Liesl & Po, and Trilby

I am behind on my book reviews! I am usually behind on my book reviews, until I hit on a book that I just have to write about - in this case, Lauren Oliver's Liesl and Po.

It reminded me of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (not least because of the lovely, atmospheric illustrations) and Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, and even a bit of Kate diCamillo's The Magician's Elephant and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book - okay, so this is a book positioned squarely on the conventions of contemporary juvenile fantasy. It does these conventions well, and it's very enjoyable if you enjoy that numinous faintly fairy-tale feeling, but it's basically reorganizing tropes rather than doing anything new with them.

It is individual only in that it has the least conclusive ending ever. It doesn't so much cliff hang as leap off a cliff and dangle in midair in a manner that suggests that maybe they just somehow forget to attach the last few chapters.

Seriously, maybe I should go check the copy at the other library and see if maybe there's another chapter going on. Because really.

***

Otherwise I have been reading George du Maurier's Trilby, which was so massively popular that they named a hat after it - and, indeed, a number of other things, because the Trilby craze was huge.

And I can see why: the book kicks off with an absolutely enchanting series of chapters about life in the bohemian artistic sections of Paris in the 1850s, as seen through the golden glow of nostalgia from the 1890s, when du Maurier wrote the novel. (He is, incidentally, the grandfather of Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca.) Little Billy, Taffy and the Laird share a studio so full of ineffable camaraderie as to be irresistibly attractive.

And it is not merely the reader who feels this enchanting pull, but the titular Trilby, too: Trilby, the half-Irish, half-upper-class-English French grisette. She's cheerful, charming, statuesquely beautiful in the best 1890s fashion; du Maurier says that if she had been living in the 1890s, people would have worshipped at her feet - which, incidentally, are the most beautiful feet in the world; he lavishes whole pages on Trilby's feet - but as she lived in the 1850s, no one was quite sure what to do about her style of beauty.

Naturally Little Billy falls madly in love and asks Trilby to marry him thirty-three times; but of course he can't marry a grisette who used to pose in the nude. They are torn apart, he falls into a massive depression, and she falls into the greasy-haired clutches of Svengali the anti-Semitic caricature.

Du Maurier seems to be vaguely aware that collapsing Svengali's Jewishness and villainy together like this is a problem. Thus you get odd passages, such as, "in his winning and handsome face there was just a faint suggestion of some possible very remote Jewish ancestor - just a tinge of that strong, sturdy, irrepressible, indomitable, indelible blood which is of such priceless value in diluted homeopathic doses, like the dry white Spanish wine called montijo, which is not meant to be taken pure..."

Way to dig yourself in deeper, du Maurier. All this rather detracts from the welcoming warmth of bohemia that is otherwise so alluring.

100 Books, #30: The Egypt Game

I love Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s books for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is the fact that she captures the magic of imaginative games. The Changeling does this beautifully too, but her finest book on this score has to be The Egypt Game, which follows new friends April Hall and Melanie Ross as they build a complicated game based on - though swiftly spiraling out from - ancient Egypt.

I love the descriptions of the game, and the book gives them their full due: it describes the backyard of the local antique store that they slowly take over as a stage set for Egypt, the household items that they manage to spruce up into Egypt wear, the way that the game slowly adds new subplots, new characters - and new players - and evolves over the course of its run.

I also love April and Melanie's friendship, which evolves from prickly beginnings into a steadfast thing. April can be difficult and prickly and not so much attention-seeking as attention-demanding; when she and Melanie first meet, April is wearing a massive feather boa, even larger fake eyebrows, and a "I'm from Hollywood and know everything" attitude. She's putting on a front: her feckless mother has just sent her to live with her grandmother, and April feels insecure and unwanted and damned if she's going to show it.

But she and Melanie manage to work past that through their mutual love of story-telling and ancient Egypt. (I suspect that taking care of her little brother Marshall, who is also a rather odd kettle of fish, has given Melanie some extra maturity for her age.)

Another thing I appreciate about Snyder's writing, more now that I'm older and rereading, is how gracefully she incorporates diversity and changing social mores into her stories. Melanie and her little brother Marshall are black, April is white, their neighbor Elizabeth Chung is Chinese-American - and also a lot younger than Melanie and April; I like how the book has a mix of ages - Ken Kamata is Japanese-American (and also kind of a dumb jock type: he can never lose himself in the game but retains always an awareness of how kookie they all look, walking around casting ashes on their heads), and Toby Alvillar is...complicated?

And it all seems very natural. Snyder introduces this diversity so gracefully that it just seems like the way things are in the Casa Rosada, where April and Melanie live, and not at all as if she's teaching a lesson or making a point.

***

This gracefulness is part of why The Egypt Game's belated sequel, The Gypsy Game, so disappointing: where The Egypt Game is light-handed, The Gypsy Game is as subtle as a brick. It would be bad even if it weren't a sequel, but the comparison makes its faults especially glaring. Clearly at some point Snyder realized that making a game about gypsies would be just as bad as making, say, the Jewish Game.

Which is true, but unfortunately social insight alone does not a good novel make. The book becomes not so much a novel as a PSA: a very dull PSA where nothing imaginative happens at all. And when I first read it, in 1997 when the book came out, I was too busy being bitter about its failure as a novel to retain any of its social messages.

Away for camping!

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a ( hot air balloon! )

Sorry for rather deluging you with posts this afternoon. There were a few things I needed to get posted before leaving for my camping trip - I'm leaving tomorrow, very early, for a ten day canoe trip in the wilds, and won't be back on my computer till August 10th at the earliest, and 11th or even 12th is more likely.

I am taking along the beautiful blank book my suitemates Sae and Mai Nou gave me when I graduated. It's so lovely I've been loath to use it; but the moment has arrived.

Hope the beginning of August is lovely for everyone!