Reading Roundup, April and May 2024

[phantomtomato]

The academic term is over and thus began summer reading. Probably a bit too much, to be honest; it's not as though I haven't had other responsibilities for the past month! But this was overall a really enjoyable crop of books, and I'm excited to get to talk about them.

Jeremy at Crale by Hugh Seymour Walpole

I got the tip to move ahead to this third book in the series from edwardianspinsteraunt, thank you for that! To be very honest, I read this at the beginning of April, but my other April reads got their own posts and so I have lumped this in with the May group.

Overall, this wasn’t bad as a boarding school book—unlike the first Jeremy novel, it takes place entirely at school, Jeremy’s grown a bit and established himself among the other boys. (This was an initial point of confusion, as afaict the second book doesn’t show us his first years at public school, it’s only about prep school?) But it’s a strange inclusion alongside David Blaize, back in that blog post I linked for the last Jeremy novel, as a story of romantic friendship. Despite there being a strong potential for romantic friendship between Jeremy and multiple boys at his school (incl. his rival, the older boy who mentors him at Rugby football, maybe the boy who is a sneak, the sad first-year fag, possibly others…), Jeremy’s own main interest is a boy who he spies from afar around halfway through the novel. I must emphasize: all of the boys alluded to in my parenthetical have multiple chapters of interaction with Jeremy. The boy from afar does not talk to Jeremy until the literal last page of the novel.

So in my opinion, this romantic friendship has nothing on that of David Blaize and Frank Maddox. Nor, to be honest, The Hill, or Fifth Form, or even poor miserable Eric.

The author called out a Talbot Baines Reed book in the foreword (The Cock-House at Fellsgarth), and I tried that as well but DNF’ed around 20% through. I will likely try to return to it later, it was just… straightforwardly a boys’ school adventure, nothing particularly slashy about it. My first Talbot Baines Reed disappointment, and I’m afraid the likely trend of his remaining school novels, judging by the quick skims I gave them. Fifth Form and My Friend Smith might be the only slashy ones.

Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr

This was in an exchange tagset (for an exchange I ultimately didn't join), but I knew I'd seen it discussed on meme and, after Middlemarch and Henry Henry, I wanted something lighter to enjoy. I really enjoyed it! Good choice, past self.

This sort of book is not my usual speed—I don’t do much fantasy, and I’ve never been into Arthuriana. The book’s conceit is that of a murder mystery, so the names and figures are largely introduced as relevant to the opening murder, and the need to answer the mystery kept me going through the worst of the info-dumps about vassal kings. I don’t think I’ve been converted to Arthurian myths as a genre, but I don’t regret spending time with this one. The plotting is very strong.

Our narrator is very opinionated: Sir Kay, foster-brother of King Arthur, and castle seneschal. I hadn’t heard of him before this book, but he was a great character. I appreciated that this novel looks at Arthur’s court in its declining years: most of the knights are middle-aged and their glories have faded. Kay is bitterly aware of how his role will be diminished in the stories of the court’s accomplishments. It felt like a nice way of acknowledging the conflicting centuries of myths about these characters, which Karr was doubtless reinventing to suit her narrative.

His counterpart is Mordred, who I had heard of, but not so well that I anticipated the mid-book reveal of his fated prophecy. Mordred’s gloominess is delightful, and the book really shines around his relationships: to Kay (this was shippy! This was also what was nominated for the tagset!), to his brothers, and to his mother. Mordred spends most of the book thinking he’s about to be murdered. Kay spends most of the book telling us how handsome Mordred is. It’s very fun.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

I read this alongside yletylyf and at her prompting, which I'm grateful for! I've probably never read Austen before (there's something I owned in high school, but I can't recall what or if I actually read it). I'm glad for the pushing, which helped me realize both that Austen's novels are not as long as I feared, and also that they're a very clear influence on Forster, which I love. I will make an effort to read at least one more this summer, ahead of the Austen Exchange.

Reading Persuasion was an interesting experience because I had a great time doing it, and I was also deeply dissatisfied with the story. Can a story be both very good and quite bad at the same time? Somehow, this was.

