearly buys into the apparent utopia created around them also enlightens the reader as to their status as part of a completely distinct system: their cheeks burn with pride as they swallow newspaper propaganda relating how 'one thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United State' (this in itself evidences Zamyatin's grand sense of scale - the Integral spaceship will soon 'rise into the limitless space of the universe' - which likens the United State to other colonial powers from throughout history).
The second method by which Zamyatin establishes the futuristic setting of the novel is his narrator's superiority over our present culture and capability. We are but 'the ancients', the subject of an incredulously written history, our art ('how primitive was the taste of the ancients, since their poets were always inspired by these senseless, formless, stupidly rushing accumulations of vapour! [clouds]') mocked by our all-knowing descendants. They question whether we knew that our lives were 'actually wholesale murder, although slow murder, day by day', stand amazed at our 'prehistoric time when such things as nations, wars, commerce, different discoveries of different Americas' existed, and label our society 'a thundering, many-coloured confusion', 'so incredible, so absurd, that I lost control of myself and laughed aloud'. In the narrator's utter disbelief that such a life as ours could have been lived Zamyatin exerts a covert post-colonial arrogance which instantly engenders in the reader a dislike of the world presented to them.
The restrictive United State operates as a single gestalt, as evidenced by the first-person pronoun that forms the book's title. In this 'remarkable intersection of thoughts' where 'nobody is one, but one of', nobody can do anything without everybody else knowing about it - the perfect conditions to breed a climate of paranoia and disharmony, you would think, but that problem seems to have been sorted out within this system. Everything is ordered and chartered, from 'sexual days' to 'personal hours', when the people of the United State can merrily trot off on their 'supplementary walk'. Of course they view the Official Railroad Guide as 'the greatest of all monuments of ancient literature', representing as it does the order and regimentation which clearly overrides creativity, freedom and individuality in this utopian future. And it makes the citizens feel amazing - the narrator feels as if he had 'won a victory over the old god and the old life'. Evidently, they feel that something was wrong with our current system, and as we begin the book the United State's new regime appears to be the solution. Although perhaps the state suffers from a case of overconfidence? The one issue left to be solved, concedes the narrator, is 'the problem of happiness', but that won't stop them imposing a forced 'mathematically faultless happiness' on the beings of the other planets that they plan to 'subjugate'.
Despite the regimentation of this society, in which free will is seen as the root of misdemeanour and therefore restricted, Zamyatin wryly shows how locking up individuality and only letting it out during specified 'personal hours' is not the way to go: the narrator's hyperbolic ecstasy at the thought of '[integrating] the colossal, universal equation!' and proclamation that 'the United State is... a great divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines!' come off as the ramblings of a more verbose Trump. Their reckoning that their joy at the imminent launch of the 'glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral' is akin to 'what a woman probably feels when for the first time she senses within herself the pulse of a tiny, blind, human being' both conveys the extent to which the state's inhabitants are hooked into its beliefs and challenges the whole society by ludicrous comparison - as does the fact that none of its characters are named; instead, their serial numbers identify them.
The book opens an engaging debate into the value of freedom. The narrator attempts to reconcile the ancient concept of liberty with the mechanisms of the United State, noticing that 'the mechanical chisels were dancing to the melody of unheard tarantellas' in a 'mechanical ballet', linking a fluid art form with the oppressive state and its fixed system of living, before they abandon any notion of subscribing to the idea, labelling 'the state of freedom... an unorganised primitive state'. We are actively told that freedom is not in line with modern thinking, a bygone relic - as it has diminished, so has 'the instinct of non-freedom' increased. The State even retrospectively notices it as 'characteristic of human nature from ancient times' and praises 'absolute, ecstatic submission' as a state of being to strive for. Yet, as the sample of the book that I was reading concluded, the narrator breathlessly announced 'Until today everything in life seemed to me clear', intimating that a further level will be added to this ongoing debate.
We is rightly heralded as 'the inspiration for all futuristic dystopia novels', tackling totalitarianism through its satirical undercurrent and its perfectly effective portrayal of a society that has developed to the point of seeming alien. Beginning with a masterful profile of a utopian superstate, Zamyatin sets the pieces on the board, ready to analyse and satirise this society's values. I can't wait to see how he does it.
