Kay's Bookshelf

Genre: Gothic suspense Main characters: Margaret Lea, Vida Winter Time and place: Britain, in the 2000s I suppose First sentence: “It was November.” Summary:Vida Winter is a successful author and very famous, and yet, in the age of information, her past is a mystery to everyone but herself. This is why, when Margaret Lea receives a request from Miss Winter to become her official biographer, she doesn’t exactly know what to believe. Miss Lea has not published a book in her life, nor has she ever read a book of Miss Winter’s, so naturally enough she wonders if she is up to the task. But curiosity gets the better of her so, at the appointed day and time, Miss Lea ends up under the penetrating gaze of Miss Winter’s, ready to embark on the literary adventure of a lifetime.

General impression I loved this book, and I loved the feeling I had, while reading, that I was reading a classic (so much so that I was quite surprised to notice the book was published in 2006, I thought it older than that). In my defence there are many classical Gothic elements here (I think I’m getting a penchant for Gothic literature, sigh), bringing to mind all the classics I love (there’s a madwoman locked away, a destroying fire, like in Jane Eyre; an overpowering love, reminding me of Wuthering Heights; The Woman in White is also somewhat represented, ditto the Turning of the Screw and more).

Characters
In a word, the characters are fascinating. Some of them strange, some of them with all sorts of mental issues, but still fascinating. Beginning with Isabelle’s father, the man who lost his wife in childbirth, and whose only reason to live became his infant daughter, completely neglecting his son. His sadistic son, Charlie, who in time developed an unhealthy obsession with the same precious Isabelle. And this is where the story actually begins, with Isabelle herself giving birth to two twin girls. Adeline and Emmeline grew up in their own strange world, surrounded by very few people and left to their own devices.

I was in a way surprised at how real all those characters felt. Even the mad ones, or especially the mad ones. I could see the Missus in front of my eyes the whole while, even as she grew older and older and the household grew more and more in disrepair. I esteemed John-the-dig more and more, seeing the way he tried to make things as comfortable as possible to his (unofficial) charges. Both Missus and John were simple people, but so kind, each in their own way, I couldn’t not care for them. I also liked the governess, Hester, a lot, for quite the opposite reason: she may not care that much about the girls, or people in general, but she was well-read, very smart, and never shied away from work when work needed to be done.

I should also talk about the main characters a bit, about Miss Winter, and Miss Lea, but to tell the truth all the characters seem so vivid to me, even now after closing the book, I simply had to mention more of then than just the two main ones. About Miss Lea, her trait that I enjoyed most is, predictably enough, her love of reading. I am sure that every passionate reader recognizes in him/her the feelings that Miss Lea recounts, and I did too, of course. As for Miss Winter… she is quite hard to pinpoint, especially since, in her current form (old and ill), she is nothing but the vehicle for her story, a means to let the said story out into the world.

Relationships
After rambling on and on about how real the characters felt, it should by now be obvious that the relationships were just as believable (else they would have taken a toll on the characters’ believability too). And yet the way the people in the book related to one another was at times hard for me to understand (or let’s call it less than obvious), especially where Emmeline was concerned. Why did Miss Winter love Emmeline so much, for example? Anything related to the twins’ relationship with one another was somewhat of a mystery to me — natural enough, I suppose, since it was a mystery for the rest of the characters too. A quote I found interesting related to that:

“Twins, always together, always two. If it was normal in their world to be two, what would other people, who came not in twos but ones, seem like to them? We must seem like halves, the Missus mused. And she remembered a word, a strange word it had seemed at the time, that meant people who had lost parts of themselves. Amputees. That’s what we are to them. Amputees.”

Plot
The one word to describe the plot is “layered”. The reader never knows what he/she’s getting in to. It all starts out blandly enough, the life story of an old lady. Yawn. But then some of the characters are introduced (Charlie, and Isabelle) and the reader gets interested in them. Then some more things are revealed, and suddenly we have a minor mystery on our hands. Another layer comes off, and there’s another mystery. And then another, more important one, keeping the reader guessing. I couldn’t but like the way the story became more and more engrossing as the pages flew by — especially as right now no other book with such structure comes to mind.

