The Help

For some reason, whenever a book gets too popular, I become less interested in it. It's contrary and weird and I'm not sure why it happens, but it does: the more people who recommend a book to me, the more wary I am about reading it. At least partly, I think it's because I like to come to books in my own time and at my own pace, and I think I've been caught up in the hype before and then been really let down by the book. All this typically changes, though, when said book is being made into a movie that I'm going to see (either for work or by choice, or some lucky combination of the two). That was the case with Kathryn Stockett's The Help: it was on the bestseller list almost immediately after its release and everyone talked about it, and then out came the movie (which opened last night), so I cracked and read it. Then I couldn't put it down.

The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early '60s and is told from the perspectives of three women: Aibileen and Minny, who are both black maids, and Skeeter Phelan, a white woman who has just returned to town after finishing her undergraduate degree. Skeeter is the only one of her friends to finish university – all the others left to get married – and her return to Jackson sees her catching up with old friends Hilly and Elizabeth, both of whom are married with children and running households of their own. Hilly is the queen bee of Jackson society ladies, and her role as Junior League president ensures her influence. So, when she decides that white homes with black maids need to build separate bathrooms for the help, she expects that to happen, starting at her friend Elizabeth's house.

Aibileen is Elizabeth's maid, and besides all the cooking and cleaning, Aibileen is also basically raising Elizabeth's daughter Mae Mobely. Aibileen has spent her entire working life raising white children for their parents, but she always leaves before they get too old. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, worked for Hilly's mother until Hilly had her fired and then spread rumours that she was a thief. Minny, in a fit of anger, does the 'Terrible Awful" (which I won't give away) and then fears for her life. She ends up getting a job cleaning for Celia Foote way out in the country. Celia is a "white trash" country girl who married Hilly's ex-boyfriend. She has therefore be banned from Jackson society (although she doesn't know it, and her attempts to make friends are heartbreaking) and has no idea Minny is supposed to be a thief.

Girl With A Pearl Earring

When I was a teenager, I went through a pretty major art phase. I was (and, to be honest, still am) fascinated by the work and the lives of the Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, The Group of 7, etc. I wanted to understand what made them see the world the way they did, allowing them to paint such colourful and vibrant images. Perhaps naturally, then, when my mum told me about Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl With A Pearl Earring, a fictional account of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and his painting of the same name, I was hooked. In fact, I was so intrigued that I read the entire novel in one day, on vacation, during a heat wave. 

The novel is set in Delft, the Dutch city where Vermeer lived and worked. But rather than centering her novel around the painter himself, Chevalier places the girl, Griet, at the centre of the narrative. Griet is a maid in the Vermeer household. Griet's father was a painter of tiles, so although his work was not on the scale of Vermeer's, she had grown up with an artist. This makes her aware of an artist's moods, and also their desire to work in a space untouched by anyone else. Griet, though, has an unusually perceptive eye, and is able to clean Vermeer's study and have it look as though no one has been there; she pays close and careful attention to where and how everything sits, and makes sure to replace it all just so. Griet's aesthetic eye impresses Vermeer, who invites her to work with him – tidying his study and mixing some of his paints – making both his wife and daughters jealous. 

Not much is known about the real-life Vermeer, and Chevalier works hard not to imagine him in too much detail. His family is described through the eyes of Griet, but he remains a more shadowy figure. After they begin working together, Griet, who is rather shy and unassuming, becomes more self-assured. She becomes rather like a companion to Vermeer, although to say they are friends would be a stretch because of the class and gender divide. Neither can say they are lovers, because although there is certainly tension, Chevalier is careful not to burst her beautifully crafted novel of looks and art with outright fantasy. What makes Girl With A Pearl Earring work is its plausibility.

The scenes of Vermeer painting Griet for the painting that will eventually become famous are by far the most compelling in the novel. Chevalier doesn't waste details about her characters, and she pours all of the reluctance and desire between Griet and Vermeer into the looks the two exchange and the brief moments in which they touch, mostly so he can readjust how she is sitting and how the headscarf is falling. Chevalier has said that it was the look on the girl's face that inspired her to write the novel, and that shows in her attention to all the details surrounding her version of how the painting came to be. 

Girl With A Pear Earring is not a high-brow treatise on art. Rather, it is a specific story about a specific painting, as imagined by an author who is not an art scholar. That is to say, as much as this story is about the painting it's named after, it is also about its characters. Despite all the research that Chevalier did, she didn't let it overtake the story the she wanted to tell; her characters are compelling, and she doesn't allow the story to succumb to cliché. Whether you had an art phase or not, Griet's experience in Delft, both with Vermeer and outside of his studio, make for a story that you just can't put down.

Girl With A Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
First published in 1999 (cover image shown from Plume/Penguin Books edition)

The Railway Children

Something about the holidays makes me want to read old children's books. It probably has to do with being at home in my old room, surrounded by my old books, many of which I received as Christmas gifts. Christmas is a pretty nostalgic season anyway, and if you throw old books into the mix, I'm toast. One of my favourite books when I was a kid was Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children, which was given to me by my mum's sister the Christmas I was 6 (I know this because, like a good book-giver, my aunt wrote the date and who it was from on the first page).

The Railway Children tells the story of a well-to-do London family who are forced to move to a small country cottage after the father is arrested on charges of espionage. This is all set pre-WWI, so the transition from the city to the country is quite a shock, not simply because the children have lost their father, but because they are living in very different circumstances. They no longer have the money for fancy food or large closets, which is hard on the mother but kind of an adventure for the three children, Roberta (Bobbie),  Peter and Phyllis. 

At the bottom of the garden of the new house ran the railway, and the children became fascinated by the trains and all the regular passengers, especially a man they called The Old Gentleman, who always waved back to the children, who would stand on the fence and wave at the trains. It didn't take long for the Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis to become a regular fixture along the railway line, and soon the conductors and the local station master came to know them quite well. The novel is filled with adventures the children had along the railway line, including one that involved the girls tearing up their red petticoats so they could flag down a train after they saw that a rockslide had buried part of the tracks. 

Of course, this is a story about family as much as childhood adventures, and a lot of it takes place in and around the little cottage. Details such as how the mother is concerned about money around birthdays and how Peter injured himself with a garden rake are as central to the children's lives as the railway that they love, and Nesbit manages to wind the adventure around the mundane in such a way that the story seems as if it could really be true. 

