Book Review: A Tangled Web
May. 12th, 2024 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerAs I’ve gone through this L. M. Montgomery read-through, many of the books have been rereads. The few that are new to me are at least books I knew a little bit about. I knew that Kilmeny of the Orchard wasn’t very good; I knew that Magic for Marigold began as a collection of short stories, which got stitched together into a novel.
I had never even heard of A Tangled Web before I saw it on sale at the L. M. Montgomery Museum in Prince Edward Island, where I bought it largely because I wanted a souvenir book and it was one of only two books they had in my preferred edition. (The other was Pat of Silver Bush, which of course I also bought.)
In some ways this book is very characteristic of Montgomery: the Prince Edward Island setting, the beautiful nature descriptions, the absolute centrality of houses to the story. (At least two characters are tragically in love with houses from which they believe themselves forever sundered.) But in other ways, it’s an odd duck among the rest of her oeuvre, perhaps most clearly in the fact that the vinegar that adds a light tang to so many of her other books is here the overwhelming flavor.
Both Emily of New Moon and The Blue Castle feature the heroine’s large and largely unpleasant clan. A Tangled Web appears to be what happens when you get rid of the central heroine and focus a book on the clan itself, insular, small-minded, hemmed in by decades of traditions, and obsessed by the question of who is going to inherit a hideous heirloom jug. Aunt Becky left it to someone in her will—or maybe left the choice with her will’s executor? In any case, the lucky recipient will be revealed a year after her death, and the book takes place over that year, chronicling quarrels and romances and deaths and marriages in the clan of the Darks and the Penhallows, two families that have intermarried sixty times over the past few generations.
The book is therefore a tangle of subplots about a bewildering array of characters. Some of them I enjoyed, like the story of Margaret Penhallow. And readers may be interested to know that one subplot concerns two men who live together, Big Sam and Little Sam (Big Sam is of course a pipsqueak and Little Sam is huge), only to quarrel when one of the Sams brings home an alabaster sculpture of a naked lady, then to reconcile in the final scene of the book.
Unfortunately, I never could keep straight which Sam was which, which exemplifies of the difficulty with the book as a whole: there are so many characters that one loses track of them, including, awkwardly, a pair of characters who prove central to the climactic scene. It loses some of its impact when you’re saying “Wait, who’s this again?”
All in all, the books lack the wish fulfillment quality that makes many of Montgomery's other books so charming. A reader might enjoy imagining living in Avonlea, but I don't think anyone reads this book and goes "Gosh, if only I were a Dark or a Penhallow."
I had never even heard of A Tangled Web before I saw it on sale at the L. M. Montgomery Museum in Prince Edward Island, where I bought it largely because I wanted a souvenir book and it was one of only two books they had in my preferred edition. (The other was Pat of Silver Bush, which of course I also bought.)
In some ways this book is very characteristic of Montgomery: the Prince Edward Island setting, the beautiful nature descriptions, the absolute centrality of houses to the story. (At least two characters are tragically in love with houses from which they believe themselves forever sundered.) But in other ways, it’s an odd duck among the rest of her oeuvre, perhaps most clearly in the fact that the vinegar that adds a light tang to so many of her other books is here the overwhelming flavor.
Both Emily of New Moon and The Blue Castle feature the heroine’s large and largely unpleasant clan. A Tangled Web appears to be what happens when you get rid of the central heroine and focus a book on the clan itself, insular, small-minded, hemmed in by decades of traditions, and obsessed by the question of who is going to inherit a hideous heirloom jug. Aunt Becky left it to someone in her will—or maybe left the choice with her will’s executor? In any case, the lucky recipient will be revealed a year after her death, and the book takes place over that year, chronicling quarrels and romances and deaths and marriages in the clan of the Darks and the Penhallows, two families that have intermarried sixty times over the past few generations.
The book is therefore a tangle of subplots about a bewildering array of characters. Some of them I enjoyed, like the story of Margaret Penhallow. And readers may be interested to know that one subplot concerns two men who live together, Big Sam and Little Sam (Big Sam is of course a pipsqueak and Little Sam is huge), only to quarrel when one of the Sams brings home an alabaster sculpture of a naked lady, then to reconcile in the final scene of the book.
Unfortunately, I never could keep straight which Sam was which, which exemplifies of the difficulty with the book as a whole: there are so many characters that one loses track of them, including, awkwardly, a pair of characters who prove central to the climactic scene. It loses some of its impact when you’re saying “Wait, who’s this again?”
All in all, the books lack the wish fulfillment quality that makes many of Montgomery's other books so charming. A reader might enjoy imagining living in Avonlea, but I don't think anyone reads this book and goes "Gosh, if only I were a Dark or a Penhallow."
