Category: Classics

Memories of A Christmas Carol: a Classics Club meme

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The Classics Club monthly meme question for December asks us for our thoughts and memories of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:

What is your favorite memory of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? Have you ever read it? If not, will you? Why should others read it rather than relying on the film adaptations?

A Christmas Carol I was given a copy of A Christmas Carol as a Christmas present when I was a child, though I don’t know exactly how old I was. I can’t remember who gave it to me either, but I suspect it was probably an aunt or uncle. I remember taking the book with me to my grandmother’s a few days after Christmas and reading those famous opening lines for the first time:

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

The last time I re-read the book was in 2009, shortly after I started blogging, and it was still a pleasure to read – both the story itself and this particular edition. It’s a beautiful hardback book with colour illustrations and black and white line drawings by Arthur Rackham. Reading a book that looks and feels beautiful can really enhance the experience! Rackham’s twelve colour plates, originally published in 1915, can be seen here. I’ve always liked the one of Bob Cratchit sliding down the icy street.

I received a different edition of the book a few years later from another family member (again I’ve forgotten who it was). I’m not sure where I’ve put this one, though I know I must still have it somewhere. After a lot of searching online – which wasn’t easy, as there are literally hundreds of different versions of A Christmas Carol and I couldn’t recall the names of either the illustrators or the publisher – I managed to find a picture of the front cover for you:

A Christmas Carol - Peter Fluck and Roger Law This edition, which I’ve discovered was published by Viking, was illustrated by Peter Fluck and Roger Law (who were also the creators of Spitting Image) with pictures of grotesque puppet-like caricatures, like the one of Scrooge pictured on the cover.

There have been so many adaptations of A Christmas Carol, but although the story and the sentiment might be the same, if you only watch them instead of reading the novel you will be missing out on so much. As I said in my 2009 post on the book, even if you already know the story it’s still worth reading it for the richness and humour of Dickens’ writing and for his wonderful descriptions and imagery.

You can see how other Classics Club members responded to this month’s meme here.

Have a great Christmas and I’ll be back later in the week with my Best Books of 2012!

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (final thoughts)

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Clarissa I have never been so relieved to reach the end of a book! It’s not that I didn’t enjoy Clarissa, but when I embarked on JoAnn and Terri’s year-long group read back in January, I don’t think I fully understood what a huge commitment it was going to be. But even though reading Clarissa did sometimes feel like a chore, there was still something very compelling about it and I knew I would keep reading until I had finished, however long it took.

Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, published in 1748, is the story of Clarissa Harlowe, a beautiful and virtuous young woman who suffers at the hands of the unscrupulous ‘libertine’ Robert Lovelace. Clarissa has long been loved and admired by her friends and family, but this changes when she refuses to marry Mr Solmes, the man her parents have picked out for her. Forbidden to communicate with Lovelace and under increasing pressure to accept Solmes, Clarissa becomes virtually a prisoner in her family’s home. Isolated and desperate, she agrees to escape with Lovelace but soon finds herself at the mercy of cruel schemes designed to break down her virtue and attack her moral integrity.

Clarissa is completely epistolary – that is, the whole story is told in the form of 537 letters dated between 10th January and 18th December of the same year. The original aim of our group read was to read each letter on or around the dates given in the book, although that quickly became impossible because some letters were undated, multiple letters were sent by different people on the same day, and other letters were received in the wrong order or withheld until weeks later. Samuel Richardson must have been amazingly well organised, as there are also lots of cross references, with letters referring to something that had been mentioned in a previous letter, sometimes one that had been written many months earlier. This is where reading the Kindle version of the book was a disadvantage, as I would have found it so much easier to flick backwards and forwards in the paperback version!

There are four main correspondents in the book: Clarissa herself, her best friend Anna Howe, Lovelace and his friend Mr Belford, and I appreciated the way Richardson attempted to give each of them a different, distinctive voice of his or her own – something so important in an epistolary novel. There are letters sent to and from other characters too, but these are the four we spend most time with and get to know over the course of the novel.