Nesbit's descriptions of Three Chimneys (the family's country cottage) and the nearby town and the countryside are just so vivid that I have to believe it's all based on somewhere real that I would very much like to visit. When I was a kid I dreamed of having the sorts of afternoon adventures Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis had, and now when I read this book I rather taken by how nice their cottage sounds. There's a bit of romance around the penny-pinching the family is forced to do, and Nesbit plays on the idea of a simpler life in the country without losing sight of how financial matters and worry over the father would have made life less than idyllic. That day-to-day awareness, and the fact that the children's adventures aren't too outrageous, pull the story into the realm of the plausible, which makes for a much more compelling read.

Behind the scenes of all the happy and sunlit adventures the children have, though, is a kind of political story that I totally missed as a kid. The father is arrested at the beginning because he has been charged with spying for the Russians, and later in the story the family takes in a Russian man who they find half-dead. He tells them that he is a writer and was thrown out of his country for the stories he told. The Railway Children was published in 1906, and Nesbit seems to have been working out some political backlash in the edges of her children's novel. The political in no way overtakes the more light and cheerful story of the Waterbury family, but it does add just a hint of something weightier that sets this novel apart from many of the other children's books of the time. That being said, you just know that Nesbit worked out how to give the family a happy ending.

The Railway Children
by Edith Nesbit
First published in 1906 (cover image shown from Scholastic Canada edition)

Paper Moon

Every once in a while, I get really lucky when buying used books. Often, this happens when I'm travelling and, in need of something to read, I wander into a used book store with no specific purchase in mind. When I was a kid, my family and I were away somewhere, and I happened upon Joe David Brown's Paper Moon – I think it was being sold for a dollar or something. The reason I can't remember where I bought it, though, is because all my memories of reading the book are of me being in a car, driving through a Depression-era landscape. Clearly, this never happened, but the story took such hold of me while I was reading it that it invaded my memories, totally blocking out everything else.

Paper Moon was originally titled Addie Pray, but after the movie came out they rereleased the novel under the new title, which I like better. Addie Pray is a good title insofar as it introduces you to the narrator and main character of the story, but it seems too absolute about the relationship of the characters, and seems less ephemeral. Paper Moon, on the other hand, introduces you to a more interesting story – one of big dreams that may or may not be attainable, an era of necessary imitation (the real thing just cost too much) and the idea of illusions, which are the foundation of every good scam.

And Paper Moon starts with Addie, who is just a little girl despite her assured voice, telling the story of how her mother was killed in a car accident with another man. It isn't really a sad story, though, at least not the way Addie tells it. Really, she's quite matter of fact about the whole thing. It's implied that her mother was a prostitute, and that Moses "Long Boy" Pray may be her father, since he was once a customer of her mother's. He denies this, but is still charged with driving her across Alabama to her aunt's house. Before setting out, Long Boy talks the brother of the man who was driving the car in which Addie's mom was killed (still following?) to give him $200 for Addie's care on the road. That is a lot of money, but Long Boy gets it because he is rather persuasive.

Addie, though, overhears the conversation and later demands the money. Well, Long Boy has spent most of it, so he promises to raise the money along the way to her aunt's. First stop, Bible scam. The novel is full of descriptions of Long Boy's scams, but this is really the first one Addie witnesses. This is his genius: He looks up women who have been recently widowed and goes to their homes, pretending to be a specialty Bible salesmen from whom their late husband has ordered a personalized Bible. Naturally, they're caught of guard and, in their grief, he is able to get quite a bit out of them for the Bible. Addie gets in on the scam by pretending to be his daughter and they become quite a lucrative pair.

But, then they meet Miss Trixie Delight, a stripper who quickly winds Long Boy around her finger. Addie is furious when she finds out that, not only is Long Boy directing his attention at Miss Trixie instead of at her, but has also spent all their money on a new car to impress her with. Addie, who is beyond precocious, devises a scheme to get rid of Miss Trixie, thereby getting Long Boy all to herself again.

Honestly, this book is hilarious. I've heard of Addie being compared to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think her voice is much closer to Baby's in Lullabies for Little Criminals. Scout was a pretty good little girl, all things considered, and Addie is so mischievous and, in a strange way, totally suited to the small-scale crime that Long Boy has introduced her to that she kind of crackles with life on the page. Brown's dialogue is so good in this story because he lets Addie talk like a child, but in a way that shows she's a child who has spent most of her life with rather disreputable adults.

In a lot of ways, this is a strange sort of love story. Not, I should say, in a Lolita sort of way, but in a familial way. Addie loves Long Boy because she wants to believe he's her father, and because he's fun, and because he kind of encourages her to get into trouble. On the flip side, Long Boy loves Addie in a way because, despite his denials, he seems to want to be her father. I get the sense that he likes the weight of that responsibility – even if it's only so he can justify his scams to himself. He and Addie also make a great crime duo, which is just fun to read about.

Paper Moon is a story about life on the road, and the strangely symbiotic that can develop between people who come to rely on one another. Addie and Long Boy are each other's family, even if they can't prove there's a biological link, and in the late 1920s, when the Depression is beating people down, their relationship gives them a kind of buoyancy. 

Paper Moon 
by Joe David Brown
First published (as Addie Pray) in 1971 (cover image from Four Walls Eight Windows edition)

Memoirs of a Geisha

It may seem like an obvious way to open a recommendation post like this, but oh well: the movie did not do this book justice. Memoirs of a Geisha wasn't a terrible movie, but it made Arthur Golden's novel look like less than it is. Alright, now that I have that out of the way, I will explain why.

The novel tells the story of Sayuri (born Chiyo) who was, it seems, sold by her father into the Kyoto sex trade. In fact, the only thing that saves her from the fate of her older sister (who is forced into a truly horrific life as a prostitute) is that she has grey eyes, which makes her interesting to look at. So, Chiyo (who doesn't become Sayuri until she becomes an actual geisha) is sold to the Nitta okiya, a geisha house that is run by the Nitta sisters and home to geisha Hatsumomo.

Chiyo is miserable. Hatsumomo is horrible to her, she is worked very hard and, when she reaches of age, she is forced to go to geisha school to learn the arts of tea service, pageantry and music. Being a geisha is mostly not about sex (although it is very much about sexuality) so there are many things she must learn, even if she doesn't want to. Her one bright spot is that one day, after crying in the street, a man comes up to her and, offering her his handkerchief, comforts her. She doesn't know right away who the man is, but she becomes infatuated and he becomes her goal.

As Golden builds this plot around Chiyo – including her geisha training and her relationship with her beautiful geisha mentor Mameha – he subtly explains the world of pre-WWII Kyoto to the reader. Of course, many things are new to Chiyo, who is learning to be a geisha just as the reader is learning about geishas, but there is also a lot of information about social standing, honour, politics and women's rights running as undercurrents through the various scenes. The world he writes about is rich and gritty and very realistic, which adds a huge amount to the story of a girl who, in many ways, had the life of many girls.

