I Wish I Knew Her in Real Life

 

I've "met" a lot of interesting characters through my reading over the years. Some of them are cherished "friends." But I "met" a character this summer who is especially memorable, one I wish I could spend time with for real - Corrag, the tiny young woman awaiting her death as an accused witch in Susan Fletcher's novel.

The book is set in late 17th-century England and Scotland. Corrag comes from a family with a history of being executed for witchcraft - both her grandmother (drowning) and her mother (hanging) were put to death. Corrag herself spends the whole novel in a Scottish jail waiting for the winter snows to thaw, when it will be dry enough for her to be burned at the stake. It's pretty poignant to read the passages where she hears the drip, drip of the thawing snow and ice, and knows the end of her life is coming nearer and nearer.

How did she get in this situation? We find out her full life story from an Irish minister who has come to interview her in his quest to get information about the massacre of the Macdonald clan in the Glencoe valley. Charles Leslie, a Jacobite, is there for proof that Protestant King William had a hand in the massacre, which he hopes will help with the Jacobite resistance and restore King James, a Catholic, to the throne. What he gets is much more.

Bit by bit, through Leslie's daily visits with Corrag, we get to know her - the lonely girl living with her outcast mother on the edge of a village, the fugitive who rides "north and west" to escape the men who are coming to arrest her mother, the hermit who finds peace in a hut she built herself on a mountain above Glencoe, the healer who earns trust and makes friends in the Macdonald clan, the courageous sentry who warns the clan of the danger they are facing, the accused witch. She's clearly a political prisoner, and this story made me think of how many women were accused and executed just because they were "different." 

Corrag is definitely different. She is gentle and forgiving, even taking healing herbs to the soldiers who are occupying the homes of the Macdonalds. What I really, really liked about her was how much she appreciates and celebrates her connection with the natural world. Here are a couple of quotes I copied from the book that are favorites:

"When did pennies make a person truly rich? Folk seem to fill their lives with favours or a title or two—as if these are the things which matter, like happiness lies in a coin or two. Like the natural world and our place in it is worth far less than a stuffed purse….”

"But what I say to myself when I see a mountain or a starry sky, or any natural thing which feels too much to bear, is what made this, made me, too. I am as special. We are made by the same thing…Call it God, if you wish. Call it chance, or nature—it does not matter.”

And this one really sealed the deal:

"Some things are hard, even if they are right. Even if you know they are the proper, decent way….It was kindness. And kindness is worth showing."

I chose this book just because it was about the Glencoe Massacre, and my husband and I had been to Glencoe a year or so ago. What I got was much more than just history - I got a new "friend" for my mental cocktail party. And what a sweet one she is. 

 

 

 

Talk to Each Other, People!

 

I started Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier three times this summer, but something else would always pop up that needed reading "right now." (Funny enough, this post is out of order, too - I read this book in July and started the post then, but got distracted by other things. Poor Rebecca!) It wasn't until the third time that I finished the book, and I have some mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I've enjoyed Gothic romance since I was a teenager and read a copy of Victoria Holt's Mistress of Mellyn that my mother had. On the other - maybe because of living in the 21st century after the "Me Too" movement - I am pretty squeamish about the relationship between the narrator and her husband. Spoiler alert! - Everything that follows is going to reveal key plot points, so if you've not read this book yet, skip this post, read the book, and then come back and let me know if you agree.

The narrator is a young, shy, naive woman who at the beginning of the book is working as a companion to an older woman. While in Monte Carlo, she meets Maxim de Winter, a wealthy widower twice her age who owns an estate called Manderley. Thanks to the older woman coming down with the flu, the narrator and Maxim get a chance to meet, and they have a whirlwind romance. She falls madly in love with him. When the older woman decides to leave Monte Carlo early, Maxim asks the narrator to marry him, and despite the fact that she met him only weeks before and knows practically nothing about him, she agrees. After a honeymoon in Italy, they go back to Manderley, and that's where the trouble starts.

The issue is that Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, overshadows everything in the narrator's life. The furniture is stuff Rebecca picked. The household routine is what Rebecca wanted. Everyone who knew Rebecca talks about how beautiful she was and what a magnetic personality she had. Worst of all, the narrator suspects her husband is still in love with Rebecca and that she herself will never be able to live up to his memories of the perfect first wife. 

