flemmings | (no subject)

Times I think reading genre has unfitted me for reading anything else. On this impromptu holiday, I've been reading those worthy 'might be interesting' books that sit on my shelves year after year, and reached Jill Paton Walsh's Goldengrove Unleaving, the compendium of the two separately titled YA books from the 70s. (The 70s' notion of YA is, as everyone says on Goodreads, utterly bizarre.) This- or Unleaving, in any case- is a book that is, I-do-not-lie, 60% descriptions of landscape: or seascape, rather, and I have to wonder what's the *point* of having something like

The waves play around the rock, filling the foreground with endless movement, with random bursts of white, and the more distant ocean juggles with falling light, keeping a million sequins of sunshine rocking and gleaming and shining back

repeated in varying detail every few pages.

What's not seascape is the obscure sort of characters I've come to expect in English fiction, who think and feel things I never have. I suppose there are late teen undergraduates who fall in love with someone and discern their innate character after a mere two weeks of social acquaintance, and even younger women, completely inexperienced, who decide who they'll marry on the same basis, and it does *not* turn out badly: only I've never met them in RL.

But the safety of this kind of fiction- everyday life and beautiful prose for the sake of beautiful prose- is that, in theory, it will never dump genre events on you. No vampires, serial killers, mermen, psychics, or corpses: and the romance will be, well, not genre romance at least. In theory. But Paton Walsh does not play fair and I shall avoid her assiduously in future.

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What's not seascape is the obscure sort of characters I've come to expect in English fiction, who think and feel things I never have. - yes. That. I get so tired of that.

I did wonder if it was a cultural difference- us this side so very adolescent into middle age, them over the Pond so quietly adult from adolescence. You reassure me.

late teen undergraduates who fall in love with someone and discern their innate character after a mere two weeks of social acquaintance, and even younger women, completely inexperienced, who decide who they'll marry on the same basis

*raises hand*

Fifteen delighted years, so far. I was eighteen and a freshman, she was twenty and a junior. In love after two weeks, engaged after six.

That said, we know how ludicrous a statistical outlier we are. We insisted on remaining engaged for well over a year because we thought the entire timeline had been completely ridiculous and wanted to make sure we weren't missing anything-- it seemed so improbable. I have had the 'do as I say not as I do' lecture planned in my head for possible future offspring ever since, though I know I have no ground to stand on.

So it does happen, but that sort of book seems to think it happens most of the time, which is simply not the case. Also, that sort of book always shows this happening to people and then not showing them sitting down and making practical plans about it, which is also ridiculous. We had a careful timetable-- tell her parents about the engagement eight months in, when they would feel we'd been together long enough, but tell mine immediately, because it would (and did) take literal years to talk them round, all that sort of thing.

Jill Paton Walsh is always genre even when she isn't genre. It's kind of her thing. I do like her novel about the kid who was an Emperor of Byzantium's luck charm because he fell out of a tree in front of the Emperor at the right time; her way of thought works well for Byzantines.

Jill Paton Walsh is always genre even when she isn't genre.

And that, I suppose, is why people can hook up just like *that* with their life-long soulmates at the age of (from the text) seventeen, the way they so distressingly do in medieval mysteries and Ruth Rendell. And, as you say, never once think about not being able to marry without parental permission.

I'd thought of reading The Emperor's Winding-sheet but now I don't trust her not to put oogies even in an ostensible kids' book.