My favourite part of the novel is not actually set in Kyoto at all. Although Chiyo's relationship with the chairman (the nice man who comforted her) and his friend Nobu becomes a central plot line and is very well teased out, the part I like most is set during the war. Sayuri (because she is now a well known and respected geisha) leaves the city to live in the countryside. The war is not going well and Kyoto has been firebombed multiple times. So she leaves and goes to live with a kimono maker, dying silks and learning a bit of his trade (a wonderful addition to the story, since the kimono geishas wore were incredibly important in their trade). 

The job ruins Sayuri's hands and changes her appearance. She returns to the city after the war as a geisha much changed by her experience. Eventually, she leaves Japan for New York City, where she lives with the chairman and, ostensibly, writes her memoirs. 

There aren't many contemporary novels that take a reader from the characters early childhood right to their death. To write like that and make a novel compelling, every step the character makes has to ring true, because the reader has known them for the character's entire life. Golden achieves this, but also allows Chiyo/Sayuri to grow as a woman, which involves occasionally awkward or out-of-character scenes. Golden winds you into her life, making her decisions as important to you as they are to her, and he does it all in prose that is both straightforward and vivid. 

Memoirs of a Geisha is a novel about love and war and culture and the accepted artifice of femininity, written as though it were non-fiction. It's a love story with more culturally serious undertones, which makes it a good book to transition into autumn with. 

Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
First published in 1997 (cover image shown from Vintage edition)

The Orchid Thief

If you ever thought gardening, or plants in general, was boring, the world of orchids will come as a great surprise. I grew up in a household where gardening was a creative passion – both my parents spend long and mostly happy hours in the garden, or planning the garden, or discussing the garden – and still, the very idea of orchids being exciting was a shock. Susan Orlean was equally shocked, but also curious, and she explores the history of orchid hunting and the flower’s modern culture in her book The Orchid Thief.

The book – which began as an article for The New Yorker, where Orlean is a staff writer – begins with the story of John Laroche, the titular orchid thief. Laroche is the reason Orlean discovered the world of orchids in the first place. As she explains, his story caught her eye when she saw a small story in a newspaper about four men arrested for orchid poaching.

Generally speaking, animals get poached. People go around the world in search of rare animals to kill and display – either as clothing, in the case of alligator skin shoes and bags or fur coats, or on walls as strange taxidermied art, or sometimes to eat, in the case of shark fin or turtle soup. It turns out, though, that orchids and many other kinds of rare tropical plants are incredibly valuable on the black market. And the history of their value goes back to the 18th century when wealthy men became obsessed with collecting orchids.

Personally, I have never been that entranced by orchids. Sure, they’re lovely and all, but until reading The Orchid Thief I couldn’t even begin to understand the attraction. But Orlean, after months of research time spent in Florida (the capital of the American orchid industry and where Laroche lives), is able to describe some truly alluring flowers. There are thousands of different kinds of orchids, all with various colours and slightly different petal and formations and textures, and just enough contrariness to make growing them an obsessive and all-encompassing endeavour.

Orlean’s starting point is Laroche, but the real story in this delightful piece of non-fiction is flower itself. The through-line often moves away from Laroche (although it always returns to him) into the wider world of plant crime, the historical precedent for orchid hunting, and the many characters who run the nurseries in southern Florida. She also managed to weave in a history of the Seminoles, a through-line about her personal hunt for the ghost orchid and an overview of Florida as a state. Suffice to say, she packs a lot into this book.

Orlean has a way of making both the characters and the landscapes she describes spring off the page so that you can feel the sticky swamp mud under your feet, and hear the slow but impassioned drawl of the man showing her around one of his greenhouses. On the one had, she didn’t have to make these characters up, but she did have to capture them and translate their vitality and unusual passions from the world of orchid nurseries – where they fit in 100 per cent – to the black and white of the page and the world of readers who have likely never experienced anything like their level of desire for anything. And really, she does an amazing job.

If I were asked before I read this book if I was interested in orchids, I probably would have offered a non-committal answer accompanied by a half-shrug. Now, though, I know better. Nothing in the world of orchid lovers is non-committal. Besides, after the rollicking education Orlean offers up, I now know that flowers, and the culture that springs up around and because of them, are far more than the sum of their parts.

The Orchid Thief
by Susan Orlean
First published in 1998 (cover image shown from Ballantine Books edition)

Don't disappoint your books

This is a beautiful little short film (2 minutes, so actually short) called The Diary of a Disappointed Book.  It was put together by studiocanoe and tells the story of a book given, forgotten, read and forgotten.

Rather than risk spoilers (because you should watch it – really), I will leave my thoughts to after the jump.


The Diary of a Disappointed Book from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

The Sword in the Stone

Sometimes it just works out that you discover a great book because of a movie, and not the other way around. That is the case with T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, which first made itself known to me (and, I'm sure many other people) through the Disney movie of the same name. But as good as that movie is (I love it as a kid), the book far surpasses it.

Generally, the story goes like this. Wart lives in Sir Ector's castle in the very ancient times of England when there were still valiant knights and dragons to fight and wizards and witches and Robin Hood (excuse me, Robin Wood – White clears history's name fumble quite nicely). Wart is not Sir Ector's son, though, that honour falls to Kay who is a couple of years older and despite all of his advantages, at least eight times more insecure. Anyway, Wart goes into the Forest Sauvage (old England has some suspiciously French names in White, which I suspect is a nod to the original Morte d'Arthur) and, after spending a rather harrowing night in the wild trying to retrieve a lost hawk, he stumbles upon Merlyn.

Of course, Merlyn knew he was coming because he ages backwards and because he's a magician. Wart and Merlyn head back to the castle and Merlyn becomes the boys' tutor. And, sure, he teaches them both all sorts of important things, but really he saves the best – and most cryptic – lessons for Wart. Merlyn, of course, knows that Wart is going to become King Arthur (his real name being Arthur) and he goes about preparing him for the job by turning him into various animals and letting him learn indirect lessons about valour and bravery and history.

The lessons are one of my favourite parts of the book. I like the way White has imagined the the different social codes and ingrained memories of the various animals. I also like that Wart isn't a natural as any of them. He has to learn to swim like a fish; he has to be taught how to fly; he is conscious of the way the shape of his body changes and White describes it all in a way that makes you think of how weird it would be to suddenly become a snake (or whatever). 

