Romanov by Nadine Brandes

A book that I would have probably liked better when I was younger. Brandes takes the story of the last few months of the Romanov's lives and adds magic and a romance between Anastasia and a guard called Zash. She had obviously researched the period thoroughly, but I wasn't entirely convinced by the magical elements. To me it felt like an unfortunate hybrid between real history and fantasy. The magic and the secret magical history of Russia wasn't really explained, and it was as if you were diving into a second book in a series. I wanted a bit more world building and description. Why did the Bolsheviks ban magic? However, this may have been a deliberate choice to normalise the magic elements.

The first part takes place in the quarters where the family is held and can be quite dry at times, contrasting with the fast pace of the second part. First part Nastya is actually quite annoying, but I think she's probably quite true to life!

Anyway, I just want to say that whilst this wasn't my cup of tea, it does have some charming elements particularly in the second half and would probably appeal much more to fans of ya fantasy/magic novels with a romantic twist. This is not a genre I tend to read much of though (I am so old and decrepit ya didn't really exist when I was a young adult!).

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (spoilers)

This was the first Greene novel I’ve read and certainly won’t be the last. I loved the lyricism of the writing, the plot was gripping and the characters were really well written.  The story is about Pinkie, a young gang leader who tires to seduce and marry a young girl whom he fears will give away his alibi, pursued by Ida, who investigates him and tries to prevent him from marrying Rose.  It’s one of those books I would like to re-read or even study in a bit more depth, but at the same time I found it quite hard writing this review, even though I felt so enthusiastic about it. 

Love this image (link)

 Pinkie is a disturbing anti-hero, yet it is still possible for the reader to feel some sort of sympathy for him given his background and experiences and the fact that everything he tries to do fails. He can be completely cold and feels only repulsion for Rose because of witnessing his parent’s sexual intercourse. He has some twisted ideas about Roman Catholicism, believing that it doesn’t matter how evil he behaves in life, he can still be saved if he repents at the point of death ‘betwixt the stirrup and the ground’. He sees his marriage as a mortal sin, and although he is completely horrified by the idea of sex, he refuses to get married in church as he feels that it will not be a proper wedding if they get married in a registry office. 

Rose could be described as a passive, innocent character in the way that she falls under Pinkie’s attempt to seduce her, but in other ways she seems to realise that she has some power over him and wilfully ignores the signs that he is disgusted by her. There is a sense that she is trying to get away from her parents and takes the only way out that she can find, by marrying the first man who asks her. There is quite a disturbing passage in the book where Pinkie, who needs her parent’s consent because they are both underage, buys her off her parents who don’t seem to care very much about her. He believes that he is taking her in, but she seems to know very well what is happening and why he suddenly pays her attention. She forces him to make a recording for her of his voice so that she can keep it for later, one of the tragic elements of the novel is that she doesn’t realise that although he tells her that he has recorded a loving message, he has really recorded a horrible message for her which she will presumably listen to after his death. 

Ida, is an appealing investigator and almost the complete opposite of Pinkie. Whereas Rose and Pinkie are Roam Catholic, Ida has no real faith, just a belief in the power of ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ and a belief in life after death in that she perform séances. She is a sensual woman who enjoys sex, likes a drink and enjoys her food, whereas Pinkie has few pleasures.  

Brighton is vividly described, acting as an appropriately sleazy backdrop to the story, representing heaven and hell.

Pinkie falls over the cliff in the course of trying to escape the police, having failed to convince Rose to commit suicide. It is a bleak ending; Rose seeks absolution from a priest and convinces herself that she has salvaged something from her love for Pinkie through her pregnancy and the love she believes he has confessed on the recording, the reader knows that she has deluded herself. It is left to the reader to fill in the blanks –Is Rose really pregnant? What will happen to her when she listens to the recording?

The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides

I’ve been puzzling for a couple of days about what to write about this book. For the most part, I really enjoyed it, particularly the descriptions of Madeleine and Mitchell’s forays into semiotics. Admittedly, I was an English Literature student, although a decade later than the characters of The Marriage Plot, at a Welsh university, but it did remind me about some of the literary theory I did. The characters are unselfconsciously pretentious, as are the lists of books that they read, but it appealed to that part of me. 

 

Despite all this, and the novel’s central premise that ‘the marriage plot’, a literary device used mainly in Victorian novels, has been rendered defunct, the book is very readable. Eugenides’s description of Leonard’s manic depression seemed authentic and the characters were realistic. I did find Madeleine Hanna a little irritating at times, but I think that this was perhaps deliberate. She functions both as a representation of the heroine of the marriage plot and as a contrast of the idea itself.  Yet, she never really matures as a person, by the end she has just rejected semiotics in favour of becoming a Victorian feminist critic. Leonard has given her a way out of the marriage she has been unable to cope with by running off into the sunset never to be seen again and Mitchell has decided that she is better off without him as well. 

This ending is the part of the book I had the most trouble with, it felt rushed and I suppose I wanted Madeline to make her own choices about her life, not for the two ‘heroes’ of the novel to decide for her. Her feminist credentials are about the papers she writes, not about the choices that she makes. Her experiences with Leonard’s manic depression and with their short-lived marriage seemingly haven’t affected her in any long lasting way. Madeleine reacts in a passive way to most of her life decision aside from skipping her graduation to spend time with Leonard.

