bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with eighteenth century novels

For some reason I had been under the impression that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent was a big sprawling Gothic novel, but it is, in fact, a satirical little novella, which is also a great type of book to be. Written shortly before the Union was enacted in 1800, it chronicles four generations of the fictional house of Rackrent, a Protestant Ascendancy landowning family as ill-governed and exploitative as the rental practice they are named after. (“Rack-renting” in British Ireland was a practice by which lazy absentee landlords would rent out all their land at once to a land agent at a reasonable price, and the land agent was charged with finding tenants for the individual lots, which he could sublet out at whatever extortionate rent he could get for them.) The story is told from the point of view of the aged house steward, Thady Quirk, whose son Jason becomes a lawyer and eventually manages to scoop the entire Rackrent estate and title from its profligate fourth heir, Sir Condy.

The novella features a lot of gently humorous digs at the culture and folkways of the indigenous Irish tenantry, alongside a lot of absolutely savage humorous digs at the uselessness and destructive tendencies (self- and otherwise) of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, of which Edgeworth was a member. The book is safely set just a generation or so back so that Edgeworth’s contemporaries could laugh at their predecessors’ folly and not be insulted themselves, and if they did see themselves at all in the terrible behavior of the four generations of Rackrent lords chronicled, well, they were clearly behind the times and should get with the progressive paternalistic program that Edgeworth’s father was an advocate and practitioner of (mainly, that the Anglo-Irish lords should live on and manage their own estates and live within their means and not engage in rack-renting).

The four generations of Rackrent upper-class twits chronicled are thus:
Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who changes his name and presumably his religion to become Sir Patrick Rackrent and be a lord under the English regime. Sir Patrick was much beloved in the countryside for adhering to old Irish norms of lordly hospitality, which did not actually pair real well with the newfangled English laws and customs around keeping a property solvent.
Sir Murtagh, an extremely litigious man with a very pick-and-choose attitude around older Irish customs. Spent so much money litigating around keeping bits of the estate that he ended up selling bits of it off to pay the legal fees anyway.
Sir Kit Stopgap, a classic absentee landlord, who gambled away all the estate’s money in Bath, married a rich Jewish woman and locked her up for seven years when she wouldn’t hand over a particular diamond necklace, and was generally terrible.
Sir Condy Rackrent, who was educated in the law but very bad at it. He wasn’t absentee but continued his forebears’ traditions of running up huge bills and not paying them. He eventually runs out of people to sponge money off of, especially since he pissed off his wife’s family by marrying her so they won’t help, and runs for Parliament to avoid being put in jail, but Parliament has its own set of expenses he can’t pay. He ends up selling first one property and eventually the whole shebang over to Jason Quirk, who he had gone to school with and who had been his land agent for many years. The tale of Sir Condy takes up the biggest part of the page count, being about as long as the tales of the other three guys put together.

The story is told in first-person style that we are assured is the unvarnished, unembellished verbal account of Sir Condy’s old steward, and it is quite a feat of colorful Irish storytelling. Footnotes, a glossary, and other commentary for the benefit of the “English reader” are provided in a voice known only as the Editor, who can be hilariously judgmental about the Irish. The place-names are a mix of cartoonishly on-the-nose English terms (such as Rackrent and Stopgap) and cartoonishly long stereotypes of Anglicized Irish place names, such as “the bog of Allyballycarricko’shaughlin,” which Thady cannot for the life of him figure out what the third Lady Rackrent finds funny about.

While there is a lot of stuff about English property law and Irish country customs that may not be immediately familiar to a modern reader unless they already read a lot about those sorts of thing, it’s still overall a very fast and funny read, and a well-deserved takedown of one of the most useless and exploitative groups of dimwits to walk the earth (not necessarily to walk Ireland, though, as half of them never set foot there).

I’m working through my Peebles Classic Library volumes this year, apparently, and also going to the beach occasionally, so my latest beach read was Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with a bonus of its little-heralded (for good reason, it turns out) sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The volume, as opposed to the two separate books within it, bears the more recognizable title of merely Robinson Crusoe, leaving me confused about whether I should consider myself to have just read two books or one. For ease of reviewing I am going with one.

