The Queen’s Man by Sharon Kay Penman

Aug5

According to the author’s note and the blurb, The Queen’s Man is Ms. Penman’s first foray into the genre of the murder mystery. Her hero/detective is Justin de Quincy, the illegitimate son of a bishop and a servant girl. Justin begins the story by confronting his father with his new-found knowledge of his parentage and then riding off in high dudgeon to make his own way in the world.

Fortune smiles on Justin by way of the misfortune of another man. Justin is an eyewitness to robbery and murder, and he is hired by the queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to find the murderer of a goldsmith who was bringing Eleanor an important letter when he was waylaid and killed.

And so the hunt begins. Lots of medieval period details and twelfth century history work their way into the story with Justin caught between an aging but still sharp Queen Eleanor and her ambitious and unscrupulous youngest son, John.

Thoroughly enjoyable, and there are sequels also featuring Justin de Quincy, Cruel as the Grave and Dragon’s Lair.

Semicolon review of The Sunne in Splendor, historical fiction by Ms. Penman. Fifteenth century. Richard III and his older brother Edward IV.

Semicolon review of When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman. Twelfth century. King Stephen and Empress Maude.

Advanced Reading Survey: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Aug4

I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.

Author note: Charlotte Bronte was the third of six children of a Yorkshire clergyman. Two of her sisters died while still in school, but Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell,, the remaining children, grew up together creating and writing down stories about fantasy lands called Angria and Gondal. Both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights grew out of these early flights of fancy and out of the Brontes’ experiences in school, as governesses, and as inhabitants of the beautiful but wild country of Yorkshire. Charlotte wrote under the pseudonym of Currer Bell to keep from public knowledge the fact that she was a woman.

Characters:
Jane Eyre: the eponymous orphan who tells her life story in the book.
Mrs. Reed: Jane’s aunt by marriage and her guardian.
Helen Burns: Jane’s friend at school.
Mr. Rochester: Jane’s employer
Adele: Jane’s pupil
Mrs. Fairfax: Mr. Rochester’s housekeeper

Quotations:
Helen:

“I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last: with this creed revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low; I live in calm, looking to the end.”

Jane:

“Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Mrs. Scatcherd’s can only see those minute defects and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.”

Conversation between Jane and Helen upon the occasion of Helen’s imminent death:

“But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?”
“I believe; I have faith; I am going to God.”
“Where is God? What is God?”
“My Maker and yours who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power and confide wholly in His goodness; I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me.”
“You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven and that our souls can get to it when we die?”
“I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good; I can resign my immortal part to him without any misgiving. God is my father; God is my friend; I love Him; I believe He loves me.”

All the rest of the quotations are Jane’s voice:

“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.”

“I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes . . . It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”

“He could not bound all that he had in his nature—the rover, the aspirant, the poet, the priest—in the limits of a single passion.”

“When I asked him if he forgave me, he answered that he was not in the habit of cherishing the remembrance of vexation, that he had nothing to forgive, not having been offended.
And with that answer he left me. I would much rather he had knocked me down.”

“His nature was not changed by one hour of solemn prayer; it was only elevated.”

“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be.”

Mature reflections:

I read the books for Advanced Reading Survey and chose these quotations to copy out about thirty years ago when I was twenty-one or twenty-two years old. Now from a fifty-one year old vantage point, I note several things.

Charlotte was rather fond of semicolons. She might like this blog were she still alive and writing.

I must have been thinking of some super-critical person like Mrs. Scatcherd, but I don’t remember who it was, if so.

From this distance, Helen looks rather priggish, but her statement of faith is moving and definitive anyway.

The last “laws and principles” quotation has come back to me many times in the midst of episodes of temptation. It’s so true. I need rules and laws for the times when everything inside me wants to break them, when I strain to justify my need for an exception to the rule. That’s when I need the standard to hold me accountable.

I’ve not re-read Jane Eyre in ages, but I tend to think it would hold up just fine.

Author Celebration Reminder

Aug3

Please note that the next installment in the Semicolon Author Celebration Series takes place on Thursday, August 7th, as we celebrate the birthday of Newbery-award winning author, Betsy Byars. If you have something, anything, to say about Ms. Byars, please write it up and bring your link to the party on the 7th.

