On my Wish List

Just heard a radio segment on CBC interviewing Anosh Irani about his new book, The Song of Kahunsha, set in Bombay (Mumbai). With the mass murder there the other day it was particularly timely. I was impressed with what the author said about his book and about events in Mumbai. His comments about the difference between Bombay and Mumbai (its new name) and how the change of name was representative of a change from a tolerant city to one of extremism was insightful. How sad that his work has been rejected for publication in India ; thought too negative he said. The book sounds like A Fine Balance which I really enjoyed and admired. The readers reviews are very good too so I am putting it on my wish list.

I am reading two books at the moment... Going Loco ( highlighted in my last post) and The Bookman's Wake which I started the day I bought it while I was waiting for the car to be serviced. I should finish that today. It is a great read.

My husband is away for a few days so I am also hoping to get some uninterrupted writing (and painting) in! Sure wish there were another 24 hours in each day. Time is our real enemy. No, I shouldn't say that. It isn't an enemy, it is neutral, but the waste of it is a crime and as I get older I must really make the most of it.

Going Loco

I have been reading from The Lynne Truss Treasury the past few nights, a story ( novella?) called Going Loco. Laugh out loud funny. I wonder if Truss's sense of humour is obvious when you meet her in person. I've read two of the others in the Treasury now -With one lousy Packet of Seeds (also very funny) and Tennyson's Gift ( which I didn't care for as much).

Truss comes up with the oddest ideas and the oddest characters. In Going Loco, Belinda, a harried writer is married to a Stefan, a Swede, who turns out not to be Swedish or named Stefan at all but a man who is impersonating a mad Swedish scientist who is now dead but had originally kidnapped him to use him for cloning experiments. There is irony here as Belinda-who writes horsey novels for young girls- is trying to write a more academic book about Literary Doubles through the ages. Belinda's friend has a cleaning lady, Linda, who is a "gem" but Belinda tempts her away from her friend to come work for her-since her household is a shambles- and Linda begins to take over Belinda's life. Really take over, doubling for her in public for example. All this sounds quite serious but the way Lynne writes it, it's a hoot. I am not quite finished it and wonder how she will end it.

Book illustrations

If you like books you probably like illustrated books. I do. Photos are alright, I like them for some books like cookbooks or travel books but for fiction obviously photos are out. Not many fiction books are illustrated these days though, with the exception of children's books, and it is a shame. Old books and old illustrations have a real appeal.

Boggled at the Bookstore

One of my favorite places is a book store but it is also very daunting. SO many books and SO many choices. And every one of them different and interesting in some way. Well, to me anyway. It is mind boggling isn't it the range of human thought? I always have trouble choosing.

But today I had a few titles in mind. First I checked on The Wreckage by Michael Crummy - our next Lit Wits book- to see if it was out in paperback yet. Nope, not yet. Then I wanted to find The Book Thief that "jar" said was so good. Waaah. They didn't have it. I mean I looked on their database and everything. Looks like I will have to order it on line from Amazon! So far I was striking out and getting a bit discouraged.

Well, not too discouraged. There were lots of other books to console me. I saw Memoirs of a Geisha which will be on our list next season so I picked that up. Then I wanted to follow up on Linda's tip so I picked up one of the Bookman mysteries by John Dunning - The Bookman's Wake. While in the mystery section I saw a book titled Bookmarked to Die, by Jo Dereske. Since I seem to be on a "books about books kick" I thought why not? I headed for the cash register and on the way I saw The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. Another author club book! I had to get that didn't I ?

I managed to close my eyes and ears to the lovely assortment of journals sirening me from the display near the check out. As my discount card expired 4 days ago- d___- I was lucky to get out for under $80 Books are expensive aren't they? But worth every penny.

Poor finish

I finished The Club Dumas a few nights ago and I have been thinking what to say ever since. I was disappointed by the ending. That is the first thing, but that is not enough. I was disappointed because the book promised more and that cannot just be written off. There is something to be learned- by the author and by me (amateur writer) and that is to finish strong.