Along trundle the Middle Ages again, this time dealing the anonymous fairytale-esque Breton lay Sir Orfeo, a reworking of the ancient Greek myth which recounts a woman's abduction into a strange land and the attempts to reclaim her. Written in the medieval French romance style which encompasses the motifs of marital love, optimism and the supernatural within a construction of brevity, simplicity and conversation, the poem mitigates the source material's Hadean darkness in favour of seeing Orpheus' wife Eurydice kidnapped to the mythical Fairyland, and begins with a good twenty lines or so describing the different kinds of lays (poems) that are often read - 'some of war and some of woe/And some of joy and mirth also', etc before introducing the 'noble king' Orfeo.
Orfeo's proficiency as a musician is evidenced throughout - he 'loved the glee of harping' to the point that 'there nothing was/A better harper in no place' and that anybody who listened would think himself 'in one of the joys of Paradise'. His 'queen of excellence' Dame Eurydice lives a relaxed life swanning about in fields with her maidens, until she 'fell on sleep upon the green'; upon waking, she begins to cry out, tear at her limbs and clothes and scratch her face until 'it bled wet', before revealing that she has been ordered to come to Fairyland, a place of 'castles and towers/Rivers, forests, meadows with flowers'. Very quickly, Sir Orfeo cycles through a range of sections, its slow opening giving way to lush pastoral description, the juxtaposition of the 'merry and hot' May setting with the feverish lunacy of Eurydice's actions, the household's trauma when Eurydice is abducted and Orfeo decides that 'never again I will no woman see' and embarks on a hermitage in the wilderness, the surreality of the happy couple meeting again (when Orfeo stumbles on the cave by which Fairyland is entered) but being unable to speak, the awe of the expansive Fairyland and the horror of its corridors of corpses (or so it seems). This speedy turnaround between different settings and moods keeps the poem continually interesting whilst never compromising on the successful creation of these atmospheres.
I worry that the brevity of this review will imply that I haven't enjoyed Sir Orfeo, because I really truly have, immensely. The upshot of its decision not to focus on in-depth characterisation or complexity of plot allows it to tell a rollicking, simple, but exciting, story which I can find no faults in. Reading it in the (annotated) original Middle English, too, was a really enjoyable experience, and the ABAB lilt of the poem ensures its fairytale quality carries through into the very fabric of the poem. All in all, another successful adventure into the literary output of the Middle Ages!
I concluded the week exploring what is, without a doubt, the most fun text I've read as part of the Banquet of Books reading challenge. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, started by Jane Austen and finished off by Seth Grahame-Smith, is deliciously funny, even though its central joke repeats itself all the way through (more on that in a minute). A disclaimer before we start: I haven't actually read Austen's source material; I understand that that might have led me to enjoy the book even further, although it's encouraging that a novice to the original book can still enjoy Grahame-Smith's humorous adaptation in the near-enough knowledge of the style it is pastiching.
Blending the already slightly ludicrous upper-class jollity of Austen with a light-hearted modern tone from the very beginning ('it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains'), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies literally reads as though the original story has simply had a horde of the undead implanted into it. We're clearly several years into the zombie invasion, to the point of nonchalance - Mr. Bennet's 'morning business' comprises 'dagger sharpening and musket polishing', and, recounting a party, the reader is told that 'apart from the attack, the evening altogether passed off pleasantly for the whole family' - and so Grahame-Smith commences the story with the perfect framework for humour. Notable is the adults' emphasis on secrecy and deception. They lie to each other about their thoughts and feelings, Mr. Bingley brings significantly fewer people to his party than at first reported, and, most significantly, they lie to themselves. This is evidenced in their reluctance to explicitly name the issue, instead settling on euphemisms; 'England's present difficulties' are the 'unfortunate scourge', 'strange plague', 'unmentionables'. No such qualms for the narrator, who frequently refers to 'zombies' and 'the living dead', as do the younger generation - that the narrator sides with the children insinuates the ridiculousness of not acknowledging the zombie plague for what it is. This dysphemistic style carries on in a description of an attack on a party, where 'Mrs. Long struggled to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut, and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers'. Although describing a tragic event, the author ensures the comedic atmosphere is kept high by the incongruity of presenting this tragedy in the Austenian style with its associations of lighthearted frivolity. Turning the page to find a Ladybird-style captioned illustration of the attack was the hilarious icing on the cake.
