Two E. Nesbit books
I've been work-travelling! which involved another hotel, another swimming pool, and the chance to swim at six in the morning, as well as in the afternoon, and then again between the last session and catching the bus back home. Bliss! Because summer's ebbing, but hasn't gone yet
( Read more... )
My inelegant response to finally getting around to reading Harding's Luck (without first reading The House of Arden) is, "What a weird-ass book!" I like the travels of Dickie and Beale, especially in the stage when Dickie in the past is still missing Beale and wanting to find a trade for him so that in the present they neither have to beg for a living nor depend on Dickie's woodcarving skills, i.e., reasons of practicality and affection rather than taking Beale on as a project; I like Dickie's gravely novelistic relationship with the pawnbroker so long as Nesbit doesn't trip over her own anxious anti-anti-Semitism, because the pawnbroker takes him seriously, does him a good turn, takes a little advantage of him, never learns how the story comes out: he's on the outside of the mystery and that's all right. Not everything needs to be part of the pattern. I like the magic while it's all allusion, unexplained, chiming with itself like a dream or a spell. The nurse tells Dickie the rules, but we never learn who or what she herself is, so she doesn't break the sense of the numinous. The moonflowers are a perfect symbol and means of the magic, ordinary real plants that grow in the street and a dreamlike inversion of the sturdy sunflower, silvery and chthonic, present across all times. Nesbit when she's writing pure fantasy is powerful. And it goes all out the window as soon as Edred and Elfrida appear, which I understand is unavoidable if Harding's Luck is to take place interlockingly with The House of Arden, but the dreaminess of the novel never recovers. The narrative only gets its strangeness back in patches-which do not include the Mouldiwarp or its comparative and superlative brethren or the brave people in the White Hall, whom I appreciate are multicultural but the scene still lands wrong with me. (I liked that Edred has to rescue Dickie instead of Elfrida because she would not pay the necessary price for the same noble deed: "It will cost you more to do it than it would cost Elfrida, because she is braver than you are." Then Edred is promptly criticized for blushing because "this is the white world" and I fell right out of the scene again.) I kept hoping the last chapter would end with someone talking Dickie out of his heart's-desire self-sacrifice, because all I could think was that him turning up apparently drowned would be very hard on Beale; it was one of the times I felt the book's ethics were totally orthagonal to mine. The nurse's last lines are great, but I side-eye how we got there. The way the narrative in general talks about bravery and nobility and responsibility and family reminded me weirdly of The Canterville Ghost (1944), on which I think Nesbit cannot possibly have been an influence (and I can't look for a common link in Wilde, because the movie has almost nothing to do with its source material beyond some names, a haunting, a trans-Atlantic culture clash, and a spectrally indelible bloodstain). I am not sorry to have read Harding's Luck, but it really doesn't work as a complete novel. I liked the book it looked like it was going to be better than the one it turned out to have been.
[edit] Then, the classism really grates - how nobility is genetically inherited, how simple it is to overhaul the lives of the poor, how quaint the poor are in their personal lives
Beale is very clearly a descendant of the Burglar in The Phœnix and the Carpet (1904). They even both hail originally from the countryside and do much better when taken away from the city and married off.
Reply
But "trips over [herself]" - yes. Not just the anti-Semitism, either - the Burglar (I'd not made that connection) and Elfrida being braver, and so Edred having to do something even better, because it would cost him more.
(If I can get the other reply out of its strange frozen state, I'll post it.)
The Grand Mouldiwarp Court is just a mess.
Reply
I'm so sorry! I'd love to see your other reply if you can recover it. I'm not having any trouble posting comments, but my journal right now looks weird, so I'm waiting to see if it's me or LJ. (Either way, since I get the apologetic error page every time I try to look at my style code, I can't fix it.)
the Burglar (I'd not made that connection)
It hit me when I was showering, which is where most of my intellectual esprit d'escalier hangs out. Beale is more genuinely shady than the Burglar, who has a day job and is just trying his hand at housebreaking when the children catch him ("I was a-selling oranges off of my barrow-for I ain't a burglar by trade, though you 'ave used the name so free"), and he is also closer to being a person rather than a social type, having a family and a genuinely complicated relationship with Dickie for a Dickensian couple of chapters, but their similar backgrounds, solutions, and general softheartedness when it comes to children were unmistakable.
I also figured out that Harding's Luck made me think of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863) mostly because of the character of the ribbon-selling old woman met twice by Dickie and Beale, who turns out to be the old nurse of Arden Castle and a supernatural figure of unnamed but evident power on both sides of time just as the poor Irishwoman encountered by Tom and Grimes in The Water Babies turns out to be one of the two powerful fairies of that book, but I didn't realize until just now that Kingsley also wrote Dickie's beloved Hereward the Wake (1866), so for all I know it was some kind of tip of the hat.
The Grand Mouldiwarp Court is just a mess.
I'm glad it's not just me!
Reply
Leave a comment