Setting
Just like the characters, the setting, the old, dilapidated mansion the twins grew up in comes to life under the skilful pen of the writer. The topiary became, for me, a place of wonder, as I loved to imagine the shapes John-the-dig gave to the yew trees. The same goes for the burnt, ruined Angelfield (reminding me of Thornfield, of course), and the contemporary mansion Vida Winter spends her time secluded from the world.

Thoughts on the title
The title is a reference to the first book Vida ever wrote, called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, although the number of the stories in the book was twelve. In time, the mythical thirteenth tale’s importance grew, everyone becoming curious about it, and what it might have been about. A parallel, in a way, with Miss Winter’s very life, another thing people knew nothing about and so were free to speculate upon. In the end, the two mysteries intermingle, as the thirteenth tale does surface, and it contains a experience of the author’s… but I am getting ahead of myself. Yup, I love the title, and I think it very appropriate. :)

Thoughts on the ending
The ending is one of my favorite things in the book, since Miss Lea, like the passionate reader that she is, remembered all the cases when she put a book down, then wondered about the lives of the secondary characters, about what happened to them next (because, of course, we all know what happens to the leads, but how about the others?), so the last few pages contain a detailed account of the whereabouts of everyone ever mentioned in the book, including Miss Winter’s cat (who got one of the happiest endings in itself :) ). I love this kind of endings, this particular take on “they lived happily ever after”, and the one in this book leaves nothing to be desired.

What I liked most
Why, the fact that the characters in the book are book lovers themselves. I always enjoy finding likely-minded individuals between the pages of a book, and both Miss Lea and Miss Winter value literary masterpieces above almost everything else.

For example, here is what Margaret Lea thinks about her favorite kind of books, the biographies of people long ago:

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

How can one not agree?

Also, another quote, this time of Miss Winter’s, and this time one I am not quite sure whether to agree with or not, but whose original point of view I admire nevertheless:

Politeness. Now, there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.

What I liked least
I didn’t quite get Miss Lea’s aching for her lost twin. While I do understand why the author chose to have Miss Lea herself part of a twin duo (because who better to understand the story of twins than another twin), I could not relate to Margaret’s longing to see the sister she never knew, to be with her — and this was the one aspect of the story I didn’t much care for.

Recommend it to?
Everyone, especially people who enjoy reading the classics and/or Gothic literature.

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From the very beginning it is obvious that in this book, like in some previous others, Mr. King has tried to explore the idea of a small group of people (good and bad), ending up outside the reach of the law. From this point of view the book reminds me of The Stand, where this separation from any law being applied came from the fact that there were simply no people left to apply it (the flu has killed 99% of the US population). In Under the Dome though this separation is quite literal, since we have the huge dome of glass that lets no armed force in. Add to that the fact that most of the police force inside the dome ends up consisting of bad guys and that’s a recipe for disaster right there.

The first (predictable) effect of such a rupture from the outside world would be (and is, particularly in this book) that the bad guys would let their lack of scruples (and their temporary invulnerability) go to their heads. And Mr. King is not one to shy from describing such deeds. We have multiple murders, a gang rape, arson, beatings, thievings, take your pick. What is the most awful is that most of these things happen almost within sight of the Army, stationed on the other side of the dome, and there’s nothing anyone out there can do because there’s no way to get in. As one of the characters put it, the armed forces were “Like kids looking into an aquarium where the biggest fish takes all the food, then starts eating the little ones.”

One of the fortes of the book is the fact that, albeit there are a lot of characters, Mr. King has managed to infuse them all with their own personalities and motivations. Sure, the good guys are good, and the bad guys are bad, but they are all believable and their choices make sense. Rennie for example, the all-around bad guy, sincerely believes that “This was the high point of his life, his chance to achieve the greatness of which he knew he’d always been capable.“. Adding to that his unwavering belief in God (and the fact that God is on his side no matter what he’ll do) we begin to get the idea of a dangerous man, a man who will single-handedly turn the quiet life of the small town into anarchy in no more than a few days.

