I rarely write book reviews; I'm usually too busy reading them or writing my own. If I really like a book, I'll tell people to read it, but I won't want to spoil it for them. If a book is anywhere from decent to miserable, I just won't find the time to review it.
Once, I found a book with such clunky prose, such cardboard characterisation, such a ridiculous premise, such an improbable setting, such a lopsided structure, such a contrived plot, and the all constructed to prop up such a stupid and distasteful theme, that I felt morally obliged to prevent anyone else ever accidentally reading a word of the banally putrescent idiocy. The pages fanned open as they blackened and charred, and the plastic coating on the cover shrivelled in the flames. The title is now ash, and will not pass my lips, lest some curious and incautious soul be tempted to seek out another copy.
There remains, however, the occasional book which I hated so deeply -- while still recognising its utility to humanity -- that I'm compelled to write an actual book review. These follow:
I'm also a great fan of Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, and intend some day to own every version in existence possible to own. So far I have the book and four film versions:
Finally, I have written brief reviews of some zebra-related books.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (available from Project Gutenberg)
Vainglory by Geraldine McCaughrean (1992)
(I'm very fond of Emily's sister Charlotte: Jane Eyre, yes, of course, but most importantly the wonderfully unreliable narrator of Villette. I was once bored by a book by their sister Anne; I was rather worse than bored when I happened to read an abridgement of Wuthering Heights, but discussion of it arose on rec.arts.sf.composition and I decided to read the full version to see if it was any better. Not long later, the following book review resulted.)
During the first few chapters I thought, "Hey, this is good, I'm glad I decided to try it again."
During the next thirty-odd chapters I rapidly went beyond the Eight Deadly Words even unto "Why will these people not hurry up and die already!" I'd have killed them myself, given a chance. I groaned and swore as fiercely as Heathcliff himself at being denied the opportunity. Words fail to express the depth of my loathing for every single person in the book.
I very barely except Nelly; she was at least the only person to really try and thwart Heathcliff, and her mistakes were within the bounds of the average flawed protagonist. I except also Lockwood, because he wasn't really a person, he was just a narrator, and also because he had the good sense to remove himself from the environs. I had brief hopes when Cathy arose from her romantic stupour to exclaim, "Mr Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery." That was an enjoyable speech indeed. But then she lapses into every cruelty herself.
I enlisted my parents' help to try and find something to like. My mother asked if that was the one with Heathcliff in. My father thought he still had his study notes but couldn't find them. He did recall that they'd discussed the setting more than the characters. I approve of his English teacher, because the setting is certainly far more agreeable than any of the characters, and I allow for the snow and wind and cold. In most books I skip descriptive passages to get to the conversations. In this I wanted dearly to skip the conversations to get to the descriptive passages.
Where it goes into 1802 is... a relief of sorts, but not to me a pleasant one. All the descent into decay and depravity has had a kind of tone of genetic fatalism, to my ear. (It reminds me of Vainglory by Geraldine McCaughrean, which is a family saga set in France: five generations, the hero of each one getting stupider and stupider than the one before, and each thereby more and more irritating.) Certainly Heathcliff is manipulating most of it, but Edgar Linton and Cathy (and others before them) have their fair share of the blame too.
And then suddenly Heathcliff lets Nelly come back, and suddenly Cathy and Hareton overcome their mutual hatred and fall in love, and Heathcliff sees the failure of all his plans through the happy perversity of nature, and he ups and dies very tidily.
There's, to my mind, nothing less fatalistic in that happy ending than there was in the horrid descent of gold to paving stone. Vainglory had something like it too, and it annoyed me then as well.
Mary Gentle <mary_gentle@cix.co.uk> wrote (in this post):
> I'm interested, particularly, in what you say about the ending...
It's because the genetic fatalism makes me gag so much I can't focus on anything else. I read it as the author hammering into me over and over that life sucks and then you die and quite possibly death sucks too, and then all of a sudden she ups and says, "Okay, everything's hunky dory now."
What's the point of that? What's the point of all these chapters and chapters of unending inhumanity and suffering and thwarted hopes? --I speak of my own feelings, having grown insensible to the characters'. What have we learnt, except perhaps "Don't bring gypsy boys into your happy family"?
Presumably there's more to the story than this, but I can't get beyond my utter despisal of all the characters to see it.
> I read the "who could imagine unquiet graves" bit at the end as supremely
> ironic -- to me, the text reads that Heathcliff and Cathy may be
> planted, but they're out haunting the moor forever, and none too happily
> either. However, I don't think this is mainstream critical
> interpretation.
To me your interpretation is supremely depressing. The one redeeming quality of the ending is that nearly everyone is dead. (The one redeeming quality of some of them still being alive is that there are no more pages and I'm not forced to read about them anymore.)
Fantastic writing, though. I could wish I could make anyone so despise any of my characters; I'd just rather throw in a likeable character or two as well, and perhaps do it in a more readable way.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (available on Project Gutenberg in English or the original French)
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant (available on Project Gutenberg as "The Diamond Necklace".