Books Read in July, 2008

Jul31

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. Fantastically disturbing (in a good way) YA fiction. Read it if you like to think about the implications of technology and futuristic scenarios. Semicolon review here.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Semicolon review here.

Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Brown Bear Daughter and I read this book out loud together to get a head start on her literature class for next year.

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. I didn’t review this one, but it was just as good as Jayber Crow, if not better.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. Semicolon review here.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Semicolon review here.

Niner by Theresa Martin Golding. I think I picked this one up at the library because the main character, a girl, had nine fingers, one thumb missing, and one of my urchins was born with twelve toes. There’s a connection there somehow. It’s sort of sad YA fiction, where mom’s a runaway, dad’s wonderful and nurturing, the girl’s adopted, and the kids get into trouble while keeping secrets from the adults in their lives.

them by Joyce Carol Oates. Semicolon review here.

The Queen’s Man: A Medieval Mystery by Sharon Kay Penman. I had to go back to the middle ages, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard I, and Prince John, to get some relief from all the modern violence and angst. Still violent, but very little angst, and the violence was logical violence, if you know what I mean, not irrational.

Gleaned from the Saturday Review

Jul30

Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. Recommended by Suzanne at Adventures in Daily Living. I added this one to the list on the strength of the comparison to Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. (Semicolon review here.)

Death Comes As an Epiphany by Sharan Newman. Recommended at What Kate’s Reading. I like historical mysteries, and since we’re studying the Middle Ages this fall, I thought this mystery in particular sounded timely.

Ruth by Mrs. Gaskell. Recommended by Sarah at Library Hospital. I like Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, but I’ve not read this particular book. It sounds like something I would like a lot.

them by Joyce Carol Oates

Jul28

7/26/08: I’m over halfway through this book, “the third and most ambitious of a trilogy of novels exploring the inner lives of representative young Americans from the perspective of a ‘class war’.” “The them of the novel are poor whites, separated by race (and racist) distinctions from their near neighbors, poor blacks and Hispanics.” The words of explanation are Ms. Oates’ commentary on her own novel in an afterword at the end of the book.

I’m finding the novel condescending and full of stereotypes: the spoiled rich girl, the poor but violent young man full of unresolved rage, the eternal victim of that “victimless crime”, prostitution. I’ve been borderline poor, not in the inner city, and I’ve lived among poor people in the city. I don’t believe there is any “class war” in the U.S. Racism, yes. A division of classes, yes. But the poor people I have known mostly don’t think of themselves as poor, resent being classified as poor, intend to become middle class or rich as soon as hard work or a lucky break will enable that to happen. And there are all sorts of poor people. Some are hard working and others are lazy. Some are conscientiously religious, and others are profane and vulgar. Some are happy; others are morbidly depressed. Ms. Oates’ them are all the same: materialistic, violent, and devoid of moral values (probably because moral values are “middle class values” in the jargon and the perspective of the sociologist).

Ms. Oates again: “Few readers of them since its 1969 publication have been them because them as a class doesn’t read, certainly not lengthy novels.” How patronizingly untrue. And yet, Ms. Oates’s main character, Maureen, one of them, reads and enjoys Jane Austen and other novels. Perhaps the author is correct in writing that the poor as a class don’t read novels like them because they generally prefer hope and optimism to a vision that condemns them to generations of poverty and violence and victimhood.

7/27/08: I was sitting in church this morning thinking about Loretta, Maureen, and Jules, the central characters in them. Even though I still believe they tend toward stereotype, there are people out there, them, who fit the stereotype. What does the Gospel have to say to the Lorettas, hard as nails, seen it all, loud, brash and poverty enslaved? How can the Church, Jesus’s church, reach and speak to the Maureens of the city, victims of a bad home, bad education, a dearth of values, and their own longing for something better? If Jesus himself could speak to the Samaritan woman who was both of these women in one, can’t the Church somehow act redemptively in the lives of women like these as Christ’s representatives? And Jules. At a point in the story Jules, the smart but criminally destined young man, has a Bible and time and inclination to read it. (He’s in the hospital.) But he says, “My main discovery is that people have always been the same, lonely and worried and hoping for things, and that they have written their thoughts down and when we read them we are the same age as they are.” Jules finds hope and fellow feeling in the Scriptures but no salvation, no change. How could Christians, how could God’s Spirit, reach a man so embedded in sin and degradation and lift him up, not into the middle class, but into heaven itself? I’m not sure. I know it happens for some people, but not for others. I do know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only hope for people like Loretta, Maureen, and Jules . . . and for people like me, good old middle class me, just as sinful and degraded in my own middle class way.