My other favourite part are the anachronisms. The story is full of them – because Merlyn a) ages backwards, and b) is not always very good at his spells, which means sometimes bowler hats end up in the 12th century – and the characters' reactions are perfect. Usually, they don't even notice because whatever is being mentioned or conjured is so foreign that they can't even begin to understand it. Merlyn, though, goes into fits over it, which is hilarious. Additionally, because the book was written in the '30s (prior to the outbreak of WWII), a lot of the anachronisms now seem really old fashioned, which adds another level of humour to the references.

Of all this, though, I'm not sure how much younger readers pick up. There are certainly points that are obviously funny and meant to make kids laugh, but there's a lot going on that would be so far over their heads that it can only have been written for their parents. It's a pretty quick read – certainly as face-paced as any thriller – and it's the sort of perfectly engaging book to bring on a picnic or something, during which you'll chuckle about something and the person you're with will want to know what's going on, so you'll have to explain to them something about a giant, at which point you'll realize that White has cleverly inserted a Hitler-Mussolini figure into the story who gets defeated before he does any real damage, and you'll wish that were really the case. And that's when it will strike you that, for all the lightness and the adventure, White's retelling of King Arthur's coming-of-age is also about England itself.

It's quite ingenious, really, how he buries that metaphor. And it works perfectly, elevating a children's story into something much greater and, in some ways, much sadder – but always gripping and almost always hilarious.

The Sword in the Stone
by T.H. White
First published in 1938 (cover image shown from Laurel Leaf edition)

The Great Gatsby

The real joy of rereading a book is getting to experience it in a different way; generally, you already know what happens, so instead of concentrating solely on the plot, you're free to notice other things. For me, in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it was the other way around. The first time I read the novel I was so struck by the language and the imagery Fitzgerald conjured up that several months later my memory of the plot was hazy at best. Although Fitzgerald's prose didn't dull with time, by my second reading I could give myself over more to the characters because I already knew what to expect from the language.

It a strange way, The Great Gatsby is a love story both on the surface and at its core, but less so in all the layers between the two. Fitzgerald sets up levels of emotion and depth of feeling, and in between them he slots all the other details of day to day life. It's a curious thing, really, because conventional wisdom says not to waste time explaining how characters get, physically, from one place to another. But Fitzgerald's characters always seem to be in motion; they walk across lawns, drive places, take the train, walk up steps, etc. And instead of being dull, all their movement heightens the story, making it about real people instead of just archetypes of the upper class in the roaring '20s.

The story goes like this: Nick Carraway, who comes from money in the mid-West, moves east to try out the bond business. He fought in the war and is well educated, but finds himself restless. So, he moves to Long Island (living on West Egg) and works in New York. As luck would have it, the little house he rents is next to an imposing mansion, which happens to belong to a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby. Gatsby throws wild, sprawling parties, but despite the debauchery, remains aloof. Most of the people who attend have never really met him and there are many, many rumours about who he is and what he's done. On East Egg, directly across the sound, live Nick's second-cousin Daisy and her husband Tom, with whom Nick went to school. Tom, who is seems has a history of philandering, has a mistress who he meets up with in New York. There are other characters as well – Jordan Baker, Nick's sort-of love interest and a friend of Daisy's, for example – who are necessary to the plot, but who don't capture your attention the same way. 

As I mentioned, this is a novel about love (as well as excess, the trappings of wealth, deceit, etc.), and mostly about the love of one man. Gatsby is in love with Daisy. They had an affair years ago, before she was married, and he never got over it. Neither, it ought to be said, did she; although, she managed to move her life along, nonetheless. Gatsby's fantasy is that he will be able to whisk Daisy away from Tom (and, I assume, her daughter) so that they can live the life he always dreamed of. It's a beautiful fantasy and really makes Gatsby the saddest character in the story, because you just know that things won't work out for him the way he's planned.

But Gatsby's love is quite straightforward compared with Tom's. Tom is not a character you warm up to, which almost seems intentional on his part (as if he wouldn't let Fitzgerald write him any other way). And yet, for all his distain and disinterest and fooling around, when his life with Daisy is threatened he seems genuinely wounded. True, Tom is jealous of possessions (his wife, no doubt, falls into this category at least some of the time), but when it comes down to it, he sees Daisy as more than a status piece and his hurt at hearing her say she never loved him surprises him as much as it does us. Then, of course, there's his mistress, Myrtle. There is nothing rich or status-enhancing about her (her husband runs the local gas station), but Tom dotes on her and has a life with her that suggests the attraction is more than physical. 

The plot is incredibly intricate, and just like in real life, certain things couldn't happen without what happened four steps back. But Fitzgerald's foreshadowing is very subtle, and although you know a story about this kind of lifestyle can't have a happy ending (that would just be too boring), the ending you get is quite unforeseeable until you're there, at which point you're stuck – like Nick – watching with shocked eyes and uncomfortable posture.

But the plot all winds together and comes back to the same themes. Love, is certainly one of them, but perhaps the most important element of The Great Gatsby is beauty. Fitzgerald's prose is beautiful, and he uses it to invoke a kind of unexpected beauty – the kind that hides the mundane. The settings are beautiful, the clothing is beautiful, the cars are beautiful. And, at the beginning at least, it seems the characters are all beautiful too. But as their safe, lovely little world erodes, the beautiful characters become less entrancing. There's nothing obvious about it; Fitzgerald certainly doesn't come out and comment on it, but you can tell that their formerly pristine edges are wearing away in places, that there are scuff marks and the like.

It's that decline in beauty that allows the shocking end to the story. In this world, beautiful people are untouchable, except by love, and for anything truly horrible to happen they must be exposed as regular. Their money doesn't insulate them, but their beauty does, until it can't any more. Because of its beauty, The Great Gatsby is more than a love story and a tragedy, it is a story about people. And strangely, for all the light and beauty and love, it's and a rather dark portrayal of humanity.

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
First published in 1925 (cover image from 1995 Scribner edition)

Persepolis

Graphic novels have gained a much more mainstream popularity lately, especially after some big ones (Watchmen, Sin City) were turned into movies. Graphic memoirs, though, are less common, even when they've also been adapted into successful films. Marjane Satrapi's memoir Persepolis: a story of childhood combines stark black-and-white drawings – arranged as comic panels – with conversational text: when the characters aren't speaking to each other, Satrapi speaks directly to the reader.

I first read Persepolis in a first-year university history class. I did not enjoy the course, but because it introduced me to Satrapi, I don't regret taking it. Satrapi is Iranian, and historically speaking, Persepolis is as much a personal history as it is a narrative take on how Iran has changed over the last 40-or-so years.

