I think Jane Austen is one of our greatest authors. ‘Pride and Prejudice‘ is a masterpiece of controlled writing that has few if any equals, with ‘Emma‘ a close second on any list of classic novels. While ‘Northanger Abbey‘ may not be in the same league, a careful read can uncover many signs of the great author Austen was to become.
The central weakness of the novel resides with our heroine, Catherine Morland.
Continue readingThis was a holiday, ‘I need something to read that isn’t too serious’ read, but to be honest it is not the kind of novel I would usually bother with, even notwithstanding the endorsement of the Zoe Ball Book Club. This is one of those novels where the book cover and blurb tell you almost everything you need to know:
“When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband’s crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting . . .”
I appreciate that sometimes dramatic clichés are hard to avoid. But this novel embraces them with ardour.
In Jane Austen’s satire on this genre, ‘Northanger Abbey’, the heroine Catherine Morland describes why she is not frightened to be visiting the Abbey, despite her romantic fancies:
“Besides, it has never been uninhabited and left deserted for years, and then the family come back to it unawares without giving any notice, as generally happens“.
You have guessed it, this is precisely what happens at the opening of ‘The Silent Companions’, when with her husband dead just weeks after their marriage, Elsie returns to the spooky ancestral home with only her husband’s cousin for company. Or so she thinks. The husband’s cousin has been dispossessed by the marriage and siring of an heir, so one would expect her to be a figure of suspicion when the inevitable mysterious and eerie events start to occur. But of course that never happens.
You have to wonder whether Austen would have thought her satirical observations on the gothic novel would remain relevant 200 years on?
Locked doors, painted wooden figures that bear a striking resemblance to other characters and whose eyes follow you around the room, a moody housekeeper, sullen villagers, mental asylum patients struck dumb with fear, things that almost literally go bump in the night – there really isn’t a cliché left unmined in this gothic horror story. Oh, not forgetting the shop that mysteriously appears and then can’t be found the next day – isn’t that borrowed from ‘Gremlins’?
The author never quite decides if she is writing a crime novel or a supernatural thriller. There is an entirely predictable, common-sense whodunit ending in which we are led to believe that the novel’s events are all wrapped up, but a moment’s consideration reminds the reader that many of those events have in fact not been explained, and could only have had a supernatural explanation, making the attempt to provide a realistic explanation redundant.
It will be clear by now this is not a recommended read. It is lazy generic fiction and a waste of the reader’s time.
One of my reasons for exploring the Guardian’s ‘best 100 novels written in English’ list is to try and find some hidden gems – books that I have not come across before that are really worth reading. Poe’s only novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket‘ meets only one of these criteria – I had not heard of it before – and now I know why.
The novel is an adventure story, following Pym as he stows away in a ship, running away to sea against his father’s wishes. He is aided by a friend, one of the crew members, and plans to reveal his presence when the ship is past the point of no return. However, a mutiny spoils this plan, and he has to remain hidden, without help from his friend, for a long time. His privations are detailed in the first person narrative in considerable, not to say tedious, detail. Finally he emerges from his hiding place, and helps in a counter-mutiny. Having secured control of the ship Pym and friends are immediately struck by a storm, which rages for days, leaving them with very little food or drink, and their ship a wreck. Again Poe details the long days of surviving on the wreck – this is actually a very short novel, but it certainly didn’t feel it while reading – until they finally resort to cannibalism, choosing one of their number to eat by lots.
Finally rescued, Pym joins another ship voyaging to the southern seas. Previous voyages of exploration are recounted in yet more detail. The purpose of all this detail is presumably to give the narrative a sense of realism, although I found the various adventures completely unconvincing. While stowed away on his first ship, for example, Pym is joined for several days by his pet dog, who his crew-member friend just happened to take along with him. Despite the ship having been taken over by the mutineers the dog at no point barks or otherwise makes his presence know. As soon as the storm arrives the dog stops being mentioned, presumably thrown overboard.
The voyage ends in the discovery of a mysterious island group deep in the Antarctic, when the rest of the group apart from Pym and a friend are massacred by duplicitous natives. Escaping from the island by canoe, Pym travels south towards the pole, when the novel ends abruptly with the appearance of a mysterious figure.
I’ve read incomplete novels where the author died mid-composition that end with more coherence and naturalism than this. It just stops, and it is obvious that the author, having reached a word count (or equivalent) thought “that will do” and moved on. The “editor’s” postscript (which incidentally is not included in the kindle version of the novel I initially read, which is really irritating) is a fig leaf that does nothing to compound the absurdity of the ending.
I look for at least one of the following in any novel: characterisation, a decent story, some interesting use of language, or some ideas. Poe provides none of the above. Pym himself hardly emerges from his narrative at all – we really have no idea what he is like, other than extraordinarily lucky in surviving his various in extremis situations, which of course we know he does from the novel’s ludicrous subtitle. (Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.) The story is extremely episodic and predictable, a loosely connected series of incidents. The language is inoffensive, at best, and the only idea worthy of the name is the suggestion that the south polar regions might lead to undiscovered continents, peoples, and species. I am a little more sympathetic to this final point – the world was still being explored in the 1830’s, and new species being found, so this wasn’t as ludicrous as it sounds.