Another thing I have enjoyed while reading was the imagery surrounding the Dome. When I first read summaries of the book I thought of the Dome as a sheet of glass, hardly visible for anyone looking at it, but nevertheless visible. But the actual Dome looks like… nothing. It does act like a sheet of glass, from the sound it makes when people knock on it, to the way it gets dirtied by pollution and things crashing into it, but it cannot be seen. Making the people who bump into it all the more surprised, and the related imagery (people trying to touch their hands but unable to, although there is no visible obstruction) all the more powerful. Speaking of imagery, the description of natural phenomena as seen through the Dome are quite cool too (my favorite was the part with the pink stars falling, of course, when the stars “come down in brilliant pink lines. Some of the lines crisscrossed each other, and when this happened, pink runes seemed to stand out in the sky before fading.“).

I think that, even if I hadn’t known who the author of this book was, I would probably have guessed it while reading. Not only do people die right and left (regardless on whose side they’re on), but there are also small clues now and then, clues that are to be found in almost every book of Mr. King’s. For one, we have the children sharing prophetic visions (that most of them don’t remember afterwards). Also, my favorite, the statement that repeats itself throughout the book, at various intervals (as far as I can remember every single book by Mr. King that I have read had a phrase like that, usually part of a song or something out of the main character’s childhood, that someone keeps thinking about). In this case the said statement is shared between many people (almost every important character thinks it at one time or another), is part of an old hit-song and goes like this “it’s a small town and we all support the team“.

The book would probably make a great movie, as it is very fast paced (something breath-taking is always happening), plus I can just imagine the special effects that could be created on this purpose. Not to mention the fact that the very presence of Barbie (a very good ex-Army guy, who just happens to be in the right place at the wrong time) made me think of a blockbuster movie from the very moment Barbie’s past was revealed :)

Something I didn’t think of while I was reading is the political side of the book — here’s what Mr. King had to say about it:

Sometimes the sublimely wrong people can be in power at a time when you really need the right people. I put a lot of that into the book. But when I started I said, “I want to use the Bush-Cheney dynamic for the people who are the leaders of this town.” As a result, you have Big Jim Rennie, the villain of the piece. I got to like the other guy, Andy Sanders. He wasn’t actively evil, he was just incompetent—which is how I always felt about George W. Bush. I enjoyed taking the Bush-Cheney dynamic and shrinking it to the small-town level.

While I (who live so far away from the States) barely know who Cheney was, and very little of what he did or did not do, I find the very fact that the book is sort of inspired from real life quite cool. Let’s call that an extra layer of the thing I liked most in the book, which is…

What I liked most: Unsettling as it may sound, I think the book was a great study of human nature. It other words, it explores people and feelings that are very believable for me; most people act the very way I would expect them to. For example, I can just imagine how, if something that bad would happen, the vast majority of people would look up to their leaders to tell them what to do and how to behave. I can also very well imagine how those people who abstain from doing bad simply because they’re afraid of the law would unleash their worst once it’s clear that no punishment can be inflicted on them (Nazi Germany anyone?). Not to mention the fact that many people would have trouble adjusting to the new world, clinging “to the notion that the world was as it had been before the Dome came down”, thus falling prey to the people who have a lot less scruples than that. And many, many more.

What I liked least: Silly but I kept being bothered about the Internet (how did they have Internet if the landlines were cut off? A city this small couldn’t have had Wi-Fi all over) and the cellphones still working (I know that air permeated the dome but would it have been enough for the cellphones? Somehow I doubt it.)

Thoughts on the ending: First of all, I noticed that many people said they loved the book until the ending, which they didn’t quite like. For me it was quite the opposite, meaning I thought it to be about the only ending that could actually make sense.

show spoiler

Recommend it to? First of all, I have read a lot of S. King’s books. Not all of them, but a lot. Second, this is quite possibly my favorite of them all. So yup, I recommend it to anyone around :) (however reader beware, there’s usually a lot of brutality in Mr. King’s books and this one is no exception).

See also
Chester’s Mill map (via Amazon)
The official site of the book
The “official” site of Chester’s Mill (a bit freaky, especially as it includes links to the site of Big Jim’s used cars dealership, the site of Chester’s Mill newspaper and the site of Sweetbriar Rose).

