tisdag 22 november 2011

Blame it on the jet-lag

I returned last Saturday from a wonderful week in New York, full of no-holds-barred book shopping at Barnes & Noble, the Strand and then Barnes & Noble again. (There is also a book shop in Greenwich Village dedicated entirely to crime fiction, Partners & Crime, which is highly recommended if you can find it and if you remember that it opens at noon.) So now, what I really should be doing is of course to blog about books. But I don't feel quite up to it, and anyway I haven't read that much of what I've bought yet - buying it is a start. These last days I've postponed everything mildly strenuous by referring to my jet-lag. In fact, having slept all of ten hours and more between Saturday and Sunday, I don't feel much more tired than I usually do at the beginning of a working week, but never mind. Because of my jet-lag, I'm not going to be over-ambitious with my blogging at the moment. I'll blog about something easy, like "Downton Abbey" - again.

In Sweden, we have reached the middle of the second series - episode four has just been aired. The plot is as satisfyingly eventful as ever, and the script has picked up after a somewhat lacklustre start (if you plan to propose to a girl you don't love, could you please not use the phrase "we'd make a great team" - it has been done). As yet, Matthew's new fiancée and Mary's new suitor aren't exactly the most vivid characters - they are quite obviously hurdles for the star-crossed lovers to overcome - but that could well change. I was somewhat disgruntled that the uppity maid Ethel was punished by fate in the guise of Julian Fellowes for her uppitiness. Not that she was very nice, but her downfall seemed all to predictable. Still, quarrelling with the plot-lines in "Downton Abbey" is half the fun (seriously, Bates letting himself be blackmailed by his wife with the old Turkish diplomat affair? What's it to him, and how could he think for a moment that anyone would be interested in Anna's part in it?).

But what can have happened to the icy bitch Mary? She's mellowed to an extent where she's hardly recognisable, and she is completely smitten with Matthew all of a sudden. To top it all, she twice holds back in trying to win him out of consideration for his drippy fiancée. Lady Mary being noble? Is this really her, or has she been replaced by an android?

Not that I'm complaining - I like the new Lady Mary a lot better than the old one. What with Edith softening as well and doing good works for convalescing officers, suddenly all the mean tricks will have to be provided by the baddies downstairs (or, in one case, formerly downstairs), Thomas and Miss O'Brien.

It wouldn't be entirely true to say that Miss O'Brien is my favourite character - I think my favourite is Mrs Hughes, who I very much hope will discover somewhere at the end of series three that she and Carson are made for each other - but she does add a welcome dose of villainy and does it better than Thomas as she is more intelligent. One of the most intriguing things about the series for me is the friendship between its two baddies. O'Brien advances Thomas's cause whenever she can, and he is duly grateful. Theirs is not a partnership founded on attraction, Thomas being on the other bus, and yet they stick together through thick and thin. Believe me, you don't see this kind of loyalty between villainous characters every day - mostly, at some point, they will be double-crossing each other.

Miss O'Brien showing a compassionate interest in the unsuitable-because-shell-shocked-out-of-his-senses valet Lang is another point in her favour. It would have been hard to warm to the always blundering Lang - really, shell shock doesn't excuse everything - if he hadn't been very good-looking in a brainy, tormented way. I wouldn't mind seeing him return to the series, once he's cured of his shell shock and general clumsiness.

lördag 5 november 2011

While on the subject of Fanny Price

This is, I suppose, as good a time as any to expand on something I mentioned in my previous blog (and by the way, P.D. James's P & P mystery is already published now! That was quick: in the newspaper piece I read it sounded as if it was only in the pipeline). What I'd like to chew over a bit is the - to me - baffling hostility often shown towards Fanny Price in "Mansfield Park" by various commentators. Shepherd with her parallel universe take of the character was clearly not impressed by the original, and she can join a large and thriving club. Everywhere Fanny is roundly condemned for her "self-righteousness" and "humourlessness". Austen famously said about Emma that in her she would create a heroine "no-one but myself will like". Yet Emma is doing all right, although people tend to share Mr Knightley's censorious view of her behaviour (for my money, Mr Knightley needs to be hit over the head with something hard: talk about humourless and self-righteous). It is Fanny who is the most unloved of the Austen heroines.