Satrapi was just a kid when the Islamic Revolution broke out, but because her parents were vehemently opposed to regime change that was taking place, her early teenage years were filled with history lessons and and anti-fundamentalist discussions. And those values and strong patriotism run deep in this portrait of a young girl in a changing Iran.

That angle, remembering how the Revolution interrupted her childhood, is one of the aspects of Persepolis (besides the graphics) that make it interesting to read. Besides being a generally entertaining story (there's conflict, coming-of-age, angst and other delightful memoir tropes), Satrapi's perspective is a fascinating one, in part because she was sent to school in France after the Islamic Revolution succeeded, which sealed her memories rather than letting them become clouded or confused by the ensuing social overhaul.

Her memories of being angry and confused by the introduction of the niqab and the ban on western culture come across as still raw, aided by the expressive drawings that illustrate a changing world more clearly than words could.

Satrapi's childhood is entwined with the Revolution and her ability to both describe things in very personal detail and also take a step back to give a more distanced viewpoint makes this a very compelling read. And, despite the heavy-ish nature of the subject matter, the graphic-nature of the memoir reminds you that some parts are funny; their simplicity work to both add lightness to the story and draw you into the truly devastating parts.

I always appreciate it when authors take a genre and then do something unexpected with it. Persepolis is such a success in this way that I'm almost surprised more authors/artists didn't try to follow in Satrapi's footsteps. But, if they were intimidated, I wouldn't be surprised. Satrapi is a literary triple-threat: writer, illustrator and historian. And she's got a sharp wit on top of all that, which adds a little edge to her memoir, keeping it fresh and relevant. Despite how often we seem to hear or read something about Iran, you're seriously missing out if you give Persepolis a pass.

Persepolis: a story of childhood
by Marjane Satrapi
First published in 2000 (cover image from Pantheon Books edition)

Into Thin Air

I'm never really sure what to expect when I pick up a non-fiction adventure book. Granted, I haven't read widely in the genre, but what I have read leads me to believe it's a little hit or miss. The ones that miss, as far as I'm concerned, are the ones that assume all the reader cares about is the writer's experience, full-stop. A hit, on the other hand, weaves a personal narrative throughout a larger story; it offers historical details, comprehensive but succinct technical explanations and it pulls in other perspectives and/or characters to back up the main narrative. In short, it gives you enough information to draw you into the action and feel like you could have been there too.

In his book Into Thin Air, John Krakauer does just that. In early May, 1996, ten climbers died on Mount Everest, either in pursuit of the summit or during their descent from it. Krakauer was on the mountain, climbing with a different team. He summited earlier than the other teams and, as he begun his descent the other teams were still on their way up. But, a storm was rolling in - either unnoticed or ignored by the other team leaders. Krakauer's account of his climb to the summit, and his subsequent descent and the fierce weather they faced at 29,028 feet above sea level, is not one you're likely to forget in a hurry.

Krakauer is a climber as well as a journalist, which gives him the background to both explain all the different aspects of the climb and the equipment climbers use, as well as sufficient experience to put himself in the position of the other climbers and imagine what they were thinking. It's a bit of a grey area journalistically, but Krakauer is up front about his suppositions and often offers up more than one scenario, which helps an uninitiated climber understand how protocol and procedure can become lost on the mountain.

But this isn't a book that points fingers (or, not overly, anyway), rather it takes you through the tragedy of such needless death. Krakauer's ability to write emotionally about the devastation of the climb and the pain and guilt he and the other surviving climbers felt is beautifully captured. My copy of Into Thin Air has quite a few pages pocked with dry tear stains, not because there's anything gratuitous about the sadness, but because Krakauer's own feelings rub off the page and onto the reader so that you too feel the burden of the loss of life.

At times, Into Thin Air is a regular adventure story, in that you get caught up in the immensity of Krakauer's trek up the tallest mountain in the world. But the consequences of the climb lie heavy in the descriptions of the early days on Everest. Really, it is a beautiful book, which is not a way I would normally describe a book about the deadliest period in Everest's (recent) history. But Krakauer writes with great care for his subjects - himself, the mountain, his colleagues - and the riveting scenes are all the more exciting and devastating for their firm hold on Krakauer's reality.

Into Thin Air

by John Krakauer

First published in 1997 (cover image shown from Doubleday edition)

The Clan of the Cave Bear

Maybe it’s the weather, I don’t know, but summer reading has been on my mind of late. Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear is great summer reading. It’s engaging without being consuming and, if you like it, there are four more books in the series that you can search out.

The Clan of the Cave Bear is set pretty close to the beginning of human existence and is the story of Ayla, a tall, slender, blue-eyed girl, who is orphaned as a young girl after a natural disaster destroys her home and her parents. She is discovered, half-starved, on the riverbank by a clan of, well, Neanderthals. Although they are afraid of Ayla at first (she is an “other” and not really human, as far as they’re concerned), Iza the clan’s healer, and Creb, their spiritual leader convince their leader to bring Ayla with them.

And so she becomes of the clan (who live in a large cave and worship the cave bear)—kind of. Ayla is strange and cannot move like they do, or speak properly (their language is more gutteral than she is used to). She also looks wrong. But, she is loved—by Iza and Creb anyway. Slowly, Ayla integrates in to the clan and soon the details of her earlier life are too hazy for her to really connect with. And although most members of the clad come to except her and her unusual looks and behaviour, Broud, the chief’s son, is jealous of the attention she garners and as she becomes increasingly accepted, he grows to hate her more.

The clan people have shorter life spans than Ayla’s people, and as a result mature sexually a lot sooner. It doesn’t take Broud long to learn that sex can be used as a weapon, and some of the scenes involving his treatment of Ayla are extremely disturbing in the kind of violence they describe. Eventually, Ayla becomes pregnant. Having the baby nearly kills her, but she survives and so does her son. Durc is the first “hybrid” child and ultimately represents the future of the clan.

Ayla, however, does not fair as well. She stays with the clan, despite Broud’s abuse, because of Durc, Iza and Creb. But Iza and Creb are old and after Creb dies, Iza tells Ayla to run away—without them there to protect her, Broud will surely kill her, she says. So Ayla runs, leaving behind her the only life she has ever really known.

Writing about prehistoric people is pretty gutsy, and although I have nothing to really go on, I think Auel does a pretty good job. The way of life of the clan people (from religion, to medicine, to what they eat and how they cook it) is incredibly detailed and the landscape she evokes is rich and vivid. Clearly, quite a bit of research went into putting together this world.

