regshoe

I have had a bit of a week of it. RL has gone from mildly busy to extremely stressful (it should be in a good way! just lots of difficult details to work out first), and that makes everything else worse: I can't sleep properly, I get more upset about trivial fandom stuff, my sensory issues get worse... when all I want to do is read fic, watch NTS Kidnapped again and work on my Yuletide assignment. :(

However, I'm feeling a bit better today, so I will attempt a not-too-ambitious reading post. And firstly, another fic rec for this adorable Alan/Davie Halloween story, which I love and will manage to comment on soon. There's also another Ewen/Keith fic in Trick or Treat which I have not read yet but which looks excellent.

The Oak and the Ash by Annick Trent (2023). Aww, I think this is my favourite Trent yet! It's another queer historical romance set in 1790s England among the lower strata of society and dealing with issues of radical politics, class issues and questions of reading, learning and education. George Evans is a rather outspoken and—politically and emotionally—forthright surgeon-apothecary who's called to treat two gentlemen for the results of a duel; here he meets Noah Moorecott, valet to one of the combatants and amateur meteorologist. (Noah is an ex-sailor—he met his master in the Navy—who is missing some of the fingers on one hand after a battle at sea, but fortunately this is the only respect in which he resembles Ralph Lanyon.) George is getting over a broken heart and trying to decide whether to take over running a radical newspaper; Noah is pessimistic about his chances of getting his (and his colleague Verity's, a housemaid) scientific work published in a learned journal. I loved their relationship—George in particular is an utter sweetheart, things develop fairly slowly and steadily between them, and they go together really well; I especially liked how they, with their different outlooks, challenge, argue and also support each other in the vexed questions that Politics raises in both their lives. Trent is always good at filling in the lives and relationships of characters beyond the main romance, and I really liked Noah's scientific colleagueship with Verity and George's relationship with the friends, a fellow surgeon-apothecary and his wife, with whom he lives and works. At one point George, writing a forlorn love letter to Noah, quotes adorably from 'Westron Wynde', but fortunately this is the only respect in which he resembles Julian Fleming. I also enjoyed the premise—it was fun to see the issue of Honourable Duelling treated perhaps more as it deserves than it generally is by my more gentlemanly eighteenth-century faves. The only things I didn't like were the treatment of George's past (non-)relationship and a bit of romance-novelish 'well, of course he can't REALLY love me seriously like that' after he and Noah first sleep together, but those were minor issues. Highly recommended!

The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett (1751). This is where 'Pickle' Glengarry apparently got his nickname, so of course I had to read it. It is an extremely eighteenth-century book: very long, plotless, meandering, full of colour and character and highly questionable in its moral outlook and judgements. In the early part of the book especially there is a lot of OTT violence treated very casually, which put me off for a bit, and I also cannot condone the (evidently quite typical for the period) strongly humiliation-based humour of much of it; but there's also a lot of interesting historical detail (if you want to know all about the course and mishandling of gentlemen's money affairs in the eighteenth century, read this book!), politics (there are quite a few, usually very oblique and careful, references to the Jacobites—understandable given the date) and the occasional actually funny bit. Also there are some characters who read rather as if Hornblower, Bush and Brown had been reimagined as comic eighteenth-century novel denizens, which was kind of hilarious. And—in true period fashion—there are two points where the main action suddenly stops while we hear the life story of a random person Pickle meets, who barely turns up again afterwards. The first is a 'lady of quality', whose memoirs provide some slightly more interesting views on gender than Pickle (who does not treat women well) generally gives us; and the second is an unfortunate young gentleman whose life bears some remarkable similarities to the pre-Alan plot of Kidnapped.

The Love Child by Edith Olivier (1927). A strange little novel about a very lonely woman, Agatha Bodenham, who after the death of her mother returns to the solitary games she once played with her childhood imaginary friend, Clarissa... until Clarissa comes to life. I came across it via the yuletide fandom recs post, and I enjoyed it very much. It's been compared to Lolly Willowes, and I can see why: published the same year, with a similar premise of unexplained supernatural happenings intruding into a mundane setting, a similar free, fluent prose style, and a similar air of having its own perfectly self-justified internal logic and not especially caring what the reader's expectations might be. On the whole I thought the premise was better than the execution, and I wasn't really satisfied with how the story ended up working itself out, but the early part, in which Clarissa first appears and Agatha has to deal with her increasing reality and work out their relationship, is really good—and I especially liked the clash between the weird supernatural stuff and the down-to-earth practical details of mundane life. Also I highly approve of Agatha's thoughts on driving.

