thursday books are anachronistic

[landofnowhere]

Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott. Mostly fun but did not blow me away -- I'd be interested in commentary putting it in historical context as a work establishing a genre. As I'd heard, Rebecca is in fact the best character in the book. I was embarrassingly slow to figure out that this book was also Robin Hood fic (and for that matter to figure out the identity of the second disguised knight). I was amused, on going back and reading the preface, to see that Walter Scott named the book Ivanhoe because he wanted a title that would not give any indication of what the book was about, so as not to set up false expectations in the readers. (Except for the false expectation that Ivanhoe would be an interesting character?) I am not in the least disappointed that Ivanhoe didn't end up with Rebecca because (a) Ivanhoe is *so boring*, and (b) part of Rebecca's awesomeness is her loyalty to her religion. I suspect that if I'd read the book when I was 12 I'd have felt differently though! If you want a better and more entertaining review of this book, I recommend this one by skygiants.

Rebecca and Rowena, William Makepeace Thackeray. This is Thackeray's satirical fix-it-fic sequel to Ivanhoe. I picked it up out of curiosity (and procrastination), and the opening is great, and grabbed me:

"A hero is much too valuable a gentleman to be put upon the retired list in the prime and vigour of his youth; and I wish to know what lady among us would like to be put on the shelf and thought no longer interesting because she has a family growing up and is four or five and thirty years of age. I have known ladies at sixty with hearts as tender and ideas as romantic as any young misses of sixteen. Let us have middle aged novels then, as well as your extremely juvenile legends let the young ones be warned : that the old folks have a right to be interesting : and that a lady may continue to have a heart although she is somewhat stouter than she was when a school girl and a man his feelings although he gets his hair from Truefitt's."

Unfortunately, the rest doesn't live up to the opening. It's not so much a satire of Ivanhoe as a satire of chivalric romance with some Ivanhoe in-jokes -- which is moderately entertaining (and to its credit doesn't feel like it is having its fun at the expense of the non-Christian characters), but overstayed its welcome. And, judged as Ivanhoe fic, it character-assassinates both of its title characters, who, like Ivanhoe in the original novel, appear less than you would expect based on the title. I don't have anything against Rowena -- she's boring, but so is Ivanhoe -- and don't feel the need to have her turned into a shrew. As for Rebecca, having her turn out to have secretly converted to Christianity undermines her -- if I wanted fix-it fic for that ship, I'd rather one where Ivanhoe converts to Judaism, but really I could do without him.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

That first paragraph is AMAZING. Too bad the rest of the story doesn't live up to it, but then, it would be a hard paragraph to live up to!

[landofnowhere]

That quote is actually a few pages in, but the first line is great too:

"Well beloved novel readers and gentle patronesses of romance, assuredly it has often occurred to every one of you, that the books we delight in have very unsatisfactory conclusions and end quite prematurely with page 320 of the third volume." (The whole first paragraph is a bit long to quote, but I'll link to it on Google books.)