Poe introduces some classic elements of gothic horror into the narrative – cannibalism, pirates, a ghost-ship, entombment, and so on, but ultimately the novel is as spooky as a Halloween costume in June.
<iframe frameborder=”0″ height=”0″ id=”google_ads_iframe_/183932232/GS_300x250_BTF_1_0__hidden__” marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ name=”google_ads_iframe_/183932232/GS_300x250_BTF_1_0__hidden__” scrolling=”no” src=”javascript:””” style=”border-image: none; border: 0px currentColor; display: none; vertical-align: bottom; visibility: hidden;” width=”0″>I’m not alone in finding this all quite ridiculous. In an introduction to the novel, Jeremy Meyers wrote that Poe’s choice of the incomplete journal form “allows Poe to disguise and excuse his own inability to control the plot and complete the novel.” Poe himself called it a “very silly book.” Indeed. I don’t know whether the unhappy experience of writing this novel led Poe to concentrate on poetry and short stories, but it is probably a good thing if it did.
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‘Nightmare Abbey’ is probably as heavy-handed a piece of satire as you will find in the whole of literature. Neither nightmarish – there are none of the traditional characteristic features of gothic fiction – nor set in an abbey, this short novel is partly a thinly disguised portrait of some of the romantic poets of the time, and partly a pastiche of their works.
It is tedious in the extreme. Some of this is deliberate – in parodying cloying philosophical nonsense it is hard to avoid writing philosophical nonsense. The trick is I suspect in providing just the right amount. There’s little or no characterisation here – all the characters are cyphers – Mr Lackwit, Mr Toobad, or the Reverend Mr Larynx. There’s also little or no narrative. The characters assemble in the abbey, which is really a moated country home on the remote Lincolnshire coast, where Scythrop Glowry, (admittedly, a pretty magnificent name) falls in and out of love as eligible females are paraded before him. Even Robert McCrum in choosing this novel for his list of 100 best novels in English for the Guardian in 2013 describes the plot as “cardboard-thin”. This is because the novel is simply a vehicle for Peacock’s friendly commentary on the lives and love affairs of the romantic poets. It may have had them rolling in the aisles in the early nineteenth century, but surely quickly lost its humour in a decade or two, and today provides many tumbleweed moments. Only one comment hit a chord; when, for the umpteenth time Mr Flosky, a friend of Mr Glowry senior is pontificating on his obscure theories, the narrator notes that he “suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense”.
The narrative voice is deeply cynical. Romantic relationships are purely commercial – “marriage is a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows upon his ticket the better” – and married life is a burden – “Mr Glowry used to say that his house was no better than a spacious kennel, for every one in it led the life of a dog”. Jane Austen wrote about relationships and courtships with a similar scepticism, but her characters are far more three dimensional and believable, and if you want a light-hearted commentary on the gothic novels of the period ‘Northanger Abbey’ is an infinitely better choice. That this novel squeezed out ‘Lord of the Rings’, the Gormenghast books, and others from the Guardian’s top 100 novels makes its inclusion all the harder to understand.
With 200 years of critical analysis weighing down on any critic or reviewer, what is one to do with a novel such as Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus? Trying to find new insight or interpretation is almost pointless. Such is the nature of the novel that it opens itself to an almost boundless variety of interpretations, on human relationships, sex and sexuality, or science and the modern world. That burden of scholarship can be oppressive and hamper the ability to say anything sensible or interesting about such a complex novel.
John Sutherland’s book on puzzles in 19th century literature which I wrote about earlier this month has an interesting take on this novel, and in particular the question of how Frankenstein actually creates the monster. The author gives virtually no detail – there are glimpses of how he prepares, but the actual process itself is not described at all. Time and again Shelley uses the word “disgusting” to describe Victor’s reaction to his work. This could be a response to the body parts he is presumed to have used, but when he begins to create the monster’s partner later in the nvoel he does so in a remote Orkney croft-house with only his scientific equipment to hand, far from any mortuary or graveyard. Sutherland speculates a sexual component to Frankenstein’s disgust, which is a seductive interpretation. How does man create life, after all? This would go some way to making sense of the original sin theme of the novel – Frankenstein creates life, then rejects it, and reaps the consequences. All parents will have some sympathy with how he feels.
As a central character it is hard to warn to Frankenstein. He is a complete idiot – for example, despite the monster making it clear to him that he will make him suffer if he does not create him a partner, and that he will see him again on his wedding night, the penny does not drop that there might be a threat to his fiancee. He lives a life of considerable privilege, but wastes his energies and gifts on ultimately fruitless personal obsessions. The monster is a more interesting character, although again his “no-one loves me so I am going to kill someone….Why does nobody love me?” wears thin fairly quickly.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many ways to read this complex novel. The one that appeals to me the most is that the monster is, like Mr Hyde, a product of his creator’s sub-conscious. Both doctors Jekyll and Frankenstein create monsters that run out of control and lead to their ultimate demise. Victor is arrested for the killing of Charval, and it is surprising that no-one suspects him of Elizabeth’s murder. Several people fear he is mad, and few other witnesses see the monster clearly. The sexual under-currents of the novel could also explain Victor’s terror of his wedding night. I appreciate I haven’t explored this idea in any depth, and no doubt there are scholarly articles and books out there which explain the idea far more coherently than I could ever do, but it is an interesting reading of the novel I think.
The Reading Bug 