Anne of Avonlea… isn’t very good?

Anne of Avonlea--cover page.jpgHere’s a blog post that might get me in hot water – but I recently listened to the audiobook of Anne of Avonlea and, let me tell you, I felt let DOWN.

Anne of Avonlea (1909) is the second book in the Anne of Green Gables series. Until now, I had only read the original – and loved it. Anne is so spirited and fun, and there is a great deal of heart and humour in Anne of Green Gables. Fast forward to the next book, Anne is in her late teens, still living in Avonlea. All of the books are available for free in the Audible Plus catalogue, so I thought it was worth diving in.

Oh.

So much that made Anne of Green Gables wonderful is missing here. Anne is a schoolteacher, a founding member of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, a sort of grown-up foster sister to a pair of twins who arrive on the scene (more on them later), and generally a noble and good member of society.

The rest of this post is going to be in bullet point form, because that is the best to describe my disappointment. Though I’ll try to throw in some good things along the way.

  • Anne is so Noble and Good in this book. She has become the quintessential heroine of a Victorian children’s novel (albeit this is later than that), thinking good thoughts and doing good deeds.
  • ALL her spirit seems to have gone. I cannot emphasise how dull she is now.
  • Gilbert Blythe gets maybe four lines of dialogue?
  • Even in his most interesting scenes, writing pretend letters to someone, he barely appears.
  • WHY SO LITTLE GILBERT?
  • (I know he comes back in later books, but I cannot fathom why L.M. Montgomery took away one of the two most interesting relationships from Anne of Green Gables. The other was with Matthew, so I can at least see why that isn’t present.)
  • Marilla takes in the twins, Dora and Davy. And lord knows I wish she hadn’t. Davy is forever doing naughty things then saying “Good gosh, Miss Anne, I had no notion this was a naughty thing to do! How will I ever repent of it when it was so fun?” and Dora just cries. How did an author who made a girl character like Anne also make these Boys Will Be Boys And Girls Will Cry characters? I loathed them.
  • Mrs Lavendar Lewis was great, I will acknowledge. An old lady who is something of a recluse but brings joy and wit to every scene she’s in.
  • Did I mention that there is basically no Gilbert?

I had planned to go on with the rest of the series, but I’m much more reluctant now. Anne has gone from one of the best characters in fiction to one of the most tedious – and, without her spark, the novel really dragged for me.

Others have promised me that the series looks up in later volumes. Does Anne get her spark back? Should I continue?

 

Literary Taste (how to form it) by Arnold Bennett

I love that this sort of book was once published – and not only published but, as my copy suggests, owned by the 23rd Hartlepools Troop of Scouts. I do hope they enjoyed it. Who knows what journey it then went on before I picked it up in Edinburgh?

Literary Taste

Literary Taste: how to form it was published in 1909, though there was later a revised edition by Frank Swinnerton in the 1930s, according to Wikipedia. My copy is undated but is evidently from around 1909 – because it doesn’t have the extra section Swinnerton added (more on that later), and, well, because the book is obviously from that period. One of my specialist talents now is being able to date an early 20th-century hardback to within a few years. It doesn’t come in handy all that often.

Bennett had only been publishing novels for about a decade when this book came out, but they included big-hitters and his name was already at the forefront of literary reputation – though it would take a tumble later, when he became more or less synonymous with the stale Edwardians (thanks partly to Virginia Woolf’s influential essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’). I’ve yet to read any of his fiction, though my book group is doing The Old Wive’s Tale next month, but I’ve read quite a bit of his reviewing and journalism. He’s certainly got a passion for books, and the sort of determined I’m-just-like-you persona that is rivalled only by Jennifer Lawrence.

This book is addressed to the person who enjoys reading and wants to be well-read, but doesn’t quite know where to start. Bennett is almost absurdly precise in where you should start (it is, apparently, the essays of Charles Lamb), but before this he says things about literature that echo down the decades to get a rousing ‘amen!’ from all of us.

Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one in asserting that he who has not been ‘presented the freedom’ of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can’t see; he can’t hear; he can’t feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner.

Love it.

The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it i to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one’s relations with the world.

Preach, Bennett!

Well, having said that, I think it can also just be to amuse the hours of leisure. I don’t think Bennett would think much of me, literature-wise. For one thing, he’s no big fan of the academic study of literature. For another, he’s not very impressed by people who don’t start with 16th-century literature – and, I’ll be honest, it’s been quite a while since I grabbed a copy of anything from before the first world war. Well, except Literary Taste, of course.

Bennett writes very interestingly about why a classic is a classic, who decides it, and how choices in reading can make or break one’s literary education. All of it feels fresh today, and are debates that still rage. But Bennett isn’t just talking hypotheticals: he wants to get down to brass tacks about actual books to read. Not only Charles Lamb (though emphatically him) – Bennett compiles a list of essential books, and prices them out as well. It’s nice that he is aware of financial limitations, and deliberately omits some authors whose works are not available in good, reasonable editions in 1909. It’s also so unexpected to see these sorts of balance sheets in a popular literary text.

