Author: Kat

Allergic to Paperbacks: The Desperate Search for Good Paper

Folio Society edition Middlemarch (2018)

It is three degrees! And that, I fear, is the high for the day. At any rate, my chapped skin tells me we are not due for a thaw or warmer temperatures. Like a rural peasant with chillblains in Thomas Hardy, I can now talk in hearty dialect and witchily predict the weather on the basis of chilblains. (I also read the weather report, of course.) My poor hands are raw and red, more so this winter than ever because of sanitizer. But, okay, in public places sanitizer is better than nothing.

And, in case you’re wondering, my rash also controls my reading. The pages of a book can soothe or sting, depending on the quality of the paper. Though I often state that I am a paperback person, I must for the present read hardbacks. The bad news: I’ve noticed a trend in new hardback books toward cheaper paper. I hope this doesn’t last: I have heard there’s a paper shortage.

A 1972 Folio Society edition of Middlemarch, illustrated by Brian Jacques

My reserve of hardbacks is smaller than my paperback cache, alas. Just the other day I complained about disliking some of the illustrations in Folio Society hardbacks. No more! I take it back! The paper in the Folio Society editions has proved so soothing that my rash recedes as I turn the pages.

And so I wondered if I could find a Folio Society George Eliot. Wasn’t there an attractive new FS edition of Middlemarch a few years ago? At the Folio Society website, it costs $125. Surely I could find a cheap used copy.

But, no! I have noticed higher prices at online booksellers lately, and perhaps they can make money on used Folio Society books. At one website there is an older edition of Middlemarch, with drawings by Robin Jacques, for $35.67 plus $5.86 postage. The cheapest used 2018 FS Middlemarch I can find is $171.83 plus $24.93 postage, more expensive than a new copy at the Folio Society. Since a used bookstore in the area used to sell them for $20 (that was a couple of years ago),I am very surprised. Perhaps it’s the pandemic? Fewer sales?

Illustration by Pierre Mornet in Folio Society edition of Middlemarch (2018)

I could, of course, “trade” my FS partial Jane Austen set for other books purchased by our Folio Society “collective”a few years ago. I loved belonging to a collective. It may not have been as important as reducing climate change, but reading is just as vital in its way. According to our hand-written “catalogue,” a friend in Marshalltown has a used Folio Society copy of Silas Marner. That is my least favorite George Eliot, but why not try it again?

Advise me on your favorite high-quality hardcover editions of classics, used or new. And who is selling cheap Folio Society copies? I am opening my comments again at this post for this weekend. Then I shall return to misanthropy!

Danielle McLaughlin’s Brilliant Novel, “The Art of Falling”

There is one good thing about the cold snap: I have done some reading. I was delighted to find a brilliant debut novel, The Art of Falling, by the Irish writer Danielle McLaughlin. Her graceful style is so nimble that I did not so much read the pages as inhabit the vibrant characters. And though I know art only as a museumgoer, I identified with Nessa, an art curator with a messy life, who is dealing with people who have even messier lives.

Nessa is thrilled to be in charge of an exhibition of the work of the late Robert Locke, her favorite artist. She has read everything about him, met him once at a lecture, and has spent weeks interviewing Locke’s difficult wife, Eleanor, and consulting Loretta, Locke’s adult daughter. She has negotiated the sale of his famous Chalk sculpture to the museum.

On a sentence-to-sentence basis, this novel is unputdownable. In the following passage, we feel Nessa’s excitement.

They were standing outside the studio where Robert Locke had worked on a number of his better-known pieces. Before the Lockes came to the house in the late sixties, the room must have been a sitting room. It was wide and bright, with two tall windows looking out to sea, another smaller window to the side, a ceiling with subdued cornicing and one bare lightbulb in the center. Gravity, nominated for the Turner in 1985 and now in the National Gallery, had been conceived and shaped in this room. Venus at the Hotel Negresco, known locally as the Chalk sculpture, was still here. Over seven feet tall, it commandeered the room, part human female, part abstract. The “chalk” strictly speaking wasn’t chalk at all, but a soft gypsum Locke had experimented with in his middle years.