The Club Dumas finish was hurried and the unravelling of the plot in one way too simple and in the other too obtuse and not really explanatory of the events the author had presented up to then: if the Club Dumas really was a harmless society interested only in the handwritten Dumas chapter then why did their henchman level a gun at the protaganist, for example? The reader feels gypped by this. Well, I did. Then the very separate denoument of the Nine Doors Book - a book collector descending into madness or what? The real calling of the devil, thwarted? Not really clear.

I would still recommend the book and I will still try to read other books by this author. But if I was his editor I would have a lot to say [ are there any go0d editors anymore???? This is one of my almost constant plaints!!!]

Book Clubs

The book I am reading at the moment, has a lot in common with The Jane Austen Book Club which I read not that long ago.

• Obviously there is the title: both involve clubs centred on an author. In the case of The Club Dumas the "club" is a mysterious and ultimately sinister force in the book.

• Both books refer frequently to the author's works and it helps to have read them although it is not absolutely necessary to enjoy the book. I have to say I know a lot less about Dumas ( either pere or fils) than I do Austen! The author though is extremely knowledgeable and tells me more than I really want to know about Dumas his life and all his writings as well as about The Anjou Wine and The Nine Doors and other works.
  

• Both books talk about books and writing although The Club Dumas has a lot more detail as the plot involves a hunt for incunabula.

• And in both we are led to closely associate characters in the novel with characters in the authors' works. This is very marked in the Club Dumas where characters who are chasing the protaganist look and act like characters from The Three Musketeers.

The writing I think is better in The Club Dumas, at least I think it might be if the translation were better. It has an awkward feel in English which I think is probably not in the Spanish version. The author plays with his character, teasing him. Is he real or not? Here's a quote or two.

The flesh and blood Corso...was increasingly tempted to see himself as a real character in an imaginary world. But that wasn't good. From there it was only a small step to believing he was an imaginary character who thinks he's real in an imaginary world. Only a small step to going nuts. And he wondered whether someone, some twisted novelist or drunken writer of cheap screenplays, at that very moment saw him as an imaginary character in an imaginary world who thought he wasn't real. That would really be too much.

In a chapter titled The Plot Thickens the protaganist, the bookseller Corso, thinks...
One way or another things were getting out of control. This was more than a matter of quaint coincidences. It was a premeditated plan...Here was a plot with all the classic ingredients of the genre [the genre of Dumas] and somebody - aptly an Eminence Grise- must be pulling the strings....And yet the key to the mystery had to lie in its very strangeness and novelistic nature."

A little later he says: " I'm not suggesting anything. I'm just trying to work out the serieal that somebody's writing at my expense." These little double entendres are little jokes shared with the reader who like the author knows Corso is indeed not real, but only a character with the plot written in around him.

As for the plot..it is quite involved and I haven't quite finished. With three chapters left, the unravelling of all the tangled strands is yet to come. But it story follow's Corso's adventurous and dangerous search for three copies of The Book of the Nine Doors which is a book supposedly used to summon the devil. Each book is slightly different and all three must be collected to solve the puzzle of the proper incantation. The Club Dumas is a secret society whose members are chasing Corso either for the Nine Doors book or for a hand written chapter of one of Dumas's books or both.

A painting a day

Now that is productive. I came across this artist's site and it seemed so like the effort I put into my Nanowrimo experience that I had to comment on it. I also like many of the paintings! So here's a plug for Jeremiah

A book about Books

I enjoy books that have to do with books in some way. Usually they are non-fiction, perhaps about writing or about reading, such as Margaret Drabble's A Writer's Britain; Landscape in Literature. but sometimes they are fiction books. I enjoyed Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith for example about Shakespeare's real identity which involved "reading" clues from his plays and his life.