While Crusoe is probably the most famous of Defoe’s stories among small children (although I’m sure most of them aren’t reading the original 1710’s text) and Moll Flanders is probably the most famous among English major types who know it’s considered the first English-language novel, my own familiarity with Defoe’s writing has mostly been the excerpts from Journal of a Plague Year that made their way into the Pearson Prentice Hall readers I edited a million of back in 2011-2012, and endless citations of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, which pop up in every single history book about pirates ever written, and while to be scrupulously fair it is highly disputed if Captain Johnson was really Daniel Defoe, it appears that every pirate book must name-drop Defoe anyway. I’ve certainly consumed my fair share of lost-on-a-deserted-island media, to the point where I’m unsure if it’s really fair to credit that whole genre to Defoe or if he was just real fast in getting there before a lot of other people.

At any rate, I figured I had a reasonably decent idea of what I was getting into when I started reading this. I’ve read my share of 18th century literature and I know it was all written by chronically drunk people with new and exciting coffee addictions and no access to a backspace key, and tends to read as such. I’ve also read a huge amount of British Empire Fun Explorey Adventure Fiction, from various time periods and in various stages of attempting (and various stages of succeeding) to correct the absolutely rancid assumptions built into the British Empire’s… whole deal, basically. So I wasn’t exactly surprised when Robinson Crusoe turned out to be full of imperialist English white guy bullshit; examining the assumptions built into these early novels is part of what makes them so rich for analysis.

What I turned out to not be quite as prepared for as I thought I was was the specific inconsistencies in the book, giving me constant tonal whiplash. This isn’t a mediocre book; it is just simultaneously a very good and a very bad book, which probably evens out to a mediocre book, but calling it a mediocre book makes it sound like I’m saying it’s consistently mediocre, and it’s not. A lot of it is really engaging and fun and handily indulges the fantasy of self-sufficient problem-solving and Rising To Challenges that provides the survival narrative with so much of its psychological draw, even though these days that sort of “vaguely imagining yourself doing ill-defined problem-solving shenanigans” seems better fitted to games. Robinson has to figure out how to hand-make all sorts of basic things from scratch with no guidance from any other humans, only items scavenged from the shipwreck that brought him there, which is always an interesting constraint to put on someone since it’s so different from how humans have historically pulled off doing literally anything.

The trouble begins when literally any other human being shows up, as it seems to require a minimum of one (1) other living creature who is not a parrot for Crusoe’s imperialist-white-Englishman worldview to reassert itself in ways that are predictably violent and entitled, but also sometimes less-predictably stupid. Like, there is a long history of white Christians renaming any non-white non-Christians they run into because they don’t think “pagan” names really count for anything, and they don’t feel like learning how to pronounce anything that’s not in one of a handful of European languages, and generally being provincial assholes about it. This is still a political hot topic sometimes so I’m familiar with the litany of culturally dominant excuses to blow off or change other people’s names. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was two entire books written without even the slightest awareness on the part of either Crusoe or, apparently, Defoe, that non-white people even have names for white people to change. I knew that there was a native character called Friday who was going to be in this book, but I sort of subconsciously assumed there would be some sort of reason, however half-assed or imperialist, for Crusoe to rename the man Friday–maybe he had amnesia, maybe he didn’t want to tell Crusoe his name, maybe his name is something Crusoe can’t pronounce properly but sounds sort of like “Friday,” Idunno, I hadn’t read the book yet–but it turns out that Crusoe, from his own perspective at least, doesn’t re-name Friday; it simply never occurs to him to ask in the first place, and Friday, a character written so servilely that I am offended on his behalf at almost every single sentence written about him, never says anything or in any way behaves like his name has ever been anything but “Friday” either. You can say what you like about the racism of the portrayals of other “cannibal savages” in 18th century literature (and there’s lots to say! Like the whole notion of “cannibal savages”!) but at least when Ishmael meets Queequeg he gets told that Queequeg’s name is Queequeg because he comes from a place where his parents named him Queequeg; Ishmael doesn’t just run into him into a hotel room as a mid-career harpooner and go “I’m gonna name you Bob” and have everyone just go along with it. The bar’s on the floor, man.

