Jane Austen, Redux

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

Every reader has a favorite novel or two that they return to, time and again, because they simply can’t stay away.  They come back for the characters, for the plot, for the comfortable familiarity that grows between reader and story.  I’ve loved many, many books in my time, but none so much as the novels of Jane Austen.

Now, Jane and I didn’t get off to the best of starts, and I’ll be the first to admit that. When we were assigned Pride and Prejudice in high school, I disliked the novel so much that I didn’t bother to finish it.  It wasn’t until a few years later that I stumbled across Emma and fell head over heels. I went back and gave Pride and Prejudice another chance, and was amazed at how it came alive in my hands.  In the years since I’ve ready them all: Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and yes, even nobody’s favorite: Mansfield Park.

These days, Austen is big business and writers of varying skill think nothing of hitching their own writings to Austen’s star.  Folks re-tell Austen’s stories all the time, from alternate viewpoints, with altered endings, or hijacking their plots wholesale out of Regency England and dropping them in new times and places.

That last approach- retelling the stories in the modern age, is the approach taken by writers of the The Austen Project. Rather than dredging the bowels of vanity publishing and gambling with poorly written knock-offs, publisher Harper-Collins has recruited authors with some serious clout, “of global literary significance” in their words, to update Austen’s stories for a modern audience.  Purists, I’m sure, will be outraged, but the results so far are just delightful.

 

Joanna Trollope and Val McDermid certainly have enough established credentials to impress any reader. These writers are no novice Austen-fans launching their fanfic onto the world, and their Austen Updates are well-polished and very loyal to their source material.  In the case of McDermid’s Northanger Abbey, the results are every bit as fun and funny as Austen’s original: Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney are just as delightful discussing vampires and Twilight as they are with gothic novels and The Mysteries of Udolpho. If any Austen character were to describe something as “Totes amazeballs!” it would surely be Isabella Thorpe (or possibly Lydia Bennet.) Austen’s satire survives well in this update, and reminds us that teenage girls haven’t changed too much since Austen’s day.  This is an update that, like the movie Clueless, gives something new to appreciate while respecting and growing on the original.

Trollope’s update of Sense and Sensibility is also a refreshing change, but, perhaps because it’s missing that note of satire, seems to take itself a little too seriously at times. The wonderful relationship between the Dashwood sisters remain intact, but their very different personalities are clumsily updated.  In the original, Elinor Dashwood is driven to hide and control her emotions by her rigid adherence to social standards. Brought forward into modern age, without those strict mores to justify her high standards, it’s harder to understand why she seems to stand in the way of her own happiness.  Marianne, on the other hand, should be even more free to express the deep emotions that drive her, but Trollope gets in her way. While the original had Marianne yearning to love wildly, frustrated by social limitations, reading Byron and Cowper, this Marianne seems tame by today’s standard: strumming her guitar and moodily playing Taylor Swift break up songs when she’s not having an asthma attack.  The book is still delightful, and Austen fans will surely enjoy it, but the plot, driven by misunderstandings and the social customs that make them hard to clear up, just doesn’t seem as credible in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Google.  This version is faithful to the source, enjoyable to read but a pale imitation of the original.

Harper Collins has plans to continue with The Austen Project, having announced versions of Emma written by Alexander McCall Smith and Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfield. They may not appeal to non-Janeites, but Austen’s legion fans will surely enjoy them.

Would an author by any other name sell as well?

The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling

Hardback $25.99, Paperback $13.49, Free from your local library

“How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.”

I don’t read a lot of books in the hard-boiled detective genre, which is slightly odd considering the fact that I usually enjoy them. They just aren’t books I generally seek out, and since my To Be Read list is always growing longer, rather than shorter, it takes something special to get it into my hands. One way to move quickly up the queue is having an author I respect and enjoy; enter Robert Galbraith- a name you might recognize as the pseudonym for one J. K. Rowling. Yes, that J. K. Rowling.

Who? Me?