The Clan of the Cave Bear isn’t like to be a book that changes your life, but neither is it fluff. Instead, it’s well-written, evocative literary entertainment. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not such a bad thing for a book to be. The plot is intricate and Auel takes some real narrative risks, both in terms of the general story arc and in how direct she is about what is happening to Ayla and the clan itself. It’s a summer read with guts (in the best sense) that you won’t be embarrassed to read in public at any time of year.

The Clan of the Cave Bear
by Jean M. Auel
First published in 1980 (cover image shown from Bantam Books edition)

The Secret Garden

It's Earth Day, and of all the nature-y books out there (some of which I've written about), The Secret Garden is one that never fails to inspire. I don't know how she did it, but even as Frances Hodgson Burnett takes you into Mary's psychological world - and all the emotional intangibles that entails - she takes you outside so you can feel the dirt on your hands and under your nails, and the damp breeze on your cheeks.

Mary Lennox is a pretty well known literary heroine, I think. But then, her story fascinated me when I was younger (well, it still kind of does), so maybe I take it for granted that everyone knows all about her. Just in case, though. Mary was raised in India, where she was incredibly spoiled by the attention of her parents' servants. In all of children's literature, I think Mary is the only thin, blonde child who is described as ugly (as much in attitude as in appearance). Anyway, at the beginning of the story, everyone in Mary's life dies from cholera, virtually overnight. And that is how Mary comes to find herself at Misselthwaite Manor, staying with her uncle on the edge of the English moorland.

As I've already said, Mary was not a pretty child, and she had a terrible temper. After being waited on in India, she had a very hard time adjusting to life in a house where none of the servants were paid to dote on her. She barely saw her uncle (whose wife had died tragically come years before), so she was very much alone. After puttering around and throwing several tantrums, Mary gets bored with her old ways and sets out to something. The Manor has large gardens and Mary starts digging around. One day, a robin shows her a door in a wall, but the door is locked and after trying to get in for a few minutes, Mary gives up.

The outdoor activity is good for Mary and she starts to perk up. Martha, one of the younger servants, introduces Mary to her brother Dickon (who has a way with animals) and they become tentative friends. Mary shows Dickon the door in the wall and they decide to try and find a way in. Mary does some poking around in the house and finds a key, which proves to fit the lock. Mary and Dickon open the door to the secret garden (which is encased by high brick walls) and go in. After playing in there for a while they decide to look after it and start trying to restore garden to its obvious former splendour.

Meanwhile, in the house, Mary has been hearing strange wailing noises at night. After being woken up several nights in a row, she decides to follow the sounds and discovers that she has a cousin named Colin. Her Uncle, Mr. Craven, is a hunchback and his son is similarly disfigured. So Colin is kept confined, away from everyone, so no one can see his condition. Because he's lonely, Colin is prone to tantrums (much like Mary was upon arrival at Misselthwaite). But as Mary slowly befriends her cousin, drawing him out of his shell and eventually out into the garden, his health also improves.

Clearly, this story has a happy ending. Colin's health improves so much that he is actually able to walk up to his father, and Mary is pretty and has friends for first time. It's fairly predictable, but as far as classic children's stories go, the moral is much more interesting.

Burnett places a huge importance on the children's life outdoors. Neither Mary nor Colin really begin to improve until they start spending time outdoors, in the company of other children. And it isn't just their health that improves from the exercise and fresh air, but also their temperament and emotional well-being. Essentially, Burnett is extolling the benefits of spending time with the natural world and illustrating how important it is for people to stay in contact with the Earth.

It may be a book written for children, but The Secret Garden is almost more important for adults. Kids are always reminded to play outside (whether in the park or their backyard) but it seems the older we get the more time we stay indoors, which often as a negative affect on both our moods and our health. Reading The Secret Garden when I was a kid made me wish I could find a place like that to look after and revel in; now, it makes me want to build something like that - I would even settle for a window-box garden, at this point. Or, I guess, sitting outside and reading.

The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

First published in 1911 (cover image shown from that edition)

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I have written about Roald Dahl and his books before, but the Wes Anderson adaptation of Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox is up for a few Oscars this weekend, and I'll take any chance I get to reminisce about all the hours I spent reading Roald Dahl as a kid.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is set in the English countryside where Mr. and Mrs. Fox live in a comfortable burrow with their kits. Their comfort is, in a large way, the result of Mr. Fox's prolific thievery. Not far from the hill the Foxes live under, three farmers - Boggis, Bunce and Bean - have large, sprawling farms that provide (unintentionally) lovely meals for Mr. Fox and his family.

But, paradise can't last forever and after a foiled heist that results in Mr. Fox's tail being shot off as he dives into his burrow, the farmers decide to exact some revenge. And so they set up a siege around the Foxes' burrow, intending to starve them out. But rather than give in, Mr. Fox decides to fight back the only way he knows how: to dig deeper into the hill in the hopes of eventually finding a way out. When the farmers discover Mr. Fox's tactics, they too decide to dig, first with shovels and then with bulldozers. Predictably, it doesn't take long for the hill to be reduced to a crater.

Under the hill, the Foxes keep digging. Eventually they run into a group of other burrowing animals who have also been caught in the siege: badgers, moles, rabbits, etc. All the animals are starving and intensely unhappy with the situation Mr. Fox has forced them into. But, he isn't fantastic for nothing, and after assembling all the animals for a feast, he and his children tunnel off in the direction of the farms.

With the three farmers well occupied by their digging siege, Mr. Fox is able to tunnel right up under their storerooms and simply pick and choose: a goose here, a duck there and apple cider all around. And so it all ends well, with the animals feasting underground and the farmers fuming above.

When you read Fantastic Mr. Fox as a kid, the appeal is the borderline-rude language and Mr. Fox's hilarious antics. Even reading now, it's hard not to laugh at Dahl's descriptions of the farmers. But now (and this may be my English degree talking), a lot of this story seems to be about habitat destruction - and I don't think that's too much of a stretch. Although the animals come out alright in the end, they do nearly starve because their home is being destroyed by humans.

In his memoirs (Boy and Going Solo) Dahl seems very nostalgic for a simpler time, when farms were local and open to the public and most digging was done by hand with a shovel. And for all the lightness of Fantastic Mr. Fox, I think a lot of that nostalgia seeps in.

And really, that's what makes Dahl worth revisiting years after you've left the target audience age. He was always able to write on more than one level. He knew what kind of language would appeal to kids and how to use it weave a story that would make kids laugh and their parents think (and laugh, too). If his stories were less complex (even the apparently simple ones) they would never have been so entertaining, and if they hadn't been so memorably enjoyable we would never have returned to them the way we continue to.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

by Roald Dahl

First published in 1970 (cover image shown from Knopf Books for Young Readers edition)

For more Dahl:

Roald Dahl Day

Danny the Champion of the World

Going Solo

Alice's Adventures

Of all the many books I have read and reread, I think my copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass is by far the most careworn. I have been reading Lewis Carroll's classic stories since I was little, and every time I pick them up I get lost in the language and the fantastical world of Wonderland (and the Looking-Glass House) just as if it were the first time I was reading about them.

