Howard's End by E.M.Forster

This book was a trial to me from beginning to end.  I started it eagerly enough - even though it wasn't really on my 'list' of books I've always wanted to read, it's a classic (or at least I think it is) and what's more it was a short paperback.

By the time I was two-thirds through it, I was reading it the way Tom Hanks 'reads' Pride and Prejudice in the film You've Got Mail.  I literally would fling the book away, promising myself that I was done for good, I wasn't even going to finish it.  Then I would roll my eyes and pick it up again - mostly because I'm stubborn as a rock when it comes to reading books, and also because unless a book is actually sordid or perverted, I will finish it so that I know what it's like from beginning to end.

Well, I know now, and let me tell you: I cannot think of a single good reason to recommend it.  The story wanders along so aimlessly, as though the book itself is disinterested in its own plot.  There are two sisters who are admirable in their love for each other, and a lovely house that you anticipate they will one day live in, but the struggle to keep the sisters in a good relationship with each other, and to get to the house in the end, is not in the least worth all the bother of finding out how they get there. 

I think part of my frustration with it was that there is so much reality - so much of what real life dishes out that we don't like, and struggle through, and weep over, and hurt from - and no redemption.  The first scene that really caused me to scowl and fling the book away was Margaret (one of the sisters) writing a note to a neighbour to explain why she felt they shouldn't spend any time together. The note was written in haste, and even its content admitted that she was probably going to regret its writing, but it was written and sent, and later on Margaret goes with abject apologies to the neighbour and has to struggle through an awkward friendship that never quite gets on the right footing again.  I've done things like this - sent a text, or an email, or said something, and later regretted it and apologised, and had to manage through difficult relations as a result.  It's not pleasant, and I don't like to think on it further, and even less do I like imagining someone else doing it, especially when the result is a tepid understanding, and things are worse off than at the beginning.

Everything in the book seemed so wan, so uncaring.  I thought I liked Helen (the other sister) at first, and then she seemed flighty and irresponsible and foolish.  Then I thought I liked Margaret, but she was stiff and hard and illogical.  Margaret falls in love, but with a man who is not worthy of her (or anyone), and I can never admire her or her husband, and the book resignedly agrees with me in the end.  No one is admirable, no one joyful.  England is proclaimed as the greatest of all countries (perhaps this is one of the aspects I hold against it, as one loyal to Scotland), but there is nothing to support its claims.  Even the house itself, Howard's End, struggles to stand as something worth loving, when it is filled with such fools as these.

And to add blankness to folly, no one has strong beliefs of any kind - about anything, or anyone.  Pale, washed-out statements about there perhaps being a God, but perhaps not; or heaven being a vague and uninteresting place, and hell about the same; no point to life and no eternity to hope for.  "Life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything..." - these kind of vague statements are peppered throughout, and make you feel a little as though the book was simply the result of Forster's dream, or babbled words on a psychologist's couch.

No, I didn't like it.  I'd be happy if I never finished it, but finish it I did, and although it was nice to get some kind of conclusion at the end, I felt a little as though there were several endings to it that were considered in succession and this one was simply chosen haphazardly from a scrap-bag.

I thought at first it was simply jet lag, or weariness, or just being tired of reading; but no, my point from Midnight in Austenland stands: a little too much reality is not what anyone wants - much less bland, washed-out reality with no clear trumpet call to glory, on this earth or beyond it.

At least Tom Hanks knows how I feel.

Midnight in Austenland by Shannon Hale

Interestingly enough, I ended up (thanks to jet lag) actually reading this book at midnight. And beyond.  After months of pressing on through books like Les Mis, Dante on Hell, The Letters of Samuel Rutherford, and Middlemarch, just to name a few, it was an incredibly smooth ride to pick up a novel like this and just breeze through it.  I forgot how easy reading could be.  One of the reasons I committed this year to finishing all the books I was half-way through is that I have a great tendency to fly through books like this, easy and fun reads, and to set aside the harder, more challenging ones. 

So when my sister excitedly sent me a copy a few months ago, I sighed and set it on the shelf for when I had finished all my half-started books.  After a few months in America (and a lot of traveling), I returned with the aforementioned jet lag and realised that I was ready to start a new book! Midnight in Austenland it was.  I brewed a cup of Earl Grey (with a slice of lemon, of course), and curled up on my favourite red sofa to read. 

Novels based on Austen are a dime a dozen these days – everyone fancies themselves an Austen fan, and a potential Austen writer.  I liked that this book isn’t an Austen wanna-be: the heroine lives in current times and has pretty normal twenty-first-century problems (like going through a divorce, trying to stay connected to her teenage children, and re-figuring out who she is as a person).  But she loves Austen, and decides to take a trip to England to visit some of the Austen sites.  The opportunity arises to stay for two weeks in a Pemberley-style house, dressing in the Regency style, living and speaking and eating as in the Austen days.  

