fredag 30 juli 2010

That pill Florence

It's high time for a Dickens-related entry. I have taken my blog name from one of his characters after all, as well as my blog picture. Maybe I should feel a bit guilty about the latter part, as although I support Georgiana wholeheartedly, I cannot say the same for Florence Dombey. The reason I pinched a picture of her is that I imagine she and Georgiana look quite alike - the same dark, timid, corkscrew-haired, slightly droopy look. There are other similarities as well: they are both shy girls, dominated by a pompous father, who have a great deal of growing-up to do. However, there are differences as well, and in my opinion they are not in Florence's favour.

Dickens's heroines are often a lot more appealing than their reputation as tiresome goody-goodys suggest. Esther Summerson's insecurity, due to a loveless childhood, explains why she is so jubilantly grateful for every kind word and deed, and she is no ninny: her summing-up of characters like Skimpole and Mr Turveydrop can be quite caustic. Amy Dorrit may take her self-sacrifice on behalf of her father too far (giving up her lunch for him! No wonder her height gets stunted), but her love for Mr Clennam, hopeless as it seems for the most part of the book, is both warm and touching. Little Nell is hardly my favourite character in "The Old Curiosity Shop" - I think she only barely makes it to the top ten, after Kit's pony - but she is surprisingly plucky, and no, you do not feel any desire at to laugh when she cops it. Please read the book before you feel tempted to quote Wilde's quip. Hopeless Dora Spenlow knows she's hopeless, which is rather poignant, and Agnes Wickfield, though suffering from an excess of good judgement, does have strength of character. Remember, she tries more than once to correct David's slushy "good angel" picture of her, with indifferent success. Generally, Dickens's heroines have a great deal more spine than they are given credit for, which is needed as they more or less have to drag the hapless heroes to the altar. Dickens often spins out his plots for a few additional chapters by making the heroes convince themselves in some tortous way that they are unworthy of the heroine's affection and cannot possibly propose to her. What's a poor girl to do, except confess her love and risk the rejection her swain shies away from?

Having said all that, there are Dickens heroines who really are as wet as they seem, and Florence Dombey in "Dombey and Son" is one of them. She is usually criticised for not standing up to her father. What surprised me, on the other hand, is that she doesn't stand up for her father. She is supposed to be the perfect devoted daugther, yet everything she does - or does not do - only brings the already sorely tried Mr Dombey more grief, that is, until their final reconciliation, after which she can finally become his Amy Dorrit. That she should cling first to her mother, then to her little brother, in such a desperate way is not difficult to understand, although I understood Mr Dombey's feeling of being shut out, especially in the case of little Paul. The siblings hardly seem to spare him a thought when they are together. What is harder to grasp from the devoted daughter perspective is why Florence leeches on to Edith Granger, née Skewton, later mrs Dombey - or vile Edith, as I call her. Not once during the deeply unhappy marriage between Dombey and vile Edith does Florence try to use her influence with her stepmother to bring about a reconciliation. Instead, she makes things worse by indirectly accusing her father of sending Walter Gay to his death (as she thinks) and confessing, wobbly-lipped, that she is "not a favourite child". She does more to blacken her father in vile Edith's eyes than Carker. I'm sure this is not deliberate, but one could be forgiven for thinking that Florence in a passive-aggressive way makes sure that her dad will not get the love he needs from anyone else, as he does not want any love from her. After all, she is happy enough to take her stepmother to task once Mr Dombey has finally capitulated in her arms.

I think a way of understanding Florence is to remember how young she is - she is practically a child and shows no signs of wanting to enter the adult world. That would also explain her strong reaction when meeting James Carker: she "recoil[s] as if she had been stung". Now, Carker is Dickens's sexiest villain. To some, that might not be saying a lot - no more than if you commended a frog for being the sexiest in the swamp. But coming from me, this is high praise indeed. I will cut my gushing short this time: suffice to say that he is both incredibly brainy and handsome. But he is also, undoubtedly, a representative of the adult world, and his insinuating ways would probably seem disquieting to a girl who does not want to grow up.

Nevertheless, Florence will never be a favourite heroine of mine. In one of the Jeeves and Wooster novels, a character congratulates himself for having escaped an engagement to "that pill Florence" (not Miss Dombey, naturally). I'm afraid it is as "that pill Florence" that I will always regard Florence Dombey.

torsdag 15 juli 2010

Summer reading

I recently finished my latest Ambitious Book Project - Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on The Shore" - and now there will not be any more ABPs for some time to come. Not that I didn't enjoy the book. It had a lot going for it. There were several engaging characters, such as Nakata, the sweet old man who can talk to cats, Hoshino, the down-to-earth lorry driver who helps him, and Oshima, the friendly librarian who seems to have a bit of a crush on the troubled hero. It also has passages of understated humour where the characters accept surrealist situations as given. "I wouldn't want Mickey Mouse to be my pimp", Hoshino says at one point, in a context where this comment makes perfect sense. A lot of the philosophical musings are way too deep for me, and the hero "Kafka" Tamura is rather too serious for my taste, but it is a quietly gripping book with occasional references to Western culture which make one feel at home (though I may never view Johnnie Walker or Colonel Sanders in quite the same way again).

So why no more ABPs for a while? Because it is summer, and my vacation. Each year, I get irritated by the recommendations for summer reading in the newspapers' culture/review sections. Critics and authors invariably come up with the most intellectually demanding or downright tedious stuff they can find and feel no shame in foisting their unhelpful recommendations on readers who just want a good read for the beach.

