North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

                                              

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell is a classic English novel about class, love, and work.  It was written in 1855, with an eye to the change in life up north with the industrial revolution - specifically, the cotton mills in Milton, in the north.  I have seen the BBC production and love it - Richard Armitage as John Thornton, mill owner, and Daniela Denby-Ashe as Margaret Hale, southern daughter of a minister who leaves the church after a collapse of faith.  They move up north where he takes up a post teaching the classics as a private tutor, going to Milton because Mr Hale has a friend from his Oxford education days who owns property up there, and offers to help get him settled. Mr Thornton owns his mill, but leases the property from Mr Bell, Mr Hale's friend. 

What's fun is that Margaret and John dislike each other on meeting.  She thinks he is a boor, and rough, and a tradesman, and he thinks she is proud, and haughty, and knows nothing.  If you think Pride and Prejudice, you are right, as Gaskell wrote this with that novel in mind.  She has changed the setting, and added a great deal about English mill-towns and working-class life that make this novel so interesting to read now, but the real story is always Margaret and John, and how they learn to really see one another beyond their initial prejudices and beliefs.

I could hardly put this book down, which enormously thrilled me.  I was hoping for a deeper understanding of John and Margaret, as the tv show shows their change of feelings, but not enough to satisfy me as to their thoughts.  North and South thrilled me with showing me the workings of John's mind. He is a great character, stern, intelligent, and self-made - the modern English man, shaped by the freeing of the Industrial Revolution, wanting their freedom from the political decisions from London.  Fiercely independent as well, he also has a conscience, and as he discovers, an ability to love deeply, hopelessly, kind of like Anne Eliot in Persuasion.  Even though the novel is mostly from Margaret's perspective, John is a stand-out figure, marching across the page, intensely alive and stealing every scene, just as he does in the tv show. 

I have spent the day pondering why I like his character so much, and why I have difficulty warming up to Margaret. At first I thought it was how she was portrayed in the series, but as I read the novel, I realized that the character of Margaret is difficult to write.  She is one of those good heroines who take in the suffering of others and often exist in relation to others.  The most interesting part of her, the revelation that she loves John, is withheld from us, in the novel - we have to read between the lines, and I dislike this.  If we get to feel her shame at the lie she tells to protect her brother, and the despair that John knows about the lie, which leads her to realize she can only care so much about his good opinion because she cares about him, it would have been good to have that clear statement of her feelings for him in the novel.  We certainly get John's!  There is no doubt that she does love him, it's just that the final chapter has a rushed feeling, when so long of the novel is the set-up and building to her realizing that she has changed - she comes to love Milton, and the man who lives there.

That aside, and that's just me, I wanted to share in Margaret's understanding of her own heart, and the joy that she loves, as well as the sorrow because she thinks he no longer does - to have that emotional depth shown from her too, clearly.  This is a small quibble though, because this is a wonderful lively novel about life in mid-century England.  I was fascinated to read about the poverty, the change of circumstance the Hales find themselves in when they leave their comfortable Rectory for the cold life of the north.  The characters are all exquisitely drawn, the Hales, the Thorntons, and the Higgins, the three families that chiefly star in the different levels of society in mid-century Victorian England.  In the midst of this, we see the dark skies above the mill towns, the heavy dark fog, the bad air caused by the machines, and the difficulties faced between those men who have achieved ownership of their mills, and those who work underneath them.  Gaskell was well aware of the working-class in England as her husband's work as a minister took him among the lower classes of Manchester, one of the great manufacturing towns of England. She could see the changes for the women who could work, the struggles of families to earn enough to live on, and the working class fear that the rich were getting rich and not paying the workers their fair share.  So in North and South, there is a strike by the workers, that draw Margaret and Mr Hale to learn about the working class needs, versus the views spoused by John Thornton.  It's interesting to read now, especially as strikes still happen, with much the same causes and beliefs as back then. Not much has changed.