To be scrupulously fair, we must also weigh the evidence that this is not exclusively a racist blindspot of Defoe’s but a general novel-writing blindspot, as our narrator Crusoe rarely appears to think that the audience needs to know anyone’s name at all, to the point where every time a character is given a name it comes off as actively jarring. Other characters are identified mainly by their relationships to Crusoe or their ethnicities and jobs– “the Spanish captain,” “the French priest,” “the three roguish Englishmen” versus “the two honest Englishmen.” In the sequel, one of the three roguish Englishmen is eventually dubbed Will. Atkins; the other twenty or so people living on the island at the time don’t get names, except Will. Atkins’ “wife,” who is dubbed Mary when she is baptized as a Christian, a thing that happens at the very end of her and Will’s story arc, where she goes through several dialogues solely under the name “Wife.” This is a baffling writing choice to me. Like, I understand why eighteenth-century English writers would think it’s a happy story for a bunch of English sailors to “chuse” captive native wives they don’t know and don’t speak the same language as and then after five or ten years convert them to Christianity and have them “consent” to an official marriage one a clergyman shows up on the island so they can pretend that Christian marriages care about obtaining the consent of both parties when that never crossed anyone’s mind when the five native women arrived on the island in the first place and were parceled out as natural resources. But I don't understand why you'd give us like twenty major characters and not give us any names for them.

Also, from a modern perspective, it’s clear that Englishmen decided that Caribbean natives were cannibals solely so they could pretend that whatever Caribbean natives they captured and enslaved were only afraid of the Englishmen because they thought they’d behave like “savages” and eat them, and were totally grateful to be kept alive and owned as beasts of burden instead. I was honestly sort of surprised when Crusoe also went on a long rant about how awful the Spanish genocide of the indigenous populations of the New World was; apparently, if there is one overarching feature of Crusoe’s principles and values as an eighteenth-century middle-class white Englishman, it’s that they change on a dime from moment to moment based on whatever is most flattering to himself. In this I suppose Crusoe is a lot more like most of us than we’d like to think.

To be very clear, the worst excess of Crusoe coming into contact with, then therefore taking actions regarding, and, god save my poor eyeballs, having opinions about other people come in the sequel, which I am clearly putting in the “I Read It So You Don’t Have To” category. The sequel just flatly sucks. It’s entirely just Crusoe bouncing around the world being racist to people on four different continents. It has no redeeming qualities. Friday gets one final indignity by dying in the final tagged-on clause in a sentence that’s about half a page long and also features getting mooned by a canoe full of natives, which is funny, thus ruining any gravitas about poor Friday’s under-described death in battle. I am so mad about Friday I’m this close to writing fix-it fic about the glorious adventures Friday has under his own real name after refusing to go to England with Crusoe as his servant, because again, Friday deserves better at every single turn in both of these books.

The first book I will admit is worth reading if you want to be well-read on classics and the Foundational Texts of various important genres of fiction, and also like reading a lot about raisins, and also like picking apart the political assumptions baked into early modern moral novels. And yes, it’s strongly a moral novel, just with very 18th-century morals–it starts off with basically a three-page sermon from Robinson’s dad about the virtues of being middle-class, and this is used to frame basically all of his adventures as a cautionary tale of the dangers of being too bullheaded to appreciate a nice civilized middle-class British life. A huge part of Robinson’s character arc is the spiritual awakening he experiences from being stranded on a deserted island for decades with nothing to read but the Bible and plenty of raisins to eat. I actually liked the old-fashioned language–the sentences are long but they have some style, which is tragically lacking in the sequel–and I find Crusoe’s philosophizing and moral self-scrutiny to be fascinating to read, given how much the assumptions and received wisdom he’s operating with as an eighteenth-century Englishmen essentially doom him to be an operationally terrible person no matter how much moral reasoning he does, even when there’s nobody about for him to even be terrible to–the decent impulses he has all have to be filtered through a Protestant set of principles that frequently warps or undercuts them, leading to interesting moral feats like a much-lauded religious “tolerance” where he’s nice to Catholics because at least they’re also Christians. I find it genuinely very interesting.

The TL;DR: The first book has its ups and downs and is interesting largely as a historical artifact. The second book is also somewhat interesting as a historical artifact but as a book is entirely downs.

The last book I read in 2015 was the fourth installment of the Outlander franchise, Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon. At this point, Jamie and Claire have arrived in the semiwilderness of the colony of North Carolina, ten years or so before the American Revolution. There are a lot of Scotsmen in North Carolina. Some of them fled impoverishment and persecution to set themselves up as plantation and slave owners, following the grand American tradition of fleeing persecution to engage in a little persecution of one's own. Other Scots have come over via indenture, either voluntary or involuntary. (Hell, I think some of the came over via involuntary indenture and bought slaves once their indenture was over; people can be shitty like that.)