Lets get this straight once and for all. When you sit in the sun with an overheated brain, your concentration is not likely not be on top form. What you long for is an easy read, a page-turner preferably, or something funny in the Wodehouse vein. This is not the time to get to grips with modernist poetry, or with Proust (yes, believe it or not, two Swedish critics recommended him: one the whole "In Search Of Lost Time", one only what I have been given to understand is the most boring volume in it).

Here are my recommendations for the beach/hammock/anywhere comfortable in the sun or out of it:

Just about anything by Agatha Christie: Although she's a best-seller, Christie is very much underrated as an author. I have reread many Christie novels more than once, even though I knew perfectly well who the murderer was. The first time you read a Christie, you want to know who did it. The second time you want to pick up all the clues you missed. The third, fourth time etc. you just enjoy the succint prose and the human drama. You may not always agree with Christie's psychological statements - she is a bit too cynical for me at times - but the characters are no stereotypes either. A problem with Christie is that she doesn't film very well, which makes people who have only seen a creaky adaptation believe she is boring, which she definitely is not. (There are other dangers with adaptations: the latest miss Marple films are reasonably pacy, but approximately every second mystery has nothing whatsoever to do with the book it is supposedly based on. "The Secret of Chimneys", for instance, was pure invention from start to finish, including the identity of the murderer.) If you truly have little time for whodunnits, try her adventure yarns like "The Secret Adversary", "Destination Unknown", "They Came To Baghdad", "The Man In The Brown Suit" and "Why Didn't They As Evans?". Avoid her very last books where her prose starts to wander a bit and get repetitive and you'll be fine.

The Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse: Yes, the Blandings novels are good too, but I prefer the Jeeves/Wooster novels because of Bertie Wooster's endearing narrative (and because efficient secretaries aren't pillorised). Invest in an omnibus, but alternate with a crime story or two so you don't get overfed on Wodehouse. What ho!

And if you have to read something ambitious: a really good 19th-century yarn: I once read "Crime And Punishment" in the sun and enjoyed it immensely. Fun cop. Colourful characters. Villains a-plenty and high drama. Or just settle for one of Dickens's best, like "Great Expectations" or "David Copperfield".

Ah, well back to my Georgette Heyer: another good holiday read, though her heroes are supremely irritating. I would like to shove their quizzing-glasses and snuff-boxes down their conceited throats. If I come across a novel where the hero does not get on my nerves, I will recommend it unreservedly.

måndag 5 juli 2010

Avoiding effort

There is a lovely German word called "urlaubsreif". It means "ripe for vacation", and that is exactly what I am. I'm one week from my blissfully long Swedish vacation, and I feel like one of those policemen in detective stories who are a few days from retirement, but still have to take on a final big and nasty murder investigation. Business has been slack for a while, but now, typically, the wheels have started spinning again. I catch myself humming "At the End of The Day" from Les Mis. At least it's not "Look Down", or the entirely un-Les Mis-related "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place", so there's still some way to go before I start smashing the office furniture.

It's not just work, either. Everything feels exhausting, even TV. Should I blame the World Cup, which has got me used to watching TV without having to follow any plot whatsoever? Or the summer weather? Or is it just sheer laziness? Anyway, I can't even be bothered to watch a recorded "Tudors" episode, let alone Gaskell's "North and South" (or John Jakes's "North and South" for that matter - too long!).

"The Tudors" has itself to blame, in part. It's getting increasingly obvious that nothing in Henry's later life really matches the Boleyn story as far as juicy drama is concerned. Well, except perhaps the disastrous marriage to Catherine Howard, and that's ages away. Meanwhile, you're left to ponder such things as: does this series have a pro-Catholic bias? Consider the evidence. The characters are described roughly in the following manner:

Catherine of Aragon Loving, loyal, popular, suffering with dignity: all in all a pearl among women.

Anne Boleyn Slut. Didn't sleep with her brother, but that's really all that can be said for her.

Cardinal Wolsey Corrupt. Should not have tried to box through that divorce. But as he's played by Sam Neill, the audience sides with him anyway.

The sainted More (That's how we "Daughter of Time" readers think of him, in an ironic, non-complimentary way) Honest and upright. The king's one true friend who could not bring himself to compromise his religious beliefs. Aaah, you break my heart.

Thomas Cromwell Ruthless persecutor of innocent li'l old monks. Takes bribes too.

Bishop Cranmer A coward. Yes, that's the-hand-that-recanted-first-in-the-fire-Cranmer. Nowhere to be seen in series 3, by the way: a bit odd, surely?

Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk A tormented soul - he didn't want to kill all those women and children, honest. He only did it because mean old Cromwell and the king made him. This is the same character who behaved like a proper swine in series one, bedding Buckingham's daughter out of spite etc.

Mary Tudor Put-upon, innocent young girl, quite pretty, friendly with Elizabeth in spite of everything. Honestly, the series seems to ask, after all she's gone through, who can blame her for finally setting fire to a Protestant or two?

Jane Seymour Unfailingly sweet. OK, she married a man who had his previous wife put to death to make himself available. So what?

Robert Aske Noble, touching, unwilling to fight, entirely justified.

Cromwell's chum with the patch over one eye Well, the patch says it all really. Sleeps around. Threatens to smash lady Mary's skull in.

At this point I might hear some complaints along the lines of: "Oh, come on, you've already blogged about The Tudors. Couldn't you try something a little more intellectually challenging? An essay on Florence Dombey whose picture you've filched? Even more Ancient Rome?" Sorry, no. Can't be bothered.