One of the things that is interesting about Margaret is that she does not really have any wants or desires of her own.  She doesn't have any intellectual leanings, doesn't study on her own, doesn't want  to be a teacher or do anything.  She doesn't even want to get married, particularly, and ignores most men .  There is no primping, no fashion talk except through her cousin Edith, who is rich, bubbly, empty-headed, and beautiful, everything Margaret is not. There is no jealousy, no wanting, nothing.  They love each other and are close, but Margaret doesn't want anything for herself.  She believes in fairness, and justice, but doesn't know what they mean until she goes to Milton and finds out that she has courage and cowardice in equal measure.  So despite her not wanting to do anything but be a support to her parents, she is an interesting character as she discovers who she is as a person.  This has to be one of the first novels that didn't have a female character constantly wondering if she would marry, worried about her prospects - which I think might have made a powerful novel if Gaskell had made her penniless and family-less when her parents die, instead of having her rich aunt whisk her away to London again, and then conveniently she is left money to become an heiress.  I think if Margaret had been forced to make her way in the world, that would have been an illuminating novel, but Gaskell had already gone there with Mary Barton, so she backed down a little with this novel. Margaret Hale is a good woman, a good character, virtuous and kind and intelligent, strong and considerate. 

I am so happy I finally read this novel.  As always,  the book is better than the tv series, at least for me.   We get to see the inner thoughts of the characters, their motivations, and know everything in greater detail.  The tv series is true to the book, and the characters, and the differences are minor tweaks, except the ending, which is better in the book, I think. She would never kiss him in public as they do in the tv series at the ending!  Even though it is very romantic and I love it, on tv, I prefer  how they come together in the book - very similar, but privately.  Much more in tune with their characters.  All in all, an excellent novel.

The House of the Spirits

I finished reading this book yesterday, and all day today bits of it kept floating into my mind. I was surprised when I thought about my lunch and realised I wouldn't be reading this book. I think I know why so many people love this book. I think I have fallen in love with it too.

It is the ending that convinced me this book is worth being on the 1001 Books to read before you Die List. It is part of my 1% reading challenge. I have to say my inner literary bookworm is so thrilled that I ended up liking this book that she is actually speaking to me (I don't read enough classics for her, this elitist book snob part of me that prefers I read only the best books. My constant argument with her is that these are books chosen by other people, not by me, and they are snobs since they don't consider fantasy or other genre writing to be 'classic' in most cases. This is an ongoing argument with myself, but since I've signed up for the 1% challenge my ILB is happily planning how to convince me to read Proust and is leaving me alone with Charles de Lint for the next year instead making me read Canadian authors I don't like just to please her. I wish I could like Carol Shields, but her early book Swann's Way I couldn't finish, and I can't stand Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. I hate that book!!! So I don't care what the rest of the world says, I'll keep reading LM Montgomery and Charles de Lint instead....yikes, I think my Inner Literary Bookworm just snarled at me!) Sorry for the side comments, you see the struggle I have between wanting to be well-read and actually reading 'classics'.....