Let me be honest: if The Cuckoo’s Calling had NOT been written by J. K. Rowling in disguise, it most likely never would have blipped on my Reader’s Radar. Given that I didn’t much enjoy her only other adult-geared novel, A Casual Vacancy, it’s a testament to the credit I give Rowling that I was willing to pick up this one. My reward, though, was a throughly enjoyable read.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is the first novel in a to-be-published series for detective Cormoran Strike, a hard-nosed, down on his luck private eye. He ticks most of boxes in the Stereotypical Private Eye checklist: anguished love life? Check. Traumatic past? Check. Secretive personal history? Check.  Strike is former military, having lost a leg in a Afghanistan, and, more recently, a fiance in London.  His creditors are hounding him and the outlook couldn’t be worse when the case of a lifetime lands in his lap.

Lula Landry was the hottest thing going in London’s fashion scene when she suddenly fell to her death one cold, snowy night. The Met may have ruled it a suicide, but that doesn’t satisfy her grief-stricken brother. Strike delves into Landry’s complicated past (aren’t they always?), unraveling her complex network of relationships along the way. Was she really driven to suicide, or were more sinister threats around? The storyline is very tightly focused, without a lot of extraneous filler or red herrings along the way. Where this novel really wins me over, though, is in the slow trickle of information. The reader can sense Strike circling in on the answers he seeks, but the plot gives nothing away. All of the clues are there for the plucking, but it would take a keener mind than mine to put them together. When Strike finally solves his mystery, (as all good private eyes must), a reader might sense Galbraith’s slight-of-hand, but nothing feels too contrived.

The character development is one of the highlight’s of The Cuckoo’s Calling, with a few exceptions. Strike is a deeply realized, fully fleshed-out character, and it’s obvious that the writer got inside the character’s head.  Through the course of the novel, his past in unfolded, making his actions more complex and his character more realistic.  The only glaring exception is in his recently failed personal relationship.  As he attempts to pick through Lula Landry’s life, she also becomes unfolded to the reader, through the eyes of the characters who knew her, loved her, and resented her.  It can be a tricky thing to bring to “life” a character who dies before the first pages of a book, but Galbraith nails it. Each character Strike encounters has a rich, unique voice, and the dialog is one of the gems of The Cuckoo’s Calling.This doesn’t hold true, however, in the case of Robin, Strike’s stereotypically plucky and resourceful office assistance.  She instead comes across as a bit of a stock character, there to raise doubts about Strike’s competence (since he is, after all, the Loner Detective with a Hidden Past). Taken together, Robin and Strike’s recently ended relationship seem included more as tropes of the genre, there more because they are expected than because they move the story forward.

Cormoran Strike will return in The Silkworm, to be published later this year.

Bookshelf Camo Fatigues? Sign me up for the next Litra-tec Training Course

The Thursday Next Series, by Jasper Fforde

The Eyre Affair; Lost in a Good Book; The Well of Lost Plots; Something Rotten; First Among Sequels; One of Our Thursdays is Missing; The Woman Who Died a Lot

“The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.” From The Eyre Affair

One of my favorite fictional worlds is the one Jasper Fforde created for his literary detective, Thursday Next. That’s literary detective as in “law enforcement protecting literature from within.” Talk about a dream job.

Thursday lives in an alternate universe where the Crimean War continued well in to the 1980s, dodos were un-extincted, time travel is commonplace, and literature is a hot commodity: street riots break out between warring poetry gangs, Shakespearean evangelists go door to door, and Richard III is performed (with Rocky Horror-esque audience interaction) every week.  Thursday’s job is to help police the hot black market literature underworld, until things get really weird . . .

In her first installment, The Eyre Affair, Thursday is tasked with rescuing Jane Eyre, kidnapped from the pages of her novel with all of literature held captive.  To do so, she must learn to travel inside of fiction, opening up a world of adventures inside and outside of fiction. Over the course of her various adventures, Thursday becomes the leading defender of the written word, and believe me, fiction couldn’t have a better champion.  She’s a great character to center these stories around; plucky, determined, and with a strong sense of right and wrong that gets her in trouble (and out of) often.

Fforde’s writing and plots border at times on the ridiculous, but almost always in ways that work.  His storylines may be convoluted, but there are plenty of literary in-jokes and character cameos to deliver a payoff for fiction lovers.  Fforde expects his readers to be well-read and he rewards us for it.  If you’ve ever wondered what an anger management group therapy session would look like inside Wuthering Heights, your wait is over.

