Brideshead Revisited  by Evelyn Waugh
Chapman and Hall, 1945
Category: Modern Classics

The copy I bought from Deseret Industries has the movie tie-in cover and the words "companion to the PBS series" at the bottom. Like the series came first and the book was written after.  Sometimes marketing gets on my nerves.

Charles Ryder returns to Brideshead with the Army, disillusioned with life and conscious of how much has changed in the more than twenty years since he first went there, how tragically it all ended.  That’s where the novel begins, moving back in time those twenty years to Charles’s first encounter with Sebastian Flyte and the beginnings of his entanglement with the family living at Brideshead Hall.  A novel that starts by telling you everything will end in sorrow isn’t exactly fun to read, because every moment of happiness is marked by that knowledge. Brideshead Revisited is fascinating, elegant, a masterpiece of characterization.  It’s also exactly the sort of book where I spend the whole time wondering how people can be so unbelievably stupid about their lives.

It really does begin like a darker version of Jeeves and Wooster–that same time period, the same upper classes of England. But where Wodehouse uses his material as a springboard for parody, Waugh inverts the stereotypes we think we know into complex personalities.  Lady Marchmain, clan matriarch, is gentle and sweet-tempered and stubborn and ultimately selfish enough to drive both husband and son away. Julia, the older daughter, seems the archetype of the modern, careless young woman, right up until she realizes she’s someone else entirely.  The book is all about people who move in and out of one another’s lives, barely touching.

I love them, and I’m frustrated by them.  I wish Sebastian could leave his family behind. I wish Julia had realized the truth about herself before ruining her life.  I wish Charles could see that his love for Julia and for Sebastian (who resemble each other strongly) is really a single thing–really, isn’t it obvious that he doesn’t connect with Julia until Sebastian is long gone?

Excellent story.  Not a happy one, unless Charles’s final realization that the light of faith burns on across the distances is a hint that ultimately he (and Julia, and Sebastian) will be happy.  If you don’t like tragedy, don’t read this one.

I See By My Outfit  by Peter S. Beagle
Viking, 1965
Category: Biography

I learned to play "Streets of Laredo" on the guitar when I was in fourth grade. Not until reading this book did I learn that there was a parody version written by the Kingston Trio, which is where the title of the book comes from. The stuff you find out when you read, huh?

For the purposes of this project, I’ve lumped all sorts of biographical writing into the Biography category: biographies, autobiographies, memoirs. I See By My Outfit is Beagle’s account of traveling cross-country with his friend Phil on a couple of scooters, New York to San Francisco. Though it is technically a travel memoir, it’s less about the country than about the people they meet along the way. The style is pure Beagle: balancing on the precarious edge between poetry and purple prose, turning the journey of two madmen (did I mention the scooters? and how they don’t actually know how to repair them?) into something epic. They refer often to the journey to Mordor from The Lord of the Rings, which is with the title song one of the two main themes of the story. It sometimes shows up as a running gag; "This must be Mordor." "No, Mordor is at the end of the journey"–the humor being that the end of the journey is Enid, Beagle’s girlfriend and the reason he is making the trip.

It’s a little weird to read Beagle’s explanation of what The Lord of the Rings is, in this era when people living under rocks have heard of it–but he was writing in a time when the books had only just been reprinted in the "official" edition, when they were a touchstone for the counter-culture and not yet a culture in themselves, a time before the great fantasy literature explosion of the early ’70s.  But then Beagle himself was writing fantasy in this era, and sometimes I wish I’d been alive to read those novels without the background assumptions of modern fantasy.

I thoroughly enjoyed I See By My Outfit. It’s beautifully written, and I love the evocation of a time not that far off by the calendar, but a million miles from our own time in every respect.  Except, perhaps, the people–and maybe a travelogue of human culture isn’t such a strange idea after all.