Effie Ogilvie by Margaret Oliphant (1886). I picked this for my next Oliphant because of this review, which compares it to Kidnapped (published the same year) in its insight into character and its beautiful and Scottish language. While that's not perhaps the first comparison I would have gone with, I can see the point! The subject matter is simpler and more conventional than the others of Oliphant's books I've read, but the style and sensibility are very much hers, and I like both very much. It's about, on the one hand, the experience of being a very young woman in the rural Scottish Borders of the late nineteenth century; and, on the other, the clash between the old rural gentry and the new rich commercial class, as represented by the ill-advised courtship of Fred Dirom, an English son of the latter class, with Effie Ogilvie, a Scottish daughter of the former. Throughout there's a keenness and specificity of emotional perception and description, and an honesty about heterosexuality and its conventions, which is proper Oliphant and very good.

And, to spoil the ending...

she manages once again to end the book without the heroine getting married! Given the plot of this one I didn't think she'd pull it off, but I shouldn't have doubted her. True, she implies a probable future marriage, but it's only an implication and not made the Happy Ending, and I think that's important.

Right, now I am going to rest and have my reward for this week, viz. watching Kidnapped again. :D

Hester by Margaret Oliphant (1883). This has just become one of my favourite Victorian novels ever! It revolves around Vernon's, the principal bank of an English provincial town; some years before the story begins, John Vernon, then owner of the bank, led it to the brink of financial ruin and then fled the country, and his cousin Catherine Vernon stepped in, saved the bank through quick thinking and resourcefulness and thence took over the running of it. Now Catherine is in her sixties, retired from the bank and the somewhat-benevolent ruler of the sprawling Vernon clan; John Vernon's widow returns from abroad to the provincial town, along with her teenage daughter Hester. Hester and Catherine clash: they're both very strong and decided personalities, and Hester objects to Catherine's cynical condescension while Catherine objects to Hester's silly impudence. Meanwhile Catherine has passed on the bank to her young cousins Harry (good-natured, not very bright) and Edward (the brains of the operation, restlessly chafing under the restrictions of Catherine's domineering rule), both of whom fall in love with Hester. And a mysterious newcomer from London arrives and starts talking to Edward about the terribly exciting time to be had and large amounts of money to be made by speculating on the stock market...

From Catherine and Hester's first confrontation onward, and through scenes of rivalry, frustration, love, temptation, mystery and so on, Oliphant writes beautifully detailed, complicated and observant descriptions of the characters' emotions and inner lives. This is one of the best aspects of the book, but it's made even better by the highly interesting and often unusual situations to which she applies the talent: a clash of wills and personalities between an old and a young woman, the two most important characters in the book; the complicated and often heartbreaking emotions of difficult family relationships, particularly Catherine and Edward's surrogate mother-son relationship; the general experience of being very young and passionate and embarrassed about everything by turns. Unsurprisingly the novel raises a lot of questions about women's place in life and society, with interesting effect. It goes without saying that both Hester and Catherine are brilliant characters, and I loved them both. Altogether I was thoroughly enjoying it all the way through, but the ending was what really made it. The plot develops towards an exciting climax which did not go where I thought it would, and where it does end up is very unusual, worthy, complicated and generally good. ( Spoilery details ) Highly recommended, and I must check out some more of Oliphant's stuff; the introduction to the edition I read describes her as 'one of the great neglected women writers of the nineteenth century', and I certainly feel like paying her more attention after this.


Fix Bay'nets: The Regiment in the Hills by George Manville Fenn (1899). Another adventure novel, this one following the travails of a British Army regiment in the mountains of northern India. Fenn pretty much completely supports the imperialist context of this and the book is generally racist about it; while I can stand a certain amount of period-typical attitudes or I wouldn't read so much nineteenth-century fiction, I do have limits, and it was definitely an off-putting feature here. Also the prose is not very good and the characterisation all pretty simplistic; but it does have some better features. The main part of the plot focusses on a young officer, Lieutenant Bracy, and a private soldier newly joined up from East London, Bill Gedge, who are devoted to each other in the very proper, manly, class-appropriate ways suitable to their relationship. They rescue each other from deadly peril; Gedge cares for Bracy when he's recovering from a wound; later they're sent together on a perilous mission to carry a dispatch across the mountains and get into various dramatic adventures. There is a certain amount of subversive slash potential here! And in fact my main reason for reading this book was that there is quite a bit of slash fic for it, which I will get round to reading soon. :D