Simon by Rosemary Sutcliff
Feb. 2nd, 2023 06:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI've had a lovely time doing the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge, but the volume of thought and post-writing it's required throughout January has obliged me to put book reviews aside for the month, and so I now have a bit of a backlog to get through! I have rather a nice little tradition now of starting off the new year with a Sutcliff novel, and this was another good one.
Simon (1953) is about two boys from the southwest of England—Simon Carey, a farmer's son, and Amias Hannaford, a doctor's son—who are best friends, but who later end up on opposite sides of the Civil War. The book opens before the outbreak of war, with Simon and Amias having adventures in a richly-described golden childhood atmosphere nevertheless tinged with ominous forebodings of the future; when war breaks out the discovery of the suddenly vitally important fact that the Careys are Parliamentarians while the Hannafords are loyal to the King causes a falling-out between them, and they don't speak for several years; then when Simon is sixteen, and the war getting towards its end, he goes to join the Parliamentarian Army. Naturally, Simon's military career leads to a reunion with Amias and plenty of further drama...
The treatment of the history is interesting, especially in comparison with The Rider of the White Horse (which I read some time ago and which is set earlier, but which was written later). As the title suggests the story follows Simon, and Sutcliff is broadly speaking on the Parliamentarians' side; she condemns the excesses of Puritanism but there are several sympathetic somewhat-Puritan characters, and the Roundheads generally get a lot more complexity than the Cavaliers, whose leaders are portrayed as weak and treacherous even if some of their followers are sympathetic enough to be allowed a loyalty commendable in itself. And Thomas Fairfax, a major character in The Rider of the White Horse, is a fairly important minor character here (disappointingly, Anne only gets a brief mention).
I'm not sure I can place why the central drama of Simon and Amias's friendship and divided allegiances didn't quite work for me. Perhaps it's in the wrong order: they start out as friends and then end up on opposite sides, whereas my Jacobite/Whig pairings all start out on opposite sides and end up becoming friends, and the emotional patterns are necessarily different. Perhaps it's that there isn't enough real conflict in their position: the book mostly emphasises the tragedy of friends separated by war rather than the drama of conflicting loyalties, and there isn't that much about why our heroes are so loyal to their respective sides. Or perhaps it's that the stakes never felt high enough: towards the end of the book there's a sequence that could have been a great conflicting-loyalties drama (and which does, to be fair, have some good hurt/comfort), but with General Fairfax rather than the Duke of Cumberland in charge I never felt that Simon was in any great danger from choosing to abandon his own side to help Amias—it's no night in the hut, one might say. I don't think it's that it isn't very slashy—it's a good friendship and I liked it as such. I would very much like to see the version of this story written by D. K. Broster so I could compare them!
One thing that probably didn't help is how much page-space the book spends leaving the Simon-Amias relationship and wandering off to other characters and stories. I actually found Simon's relationship with his one-time corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf (those sympathetic Puritans!) more interestingly substantial than Simon and Amias's friendship: Zeal-for-the-Lord deserts from the Army to go and seek revenge on the man who stole his life's savings and ruined his fortunes, and later on he returns in a horribly tragic way. At one point Simon meets Amias in the middle of a battle and is injured, and the book promptly misses a brilliant opportunity for some fraught hurt/comfort in favour of having Amias disappear and Simon's recovery introduce an implied future het love interest instead—but I did like Susanna, a quiet girl cowed by her strict Puritan mother but with hidden depths of spirit and strength, and I appreciate Sutcliff for the merely implied future. I can take the happy domestic situation described in the last chapters and imagine them all being good friends together, and canon doesn't stop me.
Sutcliff is as good at brilliantly-observed descriptions, especially of the natural world, as ever, and as good at creating an atmosphere in her stories—the settings of this one are all very memorable. Altogether this book is not at all my favourite of hers, but it is very much worth reading.
snowflake_challenge, but the volume of thought and post-writing it's required throughout January has obliged me to put book reviews aside for the month, and so I now have a bit of a backlog to get through! I have rather a nice little tradition now of starting off the new year with a Sutcliff novel, and this was another good one.Simon (1953) is about two boys from the southwest of England—Simon Carey, a farmer's son, and Amias Hannaford, a doctor's son—who are best friends, but who later end up on opposite sides of the Civil War. The book opens before the outbreak of war, with Simon and Amias having adventures in a richly-described golden childhood atmosphere nevertheless tinged with ominous forebodings of the future; when war breaks out the discovery of the suddenly vitally important fact that the Careys are Parliamentarians while the Hannafords are loyal to the King causes a falling-out between them, and they don't speak for several years; then when Simon is sixteen, and the war getting towards its end, he goes to join the Parliamentarian Army. Naturally, Simon's military career leads to a reunion with Amias and plenty of further drama...