In Alice in Wonderland movies (including, by the looks of things, the new Tim Burton one), Carroll's two stories tend to be strangely combined. Admittedly, because my copy includes both stories, I have always read them together. But, even as a kid, I knew that the white rabbit's world was one of cards and the world of Tweedledum and Tweedledee was set on a chess board.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice is just minding her own business outside, sort-of listening to her sister but really playing with her cat Dinah. Then, a white rabbit in a waistcoat runs by. So naturally, Alice follows the white rabbit down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Or rather, into a long corridor filled with doors she can't open. And then she discovers a table with a key on it. But the key only fits into a tiny door that Alice is much to big to fit through. Luckily, magically, a bottle appears with a label saying "Drink Me" tied to its neck. Alice obliges (after diligently checking to see if it had the marks of poison on it - don't let it be said that Carroll was without morals) and quickly shrinks. The shrinking (and subsequent growing) motif is a common one in Wonderland and in the beginning, brings Alice to tears (mostly of frustration, I think).

But eventually she makes her way through the little door and into Wonderland. Once there, she engages in a ridiculous caucus-race, explodes into a giant inside the white rabbit's house, meets the caterpillar who sits on the infamous mushroom, attends the Mad Hatter's tea party (although I must say I always thought the March Hare and the Doormouse were the most interesting of the guests), tries to talk with the constantly disappearing and reappearing Cheshire Cat, plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts (using a flamingo for a mallet and a hedgehog for a ball), listens to the story of the Mock Turtle in the company of a Gryphon, and goes to court for allegedly stealing the Queen of Hearts' tarts. It's an absolute whirlwind of adventure (and I left bits out!) and a very quick read.

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice is a bit older and instead of playing with Dinah at the beginning of the story, she is playing with Dinah's kittens. And she is indoors, in the drawing room, which is where she notices that in the mirror there is a Looking-Glass House, which is exactly like hers only backward. So Alice decides to explore the Looking-Glass House further and visiting it, whereupon she encounters a garden of rather rude talking flowers. The main premise of the Looking-Glass world is that it's all a giant chess board, and after Alice enters the board she's obliged to play the game. In doing so, she encounters Tweedledee and Tweedledum (who tell her the story of the Walrus and the Carpenter and all the poor little oysters), Humpty Dumpty, and the Red and White Queens (among others).

Usually I hate it when the main character wakes up at the end of the story (which Alice does in both books) because it throws all the action into a wishy-washy light and often seems to indicate a lack of follow-through on the author's part. But, here it works for me. Maybe it's because the worlds Alice visits are so strange that they really work as the kind of disjointed dreamworld that most readers have experienced at one time or another. And whether or not the stories are the result of Carroll's own opium-induced dreaming, Alice's perspective and language certainly ring true.

But beyond the dreamy quality of Alice, what I love most about the books are all the extra poems and songs and stories that Carroll includes. "The Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (both from Through the Looking Glass) are probably my favourites, but "You are Old Father William" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat" (from Wonderland) are also excellent. Carroll has such a knack for language and parody, which makes Alice a real treasure-trove for a reader, allowing you to pick up on different angles and suggestions each time you read it.

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

by Lewis Carroll

First published in 1865 (Wonderland) and 1871 (Looking-Glass) (Cover image shown from 1968 Magnum Easy Eye edition)

A Year in Provence

According to the Weather Network, the temperature in Provence today is 15 degrees C. That's 17 degrees warmer than Toronto, so I suppose that's why I'm feeling a little nostalgic for my life in France. And, since I can't afford to visit, on grey February days I let Peter Mayle take me there vicariously.

In his sort-of memoir A Year in Provence, Mayle charts the first year of his (and his wife's) life in France. After dreaming about it for years, the couple decides to take the plunge and buy an old (read: 200-year-old) stone farm house in France's southern countryside. But, as Mayle soon discovers, paradise is something you have to earn.

The Mayles, having moved to Provence from England, don't really know what they're getting into. They get a little complacent about the weather (it's nothing compared to an English winter!) and then suddenly the Mistral blows in and they realize their old farmhouse has no central heating. And then their pipes freeze and burst. And then they have no water and no heat. So they call a plumber, and with the plumber comes the story of how the pipes are unsuited to the cold weather of Provence (it has been getting colder every year), and really, if they're going to live there they probably ought to think about some upgrades. And just like that you're immersed in France - funny expressions, roundabout stories and all.

The book is organized by month, which is the best way to set out a memoir like this, because at the same time as Mayle is describing his renovation woes, he is also describing how his life in Provence develops. It starts with the tradesmen, who are more than happy to gossip about the history of the little town and tell him all sorts of things about French construction and style (and how these things should be applied to his new home), and continues with his forays into the culture of French food.

And as much as I love anecdotes about home renovation (and they are always funny when related by Mayle) it's his descriptions of food that makes this book such an escape. Whether he and his wife are eating in a restaurant, at the home of a friend or simply cooking for themselves (which often involves a description of their shopping expedition), the enthusiasm and eye for detail that Mayle turns to cuisine really do make you feel like you're at the table with him. You can practically taste the wine and smell the golden potato-onion galette.

Really, the only thing that could improve this book would be an accompanying cookbook, because all you want to do while reading is cook seasonal French food so you can eat it while reading Mayle's description of it. If nothing else, you should keep a bottle of wine handy, although to drink every time he does would make the words blurry very quickly. So perhaps the best thing to do is find a comfortable chair (in the sun if possible) and just dream about your own stone farmhouse, because as Mayle proves, sometimes those dreams have a way of working out.

A Year in Provence

by Peter Mayle

First published in 1989 by Random House (cover shown from Vintage Books edition)

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

I think I've mentioned before how much I like books with layered narratives. In Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg tells two stories simultaneously. The first is set in Whistle Stop, Alabama during the Depression (it starts out in 1929); the second is set mostly in a nursing home in Birmingham, Alabama in the '80s (starting in 1985).

The stories alternate, with Mrs Threadgoode (in the present) telling Evelyn Couch the story of Idgie, Ruth and the Whistle Stop Cafe. Evelyn doesn't know Mrs. Threadgoode when the novel begins, but she has come to the nursing home with her husband to visit his aunt who hates her. So rather than endure the torment of insult after insult, Evelyn retires to the common area, where Mrs. Threadgoode approaches her and starts telling her story.

