Jonathan Carroll and Margaret Oliphant: Cranky Romances

There’s something lovely about alternating Victorian literature with fantasy - it’s nice to have a literary novel and a genre book going at the same time - and right now I'm reading Margaret Oliphant and Jonathan Carroll. Yet it may be a mistake to classify Jonathan Carroll as fantasy: White Apples is much better written than the usual literary novel and yet more "mainstream" than Marcel Theroux's Far North, a worthy finalist for the National Book Award. Carroll was recently recommended to me by a bookstore owner who admitted he didn't know whether to classify him as literary fiction or science fiction. I suggested he try both.

White Apples is a surreal Kafkaesque romance, which I bought because of the title, thinking that it might be related to the golden apples of fairy tales and myth. The writing is great: his novels have been compared to Philip K. Dick’s (and actually I think he’s better). White Apples is published by Tor, a publisher of fantasy and SF, yet billed cagily as a tale of “a genial philanderer, (who) discovers he has died and come back to life, but he has no idea why, or what the experience was like,” rather than as a fantasy. One of Carroll's early books, Sleeping in Flame, was classified as literary fiction and published as a “yuppieback,” in one of those well-designed Vintage Contemporaries like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. How to market him? Publishers just don't know, though I gather he has a big following.

Carroll's character Vincent Ettrich is dead, and doesn’t know what to do about it. He has two girlfriends: an on-again, off-again relationship with Isabelle, the love of his life, a model-beautiful Viennese woman who loves food and sex, and brings Victor back from the dead when their unborn child insists on it; there's also Coco, a pseudo-lingerie saleswoman who is really supernatural agent assigned to guard him. The book is funny, beautifully written, and philosophical. Carroll is really a poet. How to describe him? I really can't.

Mrs. Oliphant is, of course, completely different: a very brisk, prosy, competent Victorain storyteller, who wrote 120 books so there are plenty more to read. Having finished her novella, Two Strangers, , I am starting on Harry Joscelyn, a novel recommended in some bio or intro in a Virago book; I hunted it down at Amazon in an Elibron edition. It costs the earth - it’s in two volumes - but is definitely nicer than an interlibrary loan edition. Some of the interlibrary books crumble in my hands. This was first published in 1881, and it’s my guess that that’s the very edition that would arrive at our library long after I’d forgotten about it. Whereas at Amazon - what can I say? - they fly through the mail!

This novel reminds me so much of Anthony Trollope’s novels. Harry seems to have been a popular Victorian name, certainly the name of many a character in many of Trollope’s novels, and often, if I remember correctly, of a son who has gone slightly on the skids. Oliphant’s Harry is a recalcitrant younger son, a prodigy of his uncle, working now as a clerk, who wants to borrow his “mother’s money,” about 1,000 pounds, to invest in the business. Mr. Joscelyn, the abusive, nasty and fatuous father, refuses to hand over the money. Then, after Harry storms out of the house to a bar, Mr. Joscelyn locks the house and shuts his wife into her room so she cannot help Harry. Harry’s sister, Joan, an older, very competent, unmarried sister, has no fear of their father. But when she goes out of the house by a back way to let him in, the door locks behind her. Harry is so furious that he takes off and is not seen again by his family (at least not in Vol. I, though we follow his adventures in Italy under an assumed name).

The novel is not just the story of Harry, but a story of the family. His sister, Joan, is an especially colorful character. She does not respect their mother, who has been squashed into a trembling submissive ghost by her father. Yet when Joan's suiter, an older man, Sidney, comes calling, hemanages to draw out Mrs. Joscelyn on subjects like literature (her mother is quite well-educated) and Joan is impressed. Joan dimples around Sidney, amazed that he would want to marry her at age 30, an age when she herself had given up on marriage, but she is ambivalent. For one thing, her parents’ marriage has not provided her with a good model. And she becomes cross when he tries to find Harry and his trail goes cold.

I’m very intrigued by this cranky romance!

Patricia A. McKillip

Mckillip's story "The Snow Queen" is the star turn of this excellent anthology.

Patricia A. McKillip is a writer of the same class as the well-reviewed Alice Hoffman, another writer of complex literary fairy tales, yet McKillip’s novels are ghettoized as fantasy. This is not the kiss of death, as many intelligent readers love fantasy, but it probably curtails her sales. In 2008 McKillip won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement - an award every bit as important as the National Book Award - and she has won and been nominated for countless other SF/fantasy prizes. Her prose style is rich and lyrical, her sensibility poetic, and her tales as lush and beutifully composed as the magic realists'.