The novel's main source of humour is the melding of Pride and Prejudice and the zombie horror subgenre, embodied in Mrs. Bennet who is keen that her girls are '"as deadly as they are fetching!"', whilst Mr. Darcy is attracted to both 'the beautiful expression of [Elizabeth's] dark eyes, and her uncommon skill with a blade'. A subset of this new regime is an increased emphasis on women to subvert their gender's expectations and, much like the women who were parachuted into men's jobs during wartime, they are propelled into a new way of living, one in which they conceal daggers in their socks and in which the Bennets' daughter Jane is 'a warrior first, and a woman second'. Through this concept, Grahame-Smith can satirise and ridicule the attitudes of the past, writing from a more enlightened time. Whilst Mrs. Bennet sees the new arrival Mr. Bingley as an attractive proposition because of his 'four or five thousand a year', her husband is more concerned about whether he can 'train them in the ways of swordsmanship and musketry' - yes, both of their priorities seem a little ridiculous, but the author's emphasis on the more practical concerns as opposed to the whole outdated system of parents wedding their children by flinging themselves at the nearest rich bachelor remains a pertinent point. This is also seen in Mr. Bennet's assertion that 'none of our girls has much to recommend them; they are all silly and ignorant like their mother, the exception being Lizzy, who has something more of the killer instinct'. So, too, does the ludicrousness of the Austen-era resignation that 'happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defect of the person with whom you are to pass your life' become more prominent within the mad framework of the author's creation. In some ways, the secondary narrative function of the zombie invasion is to act as a defined subversion of both the Victorian writing style and the social conventions associated with it - like Sir Toby Belch and co ripping up the rulebook. Therefore, such an atmosphere of ludicrousness is created that any antiquated ideas referenced within it are going to stick out like a sore thumb.
Perhaps the zombie developments also compound the contemporary Victorian sexism; reacting to women's increased agency, Mr. Bennet can now shirk the idea of getting married and demand that his wife 'leave me to the defence of my estate' (the personal pronouns foregrounding an increased necessity to have something to own, given that women are now asserting themselves more). Again, Grahame-Smith satirises these ideas without saying a word; the zombies' mere presence heightens the incongruity of these misogynistic attitudes. Some Austen hallmarks remain, however, such as the brevity of description - all we are told of Mr. Darcy, for example, is that he possesses a 'fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien' - yet, on the whole, any hangovers from the Victorian era are presented to symbiotically serve the story. These antiquated views contribute to the ludicrousness of the story, and in turn the ludicrousness of the story fuels the reader's perception of them as ludicrous. Speaking of ludicrous, I'm as amazed as you probably are that I've got this much out of what is, in essence, a parody book. Time for the conclusion? I think so too!
Packing the story with humour - and there really are some good jokes ('balls are always a subject which makes a girl energetic' amazed me by being, unbelievably, a paraphrase from Austen) - and engagingly rewriting Austen in a way that makes her palatable for modern or perhaps younger audiences without compromising on the events of the original narrative, the writers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are truly onto a winner here. It certainly isn't perfect - a description of Mr. Bennet as 'so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and self-discipline' is our only evidence so far that he embodies any of these qualities; he and his wife are both mere ciphers at this point - but it makes no pretense at being. Rather, this story is intended as light reading, succeeding as a deliciously funny, subversive take on a literary classic. A brilliant way to close out the week!
Apologies for the lateness of this post - I'd been trying to get it done by the end of Sunday, so that I didn't go into next week. As I type this, it's about quarter to one on Monday morning, so I've just missed my deadline, but hey ho, it's probably for the best to have elucidated my thoughts on these texts properly, just slightly later than planned. Either way, it's technically finished by close of play Sunday, so don't hate me, okay?!
Week 7 hasn't been perfect, but it's been another really solid week. The Middle Ages have delighted me again with a mini-odyssey into medieval poetry, Jane Austen (of all people) has got me fighting the urge to snigger on the bus, I've been introduced to a creepy dystopian society that I'll definitely be making a return visit to, and, in Beloved, one of the most mature and beautifully-expressed stories that I've read so far on this blog has revealed itself to me. Well done Week 7, you've done yourself proud.
I'll be back asap to bring you the Week 8 reading list, which I'm finalising now - hopefully tomorrow, but I can't promise that, sorry! We'll again be tackling a wide range of texts, sampling our way through some 20th-century classics from both sides of the Atlantic and getting a little bit saucy (by 18th-century standards, that is!)
In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates and notifications, and I'll see you back here quite soon for the Week 8 menu!
