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asakiyumeI read Linnets and Valerians because I was intrigued and entranced by what ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sovay described about the gold-hearted, black-hearted, and silver people (quotation here), especially the silver people, descended from fairy folk.
That turned out to be a wrong reason to read the book, or maybe what I should say is, whatever nebulous concept, and therefore hope for the story, that I had, based on that description, it was misguided. Those concepts didn’t really figure in the story the way I imagined they would. There’s genuine magic, both good and wicked, but its actions are almost all entirely congruent with everyday reality as ordinary people experience it. (Almost. There are some exceptions.)
But the immanent presence of magic that those words suggest is definitely present in the book, and if you adjust your eyes to see it, and turn your ears toward it, to hear it (like the singing of the bees), then it’s there, and its wonderful. Magic like this moment, when mist rolls in over Weeping Marsh (which I can’t help but associate with Marshwood Vale, which I recall seeing shrouded in mist when we lived in Dorset, one county over from the Devonshire setting of Linnets and Valerians):
As much as by that magic, though, I was moved by the characters. When Betsy, the younger of the two Linnet girls (there are two girls and two boys), meets the reclusive Lady Alicia, two things happen that I love. First, we get a child’s eye view of a situation that the child can’t comprehend, but that the reader can (even if the reader’s simply an older child, which is likely the case for most readers of the book—I’m far above the target audience age). I find this style of unreliable narrator very effective:
Second, we get a very touching, and yet to my mind unsentimental description of generosity. Betsy has burst in on Lady Alicia in pursuit of a monkey who has stolen her doll. Lady Alicia explains that the monkey, Abednego, only wanted the doll because he hasn’t been able to nurture children of his own. The wheels turn in Betsy’s head, and she decides to give the doll to Abednego:
That just about captures my every battle to be generous!
But it’s not all solemn moments. There’s plenty of humor, too. For example, Robert, the oldest boy, is always imagining himself the hero of the moment:
Upon meeting Lady Alicia:
The plot of Linnets and Valerians centers around Lady Alicia’s missing son and husband and a village woman, Emma Cobley, who also happens to practice black magic and who was in love with Lady Alicia’s husband (and, in fact, essentially thrown over by him). She’s made harmful spells; those spells must be dissolved for the story to reach its happy end.
Which brings me to my only dissatisfaction with the story.
It’s a strange dissatisfaction for me to have, since it has to do with something that usually makes me very happy—namely, the redemption of a story’s evil characters. In this case, the evil in Emma Cobley is eradicated by three factors:
I think it may be that I kind of liked Emma and her spells. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I had more sympathy for her, and interest in her, than I did in Lady Alicia. It’s not that I disliked Lady Alicia. I liked her well enough, and I felt sorry for her. But I liked Emma too, as a kind of an outlaw, impetuous, amoral type. And for all that Emma practiced vindictive magic, designed to ruin others’ happiness while not securing anything good for herself (except satisfaction at destroying the happiness of those who have gotten in the way of her own happiness, which is hardly what we can call a good, in any case), Lady Alicia herself wasn’t without flaws (she stole Emma’s book, for one thing) and is rather on the old pattern of a woman who is to be liked because we’re told she’s to be liked, and who’s a victim without any apparent ability to improve her situation on her own. So while I can accept that things have to be made right for Lady Alicia, I guess I wanted a different sort of end for Emma, something that would allow her to retain some of the power that she had as an oppositional figure, rather than simply being neutered into a pleasant village character.
But this dissatisfaction is minor. I loved the book overall.
sovay described about the gold-hearted, black-hearted, and silver people (quotation here), especially the silver people, descended from fairy folk. That turned out to be a wrong reason to read the book, or maybe what I should say is, whatever nebulous concept, and therefore hope for the story, that I had, based on that description, it was misguided. Those concepts didn’t really figure in the story the way I imagined they would. There’s genuine magic, both good and wicked, but its actions are almost all entirely congruent with everyday reality as ordinary people experience it. (Almost. There are some exceptions.)
But the immanent presence of magic that those words suggest is definitely present in the book, and if you adjust your eyes to see it, and turn your ears toward it, to hear it (like the singing of the bees), then it’s there, and its wonderful. Magic like this moment, when mist rolls in over Weeping Marsh (which I can’t help but associate with Marshwood Vale, which I recall seeing shrouded in mist when we lived in Dorset, one county over from the Devonshire setting of Linnets and Valerians):
When they turned and faced the other way the sunlit moor had vanished in a moving pall of gloom. There was no wind but the air that touched their faces was clammy and cold.
“The sea is coming in over the moor!” gasped Nan.
“And there are devils on horseback riding over the waves,” said Timothy. He spoke calmly but with a sort of despair, as well he might, for the sight was truly frightening. The waves that were rolling in were the high gray waves of storm but they made no sound and the terrible tossing riders made no sound either. It would have been less terrifying if they could have heard the crash of waves or the neighing of the horses.”
“Don’t yee be feared, children,” said Ezra. “ ‘Tis naught but mist rolling in over Weepin’ Marsh. It can come very sudden and take queer forms. But us’d best be going and quick too.” (239-240)
As much as by that magic, though, I was moved by the characters. When Betsy, the younger of the two Linnet girls (there are two girls and two boys), meets the reclusive Lady Alicia, two things happen that I love. First, we get a child’s eye view of a situation that the child can’t comprehend, but that the reader can (even if the reader’s simply an older child, which is likely the case for most readers of the book—I’m far above the target audience age). I find this style of unreliable narrator very effective:
“A long time ago I had one little boy, called Francis,” said Lady Alicia, and her blue eyes were hooded again and once more her hands looked as though she would never be able to lift them from the carved birds.