This was apparently pretty influential. Wikipedia has kindly put them all in a list, which you can examine closely; it also includes books from the post-1909 period of literature that Swinnerton added in his 1937 revision. I am more comfortable ground in this years, of course, and it’s nice to see people like A.A. Milne included – and unexpected to see Stella Benson’s The Little World, which I haven’t heard of despite being (I suspect) one of relatively few people today to have read more than one book by Stella Benson. And there’s a Compton Mackenzie recommendation to follow up after my recent review of Poor Relations.

I’ll admit, Bennett’s choices leave me feeling like I have very little literary taste – and also wondering how he’d time to read all these authors and books by the time he was 42. As he concludes the list (which includes brilliantly sassy moments like ‘Names such as those of Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik are omitted intentionally’):

When you have read, wholly or in part, a majority of these three hundred and thirty-five volumes, with enjoyment, you may begin to whisper to yourself that your literary taste is formed; and you may pronounce judgment on modern works which come before the bar of your opinion in the calm assurance that, though to err is human, you do at any rate know what you are talking about.

Well, not yet, Arnold. And probably never. Somehow I find it more fascinating to read books from 1909 about how people formed literary taste – and this was certainly a great, interesting, unusual read.

Two Classic Children’s Books

A Century of Books has led to me reading more children’s books than usual in 2012.  The debate about whether or not adults ought to read YA fiction (a phrase I hate) is probably best left for another day – but I think most of us understand the call towards unashamed classic children’s fiction, which doesn’t have the slightest pretence to being adults’ literature.

First, very speedily, a suggestion Claire mentioned when I was struggling to fill in 1909Ann Veronica went back on the shelf for another day (next to Rebecca West, amusingly enough) and Beatrix Potter came off instead.  Well, actually, since I don’t have a copy of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, I downloaded the free ebook from Project Gutenberg, and read it on my Kindle for PC.  It’s lovely – of course it is.  Peter Rabbit’s sister Flopsy and her wife Benjamin have quite a few children – ‘They had a large family, and they were very improvident and cheerful.’  (Which picture book writer today would use the word ‘improvident’?  Or ‘soporific’?  Love you, Beatrix.)

You probably know the story.  Wicked Mr. Macgregor is back, and does his best to kidnap the Flopsy Bunnies… will he manage it?  Can you guess?  (By the way, this cartoon is an amusing counterpart to Beatrix Potter’s bunny stories.)  It feels a bit like I’m cheating with 1909 – but I suppose Potter is more influential than most of the other authors featured in A Century of Books.  And it was delightful!

*  *  *

A whistle sounds, a flag is waved.  The train pulls itself together, strains, jerks, and starts.”I don’t understand,” says Gerald, alone in his third-class carriage, “how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time.”And yet they do.
This seems like a very apt quotation from E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle (1907), because she is best known (at least in our household) as the author of The Railway Children.  Her own writing, then, successfully combined the possible – if unlikely – story of children living near a railway, and this novel where all manner of extraordinary things happen.  But it is, perhaps, the possible events threaded through the novel which made it most effective, in my eyes.

Everything starts off believably.  Siblings Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen are bored during their summer holidays, spent with one of those eternal Mademoiselles of children’s fiction from this period.  Only this one is not cantankerous or hysterical, and is quite happy to let them go off to explore.  On their exploits, they discover (as one does) a beautiful castle, with grounds replete with marble statues, etc.  And – look! – a sleeping princess!  She awakes, after Jimmy (somewhat reluctantly) kisses her – and she takes them through to see her jewels.  One of these is a magic ring, she confides, which can make the wearer invisible.  Only they have to close their eyes for a bit whilst it works.  And, yes, it works!

But the princess is rather surprised.  It turns out she is, in fact, Mabel – the housekeeper’s niece – and wasn’t expecting the ring actually to turn her invisible.  And thus their adventures begin…

There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real.  And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, anything may happen.
And anything does happen.  Invisibility, expanding, swimming statues, ghosts…  I prefer my novels’ fantastic elements to be rather more restrained, with parameters neatly set.  This all felt a bit scattergun, but I suppose Five Children and It is similar and that doesn’t bother me, but that’s probably because I grew up reading Five Children and It, and this is my first reading of The Enchanted Castle.  I have a feeling that this would feel a much more coherent book for those who loved it as a child.  As for me, sometimes it seemed like dear E. Nesbit was making it up as she went along.

What saved it completely, though, was her delightful tone.  I wrote, in my post on The Railway Children, that I’d no idea E. Nesbit was so witty – and that continues here.  There are plenty of asides and sly nudges to the reader – a wit that was probably put in for the parent, but could well be appreciated by the child too.  Alongside the amusing style, my favourite aspect were the non-fantastic relationships – between siblings, between the children and Mademoiselle, between Eliza the maid and her young man, and between… no, the last two I shall leave you to find out for yourself.

It was all good fun.  And yet I’m going to throw my copy away.  Because it looks like this now…

Ooops!  TV tie-in paperbacks from the 1970s weren’t built to last, were they?

Two lovely children’s books to round off 2012.  Just one book left for A Century of Books… a biography for 1970.  Any guesses?