My recent discovery of “The Snow Queen,” her retelling of Andersen’s fairy tale, reminded me of how extraordinary she is: her writing eclipses the other adult fairy tales in Snow White, Blood Red, an anthology edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow, which features superb stories by such famous SF writers as Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, and Nancy Kress.

Set in a glittering urban setting of sophisticated partygoers, "The Snow Queen" opens with Kay and Gerda observing a snowfall together.

“They stood together without touching, watching the snow fall. The sudden storm prolonging winter surprised the city; little moved in the streets below them. Ancient filigreed lamps left from another century threw patterned wheels of light into the darkness, illuming the deep white silence crusting the world. Gerda, not hearing the silence, spoke.”

Gerda is the warm one; her cold boyfriend Kay glitters like a knife. He is trying to solve a crossword clue: the first word schoolboys conjugate. “Most likely Latin,” he says. But no emotional words come to mind: his imagination is cold, unlike that of Gerda, who immediately guesses "love."

And of course at Selene’s party Gerda loses Kay to another woman (Kay is the one who loves parties): “Half the city was crushed into it, despite the snow.”

It's the best short story I’ve read this year.

I started reading McKillip a few years ago when I discovered the first volume of The Riddle-Master trilogy in a converted-garage- bookstore where everything was chilly and damp. Miraculously it had survived the mildew. Perhaps it hadn’t been there long. But I fell into it immediately and had to rush out to another used bookstore to find the last two books.


So yesterday I found my copy of McKillip's Solstice Wood, winner of the 2007 Mythopoia Award, a novel I bought intrigued by the fact that the main character is a bookstore owner. That really has nothing to do with the story, though the heroine, Sylvia Lynn, is a literary person. She returns home to Lynn Hall from self-imposed exile after her grandfather dies. There is magic at Lynn Hall; a fairy wood surrounds it; and Sylvia’s secret is that she is half faerie (she has exiled herself because of it). But she joins her grandmother and a group of women at a sewing cirlce whose stitches prevent the troublesome faeries from entering their world. Sylvia becomes more conflicted than ever, but can’t escape back to her west coast when people start to disappear and even her uncle can see with the naked eye people made of sticks and bark.

It starts out a little slowly, but soon the beautiful story clutches you.

I look forward to reading the rest of her books.

Corporate vs. Independent Bookstores: A Comfortable Chair

Loafers at Barnes & Noble

Stuart Walton, a blogger for the Guardian, has launched an attack on corporate bookstores on account of the INTERIOR DECORATION. He reviles the comfortable chairs at Borders and Waterstones and disdains the non-book-buying clientele who squat in them. Book buyers like himself never get the comfortable chairs, he says. And as if this argument weren’t strange enough, he claims that the coffee smells bad and splashes the books.

Though he prefers independent bookstores, he doesn’t defend hand-selling of small-press books or other traditional practices of the independents. No, that's not why he likes them. He claims he misses the cold independent bookstore clerks who don't look up from their books when you come in.

So that has me thinking.

Oh dear.

The comfortable chair is not an issue for me. It is true that many students and be-black-clothed types with laptops claim those cozy chairs or occupy the tables at the coffeehouse. It adds to the ambiance, I would have thought if I thought about it at all, because it gives you a feeling that readers are everywhere (even the laptop users SEEM to be reading). And if the employee who thought I was a homeless person is right, people hang out there all day. “You can sit here as long as you want.” The non-consumer inhabitants don't bother the clerks. They like to get people in there and then let the books work their magic.

Now this is not the case at the independent bookstores. At one cranky lady's bookstore, I have been followed suspiciously as if I were about to commit grand larceny. Yes, one employee seemed to expect me to load the entire small M-Z fiction shelves into my bag; why I cannot tell you. I blame it on my shabby denim bicycling outfit and helmet. (Oh, and the sweat.) The last time I was there I voluntarily left my bag behind the desk so I could comfortably peruse the books. This is enabling them: I should have hung onto my bag.