I didn’t dislike Clarissa because, really, there was nothing to dislike but I do find perfect characters boring to read about and I couldn’t help wishing she’d had a few flaws. Still, if Clarissa had been flawed then Lovelace would probably not have been so attracted to her, his plots would have lost their effect and there would have been no story for us to read! I did admire the way she stayed true to herself and never tried to take the easy way out and I could certainly sympathise with her as the full extent of Lovelace’s wicked schemes became apparent and we could see how she had been manipulated and tricked by him. As for the Harlowes, they were completely vile, particularly her father, brother James and sister Arabella, who gave no thought to what Clarissa might want and were prepared to force her into marriage with a man she didn’t love because of the advantages it would bring to the family. The one bright spot in Clarissa’s life and the thing that sustains her through all her troubles is her friendship with Anna Howe. Anna’s personality is very different to Clarissa’s – she’s a more forceful, outspoken person than Clarissa – so she sometimes gives her the wrong advice but there’s obviously a lot of love and warmth between the two of them.

Apparently Samuel Richardson was disappointed to discover that so many of his readers actually liked Lovelace! That was not what he intended at all and he even adds a footnote to this effect at the end of one of the letters. Lovelace is a despicable person and really is the villain Clarissa’s family make him out to be, but he is also a great character and whenever he makes an appearance the story becomes imbued with a new energy and sense of excitement. In comparison to the letters written by Clarissa, Anna or Belford, his letters are more fun to read: flamboyant and entertaining – filled with poetry, quotations, classical references and lots of self-congratulations and flourishes. He revels in his badness and brags about it in his letters to Belford:

“Here have I been at work, dig, dig, dig, like a cunning miner, at one time, and spreading my snares, like an artful fowler, at another, and exulting in my contrivances to get this inimitable creature, absolutely into my power.”

Our fourth letter writer, Belford, is probably the character who changes and develops the most over the course of the novel. At first I found him quite bland and it seemed his only real purpose in the story was as an outlet for Lovelace’s letters, although there are hints from early on that Belford, despite also being described as a libertine, disapproves of his friend’s behaviour:

“‘Tis a seriously sad thing, after all, that so fine a creature should have fallen into such vile and remorseless hands: for, from thy cradle, as I have heard thee own, thou ever delightedst to sport with and torment the animal, whether bird or beast, that thou lovedst, and hadst a power over.”

Belford eventually begins to emerge as a decent person with a sense of honour and responsibility, although he does still retain some affection for Lovelace – even when Lovelace sends him letters like this:

“Confound thee for a malicious devil! I wish thou wert a post-horse, and I upon the back of thee! how would I whip and spur, and harrow up thy clumsy sides, till I make thee a ready-roasted, ready-flayed, mess of dog’s meat; all the hounds in the country howling after thee, as I drove thee, to wait my dismounting, in order to devour thee piece-meal; life still throbbing in each churned mouthful!”

Richardson’s prose really is wonderful – it can be alternately dramatic and moving, flippant and funny, or beautiful and thought-provoking. I’ve included a sample of quotes in this post already, but here are a few others I particularly liked:

“We must not, in short, expect that our roses will grow without thorns: but then they are useful and instructive thorns: which, by pricking the fingers of the too-hasty plucker, teach future caution. And who knows not that difficulty gives poignancy to our enjoyments; which are apt to lose their relish with us when they are over easily obtained?” – Clarissa to Anna Howe

*

“You must not wonder at my inquiries, Mr. Belford, said she; For who is it, that is to undertake a journey into a country they never travelled to before, that inquires not into the difficulties of the road, and what accommodations are to be expected in the way? I gave her a brief account of the poor man’s terrors, and unwillingness to die: and, when I had done, Thus, Mr. Belford, said she, must it always be with poor souls who have never thought of their long voyage till the moment they are to embark for it.” – Belford to Lovelace

*

“What briars and thorns does the wretch rush into (a scratched face and tattered garments the unavoidable consequence) who will needs be for striking out a new path through overgrown underwood; quitting that beaten out for him by those who have travelled the same road before him!” – Lovelace to Belford

*

“And yet great engines are often moved by small springs. A little spark falling by accident into a powder-magazine, hath done more execution in a siege, than an hundred cannon.” – Lovelace to Belford

*

“And I think, that smooth love; that is to say, a passion without rubs; in other words, a passion without passion; is like a sleepy stream that is hardly seen to give motion to a straw. So that, sometimes to make us fear, and even, for a short space, to hate the wretch, is productive of the contrary extreme.” Anna Howe to Clarissa.