I have come across another book of that ilk, called The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. It is translated from the Spanish and is not an easy read in some ways as it is quite involved with lots of detail about antiquarian books and many clues to absorb but I am enjoying the mystery of it very much. I would like to see the movie which was made from the book, by Polanski ( The Ninth Gate starring Johnny Depp) I hadn't heard of it so missed it when it came out -good movies never seem to come here- but I will have to look for it on DVD.

My enjoyment of this book makes me want to also read this author's previous book, The Flander's Panel a murder mystery involving a painting.

Garden shots

Nothing like some photos to brighten up a blog post.

To be Continued

After all the rain we have had the last few weeks the last few days of warm sunny weather have been wonderful. With a few of the gardening things done ( oh, yes, there is more to do but those chores can wait) I took the time to just sit in the sun with a book and a notebook.

I sat enjoying the warmth of the sun, the chirping of the birds and the sibilant sound of the stream running past. I started thinking idly about my Betty story [ I really must come up with a better title]. Mostly I thought about what had to happen next. Where should Lizzie head after Bar Harbor, what job should she get, what mischief could she get into? Meanwhile what was Janet discovering back home? What gossip could she pick up? Where could I find a believable hand in bridge to play out in the next chapter? I did come up with a few ideas which I jotted down in my notebook. My writing group meets tomorrow you see. I HAVE to come up with something.

When the ideas stopped flowing I turned to my book, A Passion for Narrative, by Jack Hodgins which I had picked up second hand somewhere. The introduction has an excerpt from Nabokov's Lectures on Literature in which he says a major writer combines storytelling, teaching and enchantment. Ah, yes, the great writers are enchanters. Think about the books that are truly memorable. There is that something that is beyond just the story, beyond the message, some elusive quality that charms, besotts, casts a spell. Witchery. I wish I had that but since I don't I can be the sorcerer's apprentice.

Farewell to Scotland Street

I lost 44 Scotland Street and then I found it again. Yes, I looked for it all over the house and couldn't find it anywhere so I knew I must have left it somewhere and the only place I could have left it was at the sauna, at the excercise club I sometimes (but not often enough) frequent. I finally got myself organised to go in I asked after it and yes, it was still there by the sauna, but with another book mark in it. Someone else who had a sauna after I did had started it - in preference to the many magazines offered- and marked their place hoping no doubt to continue when they came again. They did not make off with it. I almost felt guilty taking it away with me. Now that I have finished the book I think I may take it back and place it with the magazines so my unknown reader can continue!

Somehow that was like the book itself - a little moral anecdote -peripheral to plot. That is 44 Scotland Street. The book was not about the sketchy story line, not really about the Peploe that turns out to be a Vetrianno and then a nothing, not about Pat and her murky past and not about her supposed love affair with the narcisstic Bruce. It was about the little incidents and philosophical asides that flesh out the characters. McCall Smith offers up a view into a number of lives, a pastiche of people and their messy but compelling situations in a restricted window of time and as always with a complex moral sense that gets the reader thinking - or should. It reminds me of Seinfeld. And McCall Smith says it very well in the introduction when he says: It is in observing the minor ways of people that one can still see very clearly the moral dilemmas of our time.

Here is a small sample - an exchange between two lesser but important characters: Domenica the older woman who has seen much and Angus Lordie an anti-establishment artist with a dog that winks.

"We live in such a humourless age" Domenica remarked. It used to be possible to laugh. It used to be possible to enjoy oneself with fantasies - such as your ridiculous hymn- sorry, Angus- but now? Well now there are all sorts of censors and killjoys. Earnest ignorant poeple who lecture us on what we can think and say. And do you know we have lain down and submitted to the whole process. It's been the most remarkable display of passivity. With the result that when we encounter anybody who thinks independently or who doesn't echo the received wisdoms of the day we are astonished." [Angus replies]
" In such a way is freedom of thought lost ... by small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragments of spirit."