The book opens an engaging debate into the value of freedom. The narrator attempts to reconcile the ancient concept of liberty with the mechanisms of the United State, noticing that 'the mechanical chisels were dancing to the melody of unheard tarantellas' in a 'mechanical ballet', linking a fluid art form with the oppressive state and its fixed system of living, before they abandon any notion of subscribing to the idea, labelling 'the state of freedom... an unorganised primitive state'. We are actively told that freedom is not in line with modern thinking, a bygone relic - as it has diminished, so has 'the instinct of non-freedom' increased. The State even retrospectively notices it as 'characteristic of human nature from ancient times' and praises 'absolute, ecstatic submission' as a state of being to strive for. Yet, as the sample of the book that I was reading concluded, the narrator breathlessly announced 'Until today everything in life seemed to me clear', intimating that a further level will be added to this ongoing debate.
We is rightly heralded as 'the inspiration for all futuristic dystopia novels', tackling totalitarianism through its satirical undercurrent and its perfectly effective portrayal of a society that has developed to the point of seeming alien. Beginning with a masterful profile of a utopian superstate, Zamyatin sets the pieces on the board, ready to analyse and satirise this society's values. I can't wait to see how he does it.
Orfeo's proficiency as a musician is evidenced throughout - he 'loved the glee of harping' to the point that 'there nothing was/A better harper in no place' and that anybody who listened would think himself 'in one of the joys of Paradise'. His 'queen of excellence' Dame Eurydice lives a relaxed life swanning about in fields with her maidens, until she 'fell on sleep upon the green'; upon waking, she begins to cry out, tear at her limbs and clothes and scratch her face until 'it bled wet', before revealing that she has been ordered to come to Fairyland, a place of 'castles and towers/Rivers, forests, meadows with flowers'. Very quickly, Sir Orfeo cycles through a range of sections, its slow opening giving way to lush pastoral description, the juxtaposition of the 'merry and hot' May setting with the feverish lunacy of Eurydice's actions, the household's trauma when Eurydice is abducted and Orfeo decides that 'never again I will no woman see' and embarks on a hermitage in the wilderness, the surreality of the happy couple meeting again (when Orfeo stumbles on the cave by which Fairyland is entered) but being unable to speak, the awe of the expansive Fairyland and the horror of its corridors of corpses (or so it seems). This speedy turnaround between different settings and moods keeps the poem continually interesting whilst never compromising on the successful creation of these atmospheres.
I worry that the brevity of this review will imply that I haven't enjoyed Sir Orfeo, because I really truly have, immensely. The upshot of its decision not to focus on in-depth characterisation or complexity of plot allows it to tell a rollicking, simple, but exciting, story which I can find no faults in. Reading it in the (annotated) original Middle English, too, was a really enjoyable experience, and the ABAB lilt of the poem ensures its fairytale quality carries through into the very fabric of the poem. All in all, another successful adventure into the literary output of the Middle Ages!
Blending the already slightly ludicrous upper-class jollity of Austen with a light-hearted modern tone from the very beginning ('it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains'), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies literally reads as though the original story has simply had a horde of the undead implanted into it. We're clearly several years into the zombie invasion, to the point of nonchalance - Mr. Bennet's 'morning business' comprises 'dagger sharpening and musket polishing', and, recounting a party, the reader is told that 'apart from the attack, the evening altogether passed off pleasantly for the whole family' - and so Grahame-Smith commences the story with the perfect framework for humour. Notable is the adults' emphasis on secrecy and deception. They lie to each other about their thoughts and feelings, Mr. Bingley brings significantly fewer people to his party than at first reported, and, most significantly, they lie to themselves. This is evidenced in their reluctance to explicitly name the issue, instead settling on euphemisms; 'England's present difficulties' are the 'unfortunate scourge', 'strange plague', 'unmentionables'. No such qualms for the narrator, who frequently refers to 'zombies' and 'the living dead', as do the younger generation - that the narrator sides with the children insinuates the ridiculousness of not acknowledging the zombie plague for what it is. This dysphemistic style carries on in a description of an attack on a party, where 'Mrs. Long struggled to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut, and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers'. Although describing a tragic event, the author ensures the comedic atmosphere is kept high by the incongruity of presenting this tragedy in the Austenian style with its associations of lighthearted frivolity. Turning the page to find a Ladybird-style captioned illustration of the attack was the hilarious icing on the cake.