*

There were times when I just couldn’t believe how slowly I was progressing through this book. I don’t think it was actually the length that was the problem – it was the repetitiveness. Richardson could literally spend hundreds of pages describing the events of one or two weeks in Clarissa’s life. The Harlowe family’s endless attempts to get Clarissa to give in and marry Mr Solmes went on and on and on…going round in circles, doing nothing to move the plot forward other than to reinforce how helpless and trapped Clarissa was. After Clarissa leaves her parents’ house and falls into Lovelace’s clutches, things do get more exciting – although this book was written in the 18th century, not the 19th, the plot has a lot of the elements we find in the Victorian sensation novels written more than a hundred years later: escapes and abductions, disguises, duels, wills and inheritances – but the pace is still painfully slow.

When I finally reached the end of volume 9 of 9 it was with mixed feelings: relief, a sense of accomplishment and also sadness – after spending a whole year with Clarissa, Lovelace, Anna and Belford, I now feel that something is missing from my life. If you’ve read Clarissa, either as part of this group read or in the past, I’d love to know what you thought of it!

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

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The Handmaid's Tale This is the first book I’ve read by Margaret Atwood. I was starting to feel slightly embarrassed about never having read any of her work, so when Yvann, Iris, Ana and Alex announced that they were hosting an Advent with Atwood event this December it seemed a perfect opportunity to finally read one. I decided to start with The Handmaid’s Tale because it’s a modern classic and the most well known of her novels.

Our narrator Offred lives in the Republic of Gilead, which was once the USA until the president was assassinated, the government overthrown and a totalitarian religious group took control. In this new dystopian society, women no longer have any of the rights or freedoms they had before; they’re not allowed to work, not allowed to have their own bank accounts, not even allowed to read in case reading leads them into temptation. Reproduction is a problem in Gilead; for some unspecified reason, possibly a nuclear disaster, the birth rate is now very low. Offred belongs to a group of fertile women known as ‘Handmaids’ whose job it is to provide children for the Commanders – the leaders of the new community – whose wives have not been able to conceive. If a Handmaid repeatedly fails to do this, she will be declared an Unwoman and banished to the Colonies to clean up radioactive waste.

The Handmaids are part of a new hierarchy and supposedly less powerful than the Wives; however, we soon discover that life is not easy for the Wives either. They have no real freedom and resent sharing their husbands with the Handmaids. The Handmaids themselves have been deprived of many of the most basic human rights and are valued only for their bodies and for the role they play in bearing children. Their individuality has been stripped away; they all wear the same long red dresses and even their own names have been taken away from them as they are now considered to be the property of their Commander, hence Offred’s new name (Of Fred).

At first I assumed I was reading about a society far into the distant future but it quickly became obvious that was not the case, because Offred remembers living a normal 20th century life with a job, a family and friends, just a few years earlier. We only gradually learn how the Republic of Gilead came into existence and how in such a short period of time everything changed and people were forced to adapt to an entirely different way of life. What makes this book so disturbing is that the type of community Atwood is writing about is not completely far-fetched or implausible. Many of the things she describes are things that have actually happened in some part of the world at some time in the past, or that might even still be happening at this moment, and so the depiction of Gilead is terrifyingly believable.

I really liked Atwood’s writing, I loved the book and I know I haven’t been able to do it justice in this post. Some books are much easier to write about than others and this, for me, is not one of the easy ones. I’ve found it very difficult to say what I wanted to say about it without giving too much away to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. While I was reading the book I was making notes of all the things I wanted to mention but when I started to type them up I decided it would be fairer to leave future readers to discover all the little details of the plot for themselves. And so I hope I’ve said enough to convince you to give this book a try if you haven’t already! I will definitely be reading more of Atwood’s work, not during Advent but certainly in 2013.