And here is the priceless inner dialogue of Bertie's Mum;

Irene cast a glance over in the direction of the mysterious politician. Bertie was right: there might well be a strong resemblance between Tam Dalyell and Robin Harper and certainly if one asked the average five year old boy to say which was which one would not expect a clear answer. But there was nothing average about Bertie of course. Now she was uncertain herself. It was very unsettling really not being sure whether one was confronted with Mr Dalyell or Mr Harper and really should one find oneself in this position? Robin Harper was younger than Mr Dalyell who was a very senior politician and one might be expected to distinguish on those grounds. But Mr Dalyell did not really show the years at all and both had a rather, how should one put it , enigmatic look to them, as if they knew the answer to some important questions and we did not and both of course were good men of whom there was a very short supply. She smiled. How was the matter to be resolved short of asking him directly? But what would one say " Are you or are you not Tam Dalyell? sounded a bit accusing as it there was something wrong with being Tam Dalyell. And if one were to be given a negative answer, would one proceed to say: " In that case are you Robin Harper?" That sounded as if it was somehow second best to be Robin Harper which of course it would certainly not be, at least if one were Robin Harper in the first place. Presumably Robin Harper was quite happy about being Robin Harper. He certainly looked contented with his lot.

Tam Dalyell and Robin Harper are real politicians of course ( there are footnotes). They are not the only real person to play bit parts in the book. Ian Rankin shows up rather prominently (no doubt with his permission) as the purchaser of the perhaps Peploe. Real places are used too of course and these references to real Edinburgh must have been a delight to the readers of The Scotsman where the book was serialised.

There are lots of loose ends so I am not surprised his readers demanded a sequel. I want to find out:
Does Bertie escape his Stalin of a mother and get to go to Watsons where he can finally be blood brothers with Jock and get to ride on a train?
Does Mathew actually find a carreer that he could be good at?
Does Bruce get into the wine trade now that he has been fired?
And will we ever find out why Pat is on her second gap year except that something went frightfully wrong with a man with a patch in Australia?
And if that sounds like plot, no, it is character because we wouldn't care at all what happens except that Smith makes us care by his delineation of character.

Nature's cathedral

We had such a wonderful outing today thanks to an enthusiastic friend and guide. Our fabulous five hiked through an old growth hemlock forest, along the edge of a ravine through which ran a tea coloured stream. There were violets, there were lady slippers, there were waterfalls and moss covered rocks. Along the way we heard the silence punctuated by trickling of water or the song of warblers and vireos and often our exclamations of discovery- "Oh look!" There were sugar maples and red maples, red spruce and white spruce, pine and tamarack but the most impressive were the hemlocks, some of them old enough to have lived in my great great great grandfather's day, some of them downed nursery trees. We finished our walk at a heart shaped pond where the water mirrored the surrounding million shades of green, the surface occasionally shattered by white ripples when the breeze teased it . We sat devouring with appetite our packed lunch, our eyes drinking in the scene, satisfying both physical hunger and our cravings for beauty.

Book Choice

I'm still wandering down Scotland Street. Will the Peploe be found? Is it really a Peploe.? Will our heroine really fall for the unappealing character Bruce? Will Bertie manage to convince his mother that he really hates learning Italian and how to play the saxophone at the age of 5 and would rather play with trains? Will Bertie's mother drown in the floatariam as I hope?

Meanwhile our book circle members are choosing their books and I am collecting their entries to organise for our next season of meetings starting in Sept. I had to make my own choice too and the mention of Amy Tan in McCall Smith's preface made me think " Why not an Amy Tan book? I haven't read all of hers and I'd like to." So my choice will be Saving Fish from Drowning which will be out in paperback in Sept 2006. Sounds like just my kind of crazy book.

A walk along Scotland St.

I am enjoying my sojourn so far in Edinburgh. There is a litle map in the front of the book. Don't you love that? I think AA Milne must have started it. Wasn't there a map of the 100 Acre Wood?
It makes one feel you know where you are. There are also illustrations by Iain McIntosh - simple pen and inks. They too give one a feeling of knowing the place.