Nessa is at the peak of her career. Finally, she has accomplished what she has always wanted. And then it is as though she wakes up from a dream: Melanie, a bizarre bag lady, shows up at the museum and claims that she herself collaborated with Locke on the Chalk sculpture, and that her name must appear on it. Just as the gypsum erodes, Nessa feels her work begin to disintegrate.

Nessa’s own life is in disarray already. There are triangles within triangles in the family circle. Her husband recently had an affair with the mother of their daughter Jennifer’s best friend, whom Jennifer has dropped, and, according to a politically-correct young teacher, bullied. Ant then the e troubled 20-year-old son of Nessa’s long-dead former roommate appears on the scene.

I raced through this book, which has the combined grace of literary fiction and a seamless pop fiction plot.

A good read for all of us! Cheers!

Happy Cold Snap!

Hardbacks or Paperbacks? The Problem with Jane Austen

We’re… still… indoors! Not under lockdown, just waiting for the vaccine. All over the world manufacturers are accumulating the following curious ingredients:

Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing...

But more important, we are facing a Jane Austen problem.

The plan was simple: we would reorganize our books in alphabetical order by author. And then we discovered Jane Austen dominated the “A” shelf.

A newish Modern Library edition and a Penguin Deluxe Classic,

We have acquired multiple copies of Jane Austen’s books over the years, perhaps due to the JASNA influence. During a phase of profligate spending, I ordered a partial Jane Austen set from the Folio Society.

Folio Society editions

The sad thing is I do not admire the illustrations in all of the Folio Society editions. Some in Persuasion are colorful and fun, others are a little grotesque. Why do the women have such pouty lips? It’s not how I see them.

In so many ways I prefer the Penguin, Modern Library editions, and occasional Signets, which leave the appearance of characters to our imagination. I admit the Folio Society editions are more durable, and the paper in paperbacks has a limited shelf life, but I certainly can’t take the big hardcover on a bike trip.

An illustration from the Folio Society edition of “Persuasion”

And yet one shouldn’t donate the Folio Society to the book sales, because you drop them through a slot in a shabby building, and somehow they are bent and disheveled at the sales.

Perhaps all our hardcover Austen classics should go together on a bookcase, leaving the paperbacks on their own.

But any organization is better than the lack of system we’ve had.

The Marriage Trap: Henry James’s “The Awkward Age”

Henry James’s The Awkward Age, published in 1899, is a striking, garrulous novel, not without a note of hysteria. It unfolds like a play, in dialogue and drawing-room scenes (sometimes the characters go into the garden); and was written after the failure of James’s play, Guy Domville, in 1895.

Some of you like garrulity, some do not. I admire James’s wordy dialogue, and am not in the least perturbed by periodic sentences. Oratorically and decoratively it all makes sense to me. But the plot is a different thing: we are startled when the ostensible heroine, Nanda, a beautiful, decidedly unpoetic young woman, introduced very late into society by her sexually competitive mother, Mrs. Brooks, turns out to be a manipulator of men. And yet she does it all under a mask of goodness, and indeed she knows no better, and is in a way good.

There is no main character in The Awkward Age; rather, there are main characters. Nanda is offstage in the early scenes, much discussed by the people in her witty mother’s social circle. We get to know the men before the women; in this book particularly, James hints at the possibility of asexuality, or perhaps homosexuality. The first scene features Vanderbank, known as Van, the sophisticated, impecunious lover of Mrs. Brooks. His new friend, Mr. Longdon, a wealthy man in his late fifties, has come to London to revisit his past, and is interested in Nanda, who looks exactly like her grandmother, to whom he once proposed.