There you have it. I have already this week established myself as a philistine and an anachronism. A family member, who shall remain nameless, accused me of calling her an elitist when I confessed my lack of appreciation for one of her favorite novels, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. And now I fear that the kindred spirit-ness that a certain blogger and I have shared in the past is tinged with a lack of understanding on my part. I will say that them made me think about poverty and racism and class struggle and sin, but I didn’t enjoy reading it and don’t wish to repeat the experience anytime soon. (Maybe some of the other novels of Joyce Carol Oates would suit me better? She’s quite a prolific writer, and this one is the only one I’ve read.)

So be it. Give me Dickens or Dostoyevsky or Victor Hugo or just a rousing adventure by Tolkien or Dumas. There’s plenty of poverty and and evil and violence in those authors’ books, but there’s also something else, a lack of inevitabliity, dare I say, a sense of hope? From the twentieth century, I’ll take Alan Paton or P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers or even my newest discovery Wendell Berry (something of an anachronism himself). But saints preserve me from the modern sociological novel.

Joyce Carol Oates fans, we’re still friends, right?

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Jul27

Periodically blogging my determined attempt to finish and appreciate one of Eldest Daughter’s favorite books:

p. 58: My most insistent thought is that this book is one of the most boring tomes I’ve ever read. O.K., maybe The Old Man and the Sea ranks higher on the boring scale, unless you’re interested in deep sea fishing, but it had the advantage of being shorter than The Moviegoer. Moby Dick was much longer, and it was about fishing, but I’d rather be reading it.

p. 67: These people are not real:
An aunt who sends her nephew inspiring quotations from Marcus Aurelius? (Note: I later read that quotations from Marcus Aurelius were exactly the means of communication that Walker Percy’s rather eccentric uncle who raised him after his parents’ death used to inspire and relate to the young Mr. Percy.)

Said nephew, named Binx, who wanders through life with no goals, lots of odd philosophy, and no passion for anything. And he owns only one book, something called Arabia Deserta, surely symbolic of the desert that is modern life.

Kate, whose fiance dies in a car crash in which she is also injured, but she leaves the scene aand takes a bus home? O.K., maybe she’s in shock. But then she says that the bus trip home after the accident was the best afternoon of her entire life, or something like that. Is she crazy? (It turns out that she is.)

Nonsense. Not eccentricity, but nonsense. Eccentric nonsense can be fun, as in Wodehouse, but this stuff is pretentious. I can tell that the author is saying Something Serious about the Modern Malaise of Twentieth Century Man. And he’s communicating his message through the character of a bizarrely immature, self-centered, movie-obsessed, womanizing, bachelor stock broker. I can’t identify. Except maybe with the self-centered part.

p. 78: There are some ideas here, almost. Binx has a concept of a “vertical search” for meaning in which one can understand everything essential about everything except for one’s self, which is still “left over” at the end. Again, nonsense, there is plenty of mystery in this world that scientific analysis has not even begun to explain, but it is true that the self is the most mysterious and inexplicable of all.

p. 86: “For sometime now the impression has been growing on me that everyone is dead.”

Now I get it. This narrator, Binx Bolling, is nuts. But of course, he speaks truths in the midst of his madness. (Whoops, Eldest Daughter says I don’t get it at all. I’m Prufrock: “That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.”)

p. 178: Almost finished. Deep sigh of relief. I can’t decide if Mr. Percy is trying to be profound, trying not to be profound, or trying to pretend he’s not trying to be profound. Whatever the case, the profundity eludes me.

p. 212: The End.
I have some questions:
Who is Rory? Rory Calhoun, the actor, maybe?

And I second Aunt Emily’s questions to Binx: What do you love? What do you live by? What do you think is the purpose of life—to go to the movies and dally with every girl that comes along?