AS FOR THE COFFEE THING: Coffee is a '90s innovation, both for bookstores and libraries. I never go to a Barnes & Noble, Borders, or public library without buying coffee. Who can resist? I even tend to drink coffee when I’m buying at AMAZON or ABE’S BOOKS. But because the coffee cups in public stores have LIDS, I am unaware of ever having splashed a book. On the other hand, I am not one to lounge in comfortable chairs and spill my coffee. I browse standing up, occasionally sipping from my cup, and figure out what I need to buy.

The interior decoration is never great. B&N has a kind of green and wood thing going for it. The green bags match the decor. Perhaps Borders is more reddish. The comfortable chairs are a little TOO plush for reading. They swallow you up.

I love independent USED bookstores, but if STUART WALTON had to put up with my independent NEW store - and he does sound like the kind of book-obsessed character they foil - he'd never leave the house.

The Green Hat

Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat is a perfect get-well present or hangover present, a novel so absorbing that the ache of time or body simply goes away. Yes, when you’re sniffling in bed in the infectious diseases ward surrounded by attendants in face masks, or come home from a celebratory evening and can’t sleep, The Green Hat is a spellbinding innitiation into the shimmering amoral world of the 1920s - a society in this case dominated by the mysterious Iris Storm, a glamorous flapper who carries an air of doom about her, as she brings one man after another to his knees.

Kirsty Gunn, the writer of the introduction to the Capuchin edition, compares this to The Great Gatsby, and certainly I know what she means. I kept thinking of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, or perhaps something by Somerset Maugham - but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. In many ways this is a young person’s novel - a kind of exploration/documentation of what it meant to live in a glittering postwar society of witty conversations and sparkling parties. Some, like the heroine, have abandoned traditional morality, living for themselves and the moment, while others struggle to live “honorably,” enjoying their parties while continuing to uphold the institutions of marriage and the family. Of course it’s not just the 1920s, a decade we associate with decadence: any person in his/her twenties may imagine he/she lives in such a society.

The narrator of the novel, who refers to himself as the Author, remains in the background, but it is through his sensibility that we observe the machinations of Iris Storm. Iris, a sylph in a green hat, enters the narrator's life when she stops by in “a long, low, yellow car which shone like a battle-chariot” to visit her brother. Under her green hat, she is beautiful and mysterious, a woman who says little but tells the truth, and she has not seen her twin in ten years. Our narrator, who is getting ready to move out of the downstairs apartment and has just come home from a party, takes her upstairs to see her brother, Gerald, a drunkard novelist who is passed out for the evening. Then the narrator has an all-night conversation with her. But after the night she writes to tell him she doesn’t want to see him again. He is her friend, but must remain a friend. (Does she find him unattractive? As one gets older, one wonders such unspeakable things: one would not even think it when younger, and I doubt that Arlen did.)

And chaos follows Iris wherever she goes. The Author likes her, despite Iris' supposed frankness about immorality (she tells him one husband committed suicide "for purity" because she had affairs; the other, however, left her and died after she said another man's name in her sleep). When she becomes ill after a miscarriage, she almost dies in a nursing home in Paris.

It is by chance that the narrator finds her there.

It is Arlen’s haunting prose, that reveals the sad story in flashes:

"At this time I hadn't the remotest idea as to where Iris was or how she did. I had not seen her since the night of her brother's death; and had been permitted to gather from Hilary that he knew as little as I did of her whereaouts. Secret she had always been in her absences, Hilary said, or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively in hiding."

When he visits her, we see her as a sad, wasted woman who has almost given up. But Napier, a man with whom she had an affair shortly before his wedding, shows up and she wants to live.

One of her oldest friends, Guy, attempts to interfere when she is having an affair with Napier. It is then we see Iris as she really is, a person who makes her own rules and defies societal conventions. She is the kind of siren-hussy figure that men, rather than women, seem to love to write about, and she is in many ways a stereotype, but in some ways she does exist: who hasn’t met great beauties who feel they can have anything they want whenever they want it? She is a force of nature - and somehow a bit androgynous, which is a good thing here: she has more character than the average mindless beauty, and faces men on their own ground. She has courage. And the narrator, who likes her so much at the beginning, changes his mind again and again - as do we.

This is really a very enjoyable, exquisite, oddly written novel - a period piece, very popular in its day.