Usually James is brilliant in his delineation of women: think Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, or Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl. Nanda is elusive, not very interesting, but so very pretty that all admire her. Mr. Longdon mistakes beauty for innocence, though Nanda’s best friend is a fast young woman who is not quite-quite. Soon all the men are hovering around Nanda—Vanderbank, Longdon, and Mitchy, a smart, funny man whose father made his money by trade. I do love Mitchy, the most sincere character in the book!

Of course Mrs. Brooks plots to marry Nanda off, with the help of Mr. Longdon’s money and sponsorship, while at the same time she schemes to keep the men in her circle under her thumb. Nanda also schemes, but not for money. She wants to help her mother. And yet her matchmaking mirrors her mother’s, resulting in a friend’s miserable marriage.

We ask ourselves, What is the deal here, Henry James? I have seldom met so many characters so little interested in sex and marriage. By the end, we understand Nanda’s ambivalence, and the role of her mother in it. In my view, only Mrs. Brooks is truly corrupt, but Nanda has somehow been spoiled, too. And yet Nanda has a chance left: she may escape into innocence, after innocently causing much misery.

Sometimes There’s a Reason: Dropping Dumas & Enchanted by Lord Berners

No, I have too many books!

Every year, my favorite bloggers pipe up: “We plan to read more books from our own shelves.” What an enticing idea! I have a LOT of dusty books, on a LOT of shelves, and I’d love to get rid of the bookcases in the dining room, where the incongruous shelving of the Brownings beside Lilian Jackson Braun lowers the level of conversation.

My better-organized fellows have a certain je ne sais quoi. They emanate a charming positivity, a Pollyanna-ish spirit that can guide them through the slog of Dumas and the unvarying cleverness of Georgette Heyer. They have spreadsheets. It is humbling. But who knows? Perhaps they, too, have bookcases in the dining room.

Mind you, I recently lost my Dumas book after enjoying 300 pages of it. And I’ve forgotten the title! Well, in my defense, the title was French. Easy French, but French. La Sanfelice, or The Vicomte de Bragelonne, I think. Perhaps I could open ANY Dumas book at page 300 and enjoy it.

Oh, well, the Dumas book did make it off the shelf.

I had better luck with Lord Berners’s Collected Tales and Fantasies. I stared at it gloomily, and thought, Well, let’s try it. And I was enchanted by this strange collection of macabre, witty tales and novellas. Lord Berners (1883-1950) was known for eccentricity as a writer, composer, and painter. He moved in the set of the Sitwells. He also knew Nancy Mitford, who based her character Lord Merlin on him.

Two of the stories in this collection feature animals with special powers. In his charming novella, The Camel, a camel rings the doorbell at the vicarage one snowy day. The Reverend is terrified, but his wife Antonia leads the camel to the barn: she rode camels when she was a missionary in the East. And soon she and the camel have a special bond, as she rides him around the village, where he does not cause as much chaos as you might think, except for one man’s worry that he is hallucinating. The camel is so fond of Antonia that every time she makes a wish, he grants it. She wishes she had a mink coat like a posh neighbor’s, and it shows up at the vicarage. Yes, the camel steals for her! Everyone is quite puzzled.

In “Mister Pidger,” Millicent Denham surreptitiously brings her lapdog Mister Pidger on a visit to Uncle Wilfred Davenant. Uncle Wilfrid has disinherited one couple who brought a dog to the house, so Millicent’s husband Walter rightly worries they will be disinherited because of Mister Pidger. Millicent plans to hide Mister Pidger in her bedroom, but anyway who wouldn’t adore this charming lapdog? I won’t give away the plot, but you will wonder: IS Mister Pidger psychic?

All the stories are imaginative and very strange: in “The Romance of a Nose,” Cleopatra has plastic surgery. In “Percy Wallingford,” the perfect man’s perfect life abruptly falls apart; are the causes supernatural?

I am not at all sure the genre here is fantasy, but I suppose “fantasies” is accurate.

I Am Trying to Reconnect…with Mrs. Oliphant!