A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott

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Until recently I hadn’t realised what a diverse writer Louisa May Alcott was. Like many people I read Little Women and its sequels as a child – and Little Women is still one of my favourite books – but I never thought about exploring her other fiction until now. A Long Fatal Love Chase is a suspense novel, written in 1866 but never published in Alcott’s lifetime (it was eventually published in 1995). I didn’t even know Alcott had written books like this, so I’m glad I have now been enlightened!

Rosamond Vivian, eighteen years old at the beginning of the novel, lives with her cold-hearted grandfather in a mansion on a remote island. Bored and lonely, feeling unloved by her grandfather, Rosamond longs for some adventure in her life. When she loses her temper with the old man one day and tells him she would gladly sell her soul to Satan for a year of freedom, it seems that her wishes are about to come true.

That same day, Phillip Tempest arrives (during a storm, of course) to do some business with Rosamond’s grandfather. Tempest, who we are told resembles a painting of the demon Mephistopheles, is handsome, charming and surrounded by an aura of mystery. Rosamond is instantly attracted to him and soon Tempest sweeps her away with him on his yacht. But Rosamond’s happiness doesn’t last for long. When she makes some shocking discoveries about Tempest she decides to leave him…but it seems Tempest is not prepared to let her go.

The rest of the story is, as the title suggests, a long and fatal love chase in which Rosamond flees across France, Germany and Italy from chateau to convent to asylum with Tempest never far behind. The tension builds and builds; almost every chapter ends on a cliffhanger as Rosamond finds herself in danger yet again. With Tempest growing more and more obsessed and increasingly devious in the methods he uses to track down her hiding places, will Rosamond ever be able to escape?

As you’ll be able to tell by now, A Long Fatal Love Chase is not like Little Women at all, but that shouldn’t be a problem as long as you’re not expecting it to be (which I wasn’t). Just be aware of its sensational nature and be prepared for something over-the-top and melodramatic. There’s a lot of symbolism too and as well as the Mephistopheles reference I mentioned earlier there are many other allusions to mythology, art and literature, particularly Shakespeare – with a character whose name is Tempest, I suppose that’s not surprising!

If you have read Little Women and remember Jo writing her novels, it’s easy to imagine Jo sitting in her garret writing a story like this and persuading Meg, Beth and Amy to act out some of the scenes with her! It wasn’t the best book of this type that I’ve read, especially in comparison to the more complex sensation novels written during the same period by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon or Ellen Wood, but it was still exciting, entertaining and also quite daring for its time, with its themes of obsession and stalking. It has a lot in common with early gothic novels by authors such as Ann Radcliffe too, though with the advantages that this one is easier to read and Rosamond is a stronger character than the heroines of Radcliffe’s books.

Apart from Rosamond, the other characters in the novel are less well-developed and tend to represent either the good side of human nature (the priest who becomes Rosamond’s friend and confidant) or the bad (Tempest). From the moment he first appears in the novel, Tempest is such an obvious villain and there are so many hints and so much foreshadowing, that it’s easy for us, as the reader, to know that he is not to be trusted. Rosamond is a young, naïve girl (though not without a lot of courage and spirit) being taken advantage of by a ruthless and manipulative older man, and it takes her a lot longer than it takes the reader to discover that something is not right. But despite so much of the plot being predictable, some of the twists did still take me by surprise and the ending was not quite what I had expected either!

If you’ve enjoyed this book, I would also recommend Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart – although they were written almost 100 years apart I thought they had a very similar feel.

Classics Challenge November Prompt

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This year I have been taking part in a Classics Challenge hosted by Katherine of November’s Autumn. Every month Katherine has posted a prompt to help us discuss the classic novels we are reading.

I have enjoyed taking part in the challenge and although I haven’t managed to answer all of the prompts, I did want to respond to this one as it provides a sort of summary of the year’s reading, encouraging us to look back at all the classics we have read in 2012.