(My copy of Madame Bovary was a gift from a friend, and though I hated the novel I love the volume: a beautifully bound thing with gilt-edged pages and a ribbon to keep one's place. Again, the book review arose due to discussion on rasfc, this time a discussion about the heroine in Maupasant's The Necklace where someone had mentioned Madame Bovary in passing.)
The heroine of The Necklace is not stupid, and she does struggle. She just doesn't randomly start wondering whether maybe the sky is green, the grass blue, and the diamonds paste: rich people have diamonds, it's a fact of life, everybody knows that, and it's just not something you'd think to question. You might think, "If only I'd taken the bracelet instead," or "If only she'd refused," but you wouldn't think, "If only it had been fake," because it's not even a possibility in your worldview. Why on earth would a rich person have fake jewellery? It's too ridiculous to contemplate.
Someone elsewhere in the thread compared The Necklace to Madame Bovary, which I think is quite unfair to the heroine of The Necklace.
[Spoilers follow, though really one can pretty much tell from the start of the book what kind of a book it's going to be.]
Madame Bovary wasn't stupid either. She was just vain, pretentious, and selfish; and covetous, adulterous, and selfish; and deceitful, manipulative, and selfish; and in addition she lacked foresight, insight, hindsight, and any spark of thought or compassion for others.
She could have been intelligent if she'd wanted to be -- she was occasionally, when it suited her, which was mostly when she needed to lie -- but it suited her better to trust the nasty people who were telling her stupid but pleasant things.
Did I mention she was selfish?
When the heroine of The Necklace realises that she and her husband are ruined, she buckles down and works for ten years to fix it.
When Madame Bovary realises that things haven't gone her way, she falls sick until her husband makes things go her way again. When she realises she's finally ruined everything for everyone for ever, she just kills herself and lets the others pick up the pieces. Or not, as the case unfolds.
And that was the last straw, for me. It's not that I think much more of her husband -- he's stupid, alright -- and to the extent that he remains sympathetic, death is a blessing for the poor fool. But it wasn't fair on her daughter. Realism be damned, it's just a throwaway line: at least give the kid a chance to redeem herself from the sin of having unfortunate relations.
I'm afraid that, knowing this story as well as I do, it was hard to get caught up in the flow of events and easy to compare individual instances of this versions with others. Jeanne Moreau's performance as Juliette (née Merteuil) is an exception: despite director Roger Vadim's "foreword" attempting to paint her as villainess, she makes a compelling and convincingly sympathetic character. Her open marriage with Valmont is an interesting take on their relationship. Playful with him near the beginning of the film, she grows steadily more melancholy as he falls in love with Marianne. She is by no means a passive victim, but unlike other Merteuils she has no true moment of triumph, and by the time war is declared I could not help but feel that she deserved a victory. I particularly enjoyed her delightfully maternal scene with Cécile.
Valmont (Gérard Philippe) was a disappointment. Blandly good-looking, he adds neither charm nor charisma to his dialogue, and in his "War, then" scene with Juliette he descends to the role of utter jerk. His end plays out tediously: unable to reach Marianne by phone, he seems not to conceive of going in person to talk to her. Instead he apathetically watches a risqué party until the director can no longer be bothered spending any more time with him, and finishes him off with the wimpiest Valmont death scene in the history of Dangerous Liaisons. He is not even given a chance to take revenge on Juliette: he dies instantly without the opportunity for a single last word.
Marianne de Tourvel (played by Annette Vadim, the second of the director's five wives) has little more going for her. We first meet her in an interminable sequence where she and Valmont laugh at each other on the ski slopes for no apparent reason; this is echoed later in their affair on a beach, when they still have no chemistry. Oddly, we see her breaking up with her husband, but when she receives the Valmonts' telegram it is fade-to-black time. As in the book, her story ends in madness. Unfortunately it is somewhat saccharine for modern tastes and without any especial insight into her it is hard to feel that this is particularly motivated.
Cécile (Jeanne Valérie) was quite a surprise. Not the naive ex-boarding school creature I knew and secretly despised, from her first scene she is begging Danceny to kiss her and, if not to marry her, then make her his mistress! Jean-Louis Trintignant, on the other hand, plays the stuffiest Danceny ever. More interested in mathematics than courting, he insists on four years to finish his engineering studies before a wedding. They seem to be a happy couple at the end of the film, but I could not help but wonder if he will truly make her any happier than Court would have.
Despite the chess metaphor deployed prominently during the opening credits (complete with king, queen, and... jester?), this film is much less of a game than other versions. A greater focus is the striking contrast between the delirium of the social setting and the personal tragedies unfolding through the story. It does retain sexual innuendo aplenty, and a treat of a scene over mathematics problems between Cécile and Valmont. Otherwise, however, the era in which it was filmed has rendered it actually coy.
Two points struck me as particularly infelicitous: the flash-forward at the pivotal seduction scene made a clumsy beginning; and Juliette's scene of karmic justice, while true in letter to the book, was so startling and random as to be unintentionally hilarious.
