#94-99: the dickens entry.

[extemporally]

Calling Invisible Women, by Jeanne Ray.

AWESOME - middle-aged Clover Hobart wakes up one day and finds that she's become invisible. Not figuratively, but literally, and her family don't seem to notice at all: apparently she's been invisible to them since before. I loved how thoughtful this novel was - sure, literal invisibility is a metaphor for the invisibility of older women in Western society, and the characters are all self-aware enough at some point to reference this, but that's not all it is - it's also a disability, a superpower (she disarms a bank robbery and then writes an op-ed about it; BAD. ASS), and a cause for social outrage. There are community organising, support grouping and class-action lawsuits - which obviously makes this novel RIGHT UP MY ALLEY. One thing I like about Jeanne Ray's novels - though it can also kind of be a frustrating thing - is that they're all essentially populated by kind, goodhearted characters (usually family members) who end up doing the right thing, even if they're kind of too stressed or busy to do it at first. She also has an especial soft spot for her husband, a hugely overworked pediatrician - which is why I assume she doesn't freak out when he doesn't realise his wife's turned invisible for like months on end. That, and thirty years of marriage. Another key trope of her novels is also the Self-Absorbed Daughter, which was great in Romeo & Julie - I thought she got that keynote of selfish yuppiedom + unintentional emotional manipulation down just right - and detachedly great in Eat Cake but was just slightly too caricatured here, idk. Obviously this is a feminist novel about older women, and it was great in that sense, but the self-absorbed college daughter here, idk, maybe it just hit too many buttons close to home but it made me think about intergenerational feminist ~~divides~~ and ageism that cuts both ways. Anyway, conclusion: despite reservation, A++, would recommend!

The Magicians of Caprona, by Diana Wynne Jones.

I liked this a lot but it wasn't my favourite Chrestomanci book; I guess a lot of that is down to my personal hangups about how I associate DWJ with a particular kind of Englishness and so the Italian setting here kind of knocked me off-course, which is weird, because I didn't think that DWJ failed at writing Caprona or anything like that. In fact, it was pretty great!!! I was a fan of all the Petrocchi-Montana partnerships, esp. Rosa/Marco, and the singing especially was great. I... just don't have a whole lot to say about this novel, is all. /o\

Witch Week, by Diana Wynne Jones.

Someone (I forget who) told me that Witch Week is one of their favourite Chrestomanci novels and OH MAN I TOTALLY SEE WHY. Like, this was such a weird perspective because in all the Chrestomanci novels magic is front and centre in a way it was (but wasn't!!!) here; I mean in the sense of this world being completely similar to Real Life so that when magic or witchcraft showed up it was this huge threatening thing.

- I've said before that I don't think DWJ is particularly good at doing politics, but this book made me change my mind. I mean, magic wasn't a Big Social Metaphor here, I don't think, but I really enjoyed the.... pain and fear and danger and creepiness that goes into concealing something, if that makes sense? It's the way she writes damage so well that makes me really want to go back and reread Time of the Ghost, because I'm pretty sure I did miss some pretty huge points there when I was reading TotG. Anyway, here: It hurts to be burnt. What the hell!!!

- Also re politics - the ending and how the snotty girls ended up in a different, private, school made me want to be super wanky about how the witch thing basically gets substituted with ~~allusion to the class system~~ - though I definitely think that DWJ also did it as a sort of wish-fulfillment thing; wouldn't you want the better universe to get rid of the bullies in your class for you? But for real, though.

- But also, 'real boys' and 'real girls' - ouch. :((

- Class 6B cracks me up SO MUCH because it's so much like what some bits of my primary/secondary school life was except we were probably weirder. And, okay, I wanted to quote the journal entry bits before realising that all the journal entry bits are really Nirupam's, so, shoutout to ♥NIRUPAM♥ here:

I do not know, Nirupam Singh wrote musingly, how anyone manages to write much in their journal, since everyone knows Miss Cadwallader reads them all during the holidays. I do not write my secret thoughts. I will now describe the Indian rope trick which I saw in India before my father came to live in England...

...

I do not think, Estelle Green wrote, that I have any secret feelings today, but I would like to know what is in the note from Miss Hodge that Teddy has just found. I thought she scorned him utterly.

...

Nan Pilgrim meanwhile was scrawling, This is a message to the person who reads our journals. Are you Miss Cadwallader, or does Miss Cadwallader make Mr Wentworth do it?

&:

Nirupam wrote, Today, no comment. I shall not even think about high table.

Ahahaha!!! I can just hear him saying that. OR EVEN HERE:

Miss Hodge made Dan into suspect number one at once. "Then you begin, Dan," she said, "with Theresa. Which are you, Theresa - witch or inquisitor?"