Here are this month’s questions and my answers:

Of all the Classics you’ve read this year is there an author or movement that has become your new favorite? Which book did you enjoy the most? Or were baffled by?

It’s not exactly a movement, but it seems that a lot of the classics I’ve been drawn to this year have been what I would describe as swashbuckling adventure novels: Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope and Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. I would like to read more books by all of these authors, especially Sabatini and Scott.

I also enjoyed Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel (though not as much as one of my favourite books from last year, Three Men in a Boat) and my two Austen re-reads (Mansfield Park and Emma).

I can’t say I’ve been baffled by any of the classics I’ve read this year, but the one I found the most challenging to read was A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, purely because I didn’t like the style of his writing.

Who’s the best character? The most exasperating?

My favourite character from the classics I’ve read this year is definitely Andre-Louis Moreau, the hero of Scaramouche. I also liked Joe Gargery in Great Expectations – Dickens’ novels are always filled with memorable characters and I remember writing about Joe in response to one of the first Classic Challenge posts of the year.

The most exasperating has to be Sylvia from Sylvia’s Lovers by Elizabeth Gaskell. I was irritated by her silliness in the first half of the book and although she did start to mature after that, she still continued to frustrate me with some of the decisions she made.

From reading other participants’ posts which book do you plan to read and are most intrigued by?

The Mill on the Floss seems to have been a popular choice for the Classics Challenge and I definitely want to read that one soon. Vanity Fair, The House of Mirth, The Heir of Redclyffe and East of Eden are other books I’ve added to my list for 2013 after reading other participants’ posts.

Have you read any of the books I’ve mentioned in this post? Are there any more classics you think I really need to read next year?

The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope

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At the beginning of The Prisoner of Zenda, twenty-nine-year-old English gentleman Rudolf Rassendyll is leading a quiet, comfortable life in London, not working or doing anything at all, to the annoyance of his sister-in-law, Rose. To keep her happy, Rudolf agrees to accept a position working for the ambassador Sir Jacob Borrodaile, but finding himself with some free time before he starts his new job, he decides to visit the small European country of Ruritania to see the coronation of their new King.

Ruritania is almost, but not quite, a fantasy world. You won’t find it on a map – it’s a fictitious kingdom located somewhere in central Europe – and although there are no magical creatures, wizards, monsters or dragons, it is still a place where strange and unexpected things can and do happen. Soon after arriving there, Rassendyll meets his exact double – the man who is about to be crowned King of Ruritania, whose name also happens to be Rudolf. The likeness is explained by the fact that the two Rudolfs are distant cousins and both have the long, sharp, straight nose and dark-red hair that appear every few generations.

On the eve of his coronation, the King is drugged by his villainous half-brother, Black Michael, the Duke of Strelsau, who is hoping to steal both the King’s throne and the woman he is going to marry, the beautiful Princess Flavia. With the King unconscious and unable to appear at the coronation, his attendants persuade Rassendyll to impersonate the King at the ceremony. The coronation goes ahead as planned, but Rudolf’s impersonation doesn’t end there – the real King has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a castle in the town of Zenda. Rassendyll must continue to take his place until he is rescued, but things become more and more dangerous for Rudolf as he finds himself caught in the plots and schemes of Black Michael and his henchman Rupert of Hentzau. And as if life wasn’t already complicated enough, he also begins to fall in love with Princess Flavia…

I put this book on my list for the Classics Club, intending to read it at some point in the next few years, but I didn’t really know what it was about and was in no hurry to get to it. Then I read Lisa’s review and it sounded so exactly like the kind of book I would love that I was inspired to move it straight to the top of my list. Having somehow managed to go through life without seeing any of the film versions, I didn’t know anything about the plot, though as I read the book parts of it did feel familiar, maybe because it has been the inspiration for so many other adventure stories.