I'm not going to talk about everything that happens, but here's the major spoiler: Rebecca was not the perfect, loving wife, and Maxim didn't pine for her; actually, he hated her. Actually, he murdered her during an argument about her cheating and possibly being pregnant with an illegitimate child that would end up being Maxim's heir to Manderley (which, I guess, was more than he could bear). He shoots her, hides her body in her boat, and makes it so the boat will sink and no one will find her. Except, of course, someone finds the boat and the bones. The last section of the book focuses on the investigation and how Maxim is able to keep the secret and get away with murder, thanks to a friendly ruling of suicide on the part of the magistrate and Rebecca having a convenient case of terminal cancer.

That's where things went sour for me. The "hero" of the story is a murderer, plain and simple. We can try to justify it by saying Rebecca was so bad, but as ADA Jack McCoy often said on Law and Order, "Was killing her really your only choice?" And the narrator doesn't bat an eye about it. She's completely a stand-by-your-man kind of character, willing to lie if necessary to save him. I might be able to accept that if he had been a "good" husband to her throughout the rest of the book, but really, he wasn't. 

The poor narrator is thrown head-first into this toxic environment with absolutely no preparation. It's bad enough that she has to step into Rebecca's role, but everything is made worse by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who was utterly devoted to Rebecca. Mrs. Danvers does everything she can to make the narrator miserable and to drive a wedge between the narrator and her husband. And what's worse is that the narrator has no information about how her husband feels about the whole situaton; he doesn't communicate with her on anything more than a superficial level. In fact, there are times when he gets really angry and blows up about something the narrator has done or said (of course, we find out later that it is because it reminds him of his hated Rebecca). The narrator is left to assume meanings and motives, and as any insecure person will do, she turns it on herself.

I know a lot of the lack of communication is to help the mystery of the plot - does he love her, or is he pining for Rebecca? Still, I think we could have had the big reveal about the murder even if Max had confided in her that he and Rebecca didn't have a great marriage. And actually, it would have made it a little easier for me to swallow that the narrator is willing to cover for him and go on living with him if we had seen him being open and caring to her, like maybe explaining why he got so angry when she accidentally wore the same outfit that Rebecca wore to a costume ball. But the way it is written, I'm just left with the impression of a woman who is emotionally abused by a cold, controlling husband. And I don't see much romantic about that.

My First Rejection of the Year

 

I've read some good books so far this year. But I found one I just can't go any further with - Cherokee America by Margaret Verble. 

It sounds like something I would really enjoy - a story about a strong woman raising her family in the Cherokee Nation about 10 years after the end of the Civil War. And look at that cover! That's what makes this so disappointing, I guess. I've read 5 or so chapters, and there is no sign of a plot thread that will carry the story through. Every chapter focuses on something a different character is doing, and it's usually something pretty mundane. For example, last night, the chapter I read had the main character, Cherokee (nicknamed Check), having her nightly meetings with each of her 5 sons. I didn't see anything in it that seemed to point toward a larger plot. Maybe Verble was using that as a way to introduce the characters, but to me it is SO tedious to read sections of a book that don't take the story anywhere. USE that literary real estate, writers!

My first clue that I wasn't going to get into this book, I guess, should have been the list of characters that came up when I opened the first page on my Kindle. Ugh. If you have to have a list of characters and their relationships to each other, there are probably too many characters vying for major attention. I've read books where there are a lot of characters who are introduced organically in the story, and I've been able to keep them straight. This reminded me of The Warriors set of books about feral cats that my daughter read when she was younger, that always started with a detailed list of the cat clans and who was in them. (I never read one of those, either - started, but just couldn't do it!)

Finally, there are so MANY stinking sentence fragments in this book! Call me a grammar bitch if you want, but broken grammar rules are just off-putting to me. I keep telling myself that maybe this is a stylistic thing that is meant to give us a feel for Check's mind. I can see that. But it's not just Check who has sentence fragments - the bad grammar is woven through all the chapters I read. Just drives me batty.

I debated a bit whether to keep going. A storyline might emerge eventually, and I really do think the set-up for the story sounds interesting. But this is a book with like 400 pages. I do not want to get bogged down reading something I might not enjoy just to say I finished it. So.....onward!