The series moves away from the fictional world in later books, but still offers plenty for book lovers to enjoy. My personal favorites are the first few, but I’ve eagerly awaited all them and never been disappointed. The plots are so rich and enjoyable that I hesitate to give away details and ruin the amusement that comes with, say, discovering whether there’s such a thing as a fair trial in fiction, or the practical difficulties of communicating via footnotes.

When Historians Daydream

Interred With Their Bones, by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Paperback $12.99; Free at your local library

“That the good that we do might live on after us, while the evil lies interred with their bones.”

Let me tell you a little secret about grad students in general, and historians in particular; in the secret heart of our hearts, we all spend obscene amounts of time imagining ourselves as Robert Langdon or Indiana Jones. We daydream elaborate fantasies wherein we discover never-before-seen documents and artifacts, protect them against all odds from nefarious exploitation, winning the heart of a dashing rogue or fair maiden and the admiration of our dissertation committee along the way.

Fantasy, you say? Nay, cry we! It’s only a matter of time!

Now, some of us (sadly) will never live out this fantasy, but that doesn’t stop us. We can live it out in books! Jennifer Lee Carrell’s Interred With Their Bones is an academic adventure in the grand tradition of The DaVinci Code.  Heroine Kate Stanley is a historian and Shakespeare scholar turned director. She lands a dream gig directing Hamlet at The Globe (because if we’re going for fantasy, we’re going to fulfill All Of The Fantasies), when her estranged advisor suddenly appears with a mystery to be solved.  When tragedy strikes, Kate is sent off on a whirlwind adventure, dodging hitmen, solving riddles, and chasing lost manuscripts and First Folios across two continents.

Our reluctant but intrepid heroine is joined by exactly the cast of characters you’d expect to find in such an adventure: the mentor she left behind, a wise counselor, an ally she isn’t sure she can trust, and a mysterious stranger she probably shouldn’t rely on, but does anyway.  To be fair, none of these characters is all that deep, but let’s face it: this isn’t the kind of book we turn to for character analysis.

Likewise the plot is filled with the expected twists and turns and red-herrings, but is a fun journey for all of that. Is it more than a little implausible at times? Yes, absolutely, that’s why we like it. The shenanigans that Kate and her crew get up to are exactly the stuff of daydream adventures. There’s a good dose of history and literature here as well, which balances out the far-fetched storyline. If you’re a Shakespeare aficionado who can suspend belief and follow an adventure down the rabbit-hole, this is a good one to get lost in for awhile.

The Old Ballgame

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Hardback $25.99; Paperback $14.99; Free at your local library

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Sports-based fiction, as a genre, isn’t really my cup of tea, mostly because the sports I enjoy watching don’t translate well to the written word. I’ll spend a fall Sunday watching hours of football, but reading it? No thanks. I attribute it to the difference in pace. What is fast and hard-hitting in the game becomes tedious. But baseball, as Chad Harbach points out in The Art of Fielding, is different.

Baseball works in fiction because the pace of a good novel matches the pace of a good game. There are slowly-building tension and sudden bursts of activity, spread out, hopefully, over the course of the game or novel.  And baseball is about relationships; nothing else in sports compares to the storyline between pitcher and hitter.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding brings baseball to life, and it would be easy to write it off as another sports book. Easy to do, perhaps, but shamefully inaccurate. The baseball scenes are well-written, but what he really nails are the relationships. The story focuses on several players for the Westish College Harpooners: shortstop phenom Henry Skrimshander; journeyman catcher Mike Schwartz; intellectual right-fielder Owen Dunne; and members of the school administration: President Guert Affenlight and his newly-returned daughter Pella.  Henry is the team star, one game away from a record for error-less games, when tragedy strikes and shakes all of these characters out of their carefully constructed roles.

Like a baseball game, this book is all about relationships: between sexual relationship between Owen and Affenlight, the mentor/student relationship between Henry and Schwartz. All of their lives are changed with one mistimed throw, forcing them to redefine themselves and their relationships. Some of them do that willingly, others have to be drug on kicking and screaming (figuratively, at least).  I was struck most by how richly imagined the characters are. They are all distinct and complex, but accessible. The only exception is Pella Affenlight, who isn’t as fully realized and whose storyline doesn’t fit as neatly.

This is a book to be enjoyed like a baseball game: on a lazy summer weekend with a cold iced tea near to hand. You don’t have to take my word on it, though: the New York Times considered it one of the best books of 2011.