In contrast to the last book, which I call "Highlanders of the Caribbean" even though that's not actually its name, Claire and Jamie mostly stay in North Carolina through this one. They meet another one of Jamie's unnumerable relatives, a badass, blind old lady named Jocasta Cameron, who welcomes them and immediately starts scheming to put Jamie in charge of her plantation so that other people stop trying to marry it out from under her. This doesn't sit too well with either Jamie or Claire, since the plantation comes with a great number of slaves and can't be maintained without them, and, since Claire and Jamie are our heroes, they can't possibly countenance slave ownership. Instead, Jamie runs off and starts rustically homesteading a nearby patch of woodland he calls Fraser's Ridge, and it's all very Little House on the Prairie for a bit, except for being woodland instead of prairie.

It's Claire's daughter Brianna, it turns out, and Geilis Duncan's descendant Roger Wakefield who do the bulk of the traveling in this book. After finding a death notice for Claire and Jamie Fraser for 1776, Brianna travels back through the stones at Inverness to warn them. Roger follows once he figures out what's going on, and they each make their way to North Carolina, miraculously not dying, although they certainly meet up with their share of terrible and slightly cliche adventures, including Roger getting kidnapped by Mohawks and Brianna getting raped by a pirate. Honestly, if the plot weren't buried under such a great amount of detail and strong characterization, it would probably be awful -- most of the plot points in this book are pretty overdone in either romances or historical fiction. A huge chunk of the adventuring in the second half of the book comes from the sort of idiotic miscommunication that could have been easily cleared up by conversing like normal humans instead of romance novel twerps. Jamie is all Jealous Father about Roger, and Brianna of course gets pregnant immediately upon becoming sexually active. Some people think the book might need a bit of editing down, since it is rather enormous, but I think that would be a mistake. It's the huge amounts of ridiculous research, tiny details, wacky secondary characters, and psychological meanderings through the minds of the main characters that really make the book something worth reading, at least if you're a history nerd looking for some exciting and slightly trashy melodrama that doesn't insult your intelligence.

I'm definitely going to keep up with this series, probably no matter how overblown it gets. It's just too much fun.

Current Mood: still sick
Current Location: Vox on Two Apartments
Current Music: Star Wars

Well, I am on a roll with reading books wrong. In the case of Diana Gabaldon's Voyager, the third book in the Outlander series, it's because I got it out of the library, only read 25% of it before I had to return it about two months ago, got back in line, and read the rest of it last week when it finally cycled back to me.

While Outlander took place almost entirely in Scotland, and Dragonfly in Amber brought us as far as France, the aptly named Voyager brings us basically everywhere. Acting on news from the research project she, Brianna, and Roger started in 1968, Claire moves from Boston back to Scotland, travels back through the stone circles at Craigh na Dun to sometime in the 1760s, tracks down Jamie in Edinburgh, and from there a relentless flood of shenanigans takes them all around Scotland, then to France, and then back over the Atlantic to the Caribbean. And that's just the main plotline, from Claire's perspective. We also get POVs from Jamie, as he does all sorts of dramatic Highlander things like hide in a cave for seven years and escape from an English prison; from Roger; and from one Lord John Grey, who seems to have a bunch of his own spinoff novels now.

The book is also kind of all over the place in other ways, too. Some of it is very serious--Jamie's time in Ardsmuir, for example, is pretty dark, treated with all seriousness and mostly not filled with highly improbable action-hero hijinks. Other bits are, uh, not--once they get on a boat everything basically becomes "Highlanders of the Caribbean" and it's all very colorful and almost absurdly action-packed, and develops a serious case of Les Mis-level small world syndrome (you know how in Les Mis, Paris has like twenty people and one policeman and one apartment to rent? In Voyager, the entire British Empire has about twenty people, one ship, and two military officers).