The heart of my complaint is, after talking it over for a while with Lety, that there's all of this pining and no substantive relationship to show for it. Anne and Wentworth barely talk. We don't learn anything much about their whirlwind romance eight years prior to the start of the novel. When they do finally reunite and commit to one another at the end, their entire conversation is left to summary. Wentworth's most famous dialogue (which is beautiful!) takes the form of a scrap of a letter. And Anne, for her part, does very little on her own initiative! We see her help out when Louisa brains herself jumping off of a cliff, yes, but that's only one instance of action. Primarily Anne drifts.

But what a story it is otherwise! I was deeply engaged by all of the matchmaking and the family drama. I mean, I wanted William Elliot to have killed a man, not just... led some friends towards bad financial decisions which they ultimately made by themselves, but. It was still very exciting to see this large and compelling cast of characters play out their roles. I appreciated how well Austen established each person as fully a separate personality with their own motivations for doing things. I will say that this sometimes ran into the issues I had with Anne—Anne displays many of the same character flaws as her family but the narration doesn't treat them with the same censure as it does those other characters.

Ultimately, however, I have a fervent need for a genderbent retelling of this. I want to see the version where Anne is a man. I adore reunions in romantic relationships and I think theirs is primed for a m/m retelling, as there's many ways to fit the social roles of a second son (I think it's vital that Elizabeth is also genderbent) to Anne's story. This is one project I'm considering taking on, or at least prompting for in some exchange.

Howards End by E. M. Forster

During my debate about which Forster to read next, I found an old copy of this at a local antiquarian store, and that decided it for me. (I picked up a pretty specialty printing of A Passage to India during a recent trip, so I'll say that the ordering worked out!) I didn't know much about it going in and I wonder how it would have felt if I did—this is a novel I want to revisit in a few years' time, as I expect it offers a great deal to the rereader.

In the comments of my last Forster review, we talked about how Forster writes het relationships. I can now agree that these particular ones feel sexless, and it's an interesting novel to examine that in because there are so many heterosexual relationships. There's those between the two sisters who are the main focus of the novel, Margaret and Helen, and their partners; there's the married Basts, there's the Wilcox men and their spouses. Unlike ARWAV or WAFTT (lol, that's the first time I've considered the acronym), this doesn't attempt to be a romance; all through, it is a commentary on England and Englishness. The novel covers Imperialism, urbanization of the countryside, socialism, the shift towards working for one's wealth, and (as always with Forster) what it means to have good taste or an appreciation for art. This is what I think will be rewarded by rereading! I hope to only know more about the social and political dynamics of Edwardian England before I stop here again.

The Schlegel sisters Margaret and Helen are the main draws from a character perspective. Their relationships, primarily to one another but also platonically and romantically with the supporting cast, are the field on which all of those issues of Englishness are explored. They are half-German (scandalous!) and their Germanness stands for the free-thinking, irreverent aspects of their personalities. They each have different approaches to it. Margaret, significantly older, kept the household together while her two youngest siblings were still underage (there is a baby brother, more on him later). Helen, who has recently reached the age of majority, has more of the freewheeling iconoclasm that the more staid characters rebuke in the Schlegel family. Margaret, probably owing to her age and sense of responsibility for the family, is more strongly tempted by conventionality—indeed, a large chunk of the novel describes her temporary seduction into it.

I don't relate to the sisters' characters by liking or disliking them. They are interesting. They are the strongest female characters that I've yet read from Forster, and in some ways they make the weakness of those other women stand out more starkly. They're also some of the queerest; this is a novel which begs for a sistercest AU. Helen, towards the end, is living with a woman in Germany (Monica!) and if that's not meant to be read as a lesbian relationship then I really have no idea what Forster put it in there for. Margaret, too, has the sort of complex emotional relationship with another woman (Mrs. Ruth Wilcox) which I initially read as queer, only Ruth Wilcox dies suddenly after it's established. Margaret becoming the second Mrs. Wilcox has an interesting effect, then, of placing her spiritually closer to this departed lover by giving her the trappings of the first Mrs. Wilcox's life: husband, family, home (eventually). If one cannot possess the lover then they can possess the lover's life?