I am getting to know the inhabitants, as did the readers of The Scotsman. Know and love. Here is what the author says in his preface: " I enjoyed writing this so much that I could not bear to say goodbye to the characters so that most generous paper the Scotsman, agreed to a second volume, which is still going strong, day after day, even as I write this introduction to volume one. In the somewhat demanding task of writing both of these volumes I have been sustained by the readers of the paper who urged me on and provided me with a wealth of suggestions and comments. I feel immensely priviledged to have been able to sustain a long fictional conversation with these readers. One reader in particular... wrote me regularly, sometimes every few days, with remarks on what was happening on 44 Scotland St. That correspondence was a delight to me and helped me along greatly in the lonely task of writing."

It occurred to me that my blog readers ( imaginary beings mostly but real in my mind) serve some of that role for me ( and when I get comments - whohoo!) And my writing circles provide some encouragement. But I digress. Back to the street.

The MC is Pat, a young person with a past, Bruce with his mirror, Domenica - a widow lady who has seen a few things, a misguided mother Irene and poor Bertie, her oh so special and driven son of 5. Those are some of the inhabitants of 44 but Pat works for Mathew, the un-arty art dealer. And there is Ronnie and Pete and Big Lou who Mathew meets regulary at Big Lou's coffee bar. Kinda like Tim's you know? So I am having fun with these folk and their quirks. A whole neighbourhood... just like the 100 acre wood.

And now for something completely different...

Well, enough of Austen. And Fowler's amusing take on Austen.

So what tickles my fancy next? I looked at the stack of books at my bedside waiting their turn, lifted this one, turned that one over, picked another and looked at the first page, the preface, and said yes, this one! 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith. All the other books sighed and shrank back into dusty oblivion in the corner, envious of the one brought into the light. What was in that preface that so appealed? Serendipity at work.

You see this afternoon I was at my writing circle (one of two I attend) and was chagrined that I had nothing new written for it ( somehow the "rock" theme just didn't get my creative juices oozing). But, as something to read, I brought a chapter of my book in progress, or I should say from one of my two books in progress. The piece I brought was not from my NANOWRIMO effort but from my "Betty Story" an unfinished murder mystery (who killed Rev. Kevin by incinerating him in his own car in his driveway and how will Janet help her friend wacky friend Betty, the minister's wife, find the killer?) I read them Ch. 4 where Betty who has done a scarper "phones home" after cycling all the way to Bah Habah, Maine, a piece which I hope I had not read them before. But what, you are saying, has all this got to do with 44 Scotland Street. Get to the bleedin' point. Right! This is what I read in McCall Smith's preface that grabbed me:

"Most books start with an idea in the author's head. This book started with a conversation that I had in California, at a party held by the novelist, Amy Tan, whose generostiy to me has been remarkable." [ Interested already as I like Amy Tan's books and Stephen King who wrote a great book on writing -as well as some great books- writes about Amy Tan and she seems like a neat lady, so I continued reading] McCall continues: " At this party I found myself talking to Armistead Maupin, the author of Tales of the City. Maupin had revived the idea of a serialised novel with his extremely popular serial in The San Francisco Chronicle. [ And I said to myself hmm what an intersting name Armistead, I must look him up- so I kept reading]

" When I returned to Scotland I was asked by the Herald to write an article about my California trip. In this article I mentioned my conversation with Maupin and remarked what a pity it was that newspapers no longer ran serialised novels. This tradition, of course, had been very important in the nineteenth century, with the works of Dickens being perhaps the best known examples of serialised fiction. But there were others, of course, including Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which nearly landed its author in prison. [Interesting] McCall Smith then goes on to describe how the editorial staff of the Scotsman decided to "accept the challenge which I had unwittingly put down" and at a lunch with him said said "You're on".