One of the big effects of leaving the rural Scottish highlands is that there are a lot more people of color in this book, which is a thing that can obviously go very wrong very quickly, especially considering the time period is really the height of British colonial power in the New World (it's like, 10 years before the American Revolution starts, I think) and the slave trade is in full swing. I have... mixed feelings about how this is handled. It's clearly well researched, which certainly helps it avoid some of the more common myths and pitfalls about the time (most notably, Gabaldon knows what involuntary indenture is and the ways in which it is similar to and different from chattel slavery; this shouldn't be noteworthy but it is). But the general approach she takes to characterizing pretty much all ethnicities--which is not so much to avoid stereotypes, but to deliberately walk straight into them and then try to build up more perspective/characterization on top of it--works slightly less well with, for example, the one Chinese character--a short, frequently drunk man with very bad English whose skillset is basically a grab bag of Chinese Things, including Chinese herbal medicine, acrobatics, calligraphy, acupuncture, and, of course, magic--than it does with any one of the ten billion Scots that populate the series. (Granted, one of the things I do kind of like about the books is that every culture the characters come into contact with has its own magical traditions and they all appear to work equally well, but the execution can still feel a bit clumsy--like, this random English lady keeps finding herself in situations where every time she meets new people she gets to witness their magic in action. Every single time.) The one Chinese dude is an especially interesting case of both being an interesting character and giving me wincy feelings because he's a fairly major secondary character and he gets a good amount of page time. He's known throughout the book as Mr. Willoughby, which is obviously not his name but was bestowed upon him in a well-meaning but ultimately worse-than-useless attempt to help him blend in. He's sometimes a comic character but other times a very tragic one, especially when you finally learn his backstory--something I found particularly interesting was that a major part of his backstory is that he is actually kind of a sexist dillweed, in the hopeless-romantic-with-ludicrously-unrealistic-views-of-women method that made me like him a bit less as a reader but is clearly a huge point of commonality between him and a lot of the white dudes in the book. By the end of the story I actually did like him, but there were a couple of cringeworthy scenes to get to that point.

Also cringeworthy is an appearance of one of my least favorite tropes EVER, actually I don't really know if it's a trope but I have seen it in one other book at least, which makes two too many--where a nice white lady who is very opposed to slavery gets so upset about it that she winds up owning one, because that is totally a thing that happens, and it is very upsetting, because clearly the important thing about slavery is how hard it would be on anti-slavery white people to be landed with one, and now she has to decide how best to go about being a good white savior, which in both cases I've read have inexplicably involved steps other than "ask person what they want and do it." I partly don't like this trope because it smacks very strongly of "author's personal self-examination and thought exercises leaking onto the paper"; in this case, many of the compounding issues that cropped up in the Jackie Faber book where this happens are thankfully avoided, but at least in the series so far, I can't help but think that the entire subplot with Temeraire could have been completely excised with no harm done to the rest of the book whatsoever.

These are the low points. There are many, many other things going on in this book (these books tend to be pretty densely packed with a wide assortment of Things), including the reappearance of Geillis Duncan (who is a major creeper), our first gay character who isn't predatory and terrible, hints of family backstory and things for Claire's Boston doctor friend Joe Abernathy (JOE ABERNATHY IS GREAT), lots of ladies with lots of agency in different ways all along the moral spectrum, and, as usual, a lot of sex, although kilts have been sadly outlawed at this point so Jamie is reduced to constantly wearing breeches. And have I mentioned the MELODRAMATIC ADVENTURES ON THE HIGH SEAS? It is everything you could want out of a melodramatic adventure on the high seas; I think Gabaldon had a checklist of Stuff That Happens When Adventure On the High Seas and made sure every point got in there somewhere--there is kidnapping, espionage, shipwrecks, slave revolts, an outbreak of plague, naval battles, pirate attacks, smuggling, big storms, seasickness, hardtack with weevils, a Portuguese pirate with too much jewelry and a cutlass, stowaways, a parentally disapproved-of romance, and even a dude with a hook for a hand, although the said dude is Fergus, who we actually met in the last book and who lost his hand long before becoming a sailor. At one point there is even a big hat. (Note: People for whom melodramatic pirate adventures are NOT catnip might find this half of the book frustrating, the way I find cartoon physics in non-cartoon movies frustrating, because it kind of pushes against one's suspension of disbelief sometimes. I'm just willing to overlook this because for me, melodramatic pirate adventures are SUPER CATNIP.)

On a more serious note, the looks we get into the British penal and colonial systems, in Scotland and elsewhere, are really, really well done, I think--they're very informative but also very emotionally engaging, and involve a lot of heavy stuff about power and identity, which is especially apt since the British relied even more heavily on eradicating people's identity to conquer them than they did on brute force (not like brute force wasn't a major component, of course). I particularly appreciate the looks at the basically decent English people who were still complicit in and perpetrators of these colonial systems that very definitely weren't at all about "helping" or "civilizing" any of the people in the lands the British took over and who the English definitely never saw as their fellow countrymen, even the sort of nice ones, no matter what the official imperialist rhetoric was.

This book's story arc never particularly wraps up--it just leads right into the next book, which I have dutifully added to my library queue. The line is shorter than it was for the last few books, so with luck I will have it within a few weeks.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: Skye, Bear McCreary

That line is how Kate Beaton describes her fabulous and amazing comic strip Hark! A Vagrant! in this week's Phoenix.