It starts when Idgie Threadgoode (Mrs. Threadgoode's sister-in-law) was just a girl. Forever getting into trouble, Idgie's childhood was a wild one. She idolized her older brothers, especially Buddy, and followed them around, learning what they knew and copying what they did. But then Buddy was killed, hit by a train, in front of Idgie and she ran away for a while to live in the woods and deal with her grief alone.

But she comes back and grows up and eventually initiates a kind of friendship with Ruth, who had been Buddy's girlfriend and also present on the day he died. But Ruth is trapped in an extremely abusive relationship with a man named Frank. And one day Ruth writes to Idgie asking for help, so Idgie goes and gets her and they open up the Whistle Stop Cafe. And then Ruth has her baby, a boy she names Buddy.

One of the things Flagg does best, besides her depiction of friendship, is her invocation of the social realities in Whistle Stop, Alabama in the '20s and '30s. Poverty and racial tensions run high and Idgie and Ruth have more than one run in with the local Ku Klux Klan for daring to sell food to the black residents from their back kitchen door.

The cafe, in fact, is famous for its barbecue, coffee and pie. And because Whistle Stop is right on the railway, the rotating cast of customers and regulars offers Flagg a way to comment on the fortunes of the outside world without being too direct about it.

And just as I was the first time I read Fried Green Tomatoes, Evelyn Couch is riveted by the story Mrs. Threadgoode tells her. Evelyn is an overweight, middle-aged woman at the brink of menopause. She's depressed, unhappy in her marriage and unhappy with herself, and in the stories Mrs. Threadgoode tells her she finds a kind of escape. Suddenly, Evelyn has something to look forward to and, maybe for the first time, she is able to envision the kind of intrepid woman she wants to be.

Typically, in a story that alternates perspective and era, there's one narrative that really catches your attention and one that you just hurry through. The first time I read Fried Green Tomatoes (which was, in the spirit of full disclosure, after I had already seen the movie numerous times), all I wanted to read about were Idgie and Ruth. Their lives seemed so removed from mine, so full of adventure and customs and politics. I think as a kid I kind of wanted to be Idgie.

But now, when I go back to the novel, as much as my love for Idgie and Ruth is unwavering, I've developed a new fondness for Evelyn. In her own way, Evelyn is fighting societal norms as much as Idgie was, it's just less obvious because the battle Evelyn is waging is internal. But Evelyn has Mrs. Threadgoode and Idgie and Ruth have each other, which is a point I think Flagg is careful to make.

The friendship of women, as Flagg presents it, has changed very little in 60 years in terms what what it means. It isn't that Flagg is in any way anti-men (except maybe Frank, who she makes disappear), but Fried Green Tomatoes is most definitely a book about women and the strength they gain from their friends.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

by Fannie Flagg

First published in 1987 by Random House (cover image shown from that edition)

Abel's Island

Castaways are usually rather romantic figures in literature. Whether along the lines of Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family Robinson, stories about shipwreck victims are always more about ingenuity and courage than about the characters themselves. In William Steig's Abel's Island, as courageous and ingenious as Abel is, he remains very cerebral and much of the story is about the emotional ups and downs he faces during his year alone on an island. It bears saying, too, that Abel is not a strapping sailor like Robinson Crusoe, but is a mouse unaccustomed to work of any sort.

Abel ends up on the island because, during an afternoon picnic with his wife Amanda, a hurricane blows through. They take shelter in a cave with a number of other animals, but when Amanda's scarf pulls loose and is caught by the wind, Abel chases after it. Soon he is caught up by the wind and the storm and is swept into a culvert where he manages to scramble onto a small board before the water level rises and the board and Abel are taken into the river.

The next day, Abel wakes up on his board in the upper branches of a cherry oak on an uninhabited island in the middle of the river. After trying to build several different kinds of boats (all of which are destroyed by the river's current) and attempting to sling a piece of homemade rope across the river (which he lacks the strength to do), Abel is forced to face facts. For the time being, he is stuck on the island.

Initially, he resents the island and the sort of prison it represents. He misses his wife and his family, but because he assumes they must be frantically worried about him, he comforts himself with thoughts of their search efforts. Abel is a rather upper-class mouse and, prior to his arrival on the island, had only ever watched animals work. But soon he discovers that to survive, he must start looking after himself.

He finds a rotten log to hollow out into a home, weaves mats for the floor and to serve as window covers and begins storing away nuts and seeds for the winter. In his leisure time, he uses clay he collects from the riverbank to build statues of his loved ones, as well as construct dishes for himself. He also makes little bowls to float down the river, holding notes asking for help.

But life doesn't just fall into place for Abel. There is an owl on the island that terrorizes him and, after one perilous encounter, he is forced to fight it off using his little penknife. It's after the owl attack and as winter sets in that Steig gives us a real look at Abel's mind. Being all alone makes him a little crazy, he starts chanting curses at owl feathers he finds, after months of silence he begins to talk to himself (including full-on arguments) and he talks to his statues as though they are real people.

But Abel makes it through the winter, even if only barely, and in the spring an old toad arrives on the island, out of breath after being caught up by the swollen and swiftly moving spring river. Abel and Gower become friends, and Abel is quite devastated when Gower, after two months, regains enough of his strength to leave the island. Alone again, Abel is almost resigned to life there when a drought sets in, lowering the water level in the river sufficiently for him to risk swimming across.

And so he escapes, almost exactly one year after arriving. But on his way home he is attacked by a cat, narrowly escaping up a tree. But of course, being the hero of a children's story, Abel survives and makes it home to his lovely Amanda, who is both delighted to see her scarf again and be reunited with her husband.

Abel's Island is a deceptively simple story. On the surface, it's about a mouse who finds himself a castaway, must survive for a year and then ends up back in his luxurious life. But below that, it's about what happens to us when we are alone. In many ways, what gets Abel through his time on the island is his routine and his belief that he will make it home again. But during the winter, when he's cold and more alone than ever, his thought that there is no other world and that winter will last forever are almost painfully realistic.

Steig, by using a mouse as his hero, tells a story about a man who's a bit lost in life. Abel doesn't have a vocation and, prior to arriving on the island, he didn't really have anything to keep him going except garden parties and satin cravats. When faced with his own mortality, he fights to survive, and although it may be a little cliché now, the importance of goals and skills are privileged in this story. As a messages for children go, that's a pretty good one. And maybe it's not such a bad reminder for adults either.

Abel’s Island
By William Steig
First published in 1976 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (cover image from that edition)