The novel's main source of humour is the melding of Pride and Prejudice and the zombie horror subgenre, embodied in Mrs. Bennet who is keen that her girls are '"as deadly as they are fetching!"', whilst Mr. Darcy is attracted to both 'the beautiful expression of [Elizabeth's] dark eyes, and her uncommon skill with a blade'. A subset of this new regime is an increased emphasis on women to subvert their gender's expectations and, much like the women who were parachuted into men's jobs during wartime, they are propelled into a new way of living, one in which they conceal daggers in their socks and in which the Bennets' daughter Jane is 'a warrior first, and a woman second'. Through this concept, Grahame-Smith can satirise and ridicule the attitudes of the past, writing from a more enlightened time. Whilst Mrs. Bennet sees the new arrival Mr. Bingley as an attractive proposition because of his 'four or five thousand a year', her husband is more concerned about whether he can 'train them in the ways of swordsmanship and musketry' - yes, both of their priorities seem a little ridiculous, but the author's emphasis on the more practical concerns as opposed to the whole outdated system of parents wedding their children by flinging themselves at the nearest rich bachelor remains a pertinent point. This is also seen in Mr. Bennet's assertion that 'none of our girls has much to recommend them; they are all silly and ignorant like their mother, the exception being Lizzy, who has something more of the killer instinct'. So, too, does the ludicrousness of the Austen-era resignation that 'happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defect of the person with whom you are to pass your life' become more prominent within the mad framework of the author's creation. In some ways, the secondary narrative function of the zombie invasion is to act as a defined subversion of both the Victorian writing style and the social conventions associated with it - like Sir Toby Belch and co ripping up the rulebook. Therefore, such an atmosphere of ludicrousness is created that any antiquated ideas referenced within it are going to stick out like a sore thumb.
Perhaps the zombie developments also compound the contemporary Victorian sexism; reacting to women's increased agency, Mr. Bennet can now shirk the idea of getting married and demand that his wife 'leave me to the defence of my estate' (the personal pronouns foregrounding an increased necessity to have something to own, given that women are now asserting themselves more). Again, Grahame-Smith satirises these ideas without saying a word; the zombies' mere presence heightens the incongruity of these misogynistic attitudes. Some Austen hallmarks remain, however, such as the brevity of description - all we are told of Mr. Darcy, for example, is that he possesses a 'fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien' - yet, on the whole, any hangovers from the Victorian era are presented to symbiotically serve the story. These antiquated views contribute to the ludicrousness of the story, and in turn the ludicrousness of the story fuels the reader's perception of them as ludicrous. Speaking of ludicrous, I'm as amazed as you probably are that I've got this much out of what is, in essence, a parody book. Time for the conclusion? I think so too!
Packing the story with humour - and there really are some good jokes ('balls are always a subject which makes a girl energetic' amazed me by being, unbelievably, a paraphrase from Austen) - and engagingly rewriting Austen in a way that makes her palatable for modern or perhaps younger audiences without compromising on the events of the original narrative, the writers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are truly onto a winner here. It certainly isn't perfect - a description of Mr. Bennet as 'so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and self-discipline' is our only evidence so far that he embodies any of these qualities; he and his wife are both mere ciphers at this point - but it makes no pretense at being. Rather, this story is intended as light reading, succeeding as a deliciously funny, subversive take on a literary classic. A brilliant way to close out the week!
Apologies for the lateness of this post - I'd been trying to get it done by the end of Sunday, so that I didn't go into next week. As I type this, it's about quarter to one on Monday morning, so I've just missed my deadline, but hey ho, it's probably for the best to have elucidated my thoughts on these texts properly, just slightly later than planned. Either way, it's technically finished by close of play Sunday, so don't hate me, okay?!
Week 7 hasn't been perfect, but it's been another really solid week. The Middle Ages have delighted me again with a mini-odyssey into medieval poetry, Jane Austen (of all people) has got me fighting the urge to snigger on the bus, I've been introduced to a creepy dystopian society that I'll definitely be making a return visit to, and, in Beloved, one of the most mature and beautifully-expressed stories that I've read so far on this blog has revealed itself to me. Well done Week 7, you've done yourself proud.
I'll be back asap to bring you the Week 8 reading list, which I'm finalising now - hopefully tomorrow, but I can't promise that, sorry! We'll again be tackling a wide range of texts, sampling our way through some 20th-century classics from both sides of the Atlantic and getting a little bit saucy (by 18th-century standards, that is!)
In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates and notifications, and I'll see you back here quite soon for the Week 8 menu!
No comments:
Post a Comment