After I finished the book and wrote the above notes, we discussed it at Eldest Daughter’s book club meeting and in the car on the way there. Eldest Daughter insists, and I have no reason to doubt her, that I just don’t understand the book at all. She also says that Walker Percy was a great fan of Kierkegaard, and that the philosophy and modern quandary in the book are based on the writings of Kierkegaard. I’ll have to take her word for it since I’ve never been able to make it through more than a page of Kierkegaard.

I did finish The Moviegoer, though, and I regard that as an accomplishment even if I did end up in a rather Prufrockish position. I didn’t “get” T.S. Eliot for a long time either. Maybe Percy will grow on me.

(Please forgive all the sentence fragment and incomplete phrases. I think they were somehow a response to the book and symbolic of something. Perhaps even profound.)

John Lienhard, Engines of Our Ingenuity, on Walker Percy and his search for a father figure. Interesting analysis.

Sunday Salon: The Plight of Modern Man and Bookshelves Again

Jul27

My reading has been rather grim this week, which befits my mood, unfortunately. I read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer for Eldest Daughter’s book club. It won the National Book Award in 1961. Then I started reading them by Joyce Carol Oates. It won the National Book Award in 1970. I can tell you that neither novel wins my book award . . . unless it’s the Semicolon Grim, Disturbed and Neurotic Book Award.

So, to think of brighter things, I turned my thoughts toward bookshelves in which to keep the Grim, the Disturbed, the Neurotic, the Hopeful and the Joyful books, all on shelves touching and informing one another. With the right kind of bookshelf, the books might be able to talk to each other in the night, rub covers, even make friends. Jan Karon’s Father Tim could tell Dostoyevsky to cheer up and pray the prayer that never fails. Or Richard Adams’ Bigwig might give some advice to Alice about rabbit holes. Or maybe Edgar Allan Poe will scare the stuffing out of some pompous old bore from one of Dickens’ novels. Who knows? With the right sort of bookshelf and the proper arrangement of the books, Nonfiction and Fiction and the Memoir-in-Between might even come to some agreement or at least peaceful co-existence. (A new blog/reading meme: Describe a meeting between . . . two disparate book characters. This week: describe a meeting between Winnie the Pooh and Becky Sharp.)

Thanks to Fuse 8 for the link to the Opus Shelving System. My regular bookshelves already look sort of like these with the books on top of books, sideways and every which-a-way. But why not just go with the flow and wedge them in any old way to vary the decor?

30 of the most creative bookshelf designs is a series of pictures and descriptions of bookshelves that a designer has found to be, well, creative. The author didn’t say they were terribly practical, and in fact most of them won’t hold very many books. But they are fun to look at.

Someone named Alex has an entire blog devoted to bookshelves. His entries seem to be more innovative than practical, too.

Maybe you just can’t beat ye old wooden bookshelf stuffed full of books. Small World is looking for book shelving suggestions. Tell her what you think.

Random Movie Blog-a-Thon

Jul25

This sounds like fun. Buy or rent a movie that you wouldn’t normally be interested in watching. Watch and then write a review. From the originator of the idea at Cinexcellence:

This doesnâ€™t mean that it has to be one that you would probably hate. It could be one of those DVDs that you walk by all the time but never took a chance on it. But it could be one that you hate. . . . hey, we might discover some hidden gems along the way.

I think I’ll try this out. Something rated PG or G that nevertheless sounds stupid.

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: Edmund Spenser

Jul24

Spenser is most famous for his famously l-o-n-g poem, The Faerie Queen, which I, like 99% of the world, have never read. He lived in Elizabethan England, a contemporary of Shakespeare and a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Spenser wrote the following poem, and my question to you is: what is the poem about? A hunting expedition? A woman? Both? Something else?

The Tamed Deer

Like as a huntsman after weary chase
Seeing the game from him escaped away,
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So, after long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all weary had the chase forsook,
The gentle deer returned the self-same way,
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide;
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own good-will her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild
So goodly won, with her own will beguiled.

The Hunted Roe-Deer on the Alert, Spring, 1867

Giclee Print

Courbet, Gustave

Buy at AllPosters.com

More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading: Two Teachers Who Read. A Lot.