Friday, April 6, 2018

Settling Accounts (Rebecca to Birdsong)

As per my usual blogging style I find that it's been a year since I last entered anything here.  I'm appalled by my behavior on that count AND by the fact that I didn't lay a finish to the novel, "Rebecca".  I am apparently confoundedly thick.  I'm not sure where my copy is and as such I can't excerpt it like I like...BUT I will review it.

"Rebecca" is one of the single best suspense novels I have ever read in my life.  Unlike...some...it absolutely deserves its place on this list of 100 Books.  Mdme. Du Maurier is far and away one of the best writers I have encountered in ages.  She can take an otherwise beautiful scene and inject just the right amount of tension that makes you think there is something wrong. By the same hand she deftly gives you reason to believe that everything actually is fine, you're just making something out of nothing.  Her sense of character and setting is so good it's ridiculous.  There is no character that is not believable.  Even the secondary villain of the novel, Mrs. Danvers, is quite believable.  You do not walk away thinking, "Oh, that could never happen."  Instead you wonder how often this sort of thing actually does happen. 

When we come to the end and the massive reveal, when the truth comes out, it is more ugly and sinister than you imagine.  At the same time, though, you feel as if you suspected it the entire time.  When the true villain is revealed (and just who that is happens to be up for debate) you actually understand the actions taken.  They are entirely logical.  Now, it is up to the reader to decide if that's a comfort or not.

The fallout at Manderlay is complete.  No one gets out of it unharmed, and Du Maurier leaves it all hanging there making you wonder what will go on, what lays beyond the final dot on the last page.  Normally that sort of thing annoys me; often it's used in a manner that tries to show the world how clever the author is.  Not so here.  To put a bow on it would detract from what the characters and yourself had just experience.  Life rarely has a tidy bow on it at any point, and all the feelings, thoughts, and emotions continue to wreck havoc on the couple beyond and probably into their last days. 

Short version:  It's a novel I'm proud to have on my shelf...as opposed to, say, "Catch-22". 

I bring up "Catch-22" and I'll be bringing it up again soon because it is the first novel of any war that I'd read on this list.  Now I have "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks to compare it too. 

I won't go too much into "Catch-22" except to say it was a pointless novel about the pointlessness of war and the pointlessness of everything.  Nihilistic to its core it even went so far, to me, as to not even be able to justify its existence.  "Birdsong", on the other hand, blimey what a book. 

The reason I hadn't gone back to it, and thereby back to this blog, was due to the first part of the book.  I made the horrible, horrible mistake of judging it by the first 99 pages. 

"Birdsong" opens up from the perspective of Stephen, a young man somehow attached to the British military, who has come to live at the home of the Azaires.  Rene, the husband, teaches Stephen about the French textile industry.  Isabelle is the second wife of Rene and takes care of his children.  It doesn't take long for romantic tension to build up between Stephen and Isabelle and I proceeded to gag. 

I like a love story.  I have an almost feminine love for love stories.  Watching a couple go through the BS of life trying to find each other, and then overcoming insurmountable odds to end up together and hand in hand bravely face down the rest of their lives...  Honestly there probably isn't a better, more hopeful thing someone can write about.  BUT...This whole "oh dash it all, Penbrooke, I'm married to another...whatever shall we do...Oh, I can't...but, oh, I want to" back and forth tripe is ridiculous.  When the obstacles to a romance are marriage, that's when I check out. 

It's not love.  It's hormones.  I know, the post-modernists would rise up and say, "But all love is just hormones!" to which vehemently respond that just because that is the entirety of your limited experience, that doesn't necessarily make it so.  There is out there significant love; true, faithful, sure, enduring, selfless love.  I know because I experience that every day.  Infidelity, even when it's dressed up as polyamory, or an "open marriage" is the exact opposite.  It is false, unfaithful, unsolid, fleeting, selfish lust.  There is nothing noble in it whatsoever; nothing that pushes the human narrative towards the light, and I reject it as a narrative device wholeheartedly.

Except...

Except when it is not glorifying it.  When it shows, and rightly so, how destructive and gutting it truly is. 

When we arrive at the end of the first part of the novel (which is broken up into 7 episodes or acts) we see just that.  The farce is laid bare, the hopes are dashed, and the child they created between the two of them returns to her husband.  Stephen watches both the woman he "loves" and the child she is carrying walk out the door with only a cowardly note left behind. 

I don't root for a cheating couple.  I can't.  I won't.  Yes, her husband punishes her with a belt.  He's a brute and a terrible man.  I agree.  But infidelity is not a cure for anything.

The second of the 7 episodes begins with Stephen on the front lines of World War I.  And I'll properly write that episode up next time. 

Pax,

W

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