regshoe

A version of the 'NO FEAR/ONE FEAR' comic meme. The first panel has been edited to add the cover of the book 'No Name' by Wilkie Collins; the second panel shows the text 'Allan Armadale'; in the third panel, the book's title has changed to 'One Name'.

I deliberately didn't look up the publication date of No Name (1862) while reading it, because it was so much fun trying to guess whether it or Armadale came first. (I hesitantly guessed Armadale (1866), and was wrong.) No Name is another excellent, twisty, thrilling, ever so slightly OTT sensation novel, and fascinatingly similar to Armadale, so I highly recommend it to all fans of the latter. Unfortunately it's difficult to talk about without spoilers, and I do recommend going in unspoiled, but I'll say what I can...

Like Armadale, No Name is a dramatic sensation novel in which a woman, cast out from respectable society and believing herself wrongly deprived of part of the fortune inherited by a wealthy man, schemes to get the money back by any means she can, assisted by even more unscrupulous schemer characters. The plot is heavily dependent on legal points, especially around inheritance and marriage law, and lawyers feature as important side characters. Fun as the woman's scheming is to follow, she's not a cackling evil villain; she's a sympathetic character with feelings and weaknesses, who feels genuine remorse for what she does. The difference between the two novels is that they're opposite ways round. In Armadale Lydia, sympathetic as she is, is the villain; her counterpart in No Name is the heroine. Allan—okay, I'm aware some readers find him annoying, but he's basically a decent person and we're intended to root for him—his counterpart is genuinely cartoonishly evil.

Both plots are also largely about the consequences of the past and the sins of the fathers, but in No Name the mechanism of visitation on the children, while it involves quite a lot of contrived coincidence, is entirely mundane; the possibly-supernatural elements of Armadale are absent.

Both novels are partly omnisciently-narrated and partly epistolary, but No Name is more structured about it—the book is divided into omnisciently-narrated sections called Scenes, each taking place in a different location, and these are separated by interstitial epistolary sections—and the neatness of this structure was very pleasing to me. One of my minor favourite things about Armadale is Collins's attention to varied, unusual (how many novels are set on the Isle of Man?), specific and vividly-described settings, and the Scenes here provided even more of that. One of the settings happened to be somewhere I'm fairly familiar with, and it was fun seeing what it looked like in the 1840s.

Other notable non-spoilery things:

One of the side characters, Matilda Wragge, has a learning disability, and is portrayed sympathetically if not totally seriously; I liked her.
She also presents a minor linguistic mystery. Dictionaries seem to agree that the literal meaning of the phrase 'down at heel' refers to worn-down heels of shoes, and I think that's what I'd assumed; but Mrs Wragge's bullying husband often berates her for 'having her shoes down at heel' in a way that makes clear it's something that can be fixed in the moment, like having her bonnet askew. My best guess is perhaps it means the backs of her shoes are folded down under the heels of her feet, in the way that's possible with fairly soft shoes/slippers? But then, is that the actual origin of the phrase and the dictionaries are all wrong, or is Collins misusing it/using it in an idiosyncratic way, or is it a legitimate but distinct meaning unrelated to the metaphorical use of the phrase?
This novel pays attention to the servants' point of view on their masters' and mistresses' drama—sometimes comically, but at one point the plot turns on a servant character having a personality, backstory and agency of her own.
Wilkie Collins remains rather tiresomely fond of making generalisations about the Nature of Women, despite writing really pretty good female characters as male authors of the time go.

( I have no name, no title—no, not that name was given me at the font—but 'tis usurped )

Anyway, where is my crossover femslash???

I have liked Armadale (1866) very much ever since I first read it a few years ago. It's an amazing sensation novel, with a complicated and exciting plot and a fascinating villain, and also it contains one of the cutest slash pairings in nineteenth-century literature. Recently I was encouraged to re-read it, and this has been an excellent decision.

( Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing... )

ETA: I post about this book on Dreamwidth, and the very next day

chiropteracupola has started reading it and drawn fanart! I am delighted—look at them all cute there :D

My last few reads have been very sensational: a taste of melodrama from the eighteenth to the twentieth century!

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (1910; translated by David Coward, 2012). I'd managed to osmose quite a bit about the musical, and know a few of the songs (and, of course, have read Maskerade), but I've never actually seen it, so I went into this not really knowing how the plot would go. I was a little surprised at how much of a romance it isn't: the Phantom is shown as an object of pity but not really one of admiration or attraction, and most of the drama of the plot involves the other characters' not at all equivocal attempts to escape and thwart him. The writing was fairly clunky, both in pacing and at the sentence level, although I'm not sure how much of that was the translation.

Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins (1872). Quite a bit smaller-scale than the other Wilkie Collins novels I've read so far, but still dramatic enough. The book follows the adventures of Lucilla Finch, a young blind woman living a quiet life in rural Sussex, as she becomes entangled in various schemes, plots and deceptions involved in a love triangle. Besides some surprising medical details (some of which seemed rather implausible, but it turns out long-term exposure to silver compounds really can turn your skin purple—who knew!) and an interesting look at Victorian attitudes towards blindness, the highlight of this book is its narrator. This is Lucilla's companion Madame Pratolungo, a French republican and ardent revolutionary, and the reading experience is greatly improved by the random passionate leftist asides she scatters throughout the narration. Recommended.

The Monk by Matthew Lewis (1796). One of the most (in)famous Gothic novels ever written, and not undeservedly so. To be clear, this isn't a good book: the pacing and structure are all over the place, the narrative veers into random asides and introduces new plot elements from thin air whenever the author feels like it, and none of the characters has much of a personality beyond their levels of Virtue or Depravity. However, it makes up for all this by being so over-the-top melodramatic that it loops back round into being pretty enjoyable for sheer ridiculousness. (And now, random lengthy backstory featuring German bandits! Now, you thought she was dead but actually the evil prioress faked her death and locked her up underground indefinitely! Now, an angry mob burns down the convent! Now, a sudden and unexpected deal with the devil! etc. etc. etc.) I can't exactly say I liked it, but I can see what Catherine Morland and her peers were getting so worked up about.

I'm stuck in the Victorian era at the moment, but it's okay because it has lots of really good books.

New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891). A novel about the modern world of the late nineteenth century, and specifically the place of professional writers in the culture and economy of that world. The story follows and compares the fortunes of various literary characters, both in their careers and in their personal lives: the idealistic and sensitive Edwin Reardon and his failed marriage with his more practical-minded wife Amy, the opportunistic and cynical Jasper Milvain and his fragile relationship with the more principled Marian Yule, and the outdated and intellectual Alfred Yule, Marian's father. It's fascinating and vivid stuff, if even more depressing than the other Gissing novels I've read. I think part of the reason it works so well is that it combines its lofty, abstract ideals and philosophical bleakness with a very immediate sense of harsh material reality: characters debate abstruse questions of Greek poetry while living on ten shillings a week in a garret. Very good, but not at all easy going.

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). Re-reading an old favourite, one of the earliest vampire stories in modern literature and also (coincidentally?) one of the first lesbian stories. It definitely holds up: it's compelling in the best sense, genuinely unsettling, and my goodness does Le Fanu know how to write a good twisted messed-up romantic obsession. One of the things that struck me this time through was: this book really doesn't believe in its own ending, does it? The language, settings and character interactions in the early part of the book draw you in and convey a brilliant sense of emotion and urgency, and then at the end the perspective suddenly draws back and the whole conflict is resolved in an almost perfunctory way. It's only at the very end that the earlier atmosphere returns, with the ambivalence and restlessness of Laura's feelings. Lots of implications there!

Armadale by Wilkie Collins (1866). A classic Victorian sensation novel, with the convoluted, intricate and frankly bonkers plot (which I won't try and describe in detail) to make it well deserving of that status. Featuring a murder that went undiscovered, a deathbed confession by the murderer in a letter to his son, several secret identities, significant identical names (of no fewer than five characters), a scheming villainess bent on revenge, a prophetic dream, the anxious weight of superstition and knowledge, secrets, lies, multiple attempted murders and a lot of sailing in yachts. As well as being great fun, the story does actually manage to raise some interesting questions about fate vs. free will. The only major flaws are unnecessary amounts of period sexism (and it's not like Collins can't write good female characters—what about Marian Halcombe?) and the inability to admit that the two younger Allan Armadales are clearly in love with each other, which is one of the most enjoyable, not to say adorable, things about the book (I've just gone looking for fanfiction and there doesn't seem to be any Allan/Allan, a great shame which I will clearly have to rectify—but how will I tag it???).

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Entries tagged with author: wilkie collins

No Name by Wilkie Collins

Armadale by Wilkie Collins

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