So, anyway, I went to the Boston Book Festival the other day, and I bought a copy of her shiny new book Hark! A Vagrant! and then I listened to her talk at a panel (she is so cute, you guys), and then she SIGNED my book and drew me a little picture of a Victorian lady with an updo going "Oooh" and I was like, the happiest little fangirl ever.

The very first comic in this book is Dude Watchin' With the Brontes, which is one of my favorites and a printout of which has been hanging in my various walls for three years:

Basically, this book is a collection of her best strips, which is almost all of them, and sometimes including the little commentaries she writes when she posts them, but there are also some new ones! Obviously I cannot post any examples of the new ones; you will just have to go buy the book. If you can find it. The BBF had completely run out of them by, like, three o'clock. There were so many overexcited Beaton fans there. I got to stand in line with them for hours and hours! Luckily, I had a book to read. ;)

Most of the HaV comics are standard six- to eight-panel jokes about books, history, and sometimes pop cultural things (like superheroes and hipsters). Sometimes she also picks a topic and does a bunch of three-panel strips all on roughly the same thing, like last year's set of Dracula comics, which have rendered me totally incapable of reading Dracula quite the same way ever again:

She also does these hilarious strips based on book covers, including a bunch of covers by Edward Gorey and nearly the entire Nancy Drew series, but you'll have to actually go to her website to check those out because two comics is enough to spam you with for one day.

If you have been to this blog before you may recognize some of these strips because I like to link to them when I can remember when there are jokes that are relevant to whatever I am reading, which is a lot of the time, because this comic is just that awesome.

I have watched some fun movies lately! There doesn't seem to be any sort of unifying theme to them, though. Except that I liked them all.

Last weekend I watched Whip It, which I had been wanting to see since it came out, but when it came out it was aggressively under-marketed despite having all sorts of big names in it, so I could not find in a theater near me. Anyway, it is basically one of those sports team movies where the team is famously crappy at the beginning but then they cohese and get awesome, and there is bonding and funny stuff between the team members. It may be the best movie of this particular formula I've seen in a really long time, because instead of being about high school football or something, it's about women's roller derby. The main character, Bliss--played by Ellen Page--is a teenager, because this kind of story is always a coming of age story, but it is an adult team and she lies about her age to be on it. Bliss comes from a painfully fifties kinda nuclear household, in which her mother, and ex-beauty pageant queen type of person, makes Bliss also do beauty pageants, and her doofy dad is a pretty typical sitcom/cartoon Doofy Dad until right up at the end when he starts being involved and supportive, but only because roller derby is a sport, and being very stereotypical, he likes sports. The mom is more developed. Bliss also has a best friend, who is played by Maeby from Arrested Development. The best friend does not join the roller derby team, instead playing faithful sidekick until this role comes to bite her in the ass, at which point there is drama stuff about how it is actually kind of douchey to make your best friend be your faithful sidekick sometimes. There is an obligatory Awkward But Supposedly Adorable Dude In A Band Who Turns Out To Be A Douche After The Protagonist Sleeps With Him, and I am sad to report that this entire plotline is exactly what it always is and there wasn't really anything fun about it. Oh, well. The roller derby teams more than made up for it. They were loud and colorfully dressed and many of them had tattoos and the one played by Drew Barrymore was clearly a little messed up from too much contact-sport-playing, and they were also funny and expressive and had fun hanging out and helped each other and one of them had an adorable small child, and basically were a bunch of cool ladies being friends and playing roller derby. I think this is the sort of thing we should see more of in movies. Also one of them was played by Eve, a rapper I really liked back when I was in eighth grade and went through my gangsta rap phase for like six months before I discovered metal. I will probably never listen to rap again in my life if I can help it but I will always think Eve is awesome anyway.

I kind of feel like trying to talk about the plot here would be pointless cos it's kind of exactly what you'd expect, that just doesn't make it any less fun to watch. Bliss joins the worst roller derby team ever! She starts out badly because she is timid and roller derby is a contact sport! She gets better because she is small and speedy and becomes the best ~~Seeker~~ jammer ever! They qualify for the championships, but something happens so that Bliss may not be able to go! (In this case, it is because she is outed as underage and then can't go without parental permission, but her mother wants her to do the beauty pageant that is that same night instead.) But then she is able to go to the championship, of course, and she has a cranky Nemesis on the other team, and the game is close and at the very very end the game is very very close and it is Her Versus Her Nemesis to end the game one way or the other. The ending is somewhat less formulaic than usual, so I won't tell you about it.