The Prisoner of Zenda was written near the end of the Victorian period, in 1894, though I found it a lot lighter and easier to read than most Victorian novels. It’s also a very short novel (only around 200 pages in the edition I read) but the kingdom of Ruritania, with its woods, castles and palaces, and the people who inhabit it are well developed and unforgettable. One of my favourite characters was Rupert, so I was pleased to discover there is a sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, which I’m looking forward to reading.

“One of the great swashbucklers” it says on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of this book, and I would agree, although I did prefer Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini and The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, both of which I read this year and loved. 2012 seems to be turning into the year of the swashbuckler for me, doesn’t it? I did still enjoy this one though; it was entertaining, fast-paced and a lot of fun to read. I recommend saving it for a dull, dreary afternoon when you want nothing more than to be whisked away to a world of action, adventure, kings, princesses, evil brothers, mistaken identities, swordfights, romance, castles, kidnappings and daring escapes!

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

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I’ve never read anything by Ernest Hemingway before, partly because he’s one of those classic authors I’ve always felt intimidated by, but when I was offered a review copy of this beautiful new hardback edition of A Farewell to Arms (with a cover image replicating the original 1929 cover and lots of additional material) it seemed a perfect opportunity to give one of his books a try.

A Farewell to Arms is narrated by Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver who is serving as a Lieutenant (or ‘Tenente’) in the Italian army during the Italian Campaign of World War I. Early in the story he meets a British nurse, Catherine Barkley. When Henry is injured by a mortar shell he has to spend some time in hospital and during this period his relationship with Catherine develops. What will happen when it’s time for him to return to the front? Part love story, part war story, this novel is based on Ernest Hemingway’s own experiences in the Italian ambulance corps where, like Henry, he was injured and fell in love with one of the nurses at the hospital. The fact that the story is semi-autobiographical gives it a realistic, unsentimental feel.

Hemingway’s writing style is very simple and direct, he gets straight to the point and avoids flowery language and long, detailed descriptions (though he still manages to choose just the right words to evoke the settings he is writing about). You might think that such plain, simple prose would be easy to read but for me, the opposite was true; it was distracting and it took me a long time to get used to it. Some passages are written in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, which is something I often struggle with, and there are also lots of very long sentences consisting of a string of short clauses all joined together by the word ‘and’. His writing is very distinctive and you’ll either like it or you won’t.

Hemingway rarely tells us anything that is not completely essential to the plot and so I finished the book feeling that I never really got to know either Henry or Catherine – neither of them are described in any great detail, we are only given very basic information about their backgrounds, and we aren’t even told the narrator’s name until several chapters into the book. Instead it is left to us to read between the lines, work things out for ourselves and use our imagination, and I think it’s intentional that we are told so little about the lives of Catherine and Henry before the war. However, the fact that the characters were not fully fleshed out meant that Catherine in particular didn’t feel like a real three-dimensional person; I liked her, but seen through Henry’s eyes she was very sweet and submissive, and it would have been nice to have had more insight into her personality.

Frederic Henry’s narrative style is detached and factual, almost as if things are happening at a distance and as if he sometimes feels very disconnected from the events going on around him. This works though, because it helps to portray the futility and harsh reality of war, and it reflects the way Henry feels; he is a person who has seen so many terrible things they no longer have such an emotional effect on him. The problem with the combination of terse writing style and detached narrative voice is that it made it hard for me to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters, but the story was still quite poignant and moving in places, especially the final chapter.

Apparently Hemingway wrote the ending of the book thirty-nine times before he was satisfied with it. This new edition of the book includes an appendix with the text of all thirty-nine different endings. I read some of them, though not all (I think this type of supplementary material might be of more interest to someone who is studying Hemingway or considers themselves a fan of his work rather than to a first-time reader like myself) and although I did like some of the alternate endings, in my opinion the one he finally settled on was probably the right choice. I had tears in my eyes at the end and I’ve always thought that if an author can make me cry he or she must have done something right!

I’m not sure if I’ll want to read more Hemingway novels in the future but I’m glad I’ve had the chance to try this one and have now had some experience of an author I had heard so much about.

Thanks to William Heinemann for the review copy of A Farewell to Arms