Why is this, exactly? And how judgemental is Fanny? You'd think, by the way she's described not least in sequel fiction where she occasionally pops up as a secondary character, that she's some kind of 19th century Oliver Cromwell, calling "Guards!" Horrible-Histories-style every time anyone even mentions something fun. Yet Austen's timid Fanny hardly ever ventures an opinion on anyone or anything. She certainly doesn't set herself up as being morally better than the family at Mansfield: it's Austen who does that. How can this shrinking violet have provoked so much loathing among the Austen-reading public?

The answer is, largely, because she is a shrinking violet. In our day and age, we are more into the feisty kind of heroine (the "f" factor, also mentioned in a previous post) personified by the warm, witty and spirited Elizabeth Bennet. I like a heroine with bite myself: someone who can "answer back", like Elizabeth or Jane Eyre. Perhaps it's understandable that modern readers - and maybe not just modern ones - are bound to compare goody-goody heroines like Fanny unfavourably with the more spunky Elizabeth Bennet kind. Clearly, heroines didn't have to be self-effacing in the 19th century. So why on earth does Fanny choose to be?

Because, now as then, individuals are different, and we can't all be spunky. Fanny's position as a poor relation taken on in sufferance and continously bullied by Mrs Norris does not exactly encourage spunkiness, either. With time, I have become more and more tolerant with the non-spunky heroine type. We should cut them some slack and not assume that just because they are good, they are dreary and two-dimensional. Fanny's unrequited love for Edmund is so feelingly portrayed by Austen that I rather warmed to her. Besides, she is trying to do her best as she is thrown into one impossible situation after the other.

If you ask me, Edmund is the real stinker in "Mansfield Park". Fanny may utter some prissy lines, but you can always trace Edmund's influence in them. He is the one who moralises, while at the same time drooling over the funny but extremely worldly Mary Crawford. His treatment of Fanny is unfeeling even by cousinly standards - depriving her of her horse, a hard-earned privilege, so he can give Mary riding lessons; abandoning her and forgetting her altogether at Rushworth's place so he can stroll around with Mary - and becomes even more heart-breaking when you consider Fanny's love for him, which it would not have been difficult for him to guess at if he had cared more about her. If this is supposed to be Fanny's mainstay and support in the Bertram family, one wonders what the rest of them are like. To add insult to injury, though, or rather injury to insult, the way Edmund tramples on Fanny's feelings is probably another reason for her unpopularity. Why does she put up with this ghastly fellow? readers ask. And some female readers may also add in an undertone: "It's not as if she didn't have options..."

Which leads me to Henry Crawford. Apparently, he has quite a following among female readers: many sequels/retellings on "Mansfield Park" are designed to exonerate him and sometimes to give him another chance with Fanny. Of course, and I know this from experience, when a heroine scorns a man you would very happily have taken on board yourself, especially if you sense that there is some moral reason behind her unwillingness to give him the time of day, you can't help muttering "silly cow!" and "she should be so lucky" at regular intervals. Why Henry should be considered such a catch beats me, though. I never did care for salon-savvy layabouts (Sir John Chester in "Barnaby Rudge" being the great exception). What does Henry ever do except chase skirt? A villain should do something more to show a bit of drive, verve and efficiency - like defrauding his boss, building a fortune on stolen goods or snooping into the private affairs of his clients and using his findings against them. I know my villain taste is somewhat bourgeois, but honestly - I can't see what Henry's got that could make up for the fact that he started the whole Fanny-winning enterprise wanting to make "a small hole in Fanny Price's heart".

Austen, though, seems to have anticipated that some readers could be irritated by Fanny's refusal of Henry Crawford. She makes it clear that he would have stood much more of a chance, in spite of being a seducer and wastrel, if Fanny had not already been in love with Edmund, and she hints that he would have won Fanny with time if Edmund had married Mary. Henry does win some ground when he meets Fanny and her family in Portsmouth, and might have prevailed if he hadn't been just as flighty as Fanny predicted and gone off with Maria Rushworth. I should think it's just as well he did, though. Fanny herself put it best when contemplating a future with him (and I try to think of her perceptive words when I grumble about other heroines wilfully refusing villains): "I am so perfectly convinced that I could never make him happy, and that I should be miserable myself."

So, next time there is an adaptation of "Mansfield Park", it might be a novel idea to have a Fanny Price who actually bears some resemblance to Fanny in the book. (Sylvestra Le Touzel was a wonderful Fanny in the old TV adaptation from -83, but that was a while ago now.) A Fanny who is not a tomboy - as in the ITV adaptation - or a saucy slave-defender - as in the dreadful film: don't get me started! - or has extra feistiness injected in her in some other way. Please?