"Inquisitor, Miss Hodge," Theresa said promptly.

"It's not fair!" said Dan. "I don't know what witches do!"

Nor did he, it was clear. And it was equally clear that Theresa had no more idea what inquisitors did. They stood woodenly by the blackboard. Dan stared at the ceiling, while Theresa stated, "You are the witch." Whereupon Dan told the ceiling, "No I am not." And they went on doing this until Miss Hodge told them to stop. Regretfully, she demoted Dan from first suspect to last, and put Theresa down there with him, and called up the next pair.

Nobody behaved suspiciously. Most people's idea was to get the acting over as quickly as possible. Some argued a little, for the look of the thing. Others tried running about to make things seem dramatic. And first prize for brevity certainly went to Simon Silverson and Karen Grigg. Simon said, "I know you're a witch, so don't argue."

And Karen replied, "Yes, I am. I give in. Let's stop now."

By the time it got to Nirupam, Miss Hodge's list of suspects was all bottom and no top. Then Nirupam put on a terrifying performance as inquisitor. His eyes blazed. His voice alternately roared and fell to a sinister whisper. He pointed fiercely at Estelle's face. "Look at your evil eyes!" he bellowed. Then he whispered, "I see you, I feel you, I know you - you are a witch!" Estelle was so frightened that she gave a real performance of terrified innocence. But Brian Wentworth's performance as a witch outshone even Nirupam. Brian wept, he cringed, he made obviously false escuses, and he ended up kneeling at Delia Martin's feet, sobbing for mercy and crying real tears.

a) oh, my god, it's like writing this DWJ had a lifeline right into what school was like for me a lot of the time (except for the last two years, socially those were a bit shit) b) I AM PRETTY FOND OF THIS NIRUPAM FELLA IF YOU HAVEN'T NOTICED and c) I actually want all the school stories now. All the comic stories about state schools forever, please and thank you

I'd been somehow led to think that Witch Week was actually a novel about... the school that the Chrestomanci before Christopher Chant set up, when Christopher was still a boy? I'm actually really really glad this novel isn't that and is the novel it is instead. (Although ngl, I would still read that novel.)

Is, by Joan Aiken.

I always tend to think that Joan Aiken is much less famous than she actually is, with the result that whenever I read one of her novels I always end up beating at my chest and rending my clothing and doing some seriously weird things with sackcloth and ashes and being like WHY ISN'T SHE MORE FAMOUS THOUGH??? Throwbacks of being of the Harry Potter generation: writing YA suddenly seems so much more lucrative and glamorous than it actually is.

Anyway, little preamble over: this was great!!! So somewhere on the Internet it says that Joan Aiken was really influenced by Dickens, and having Dickens read to her when she was little, and that makes a lot of sense - I mean obviously the first Big Thing is that sense of what I will always, due to an extremely influential high school teacher, refer to in my head as elemental consciousness: she has it, and I think the atmosphere just gets so much more fantasylike without it actually being fantasy. Or maybe I just mean Dickensian.

On a sidenote, I really do love the Wolves of Willoughby sequence a lot because it is fantasy without being supernatural; her alternate universe (in which James III is on the throne and there are wolves in England) is so brilliant and frightening and superreal; it's brilliant. In a sense it's more Dickensian than Dickens really because all of Dickens novels are really about young protagonists making their way (or not making their way, as in the case of Great Expectations blah blah blah five minute discourse on agency and passivity blah blah blah maybe I should reread that) in the world and the magic of his universe really comes out in his descriptions of things, especially in novels like Great Expectations and Little Dorrit and... A Tale of Two Cities, I've been told? Here the sequences of events are themselves Dickensian; I don't know how else to describe it.

ANYWAY this was also great because it was also about, you know, classic Dickensian concerns like the Industrial Revolution and exploitation and children (god, it was so great how she expanded the enslavement of children into a whole thing where to be a child is to be stigmatised and exploited and damaged, no matter where on the class system you're on) and argh politics. One thing I've started to realise through my YA reading jag this summer is that a lot of YA - or, the best YA - or, the YA I'm the most drawn to is really about social justice and STANDING UP AND FIGHTING FOR WHAT'S RIGHT in a way that a lot of adult fiction... is not. (I mean, feel free to prove me wrong and rec me a lot of adult fiction that is about that!!!) Which makes me look very kindly on YA writers as a demographic. I hadn't realised they were so... well, what's the non-derisive term for preachy? Anyway, concerned with the right and good is all I mean. I love that at numerous times here Is has the option of just running away, but she doesn't, and just stays on to snoop around. ♥IS♥

This Review Is All About Charles Dickens, part 3: the thing that always irked me the most about Great Expectations was how Joe Gargery would be written dialectically, and Pip wouldn't, even when he was a little boy still living with Joe & Mrs Joe. I mean, yes, for sure, he goes to London and learns to be a gentleman and shit, but there's still years and years before that where he's basically linguistically exposed to solely how everyone else in the village talks! Dickens goes to great lengths to depict Joe dialectically, but with Pip it's, like, RP from the get-go, and that's one of those blindspots that I find infuriating as fuck.