“Did you lose him?” inquired Betsy with interest.
“Yes,” said Lady Alicia.
“Where did you lose him?”
“On Lion Tor,” said Lady Alicia in a voice dry as dust. “Thirty years ago. He was eight years old.”
“Timothy is eight,” said Betsy.
She was sorry Lady Alicia had this habit of losing things because she could see it made her unhappy, but she did not know how to say so …
“Did you lose your husband too?” asked Betsy.
“No, he lost himself. He was an explorer. He used to travel all over the world digging up vanished cities. And then he also vanished.”
“Perhaps he’ll turn up,” said Betsy hopefully.
“Not, I think after twenty-seven years,” said Lady Alicia. She sounded sad but Betsy thought she had got over her husband losing himself in foreign parts a good deal better than she had got over herself mislaying her little boy on Lion Tor. (92-93)
Second, we get a very touching, and yet to my mind unsentimental description of generosity. Betsy has burst in on Lady Alicia in pursuit of a monkey who has stolen her doll. Lady Alicia explains that the monkey, Abednego, only wanted the doll because he hasn’t been able to nurture children of his own. The wheels turn in Betsy’s head, and she decides to give the doll to Abednego:
Now Betsy was not an unselfish or even an outstandingly loving child, but she suddenly remembered her father saying good-bye to her before he went away. He had picked her up, holding her with her cheek against his face, and then had put her on Grandmama’s lap and gone out of the room without saying a single word. And then there was the old lady, so heavy and dusty because she had lost her little boy. And now there was Abednego. Three times now this strange adult thing had touched her. She was well aware that her feeling for Gertrude [the doll] was not this thing but something far less admirable, and looking up into Abednego’s face she fought a battle inside herself with the thing that it was, a sort of grabbing thing, and then she held Gertrude out to him. “You have her,” she said. (94)
That just about captures my every battle to be generous!
But it’s not all solemn moments. There’s plenty of humor, too. For example, Robert, the oldest boy, is always imagining himself the hero of the moment:
Robert found he was sweating profusely and trembling like an aspen leaf. He did not know what an aspen leaf was but he knew it was what you trembled like when a moment of supreme crisis was safely past. (13)
Upon meeting Lady Alicia:
It was obvious that she did not like being visited and Robert bowed very humbly indeed, sweeping his feathered hat from his head. Sir Walter Raleigh could not lay his cloak at the feet of Gloriana, since she showed no signs of wishing to leave her chair, but his burning glance told her of his deep devotion.
“Is this histrionic gentleman your elder brother?” [Lady Alicia] asked Betsy. (116-117)
The plot of Linnets and Valerians centers around Lady Alicia’s missing son and husband and a village woman, Emma Cobley, who also happens to practice black magic and who was in love with Lady Alicia’s husband (and, in fact, essentially thrown over by him). She’s made harmful spells; those spells must be dissolved for the story to reach its happy end.
Which brings me to my only dissatisfaction with the story.
It’s a strange dissatisfaction for me to have, since it has to do with something that usually makes me very happy—namely, the redemption of a story’s evil characters. In this case, the evil in Emma Cobley is eradicated by three factors:
[Her] change of heart was astonishing … and the villagers were at a loss to explain it. Of course they did not know what a hard fight the goodwill of the children and Uncle Ambrose and Ezra had put up against the ill will that had opposed them, and they did not know about Ezra’s good spells or the labor of the bees. Least of all did they know how Lady Alicia had forgiven Emma from the bottom of her heart. (281)
I think it may be that I kind of liked Emma and her spells. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I had more sympathy for her, and interest in her, than I did in Lady Alicia. It’s not that I disliked Lady Alicia. I liked her well enough, and I felt sorry for her. But I liked Emma too, as a kind of an outlaw, impetuous, amoral type. And for all that Emma practiced vindictive magic, designed to ruin others’ happiness while not securing anything good for herself (except satisfaction at destroying the happiness of those who have gotten in the way of her own happiness, which is hardly what we can call a good, in any case), Lady Alicia herself wasn’t without flaws (she stole Emma’s book, for one thing) and is rather on the old pattern of a woman who is to be liked because we’re told she’s to be liked, and who’s a victim without any apparent ability to improve her situation on her own. So while I can accept that things have to be made right for Lady Alicia, I guess I wanted a different sort of end for Emma, something that would allow her to retain some of the power that she had as an oppositional figure, rather than simply being neutered into a pleasant village character.
But this dissatisfaction is minor. I loved the book overall.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 04:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 05:19 am (UTC)I tried reading The Wind in the Willows as a child, and unfortunately it was not, at that time, for me. I might enjoy it more now, as an adult.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 09:01 am (UTC)Hm, someone should do a fan-fic of Eustace's journal after he got reformed and started acting like everyone else, but still with the Oswaldian histrionics. Him and Puddleglum in the New Narnia of THE LAST BATTLE, maybe. Them and the bear and the fruit....
no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 11:08 am (UTC)And I do love me some Nesbit children, too ♥
Re: may interest you...
Date: 2012-03-24 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 03:39 pm (UTC)Kigeki
Date: 2012-03-24 08:23 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pNaRrp-PwA
Re: Kigeki
Date: 2012-03-24 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 10:08 pm (UTC)I typed them! You'll find typos if you look (though I keep trying to weed them out).