Category Archives: Historical Fiction

February 9, 2011 · 8:01 pm

Obasan: Fifth time’s the… last?

Because Obasan is on the list of course texts I need to teach this term, it is one of the few books on the 10-10-12 list that I have read before (the others are also books I need to teach). It is certainly the only book I’ve read four times before. Why, you might be thinking, would I need to read it again if I’ve read it four times already? Combination of terrible, no good, very bad memory for plot and a (maybe?) unmemorable plot itself. (and because of the good teaching practice, that, too, I think.)

It might be because the novel over-emphasizes description and so some of the plot gets weighted down in my memory by long passages describing prairie grass or dreams (I *hate* dream sequences). Or maybe because there’s a limited range of symbols/images and questions that the whole book feels like a focused meditation on how one should best deal with trauma (speak about it or banish it to the past). Which is not to say there aren’t any complications – why doesn’t Namoi tell her mother about her sexual abuse? why sexual abuse at all? I don’t know, perhaps because I’d read it so many times before the questions the novel raised felt belaboured. Actually, that’s probably exactly the reason. Hmm.

I don’t like the ending. That has nothing to do with having read it too often and everything to do with there being an atomic bomb where there ought not to be one. Well, no, the bomb is in the right geographic location, but it doesn’t belong in this narrative, that much I’m sure of.

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February 4, 2011 · 2:22 pm

The Name of the Rose: Two books made one

                         I’m very excited about the “spies and detectives” category of my list. I haven’t read much in the way of mysteries in my life-time of reading, and I enjoy the plot driven excitement. So consider my delight in finding out that Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose (featured in my ‘first novels’ section) is meant to be a mystery. Alas, the murder mystery aspect of the novel gets far less attention than the sometimes interminable feeling conversations and meditations on the nature, transmission and preservation of knowledge. Which is not to say I don’t appreciate a good debate about interpretation or the availability of meaning, I just don’t appreciate that debate masquerading as narrative.

Am I complaining that a novel should not engage with philosophical questions? No. Rather, this novel bothered me because the philosophical ideas and questions read like separate sections of another text stitched into the middle of a murder mystery. To my mind the mystery added little to the debate about knowledge (except the most obvious point that the ‘detectives’ search for knowledge, and that search offers no nuance or complication to the discourses about knowledge, rather it just reflects at the most basic formal level the thematic questions). Further the questions about knowledge were consistently raised in dialogue between characters, a frustrating and tiresome dialogue wherein this reader kept waiting for the conversation to end and the plot to resume. I’d enjoy reading this same plot and these same questions but with a single narrative, where the plot adds to the complexity of the philosophy and the philosophy does not read as a diatribe or didactic exercise, but as subtle and nuanced (if you’ve read ‘Sophie’s World,’ you could comfortable compare narrative structure).

And perhaps my complaints arise only because I had such great expectations for this novel. Several friends suggested I’d like it a lot, and the murder mystery presented such potential for thrill, not to mention the 14th century setting. I’d still recommend it if you’re interested at all in questions of meaning making, the responsibility of academics to maintain, disperse and preserve knowledge, or whether or not Christ laughed (seriously).

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December 7, 2010 · 5:16 pm

Sanctuary Line: Symbolism Gone Wild

     Im writing about Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass for the big T right now, and so I should begin this post with the caveat that my interpretation of Sanctuary Line may be skewed by my frustration with writing about A Map of Glass. That said, even though I am writing endless pages about it, I like A Map of Glass. I do not, however, like Sanctuary Line.

The top lists of 2010 like Sanctuary Line. They like it, I suspect, because it comes heavily laden with symbolism and with the promise that this. is. literary. fiction. Unfortunately the endless symbols of butterflies, transformation, lighthouses, reading, vigilance, connection, and a vital past do not accompany anything like an engaging plot. Instead the reader encounters chapter after chapter of a frustrating (not tantalizing) promise that soon – no! soon! – the “mystery” that explains the disappearance of Liz’s uncle and the tragedy of Liz’s childhood will be revealed. This reader suspected, nay expected, that somehow the over-determined symbolism that weighed down the narrative would, in the final reveal, make sense, would make the plot richer and the experience of slogging through worthwhile. Alas. The big mystery appeared to this reader so surprising, so unexpected that I couldn’t help but wonder if in all my attention to symbolism I had somehow missed the connection between transformation and… (the big reveal).

I have to say I generally admire Urquhart for her poetic descriptions of landscape, her weaving of symbol, plot, metaphor and character, and her ambition in thematic scope. This novel, however, left me feeling frustrated and vaguely discomfited: have I become a poorer reader? Let’s not discount this possibility, it’s been a long semester. But let’s also consider the possibility that this book may have missed the mark, and instead of weaving a delightful tapestry of character, plot, theme and symbol we’re left with a knotted ball of (enter the misplaced metaphor).

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August 29, 2010 · 11:22 pm

The Outlander: Half-Half

            Gil Adamson’s The Outlander focuses on “the widow,” a nineteenth-century woman we quickly learn who has killed her husband and, as the novel opens, is on the run from his two brothers.

The widow herself is unremarkable. The plot, likewise, leaves something to be desired. The widow encounters a series of figures who help/hinder (but mostly help) her escape in the fashion of a children’s book where a lost lamb tries to find its mother and must first meet a duck, horse, pig and cow before at last finding its true mum. So follows the plot of The Outlander. That said, by the time the novel gets to the “cow” in the series of chance encounters, I found myself rooting for the widow’s escape and invested in her finding something of a happy ending. Not overly invested, mind you, but interested, which is more than I expected throughout the first half of the book where (I confess) I only kept reading because I suspected the novel might be of some use to my thesis (it will not be).

Meh.

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