Her relationship with Leonard hardly makes her a paragon of feminism either. The worse he treats her the more she seems attracted to him at first, then she seems to be attracted to him because of his neediness and acts in almost a motherly way towards him. With Mitchell, on the other hand, there is a sense that she looks down on him. I suppose that this may be the point that Eugenides is making, that modern ideas about marriage, relationships and the concept of equality make it more difficult for both women and men to find a suitable partner. Ideas about the role of women have been superseded.

As have ideas about religion, which affects Mitchell who travels to India searches for a form of spirituality or religion that he can believe in. Yet his search proves ultimately fruitless, just when he seems to find something in the hospice he flees in horror when confronted with the worst of the jobs. He ends up realising that he is not meant to be a monk or even a theologian, as well as not marrying Madeleine. 

At the end of the novel it is only Madeleine who has some sort of idea of what she is going to do. The book subverts the traditional coming-of-age story in that there are no real ‘answers’ at the end, presumably Madeleine will be successful as a Victorian feminist critic and her marriage to Leonard will be annulled, but there is no indication she will start a relationship with anyone or what will happen to Leonard and Mitchell. It would be interesting to re-visit the characters in the 1990s and beyond to find out what they have become. 

Anyway I gave it three stars at the end, but I am still considering giving it four despite the ending. Perhaps more of a 3.5 star book.

End of Part 2 - Victor and Religion

Whereas there is a conscious effort to distance the reader from the author in modernist and postmodernist works, in the work of nineteenth century authors it is often apparent that it is important who was writing and why.  There is no possibility of dismissing Hugo’s voice in Les Mis as he directly addressed readers on one of the central theme of the book, the issue of religion. So far the reader has encountered some religious figures and characters associated with religion including the Bishop and his sister and Madame Victurnien. Now, the reader is given a fuller understanding of Hugo’s philosophy.

Partly due to the old woman’s spying, partly due to Valjean’s unfortunate generosity to a beggar who is also a police informant and also to do with the Thernadiers gossiping about Valjean ‘abducting’ Cosette; Javert manages to find them, making it necessary to leave in a hurry. The excitement of the pursuit of the pair is partly hampered by Hugo’s insistence on describing parts of Paris, but is nevertheless quite a thrilling part of the book. Valjean and Cosette eventually find themselves at the convent of Petit-Picus, where Fauchelevent, a man whom Valjean previously saved, works as a gardener. Again, there is a sense that destiny or fate is at work here, that Valjean is rewarded for his saving of a man at peril of being recaptured. Also, the political situation of the time affects the narrative in that Valjean escapes Javert again as the Police Inspector fears arresting the wrong man due to the police being censured in the press for false arrests (he has trouble recognizing Valjean, who has aged considerably in a short period of time). 

Hugo goes into great detail about the convent of the Order of Perpetual Adoration and the school attached, a somewhat strict Benedictine order. There is a sense that he is careful to describe the practices due to the sense that it is shortly to become obsolete. There are already a number of nuns inhabiting the ‘little convent’ outside the main convent, who are refugees from the Revolution. At the end of Book Six Denny has appended Book Seven to the end of the book, which is understandable as it interferes somewhat with the narrative flow. Book Seven continues and expanded information about the convent and Hugo’s ideas about religion. 

Hugo had a complex relationship with religion. Having been brought up as Catholic (but never baptized) he began questioning his faith after he lost his daughter, son-in-law, uncle and cousin in a boating accident. “Grief made him doubt God’s goodness, and yet he struggled to affirm his belief,” (Algis Valiunas, ‘The Sacred Heart of Victor Hugo’, First Things, August 2007). He turned to spiritualism, firstly in an attempt to contact his daughter, but later to contact religious figures such as Moses. Like Voltaire, he considered himself a rationalist deist, with a belief in God but rejecting the Church, in particular the Catholic Church.  This is clear in the way that he views monasteries, convents and other religious orders, as a ‘leprosy’, ‘filled with the dark light of death’ (p1203), consuming valuable resources and causing impoverishment. 

He describes the Spanish convent using grotesque imagery of death and torture.  The use of the medical term ‘recrudescence [of asceticism]’ highlights the way that he considers this type of religion to be like a disease, furthered with adjectives associated with decay: ‘rancid scent’, ‘rotten fish’ and finally ‘the tenderness of corpses returning to embrace the living’ (p1205).  Yet he respects the equality of men and women living in communities and believes that ‘[T]he denial of the Infinite leads straight to nihilism’ (p1210). What he abhors is the kind of religion where men and women are cloistered away from other people. As his portrayal of the Bishop and his sister (and the way that they affect Valjean) shows, he is far from being against religion itself, only that it must be a kind of faith that can be practically demonstrated with good works, charity and mercy towards the poor, and Les Mis did inspire people (including Napoleon III) to do charitable work and to enact social legislation that affected the poor.  However, the Catholic Church took a dim view of the book and Les Mis and Notre Dame de Paris were both part of the Index Liborum Prohibitorium, a list of books banned by the Catholic Church, until 1959, probably due to the way that Hugo viewed religion and also for the portrayal of Fantine. 

In another desperate situation Valjean is almost buried alive when he is hidden in a coffin and smuggled into the convent. In the process he undergoes another spiritual re-birth, becoming Ultime Fauchelevent by disguising himself as Fauchelevent’s brother and losing his any kind of pride he was in danger of developing as Pere Madeleine. Fauchelevent is feted as a hero and Cosette attends the convent school, gaining an education and the good will of the nuns who believe she will become a nun herself because “she will be plain.” (p485). Valjean contemplates the life of a nun, comparing it to that of a prisoner, realizing that the nuns undergo a worse suffering voluntarily for the sake of their souls.