The Mill on the Floss –by- George Eliot

The afterword to this copy of The Mill on the Floss describes it as “earnest, moral, and long” which, I have to say, aren’t necessarily my three favorite literary adjectives. But I was 80% sure that there wouldn’t be any dragons, and I figured I was due for an earnest novel after wallowing in fantasy and all that modern ironic stuff. I also really loved Middlemarch, although I read that a long time ago and on a train across Greece, which may have impacted my state of mind.
The Mill on the Floss is, as promised, an earnest story about Maggie Tulliver, a young girl growing up in semi-rural England in the early 1800s, faced with a temperament that is strictly at odds with the rest of her family, an intellectual curiosity that is rarely fed and, as time goes on, financial problems with her family and a remarkable number of romantic complications for a book that ends before she hits her 20s. Throughout the book, Maggie strives to align her desires and views of the world with those of her family and lovers (used throughout the book in the least physical way possible) and constantly comes up short; it is in many ways an epic story of her vacillating between passion and asceticism and never finding a balance that wins her the approbation of the brother she loves kind of desperately – indeed, she seems to sink from one social mistake to the next pretty rapidly.
The most curious part of reading this book for me was how little I was able to root for any of the characters. I’m not sure if I couldn’t pull myself into alignment with a Victorian sensibility, or if Eliot wrote them as intentionally unsympathetic, which is sometimes the sense I got from her narrative voice, or if she was just trying to capture the reality that some situations are just untenable, that when a young girl is asked to accept or reject the friendship of her father’s enemy’s son that it’s impossible to pick a side between the virtues of friendship and those of family responsibility.  Maggie is faced with a series of harshly unpleasant choices, particularly for a sensitive teenager (a category that didn’t really exist in the 1820s, of course), and rather than wanting desperately for her to make one choice or the other – if she makes the happy one, it’s a romantic novel, if she makes the unhappy one it’s a tragedy – the reader instead must suffer alongside her as she dreads making either one. (Apparently George Eliot herself had a long relationship with a married man, making her something of an expert in these inescapable moral and emotional quandaries). I’ll agree that the book is earnest (and long!) but it’s certainly not moral an Aesopian, proscriptive kind of way: rather, it exposes the fragile emotional center of morality and how it fails to take into account the complicated relationship between personal desires and social demands. It’s pretty emotionally gripping, but if you need resolution, prepare to be disappointed.

The Dragonbone Chair -by- Tad Williams

Normally, I wouldn’t review a fantasy novel, largely because I often feel a tiny bit shameful about reading them. I think it’s because I spent such a large portion of my pre-teenage years gleefully reading and re-reading, well, books that had dragons in them (and other things! I also read other things about, like, Okies or Vietnam or depressed poets). As this was the same time that I listened to New Kids on the Block and pegged my jeans and had giant, pink, plastic-framed glasses, I am suspect about all of my judgment from that time. Also, the library tends to shelve romance, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery paperbacks altogether in the side of the main room they might as well label “books for people we assume don’t enjoy real literature.” So, I’ve tried to hide my recommendations under the labels of cyberpunk (Gibson) or indefinably good (Bull), but the sordid truth remains that sometimes I really do enjoy a long, epic saga and sometimes those come with magic or ogres or, yes, a dragon or two.
The Dragonbone Chair, and its attendant sequels, is really not as dragon-y as the title would suggest: it’s (as the genre demands) the very long story about an unlikely hero (a kitchen scullion named Simon) and a bunch of his unlikely companions (a princess, a troll and his wolf, a bunch of dukes and knights, and some mysterious immortal folks) trying to save their moderately unlikely world from total annihilation. Despite his twee tendencies toward the names in his alternate universe (do you really have to you’re your winter months ‘Novander” and “Decander’?) and an unappealing tendency to including the lyrics to ballads his characters are singing to pass the time, Williams actually avoids a lot of the pitfalls that can come from following the strict boundaries of the genre (and, believe you me, in that misspent youth I read plenty of books that wallowed in those pitfalls). He compelling conveys that characters can have doubts and misgivings without being paralyzed from action and he doesn’t shy away from the absolute misery of participating in an epic quest – lots of eating crappy food and sleeping in the forest and getting lost in the dark and not knowing if your loved ones are safe. And he tries to keep the dei ex machina to a bare minimum, which is quite a feat if you’re going to include immortals and dragons and the like.
Phew. I feel so much better for having gotten this secret reading habit off my chest. Maybe I’ll go dig out some peasant blouses and listen to Paula Abdul.