Far North

Marcel Theroux's Far North is a science fiction classic. It is one of the best books of 2009, period. It is not catalogued as science fiction, and because it is sold as literary fiction, it has an edge over the average literary SF, which isn’t fair, but thus it goes. It is a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, which brought it into the stratosphere for me, as it probably did for others. So far it is the best of the three NBA finalists I have read, the others being Jane Anne Phillips’ Lark & Termite and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. There are five finalists altogether, and the winner will be announced 11/18/09.

Theroux’s novel is set in a bleak post-apocalyptic future, but it is not the cliched world of Mad Max , The Road, or Riddley Walker. I would put this novel in the same class as The Day of the Triffids, though the plot is different. Far North is narrated by a sheriff, Makepeace, the last citizen of a ghost city settled by the previous generation - a group mainly consisting of idealistic Quakers, including Makepeace’s parents - who were fleeing the upheaval of climate change, violence, and materialism.

Makepeace is a woman. We do not find out her sex until Chapter 3, and it's a startling revelation. Big, broad, and scarred in the face from a terrible rape by men trying to pay her father back for nonviolence, she passes as a man to the marauders and rioters and carries a gun. Her father killed himself after her rape. Ironically, she did not share his nonviolent philosophy, as refugees from floods and plague invaded the city, robbed, looted, killed, and died.

"The years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how men never act crueler than when they're fighting for the sake of an ideal....You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal."

Yet, though she must carry a gun,

"Killing always sits heavy with me.

"Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally softhearted for another reason, I don’t know.

"I’ve had to fight the womanish things in my nature for almost as long as I can remember. These are not softhearted, womanish times.”

For a brief time she has a companion, Ping, a Chinese slave on the run, whom Makepeace wounded when she saw Ping taking books to make a fire. Makepeace believed in preserving culture, though she wasn’t a reader herself; she knew someone else would want books in the future. Ping recovers from the wound - it turns out she, with a shaved head, is a woman, too, pregnant from a rape, and in the summer she dies in childbirth. Makepeace goes half crazy. She hits the road after she sees an airplane. Someone must be out there, somewhere. She dreams of civilization.

This is a grim novel, but Makepeace’s stoicism and original observations make it worth reading. And Theroux's style is beautiful, simple but poetic. He is a new writer to me, the winner of the Somerset Maugham award for The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: A Paper Chase.

Marcel Theroux is Paul Theroux’s son, but lives in London and was educated in England: perhaps he has dual citizenship. Colum McCann, the Irish author of Let the Great World Spin, also presumably has dual citizenship.

Theroux gets my vote for winner.

The Princess on the Glass Hill

Having read some novelistic fairy tales lately (Tam Lin by Pamela Dean and Snow White and Red Rose by Patricia Wrede), I've been rereading some of my own favorites. One I come back to again and again is the strange tale, The Princess on the Glass Hill. In my old Blue Fairy Book, it's attributed to the Norwegians. The imagery of the glass hill always fascinated me. The story seems to be divided, in very Greek or Latinate fashion, into elements of three. But it is the story of the princess, a lone figure, that especially interests me: she is not a member of a trio.

There is a threat to the three brothers: a monster devours their father's meadow of grass year after year on St. John’s Eve, the festival of John the Baptist's birth, distinguished by prayers for God's blessing on the crops. The farmer has little hay and cannot afford to lose more grass. So the oldest son goes to guard the meadow on St. John’s Eve. In the middle of the night, however, the terror of an earthquake, apparently caused by a monster, scares the oldest son away.

The next year the same thing happens. The second son goes to guard the field. He also runs away in terror of the earthquake.

Then we learn the story of the greatly underestimated third son. Everyone laughs at Cinderlad when he says he'll watch (he is not a stepchild like Cinderella, we learn few details about him, and we do not know what his name means).

“Well, you are just the right one to watch the hay, you who have never learned anything but how to sit among the ashes and bake yourself!” (Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book). Cinderlad comfortably retires to the barn. He is fearless, but in the middle of the night he is aroused by the rumbling of the first earthquake. Then there's a second earthquake. Then a third very violent one. When the earthquakes stopped, he hears what sounds like a horse eating grass. And indeed it is. He goes outside and sees a giant horse: “...a saddle and bridle lay upon it, and a complete set of armour fit for a knight, and eerything was of copper...” He rides the horse away to a place no one knows and then rides homes again. And they have hay for the year.
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The next year, he guards the field of grass again. A horse bearing silver armour appears. And they have hay. And the next year, ibid: a horse bearing golden armor appears.

