![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading: Northanger Abbey
Jun. 10th, 2016 07:05 pmNot Jane Austen's original, which I re-read last year and loved for its commonsense deflation of the conventions of Gothic melodrama and its delightfully anti-romantic romance, but Val McDermid's 2014 contemporary reworking.
I'm really not sure who thought that what Northanger Abbey really needed was a modern Edinburgh Festival AU, but I don't agree with them. McDermid's version follows the structure of Austen's novel exactly, even to the number of chapters, and the writing is a rather uncomfortable mixture of Austen pastiche and teenage slang, as "Cat" Morland tweets and texts and Facebooks away to her friends about how "totes amazeballs" the Festival is. Instead of Gothic novels, Cat's predictable obsession is Twilight and its ilk; she spends quite a bit of the novel suspecting the Tilneys of being vampires, which seems unbelievable even for an implausibly sheltered 17-year-old. McDermid explains her heroine's naivety as being down to her being the homeschooled daughter of a vicar in rural Dorset, but what seems endearing and plausible in Austen's heroine just feels ridiculous in a modern teenager. McDermid writes well, and there are some mildly entertaining moments (I did like her reimagining of John Thorpe as a boorish Oxford-graduate City boy, and his carriage as a red sports car), but all in all it just felt like a waste of time. And, to add insult to injury, instead of Austen's frank admission that Catherine fell in love with Henry Tilney, or perhaps the idea of Henry Tilney, largely because he was almost the first personable young man she'd ever met, and he ended up returning her feelings because he was so flattered by her being in love with him (which I love because it is so pragmatic and so contrary to the normal one-true-love message of romance; the world of Austen's Northanger Abbey is a world where you can feel sure that most people would be equally happy with any of a wide range of people they might happen to encounter), McDermid decides that her young people will have been attracted to each other from the moment they met, Henry just as much as Cat. Pshaw!
I'm really not sure who thought that what Northanger Abbey really needed was a modern Edinburgh Festival AU, but I don't agree with them. McDermid's version follows the structure of Austen's novel exactly, even to the number of chapters, and the writing is a rather uncomfortable mixture of Austen pastiche and teenage slang, as "Cat" Morland tweets and texts and Facebooks away to her friends about how "totes amazeballs" the Festival is. Instead of Gothic novels, Cat's predictable obsession is Twilight and its ilk; she spends quite a bit of the novel suspecting the Tilneys of being vampires, which seems unbelievable even for an implausibly sheltered 17-year-old. McDermid explains her heroine's naivety as being down to her being the homeschooled daughter of a vicar in rural Dorset, but what seems endearing and plausible in Austen's heroine just feels ridiculous in a modern teenager. McDermid writes well, and there are some mildly entertaining moments (I did like her reimagining of John Thorpe as a boorish Oxford-graduate City boy, and his carriage as a red sports car), but all in all it just felt like a waste of time. And, to add insult to injury, instead of Austen's frank admission that Catherine fell in love with Henry Tilney, or perhaps the idea of Henry Tilney, largely because he was almost the first personable young man she'd ever met, and he ended up returning her feelings because he was so flattered by her being in love with him (which I love because it is so pragmatic and so contrary to the normal one-true-love message of romance; the world of Austen's Northanger Abbey is a world where you can feel sure that most people would be equally happy with any of a wide range of people they might happen to encounter), McDermid decides that her young people will have been attracted to each other from the moment they met, Henry just as much as Cat. Pshaw!