This was definitely one of those movies where the fun lies in the individual lines and funny side characters and charmingly awkward moment-to-moment stuff, rather than plotular suspense. But there is a lot of fun in those things! And you really get an appreciation for how totally awesome roller derby is. I retain my original impression that this would be a great sleepover movie.

This weekend I moved into very British period dramas, or what I am learning to think of as "Hat Movies" in that the characters tend to wear big awesome hats.

Sense and Sensibility is, obviously, pretty awesome, because it is an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and it's hard to fuck those up entirely. This one also has a brilliant cast, with Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood (the practical one), Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood (the romantic one who would be the biggest Twilight fangirl ever if she were alive today), Hugh Grant as Edward (not a vampire), Alan Rickman as ~~awesomeness~~ Colonel Brandon, and some dude with hilarious sideburns as Willoughby. Everyone has really terrible hair, and I can't quite tell if this is a 90s thing or if it's actually a period thing that a lot of other adaptations have let up on a bit because it is so terrible. It looks kind of nineties to me, but I was not very fashion-conscious in 1995 (besides, y'know, slap bracelets) so I am basing that assumption entirely on vague memories of that one time my mom got a perm. Anyway, everyone has either super frizzy or super laquered tight tight spiral curls and it looks awful, is what I'm saying. Everything else is gorgeous.

For me, the most important part of any Austen adaptation is "Is it still funny?" because Austen is hilarious but I think sometimes people forget this and think that she is writing straight romance (with occasional jokes) instead of a social satire using a love story as a structural aid a la The Importance of Being Earnest. (See: this Hark, A Vagrant! strip) Luckily, this one was still funny! Particularly Hugh Grant, who was perfectly funny and awkward and sweet and British all at the same, which just made it extra funny. The moving bits were all very moving, but when the basis of your story is essentially to contrast silly people romance with awkward people romance, the stuff that's probably very serious drama to the characters still comes off as sad-larious more than anything else.

After this, I was like "I need more sad-larious awkward British people with big hats!" so I decided to watch The King's Speech. This one also has a cast of People Who Make Everything Better: in this case, Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Geoffrey Rush. HBC has the freaking fabulousest hats in this movie. If you are the one person left in the English-speaking world who has not heard of this movie, I will tell you what it is about: it is about George VI's (known as "Bertie") ascension to the throne at the beginning of World War II, and his quest to overcome his stammer so that he could engage in the public speaking required of a king now that this newfangled radio thing had been invented. Geoffrey Rush plays his speech therapist, Lionel "I Am A Huge Nerd, You Have No Idea How Nerdy I Am" Logue. He is hysterical. He is definitely not a comic relief character, and the movie is definitely not a comedy (except to the degree that all Hat Movies are inherently comedies, because Hat Movies), but it is a very well-done and engaging and serious drama about a lot of very clever and witty people with excellent senses of humor. Except Bertie's brother; his sense of humor consists of making fun of Bertie's stammer and as such he is not as clever as he thinks he is.

This movie has pretty much everything I like in it--in addition to the aforementioned Britishness and hats, there is a lot of political crap, which I'm really big on lately, and of course, there is language nerdery, although since it is more focused on public speaking than linguistics it does not make me as flaily as, say, Pygmalion. There are lots of those dippy sort of "history, it is in the PAST, LOL" types of comments that I always think are more clever than they really are ("RADIO, it is so NEW AND TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED!" and "This Hitler fellow, how big of a problem is he?" and stuff). Did I mention big hats?

I could probably give serious review of this movie if I really tried, but every movie critic ever has already done so, so that's why I'm just squeeing.

Anyway, I give it five hats.

Current Mood: hungry

The above quote is from my friend Emily. She and Liz and I went to see Jane Eyre on Sunday. I almost put that Jasper Fforde quote about Jane Eyre being FOR ALL TIME again, but I think I have used it enough.

Anyway, I will not review the plot of Jane Eyre, since hopefully you already know it, and if not, you should drop whatever you're doing and go read it. The first chapters are a little slow, as is the case with all books written before about World War One, but it picks up, I promise you. And then it is ALL SORTS of weird Gothic novel shit with secret marriages and mysterious strangers setting things on fire and even some hilariously convenient rich dead uncles. Also, don't keep reading; here there be spoilers.

