books
The Tricksters by Maragaret Mahy. YA about a girl discovering herself through her imagination. Harry is on the traditional Christmas family holiday, full of nostalgia and underlying family tensions, which is disrupted by three strange brothers turning up and being invited to stay. There are two dark brooding twins and a third brother who does the talking and thinking. Harry eventually forms some kind of relationship with the more human twin. There is a kind of background of stories prepared for the brothers' entrance, and Harry can't help but use the stories as a tool to try and understand the mystery of their presence. Years before, a charismatic, rebellious boy with an oppressive father drowned mysteriously at the house they are staying in, and Harry and her siblings have always been fascinated by the thought of his ghost. Harry is writing a quintessentially teenage girl story herself, of wicked angels dubconning beautiful ladies, and she fears some elements of it are coming to life in the form of the brothers. I'm not sure this really touched me personally as much as I thought it should have, but I do like what Mahy is trying to do with identity and narrative. I liked the way Harry felt she gained power by creating, and grew out of her story without disowning it. The brothers turn out to be the dead boy, all three of them, representing different elements of his personality, which he needs to express fully but is unable to reconcile together, and I liked that idea. It's the "shy middle sister comes of age with sexual awakening" story but jazzed up and without passing the heroine's power to a hero. Interesting but perhaps some of my distance is because I didn't like Harry's family much.
Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray. Victorian novel about an eighteenth-century antihero. An Irish rogue who claims to be a member of the aristocracy flees home early and becomes a soldier, deserter, spy and gambler, having frequent duels. It's a picaresque series of adventures and schemes, some which work out and some which don't. It's all pretty light and easy to read, and though obviously you know Barry's pretty terrible, you don't mind much. The format isn't an emotional one and, though the fictional editor of Barry's memoirs tells you that his pointing out that others are rogues doesn't disprove his own roguery, the general tone is cynical and there aren't any good people with real feelings. The world of the novel doesn't seem much different to the character of Barry, so you don't feel you need to disapprove of Barry in particular. It becomes darker and more uncomfortable when Barry becomes an abusive husband and stepfather and you're suddenly reminded of Heathcliffe. The representation of a home so completely dysfunctional and immoral reminded me very strongly of Wuthering Heights and Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It feels like a genre shift, because even though Barry's wife isn't anything more than a caricature, it isn't possible to feel comfortable reading about her treatment, and indeed, you're very definitely not supposed to, whereas before it didn't feel as if the novel wanted to be anything much more than entertaining. I think Thackeray's trying to put his own twist on the genre and make it more realistic, and that he would argue that putting the first section of the book together with the last section is part of that. But I think that if it was going to totally come off he should have dealt with it differently from the beginning, and given it more psychological realism, and made us feel that this was a story like all those other stories Thackeray is imitating, only happening in a world where things have consequences and everyone is three-dimensional. That would have been interesting. Also I don't get another thing the "editor" pipes up with, about how the importance of the novel is that it shows moral degradation objectively as it really happens in the world, without pretending that people that the world thinks well of are not sometimes the worst people of all, and that bad people end badly and good people get worldly success as a reward. Barry may sometimes get money and flashy glamour, but he is never really respectable, and he ends badly. If Thackeray really wanted to make that point he should have either had Barry end with everyone telling him what a good fellow he was, or written about a hypocritical pillar of the community.
The Lady's Not for Burning by Christopher Fry. Play from the forties, set in the fifteenth century. The writing is pastichey, but not hard going -- I'm not sure it always hits the target, but it's very pretty and charming and often it hits the target exactly. It's mostly about two people who are unfitted for the world by being too good, and honest, for it: a witch about to be burned and a man who wants to be hanged. Obviously they end up together because they give each other hope for the world in general. I thought there was something so likeable about this that was hard to define.
Bareback by Kit Whitfield. Most people, in this world, are werewolves, or lycos. The ones that aren't are second class citizens and have the job of keeping the werewolves in order on full moon nights. It's certainly possible to pick holes in the plausibility of this arrangement, where the powerless actually have unlimited power in some ways, but I think it was more interesting to just accept it: Whitfield wanted to create a conflict in which both sides have very real grievances, resentments and reasons to fear the other. Lola, a "bareback", ie not a werewolf, gets tangled up in murder mystery cum institutional conspiracy, learns to love a lyco, is miserable as fuck and undergoes a crisis of conscience in which she does not really come out well. It's a bit intellificcy but it's the kind of depressing that I enjoy.