Then the third and most interesting part of the story: A king, for whatever reason, commands his docile daughter to sit on a glass hill (and where does the glass hill come from?). Suitors must ride up the glass hill and take the three golden apples she holds.

Day 1: only Cinderlad (disgused in his copper armor) rides 1/3 of the way up the hill. The princess throws a golden apple which rolls into his shoe (how? Is it extremely small?).

Day 2: Cinderlad (disguised in his silver armor) rides two-thirds of the way up the glass hill. Another golden apple is thrown at him.

Day 3: he wears his gold armor and wins the princess.

Poor princess. We know little about her. How did it feel to sit on the glass hill? Foolish? She throws the golden apples, so isn't shy, but how can she know that the man in the most expensive armor is for her? (Suddenly I don't like her.)

Motifs: The youngest son takes the trick (succeeds). Tthis is definitely a folk tale motif. It occurs in The Frog Princess, Hop o’ My Thumb, The Golden Bird, The Singing Bone, The Grateful Beasts, The Crystal Ball, Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf, and many other fairy tales. What does it mean? A tale of the weak (the last) overcoming strength (the first)? Encouraging people with low expectations? Appearance and position don't mean success?

Then there are the golden apples, particularly common in myth. Atalanta loses the race when Hippomenes distracts her with three golden apples. Hercules must steal golden apples from Hera’s orchard. In The Judgment of Paris, Eris (Discord), throws a golden apple at the wedding of Peleus and Thesis, inscribed with “for the most beautiful.” Paris must decide between Juno, Venus, and Diana.

Golden apples are irresistible, but not to Cinderlad, who waits till the third day to claim his prize.

And then on the glass mountain. Why on earth are they connected with marriage here?

And/Or Margaret Oliphant

After one has either read and/or absorbed through osmosis much canonical literature, one often turns for literary sustenance to the second tier, which forms something of a “secondary canon” among the cognoscenti. You find yourself delightedly reading George Gissing, Charlotte M. Yonge, Dorothy Baker, Pamela Hansford Johnson, and others who are not household names.

I went through an intensive Margaret Oliphant stage a few years ago. It began with a shriek of “Oh, I love Mrs. Oliphant!” at a used bookstore when I discovered Virago editions of The Chronicles of Carlingford on the $2 sales shelves. Actually, I had read none of Oliphant at that time: I meant that I hoped to love Mrs. Oliphant. She wrote something like 120 books, and I don’t know about you, but 120 books can keep me occupied for a long time. I very much enjoyed The Chronicles of Carlingford

(Miss Marjoribanks is my favorite), so I began to collect Mrs. Oliphant in Kessinger and Elibron Classics -very expensive, no-frills reprints. Yet if you want to read The Ladies Lindores, Kirsteen, The Duke’s Daughter, or many of the others, you turn to these.


I finally got around to Margaret Oliphant’s spellbinding novella, Two Strangers (Elibron), only 195 pages of huge print. The writing is very plain and unadorned--this is not her best style - but I’m stunned by the subtle presentation of the situation and very modern ending. Published in 1894, one of her later works, Two Strangers centers on the Wradisley family. Ralph, the adventurous younger son, returns home for the first time in years, bringing with him a friend, Bertram, who has written some journalistic pieces and aspires to write more (the writing terrifies the conventional family until they find he wrote "only about Africa" and does not intend to write about them). But Bertram is not the only stranger in their life: a beautiful, fascinating widow, Mrs. Nugent, has moved in nearby with her five-year-old daughter, Tiny. Lucy, the Wradisley daughter,is enraptured by her new friend and wishes her brother to meet Mrs. Nugent right away. He, however, prefers to smoke cigars with Bertram.

The other members of the Wradisley family, however, are fascinated by Mrs. Nugent: the oldest son, Reginald, wants to marry her, and his mother, Mrs. Wradisley, loves her dearly. Then Mrs. Nugent's daughter, Tiny, forms a bond with the stranger, Bertram, who does not meet her mother till near the end. And the meeting of Bertram and Mrs. Nugent catalzyes - well, one expects a romance.

I was very surprised by the ending.