Mrs. Oliphant, an underrated Victorian writer

Although we are not housebound, we have new ice and snow on top of the old snow. It is very slippery, my husband says. He searched the closets for the Yaktrax, special cleats you attach to the soles of your shoes. (The mailmen and mailwomen wear them.) One does not slip on Yaktrax, but the farthest I’ve ever managed to walk in them is three blocks.

“No, don’t bother,” I said listlessly.

I have been lethargic lately. Well, it is February. Instead of contentment, or at least the ability to fake it, I am utterly drained by winter. And my reading has not made me happy: I have perused several unsatisfying third-rate 19th-century novels.

The difficulty began when I decided to read books from the old TBR list. Very Goodreads-ish plan, yes? But actually, I am not the list-ticking type at all, so this was a bad idea for my personality type.

“I don’t want to read this crap!” I gently threw a paperback copy of an inoffensive but ridiculous novel across the room. I didn’t want to damage it, just to make a gesture before dropping it in the donate box–actually, boxES at this point.

There was nothing for it but to turn to some of my favorite classics, books rich in language, style, and plot.

And so I turned to Mrs. Oliphant’s delightful Chronicles of Carlingford, a six-book series which, I think, was inspired by Trollope’s Barsetshire series. All the books are set in the fictitious town of Carlingford, and many of the characters are connected with the church. Characters also recur from one novel to the next. The first in the series includes a short story, “The Rector,” and a short novel, The Doctor’s Family. Although I enjoyed “The Rector,” The Doctor’s Family is really brilliant–and I shall write a little about it here.

Young Dr. Rider lived in the new quarter of Carlingford: had he aimed at a reputation in society, he could not have done a more foolish thing; but such was not his leading motive.

Dr. Rider practices medicine in the ugly brickworkers’ part of town so as not to have to tread on the toes of the wealthy, established Dr. Marjoribanks in Carlingford proper. But Dr. Rider is frazzled and bitter, because he is unmarried, uncomfortable, and overworked. He returns every day to an unhomely home. And when his ne’er-do-well brother, Fred, shows up out of the blue and moves in, Dr. Rider is exasperated and depressed.

The only good thing about Fred: he likes to read. He lolls about the house all day drinking alcohol and reading novels. Fred ruined Dr. Rider’s living at his last practice, so Dr. Rider paid Fred’s passage to Australia and started again in Carlingford. He is horrified by Fred’s return, and worries that he will be ruined a second time.

And then the plot takes a fantastical, fascinating turn. Two young Australian women show up at Dr. Rider’s office, and one of them is Fred’s wife, Susan. Dr. Rider is flabbergasted: he had no idea Fred was married. And Susan and her younger sister, Nettie, have the impression that Fred needs to be rescued from Dr. Rider. Fred had told them falsely that Dr. Rider had ruined him, instead of the other way around. But fortunately Nettie is savvy and sees the way things are. Totally in charge of the family, she marches Fred to the hotel–where his three children also await him!

Pretty, tiny, fairy-like Nettie rents a house and supports the family on her small income. She impresses Dr. Rider with her competence and charm, and naturally his thoughts turn to marriage. The course of Dr. Rider’s courtship of the oblivious Nettie does not run smooth, though, and we have to laugh a little. Nettie is too busy managing her whiny sister and Fred. and raising the children to think about marriage. In fact, she says she will never marry.

But the marriage plot rules in The Doctor’s Family. Mrs. Oliphant has a gift for matching compatible types of people. Dr. Rider and Nettie are two of a kind–smart, hard-working, and competent–while Fred and his wife are lazy and inept, completely without conscience about sponging on their relatives. Quite a few other characters appear in the novel, and other things happen, but we are satisfied well before the end that one marriage or even more will occur.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ Mrs. Oliphant (1828-1897). She is an underrated Victorian writer who somehow has not been admitted to the canon. (Sounds like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, doesn’t it?) She wrote more than 100 books to support her family, and though not all are equally good, her best are certainly as good as Mrs. Gaskell’s. As far as I know, The Carlingford Chronicles are not in print. You can find e-books. I have used copies of the old Viragos. But it’s a disgrace that Penguin and Oxford haven’t published them.