And I know some people who are like, but what the fuck is dialectal rendering about, anyway? And fair point - it can be hard to pull off, and if it's not done well it can be super condescending, but I actually... love it. Idk, maybe my standards are just lower, but nothing will ever make me joy as hard as a Lord Peter Wimsey dropped g or an Alfian Sa'at 'is it' or a Dickensian 'pint out the place', and I'm certainly not about to stop right about now. So. I loved Is's dialectical renderings here. I JUST... LOVE THEM. OKAY.

In conclusion: given that the events of this novel is supposed to take place alongside those of Midwinter Nightingale, which I read like two years ago and liked but not as much as this, I also loved the neat parallelism of the female protagonists crying at the end of the book. YES.

Cold Shoulder Road, by Joan Aiken.

Not as brilliant as Is, but I think I make it pretty clear in my last review that that's a pretty high standard. I'm all talked out now but I enjoyed this! I didn't think the Dickens mojo was as strong in here, if only because it was pretty different in terms of theme and character - Dickens can do a lot of things, but he never really paid any attention to 'somewhat dysfunctional and mismatched families trying to work it out while saving the world' without reducing it to caricature, so.

Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters.

ANOTHER DICKENS HOMAGE and no I'm not even kidding, GUYS this is so obviously the lesbian version of Great Expectations and I loved it for that but I also loved it for being an absurdly compelling novel on its own terms. I mean, I rushed through this in a matter of hours and that was at the end of reading, like, the Aiken novels AND being blown away by those and this is also 550 pages long but you probably wouldn't feel the heft of it, it was just that great. I admit, some bits gave me pause - alternate 1st povs are always especially challenging, especially given that one of them was, like, in present tense, but still. Still!!!

(Like I knew the double-cross was coming but not THAT one, and ouch, OUCH. God, I love it when books outwit me!!)

So, like, in Tipping the Velvet Sarah Waters imagines this whole lesbian subculture to Victorian London that is sexy as fuck and also vaguely utopian in its outlook, but here that all gets stripped away and what you have instead is this love story between two girls that turns inwards (and I definitely thought that the fact that they'd been switched at birth made it even more internal) DESPITE the plot, which is full of thrills and all. I... can't quite explain it.

And also, yeah, obviously this book also really talks about how shitty it is to be a woman in that time and place - here's a woman who's done her research, whether it's about what lady's maids do (or are there any records left of that, really?) or the mental health system at the time, and it made me thrill.

The last point I will add, before devolving into bullet points complete, is that for a book with very little actual sex, some of the writing in here is seriously sexy.

But also I just wanted to talk about Dickensian references and:
- Mrs Sucksby's hanging and how she's basically Magwitch but also she gets hanged, which is more cruel than Magwitch, any day
- "But that was something not to be thought on. There were other things to see to, now. I had become an orphan again; and as orphans everywhere must, I began, in the two or three weeks that followed, to look about me, with a sinking heart; to understand that the world was hard and dark, and I must make my own way through it, quite alone." To look about me!!! Sarah Waters, I am catching yo volley of a Great Expectations reference.
- That the Big Revelation has to do with the origins of their birth and a fortune. I love me a good old-fashioned fortune. *g*
- That they meet again, finally, in what is essentially their Satis House.

But also, all the ways in which Sarah Waters is not Dickens (and that's good, because only Dickens can be Dickens):
- That they're both Pip. Even though this means no one is Herbert - they're both Pip!!!
- I don't think that Dickens could have (or did he?) come up with a villain quite like the Gentleman.
- Or, really, a character like Charles, whom I will admit to spending an inordinate amount of time cooing over.
- But what it really comes down to is this: I can see the appeal of Pip & Estella, like, on A LOT of days. I mean... I am also behind Pip/Herbert a lot!!! But Pip/Estella is just... despite all the ways in which it's problematic, I mean, I just really really like it okay, what with all the deliberate cruelty and the way they both use passivity (or passivity uses them), it's just great. But here Maud/Sue achieves that particular intimacy that Pip/Estella didn't, and the ending is just brilliant for that reason.