The treatment of the history is interesting, especially in comparison with The Rider of the White Horse (which I read some time ago and which is set earlier, but which was written later). As the title suggests the story follows Simon, and Sutcliff is broadly speaking on the Parliamentarians' side; she condemns the excesses of Puritanism but there are several sympathetic somewhat-Puritan characters, and the Roundheads generally get a lot more complexity than the Cavaliers, whose leaders are portrayed as weak and treacherous even if some of their followers are sympathetic enough to be allowed a loyalty commendable in itself. And Thomas Fairfax, a major character in The Rider of the White Horse, is a fairly important minor character here (disappointingly, Anne only gets a brief mention).
I'm not sure I can place why the central drama of Simon and Amias's friendship and divided allegiances didn't quite work for me. Perhaps it's in the wrong order: they start out as friends and then end up on opposite sides, whereas my Jacobite/Whig pairings all start out on opposite sides and end up becoming friends, and the emotional patterns are necessarily different. Perhaps it's that there isn't enough real conflict in their position: the book mostly emphasises the tragedy of friends separated by war rather than the drama of conflicting loyalties, and there isn't that much about why our heroes are so loyal to their respective sides. Or perhaps it's that the stakes never felt high enough: towards the end of the book there's a sequence that could have been a great conflicting-loyalties drama (and which does, to be fair, have some good hurt/comfort), but with General Fairfax rather than the Duke of Cumberland in charge I never felt that Simon was in any great danger from choosing to abandon his own side to help Amias—it's no night in the hut, one might say. I don't think it's that it isn't very slashy—it's a good friendship and I liked it as such. I would very much like to see the version of this story written by D. K. Broster so I could compare them!
One thing that probably didn't help is how much page-space the book spends leaving the Simon-Amias relationship and wandering off to other characters and stories. I actually found Simon's relationship with his one-time corporal Zeal-for-the-Lord Relf (those sympathetic Puritans!) more interestingly substantial than Simon and Amias's friendship: Zeal-for-the-Lord deserts from the Army to go and seek revenge on the man who stole his life's savings and ruined his fortunes, and later on he returns in a horribly tragic way. At one point Simon meets Amias in the middle of a battle and is injured, and the book promptly misses a brilliant opportunity for some fraught hurt/comfort in favour of having Amias disappear and Simon's recovery introduce an implied future het love interest instead—but I did like Susanna, a quiet girl cowed by her strict Puritan mother but with hidden depths of spirit and strength, and I appreciate Sutcliff for the merely implied future. I can take the happy domestic situation described in the last chapters and imagine them all being good friends together, and canon doesn't stop me.
Sutcliff is as good at brilliantly-observed descriptions, especially of the natural world, as ever, and as good at creating an atmosphere in her stories—the settings of this one are all very memorable. Altogether this book is not at all my favourite of hers, but it is very much worth reading.
no subject
Date: Feb. 3rd, 2023 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 3rd, 2023 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 3rd, 2023 10:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 3rd, 2023 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 3rd, 2023 08:05 pm (UTC)This is pretty much how I feel about the book, as well! There was a lot to like, but it is not my favorite. I did not find Simon and Amias to be slashy, either, but then the very fact of them being childhood friends makes that less likely for me--it makes me think of them more like brothers.
As for her not quite hitting the nail on the head, it seems that this is the first book where she really began to hit her stride and find the themes that appealed to her.
no subject
Date: Feb. 4th, 2023 04:27 pm (UTC)it seems that this is the first book where she really began to hit her stride and find the themes that appealed to her.
*checks bibliography*
Aha, and a year after this one she wrote The Eagle of the Ninth, and the rest is, er, history :D