flemmings | (no subject)

Finished Jonathan Strange last night at 1:30. (One reason I haven't finished JS&MN before- these days I can't stay up till 1:30 in the full charge of a good read. Reading like writing is something I do better from 11 to 3 am but employment doesn't allow of such luxuries.)

It's true, it's not a read but an experience. If you're susceptible to that kind of thing it swallows you for a period-- a very fantoddy period. The fantods for me come only partly from the horrifying but exquisitely distanced fairy events. Mostly it has to do with place.

I wonder how the book reads to someone who hasn't been in England or Europe? Can American odd localities and umm distanced landscapes stand in for the old world ones? There's so much /history/ in JS- that sense of the past piled up and pressing on the present that stifles me when I'm in England and that still manages to crowd me in Europe. Does that have an American equivalent? (Yes,

nojojojo, there's New Orleans and Boston. ^_^ But what about everyone else?)

All *I* know is that JS is 'about' places I was in before I was really able to remember them, the way The Rebel Angels has always been 'about' Toronto even though the TO presented there is never much described. It feels like Toronto, all through it, and a very particular Toronto as to time and place: the prior-to-the-late-60s one still under the shadow of the very British 50's (I believe it's set later, but Brit TO was the one Davies knew) and the Annex Toronto around the university (which is where I lived) even though the domestic settings are all in Rosedale. Which is very like the Annex but a lot narrower in its views: the 'foreign' heroine obviously belongs to the more intellectual and less caste bound Annex. My memories of the time and place are limited. But what I gathered of the Annex as a child is what peers from the background of The Rebel Angels.

Similarly, JS feels like England and Europe from a long way back, when I was 5 and 9. Not the one I remember consciously, but the atmosphere I picked up in 400 year old houses where my cousins lived and London parks my parents took us to. The colours are different there- paler and bleached out, by NAmerican standards. The weather is different: thunderstorms announce themselves as an inability to breathe and a sense of the horrors all morning, to be broken by half an hour's violence in the afternoon. The cities are dark grey and black and washed in rain, the countryside is the colour of pale sand. There's something all around you, unseen but dimly sensed, that doesn't exist at home. It might as well be magic, not the magic you know from kids' books here but something paler and different and beyond your ability to put a name to.

(I'll say here that one thing about Japan is that its past keeps a very distinct distance. There if you want it but not nudging your elbow every minute. Of course, so is its reality distanced, as though applicable only when you're in it: it doesn't feel real by home standards. It's like you don't cast a shadow there. Elizabeth Hardwicke, I think, said 'The first thing you discover when you travel is that you don't exist' which is as true as it needs to be. But Japan takes it to extremes.)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I loved JS&MN despite, sadly, never having been to England-- I've been to Europe several times, but Europe varies so even from valley to valley that I'm fairly convinced England must be as wildly different from the places I've gone as those places were from the U.S., or from each other. However, England in general, and especially London, have been so thoroughly constructed in my mind through reams and reams of fiction, history, poetry, paintings, and photos that there is a definite atmosphere that I associate with 'London' or 'Britain' or 'fiction set c. the Napoleonic wars'. While I've no way of telling what relation this imagining on my part bears to the facts, it is fairly internally self-consistent.

And so it isn't American landscapes, histories, and oddities that come into my head when reading something like JS&MN: it's the landscape of British literature, everything I've ever come across in the history books, the portraits of Kings of England that I've seen in various museums. Clarke works with and in that landscape beautifully and richly and with a real sense of depth. I'm sure I shouldn't be able to appreciate the book as much if it were Slovenian or Senegalese, but England to me is a place somewhere in reality between Ancient Rome and Broceliande, so there it is.

I do worry somewhat that when I eventually do go to England I'll have trouble getting past this internal construct and actually seeing the place, but I will try to guard against that, which is a start.

Frankly, I don't think even the oldest bits of the U.S. have enough history to make a satisfactory sense of time yet. I live in Boston, and it feels fairly young to me, and the places I grew up in the Midwest have had a thin skin of homogenized monoculture laid over a chasm of willful ignorance. In another five hundred years it may have got a little better.

I spent five years constructing a mental Japan from the hundreds of books I read. Japan wasn't anything like it, but London very well might be. You can construct a very realistic Paris from literary Paris, after all, and my experience of New York, first seen in my late 30's, has always been very like the idea I got of it from books in my teens.

But the thing that sticks in my mind about JS&MN is the smells. There are no smells from the book itself, obviously-- and anyway I read half of it with no sense of smell at all. ^_^ But when she began describing rooms I at once remembered the way rooms smell in old houses over there: which by default was old French and continental houses because I haven't been in that many old English ones. That may be why the Italian sections in particular were so vivid-- though in fact I've never been to Venice.

(But the light? How do you see the light when all you're used to is the hard-edged eastern half of continent stuff you're used to here? Movies? Pictures?)

I don't think I've got any smells to reference for ninety percent of the books I read, which is sad.

As far as the light goes, yeah, movies. Pictures. A melange of all the adjectives everyone uses to describe it-- I know that with old-fashioned London fogs, I'm extrapolating from experience in San Francisco. But it isn't adequate, and I know it isn't, which is one of the several reasons I've been trying to visit England for a few years now.

You must have got Paris on a sunny day. Sicily is dry, one hears, which would explain the crispness. But northern Europe does grey an awful lot. I like it- it's a pleasingly melancholy grey- but I'm also photophobic. Hell is a bright sunny day.

The first part of JS&MN reads to me like- mh well Trollope, I'd have to say- crossed with the less bizarre Dickens. I read it as scene-setter, to show the kind of world you're in as well as the differences from what you're expecting, given that kind of prose style. It has the same leisureliness as a 19th century novel, and IMO makes a nice change from the bloated padding that happens in most fantasies. The action may start immediately in those books but it's always slowed down by the unfortunate style. JS doesn't do fireworks right off- or ever, actually- it just creeps me gently in its calm prosaic way.