And Now…the Double Mask

Everything was normal last January, in a hysterical election-year kind of way. The political flyers for Democratic presidential candidates piled up on our mail table. I considered cutting them up and making a Bernie-Pete-Elizabeth-Amy-Biden jigsaw puzzle. All this was before the pandemic.

I knew “pan” from the Greek, but I had never heard of a “pandemic.” “Epidemic” was as far as my “TV MD” had taken me. (The syllabus includes “The Quarantine” episode on Chicago Hope, “Legionnaires, Part 2” on St. Elsewhere, and the influenza episode on Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman.)

I got sick late in January 2020. I wrote here cheerily in February:

Alas, I have a touch of the flu. Between napping and meds, I haven’t left the house. Not surprisingly, I’m too sick to concentrate on Lucy Ellman’s never-ending novel, Ducks, Newburyport, which surely would have elevated me to the rank of a reigning intellectual had coughing allowed me to concentrate.

I am sure it was the flu. There were no reported cases of Covid here. But wouldn’t I have panicked if I’d been reading the news? The devastation hadn’t started yet.

And now I still can’t take in the “pan” thing: I can’t take it in that there’s nowhere to travel, that we’re not allowed in Europe, but even if we were, there’d be nothing open, so why bother? The whole world is sick.

And NOW THERE’S THE DOUBLE MASK. Today I watched a how-to video on double-masking. You need a surgical mask for the first layer. That means buying MORE masks.

First they said masks wouldn’t protect us ( there was a shortage of masks for health professionals), then they told us to wear masks (though, confusingly, they said it would not protect us, but would protect other people from us), and now I suppose one mask will protect us and the other the other people.

Yes, I’ll do my bit. I’ll wear two masks gladly.

But we’ll be so very happy when this pandemic is over.

“So say we all.” (Battlestar Galactica)

Fascinating Writers, Alive and Dead: Danielle Geller, D. H. Lawrence & J. I. M. Stewart

I resolved to read more genres this year, and recently picked up Danielle Geller’s engrossing new memoir, Dog Flowers. This thoughtful, quiet, empathetic book deals with her acceptance of a deeply flawed family and problems of identity.

Raised in Pennsylvania by her white grandmother but a member of the Navajo nation, Geller grew up in a relatively stable home but took for granted the problems of her alcoholic, divorced, often homeless parents.

The impetus for the memoir is the death of her mother, Lee, who dies homeless in a hospital in Florida. Danielle flies from Boston to Florida to visit: Danielle’s sister Eileen has a drug problem, screams at her on the phone when she hears the news, and is in trouble with the law. So Danielle holds it all together: a nurse questions her presence, because she’d been told Lee had no family, and Danielle is upset by their assumptions about homelessness. And we readers learn about the challenges that kept Lee from living a normal life. She left the Reservation in Arizona at 19, and her sporadic heavy drinking made it impossible to keep a job.

After Lee’s death, Danielle finds scraps of her mother’s writing, diaries, and letters among her belongings. She cherishes these scraps, which show her mother’s love for her daughters and appreciation of their relationship . She visits her relatives on the Reservation, and they share memories of Lee. Later, Danielle is trained in library school as an archivist. And so she archives her mother’s writings, using them as footnotes to this narrative.

Geller’s writing is flawless, graceful, and moving. Her writing reminds me of Pam Houston’s. An excellent read.

AND NOW A CONNECTION BETWEEN D. H. LAWRENCE AND J. I. M. STEWART.

A few years ago I declared D. H. Lawrence my favorite writer. His writing is brilliant, hypnotic, and darkly irresistible–but sometimes he goes too far.

I love The Rainbow, which is one of the best English novels of the 20th century. But then, alas, I went on to The Plumed Serpent, which is positively risible. An Englishwoman, Kate, visits Mexico and marries Don Ramon, a wealthy general and landowner, who claims he is the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl:  one of his goals is to drive Christianity out of Mexico.  It’s not just Don Ramon’s ideas that are bad: it is an incredibly bad book.

