regshoe

The Pillars of the House by Charlotte M. Yonge (1873). I enjoyed The Heir of Redclyffe and I'd seen this one recommended too, so I now decided to launch into it without appreciating at first just how long it is. Well, it's about five-sixths of a Les Misérables long and took me a good couple of weeks plus a break between volumes, but a) it fully justifies the length and b) it is very good. The book takes place over nearly twenty years and follows the lives of the thirteen siblings of the Underwood family, some of whom are more main characters than others but all of whom get at least some focus, and there's a large and colourful cast of side characters, friends, neighbours, extended family, love interests, clergy (lots of clergy)—hence the size. Near the beginning the Underwoods' saintly clergyman father dies; their mother becomes an invalid and shortly afterwards also dies; and the children are left to make their own way in the world. The 'pillars' are the eldest siblings: Felix (sixteen at the start of the book), who gives up his academic and professional opportunities to support the family by working for a provincial newspaper, and fifteen-year-old Wilmet, who teaches at the local girls' school as well as keeping house. (Yes, Wilmet is an amusing contrast to her namesake in A Glass of Blessings.) Yonge was a major literary force in the Oxford Movement, and this is much more specifically evident here than in The Heir of Redclyffe. The Underwoods are committed Anglo-Catholics and there's a lot of discussion of why that's the best and most sensible thing to be, and while Yonge is sometimes surprisingly well able to be clear-sighted about taking things too far in the way of rigidity and snobbery (especially through Clement, the brother who goes to be educated at a very High church in London and eventually becomes a priest himself), she is also utterly awful about Dissenters, Low Church Anglicans, Latitudinarians, anyone who disagrees with her objectively correct and highly important opinions about church aesthetics, etc. etc. Two of the siblings are disabled—Geraldine, one of the older girls, has a bad ankle very much like Charles in The Heir of Redclyffe, and Theodore, the youngest boy, is intellectually disabled—and there's a lot of interesting period attitudes to disability, some good and some bad. I've barely touched the surface of this book, which is really very long and has an awful lot going on in it. It's always an enjoyable read—Yonge's writing has a lovely liveliness, and she is especially good at developing the varied relationships between the siblings—and for the rest, she writes about people, relationships, society and life in general with a mixture of kindness and bigotry, contempt and compassion, which is kind of bewildering if also somewhat sadly familiar.

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (1941). Well, after weeks of that I wanted something a bit different, and I chose this on the basis that Carson McCullers was probably about as far from lengthy, sentimental Victorian piety as I could get while still being firmly within the sphere of things I like. It worked! This book is about a group of people on an army base in the US South—two officers and their wives (where one officer and the other wife are having an affair), a private soldier who becomes obsessed with one of the wives, and the other wife's servant—and the events leading up to the murder of one of these people by another (McCullers tells you this near the start; it's not a book of great surprises). It's weird and miserable in exactly the way I like from McCullers's writing, and I liked it very much. It's also quite openly and matter-of-factly queer, albeit in the way where queerness doesn't get any more happiness or fulfilment than anything else in a Carson McCullers book.

By Honour Bound by Bessie Marchant (1925). I had high hopes of this school story, which is about Honour and terrible dilemmas thereof. The book opens with the main character, Dorothy, going clothes shopping on the way to her new school; she sees another girl shoplift a jumper and is so frozen with horror she says nothing, and then of course it turns out that the shoplifter goes to Dorothy's school and is her main opponent in competing for the terribly important scholarship to Cambridge that Dorothy has set her heart on. Should she say anything?? But then Dorothy finds out something about her own family's past that means—by its strictly honourable rules—that SHE might not be eligible for the scholarship! Should she say anything??? So, great premise; but unfortunately a) Dorothy wavers and worries, but never has the Windhamesque strength of principle or depth of agony that would make her dilemmas really compelling, b) the writing and characterisation are so flimsy and dull that it all has very little effect. Eventually the plot is resolved by, to put it politely, a massive cop-out of a twist which I'm afraid I was uncharitable enough to guess in advance. The girls' school of the setting forms half of a pair with an associated boys' school, which Dorothy's brother attends; while I'm sure this is an interesting window into the history of education and gender, it did mean more male characters and implied potential het than I like in my girls' school stories.

Re-read The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula le Guin (1972). So, in search of some beautiful prose and solid thought, I decided to continue the Earthsea re-read, and I really enjoyed revisiting this one! I liked how it was a sort of outsider-POV with respect to A Wizard of Earthsea, I really liked the setting and worldbuilding in the early chapters* and I thought the main story sustained the essential kindness of Le Guin's writing much better, really, than the first book. Especially in being less sexist, which is kind of surprising for a book whose basic plot could so easily have been conveyed in a very sexist way indeed, but it's not, really. (I was only slightly distracted by wondering whether you could grow all those apples in a desert climate, and by the way the lovely intricate drawing of the Labyrinth at the front of the book didn't quite match the descriptions in the text.)

*Now there's an idea: school story with totally ordinary low-stakes school-story plot and drama, but set among the novices in an extremely messed-up fantasy priestess-hood serving the great powers of evil. Hmmm.