Written by the same author:
The Black House (with Peter Straub)

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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There is a special magic in number three, isn’t it? Welcome to the third stop of the Wilkie Collins tour! It is the first tour on The Classics Circuit and it plans to follow Mr. Collins as he visits a few of the book blogs in the blogosphere, in hopes of making new acquaintances. Feel free to visit the previous stops (1, 2) and the full list of the stops planned for the future. And, of course, enjoy this one!

Ever since first opening the book I was amused at the shape it way written in: letters and descriptions of events by various characters, in order to record a certain story “in the interest of truth“. The very same way The Woman in White was written, and, as I liked that book, I readily prepared to like this one in turn. At first it started out a bit slowly, but once things got rolling I could hardly put it down.

Were I to name a most amusing narrator, I would certainly choose Miss Drusilla Clack, a single woman dedicated to her faith and her charitable causes, so much so that she became a caricature of such a character instead of a multifaceted human being. Among her quirks we should note the fact that she considered sympathy for the sick a very un-Christian reaction and takes pride in giving tracts to people because that’s her idea of doing them good. A funny scene involving her is when she tries to force Lady Verinder into salvation by hiding books on religious topics all around the Lady’s house (and then she goes home so convinced she did good that she feels like a young girl again).

Another narrator that I have liked was Mr. Gabriel Betteredge, Lady Verinder’s house stewart. Despite his age (somewhere around seventy and eighty) he takes pride in doing his job well and he treats the people under him as kindly as they deserve. In the course of the book he has quite a few fits of the “detective fever”, as he calls it, but always in the company of someone better acquainted with the situation and more likely to make discoveries (it can be said that Betteredge would make a wonderful Watson while never being capable of being a Sherlock Holmes himself). Although I have mostly liked him he did have at times moments of feeling superior to other people (usually women), and then I usually got annoyed at him. But then I remembered his most interesting quirk (he believed the truth, the life and everything was to be found in the pages of Robinson Crusoe) and it made me smile again.

Here’s one of his “superior” quotes, just to form an idea:

“[...] it is a maxim of mine that men (being superior creatures) are bound to improve women—if they can. When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn’t matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn’t their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it’s the fault of the fools who humour them.”

Ugh.

Looking back I realize I have only mentioned things I have found amusing in the book. Don’t expect this to be a funny volume though — on the contrary, it is a very serious one as the happiness of the members of a whole family is at stake. Not any members of any family, but a cast of characters that the reader grows to like and root for, and as such their happiness becomes important (or at least that’s what happened with me). The atmosphere of the book is also rather gloomy, what with everyone suspecting everyone else of theft, with even a few deaths and illnesses thrown into the bargain. It is not a happy reading in any way, but it’s definitely a captivating one.

Here is a quote from the book’s preface by the author, illustrating an interesting side of the book:

“In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process. The attempt made here is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl, supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.”

The young girl in question is, of course, Miss Verinder. She is a complex character, young, pretty, gentle, kind hearted, but with an easily excited temper. A temper that made me actually dislike her at first (way too overexcited by everything around her for my taste), but as the story progresses her strong nature begins to shine through, and the book ended with her as my favorite character of them all. As far as her way of seeing things influences the narrative, it is obviously after a while that her decisions influence the book throughout, but I think the mystery would have been just as complete even without her acting in a certain way. But, of course, I agree that the author knows best so I will say no more.

Last but not least, T.S. Eliot called this book “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels“. It is hard to believe in this day and age, when detective novels are everywhere, that a little over a century ago the genre almost didn’t exist. And then Wilkie Collins appeared on the scene. While not entirely original (parts of it are inspired from real life), the book established the cornerstone of the genre, and some of its elements are still used to this day (large number of suspects, amateur detectives, the person who did it was the least likely of all, a local policeman who does a bad job at solving the case and more).

What I liked most: There is a certain scene where Rachel has a heated conversation with the guy she’s in love with. It’s my favorite scene and I liked Rachel at least twice as much afterwards.

What I liked least: I was less than enchanted by the “medical experiment” that helps solve part of the mystery. I found it quite hard to believe despite Ezra Jennings quoting from official (and I supposed real life) books. Sure, the author assures us in the preface that he had make sure this is what it would have happened, by consulting “not only [...] books, but [...] living authorities as well“. I do believe him of course, and yet that part of the narrative was decidedly the one I liked least.

Recommend it to? Anyone who likes classics and/or good mystery books.

