100 Books, #41: Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

[osprey_archer]

In lieu of the Wednesday reading meme (because I accomplished basically no reading this past week, except a reread of Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary), I'm going to answer lycoris's December meme question: Tell me about your favourite book that you think I might not have heard of.

I actually have a tag that is partially devoted to this question: one of the things I used the 100 books tag for is to write reviews of tragically overlooked books that no one else knows even though I love them. Past reviews in this category include The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, Nekomah Creek, Mummy, and Becoming Rosemary.

But this time I'm going to write about Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, because I did just reread it and because I think it's an absolute tragedy that I didn't hear about it to read it earlier. I don't know that I would have loved it more - I don't think it's a book you need to read at a certain age to love - but I would have loved having it as part of the leafmold of my mind when I was a teenager.

What I love about this book - one of the things I love about this book - is that it's so wide-ranging in its interests. The main characters talk about science and religion (and how science and religion fit together, or don't), feminism, philosophy, vocations, the meaning of friendship and the permutations of friendship, and the way that families work or don't work, and books and literature. This takes up a huge amount of the book: it's all urgently important to Gentian and her friends, and therefore provides the main plot of the book.

For instance, there are couple sections where the narrative absolutely stops while Gentian reads an act of Julius Caesar with her family. I feel like this is doing some sort of thematic work, the way that the Hamlet performance does thematic work in Dean's Tam Lin, but I'm not sure what it is and it's possible that Dean was just like "I feel like talking about Shakespeare."

This is not, suffice it to say, a book with a strongly propulsive plot. In fact, calling the story meandering doesn't really do justice to the way that their conversations loop back on themselves, covering the same ground from different angles, and then shooting off in new and strange directions.

I have heard Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary criticized because Gentian and her friends seem unrealistically precocious, and there is perhaps something to this - they're not only very bright, but also extraordinarily well read and capable of having precise and philosophically sophisticated arguments - but IMO it misses the point. That's not something that would have bothered me if I had read the book as a teenager, any more than it bothered me in Tamora Pierce's First Test that fifteen-year-old Neal apparently found a bunch of ten-year-olds completely suitable companions.

The other problem with the book is that the ending doesn't really come together (I wrote about this at greater length in my original review); endings don't generally seem to be Dean's strong suit - Tam Lin's ending seemed quite abrupt to me. But the book is a dialogue as much as a novel; it's interesting because of the explorations it takes through issues, and those explorations are not discounted because none of them tie up nicely at the end.

***

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary has also led to some musing on my part about friendship novels - that is, novels where the friendship is the force that pushes the narrative, the way a romance pushes a romance novel, rather than novels where the friendship is important but the actual plot comes from something else (like The Eagle of the Ninth, say, where Marcus and Esca's friendship is absolutely integral but the story comes from the search for the eagle).

I think it's rather hard to structure a book around a friendship, because unlike a romance,
a friendship doesn't usually have an arc: there isn't a moment of consummation. It chugs along steadily unless things go south, and even the going south is often not dramatic. Drift kills friendship as much as anything else.

Perhaps having a non-standard structure is an important part of telling friendship stories? Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, my touchstone book about friendship, also has a distinctive structure. I must think about this.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That's a really interesting question, re: books that have friendship as their driving force. It reminds me of a thing that went round the Internet some time back about conflict-less stories, how we're told that stories need conflicts, but in Japan (that was the example given), this isn't necessarily seen as so. The examples were taken from Japanese four-panel comics.

The book I'm reading now, Tinkers has very little plot, and yet I find it hugely compelling. It's the way the characters look at the world, and where they turn their eyes that makes it so.

Yeah, it would be really interesting to think about what makes The Changeling so compelling--because it is.

I'm thinking rachelmanija's category of secret-garden books plays into this too--not that The Changeling or Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary is that kind of a book, but that that category of book also doesn't have the much-touted intro-rising action-climax-denoument structure.

I really loved this, as a concept: I would have loved having it as part of the leafmold of my mind when I was a teenager.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think there is an element of the secret garden to The Changeling - with Bent Oaks Grove, and the imaginary worlds that they build there. And perhaps also the stables? They make a lot of secret worlds in a wider world that is not very hospitable to them.

It's interesting to think about The Changeling in this context, because I think the least compelling part of the book is the attempt to give in a proper climax: the part where Ivy and Martha get accused of breaking into the school. Obviously it didn't ruin the book for me (and the ending is completely perfect, IMO), but it does bobble a bit there, probably because she's trying to push the story into the "proper" story shape and it doesn't quite fit.

The "leafmold of my mind" bit is a quote from somewhere. I wish I could remember where, because I think it would be something you might like (that's why it took me so long to answer this comment, I've been trying to remember where I read it) 0 but it's flittered out of my mind.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about Bent Oaks Grove.

I didn't mind the break-in accusation so much, though now that you mention it, I can see what you're saying about it being an attempt to give the story a proper climax. It (or something like it) seemed necessary precisely for bringing to a head the nature of Ivy's changeling-ness. Thinking about that scene *now* (I mean the scene where Martha says "Oh, it's okay though because you're a changeling," and Ivy rages at her), in the context of conversations about privilege, it's clear that Martha--with no ill will, just profound ignorance--was retreating into a comfortable fiction, and the fiction just could no longer work for Ivy. And it was only if they had this conflict that Ivy could come to think about, and recognize, her more deep changeling nature. And--though I'm not sure that this really gets explored in the story; it's more something I'm thinking about for real-life situations--I think Martha-characters really benefit from having to face Ivy-characters' anger over things like this. Within the actual story, I think it helps Martha, too, understand the difference between the way the metaphor is real and the way it's an insufficient comfort. There was genuine magic in their lives, but they could only see it by seeing past the illusion. ... or something like that. Maybe that de-emphasizes imagination too much, though, which I don't want to do. And comfort stories are vital and absolutely okay, when you're young.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think the break-in accusations are necessary, and they certainly add an extra poignancy to the framing story. Martha hasn't seen or heard for Ivy for two years, and the last time they did see each other it ended sadly, and yet when she hears the Carsons are in town she still runs to Bent Oaks Grove at the first opportunity.

But I feel like the execution leaves something to be desired somehow - the neatness of the fact that it was actually Tom who broke in, or something like that. Although I realize that without Tom's confession, the question of guilt would never get resolved - not that the readers would suspect Ivy, but everyone around Martha would, and that would be thoroughly unpleasant.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I kind of like the more ambiguous resolution you're suggesting. Maybe there could have been a way to do it that neither gave us a neat confession nor left it grim for Ivy and Martha.

I need to go back and reread Tom's confession, and Tom's overall storyline. Was it a believable arc for him, or just, "Here's a character who's in the book; let's have him do it." My copy of the book is inconveniently in a box under my box of CDs, or else I'd get it out. (Tom was Martha's brother, right? I remember him playing Monopoly with her, but I don't remember what prompted the vandalism.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, he's Martha's older brother. It more or less makes sense for him: he's been established as a nice guy who tends to go along with what others want him to do - he's not really in love with football but everyone expects him to play so he does, say. So I could see him doing drugs for the same reason.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a book I should read.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

YES.