And this is all without digging into the epilogue, during which Maragert, her husband, and her sister all occupy the family home which originally belonged to Ruth—the husband, retired, symbolically emasculated, delighted only by a baby; the sisters, running a household together now, united forever.

Surprising no one who has read my Forster reviews thus far, my favorite character was Tibby Schlegel, the youngest sibling and only brother. Forster always seems to provide someone as a hint that male queerness exists—no matter the marriages and babies which occupy the foreground of the drama, there will be, lurking at the edges, a disaffected brother or an affected suitor. He is probably Forster or one of Forster's university friends. Inevitably I adore these men. Tibby lounges about, eating. He makes flippant comments or absents himself from serious discussions, and yet the narration recognizes that he has depth and exists in a realm of his own, if off-page. I think I fell in love with him at this quote:

Tibby, for all his defects, had a genuine personality.

I can imagine how Forster would have treated Tibby as the protagonist of his own novel. I would have loved to see it. Maurice, for all of its wonders, is not the story of Forster's affected, effete, upper-class Englishmen; even there, they are relegated primarily to the sidelines through the role of Clive Durham. He would have done a marvelous job of it, and I wish that Forster had been able to write a half-dozen stories about queer men so as to give us that variety.

I will limit myself to one more comment: Tibby makes a single offhand mention of a Mr. Vyse, which must be a reference to Cecil Vyse from ARWAV. I wonder if there are any other such crossover references in the Forster Extended Universe! I will look for them in A Passage to India. Whether or not there are, this one makes me very much want Cecil Vyse/Tibby Schlegel fanfic.

Comments

re Austen (the only one of these authors I have read any of thus far)

[rugessnome]

I ...finally finished reading Pride and Prejudice, on something like the fifth attempt, about a year or two ago.

I also didn't find that romance particularly substantive (at one pivotal moment, I did find myself rooting for Darcy ...to be reconsidered as a friend, not as a romantic interest 🤦) but then I didn't particularly like most of the characters. Arguably I felt like punches were similarly pulled with the villain there, too, although it's probably a bit more substantial.

(...I do feel like my life experience has poisoned me against the notion, that seems to me to underlie much of P&P, that conformity to a certain social standard will... protect you from bad outcomes/demonstrates that you're *good people*. And I'm not sure that Austen really ultimately endorses it there, but the poking at it felt somewhat toothless to me.)

But, there were points where Austen's quietly ~sardonic narration had some charms, so I intend to try something else by her at some point to at least determine how much of my distaste is aspects specific to P&P and how much is her style in general.

(hi! hopefully this wasn't too weird as a first comment. I think we've at least briefly interacted on tumblr, though probably mostly via my presently dormant hp sideblog)

Re: re Austen (the only one of these authors I have read any of thus far)

[phantomtomato]

Hi! I’m excited to get to know you over here on DW. :) Tumblr can be a little difficult to actually talk on, you know?

P&P will probably be what I read next from Austen, so look out for that post sometime this summer. I roughly know the plot of it, if only because I’ve read a delightful slash fic by mildredmost featuring Darcy and Wickham. Lety has assured me that there’s at least much more dialogue between the romantic leads than in Persuasion!

I really enjoy Victorian and Edwardian literature, though I’m only beginning to poke my toes into Regency, but I’ve certainly discovered that I need to have a bit of tolerance for old-timey English social mores in order to enjoy them. Sometimes the stuff that plays it straightest (boys’ school novels and their Muscular Christianity) are outright funny! But I think you’ve hit on what was occasionally frustrating about Anne in Persuasion, in that her values are not played completely straight, but neither are they really satirized. This is most frustrating when we see her eldest sister judged for her class-consciousness and then Anne, in the next scene, does the very same thing to no narrative judgment.

But also it’s the sort of thing that would be fun to pick at in a fic where you have control over the narrator and can preserve the character traits but not the framing of them. So, you know, maybe that with male!Anne.