Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance, by Paulette Jiles
I knew I wanted to read this novel, as I had such fond memories of an earlier work by this author, entitled News of the World. That book achieved the rare distinction of being liked – no, loved! – by everyone in my book group.
John Chenneville is a veteran of the recently ended Civil War. He is recovering from a head wound while making his solitary way back home. At length, he reaches his destination, only to be told about a vicious killing that has blighted his own family. His reaction to this atrocity is to set out in pursuit of the perpetrator. Nothing else matters; he must have his revenge.
Jiles has a way of recreating the past that is uniquely evocative. In her writing, she combines beauty of language with meticulous detail. It works like a kind of magic. Sometimes pictures would appear vividly in my mind, or feelings would become so powerful that I had to stop reading and just sit and stare into the middle distance.
There’s this:
‘John made camp at a good spot higher up so he could watch the road. He found a dry rock shelter with a trickle of spring water coming down one wall, maidenhair fern like green lace. He was careful with his fire; this was Indian Territory, and there was some doubt among the people as to which laws applied, if any, and to whom. The river was noisy far below, and the forest spoke aloud as one naked branch creaked against another and small dried leaves trembled on the greenbrier vines. The new moon swam up out of the horizon and into the heavens.’
And this:
‘He wondered if perhaps his search had come to an end. If there was no further place to go. This was a foreign country to him. His demons were now interior ones: discouragement, bafflement, weariness. A flush of anger came to him. It was unfair, unfair. He stopped this internal monologue by looking up quickly, seeing the forest around him and the deep red soil in the road leaching into the puddles as if in remembrance of some ancient crime. The woodland seemed bitter and disordered, and he remembered a better way of life with great imperishable rivers and silky hayfields in windblown waves and apple blossom petals cascading like snow. They were a great possession, those memories.’
Do I recommend this novel? Gosh, do I ever.
Ron’s Birthday
Earlier this month, Ron celebrated his birthday. It was a lovely occasion.
He received a number of cards, from family and friends:
We went to dinner at a restaurant here at The Garlands. I had whitefish, while Ron had one of his favorite meals, a hamburger with French fries. The food here is delicious!
Finally, Ron received from me the gift of a framed portrait – a photograph – of Gustav Mahler, one of his favorite composers. (Mahler is also a favorite of mine.)
This is as good a place as any for me to say once more how deeply I love this man. He has been, since 1989, my beloved, my friend, my support in times of need. Thank you, Ron!
It was music that first brought us together. Should you be curious as to why we are such ardent lovers of Mahler’s music in particular, I invite you to listen to this joyous performance of his First Symphony:
Autumn Comes to The Garlands
We are currently being treated to a succession of beautiful sunny days:
This gentleman continues to walk his Schnauzer every day up and down this path in our courtyard. (I have noted them before.) Their appearance, though poignant, lifts my heart. You can tell from watching them interact that they have a lovely relationship.
Meanwhile, the gardening season is drawing to a close. The flowers are making an especially luminous display, or perhaps it only seems so.
I am deeply grateful to have at present this beauty, man made and natural, surrounding me.
Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life, by George Eliot
I was so enraptured by Thunderclap, I couldn’t imagine what to read next. Fiction or nonfiction – it had to be something altogether wonderful, brilliant, unforgettable…
It had to be Middlemarch.
I first read this book decades ago, during my inexorable march though all the classics that I never had time to read while I was majoring in English in college. Even amid that welter of memorable prose and riveting storytelling, Eliot’s masterpiece stood out in my memory. I had long desired to reread it when Rebecca Mead came out with My Life in Middlemarch in 2014, reminding me yet again of that intention. Then, rather oddly, I began seeing Eliot’s novel on an increasing number of lists of favorite books of all time posted by various individuals – all passionate readers like me. Obviously, the time had come.
Middlemarch was written in the early 1870s, but Eliot sets her work in earlier in the nineteenth century, 1829 to 1832, when the effect of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to make themselves felt in England’s rural hinterland. Middlemarch is just such a place. The novel tells three love stories; the fates of the six characters thus involved unfold against the back drop of a provincial society on the cusp of major and irrevocable change.
So: what happens when Dorothea Brooke, a stern yet fascinating young woman, marries Edward Casaubon, a man who…well, put it this way: to make his acquaintance is, for a variety of reasons, to find oneself utterly dumbstruck.
Mr Casaubon is an ordained cleric who aspires to scholarly greatness. He is laboring – and I do mean laboring, a word which in this case rightly evokes an image of unrelieved drudgery – on his magnum opus, entitled (with no hint of modesty) A Key To All Mythologies.
By the time the reader meets him, he is already woefully beset by the difficulties inherent in this project:
‘Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.’
Completely preoccupied by his (futile) scholarly endeavors, Casaubon has no idea how to be a loving husband – how to a cherish a worthy wife like Dorothea. She meanwhile, in her efforts to act as his helpmeet, only succeeds in alienating him by convincing him of his true inadequacy:
”There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that inappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.’
It may be readily imagined how much pain this situation brings to both parties. This is especially true of Dorothea, whose nature is at once passionate and generous, and informed with high, if unrealistic, idealism.
Now, there is a phrase that is at once abstruse and beautiful: …’a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts….’ It may serve as a reminder that we are visitors in a literary world radically different than our own. I have found that it takes a major intellectual readjustment to read the Victorians in a way that flows smoothly. The sentences are longer and sometimes seem convoluted. And the vocabulary can be challenging. And yet, once I became accustomed to this different means of expression, I began to enjoy it – even to crave it.
Now I love it.
Middlemarch is a big, sprawling epic; I’m in no way trying to do it justice in this space. I am only trying to commend it to you, with all my heart.
I was looking for the 1994 BBC version of this novel when I came across this video on YouTube. I disliked it at first because of the song “Hallelujah,” which I feel as been somewhat overused and at any rate seemed inappropriate in this context. Oddly, however, I watched it a few more times and found myself liking it very much.
Juliet Aubrey is not an actress that I know, but she seems very fine in the role of Dorothea. In the final scene, the expression on her face – of courage, serenity, and love – is intensely moving. Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw is likewise perfectly cast.
(I was somewhat surprised to encounter Patrick Malahyde as Casaubon, since I have so enjoyed his performance in the title role of the Inspector Alleyn Mysteries.In this series, Roderick Alleyn’s love interest, the artist Agatha Troy, is played by Belinda Lang. She is married to Hugh Fraser, best known as the stalwart if not overly bright Captain Hastings in the Poirot mysteries starring David Suchet. This has nothing to do with Middlemarch, but I love uncovering facts like this.)
Obviously, the next book to read was My Life in Middlemarch. Rebecca Mead’s book is a mixture of memoir and literary analysis, and I enjoyed it very much. Her research on the life and work of George Eliot was deeply impressive.
There is a new book on Eliot entitled The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, by Clare Carlisle. This topic was covered pretty thoroughly by Mead, but nonetheless I think I’ll read Carlisle’s book anyway.
Books to the Ceiling 