See also
Audrey Niffeneger’s review of The Moonstone

Written by the same author:
Poor Miss Finch

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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The book shows its promise from the very first line, as the narrator announces he could count his overdoses on one hand, letting the reader assume that, oh well, this means he’s had at most five such problems. But then Daniel (as we later find out he’s currently called) enumerates his list and it contains six items. A first reason to wonder and a first hint at what makes Daniel special: he has six fully-formed fingers on his left hand. A first piece of the puzzle Daniel turns out to be, and in a way a symbol of what he’s become: the doctors think that the extra digit means that something may be wrong with his brain too (but that’s only a theory since his parents couldn’t afford to have him checked). There are more obvious signs attesting that too, as Daniel had a delayed development as a toddler (couldn’t talk until five) and in junior school he had to be enrolled in special children classes. There simply are some parts of life that don’t make sense to him (for example he failed the Rorschach test miserably because he couldn’t see anything but blots there), but there are also parts where he’s incredibly gifted at (mostly anything to do with numbers, geographical coordinates and, for lack of a better word, calligraphy).

And yet, despite all this and despite his somewhat dysfunctional family, our hero could have led a more or less ordinary life. He’s had a stint in jail, for forgery, when he was sixteen, and had decided to start a new life under a borrowed name, with a clean slate and all. Enter one more effect of his possible brain affliction: he has incredibly painful headaches that last for days, headaches that never appear on any doctor’s scan but that tormented him so intensely that most of the time he ended up ODing ’cause he didn’t care anymore what pills he took and how many of them. Having grown up near a psychiatric hospital and knowing the awful things that may happen to the patients in such places, Daniel focuses all his resources on escaping the possibility, reinventing a new name and character for himself after each and every encounter with the law.

On a personal note, I am not sure how I felt about the protagonist. I rooted for him and felt sorry for him when life treated him bad. But he is not only a victim to circumstances (his darn headaches), genetics (his father drank too much and it seems like our hero will follow in his footsteps) or bad luck (the time he landed into prison through virtually no fault of his own). He has no respect for the law (as in he stole lots of things when he was younger) and is a dedicate cocaine user (a habit that doesn’t help his health any). At times I did wonder why doesn’t he just clean up his act, leaving the past behind once and for all (as even the best forgery is not without risks) — however the author has done a great job creating unavoidable circumstances and I had no other chance than to understand, yet again, how a new identity change is the only way to go forward. I could have done without the drug addiction though.

A quote that explains the title:

Told a girl once that I’d wanted to be a contortionist. Saw a guy on TV when I was younger, bend, twist and crumple his body into an air tight box no bigger than a knapsack. Stayed inside for two hours, like he didn’t breathe at all. When they opened the box, he crawled out slowly like some strange hatching thing, every bone intact and breathing like normal. I can’t explain it, but that seems closer to what I do than any thing else.

And another quote whose imagery I liked:

Picture a shattering window, each piece of glass—from the biggest shard to the tiniest sliver—is a thought, a memory, an idea or an impulse, tumbling end over end in every direction at once, every minute of your life, from your first heartbeat to your last. Imagine stopping the film in a split moment, then running it back wards. Imagine the billions of jagged fragments magnetized in an instant, pulled back into an unfractured whole, crystal clear. That’s what it feels like. The perpetual whirlwind of vaporous memories and regrets goes away.

What I liked most: All the small details in Daniel/John/Eric/Steve/etc.’s mind. His very way of thinking was interesting to me. I like to think I learned a lot from what he said (mostly when it came to the way psychoanalysts categorize the people in front of them) but unfortunately I’ll probably forget every detail in a short while. I very much liked reading about that though :)

Oh, and I also thought the end was as close to a perfect one as possible. :) (in my eyes the fact that show spoiler

What I liked least: May I mention the cover? I have no idea why but I really didn’t like it — I get its point (a contortionist) but the knee bended in the opposite direction than normal was an image I didn’t care to look at.

Recommend it to? I encourage everyone to give it a try, as I have found it to be quite captivating (remembering me at times of a tamer Chuck Palahniuk) (speaking of Mr. P, he liked it too, according to the cover, so this should be an extra incentive for his fans :) ).

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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