Illicit Reading, Continued
September 24, 2010
The obit pages are an important source of leads for great yet undeservedly obscure books. That was where I learned of The Tortoise and the Hare by the recently deceased Elizabeth Jenkins, whom I already knew of as the author of a wonderful, though hard to find, biography of Jane Austen. I finished reading The Tortoise and the Hare last night, rather too late, and am still under its spell. Such a book should not be forgotten, yet it largely is.
What made it at once so much fun to read and so satisfying as a work of art? The sly humor, the use of telling detail, and the aptness of the social observation, though it describes a world that is both unfamiliar to me and long vanished (English, upper-middle class, late 1940s or early 50s) The subtle way the story is told. The ending. Especially, the ending. It is a truly magnificent ending, which surprised me, for all along, though I was enjoying the journey the book was taking me on, I kept feeling the structure — the plot — was odd. Unusual. Where was she going with this?
The novel tells the story of about a year in the life of Imogen, a sensitive and attractive woman of 37, married to Evelyn, a successful lawyer 15 years older, and her gradually dawning horror and despair as she realizes she is losing her husband to an unlikely rival: a never-married, badly dressed, unattractive neighbor, Blanche, age 50. Blanche is decisive, generous, practical and rich. Unlike Imogen, she enjoys fishing, hunting and outings to the race track. She is everything Imogen is not, and Imogen’s self-confidence, never strong to start with, slowly wilts as she moves from vague discontent to suspicion, then to fear, then to certainty that Blanche has become her husband’s mistress. The couple’s one child, Gavin, is a copy of his father, and his contemptuous treatment of Imogen is a humorous foil for the more subtle cruelty meted out by Evelyn. Only Gavin’s friend, Tim Leeper, who becomes a fixture in the household as a refuge from his own chaotic home (the scenes at the Leepers’ are among the broadest and most amusing in the book), seems to have any admiration for Imogen and her quiet virtues.
The book’s narrative structure is odd, because nearly the entire novel is taken up with the gradual crushing of Imogen. She is passive, inert, completely under the spell of her charismatic and adored husband even as she realizes she is losing him. A woman from another era, she has defined herself completely in the role of wife and mother, only to find she has failed at both. Her despair is nearly total, yet the flashes of wit and beauty keep the story from becoming too depressing. And yet as I kept reading, I kept asking myself, what is she going to DO? And when is she going to do it? The structure of a novel demands conflict and resolution — a character resisting, in some fashion, the mess she has been presented with. And yet Imogen seems powerless to do anything. Until, finally, she does.
To describe the ending would not be to spoil it — there is no shocking development, nothing that does not grow organically out of character and situation — yet it would also not do it justice. All along, the author has skillfully kept the reader just a few steps ahead of Imogen, so we see what she does not yet, the utter ruin of her marriage. And this technique succeeds brilliantly in the end, for we are taken exactly to the point — and no farther — where we realize that Imogen is going to be all right, even though she does not yet fully understand that. That she has, in fact, escaped a kind of living death, the illusion of happiness with a selfish, cruel husband, and whatever her life is going to be going forward is going to be hers, founded in reality. But the author does not explain any of this as baldly as I have just done; she does not need to. The story tells us everything we need, and no more.
More Illicit Reading
September 23, 2010
I felt I did not do full justice to Lynn Shepherd’s Murder at Mansfield Park the last time I wrote about it, and I resolved to go back and do something about that. I should have done so long before now, but so many things have gotten in the way.
I wrote my comments at about midpoint in my first reading of the book, shortly before the murder is discovered. The book has 363 pages in the edition I am reading, and the body is discovered on page 158. Once a murder has been discovered, the book takes on a kind of energy it seemed to lack before that. Or maybe it is not the book that underwent a shift, but the reader. For the things that were troubling me about the book up to that point — how it both was and was not like Mansfield Park, the abrupt shifts in points of view and tone, the moments of foreshadowing that did not seem to fit, my sense of puzzlement about what the author’s aim was — all seemed to fall away. Suddenly, everything made perfect sense, for I found myself in the familiar, forgiving world of an English country house murder mystery, and I understood exactly what the author was doing. And thought she did it very well. The detective, Charles Maddox, is perfect. Mary Crawford, once she steps out of the shadow of the other Mary Crawford , becomes an engaging and sympathetic character. The mystery plot is taut and engrossing; the language never gets in the way.
And could I have not figured this out before? The title of the book after all, contains the word “Murder.” There is an image of a corpse on the cover; a tasteful image, to be sure, but still a dead body. A person might be forgiven for thinking I was a bit slow on the uptake. The only thing I can say in my defense was, there was so much of Jane Austen here, I got confused. I was thinking the author was trying to do something else — what? I was not certain. Construct an alternate Mansfield Park, somewhat the way the wonderfully strange Wild Sargasso Sea constructs an alternate Jane Eyre? Certainly Mansfield Park is the novel that Jane Austen fans find the most vexing: the way the people we feel we are supposed to admire (Fanny and Edmund) are so much harder to like than the supposed villains of the piece (Mary and Henry Crawford). Certainly there is a large body of readers who think the main characters married the wrong people, and that a Henry-Fanny and Edmnund-Mary match-up would have been a more satisfying result. I do not share these views, but I do understand them. Was this the author’s intent, to at once construct a homage to Mansfield Park and a more satisfying end to it, through the device of murder mysteries and alternate endings?
It’s a good deal easier, and probably more pleasing to readers, to write a good murder mystery than the Mansfield Park answer to Wide Sargasso Sea, and I am happy that this in the end is what Lynn Shepherd did. The main lesson I took away from this book is how truly elastic the murder mystery is as a form, despite its seemingly ironclad requirements.
SPOILER ALERT!!! And in this retelling, I really did think the heroine married the wrong person! I was hoping Mary Crawford would marry Mr. Maddox and travel around England solving crimes with him. I think this could be the basis for a very promising series. Perhaps in Lynn Shepherd’s next book, he can end up with another overlooked Austen heroine. Charlotte Collins, anyone (after the convenient death of her first husband)?