The Girl Who Could Fly  by Victoria Forester
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008
Category: YA/Juvenile
UNFINISHED

This one looked very promising at first.  I like stories about kids with psychic powers working together, enough so that I’m willing to overlook a certain amount of cheese.  While The Girl Who Could Fly doesn’t exactly tip the cheese-o-meter, it’s definitely a kid’s book–probably not something that will appeal to adults the way many juvenile and YA novels do.  The style is average; the description of how Piper McCloud, the titular protagonist, learns to develop her talents is well done.  The author is a first-time novelist (though a long-time screenwriter) and that fact is obvious in some of her narrative choices, primarily in how she attempts to use a self-aware third-person narrator a la Roald Dahl, but doesn’t sustain that POV throughout. Readers in the eight- to twelve-year-old group will probably not notice the flaws, and the idea and descriptions are very interesting.

What is not so forgivable–and the reason I stopped reading–was a major plot twist that depended on reversing the stated meaning of earlier events.  At a key point in the story, Piper learns that Conrad, a fellow gifted student, actually knows the truth about their "school" (basically, it’s EEEEvil) and has been trying to fight against it.  This would have been an excellent plot twist, because Conrad has been nasty and antagonistic to her, and it turns out that his actions were to keep her from being lulled into somnolence and thus losing her powers.  Except for one thing.  The reason we know about how nasty Conrad was is that those scenes were told from his point of view–including his thoughts about how much he loved hurting people and how he would get so angry he needed to hurt others.  This includes, by the way, the time he plotted to kill Piper herself.  The author’s own explanation didn’t suggest that Conrad needed to control his thoughts so the bad guys wouldn’t find out, or fake thinking about being a bad guy.  Forester apparently thought it would be more dramatic and compelling if we heard Conrad plotting to hurt others, but didn’t carry this thought through to its logical conclusion.  Is this the sort of thing young readers notice?  Maybe not.  I doubt it, though.

So now I’ve reached the first book on my list that I choose not to finish.  I reached a point, years ago, where I decided that I was never going to make myself read a book that I didn’t enjoy.  I believe this for the same reason that I don’t believe in "must-read" books; that’s usually shorthand for "I liked it a lot and I think everyone is Just Like Me and should read it and if you don’t like it then you suck."  There’s no book offers such a unique experience that you can’t get that experience from some other book.  Even the books I love, and rave about, and think are amazing–some of you reading this won’t like them.  You’ll think they’re boring, or pretentious, or you can’t accept the underlying premise, or you just don’t read X genre.  And except for that last one (you may have certain genres you won’t read, and I won’t push it, but don’t expect me to be sympathetic to that excuse) you’re probably right–for you, that’s a pointless book.  If you can’t do it yet, learn to put down a book you dislike.  It’s one of the nicest gifts you can give yourself.

Things Fall Apart  by Chinua Achebe
William Heinemann, 1958
Category: Modern Classics

Okonkwe is a strong man, a great warrior, respected by his village, admired for having built his fortunes from nothing. He is also weak: his fears of becoming like his lazy, shiftless father turn him hard and unforgiving toward others’ faults, harsh to his wives and children, and make him unable to allow for weakness in others.  In the course of the novel, things fall apart not only for Okonkwe, but for his people as a whole, as they collide with the white man’s culture and discover it is incompatible with theirs.

Things fall apart in so many ways, chiefly in Achebe’s masterful portrayal of the deeply flawed and unsympathetic Okonkwe. I would have him pegged as a cruel man, and he would turn around and do something kind–and then he’d turn that image on its head again. Okonkwe is a prisoner of his past, in a society that could not help him become anything different because his negative traits are, in lesser form, the characteristics the tribe depends on.  I can’t like him, but I can feel sorry for him.

Having first read Guns, Germs, and Steel, I can appreciate the inevitability of Western domination over the African tribal model. Where Achebe differs from many (possibly most) writers dealing with this subject matter is his tacit respect for African internal sovereignty (i.e. the way the villages govern themselves) while still recognizing the flaws that would have left it open to conquest by Western ideals regardless of military might. In describing the arrival of Christian missionaries to the Ibo tribes, Achebe points out that the first converts are those people who are outcast from the tribe–something that happens almost everywhere Christianity spreads. The church may speak against some of the customs of the tribe, but the first people to respond are the ones who suffered because of those customs in the first place.  Okonkwe’s son Nwoye becomes a Christian because the religion offers an alternative explanation for unjust traditions (the exposure and murder of twin babies, who are considered abominations) than the one he has learned from his father (which is essentially to man up and stop whining).