So I must share a funny passage from from J. I. M. Stewart’s The Gaudy. The narrator, Duncan, literally runs into a girl at the library, and one of her books crashes to the ground.

It was The Plumed Serpent. Janet appeared to be on her way to return it to the desk.

“Did you like it?” I asked.

This was an eternal moment, for I had done something I couldn’t–until the words were spoken–have believed myself capable of. And it had never occurred to me that Janet Finley might read books.

“No, I didn’t!” Janet replied instantly, and with a vehemence apparently unconnected with any just outrage she might have felt at being addressed by me. “That woman Kate. She watches her husband murdering people, and their blood being sprinkled on a sacred fire. And it makes her ‘uneasy.’ Just that! Not mad with horror, or crazed with some daft religious ecstasy. ‘Uneasy’–and gloomy too. I’d be gloomy! But I supposed it’s all deeply true.’

“I don’t think anything of the sort.” Although my passion for Lawrence was at that time was fathomless, I felt it should be made known to Janet that a line has sometimes to be drawn in him.

This conversation goes on for another page–I loved The Gaudy, but it would be worth reading just for this.

Hugs, Self-Care, and Comfort Books: Which Do You Need Most in the Age of Covid?

A self-hugging yoga exercise.

I am fascinated by articles about self-care. The anxious writers address the needs of their stressed-out readers by trying to sell them products like scented candles and weighted blankets. I do want those products, but I buy books instead.

Eleanor Morgan at The Guardian has a different spin: she writes about single women who are isolated during lockdown and are not getting enough hugs. She thinks the lack of hugs is damaging her subjects’ mental health. And the sympathetic Ms. Morgan leaves even the hugged of this world feeling sad: she quotes an Oxford evolutionary psychologist who claims the average person has FIVE BEST FRIENDS. And they’re all huggers.

Naturally, I felt desperate by the end of the article. I asked my husband, “Do we have five best friends?”

“No.”

“Then we might have to move to Oxford.” Heavens, that Oxford evolutionary psychologist must have quite a social life.

Even at the height of popularity (perhaps college? or my long-distance bicycling late forties?), I had many acquaintances but few close friends. Yes, you have five friends in your book club, or people you ask for dinner, but they are probably not your BEST friends. Ask people on the street if they have five best friends, and they will name their family members. Mine is my husband. I miss my mother, but she wasn’t a hugger. She did give the handshake of peace, which would be reckless these days.

It looks thoroughy uncomfortable.

If you need a hug, you can compensate with a weighted blanket, I’ve heard. I haven’t been shopping in a while, and I’ve never seen one of these. NBC says “the deep pressure of the blanket makes you feel like you’re being hugged or swaddled.” I prefer to sleep without any blankets, though I do use blankets in winter (reluctantly). But if you want a blanket that weighs 15 pounds, you have my blessing.

Far better, in my opinion, to hug yourself if you’re alone and blue. Have you done that yoga exercise where you cross your arms and and reach your hands over your shoulders? Now that is self-care!

I also advise reading comfort books. And here is a list of comfort books with links to my posts about them (when I’ve written about them).

Miss Penny and Miss Plum, by Dorothy Evelyn Smith.

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.

Any Peter Wimsey mystery by Dorothy Sayers.

The Barsetshire series by Trollope (Try Framley Parsonage)

Dear Beast by Nancy Hale (if you can find it)

Anything by Ada Leverson.

Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing (a cozy catastrophe)

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley (or any of his other satires)

The Egoist by George Meredith

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

And now let me retire with a comfort book.

Philosophy in Fairy Land: George MacDonald’s “Phantastes”

It is difficult to find the half-forgotten novels of 19th-century writers like George MacDonald, who is remembered, if at all, as a children’s fantasy writer. Perhaps you have read At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, or The Princess and Curdie. Perhaps your library still has these books. But does it have MacDonald’s first adult novel Phantastes? Never mind: you can find an inexpensive Dover edition illustrated by Arthur Hughes at online bookstores, and there are countless editions by publishers I do not recognize.

