Reading: Framley Parsonage and North Face

[white_hart]

After two fairly heavy novels set around World War 2, I was in the mood for something comforting and decided to read Framley Parsonage, having downloaded pretty much all of Trollope onto my Kindle for free ages ago. I mostly know him from various radio adaptations, as well as the excellent 1980s TV Barchester Towers (Alan Rickman's Obadiah Slope was absolutely what his Snape should have been, but wasn't), and actually, I think I may prefer him in adaptation; on the page the chatty authorial voice can seem a bit long-winded, and the whimsical naming feels a bit too obvious. Or maybe it was just that I remembered the plot better than I thought and wasn't quite as much in the mood for frivolity as I thought; either way, it didn't leave a great impression.

I then decided to read Mary Renault's North Face for the renaultx CBC rather than just sitting on the sidelines (well, I may still sit on the sidelines, but at least I'll understand what people are talking about). Given that, I'll save most of my comments for there, but I do feel compelled to remark that I don't think I've ever read a book where I was so fervently hoping that the protagonists wouldn't end up getting together. And this despite it being described as a "romance" by Wikipedia (although as the entry also gets one of their names wrong that's probably just par for the course).

Comments

[lilliburlero]

I'm bemused by the writing history that produced North Face in between* Return to Night and The Charioteer, both of which are romances (if not very optimistic ones) in which the reader has a genuine investment in the central relationships. Whatever you feel about Hilary's and Laurie's eventual choices, I do think you're successfully made to care, and trainwrecky as their relationships have the potential to be, you believe the characters care for each other too. Whereas Neil and Ellen have this peculiar fuck-or-die vibe, as if their author is standing just out of vision with a revolver pointing at them. You want to shake them and say 'you know you don't have to, right? That there are other people on earth?' I mean the first summer of the peace must have been pretty grim in all sorts of ways, but I'm not sure people were behaving in quite this literally post-apocalyptic way...

*as far as I know, it wasn't a shelved effort that was hauled out and revised or anything.

[white_hart]

I did find myself idly wondering if it was meant to be an idictment of a society which insists that sex has no place outside wedlock, because really, one massively disappointing shag and I'm pretty sure they'll be well over each other but tied together for life by then.