McCall Smith goes on to say " At that stage I had not really thought out the implications of writing a novel in daily instalments; this was a considerable departure from the weekly or monthly approach which had been adopted by previous serial novelists." [and I am thinking - doing that is just like Nanowrimo 'cause you have to write so much a day - only it has to be good enough to publish !!!] " However, such was the air of optimism at the lunch that I agreed." McCall Smith said. " The experience proved to be both hugely enjoyable and very instructive. "
[And I said to myself - what did he learn and how did he do it?]

"The structure of a daily serial has to be different from that of a normal novel. One has to have at least one development in each instalment and end with a sense that something more may happen. One also has to understand that the readership is a newspaper readership which has its own special characteristics. The real challenge in wriitng a novel that is to be serialised... is to keep the momentum of the narrative going without becoming too staccato in tone... Above all a serial novel must be entertaining. This does not mean that one cannot deal with serious topics, or make an appeal to the finer emotions of the reader, but one has to keep a light touch."

So I hope to learn something about writing - about how to continue my Betty story- and besides I like McCall Smith's writing, so there. I will be exploring 44 Scotland Street.

LitWits

We met the other day in an idyllic setting to discuss The Jane Austen Book Club. One of the discussions was a bit of a revelation to me, in that it articulated something which I immediately recognized as something I had felt but not brought to the surface of my thinking. It came about because one of the members said " We tend to see Austen as a bit of a period piece...the costumes, the history." [which is what the movies emphasise] and I realised when she said this that yes, this masks the reality of the books for us. When Austen wrote and people read her the historical window is not what they would see. The readers of Austen's day would see only the stories, the gossipy situations, the irony, the tongue in cheek humour etc. Austen's books were much more like Fowler's book than they seem on the surface.

Prudie and Mansfield Park

My book club meets tomorrow and I am no where near finished my book by book, chapter by chapter analysis. Ah well. But I can at least do Prudie. She is sorely tempted, isn't she? Her wonderful, sensitive, romantic and caring husband seems dull, uninteresting, too familiar.

" What was wrong with a solid kind of guy? Did you want a marriage full of surprises, or did you want a guy you could depend on?" But later ... " Prudie had thought that was what she wanted. Someone with no pretense...But just occasionally she felt more lucky in her marriage than contented with it. She could imagine something better."

Around her are the raging hormones of her students ( and her own) She has very "unAustenish" thoughts about Trey Norton ( but of course these were exactly Austen thoughts as Austen's characters are similarly beseiged and in MP Maria succumbs!) She has the glimpse of an affair between two colleagues one of them married. "Prudie's own feelings on adultery were taken from the French". She dislikes the character of Edmund for not being more forgiving of his sister who commits adultery.
The rehearsal for Brigadoon ( about love) in Prudie's chapter mirrors the rehearsal of " Lovers Vows" in MP - the play itself is never performed. There is the whole courtship problem of the student players which mirrors relationship flirtations in MP.

Then there is the theme of change. There is the computer trouble which Prudie has which must be handled by her young neighbour Cameron with all his talk about DSL and bandwidth. She sees all the young students and is not really part of their world. Then there is the death of her mother ( which she dreams about) Jane showing her through an estate ( like MP-heaven) and in one room she has put her mother - the island in the distance - the great sea change of her mother's death.

Prudie's mother made her care more for unreality than reality, living in imagination more than in the actual. I am not sure how this relates particularly to Mansfield Park, except it perhaps explains Prudie's love of Austen's fictional world. Perhaps the others in my book group will have a better idea.

Mansfield Park

I have been away but I have been reading. I finished The Austen Book Club and read Mansfield Park; it is the one Austen book I had never read! This was a good time to make up this deficiency. It is perhaps the most moralistic of Austen's creations, but also the most profound, especially in its writing, I think.

The main theme as always is courtship. How different types "choose" their partners. In MP there are a number of possible partnerships in the pot which Austen stirs vigorously.

