God on the Rocks: Review

Hmmm...so writing reviews of books that you didn't really enjoy reading turns out to be not as much fun.  Actually, it's overstating things to say that I didn't enjoy God on the Rocks at all.  It's just that I've enjoyed Jane Gardam's other books so much that this one felt like a let-down.  In the interest of making prejudices clear, I really have something against books about children.  I mean, I like children.  I'm sure they would have interesting things to say, if they ever wrote novels themselves.  But I kind of hate reading adults' interpretations of a child's world.  In most bildungsroman, I really only like it once the narrator has reached, say, fifteen.

While nearly all child narrators are somehow precocious (otherwise they wouldn't know all of the big words that their adult puppetmasters force upon their lips), they do provide a tempting canvas on which to paint a distorted picture of the adult world.  Children are credited with understanding the world in a unique and prescient way; because they don't always understand what is going on around them, they can give us fresh interpretations.  But again, I usually come back to the cynical position that we are not actually seeing things through the child's lens of confusion and wonder, but rather from the artificial construct of that lens by the author.  I don't know, maybe that doesn't bother other people.  Maybe I need to get over it.

Anyway, rant against pseudo-childlike insight aside, I just didn't think that this was Gardam's best work.  Margaret Marsh, the young girl protagonist, reminded me a little bit of surly Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, but without the eventual sunny breakthrough.  Her mother has just had a baby, and Margaret is disgusted both by the infant and her mother's obvious infatuation with him.  Because of the baby, though, Mrs. Marsh decides that Margaret deserves a special treat each week, as a solace for the reduction in motherly attention.  The treat takes the form of trips to the seaside with the Marsh's servant-girl, Lydia.  While the Marshes are strict and upright Christians, particularly fanatical Mr. Marsh, Lydia plays up her sensuality with tight satin dresses and speaks coarse Cockney English.  Margaret begins a period of growth and change on these day-trips, first in the exposure to some kind of sexual relationship between Lydia and a gardener on an old estate, and then through her experience at the estate itself.  Unsupervised while Lydia conducts her love affair, Margaret wanders onto the private property and its strange denizens.  At this point in the story, perspectives begin to open up and we learn that the estate begins to Rosalie Frayling, now a mummified old woman, who has opened up the house and grounds to mental patients.  Unbeknownst to either Margaret or Rosalie, Mrs. Marsh was once engaged to be married to Rosalie's son, but the affair was quashed by Rosalie's outrage at the idea of her son abasing himself to marry the daughter of the postman.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Marsh decides to reconnect with this son, who has moved back into the village.  How these pieces all come together in a fairly natural way demonstrates Gardam's sure hand with plot.

Gardam is also a beautiful writer, and she does justice to the setting as well as the complex emotional lives of her characters.  In the end though, I wasn't fully moved by the characters.  Blame my irrational hatred of child protagonists, if you want.  But I'd pick up Old Filth or Man in the Wooden Hat first.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa: Review

This is one of the must-reads that I came across in my days of post-college malaise, when I figured that the only thing that could give my life meaning would be to continue my Great Books education and read every obscure classic that I could get my hands on. Luckily I decided to continue my education more officially soon thereafter and thus was spared too many more angsty moments, but I'm pleased that one result of those wrought days spent reading book reviews and then browsing used books stores is that I heard about The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The book is translated from the Italian and was published posthumously in 1958. It tells the story of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina at the time of the Risorgimento, or Italian unification. Lampedusa was himself a titled aristocrat, and resigned wistfulness seems to be a predominant theme of the book.

I was watching the PBS miniseries Downton Abbey right at the time when I picked up The Leopard. Both the show and the novel depict societies on the brink of major, perhaps inevitable, upheaval: England just prior to World War I, and Italy in the 1860s. While Downton Abbey gives a fascinating picture of life both above and below stairs and the anxieties and hopes faced by all parties, The Leopard primarily explores the complex emotions of those at the top.

Don Fabrizio, though, seems more accepting of the change he sees coming with the landing of Garibaldi. This acceptance (which is arguably more like resignation), seems to come from a conversation he has with his nephew, Tancredi. Tancredi is both a force of change and also a sign of the limits of transformation. Though an aristocrat, has chosen to join Garibaldi's forces. His decision initially shocks and upsets the Prince, but Tancredi responds, "They will foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

This very pragmatic approach to revolution ferments in the Prince's mind, and he begins to dwell on the certain sameness that underlies all human interaction and politics. Later, at his estate in Donnafugata, he thinks, in depression:

All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always,' of course, a century, two centuries...and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

What seems unique is his willingness to admit that the way of the Leopard and the Lion is no more right or justified than the way of the hyena and jackal, and he undermines his very assertion that things will be "worse" by assuring us in the next line that every last being will go on thinking that their way is the best.

I have had a long standing argument with my husband and father-in-law about whether the state of man and the world is constantly improving or simply cycling through highs and lows. I tend to believe the latter, which might be part of why this book appealed to me. The thing is, someone's high is usually someone else's low (from the personal to the global scale). Don Fabrizio is prescient because he realizes that his loss of power is simply someone else's gain. Of course happiness is not necessarily a zero-sum game, but many of the things that people think accompany or support happiness sometimes are--power, money, prestige, resources, etc.

I'm probably making this book sound a little more grim than it actually is. But though this story isn't about the promise of change, it's also not about it's devastation--it's more the often humerous exploration of the realities of transition, often so very mundane. The author, himself the last Prince of Lampedusa, must have understood this particularly well.