This movie version stayed pretty true to the book, although being only movie-length it did have to shorten a few things--Jane only has one weird argument with St. John about marrying him and going to India instead of like nineteen, and they skipped over all the drama about Jane's wedding veil, and they left out the bit where she suddenly learns she is actually related to the Riverses (perhaps they felt a modern audience would only be able to believe so many mysteriously acquired relatives). Also, I was really hoping for a cheesy voiceover at the end with Jane's whole "Reader, I married him" speech, because it is so saccharine in text that I would have positively died having to hear it spoken out loud over tinkly piano music and footage of Jane and Rochester making eyes at each other in the English countryside. Alas, this did not happen.

However, many wonderful things were still included, including a fabulous, fabulous cast. Mia Wasikowska I had only seen as Alice in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and I am pleased to report that she was an awesome Jane. (She is probably too pretty to be Jane, but they plained her up as well a possible, including with a clever hairdo that is basically one of those beautiful braided knots that passed for "simple" hair back then, except with the front locks twisted in such a way as to draw entirely too much attention to her ears, but without making it look like they'd given her ugly hair.) Michael Fassbender was such an excellently cranky and weird Mr. Rochester that you almost forgot that he is also far too attractive for the role. (They actually dealt with this issue similarly--Rochester has increasingly terrible facial hair as the movie progresses. It's highly amusing.) I particularly appreciated him as Rochester because, while many of us Americans know him best as The Guy Who Says "Then We Shall Fight In The Shade!" from 300 or Lieutenant Archie from Inglourious Basterds, to me he will always be first and foremost Azazeal, the broody eyeliner-wearing demon dude from Hex.

We spent a lot of the movie trying to figure out who was playing the Rivers sisters, because they both looked very, very familiar. We finally figured it out: one of them is Tamzin Merchant, who I know as Catherine Howard from The Tudors, Georgiana Darcy from the newer Pride and Prejudice, and the original casting for Danaerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. The other one is Holliday Grainger, who I had never seen before in my life until about three weeks ago, until I saw her as Lucrezia Borgia in The Borgias and as some crazy Sidhe lady who enchants Arthur in an episode of Merlin. It was a shock seeing either of them in only semi-ridiculous costumes, since the Rivers sisters were sensible and not very wealthy, so they mostly just wore not-very-colorful plain dresses and their hair in beautiful braided knots that also kind of did unfortunate things to their ears. At any rate, it turns out they are both more than capable of playing normal characters with normal wardrobes, and though Mary and Diana are not the biggest parts in the story they are both very endearing.

None of these people were quite as awesome as Judi Dench, though, because nobody is ever as awesome as Judi Dench. Dame Judi played Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, and though I don't remember Mrs. Fairfax being a particularly favorite character of mine in the book, she was in the movie. She was just the right level of fussy to alleviate her from being generally a kind and sensible character to being a funny one, and as always, she can communicate volumes with very subtle facial expressions, which is especially important when you do a lot of stuffy Regency and Victorian era pieces. She also has excellent comic timing. I really don't know how to describe her performance, other than that she somehow changed Mrs. Fairfax from "the nice old housekeeper" into "the AWESOMEST HOUSEKEEPER EVER," through sheer force of being Judi Dench.

Now that I am done dithering about the cast, here are my brief thoughts on everything else about the movie: the framing device was ingenious, alleviating the aforementioned "slow beginning" problem without leaving out Jane's very important "tale of woe"; Thornfield Hall and the rest of the setting were freaking gorgeous in a damp Englandy gothic-novel sort of way; Little!Jane was so cute I could die and not at all stiff or awkward (I'm always extra impressed when you get a really good performance out of a child actor); visually the movie was spot-on--gorgeous, with a style that vacillates weirdly between being all dark and gothic and gritty and stuff, and being the usual lightly gorgeous, somewhat awkward style that characterizes all Regency movies. There is even the obligatory montage of "happy Regency country summer," which consists of lots of flowers, lots of sunshine, ladies painting, men smiling very broadly whilst wearing top hats, and tinkly piano music. This mishmash of visual styles all makes absolute sense depending on where in the story we are, and manages to come together as cohesively as Charlotte Bronte's original novel did (which was a pretty impressive piece of genre mashup, in its way). Most importantly, the movie absolutely did not play down Jane's whole restlessness thing, which is one of the key things that make Jane Eyre Jane Eyre instead of any other random Regency romance. There is a longstanding history of moviemakers leaving out the things that make all the best Regency romances more than just Regency romances (I'm looking at you, various harlequinized, unfunny adaptations of Jane Austen novels!), and so I am always afraid, when a new one comes out, that they will play it straight sappy. Luckily, this Jane Eyre is not harlequinized or sappy--it is very much Jane Eyre.