In terms of pacing, it felt slightly slow to start but moved steadily along thereafter. The denouement had no sense of the rush towards doom, however, and the final scenes felt more like a vignette-style afterword than true closure. Much like this review, in fact.
back to the top
Untold Scandal (2003), dir. Lee Je Yong
The trailer for this version is abominable. Since the film is in Korean with English subtitles, the trailer shows only snippets where the characters don't speak, and overlays them with a narrator with an American accent who sounds as if his regular job is announcing "And next on CBS..." He recites part of a review which, as near as I can tell, watched some other version of Dangerous Liaisons, heard someone say that this was a brilliant version of the same, and put two and two together to make five: "a viciously purring comedy".
Vicious, I'll grant them. Purring... well, parts of it. Comedy... that's a strange word to use of any version, but it's least true of Untold Scandal. The naive but eager So-oak and her awkward lover Kwon In-ho do add comic relief, as do the chatty aunt and the nervous maid of chaste Lady Jung. (These two, along with Sir Cho's servant, are developed more here than in other films; I get the feeling Korean sensibilities tend towards the ensemble cast.) But the dialogue, at least in the English subtitles, almost entirely lacks the sparkling wit that makes Frears' version and Cruel Intentions in particular such a delight.
Yet this is a brilliant film. Period drama is very popular in Korea, where whole mock villages are built in which to film 70-hour-long 'mini-series', so Untold Scandal is worth watching just for the costumes, furnishings and lifestyle of the Chosun dynasty. More uniquely, it is the most poetic version of this story I've seen, and the most restrained.
Poetic: where the original is framed through letters, Untold Scandal uses paintings: Sir Cho is to all appearance the model of nobility and practices the fine arts as skillfully as the martial or the seductive; thus each of his one-night-stands is memorialised in precise pen strokes, carefully coloured. But the poetry is embedded even deeper in the Korean-style cinematography: lingering shots of the serving of a meal; of musicians playing by a lily pond; of walks over stone bridges and under trees drenched in summer green... Nature becomes entangled in the plot, as when Sir Cho offers flowers to his cousin Lady Cho, a butterfly predicts both good and bad luck, vital encounters turn on the rain, and the passing seasons mirror a passing love affair.
Restrained: where other versions of his character struggle, choke and sigh through the "It's beyond my control" scene, Sir Cho sets his jaw, looks Lady Jung in the eye, and gets the job done. Where other versions of hers scream and attack him hysterically, she reins in the turmoil of her emotions, holds back her tears, and forces herself to face him with dignity; in the height of her pleas for an explanation she barely raises her voice, and though her legs may fail her, she refuses to let shaking hands stop her from quietly retrieving her fallen scarf.
Powerful as it is in such key scenes, restraint like this means quieter scenes rely even more heavily on brilliant acting and sensitive watching. Indeed in most scenes Lady Cho's impassive face is the perfect setting for a coy, amused, or angry flick of her eyes, and Lady Jung's demure silence expresses more than any flustered blush. It's only in the more complex scenes, where Lady Cho pretends sisterly affection in tutoring her husband's new concubine So-oak, that I feel her acting is too good, and that I'm relying on the corresponding overacted scenes of Cruel Intentions to fill in the blanks of her true feelings.
With restraint so valued by their very culture, Lady Cho never has her moment of pouring out a lifetime of simmering resentment in one explosive speech; instead she drops hints here and there, to her cousin, to her husband's concubine, and to that girl's would-be lover. When Sir Cho is stabbed in the back he stops walking and looks exasperated. Lady Jung accepts it in silent grief. In such a context, when Lady Cho learns of his death, her loss of control is almost as much a marker of her villainy as any of the casual manipulations that indirectly caused it.
There are as always modifications of the plot. Sir Cho has Lady Jung physically threatened so he can rescue her in a set-piece display of martial prowess. Kwon, presumably unable for cultural reasons to act himself, provokes Lady Jung's brother-in-law to the murder of Sir Cho. So-oak clearly takes to heart Sir Cho's warning that "It's all over when a woman starts clinging to a man", which enables her appearance in a brief but chilling montage post-credits.
But the most startling 'change' was actually what seemed to me an inappropriate lack of change: Lady Jung is a devout Catholic, in a country where Catholics must worship underground. It's a fascinating look at a little-known piece of history; it's used well by Sir Cho to pretend altruism, and by Lady Cho to have her revenge. But I felt giving her this imported religion detracted from the idea of loyalty as a Confucian virtue: Lady Jung's faithfulness to a dead husband who never consummated their marriage is the epitome of traditional Korean values.
And yet, despite modifications small and large, the plot unfolds with its wonted tragic inevitability. China is spoken of as a refuge in which to start a new life, but it is impossibly distant. From the moment we see Lady Jung step onto the frozen lake it is clear what will happen, yet I could watch the scene a hundred times and always feel the moment as a physical jolt. In quick succession, then, the poignancy of her final words; the plotting of the offended elders set against their spies' assassination attempt; Lady Cho's sunken spirits in humbling circumstances; and, post-credits, So-oak's smile -- I would not change a moment of this movie's emotional rollercoaster-ride of an ending.
Back to the writing page, the hobbies page or the main page.
Email me if you're an author rolling in an unquiet grave.