But in addition, Mansfield Park is about temptation and about change. The place of the title is in a sense the main character; it is everything that is good and right ( like heaven) and the characters who will inherit the kingdom ( the Park) are the righteous. Fanny Price has been described as the most unlikeable of all heroines in English literature. She isn't bright or witty, she seems passive and inactive. She is a goody two shoes. She is humble and diffident, worried and unsure of herself, fearful for the soul of others. She has a very strong sense of the correct thing, the kind thing, of decorous behaviour, moral behavior. She is a lover of peace and order. But as the book opens the influences around her attempt to divert her inner compass. This is symbolised in great part by the theatrics where her cousins and their guests try to get her to act in the play when she doesn't wish to. The play, titled Lovers Vows, we are led to believe, is very unsuitable, and she worries not only about her own reputation but about those of the other participants.

The other characters in the book are much more interesting ( as are things that are not good for us). Her cousins and their friends are well bred, well educated, well heeled, and they are witty, bright, sophisticated, fashionable, active. But they are also unkind, unthinking, self indulgent, irresponsible, and guilty enough in the end to let the kingdom slip through their fingers. Well, except for Edmund (about to be ordained) who is almost as dull as Fanny and who marries her in the end, but not before he is sorely tempted by the more fascinating Miss Mary Crawford.

What most impresses me about this book is the discipline of the author. It must have been extremely hard for Austen to make her main character so uninteresting. But that is the whole point. It is often dull to do the right thing, it is often unexciting and unappreciated, and painful indeed to do the right thing. Fanny seemed passive externally but internally she is on the boil-always grappling with her conscience.

So that's the temptation part. The other main theme is about change. Change is also exciting, novel, what people crave. But Austen, writing on the verge of the industrial revoluation which she saw would destroy the country life she saw as a sensitive social ecosystem which deserved to endure, emphasizes the emptiness of modernists love of change for change sake, of tossing out the baby with the bathwater. Mansfield Park stands for tradititon, for manners, for order and peace, for a rural community where personal connections and mutual responsiblities ruled. The urban infiltrators into this society (the Crawfords) brought with them an citified insensitivity, a contempt for the unsophisticated, an authority based on wealth and power, which compared poorly ( in Austen's view) to country society where conflicts were tempered by personal interchange and affections.

But the unrighteous are cast out and the meek inherit the earth - the poor mousey Fanny Price inherits Mansfield Park.

Sense of Sense and Sensibility

In Sense and Sensibility Austen contrasts two sisters and their very different styles of courtship- one, Marianne- all emotion, the other, Elinor- all common sense and decorum. Since this Austen novel is paired with a focus on Allegra who is meteoric, passionate, emotional, and self centred we are encouraged to compare her to Marianne ( who is a secondary character in S&S).

In S&S Marianne falls head over heels for the gallant and adventurous Willoughby. He turns out to be a rat...well, perhaps not a rat, but while he "courted" Marianne when it came down to the crunch other virtues ( wealth, position) had more weight. Marianne, in her depression at Willoughby's betrayal goes out in the rain and becomes ill [but recovers]

Allegra is lesbian and her lover Corinne appears at first as adventurous and impulsive as Allegra but turns out not to be as she seems, we are told. Corinne betrays Allegra; Allegra tells Corinne secrets, stories and Corinne steals them and tries to sell them and fails. [It is speculated that Austen was lesbian as she never married and of course writes stories, and her early manuscripts were rejected.] Allegra discovers Corinne's betrayal. " How dare Corinne write up Allegra's secret stories and send them off to magazines to be published? How dare Corinne write them so poorly that no one wished to take them?"