So, I opened The House of the Spirits not knowing what to expect, except that I knew a lot of people, both in the blogging world and from my years at the bookstores, who read and loved this book. From the beginning this book swept me up into the story of the Trueba family. Clara, Esteban, Alba, Miguel, Ferula, Nanny, Pedro, Blanca, they were alive in the way that only the best characters are. Clara floated through the novel as she floated in her world, and in the same way she was the heart of the house, and her family, she was the heart of the story. Clara the clairvoyant, who talked with the spirits and dreamed the future; Esteban, who seems to be a loud tyrant, and slowly is revealed to represent the old Chile - he is the voice for the wealthy landowner, conservative MP, who doesn't understand why his serfs want rights and equality. It is fascinating to see how Allende gives voice to all her characters, so we see Esteban proud of what he has accomplished and unaware of how feared he was - yet knowing he had to 'rule his peasants with a firm hand because they are like children'. Clara, who knows the future, but unable to run her household or prevent her dear sister-in-law being thrown out, or stop the future from happening - she just sees it. Blanca, the only one to get her heart's desire in the end. All these characters are the centre of the book, the heart of the family, this proud, dysfunctional family caught up in Chile's tumultous 20th century culminating in the terrible coup d'etat in Sept 1973 that saw President Allende - the uncle of the writer - overthown. The Trueba family is caught up in these events, and to my mind, the most powerful part of the book is the ending, when Alba is taken away in the night to be tortured. I stayed up late Tuesday night to finish the book, and I wept through all the terrible suffering and torture. Isabel Allende takes the story of Chile's change from an agricultural country with the land held by a few to a semi-industrialized nation with the dispossessed workers moving to the city and starving and makes it become real through the position the Trueba family holds and the differing values and beliefs of each of the family members. While this is a common technique in novels, in this book, this brings the struggles to change, the resistance by the rich, leading to the Marxist president and then his eventual overthrow by the army a gripping one that had me on edge, because the characters are intimately involved in different levels of society in that world. Jaime is a doctor, Esteban is a senator and landowner, Blanca loves a revolutionary, as does Alba. Knowing the outcome of the real-life events only gives the novel a deeper edge. One of the most shocking moments for me was when Jaime (one of Esteban and Clara's sons) receives a phone call from the President's Office on the morning of the coup. He goes. It gave me a start because in real life, I had recently watched one of our talk-show hosts on TV Ontario (a public station like PBS in the US) interview Ariel Dorfman, who worked as one of the spokesmen for President Allende. He survived the coup because on the morning of the coup, he didn't receive a phone call. He wondered why later, and found out that someone already at the Presidential Office had crossed his name off the list and offered herself instead, thereby saving Dorfman's life. Dorfman was allowed to flee the country, and eventually ended up in the US, and has just recently made a film about the coup, called "A Promise to the Dead", and what life has been like for him as an exile. I also would like to say that I lived next door to a woman for many years here in Ottawa, who was also an exile from Chile. She and her brother fled after the coup. She only ever talked about being away from Chile and not being able to go back, and what her family did before, a little. She was always so sad, and for her, life was before the coup, and after. So I brought all this with me to the book, and when I read that paragraph: "The day of the coup the sun was shining, a rare event in that timid spring that was just dawning. Jaime had worked practically all night and by seven in the morning his body had had only two hours of sleep. He was awakened by the ring of the telephone. It was a secretary, her voice slightly agitated, who scared his drowsiness away. She was calling from the Presidential Palace to inform him that he should present himself there as soon as possible; no, the President was not ill, no, she was not sure what was happening, she had simply been instructed to call all the President's doctors." I gave a little jump. From now on, it was the recounting of what really happened, in the guise of fiction. And by putting into fiction, by writing about it, Allende has born witness to what happened, and made sure the story is told.

This is why writing is important, why books are censored, why writers are feared by dictators, presidents, tyrants, anyone who fears free speech: writers, and the stories and books they tell, show the truth. They tell the stories so people will remember what happened. So all the people who died in Chile, in Rwanda, in the Congo, in World War 2, in the past and in the future, will be remembered. So their voices will be heard.

"they can't do that to someone from my own family, in my own house, because then what the hell is left for everybody else, if people like us can be arrested then nobody is safe, that more than twenty years in Congress aren't worth a damn and all the acquaintances I have, I know everybody in this country, at least everyone important, even General Hurtado, who's my personal friend but in this case hasn't lifted a finger to help me locate my granddaughter, it's not possible she could just disappear as if by magic, that they could take her away in the night and that I should never hear a word of her again...." Every parent is in those words, every person who lost someone in that coup, and in Argentina, and anywhere else where people disappear because of what they stand for.

This book breaks my heart, and puts it back together, and is amazing, beautiful, and haunting. It is a story about love, and death, about idiosyncrasies and human souls and evil and ghosts and it is above all wise and haunting, like Clara, like the ghosts who run up and down the halls of the house of the title.

I will do another post of the banned book Challenge, but as I still have to review A Wrinkle in Time (which I also loved), I will leave it for another day, when it is not so late! It's well past midnight now! I, and my Inner Literary Bookworm, are still mulling through all the ideas and emotions The House of the Spirits brought up. And I haven't even discussed the poetry of the settings, the language, the humour, the life in this novel. If you haven't read it yet, then it's worth it to get it. and if you have, let me know and I'll add your review link to the bottom, and I'll come see what you thought about the book. If I had a book club, this would be one of the books we'd read the first year.

And, in a side note, the coup in Chile occurred Sept 11, 1973. Ariel Dorfman has written a book titled : "Other Septembers, Other Americas". Here is a link to a recent interview with Dorfman on Salon , about his film, and what it was like to go back to Chile and revisit his memories of President Allende and the coup. If we get the film up here I will be going to see it.