I like her merging of a current-times mindset with a past-times style of living.  As any of us would do, she disappears into historical times for the most part, every once in a while wondering what she’s doing there and whether it is changing her life yet.  As she arrives at the venue, she looks over the landscape and wills it to help her, thinking to herself: “Come on, change me. I dare you.”  And later on, dressed in full Regency style, she stares at herself in the mirror and wonders if the change has begun.  “Lately she’d become the Divorced Woman. She’d let herself be defined by what James had done to her. Now it was her chance to redefine things.  I choose this, she told the reflection. The reflection didn’t change. She hoped it wouldn’t take its time. She only had two weeks.” 

In some ways, the plot twists and turns surprised me a little, if only because from the beginning I thought maybe, just maybe, this would turn out to be one of those books that mirrors real life a little more accurately.  I have a feeling if I went to Austenland for two weeks, I wouldn’t be nearly murdered (twice), solve a centuries-old mystery, and fall in love to boot.  And get a few other happy endings that I won’t spoil for you.  And sometimes I almost wish that books like this went that route, so I don’t feel so bad that my life doesn’t have the perfect happy ending in the middle of my days.

But then, that’s not why we read books like this.  We read them for the exceptions, for the fairy tales.  We read them for inspiration and remembering that, sometimes, people do get happy endings.  The handsome man appears out of nowhere, the relationship with children is restored, the woman who thought herself as plain is actually quite beautiful.  We all want to be Cinderella (or Elizabeth Bennett, or Emma), and so we read – and write – books like this.

So go on – have a read.  Curl up in your favourite chair, or couch, or bed, make yourself a perfect cup of tea, don’t let anyone interrupt you, and get whisked away to Austenland.  After the day (or week, or year) you have probably had, you could use a little fairy tale happiness. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

 

This was a surprising treatise on beauty, and the manner in which it is distorted by sin. 

The opening preface included a few nuggets that captured my interest immediately, and caused me to choose this book over a few others I was debating reading at the moment:

• The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
• Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
• No artist desires to prove anything.
• No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
• It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. 
• The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

The more I read, the more I find that I’m trying less to understand if I think the writer or the book is ‘right’, and I’m endeavouring more to simply look intelligently at what is written and glean some new light, or new perspective, on my own thoughts and life.  (There are some books that are sordid or ugly, and they poison the mind even in a small way. Those I set aside the moment the realisation comes upon me, because there will be no good or beauty to be gleaned from something that has set itself out to destroy, or to describe destruction in an ugly way.)

The rough story of Dorian Gray is that of a beautiful, almost a young Greek god of a man, whose portrait is painted.  He stands before it and utters the wish that he might always be so beautiful, and that only the portrait itself would reflect the passing of the years.  “For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” the young Dorian cries.

And over the years it is so.  What fascinates me is the resulting effect on those who relate to this young man.  They cannot believe any atrocities of him, any sins, because one look at his young, glorious, untroubled face, and their minds are soothed.  “Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them.”  Sin and evil are always, eventually, reflected in the face.  Even just a cruel twist of the lips, or a ‘something’ in the eyes, but those whose souls are cruel cannot reflect a purity and innocence to the world – truly the soul shines out of the eyes, and the face.  Dorian cheats this rule, but as always with rule exceptions, there are effects he did not imagine.  He longs to be pure and beautiful inside, but when he makes brave resolutions, he is falsely comforted by his own visage and beauty. 

The portrait, as he wished, takes on all the ugliness of his own soul, and Dorian has a lifelong fascination with it – going days or months hardly thinking of it, and then suddenly possessed with a fierce desire to see it, in a vain hope that the beauty will, somehow, return.  Even when he makes a noble sacrifice and rushes to the painting with a desire to see change, he is horrified to discover that there is “no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome – more loathsome, if possible, than before.” 

I was struck by the constant references to art and beauty – the author has a true passion for it, and a real understanding that true beauty cannot exist hand in hand with evil, or with sin.  There are passages without number detailing Dorian Gray’s search for beauty in the world around him – in jewelry, and tapestries, and music, and perfumes.  You feel swept away reading about “the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates, and stitched over with iridescent beetles’ wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the east as ‘woven air’.”  His descriptions are like few I’ve read before – here are just a few of the phrases that caught at the edge of my mind:

“The light shook and splintered in the puddles.”

“The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl.”

“Noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.”

There are more, many more…but to go on would prevent the need for you to read the book in its entirety, and there is nothing like reading the fullness of a book to come away with a real understanding of its heart and soul.  Be aware as you read it that you may be holding a mirror up to your own soul.