She leaves in the rain in only a T shirt , drives to her parents and stays in bed for 3 days (compare to Marianne's outing in the rain in S&S) There are secrets revealed in S&S too. Elinor's love interest Edward is secretly attached to Lucy but this secret is revealed by Lucy's sister causing much upset in vaious quarters. In the end though Lucy succumbs to the lure of wealth also and accepts the "better" offer of brother Robert instead, leaving Edward conveniently for Elinor. But what about Marianne? She ends up with Col. Brandon, a nice older man, who cares for her. And what will happen to Allegra? If she leaves Corinne for good who will she end up with.

Fowler in the Austen Book Club is taking situations from not the Austen's main character but secondary ones. "It wasn't Jane Austen's fault that love went bad. You couldn't even say she didn't warn you. Her heroines made out well enough but there were always other characters in the book who didn't finish happily...These were the women to whom you should be paying attention, but you weren't"

Some ideas to ponder

Here are thoughts I have had about the very modern society of the Jane Austen Book Club in contrast with the characters and society of Austen's books, and particularly to begin with, the novel Emma.

Some questions about Emma. What if Emma had not realised her faults and her true affections and not fallen eventually for Knightly, or if Knightly had not been so constant in his affection for Emma and been completely turned away by her foolish and sometimes cruel behavior? Would Emma have remained unmarried, still admiring/loving Knightly from afar? What if Knightly had married Emma's friend?

Jocelyn is unmarried. She had a relationship with Daniel but this was lost and Daniel married her best friend Silvia. Don't you get the feeling Jocelyn still loves Daniel? Silvia and Daniel are separating and the narrator says of Jocelyn " It was occurring to her for the first time that she was losing Daniel too. She'd handed them over, but she'd never given him up. Now, while she was breeding her dogs and dusting her lightbulbs and reading her books, he had packed his bags and moved away."

Breeding. This is an important issue. For Jocelyn as it is for Austen and her character Emma.
" We thought how the dog world must be a great relief to a woman like Jocelyn, a woman with everyone's best interests at heart, a strong matchmaking implulse and an instinct for tidiness. In the kennel, you just picked the sire and dam who seemed most likely to advance the breed through their progeny. You didn't have to ask them. ..." Wouldn't it be nice if love/marriage was this simple? This is Emma as she starts out, the controller, the matchmaker. She "knows" what is best for Harriet, for Mr. Elton, for herself. But of course, like Jocelyn she doesn't really know what is best at all. What Austen points out is that what is necessary is a moral compass of sorts, a love compass. Emma starts without one but gains direction in time. Jocelyn learned but perhaps too late. It isn't just class as Austen makes quite clear ( in my view) in all her books. There is something else that is more important.

An incident of note in the back story of Jocelyn...the picnic with her friends with her mother and Jocelyn makes cruel and cutting remarks to her. This compares to the incident at Box Hill where Emma makes cruel remarks to Miss Bates and Mr. Knightly rebukes her. Daniel rebukes Jocelyn: "That was kind of mean Jocelyn ...After she cooked all that food and all."

...and it is just after this incident that he reveals to Jocelyn that he loves Sylvia not her.

I get the feeling Jocelyn feels she missed her chance. She likes Austen because Austen recreates a world where it is all possible again, where people ALMOST make the wrong choices but are saved and all works out in the end. Is real life like that? Not for some. Does Jocelyn wish she could go back and do things differently? Of course, don't we all? Austen herself was unmarried- like Jocelyn. Did she have the same feeling? Austen didn't breed dogs and dust light bulbs- she wrote books instead.

The choice of who we marry is perhaps one of the most important choices we make. It is no less fraught with false leads in our day and age and society than it was in Austen's day.

But we all have our own private Austen. This is jumping ahead a bit, but reading the comments at the back of the book about Austen and her novels...everyone has a different take. For example ( from Martin Amis) Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros and Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the semioticians, the deconstructors- all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle class provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself." Jocelyn you see is reading herself into the novel and Fowler who wrote the Book Club is reading herself and her characters into the novel and we read ourselves into it. Which tells me that Austen captured some of the complexity of life in her novels about middle class provincials and that is something!