George MacDonald, a clergyman, a devout Christian, and a writer of fairy tales and fantasies, was, by all accounts, something of an intense character. He was dubbed the Father of Fantasy for his wild imagination and love of the fantasy/fairy tale genre. And his influence on other writers, especially C. S. Lewis, was enormous.

In Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he writes that he had long been on a fruitless quest for joy and finally found it in the ending of Phantastes, which converted him to Christianity. In the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, Lewis wrote, “What [Phantastes] actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise … my imagination.”

Phantastes is billed as a novel–but it isn’t quite. It is a hybrid mix of prose and verse and could be labeled “experimental.”

The story line is simple, and takes the form of a journey, but there is no particular plot. When the wealthy narrator, Anodos, wakes up on his twenty-first birthday, he is startled by a statuette-sized woman, who pops out of his father’s desk. During their talk, she magically grows into a tall majestic woman. And she tells him the news that he will go to Fairy Land. Not quite what he had in mind.

The room breaks down into a dream. It metamorphoses into an outdoor scene: the basin becomes a spring that runs into a stream over the carpet; the carpet’s design of grass and daisies turn into a border of grass and daisies. As for his dressing table:

My dressing-table was an old-fashioned piece of furniture of black oak, with drawers all down the front. These were elaborately carved in foliage, of which ivy formed the chief part. The nearer end of this table remained just as it had been, but on the further end a singular change had commenced. I happened to fix my eye on a little cluster of ivy-leaves. The first of these was evidently the work of the carver; the next looked curious; the third was unmistakable ivy; and just beyond it a tendril of clematis had twined itself about the gilt handle of one of the drawers. Hearing next a slight motion above me, I looked up, and saw that the branches and leaves designed upon the curtains of my bed were slightly in motion.

MacDonald’s surreal prose can be verbose, but you soon get used to it. I loved the fairy tale aspects of Phantastes. Sometimes the narrator falls into dreams and reads or listens to stories.I was especially fascinated by the story of Cosmo, a young bohemian who buys an antique mirror with unusual carvings on the frame. Naturally, it is a magic mirror; and in its reflection, a beautiful woman lives in Cosmo’s room. He becomes obsessed with her and begins to teach swordsmanship in order to make money to furnish the room elaborately. But how can he break the spell and meet the woman?

Some of the stories are told in verse. And some, decidedly, are better than others. Here are a few melancholy stanzas of one that goes on for four pages. Some of these are better than others.

Sir Aglovaile through the churchyard rode;
SING, ALL ALONE I LIE:
Little recked he where'er he yode,
ALL ALONE, UP IN THE SKY.
Swerved his courser, and plunged with fear
ALL ALONE I LIE:
His cry might have wakened the dead men near,
ALL ALONE, UP IN THE SKY.

As for the Christian symbolism in Phantastes, the reader joins the naive narrator in the struggle between good and evil, learns who the good trees are and who the evil (avoid the Ash and Alder!), realizes that fairies abide by different rules than humans, and pits himself against the ominous shadow picked up along the way. Anodos is always in trouble, because he doesn’t follow directions. And he is also often enchanted, i.e., under a spell, so we can’t blame him too much.

Truthfully, I delighted in the journey through Fairy Land, but the writing is uneven. Some scenes are tediously static. Lots of wandering through beautiful scenery. I preferred the stories Anodos hears to own rather dull adventures. And I alternately enjoyed and was exasperated by the poetry.

MacDonald was prolific, and he loved describing his Fairy Land, but my guess is that some of his other adult books would be more my cup of tea. Still, I can tick this off my genre-reading list. It is a fantasy classic! C. S. Lewis liked it more than I did.

N.B. Anodos (the hero’s name) means “pathless” or “without a road” in Greek.