On the other hand, Achebe doesn’t try to justify the ultimate dominance of the white man over Okonkwe’s tribe. In referring to the native men who side with the white government officials, it’s pretty clear he despises their betrayal of their own people. Those native "messengers," for example, are much harsher on those who break the new laws than the white interlopers are. My favorite part has to be the way that the village leaders respond to the newcomers. They clearly think their customs are crazy, but they give them hospitality and treat them as equals with whom they should negotiate fairly. I like this because it’s in contrast to the usual narrative, which has the black man servile and less intelligent than the white–a narrative that reflects the attitude of many Westerners of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who went to Africa believing that their superior armament and technology meant superiority of mind and spirit. It’s my favorite part, but it’s also the saddest part–seeing these men meeting in council and talking in all seriousness about how to work with these strangers, and then the final chapter showing how the government official in charge sees them all as so many animals.

I’m deeply impressed with this book. Okonkwe’s actions, particularly near the end, are those of a bewildered man who belongs to another time, even from the perspective of his friends and neighbors. Though his inability to conform to the new society is an implicit metaphor for Africa as a whole, it’s not the sort of metaphor that allows the reader to feel comforted at understanding it. Achebe’s novel implies that Africa’s fate has always been her own.

Cary Grant: A Class Apart  by Graham McCann
Columbia University Press, 1997 (1st US edition)
Category: Biography

I don’t remember how I found out about this book.  I know Jacob and I saw something on TV about Cary Grant’s life, and thought it would be fun to read a biography of him; I read somewhere that this was the best one; I found it listed on ABE for a piddling sum and bought it immediately.  Then it sat around for a while, shamefully unread until now.  I should not have needed such a perverse incentive to finally read it.

It’s not so much the subject matter as McCann’s style that makes this book brilliant. McCann not only provides an exhaustive look at Grant’s life, he also refers extensively to the other major biographies (and Grant’s own autobiographical essays) to put the material in context.  Where dates or events are in doubt, he explains the discrepancies and the merit of each source. Throughout he attempts not to reconcile, but to bring all sources into a single narrative that is extremely readable and endlessly fascinating.  All biographies should be this good.

Of course, without the subject matter there would be no point, no matter how good a writer McCann is.  His primary goal is to examine the influence Cary Grant had not just on moviemaking, but on audiences around the world.  Like other biographers, he refers to how Archie Leach (Grant’s birth name), a low-class working man’s son from Bristol, coexisted with Cary Grant, the smooth, elegant, sexy leading man from nowhere, but rather than resort to the simplistic explanations of others (that Leach was Grant’s secret and uncomfortable true identity) McCann explores how Leach set out deliberately to become Cary Grant, and how Leach’s upbringing and experiences helped build a leading man who was both suave and humorously awkward, distant and approachable, seducer and seduced.

Yes, it’s a two-bookmark book, and I wished so many times that the endnotes were color-coded for my convenience, with black indicating a reference and red, or something, meaning that there was something substantive back there.  The endnote material had some of the most interesting tidbits, like how Billy Wilder wrote Humphrey Bogart’s role in Sabrina for Grant, who never was able to make his schedule fit Wilder’s.  Can you imagine the difference in that movie? Okay, besides the fact that no one in her right mind could believe Audrey Hepburn choosing whats-his-name over Cary Grant.  (I could have looked that up on IMDB, but it would have been pretentious.) Or how worried Grant was, later, about the age difference between himself and Audrey in Charade–so much so that he insisted the writers insert lines here and there to defuse the "dirty old man" vibe.

I read biographies of actors because I’m intrigued by what drives such people and how the difference between their private and public lives affects their work. McCann tells the story of a man who was in many ways exactly the same in private as he was in public. Almost everyone he ever worked with was impressed with him–his work ethic, his generosity with his costars, the unrelenting demand for excellence in every aspect of movie making. What startled me was that, after he retired from films, he was genuinely surprised that people still remembered him and his movies.  Try to imagine that. For me, Cary Grant may be the one actor whose work I remember for the rest of my life.